Haunted Data

Also available from Bloomsbury

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 Haunted Data

Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

Lisa Blackman
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science viii

Part One  Priming and Networked Affect: Data Mediation

and Media Contagions 1

1 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 3

2 Social Media Contagion(s): An analysis of Priming Controversies
within Cognitive Science 28
3 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever
Hans Charge’ 53

Part Two  Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures 79

4 Feeling the Future 87

5 Pornception and Big Data 106
6 Open Science and Quantum Matters 123
7 Conclusion: Affect and Archives of the Future 166

Notes 183
Bibliography 209
Index 223
 Acknowledgments

The idea for this book came out of a short paper I gave at the Max Planck
Institute in Berlin at an event, “Experimental Entanglements”, organized by
Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald in October 2012. Thank you to the both
of them for inviting me. The event brought together humanities scholars
and neuroscientists to discuss collaboration and interdisciplinarity through
foregrounding and questioning experiment-as-practice. It became very clear
that although there was an appetite for new methods and ways of working this
was thwarted by huge chasms that were preventing the emergence of something
genuinely new and unexpected within the innovation of experimentation.
Drawing on my own training in science and the humanities I wanted to
pursue this problem further, particularly at the intersection of science studies,
affect studies, weird science, debates on datafication and feminist and queer
theories. The focus on data within the context of weird science was developed
initially at the Compromised Data Colloquium held at the Social Innovation
Centre, Toronto Canada in 2013. Thank you to Greg Elmer for the invitation.
The first foray into affect studies at this conjuncture came from an invitation
from Greg Seigworth to give a keynote at the inauguration of the first Affect
WTF conference in 2015. Thank you to Greg for his on-going support
and enthusiasm for my work. Greg is a rare breed of academic who thinks
collectively and with the utmost generosity. Since then I have presented the
research to anomalistic psychologists at Goldsmiths. Thanks to Chris French
for the invitation and for going some of the ground with me. Thank you
also to Samantha Frost for inviting me to contribute to the “Experiments in
Thinking the Human” symposium at the University of Illinois in 2017, which
further convinced me of the value of engaging with new materialism within
this context. Thanks also to the Wellcome Trust and particularly Emily Wiles
for the invitation to the “Out of Control” symposium in 2016, which brought
the weird and wonderful into science in such a productive and engaging way.
Thank you also to the numerous invites I have had to Copenhagen to present
different parts of the research. This includes invites by Christian Borch and
 Acknowledgments vii

Justine Grø nbæ k Pors at the Copenhagen Business School, and Carsten Stage
and Britta Tim Knudsen at Aarhus University. Thank you to Jan Slaby for the
invite to present material as part of the Affective Relationalities conference at
the Freire University Berlin; Gary Hall for the invite to present as part of the PG
Meccsa conference on “Transformative Practice and Theory: Where we Stand
Today”. Thanks also to my Finnish collaborators including Tuula Juvonen for
the invite to the University of Tampere, Leena Rouhiainen and Esa Kirkopelto
for the invitation to give a keynote at the “Perilous Experience? Extending
Experience through Artistic Research” at the University of the Arts, Helsinki
(and our ongoing collaborations). Also thanks to fellow ghost-hunters and
artists Sarah Sparkes, Kjersti Sundland, Stephen Fortune, Sarah Wood, Birgitta
Hosea, Outi Condit and Shona Illingworth. Thanks also to Frankie Mace, Liz
Thompson and Monica Sukumar at Bloomsbury.
 During the finalizing of this book I have been co-Head of the Department
of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. This has
curtailed my research time and ability to travel but has incorporated a renewed
focus on action plans, strategic documents and cascading: thanks particularly
to my co-Head Joanna Zylinska who has made a brilliant ally, colleague and
friend (with much good humour) and to Sean Cubitt, Julian Henriques and
Hugh Macnicol for the “DMT experience” while I was Deputy and to Sean for
the year when we shared the Headship; also thanks to all my colleagues in the
department who make the department the world renowned place that it is.
Lastly a huge thank you to my partner Isabel Waidner who through her own
creative writing makes the weird into techniques for world-making. She is just
a brilliant person whom I love dearly.
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

Things, places, people, objects, music, memories, buildings can all be haunted.
Haunting evokes images of visitations by ‘things’ not of this world; this might
include the dead and aliens. One iconic image of an alien visitation that evokes
images of alternate imaginaries and virtualities is the image of the late David
Bowie appearing in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Bowie falls to earth
on a mission to save his own species dying from a lack of water as a result
of a catastrophic drought. Throughout the film, as well as being out-of-space
(extra-terrestrial), Bowie’s character, Jerome Newton, is also presented as out-
of-time, represented perhaps by his androgyny and enviable fashion sense.
Although the alien in this context is aligned to extra-sensory perceptions, su-
perior intelligences and technological prowess the ending is all too human.
Through the exploitation of the alien by the human, Jerome Newton
is exposed, cheated and incarcerated such that his mission is thwarted
by alcoholism and depression. He is made ‘thing-like’, outside of human
connection, and as a hybrid human-alien life form discloses the intimate
cultural connection made between the alien and psychopathology. Newton
becomes haunted by persistent telepathic images of his own family dying
and his failure to return home and save his species. The film explores the
etymological connection between haunting and home,1 and what it might
feel like to not feel at home in one’s surroundings, milieu, country, planet or
even body, a familiar theme to many who experience their own embodiment
as ‘thing-like’. This haunting persists in his own torment and anguish made
worse by Newton’s addiction to alcohol, which does little to quell his troubles
and anxiety.
This book explores the themes of haunting and being haunted within the
context of alien phenomenologies. I am using the term ‘alien phenomenology’
as it has been specified within psychiatry and cognitive science (the field
of automaticity research more specifically) to describe experiences where
people feel as if they are being directed, moved, possessed or haunted by
someone or something else. The body is often experienced as ‘thing-like’.
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science ix

Automaticity research is, broadly speaking, concerned with processes

that exist below the threshold of conscious awareness and attention. In
the more conventional sense of the term, ‘automaticity’ explores processes
that feel automatic, that might become habitual and that do not demand
our attention. However, automaticity research also focuses on experiences
that explore how we can be made to do things without being consciously
aware (so-called unwilled action), and to that extent has a much more
controversial side.
Automaticity research brings together all kinds of enigmatic behaviours
and puzzling phenomena facing modern psychology and often falls under the
rubric of weird science. This includes hypnotic suggestion, trance states, voice
hearing, motor automatisms (including involuntary muscular movements),
various contagious phenomena and ‘actions that are so remarkably divorced
from a feeling of doing’ (Ansfield and Wegner, 1996: 483) that they are often
attributed to supernatural forces. The focus on ‘alien phenomenologies’
includes experiences of suggestion, contagion and imitative processes that are
shared and distributed across the human and more-than-human. They invite
a renewed focus on registers and modalities of attending to the world that
exceed conscious rational thought, or that exist at the edges of consciousness.
They are ‘alien’ if one subscribes to psychological individualism and clear and
distinct borders and boundaries between self and other, human and technical,
material and immaterial, affect and cognition, and body and society. As will
become clear, this assumption is perhaps untenable, unwise and even in many
cases does harm.
The term ‘alien phenomenologies’ has also been used in speculative
philosophy to describe the phenomenology of what it might feel like to be
‘thing-like’ within the context of objects and object-oriented ontologies. Ian
Bogost’s (2012) book, Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing
argues for a phenomenology of things beyond the human. Also see Steven
Shaviro’s provocative book Discognition (2015), and particularly the chapter
‘Thinking like an Alien’, which considers the question of alien consciousness
through Peter Watts’s novel Blindsight (2006).
This book extends this work beyond the human by exploring alien
phenomenologies within the context of software cultures and digital archives.
It does this by taking two science controversies, which cross cognitive science,
x Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

speculative philosophies, anomalistic psychology and the field of affect studies.

These controversies focus on alien phenomenologies, which at the same time
take shape within digital archives that are haunted by submerged narratives
and displaced actors and agents. These archives re-move (that is put back into
circulation) what haunts contemporary science within this area. The book mines
the potential of this ghost-data thus returning the hauntological dimensions to
studies of the media and mediation. This is done primarily within the context of
computational culture and software media and to the question of the difference
that digital media are making to the evolution of science.
The hauntological dimensions of analogue media have been written about
before, not least in Jeffrey Sconce’s book, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence
from Telegraphy to Television (2000), and John Durham Peter’s evocative book,
Speaking into the Air: The History of the Idea of Communication (1999). These
books, as well as the writings of the media archaeologist Stefan Andriopolous,
including his two seminal books, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate
Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (2008) and Ghostly Apparitions: German
Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (2013), have all been sources of
inspiration for the book’s themes. In different ways, all of the aforementioned
books draw explicitly from the relations between spiritualism, psychic research
(entities, practices and imaginaries), forms of ghosted consciousness and the
material-technical shaping of media such as telegraphy, television, film, radio
and so forth. Media have always been haunted and haunting and the themes
of haunted media live on in discussions of twenty-first-century media and
computational culture. This includes Mark Hanson’s book Feed-forward: On
the Future of 21st Century Media (2015), which seeks inspiration from the
writings of the early twentieth-century philosopher Albert North Whitehead
to explore the ghostly qualities of mediation as it takes form within software
and computational practices. This book explicitly explores the challenges
data and software media pose to theories of mediation, developed within the
context of older forms of media, and extends this within studies of the cultural
and affective politics of data.
The term ‘data’ is of course a vexed term referring to different practices
(software, informational, statistical, etc.); different theoretical and disciplinary
traditions (software studies, sociology, science, etc.); different platforms
(Facebook, Twitter); and different ways of imagining the relations between
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xi

people, things, entities and power relationships. What we mean by data, what
counts as data, and how to study the cultural politics of data is a pressing concern
and one that this book attempts to tackle. I am, however, not approaching data
as code although the psychological and psychic imaginaries that shape code
are part of the story. I am not approaching data as monetized or mathematized
although some of these conceptions enter the story I will tell. The story of data
I will tell is one which primarily explores data hauntologically and analyses
how software-driven encounters, transactions, traces and practices, which
take place within media environments understood as digital or data-driven,
return media to its ghostly dimensions.
Some have argued that data is now a ubiquitous presence in our lives and
that in different ways we live with data, imagine with data, feel with data
and even anticipate futures, which have yet to come. This includes that we
are living in the midst of what Patricia Clough and others (2015) have called
the ‘datafication’ of society. The term ‘datafication’ is an important attempt to
move beyond some of the utopian and dystopian fantasies associated with the
ubiquity of data – that is that data either changes everything, or repeats and
extends forms of power that are part and parcel of older forms of surveillance
and regulation. Datafication draws attention to what exceeds human capacities
of measurement and meaning – to the ‘noise’ in the system, to the incomputable,
which sometimes allows for novelty, creativity and the generation of the new
(also see Clough, 2018).
This book is situated within these debates that explicitly concern the
challenges of twenty-first-century media and computational cultures to our
understandings of the media, mediation, representation, affect, power and
subjectivity. The book specifically looks at how software-driven transactions
are changing scientific innovation, progress, discussion, review, debate and
the nature of consensus and controversy. It explores how both computation
and science share a hauntological dimension. In order to explore this, the
book takes a field of scientific experimentation that has caught the interest of
many humanities scholars interested in contagion, imitation, suggestion and
processes and registers of experience more broadly associated with the field
of affect study. The ‘turn to affect’, as it is sometimes known, will be discussed
throughout the book, particularly as it intersects with debates on networked
affect and the question of how fads, fashions, beliefs, emotions, moods and so
xii Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

on might spread across social media and networked culture in ways that invite
analyses of ‘contagious relationality’ (Sampson, 2012).

Affect

We can see in writings about affect2 by media theorists, philosophers and cultural
theorists that there is a renewed focus on registers that exceed conscious rational
thought or that exist at the edges of consciousness. This includes recognition
that normative conceptions of self-determination and psychological autonomy
occlude questions of how power works in registers that are never simply
conscious or rational. As many scholars across the social sciences and humanities
have argued, ‘philosophers and critics have largely neglected the important role
our corporeal-affective dispositions play in thinking, reasoning and reflection,
then it seems to follow that an account of affect and its place in our lives and
institutions is called for’.3 We encounter affect in descriptions of architecture (in
terms of atmosphere and as immersive, immaterial), in discussions of objects as
enchanted and captivating, in discussions of social media and networked affect4
and the question of what gains a reach and traction and why, and in relation to
political and governmental practices and policies. This includes the relationship
between post-truth politics and the registers of emotion and feeling.
Across a broad rubric of disciplines, which cross the arts, humanities, social,
human and natural sciences, there is a renewed interest in how our experiences
might be understood, targeted and modulated via processes understood to
exist below the threshold of conscious attention. These processes open the
subject to modalities of power and mediation understood to be suggestive or
operating with the potential for contagion or imitation, for example. They invite
consideration of what it might mean to govern through affect or what I term
processes and practices of ‘psychomediation’.5 The logics underpinning these
strategies of governance draw from the psychological sciences and particularly
theories, concepts and understandings which have attempted to understand
the suggestive capacities of human subjects – turning attention to processes
that are assumed to not be accessible to conscious awareness or control. It is
at this shared interchange and intersection between the psychological sciences
and affect studies that the book is situated.
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xiii

Data and affect

The book specifically develops an affective approach to data, which attends

to what exceeds more quantitative and often instrumental approaches to big
and small data (see Chapter 2). I argue that data bear the traces of human,
material, technical, symbolic and imaginary histories that are often displaced
and occluded in data metrics. The case studies analysed throughout the book
and the affective methodology that puts them into circulation foregrounds the
relationship between science and storytelling.6 Although storytelling might
not usually be associated with either science or computational culture, the
book makes an argument that storytelling, or what Donna Haraway (1990)
has called the relationship between science and fiction (or science-fiction),
is central to understanding what counts as science and how it takes form.
This relationship is further illuminated by Haraway’s more recent shaping
of the feminist practice of ‘speculative fabulation’ (Haraway, 2013) as a
transdisciplinary strategy for intervening within science and world-making.
My particular approach to the relationship between science and storytelling
will be framed through the concept of transmedial storytelling (see Chapter 1).
This is a form of distributed storytelling, which specifically allows a
consideration of the difference digital media make to the potential evolution
of science, and our capacity to make sense of controversies. This book will
make an argument that suggests that both science and computational culture
are haunted by both the histories and excesses of their own storytelling and
that these excesses surface in ‘queer aggregations’ or haunted data to be mined,
poached and put to work in newly emergent contexts and settings.7 The book
points to the propensity of straight or legitimate science to sanitize, excise or
even exorcise narratives, actors, agents and entities, which ‘contaminate’ it
with queerness.
The ‘datalogical turn’ also invites a reformulation and reconfiguring of
important questions about the nature of subjectivity, of the human, and what
counts as a digital subject within the context of data and computational culture.8
A current trend addressing some of the distinctiveness of computational
media is to turn to older theorists of media and communications. These
were primarily developed and shaped prior to the internet and social media.
This might include Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to the self, or
xiv Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

nineteenth-century philosophers and theorists who were concerned more

with early media technologies, such as Gabriel Tarde, for example.9 At the same
time the canons and historical a prioris10 of established disciplines are being
challenged by new configurations of cross-disciplinary knowledge formation.
These configurations include tactical alignments across different disciplines
and forms of analysis, which aim to unsettle the boundaries of knowledge-
practices and disciplines in order to open to the new and unexpected.
Mark Hansen, for example, moves through and across nineteenth-century
process and vitalist philosophies, phenomenology and post-phenomenology,
affect theories, the non-human turn and contemporary media theory. This
allows him to reread Albert North Whitehead, an early twentieth-century
philosopher as a contemporary media theorist. One question explored
throughout this book is what other kinds of unorthodox or tactical alignments
of disciplines, sub-disciplines, theories, perspectives, figures, archives, entities
and practices would help us probe into the complexity of twenty-first-century
media, the cultural politics of data, and the question of what counts as a digital
subject within the context of what I am calling haunted data.
My contention is that there is much to be gleaned from bringing together
the fields of science studies, affect studies, the non-human turn, with queer
theories, feminist approaches to automation, new materialisms, hauntologies,
and some of the diverse and differing genealogies of subjectivity that exist on
the margins of many disciplines and philosophical perspectives. The book
specifically takes its cue from a number of feminist and radical philosophers
of science and from science studies scholars who have developed innovative
approaches to science, which cross philosophy, science and culture. They have
explored the histories and genealogies of science within specific historical,
cultural, political, technical, psychological and symbolic conjunctures.
This includes attention to the historical a prioris, which have shaped the
philosophies and practice of science, including what counts as an experiment,
experimentation and evidence, as well as the close interdependence and
interrelationship between cultural configurations of matter-meaning and the
materialities of scientific cultures.
Specifically, I have been inspired by the writings of Isabelle Stengers,
Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Hans-Jö rg Rheinberger.
The work of the philosophers Stengers and Despret have been of particular
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xv

importance given their focus on experiences and phenomena that are often
considered strange, weird, outside of reason, or as presenting challenges to
established scientific orthodoxies. In their book Women Who Make a Fuss:
The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (Stengers and Despret, 2014)
they recount how the subject matter they have focused on, which includes
‘hypnosis, addicts, witches, the Arabian babbler, peasants, the uneasy dead’
(p. 15), are topics that are not considered serious or worthy of interest for
most conventional philosophers. I would add that they are also considered
anomalous within psychology, where the designation ‘anomalous’ works to
mark out what is understood as falling outside of conventional psychological
understandings and explanations.
The definition of ‘anomalous’, that which deviates from what is standard,
normal or expected – the aberrant, freakish, odd, bizarre, peculiar and unusual,
captures the experience and phenomena that are under investigation in this
book. ‘Anomalous’ practices, phenomena, experiences and entities haunt two
contemporary science controversies within psychology, which have crossed
into the mainstream primarily via social and digital media. The content of
the controversies and their ‘alien phenomenologies’ will be introduced in
Chapter 1. They both allow new stories to be told about affect, emotion and
the psychological, which question the borders and boundaries between the
psychic and the psychological, the rational and the irrational, the self and
other, truth and falsehood, the material and immaterial and the corporeal and
incorporeal.
Vinciane Despret’s engagement with the psychological sciences and the
ambiguities, puzzles and anomalies that can be found historically and in
the present imaginatively show how we need approaches that unsettle the
polarizing logic that often frames debate and scientific investigation in this
area. This includes explanations which focus either on proving the existence
of phenomena or undermining them as evidence of so-called false belief:
is it real or unreal, true or false? In the area of anomalous psychology the
scientist is often cast in the role of judge and juror attempting to close down
on the ambiguity, hesitations, puzzling curiosities, and what continually resists
current scientific explanations. As she has argued in relation to the case of
‘Clever Hans’,11 a talented horse who challenged psychological ideas, theories
and practices at the turn of the nineteenth century, there are much more
xvi Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

interesting questions to be asked and speculative propositions to be explored.

Hans reappears in one of the controversies staged in the first half of this book,
raising questions about the policing, shaping and emergence of concepts
of psychological individualism and subject–object bifurcation, which are
challenged throughout the book.
My companions in thought (Ahmed, 2014) allow me to situate and speak to
the problem of the ‘psychological’ and what counts as psychological processes,
entities and matters when the psychological is not considered separate from
contiguous processes, including the historical, technical, ecological, symbolic
and affective. The conversation and dialogue that these authors make possible
throughout the book is unorthodox and tactical. It disrupts many of the
border wars that police the boundaries of different intellectual heritages and
philosophical perspectives. Some of these perspectives aren’t usually brought
into conversation, or if they are it is often through antagonisms, suspicion,
refusal, or by simply ignoring dissent through specific citational practices.
Rather than being interdisciplinary in nature the book is therefore rather
undisciplined and to that extent is aligned to many queer theorists and queer
theories, which refuse the straight path.12
I approach data primarily as a non-expert (particularly in software
studies and computational culture), as a non-philosopher (although the
Feeling the Future controversy explored in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 engages with
the philosophies of statistics and speculative philosophies), and as a scholar
who has spent the last twenty-five years working in sociology and media
and cultural studies within a very interdisciplinary context. The value of the
undisciplinarity that I inhabit with its queer and feminist orientations, and
my previous contributions to critical genealogies of psychology and affect, are
important for the stories I am able to tell.

Questions and challenges

The book is centred around and responds to four main questions which relate
to the broad areas that the book is situated within: data, affect, weird science
and transmedia. These areas connect up timely questions related to science,
governance, subjectivity, data and the question of what difference digital media
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xvii

and computational cultures are making to our lives. The first question comes
out of a much earlier tradition of work, which has explored and examined the
role of the human sciences in the government and management of human and
even non-human life. This work, which has been indebted to the thinking of
the radical philosopher Michel Foucault, has analysed how scientific concepts,
theories, practices and experimental forms of life have shaped the conditions
under which specific human subjects have emerged. This work, as we will go
on to consider in Chapter 1, has been shaped in the context of disciplinary
forms of power, which have formed the basis of technologies of the social,
such as the prison, hospital, asylum and school. These technologies for
governing life have circulated the norms through which conduct, behaviour,
thought and feeling have been judged, evaluated, categorized, measured and
circulated. They have also circulated in different ways as techniques of self-
inspection and self-production. The book raises the question of whether and
how science and governance are changing in the context of digital media and
digital forms of communication. What are the consequences thereof for how
we might understand and examine new technologies of power, and specifically
psychological and affective forms of governance, as they extend and are
extended within software and computational cultures?

Engaging with science

These two questions are posed against a backdrop of calls for humanities
scholars to take the sciences more seriously and to see them as potential allies
or ‘critical friends’ rather than as opponents or antagonistic partners. It is being
argued that there are too many schisms between and across the sciences and
the humanities, and that there are now new opportunities for rapprochement
and for interdisciplinary and collaborative forms of inquiry. Some of these
arguments suggest that there are emergent ontologies, which can be found in
the sciences and humanities, which destabilize well-rehearsed arguments that
have positioned the sciences as deterministic, reductionist and as reinforcing
already existing inequalities and oppressions. These new opportunities are
captured by new fields of study, which cross the humanities and sciences,
including the biosocial and the biohumanities. Some of the scholars who are
xviii Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

making these arguments have also come out of traditions of research that in
the past have been more critical of scientific ontologies and experimental
forms of life. This includes the work of the sociologist Nikolas Rose, and
of Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald in the context of the neurosciences;13
Elizabeth Wilson in the context of the cognitive and psychological sciences;14
and arguments made by sociologists such as Maurizio Meloni who argue that
sociology is now more open to biological suggestions just at a time when
biology is becoming more social.15
As the philosopher and software studies scholar Tiziana Terranova (2004)
also suggests, what are viewed as non-deterministic approaches to materiality
are providing renewed opportunities for humanities scholars to forge alliances
with the natural and human sciences. She asks, ‘Is it possible to draw on
scientific concepts to further our understanding of cultural processes?’ (2004:
51). There are also now a slew of books and special issues of journals devoted
to ‘biosocial alliances’ (see Meloni et al., 2016). This includes the coining of
terms such as the ‘biocultural’ (Frost, 2016), ‘political biology’ (Meloni, 2016),
or ‘New Biologies’ (Blackman, 2016), which are taken to indicate something
explicitly new about the present conjuncture. The question of whether and how
to forge alliances between the humanities and the human and life sciences is,
of course, not new, even if there is apparently something distinctive about the
present conjuncture, which brings the potentiality of possible collaborations
sharply into focus.
This shift in the positioning of science relates to the identification of common
ontologies emerging across the sciences and humanities, which emphasize the
complex, processual, indeterminate, contingent, non-linear, relational nature
of phenomena constantly open to effects from contiguous processes. These
arguments are being advanced in relation to the fields of genetics and the
biological sciences (including epigenetics and the microbiome), mathematics,
quantum physics and the physics of small particles, the neurosciences
(particularly the social and critical neurosciences), affect theories across
media and cultural theory (see Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, Clough, 2008),
new materialisms (Coole and Frost, 2010), as well as the neurosciences of
affect and emotion (see Wetherell, 2012). These common ontologies are
grounded in concepts such as biosocialities (Rabinow, 1996), naturecultures
(Haraway, 2003), entanglement (Barad, 2007; Wilson, 2015), assemblage, flow,
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xix

turbulence, emergence, becoming, relationality, intra-action, co-evolution,

co-emergence, the machinic, to name just some of the heuristics and new
biosocial languages being deployed. In their wake, relationships between the
social and the natural, the mind and body, the cognitive and the affective, the
human and the technical and biology and identity are being reformed.
In some ways the engagement with science and specifically psychology and
the neurosciences (and particularly the neuroscience of affect and emotion) by
humanities scholars is not new. In a book I wrote with Valerie Walkerdine in
2001, Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies, we were intrigued
with how theorists who staked a claim for their radical thinking and were
critiquing psychologism often drew on psychological concepts and theories
through the back door and I might add in rather conservative ways. Then
the debates were framed around postmodernity and the postmodern (turns
which had a similar feel to the turn to affect), and we remarked on how
psychological concepts were being taken up within postmodernist cultural
theory, in the writings of Baudrillard, Lyotard and Frederik Jameson, to
theorize conditions of experience under postmodernity. Some of the concepts
used were schizophrenia, autism (a subject trapped within their own silence),
flattened affect and the invocation of silent and frozen masses that we find in
Baudrillard’s work, for example.
What was curious about these theorists was that, on the one hand,
they disavowed modernity and psychology (as grand narratives based on
universalizing experiences and depth models, for example), while, on the
other, they used psychological and even psychiatric concepts and theories to
describe experiences within postmodernity. We remarked how much these
theorists were dependent upon psychological terminology and concepts
despite their disavowals and how this led to wild overgeneralizations and
prohibit the study of precisely what subjectivities were formed within any
specific historical and cultural location. I think we can see similar problems
within the field of affect study, which is not helped by the arguments made by
many scholars that subjectivity is now obsolete and redundant as a concept
and field of study. The second controversy analysed in the book Feeling the
Future suggests that this is not the case and that the issue of how to investigate
mind–matter relations remains a problem for affect studies, new materialisms,
speculative philosophies and for the psychological sciences.
xx Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

As we argued back in 2001 (making reference to trends in the 1990s), cultural

theorists are, on the one hand, all too ready to dismiss psychology, while, on
the other hand, making completely questionable psychological assumptions in
their own work. We argued that these moves displayed a wearisome disinterest
in the critical work that had been going on within and outside psychology for a
long time, as well as freely adapting terms from psychology to give their work
a spurious authenticity. I think these arguments could be made in relation to
some of the debates within the field of affect study and particularly those that
dismiss subjectivity, while at the same time replacing subjectivity or critical
approaches to subjectivity with a neurophysiological body, or sometimes with
more quantum approaches to matter.
As a trained psychologist who left the discipline to work in sociology and
then media and cultural theory, I have retained an interest in what experiences,
phenomena, entities, processes and practices have been marginalized within
psychology. I want to bring these interests and experiences more directly to
bear on these issues and to specifically address what a critical reconfiguration of
psychological matters might add to the fields of affect studies and the emergent
field of the biohumanities (see Frost, 2016). This book is therefore also an
attempt to open up what I call ‘speculative psychologies’, which might draw
from new materialisms, affect studies and critical theorizations of subjectivity
at the intersection of the non-human, more-than-human and post-human.16
My focus will be on what is excluded from straight psychology and from the
historialities of psychology’s disqualified and submerged pasts – what remain
as outliers, anomalies and puzzles, which sometimes register as abnormal
perceptions or signs of psychopathology. Within the book these moments
appear as haunted or ghostly data to be followed, re-moved and put back
into circulation within the context of contemporary philosophy and cultural
theory. This diffraction of psychology through the weird, strange, ridiculous
and ludicrous is offered as a strategy for the playful contamination of science.
This strategy has more in common with what psychology might have become
if it had constituted psychological processes as fundamentally entangled,
indeterminate, processual phenomena. These archives of the future exist in
psychology's disavowed past and return in the book as insistent traces to be
mined, poached and put to work in new and newly emergent conjunctures
and context.
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xxi

The politics of data

The third question asks what kinds of critical research can be done in the
context of software and computational cultures. In recent years the politics
of data, its social and cultural life, and the new methods cultural theorists
might need to analyse this have been posed as central issues for the humanities
and social sciences (see Clough et al., 2015; Ruppert, Law and Savage, 2013;
Manovich, 2013; Gitelman, 2013). The politics of data open up the question
of exactly what counts as data, especially in the context of the multiple media
transactions that register our presences, both in work and play, or as many
have argued, those which blur the boundary between work and play (Gregg,
2011). These transactions leave traces, which potentially accrue ‘after-lives’
(see Fuller, 2009). As Beer and Burrows (2013) suggest, data acquire their own
social lives, becoming lively in ways that are difficult to see, comprehend and
analyse using conventional qualitative methods of inquiry.
I argue that data can be extracted, mapped, aggregated, condensed,
measured and translated, acquiring autonomies and agencies that extend and
travel beyond the original event or transaction. Dystopian arguments present
what is seen as the increasing metrics of life as the final stage in technology
acquiring its own agencies and taking over. Reminiscent of nineteenth-
century and early twentieth-century dystopian anxieties, machines, and in
this context, machine learning, are now governing humans in ways that are
impossible to see, comprehend, understand or predict. The so-called back-end
of social media, for example, provides data that is conjoined with automated
practices and analyses in complex ways. These recursive relations defy calls for
transparency and raise ethical questions about ownership of data and corporate
agendas. Data repositories potentially create surplus value, including revenue
and profit for businesses, governments, science and related actors. Particular
data banks and archives are mined, often using proprietary forms of software,
which can aggregate vast amounts of data in order to shape and anticipate the
future – or this is at least the data-driven dream.
There are many debates related to the politics of data that we will explore
throughout the book. This includes the emergence of a new interdisciplinary
object of study, ‘big data’, which is providing a new focus for scholars across
many disciplines who are repurposing usually rather positivist methods to
xxii Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

make certain claims. Although scholars who share vastly different approaches
to the epistemology and ontology of knowledge claims are now speaking
to each other, at conferences and symposiums, for example, the axiom that
governs these debates is that ‘big data’ require new forms of processing –
new approaches and methods that challenge the well-rehearsed qualitative/
quantitative divide.17 Funding councils support these axioms, as much as
they are invested in by venture capitalists keen to harness new automated
forms of power. Positivist methods are also being remediated within digital
environments by humanities scholars, often using advanced software
techniques. These are pro-offered as potentially transforming research across
the arts, humanities and social sciences.
For some, this will potentially result in the ‘end of theory’ replacing
critical inquiry with data analytics (Anderson, 2008). Techniques based on
quantification have always been the mainstay of more positivist methods.
However, they are now regularly offered as the solution to a range of questions
that have been more central to the humanities: how to gain a purchase on
questions of power, agency, subjectivity, technology and embodiment, for
example. Those of us who have remained suspicious of the claims of positivism
(mine due to my own training within positivist science) must however recognize
that as David Beer (2013) has argued, the ‘doing of culture has changed’ (12:
author’s emphasis). Beer suggests that there are four aspects to the performance
and circulation of what in the past have been termed cultural processes that
require consideration: archives, algorithms, data-play and the body. These are
important concerns and concepts and the approach to data that I develop in
this book takes these suggestions seriously. As with any interdisciplinary field
of study this will require a movement across debates that are taking place in
many disciplines, and which importantly are far from settled.
One important question that is at the centre of this book therefore is what
counts as data. What does one analyse when one takes data as a central focus
of study and analysis? This question is far from clear, particularly when one
moves away from instrumentalist, mathematized and monetized definitions
of data and pause to reflect on what exactly can be translated into data. If data
is considered a process of translation, which creates a use or surplus value
from digital traces, then what exceeds these data analytics and strategies of
pre-emption and anticipation? Are there other strategies open to cultural
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xxiii

theorists who might not want to engage software techniques as the sole way of
understanding some of what inevitably are new forms of power?
Against the popular rally that big data represents the ‘end of theory’ and the
capacity for humanities scholars to engage in critique, there are many adjectives
being used to describe data that introduce nuanced critique and qualification
into such arguments. This includes the description of data as beautiful, small,
smart, anticipatory, aggregated, false, raw, cooked, compromised, lively, inert
and so on. My own chosen adjective to approach data in the context of post-
publication-peer-review (PPPR) is haunted. This adjective is inspired by the
work of Matt Fuller (2009) in software studies. He has used the concept of the
‘after-lives’ of data, to explore the agency and autonomy of data as it moves on
from the particular event that originated it and becomes active. The agency
or what I call aliveness of data allows for a consideration of the social and
cultural life of data, which exists beyond more instrumentalist notions of data.
The concept of ‘haunted data’ is designed to disrupt the distinction between
big and small data and to explore what leaves the frame if we focus solely on
metrics, quantification and digital methods based on counting, measuring,
aggregating and visualizing numbers.
The book develops a data ethnography that is attentive to historicity
and to what Hans-Jö rg Rheinberger (1994) has called historiality (i.e. the
intimate connection between science and storytelling). It explores two science
controversies in the area of weird science, which took form across social media
and in the context of a corpus of digital communication produced by scientists.
The data refers to science writing appearing in blogs, tweets, comments posted
on websites, in comments offered by open-access journals linked to journal
articles, in Google+ communities, Reddit bulletin boards, emails and responses
to science journalists writing about the controversies and bringing them to the
attention of broadcast media. As well as a data ethnography the book is also
offered as a resource for affect theorists and those interested in suggestion,
contagion, imitation, automaticity, the non-conscious, pre-conscious and
related processes and practices.
The book is part allegory of the turn to speculative forecasting and
futurisms of all kinds, and the historical, ontological, technical, economic,
symbolic and psychic conditions under which such imaginaries have taken
form. It also develops a methodological strategy for engaging with science
xxiv Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

and bringing hauntology into digital environments. It is an attempt to think

through networked virality or networked affect in the context of social media
and the politics of small data. It is also an attempt to debate what we might
inherit or actively refuse in the ways digital communication is transforming
science and measures of academic value. It also provides reflection on some
very unconventional psychologies of time, will, intentionality and experiences
gathered together under the designation of the subliminal or non-conscious.
This is taken from the perspective of what is actively disqualified from cognitive
science. These dispersed interests and influences are all brought together in a
single question: what does following science controversies as they take form
in digital communication add to contemporary calls for more rapprochement
between the humanities and the sciences?

Conclusion: The politics of change, truth and indeterminacy

In this age of post-truth politics, and questions about the emotional and
affective nature of change and transformation, this book situates these concerns
within a novel context of scientific controversy and debate. This is linked to
new forms of post-publication-peer-review, which are driven by the forms
of comment, review, evaluation and discussion made possible by the digital
disruption of the publishing industry. PPPR refers to a particular context of
data production and circulation that has the potential to transform academic
practices of writing, publishing, debate and impact. It focuses on the after-
lives that academic articles and books might accrue after publication, and the
ways in which the PPPR found on blogs, internet forums, social networks and
other social media might enter into, intervene within and change the settings
and parameters of what counts as legitimate and illegitimate debate. PPPR is
a corpus of distributed data which some academic journal articles and books
might accrue post publication and particularly as they might be blogged
about, tweeted, discussed on websites, in comments boxes attached to science
trade journals and in digital versions of newspaper and broadcast media.
Journal editors, book publishers and authors in different ways see PPPR as an
important measure of impact, as well as a resource to harness and extend the
reach of an author’s work.
 Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science xxv

Post-publication-peer-review entangles multiple actors and agents, including

social media and open-access platforms, websites, communities of academic
scholars and researchers, journal editors, science journalists, media broadcasters
and particular interested publics. The book explores what kind of scientific data
PPPR is and how it contributes to the dynamism of science and its potential to
innovate and shape new entities, practices, subjects and objects. I argue that
PPPR does matter to the humanities and sciences but these extend beyond some
of the current arguments being made about its significance.
For example, there are arguments which suggest that PPPR is potentially
changing what counts as the proper object of science and science-in-the-
making, and what counts as legitimate and illegitimate entities, practices and
processes. Some scientists feel the data produced by PPPR is threatening the
integrity of science, whereas others argue that it has the potential to transform
science, making it more open, democratic and participatory. In other contexts
this might be considered part of how science is popularized, or publically
communicated. I argue that PPPR provides a corpus of data that can be mined,
poached and put to work in newly emergent contexts and conjunctures. This
data provides the humanities scholar interested in science an entry point
into some of the controversies, submerged narratives, displaced actors and
disqualifications that are often covered over, edited out, discarded or exist as
minor agencies within legitimate science.
As we will see in Parts 1 and 2 of the book, the radical potential of PPPR has
the tendency to be straightened and replaced with a form of representationalism
or storytelling that is more in keeping with positivist science writing. The
book will reveal this ‘politics of straightening’ or ‘business as usual’ allowing
a discussion of the relationship between power, status, hierarchy and the
dynamics of change – of processes of movement, indeterminacy, stabilization
and actualization. Digital media may well afford the potential for change
and transformation but this potential is often closed down and thwarted.
Understanding the complex historical, economic, political, affective and
governmental reasons for these processes of opening and closing will help
us understand some of the wider dynamics of change, transformation and
foreclosed possibility and epistemic uncertainties.
This book provides a novel context to explore these issues, which
cross the field of affect studies, affective science, new materialisms and the
xxvi Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

biohumanities, anomalous psychology, the digital disruption of publishing

within science, and the cultural politics of data. It argues that the sciences need
the arts, philosophy and the humanities in order to develop the possibility of
more open, creative, adventurous and inventive science(s). It is also driven
by the concern that it is important for cultural theorists to invent new ways
of engaging with science, in all its ambiguities, contradictions, uncertainties,
fracture-lines, hesitancies, erasures and displacements. It is a call for a Queer
or even QWeird Science that can follow those data-trails or haunted trails,
which point towards new visions for the future.
 Part One

Priming and Networked

Affect: Data Mediation
and Media Contagions
2
 1

Transmedial Storytelling, Weird

Science and Archives of the Future

Introduction: Weird science

Is it possible to see into the future or even for the future to retroactively
influence the past? Can experimental subjects be primed to walk to a lift more
slowly after being shown words associated with ageing on a scrambled language
task?1 How do we make sense of the experimental evidence, which suggests
that both of these questions can be answered affirmatively? These questions
are related to experiments written up in two journal articles, considered classic
studies, which cross cognitive science, anomalistic psychology and psychic
research (Bargh, Chen and Burrows, 1996; Bem, 2011). In different ways the
studies also remediate debates within affect theories, new materialisms and
speculative philosophies in the humanities. They invite a refractive method,
which reads and stages texts, events, human and non-human actors and
agencies, objects, entities and practices through one another (Barad, 2010).
One of the studies and the controversies that ensued speak to current debates
about data and computation and the question of what one analyses when data
is a central focus of study and analysis. Last but not least, they both provide
a springboard for addressing a topical question: how can we perform critical
research in the context of the computational turn and what implications does
this have for studies of the media and mediation?
Both of the articles provide starting points for the argument of this book.
They have both been highly cited and have captured the attention of the
broadcast media in different ways. They have both had impact and have after-
lives on the internet and across social media. Readers will be able to find
hyperlinks to these articles, which extend across space and time, and lead to an
4 Haunted Data

encounter with a range of strange related entities: horses that can type or tell
the time, clairvoyant computers, entangled minds (human and non-human),
non-local consciousness, so-called mad scientists, and entities and practices,
which are deemed impossible, improbable or the product of irrational belief
systems. Both articles have become part of unfolding controversies across
social and broadcast media and have in different ways become ‘media events’.
They have left contagious trails composed of montages of hyperlinks, some of
which have been assembled into accepted versions of events, and others that
have been rendered insufficient, nonsensical and have been redacted or exist
below the radar. These ghostly links sometimes open to detours and dead ends
and often to submerged and displaced actors and agents. The articles and the
controversies surrounding them concern puzzling phenomena and connect to
some of the most vexed questions concerning life, matter, nature, the universe
and sometimes to everything!
Both of the controversies challenge some of the inherited beliefs readers
might have about what it means to be human, an organism, a subject and to
have and be a body. We might think of ourselves as primarily, or striving to be,
unified, bounded and whole with clear and distinct boundaries between self
and other. We might recognize of course that others influence us in a myriad
of ways, and that relationality is perhaps a better concept for describing the
richness and potentiality of what it means to be embodied. But what when
relationality extends to forms of experience, practices, entities and phenomena
that suggest more of a radical indeterminacy and contingency that questions
any distinct sense of boundary between self and other, inside and outside,
mind and body, material and immaterial, human and technical, past and
present, psychic and somatic and the affective and cognitive?
The experiences and phenomena that are the subject of the controversies
are often described as having an ‘alien phenomenology’. What I am calling
the ‘John Bargh priming controversy’ opens up the question of where mind
should be located when taken out of a distinctly human bounded subject. The
‘Feeling the Future controversy’ for how to approach modes of perception
and sensation that are ‘extra-sensory’, or that challenge the limits of current
modes of sensing and relating. These include modes of perception and sensing
that appear to be distributed and extend across time and space, and which
break down any clear causal and linear relationship between past, present
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 5

and future – what we might call ‘alien time’. They involve non-linear and
entangled practices of memory and forgetting, which challenge any sense of
psychological autonomy and bounded consciousness. This includes challenges
to any assumed bifurcation of the human and technical, present and absent,
mind and matter, the corporeal and the incorporeal, and the popular and the
scientific.
In different ways both controversies challenge a key set of colonial
cultural beliefs and theories of mind, which have assumed that psychological
capacities are properties of clearly bounded, autonomous subjects that are
subject to bifurcations between subject and object, material and immaterial,
and biological and cultural. The phenomena that are the subject of the
different controversies bypass reason or rationality or disclose how limited
these concepts are for describing what it means to have and be a body. Both
controversies also raise important questions about the limits of the scientific
method as it operates in its most positivist mode. They introduce the ‘wonder’
back into what it might mean to conduct experiments with experiences that
are considered odd, strange, anomalous, uncanny and unsettling, and which
regularly appear as the subject matter of psychology as it intersects with
weird science.
‘Weird science’ is a broad term, which captures all manner of sciences
of oddities, exceptions and anomalies. It is a term often used to refer to
phenomena, practices, experiences and entities, which have been associated
or linked with the paranormal or supernatural. As a field it refers to science,
which concerns itself with unexplained mysteries, oddities, ‘strange stuff ’ or
challenges to established thinking. This might include the area of anomalous
psychology, or the ‘psychology of anomalous experience’, formerly known
as parapsychology. This sub-discipline of psychology aligns a diverse range
of phenomena and experiences, including mediumship, electronic voice
phenomena, magical beliefs, lucid dreaming, deathbed visions, miracle
cures, paranormal beliefs, false memory, telepathy, near-death states, haunted
experiences, hypnosis, the placebo effect and so forth. It is framed as a study
of extraordinary or exceptional phenomena, but is not restricted to those
experiences which might be delineated as paranormal.
These phenomena are often framed and constituted through the cognitive
and neuropsychology of perception and belief. Both controversies speak to the
6 Haunted Data

vexed question of what it means to enter into suggestive relations with another
human or non-human. They both disclose how little we understand processes,
practices and registers of experience, which challenge rationality, control,
will and autonomous thought. Mark Fisher (2017) invites us to consider the
affective pull or intensity of the ‘weird’ in his book, The Weird and the Eerie. He
asks, ‘What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling
are we pointing to?’ He goes on to say,

I want to argue the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a

sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us
feel that it should not exist, or at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the
entity or object is here, then the categories, which we have up until now used
to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong,
after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate. (Fisher 2017: 15)

Weird is often linked to the supernatural but he suggests that this does not
exhaust the kinds of phenomena and experiences that might be designated
weird. Fisher’s focus is on weird fiction or what he also calls ‘writers of the
weird’ (particularly exploring the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and George
Orwell). He also suggests that the affect of the weird is linked to a fascination
with the unknown, where ‘the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel
our attention’ (p. 17). The weird involves an interplay between this world and
others and evokes ‘a flavour of the beyond’ (p. 21) or invokes a break with
something. This might include normality, the past, Euclidian time and space
for example.
Within legitimate or straight science ‘weird’ phenomena, such as ‘alien
phenomenologies’ retain such a fascination and evocation. They primarily
appear as abnormal perceptions, signs of psychopathology or puzzling
curiosities that challenge foundational assumptions and normative values
and expectations. They include a diverse range of suggestive, contagious and
imitative phenomena that suggest we can be moved to action, to feeling, to
thought, to belief in ways we little understand or comprehend. They relate to
other unusual experiences, such as possession, thought control, altered states
of mind and body, and the sense of futures speaking in the present. They are
sometimes associated with the paranormal and the occult but have always
retained a fascination in popular culture, film, art, literature, psychoanalysis
and entertainment. They are the subject of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 7

science, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology, as well as providing a range

of concepts, explanatory structures, heuristics and imaginaries for exploring
the ontological indeterminacy of what it means to be human.

Governing through the affective

Both controversies also involve two distinct ways of imagining and governing
conduct, behaviour, thought and feeling. The first, which will form the
subject of Part 1 of the book, is linked to the concept of priming. Priming
relates to a range of strategies and techniques of psychological governance, or
psychomediation, which have been taken up in nudge behavioural economics,
popularized in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and
Happiness by Taylor and Sunstein (2009). Priming refers to the management
and control of conduct, behaviour, thought and feeling, which can be shaped
and produced via techniques taken to work primarily through non-conscious
registers of experience. It relates to the use of techniques of indirect suggestion
to influence conduct and induce behaviour and to stimulate change and
transformation. Nudge has been an important dimension of how citizens in
neo-liberal countries have been moved to action by governments attempting
to shape behaviour beyond a subject’s conscious reflection and control.
According to the philosopher Gary Gutting (2015), although priming is part of
a scientific tradition that crosses cognitive science, behavioural economics and
political science, the approach popularized by the authors of Nudge chimes
more with common sense than established science in this area. Perhaps the
invocation of common sense to describe nudge is another example of how
little we understand priming, although we might be able to identify moments
where subjects might be said to have been primed.
Priming is already controversial as it unseats the rational cogito from its
Cartesian throne and draws limits around the concept of free will. It discloses
how much of our thinking, action and reaction occur in registers which
exist below or beyond conscious, cognitive control. As a mode of power
or governance it is more akin to post-hypnotic suggestion than to power
operating in registers that are conscious, cognitive and rational; the latter is
usually associated with the neo-liberal subject of agency and choice. Priming
8 Haunted Data

covers a broad range of techniques used by advertisers and marketers to shape

consumer behaviour, but also appears as a set of psychologized explanations
of how practices, such as racisms, are taken to be produced, maintained,
shaped and rehearsed. The following example will illustrate what is at stake
for the reader.
In an article published in The Washington Post2 titled ‘Racial Prejudice
Is Driving Opposition to Paying College Athletes. Here’s the Evidence’, the
article recounts the controversies surrounding how college athletes are treated
within the American university system. The revenue that athletes bring to
colleges through merchandise, subscription fees for broadcasting sports
events, concessions and licensing fees adds up to a very lucrative business.
However this far outweighs the grants that are given to athletes, where money
only usually very minimally covers tuition and maintenance. Why is this the
case? The article suggests that this is primarily due to racial prejudice and
that most blacks want college athletes to be paid properly while most whites
don’t. In order to authenticate this statement the article validates a survey
carried out that links this to pre-existing racial prejudice by conducting an
experiment. The experiment is a typical priming experiment where white
respondents were asked their view on whether college athletes should be
properly paid, while showing ‘one group pictures of young black men with
stereotypical African American first and last names. We showed another
group no pictures at all.’ They go on to demonstrate within the parameters
of the experiment that ‘whites who were primed by seeing pictures of young
black men were significantly more likely to say they opposed paying college
athletes’.
As readers can see from this experiment, priming is a broad term, which
covers processes and practices, which are taken to emanate from non-
conscious registers of experience that can be triggered, stimulated, modulated,
amplified, extended and shaped through particular technologies of material-
semiotic-affective association – in this case, images of black men, taken to have
stereotypical African American first and last names. However, this is ultimately
a very psychologized explanation rooted in the concept of racial prejudice,
which is not adequate for exploring and examining how and why racism exists
as an institutional structure of inequality and oppression. Ultimately, as we
will see in Chapter 3, priming is a limited concept due to the assumptions and
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 9

ontologies surrounding mind, cognition, will and affect, which have shaped
modern psychology. It is haunted by what is disavowed and returns in the
priming controversy. This includes already existing controversies surrounding
how to understand the basis of these psychological forms of governance,
management and control. This includes the need for more innovative
propositions, which bring the humanities more into the frame.3
Part 2 of the book, ‘Feeling Futures/Mediating Futures’, turns to a rather
different set of strategies and techniques for governing through the affective
materialized within the second controversy, ‘Feeling the Future’. This
controversy is part of a broader set of cultural imaginaries and discourses,
which are entangled with new strategies of power based on future shaping
and anticipation, which attempt to govern through rather non-linear and
distributed psychologies of time. This includes techniques and practices of pre-
emption, foresight, foreseeing and premediation. These techniques are what
I call ‘strategic imaginaries’, which are manifest and becoming instantiated
in computing (particularly programming and software development),
biology and the neurosciences, practices of mediation within the context
of communication technologies (see Grusin, 2010; Hansen, 2015), business
strategy, finance capitalism, and in the conduct of war, terrorism, politics and
public health responses to global threats (such as the Ebola crisis of 2014).
They underpin and are shaping the development of future technologies,
some of which are based on quantum mechanics and theories of quantum
entanglement. Examples of these include quantum teleportation and
quantum cryptology, and algorithms which attempt to change the past
within open systems, sometimes called programming in the subjunctive
(including retroactive update). These are algorithms which attempt to change
computational pasts and are therefore seen to step sideways in time. One might
also add that all of these imaginaries and the strategies that they are entangled
and produced by are rather queer. Algorithms that can bend, telescope or
subvert linear conceptions of time and technologies that create parallel times
that bend into and beyond past, present and future certainly represent ‘a
“queer” adjustment in the way in which we think about time; in fact, (they)
require(s) and produce(s) new conceptions of space’ (Halberstam, 2005: 6).
Quantum teleportation might be more recognizable as the stuff of science
fiction, conjuring up the image of Star Trek and people being made to
10 Haunted Data

disappear from the Starship by entering the transporter, which converts people
to energy replicas to reappear somewhere else. These more recognizable sci-fi
fantasies are invested in by large corporations and scientists employed by IBM
(for example), who have been experimenting with teleportation since 1993.4
Quantum cryptology is a strategy of encoding and decoding messages, which
converts photon light waves into signs. This is a process of encryption, which
depends on quantum physics rather than mathematics and is attempting to
create processes of encoding and decoding, which will be difficult or even
impossible to decipher. This includes an encryption machine using quantum
physics, developed by a Swiss manufacturer, Id Quantique, which was used in
the October 2007 parliamentary elections in Geneva to prevent voting fraud
and to safeguard votes.5
Alongside these more futuristic and yet increasingly realizable fantasies, we
should include business strategies such as strategic foresight, often marketed
as ‘leading from the future’, and forms of venture capital based on probabilistic
thinking about future risk and profit wound together into the derivative (see
Seigworth and Tiessen, 2012). As the reader will see, some of these strategies
and practices are quite commonplace, others less so, but certainly they are
part of an entangled set of objects, entities, atmospheres and practices, which
are based on anticipating and shaping future actions. They disrupt linear and
Euclidian conceptions of time and space and often work in micro or even nano
scales. These are considered difficult to see in the conventional methodological
sense. As we will see, these attempts to govern through the affective draw more
on concepts, understandings and techniques of psychological life, which are to
be found in psychic research and particularly forms of quantum mechanics,
which draw from theories of the paranormal and supernatural. These alien
imaginaries disrupt any clear and distinct division between past, present and
future, and displace from its privileged position the clearly bounded agentive
psychological subject, as the subject of choice, control and reason.
Within the current conjuncture the rational, choosing subject is celebrated
as the epitome of democracy, civilization, liberalism and scientific truth, while
at the same time suggestive processes and practices operate as part of the
curious vertigo of neo-liberal forms of power. Suggestion is both feared and
to be avoided while at the same time we are increasingly targeted through
practices, which attempt to work in registers beyond, below or at the edges
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 11

of conscious awareness and attention. Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian science

studies philosopher, has cogently highlighted the paradoxes of suggestion,
when she asks, ‘But above all, what do we really know about this suggestion
that we are supposed to avoid?’ (Stengers, 1997: 103). As she goes on to argue,

It is logical, in particular to ask oneself what hypnosis would be if it was rid

of the illusion whereby the hypnotist is situated as an external observer of
his patient; what is more, it is logical to again raise the question of knowing
what suggestion can do in its many diverse modalities from the moment it is
stripped of the illusion that the one who suggests knows what he is doing
and can control the meaning and consequences of his suggestions with
regard to the one he is addressing. (Stengers, 1997: 105)

Stengers’s arguments raise the important question of how our understandings

of suggestion and contagious phenomena have been framed by historical
discourses, which have primarily associated suggestion, contagion and
imitation with a lack of will or loss of self-control, as the intrusion of the
irrational, or evidence that the primitive and animal have not been successfully
renounced. Contagion, suggestion, imitation and related concepts, strategies
and phenomena have been making something of a comeback or return within
contemporary theorizing across the humanities and social sciences, not
least within what has come to be known as the turn to affect. They are also
foregrounded in some of the popularized language and imaginaries, which
address why and how things, processes, objects, entities and phenomena spread
in ways, which appear to defy the actions of rational conscious control. This
includes the concept of networked virality or networked affect – how and why
trends, fashions, fads, feelings, moods and emotions spread across social media
in ways which appear to defy the actions of rational logic and understanding.

Psychomediation/psychology as a science
of population management
This book situates both forms of governance or psychomediation within the
context of a large body of scholarship, which has developed critical approaches
to the psychological sciences. It also extends arguments developed in my
previous book, Immaterial Bodies, Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (2012).
The approaches that inform my orientation to psychology include those
12 Haunted Data

that have drawn primarily from the writings of the French philosopher
Michel Foucault. This includes a reconfiguration of psychology and its subject
matter as intervening within a science of population management, rather
than being part of a science of the individual. Within this broad tradition of
work, psychological knowledge, practices, techniques and concepts have been
analysed as part of processes and practices of governance and regulation. These
traditions of scholarship are often subsumed under the mantle of studies of
neoliberalism and its detrimental effects and affects. This includes what has
come to be known as ‘governmentality studies’, which takes the relationship
between technologies of governance and techniques of selfhood as its focus.
A more popularized version of these arguments can be found in a book
written by the sociologist Will Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the
Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.6 This book in many ways
contributes to over fifty years of scholarship, which has examined the place
of psychology in the government of human lives. This includes the important
work of the British sociologist Nikolas Rose (1985, 1989, 1990) whose
genealogical approach to the psychological sciences has cogently demonstrated
how the psychological sciences emerged during the nineteenth century as
key knowledge practices to constitute, frame and offer resolutions to the
management of conduct across a range of settings and surfaces of emergence.7
Psychology was never simply a science of the individual with unquestionable
claims to neutrality, fact and truth. It was rather a set of veridical practices,
which contributed to and helped to shape those historical truths, or ‘fictions-
which-function-in-truth’, which have come to make up what it means to be
human within contemporary neo-liberal societies.
Rose’s writing is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault and his
archaeological and genealogical analyses of the human sciences as part of a
history of the present. The aim of these approaches is to explore the complex
power–knowledge–subjectivity relationships, which shape particular forms of
regulation and particular kinds of subjects. Within this broad tradition of work,
power is taken to work on and through subject’s actions and desires. This work
has been extended and can be found across a range of disciplines including
sociology, media and cultural studies, education, philosophy, organization
studies and feminism and queer theory, for example. This includes studies
of the consensual and conformist nature of popular fictions and fantasies as
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 13

they might circulate and become mediated within media and popular cultures,
as well as studies of key practices, such as schooling, education, healthcare,
social work, mental health, work and the management of austerity. Within
these settings it has been demonstrated that psychological norms become
the arbiters of what is considered desirable, normal, natural, aspirational,
entrepreneurial and what is ultimately considered to fall within or outside the
parameters of the human.
This interdisciplinary approach to psychology was also shaped by feminist
psychologists entering the discipline, the turn to discourse within social
psychology,8 and the work of philosophers and historians of psychology
such as Graham Richards.9 The approach I have developed in my previous
writing10 is associated with the book Changing the Subject: Psychology,
Power, Social Regulation, published in 1984, which was written by a multi-
authored collective of psychologists who had gone on to leave the discipline of
psychology to work in neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology, education,
psychosocial studies and media and cultural studies. The collective had
begun developing what now might be described as ‘Foucauldian critiques of
psychology’ taking Michel Foucault’s theorizations of power-knowledge as the
basis of their approach (Henriques et al., 1984). The authors had previously
worked together on the journal Ideology and Consciousness in the 1970s,
developing a post-Althusserian approach to psychology and the production of
the human subject. The following is a quote taken from the founding editorial
of the journal and sums up the collective’s position nicely:

This position conceives of the social formation as a complex, over-

determined and contradictory nexus of discursive practices, in which the
human subject is constituted and lives in a relation of absolute interiority. No
region or level of the social formation is contemplated which stands outside
the discursive practices in which the material activities of concrete subjects
consist; the social formation is equivalent to the non-unified totality of these
practices. The human subject is not seen as occupying a given ‘place’ within
a ‘social structure’, but as constituted in the intersections of a determinate
set of discursive practices, which take their particularity from the totality of
practices in which they are articulated. The concept of discursive practice
thus theorises the internal relation between the constitution and existence
of human subjects in the totality and the always-on going processes of
production and reproduction of that totality. (Adlam et al., 1976: 46)
14 Haunted Data

The collective11 developed an ‘Althusserian-Lacanian axis’,12 which increasingly

moved away from the structuralism of Althusser to the post-structuralism
of Michel Foucault and towards the necessity of developing a ‘theory of the
subject’. I will quote from the founding editorial of the journal Subjectivity as
my own work has a direct lineage to this collective and to the approach to weird
science that implicitly frames my approach. As Valerie Walkerdine recounts,

This shift was seen to be one that took us towards an acknowledgement of

plurality and the historical specificity of structures. This move signalled a
sense that Foucault’s work on power/knowledge understood subject positions
as formed within the apparatuses of power/knowledge, the discursive
practices and technologies of the social through which subjectification
occurred. That this was historically specific and plural was crucial. We
moved away from a singular theory and a singular pathway understood
through psychoanalysis. This also implied moving away from ideology. This
is because Foucault understood the human and social sciences, for example,
as creating knowledge that itself was a ‘fiction functioning in truth’ or a
‘regime of truth’. He therefore followed Althusser but went beyond him, in
claiming not that science was ideological but that all knowledge was itself
fictional and productive of subjects. This placed a great deal of emphasis
on the historical emergence or genealogy of the present ‘truths’, and on
the multiple sites through which these historically contingent truths are
productive of positions for subjects to be formed. (Blackman et al., 2008: 6)

Readers who are not familiar with this work might recognize some similar
ways of thinking in the work of other seminal figures within cultural and
queer theory, including Judith Butler, Angela McRobbie and Lauren Berlant,
who have all developed a discourse-fantasy axis combining Foucault with
psychoanalysis (Lacanian and otherwise). Their writing has particularly
explored subject-formation in the context of what Berlant describes as ‘cruel
optimism’. Butler’s work (see 1990, 1993 for example) has developed this in the
context of gender performativity exploring how gendered subject positions are
materialized through a subject’s own actions rather than as the expression of
an inherent gendered binary. McRobbie (2008) has explored this particularly
within the context of new forms of femininity and post-feminism and their
cultural symptoms, manifestations and consequences.
All in different ways are interested in the question of how and why we might
invest or subjectively commit to particular normalized fictions and fantasies,
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 15

even when they do us harm, what Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ (see Berlant
2011). Or to the question of what happens psychically and socially when subjects
who are excluded from such norms attempt to live liveable lives. They echo the
view contained within Foucault’s writings that all knowledge is fictional and
productive of subjects, and attend to the multiple sites (science, popular, war,
conflict as well as the mundane and everyday) through which such historically
contingent truths and fictions are produced and lived (also see Ahmed, 2010).
The emphasis has been on some of the enduring and recurring positions
(in all their sexed, gendered, raced and classed dimensions), through which
subjects become and are sometimes, and even often, undone by processes of
subjectification.

Speculative psychologies and ghost-hunting

This book draws from these traditions but focuses instead on what became
excluded from the psychological sciences as it professionalized as a discipline
and separated from its previous close relationship to psychic research
throughout the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century. I
pay particular attention to those entities, agents, actors, practices and objects,
which became disqualified and disavowed and which exist in a submerged
and displaced form. I argue that what became excluded, including entities,
processes and practices associated with psychic research13 was of interest to
nineteenth-century process psychologies and philosophies. They approached
mind, consciousness, perception and so forth, as a set of transitive processes
contiguous with the technical, symbolic, psychic, affective, historical, political,
cultural and so forth. In other words prior to the instantiation of the singularly
bounded psychological subject as the normative position, early psychology
worked more with the radical indeterminacy of the human and with more
speculative and proto-performative approaches to experimentation linked to
research with psychic phenomena (also see Blackman, 2012, 2014a and b).
These can be found in the writings of William James, Henri Bergson, Frederick
Myers, Gabriel Tarde, Boris Sidis, William McDougall, Gertrude Stein, Leo
Solomons and Edward Ross. They all took ‘threshold phenomena’ seriously
for illuminating questions about body–world–consciousness relations. As
phenomena they were mapped onto a more relational ontology – one which
emphasized process, indeterminacy, non-linearity and contiguity and the
16 Haunted Data

co-emergence of the ‘psychological’ with the technical, symbolic, biological

psychic, affective, historical, political, cultural and so forth.
One of the questions explored in Immaterial Bodies, which returns in
this book, is why this nineteenth-century conceptual apparatus and radical
relational ontology, although banished from psychology, comes back within
the humanities and philosophy in the present. The practice of rescuing ‘lost
figures’ that exist within a historical archive, and restaging their theories within
the context of contemporary problems and questions is not a new enterprise.
Philosophers have engaged this practice in order to create wonder, and to
enable the present to be seen as a process of becoming rather than the natural
and inevitable outcome of historical processes. Deleuze (1992) has restaged
Spinoza’s philosophical writings on ethics in order to refigure the body as a
process, rather than a substance or essence. Latour (2004) has restaged the
work of Gabriel Tarde in order to inject psychic energy into social processes,
and Massumi (2002) has restaged the writings of William James (1890), in
order to make visible the limit of science’s ability to theorize affect, passion and
emotion. Grusin’s (2015) inspiration for his concept of radical mediation is the
radical empiricism of William James’s psychology, also a source of inspiration
for the process philosophy of Brian Massumi (see Massumi, 2016) and the
innovative writings of Vinciane Despret (2016).
Isabelle Stengers (1997: 49) has advocated a ‘going back’ in order to resurrect
figures that have seemingly been forgotten. She cogently shows how reversing
the logic of scientific invention enables one to see, in a contemporary light,
how, ‘questions that have been abandoned or repudiated by one discipline
have moved silently into another, reappearing in a new theoretical context’.
She argues that it is never simply the case that questions have been definitively
abandoned or refused. What we might be more likely to see is the way in which
questions are slightly modified or translated, or particular theories exist in a
dynamic relationship with those that elide or disavow the claims they might
make. Avery Gordon (2008) describes ghost-hunting as a practice, which
makes ‘a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which
you are located. … It is often [about] inarticulate experiences, of symptoms
and screen memories, of spiraling affects, of more than one story at a time,
of the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but transparent and
referential’ (Gordon 2008: 25).
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 17

This is the ‘background context’ that Vinciane Despret (2004b) argues

is what makes practices of science-making so creative and inventive. They
exist in relations of disequilibrium, disqualification, coexistence, conflict and
continuation with those versions which are kept in the background. This relates
to what Stengers (1997: 49) refers to as the ‘deep communications beyond the
proliferation of disciplines’. In the context of haunted data rather than ‘going
back’ to a historical archive in order to understand present formations, the
book explores the removal and circulation of a submerged historical archive,
which returns and haunts online science discussion within the context of both
controversies in the present. As we will see the direction psychology took
in the twentieth century occluded the more radical potential these practices
presented to the shaping of a more open, inventive and creative science.14
Contemporary psychology took a very different path leaving behind a
‘Future Psychology’, which is more compatible with contemporary affect
theories and processual accounts of what it means to be human, a subject and
so on. I argue that weird science’s close alliance with this disavowed archive
of experimentation offers up a productive set of resources for engaging with
contemporary science. The kinds of data (biological, cognitive, psychological,
affective) that are shaped and refracted through the post-publication-peer-
review surrounding both controversies provide some new and innovative
ways for contributing to the dynamism of science and to interdisciplinary
and collaborative forms of inquiry. This book opens the field of affect studies,
new materialism and the biohumanities to new productive possibilities and
future directions. It invites a speculative consideration of what it might mean
to experiment with the impossible or the improbable. It is also a call for the
creation of more inventive propositions that can provide openings to what
Derrida (1995) has termed ‘archives of the future’ and for the proliferation of
more speculative sciences.

Methodological reflections

Affective methodologies and data hauntology

The book develops an affective methodology informed by hauntology and
genealogy to analyse the post-publication-peer-review associated with the
18 Haunted Data

two science controversies. In the context of the data that form the basis of
this book, the reader will encounter not just texts or statements or practices,
but spectres, displacements, disjointed times, submerged events and multiple
temporalities. As Derrida (1994) argues in his reflections on hauntology in
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New
International, hauntologies raise the important ethical and methodological
questions of how one can follow ghosts, or be followed by ghosts, interpret
ghosts, interrogate ghosts, and listen to ghosts. Derrida argues that hauntologies
are ‘performative methodologies’, an ‘interpretation that transforms the thing
it interprets’ (p. 63). The data that form the basis of this book entangle the
somatic, historical, technical and digital in complex ways. It requires a method
of ‘interfering’ in order to make visible what cannot be easily seen in the
conventional methodological sense. As Karen Barad has argued, hauntology
is a methodological orientation that requires a diffractive reading (a term she
borrows from Donna Haraway), so that the displaced event or narrative can
be interfered with. She terms this ‘diffraction as method’ (2010: 243), in which
texts, events, actors and agencies are read ‘intra-actively’ through one another.
The use of the term ‘intra-action’, rather than ‘interaction’, signals that texts
are not separate and then brought together, but rather that texts, or data (or
statements, events, actors, agencies), are always-already entangled in complex
ways. This is what lies outside of the frame of more quantitative instrumentalist
approaches to data.

The after-lives of data

One of the methodological questions addressed in the book is, how does one
study the after-lives that data attract as they move on from the original event
and accrue their own agencies? This book is an attempt to situate this question
within the context of two case studies of ‘small data’. One answer to the how of
this question is that it requires some tenacity and training. Following the lead of
others who have had a keen interest in the positivity and proto-performativity
of science, I have constituted myself as an embodied instrument (see Despret,
2008; Solomon and Stein, 1896). I have had to attune myself to a new practice of
research, which I consider rhizomatic, and that has entailed the development
of new habits of academic attention. Deleuze and Guattari (1980) evoke the
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 19

concept of the rhizome, which they relate to botany and the rhizomatic quality
of botanical roots. They argue that it is a philosophical concept or heuristic
that allows for the apprehension of multiplicities. Rhizomatic inquiry looks for
distributed and non-hierarchical entry and exit points. They are seen to have
no origin, genesis, beginning or end. Rather the connections are considered
to be ceaselessly moving. They grow and propagate new links, directions and
connections, as an image of thought the data, research and analysis in this
book has rhizomatic qualities.
Unlike practices of research located within particular archives and
technologies of inscription, including the (paper) book and journal article (as
well as newspaper reports and cuttings; scientific reports held by particular
institutional bodies; ethnographic research and interviews with research
subjects, etc.), my research data consists of a dizzying array of hyperlinks. These
links extend across blogs, tweets, online science discussion forums, online
science journalism, comments on websites and open-access science journals.
The links are related to specific URLs and their after-lives. It is what some
media theorists have called cross-platform data, as the data is not generated
and bound by particular application programming interfaces. All of the data
is digital, in the sense that I am following the fate of particular journal articles
as they are transformed post-publication within and across different digital
platforms. I liken my role to a ghost-hunter with an obsessive compulsion who
focuses on what sometimes appear as insignificant or minor details to the plots,
which take form. I attend to outliers, gaps or links, which insistently return,
while at the same time being subject to processes of redaction or recoding.
They set in motion trails, which sometimes end at dead ends and which are
often obscured by particular regimes of remembering and forgetting.
These trails are difficult to account for in terms of graphs, data visualizations,
index cards, overviews of the data sample, taxonomies of research materials,
categorizations of methodological protocols, or as an account of the dispersion
of texts as they relate to each other in an archive delimited by particular
conditions of possibility and existence. The method is perhaps closest to an
example of embodied hauntology, where the data is shaped and reshaped by
my own actions. I have often experienced this reshaping and re-moving as
akin to a form of daydreaming or reverie. It is the closest account I can give for
the absorption I have experienced as I move through and experience the logic
20 Haunted Data

of what Bolter and Grusin (2000) have termed hypermediation – that is acts
of mediation, which draw attention to their construction. Bolter and Grusin
explore this logic in relation to the hyperlinked design of the internet and the
remediation of graphic design within its aesthetic construction. This aesthetic
is perhaps closest to practices of montage and collage found in modernist and
postmodernist art, and is a visual logic that they argue emphasizes process,
fragmentation, indeterminacy and heterogeneity (in that it does not emphasize
one unified point of view).
This hypertextual style means that lots of things compete for attention and
reverie is perhaps one affective style that is suited to the remediated research
environment that digital hauntologies engage. This feeling of syncopation
and compulsion is as much about paying attention to absences, gaps, silences,
contradictions and places where data trails coalesce and become attractors.
Attractors relate to statements, texts, objects, events or entities that become
entangled through discord, discontinuity, a temporal clash or collision. These
collisions often create moments of affective intensity – anger, incredulousness,
disbelief or an insistent belief that there is something more to say. These
entanglements might set in motion a genealogical trail that resurrects the
spectre of past controversies. These ghosts might undo the present and open
to those lost-futures, which are still very much with us, albeit as repressions,
displacements and movements in submerged forms. The book will illustrate
the challenges of working affectively with particular archives when genealogies
explicitly confront hauntologies – where the researcher encounters not just
texts or statements or practices (in the Foucauldian sense), but spectres,
displacements, disjointed times, submerged events and multiple temporalities.
Avery Gordon (2008) describes ghost-hunting as a practice, which makes ‘a
contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you
are located. … It is often [about] inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and
screen memories, of spiraling affects, of more than one story at a time, of
the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but transparent and
referential’ (p. 25).
She goes on to argue:

Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a
bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience,
not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (p. 8)
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 21

How might one provide the means to make visible such a transformative
recognition? One technique that has been used by Jackie Orr (2006) is collage,
which she describes as a performative strategy that allows for the telling of
more than one story at a time. She brings together different fragments,
including fiction, autobiography, history, dreams, and an ethnography of anti-
anxiety medication in order to question linear time and to disrupt patterns
of connection. Coleman (2009) describes how collage or collaging are not
just aesthetic practices but can become methodological. The practices of
moving, cutting, looping, tearing, juxtaposition and so forth are all techniques
developed within this book as a form of transmedial storytelling. The
technique is moved into the digital realm to develop a performative strategy
that tells more than one story at a time and where events and controversies are
always more than one.

Transmedial storytelling
The concept of transmediality is borrowed from the work of the critical race
studies scholar Rey Chow (2012). Transmediality is usually associated with
strategies of storytelling, which are coordinated and orchestrated across
multiple media platforms. Transmediality is often framed as a form of multi-
platform storytelling that has emerged and is situated within practices of
media convergence and the emergence of networked media (Jenkins, 2006).
One might on this basis find reference to transmedia narratives and texts
(Leavenworth, 2011), to transmedia television (Evans, 2011), to transmedia
technologies, performances and even transmedial worlds. The book will
explore how the focus on fiction and the construction and orchestration of
transmedia (fictional) worlds can be extended within the context of hauntology
and controversy analysis.
As Evans (2011) argues, the association of transmediality with new media
platforms obscures the way in which stories and myths, which blur fact
and fiction (for example), might be considered transmedial in a way that is
anachronistic to the rise of (new) media technologies. She argues, for example,
that ‘the narrative of Jesus Christ might be considered multi-platform’ (p.
19). It does not exist in one place, is distributed across time and space and
is enacted by multiple agents, actors, agencies, entities and objects, for
22 Haunted Data

example. She argues that the history of storytelling is one that is transmedial
and to that extent there are historical precedents for transmediality and its
remediation within and across networked media. As she argues, it is important
to differentiate historical and more contemporary enactments (or what she
terms uses) of transmediality. This question will be considered by turning
attention to the hauntological forces that are transmitted within and across
different media, and by extending the question of what counts as media within
transmediality.

Transmediality and hauntologies

As we have seen in the preceding discussion transmediality is primarily
concerned with fictional worlds, with the transmission and circulation of
narratives, stories, myths and texts across time, space and different ‘platforms’,
which contribute to a particular kind of experience (of a historical figure, an event
or a television programme, for example). The etymology of the prefix ‘trans’
in transmediality comes from the Latin ‘trans’ and refers to processes that are
crossed, gone beyond or through. It introduces a particular kind of temporality
into discussions of mediation, which blur distinctions between past and present
and space and time. This leads, Chow suggests, to an experience of immediacy,
where everything appears connected yet experienced as part of a perpetual
present. This is a familiar account of media time and one that is associated with
the entangled relations of the web, for example, which underpin Chow’s analysis.
Chow suggests that this un-fixes the past and the present and she offers
a variety of performative strategies, which might mine and work with this
potentiality. This includes the concept of montage, which she presents as a
practice which both separates and reconnects; she argues that montage is akin
to a process of scattering a ‘(purported) previous continuum into fragments,
which are then soldered or sutured together and distributed anew. We perform
montage whenever we move things around from one context into another
in the realm of thought, producing unanticipated, unsuspected relations –
oftentimes triggering a crisis and a new situation – through the very gesture of
juxtaposition’ (Chow 2012: 3).
Montage as a critical practice is reliant on the critical theorist or artist able
to separate and reconnect entangled relations to produce something new or
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 23

unanticipated.15 The artist or theorist is implicated in the cut and creates what
might be equated to a ‘self-conscious staging of mediality’ akin to a post-human
form of reflexivity (Chow, 2012: 28). The critical theorist or artist becomes part
of the assemblage or what Chow (Chow, 2012) terms the ‘event of capture’
intervening in order to open up the potential to think otherwise. Chow
connects this transmedial strategy to critical and creative strategies that have
gone before, including Brecht’s strategies of de-familiarization. Chow suggests
that ‘shadow media’ or social media, which are both atomized and increase
capacities for connectivity and interactivity, allow new realities to happen. She
equates this to the setting in motion of different times and temporalities – no
longer fugitive, fossilized and anachronistic.
The events of capture made possible by such time-shifting and their radical
potential should not be judged for truth-value or veracity (i.e. as the capture
of reality). Rather Chow ties the event of capture to the concept of captivation
inviting the reader to consider their own investments and entanglement
within particular events. Chow defines captivation as the capacity to be ‘lured
or held by an unusual person, event or spectacle’ (Chow, 2012: 47) and which
underlies the extent to which we might be drawn into particular (imaginary)
worlds. She prefers the term ‘captivation’ over interpellation suggesting that
our ability to be drawn beside ourselves involves registers, which might be
termed ‘affective’ and open up to theories of attachment, desire, imitation,
mimetic violence, embodiment, victimization and forgiveness. Chow’s
approach to transmediality turns our attention to ‘scenes of entanglement’ and
to the potential transmedial relations open up for radical politics. Although
Chow’s examples are mainly from earlier media forms (films and literature, for
example), her development of transmediality in the concept of social media is
useful for the digital hauntology that underpins the book and the concept of
haunted data.
Each ‘scene of entanglement’ that I stage in Parts 1 and 2 of the book splice
and enact different temporalities and media times. In this sense, the staging
has affinities with Karen Barad’s (2010) aligning of her own performative
approach to science experimentation as hauntological. Barad’s approach is
developed in an article written in the journal Derrida Today and draws an
analogy between the quantum activity of electrons and what it means to be a
host – to be receptive and open to entanglements. Barad (2010) argues that an
24 Haunted Data

electron is ‘an interesting body to inhabit’ because electrons are intra-active –

entangled phenomena ‘differentiating and entangling, within and across, the
fields of spacetimemattering’ (p. 244). Quantum movement is discontinuous
rather than linear, undoing strict boundaries between here and there, past and
present, dead and alive, material and immaterial and so forth. Barad uses this
analogy to upset the linear progression of science and to introduce multiple
temporalities into histories of quantum mechanics.
Quantum activities extend perception and, Barad argues, act as a ‘queer’
lens through which to enact hauntologies of science. Barad aligns the quantum
to queerness and to queer readings which are diffractive – reading and staging
texts, events, human and non-human actors and agencies, objects, entities and
practices through one another. This performative methodology is particularly
suited to the social media science controversies that are staged in the book.
In this respect I will be working with the concept of haunted data to follow
those traces, deferrals, absences, gaps and their movements within a particular
corpus of data and to re-move and keep alive what becomes submerged or
hidden by particular regimes of visibility and remembering. These movements
are simultaneously technical, affective, historical, social, political and ethical
as will be illustrated throughout the book.

Ethos and queer aggregations

One of the questions explored in the following chapters is, what does it mean
to be a ‘host’ to alien phenomena as they appear within these controversies and
particularly those appearances that are themselves ghostly – that is they appear
as multiple present-absences (as data traces more specifically) that often end
up in dead ends, detours, backtracks and loopings? What does it mean to
commune with the haunted data associated with these controversies that do
not become assembled into established or accepted narratives of the event –
indeed they do not register on Google PageRank as important or significant?
What kind of host would allow this data to take form and become re-moved
– that is put back into circulation within the present?
This hauntological approach to data draws from queer approaches to ethos
that recognize ethos less as character and more as dwelling or habitual haunt.
Ethos in this context relates to a habitual haunt or site of dwelling (as in an
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 25

animal’s lair), but has an uncanny dimension in relation to the human. In

this context the locale or site of dwelling is always haunted by what cannot
easily be seen or spoken: ethos-as-haunt. Thus ethos is also the cultivation or
attunement to one’s site or dwelling that incorporates manners, customs, shared
experiences and memories, ambiences, atmospheres, displaced narratives,
structures of feeling, traditions and so forth.16 To that extent responsiveness
or attunement is not simply a human affair or activity, and requires mediated
forms of perception to be ‘seen’.
Although these arguments have largely been made in relation to analogue
media, to memories of place, or to situated writing practices, the focus on ethos
understood in this way will be extended within the context of digital archives
and data ethnography. Within this context a host can be human, non-human
or, more usually within the context of computational entities and practices, an
entanglement of human and non-human actors and agents. These entangled
relations, practices and processes come together in non-linear, indeterminate
and sometimes rather queer ways – what I am calling ‘queer aggregations’.

Conclusion: Digital archive fever and archives of the future

What is at issue here is nothing less than the future, if there is such a thing:
the future of psychoanalysis in its relationship to the future of science.
As techno-science, science, in its very movement, can only consist in a
transformation of the techniques of archivization, of printing, of inscription,
of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, and of translating marks.
(Derrida, 1995: 16)

Derrida (1995) in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression considers the nature

of the archive and what he terms the archive of a familiar word. His subject
is both Freudian psychoanalysis and the techniques of archivization that
organized and produced the very archive that might be recognized as Freudian
psychoanalysis (and therefore the ‘proper’ object(s) of psychoanalysis). This
archive was consigned at the time of Derrida’s writing through a process of
institutionalization linked to the inauguration of Freud’s house in Finchley
(North West London) as the site of the Freud Museum. As Derrida argues,
this is the archive located within a place, literally a house or residence,
26 Haunted Data

which becomes ‘a privileged topology’ or what is also described as a logic of

conservation (p. 10). The process of institutionalization of such an archive
becomes a process of gathering together signs, which are given order, place,
and status allowing regimes of visibility and knowing to be enacted as part
of the ‘violence of the archive’ (p. 11). As he argues, the politics of the archive
understood in this way draws attention to what materials and techniques allow
the taking form of the archive – what counts as public/private, theory/personal
feeling, significant/insignificant, human/technical, real/imagined and so forth.
When reading these reflections on archivization in the present they feel
prescient in relation to the issues, questions and debates at the heart of this
book. These concern the future of science in the context of (social media)
controversies; the extent to which digital media, open-access and post-
publication-peer-review are changing science communication and have the
potential to contribute to a more open science. What new objects, entities,
processes and practices might be possible if this corpus of data were mined
to disclose the potential dynamism of science and science’s lost futures and
futures-yet-to-come? One of the questions that Derrida asks, for example, is
the extent to which archival machines or techniques change the object. At the
time Derrida reflects on how the traces of his own thinking were recorded
on his portable MAC (which travelled with him to Naples) and the extent
to which psychoanalysis might have been or indeed have become a different
object (in terms of its archivization) if it had been shaped and produced by
archival machines of the future. The future in 1995 referred primarily to
portable computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and email, for
example. As Derrida asks, ‘Do these new archival machines change anything?’
(p. 15). He replies that indeed psychoanalysis would have been something
quite different if email had existed.
Technical mediation of communication in this context is not supplementary
or ancillary to what takes form but plays a constitutive role. This of course is
a familiar argument within contemporary media and cultural theory where
technologies are not simply carriers of pre-existing objects, processes, desires
and information, but enter into their very formation. One must of course be
wary of technological determinism and take into consideration the extent
to which mediation is simultaneously technical, political, somatic, social,
psychic and so forth. In this respect Derrida recognizes some of what is
 Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 27

changed by electronic communication (with possible changes to what counts

as public and private, and to the increased speed and instantaneous nature
of communication), but also focuses on the important issue of what we are
already primed to both recognize and misrecognize as part of an archive’s
subject matter.
In order to expose this process, part of what Derrida terms the Freudian
impression; he works against the logic of conservation in order to uncover the
half-hidden and submerged statements that have the potential to radically
transform psychoanalysis. He finds the traces of one such statement in a private
inscription, specifically in a dedication from Freud’s grandfather to be found in
a bible given to Freud as an act of paternal love. This trace sets in motion a trail,
which takes him to a text written by the Jewish scholar Yerushalmi (1991).17
This text poses a question to the specter of Freud and the extent to which Freud
might have characterized psychoanalysis as a Jewish Science. This question
posed hauntologically sets in motion a trail, which is followed by Derrida.
This takes him to those gaps, traces, contradictions and moments, when Freud
enacted this characterization (in private correspondence, for example). This
strategy allows Derrida to performatively re-stage or re-imagine an archive
of the future or at least a future-yet-to-come. These are examples of what he
terms ‘half-private, half public conjurations’ (p. 57). These issues, I will argue
are important for understanding processes of change and transformation,
and what becomes resistant to alternative directions and possibilities. This is
despite the virtual potential of what Derrida termed ‘archives of the future’, as
we will go on to explore in the next two chapters.
 2

Social Media Contagion(s): An

analysis of Priming Controversies
within Cognitive Science

Introduction: From thinking without thinking to psychic

animals – The case of Clever Hans and the strange coupling
of Mr von Osten and Professor John Bargh

In August 2014 John Bargh, the Yale cognitive scientist, considered by some
to be the ‘Father’ of priming, received the APA (American Psychological
Association) Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. On 1 January
2014 he published a notable article in Scientific American with the title ‘How
Unconscious Thought and Perception Affect Our Every Waking Moment’. On
5 March 2012 John Bargh resurrected his blog for Psychology Today, which had
lain dormant for two years prior. He did this in order to respond to a failed
replication study of one of his studies on priming, one of the most highly cited
studies in the field (1996). To date it has been cited over 3,634 times. He wrote
another subsequent blog post responding to a comparison that had been made
between himself and Mr von Osten. Mr von Osten was the owner of a horse
and equine celebrity known as Clever Hans, who courted controversy and
publicity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This response
was made by a science journalist Ed Yong, commenting upon his first blog
entry and contributing to its contagious affects. These posts were ephemeral
and elusive, subject to recodings, redaction and deleting.1
This chapter will primarily consider why this post and subsequent blog
posts gained a reach and traction and became part of what was described
as an ‘Internet drama bomb’. In the next chapter I will amplify some of its
contagious and hauntological potential by assembling two further scenes
 Social Media Contagion(s) 29

of entanglement, which will re-move some of the displaced and submerged

actors, traditions, agents and narratives, which haunt this controversy. These
ghosts open contemporary psychology to some rather curious and interesting
pasts.2 These are put back into circulation by the strange coupling of
Mr von Osten and Professor John Bargh made in Ed Yong’s interpretation of
the significance of the controversy, as we will go on to explore. What comes
back and is re-moved by this coupling are displaced psychologies, which
were attempting to grapple with the ontological indeterminacy of the human.
They approached psychological processes as transitive and contiguous with
the ecological, biological, symbolic, technical and historical, rather than as
discrete properties of mind, which was later to become stabilized within
psychology. In this chapter I will consider the micropolitics of the post-
publication-peer-review that shaped this controversy, and consider what we
might learn about media contagions and network viralities from this novel
case study.

Scientific communication is down at the

moment, please check later3

The ‘John Bargh priming controversy’ is a good example of a controversy

which largely took shape across digital and social media, and is one which
might be described as having a contagious virality, or ‘networked affect’. The
question of how to understand why this controversy became so contagious and
what this raises for analyses of social media is a vexed issue, and one that takes
us beyond some of the key debates and concepts often found in social media
scholarship. These will be discussed throughout the chapter. The controversy
involved a number of protagonists, some alive, some dead, and involved both
human and non-human actors. The controversy revolved around a tradition
of research known as priming, which crosses psychology and cognitive science
as discussed in the previous chapter.
Readers might be more familiar with priming as popularized by Malcolm
Gladwell (2007) in his book Blink: A Study of Thinking without Thinking. The
Nobel Prize-winning cognitive scientist Daniel Kahnman, in his best-selling
book Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011, has also popularized priming. This outlines
30 Haunted Data

what is considered a fast, intuitive form of thinking, which is seen to register

below the threshold of conscious attention. To that extent the controversy
perhaps has a receptive audience given many readers have been primed to
think about priming and its implications for the limits of will, consciousness
and intentional thinking. As we saw in the Preface and Chapter 1, it has also
been taken up within nudge behavioural economics.
One area of scientific experimentation linked to priming that Gladwell
discusses is the field of automaticity research. Automaticity’s subject matter
is related to a kinship of experiences, which disclose that a subject’s decisions
are often made in ways that exceed conscious, rational thought – or what is
often understood as free will or intentionality. Gladwell brings together a
range of experiences which are taken to exceed conscious volition, these
include snap judgements, rapid cognition, gut feeling and intuition. He also
exposes the entanglement of the human and the technical in such processes.
Priming, the subject of the controversy, is part of an imaginary, which
connects hypnosis, brainwashing, advertising, mediumship, voice hearing
and related phenomena. All of these phenomena in curious ways disrupt the
borders and boundaries between the self and other, past and present, material
and immaterial, human and technical and inside and outside. They relate to
an ‘alien phenomenology’ – that is the sense that we can be haunted or moved
by someone, or even something, else. They also articulate a range of fears
and fascinations which surround what it means to be human, and the limits
of conceptions of the unified, self-determining subject for understanding
processes of subject-formation.
This chapter will respond to a key question raised by social and digital
media scholars who have asked how we might perform critical research
within the context of the ‘computational turn’ and what many see as the
reshaping of the social through data practices (see Langlois, Redden and
Elmer, 2015; Terrenova, 2012). The data explored in this chapter reveal how
data-mediations are entanglements of the personal and the political, the
human and the technical, the affective and the cognitive, past and present,
fact and fiction, and forms of communication, which challenge the rationality
of science. This extended and distributed commentary carried by post-
publication-peer-review (post-publication-peer-review) leave behind living
archives, which open possibilities for reinterpreting the ‘proper object’ of
 Social Media Contagion(s) 31

scientific traditions, as well as observing science in the making (Latour, 1987).

These new practices, which involve scientists and non-scientists, and human
and non-human actors and agencies (specifically algorithms and application
programming interfaces), are challenging the conventions of positivist science
communication (see Nosek and Bar-Anan, 2012). They underpin some
scientists’ calls for the development of an Open Science in the context of the
affordances of digital publishing and social media.

Open Science
‘Open Science’ is a term, which is explicitly linked to the digital transformation
of publishing and the argument that the published journal article is
anachronistic in the context of digital communications. Open scientists
argue that the published static unmodifiable journal article is rooted in
seventeenth-century technologies and practices of publishing, which should
now be abandoned. Open Science is a call for a more democratic, inclusive,
participatory, public science, which has the capacity to transform itself. These
debates are happening across the sciences and are linked to different trends
and themes. This might include the embracing of digital communication
and social media platforms, the call for open-access publishing, new forms
of evaluation including continuous peer review and the publishing of peer
review, and new outlets for disseminating research, which allow new publics
to contribute to the evolution of science.
For some scientists, the barriers to change are not technical or even financial,
but rather to be found in the different cultures of science, which are linked to
the status quo and to already existing relations of prestige, status, hierarchy and
power. There are many fears and anxieties surrounding the new publishing
platforms and forms of dissemination made possible by digital and social media.
As with similar debates across the humanities, the transformation of publishing
made possible by digital communication is shaping new forms of peer review,
evaluation and opportunities for academic research to be read, used and
appropriated.4 It is also being linked to distinct calls by some feminist academics
for the publishing of research and forms of evaluation, which are fairer, less sexist
and more humane.5 However, as we will see in this chapter, despite the politics of
open access and open science, it is often business as usual which ensues.
32 Haunted Data

A key question examined in this chapter is, to what extent the archives
associated with this controversy might open to what Derrida (1995) termed
‘archives of the future’? I am particularly interested in those archives, which
relate to the possibility of a ‘Future Psychology’. That is to a psychology that is
attentive and oriented to psychological processes as fundamentally relational,
indeterminate and entangled in complex ways with material, immaterial,
symbolic, technical, historical, cultural and political practices, objects and
entities. This ontology of psychological processes is more compatible with
affect studies, and is one that I argue can be found in traces of psychology’s
many pasts – pasts, which resurface and return within science controversies
when followed across time. As Emily Martin (2013) has argued in relation to
the affective turn across the humanities, many affect theorists have turned to
the cognitive and neurosciences for inspiration, and on that basis are in danger
of working with stripped-down models of human subjectivity – what are often
described as forms of biomediation (see Clough, 2008a). Indeed, as she argues,
the genealogy of the models of subjectivity that are being brought into the
humanities have separated mind from brain and subjectivity from the social,
seeing the brain or the supposed ‘gap’ between brain and mind as the site of
(critical) potentiality.
In her article she returns to a rather different site of psychological
experimentation, The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres
Straits Islands in 1898, which haunts contemporary cognitive neuroscience –
one where she argues that ‘even the most raw, “natural” perceptual inputs
from eyes, ears, nose and skin were only graspable as products of specific
human social environments’ (p. S153). She argues in comparison that many
affect theorists ‘depict the social as stopping well before we get down to the
bottom’ (Martin, 2013: S154). The ‘bottom’ here refers to the brain and to
non-conscious processes which are taken to exceed or exist below conscious
perception and attention and sometimes even outside culture and social
relations. The controversy that is the subject of the next two chapters also
re-engages a more anthropological or ethnographic imaginary that haunts
priming and automaticity research across the cognitive neurosciences. It is
one that is brought back in the present and to that extent will be of interest
to contemporary affect theorists and humanities scholars interested in
science and the problematic of subjectivity. It represents what I will go on
 Social Media Contagion(s) 33

to describe as a more ecological approach to affect and the question of what

makes us human.
Derrida’s method as outlined in the last chapter is particularly useful when
considering how archives might be transforming within digital environments
with the potential for re-interpretations, rewritings, reposings and restagings.6
However, the contrary logic of archives that Derrida discusses, with both the
drive towards conservation of the past and the potential for future rewritings
(what he describes as the conditional nature of all archives), is one that is
further constrained by the performative nature of algorithms and the human
and non-human agencies which shape and anticipate future decodings and
recodings (see Rieder, 2012).7 In this respect, a data hauntology also needs
to consider the processes of automation enacted by algorithms that shape
particular regimes of remembering and forgetting (also see Parisi, 2013). In
previous writing I have considered this in the context of the Google PageRank
algorithm and the particular relations of prestige, status, hierarchy and power
relations which shape what can and cannot be easily seen.8 These rankings are
time-sensitive and constantly changing. The labour, human and non-human,
which supports the rankings is further hidden and obscured by the algorithm’s
proprietary nature, automated practices, which ‘clean-up’ or edit comments
for professionalism, as well as the immaterial labour that users might engage
in order to manage their own social media reputational economy (see Gerlitz
and Lury, 2014). All of these issues constrain the conditional nature of the
archives, but do not close down on the critical potential and the places that
the data become compromised and open to possibilities for future rewritings.
The half-hidden and submerged statements within the controversy, that
form the subject matter of this chapter and Part 1 of the book, are set in motion
by three blog posts, which were subject to processes of removal, redaction
and partial erasure. Written by the Yale cognitive scientist John Bargh and
posted in his blog The Natural Unconscious, they were published in the trade
magazine Psychology Today. This chapter will set the scene (scene 1), before
I move in Chapter 3 to assemble a distributed form of perception (a series
of decodings and recodings), which works across a rhizomatic or machinic
form of non-conscious9 (see Cho, 2008). This will allow the reader to see why
these removals were qualitatively significant, even if quantitatively they only
represent ‘small data’.10
34 Haunted Data

Scene 1. Priming horses and new media

worlds: The case of Clever Hans

Clever Hans was a horse in the early twentieth century who was apparently
able to tell the time and solve complex multiplication puzzles by stamping his
hooves. The comparison between John Bargh and the owner of Clever Hans,
Mr von Osten, was made in a blog post for the online science journal Discover
by a respected science journalist, Ed Yong.11 Yong was commenting on the
same ‘failed replication study’ of a classic priming experiment by John Bargh,
Chen and Burrows (1996). Bargh’s study claimed that experimental subjects
walked more slowly to a lift after being shown words associated with ageing on
a scrambled language task. A Belgian post-doctoral researcher Stephane Doyen
carried out the failed replication study. Doyen is a psychologist interested
in priming, who led a team intent on replicating Bargh’s classic study. They
changed some of the parameters of the study and did not replicate the results.
The only parameter within which they did replicate the results were when
experimenters believed that subjects would walk more slowly to the lift. As
they suggest:

Experimenters’ expectations seem to provide a favorable context to the

behavioral expression of the prime. Obviously, this interpretation remains
tentative, as we do not know how this process operates. However, it is likely
that experimenters who expect their participants to walk slower behave
differently than those who expect their participants to walk faster and that
such behavioral cues are picked up by participants. (Doyen et al., 2012: 1)

They argued that this suggests ‘that both priming and experimenters
expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect’ (p. 1). This
non-replication led to what Yong described as a scathing personal attack on
Doyen, written in Bargh’s blog, The Natural Unconscious, for Psychology Today,
which had lain dormant for two years previously. The URL to this blog entry –
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-natural-unconscious/201203/
nothing-in-their-heads – was later removed.​This scathing attack, represented
by Yong with an image of toys being thrown out of a pram was taken down and
removed from the scene leaving behind ghostly traces. Interested readers could
find hyperlinks to Bargh’s response – commentaries on the response, responses
to the response – but the actual response remained elusive.
 Social Media Contagion(s) 35

Figure 1  Clever Hans with his owner Mr von Osten. Copyright Wikimedia Commons.

As one commentator argued,

In response to that non-replication, Bargh published two blog posts

called  ‘Nothing In Their Heads’  and  ‘Angry Birds’, criticizing both the
study itself and the journal it appeared in, PLoS ONE. It was a combative
defence of his work. However, Bargh seems to have since decided it was a
bit too defensive, because the posts have been deleted. They just vanished: to
my knowledge Bargh hasn’t announced this, nor explained why.12

Although the blog post was removed, one could gather clues as to its
emotional valence and tone through a set of hyperlinked blog posts. One was
a commentary by Daniel Simons, a psychology professor at the University of
Illinois with 22,920 Google+_ followers and with 708,922 views at the time of
writing on this particular post: https​://pl​us.go​ogle.​com/+​Danie​lSimo​ns/po​sts/
V​JH8wX​xxc3f​He provides a commentary on Bargh’s removed blog post with
the title ‘A Primer for How Not to Respond when Someone Fails to Replicate
Your Work.’
As he goes on to comment,

In the linked post, John Bargh responds to a paper published in PLoS ONE
that failed to replicate his finding that priming people with terms related to
aging led them to walk more slowly to the elevator afterward. His post is a
case study of what NOT to do when someone fails to replicate one of your
findings.
36 Haunted Data

One could also find some reflections made by Sanjay Srivastava, an American
psychologist who writes a blog, The Hardest Science: A Psychology Blog:
Thoughts about the Mind, Science, Society and Whatever Else. The blog entry
is titled ‘Some Reflections on the Bargh-Doyen Elderly Walking Priming
Brohaha’.13 He reflects on the inflammatory nature of Bargh’s response, and
Yong’s comparison of Bargh to Mr von Osten. Srivastava frames his discussion
by calling for a discussion of replication and its continuing importance to
scientific discovery and innovation. As we will go on to see this became the
way in which the controversy was framed as it started to settle. Interested
readers can also read a summary of Bargh’s removed post with the author’s
annotated responses posted in a Reddit community, which calls itself the
Reddit Society for Psychological Research.14 It was submitted by a user called
ViscountPrawn with the title ‘Failed replication of famous elderly-priming
walk speed experiment prompts icy response from original author, internet
drama-bomb in comments’. It drew twenty-nine comments, two of which were
later deleted or perhaps edited for professionalism.
The ‘internet drama-bomb’ relates to the tone or sentiment of Bargh’s PPPR,
which was considered unscientific by many, and as exceeding scientific debate
and dialogue usually linked to the norms of rationality, reason and reflection.
Bargh claimed to be offering the expert review and editorial scrutiny, which he
suggested the Doyen failed replication study did not receive as part of the official
review process. Bargh tried to persuade readers that the experiment lacked
integrity, using sarcasm, righteous indignation and hostility. He expressed hurt
and upset creating a sentiment that cast doubt on the findings of the study.
Sentiment analysis reflects a key area in social media analysis that relates to
the nature of communication within digital environments. These debates often
challenge or contest idealized norms of rational, detached and deliberative
communication, viewed as essential to democracy and effective public spheres.
The use of social media certainly represents an issue for many scientists
now finding their research and its evaluation post-publication challenging the
norms of science writing and its cherished ideals of objectivity, detachment
and neutrality. Many theorists have argued that social media communicative
strategies challenge so-called rational conventions of communication. To that
extent they are often argued to be more affective. Papacharissi (2012) suggests
that many communication strategies on social media are improvisational and
 Social Media Contagion(s) 37

primarily affective in nature. In other words, the performance of what she

calls ‘affective statements’ are those that combine ‘opinion, emotion and fact’
(Papacharissi, 2012: p. 2000) and are designed to provoke.15 In her article Without
You I’m Nothing16 (Papacharissi 2012), she foregrounds play as an important
performative strategy. That is, play is part of the performance of selfhood, to use
the dramaturgical metaphor that underpins her work. She identifies this as part
and parcel of self-presentation within social media environments.
The ‘storytelling project of the self ’, which she analyses on Twitter, for
example, does not reveal or disclose a pre-existing self. Rather it is comprised
of performative strategies designed to do certain things – persuade, provoke,
impress and upset, for example. This often includes the use of irony, humour,
profanity, incivility and the broaching of taboo and risque subjects. That is,
as she argues, the ‘playing out of the fantasy of saying shocking or potentially
shocking things in public’ (Papacharissi, 2012: p. 1994). These forms of play,
she suggests, operate within ‘as if ’ registers. They are virtual rather than actual,
and ascribe an improvisational character to the performance of selfhood across
social media platforms. She describes such performative strategies as forms of
anticipation rather than actualization, which allow for fantasy to be integrated
into the everyday giving voice to personal sentiment and feeling. Such practices
understood as performative strategies also blur fact and fiction, the real and
imaginary and the private and the public creating contradictions and tensions
that require management through engagement in particular storytelling projects
of self-management. As we will see in this controversy, this required Bargh
to engage in a series of redactions, erasures and ongoing attempts to manage
the after-lives that the blog posts and their removals and re-movals accrued.
These storytelling projects of the self almost always exceed the intentions and
volition of individual social media users, revealing or disclosing the hauntological
potential of individual social media transactions, as we will see in this and the
next chapter.
In the following paragraph I reproduce the opening paragraphs of the first
blog post ‘Nothing in Their Heads’ (http​s://w​ww.ps​ychol​ogyto​day.c​om/bl​og/th​
e-nat​ural-​uncon​sciou​s/201​203/n​othin​g-in-​their​-head​s) – later removed – so
that the reader can get a sense of the tone and framing of Bargh’s commentary:

Scientific integrity in the era of pay-as-you-go publications and

superficial online science journalism. What prompts the return of the
38 Haunted Data

blog is a recent article titled ‘Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but
Whose Mind?’  by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and
Axel Cleeremans. The researchers reported that they could not replicate
our lab’s 1996 finding that priming (subtly activating in the minds of
our college-age experimental participants, without their awareness) the
stereotype of the elderly caused participants to walk more slowly when
leaving the experiment. We had predicted this effect based on emerging
theory and evidence that perceptual mental representations were
intimately linked with behavioral representations, a finding that is very well
established now in the field (see below). Following their failure to replicate,
Doyen et al. went on to show that if the experimenter knew the hypothesis
of the study, they were able to then find the effect. Their conclusion was
that experimenter expectancies or awareness of the research hypotheses
had therefore produced the effect in our original 1996 study as well – in
other words, that there was no actual unconscious stereotype effect on the
participants’ behavior.
The Doyen et al. article appeared in an online journal, PLoS ONE,
which quite obviously does not receive the usual high scientific journal
standards of peer-review scrutiny (keep reading for the evidence of this);
instead, the journal follows a ‘business model’ in which authors pay to
have their articles published (at a hefty $1,350 per article). The journal
promises a ‘rigorous peer review’ for technical soundness but not as to
the importance of the finding. On their website PLoS dismisses the use of
knowledgable editors to oversee what gets published and what does not,
claiming this adds only a subjective element to the acceptance decision that
can be biased against new research directions. But knowledgeable editors
also can prevent articles from being published based on faulty peer reviews,
such as by inexpert, lazy, or biased reviewers. Expert editors also know the
relevant theory and past research in a given domain, and also know of
common methodological pitfalls that inexpert researchers in the domain –
such as, apparently, Doyen et al. (keep reading) – can fall prey to.
The lack of rigorous expert editorial scrutiny by PLoS in the Doyen et al.
case means that I must supply it here, only after it has been published. If I’d
been asked to review it (oddly for an article that purported to fail to replicate
one of my past studies, I wasn’t) I could have pointed out at that time the
technical flaws, though these might not have mattered to PLoS ONE – as a
for-profit enterprise, PLoS published 14,000 articles in the year 2011 alone.
Fourteen thousand. Something tells me they don’t turn down many $1,350
checks. ...
 Social Media Contagion(s) 39

Although the essentially self-published nature of the Doyen et al. article

is bad enough, the misleading conclusions it drew were made even worse
by the publicity given to them by some online science-journalism blogs,
one of which posted about the Doyen et al. failure with the title ‘Primed by
expectations: Why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it seemed’. So as
you have read this far, and are therefore a reader interested in psychological
science, I’d like (and apparently need) to set the record straight.

This blog entry had many after-lives moving on from the original event of
‘setting the record straight’ and becoming linked to an assemblage of actors
and agencies, and academic and non-academic publics across various social
media platforms and APIs (application programming interfaces). The multiple
media transactions provide a corpus of responses to what was framed as Bargh’s
personal attack on open-access publishing (and particularly the journal PLoS
One), science journalism (and the trustworthiness of online media sources),
and the problems with replication studies. I have partially reconstructed the
trails of the lives that this blog entry accrued in previous writing.17 I will commit
here to discussing more of the hauntological implications of this re-moving.

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
The concept of re-moving is taken from the science studies scholar Hans-
Jörg Rheinberger’s work. I argue that although Rheinberger’s focus is science
and specifically scientific controversies, his insights have much to add to
social media analysis and the digital humanities. Rheinberger is a significant
German science studies scholar, who until his retirement was based at the
Max Planck Institute in Berlin. His work, like those of many feminist science
studies scholars (Haraway, Barad, Franklin, for example), has produced
new objects, entities, methods and ways of thinking at the intersection of
science and philosophy. His work was very influenced by Derrida, Haraway,
Bachelard, Foucault and Canguilhelm, for example. He has been described
as a leading historian and philosopher of the biological and life sciences
(Lenoir, 2010). His philosophy of experimental practice is one that has many
shared ontologies with those taken up within anthropology, sociology and
literary studies (those which foreground process, enaction and relationality,
for example). It is what Lenoir (Lenoir, 2010: xii) refers to as an ‘exercise in
40 Haunted Data

historical epistemology’. His work and historical method present a critique of

scientific positivism and explore the entanglement of science, the technical
and cultural in the production of scientific objects and entities – or what
we might term, following Karen Barad (2007), ‘phenomena’. The term that
Rheinberger uses is ‘epistemic things’.
Rheinberger’s approach foregrounds recursion, or patterns of repetition
and difference, which underpin the invention of new scientific objects. They
also contribute to the epistemological foreclosure of specific materialized
interpretations. Scientific objects are always mediated and become an agent
in ‘the process of making knowledge’ (Lenoir, 2010: xiii) and are part of
‘experimental systems’ or apparatuses which are performative. That is, they
invent rather than discover. However, the processes of what becomes stabilized
are always haunted for Rheinberger in terms of displaced and suppressed
narratives, which always threaten to surface and come back; they exist as traces
or deferrals in the Derridean sense. The concept of ‘epistemic things’ captures
the patterns of difference and repetition that are characteristic of scientific
objects and entities. Although science controversies might be considered
settled at particular times, Rheinberger (1994) shows how they have the
tendency to resurface in new ways and forms.
This is something he cogently shows when following the controversies
surrounding chicken tumour agents within oncology across time. This is what
Rheinberger (1994), following Derrida, refers to as the historical movement
of a trace (its haunting perhaps), the tension between persistence and
transformation. He argues that this process is not captured by Thomas Kuhn’s
more totalizing notion of a paradigm, and a paradigm shift, to understand
change and transformation within science. It would seem that experimental
systems are haunted by traces of the past, and that this haunting increasingly
materializes in new forms of animation and automation, off-line and most visibly
in online science discussion and its often volatile displays of affect, emotion
and feeling. I argue that the time lags, time shifts and multiple media times and
temporalities re-moved within this controversy, allow one to orient attention
to the uncertainty and indeterminacy that characterizes experimental systems.
The distributed data of post-publication-peer-review, as presented in the John
Bargh priming controversy, present opportunities to analyse the hauntological
dimensions of social and digital media and science more generally.
 Social Media Contagion(s) 41

Rheinberger’s influence by Derrida is most telling in the neologisms that

he constructs to undergird his approach to science and scientific forms
of experimentation. This includes the concept of historiality, which draws
attention to the multiplicity of times that intrude within experimental
systems. The concept also draws attention to science as a storytelling machine,
where as he argues, ‘An experimental system has more stories to tell than the
experimenter at any given moment is trying to tell with it’ (Rheinberger,
1994: 77). He equates this dynamic potential to older narratives that persist
in the future, as well as ‘fragments of narratives that have not yet been told’
(Rheinberger, 1994: 77). As is apparent from this discussion, controversies
are scenes of entanglement where the past and future crisscross, intervene,
intrude and open up the potential for something new to emerge. Rheinberger
also characterizes this potential dynamism as an excess that escapes definition.
It has different momentums, and allows for a potential tinkering, or what he
also characterizes as a form of ‘re-moving’ (Rheinberger, 1994: 78).
The concept of re-moving expresses what I take to be the hauntological vision
of this thesis – the re-moving or animation of frozen time, or temporalities
which haunt what has come to pass (as scientific truth or certainty, for
example). Controversies are potential ‘scenes of entanglement’ which re-move,
or have the potential to set traces in motion – traces which perhaps are not
visible or knowable in relation to the intelligibility of particular experimental
systems. Re-movings have the potential to perform retroactive re-shapings, but
importantly such dynamism is not reducible to scientific research and practice
itself. Re-movings are not internal to science or to the internal times and practices
of formal scientific laboratories. As we will go on to see, the concept of re-moval
allows a researcher to move beyond the immediate display of sentiment and
emotion within online discussions, and to also explore what traces or deferrals
are also potentially being set in motion or kept alive by such practices of self-
performance and self-curation of data. I term these ‘queer aggregations’.
As an example of the haunting persistence of a trace or deferral, although
Bargh’s blog posts ‘Nothing in Their Heads’ and his subsequent post ‘Angry
Birds’ were taken down from his Psychology Today blog, the posts are
hyperlinked in complex ways to a distributed network of comments, responses,
counter-responses and links to actors, agencies, sites and practices, which have
become part of the controversy’s extended life and after-lives. This assemblage
42 Haunted Data

of relations is performative, extending the controversy in unforeseen directions

and having unanticipated consequences for the debate that ensues. The data
that carry these relations are visible and invisible, material and immaterial,
covering the internet like a spider’s web of present and ghostly traces. This
is a corpus of haunted data to be mined, poached and put to work in newly
emergent and emerging conjunctures and contexts.
These traces point towards another scene, the ghosts of Clever Hans and his
owner Wilhem von Osten from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
which this controversy re-animates in the present. These ghosts follow John
Bargh. The area of priming within psychology has continually to be policed in
order to prevent these historical associations from surfacing. The hauntological
question is, why is this policing necessary? What is being displaced, submerged
and occluded by this policing? This hauntological dimension is confirmed in
the first comment made by Bargh in his subsequent erased blog entry ‘Angry
Birds’ posted in Psychology Today.18 He begins with the plea:

The discussion sparked by my previous post has now far transcended the
remarks I made in the post itself, in defense of our lab in the face of the
‘Clever Hans’ charge.  That was a slur on our lab that had to be responded
to in order to set the record straight.  Insults like that typically make people
angry, and so a lot of heat was generated, but too much heat produces smoke,
and smoke obscures clear vision. Let’s see if we can continue the discussion
without anger and hostility clouding the real issues.

The blog goes on to engage with some of the issues that have been raised in
relation to the study and to put the record straight, again. The comments for
this entry have not been recovered and no subsequent entries by Bargh have
been made in Psychology Today since this post (and at the time of writing). As
a cultural theorist interested in affect and phenomena that disrupt borders and
boundaries between the inside and outside, material and immaterial, past and
present, public and private and self and other, for example, I have been fascinated
by the unfolding of this controversy and what has taken form. I was led to this
controversy by my own research into the phenomenology of will and what has
come to be known as the ‘half second delay’ within affect studies (Massumi,
2002; Thrift, 2007).19 I knew that the neuroscientific evidence underpinning
this statement was controversial and through my own searches I was directed
towards and became captivated by this particular social media controversy.
 Social Media Contagion(s) 43

I argue that this controversy is a good example of Rheinberger’s arguments,

which suggest that science controversies, although considered settled at
particular times, have the tendency to resurface in new ways and forms.
In his recent work (2010) he has extended this insight to consider what he
terms the ‘economy of the scribble’ – those traces of practices which exceed
the parameters of recognized scientific practice. Although Rheinberger in
this instance focuses on what gets left out of studies once they are written up
for publication – scribbles on pieces of paper, workings out, ponderings and
so on, I argue that digital archives represent opportunities to explore such
economies within distributed, extended networks of actors, agencies and
practices. These exist as traces, which can be followed, mapped, listened to and
re-animated. Some of these traces are deleted or removed and exist as ghostly
presences, requiring ingenuity, tenacity and some knowledge of software and
data practices in order to recover and re-perform.
The traces are lively and disclose some of what is carried by the social and
cultural life of data. Data traces can be moved and re-moved, redacted as well
as re-mixed, and require the work of articulation, translation and staging in
order to be made visible. This is a different strategy to predictive analytics
and is one that mines and focuses upon the potential of compromised data.
These traces often become hidden or covered over by representationalism – by
what narratives and representations come to stand in for the event or which
take on the status of animations (see Kember and Zylinska, 2012). These
obscure the more temporal aspects of events – the historicity of time and the
different temporalities that disclose the more-than-one nature of controversies
and events. The strategy of data hauntology as a mode of inquiry reveals the
dynamic nature of archives and their unexcavated potential. It also opens up
questions of ethics and ethical entanglements – about how our attempts to
repurpose and re-imagine data are highly situated engagements. The focus
here is much more on the performing and re-performing of archives, rather
than their conservation as monuments.

Page not found

‘Page not found’ has been a recurring theme within this scene of entanglement;20
and after the removal of Bargh’s post ‘Nothing in Their Heads’ it was replaced
44 Haunted Data

with various animations to carry the traces of Bargh’s irate response, that were
later removed. One meme, which was later removed, went by the name of the
‘Barghinator’ and for some time captured something of the uncivil discourse that
for many within this debate crossed the boundaries of acceptable science debate
and communication. The ‘Barghinator’, enacted a trace of Bargh’s outburst and
was represented by a cartoon image of a face crumpled in anger with furrowed
brows and cross-eyes set against a brown background. Although I have a copy
of this meme I am unable to reproduce it due to copyright permissions. The
removal of Bargh’s post was often commented upon by social media users,
where interested parties attempted to reconstruct and familiarize themselves
with why Bargh was so angry. This includes questions such as the following:

August 31, 2012 @ 7:52 am

I cannot find the rebuttal (of the Doyen et al. study) by Bargh anymore.
All the different links to it appear to be broken (perhaps Psychology Today
removed it?). Can anyone tell me where I can find this rebuttal? Thanks. JP

What was it about this particular failed replication study that incensed Bargh
and motivated an intense outpouring of emotion on his blog for Psychology
Today, now removed? What is all the fuss about? Why the cover up? Why
was Bargh’s response(s) removed from the scene? Surely the results of Doyen
et al.’s study (2012), which has already been cited over 426 times21 at the
time of writing, are significant, even if they failed to replicate Bargh’s study.
What sparked an outpouring of anger and a scathing personal attack by
Bargh in relation to Doyen, an ambitious researcher who tinkered with the
experimental apparatus and interpreted the results by drawing links between
studies of priming and an archive of earlier psychological experimentation
that Hans the Horse is part of. What kind of imaginary or dispositive22 did
Doyen’s experimental apparatus enact, such that the specter of Hans returned
to haunt Bargh and the field of automaticity research more generally?
What made Doyen et al.’s (2012) failed replication study into a media event?
Most psychological studies do not become media events. They do not become
the subject of journalistic scrutiny, audience speculation and more general
public interest. This failed study was the subject of a blog in the Wall Street
Journal with the headline ‘Failure to Replicate Famous Study Causes Furore’.23 It
was picked up by various bloggers and published in different science magazines,
 Social Media Contagion(s) 45

including Nature, Discover Magazine, and websites such as Live Science, with
its headline ‘Psychologists Confront Rash of Invalid Studies’.24 It is the subject
of numerous Google+ posts and personal blog entries. It has been tweeted
and re-tweeted and been discussed in emails that have found their way onto
the internet for public consumption. It has travelled and in its travels it has
accrued its own agencies, moving from the original scene of experimentation
and has become an actor within a mutable scene of entanglement; it opens to
multiple leads, crisscrossings, loopings, backtracks, movings and re-movings.
It has come to stand in for a history of experiments within psychology that
have been tainted with the mark of scandal. Indeed Bargh’s priming study is
considered by some to be in the top five most controversial psychology studies
ever published.25 It continues to attract attention in the present, variously
articulating a perceived crisis within contemporary psychology, including with
replication, which is considered the cornerstone of the scientific method.26

It’s all in the mind but whose mind?

Doyen et al.’s non-replication study bears the title ‘Behavioural Priming: It’s
All in the Mind but Whose Mind?’ – a provocative title no less as it suggests
that Bargh and his associate experimenters were unaware that they were
influencing the experimental set-up. Within the scientific method, ideally any
form of experimental bias or experimental expectation should be eliminated
from the experimental scene. Experimental bias is usually related to the beliefs
of experimental subjects rather than the experimenter. It is understood to be
a form of bias where the subject conforms because they think they know what
the experimenter wants. In this context what Doyen et al.’s non-replication
revealed was the influence of the experimental apparatus itself and how
this might re-qualify what counts as an experimental effect or bias. Doyen’s
study challenges the assumption that experimental bias should necessarily
be removed or eliminated by its translation into various technical devices
for removing suggestion so as to seek objectivity. This is what is known as
the ‘experimenter effect’ (Rosenthal, 1966). The need to remove what is
understood as experimental bias is often linked to a discovery made within an
experiment that has become known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’.
46 Haunted Data

The Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne Effect takes its name from a study carried out in the late
1920s which was exploring whether there were any physical characteristics
of a factory setting (the Hawthorne factory), such as the level of illumination,
that would increase or decrease productivity. The study set out to explore the
hypothesis that increased levels of illumination by electric light would increase
productivity. The experimenters created a factory setting within a factory
(through the use of partition walls) and after establishing a baseline measure
of productivity, increased the level of illumination twice and measured
productivity (which was seen to rise). By mistake they then decreased the level
of illumination and found that productivity still rose. They concluded that the
increase of productivity was not due to the level of light, but rather because of
the way in which the experimental subjects had been singled out for study and
given special attention (Coombs and Smith, 2003).
Doyen et al.’s conclusions are interesting because he suggests that
experimental bias within the context of Bargh’s study does not mean that
priming does not exist. He rather suggests that priming involves mechanisms
that are still little understood and that might challenge those typically assumed
to underpin priming. Rather than eliminating the experimental bias, he
suggests rather that this is a productive process that reveals something very
interesting about modes of psychological experimentation in this area. In
other words, the experiment introduces epistemic uncertainty into the area
of priming, and raises questions about what priming is and how scientists
might experiment with priming effects. It does not suggest that experimental
bias or the experimental effect should be removed or eliminated, but rather
that within the conditions of the experiment, or what we might call following
Despret (2015) the dispositive, the implications cannot be adequately
investigated. As Despret has argued, what psychology has failed to do is
examine and acknowledge ‘the influence of the dispositive itself ’ (p. 81). As the
title of Doyen et al.’s article suggests, ‘Behavioural Priming: It’s all in the Mind
but Whose Mind?’ It is a scholarly article, which fulfils the criteria expected of
a scientific journal article. The citations in the article are mainly from the field
of cognitive neuroscience and high-ranking social psychology journals, such
as the Journal for Personality and Social Psychology. It is written in the manner
of a considered journal article, with clear descriptions of the parameters of
 Social Media Contagion(s) 47

the experiments. Its aim is to open up scientific debate about priming and the
question of how to understand and analyse priming effects. So what then is all
the fuss about?

#conceptual replication
The article was eventually published in an open-access science journal
with a (mythological) reputation for taking articles which carry a history
of rejection from proprietary journals. The journal, PLoS One, has however
been lampooned for publishing the Doyen study. John Bargh considers this
action a result of their questionable ethics and business model.27 When I
initially followed this controversy in May 2012 one was taken to Psychology
Today and met with the automated response: ‘Page Not Found’.28 However,
while attempting a temporary denouement to the controversy during April
2018, if the user followed the link https​://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​
-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​03/no​thing​-in-t​heir-​heads​they will be led not to
Page Not Found (its previous after-life29) but rather to a page which has a link
to a third reinstated blog post, posted initially on 11 May 2012 (https​://ww​
w.psy​cholo​g ytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​05/pr​iming​-effe​
cts-r​eplic​ate-j​ust-f​ine-t​hanks​). It now bears the date, ‘Post published by John
A Bargh PhD on May 11th, 2012 in The Natural Unconscious’. This version has
no comments and does not allow comments to be made by users and interested
publics. The prefix post is suggestive of the curious after-lives this URL now
carries, where it has come to stand in for the two previously removed blog
posts (https​://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​
03/no​thing​-in-t​heir-​heads​ and https​://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​
-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​03/ angry-birds).
This blog entry represents an attempt by Bargh to repair what many saw
as his damaged reputation, and the blog becomes an actor and agent, which
enters into and attempts to change the setting of the controversy. That is to link
the controversy to issues and problems surrounding replication, seen as the
cornerstone of the scientific method. This included that the controversy was
an example of the importance of having strict protocols so that subsequent
researchers can replicate scientific experiments. This is considered an
important part of how the validity and reliability of statistical results and
effects are assessed. One of the key debates on Twitter, for example, became
48 Haunted Data

about ‘conceptual replication’, something that the science journalist Ed Yong

picked up, which became part of a discussion associated with the hashtag
#conceptual replication.30
One might speculate that the reappearance of Bargh’s blog post https​://ww​
w.psy​cholo​g ytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​03/no​thing​-in-t​
heir-​heads​is because it corresponds more to the conventions of positivist
science writing and might be considered part of a narrative and practice of
redemption. It exists in a rather static, unmodifiable form. This was the last blog
entry that Bargh wrote which tries to set things straight (again) by responding
to an article published in Science News debating priming (http​s://w​ww.sc​ience​
news.​org/a​rticl​e/hot​-and-​cold-​primi​ng), and to a second blog post by Ed Yong,
the science journalist, written on the 16 May 2012 (http​://ww​w.nat​ure.c​om/ne​
ws/re​plica​tion-​studi​es-ba​d-cop​y-1.1​0634)​, which discusses the controversies
surrounding replication within psychology and the cognitive sciences. It
includes a short paragraph, which revisits the Bargh/Doyen controversy:

Stéphane Doyen, a cognitive psychologist at the Free University of Brussels,

encountered similar issues when he and his colleagues failed to replicate
a classic experiment by John Bargh from Yale University in New Haven,
Connecticut, showing that people walk more slowly if they have been
unconsciously primed with age-related words. After several rejections,
Doyen’s paper was also eventually published in PLoS ONE, and drew an
irate blog post from Bargh. Bargh described Doyen’s team as ‘inexpert
researchers’ and later took issue with the writer of this story for a blog post
about the exchange. Bargh says that he responded so strongly partly because
he saw growing scepticism of the idea that unconscious thought processes
are important, and felt that damage was being done to the field.

At the time I followed this link31 there were no Facebook likes and the post
appeared in an un-modifiable form.
The second removed blog post, known as ‘Angry Birds’ (https​://ww​w.psy​
cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​03/an​gry-b​irds),​ was
removed and has not reappeared at the time of writing. For some time, if one
followed the link one was taken to a dead end, a blank white page. However,
at the time of writing the link now takes an interested reader to Bargh’s blog
for Psychology Today, The Natural Unconscious, which details three posts,
including a link to the recovered post, https​://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​
 Social Media Contagion(s) 49

g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​05/pr​iming​-effe​cts-r​eplic​ate-j​ust-f​i ne-t​hanks​
As the reader will be aware, this blog post has come to stand in for the two
redacted blog posts, ‘Angry Birds’ and ‘Nothing in Their Heads’. The full text
related to ‘Angry Birds’ could be recovered in a Google Doc by following this
link: https​://do​cs.go​ogle.​com/d​ocume​nt/d/​1wuu8​URArg​ZusJE​LXF5j​4xpM2​
6ESkF​fOveY​oGKBf​0CHo/​edit?​pli=1​
Why these patterns of disappearance, removal and reappearance? What
archives of the future are put into motion and what is being remembered and
forgotten by these data practices of redaction, removal and re-moval? What
does this investigation open up for a future psychology – one that can listen to
the traces of its past in the present and open to possible futures?
As the controversy opened up to traces of the past and the possible futures
of priming, very specific entanglements of human and non-human actors also
closed it down. It is these narratives which will come to the reader’s attention
within Google PageRank algorithms. This includes an interview with John
Bargh in The Chronicle for Higher Education some twelve months after the
controversy erupted where he narrates the events as a particular redemption
narrative.32 In the interview he regrets taking down the blog posts and attempts
to settle the controversy and set things straight, again. As is probably clear from
my discussion so far this controversy attracted the attention of many scientists
in the field. The following extract appears in a blog written by Cedar Riener
known as Cedar’s Digest, which provides a remediated story about the John
Bargh priming controversy.33 He opens the review of the post-publication-
peer-review commentary with the following spoiler:

Attention conservation notice: This post dives into some inside baseball
stuff on social psychology, how the science of psychology is practiced, and
how science is communicated online. It is kind of long, but I intend it as sort
of a reference for this event, but also something to point to for my colleagues
who either aren’t aware of, or doubt whether real scientific discussion can
occur online.’

He goes on to say,

In the past I have been skeptical of online post-publication peer review

this serving as a bona fide replacement of peer review. Comparing my own
comments when I have served as a reviewer (and received for my submitted
manuscripts to those that I leave as a web commenter), the formal peer review
50 Haunted Data

process (anonymous or otherwise) has always come out on top. But this latest
episode, and some related conversations, have convinced me that online
post-publication peer review has made an amazing amount of progress.

If any readers are having trouble following the detail and time scale of the
controversy as it was initially shaped within the context of PPPR, Cedar Riener
provides a useful overview and remediation of events in his blog post, some of
which I reproduce below:34

Then, this is all within a week:

1. Science writer extraordinaire Ed Yong writes up this failed replication

attempt on his blog at Discover magazine: ‘Not Exactly Rocket Science’.
2. John Bargh responds on his blog at Psychology Today.
3. Ed Yong responds to the response on his blog.
4. The psychology blogosphere erupts with conversation and reaction.
I am going to annotate a little here.
a) The comments on Ed Yong’s first post include someone who is a
priming researcher (‘Joe’), another research psychologist (‘Chris’) as
well as someone who I would assume is Bobbie Spellman (‘Bobbie’),
a well-respected social psychologist and one of the founders of a site
devoted to rectifying the fact that unsuccessful studies often never
see the light of day: PsychFileDrawer.org
b) The initial response by Bargh (62 comments) includes comments by
Ed Yong, a neuroscientist who goes by Neuroskeptic, Publisher of
PLoS One Peter Binfield, another founder of PsychFileDrawer.org Alex
Holcombe, one Peter C who says he is an editor of a major journal in
this field, in addition to a number of anonymous commenters.
c) Ed Yong’s response to the response has mostly named commenters,
including: Well known cognitive (gorilla) psychologist Dan Simons,
social psychologist Dave Nussbaum, social psychologist Michael
Krauss, neuroscientist Chris Chambers, neuroscientist and editor
at Nature Noah Gray, cognitive neuroscientist Matt Craddock, little
old me, and social psychologist (and someone who published with
Bargh) Gordon Moskowitz.
d) Dan Simons google+ post entitled ‘A primer for how not to respond
when someone fails to replicate your work’. This includes a long
 Social Media Contagion(s) 51

conversation between Dan and another well-known cognitive

psychologist, and one of the few reasons I would still visit
Psychology TodayArt Markman.
e) Friend and social psychologist par excellence Sanjay Srinistava posts
reflections on his blog.
f) Conversations on twitter about the difference between conceptual
replication and direct replication involving Ed Yong and quantitative
molecular biologist, Professor of genomics and evolutionary biology
at Princeton, and guy you should totally follow on twitter Leonid
Kruglyak. And me. Here’s my first attempt at a storify of this convo.

The above storify and remediation of this event illustrates how scientific debate,
review and assessment are potentially being transformed by digital media and
PPPR. Journal articles and books can accrue after-lives as they move on from
the event of their publication and enter into new scenes of entanglement.
The impact virality of these practices can of course increase the chances of
an academic’s work becoming read, cited, used and appropriated. They can
extend the reach and traction of an academic’s research, open it to new publics
and readerships, and potentially increase the academic’s standing and status.
However, as academic work becomes controversial and operates with the
potential for contagion it can also become an attractor for agencies, actors,
entities, submerged and displaced narratives, which disclose its hauntological
potential.
If, as Rheinberger has argued, science is a storytelling machine that always
has more stories to tell than the experimenter at any given moment is trying to
tell with it, what opportunities does this open up for transmedial storytelling?
If transmedial storytelling is a form of storytelling that sets in motion fugitive
and fossilized times and that allows new visibilities to be shaped, then what
might these insights bring to our understanding of scientific progress,
innovation and creativity? To what extent can this data be moved around into
new contexts, to be separated and reconnected, in order to create something
new or unexpected? These questions will form the subject of the next chapter
where I will explore the hauntological force of this science controversy and
how it unexpectedly re-moves or sets in motion some very interesting and
innovative propositions. These connect to key contemporary debates within
the field of affect studies, science studies and related perspectives.
52 Haunted Data

Conclusion

The ethics and integrity of science communication within these new media
worlds and the image and reputation of the field of priming is at the heart of
this controversy. However, in order to explore the contagious and hauntological
potential of this controversy I will turn in the next chapter to the comparison
made between John Bargh and Mr von Osten, the owner of Hans the Horse
or Clever Hans, that was made by Ed Yong. Why did it create what some
media theorists have termed ‘emotional flaming’, impassioned and emotional
responses, which exceed what is often assumed to be the basis of scientific
debate – calculative and deliberative rationality, for example. Why did the
association between Bargh and Mr von Osten challenge the field of priming
studies and what exceeds what has started to settle following this event? Why
would the comparison with Mr von Osten upset Bargh? In other contexts the
case of Clever Hans has been revitalized in contemporary cultural theory to
ask questions about what it means to affect and be affected and what issues
this controversy raises about what it means to be open to the other, human and
non-human (see Despret, 2004a, 2015).
In order to re-examine some of the hauntological potential of this
controversy I will expand, extend and mediate the splicing of two different
historical moments and temporalities that have become entangled and
refracted through one another. This will involve reading what haunts this
controversy genealogically, by revisiting an earlier related controversy, which,
as we will, see was and remains far from settled. It is this controversy which
is re-moved by Ed Yong’s comparison, and becomes spliced with John Bargh’s
attempts to manage his reputation as a prestigious cognitive scientist and one
of the primary authors of the most highly cited journal article in the field of
priming. This ghostly corpus of data extends the controversy across space
and time, disrupting the boundaries between past and present, the rational
and the emotional, fiction and fact, the human and the technical, and science
and media. It is the practices of remembering and forgetting that visualize
certain of these data-trails, while others become lifeless or inert. My focus will
be on those marginal agencies, which remain as a seething absent-presence,
allowing a rather playful investigation of psychology’s many pasts, presents
and possible futures.
 3

Data-Mediation and Hauntological

Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’

Introduction: Haunting as a form of mediation

This chapter will analyse the contagious and hauntological potential of what
became known within the John Bargh priming controversy as the ‘Clever Hans
charge’ or the ‘Clever Hans slur’. As we saw in the last chapter the association
made between John Bargh, and the owner and trainer of Hans the Horse, Mr
Wilhelm von Osten, was experienced by Bargh as a slur on his reputation.
This slur became a half-hidden statement partially occluded by the redaction
of Bargh’s blog post, ‘Nothing in Their Head’, which accrued agencies in
its absence. The aliveness of this statement and its generative potential will
form the basis of the hauntological analysis performed within this chapter.
The focus will be on the splicing of two different historical controversies put
back into circulation by this statement, which produced a corpus of ghost or
haunted data. I will argue throughout the chapter that hauntological analyses of
ghost-data allow an interesting and novel way of analysing the affective
potential of forms of data-mediation beyond the actions of individual social
media users. It also provides a novel way of engaging with science, particularly
with scientific traditions, that have been and are being engaged with by affect
scholars.
The chapter will engage with arguments that suggest that media can be
hauntological, and haunting is a form of mediation. As Mark Fisher (2012)
has suggested, certain media forms, practices and genres have allowed us to
anticipate a world radically different to the one we now live in. Fisher defines
haunting as the mediation of possible (lost) futures in the present – what
he terms ‘a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning
54 Haunted Data

expectations and motivating cultural production’ (p. 16). Fisher focuses on

music and television as carriers of hauntological forces. He suggests that
digital platforms in the present do not present innovation if the potential for
hauntology is constrained or erased. He argues that the public broadcasting
of the BBC and its potential for hauntology (within what he describes as its
visionary public broadcasting ethos from the 1950s to the 1970s) has now
diminished, ‘made obsolete by neoliberalism’ (p. 24). This lament is one that
places the hauntological potential of media as something that is potentially
lost, and places this loss primarily within standardized media content and
genres, which are repeated across platforms with little difference.
In contrast, Fisher describes hauntological media as visionary and views
digitalization as closing down the possibilities of public or social dreaming
so necessary to imagine different realities. He laments the BBC broadcasting
ethos of the 1950s to 1970s as now firmly in the past, made obsolete by the
rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s in Britain and further afield of course. The
forms of ‘popular modernism’, the term he also uses to describe hauntological
media, refer and come out of a time that is ‘no longer’ (p. 19). Popular
forms of modernism are contrasted with the media of now, the media futures,
which he suggests reproduce ‘the same thing, seen and/or heard on a new
platform’ (18). The future of media therefore returned to a linear historical
development tied to broadcast technology and its innovation.
Younger generations reading this chapter might feel that this is a form of
generational nostalgia – a defensive reaction to so-called digital natives who
experience newness as the inevitable forward of progress and innovation.
What I am interested in doing is extending this concept of hauntological
media in the context of the transmedial controversies followed in this book.
The broadcast model of media production and consumption that underpins
Fisher’s model does seem rather dated when we consider modern media
ecologies with all their recursive entanglements and remediations. Although
Fisher’s approach is associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, we will
explore how the principles of hauntological inquiry have been developed by
many feminist, queer and critical race scholars. I will consider what this adds
to current discussions relating to the hauntological potential of social media.
Fisher’s approach to mediation is also framed within a broadcast model of
media and communications. That is it assumes that media are discrete objects
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 55

(film, television, music) made up of content which is transmitted to audiences

and potentially constrained or enabled by particular institutional structures
and organizations: the BBC or Fox news, for example. It follows what many
have described as the triangle of perspectives which have been brought to
bear upon the study of media and communications: political economy, textual
analysis and audience reception specifically within the field of media and
communications research.1 Where Fisher laments social and digital media as
evidence of the loss of media’s hauntological potential, I want to ask whether
social and digital media can be considered hauntological and if so what
questions this might open up for data analysis.

Data and the traces of software-driven media

One assumption that seems to unite researchers within the field of social
media analysis is that one is studying traces, usually digital marks that are left
behind by transactions that are made using software-driven media or what are
usually referred to as data. The concept of data derives from mathematical and
computational approaches to information, which assumes that information can
be given some kind of numerical value. This is taken to enable aggregation,
comparison, cross-referencing and searching according to common factors
and indices. However, this raises the question of what is and is not available
to be quantified and what exceeds the instrumentalization of data as metrics.
These are critical questions as the concept of traces might not equate to data and
might exceed attempts to search and aggregate. These anomalies are particularly
intensified given the restrictions on what is searchable using proprietary software
shaped by APIs owned by conglomerates such as Google, Facebook and Twitter
for example. In that sense, critical methodological issues are raised regarding
what it means to engage in ‘data ethnographies’ which take software media as
an object of analysis (see Hochman and Manovich, 2013 for example; Langlois,
2015). These questions are recognized as important aspects of a cultural politics
and analysis of the social life of data. This issue has been raised as an important
aspect of contemporary sociological inquiry (see Beer and Burrows, 2013).
As we saw in the last chapter, data have a life, which exceeds attempts
to measure and quantify behaviour, thought and existence. Data have
56 Haunted Data

hauntological force as they move from the original event, accruing what Matt
Fuller (2009) has termed ‘after-lives’. These after-lives can be approached
hauntologically, directing our attention to what already exists in the present
as a form of anticipation, to a time in the present that has not passed, and
which operates as an attractor for possible futures. The after-lives of data
attract, collect and channel fragments, gaps, anomalies, puzzles and parallel
temporalities producing the potential for ‘queer aggregations’. They can flow
and arrest, stopping us briefly in our tracks before they disappear from view, or
at least from those narratives which quickly frame and interpret data according
to particular authorized stories. As boyd and Crawford (2012) remind us, all
data require interpretation. Some interpretations are staged and authorized
through relations of prestige, status and hierarchy and are embedded within
the ontologies of the network enacted by computational objects, such as
Google PageRank. These almost always remove wonder from the world.
Gitelman and Jackson (2013) have argued that there is no such thing as ‘raw
data’; data has to be imagined as data and such imaginings are materialized
through technical forms that generate, aggregate, code, classify, pattern
and sort information into specific data-forms. These forms of management
are largely obscured once data is scraped, visualized and made to speak in
relation to certain issues, debates and matters of concern. As they argue, data
is cooked and has to be ‘imagined as data to exist and function as such, and the
imagination of data entails an interpretive base’ (2013: 3). In that sense, data is
not simply a function of machines (algorithms, software, programmes, etc.),
but is imagined as data in different ways and through different interpretive and
often disciplinary imaginaries. Data, as with statistical forms of analysis, never
speak for themselves. Data assume rhetorical forms, functions and strategies.
One dominant form is the speculative, anticipative relations shaped from the
aggregation and enactment of data patterns, put to work in order to generate
future value and capital. Data are assembled, reassembled and re-performed.
One thing that is an axiom is that data within digital and software media
environments accumulate, leave traces and also disappear. Despite the myth
or fiction of the universal database, where it is assumed that every action and
transaction leave a trace, this dystopian myth of complete dataveillance does
not stack up. Data disappear, are removed, become submerged or displaced,
are lost, overlooked, deemed irrelevant, make accidental connections (rather
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 57

than aggregated patterns), can remain alert or lifeless (Gitelman and Jackson,
2013). This often depends on the kinds of imaginaries at work. As Gitelman
and Jackson (2013: 6) argue, ‘Data require participation. Data need us.’ Data
can obscure ‘ambiguity, conflict and contradiction’ (Gitelman and Jackson,
2013: 8), or work against such tendencies. This requires different acts of data
mobilization, interpretation and narrativization.
As much as ghosts might be considered material transmutations ‘in time’,
which travel with us, I stage my archive of data as a haunted archive which
materializes the past in the present as particular forms of ‘time travel’. Time
is stretched in these archives; it becomes disjointed, emotional, bent and
otherworldly. The data are enacted as agents of temporal disruption. The
data look backwards and project forwards to what has been left behind after
particular narratives and sorting processes have taken place, as well as to those
traces and absences, which operate as a double to this process. I am looking
for something more than now and this refrain will be repeated in myriad ways
throughout this chapter.
To that extent the concept of haunted data also points towards the
hauntological forces at work within and across social and digital media. I
therefore do not agree with Mark Fisher (2012), where he suggests that new
media forms have lost their hauntological potential and repeat the same with
little difference, closing down on the potential of staging futures different to
the one now. This offers a bleak horizon in my view that is too tied to technical
form. It is an argument that overlooks the imaginaries that are as much at
work in so-called new media, as they have always been in media sometimes
considered old or even obsolete. Queer archives and queer imaginings have
been described in these ways long before and provide an important reference
point for analysing software media’s hauntological potential.2
Within this context, my focus throughout this and the next three chapters
will be on the haunted media times and temporalities, which return and
might be captured and dramatized through specific scenes of entanglement.
Although my focus is on science controversies, we will see they have much
broader repercussions for the politics and ethics of mediation. Rather than
seeing the individual user as the site of such entanglements, I will argue that a
data hauntology provides a method for exploring, analysing and representing
controversies as particular scenes of entanglement. The scenes of entanglement
58 Haunted Data

I will perform and analyse stage multiple (media) times and temporalities that
open up to queer, feminist and even non-human and otherworldly voices. This
chapter will stage two related scenes of entanglement, which will allow the
reader to orient their attention to the hauntological potential of the ‘Clever
Hans charge’ that Bargh experienced as a slur on his reputation. They overlap,
criss-cross, intersect and backtrack to the scene of entanglement developed in
the previous chapter.
The controversy brings back the ghost of Clever Hans. It stages a re-imagining
of what ‘Clever Hans’ might be trying to tell us if only we could and would
listen. The method in different ways emphasizes the non-linear times that
hauntologies apprehend and the importance of developing a distributed and
mediated form of perception (many eyes and ears – human and non-human)
in order to create the possibility of ‘seeing’ what often remains foreclosed,
disavowed, fugitive and yet which seethes as an absent-presence. This chapter
more explicitly brings science studies into conversation with these approaches
and opens up a novel imaginary for mining, poaching, re-moving, assembling
and mediating the extended and distributed perception that software media in
some instances might make possible.

Scene 2. Clever Hans: The horse that won’t go away

Clever Hans was a horse with apparently remarkable and prodigious talents.
He captivated audiences in the early twentieth century keen to witness his
abilities and offer explanations for his seeming mathematical acuity: stamping
his hooves it was claimed he was able to tell the time and solve simple
arithmetical problems. It was also claimed that he could spell, recognize people
from photographs and differentiate pieces of music and different colours.
Was he psychic or a genius? This question was central to how he was judged
by enthralling psychologists and other experts with his demonstrations and
capturing the attention of newspapers, including The New York Times which
published an article on Clever Hans on 4 September 1904, with the headline,
‘Berlin’s Wonderful Horse – He Can Do Almost Everything But Talk – How
He Was Taught’. The article informs the reader that Hans’s equine abilities were
not to be found in imagination but rather in fact. These facts, we are told had
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 59

Figure 2  Hans the Horse with Mr von Osten. Copyright Wikimedia.commons.

been witnessed by many, including the scientific, military and sporting worlds.
His credentials were to be found in his performances of such amazing feats,
which had even been taken seriously and witnessed by the Prussian royalty,
including the young Duke of Sachse-Coburg-Gotha (Hans was apparently able
to spell his name correctly!).
We are told in the article that Hans’s owner, Mr von Osten, is a retired
schoolteacher who lives in a tenement building. Since his retirement and
for the last four years he has been teaching Hans, much like he had taught
schoolchildren, to read, count and tell the time. He used various devices
to enlist Hans’s attention, including a blackboard and a counting machine
comprised of balls (an abacus); modulation of his own voice; vegetables and
minerals, including sugar and carrots; the mechanics of the horse’s foot; and
various human and non-human objects. These objects included gold, silver
and copper coins, alphabet letters and various members of the public who
took part in identity recognition parades. Hans’s acute sensitivities were
also demonstrated in his ability to attune to musical scales and to be able to
differentiate tones. The article contains some notable comments by Professor
Karl Moebius, an eminent Prussian zoologist (who at the time was the director
of the Prussian Natural History Museum). He suggests that wild horses exhibit
60 Haunted Data

some of these potentialities providing evidence that horses could indeed be

taught such skills.
Moebius’s own expertise was in relation to marine animals and he is famous
for coining the term ‘biocenose’, which refers to the relations and interactions
between organisms, which make up an ecosystem. His own studies focused
specifically on oysters and mussels. This approach became known as
‘synecology’, the ecological study of communities of plants and animals.
Moebius’s accreditation of Hans’s abilities (and von Osten’s teaching prowess)
will be important in what surfaces later as the traces of the controversy have
travelled across time. I am equating this time-travelling to what Rheinberger
(1994) terms ‘historiality’ or the historical movement of a trace. The article
finishes by saying that Mr von Osten indeed claimed that any horse of fair
intelligence could be taught. It finishes by pre-empting that by the time
the reader will have seen this article the German Kaiser will have seen and
witnessed the prodigy known as Hans.
By 12 September 1904 a special commission of experts brought together
to judge Hans’s abilities had been assembled – this became known as the
Hans Commission. The Hans Commission was a response to a request to the
German Board of Education by Mr von Osten who was keen for experts to
witness Hans’s talents. It was comprised of psychologists (notably Professor
Carl Stumpf a philosopher and psychologist at Berlin University), a retired
military person, zoologists, teachers, a circus manager, a veterinarian and
physiologist, among others. The conclusion of this commission was that there
was no fraud. It was not a hoax and Hans’s abilities defied various explanations
brought to bear upon him. Here was a horse that could genuinely think and
reason and not simply learn tricks. The commission was reported on in The
London Standard on 13 September 1904 with the headline, ‘‘Clever Hans’ again.
Expert Commission Decides That the Horse Actually Reasons’. The article cites
a statement from the commission ‘that it is of opinion that there is no trickery
whatsoever in the performances of the horse and that the methods employed
by the owner Mr Herr von Osten, in teaching Hans essentially differ from those
used by trainers, and correspond with those teaching children in elementary
school’. This article was reprinted in The New York Times on 2 October 1904.
Although Prof Stumpf was satisfied with the conclusions of the commission,
of which he was a participant, his doctoral student Oscar Pfungst saw the
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 61

occasion for further investigations. Pfungst is credited with ‘solving the

mystery’ within contemporary historiographies of psychology and with the
associated narratives of the controversy, which appear in many places and
related sciences. Pfungst conducted a series of imaginative experiments, which
requalified the proposition that Hans was either psychic or a genius. These
experiments were clearly of interest to Hans and extended and disclosed the
nature of his intelligences.3 The various experiments that Pfungst conducted
with Hans and Mr von Osten were written up as a book length analysis based
on a psychological assessment of what was considered a performance of
unconscious deceit (Pfungst, 1911). Mr von Osten was accused of unwitting
fraud and the book is written in the manner of a legal report and judgement on
what had become a national controversy and scandal. Here was a controversy
that even at the time the book was written was far from settled.
Pfungst’s report was framed in the preface to the book, written by James
Angell an American psychologist, as a final verdict to settle the matter once
and for all. Angell was perhaps a good person to write the preface having a
reputation for resolving disputes and intervening within controversial issues
within psychology (see Angell and Moore, 1896). The riddle was solvable.
Unconscious unintentional movements made by Mr von Osten, his owner
and trainer, were influencing Hans, it was argued. Without von Osten, Hans
was impotent, although not everybody agreed with this statement. Despite
Pfungst’s intervention and the judgements that were made, which brought Mr
von Osten into disrepute, the many after-lives of Hans lived on. He had many
fans due to the international sensation, which surrounded his performances.
He had already become an attractor for many different interests, actors
and agencies. This included vets, animal trainers, physiologists, psychic
investigators, psychologists, philosophers and medical doctors, for example.
He was compared to talented circus animals by the American director of the
Bronx Park Zoological Gardens, Dr William T. Hornaday in his 1922 book,
The Mind and Manners of Wild Animals.
Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect and
spiritualist enthusiastically introduced Hans as an interesting case study for
exploring human–animal relations. In his Nine Lectures on Bees, comprised of
lectures and interviews, first published in 1923 and translated and published
into English in 1998, Steiner suggests that Pfungst was wrong. Where Pfungst
62 Haunted Data

claimed that Hans could read minimal, almost imperceptible unintentional

movements (facial expressions for example) expressed by von Osten,
Steiner suggests a more spiritual reading of Hans through his training in
anthroposophic science. Hans had the ability to be able to ‘read von Osten’s
brain’ – to get inside his head – and this ability Steiner suggests had been
cultivated through Hans’s love of sugar, fed to him by von Osten during his
education and training.
This sugar-related bond had enabled Hans to develop an acute sensitivity
such that he could anticipate and sense von Osten’s thoughts – a taste for what
Steiner termed ‘truly invisible things’ (p. 59). This taste was shared with bees,
other animals and even plants, who he argued were able to attune, affect and
be affected by human and non-human others. Hans therefore travelled and
was taken up by many people keen to make him speak for their own particular
theories and philosophies. The figure of Hans retained celebrity status even
if many psychologists became less and less entranced with his seemingly
miraculous actions. He also lived on in the interest more generally in ‘wonder
animals’ that Sofie Lachapelle documents in her 2010 article, ‘On Hans, Zou
and the Others’. Hans also shares a queer kinship with a range of psychic
animals, including Lady Wonder the Typing Horse, a supposed ‘mind-reading’
horse who was investigated by J. B. Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine in 1929. They
used experimental techniques and methods developed in their parapsychology
laboratory at Duke University.

Psychic animals
Rhine and Rhine had an interest in the reporting of telepathic sensitivities in
animals and rather than adopting an attitude of ‘credulous skepticism’ (Rhine
and Rhine, 1929a: 449), they took the investigation of animal telepathy into
the scientific laboratory. Rhine and Rhine drew a lineage between a range of
cases where owners testify to the psychic abilities of their pets; this includes
Dodgerfield and Roger, two unrelated psychic dogs, Clever Hans, telepathic
circus dogs, the Elberfeld horses,4 as well as human psychics including Van
Dam, who could be ‘willed’ ‘to move to a given square on the board’ and ‘would
tap twice on the board when he felt a ‘conviction’ that he had the right square’
(ibid: 451).5 Lady Wonder the Typing Horse was the specific animal subject of
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 63

Figure 3  Lady Wonder the Typing Horse with Mrs Fonda (the owner). Copyright
Wikimedia.commons.

their telepathy experiments. She was a three-year-old filly, ‘black with white
face and feet’ (ibid: 451; see Figure 3). Lady Wonder’s owner Mrs Fonda’s
claims that Lady Wonder could ‘mind-read’ were subjected to a battery of tests
to determine whether these claims were rather dependent on hyperesthesia.
Hyperesthesia is the argument that rather than telepathy, the animal was
responding to signals made by the owner, either conscious or unconscious.
Professor William McDougall (1910), an eminent British social psychologist,
had moved to Duke University due to a dislike of the English climate. He had
acted as a mentor to Rhine and Rhine, who were the first to coin the term
‘parapsychology’ and to set up the first parapsychology laboratory under his
tutelage. McDougall had an interest in telepathy, hypnosis, suggestion and
other psychic phenomena. He had been influenced by the writings of Gabriel
Tarde and saw contagious phenomena as central aspects of understanding
what it means to be human (see Blackman, 2013). Rhine and Rhine were
protégés of McDougall; J. B. Rhine was initially trained as a botanist but had
64 Haunted Data

been galvanised into action in May 1922 when he went to a lecture given in
Chicago by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the time almost as well known for his
dabbling in spiritualism as for his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes (Rhine,
1937: 50). This changed the course of J. B. Rhine’s career where the investigation
of psychic phenomena as part of psychology became his and his wife’s life’s
work. On the basis of their investigations of Lady Wonder, the experimental
team, which included McDougall (referred to as M), concluded that the
telepathic explanation was the only one that held sway. They acknowledged
that telepathy was an ‘unknown process’ (ibid: 465). They also argued that
telepathy also seemed to involve hypnosis. Both were facilitated by an equally
unknown process, called ‘willing’, which was also described as ‘telepathy under
hypnosis’ (p. 451).
In a later postscript, the Rhines described a further study of Lady Wonder,
which took place in December 1928, where they did not replicate earlier results.
This led them to observe that her owner, Mrs Fonda, and specifically her voice
and whip seemed to ‘coordinate very significantly with the body movements’
of Lady Wonder (1929b: 288). Horse, whip, voice and the proximity of horse
to the particular human who stood at her head seemed to account for Lady
Wonder’s superior intelligences. This led the Rhines to conclude not that
telepathy did not exist or had not been observed in the previous experiments,
rather ‘that the telepathic ability we earlier found the horse to possess has
been now almost if not entirely lost and that Lady has become merely a
trained animal conditioned to a system of signals made up of indicative body
movements, voice inflections, whip movements’ (p. 291). This they argued is
not unique to Lady, as telepathy in humans can be weakened or even lost. This
might be due to a change in her passivity or sleepy state, which they linked to
telepathy under hypnosis. This was seen to provide one of the clues as to her
subsequent loss of sensitivities.
Lest the reader think that this is an outmoded statement that science would
now dispel, one only has to confront contemporary neuroscientific experiments
on hypnosis to see how little is understood about hypnotic suggestion, and
the question of what it means to enter into suggestive relations with another,
human and non-human. In an experiment which caught the attention of
BBC Radio 4 All In the Mind series,6 the episode, ‘Hypnoticism; Automatic
Writing, Magic and Memory’ broadcast on 23 December 2014 discussed a
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 65

contemporary neuroscientific experiment using hypnosis and the technique of

automatic writing (see Walsh et al., 2014). The assumption of the experiments
carried out by a team of neuroscientists at Kings College, London, is that the
normative psychological subject is aware and has ownership and control of
their thoughts and movements. Using a particular experimental apparatus,
involving the technique of automatic writing, a specially constructed writing
frame, the technique of hypnotic induction and a mock MRI scanner, they
modulate this sense of control and automaticity, such that subjects experience
their hand moving as if was being directed by someone or something else,
what they also describe as the phenomenology of alien control.
However, the authors also highlight an important tension in the experiment
that challenges and exceeds the assumption they are working with, but
which is left hanging as an anomaly and puzzle. They assume that ‘hypnotic
phenomena must be experienced as involuntary and effortless’ by hypnotized
subjects (p. 33), while recognizing that this actually relates to a set of cultural
beliefs or ‘expectancy effects’ about hypnotic suggestion, which are tied to
‘explicit learning’. This paradox has also been captured by the term ‘cultural
invitation’, developed by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2011) within
the context of voice hearing and suggestion. ‘Cultural invitation’ identifies how
local theories of mind shape perception, sensation and attention. This term is
useful within the context of the biohumanities and affect studies because it
suggests that the biological or materiality is cultural right the way down, all
the way to the bottom, and even to what is often experienced as automatic,
visceral, raw and so forth. It reveals what might be described as the body’s
‘deep history’ (Smail, 2007). However, I would also argue that the concept of
‘cultural invitation’ is overly cognitivist and rationalist. It foregrounds beliefs
and theories of mind, rather than opening up to mechanisms and processes
of becoming that exceed learning, conditioning and cultivation understood
in this way.
The cognitivism of ‘cultural invitation’ will form the subject of Part 2 of
the book, where we will find some interesting propositions to explore this
within the context of the Feeling the Future controversy. These propositions
are less cognitivist and approach psychological processes as transitive and
distributed across a range of human and non-human actors and agents.
The precursors to these propositions can be found in psychology’s past, and
66 Haunted Data

particularly at the nexus of psychic and psychological research. This was at a

historical moment where I argue that psychological processes were considered
more transitive and contiguous with the technical, ecological, non-human,
historical and cultural. This was a transdisciplinary moment, which occurred
at a point before the professionalization of disciplines and where researchers
were experimenting in more speculative and proto-performative ways with
the question of what it means to be human. The examples we will explore were
more open to the radical indeterminacy of the human than we might now find
in the biohumanities and related perspectives. They offer up some interesting
ways of exploring cultural invitation in the context of affect studies.
The puzzle of ‘cultural invitation’ is however left unresolved in this
particular neuroscientific experiment, and demonstrates how phenomena
such as suggestion, contagion, imitation, telepathy, automatic writing and so
forth still present challenges to the contemporary psychological, cognitive
and neurosciences. They are part of ‘weird science’, which challenges the
psychological individualism of the psychology such examples constantly
exceed, displace and subvert. To repeat a refrain presented in Chapter 1,
made by Isabelle Stengers: ‘But above all, what do we really know about this
suggestion that we are supposed to avoid?’ (Stengers, 1997: 103).
Clever Hans, Lady Wonder the Typing Horse, as well as experiments on
automatic writing, mediumship, human and animal telepathy, clairvoyance,
precognition and related phenomena are all part of this science of oddities,
exceptions and anomalies. This strange or queer kinship are re-moved or put
back into circulation by Clever Hans’s association with John Bargh in the
present. These associations have to be continually policed by the cultivated
scientific attitude of credulous scepticism, which at the same time helps to
keep the association alive but fixed as part of science’s past. They represent an
archive of ‘unreason’ which haunts contemporary psychology.
As a host for this association I want to offer a temporary home, which can
open up to other positions which are not exhausted by this sceptical attitude. As a
very queer coupling, the Bargh/Clever Hans association is one that has not gone
unnoticed by cultural theorists and philosophers who have asked critical questions
about the kinds of stories that we might tell about human/animal relations that
disrupt the anthropocentrism of the masterful human exerting control over the
animal ‘other’ (Despret, 2004a, 2015; also see Haraway, 2007; Massumi, 2015).
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 67

These critical questions and more inventive stories also raise important
questions about what it means to enter into suggestive relations with another.
The excess to this storytelling and the inventive stories yet to be told points
towards ‘archives of the future’. They might help open up the potential of
cultural theory to shape a future psychology and future visions for world-
making within the context of psychology. This excess will form the subject
matter of Scene 3.
What happened to Hans, the reader might ask? Did Hans, along with Mr
von Osten, fall into disrepute allowing psychology to relieve itself of its close
connection and proximity to psychic research? What disturbed psychologists?
If Hans was a ‘good imitator’, as Dr Strumpf claimed, then what did this
disclose about the nature of suggestion and imitation? What further debates,
problems, questions and issues were specified on the basis of Hans’s capacity
to imitate? Who was imitating whom in this story (see Despret, 2004a)? Is
this a story about Hans’s capacities or the story of a relational connection that
extended and distributed mind as a collective, shared process, even if Mr von
Osten was seemingly oblivious to his unwitting participation? If priming alters
thought, action and behaviour, where in this case a horse can be made to add
or subtract or tell the time through its connection with another, then who is
mediating whom? In whose mind should the capacity to imitate be located or
is this the wrong question to be asking?

Scene 3. Berlin’s wonderful horse, synecology

and feminist/queer diffraction

‘He can do everything but talk – how he was taught’.

New York Times, 4 September 1904.

‘During all studies of animal behavior, any face-to-face contact between the
examiner and the experimental animal should be strictly avoided’ (Samhita
and Gross, 2013: e27122.2).

‘The horse was simply a channel through which the information the
questioner unwittingly put into the situation was fed back to the questioner.
The fallacy involved treating the horse as the source of the message rather
68 Haunted Data

than as a channel through which the questioner’s own message is reflected

back’ (http://skepdic.com/cleverhans.html).

In a reconsideration of the ‘Clever Hans Phenomenon’, the lessons of Clever

Hans are linked to the problem of controlling for face-to-face contact
between experimenter and experimental subject, human and animal in this
context (Samhita and Gross, 2013). As with experimental psychology, the
problem of ‘experimental expectation’ and ‘experimenter bias’ (Rosenthal,
1966) has come to be seen as an issue that might confound experiments
exploring animal intelligence, and ideally should be controlled, removed or
eliminated. One identified problem is how to modulate facial expressiveness
and its potential to (inadvertently) shape the experimental apparatus. The
authors go on to argue that ‘professional poker players know about the
importance of unwitting cues and present a “pokerface,” even going so far
as to wear dark sunglasses’ (Rosenthal, 1966: e21722.3). Experimental bias
and expectation is considered a design problem, which ideally should be
eliminated or controlled for in order to produce valid and reliable evidence.
This, it would seem, is one of the lessons of Clever Hans that lives on within
positivist experimental practices. Experimental bias is carried by the slur that
this is nothing but ‘the Clever Hans Effect’ that helped to orchestrate John
Bargh’s umbrage.
Let’s return to a rather different statement made by an ethologist of the
early twentieth century who had something to say about Clever Hans, which
reveals a trace of what experimental psychology might have become if it had
taken a more ecological turn. This more ecological way of specifying human/
animal, organism/environment relations does not start with a bifurcation
between nature and culture and the subject and object. Arguably, it is this
trace and its movement within and across cultural and feminist theory,
including feminist science studies, which opens up to an archive of the future
(Derrida, 1995). Let’s return to Professor Karl Moebius, the eminent Prussian
zoologist who endorsed Hans’s abilities in a New York Times article written
in 1904. In this article Moebius has the following to say about what we might
term the synecology of Hans-von-Osten. Synecology brings together the
prefix syn of Greek origin to mean, together with, and ecology – studies of the
interaction between organisms and their environments. Moebius coined the
term biocenosis in 1877,7 a key concept within synecology, which refers to
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 69

the interactions between organisms within a particular habitat. This perhaps

gives us a clue to the basis of his enthusiastic endorsement of the Clever Hans
phenomenon.

(Extract from The New York Times, 1904, ‘Berlin’s Wonderful Horse – He
Can Do Everything but Talk – How He Was Taught’.)

Moebius draws attention to Hans’s ‘hoof language’ and his ‘desire for
delicacies’, which are modulated by a variety of experimental set-ups (or his
surroundings). This apparatus or setting is taken to retain Hans’s interest and
curiosity, or at least his want for food. The potentialities of Hans and von Osten
become entangled and take form as shared sensitivities, which allow them
both to be moved by a material-semiotic apparatus which disappears through
training, habit and discipline. At least, this is another interpretation, which is
compatible with what we know about Moebius and his interest in co-evolution
and co-enactment within marine animal ecologies, or what he might rather
have termed the close interdependence of one with the other. These traces are
re-moved (Rheinberger, 1994) by Vinciane Despret, the Belgian science studies
scholar who introduced Clever Hans to body studies and cultural theory within
the journal Body & Society in 2004. This article was in a special issue on science
70 Haunted Data

and technology studies devoted to the important question of what counts as a

body when the human and technical are not viewed as separate pre-existing
entities. It also contains Bruno Latour’s (2004) oft-cited article ‘How to Talk
about the Body? The Normative Dimensions of Science Studies’.8
Despret (2004a) reconsiders Pfungst’s interpretation of Clever Hans and
argues that it opens up more questions than it answers. Although Pfungst
aimed to settle and solve the mystery once and for all, Despret (2004a: 113)
argues that

the most interesting aspect of this story is the way Pfungst decided to
construct the problem. Yes, it was a beautiful case of influence, but it was more
over a wonderful opportunity to explore a fascinating question. Indeed, the
horse could not count, but he could do something more interesting: not only
could he read bodies, but he could make human bodies be moved and be
affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their
owners’ knowledge. And this could be experimentally studied. Hans could
become a living apparatus that enabled the exploration of very complicated
links between consciousness, affects and bodies. Hans could play the role
of a device that induced new articulations between consciousness, affects,
muscles, will, events ‘at the fringe’ of consciousness (Pfungst, 1911: 203); he
could be a device that, furthermore, made these articulations visible. Hans,
in other words, could become a device that enabled humans to learn more
about their bodies and their affects. Hans embodied the chance to explore
other ways by which human and non-human bodies become more sensitive
to each other.

She goes on to suggest that the practices and training enabling the Clever
Hans phenomena are not just human practices or on the side of the human.
As she argues, ‘Hans was teaching them what made him move. Hans the
horse was as much leading them as the humans were leading him. Their
human bodies were not only sensitive to their own desire to make the horse
succeed, they were also translating the horse’s desire to help them to lead him
successfully. Let us not miss that last point: Hans wouldn’t have done so well
if he had not been interested in the game, sometimes for different reasons
than some of the humans’ (p. 116). Importantly, she suggests that these
sensitivities and their modulation would need to occur without intention
(implying consciously directed thought) and more through anticipation,
an embodied sense that might be considered more non-conscious or even
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 71

affective (also see Game, 2001). However, despite opening up these questions
and riddles Hans’s after-lives are not so exciting it seems. As Despret argues,
the potential of this controversy is reduced to and replaced by ‘the most
impoverished version of Hans’s marvellous story’ (p. 121).9

The ‘Clever Hans charge’

Despret illustrates this by turning to contemporary experimental psychology
and the Clever Hans phenomena or effect as it is now termed. Disappointingly
(from a science studies scholar’s perspective), Clever Hans is reduced to the
problem of experimental bias and the importance of eradicating this from the
experimental scene (see Rosenthal, 1966). As we have seen, this denouement
can be found in many places across past and contemporary historiographies
of psychology. When Hans’s more interesting after-lives are opened up these
are simultaneously closed down and seen as a legacy of both how gullible
science can be (according to critics and sceptics) and of its ‘queer’ kinship with
other controversial experiences and phenomena that cross cognitive science
and psychic research. Importantly, it is argued that these need to be policed
and expelled. These phenomena include facilitated communication, psychic
animals and pets (including Lady Wonder the Typing Horse) and mental
telepathy, or what were also termed ‘Wonder Animals’ (see Lachapelle, 2010).
Clever Hans is entangled closely with psychic and paranormal phenomena, all
of which often appear and are framed as hoaxes and scandals, tainting the area
of priming and automaticity within cognitive science.
There are traces of Hans’s more curious after-lives, which appear in
veterinary science for example. This includes a special issue of Vetlearn
(2012) devoted to the Clever Hans phenomena. In this issue, the guest
editorial written by James R Coffman, with the title ‘The Clever Hans Effect’10
reconsiders Clever Hans as an example of the extraordinary sensitivities of
equine perception that practitioners should attune to, understand and enter
into as part of their practice. This interestingly is not framed as something
that should be suppressed or eliminated from encounters but rather focused
upon and even increased and improved as part of ‘his or her awareness of the
subtlety of the human-horse interface’. The notion of an interface also conjures
up an image of a shared boundary through which an exchange takes place,
an exchange where what emerges does not pre-exist the relating perhaps.
72 Haunted Data

These traces appear in odd places and are not part of the narratives or forms
of ‘bundled time’ (see Ruppert et al., 2013), which stand in for the potential
after-lives. They are perhaps traces of what Derrida (1995) termed an ‘archive
of the future’. They exist as outliers, rarely if ever becoming objects, entities or
sources, which are performative. They are rather non-performative (Ahmed,
2010; Butler, 2010), never or rarely transforming the relationship of cognitive
science to its own rather queer archive.
These outliers suggest some rather different ways of understanding
suggestive capacities and bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected. In order
to understand what might be at stake I will discuss some ways of conceiving
of suggestion, which amplify and extend more radical understandings of the
extraordinary capacities of equine perception. I will do this by turning to more
marginal ways of thinking about the suggestive capacities of the human in the
context of hypnotic suggestion. This reveals the importance of approaching
suggestion technically and has resonances with Vinciane Despret’s approach,
as I will go on to illustrate. In order to situate the discussion I will turn to the
practices of Milton Erikson, a medical hypnotist, who discloses the importance
of approaching suggestion technically and as a potentiality distributed across
a range of actors and agencies. Milton Erikson (see Erikson and Rossi, 1981)
spent years developing techniques to induce hypnotic trance, and subjected the
phenomenon of hypnotic trance to particular kinds of experimental staging.
He published numerously in a range of different experimental psychological
journals during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He also edited the Journal
of Clinical Hypnosis until his death in 1980 and is a seminal figure in the
establishment of medical hypnosis exploring the role of hypnotic trance in the
induction of anaesthesia and pain relief, for example.
Importantly, Erikson did not frame suggestion as a problem of will. Rather,
he saw hypnosis as a different way of engaging and knowing. Hypnosis was
approached as a more incorporeal form of knowing and feeling that positions
the successful hypnotist as somebody who can read very subtle minimal bodily
communications. Rather than suspending ‘will’ this was about developing
the capacity for attunement that would allow the hypnotist to engage the
subject through non-conscious forms of knowing and awareness. This would
enable the subtle redistribution of ways of feeling, thinking and knowing that
might result in changes in physiology, neurology, the nervous system and
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 73

so forth. However, attunement was not simply a human affair. Milton’s life
story is particularly interesting in the context of thinking about the technicity
of suggestion, and the role of training and practice to the orchestration of
what might take form. This is what I call a more developmental aspect to the
modulation of this capacity, which takes into account Erikson’s life-history, as
well as the milieu and setting which shaped his practices. Due to his history
of polio and congenital sensory problems this resulted in Erikson being tone-
deaf and colour blind (see Rosen, 2010).
As Rosen (2010) argues, these problems encouraged Erikson to pay attention
to minute muscular movements in his attempts to rehabilitate his own partial
paralysis and overcome a limp due to the polio. He also developed an acute
sensitivity to minimal bodily communications in order to develop ways of
knowing that did not rely on cognition – famously he said he could tell a good
piano player by the way their hands moved across the keyboard. However,
what also characterized being able to enter into hypnotic relations and bring
about change was persistence and perspicacity. In other words, suggestion was
highly technical and could not be located within a psychological capacity such
as will. What was important in this process was the setting that would allow
various psycho-physiological processes to be aroused ‘into activity by indirect
forces’ (Rossi, 1980).
This was not about the will of the hypnotist and the compliance of the
subject, but rather the capacity or affordance of the experimental apparatus to
be sensitive and enact attunement in meaningful or even surprising ways. This
is a point that Vinciane Despret (2008) makes in her discussion of psychologist’s
attempts to communicate with animals. She argues that the co-production of
meaningful communication across species-borders is dependent upon the
success of the apparatus in redistributing the parameters and terms of what
is meaningful for the species in question. Despret recounts issues that emerge
from experiments designed to enable communication between humans and
animals – that is talking with parrots. She asks the question: What makes
an experimental apparatus successful within this context? Rather than just
focus on the objects – the devices or non-human actors – she also focuses her
attention on how to think and approach subjectivity in relation to this question.
She banishes objectivity and control from the scene, showing how
impoverished these organizational concepts are in creating ‘interested’
74 Haunted Data

experimental subjects. Drawing on the work of the psychologist Irene

Pepperberg, who is credited with success in speaking with parrots, she
considers why the experimental apparatus that Pepperberg created was
efficacious in facilitating communication. Objectivity and control are
replaced with the concepts of interest and attunement, which fundamentally
redistribute control and agency within the apparatus. Pepperberg recognized
for example that parrots’ use of language is pragmatic rather than referential
and that the apparatus would have to be sensitive to this in order to keep the
parrot interested, to remain attuned to what matters to the parrot and adjust
accordingly. This also challenges one of the other axioms of contemporary
positivist experimental analytics – generalization. Rather than approaching
generalization as what might be possible or probable to predict from a
specific case, ‘generalization is something that might be accomplished ‘bit by
bit’ ‘in terms of the possibilities that the apparatus could actualize’ (p. 128).
Generalization qualifies the apparatus rather than the subject (the parrot and
the human as essential categories for example). As she argues,

The question is now about the effectiveness of the apparatus, the researcher’s
desire no longer being anything but one of the modes of this efficacity.
The apparatus reveals nothing, it testifies instead to the power of the
transformations themselves. As a corollary of this resistance, the question of
the subjectivity of the parrot no longer has much sense, short of restricting it
and rendering it very concrete. If the parrot can talk, we do not know what it
is, nor what parrotness is, nor anything about the point of view of parrots on
the world. But we do learn in a viable manner about its point of view on the
apparatus. We learn something about its point of view on the new materials
with which it will make a world: colour boxes, numbers, words, a grammar,
forms, humans and abstractions. In the same manner that the refusal to
talk, in other apparatuses, constitutes an expression of the parrot’s opinion
in relation to the relevance of what it is asked, the fact that it engages with,
accepts and actively transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates
an extension of this world and therefore an extension of its subjectivity as
‘parrot-with-human’. (p. 128)

The human, animal and apparatus work together to accomplish what is possible,
she suggests, through attributing intentions and acting accordingly  – human
and animal (also see Game, 2001). This she suggests is about the extension of
subjectivities rather than the banishment of subjectivity from the scene. In a
development of this thesis in an article in Theory, Culture & Society (2013),
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 75

Despret turns her attention to the different ways in which scientists’ bodies are
involved with the animals they observe in the field. She equates this to a form
of ‘embodied empathy’. This is defined as ‘a concept, which describes feeling/
seeing/thinking bodies that undo and redo each other, reciprocally though not
symmetrically, as partial perspectives that attune themselves to each other’ (p. 51).
So as well as the importance of the experimental apparatus – that is the devices –
in actualizing what might be possible, the subjectivity or transsubjectivity of
the experimental subject, and how to think this are also an important part of
the success or efficacy of inventing or constructing particular experimental
scenes. This is a more inventive and creative approach to experimentation and
human/animal relations. It does away with the scientific method and the social
technologies that underpin how experimental arrangements are conducted
within positivist science (also see Chapter 4). Psychological processes, such as
will, intentionality and anticipation are approached as indeterminate, relational
processes that are contiguous with the technical, symbolic, material, immaterial,
historical and political forces that shape the milieu and setting.11
This is what Hans the Horse, Lady Wonder the Typing Horse, and all
the strange oddities and puzzles encountered in this chapter re-move in the
present. This is the hauntological force of the Hans the Horse charge, which
was disclosed in the affective intensities surrounding the comparison between
John Bargh and Mr von Osten – or what Bargh called the ‘Hans the Horse slur’.
This perceived slur led to various attempts by Bargh to close down on forces
that are part of the historiality of priming and reveal the more-than-one nature
of the controversy. The slur opens to a future psychology that approaches the
affective as relational, indeterminate, contingent and contiguous with the
setting and milieu. This future psychology is one that might open to more
speculative modes of experimentation. This represents what I am calling an
ecological approach to affect that approaches affect as historical, all the way
down, right to the bottom. We can see how this alternative genealogy of affect
is disclosed by all those marginal and displaced agencies, actors and entities
re-moved and put back into circulation by this controversy. I am suggesting that
this way of approaching affect and the biohuman has its precursors in ecological
approaches that were mobilized to explore psychological phenomena, as can
be found in synecology and the concept of biocenosis (Moebius12). These have
a lineage to epigenetics and related fields in the present that similarly attempt
to break down nature/culture separations and bifurcations (see Blackman,
76 Haunted Data

2016b). However, the newness of contemporary approaches such as these

are questioned when placed within genealogical approaches to psychology
informed by hauntology and historialities.
This chapter reopens a case that, although consigned to history within
psychology, lives on as a reminder of how little we understand the suggestive
capacities of subjects, human and non-human. As Despret (2015) has argued
‘Clever Hans’, and the entry of Clever Hans into the field of psychology, has
closed down on relevant, interesting and important propositions about how
to understand and explore Clever Hans’s intelligences. In her reopening of the
case of Clever Hans, she argues that Pfungst’s experiments and interpretations
close down on the ‘undecidables’ – those anomalies, which put his explanations
into doubt, revealing that the case is ‘far more complicated than Pfungst wants
to think’ (p. 82). She also suggests that what Pfungst’s experiments reveal is
the entry of Hans into psychology (rather than ethology), transforming Hans
and his capacities to be affected and affect, within the first beginnings of a
behaviourist technology.13 As she argues, the Hans before Pfungt’s experiments
and the Hans afterwards was not the same horse, where he becomes a ‘well and
truly mechanized horse’ (p. 80).
This dispositive or experimental apparatus put in place particular conditions
which transformed Hans into ‘a circus horse, a clown horse’ (2015: 80), and left
behind a residue of possible explanations and propositions that have become
disqualified, disallowed and left unnoticed. It is these which are re-moved by
the John Bargh priming controversy. It also shows how the movement of these
traces and their transformation across time continues, albeit in a controversy,
which is again closed down and consigned to history. The haunted data in this
controversy return, affectively and hauntologically, reminding us why Hans
truly is a horse who refuses to go away.

Conclusion: Affect and future psychology

Software media, specifically in the context of post-publication-peer-review,

make visible the extent to which the micro-dynamics of individual user’s social
media transactions are entangled with different temporalities, actors and
agencies. These material and immaterial traces entangle the past, present and
future in contrary ways. These antagonistic forces open up to archives of the
 Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ 77

future while often closing down such potentialities. The histories of citation,
which are carried by the historical movement of a trace, or historiality, are
revealed in those submerged narratives and displaced actors which haunt
such a movement. I have called this transmedial time following the work of
the critical race scholar Rey Chow (2012). This approach enriches studies of
media-time beyond the perpetual instantaneous time of the present (marked
by flow and duration for example), to traces of the power relations, which
govern specific regimes of visibility and invisibility. This is often referred to
as the back-end of social media but perhaps more aptly might be considered
hauntologically as what haunts automation and cannot easily be converted into
particular kinds of capital (financial, social, cultural, etc.). These processes are
captured by the concept of haunted data.
This book invites scholars to pay attention to what is rendered immaterial,
invisible, to what becomes displaced or submerged. It is one attempt to
continue long traditions of critical research across the humanities, science
studies, feminist work and queer theory in the context of the ‘computational
turn’. The conclusion to this chapter is that we can ‘read against the grain’ in
digital environments, and that working with ‘small data’ can allow a purchase
on what might be at stake in mapping the cultural and social life of data and the
politics of automation. It can also open up to and mine the gaps, contradictions,
silences and anomalies within science and science controversies as inventive
ways of working across and between the sciences and humanities. This
reveals the traces of a future psychology, which is re-moved and haunts the
present. It speaks through the affective intensities of individual user’s software
transactions, while at the same time exceeding attempts to set things straight.
This chapter is perhaps one example of how digital communication and
data analytics have the potential to make a difference and anticipate futures
yet-to-be-realized. However, what has settled following this controversy is
‘business as usual’, a process of setting the record straight, which endorses some
of the most conservative understandings of what it means to have and be a
body. Despite radical indeterminacy and the potentiality of those historialities
removed by this controversy, the excess of stories are closed down, repealed,
displaced and erased from what has taken form. A moment of potential is lost
leaving traces to what might have been and could be if psychology were able
and willing to listen to the traces of its own radical pasts.
78
 Part Two

Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures

Introduction: Mediating futures

The introduction to Part 2 of the book will situate the second controversy,
Feeling the Future, within the context of the current political conjuncture.
This includes the rise of futurology and futurism, alongside for some, the
inability to imagine alternative futures within the context of the anthropocene,
global finance capitalism, the rise of nationalisms and reactionary populisms,
and a concomitant loss of hope. The introduction will contextualize the
Feeling the Future controversy for the reader within the context of broader
cultural imaginaries and practices. As we will see, the capacity to feel multiple
futures in the present and even futures, which can rewrite the past, and alter
the present is a potent cultural imaginary. It connects regimes of anticipation
that can be found within and across software and computational culture with
strange psychic and extra-sensory capacities, such as precognition. The Feeling
the Future controversy invites a consideration of what these displaced and
submerged relationships might bring to our understandings of the present;
to the relationships between affect and governance, science and the popular;
to post-human understandings of the subject; and to the need for speculative
experimental philosophies within science that can return the wonder to
the world.
I am writing the introduction to Part 2 of the book at a historical conjuncture
where for many imagining alternative futures is politically imperative, but
seems at the same time replete with failure and a (lost) longing for the hope
that things could be otherwise.1 At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is
moving towards a post-Brexit landscape and President Trump is establishing
himself as the ‘people’s president’ within the United States. People are being
80 Haunted Data

further displaced due to wars, terrorism, persecution and poverty, while at the
same time borders and boundaries are being drawn and redrawn amplifying
racisms, xenophobia and a fear of the ‘other’. This book was begun at the
first signs of economic recovery across the globe and following the financial
crash in 2008. However, what we have witnessed since 2012 are worsening
inequities between rich and poor, the entrenchment of nationalisms and
fundamentalisms across the globe, the rise of populist nationalist politics and
the emergence of ‘post-truth’, alongside discussions of the anthropocene and
the end of the human and even the planet. These latter narratives abound
in literature, film, philosophy, science and the humanities. The future is a
hot topic, which continually encounters its own uneven pasts and potential
catastrophic futures.
Futurism abounds in the United States, fuelled perhaps by a therapy culture
where self-proclaimed futurists not only advise on what individuals can do
to maximize their own potentials, recovery, successes and health, but also
turn their gaze to what consumption will become, what shopping will look
and feel like in the future. As David Houle, futurist to Oprah Winfrey and the
communities she enacts, asks,

People like to shop. Americans like to shop. American women in particular

like to shop. According to futurist David Houle, in the past 40 years,
shopping went from something one did when something was needed to a
leisure activity in and of itself. With changes in economics and technology,
what will shopping look like in the next 10 years?2

Of course the future of shopping is not a banal concern. Consumption has

been placed as a central driver of economic recovery across many neo-
liberal countries, where we are urged, encouraged or incited to buy property,
goods, services or lifestyles to help develop and strengthen failing systems of
governance. The prediction of how and what we will shop for has therefore
been a concern for politicians, governments, economists and even our own
perceived well-being. Trendspotting – predicting the future – is big business.
But of course the trendspotting that is taking form is no crystal ball gazing and
neither is it a solely human activity. Non-human agencies are at the forefront of
not simply predicting, but in a recursive relationship also shaping what we will
come to want and, importantly, buy. One of David Houle’s futurist predictions,
 Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures 81

for example, is that the ubiquity of online shopping in our lives will not destroy
one of the main non-places, to use Mark Auge’s (2009) term – shopping malls.
Shopping malls are generic places of transit where the experience of shopping,
he argues, as an embodied, sensory and sensual practice is crucial. The irony
of giving a talk to business executives in a carefully and hermetically sealed
air-conditioned shopping mall in Dubai is not lost on Houle. He reflects on
how one of his predictions was made in a mall in the desert, which had a ski
slope for skiing and snowboarding (despite the 40+ degree desert temperatures
outside)! However, experiential shopping omits or overlooks the role non-
human agencies play in shaping our desires.
As Luciana Parisi (2013) among many others have argued, algorithms,
that is practices of machine-learning, which seek to pre-empt and shape
what we desire, are already at work in shaping possible futures out of the
patterns, anomalies, accidents and multiple media transactions that we make
throughout our lives. As she argues, algorithms are no longer to be thought of
as instructions or rules to perform tasks at the level of computation, but are
‘performing entities: actualities that select, evaluate, transform and produce
data’ (p. ix). She argues that increasingly computation and computational
entities have pervaded culture and to that extent are our co-creating partners
in what might come to be. She argues that we live increasingly in computational
cultures and, as Adrian Mackenzie (2013) has argued, what defines computation
and the practices of software programmers, for example, are attempts to
anticipate and shape the future rather than predict timeless truths, regularities
and laws. Drawing on a special issue of the journal Subjectivity, devoted to
Technoscience, he cites the feminist science studies scholars Adams et al.
(2009). They argue that governance has increasingly moved from regimes of
truth to regimes of anticipation. As they suggest,

Anticipation …  emerges at a moment of actuarial saturation, when one

realises that the sciences of the actual can be abandoned or ignored to be
replaced by a knowledge that the truth about the future can be known by way
of speculative forecast, itself relying on proliferating modes of prediction.
(p. 247)

Rather than sciences of the actual and knowledges that seek to confirm truth,
we have moved into what many people now describe as a post-truth landscape.
82 Haunted Data

The knowledges that condition these post-truths are those which are able to
mobilize longings, desires, habits, beliefs, fears, anxieties, defences, prejudices
and processes and practices more associated with psychological registers of
experience – in other words, with how people feel about the conditions of their
lives. Placing feeling within a broader political context therefore speaks directly
to the role the psychological knowledges play in strategies of governance and
regulation. Out of this conjuncture practices, such as speculative forecast,
anticipation, post-truth, pre-emption and human and non-human agencies
arise, which all seek to shape the future at a time where the future of the planet,
the human, and for some ‘life itself ’ is under threat. Millennial fantasies
abound in film, literature and TV – they contemplate the end of the planet and
of a possible time of past, present and future. These scenarios stage possible
futures that defy forecast or even comprehension.
Future studies is a recognizable discipline with its own journals, monographs,
magazines, think tanks, methods, strategies, indexes, organizations and forms
of intervention. Rather than see the future as an inevitable unfolding of the
present, framed within a linear narrative of progress, it is rather recognized that
there are possible futures that could be engineered, planned and orchestrated
as a way of solving conflicts in the present. One focus of future studies is
trend analysis and forecasting, a particular form of human and non-human
pattern recognition that attempts to anticipate trends in order to shape them
in the future.
These strategies and regimes are taking form in the context of increasing
anxiety about the future. As we have seen, this includes talk of the anthropocene
and the end of the human and even the extinction of the planet3  – and in
the context of the impotence of human problem solving and capacity to
understand the financial entities, objects and practices enacted by global
finance capitalism (see Seigworth and Tiessen, 2012). These objects and
entities appear to have their own unanticipated and autonomous agencies and
effects. Thus futurology, with its hope for engineering possible futures different
to now, is situated within melancholic and sometimes bleak predictions for the
legacies (environmental, economic and otherwise) that current generations
will bequeath to others. Futurology assumes therefore that the future is not
fixed, and therefore the inevitable outcome of the present. Neither does it have
to be an extended present, which repeats the problems of the past. Speculative
 Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures 83

forecast and regimes of anticipation have therefore become the new forms
of quantification and thought-style marking out present concerns.4 I argue
that post-truth politics should be situated within these broader shifts and
landscapes of production and consumption.
The trend analysis and forecasting which are part of futurology combine
machinic forms of pattern recognition with human consensual vision – what
kind of future do we want; and on the basis of this vision, how can we get
there? The invitation to ‘plan backwards’ enacts a form of ‘global foresight’,
which remediates the capacity to anticipate the future once associated with
psychic phenomena, such as clairvoyance and precognition, within a technical
apparatus. This includes a range of actors and agencies, which include software
and data analytics, business consultants, economists, policy makers, NGOs,
speculative narratives and different modalities of visioning (e.g. blurring
the distinction between science and science fiction). These help to create a
distributed and mediated form of networked collective intelligence5 – or at
least the hope is that ‘Tomorrow Can Be Built Today’.

Feeling futures
It is in the context of futurology and futurisms, media and otherwise, that the
second controversy analysed in this book is situated. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 will
focus on the Feeling the Future controversy, which is associated with a beguiling
series of experiments carried out by an eminent Cornell American scientist,
Daryl Bem (2011).6 Bem attempted to prove or disprove precognition – that
is the proposition that it is possible to forecast the future. Within the realms
of statistical probability Bem argued that he had demonstrated the existence
of premediation – the capacity to anticipate and shape the future, or even for
the future to retroactively reshape the past. This controversy, as with the John
Bargh Priming Controversy, gained traction across social media, and was also
brought to the attention of the broadcast media and even an American comedy
show. In the context of futurology it is an interesting controversy to follow, and
one that re-situates attempts to anticipate and shape the future, within a much
longer history of concern with registers of attention, remembering, sensation
and thought, which exceed current conceptions of cognitive processes.
The question of time and of foresensing the future in the present, or of
84 Haunted Data

time-travelling to the future and the future retroactively influencing the past, is
an evocative cultural fantasy. It is perhaps not surprising that this experiment
became part of a much bigger controversy, and one which as we will see, raises
interesting questions about the re-imagination of concepts of time, duration
and temporality that govern digital archives, with their capacity for remixing
and remediation.
Feeling the Future is linked to broader cultural imaginaries, which enact
foresight, anticipation, pre-emption and premediation such that temporalities
are queered (see Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005; Love, 2007). Queer
temporalities question what it means to be human, turning this upside
down, inside out, back to front and sideways, often at the same time. This
controversy also connects to a dispersed set of surfaces of emergence, where
the quantum scale of matter is enacted, imagined, performed, materialized and
dematerialized. This includes discussions which range from the quantum brain
and biology and quantum entanglement in physics, through to controversies
regarding queer sexualities and pre-trans-feminisms (see Bem and Lipsitz,
1981). Queer sexualities and queer times intrude within this particular scene
of entanglement, and prefigure in important ways current trans-feminisms
with their focus on molecular becomings (see Preciado, 2013).
The ‘scenes of entanglement’ that I enact in the next three chapters will
stage a queer montage of relations based on the experiments and their after-
and even future-lives. The experiments became something of a media event,
creating a media flurry of attention and becoming the butt of many jokes,
academic and non-academic. As well as remediating this event in the context
of the submerged and displaced narratives the controversy revitalizes, I will
also turn my attention to the politics of data that was disclosed and brought
to the surface by this controversy. This will allow me to advance an argument
that considers the performativity of the different software analytics that allow
particular claims to be made within science. I will consider what these debates
and controversies reveal about the social and cultural life of data that are often
covered over when data is reduced to metrics. This will also enable a discussion
of post-truth politics, and how we might understand the parameters and
conditions of what might be believed or believable, and what is excluded as
fake, hoax and as an object of ridicule. As we will see these differentiations
have little to do with truth per se and more to do with historical narratives,
 Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures 85

practices, modes of remembering and forgetting, and the specific conditions

under which truth-claims can be made and advanced.
It is perhaps no surprise that the Feeling the Future experiments have taken
on the status of weird science, linked to so-called mad scientists conjuring up
statistical probabilities that defy belief. Many commentators believe that the
experiments should be consigned to the fraudulent, and aligned to experiments,
which with hindsight have been exposed as hoaxes and scientific jokes. They
are a good example of what Judith Butler (2009) and Sara Ahmed (2010) have
termed non-performative(s) – that is they do not bring about the objects and
entities of which they speak. In other words, despite their particular strategy
of speculative forecast (or even post-truth-claims) it is not possible for the
future to change the past, or at least this question remains unsettled. I will use
the concept of the non-performative to explore the limits of techniques and
technologies of futurity, which are based on particular software analytics and
historical truth-claims. These can create statistically significant effects (within
the parameters of the scientific method and positivist science), while failing to
bring about the objects, entities and effects they perform. The discussion will
show how mathematical probabilities and the cultural and social imaginaries
they perform (particularly at the level of algorithms) are actualities, which
often enact impoverished versions of past, present and possible futures. On
this basis I will argue our concerns about data and the potential of data to
shape worlds is perhaps overstated. Rather what the controversy discloses is
questions about what we are already primed to believe (technically, culturally,
historically, affectively) and what therefore the limits and reach of post-truth
politics are.
I will argue that the future-sight that this enables shows how limited
mathematical probabilities (and particularly Bayesian probabilistic statistics)
and the techniques of anticipation they might enact are. I call this paradox
the paradox of the mathematical non-future(s). I will argue that imagining
and realizing possible future(s) is still within the grasp of arts, humanities
and science scholars, who can work in the gaps, silences, absent-presences,
hesitations, submerged narratives and displaced actors surrounding scientific
controversies. I will argue that this playful way of contaminating legitimate
science represents the basis of an important rapprochement between the
humanities and sciences, which does not simply confirm positivist science
86 Haunted Data

by way of endorsement, speculation or confirmation. It represents a form

of undisciplinarity that is compatible with queer theories and with critical
approaches to science that remain committed to the possibility of more
inventive, creative and open science(s). In this era of post-truth finding new
ways of judging and authenticating truth-claims is ever more urgent. The
analysis of the Feeling the Future controversy in the second half of the book
will go some way to identify what might be at stake.
 4

Feeling the Future

‘Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real: Which Means Science Is Broken’1

To have an idea of the impact of this paper, it is instructive to take note

of the number of times this paper was cited in other scientific journals:
342 times as of 3 July 2015. Furthermore if you search ‘Feeling the future’
with Google you can find approximately two million pages that includes a
dedicated page on Wikipedia. Additionally Bem was interviewed by many
radio and TV stations, from the Colbert Report to the David Letterman
show and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. Such widespread
and generally positive media coverage is unprecedented for any kind of
­parapsychological type finding. Bem deserves plaudits for breaking new
ground in this way.2

Introduction

This chapter sets the scene for the unfolding controversy explored in the next
two chapters. It will provide the reader with the means to ‘see’ what might
usually remain occluded by forms of representationalism, or what has come to
stand in for the controversy. It shapes a form of mediated perception that opens
to epistemological uncertainties and foreclosures. This allows the haunted data
within the controversy to speak back to some of the usual commentary that
can be found about it on the internet (particularly commentary which engages
either in endorsement or scepticism). The commentary is a good example
of the polarizing logic that Vinciane Despret (2015) suggests characterizes
science within this area and that needs unsettling. The scenes that shape the
chapters all commune with ghost-data and provide a home and hospitable
88 Haunted Data

atmosphere or ethos for ‘queer aggregations’ that usually remain submerged,

disguised or displaced. These ‘queer aggregations’ are put back into circulation.
The implications of this for the shaping of biological and psychological data
will be discussed in Chapter 6 and in the conclusion of the book.
In this and the next two chapters the reader will encounter very complex
arguments that bring back or re-move unresolved debates and issues within
statistics, truth and post-truth-claims, scientific experimentation, studies of
consciousness and the status of the human within the context of the molecular
and more-than-human. The storytelling discloses how complex this more-than-
one event is. It raises questions about media contagions and what we might
learn about the contagious potential of (science) controversies as they spread
across digital and social media. As the reader will see, the contagious potential
of the controversy is due to the layered and yet displaced actors and agents who
intrude in the present. In different ways they all invite consideration of what it
might mean to learn to listen, commune and speak with ghosts or haunted data.

Scene 1: The “Buzz on Bem”

In 2010 the Cornell scientist Daryl Bem conducted a series of nine experiments,
which demonstrated, within the realms of statistical probability that the
future could retroactively reshape the past. The experiments were framed as
an exploration, demonstration and possible verification of the existence of
precognition defined as the ability to anticipate the future. This ability could
extend not just from the past to the future but also from the future to the past.
Controversially Bem argued that the future could retroactively anticipate and
shape events that had already happened. He has also suggested that whether
one believes in precognition or not, it is important to engage in what we might
call more speculative modes of experimentation, that is experimenting with
the impossible or the improbable.
Bem (2011) recounts that the inspiration for one of the dramatic hooks of
the experiments was based on the beguiling proposition that ‘time-reversal’
is possible. This he says was influenced by the character of the White Queen
in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The concept of ‘retroactive
facilitation of recall’ is aligned to the White Queen’s view that memory that
 Feeling the Future 89

only works backwards (from present to past) is a poor memory. As he suggests,

‘In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen explains
to Alice that the citizens of her country have precognitive ability, or, as she
puts it, “memory works both ways” in her land and she herself remembers
best “things that happened the week after next”. When Alice says, “I’m sure
mine only works one way. … I can’t remember things before they happen.”
the Queen disparagingly remarks, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards’” (Carroll, 2006, p. 164).
Although many scientists have responded to Bem’s invitation to experiment
with the impossible or extraordinary as ridiculous, absurd and not to be taken
seriously, I will argue throughout this and the next two chapters that this
invitation is one that should be taken seriously. As I will argue this invitation
connects to broader issues in the humanities and the field of affect studies. This
includes how to analyse the relationships between anticipation, pre-emption,
subliminal and non-conscious registers of experience, and their modulation
and orchestration within systems of power and regulation. So for the purposes

Figure 4  Alice with the White Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
Copyright Wikimedia commons.
90 Haunted Data

of this chapter I invite the reader to suspend their own disbelief and to
entertain the White Queen’s retort that memory that only works backwards is
a poor sort of memory.
On this basis I will approach the experiments as engaging in rather queer
forms of time-travelling. They are certainly analogous to the way Karen Barad
(2010) uses the queerness of quantum ontologies to disrupt any notion of
fixed time in nature. As she says, ‘quantum weirdness’ is actually ‘quantum
queerness’ (Barad 2010: 246–7) – not queer as in strange, but queer as undoing,
queer as ‘trans/formation’ (p. 247). She also uses the figuration of quantum
queerness to refer to asynchronous time, where time is out of joint and where
stable identities are undone. The experiments also show the entanglement of
literature and science in the imaginaries that are enacted and come to matter
within scientific forms of experimentation (see Haraway, 1997).
Fantasies of time-travelling are of course the stuff and staple of science
fiction and popular culture. We can think of the Hollywood blockbuster Back
to the Future or the film adaptation of the Philip K Dick Sci-Fi novel Minority
Report, for example. The concept of the seer, the mystic who has second-sight
enabling visionary experience, also appears as a figure within many ecstatic
religions and ancient Middle Eastern traditions. The concept of foresight
and the capacity to anticipate the future also underpins new strategies of
governance, such as premediation and pre-emption, which increasingly shape
automated media worlds. Not just the stuff of fantasy or science fiction, the
concept of artificial precognition is a new form of data analytics developed
by IBM, which provides a data service that claims to ‘provide you leads when
you don’t know the question to ask, and for when you want to uncover and
discover in the data new insights and patterns’.3 This service, known as the
Watson Discovery Advisor, identifies trends, patterns and correlations in large
amounts of data in order to generate new insights. Alongside this, there is a
rush to design, implement and patent artificial precognition technology, which
claims to provide ‘knowledge of possible events’4 before they happen. This is
linked to desires to intervene and shape possible futures. These data-driven
dreams and fantasies bring together big data analytics with forms of decision-
making based on probabilistic statistics, often to extract value and revenue
from data. The hope is that operating costs can be reduced and efficiencies for
business increased.
 Feeling the Future 91

In some senses these technologies extend cybernetics and communication

science into a psychology of time that has always haunted cognitive science,
neuroscience and social psychology. This includes studies of the paranormal
and those psychic entities, concepts, practices and phenomena that remain as
a ‘nagging residue’ to psychophysical understandings and measurements of
sense perception and attention (Halpern, 2015: 66). Parapsychology has always
represented a form of inquiry ‘on the margins’ of experimental psychology.
Although often dismissed by contemporary scientists, the historian Ian Hacking
has argued that early psychic research shaped the parameters of contemporary
positivist scientific practices as they operated in a more speculative mode. This
speculative mode and the more radical implications of understanding what it
might mean to experiment with the impossible or extraordinary have been
displaced, occluded and under-explored (Hacking, 1988: 434).
This chapter will begin to explore the implications of this for the field of affect
studies and those interested in the biohumanities, that is in developing new
theories of the human that draw from the sciences and humanities. The analysis
as it extends across this and the next two chapters will show how we need more
creative and inventive approaches to experimentation and the shaping of more
speculative sciences. I will specifically outline how the experiments were pre-
empted within the scientific community showing how the criteria for arbitrating
truth are never simply statistical or mathematical. What one is willing or able to
believe directly shapes the post-commentary and post-publication-peer-review
associated with this ongoing controversy, including a gamut of non-replication
and replication studies.5 The chapter opens to some new ways of assessing and
analysing the scientific method and scientific experimentation that draw from
literature, art and theatre. This analysis will be extended in the subsequent two
chapters allowing for a novel analysis of the significance of these experiments
for the field of affect studies, speculative philosophies and the biohumanities.

Pre-empting the experiments

Before the experiments were written up and published in the peer-reviewed
journal International Journal of Social Psychology in 2011 (cited 670 times to
date), the scientific community and science bloggers had picked up on a pre-
publication version that appeared on Daryl Bem’s website.6 This was circulated
92 Haunted Data

in blogs and across Twitter pre-empting the outrage that many in the scientific
community felt. The article quickly started to create a stir and subsequent
media flurry of attention. In a blog written by two psychologists, Andrew D
Wilson and Sabrina Golonka, called Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists,
they summarize their basic take on events as follows:

I don’t believe a word of it because a) let’s face it, it’s about precognition and b)
there’s simply no effort to propose a mechanism that might support such an
outrageous claim (and no, ‘quantum mechanics’ is not a mechanism). Bem
explicitly states that coming up with a mechanism isn’t his job and he’s just
‘reporting the data’. But this is precisely the problem with psychology right
now – not enough theory – and the links below that talk about the analysis
problems with this paper (and all statistical testing in the social sciences)
make good points about the fact that statistical testing in the absence of a
clear theory which includes mechanisms is effectively a fishing trip. There’s
also a nice discussion here about why it’s healthy to be immediately sceptical
of a study that claims to have found something inconsistent with the rest
of science.7

In another blog, Practical Ethics, published by Oxford University some two

days prior to this (and hyperlinked to the blog above), it is stated that ‘the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the most influential journal in
social psychology, is about to publish a study that presents evidence for the
existence of psychic phenomena’.8 Over the next twenty-four months and
beyond, commentators from science, media and even the American comedian
Steven Colbert weighed in to ridicule and lambaste the experiments. The
commentary included a revitalization of Bem’s already existing status as a
controversial figure both within and outside psychology. Bem was invited
on to The Colbert Report, a late-night American political comedy show on
26 January 2011, with the headline, ‘Time-Traveling Porn’.9 As we will see in
Chapter 5, the experiments provided ample material for such an attention-
grabbing headline. He appeared in Season 2, Episode 5 of the American
documentary series Through the Wormhole presented by Morgan Freeman,
in an episode asking ‘Do We Have a Sixth Sense?’10 He appeared on the CNN
and the MS NBC news, and various newspapers and bloggers picked up on the
experiments and amplified their apparent comedic and entertainment value.
On 7 January 2011, Daryl Bem appeared on the NBC news, with the headline,
‘Psychic Ability Doesn’t Fly in New Experiments’.
 Feeling the Future 93

The experiments were reported on in the New York Times three times, on
the 5th, 7th and 11th of January, 2011. They were reported on in the Spanish
TVC Channel News on 25 April 2013, and in the United Kingdom in the
broadsheet The Telegraph (three times) and particularly on 19 November 2010,
with the headline, ‘Frankly the Future Is All Too Predictable’.11 Bem received a
sympathetic response, which was accompanied by a lively discussion linked to
352 posted comments in the British Daily Mail on-line (18 November 2010),
with the headline, ‘Are Humans Psychic? Startling New Study “Proves” That
We Can See into the Future’.12 His experiments were also the subject of an
article published on 17 December 2010, in the blog for the Healthy Living
Section of the HuffPost. This was written by the CEO and president of the
Institute for Noetic Studies (and author of Mindful Motherhood), Cassandra
Hieton. It was published with the title ‘It’s About Time: The Scientific Evidence
for Psi’.13 Bem became the subject of more measured scrutiny in the British
broadsheet The Guardian, as well as in the arts and culture magazine Dazed,
with the headline, ‘Can We See into the Future?’.14 Bem was also interviewed
by Al-Jeezera, ABC and Fox News. As The Institute of Noetic Sciences has
argued, there was a ‘Buzz on Bem’, with numerous blogs reporting on the
experiments, enough that the traction registered on the Science Commons.15
This is a web application that organizes and curates information about the
impact and reach of scientific articles on social media.16
The ‘Buzz on Bem’ brought the realm of anomalistic psychology and weird
science into the mainstream press and extended post-publication-peer-review
across a number of actors and agencies. The experiments became ‘the thing’
(Latour, 2005) that brought together and re-assembled a number of long-
standing and unsettled issues that connect psychology to its submerged and
displaced pasts. As with the last chapter, this chapter will focus on how the
experiments travelled, and in their travels and curious forms of time reversal
have accrued their own agencies. They have moved from the original scene of
experimentation and become an actor within a mutable scene of entanglement.
The experiments open to multiple leads, criss-crossings, loopings, back tracks,
movings and re-movings. As I tease apart the entangled relations set in motion
by this controversy, we will see how different temporalities and media times are
knotted, spliced and enacted. In this respect and as with the last two chapters,
I will be following those traces, deferrals, absences, gaps and their movements
94 Haunted Data

within a particular corpus of data. I will attempt to re-move and keep alive
what becomes submerged or hidden by particular regimes of visibility and
remembering. These movements are simultaneously technical, affective,
historical, social, political and ethical and are distributed across a variety of
social media platforms, actors, publics, agencies, bodies and practices.
The approach I take exceeds the usual critical commentaries that surround
anomalistic psychology and weird science, which include the role of
professionalized sceptics, who police the boundaries between the psychological
and the paranormal. This is an established tradition of critique within
anomalistic psychology, and is often where critical commentaries are located.
This usually includes an assessment of the experimental claims and the status,
reputation and worth of the person making them. It is perhaps not a surprise
therefore that Bem’s personal life also became the subject of scrutiny. We are
told he is a gay Cornell professor with an unusual gender non-conforming
past. He had married and had children with Sandra Bem, the late women’s
studies professor.17 He was a former stage magician, had a history of civil rights
activism and perhaps had a wry sense of humour. Was he being taken too
seriously and what was his intent? Does Bem really believe in extra-sensory
perception (ESP) or is he a Mad Scientist?18 Is Bem simply reproducing the
traditions of dramaturgy and stagecraft, which have been recognized by some
as integral to some traditions of social psychological experimentation? (see
Millard, 2014). Is he extending the deception of psychological experiments
into a mediatized realm, such that the joke is distributed across different
publics? As Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University
of Oregon argued in The New York Times on 7 January 2011, ‘He’s got a great
sense of humor.’ ‘I wouldn’t rule out that this is an elaborate joke.’ What can
we read into Bem’s apparent poker face and what exactly is the nature of the
deception? Or rather what exactly is motivating the ‘blather on Bem’ or ‘hissy
fit’ as Larry Dossey, the executive editor of Explore asks?19
Is this an assault on rationality? This was a quote from the New York Times
article ‘Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage’ (5 January 2011).
Do the experiments reveal something more endemic about the problem with
statistical probability and the mathematization of chance that underpins the
scientific method and positivist science? Are these experiments an enactment
of quantum entanglement (see Hameroff, 2012)? Do these experiments enact
 Feeling the Future 95

quantum scales of matter at molecular levels that might turn on our heads the
already vexed and complex questions concerning the nature of consciousness,
matter, free will and intentionality? What might these experiments and
the statistical software analytics they use reveal about the problems and
possibilities of data analytics and the politics of data? Do they have anything
to say to media and cultural theorists who might be attempting to wrestle with
the challenges of computational cultures to analyses of mediation?
All of these questions are carried by the controversy and extend the
controversy into areas of debate, research, dialogue, curiosity and reflection,
which disturb boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present, science
and humanities, private and public, the material and immaterial and the
theoretical and the technical. The denouement that Bem leaves puzzled or
sceptical readers with in the article relates to the question, ‘But how can it be
like that?’ (p. 17). How is it possible to believe impossible things? Pre-empting
the scepticism of many psychologists (and non-psychologists) he defers again
to the White Queen who in response to Alice’s protests that ‘one can’t believe
impossible things’ retorts, ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When
I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’ (Carroll, 2006:
p. 166; see Figure 4).

Future forecasting and post-truth politics

As we explored in the introduction to Part 2 of the book, the capacity of the
future to retroactively reshape the past is part of a potent cultural imaginary.
Futurism(s) of all kinds are performed, imagined, practised and enacted
across a variety of practices, locations, strategies and technologies, revealing
some of the current ways in which conceptions of life and its parameters are
being shaped. These ‘imagined worlds’ (Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000)
are sometimes considered extraordinary or anomalous. They are sometimes
projected as part of science(s) possible futures. They particularly appear in
scientific and increasingly humanities traditions, which take the ‘quantum’ as
the basis of imagination, intervention and experimentation. Foresight and the
capacity of anticipated futures to shape the present (and sometimes the past)
are also and often an ordinary and barely perceptible part of how business,
96 Haunted Data

commerce, governments, the military, politics and related actors and agencies
attempt to intervene and shape what comes to matter.
As the feminist science studies scholars, Adams, Murphy and Clarke
(2009) have argued, one of the defining qualities of the current moment ‘is its
characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future’
(p. 246). As the authors go on to argue, this state of anticipation is displacing
science(s) based on actuality to science(s) based on speculative forecast. As they
argue, these future-oriented logics enact a particular politics of temporality
and affect that pervades how current problems might be thought, felt and
addressed. Anticipation and pre-emption of possible future(s)-acting-in-the-
present displace static and linear conceptions of time. They argue that time
is stretched, bent, mobilized, reversed, telescoped, inverted, turned upside
down, inside out, entangled, disjointed, disoriented, bundled, expanded and
multiplied. It is perhaps therefore not a surprise that a series of experiments
claiming that precognition (the capacity to anticipate and feel the future)
is possible should attract attention, both inside and outside science. The
New York Times pre-empted the publication of the experiments on 5 January
2011, with the headline, ‘Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage’.
Part 2 of the book will consider why these experiments were met with scorn,
amusement, embarrassment, anger, hostility and scepticism, particularly when
they are read and made to collide with the myriad of sites and practices, which
attempt to mobilize time, ‘turning the ever-moving horizon of the future into
that which determines the present’ (Adams, Murphy and Clarke, 2009: 251).
Why did these experiments become a media event that demanded attention
and become the subject of debate, scandal, controversy, scrutiny, gossip
and disbelief? What did this event become an attractor for, and how was it
extended, intensified, multiplied and potentially made more indeterminate
and messy, when we consider the distributed and pervasive effects of social
and digital media on the enactment and shaping of such a controversy?
What are some of the conditions of possibility for precognition, as an
assumed psychic capacity or form of perception, to be modulated, simulated
and materialized through a particular material-semiotic apparatus? This
apparatus was composed of a computer, a screen, a software package, erotic
images, a chair and an experimental subject. How is precognition reworked
within these experiments and how does it differ from psychic experiments on
 Feeling the Future 97

precognition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What do these

experiments and their reception suggest about historical forms of attention and
perception and their productive limits and constraints? What do they suggest
about those points of ‘epistemic anxiety or instability’ (Daston and Galison
cited in Halpern, 2015: 27), which characterize the ontologies underpinning
future-oriented modes of ‘seeing’? Computers or software data analytics might
be able to ‘see into the future’ but they of course do not employ clairvoyants, or
at least not as far as I can tell!
In order to start to explore some of these questions, scene 1 will consider
philosophies of science, and the different histories and assumed a prioris
of what counts as an experiment, evidence and experimentation that are
enacted and incorporated. In the Preface I stated that the book specifically
takes its cue from a number of feminist and radical philosophers of science
and science studies scholars who have developed innovative approaches to
science, which cross philosophy, science and culture. They have explored
the histories and genealogies of science within specific historical, cultural,
political, technical, psychological and symbolic conjunctures. This includes
attention to the historical a prioris, which have shaped the philosophies and
practice of science, as well as the close interdependence and interrelationship
between cultural configurations of matter-meaning and the materialities of
scientific cultures.
The next section will specifically develop this through the work of Steve
Brown (2012). Brown is an interesting ally as he was also trained as a
psychologist and has come through the critical traditions and approaches to
psychological matters that have characterized my own trajectory. He has also
opened his thinking to sociological approaches to science studies (including
science and technology studies), and more speculative philosophies, including
the thinking of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century process philosophers
such as William James, Albert North Whitehead, Henry Bergson, as well
as contemporary philosophers of science who have been influenced by this
thinking (see Brown and Stenner, 2009). This includes Isabelle Stengers,
Vinciane Despret and Bruno Latour. This reconfiguration of psychological
matters allows for a consideration of science experimentation as an
entanglement of art, culture, media, philosophy and science. Psychological
experimentation is always situated within specific milieu and sociopolitical
98 Haunted Data

understandings of what counts as an experimental subject and experimental

rules and procedures. As we will see, once the historicity of psychological
experimentation is opened to its own submerged and displaced narratives,
actors and agents, more speculative modes and philosophies of experimentation
can start to speak back to the scientific method. This is particularly as it has
stabilized and operates in its more positivist mode in the present.

The experimental device

Most psychology experiments are conducted within the auspices of the
scientific method, which operate according to a particular ‘social technology’
(Brown, 2012). The scientific method relates to a set of procedures, rules and
a prioris, which assume that scientific experiments are oriented to arbitrating
truth and establishing the statistical probability of truth-claims. Within the
context of psychology this would position psychology as a science of mind or
science of the individual, rather than as a science of population management
(see Chapter 1). Steve Brown uses the concept of social technology to rather
explore how experiments are shaped according to a particular arrangement
of forces, or what he terms the experimental device.20 The experimental
device consolidates and enacts specific contingent histories of what counts as
a proper psychological experiment. It sets up the rules governing the status
of evidence and how this might be authenticated, legitimated, verified and
evidenced. The scientific method is shorthand for such a contingent history
of experimental practice within psychology. This method is meant to guard
against spurious claims, unfounded evidence, statistical error and to contribute
to the accumulation of scientific fact and knowledge.
On this basis how might it be possible to enact a series of experiments
shaped by the scientific method, which ‘prove’ within the realms of statistical
probability that it is possible for the future to retroactively shape the past?
Usually psychology experiments do not make such dramatic claims or
contribute to the invention of the new or unexpected. As we explored in the
previous chapter, the explanation of anomalous psychological phenomena
(such as a horse telling the time and counting with his hooves) are usually
framed through the most impoverished version of what might be possible and
probable (see Despret, 2004a, 2015). Psychology is largely viewed as reductionist
 Feeling the Future 99

and deterministic, based on establishing connections and relationships, which

close down the invention and enactment of what the Belgian science studies
philosopher terms ‘innovative propositions’ (Stengers, 2000).
However, there is much more to say about the experimental method and
its close links to more creative forms of experimentation associated with the
arts, entertainment and theatre. For example social psychology experiments
have a history of courting controversy and turning on a dramatic hook or
proposition. Brown considers a number of social psychology experiments,
including those undertaken by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, which
disclose psychology’s close relationship to media, artistic and theatrical
practices. These experiments in different ways all attempt to simulate social
phenomena. Most readers will have heard of Stanley Milgram and his studies of
conformity and disobedience carried out in the wake of what Hannah Arendt
during 1961 termed the ‘banality of evil’.21 These experiments are usually
framed through a long tradition of research in social psychology, which aims
to analyse ‘what happens to the individual in the presence of other people’?
(Gough and McFadden, 2001). As Brown argues, this tradition of research has
much in common with Brechtian theatre and art practices such as abstract
expressionism, which draw attention to artifice and a moment of dramatic
tension, or a dramatic hook (Millard, 2014). In the case of Milgrim’s obedience
experiments, the dramatic hook revolved around a particular question: will
the experimental subject deliver what they believe to be an electric shock, in
order to help the ‘learner’ improve their success on recognizing word-pairs?
This moment of dramatic tension is staged as a miniature drama, ‘which
turns on a single moment’ (Brown, 2012). The drama is amplified and enacted
by the unwitting insertion of the experimental subject into an arrangement
of forces. These include deception, cover stories, props, pranks, knowing
confederates and an experimenter who plays an executive role in directing and
animating proceedings (Brown, 2012). To that extent the ‘social technology’,
which shapes this tradition of psychological experimentation, has much in
common with reality TV. Many commentators have drawn attention to the
influence of early reality TV on the shaping of experimental apparatuses within
psychology (Brown, 2012, McCarthy, 2008). This includes an awareness of
how audiences might be enrolled into the drama when it might subsequently
be watched on television and film.
100 Haunted Data

The dramaturgy and stagecraft of psychological experimentation has

been extended by recent work, which has explored the role of media in the
production of scientific fact, or at least those scientific theories, concepts and
experiments, which take on the status of truth and veridicality (Foucault,
1980). The Australian film studies professor Kathryn Milliard (2014) has
re-examined the role of photography and film in the shaping and production of
Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, and what has become the accepted,
although highly contestable, explanation of what took form. In her analysis
of the discarded film footage of the experiments, which were edited into the
educational documentary Obedience (first shown in educational settings from
1965), she has re-examined the archives from the Stanley Milgram papers held
at Yale University. Her focus is on what did not make it into the final cut. As she
argues, Milgram was very interested in the role of media in the production and
establishment of scientific fact (or consensus and fact-building). He designed
the experiments with a camera and audience in mind. The initial prototypes
of the experiment were watched through a two-way mirror reproducing a
‘peep-show’ aesthetic. Filming the experiments with concealed cameras later
extended the aesthetic. This created some of the footage which was used in the
original cut of the documentary, and also incorporated ‘cut away’ shots of the
main prop involved (the electric shock machine) filmed at a later date in what
was conceived as a ‘film-noir’ style. This was thought to further heighten the
potential for dramatic tension.
Milliard also illustrates how the documentary and the design of the
experiments remediates the Eichmann trial; this was the court case in
Israel which put one of the Nazi high ranking officers on trial for crimes
committed during the Holocaust. This led Hannah Arendt to describe him
as ‘frighteningly normal’. The case was filmed and shown on television and
took the form of a ‘season-length morality play’ (Milliard, 2014: 441). It was a
‘television event’, which interrupted normal schedules, was shown every night
on television in many countries (including the United States and Europe), and
used close-ups and concealed cameras to capture the supposed ordinariness
of Eichmann. Milliard shows how Milgram remediates this event in the
design of his experimental apparatus (specifically the peep-show aesthetic and
construction of the experimental subjects as ordinary, as ‘every man’); how
audiences brought this event to their reading and experience of the Obedience
 Feeling the Future 101

documentary; and how at a later point, when Obedience had been released
for general distribution, it was then assumed to have been filmed before the
trial. This pre-empted perhaps its growing status as a cautionary tale of what
ordinary people might do when they cede responsibility to others.

Mediatization and science

The complex processes of remediation involved in these experiments illustrate
the entanglement of art, media and science in the construction of experimental
apparatuses. As well as the dramatic hook and the stagecraft involved in
creating the tension, the experiments are perhaps a good example of how some
psychologists have engaged with mediatization or ‘media life’ – what Mark
Deuze defines as a critical awareness of ‘the scripted and broadcasted nature
of everything one does’ (2012: 255). Although one could argue that Milgram
simply saw the footage as a scientific record, the editing of the footage clearly
shows how attuned he was to the structuring role of media in our everyday
lives and how the editing process was used to construct a version of events that
was compatible with an already accepted consensus – that ordinary people
are capable of doing extraordinary things (see Milliard, 2014). This belief was
particularly apparent in the public appetite for screenings of the Obedience
documentary in 1970 in the wake of the Vietnam War and the My Lai massacre.
The tension between seeing the film footage as scientific record and
approaching it as part of the performativity of the experimental apparatus
comes through in the misgivings of the Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel
Kahneman in relation to the John Bargh priming controversy (see Chapter 3).
In an open email sent to students of priming studies,22 Kahneman positions
himself as a general believer in priming, while at the same time acknowledging
the stagecraft involved in psychological experimentation. As he documents, ‘I
am not a member of your community, and all I have personally at stake is that
I recently wrote a book that emphasizes priming research as a new approach
to the study of associative memory – the core of what dual-system theorists
call System 1. Count me as a general believer. I also believe in a point that John
Bargh made in his response to Cleeremans, that priming effects are subtle and
that their design requires high-level skills. I am sceptical about replications by
investigators new to priming research, who may not be attuned to the subtlety
102 Haunted Data

of the conditions under which priming effects are observed, or to the ease with
which these effects can be undermined’.
Kahneman argues that the conduct of psychological experiments is
akin to the direction of a theatre performance, where all the subtleties and
contingencies, which modulate experimental processes (or what we might
call the performativity of the material-semiotic apparatus) are obscured,
suppressed and written out of the published study. This important insight is
partially acknowledged but reduced to ‘confirmation bias’, which is considered
a tendency for psychologists to confirm their preconceptions. It is assumed that
preconceptions should be removed by the development of tighter protocols
governing replication, and Kahneman suggests that this strategy is important to
rescue, what he considers to be the tarnished nature of the field. As we will see the
Feeling the Future controversy has also been settled in a similar way, coming to
stand in for the problems with replication in the field and with replication as the
cornerstone of scientific experimentation.23 We saw at the end of the previous
chapter how this closes down on more inventive propositions and approaching
scientific experimentation in a more open, creative and speculative way.
As Milliard has argued, the rushes that are left on the cutting room floor, the
editing notes written on scraps of paper, the writes and rewrites of the scripts
and scenes, the editions and subtractions and the nuances and influences on
the filming methodology all demonstrate the time, effort, labour and direction
that was integral to the success and efficacy of the experimental apparatus and
its media after-lives. The discarded potential lives of the documentary might
also be related to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s (2010) concept of the ‘economy
of the scribble’, those traces of practices which exceed the parameters of
recognized scientific practice. Although Rheinberger in this instance focuses
on what gets left out of studies once they are written up for publication –
scribbles on pieces of paper, workings out, ponderings, and so on – I argue
that digital archives also represent opportunities to explore such economies
within distributed, extended networks of actors, agencies and practices. These
exist as traces, which can be followed, mapped, listened to and re-animated.
However, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, there is an ‘economy of the trace’, where
certain links and associations are subject to practices of redaction, disavowal,
disqualification, and exist in a submerged form. The links to these traces are
often broken or fail, one comes to dead ends but often also to uncivil discourse
 Feeling the Future 103

or to an intensification of dialogue, a ‘blather’, which discloses through the

affective dynamics on display that there is something more than meets the eye.

Queering Weird Science

There is a buzz, an outrage, incredulity, concern, a sensationalist gaze cast
across a person and their reputation. They might become the subject of
interrogation, the butt of a joke, of journalistic scrutiny and media broadcast
attention. The person might come to stand in for a complex set of entangled
processes, practices, human and non-human entities and devices. This creates
the possibility for the experimental apparatus to attune and shape what takes
form and travels beyond the laboratory. What kind of networked virality
or media contagion is therefore on show when a series of experiments can
channel public(s) hopes, fears, anxieties, fantasies and curiosities in this way?
What queer forms of time-travelling can a series of experiments in the present
enact such that multiple leads are laid through dead ends, failures, subterfuge,
detours, turns, twists, temporary denouements and through what might
appear irrelevant to the plot that takes form?
If, as Halberstam (2010) has argued, failure is a queer art that can be
mined for critical potential, what insights can be brought from queer studies
to weird science with its tendency to operate according to a polarizing logic?
This includes explanations, which focus either on proving the existence of
phenomena, or undermining them as evidence of so-called false belief or
even the musings of a ‘mad scientist’. I will argue that we need more inventive
propositions that do not operate according to such logic; is it real or unreal,
true or false? In the area of anomalous psychology the scientist is often cast
in the role of judge and juror attempting to close down on the ambiguity,
hesitations, puzzling curiosities and what continually resists current scientific
explanations. Rather than taking the position of judge and juror, what does
approaching science experimentation as a particular genre of production
and consumption add to our understandings of the production of truth, and
even post-truth within the context of scientific knowledges? What does queer
studies bring to weird science and those experiments which achieve statistical
probability but which are considered aberrant, freakish, odd, bizarre, peculiar
and unusual?
104 Haunted Data

Drawing on Foucault’s (2003) concept of ‘subjugated knowledges’

Halberstam argues that we might turn to what gets rendered nonsensical,
irrelevant, insufficient, inferior and buried below to refuse and resist
normalization. As Halberstam cogently shows, Foucault’s tactic of ‘anti-
disciplinarity’ was directed to those knowledges ‘that are below the required
level of erudition or scientificity’ (Halberstam, 2010:11: Foucault, 2003: 11).
Conversation, gossip, rumour, raised eyebrows, righteous indignation,
in-fighting, anger, surprise, ridicule, humour, as well as well as what I call
the practice of sceptical correction, are all remediated in and across the
mechanisms and practices of post-publication-peer-review. As many scientists
have lamented, post-publication-peer-review is opening science up to publics
who can now engage with science in mediatized environments and in ways
that can exceed either endorsement or scepticism. The ‘shadow media’ of
blogs, websites, Twitter, Google+ posts, comments on articles in open-access
journals and so forth (Chow, 2012) are potential carriers of ‘low theory’
(Halberstam, 2010). Low theory can take us to ‘the unplanned, the unexpected,
the improvised, and the surprising’ (p. 16). As Halberstam goes on to argue,

Here we can think about a kind of theoretical model that flies below the
radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses
to confirm the hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory.
(Halberstam, 2010: 16)

Conclusion

If we consider science experimentation as part of what Halberstam terms

‘high theory’, we can also turn our attention to what flies below the radar and
is a carrier of ‘low theory’, of those subjugated knowledges that trouble the
parameters of positivist science experimentation. In the next chapter and
Scene 2 ‘The Experiments: Time-Traveling Porn, the Political Economy of
Pornception and Big Data’. I will explore this by focusing particularly on what
was considered absurd and nonsensical within and about Bem’s experiments
(despite his use of the scientific method). Rather than confirm some of the
scepticism, which accompanies these experiments as they have travelled across
 Feeling the Future 105

broadcast and social media, I will mine the potential of the buzz and blather
in order to extend and make visible the historical a prioris that have shaped
science in this area. They continue to haunt the scientific method. Chapter 5
will explore how the comedic satire of the experiments that was condensed
into the image of pornception or ‘time-travelling porn’ disclose the under-
explored social technology of these experiments.
This will extend Brown’s (2012) analysis of the social technologies and
social devices of contemporary psychological experimentation and re-move
those displaced narratives, actors and agents who gesture towards a future
psychology. This is a psychology that is more compatible with the field of
affect studies, speculative philosophies and the biohumanities and with a
reconfiguration of psychological matters as transitive, indeterminate and
primarily ecological, that is contingent within specific historical, technical,
symbolic, biological and historical milieu – all the way down and right to the
bottom. The analysis in the next two chapters will reveal or disclose some of
the more interesting and inventive propositions, which revive the scientific
methods’ more curious and creative pasts.
 5

Pornception and Big Data

Scene 2. The Experiments: Time-Travelling Porn, the

Political Economy of Pornception and Big Data

The media descended on the story. Stephen Colbert brought Bem on air and
made quips about ‘time-traveling porn’. The New York Times interviewed Bem,
as did Al-Jazeera, ABC, and Fox News. And by the time I finally reached him – in
early February, at his modest condo in Ithaca – it seemed like he was returning
from a long and comical voyage. The egghead scholar, who’s spent the last 54
years of his life tucked away on college campuses, had just journeyed through
the bowels of celebrity culture – and emerged sporting a bemused grin. ‘My
partner is always talking about who should play me in the film version,’ Bem
said of his long-time companion, Ithaca College communications professor
Bruce Henderson. ‘He’s thinking Dustin Hoffman.’1

Professor Daryl Bem appeared on The Colbert Report on 27 January 2011,2

where Stephen Colbert mined the comedic potential of ‘time-reversal’ and
retroactive facilitation to predict the 2012 presidential election. The title of the
segment was ‘time-traveling porn’ and referred to experiment 1, one of the nine
experiments, which Bem constructed in order to investigate his proposition
that time reversal is possible. By all accounts the other eight experiments did
not have much dramatic tension despite Bem’s experience and recounted gift
for stagecraft, which was demonstrated to audiences in his former life as a
stage magician. The other eight experiments were rather boring and certainly
did not capture the imagination of commentators in the way that this one did.
Colbert amplified Bem’s apparent proposition that erotic images were likely to
be more attuned to experimental subjects’ propensities for precognition, such
that anticipating and feeling the future was transposed to the future anticipation
of porn – or, in a curious time reversal, porn’s propensity to anticipate subject’s
 Pornception and Big Data 107

capacities for precognition. The comedic value of erotic images being used
to turn on (no pun intended) this capacity became a humorous tag-line for
broadcasting the experiments to a wider public and the joke was certainly not
lost on Colbert. To understand what captured Colbert’s attention I will turn to
the specific experiment, which captured and captivated public attention. The
experiment, which became the butt of the joke, used erotic imagery to shape
experimental subject’s future propensity for porn.

Time-travelling porn and pornception

As with most psychology experiments, the experimental subjects were
psychology undergraduates (fifty men and fifty women) who were briefed as
to the experiment’s aims in the manner of a prime designed perhaps to arouse
and stimulate their potential desire for erotic imagery. The experimental brief
is reproduced below:

This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run
completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions.
Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear
on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has
a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has
the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if
you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the
pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g. couples engaged in nonviolent
but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you
should not participate in this experiment (Bem, 2011: 3).

The main hypothesis for the experiment is that experimental subjects would
be able to anticipate the position of erotic imagery more accurately than
might be expected by chance. Bem situates this hypothesis within studies
of psi phenomena, which include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition
and premonition. Although such phenomena have a long history of being
associated with the paranormal, Bem suggests that the term psi is descriptive –
it refers to phenomena that cannot be explained through current conceptions
of what it means to sense, anticipate and predict. Bem argues that psi
phenomena present two challenges: empirical and theoretical. The empirical
challenges are related to the need to design experiments that are ‘simple and
108 Haunted Data

transparent’ (p. 408), so that they can be replicated by other researchers and
laboratories. The theoretical challenges relate to most psychologists’ beliefs
that such phenomena are impossible or improbable.
In relation to the empirical challenges of Bem’s particular experiments,
experiment 1 is presented as a simple and transparent experiment, which
will be easy to replicate by others. Indeed, Bem has made available all the
materials needed to carry out the experiments in order to meet the protocols
for replicability (also see Bem, 2015).3 This includes detailed instruction
manuals, the computer software for running the experiments and the data-
analytic packages to translate the results. They are presented as needing only a
desktop computer and some statistical packages to collect and analyse the data
and are available for a general public to participate in.4 A simulation of the
ESP test that Bem used was published in the New York Times on 27 February
2011. Interested readers can follow the link5 to take a version of the test for
themselves. Some of the experimental instructions as reported in the New York
Times are reproduced below:

Click Anywhere to Continue

After a ten-second relaxation period, during which you should try to clear
your mind, you will see two curtains. Click the curtain that you believe has
an image hidden behind it. After you choose, the curtain will open, and
you’ll see if you were correct.

After 24 guesses, you’ll see your results.

Daryl Bem’s original experiment included ‘neutral’ images and ‘erotic’
images; so will ours, although our erotic images are much more SFW
than his.

The eleven comments on this article represent some of the microdynamics

surrounding the reception of his study, which have formed some of the extended
commentary found across different media platforms. This includes that Bem is
demonstrating what a good sense of humour he has and that in the ‘Professor-
Retirement Phase of his life’ he is having a bit of fun. More importantly, he is
showing how easy it is to fool people. Brianj is more concerned, suggesting
that the experiment is ‘fake’, and as he goes on to suggest:

I suspect this is a Randi sting – he has designed a fake experiment which

will nearly always produce a big effect, and after a lot of people have written
 Pornception and Big Data 109

in saying this proves psi exists he will announce that it is a fake, and say
triumphantly that this shows how easily people can be fooled! I’ve not been
fooled anyway.

The sceptical view that the experiment is fake and a hoax is entangled with
endorsements of the experiments by parapsychologists who indeed believe that psi
phenomena exist. The reader may recall in Chapter 3 that the first parapsychology
laboratory was set up at Duke University in the 1930s by JB and Louisa Rhine. The
Rhine Research Centre, as it is now called, exists to this day, although it is now
independent from Duke University. In the blog associated with the centre, a post
published on Wednesday 2 February 2011 leads with the headline, ‘Daryl Bem:
Precognition in the Mainstream’.6 As the author, John J Kruth argues,

On Thursday, January 27, 2011, the well-respected psychologist Daryl

Bem, PhD appeared on the Comedy Central program the Colbert Report
to discuss a topic that has set the media ablaze and has given the world of
psychology a new perspective on how to test theories that have been the
subject of parapsychology for over a century. Retroactive habituation,
or time-travelling porn (as Stephen Colbert called it), is an example of
precognition (receiving information about future events) which can be
demonstrated under laboratory conditions using traditional psychological
testing methods. This top notch research has been recognized by the
New York Times, New Scientist, Psychology Today and ABC News, and
it has been published by the respected peer-reviewed scientific Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology.

Bem of course was very aware how controversial this and the other eight
experiments were likely to be. His appearance across the media, in what Kruth
terms the ‘media blaze’ fuelled by these experiments, is tempered by Bem’s
more considered call for other researchers to replicate his study. The challenge
of replication has been taken up by at least ninety laboratories to date, and
Bem (2015) has presented a meta-analysis of this data, which still fails to
convince his sceptics.7 The debate and stack of proliferating non-replication
and replication studies piles up.8 As with all of the experiments conducted by
Bem they are presented as ‘time-reversal’ experiments. They are framed as
reversing ‘known psychological effects’.
Experiment 1 is said to reverse a known psychological effect, which Bem
terms presentiment, which has a lineage to studies of priming (see Chapters 2
110 Haunted Data

and 3). This psychological effect relates to studies by Dean Radin (1997), which
found that subjects viewing erotic imagery were more physiologically aroused
than when viewing so-called neutral imagery, and that the physiological
arousal occurred a few seconds before the imagery was presented. Readers
familiar with debates on affect theory in the humanities might recognize
this as a version of what Massumi (2002) and many others have termed the
‘half-second delay between stimulus and response’. This refers to studies,
such as those by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet on readiness potential, where
measures of physiological arousal or brain activity apparently occur prior to
cognitive awareness.9 There are many critiques and counter-critiques in the
affect literature of this position. Despite the contestation surrounding this
experimental artefact, the ontological assumption of a delay between matter
and mind (and affect and meaning) has become something of a blackbox
across affect theories.
The more interesting proposition within the affect literature is that processes
that are seen to take place subliminally or outside conscious awareness or
attention have not been given enough consideration in accounts of the media
and mediation. This is what Richard Grusin has described as a more ‘embodied,
affective experience’ of mediation’, which foregrounds bodily, sensory, haptic
extensions of media into the everyday ontological immediacies of our lives
(2015: 131). This trend within media studies towards studying processes
variously described as subliminal, non-conscious, automatic, pre-conscious
and so forth, is also mirrored in social psychology with more attention,
according to Bem, being given to ‘processes that are not accessible to conscious
awareness or control’ (2011: 2). Bem cites studies on priming by John Bargh
to evidence this tradition, who in his 2008 book, The Unconscious Mind has
argued that psychology has suffered from a ‘conscious-centric bias’ and a ‘mind
first’ cosmology, which he links to the influence of Descartes and Locke on the
discipline (p. 73; also see Chapter 3; and experiment 3 in Bem’s study).
As we saw in the last two chapters, studies of priming have a long history
of courting controversy and exactly what priming is and how it might be
understood is far from settled. It is certainly far from a known psychological
effect although it might be considered a demonstrable psychological effect
that often exhausts the interpretations brought to bear upon it. For that reason
priming shares a kinship with other phenomena, such as suggestion, imitation,
 Pornception and Big Data 111

emotional contagion, automaticity, and related processes, which have been of

interest to many affect theorists. As I have argued in previous work, engaging
in creative mis-readings or speculative what if readings of mainstream
psychology and neuroscience, often obscures the dynamism of scientific
debate, contestation and controversy. On that basis just what might count as
‘known psychological effects’ and how then these might be reversed relate to
more fundamental ontological issues that are not adequately acknowledged or
discussed by most psychologists.
Despite these important issues, which for the most part fall outside the
established parameters of critique in this area, I will invite the reader to now
suspend these problems and return to experiment 1 and its experimental
design. In its ‘simple’ formulation it is designed to reverse the anticipation of
erotic imagery and the physiological arousal that pre-empts it. It is important
to state that measures of physiological arousal were not undertaken in these
studies, but variations of the experiment did explore gendered differences in
precognition scores, which were related to male-identified subjects’ supposed
higher threshold for erotic imagery – in other words that the imagery used
would need to be more explicit to produce arousal. In short, the argument
made is that subjects will have a better-than-chance capacity to anticipate
erotic imagery, because of erotic imagery’s ability to increase physiological
arousal. This would be the case even when erotic imagery was presented after
the subjects had already made their prediction. This according to Bem is
confirmation of the White Queen’s view that memory works both ways. The
experiments might therefore be described as engaging in very queer forms of
correlation!
This was framed by Bem as the potential of erotic imagery to retroactively
influence the past, providing the comedian Stephen Colbert with his headline
and punch line ‘Time-Traveling Porn’. Within the realms of statistical
probability Bem demonstrated that precognition, the capacity to feel the
future, is possible and that the hypotheses in most of the experiments were
supported (53.1%).10 Bem’s extended discussion considers the problems with
the automated logic of the experimental design and the extent to which the
‘Araneus Alea 1 hardware-based random number generator’ can be considered
truly random. He concludes that the supposed simple and transparent design
of the experiment and their time-reversal logic makes the experiments easy to
112 Haunted Data

replicate, and that these are well-established psychological effects that would
be familiar to most readers of the journal (see p. 14). As he argues, ‘Simplicity
and familiarity become essential tools of persuasion’ (2011: 14).
As we have seen, one of the discourses, which emerged in relation to the
experiments and spread across social and broadcast media related to the
use of erotic imagery to shape the past and therefore the assumed capacities
of experimental subjects to feel and anticipate the future. This was picked
up in headlines on blogs and articles, including an article on a website for
Fastcompany.com with the title ‘Predicting the Future with Porn’,11 or in a similar
article published on the site mentalfloss.com with the headline, ‘Predicting the
Future (or at least predicting where Naked people are)’.12 It was also carried
by an article in the Scientific American on 19 April 2011, with the headline,
‘Extrasensory Pornception’,13 making links to Bem’s appearance on The Colbert
Report and written by the publisher of the Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer.14
The article outlines a position endorsed across social and broadcast media by
many sceptics, and draws on a riposte to Bem’s study written by Ray Hyman,
which has gained much attention and coverage. This response appeared in the
New York Magazine in March 201115 with the headline ‘53.1% of You Already
Know What This Story’s About. Or Do You? Need a Hint?’ Although using
an attention-grabbing headline, which made links to The Colbert Report, the
article starts with a slideshow ridiculing another of the experiments based on
reversing the ‘retroactive facilitation of recall’. This time reversal is based on
the assumption that practice improves memory recall. In this case, the practice
occurred after the recall demonstrating The White Queen’s proclamation that
good memory works both ways (forwards and backwards in time).

Panspectric surveillance and pornception

I will consider the parameters of the sceptical positions in Chapter 6, scene 3.
What I want to do in the next section is consider why erotic imagery condensed
into the image of ‘pornception’ is so contagious and what this might tell us
about the political economy of propensity. The surveillance scholar Karl
Palmas (2011: 343) identifies the political economy of propensity as a field,
which takes new forms of surveillance and regulation as its object. He turns
his attention to those techniques and forms of surveillance which attempt
 Pornception and Big Data 113

to ‘control markets through techniques of predictive surveillance’. These

techniques are reliant on ‘computer-assisted data-mining’ and corporations
such as Walmart and Google are good examples of such practices.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze on ‘control societies’ (1992) and Delanda
(1991) on the panspectron, he argues that panspectric surveillance works
through data-mining, data analytics and forms of regulation, management
and control aligned to ‘computer analyses of large sets of data’ (343). The
concept of panspectric surveillance is often seen to mark a decisive break with
more panoptic forms of power analysed by Michel Foucault, specifically in
Discipline and Punish. Palmas rather explores how these diagrams of power
co-exist and indeed how predictive analytics extends probabilistic statistics,
taking it into new thresholds of analysis and attempts by corporations,
government and the military to anticipate, govern and shape behaviour. These
new diagrams of power are also associated with new ways of specifying and
acting upon human propensities, based on ‘preemptive modes of control’
(343), which work in and through what Palmas describes as ‘sub-individual
mimetic contagions’ (350).
This is one version of what Deleuze (1992) termed ‘abstract machines’, which
brings together new data-mining techniques, the increasing digitalization
of cultures, with new ways of acting upon (human) subjects. This includes
targeting what many refer to as precognitive, or non-cognitive registers
of experience, also described as affective and immaterial forms of labour.
Thus, data analytics and strategies of pre-emption and anticipation, which
increasingly organize software cultures, are being taken up by business and
consumer organizations using ‘sophisticated techniques that anticipate the
propensities of customers to act in certain ways’ (Palmas, 2011: 339). Palmas
calls for a ‘political economy of propensity’ (p. 352), which can contribute to
an excess or ‘something else’ to these normative anticipatory strategies. In
relation to this I want to consider the iconic image of porn and pornception,
and particularly the capacity of porn to retroactively reshape the past. This icon
speaks to current regimes of anticipation and pre-emption, which as we have
seen work with such a conceptual a priori. These relate to the more ordinary
aspects of preemption, foresight, foresensing and premediation, which shape
the cultural politics of data and which disclose the gendered, classed, sexed
and raced politics of automation (also see Chun, 2006, 2016).
114 Haunted Data

The political economy of pornception

This section will ask why the anticipation and perception of porn, or what
commentators referred to as ‘pornception’ became so contagious? How did
pornception condense Bem’s studies into a particular iconic image that was
shared across broadcast and social media? We might ask, why is porn so
contagious? What imagined futures was the capacity of pornception valorizing,
creating and making perceptible? What does this example of media contagion
suggest about networked affect and how to understand processes of change,
transformation and transmission within and across digital and social media?
In order to address these questions let’s first return to the ‘simple and
transparent’ experimental design that Bem (2011) argues will enable easy
replication. This design of course will be familiar to most readers as it deploys
a techno-bodily interface, which inserts the experimental subject (or user)
into a computer-assisted mode of response and attention. The subject is
sedentary (in a chair), facing a screen, where they are asked to anticipate and
respond to the possibility of erotic imagery appearing from behind one of
two curtains by pressing keys. The keys correspond to two possibilities (yes
or no), which reproduce a ‘forced-choice’ design that has been used in psi
research since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. Bem suggests
that one of the differences between this forced choice design and the current
experiment, is that the experiment is assumed to be working through processes
that are not available to conscious awareness or control – in this case preemptive
physiological arousal.
On this basis we might consider the experiment an interesting laboratory for
isolating those micro-processes that are the subject of regimes of pre-emption
and anticipation discussed in the previous section (see Palmas, 2011) – that
is the subject’s propensities for arousal in the anticipation of erotic imagery
and  the capacity of algorithmic entities to respond and shape preemptive
arousal. The experimental subject is also participating in the creation of a
particular databank, where their responses will be aggregated with others and
patterns of statistical significance will be determined. The analysis will use a
data analytics shaped by specific algorithms – Markov Chain algorithms – ,
which underpin Bayesian statistical analysis, for example (see Chapter 6).
In an interesting twist to the problem of experimental bias, or experimenter
expectation, the experimenter and their own intentions, anticipations and
 Pornception and Big Data 115

actions have assumed to have been excised from the material-semiotic

apparatus. Despite some images which have circulated across social and
broadcast media of Darly Bem as a magician conjuring effects from the
screen,16 the decisions as to what kinds of imagery (neutral or erotic) go
behind which curtain are fully automated. The automated decisions are based
on a set of algorithms, which compute and enact particular mathematized
conceptions of randomness, with the aim of taming and beating chance.17
In this sense they also foreground the capacity of algorithms to shape
anticipation, introducing non-human actors and their computational actions
into the culture and design of the experimental apparatus. The experiment
crystallizes many of the arguments made about software cultures and the new
forms of mediation that are being materialized within contemporary forms
of governance and control. As we explored in the introduction to Part 2 of
the book, Luciana Parisi (2013), among many others, has argued increasingly
that so-called intelligent algorithms, which seek to pre-empt and shape
what we desire, are already at work in shaping possible futures out of the
patterns, anomalies, accidents and multiple media transactions that we make
throughout our lives. As she argues, algorithms are no longer to be thought of
as instructions or rules to perform tasks at the level of computation, but are
‘performing entities: actualities that select, evaluate, transform and produce
data’ (p. ix).
She argues that increasingly computation and computational entities have
pervaded culture and to that extent are our co-creating partners in what might
come to be. To this extent the experiment simulates an arrangement of forces
that are part and parcel of everyday media transactions. In the specific case of
pornception, such practices are part and parcel of media transactions seeking,
anticipating and consuming pornographic images on computer screens, while
clicking or ‘clicking through’ (Paasonen, 2011). The human subject is sedentary
and browsing the internet for porn, or engaging in practices of distraction as
part of a technology of divided attention (combining work and play perhaps).
One example of this latter practice of divided attention relates to a CNN report,
which suggests that when the United States was in the middle of one of its worst
financial crises, in 2007, employees of the Security and Exchange Commission
(the SEC) were visiting porn sites and consuming sexually explicit images on
government computers.18 The switching from financial trading to porn and
116 Haunted Data

the temporality of porns’ (and financial markets’) endless cycles of repetition,

arousal, open-ended gratification, deferral and waiting is perhaps one clue as
to why traders switched screens from one ecology to another (related) ecology
in the midst of a financial meltdown. This is perhaps not so surprising when
read in the context of what it means to be plugged into a social technology
and milieu, which disappears or recedes from conscious awareness while at
the same time returning in curious and sometimes not so curious forms of
anticipation and feeling the future.
In this sense practices of divided attention are shaped through the
affordances and embodied immediacy of particular technological apparatuses.
Users are ‘plugged in’ to life forms that have become ubiquitous and computer
screens embody imaginaries that disappear from view only to reappear
as automatic reactions or physiological responses (also see Venn, 2010). In
order to understand the significance of the way subjects might be primed
in their habits, dispositions, affective tendencies and apparent capacities for
pornception, let’s consider insights from science and technology studies and
body studies in relation to the under-explored social technology or dispositive
of this experiment.
In a seminal article based on an ethnography of market traders, Knorr-
Cetina and Bruegger (2002: 180) explore market traders’ apparent propensities
for ‘knowing’ the financial market and when to act – what some describe as
‘developing a feeling for the market’. They argue that the kinds of automatic
bonds and capacities that traders experience as gut reactions or being on
automatic pilot come from training, choreography, discipline, habit and a
form of ‘binding’ where their insertion into a complex set of human and non-
human relations disappears from view. This might be described as an ecological
analysis that underscores the reliance, interdependence and relationality of
organism with environment. As the authors describe, the trader appears to be
‘viscerally plugged into the screen reality’ (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2002:
176), often from 7 am to 6 pm, enjoying the adrenalin buzz, which is described
by some traders as literally eating, sleeping, working and relaxing with the
market. The complex actors and agents, which compose the market and its
speed and liquidity, or even illiquidity (see Seigworth and Tiessen, 2012),
are condensed into a screen, which the trader becomes plugged into. They
experience the ‘hooking power’ of the market via the screen as a life form,
 Pornception and Big Data 117

which they enter and become part of (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2002: 164).
As Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger (2002: 164) describe,

When traders arrive in the morning they strap themselves to their seats,
figuratively speaking, they bring up their screens, and from then on their
eyes will be glued to that screen, their visual regard captured by it even when
they talk or shout to each other, their bodies and the screen world melting
together in what appears to be a total immersion in the action in which they
are taking part. The market composes itself in these produced-and-analysed
displays to which traders are attached.

This ethnographic or ‘anthropological attitude’ to the visceral and affective is

one that we encountered in Chapter 3 in relation to the writings of the American
anthropologist Emily Martin, and the work of the Belgian science studies
scholar, Vinciane Despret. As Martin (2013) argues, it is important to develop
an understanding of how the social goes all the way down, right to the bottom,
and even to those behaviours which are experienced as automatic, visceral,
raw, natural and so forth. This is important, she argues, if we are to avoid a
neuro-reductionism in our understandings of the non-conscious and what is
often gathered together under the designation of the subliminal. The question of
precognition might be recast differently in this respect: how are subjects primed
historically through attachments to particular technical assemblages of matter
and meaning that are brought to the fore within these experiments? In other
words, how do these experiments make visible those practices of anticipation,
which work on the edges of consciousness, reduced in this experiment to
an apparent capacity to anticipate erotic imagery? How have capacities of
anticipation and attention been shaped through historical assemblages of
matter-meaning such that dispositions are always-already part and parcel of
what becomes experienced as automatic or involuntary? These questions are
left under-explored. As is the question, why did pornception become such a
contagious meme for spreading the experiments to a wider public?
The experience, memory and potential histories of such practices of
anticipation form the unexplored social technology of this experimental
apparatus. They arguably come to the foreground in the comedic and
contagious potential of what has come to be known as ‘time-traveling porn’
or extrasensory pornception. This is perhaps just one example of how twenty-
first-century media work in what Mark Hanson (2015 has termed a shift from
118 Haunted Data

a past-directed recording platform to a data-driven anticipation of the future.

He argues that twenty-first-century media largely work outside the realm of
perceptual consciousness and through these new future-oriented modalities
of ‘seeing’. These of course are complex and vexed genealogical questions,
which foreground how specific imaginaries are entangled with technologies.
The critical question is how to understand mediation without instating a
technological determinism. Approaches to mediation must also account
for the entanglement of particular imaginaries that are not only necessary
preconditions for technological forms, but also shape and are shaped by the
affordances of particular technologies. It is the imaginary of pornception that
grabbed public attention as well as the potent cultural fantasy of the future
time-travelling to the past. What therefore does the contagious potential of
pornception disclose about networked affect or the affective dynamics of
pornception?
Susanna Paasonen has recognized the affective potential of porn and
developed an analysis informed by affect studies in her book Carnal Resonance;
Affect and Online Pornography (2011) and in an article in the journal Porn
Studies, ‘Between Meaning and Mattering: On Affect and Online Porn’ (2014).
As she argues, although analysing the representational dynamics of porn are
important, there is also a need for ‘more complex theorizations of how these
cultural images, texts and sounds work and what they may do, and how these
depictions of bodies work with and in relation to the bodies of the audience.
This necessitates explorations into the visceral and the affective’ (p. 138). The
capacity of porn to move subjects beyond ideological effects, as Paasonen
argues, is one that affect theories foreground. What she calls ‘carnal resonance’
relates to ‘practices of sensing and making sense’ (p. 138) that following
Stephen Shaviro (2010) she suggests, open up to a conceptualization of affect
‘as a non-personal and precognitive intensity that animates encounters with
images’ (Shaviro 2010). What I have hoped to show is that the question of
affect and non-personal and precognitive intensities cannot be divorced
from the complex entangled relations (economic, psychic, political, cultural,
historical, technical, symbolic, imaginary) that go all the way down, literally
right to the bottom!19
Porn travels and, as the feminist Sheila Jeffereys (2009) has argued, is a
multibillion-dollar global market that is outsourced to search engines such
 Pornception and Big Data 119

as Google. Its ‘intelligent’ algorithms anticipate and shape pornception aiding

and extending the ‘commercialisation of women’s subordination’ (Jeffereys
2009: 1).20 Pornception is an iconic image that articulates the enactment,
performance, techniques, and imaginaries that shape practices of future
forecasting. Franklin, Lury and Stacey (2000) use the concept of the icon to
capture those complex relationalities, which become figuratively condensed
into particular recognizable images. In the context of theories of globalization
in the 1990s, they identify three recurring icons – the blue planet, the seed
and the cell. As they argue these icons perform new ways of imagining life
and its parameters. Franklin et al. were writing in 2000, where in the interim
the open-ended and future temporality of such icons has been extended and
supplemented by icons, which condense future forecasting, computation and
new ways in which populations are being specified, governed and managed.
Feeling the future is perhaps one icon, as is its more bleak counterpart, the
anthropocene.
I would also suggest there are much ‘older’ icons that have become barely
perceptible, which perform future-oriented imaginaries. This might include
Preciado’s (2013) description of the current phase of capitalism as one, which
is primarily ‘pharmacopornographic’. The enthusiastic reception across the
arts and humanities of Paul, formally Beatriz Preciados (2013) book, Testo
Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic era, cogently
describes the pharmacopornographic era as one in which sex, sexuality, gender
and the body have become the target and object of biopolitical rationalities
(pharmaceuticals, hormones, psychotropics), which trouble any notion of there
being any truth or secret to the body. Pornception is therefore an iconic image,
which captures such complex entangled relations, and articulates the range
of interests (commercial, economic, political) with those labours (immaterial,
emotional, sexual, affective) that produce porn as an object to be consumed via
a computer screen. Who consumes whom, whose interests and investments
are furthered, and how do computational entities enact, shape and anticipate
specific subject’s desires and propensities for pornception are all-important
questions. These are often missed by analyses of big data and analyses of those
feedforward processes seen to characterize media and mediation.
Porn is a dirty matter and the future-oriented temporalities of the internet
only serve to shape propensities in ways that repeat some of the most enduring
120 Haunted Data

raced, classed, gendered and sexed inequalities and oppressions. In that sense,
the future ability of porn to anticipate and retroactively shape the past (its
capacity to time-travel), its contagious potential and the complex entangled
relations, which are condensed in the image of porn, make pornception an
interesting subject for analyses of mediation and computational cultures.
This displaced narrative is also carried by Bem’s studies, albeit if it only
surfaces in the comedic satire made of his attempts to conduct experiments
on precognition. Porn is big (data), it is anticipatory and provides interesting
subject matter for examining the political economy of propensity and the
engineering of affective contagion. This is an important feminist issue and
has yet to be noticed and written about within the context of big data and
analyses of the data-driven anticipation of the future. Time-travelling porn
and pornception highlight the importance of a feminist politics of automation
that challenges the number crunching of many big-data analyses. Perhaps in
this sense Bem’s use of erotic imagery is an invitation to lead from the future
and consider why pornoception has created such a stir!

Conclusion

In this chapter I hope to have illustrated how the comedic satire of the
experiments condensed into the image of pornception or ‘time-travelling
porn’ disclose the under-explored social technology of these experiments.
Although the experiments might meet the criteria for statistical probability –
that is the probability that the effects were not due to chance – what is missed
are the complex affective, technical, symbolic, historical and material elements
that shape the arrangement of forces that circumscribe the experiments.
What subjects are ‘plugged into’ and how these forces and relations might
circumscribe the experiment and may or may not work through pre-emptive
physiological arousal is left under-acknowledged. As is what subjects are
primed to believe or disbelieve, revealing the politics of truth, and even post-
truth, in terms of our investments, desires and subjective commitments.
These issues intersect with an important issue raised within the context
of science and technology studies and what Bruno Latour (2004) has termed
the conditions under which a body can learn to become affected by others,
 Pornception and Big Data 121

human and non-human. Latour uses the term articulation to refer to those
histories, practices, training, choreography and disciplining which allow
a body to become more sensitive to finer and finer differentiations (in this
context learning to become a ‘sensitive nose’ within the perfume industry).
What is important is the setting and milieu, which circumscribes what it
might mean to learn to become affected within this context. This rather
different way of approaching what it might mean to become affected by an
experimental apparatus also allows a more interesting way of approaching
one of the gendered issues revealed by the experiments exploring pre-emptive
physiological arousal.21 This is reported as a male-identified subject’s supposed
higher threshold for erotic imagery – or, in other words that the imagery
used would need to be more explicit to produce arousal. The long histories
of how different subjects might learn to become affected by porn and how
to understand the intersections of class, gender, sexuality, age, race and so
forth are an important yet under-acknowledged issue.22 This is what I term the
‘historicity of psychological matters’ and is an approach, which I argue invites
a more ecological approach to affect studies. It is one that requires a complex
psycho–social–material–affective account that displaces psychological
individualism.
Pornception as a contagious icon therefore condenses a range of issues,
which point towards how little we understand experiences, which register or
are experienced as visceral, anticipatory or preemptive, particularly as they are
experienced through bodily forms of arousal and attachment. These ‘known
psychological effects’ are actually little understood and reveal at best how
important it is to not assume that psychological processes are outside of history,
milieu, setting and the material-semiotic apparatus of the experiment(s). As
Emily Martin (2013) has argued in the context of affect theory the visceral and
anticipatory are historical all the way down.
In the next chapter this ethnographic and ecological approach to affect
will be developed by returning to the social technologies of earlier psychic
experiments in the nineteenth century. These have much to offer contemporary
affect theorists and those interested in exploring the modulation of processes
taken to exist outside of conscious awareness. Scene 3 takes these issues into
the histories of statistics and statistical imaginaries in relation to truth, and
even what we might now call post-truth – and to past histories of psychic
122 Haunted Data

research which have attempted to experiment with impossible or improbable

things. We will explore how they intersect and are revived by contemporary
discussions across the sciences and humanities of quantum and non-local
consciousness, process philosophies and new materialisms. We will return
to a beguiling question posed by Bem: what does it mean to experiment
with impossible or improbable things? As the reader might anticipate,
this question returns us to some very vexed questions about the nature of
the human, subjectivity, and those processes, phenomena and registers of
experience currently gathered together under the designation of the affective,
the quantum and the weird.
 6

Open Science and Quantum Matters

Scene 3. Statistical Imaginaries; Telepathy; #replication;

The Chorus of Sceptics; Open Science; Quantum and
Non-local Consciousness; Quantum Retrocausality;
New Materialisms; Clairvoyance; Moralizing the
Future; Conspiracy theories; OOO and Orch OR

Introduction

This chapter splices together two scenes: current debates about conceptual
replication within the philosophy of science and statistics, with nineteenth-
century debates as they played out in the wider social technologies and
imaginaries governing experimentation into impossible or improbable
things – this was specifically within the context of early psychic research. The
epistemological hesitancies and uncertainties provide a data-trail to some
of the displaced and submerged narratives, which are re-moved and carried
by this controversy but which appear primarily as haunted data. The corpus
of data that is re-moved by this storytelling provides openings to quantum
approaches to precognition or retrocausality as they intersect with discussions
of matter shaped within new materialisms and speculative philosophies across
the humanities. The extended scene foregrounds the invention and creativity
of experimenting with the improbable, impossible and the counterfactual as a
key focus of an open science. It points towards collaborative opportunities for
scientists, artists and humanities scholars to work together in new ways.
124 Haunted Data

A Year of Horrors
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

For social psychologists, the year 2011 can go in the books as a true annus
horribilis. First, the flagship journal in the field, the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, decided to publish an article claiming that people
can look into the future. Going from silly to bizarre, this ability was reported
to be strongest for extravert women confronted with erotic pictures. The
resulting media frenzy centered on questions such as ‘should JPSP ever have
accepted such an article?’ and, more to the point, ‘is there something wrong
with the way social psychologists conduct their experiments and analyze
their data?’ The author of the infamous article, Dr. Daryl Bem, was a guest
on the Colbert Report, where the host mocked the effect as ‘extrasensory
pornception’. And then, as if the reputation of JPSP had not yet been tarnished
quite enough, the journal rejected (without external review) all manuscripts
that reported failures to replicate the Bem results. As it turns out, JPSP has
a long-standing policy not to publish ‘mere’ replication studies. A terrible
policy to espouse, of course – apparently, JPSP believes it can pollute the
field and then leave the clean-up effort to the lesser journals.1

Statistical imaginaries
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers is a psychologist based in Amsterdam with an interest in
Bayesian statistics, models of decision-making, philosophy of science and the
interaction between quantitative modelling and cognitive neuroscience.2 The
‘year of horrors’ that Wagenmakers depicts is one that saw Bem’s precognition
study reaching a ‘media frenzy’, with its claim that ‘people can look into the
future’. As he looks forward to the beginning of 2012 he reflects on the fact that
the year has not got off to a good start either with Doyen’s non-replication of
John Bargh’s priming study (see Chapter 2). He focuses particularly on Bargh’s
response in a blog post for Psychology Today, which is described as a scathing
personal attack.3 As readers will recall, this post was later removed and the user
will be taken to a broken and repaired link. Wagenmakers’s piece published
in De Psychonoom, (27 pages 12–13) reflects on the problems in social
psychology from the position of a psychologist engaged in the philosophy of
statistics, or at least in drawing distinctions between psychological research
which is exploratory (he cites that at least 99 per cent of experiments would
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 125

meet this criteria) and those that are confirmatory (the remaining few), which
he says statistics have been designed for. Wagenmakers was also a co-author
of an article published subsequently to Bem’s ‘Feeling the Future’ article in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, responding to Bem’s claims
(Wagenmakers et al., 2011). This article, which Bem also responded to in a
further publication in the journal (Bem, 2011b), is titled ‘Why Psychologists
Must Change The Way they Analyse their Data: The Case of Psi: Comment
On Bem (2011)’.
The article reports on a non-replication study of Bem’s experiments and
a change made by the authors to Bem’s statistical analysis, where they use a
Bayesian T test rather than a one-sided P value. These technical changes in
statistical analysis lead to what is described as a more conservative analysis
(rather than the ‘liberal’ charge made against statistical analyses of the P value,
for example). They do not replicate Bem’s effects. Rather than orient the
discussion to disproving the existence of psi phenomena (a recognized sceptics
position), they rather argue that parapsychology is an interesting field of study
because it demonstrates how statistics and probabilistic thinking can be used to
mislead people. Later in this section I will relate this to the data-driven fantasy
or dystopia of data increasingly exerting agencies over our lives, representing
a hidden and increasingly omnipotent form of dataveillance. I am calling this
the ‘magic of statistics, or predictive analytics as non-performatives’, to draw
attention to the difference(s) between the automated practices of anticipation
that users experience (often hovering at the edges or fringes of perception) and
what is brought into consciousness or materialized as part of these attempts to
shape action. They are not homologous or the same thing.
As Giraud (2015) has argued, accounts of digital subjectivity which assume
that users are captured and their desires shaped to the needs of capitalism
represents a ‘deterministic picture of media-use and depicts on the one hand,
a subject who is passive and politically dis-engaged and, on the other hand,
the technologies of capital as operating smoothly to commodify subjectivity,
with no scope for resistance’ (p. 125). Although this is a familiar argument
to media studies scholars versed in active audience traditions, the attempt to
move beyond the concept of ‘digital capture’ to open up more vexed questions
of subjective entanglement with technology is welcomed. However, the shift to
media-use is also rather voluntarist and separates technology from subjectivity
126 Haunted Data

in ways that map onto other dichotomous forms of thinking: virtual/actual,

performed/authentic, technology/consciousness and so forth.4 The critical
point of Giraud’s discussion, as it bears on the calls for scientists to change the
way they analyse data, relates to the problems with how different statistical
tests and practices aggregate data in different ways.
The concept of aggregation is central to statistics and the kinds of probabilistic
thinking, which underpin future-oriented data analytics. Aggregation is a
strategy of taking data from different (often numerous) sources and measures,
which are replaced with what are called ‘summary statistics’. Summary statistics
are then used to model probable or possible explanations to shape possible
futures. It is an automated competence within the context of big data analytics
and remediates a strategy, which is central to probabilistic statistics. Debates
and discussions about the problems with aggregation are numerous in the
literature, and relate to issues of ‘ecological validity’ and what gets obscured
and lost when data are taken and combined and put to work in relation to
other variables (see Clark and Avery, 1976, for example). Later in the chapter
we will consider the value of ‘queer aggregations’ to some of these arguments.
Aggregation has perhaps overtaken randomization, which as Ian Hacking
(1988) has argued was one of the principal methodological practices of early
experimental design to assess validity and reliability of statistical results.5 This
was primarily shaped within early psychic research on telepathy particularly
through the Society for Psychical Research (established in the United Kingdom
in 1882). Hacking suggests that the philosophy and practice of statistics was
first developed within psychic experiments which, he argues, were marked
primarily by ‘compete ignorance’ of possible explanations of psi phenomena,
for example (p. 427). That is they were not concerned with explaining psychic
phenomena but rather what it might mean to experiment with improbable,
impossible or ‘counterfactual phenomena’. I use the term counterfactual in
the dictionary sense of the definition – that is as representing what has not
happened or is not the case, or, more curiously, as ‘representing what has not
happened but could, would or might under differing conditions’.6 Hacking
shows how one of the key concepts to assess the truth and validity of scientific
experiments, randomization, emerges in this context and has a much more
curious genealogy that complicates its existence in the present primarily as an
arbiter of truth and reliability.
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 127

Hacking shows how in early psychic experiments randomization was

interwoven with the challenges of the ‘Bayesian’ school of statistics, ‘modeled
by the calculus of probability and a theory of personal utility’ (p. 429). The
Bayesians argued that one was never simply confirming or disconfirming
hypotheses through randomization. Rather, that personal belief entered
into the dispersion of probabilities, or probable explanations. These are
often referred to as priors. Beliefs or priors needed to be acknowledged,
factored into the design and modified in light of experimental evidence,
rather than statistical tests confirming or disconfirming hypotheses. In
other words, experimentation was speculative and future oriented in its
probabilistic thinking. Although randomization as an arbiter of statistical
truth eventually won out in the 1930s as a key practice of the scientific
method, according to Hacking, the more speculative and future oriented
assumptions of Bayesian statistics were interwoven with what took form.
In other words, statistical practices are never confirming or disconfirming
truths, according to these arguments, but rather are always involved in
anticipating and mapping possible futures. In contemporary data analytics,
Bayesian models of statistical inference are primarily used in future-
oriented thinking (based on a dispersion of probabilities). The theory of
personal utility (of the usefulness of different possible avenues for thought)
has become more aligned with the commercial and corporate utility of data-
mining and aggregation services.
Wagenmakers’s critique of Bem is primarily one which raises the spectre of
these earlier disagreements and moments of epistemic uncertainty in statistical
reasoning in the nineteenth century. As we have seen, it is usually assumed that
randomization is used primarily to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis – does
precognition exist? However, an early debate in psychic research, which also
introduced probabilistic thinking into studies of psychic phenomena, further
undermined this distinction. One question related to this is whether asking
if precognition exists is primarily an empirical question (does it exist) or is
it rather what Hacking calls ‘non-theoretical’ (Hacking, 1988: 434)? That is it
relates to what can’t be explained or to ‘a residue of inexplicable well-attested
facts’ (p. 436). As the reader can probably see, these earlier historical problems
are re-moved by Bem’s experiments and particularly his distinction between
the theoretical and the empirical.
128 Haunted Data

Telepathy
An example of what Hacking means by the distinction between the empirical
and the (non)-theoretical relates to his discussion of the coining of the
term telepathy by Frederick Myers in 1882. Myers argued that telepathy
was a ‘mere designation’ and implies no hypothesis (p. 436). It was what he
also called a ‘neutral term’ (Hacking, 1988:). Hacking suggests in this early
research on psychic phenomena that the questions were taken to be technical
or empirical rather than theoretical representing a more proto-performative
and speculative approach to scientific experimentation. The experiments
were exploring what it might be possible to produce, invent and shape if
one opened up to the possibility of the improbable or impossible (or the
odd and the strange). This of course was met with critical commentary
and discussions on how to explain particular experimental results (their
modelling perhaps) which was lively and unsettled. The interest by the
Society for Psychic Research in what Hacking terms the odd and strange was
embodied by the experiments into clairvoyance and thought transference
by Charles Richet.7 Hacking shows how these experiments were not simply
confirming or disconfirming hypotheses. Rather through a ‘calculus of
probabilities’ the results were assessed against measures and calculations of
results being obtained by chance.
An interesting related issue in early research on psychic phenomena
involved the capacity of scientific forms of experimentation to simulate
phenomena rather than validate, assess or arbitrate truth-claims. One example
of this relates to attempts by a Russian doctor, M. Gomalez to replicate some
of Charles Richet’s experiments on ‘thought transference’ or telepathy. These
results were published in a Russian medical journal Vratch and were reported
on in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1885. As with debates
on priming and Clever Hans, as well as experiments with psychic animals, such
as the Rhine’s experiments with Lady Wonder the Typing Horse discussed in
chapter 3, Gomalez argues that people receiving thoughts (percipients) could
learn by observing the slight respiratory motions of the operator. He suggests
that these are not consciously perceived, but rather perceived in a state of
rapport or hyperanaesthesia (considered a form of hypnotic rapport). It was
possible therefore, according to Gomalez, to simulate Richet’s results with
telepathy in two ways.
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 129

First, telepathy can be simulated through a curious form of hypnotic

rapport (sometimes called muscle memory), which produces effects, which
transfer through states still little understood. This argument is similar to the
one we encountered in chapter three in relation to psychic animals and how
to understand their apparently prodigious talents. As we saw the replacing of
telepathy with processes of hypnotic suggestion and what it means to enter
into suggestive relations with another, human and non-human is still little
understood within the contemporary sciences (see Chapter 3; Walsh et al.,
2014). The productive potential of suggestive phenomena has been closed
down, due in part to suggestion’s close association with Hitlerism, propaganda,
fascism, dictatorships, crowd psychology and the image of an evil Svengali
figure manipulating others (see Stengers, 1997; Blackman, 2012).
Hacking also argues that Gomalez simulates telepathy in another way
by drawing attention to the material-semiotic apparatus, or measuring
apparatuses, which produce particular phenomena. Gomalez used what he
called ‘chance devices’ (Hacking, 1988: 441) such as the National Lottery to
gain effects that could be ‘read’ as telepathic. These practices of simulation,
which were designed to discredit Richet show how particular practices
of probabilistic reason can be used to obtain results, which are non-
performatives; that is they do not bring about the objects of which they speak
but do produce particular objects and entities. They tell us something very
interesting about the productive and constitutive possibilities of particular
measuring devices and act as an interesting precursor to more performative
approaches to scientific experimentation that we find within new materialisms
and science and technology studies for example. Although some of these early
debates have been inherited by contemporary science, as we will go on to see,
the question of what exactly measuring devices and experimental apparatuses
do returns only on the margins of the Feeling the Future controversy, and in
those narratives, which speak of the quantum and quantum ontologies. This
submerged controversy speaks to very contemporary debates across science
studies and the humanities in relation to the performativity of scientific
experimentation and particularly in relation to quantum physics (see Barad,
2007). This will be developed in the next section.
What also return more centrally in this controversy are earlier debates in
the philosophy and practice of statistics as they were developed and played
130 Haunted Data

out in early psychic research. These still haunt the contemporary field of
parapsychology as it leaks into cognitive science and anomalous psychology.
This includes the field of debate, contestation and argumentation concerning
randomization and probabilistic thinking, which as we have seen have their
roots in psychic research. It is not surprising therefore that these issues return in
relation to experiments with contemporary psi phenomena. As Wagenmakers
et al. (2011: 1) argue,

Instead of revising our beliefs regarding psi, Bem’s research should instead
cause us to revise our beliefs on methodology: The field of psychology
currently uses methodological and statistical strategies that are too weak, too
malleable, and offer far too many opportunities for researchers to befuddle
themselves and their peers.

If Bem’s experiments were therefore elaborate practices of simulation, what

exactly is being simulated by these curious practices of anticipation and feeling
the future? What does simulation do as a particular material-semiotic apparatus?
What exactly is pornception if approached as a practice of simulation? What
kind of experimental apparatus is simulation and in what ways is simulation
performative? These are all complex questions, which would reconfigure
how scientists working in the area of psi research and anomalous psychology
approach experimentation.8 This is one area where science and technology
studies, philosophies of experimentation, and the field of affect studies has
much to offer contemporary scientific debate and formulation in this area.
This argument will be returned to later in the chapter, when we consider
the relationship of this controversy to the quantum and particularly to
retrocausation, a concept that is derived from quantum mechanics. One of the
key issues that is foregrounded in contemporary debates on psi phenomena
are practices of statistical reason themselves, and the performative and non-
performative nature of probabilistic thinking. If as Wagenmakers, as well as
many others, have argued, certain experimental results might be thought of
as practices of statistical simulation, which do not bring about the results
they claim (that people can see into the future), then what does this suggest
about the kinds of data imaginaries that are shaping what Adams, Murphy and
Clarke (2009) have termed sciences of speculative forecast?
The gaps or lacunae between future-oriented forms of anticipation and
the kinds of practices that data/experimental subjects might exhibit show
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 131

how little we understand simulation as a productive practice that produces

effects as at the same time these effects might be rendered counterfactual – as
representing what has not happened or is not the case, or, more curiously, as
‘representing what has not happened but could, would or might under differing
conditions’. These questions, as Hacking cogently shows, go right back to early
psychic research and the shaping of positivist scientific methodology. They
demonstrate the relationship of positivist scientific methodologies to their
rather queer and submerged historical archives. A related issue according to
Hacking is that psychic researchers ‘were not able to think very carefully about
how to analyse their data’ (1988: 437).
If we think that automated data practices of speculative forecast are more
‘intelligent’ we might want to reflect on the histories of these problems and how
they are central to the conditions of possibility under which statistical reason
was shaped as a form of probabilistic thinking. We inherit these problems as
they mutate within and across computational culture and practices of artificial
precognition. Perhaps, this is one lesson that Bem teaches us, whether as a
joke, a hoax or even by simply showing what can be produced that confounds
what we take the empirical and theoretical to be. These are of course complex
questions that most scientists struggle with and which re-surface in these
controversies in new ways in the present.

#Replication and the chorus of sceptics

The complexity of these issues is missed by most contemporary scientific

researchers who condense and reduce these vexed questions into the
importance of replication, considered the cornerstone of scientific debate and
progress.9 This became one of the key ways in which the controversy became
represented across social media and ‘the blogosphere’. It was carried by the
machinations of sceptics keen to disprove Bem’s claims. As Ritchie, Wiseman
and French (2012) argue for example,

If these results are true, the implications for psychology – and society – are
huge. In principle, experimental results could be confounded by participants
obtaining information from the future, and studying for an exam after it has
finished could improve your grade!
132 Haunted Data

The sceptical position is usually accompanied by a call for the importance

of replication. I will only touch upon this narrative briefly because it is the
dominant narrative or form of representationalism, which comes to stand
in for what becomes submerged, displaced, overlooked and discredited
within the controversy. There are numerous blog entries that an interested
reader can follow,10 which articulate such sceptical positions, which aim to
discredit Bem.
I will however give some examples of these positions as they coalesce in
relation to the call for a more open science. As we saw in Chapter 3, ‘open
science’ is constituted as a science fit for the twenty-first century and as an
appropriate response to how digital communication is potentially transforming
the theory and practice of scientific experimentation. As an example, a blog
written some two years after the Bem study by Daniel Lakens11 on Friday 23
May 2014 outlines the practice of pre-publication-peer-review and the ethics
and problems with replication and statistical claims and practices (including
correcting statistics). It includes the claim that parapsychology is an area of
research, which is responsive to improvements in methodology and statistical
calculations and the evidential claims that can be made. The blog includes a
link to a site run by Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh
where parapsychologists are encouraged to pre-register their experiments for
the purposes of pre-publication peer review.12 The author of the blog, Daniel
Lakens, is in the School of Innovation Studies at Eindhoven University of
Technology and works in the Human–Technology Interaction Group. He
is a keen advocate for open science and open research and lectures, writes
and blogs about methods and statistics. His view on open science has been
influenced, he says in the blog post, by an article published in Psychological
Inquiry by Nosek and Bar-Anan (2012) called ‘Scientific Utopia: 1: Opening
Scientific Communication’.13

Open science

Nosek and Bar-Anan (2012: 1) have written what might be considered a

manifesto for how they believe science ought to be responding to the challenges
of digital communication. Their specific focus is on the need for new practices
of scientific authentication and legitimation and for a debate on how to use the
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 133

new practices of science communication made possible by digital platforms.

They call for six changes, which I will reproduce for the reader:

(1) full embrace of digital communication, (2) open access to all published
research, (3) disentangling publication from evaluation, (4) breaking
the ‘one article, one journal’ model with a grading system for evaluation
and diversified dissemination outlets, (5) publishing peer review, and,
(6) allowing open, continuous peer review.

They go on to argue that the constraints on this happening are not financial
but social. As they ask, what would it mean to ‘replace paper with the
internet as the primary mechanism of scientific communication’? (p. 12).
They specifically challenge the hierarchical model of influence and prestige,
which they associate with scientific publishing based on the learned journal
with its high impact factor, committed to publishing the leading researchers
and research in the field. They argue that scientists in the context of digital
communication are more akin to ‘a distributed system of agents operating
with minimal hierarchical influence’. This more swarm-like analogy is used
as a basis for expanding what peer review should, could and might become,
in the context of post-publication-peer-review. It might be considered a more
rhizomatic14 approach to scientific progress and innovation, where the concepts
of reliability and validity are replaced with transparency and accessibility.
One of the insights of the article commensurate with some discussions of
post-publication-peer-review within the context of humanities research is that
published journal articles are no longer static non-modifiable entities. As they
argue, ‘Web-based publishing enables improved search and linking capabilities
such as adding hyperlinks to citations for immediate article retrieval’ (p. 15).
There is also a useful discussion on open access, which mirrors debates that
the humanities are inheriting from the sciences. These practices are being
shaped in relation to discussions about new forms of digital publishing and
potential new measures of post-publication-peer-review linked to judgements
of academic worth and value by funding bodies and related institutions (see
Broekman et al., 2014; Blackman, 2016). As I have argued, controversies are
interesting because they draw attention to some of the factors which govern
networked virality or the reach and traction of particular articles, which
impact factors, citations and networks of relation, prestige, academic value
and hierarchy obscure.
134 Haunted Data

As we have seen throughout the book, journal articles in the context of

post-publication-peer-review and digital communication can be blogged
about, and commented upon in websites, in the comments sections of open
access journals; they can be tweeted and posted on Facebook, and they
sometimes capture the attention of broadcast journalism and other more
entertainment-based media cultures. However, as we have seen with this
and the Bargh controversy, certain animations come to represent or stand in
for the messy and indeterminate nature of digital communication and those
traces, which open up to archives of the future. They are subjected to a politics
of straightening becoming part of practices that work to confirm ‘business as
usual’ or the reproduction of the same. As Wendy Chun (2016) has argued
in her book, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, we need to
understand the habitual nature of new media if we are to grasp the potential
for change and transformation. This includes addressing questions such as:
‘Why and how are so many things seemingly ignored? Why and how do things
linger?’ (p. 15). Within this context the question of how and why the potential
of PPPR is often simultaneously closed down at the point at which it opens
to change and indeterminacy is pertinent. Nosek and Bar-Anan (2012) make
a similar argument, referring to a case study linked to two blogs discussing
fMRI research and the problem of corrected statistics by Neurocritic and Bor15
Although there was a substantial discussion among neuroscientists ‘using this
as a case example to decide’, they ask,

‘How much of the neuroimaging literature should we discard’? After all

that, the original article remains in print, unmodified. Notably, the critique,
response, and subsequent debate all occurred within a matter of days through
science blogs operated by scientists online. In the present system, articles
with known deficiencies continue to influence future research because there
is little incentive or opportunity to reexamine them.

This was also the temporary denouement to the ‘priming controversy’ staged
in Chapters 2 and 3, where John Bargh’s attempts to ‘set the record straight’,
overshadow the controversy that took form and the status of what remains as
haunted data.
In the next section I will turn to discussions of the quantum and non-local
consciousness. This brings a submerged narrative within the Feeling the Future
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 135

controversy into dialogue with contemporary debates across the humanities.

These debates concern the nature of the human in the context of data and
materiality framed within the context of the post and more-than-human.
These debates currently appear within vitalist and speculative philosophies,
some affect theories, new materialisms and science studies. I will attempt
to show how productive this controversy is for approaching some of the
most vexed and contested questions concerning the human, consciousness,
subjectivity, time, and calls for a more inventive, creative and speculative
science. It also raises the difficulties of analysing mind-matter relations,
particularly within the context of theories of consciousness, which defy linear
laws of time and space, and disrupt and displace psychological individualisms.
It shows the need within affect studies, the biohumanities and speculative
philosophies to theorize the incorporeal (see Grosz, 2017). It recognizes that
the turn to materiality does not adequately exhaust our understanding of those
experiences that have become the subject of psychology, and which are often
consigned to weird science. In previous work I have described these relations
as immaterial rather than material (Blackman, 2012).

Quantum and non-local consciousness16

Some readers might have felt on firmer terrain in the previous discussion of
statistics, non-performatives, practices of simulation, histories of statistics and
discussions of replication and its possible remediation within digital forms of
communication. However, I want to begin to provide a temporary denouement
to this controversy by re-moving a more marginal discussion, which hovers
on the edge of this controversy. This relates to an alien psychology of time,
which is rather queer (and noted as such by Karen Barad, for example). It has
extended discussions of Feeling the Future into the realm of the quantum with
its bending of time and nonlinear conceptions of past, present and future. This
is perhaps the more submerged and displaced narrative, which hovers at the
edge of scientific consciousness and which is carried by some of the affective
dynamics on display. It certainly represents a very ‘queer aggregation’.
More ironically perhaps it is the narrative and set of concentrated hyperlinks,
which relate to contemporary discussions across the humanities within some
136 Haunted Data

affect theories, new materialisms, queer and speculative philosophies and

related perspectives. It specifically relates to those perspectives which take
the quantum and the molecular as objects of inquiry, as the basis of thought-
experiments (what if the world were like this?), as ontology, as a methodological
strategy, and sometimes as a quasi-positivist rendering of the world and its
virtual potential. The quantum is also a design problem for some contemporary
technologies, which cross the military, business and commerce in their
emerging computational forms (see introduction to Part 2). As Larry Dossey,
the executive director of the journal Explore asks in relation to the Feeling the
Future controversy, why is the concept of non-local consciousness, or non-local
knowing, that is consciousness ‘manifesting non-locally in ways that defy the
limitations of space and time, why this concept is so offensive to many scientists,
and why is it likely to become, at long last, a part of the scientific worldview’.17
Dossey goes on to argue,

One of the unique features of these phenomena is their capacity to elicit

overheated, hysterical responses from scientists. Many scientists, who
are willing to entertain hypotheses in other areas of science that are so
breathtakingly bizarre they can hardly be imagined – for example, an infinite
number of alternate or parallel universes; string theory, which many scientists
consider to be unproven and unprovable, requiring eight extra dimensions
that have no basis whatever in human experience, and which cannot be
experimentally verified in any way; or a Big Bang, out of which an entire
universe arose from nothingness – lapse into fevered frenzy when confronted
with so-called paranormal events. They simply ignore the research validating
these phenomena and resort to the ‘everybody knows’ argument – because
‘everybody knows’ these things cannot happen, they do not happen.

As well as invoking prejudice as an explanation for such responses, he also

suggests a form of ‘herd immunity’, which dampens any curiosity, wonder or
inkling to consider whether extraordinary or even impossible things might
exist (as the White Queen would retort). Dossey backs up this view with a
quote from the vitalist philosopher, Albert North Whitehead, from his 1948
book, Essays in Science and Philosophy;

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied

dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the
delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 137

believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading
dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred.
This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophical adventure. The
Universe is vast.

Humanities readers may be familiar with the burgeoning scholarship on

Whitehead and the revitalization of process philosophy and the re-invention of
some of his concepts and neologisms to address a range of subjects, areas and
topics; this includes but is not exhausted by Whiteheadian-inspired analyses of
medicine (Michaels and Rosengarten, 2012), psychology (Brown and Stenner,
2009), media and mediation (Hansen, 2015; Shaviro, 2015), sociology and
social theory (Halewood, 2011), contemporary philosophy (see Faber and
Goffey, 2014; Savransky, 2016) and science studies to name just some avenues
(see Stengers, 2014). The orientation of this work is on invention and creative
experimentation, particularly using Whitehead’s concepts and neologisms as
the basis for adventurous thought. What is perhaps less considered are the
relations more generally between vitalist or process philosophy and psychic
research.18 Although Whitehead was not explicitly attached to programmes
of psychic research as his contemporaries William James and Henry Bergson
were, he did study at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1870s (where the
Society for Psychic Research – SPR – was founded), he was a close friend of
Henri Sedgwick who was the president of the SPR during his time there, and
as Papanicolaou and Gunter (1987: 355) have argued, Whitehead might be
considered a ‘pioneering citizen’ of the same philosophical world as Bergson
(with the close links between the psychic and the philosophical) given their
shared emphases on contingency, indeterminacy, duration, prehension,
intuition, becoming and related concepts.
It is perhaps not a surprise therefore that Whitehead’s process philosophy
might be invoked as an example of a science that is more open, inventive,
adventurous and creative. Nor that this orientation has migrated primarily
from mainstream science to humanities, philosophy and social science
disciplines, as well as to those researchers in the sciences still pursuing the
pull and lure of psi phenomena. This migration can be seen most visibly in
those areas influenced by philosophical traditions keen to reopen questions
that have become disqualified and discredited by legitimate or straight science
and to invent, fabricate and form new concepts for thinking. This includes
138 Haunted Data

the work and writing of Deleuze and Guattari and process philosophers for
example, sometimes aligned through a form of ‘speculative philosophy’ (see
Faber and Goffey, 2014). To return to Whitehead in the context of the Feeling
the Future controversy, Papanicolaou (1987) suggests that Whitehead and
Bergson were interested and influenced by physics and were perhaps prophets
of quantum mechanics. The link between quantum philosophies of time (non-
local knowing) and physics (specifically quantum mechanics) is reopened in
this submerged narrative. As Dossey argues, there is no consensus in quantum
mechanics so controversy is a resource for thinking, not an indication that an
area should be closed off or closed down. As he suggests,

It would be wrong to suggest there is agreement on what these experiments

mean. But the fact that there is controversy and that fundamental issues
in physics remain unsettled suggests that the presumptuous, full-bore
criticisms of Bem’s findings are inappropriate. (page 30)

Quantum retrocausality

A different history is always possible, at any time, here and now. (Schrader,
2012: 125)

The past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no
taking it back, setting time aright, putting the world back on its axis. There
is no erasure finally. The trace of all reconfigurings are written into the
enfolded materialisations of what was/ is/ to-come. Time can’t be fixed.
To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain
or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be
responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past
and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that ‘we’
are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the
present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self),
to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to come
(Barad, 2010: 25).

As the quantum eraser experiment shows, it is not the case that the past (a
past that is given) can be changed (contrary to what some physicists have
said), or that the effects of past actions can be fully mended, but rather that
the ‘past’ is always already open to change’ (Schrader, 2012: 27, my emphasis).
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 139

Quantum retrocausality is a queer phenomenon indeed. Part thought

experiment and inventive concept, retrocausality is a term dispersed across
quantum mechanics. It is also a placeholder and name given to curious
events which defy linear conceptions of time – what is often described as the
fixed arrow of time from past, present to future. These events relate to the
sub-atomic behaviour of entities encountered by physicists at the molecular
level  – electrons, particles, atoms and so forth. Physicist and queer theorist
Karen Barad has brought the queer potential of quantum ontologies to the
humanities attention. For readers not familiar with her 2007 book, Meeting
the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning, considers how queer theory, and specifically Judith Butler’s theories
of performativity, might be developed through quantum insights relating to
the performativity of matter (at the sub-atomic level). She extends Butler’s
concept of performativity into the realm of non-human agencies. Within what
has become known as new materialisms or agential realism, it is argued that
her concept of materiality offers a way out of human-centred, biologically
reductionist and deterministic views of (human) vital processes. Her work
is seen to replace the psyche (often equated to subjectivity) with a more
entangled and distributed conception of materiality, which introduces non-
human agency into being and becoming.19
Barad’s work was very influenced by Judith Butler’s (1993) concept of
performativity, but also claims to offer a critique of this approach when refracted
through particle physics. Barad situates her interventions within the context
of science studies and how to understand the nature of scientific practices
of experimentation. The approach to scientific forms of experimentation is
informed by particle physics and quantum mechanics primarily through
the work of Niels Bohr, the quantum physicist. Performativity has also been
used in different ways to understand social media practices as vehicles for
self-mediation. The question then often becomes framed through the need
to judge these forms of self-mediation, where the questions often presuppose
a series of (false) oppositions and polarizations; are they staged or authentic,
individual or collective, private or public, expressing or managing the self; do
they represent practices of anticipation rather than actualization; are they real
or fantasy, deliberately motivated or automatic – often linked to contagious
processes? So in other words, as much as the performative is central to
140 Haunted Data

discussions and analyses of identity and subjectivity within and across social
media platforms, the status of the performative is reintroduced as a matter of
concern.

New materialisms
Barad (2007) engages in a reworking of Butler’s (1993) concept of performativity
through a diffractive reading of Butler and Bohr’s ‘insights through one another
for the patterns of resonance and dissonance’ (p. 195). Barad suggests that Niels
Bohr is an interesting scientist as he developed a ‘proto-performative account
of scientific practices’ (p. 31). That is, he recognized that scientific apparatuses
do not simply describe or measure pre-existing objects and entities, but
rather bring about the objects of which they purport to measure, inscribe and
speak. Words, or scientific concepts are considered material enactments, ‘that
contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe’ (p. 31). This is
framed as a critique of representationalism. In this sense, Barad argues that
scientific practices are performative and productive, and on this basis Barad
seeks to make a ‘sympathetic but critical reading of Judith Butler’s provocative
theory of performativity’ (p. 34). This is to displace what she suggests is an overly
human-centred approach. This is framed as a ‘posthumanist performative
understanding of the materialization of bodies’ (p. 34).
Barad’s work, like Butler’s, has been influential across the humanities and has
become staged as part of a series of turns towards the non-human, more-than-
human, post-human and the ‘new materialisms’. It is perhaps easy to see why
her provocations might be useful to media and cultural theorists who recognize
that we come into being in and through mediation and that media forms and
practices are entangled with such processes of being and becoming. Throughout
the history of media studies and the long history of work on mediation and
mediatization the critique of media forms and practices as representational has
been a central unifying epistemology (also see Kember and Zylinska, 2012).

Performativity and post-human performativity

Butler was influenced by Michel Foucault’s theory of power and the question
of subjective commitment or investment found in psychoanalysis: why do we
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 141

repeatedly invest in certain social norms, even when and if we recognize that
these norms fail to deliver their promises or even do us harm – what Lauren
Berlant has termed a form of ‘cruel optimism’ (2011). One of Butler’s (1990,
1993) main focuses has been on gendered norms or heteronormativity and
how gendered binaries are repeated across a range of practices such that they
come to appear as natural instantiations of human nature rather than reiterative
statements which enter into our own self-formation in complex ways – or what
Foucault termed practices of subjectification (see Chapter 1). Barad suggests
that this approach relies on some kind of mechanism of psychic identification
(however conscious or unconscious) in order for power to act on and through
a subject’s actions – a psychic mechanism which places identification within
the realm of ideation and is in danger of reducing the materiality of the body
to some kind of dumb or brute materiality.
These critiques have been made by many and are related to the kind of
‘docile body’ that can be found in Foucault’s account of how power works.
The concept of iteration presents for many an overly semiotic way of
approaching subjectification, which primarily approaches statements as forms
of signification (as sites of compulsion as well as conflict and ambivalence,
for example), rather than perhaps the more ambivalent and complex status of
statements that can be found in Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge, such as
The Order of Things. For Barad, iteration and reiteration are primarily linguistic
concepts and in her argument they fail to adequately account for material
processes or in her words, how matter comes to matter. On the basis of this
critique Barad suggests that performativity needs to be revised and extended
beyond the realm of the human body and its primary focus on citationality
within (social) practices.
One of the conditions of possibility for this move are some of the new
ontologies, within and across the biological and life sciences, including quantum
physics. Quantum physics as well as the ‘New Biologies’ (see Blackman, 2016)
or the biocultural (see Frost, 2016) present bodily materialities as lively,
agentive, temporal, and always already entangled within material-semiotic
apparatuses, rather than the object and instrument of power in a Foucauldian
sense. As Barad (ibid: 65) argues, reflecting on Foucault’s contributions, ‘He
fails to offer an account of the body’s historicity in which its very materiality
plays an active role in the workings of power.’ This shift from ideation and
142 Haunted Data

psychic identification (subjectivity) to the role of material processes or the

liveliness of materiality (ontology) has paved the way for humanities scholars
to turn towards the neuro and biological sciences to furnish their own accounts
of mediation.
This move towards shaping a biohumanities or the biosocial is often framed
as a move from epistemological to ontological issues, which Barad argues
have not been given sufficient attention within accounts of performativity.
Barad suggests that quantum theories of the liveliness of matter unsettle any
distinction between matter and meaning, which she argues can be found in
Butler’s writing. Barad’s approach displaces the view of scientific knowing or
rationality, which sees the human subject as either potentially mastering the
world or until that time existing in a state of unknowing-until-the-future –
that is enacting a form of anticipative epistemological certainty. Barad has
shaped a conceptual cosmology that adds materiality to the assumptions that
‘there is one further anthropocentric attitude that needs to go: the idea that the
universe is as “in the dark” about the future as we are ourselves’.20 At a quantum
level this appears not to be the case.
Barad’s writing has been extended across the humanities and includes Vicki
Kirby’s (2011) quantum anthropology; quantum approaches to (new) media
studies (Kember and Zylinska, 2012; Coleman, 2011); and a branch of science
studies, known as new materialisms (Coole and Frost, 2010; also see Frost,
2016), which takes seriously the liveliness of matter in the context of the human
and life sciences. Barad’s own account of quantum mechanics engages with a
particular psychology of intentionality that she suggests quantum mechanics
inherits. She attempts to upset its human-centred ontology by extending it
through distributed approaches to cognition, or what are often referred to as
‘extended mind approaches’. These assume that cognition is extended beyond
the body, distributed among human and non-human actors, embodied and
embedded such that cognition should not be approached as a psychological
property of mind (see Clark, 2008). These are refracted through quantum
ontologies of time, which further upset notions of free will, human mastery
and control. This is a productive interchange and one that reconfigures
intentionality as ‘attributable to a complex network of human and non-human
agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed
the traditional notion of the individual’ (p. 23). This, as many people have
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 143

argued, develops a post-human or more-than-human approach to subjectivity.

It is an approach, which appears to leave psychology and its human-wedded
individualistic conceptions of the subject behind.

Speculative psychologies
However, psychology like any knowledge-practice is far from unified and
as we have seen throughout the book has its own histories of displaced
traditions, ontologies, experimental practices, objects and entities, hesitations,
anomalies and controversies. In different ways what reappear as haunted
data within the book also decentre psychological individualism and point to
alternative directions that psychology might have travelled. These ‘archives
of the future’ reconfigure psychological matters as transitive, indeterminate
and contiguous with the biological, symbolic, technical, material, immaterial
and historical. My argument is that although we have very good ontological
arguments, which support post-humanism, these are arguably closed
down by rather impoverished engagements with subjectivity and how to
analyse the complexity of mind-matter relations and the reconfiguring of
psychological matters.21 This is even in perspectives such as new materialism,
which are trying to move beyond psychologically individualistic accounts
but do not provide a rethinking of the psychosocial within this context (see
Blackman, 2017).
It is these problems which are put back into circulation by the Feeling
the Future controversy, which re-moves earlier psychological ideas about
personhood which did not subscribe to a strict separation between self and
other, human and non-human, material and immaterial and human and
technical. As we have seen these displaced histories haunt the Feeling the
Future controversy in the present and return as traces to a past, which open to
archives of the future. One issue related to this, which was explored in the last
chapter is what I termed the ‘historicity of psychological matter’ characterized
as a more ecological approach to affect; or how psychological matters are always
already shaped and reshaped through milieu, history, context and setting. As
some scholars have argued, work within affect studies often does not view
affective processes as historical, all the way down and right to the bottom.
Instead separations are made between matter and meaning, which can lead
144 Haunted Data

to rather neuroreductionist and even behaviourist accounts of the suggestive

capacities of subjects.
A good example of what is at stake can be found in the work of Hannah
Landecker (2016) and the analytic attention she gives to the materiality of
history as well as the historicity of matter, or what she calls the biology of
history and the history of biology (Landecker, 2016). Landecker makes these
arguments in relation to the historicity of bacteria showing how the very
human and technical practices, which have taken bacteria as their object have
fundamentally shaped and reshaped what bacteria is, as an entity. In other
words matter is always already entangled and contiguous with other processes
and practices and bears the imprint of historicities and even historialities
before it enters into future relational refigurings. Matter is not simply lively
but historical and this historicity already displaces strict separations between
past, present and future conditionings and reconditionings.
These arguments provide an opening to future research directions that are
carried by the Feeling the Future Controversy. However, what we find in Barad’s
account is a refutation of a particular psychological account and theory known
as a ‘psychology of intentionality’. This inadvertently reproduces the role of the
scientist as an arbiter and judge of which theories are true and relevant and
which are not. What are missed are the histories of hesitations, gaps, anomalies
and ‘versions’ of science (to use a term coined by Despret), which become
backgrounded, yet exist in relations of disqualification, disequilibrium and
co-existence. It is these trails which haunt Feeling the Future and which trouble
the historical distinction and policing of the boundaries between the psychic
and the psychological, which have become part of psychology’s emergence and
professionalization as a discipline.
As an example, a very particular psychology of intentionality and will
entered quantum mechanics via the work of Niels Bohr. This was primarily
in his consideration of how experimenters influenced measurement
interactions. Bohr assumed a particular human-centred psychology, where the
experimenters’ intentionality is taken to influence the experimental system.
Barad rejects this human-centred psychology and as we have seen replaces
it with a post-human account of performativity. However, Bohr is recruiting
one possible account of experimenter subjectivity, which does not exhaust
other productive possibilities and interchanges. There are other starting
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 145

points in the past and present of psychology – particularly as it intersects

with ‘weird science’ – which also displace traditional individualistic notions
of the individual and the human. The question might then be reframed – it
is not whether the human is over, post or obsolete, but rather it is, what other
kinds of experimental arrangements or forces might attune to submerged or
displaced potentialities or historialities? What kind of human is possible when
experimental practices that actively recruit or attune to particular potentialities
(improbable, impossible, extraordinary or even counterfactual) are staged?
One obvious starting point, which already intrudes on the contemporary
cognitive neuroscience of will and intention, is to engage with a physics and
psychology of time that is re-moved in the Feeling the Future controversy. It
is expressed in and through the ontological indeterminacy of all those strange
psychic entities, processes and objects, which confound scientific consensus.
These enter the controversy via the work of particular physicists developing
quantum theories of consciousness or mind-matter relations to explain psi
phenomena and particularly clairvoyance and precognition (Hamerof, 2012;
Stapp, 2011). These strange mysterious relations align the quantum activities of
particles and atoms with psychic capacities considered impossible, improbable
or otherwise inexplicable by rational cognitive means. This rather weird or
queer science is not given any attention by Barad and I want to imagine in the
next section what such a queer coupling might produce in terms of shaping an
archive of the future.

Strange causalities, queer critters and nature’s

queer performativity
Although Niels Bohr engaged with a particular psychology of intentionality
and will (predicated on a bounded human agential subject) he perhaps did
not recognize approaches to will and intentionality within weird science
that have more in common with his performative approach to quantum
experimentation. One example is in those border-crossings between and across
parapsychology, automaticity research, and controversies and disagreements
in the phenomenology of will and intentionality within cognitive science
(see Ebert and Wegner, 2011). The work of the late cognitive scientist Daniel
Wegner,22 for example, explores how the phenomenology of will, intentionality
146 Haunted Data

and automaticity might be produced through specific ‘entangled agencies’

(Ebert and Wegner, 2011: 23). As he has argued, conscious will is a trick or
illusion, which is not attributable to a bounded human subject exerting agency
or intentionality (the usual psychologized explanation that Bohr reproduced).
Conscious will is produced or enacted through particular material assemblages
of matter and meaning. Bodies are indeterminate and extended by the relations
they enter into. These relations are often experienced in intensive registers –
that is below the threshold of conscious awareness and attention and even as
‘alien phenomenologies’. This is the phenomenology of will and intention that
Wegner and others are exploring, including critical questions regarding what
it means to be or feel moved by someone or something else.
These traditions of phenomenological and post-phenomenological
approaches to automaticity do not subscribe to the kind of human-centred
psychological ontology that Barad is in conversation with via Bohr. Post-
phenomenological approaches to will and intentionality also focus on forms of
‘strange causality’ that have an unexplored kinship with Barad’s queer critters
or what she also calls nature’s queer performativity (see Barad, 2012, 32).
They provide different starting points which recognize that psychology is not
a unified discipline and that there are extensive critiques within and outside
psychology, which have also challenged human-centred, individualistic
notions of will and intentionality. These can be found in those traditions of
psychological research historically, and in the present, which displace the
borders and boundaries between the psychic and the psychological.

Clairvoyance
As an example of this close yet disavowed alliance between the psychic and
the psychological, I will draw on two stories from Vicki Kirby’s (2011) work
that Barad uses to illuminate what she calls nature’s queer performativity. This
includes the apparent ‘clairvoyance of cellular communication and lightning
strokes’ (Kirby, 2011: 13), both of which are taken to be ‘possessed of some
mysterious clairvoyance’ (Kirby, 2011: 9). Both stories confound ‘the logic of
origins and causality’ (Kirby, 2011: 10) offering examples of entities or ‘queer
critters’ that seem to be able to anticipate the future before it has arrived.
This foresensing confounds notions of distance, linear time and distinctions
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 147

between sender and receiver. Clairvoyance in this context is used to refer to

mysterious or what Barad terms ‘paradoxical forms of communication’, which
queer concepts of time, space, matter and causality. Although Barad displaces
the human and human-centred cosmologies, she does not consider work in
quantum physics that takes psychic phenomena as its subject. This is perhaps
surprising given her interest in clairvoyance and paradoxical communication.
This is important as this work has the potential to reopen important questions
about experimentation and radical notions of human indeterminacy that can
be found in psychology’s past and possible futures. However, at present and
as I will go on to illustrate, conservative notions of subjectivity re-emerge and
close down on future possibilities.23
As I hope to have shown throughout the book, the historicity and
historiality of psychological phenomena also provide openings to approaches
and practices, which displace cognitive human-centred cosmologies. They
find inspiration from entities, processes and practices that have been largely
occluded by legitimate science and straight psychology. The confounding logic
of clairvoyant causality is central to the revised notions of subjectivity that can
be found and which have the potential to contribute to a speculative science –
to a science that is more open, inventive and adventurous (also see Savransky,
2016). It is at this nexus that we might take seriously the liveliness of mind-
matter relations as well as the liveliness of matter or materiality. I have termed
the complexity of mind-matter relations understood in this way through the
concept of immateriality. I argue that immateriality has not been given enough
attention within rethinkings of matter and materiality (see Blackman, 2012).
In order to illustrate what might be at stake I want to re-move an encounter
between quantum physicists and parapsychologists also interested in
paradoxical forms of communication and clairvoyant causality that hovers on
the edge of this controversy and which goes nowhere. In 2011 a conference was
held in San Diego hosted by the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. It brought together physicists and parapsychologists, including
Daryl Bem, under the title ‘Quantum Physics and Parapsychology: Two
views of the same thing’?24 Why despite bringing together leading figures in
quantum physics with parapsychologists did the quantum physicists present
on the first day and then leave the parapsychologists to largely talk among
themselves on the second day as they had another physics symposium to go
148 Haunted Data

to?25 They left the parapsychologists ample material for illuminating their own
interests: backward-in-time causality, time-symmetric quantum theories,
retrocausal influence and weak measurement. This was described as a historic
meeting, which although productive was rather one-sided where the talks by
parapsychologists were largely unheard as the physicists had left by the second
day, which was devoted to parapsychology. Although not wanting to endorse
parapsychology, I do want to draw attention to the epistemic uncertainties and
foreclosures, which circumscribe these areas and the submerged narratives and
disavowed or displaced actors and agents who do not intervene and change the
setting. These are all questions opened up by the controversy and which are left
going nowhere – a dead end perhaps – their potentiality existing as a matter
of concern but not a matter of relevance for the experimental apparatuses and
events that might bring them into being.

Moralizing into the future – or can you

replicate something that doesn’t exist?

The main theoretical criticisms stand on the premise that ‘precognition’

does not exist and hence all evidence supporting it is surely based on
flawed procedures or interpretations. It is clear that this attitude is based
on a prejudiced old Newtonian ideology rather than an examination of the
state of the debate. As mentioned above, serious scientists are exploring
retrocausation with obvious implications for the possibility of precognition.
More generally, quantum mechanics with its basis in probability theory,
non-locality, and entanglement effects is so strange and counter-intuitive,
that outlawing parapsychological phenomena because they contradict the
so-called laws-of-physics seems somewhat premature.26

In no way wanting to end with a fixed conclusion I will lay some future trails
by exploring some of the debates laid by those psi researchers who exist at the
interstices of physics (particularly quantum mechanics) and the psy sciences
(whether parapsychology, cognitive science or anomalistic psychology). As we
will see, it is much easier and accepted within science and the mainstream
science press for quantum time-travel to be entertained as a possibility, than it
is for psychic precognition to be debated in a similar scientific tone.27 Although
not wanting to either endorse or cultivate a sceptical position in relation to
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 149

this issue, I raise this particularly as it bears on what is and is not allowed
into discussions of the extraordinary and impossible, and how we evaluate the
historical a prioris that are already in place and have shaped what comes to
matter and be materialized as precognition.
I started the book with a commitment to refracting these controversies
through my own interest in affect theories. As I argued the book is an
attempt to take this strategy into the realm of science and to mine, poach
and exploit the potential of weird science for affect studies. This diffraction
of psychology through the weird, strange, ridiculous and ludicrous is offered
as a queer strategy for the playful contamination of science. On this basis,
what does this controversy and its re-moving bring to affect studies and to
future research directions? One of the issues that I have raised in relation
to both controversies is the importance of attending to both historicity (the
historical specificity of phenomena that are experienced as affective), and to
historiality (those repressed or displaced narratives that open up to future
directions in science and science-in-the-making). As a way of tentatively
ending this chapter, I will ask a historical question about the kinds of
boundaries or ‘spacetimematterings’ that are already in place in this, and the
John Bargh priming controversy, which mitigate against thinking, feeling or
experimenting with the impossible, improbable or extraordinary? As I hope
to have shown, the proto-performative approaches to experimentation that
can be found in the histories of psychic research, and which are re-moved in
the present in the form of haunted data, demonstrate how impoverished our
understandings of affective phenomena are.
We have seen throughout this and the John Bargh priming controversy
that certain boundaries are already within and articulating the parameters
of both controversies and what counts as legitimate and illegitimate science.
This includes distinctions drawn historically between accepted and weird
science, and with what therefore is considered outside of human reason. This
can be found in those experiences and phenomena, which register primarily
as exceptions, oddities and anomalies to a particular ontological conception
of the psychological subject. These paradoxical forms of communication,
including ‘non-local causalities’ have historically been figured as abnormal
perceptions, puzzles or sometimes as signs of psychopathology. Priming and
precognition are both already associated with weird science, sometimes with
150 Haunted Data

‘mad scientists’ and certainly with distinctions drawn between reason and
unreason, the legitimate and illegitimate, the normal and the abnormal and
with the odd, the outlier and the anomalous. These are historical distinctions,
which became central to the making of psychology and its boundary-making
practices. As psychology professionalized as a discipline throughout the early
twentieth century, it separated from sociology, philosophy and with its earlier
close and intimate relationship with psychic research (see Luckhurst, 2002;
Valentine, 2012).
Thus these distinctions are based upon a prioris, which already specify that
psychic phenomena are outside of known laws of nature and the universe, and
are therefore based upon theoretical presuppositions, which are ridiculous,
ludicrous, unbelievable and unscientific; as some commentators have put
it they rest on ‘irrational belief systems’.28 The phenomena in question are
those produced once a boundary is in place, rather than reflecting on what
phenomena might become if these boundaries were not seen as given, ‘but
rather as the effect of particular boundary-drawing practices’? (Barad, 2012:
33) In other words, what seismic shift in experimentation would need to
happen for researchers to recognize that the entities they investigate are
the effects rather than the causes of practices? This is what Barad (2012: 39)
terms, ‘iterative interactivity’. This is a crucial point and one that provides an
opportunity for rapprochement between the humanities and the sciences, and
for the invention of creative collaborative experimentation across the arts and
sciences that might open to what Derrida termed ‘archives of the future’.29
In a curious twist, which takes seriously the proto-performativity of scientific
experimentation in the present, what has been deemed outside of human
reason and psychology by the human sciences now forms part of contemporary
imaginaries (molecular, quantum, etc.), which are shaping computational
forms of artificial intelligence. This includes quantum cryptology, quantum
teleportation technologies and artificial precognition based on quantum
entanglement (see introduction to part 2).30 These automated practices can
‘see’ patterns that exceed human perception and consciousness, and prime
and shape potential-futures through practices and processes of quantum
aggregation; or so the data-driven dreams go. These are the imaginaries that
do not describe what ‘we’ (that is humans) supposedly do naturally31 but rather
mediate the potential non-knowing that hovers on and across the boundaries
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 151

or fringes of what can and can’t be seen or known through so-called conscious
practices of (human) perception and attention.
The already existing boundary between the psychic and the psychological
and the human and the technical, made possible by a historical distinction
between particular forms of reason and unreason, produces the kinds of
moralizing discourse, which researchers located at the intersection of the psi
and the quantum have to contend with. At best these surface in discussions
of methodology and statistics (replication, protocols etc.), but at worse they
surface in attacks on Daryl Bem’s character, motivations and past-life (as a
magician or putting the present down to him having had a ‘rebellious youth’32),
for example. One of the issues that Bem has brought up in relation to this often
aggressive and active de-bunking is that parapsychology as a field of debate is
overly policed by sceptics – those who often will not entertain the possibility
of the impossible. As he says about one prominent sceptic, Ray Hyman, ‘No
amount of data will convince them.’33

Conspiracy theories
This active de-bunking co-exists alongside those who entertain some link
between quantum retrocausation and precognition, some of which ends up in
the realm of conspiracy theory and very weird science. An example of this can
be found in a blog written by Jim Euclid called Regolish. In a post on 13 June
2012 titled ‘The Titanic Effect of Retrocausality’ ,34 there is a lucid discussion
of quantum entanglement, quantum foam and psychological retrocausality,
alongside links (many now broken) to conspiracy theories referring to 9/11
being known about long before it happened (link now broken)35 – or the
relationship between presidents of the United States and time-travel. There
also exist links to apparent anomalous artefacts found on archaeological
digs, including a 100,000-year-old plug and a Swiss watch apparently found
in a 400-year-old tomb (link now broken36)! There is also a brief mention of
quantum cryptology, an example of a quantum imaginary forming the basis of
new ways of encrypting information.37
Conspiracy theories are the places where discussions outlawed by reason and
rationality often take place, so these (broken) links are perhaps not surprising.
They fuel fears and fascinations and provide a way of making political critique,
152 Haunted Data

which falls outside of established parameters.38 There are some exceptions to

be found in quantum neuroscience, which provides a positivist reading and
potential closing down on the questions and issues I have raised. One example
includes a high-ranking article, written by a quantum physicist, Henry P. Stapp,
who worked with Werner Heisenberg and is now located at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. The article is called ‘Apparent Retrocausation As
a Consequence of Orthodox Quantum Mechanics Refined to Accommodate
The Principle of Sufficient Reason’ and is supported by a grant from the US
Department of Energy. This article is a difficult read and perhaps shows what
quantum mechanics becomes when a psychology of intentionality is brought
into discussions of quantum mechanics and not refracted through a materialist
deconstruction and post-human account of performativity (Barad, 2007).

Quantum mind-matter relations

Stapp opens the article with a discussion of Bem’s ‘feeling the future’
experiments and particularly refers to a ‘heated discussion in the New York
Times’ (2011: 1) and the claims of one discussant, Douglas Hofstadter, which
will be very familiar to readers by now:

If any of his claims were true, then all of the bases underlying contemporary
science would be toppled, and we would have to rethink everything about
the nature of the universe.

Stapp attempts to refute this claim by arguing that quantum mechanics does
indeed allow a theory of the nature of the universe, which would allow Bem’s
experimental results to be made intelligible. Stapp’s account of quantum
mechanics is rather different to Barad’s and I don’t feel qualified to evaluate
those differences comprehensively. What however is obvious is that Stapp’s
account of nature or matter is one that does not subscribe to ontological
indeterminacy but rather to the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ (1). Rather
than ascribing capriciousness to nature, one where nature operates randomly
or according to chance (one version that he discusses and which I suspect
Barad would replace with indeterminacy), he rather argues that there are also
psychophysical processes (choice, intentionality, reason), which modulate
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 153

quantum effects. In other words he brings a conservative and rather straight

human-centred psychology of intentionality and will back into the picture.
Stapp attempts to develop a ‘rationally coherent ontological account
compatible with the standard computational rules and predictions’ (10). In
other words, he suggests that nature has reasons for why it makes certain
choices and these choices modulate quantum effects. Stapp’s arguments
demonstrate that as in any field there are competing interpretations of quantum
physics. As Barad has made clear, for example, her interpretation is one that
is aided by Butler, Foucault, Derrida and other ‘co-workers’, such as Vicki
Kirby. Stapp provides complicated mathematical formulas to elucidate how
nature might ‘choose’ to actualize certain quantum experiences (rather than
other potentialities) and that these choices would manifest in the statistical
probabilities that Bem found. Rather than discuss Stapp’s theoretical edifice
in detail I will focus on the conclusion to Stapp’s study which foregrounds
the importance of what he calls ‘backward-in-time causal effects’. This is a
very strange and mysterious form of clairvoyant causality, which he suggests
explains Bem’s data.

Numerous reported seemingly backward-in-time causal effects are naturally

explainable within forward-in-time orthodox quantum mechanics, provided
the orthodox input of pure chance is replaced by the input of sufficient
reason, with two such reasons being the promotion of positive, and the
suppression of negative, feelings, or their subconscious relatives generated
by subliminal stimuli. (p. 22)

Stapp’s account of quantum mind-matter relations is a form of panpsychism,

which imputes the qualities of intentionality (ascribed to the mind) to all levels
of matter. He has developed a quantum approach to neuroscience, which
suggests that mind and matter are dynamically and inextricably interdependent
(in non-deterministically causal ways) and draws on discussions of so-called
practices of ‘self-directed neuroplasticity’ (mindfulness, meditation, cognitive
reattribution) to make his arguments (see Schwartz, Stapp and Beauregard,
2004: 2). He also draws on process philosophy (James, Whitehead) to advance
his thesis. In this account post-human performativity is replaced with
active observing agents or participants, reducing intra-action to the choices
experimenters set on the parameters of experiments. As Schwartz et al., argue,
‘How one acts on a system would, in general, be expected to affect it’ (7).
154 Haunted Data

Agency is not distributed but rather imputed to human decisions or

choices, and to a psychology of intentionality underpinned by a particular
interpretation of quantum mechanics. ‘Quantum theory thereby converts
science’s concept of us from that of a mechanical automaton, whose
conscious choices are mere cogs in a gigantic mechanical machine, to
that of agents whose conscious free choices affect the physically described
world in a way specified by the theory’ (8). This is intentionality writ
large and positions the human knower as masterful vis-a-vis the quantum
systems they are interacting (rather than intra-acting) with. Quantum
processes are imputed ‘within’ (to the brain, to neurotransmitters, ion cells,
etc.) in an attempt to displace what are considered mechanistic accounts
of neurophysiology (mind as an epi-phenomenon of brain processes, for
example). There is a commitment to the evolution of scientific progress
and knowledge, which is based upon a particular psychology of attention
and will. This is human-centred and based upon particular ontological
assumptions that reify the consciously, choosing subject as the pinnacle of
human reason.
Stapp’s approach is characteristic of a quantum approach to neuroscience
that can be found in consciousness studies and which foregrounds ‘backward-
in-time causal effects’. Another example of this trend within quantum biology
and neuroscience can be found in an article published in the journal Frontiers
in Integrative Neuroscience, ‘How Quantum Brain Biology can Rescue
Conscious Free Will’ (Hamerof, 2012). This article also debates what is cast as
the worrying determinism of quantum mechanics, which displaces free will
and human-centred control and agency. This is one of the key distinctions
between Barad’s post-human approach to quantum mechanics, and the radical
implications of indeterminacy when a post-human approach is foregrounded.
Hamerof ’s approach is an attempt to rescue free will and agency through an
incorporation of the possibilities of ‘backwards-in-time causalities’ to human
consciousness. Hamerof discusses the capacity of human consciousness or
what is cast as conscious choice to affect experimental events and matter more
generally. Attention is turned to molecular processes in brains, which disclose
quantum properties (including cytoskeletal microtubules) to foreground a
quantum consciousness where mind-matter relations are considered dynamic,
non-local and non-causal.
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 155

Within this account there is considered no before and after (mind

does not react after brain action). This is known as the ‘half-second delay’
within neuroscience associated with the reaction-time experiments of the
neuroscientist Benajamin Libet. Libet’s experiments have been brought into
cultural theory and have also been used to authenticate what has come to be
known within affect theory as the ‘half-second delay’ between thinking and
action (Thrift, 2007). As Leys (2011: p. 454) argues, these experiments have
been taken up across the humanities ‘to prove’ that ‘material processes of the
body-brain generate our thoughts and that conscious thought, or intention’,
arrives after a ‘half-second delay’. Libet and his associates published the
article based on their studies in the journal Brain. They assumed that they
were exploring ‘free will’ or intentionality by measuring what is known as
‘readiness potential’ (RP). They used electrodes that were placed on six college
students scalps and asked the students to engage in certain tasks and activities,
or to elicit voluntary actions in a spontaneous manner; spontaneity was of
course circumscribed by the parameters of the experiment. They were able
to measure the activation of brain processes several 100 milliseconds before
the experimental subjects performed particular acts, and on this basis they
concluded that ‘the brain decides to act before awareness of, or conscious
initiation of that act’ (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013).
This has become known as the half-second delay between thought and
action, or even cognition and affect. This a priori, which as Rose and Abi-
Rached (2013) argue is ‘alive and well’ (p. 211) in the neurosciences has also
taken on an after-life within affect theory. It is a statement that disperses a
variety of approaches across a range of disciplines to explore the potential
of affect to open up the question of what counts as a body; and how matter
might be figured as lively, processual and indeterminate. As Celia Lury (2015)
suggests in Affective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for
the Study of Affect, edited by Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage, there
is neuroscientific support in Libet’s studies, for example, for the autonomy of
affect and for what she calls following Patricia Clough, the realm of the infra-
empirical.
Nikolas Rose and Abi-Rached in their recent book, Neuro: The New Brain
Sciences and the Management of Mind refer to the positivity of Libet’s studies
and of this statement as a form of Libetism (with the ism perhaps suggesting
156 Haunted Data

some kind of distinctive practice, style, system of beliefs, collective ideology,

movement, affliction or even dogma). As a form of historiality Hamerof ’s
account is of interest. Rather than accept this statement as a truism, he rather
links Libet’s reaction-time experiments to evidence of ‘temporal non-locality’
(Hamerof, 2012: 2). This is described as a backwards and forwards in time,
which undoes any sense of duality. Libet’s theories of reaction time are reread
through non-local retrocausality and he argues that the supposed half-
second delay between stimulus and response is non-quantum and reliant on a
classic theory of physics.39 Hamerof displaces this account through quantum
physics, which he suggests introduces non-local knowing into molecular
mind-matter relations. Mind-matter relations are topological spaces that are
looped, nonlinear, which switch, encounter and make choices in ways, which
the author suggests undoes any notion that consciousness comes ‘too late’ or
after brain activation. Discussing the much-cited experiments on readiness
potential (RP) by Libet, Hamerof makes the following claim:

Libet et al. used a rapidly moving clock and asked subjects to note when
on the clock they consciously decided to move their finger. This conscious
decision came 200ms before actual finger movement, hundreds of
milliseconds after onset of the RP. Libet and many authorities concluded
that the RP represented non-conscious determination of movement, that
many seemingly conscious actions are actually initiated by nonconscious
processes, and that conscious intent was an illusion. Consciousness
apparently comes too late. However,  … temporal non-locality enabling
backward time referral of (quantum) information from the moment of
conscious intent can account for necessary RP preparation.

Hamerof (2012) argues that Libet’s own interpretations of RP drew on notions

of time-travel or backwards-in-time assertions to explain his results. This
interpretation was based on a rather queer ontology of time, one where time
is bent, distorted, telescoped, goes sideways and back to front, and where
the psychic dimensions of timespacematter are reconfigured. Libet argued,
in short, that it was not that the brain reacts before conscious experience or
interpretation; rather, the future can retroactively influence the past. He did
not subscribe to a temporal delay between brain and cognition, non-conscious
and consciousness, affect and will (with both the temporal delay’s potential for
indeterminacy but also the linear ordering of relations between brain/cognition,
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 157

non-conscious/conscious, affect/intentionality and even past/present, before/

after, then/now etc). Libet suggested that the evidence for different temporalities
could not be understood in such dichotomous terms. There were conflicts in
his experiments which did not so easily map onto the half-second delay, or at
least to how this might be understood. Rather, he suggested more of a looping-
effect where on a moment-to-moment basis we automatically transport our
own consciousness backwards through time to experience something before
we could scientifically ever have actually experienced it! In other words mind,
whatever mind is, has an anti-dating capacity or is ahead of brain, or mind has
time-travelling tendencies.
Or to quote a contemporary neuroscientist,

So the first set of findings 1 to 3 are to the effect that neural adequacy for
any sensory experience is achieved only after a certain delay, about half a
second. But finding 4, which is indeed crucial, appears to conflict with this.
That is, the ordering by subjects of their experiences is this: consc​ious-​exper​
ience​-owed​-to-l​ater-​skin-​stimu​lus came before consc​ious-​exper​ience​-owed​
-to-e​arlie​r-cor​tical​-stim​ulus.​ (Honderich, 2005: 75)

These quantum interpretations are far more curious and certainly queer
the science that is often drawn upon by many affect theorists to endorse
their philosophical approaches (see Papoulias and Callard, 2010). These
interpretations were however ridiculed by Libet’s interlocuters resulting in
their mutation into a much more palatable statement that will be familiar to
affect scholars – that non-conscious processes act prior to and are separate
from conscious attention.
Hamerof provides three lines of evidence, which he suggests refute the ‘half
second delay’ and which return the vexed question of consciousness to quantum
mechanics: Can (human) consciousness affect quantum matters? Can quantum
backward referral happen in the brain? (p. 11). As well as Libet’s disavowed
time-travelling explanations of reaction-potential, Hamerof also cites quantum
delayed choice experiments,40 and Bem’s feeling the future experiments on
precognition, to argue that conscious choice can affect ‘behaviour of previously
measured, but unobserved, events’ (p. 9). These discussions of retrocausality
and the proposed evidence to support his claims for backwards-in-time effects
take the discussion into process philosophy and a discussion of Whitehead’s
(1929) concept of ‘actual occasions’ or occasions of experience.41
158 Haunted Data

There are many competing interpretations of Whitehead’s philosophy,

which underpin debates within and across object-oriented ontologies and
speculative philosophies within the humanities (Bogust, Harman, Shaviro).42
This controversy opens up leads to these debates and to the question of what
it might and could mean to ‘think with’ Whitehead (see Stengers, 2014;
Savransky, 2016, 2018). This is an opening to future possibilities that this
controversy re-moves and I will leave this as a detour that others might
want to follow. In this last section I finish by showing how the distinction
between the theoretical and the empirical, which was central to early psychic
research has been lost in these perspectives. Rather than approach43 psychic
phenomena as mere designations and the experimental practices as practices
of simulation (with their proto-performative orientation) we see attempts
to explain psychic phenomena through specific quantum explanations of
mind-matter relations. They are based on a return to an ontology of human
consciousness, and subjectivity, which is based on imputing the values of
free will, autonomy, choice and reason to the question of what it means to
be human.
The traces of the human and technical practices, and their complex
iterative histories that have shaped what takes form as retroactive causation,
are displaced and replaced with a more positivist understanding. Hamerof,
for example, uses Whitehead and William James’s concept of the ‘specious
present’ to unify these different traditions in relation to his proposed theory
of quantum consciousness, known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction
(also known as Orch OR). This is a theory of the world, life, the human and
everything and arguably closes down on the creative and technical possibilities
of experimenting with psychic and psychological indeterminacy.

Orch OR
It is probably fair to say that researchers attempting to unify psi entities with
quantum mechanics emphasize those aspects of process philosophy that
have been refused, disqualified, ignored or disavowed within contemporary
humanities theorizing. As I have argued in previous work, William James
research is generally used to refer to process, relationality, the virtual and non-
human ignoring perhaps his own interests in the problem of unity or synthesis
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 159

and what he called ‘the problem of personality’ – how we live singularity in the
face of multiplicity. This was also termed the problem of the ‘one and the many’
and this problematic appeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
across economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, medicine, and so on (see
Blackman, 2012). It was far from settled or resolved. These issues recur in
this controversy and appear in attempts to translate the quantum dynamics of
photons, electrons and atoms into understandings of psychological processes
that are seen to operate non-locally.
Hamerof cites the example of ‘quantum delayed choice experiments’. These
experiments draw on understandings of quantum entanglement, where, as
Hamerof argues, ‘entanglement is a feature of quantum mechanics in which
unified quantum particles are separated but remain somehow connected,
even over distance. Measurement or perturbation of one separated-but-still-
entangled particle instantaneously affects the other, what Einstein referred to
(mockingly) as ‘spooky action at a distance’ (2012: p. 9). This principle forms
the basis of experiments involving human subjects whose decisions to measure
the atoms as either unified or separated is connected to the decision of a third
observer and his (stet) decisions, even if these are decided after the decisions
of the other two researchers have been made. This is another example given
as evidence of ‘backwards in time effects’ (p. 9) and this forms the basis of
the question Hamerof asks: ‘How can backward time effects be explained
scientifically’? (2012).
Hamerof ‘thinks with’ particular readings of William James, Whitehead,
St Augustine, Buddhism and the effects of long-range gamma synchrony in
the brain to argue that ‘consciousness could be identified with sequences of
quantum state reductions’ (2012: p. 10). Quantum state reductions relate to
those rules and principles generally accepted within quantum mechanics;
this includes that objects or particles exist in or as multiple co-existing
possibilities (quantum superposition) – that is they can exist in unified states
that remain separated (in space) yet entangled in time. These relations in time
upset linear conceptions of time, as we have seen, and raise questions about
what Barad has called strange forms of causality, which confound origins and
foundations. The crucial question for Hamerof is whether these relations can
be seen or even produced macroscopically and the answer he suggests is a
resounding yes.
160 Haunted Data

Orch OR
In order to ‘scale up’ from the molecular to the molar, Hamerof turns to
theories of consciousness and panpsychism and to those that explicitly
bring consciousness into physics. This includes the work of Penrose (1987,
1989, 1994) who coined the theory of Orch OR, which draws on algorithmic
quantum computing and spacetime geometry. This theory is given neuro-
biological underpinnings by turning to the brain and explanations of the
actions of neurons, dendrites and proteins, which provide the possibility for
non-local quantum thresholds in the transmission of information throughout
the brain (or how neurons fire through non-local conductance pathways).
Orch OR is a speculative philosophy and one which attempts to theorize what
are taken to be the minimal conditions under which quantum explanations of
matter and nature can be translated into a neuropsychology of consciousness
underpinned by quantum brain biology. It is also an attempt to ‘rescue’ free
will from what is anxiously considered a form of quantum determinism. This
attempt closes down the potential of quantum indeterminacy, which has
become a key feature of new materialisms across the humanities.
However, what I want to argue is that the particular psychologies of free
will and intentionality that quantum brain biology inherits are those which
are based on a human-centred agential subject. Barad is right to displace this
cosmology through post-human approaches to the subject. However, there
remain other collaborative possibilities and starting points to be found in all
those displaced, occluded and submerged narratives, practices, entities and
phenomena – particularly those that assume that psychic and psychological
processes are always indeterminate, relational and contiguous with the technical,
symbolic, historical, material and immaterial. These return in both the priming
and Feeling the Future controversies and show the importance of pursuing the
historicity of matter and the matter of historicity in the field of affect studies,
new materialisms, speculative philosophies and the biohumanities.

Conclusion: The materiality of history and

the historicity of materiality
As we have seen throughout the book, although the concepts of time-travel,
precognition, or even quantum retrocausation are weird or strange propositions,
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 161

in different ways they have formed the basis of regimes of speculative forecast
and anticipation that are part of the defining logic of computational cultures
as they operate within a capitalistic mode. The Feeling the Future controversy
connects to a dispersed set of surfaces of emergence, where the quantum scale
of matter, is enacted, imagined, performed and materialized in order to shape
possible futures. The controversy is part of a broader set of cultural imaginaries
and discourses, which are entangled with new strategies of power based on
future shaping and anticipation, which attempt to govern through nonlinear
and distributed psychologies of time. This includes techniques and practices
of pre-emption, foresight, foreseeing and premediation.
These techniques are ‘strategic imaginaries’, which are manifest and
becoming instantiated in computing (particularly programming and software
development), biology and the neurosciences, practices of mediation within the
context of communication technologies, business strategy, finance capitalism,
and in the conduct of war, terrorism, politics and public health responses
to global threats. They underpin and are shaping the development of future
technologies, some of which are based on quantum mechanics and theories
of quantum entanglement. Examples of these include quantum teleportation
and quantum cryptology, and algorithms, which attempt to change the past
within open systems, sometimes called programming in the subjunctive
(including retroactive update). These are algorithms, which attempt to change
computational pasts and are therefore seen to step sideways in time.
The collision of these different imaginaries, theories, propositions, forms
of experimentation and statistical imaginaries shape some of the displaced
narratives, actors, agencies, spectres, entities and puzzling anomalies that are
re-moved within this book. As Rheinberger has cogently argued, scientific
controversies although considered settled at particular times carry the potential
to be re-moved at different historical moments – what he terms the historical
movement of a trace. As he has also argued, science always contains more
stories than can be told at any one time. His concept of historiality returns
the storytelling to science and provides a cogent argument as to why our
engagements with science need to be qualified through the important question
of how we understand and analyse the different philosophies, histories and
technical materialities of experimentation at play. Post-publication-peer-
review becomes an interesting source of data in order to speculatively explore
162 Haunted Data

these potentialities. What I hope to have shown throughout the book, and
particularly in this and the last two chapters, is how a genealogical approach to
data refracted through hauntology provides an interesting lens through which
to engage with contemporary science as it intersects with the contemporary
field of affect studies.
Within the context of the Feeling the Future controversy what comes into
view are radically different approaches, philosophies and multiple genealogies
of experimentation – positivist (orch OR), proto-performative (including
simulation and experimenting with the counterfactual), empirical and non-
theoretical (what we might call a version of post-truth politics and practices).
I hope that this novel approach to data adds weight to arguments made by
sociologists and cultural theorists who are urging humanities scholars to open
up to some of the problems as well as possibilities with engaging with science.
The two controversies analysed in the book return us to four key areas of vexed
discussion: how to analyse what it means to be human within the context of
data and computation; how to understand and analyse mind-matter relations;
and how to understand particularly the ontological definition of bodies as
being defined by their capacities to affect and be affected. And lastly, what
kinds of approaches to science, scientific data and experimentation can be
shaped at the intersection of the sciences and humanities?
Callard and Fitzgerald (2015) use the term ‘ebullience’ to describe a mode of
interdisciplinary engagement within the context of the neurosciences, which
tends towards an acceptance or assumption by humanities and social scientists
of ‘experimental results and theoretical statements from the neurosciences
as more-or-less true – with little contest or context, and in the absence of a
sense of the wider, often fierce, epistemological and ontological debates within
those sciences’ (p. 11). Thus before we endorse any account of affect with
scientific theories, concepts and evidence we would be wise to develop a more
critical, creative and speculative approach to different and sometimes hidden
philosophies of experimentation and statistics; to the social technologies and
devices of experimental apparatuses; and to the different psychological and
psychic imaginaries that are assumed, shaped and bear the marks of particular
technological and material histories.
Scientific data is a very curious entity and its conditions of existence,
possibility and emergence require the very kinds of critical ‘reading against
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 163

the grain’ as well as reparative readings that we have developed so persuasively

within the humanities, feminism and queer theories. As Hannah Landecker
(2016) has argued in relation to antibiotic resistance, and the concept of bacteria
when conventionally understood as an ontologically distinct entity, we need
work that can be attentive to the materiality of history as well as the historicity
of matter. Landecker’s writing skilfully uses historical archives and puts them
to work by re-moving or putting them back into circulation in the present.
As she cogently shows the historical records, which trace the circulation of
antibiotics into what she calls an ‘industrialized biological’, disclose how its
history has become inscribed into the biology of bacteria itself. Revealing that
history and biology are thoroughly entangled and matter to each other in ways
that have serious consequences for antibiotic and human futures, she develops
the concept of the ‘biology of history’, to demonstrate how ‘human historical
events and processes have materialized as biological events and processes and
ecologies’ (p. 21).
Biology not only matters in this example, but what comes to be recognized
and produced as biological data already bears the material traces of human and
technological histories that cannot be divorced or separated from what takes
form. As she suggests, ‘The bacteria of today are not the bacteria of yesterday,
whether that change is registered culturally, genetically, physiologically,
ecologically or medically’ (p. 21). This raises important questions about
what exactly counts as biological data given the historicity of matter and the
materiality of history and suggests that the important question of antibiotic
resistance might be shifted away from ‘bacteria’ (understood as a ontologically
distinct entity) to a new more relational ontological register.
In a similar vein I am arguing that we are still in urgent need of developing
accounts of the psychic and the psychological (or mind-matter relations more
broadly) that are attentive to the historicity of matter and the materiality of
history. What the Feeling the Future and John Bargh Priming controversies
show us is how impoverished our understandings of psychic and psychological
indeterminacy are. What takes form as phenomena, including precognition,
pre-emptive arousal, priming, clairvoyance, telepathy, retroactive causation
and so forth, already bear the traces of human and technological histories,
many of which have become displaced, occluded, erased, disqualified and
forgotten.
164 Haunted Data

This is perhaps a good place to temporarily end or draw a cut in this

controversy, as it brings contemporary debates in the humanities into the scene
and offers a bridge to some fundamental re-workings of what might be at stake.
I have followed those data-trails, some of which appear marginal, insufficient,
sometimes through detours and back tracking, operating sometimes below
the radar or through the intensification of affective dynamics on display. These
are all what I have termed ‘haunted data’, which has entered into the scenes
of entanglement staged throughout the book. I started with an initial feeling
that both controversies would and should be of interest to humanities scholars
and that there was more in both controversies than meets the eye. This has
been borne out. What I hope to have demonstrated is just how rich engaging
with science controversies within mediatized environments and across digital
platforms can be. This engagement has been shaped by approaches to the
philosophies of science, which have explored the close interdependence and
interrelationship between cultural configurations of matter-meaning and the
materialities of scientific cultures.
For those scholars interested in affect and the challenges of computational
cultures for studies of media and mediation, what has been opened up is a
complicated set of historical relations and conditions of possibility, which
shape the parameters of what can and can’t be said. What can be seen and
not seen, what can be articulated and what remains in-articulable, but can
sometimes be felt, managed and produced. In other words, the hauntological
dimensions of both controversies and the sense that there is something more
to be said have provided the affective draw and resonance for the thought-
space opened up in this book. Both controversies stage timely questions
about science, computation and data analytics, mediation, power, truth,
experimentation, statistical imaginaries, networked affect, subjectivities,
ontologies, and what kinds of alliances we might and could enact across the
sciences and humanities.
They respond to current discussions in relation to networked affect and
how to understand media contagions. They also speak to current theories
of anticipation and affect, to the capacity to feel the future, or to be moved
by someone or something else – what I have described throughout the book
as ‘alien phenomenologies’. One central issue raised by the book is that the
shaping and emergence of more speculative psychologies and philosophies
 Open Science and Quantum Matters 165

within science will only come about through collaboration with scientists,
artists and humanities scholars who can ‘think together’ as part of a collective
enterprise. I argue that this will only happen effectively if one is attentive to
both science and data’s potential for historicity and historiality. This more
speculative approach aims to return the storytelling to science, and recognizes
the capacity of digital archives and post-publication-peer-review to re-move
the excess to what is currently told. I will return to these issues in the short
conclusion to the book and open up to what I think are some of the interesting
leads and directions for research that this hauntology feeds-forward.
 7

Conclusion: Affect and Archives of the Future

Hauntological media

This book has developed a hauntological approach to data and computation,

which suggests that data bear the traces of human, material, technical,
symbolic and imaginary histories that are often displaced and occluded in data
metrics. The hauntological analysis developed in this book, with its particular
focus on science and computational culture, explores how both science and
computational culture are haunted by the histories and excesses of their own
storytelling. In the context of the book these excesses have surfaced in ‘queer
aggregations’ or haunted data to be mined, poached and put to work in newly
emergent contexts and settings.1 The book points to the propensity of straight
or legitimate science to sanitize, excise or even exorcise narratives, actors,
agents and entities, which ‘contaminate’ it with queerness. I have provided a
host or home for these queer aggregations and allowed them to commune with
displaced and submerged actors, entities, processes and practices. Starting
with two high impact articles and the post-publication-peer-review associated
with the articles, I have followed data-trails across time and space, the visible
and not-quite-visible, the legitimate and the weird, the accepted and archives
of the future, in order to open up some critical questions. These questions
speak to current concerns within affect studies and approaches to mediation,
truth and post-truth across media and cultural studies. Before I move to some
conclusions to feed-forward in future research I will situate the hauntological
approach to data within the context of hauntology as it has been developed
within the context of other archives and media forms. This will make a further
argument as to why hauntological approaches to science and computational
culture can be so productive, and particularly for those experiences, phenomena
and entities, which are considered weird, odd, strange, freakish and aberrant.
 Conclusion 167

As we saw in Chapter 2, hauntology is often associated with Jacques Derrida

(1994) and particularly his meditation on the fate of Marxism following the
so-called fall of communism at the end of the 1990s across Europe, which was
articulated within a ‘discourse of the end’. This was a melancholic moment for
many left academics who lamented such a fall. They wondered at the costs
of this supposed ending to critical (Marxist) thinking. The refrain that is
central to Derrida’s reflections is the feeling of time being out of joint – what
he terms a ‘disjointed now’ (p. 1). Derrida sets out to explore this ghostly and
melancholic feeling and to conjure and summon the spectre of Marxism in the
present by engaging with various ghostings – the ghosts within Marx’s writing
itself, as well as the way in which fictional writing (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for
example) has staged apparitions and called forth, interpreted and interrogated
ghostings.
Derrida’s main site of reflection is the spectral quality of language itself,
which Derrida mines to perform the different temporalities that language can
evoke. The radical untimeliness of language, Derrida suggests, performs the
myriad of ways in which a feeling of radically disjointed time can be conjured.
This, he suggests, can create the sense of ‘being-with spectres’ (xvii). This might
include time being ‘off its hinges, time is of course, beside itself, disadjusted’
(p. 20) – in other words, ‘does not walk straight, or goes askew’ (p. 23). As well
as ghosts or revenants always returning and coming back, language itself is
structured, Derrida suggests, by relationships of condensation, displacement,
metonym and metaphor, which perform temporalities ‘beyond the living
present’ (p. xix). Derrida’s writing itself is akin to a magical incantation, which
calls forth the spectral qualities of language to question what it might mean
to live and to learn to live with ghosts. This question is aligned to a ‘politics
of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ (1994: xvii) – to those he goes
on to suggest are not present: ‘Those who are not yet born or who are already
dead’ (p. xvii). They might also exist as an absent-presence.

Haunted lives

Rather than the concept of media life that has become so central to discussions
of contemporary media forms and practices, this work extends what counts
168 Haunted Data

as media in the context of haunted lives. As an example of this distinction,

David Marriot (2007) explores the work media do in the context of the endless
repetition and consumption of colonial fantasies within media cultures.
The book starts with video images of the murdered black British schoolboy
Damiola Taylor, and it invites the reader to consider what we were being
invited to recognize as these images were endlessly repeated and circulated
within news broadcasts in November 2000. Marriot equates the work these
images do to a form of ‘nonvision’ (p. xiv), where he suggests these images are
haunted by the ‘future-to-come’ – what we already know – which is that they
remain the last images of the boy before his brutal murder. He suggests that
images do not work indexically, but rather they are anticipatory, enacting a
‘future memorialized, and yet unseen’ (2007: xv). The theme of Marriot’s book
and his analysis of visual culture and black modernity is ‘what cannot appear,
by what is missing’ (2007: xvi) – that is how TV, photographic images and
other media can create a form of mediated perception which allows one to see
and experience the un-seeable.
Marriot’s focus is on the relationship between the spectral and visible and
what he calls the ‘occult presence of racial slavery’ (2007: xxi) – ‘the way in
which colonial fantasies create a form of ‘ghosted consciousness’ (2007: xxi).
He uses this term to refer to the histories of oppression and trauma created by
slavery, which are displaced by what comes to stand in for this disappearance –
the endlessly repeated colonial fantasies which produce the colonial subject as
an ambivalent object of both fear and desire (BhaBha, 2004; Fanon, 1967). He
suggests that this is a ‘blinded mediatised seeing’ (2007: 2), which he equates
to the ‘telepathic life of race’ (2007: 4). Marriot’s hauntological approach to the
politics of racial disavowal creates what he calls a ‘shared hallucination’ (p. 8),
which constitutes particular ways of ‘seeing’ blackness. In this sense, like Derrida
(1994), Marriot views television as a haunted technological medium, extending
the reciprocal and recursive relationships between the haunted imaginary of
media and locating this within the context of racial discrimination and colonial
racism. Through an analysis of film, television, modernist literature and the
practices of black gay artists, such as Issac Julien, he develops the argument that
media technologies are haunted by the phantom of racial slavery.
Where Marriot suggests that the temporal, or the now, must be grasped in
and through the time of racist historicity, Rey Chow (2012) asks the important
 Conclusion 169

question of what happens to time as it is experienced and enacted within what

she terms transmediality. Referring to the entangled relations of the web, and
the ‘rapid disappearance of time-honoured intervals’ (Chow 2012: 10) her
focus is on how hypermediatization and the ‘new regime of abstract touch –
the pinch, the click, the tap, the slide, and the finger swipe’ (Chow 2012: 25)
have created a sense of illusionism and automatism. This is perhaps a familiar
account of media time, which focuses on immediacy where everything appears
connected yet experienced as temporal – as part of a perpetual present. As
she asks, ‘What happens to memory when images, in which past events are
supposedly recorded and preserved, become instantaneous with the actual
happenings?2 When conventional time shifts vanish as a result of the perfecting
of the techniques of image capturing? When time loses its potential to become
fugitive or fossilized – in brief, to become anachronistic?’ (Chow 2012: 5).
The entanglement characteristic of transmediality is understood through
images such as traps, knots, masks, mazes, parasites and shadows, creating
a form of ‘topological looping’ (Chow 2012: 1). Her question, which is also
situated within colonial relations, is to ask how does one engage in critical
practice and the potential to think otherwise ‘when a particular form is
involved?’ (Chow 2012: 23; also see Rotman, 2008). This question is also central
to the hauntological method developed in this book and the question of how
digital and software media are changing the nature of science controversies and
their potential to accrue contagious potential. Chow’s focus is on the radical
potential of what she terms ‘shadow media’ in the context of the proliferating
‘visibilities-in-flux, made up of user-generated, often mediocre-quality
images’ (Chow 2012: 166). She suggests that this creates flows, criss-crossings
and multiple becomings that provide ways of enacting and performing the
present through ‘the small act of capture’ (Chow 2012: 166). She suggests that
shadow media – the portable, atomized and individualized media that extend
capacities for connectivity and interactivity – allow for the potentially wide
dissemination of small moments. This potentially releases the image from the
memorial of a time past and puts into motion new possibilities. This is equated
to a move from captivity to captivation.
Chow’s work is useful to think about how ‘information-objects’ (Chow
2012: 165) can become stagings or scenes of entanglement, scenes where new
linkages and enmeshments might accrue ‘supplemental time-space’ (Chow
170 Haunted Data

2012: 12). This might enable a form of critical reflexivity, which is dramatized
within a particular media form. This draws attention to the apparatus itself,
but does not reduce the capacity to captivate to the media technology itself,
nor to its use. Rather the critical reflexivity is shaped through the specific
entanglements that might be staged that include multiple temporalities that
overlap, cross, loop and create the event of capture. To that extent Chow’s
focus is on the unhinging of time and its perpetual looping that she argues
characterizes transmediality and opens up the potential for new forms of
critical reflexivity. Drawing on Deleuze’s rereading of Foucault’s approach
to disciplinary power, captured in Deleuze’s concept of the ‘control society’
(1992), she suggests that there has been a breakage within so-called old and
new media, or medial and transmediality. This is represented by new forms of
time shifting, or the collapse of what she terms a time lag. Chow suggests that
this is leading to new battles for the media frame.
All of these approaches focus on media as scenes of entanglement understood
as performative re-movals or compositional forms of ‘seeing’ which move
beyond representationalism.3 That is they stage entangled relationships
(here Chow refers to strategies such as collage, montage and tableau, for
example), which have the potential to open up or contribute to existing
‘epistemic foreclosures’ (2012: 22). Chow’s concept of scenes of entanglement
is also captured by a number of other medial concepts that include ‘situation,
dramatization, staging, picture, frame (and) window’ (ibid: 12). The
supplementation of the concept of the cut or the ‘critical aperture’ (ibid: 12)
with the concept of ‘supplemental time-space’ (ibid: 12) also introduces
different conceptions of media time into the analysis. As we have seen in the
discussion in this section, these media times can be ghostly but also introduce
a politics to ghosting, which situates medial or transmedial forms of haunting
within specific racist and colonial imaginaries.
Hauntological analysis therefore extends across the arts and humanities,
has a particular place in philosophy and has entered into discussions of media,
such as film, photography and television. Hauntology has a particular place
in the lives of oppressed and marginalized peoples and those suffering from
traumatic memories that blur the historical and the personal and the past
and present (also see Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012). Avery Gordon (2008)
suggests that hauntological analysis is a way of focusing on how people sense,
 Conclusion 171

intuit and experience the complexities of modern power. It focuses on ‘what is

usually invisible or neglected or thought by most to be dead or gone’ (Gordon
2008: 194). There is a sense that ‘we’ already know, in some form or way, what
haunts as a ghostly presence, but that the paradigms we have for animating
these ghosts operate at the limits of what is taken to be understandable. Gordon
suggests that as researchers, readers, citizens and persons we are implicated in
particular hauntings, but that we might need companions in thought, such as
novels, photographs and other media to help articulate our concerns (also see
Ahmed, 2014).
Hauntologies are also histories of the present – of how particular presents
have materialized in relation to specific and contingent normative horizons
and what is relegated, excluded, disavowed or consigned to pathology. In that
sense, hauntologies have a relationship to work which has explored how social
norms become social goods or truths and the social figures who carry what
is excluded from such norms – the feminist killjoy, the melancholic migrant,
the unhappy queer and so forth (Ahmed, 2010). However, the aforementioned
figures might be said to have a hyper-visibility in that they can be found,
tracked, analysed and allowed to speak through the animation of particular
archives of wilfulness perhaps (see Ahmed, 2014). The ghost might be said
to be a different kind of social figure, which is both ‘there and not there, past
and present, force and shape’ (Gordon, 2008: 6). It takes form and crops up in
places, relations and shapes, which exert agency or an affective force without
obvious definition. The ghost requires a host, someone, something or perhaps
a controversy, which allows it to surface and demand our attention. Haunting
can impose and then retreat; it can leave traces of its visit and invite us to
take notice and ‘imagine beyond the limits of what is already understandable’
(Gordon 2008: 195).

Media time(s) and haunted socialities

The focus of this book has been on the forms of extended perception and
mediation made possible by social and digital media, and with the way in
which scientific controversies are increasingly performed within digital
environments. It has staged new directions and explored how the archive of
science and its proper object is extended, contested and re-animated by the
172 Haunted Data

re-moval of science’s pasts and possible futures within an archive of haunted

data. These new media environments disclose the dynamism of controversies
and allow for the mapping and representation of the complexity of science,
which is usually covered over by positivist forms of science writing. As
Venturini (2010) has argued, positivist forms of writing and argumentation
often present disagreements as technical points – problems with replication,
the experimental set-up, statistical analysis and interpretation – but rarely as
‘conflicting visions of the world’ (p. 808).
In this sense the controversies have investments in the shaping of
particular visions of the future and in that sense are timely expressions of a
broader cultural imaginary where science is being repositioned as renewing
interest in possible futures-yet-to-come. They are all also examples of what,
following Avery Gordon (2008), might be termed ‘haunted socialities’. The
concept of haunted socialities points towards the different times that are
present within what I term ‘transmedial time’. Within the controversies that
I perform and animate within the book, different temporalities and space–
time configurations collide and clash. The linear development of science as
a narrative of progress towards truth is radically disrupted. The idea that
media time is pure duration – movement, change and transformation – until
stabilization cuts into temporal flow does not quite work. Instead, what we
witness are different times and temporalities moving in and out of each other,
sparking moments of discord, conflict, tension, anxiety, fear, fascination and
inchoate feelings. The affective dimension and the hauntological potential of
both controversies gesture towards half-hidden things, people, entities and
agents. They unsettle and are unsettled.
Although beyond the scope of this concluding chapter to include in any
detail, there are many different examples and practices of hauntology across the
arts and humanities. This includes the seminal work of the black British artist
and filmmaker John Akomfrah who has used the term ‘hauntology’ to describe
his own films and aesthetic. Akomfrah’s practice combines archival footage
(often from sanctioned media archives such as those of the BBC including
documentary TV and radio), with imaginative re-stagings and enactments
of the gaps, silences and absences in such footage. These require the action
of myth, fiction and fantasy as companions in thought. In a commentary
in relation to a 2012 art installation of Akomfrah’s work, which mobilized
 Conclusion 173

hauntology as its title, the author acknowledges Derrida’s use of such a term
and its reference to those multiple pasts in the present, which remain as absent-
presences4 – what is termed the ‘many pasts present in the present’. Akomfrah’s
subject is the colonial histories of Jamaican and West Indian migrants to the
United Kingdom and a staging of those stories erased by official histories
and forms of mediated perception. Akomfrah’s film of Stuart Hall,5 the late
and great black British scholar and public intellectual, whose story was told
through the conjoining of archival footage and interviews, punctuated by the
music of Miles Davies, shows just how effective and important hauntology as
a political and artistic method can be.
Hauntological approaches to the many pasts in the present are also carried
by the figure of the ghost as a sociocultural and political phenomenon.
This assumption is part of the curation of an ongoing interdisciplinary arts
project led by the British artist Sarah Sparkes. GHost Hostings6 was initiated
in 2008 and has to date curated fourteen events, bringing together artists,
performers, dancers, academics, filmmakers and other kinds of ghost-hunters
to conceptually interrogate and manifest the idea of the ghost. GHost takes
its title from Marcel Duchamp’s (1953) aphorism and artwork, ‘A GUEST +
a HOST = A GHOST’.7 As Sparkes argues, the guest is a host inside the
ghost, which points towards the success and effectivity of the experimental
apparatus to stage or summon ghosts for interrogation. In March 2014 GHost
Hostings 14 staged three performance pieces, which all used sound, embodied
performance and mediated images in order to conjure the experience of
displacement through forced migration and traumatic histories. This included
the work of Stasis 738 who animated found archival images and testimonies of
people forced to migrate, sometimes by foot, or train or boat, to another place,
leaving behind abandoned buildings, homes and villages, personal items, lives
and the dead. Through a form of mediated perception they attempt to stage
the unspoken trauma of such displacement through image and sound, in
order to raise the ghosts and re-animate what they term the dead camera-eye,
which captures such images frozen in time. They return perhaps captivation
to captivity.
In my development of an affective methodology that brings hauntological
analysis into studies of data and computation, my focus was on returning
storytelling to science or what Rheinberger termed historiality. I have explored
174 Haunted Data

this in the context of new forms of scientific data that blur fact and fiction,
self and other, human and technical and the popular and the scientific. The
data that are generated within post-publication-peer-review have provided the
archive within which I have worked and have allowed a productive and I hope
inventive way of attending to a statement’s liveliness. One of the conclusions
I want to advance is that if we are to work and collaborate with science and
scientists as humanities scholars and artists, it is important to recognize how
contested science is. Papoulias and Callard (2010) have argued that not enough
attention has been paid by affect theorists to the circuits of debate, legitimation,
contestation and authorization that circumscribe scientific practices, theories
and data. In other contexts humanities scholars such as Elizabeth Wilson
(2015) argue that we, and particularly feminist scholars, should take scientific
data more seriously. This book is an attempt to do both but to explore an
alternative realm of scientific data production that for some scientists has the
potential to shape a more open, democratic and participatory science. For
others it is a source of anxiety and consternation potentially threatening the
integrity of science and opening it up to the wrong kinds of public.
As with other scholars who have crossed the sciences and humanities, I have
been influenced by arguments that suggest there is always more to be said, that
science always contains more stories waiting to be told, and that the paths to a
more inventive, creative and curious science are to be found at the interstices of
all those gaps, cracks, loops, dead ends, fracture-lines, detours and anomalies,
which can be found in contemporary science controversies. As we have seen,
the science controversies analysed in this book are more-than-one and splice
together and re-move earlier historical controversies once thought resolved.
As they move and migrate into new contexts they accrue agencies and enter
into new scenes of entanglement. I have provided a temporary host for these
voices, apparitions and ghosts who I believe have something very important to
say to some of the current ontologies across the humanities and the sciences,
which are questioning what makes us human. They foreground process,
indeterminacy, relationality and creative experimentation in the context of the
field of affect studies, and to those phenomena which displace the rational,
self-enclosed, bounded, distinctly human subject.
As a conclusion to this book I will outline seven areas germane to the book,
which I hope will be useful to affect theorists, media scholars and to all those
 Conclusion 175

interested in philosophies of science, and in the relations between science

and storytelling, and to the possibility of more speculative sciences. I hope
that these seven points will provide a stimulus for readers and researchers to
imagine future possibilities in their own research, and to help open science up
to new publics and the proliferation of new visibilities, new entities and new
forms of experimentation, authorization and data analysis.

Seven points to feed-forward. Speculative manifesto for

affect and the more-than-human: Loving the alien

1. Open Science:  Open science should not just be confined to a discussion

of how digital communication is transforming the communication of science
and therefore how science engages in practices of verification, legitimation and
authentication. The challenges of digital and social media to science cannot be
contained by discussions of where, how and what to publish, nor with what
kinds of practices pre- and post-publication might modify what was once
considered the static, unmodifiable published journal article. These of course
are important questions, which relate to open access publishing, the nature
of peer review, reputational economies, citation metrics, and the way science
might and is transforming within the context of the public communication
of science and what it means to engage and publish research that will attract
impact. Important as all these issues and questions are open science will need to
confront bigger ontological questions about the nature of scientific progress,
innovation, evolution and transformation. Science and scientists need to
become more adventurous.
Scientists need to confront the nature of scientific archives as they are and
might be transformed across time. What might be considered the ‘proper
object’ of any scientific archive is challenged by the kinds of transmedial
times (nonlinear, criss-crossed, looped, back-tracked, telescoped, bent etc.),
which are re-moved by contemporary science controversies as they form and
are re-formed within and across digital media worlds. Derrida, Rheinberger,
Barad, Haraway, Despret, Stengers and many others have foregrounded the
historicity of times and the historiality (Rhineberg) of science with its potential
for dynamism and creative indeterminacy. Scientists and philosophers of
176 Haunted Data

the nineteenth century knew this and what we have forgotten comes back
insistently and often in submerged and disguised forms in the present opening
to lost-futures. Open science needs the humanities and philosophy. That is
why many of those who in my view write the most interesting work about the
history, philosophy and practice of science have already crossed disciplines
from science to the humanities and philosophy and sometimes back again.
These crossings and borrowings, and their potential to open to archives of the
future must not be forgotten in the contemporary calls for more rapprochement
with the sciences and particularly the cognitive, biological, psychological and
neurosciences.

2. We can still do critical research within the context of the data and
computational turn. There is no ‘end of theory’ nor should we resign
ourselves to inertia, resignation and defeat in the context of the software-
driven and increasingly automated media worlds that we live within and
through. These worlds often perform rather impoverished imaginaries that
remove wonder from the world and enact some of the most unimaginative and
restrictive psychological imaginaries about what it means to relate, connect,
influence, know, forget, anticipate and feel about one another. Although
we might scrape and visualize some of the data produced through these
imaginaries, showing a keen awareness of the affordances of the application
programming interfaces that shape the data, this must not exhaust the other
critical openings that software and computational practices make possible.
Many of the theories adapted to speak to these new automated media worlds
draw from social psychological theories (Goffman for example), or overlay
discussions of networked performativity with unexamined psychological
assumptions about the nature of self, creativity and authenticity for example.
There are other theories and practices we might use which served marginalized
communities well in critical analyses of analogue and broadcast-media worlds.
This includes the queer practice of ‘reading against the grain’ and attention to
the hauntological forces at work in media; what I have termed the potential for
‘queer aggregations’.
The latter approaches can be found in discussions of racist historicity, queer
lives, displaced communities and those people, practices, entities, phenomena
and experiences, which have been submerged, displaced, disqualified and
 Conclusion 177

rendered insufficient or nonsensical. These practices can and are being

extended and amplified by and through social and digital media, which is
allowing collective psychic apparatuses to be assembled and made to speak
as a powerful authorial voice. We can see this in relation to sexism and sexual
harassment (think of the Everyday Sexism Project #metoo); to critical race
studies in the context of #blacklivesmatter; to the transformation of mental
health approaches in the context of the Hearing Voices Movement; and to,
particularly, the link between trauma, abuse and voice hearing (see Blackman,
2016b). Digital practices are enabling the linking up of the inchoate, the
marginal, the small and those traces and fragments which have been made to
exist as outliers and as non-performatives. They can be re-moved, animated
and kept alive through processes and practices of coding and re-coding, which
allow something new to emerge and that refuse to stay silent or go away. It
is through the connecting up of fragments across space and time that a new
collective storytelling machine can and could take form.
I have tried to adapt these distributed practices to science and to my
feeling that science ought to be transforming, not least in those areas of
science (psychology, the cognitive neurosciences etc.), which are supposed to
help, support and transform people’s lives. We live in a world that is riven by
inequalities, oppression and unequal distributions of everything. The kind of
psychology I want (what Valerie Walkerdine and I have called ‘psychologies of
survival’) must be one that can listen to its own pasts in order to open to lost-
futures and futures-yet-to-come. In just these two science controversies there is
much that opens to creative indeterminacy and speculative thinking about what
could and might become, including the counterfactual and the relationship
between what counts as truth and post-truth. Sadly these possibilities are left
under-explored and do not cross the threshold where they might appear as a
matter of concern or relevance. They are often closed down at the very moment
that they are opened up insistently, affectively, hauntologically.

3. Future-Psychology/Speculative Psychologies.  We need many! My work

has been influenced by many different critiques of psychology that have
been shaped in different conjunctures: critiques made in the 1980s by black
psychologists entering the discipline; critiques made by feminist psychologists;
philosophers of science; critical and discursive psychology; psychosocial
178 Haunted Data

studies; Foucauldian ‘histories of the present’; archaeologies and genealogies of

perception, attention, suggestion, etc. This critical work rarely enters into the
new rapprochements being forged between the humanities and the sciences.
We must not simply either endorse or reject science but find ways to work in
the gaps, silences, contradictions and absent-presences – with those versions
of the psychological that have been disqualified, but which importantly
do not go away. We have developed theories of materiality, but what is left
under-explored and analysed are mind-matter relations, the incorporeal,
and specifically those experiences that often end up as the subject matter of
psychology particularly as it intersects with weird science. We need, as Isabelle
Stengers has so cogently called for, more ‘innovative propositions’. For the last
twenty-five years I have worked in the area of voice hearing and through the
efforts and labour of voice hearers and those professionals willing to listen and
learn we have begun to effect change.9 We must not do this by giving up on our
critical theories, methods and practices.

4. New materialisms.  The human subject is not over or post and subjectivity
is not obsolete. We should not banish the human from discussions of the digital
subject or consciousness, but we do need radically revised notions of body–
world-consciousness relations and theories of the human compatible with
twenty-first-century media. What it means to be human has continually been
qualified and re-qualified when we look at other contexts and conjunctures.
Some of what has created the displacement of the subject within new
materialisms and related perspectives comes out of a refusal of conservative
psychological theories of will and intentionality, which shaped other disciplines,
such as quantum mechanics. Certain psychologies have travelled while others
remain at the level of fantasy, fiction, myth or impossibility. Psychology needs
a makeover in order to make good on the promises of new materialisms to
return the dynamism to matter. This issue returns most insistently in the
Feeling the Future controversy and should demand our attention. If we do
not pay attention we reinstate problematic mind-matter relations, which end
in panpsychism and other forms of speculative realism. Objects might indeed
feel, think or refuse our concerns but what human subjects might and indeed
could become in our ‘humanicity’ (Kirby, 2011) is one that opens to speculative
thinking that challenges the ‘post’ in all its forms.
 Conclusion 179

5. Affect.  This in my view remains a productive area of research and inquiry,

which crosses the arts, humanities and sciences and is returning the invention
to radical thinking. However, this in my view will only be realized if we
recognize the long traditions of inventive experimentation that have been
gathered together under the designation of the subliminal, non-conscious
or pre-conscious. This does return us to archives of experimentation
which have a close association with psychic research and which return in
both controversies staged within the book. These archives contain proto-
performative approaches to experimentation; imaginative discussion and use
of statistics and the shaping of statistical imaginaries; as well as reconfiguring
rather queer psychic dimensions of space, time and matter. They haunt vitalist
philosophy, new materialisms and speculative realism. Rather than engage
in creative misreadings of science or speculative what if scenarios, we might
also engage with what is excluded from legitimate science. This often opens to
the historicity of affect and with the indeterminacy of affective potentials and
therefore the potential to enter into new relations with others, human and non-
human. What it means for the ‘social’ to go all the way down – to the visceral,
anticipatory, phenomenological, to gut instinct returns in both controversies. I
have called this following the work of Hannah Landecker (2016), the matter of
history and the historicity of matter (referring to what she terms the biology of
history and the history of biology). We must be prepared to displace what has
become ‘black-boxed’ within affect theories to avoid ending up in accounts
of mediation, which often feel too behaviourist, too neuro-reductionist and
remove wonder from the world.

6. Governing through the affective/governing through the psychological. One

of the concerns of the book has been to explore those psychic and
psychological imaginaries that have become materialized within specific
practices of governance and regulation, including nudge politics (priming),
and anticipatory forms of speculative forecast (feeling the future). I hope
to have shown that psychological theories and data are part of population
management and that computational cultures enact psychological imaginaries
as much as older forms of power and regulation have. They do not describe
what we do naturally but rather perform imaginaries, which attempt to
recruit particular psychological propensities and capacities in order to shape,
180 Haunted Data

augment, orchestrate and modulate what we see, do and experience. As I hope

to have shown, many of the proprietorial forms of algorithmic power are still
based on rather impoverished psychological imaginaries that in many cases
are non-performative or counterfactual. Given the lack of understanding of the
ontological indeterminacy and radical historicity of those experiences gathered
together under the designation of the subliminal, suggestive or affective,
digital subjects are not captured by these practices and the question of what
becomes captivating is still little known and understood. However, some of the
more radical practices that are experimenting with anticipation and feeling the
future do seem more attuned to this radical ontological complexity and what
might be possible. The current conjuncture therefore holds opportunities for
shaping more open and creative forms of experimentation, and working in
the gaps, silences, interstices and contradictions to shape radical politics and
possibilities.

7. Haunted Data.  I hope that the book provides a corpus of data, which
challenges more instrumentalist notions of data. The data re-moved in this book
is not immediately available for conversion into revenue or capital, but does I
hope show the value of developing new ways of resisting such formulations and
showing where data becomes compromised (see Langlois, Redden and Elmer
2015). There are many adjectives to describe data – big, beautiful, small, smart,
anticipatory, aggregated, false, raw, cooked, compromised, lively, inert and my
chosen adjective haunted. This adjective connects the analysis staged in this
book to genealogical work, which has confronted hauntologies, which works
with a sense that there is something more to say. I end this book at a time when
debates about data mirror some of the utopian and dystopian debates shaped in
the 1990s which saw the new media worlds then (virtual reality, for example) as
either changing everything (for the better) or closing down on possibilities for
human agency and change. We can look back now and see that neither of those
poles could adequately capture what difference such technologies might make
to our lives. The challenges of analysing mediation within computational and
increasingly automated media worlds has come back to haunt us and I hope
that this book has provided one small path through what in most contexts
would be considered small or insignificant data.
 Conclusion 181

The controversies and the data animated, re-moved and kept alive by this
staging open up to what I think remain as some of the most challenging and
vexed questions troubling the humanities, philosophy and sciences, as well as
politicians, economists, designers, artists and many other interested publics. It
is perhaps apposite therefore to finish with the words of the White Queen in
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. As well as an inspiration to Daryl
Bem, the White Queen also encourages readers to open to the impossible,
the improbable and the extraordinary. In the context of Haunted Data and a
post-truth landscape, this is not an invitation to endorse ‘weird science’, but
rather to urge the shaping of more innovative and inventive propositions.
We so desperately need these to explore what it means to be human and to
what might be possible at this particular juncture, specifically as they operate
at the ‘edges of consciousness’. This is situated within a context where linear
conceptions of time, space and matter, and boundaries between the human
and non-human, material and immaterial, fact and fiction, and media and
mediation seem increasingly blurred, unstable and riven with possibilities and
potentialities.
182
 Notes

Preface

1 http:​//www​.etym​onlin​e.com​/inde​x.php​?term​=haun​t
2 For readers not familiar with the field of affect study I will briefly outline some
of its distinctive markers and characteristics. This includes a critical re-appraisal
of the sciences (and particularly the psychological and neurosciences) by the
humanities; a critical and creative re-engagement with ontological as opposed to
epistemological concerns; a grounding of what might have passed as immaterial
within a neo-materialist reading of what a body is capable of doing, and to that
end a radical re-conceptualization of embodiment, often beyond a distinctly
singular, phenomenologically experiencing human subject. Of course these
concerns have pre-histories that affect acts as an attractor for and pick up on more
long-standing debates surrounding power, agency, subjectivity and biopolitics,
and on how to invent methodological and conceptual apparatuses that allow a
purchase on the question of power, subjectification and the complex problematic
of subjectivity. This is often but not always set within a destabilization of what
it means to communicate beyond the context of (human) talk, discourse and
conversation. This includes an exploration of theories that are sensitive to non-
human agencies, entanglements and thresholds, which confound and unsettle
humanist and sometimes post-humanist beliefs and sentiments (see Clough,
2008a; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010).
  Affect theories and the field of affect studies has been a very influential
interdisciplinary focus of research and thought, which can be found across a range
of disciplines, including literature, philosophy, cultural theory, media studies,
film studies, art and curatorial study, queer theory, feminism and critical race
studies. One of the orientations of affect theories that is examined in this book
is a statement that has become something of a truism across the field of affect
studies – that is that there is a half-second delay between affect and cognition,
There is a growing edifice being assembled on the basis of this assumption, which
has become something of a ‘black box’ across affect theories (Latour, 1998). The
statement itself might be considered part of a surface of emergence, which has
led to critique and counter-critique, and the mobilization of certain theories and
184 Notes

theorists (such as Silvan Tomkins) for example to authorize and extend its reach.
It also opens affect theories to the cognitive and neurosciences and relates to an
area of scholarship within cognitive science known as automaticity research.
3 This quote is taken from Ruth Leys’s (2011) critique of affect theory that was
published in Critical Inquiry. Although she is sympathetic to such a move she is
also critical of the current assumption that affect is independent or autonomous
from meaning and signification. Also see Leys (2017).
4 The paradoxes that govern discussions of network culture for example ask how
and why do certain contagions spread and intensify across social and digital
media. This problem is seen by some to be usefully addressed by turning to
theories of suggestion, imitation and automaticity found within experimental
social psychology and the cognitive sciences. One book, which explicitly draws on
such theories and concepts to explore the virality or viral logic of network culture,
is by the cultural theorist, Sampson (2012). He argues that contagion and theories
of imitation found within the past and present of experimental social psychology
and the neurosciences might provide important heuristics for rethinking
communication processes beyond the human, singularly bounded, cognitive
subject. This is an attempt to grasp what is termed a ‘contagious relationality’
(p. 3), which he relates specifically to biopolitical strategies in the present that are
taken to work pre-emptively.
  Sampson suggests that pre-emption tendencies attempt to modulate and exploit
emotion and affect, as well as to ‘affectively prime social atmospheres, creating
the conditions for increasingly connected populations to pass on and imitate the
suggestions of others’ (p. 5; also see Massumi, 2009). Sampson draws a lineage
with the concerns of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century psychologists
and sociologists and specifically with the potentially unconscious, instinctual
or even affective bases of contagion (also see Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001;
Reicher, 2001; Blackman, 2012; Borch, 2012). These theories of the crowd,
imitation and suggestion are brought into dialogue with explicitly contemporary
concerns – with how communication is intensified and spreads within networked
populations. The question for Sampson, as with many others, is, what is it that
spreads? Clearly, it is not just information as understood within traditional
media theory, or cybernetics, as what spreads includes political rumours, fads,
fashions, trends, gossip, hype, emotions, feelings, affects, sensations and moods,
for example – forms of contagious communication that, as many people have
argued, take us back to the nineteenth-century concerns and potentially to those
theorists, such as Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon, whose interests in contagion
underpinned their own models of sociality (see Blackman, 2012).
 Notes 185

  Sampson announces the present as an ‘age of contagion’ (p. 1), and brings the
past, primarily the French micro-sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde’s
work described as ‘Tarde’s imitation-suggestion thesis’ (p. 13) into dialogue
with contemporary neuromarketing and post–Second World War experimental
social psychology (specifically the work of Stanley Milgram and his famous
obedience experiments). Tarde, like Whitehead in the writings of Hansen, is
reread as a contemporary media theorist. In different ways all these theories
and experimental practices are seen to potentially explain, animate, articulate,
dramatize, make visible and allow a purchase on the modulation of processes,
which exist, below, beyond and to the side of cognition (see Protevi, 2009). These
processes are taken to reveal our fundamental relationality with others human and
non-human. On this basis, Sampson argues for a ‘revised notion of subjectivity’
based on a refiguring of Tarde’s ‘sonambulistic subjectivity’ embedded within
‘technological network relations’ (p. 13). Tarde’s sonambulism relates to his oft-
quoted assumption, that suggestion rather than rationality, or reason is the basis
of sociality. This assumption discloses Tarde’s interest in hypnotic suggestion and
contagious forms of communication.
5 The term ‘psychomediation’ is a term that resonates with Patricia Clough’s
(2008a) concept of ‘biomediation’ to describe the interlocking of the biological
with the technical. The concept of psychomediation refers to the interlocking of
the psyche with processes of mediation understood as simultaneously material,
immaterial, technical, symbolical, affective, biological, historical, etc. The focus
on the psyche attempts to introduce a revised notion of subjectivity into debates,
which have tended to reinstate or even overstate distinctions between psyche
and body – for example the ‘bio’ in biomediation is often overlaid by a rather
flat neurophysiological body (see Blackman, 2012, Immaterial Bodies: Affect,
Embodiment, Mediation, chapter 1). This tendency across the field of affect studies
has been subject to critique (see Leys, 2011; Wetherell, 2013, for example), as
it assumes a rather reductionist account of subjectivity, replacing unconscious
desires and motivations with a neurophysiological model of personhood. This
has opened the door to many cultural and media theorists to make bridges with
and join alliances with psychology and the neurosciences to model ontologies of
the human subject. Many of these ‘new’ ontologies are seen to be compatible with
various turns – the affective, new materialist, non-human and so forth. This often
involves overlaying the performative with the neurological or the neurobiological
in order to specify the ontological materialities of psychic processes.
  As Wetherell (2013: 350) argues, the study of affect and bodily affectivities
is not just marked out as a particular research area, but is ‘registered as various
186 Notes

paradigmatic breaks’ with the past. These breaks, ruptures or turns include a
break with psychoanalysis (and therefore subjectivity), a break with work on
discourse and representation, and a break with the privileging of the human as
the investigative site of interpretive activity. Affect emerges from assemblages
of material, social, biological and cultural processes, which create intensities,
atmospheres, resonances and so forth. These are pre-personal or trans-personal
and relate to processes viewed as ‘beyond, below and past discourse’ – affect as
excess (ibid: 350). Mediation is akin to forms of embodied immersion, which are
not immediately knowable and communicable and therefore readily verbalized.
As Wetherell (ibid) argues, affect and discourse are pitted against each other in an
ambivalent relationship. Affect is seen to rescue the body from ‘dumb materiality’,
an accusation launched at those who have attempted to explore performativity
through a conjoining of Foucault’s work on discourse, with psychosocial
understandings of psychic processes (see Butler, 1993 for example). Affective
approaches it is argued are capturing the more captivated and lively bodily
processes, which are implicated, channelled and modulated through mediation.
These are often framed at the level of the brain or nervous system for example.
  With this in mind I will explore what a turn to affect articulated in this
way might open up, while also being mindful that what affect is pitted against
covers over the complexity of perspectives: the diversity and difference of
what came before and still exists in the present as a ghostly presence. These
genealogies cannot be reduced to and summarily dismissed as approaches that
reduce mediation to discourse or subjectivity for example. The media theorist
Richard Grusin (2010: 7) is explicit that his approach to mediality is counter to
poststructuralist approaches to discourse and to psychoanalytic models, which
he suggests were ‘favoured by most contemporary cultural and media theorists’.
Affect theory is positioned as offering something different and allows one to
engage with the ‘materiality or agency of mediation’ 2010: 19). This materiality
is tied to affect systems (often understood as precognitive and located in the
brain), which can be modulated, shaped and channelled by remediation and
premediation strategies. Neurobiological approaches are often preferred over
accounts of subjectivity and fantasy and desire, as the problematic of bodily affect
is taken to be foregrounded, a materiality which is seen to have been displaced by
psychoanalytic conceptions of and theories of the psyche and psychic processes.
This non-conscious, rather than unconscious approach to mediation, assumes
that affect is imbricated with mediality, the experience or feel of which falls below
the threshold of conscious awareness.
 Notes 187

6 The focus on storytelling and inventive writing practices has been a key
characteristic of new forms of writing being developed across the field of affect
and non-human studies. See Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) Ordinary Affects, Duke
University Press, and Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s joint project,
The One Hundreds, see http:​//sup​erval​entth​ought​.com/​tag/b​erlan​t/ Also see
the poetic writing of Patricia Clough in her performative memoir writing (see
Clough, 2008b).
7 Clough et al. frame big data as the ‘performative celebration of capital’s queer
captures and modulations’. The queerness of such queer capture and modulation
is aligned in the reach of big data beyond number to the incalculable. This book
engages in a different form of ‘queer capture’ and modulation, which attends to
those ‘queer aggregations’ which are present in a corpus of data associated with
post-publication-peer-review, but which are discarded from attempts to ‘storify’
or modulate the data within specific algorithmic and computational practices,
including the Google PageRank algorithm for example.
8 Mark Hansen (2015) has argued for example that ‘agency is resolutely not the
prerogative of privileged individual actors’. He suggests that this has always
been the case but is revealed more closely in twenty-first-century media. This
is aligned specifically to the capacities of computational media to make visible,
articulate, extend and animate ‘environmental agencies’. The focus on the
‘environmental’ is not at the expense of a blanket dismissal of the human, but
rather is one that argues for the profound need for a requalification of experience
and subjectivity within the context of process, indeterminacy and radical
contingency. This includes the development of approaches that can do justice to
twenty-first-century media and that move beyond psychological individualism
and the distinctly human subject as an agential centre of experience.
9 See the important writings of Tiziana Terrenova for example.
10 What Clough et al. have also termed the ‘unconscious drive’ of disciplines, such
as sociology, for example.
11 See especially Despret (2004a, b, 2015).
12 Specifically see Jack Halberstam’s (2010) concept of undisciplinarity in the Queer
Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.
13 Specifically see their book, Callard and Fitzgerald (2015). The book is open
access and can be read and downloaded for free following this link: http:​//www​
.palg​rave.​com/u​s/boo​k/978​11374​07955​
14 Wilson (2015).
15 See Rose and Abi-Rached (2013), Wilson (2015), Meloni (2016).
188 Notes

16 Also see http:​//lin​k.spr​inger​.com/​artic​le/10​.1057​/s412​86-01​6-002​2-6, Blackman

(2017). doi:10.1057/s41286-016-0022-6
17 See here the important research of Beverley Skeggs and Simon Yuill (2015) who
have developed what they call a ‘life method’ in order to understand the rhythms
and encounters that become entangled within Facebook intra-action (following
Kember and Zylinska, 2012 and Barad, 2007).

Chapter 1

1 These words included worried, Florida, wrinkled, lonely, old, grey, bingo, wrinkle
and forgetful.
2 https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/news​/monk​ey-ca​ge/wp​/2015​/12/3​0/rac​e-aff​
ects-​opini​ons-a​bout-​wheth​er-co​llege​-athl​etes-​shoul​d-be-​paid-​heres​-how/​
3 The controversy re-moves long-standing problems with the individualization of
racism, viewed as a property of individual minds found in the concept of racial
prejudice (see Henriques et al., 1984). The question of how racism might be
shaped by indirect suggestions is perhaps better understood through the analysis
of already existing affective economies of racism, where racism is the product of
cultural practices, rather than psychological beliefs or states of mind (see Ahmed,
2004). One of the crucial questions for priming studies is where is mind located?
How is mind shaped, produced, changed and transformed, etc.? As we will see
one response is that we need better questions and more innovative propositions.
4 http:​//res​earch​er.wa​tson.​ibm.c​om/re​searc​her/v​iew_g​roup.​php?i​d=286​2
5 http:​//sci​ence.​howst​uffwo​rks.c​om/sc​ience​-vs-m​yth/e​veryd​ay-my​ths/q​uantu​
m-cry​ptolo​gy4.h​tm
6 As well as a range of popular books either critiquing or extolling the virtues of
the happiness industry, there is also an important corpus of work appearing
across feminism, queer theory, critical race studies and critical psychology.
This work has refused the claims of the more humanistic side of psychology
to represent the inherent freedoms and desire of the subject to change and
transform themselves in order to achieve success in relationships, work, health,
wealth and well-being, for example. In brief these arguments suggest that the
positing of the psychological subject (often described through a fictional image
of the autonomous self), as the agent of change and transformation obscures the
workings of power and the social exclusions, inequalities and oppressions, which
are created, reinforced and maintained. The complex machinations of power
 Notes 189

are translated into psychological capacities to be lived, harnessed, discovered,

coached or managed into being in order for change to be effected. Sara Ahmed’s
important book, The Promise of Happiness (2010) reframes these psychological
desires, concepts and techniques often found within positive psychology as
social norms rather than social facts. She explores who is excluded from these
norms, including the social figure of the unhappy queer, melancholic migrant
and feminist killjoy, for example. The feminist Barbarah Ehrenreich (2010), in
her book Bright-Sided. How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has
Undermined America, argues that positive thinking is a tyranny, which enters into
how individuals are enlisted to manage their own health and fitness for work in
the context of unequal health care systems, bad luck, poverty and austerity, for
example. Within the context of self-health a cancer diagnosis is reframed as an
opportunity for self-improvement, or the chance for a creative makeover, or even
as the lease for new life. The cancer sufferer must never get angry or breakdown,
where positive thinking should also extend to accepting one’s lot with humility
and dignity (also see Stacey, 1990). Positivity is intimately linked to practices of
neo-liberal governmentality where self-health or healthism constitutes practices
of self-determination as normalizing strategies of self and social regulation.
7 This includes a number of influential books, which explore the genealogical
question of what does it mean to be human within the context of the psychological
sciences. More recent versions of thinking on psychological governance include
Whitehead et al. (2017) and Pykett, Jones and Whitehead (2017).
8 See the book by Potter and Wetherell (1987).
9 See Richards’s important books: Putting Psychology in its Place: Critical Historical
Perspectives (2010); Race, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History
(1997).
10 Specifically see Blackman and Walkerdine (2001); Blackman (2001); Blackman
(2012).
11 The collective included Diana Adlam, Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Nikolas
Rose, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine.
12 See a discussion in the founding editorial essay of the journal Subjectivity, which
has a direct lineage to Ideology and Consciousness via the work of the British
psychosocial studies theorist Valerie Walkerdine (Blackman et al., 2008: 6).
13 I am not alone in these observations and arguments. Please see the important
genealogical work of Roger Luckhurst (2002) on telepathy; Asprem (2010) on the
unexplored links between psychic research, neovitalism, eugenics and Lamarkism
within psychology; the historian of psychology, Elizabeth Valentine (2012); and
190 Notes

the writings of Andreas Sommer (2014) on the close yet disavowed relations
between psychology and psychic research.
14 Although arguably psychology took the wrong path or direction in its pursuit
of the human self-determined bounded agential subject as its normative subject
matter, the banished process psychologies and their concern with ‘threshold
phenomena’ moved into other disciplines, areas and practices. One example
of this migration can be found in media archaeological accounts exploring
the intimate and close interrelationship between ‘processual psychological
imaginaries’ associated with the psychic, occult, supernatural and paranormal
and different media’s technical forms. Stephan Andriopoulos (2013), for example,
has explored how ghosting took a particular turn between 1750 and 1930, in
the context of reciprocal and interdependent relationships constructed between
nineteenth-century psychic research and the development of modern media
technologies, such as TV, radio, cinema, telegraphy and the printing press. In
his media archaeology of ghostly apparitions, he explores the reciprocal and
recursive relationships between engineering, the gothic novel, philosophy
(particularly German idealism) and psychic research, which shaped particular
apparitional forms. Rather than see technical media creating the possibilities of
psychic research – what he terms the ‘primacy of technology over culture’ (2013:
13) – he rather explores how material objects and discursive figures (in the form
of particular psychic imaginaries and instruments) were central to the invention
of particular media practices. As he suggests, what we witness are the permeable
boundaries between philosophy, science, media and culture in the realization of
what came to be.
  This media archaeological approach takes a particular archive – in this case
moments of interchange and connection between the philosophies of Hegel, Kant
and Shopenhauer, the gothic novel and the occult – to explore what he terms the
juxtapositions, nuances and range of cultural and technological preconditions
which shaped the invention of TV for example. This is a particular delimited
archive, read through the resonances, confluence and interchange across such
spheres, and reading back through those epistemic figures and instruments that
are part of modern media’s conditions of existence. Andriopoulos’s own interests
in apparitions come from what he sees as the lack of attention by many media
archaeologists to the centrality of the occult, psychic and the spiritual to the
mediums and materialities of technical media forms. These are often considered
‘marginal cultural materialities’ (2013: 155), which are left out or erased in the
desire to explore the contingency of the present and what could have been.
 Notes 191

  The controversies that form the case studies of the book also concern
marginal cultural materialities that are culturally significant in the shaping
of contemporary computational media and their conditions of existence and
interchange with psychic and psychological imaginaries. In different ways these
imaginaries also speak back to some of the key points of critique and counter-
critique governing debate within the field of affect studies – particularly the
assumed distinction between cognition and affect, which has become such a
productive area of debate and disagreement.
15 Also see Kember and Zylinska’s (2012) use of the cut as a critical and creative
media practice.
16 See Blackman (2015) for a further discussion of the importance of ethos in the
context of affect studies.
17 also see https​://th​epsyc​holog​ist.b​ps.or​g.uk/​volum​e-19/​editi​on-9/​speci​al-is​sue-l​
ife-m​argin​s

Chapter 2

1 http:​//blo​gs.di​scove​rmaga​zine.​com/n​euros​kepti​c/201​2/11/​02/jo​hn-ba​rghs-​trans​
ient-​and-e​pheme​ral-b​logs/​#.WOu​HzFPy​s8Y
2 Social media can be hauntological in the same way as media forms and practices
that have come before can be despite arguments, which suggest that this is not
the case (see Fisher, 2012). As Avery Gordon (2008: 195) reminds us, ‘The not
there is a seething presence’ and these absences are performed within relations
and structures, which can be actively lived and felt. They may also account for
some of the stark contradictions in theorizing identity and subjectivity within
social media, which often foreground performance as central to the work the
self (individual and collective) does within this context, but at the same time
falls back on concepts of authenticity, where performances are judged for truth,
veracity, and the extent to which they give voice to personal sentiment and feeling
(see Papacharissi, 2012).
3 The subtitle for the introduction is taken from the title of a journal article
by Ioannadis (2012), published in Psychological Inquiry: A Journal for the
International Advancement of Psychological Theory, which responds to an article
published in the same journal in 2010 by Nosek and Bar-Anan, ‘Scientific
Utopia: 1. Opening Science Communication’, which calls for the development
of what they call open science. Nosek and Bar-Anan’s article is essentially a
192 Notes

call for scientists to abandon forms of science publishing which they argue are
anachronistic in the context of digital communications (that is the published
journal article, which they link to seventeenth-century technologies and practices
of publishing). see http://lib.hku.hk/cdblog/?p=15025
4 See an important book by van Mourik Broekman et al. (2014).
5 See the journal Ada: A Journal for New Media, Technology and Gender http://
adanewmedia.org/
6 This includes strategies known as ‘wikithons’ and ‘hackathons’.
7 As Bernhard Rieder (2012) has cogently shown, software and programming
practices enact particular forms of sociality, which often originate within fairly
traditional mainstream psychological theories. One theory of ‘social influence’,
for example, which is one of the conditions of possibility that shaped PageRank,
the Google algorithm that ranks connection and influence, draws from theories
of sociometry associated with the writings of the social psychologist Leon
Festinger (1949). The concept of influence that is enacted is of a particular kind;
it enacts a particular ontology of the network which stages connections and links
based on status, prestige, hierarchy and canonization, rather than popularity per
se. This will become apparent in this chapter, when we explore the relationship
between Google PageRank, and what will come to the reader’s attention if they
search for the ‘John Bargh priming controversy’.
  As Betty Bayer (2008), the feminist psychologist has argued, Festinger (1957)
was committed to securing the idea of a rational psyche to matters of subjectivity.
He was interested in contagion, and groups, processes and practices – such as
religious sects, cults and prophecies – whose beliefs spread rapidly in ways that
were difficult to understand. Despite these interests he nevertheless produced
a rational theory of cognitive dissonance to explain such phenomena. We will
return later in the chapter to the issue of contagion, as this has also found its
way into discussions of social media (also see Knudsen and Stage, 2012). The
fascination with networked virality or networked affect (see Sampson, 2012;
Hillis, Passonen and Petit, 2015) – the capacity for particular communication
forms to spread and circulate with a speed and rapidity – is an issue that puzzles
contemporary researchers and practitioners. What spreads through social
networks, how and why? These questions are the subject of new business and
advertising models, which attempt to harness virality to produce maximum profit
and attention. What is clear from Rieder’s (2012) and Bayer’s (2008) genealogical
approach to psychology is that the psychological models of sociality instated and
performed by algorithms are often limited and constraining, removing wonder
 Notes 193

from the world. As she asks, one ‘wonders instead what social psychology and
psychology more broadly traded off historically in its accounts of the world
and psychological life’ (2008: 163). These accounts have found their way into
the forms of sociality that are made possible within and across social media
platforms, although they may of course not exhaust its potential.
8 (see Blackman, 2015 and 2016a).
9 Also see the important work of Grace Cho (2008) and her concept of ‘diasporic
vision’, which is a distributed, mediated form of perception, which requires many
eyes and ears, human and non-human.
10 Although a lot of discussion of data is framed in relation to the concept of ‘big
data’, the data that form the subject of this book are small in comparison. As
boyd and Crawford (2012: 663) argue, big data is a rather poor term, which ‘is
less about data that is big than it is about a capacity to search, aggregate, and
cross-reference large data sets’. The data that I will re-animate in this book
are not searchable in the way that data shaped by specific API’s (Application
programme interfaces) might be, notwithstanding the problem of the reliability
and validity of big data samples and data sets. As boyd and Crawford (2012)
have convincingly argued, Twitter data, for example, might be relatively easy
to ‘scrape’ using particular software tools, but this does not mean the data are
representative. As they argue, big data are not always better data, although this
does underpin some of the claims that are being made for data-driven analytics.
The data in this book might be considered by some to be ‘small data’ (2012: 670)
and therefore overlooked in the rush to scrape and visualize big data sets derived
from platform API’s such as Twitter or Facebook.
11 http:​//blo​gs.di​scove​rmaga​zine.​com/n​otroc​ketsc​ience​/2012​/03/1​0/fai​led-r​eplic​
ation​-barg​h-psy​cholo​gy-st​udy-d​oyen/​
12 By Neuroskeptic | 2 November 2012 11:54 am ‘John Bargh’s Transient and
Ephemeral Blogs’. http:​//blo​gs.di​scove​rmaga​zine.​com/n​otroc​ketsc​ience​/2012​
/03/1​0/fai​led-r​eplic​ation​-barg​h-psy​cholo​gy-st​udy-d​oyen/​Also see https​://tw​itter​
.com/​psych​scien​tists​/stat​us/39​41725​05168​31436​9?lan​g=en
13 https​://ha​rdsci​.word​press​.com/​2012/​03/12​/some​-refl​ectio​ns-on​-the-​bargh​-doye​
n-eld​erly-​walki​ng-pr​iming​-brou​haha/​
14 http:​//www​.redd​it.co​m/r/p​sycho​logy/​comme​nts/q​xspe/​faile​d_rep​licat​ion_o​f_fam​
ous_e​lderl​yprim​ing_w​alk/ Reddit is described on Wikipedia as an online bulletin
board, which is part social networking, part entertainment, part news and to that
extent is a good example of the remediated digital environments transforming
scientific debate and discussion. It is a good example of what Bolter and Grusin
194 Notes

(2000) term the ‘genealogy of affiliations’ between so-called old and new media.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
15 One of the paradoxes recognized by many theorists, is that Twitter, for example,
is both ‘individualistic and communal’ (Murthy, 2013: 151). There is a tension
between tweets, for example, which are essentially forms of self-promotion, and
those which become an ‘event’, that is those that gain a reach and traction, and
get taken up by broadcast media or that bring people to the street, for example.
As Murthy argues, although social media is often considered a revolutionary
medium, it should be considered alongside the role different forms of media have
played in social change, protest and activism. Anabelle Srebeny-Mohammedi
(1994) has talked about ‘small media’, such as cassette tapes, Xeroxes, tape
recorders and telephones that allowed the spread and circulation of the Ayatolla’s
words of revolutionary inspiration from France to Iran during the 1978–9 Iranian
Revolution. This happened across time and space as the messages spread while he
was under exile in France.
  Similarly, we might consider the role that video technology and art installations
and practices (such as the Quilt project) played in activist movements, such
as ActUp in the United States and Europe during the 1990s. ActUP mediated
protests, which took the private anguish of dying individuals (from HIV and
Aids) onto the streets, to the broadcast media and into people’s homes, and to the
Bush administration and the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Different
forms of media, including DIY video technology of the time, were used to mediate
collective action against governments and pharmaceutical companies. The
alternative media of the time and its circulation within particular networks acts as
an interesting precursor to YouTube (and the uploading of documentaries, video-
diaries, etc.). These media carried feeling, passion, imagination, longing, anguish
and hope, as well as being embedded and circulating within social networks,
which were performatively linked, creating a new entity, the PwA (person with
Aids). This entity blurred the personal and political in effective ways, and was
staged via forms of direct action. These strategies memorialized the genocide,
which occurred among the many, mainly gay communities during that time.
  The alternative media produced were often passed to the broadcast media
and journalists gaining more mainstream media attention and public sympathy
towards the plight. Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman have brought together
some of these archives in a moving documentary, United in Anger: A History of
ActUp (2012), and Schulman (2012) has written an important critical memoir of
this period and her own memories and experiences in the book, Gentrification
of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. These genealogies suggest something
 Notes 195

important about the collective amnesia that occurs when social media is always
considered distinctly ‘new’. They also open up different questions about the
nature of change and transformation, which bring the politics into feeling, and
show how the evolution of science is not purified from the networks of publics
and communities linked by broadcast and alternative media. These potentially
bring new entities, objects and practices into being.
  These remarks also take us back to the concerns of crowd psychology and to
the important writings of the crowd psychologist Serge Moscovici (1985). He
argued that fascism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries appealed to a
feeling body, recognizing that appeals to reason and rationality, didactic command
and instruction and staged forms of persuasion would often miss the mark and
make followers more resistant to change and transformation. As Moscovici (1985:
104) proclaims, ‘The age of the crowd was the age of the imagination, and he
who rules there rules by imagination.’ Similarly, Stuart Hall (1988), the important
black cultural studies theorist, recognized that Thatcherism in the United
Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s appealed to particular fantasies, which have
become embedded as social truths and social goods. Thus Thatcherism’s vision
extends well beyond Thatcher and even the Conservative governments of then
and now in the United Kingdom. He supplemented his approach to mediation
with psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and desire in order to draw attention to
the complexity of processes of self and social change. We would be wise therefore
to situate the potentially affective dimensions of social media within the context
of these long histories of mediation, fantasy, public imagination and protest. As
Murthy (2013: 102) suggests, ‘Even Martin Luther King generally needed more
than 140 characters to capture people’s hearts!’
16 With its title nod to Sandra Bernhard, the American lesbian comedian whose
stage show of the same name parodied the rumour about her own affair with
Madonna in the 1990s.
17 See (Blackman 2014a and b, 2015, 2016a).
18 https​://do​cs.go​ogle.​com/d​ocume​nt/d/​1wuu8​URArg​ZusJE​LXF5j​4xpM2​6ESkF​
fOveY​oGKBf​0CHo/​edit?​pli=1​The original blog entry was posted on Psychology
Today on 23 March 2012, later removed. It has been replaced with this post https​
://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/the​-natu​ral-u​ncons​cious​/2012​03/no​thing​-in-t​
heir-​heads​
19 Interested readers can follow the influence of Libetism across affect studies in my
article, published in the journal, Subjectivity, ‘Affect and Automaticity: Towards
an Analytics of Experimentation’ http:​//www​.palg​rave-​journ​als.c​om/su​b/jou​rnal/​
v7/n4​/pdf/​sub20​1419a​.pdf
196 Notes

20 https​://tw​itter​.com/​psych​scien​tists​/stat​us/39​41725​05168​31436​9?lan​g=en https​://
mu​ckrac​k.com​/link​/YByP​/angr​y-bir​ds-ps​ychol​ogy-t​oday
21 DOI 10 April 2018.
22 Despret (2015) uses the term dispositive to refer to the specificity of different
practices of experimentation, including their philosophies of experimentation
and assumptions about mind and matter, that bring particular entities, objects
and processes into being.
23 http.​//blo​gs.ws​j.com​/idea​s-mar​ket/2​012/0​3/12/​failu​re-to​-repl​icate​-famo​us-st​
udy-c​auses​-furo​re/?m​od=go​ogle_​news_​blog
24 http.​//www​.live​scien​ce.co​m/272​62/ps​ychol​ogy-s​tudie​s-que​stion​ed.ht​ml
25 https​://di​gest.​bps.o​rg.uk​/2014​/09/1​9/the​-10-m​ost-c​ontro​versi​al-ps​ychol​ogy-s​
tudie​s-eve​r-pub​lishe​d/
26 http:​//and​rewge​lman.​com/2​016/0​2/12/​primi​ng-ef​fects​-repl​icate​-just​-fine​-than​
ks/ht​tp://​andre​wgelm​an.co​m/201​6/09/​22/wh​y-is-​the-s​cient​ific-​repli​catio​n-cri​
sis-c​enter​ed-on​-psyc​holog​y/htt​p://w​ww.sl​ate.c​om/ar​ticle​s/hea​lth_a​nd_sc​ience​/
scie​nce/2​016/1​0/why​_the_​repli​catio​n_cri​sis_s​eems_​worse​_in_p​sycho​logy.​htmlh​
ttp:/​/disc​overm​agazi​ne.co​m/201​6/sep​t/2-t​he-re​plica​tion-​crisi​shttp​://os​c.cen​terfo​
ropen​scien​ce.or​g/201​4/03/​12/pr​eviou​s-epi​sodes​/http​://ww​w.sci​encem​ag.or​g/car​
eers/​2015/​01/sc​ienti​sts-u​nder-​micro​scope​
27 As a blog on the Wall Street Journal has argued, the basis of Bargh’s attack does
not stand up to scrutiny. As they suggest, ‘Bargh called PLoS ONE a “for-profit”
operation that disdains peer review and whose articles should be viewed as
“essentially self-published”. He suggested that anyone with $1,350 can get his
or her article published. In fact, as the publisher of PLoS ONE wrote in the
comments section, the online journal is peer reviewed, non-profit, rejects 31%
of articles submitted – and the fee structure resembles that of other open-
access journals. Fees, which are waived when necessary, help substitute for the
high subscription fees that it does not charge. You might raise eyebrows at the
article-acceptance rate of 69%, but much of Bargh’s claims about PLoS ONE
seemed to evaporate on inspection.’ See http.​//blo​gs.ws​j.com​/idea​s-mar​ket/2​
012/0​3/12/​failu​re-to​-repl​icate​-famo​us-st​udy-c​auses​-furo​re/?m​od=go​ogle_​
news_​blog
28 One can start to piece together the response from long quotations from Bargh’s
original response reproduced on related blogs. The following extract was posted
on The Situationist, a blog that is attached to The Harvard Law School. The link
to Bargh’s original post that this reproduces is now lost. The reader is again taken
to Psychology Today and met with the automated response, Page Not Found.
 Notes 197

29 See Blackman (2014, 2015, 2016).

30 Interested readers can follow a storify of this Twitter conversation by Cedar
Rieners on his blog, http:​//rie​ner.u​s/WP/​uncat​egori​zed/p​ut-yo​ur-he​ad-up​-to-t​
he-me​ta-a-​peer-​revie​ws-po​st-po​st-pu​blica​tion-​peer-​revie​w-a-b​argh-​f ull-​of-li​
nks/
31 26 May 2017.
32 For an extended discussion of this redemption narrative and the work it
performs, the reader is directed to my article: Blackman (2016).
33 http:​//rie​ner.u​s/WP/​uncat​egori​zed/p​ut-yo​ur-he​ad-up​-to-t​he-me​ta-a-​peer-​revie​
ws-po​st-po​st-pu​blica​tion-​peer-​revie​w-a-b​argh-​full-​of-li​nks/.​
34 https​://ce​darsd​igest​.word​press​.com/​2012/​03/21​/put-​your-​head-​up-to​-the-​meta-​
a-pee​r-rev​iews-​post-​post-​publi​catio​n-pee​r-rev​iew-a​-barg​h-ful​l-of-​links​/

Chapter 3

1 (See Curran, Fenton and Freedman, 2012). In an overview of these theories,

Couldry and Hepp (2013) have argued that this triumvirate model never really
stood up to scrutiny. It is even less convincing now media are considered
dispersed, pervasive, ubiquitous, embedded, embodied and part and parcel of the
texture of experience (also see Deuze, 2012).
2 See the important work of the late queer theorist Jose Munoz (2009) and feminist
scholars such as Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Heather Love (2007).
3 See Despret (2004a) for a good description of the experiments and their retelling
of the Clever Hans effect. In later work Despret (2015) has reopened the case of
‘Clever Hans’ and explored what was discarded, overlooked, missed and actively
disqualified and disavowed in Pfungt’s experiments. As she argues, ‘Pfungst’s
solution, despite its coherence and all the accumulated experimental evidence,
leaves here and there unexplained residues, peculiarities, details that do not settle
well with the whole and which suggest that there might be another investigation’
(p. 78).
4 The Elberfeld horses were horses owned by Herr Krall, an Elberfeld
manufacture who had been enthralled by Hans and von Osten’s feat and who
continued this tradition and his own interest in psychic animals training his
horses, including Hans to undertake marvellous feats. Following von Osten’s
fall into disrepute he sold Hans to Herr Krall, who continued nurturing Han’s
equine celebrities and prodigious talents, where Hans lived on with two other
198 Notes

horses, known collectively as the Elberfeld horses. If readers want to read

a fascinating account of the Elberfeld horses they are directed to an online
book by Maurice Maeterlinck, The Unknown Guests, and particularly
Chapter IV, The Elberfeld horses http:​//www​.lear​nlibr​ary.c​om/un​known​-gues​
t/ind​ex.ht​m This book also contains a chapter, The Knowledge of the
Future (chapter III), which discusses precognition, the subject of Chapters 4,
5 and 6.
5 Also see the contemporary writing of the controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake
(1999) and particularly his book, Dogs who Know when their Owners are Coming
Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.
6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vf36p This episode of the BBC Radio 4
All in the Mind series was broadcast on Tuesday, 23 December 2014, as part of
an episode called, ‘Hypnoticism; Automatic Writing, Magic and Memory’.
7 http:​//www​.biol​ogy-o​nline​.org/​dicti​onary​/Bioc​oenos​is
8 In this article he considers what it means to become a nose within the perfume
industry when human and technical are not consider separate, pre-existing
entities.
9 The following blog identifies some interesting issues with foregrounding
the body’s capacity to affect and be affected through the concepts of device,
activation, test etc. The author suggests that this language is instrumental despite
the aim to go beyond instrumental approaches to the body https​://bl​ogs.b​rown.​
edu/e​ngl-2​761k-​s01-f​all-2​016/2​016/1​0/13/​being​-with​being​-for-​instr​ument​ality​
-and-​embod​ied-e​xperi​ments​/
10 http:​//www​.scoo​p.it/​t/epo​nastr​ibe/?​tag=%​23hor​sewhi​sper+​%23cl​everh​an+%2​
3smar​tequi​nes the link to this issue is now broken DOI 26 May 2017.
11 Also see a fascinating book by Nosworthy (2013).
12 https​://en​.wiki​pedia​.org/​wiki/​Bioco​enosi​s
13 Despret’s (2015) reopening of the case cogently shows how productive the
anomalies and residual traces of other explanations might be. As she argues,
what is left are critical questions about ‘a dual intelligence, involving bodies,
attentions to the other, desires and wills, consciousness capable of splitting, of
being relocated, edges of consciousness that bring about effective actions’ (p. 83).
She suggests that Pfungst is closer to these traces when he operates more as an
ethologist, rather than psychologist, showing that he was working at a critical
juncture in the history of psychology where the subject of psychology had not
been stabilized.
 Notes 199

Part 2

1 Particularly for those who have identified with left politics or are part of queer,
critical race, de-colonial, feminist or disability activism and movements, for
example.
2 Read more: http:​//www​.opra​h.com​/worl​d/Fut​urist​-Davi​d-Hou​le-In​vesti​gates​-the-​
Futur​e-of-​Shopp​ing#i​xzz2r​n2s6i​Ko
3 Also see the writing of Zylinska (2014), http:​//quo​d.lib​.umic​h.edu​/cgi/​p/pod​
/dod-​idx/m​inima​l-eth​ics-f​or-th​e-ant​hropo​cene.​pdf?c​=ohp;​idno=​12917​741.0​
001.0​01
4 See Seigworth and Tiessen’s (2012) analysis of the mythology of financial
liquidity, what they also call the ‘illusion of liquidity’ (p. 64) and its future
orientation and colonization of possible futures. As they go on to argue, ‘The
liquidity crisis is only one expression drawn from out of a whole web of credit
driven colonizations that mortgage the future to fund today’s human and more-
than-human desires’ (p. 68).
5 H. G. Wells is often cited as one of the founding figures of Future studies, for
example. He is considered a notable seer whose fiction imaginatively staged
possible futures and potentially predictive scenarios, which anticipated
futures-yet-to-come. As a journalist, popularizer and novelist Wells blurred
fact and fiction in his own writing, publishing novels and short serialized
stories of possible futures, which held wide appeal. Within the context of
future studies, his volume, Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and
Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, (1902) is often staged as
a key moment and cornerstone in the development of Future Studies as a
modern discipline.
6 Cited 670 times at the time of writing on 10 April 2018.

Chapter 4

1 http:​//red​ux.sl​ate.c​om/co​ver-s​torie​s/201​7/05/​daryl​-bem-​prove​d-esp​-is-r​eal-s​
howed​-scie​nce-i​s-bro​ken.h​tml
2 http:​//tan​clab.​org/f​eelin​g-the​-futu​re-of​-bems​-find​ings/​
3 http:​//www​.tech​centr​al.ie​/ibm-​watso​n-goe​s-pre​cogni​tive/​
4 http:​//www​.data​nami.​com/2​015/0​4/24/​ai-de​velop​er-to​uts-a​rtifi​cial-​preco​gniti​on/
200 Notes

5 http:​//rat​ional​wiki.​org/w​iki/F​eelin​g_the​_Futu​rehtt​p://t​ancla​b.org​/feel​ing-t​he-fu​
ture-​of-be​ms-fi​nding​s/
6 (http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
7 http:​//psy​chsci​encen​otes.​blogs​pot.c​o.uk/​2010/​11/br​ief-n​ote-d​aryl-​bem-a​nd-pr​
ecogn​ition​.html​
8 http:​//blo​g.pra​ctica​lethi​cs.ox​.ac.u​k/201​0/11/​again​st-op​en-mi​ndedn​ess/
9 Some readers may be able to access the clip from the show by following this link:
http:​//www​.cc.c​om/vi​deo-c​lips/​bhf8j​v/the​-colb​ert-r​eport​-time​-trav​eling​-porn​
---da​ryl-b​em
10 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1930067/
11 http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/com​ment/​colum​nists​/bryo​nygor​don/8​14795​3/Fra​
nkly-​the-f​uture​-is-a​ll-to​o-pre​dicta​ble.h​tml
12 http:​//www​.dail​ymail​.co.u​k/sci​encet​ech/a​rticl​e-133​0596/​Human​s-psy​chic-​power​
s-New​-stud​y-pro​ves-f​uture​.html​#comm​ents
13 http:​//www​.huff​ingto​npost​.com/​cassa​ndra-​viete​n/esp​-evid​ence_​b_795​366.h​tml
14 http:​//www​.daze​ddigi​tal.c​om/ar​tsand​cultu​re/ar​ticle​/1689​3/1/c​an-we​-see-​into-​
the-f​uture​
15 noetic.org/​sites​/defa​ult/f​iles/​uploa​ds/fi​les/P​K_BuzzonBem.doc
16 see http://curatescience.org
17 see Sandra Bem’s (1998) autobiography An Unconventional Family for an account
of their life together, including their commitment to ‘egalitarian partnering’ and
‘feminist child-rearing’ practices.
18 http:​//bef​oreit​snews​.com/​opini​on-co​nserv​ative​/2011​/04/t​he-to​p-5-m​ad-sc​ienti​
sts-i​n-the​-worl​d-567​089.h​tml
19 Dossey (2011), http:​//www​.alic​e.id.​tue.n​l/ref​erenc​es/do​ssey-​2011.​pdf (accessed
on 6 March 2015).
20 Despret (2015) uses the term dispostive to describe the a priori’s that shape
different experimental configurations. She argues that psychology as it
operates in experimental modes does not reveal pre-existing subjects, objects
or entities, but rather is a technology of transformation that produces what
is being looked for. In this case she argues that what is often dismissed in
psychology as an ‘experimental effect’ actually reveals something much
more interesting about the capacities of subjects to be affected and to affect
experimental apparatuses and what we might conclude from this effect.
The positivity of experimental apparatuses and their capacity to shape the
experimental scene often closes down on the potential of experimental
subjects to enter into more interesting relationships that are removed, buried,
 Notes 201

re-routed or disallowed. As Betty Bayer (2008) has argued psychology removes

wonder from the world often mechanizing experimental subjects and enacting
impoverished notions of ‘influence’ that foreclose other explanations, routes
and possibilities.
21 This referred to the apparent ordinariness of evil in the wake of the actions of
Adolf Eichmann during the Holocaust https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​
isfre​e/201​1/aug​/29/h​annah​-aren​dt-ad​olf-e​ichma​nn-ba​nalit​y-of-​evil
22 http:​//www​.natu​re.co​m/pol​opoly​_fs/7​.6716​.1349​27130​8!/su​ppinf​oFile​/Kahn​
eman%​20Let​ter.p​df
23 http:​//www​.skep​ticfo​rum.c​om/vi​ewtop​ic.ph​p?t=2​3315h​ttp:/​/jour​nals.​plos.​org/p​
loson​e/art​icle?​id=10​.1371​/jour​nal.p​one.0​03342​3http​://ta​nclab​.org/​feeli​ng-th​e-fut​
ure-o​f-bem​s-fin​dings​/

Chapter 5

1 http:​//www​.reed​.edu/​reed_​magaz​ine/j​une20​11/ar​ticle​s/fea​tures​/bem/​bem2.​html
2 This episode was screened in the United States on 27 January 2011. http:​//the​
colbe​rtrep​ort.c​c.com​/vide​os/bh​f8jv/​time-​trave​ling-​porn-​daryl​-bem
3 The main story emerging at the time of writing is that the controversy discloses
the importance of replication. The reader will find a link here to a more
submerged story about replication, which Bem says is being overshadowed by
the voices of particular sceptics who are more newsworthy. http:​//www​.dail​ygrai​
l.com​/Mind​-Myst​eries​/2014​/1/Is​-Prec​ognit​ion-R​eal-P​ositi​ve-Re​plica​tions​-Dary​
l-Bem​s-Con​trove​rsial​-Find​ings Also see http:​//www​.abov​etops​ecret​.com/​forum​/
thre​ad993​701/p​g
4 http:​//nym​ag.co​m/new​s/fea​tures​/esp-​instr​uctio​ns-20​11-3/​The ESP test is
made available to a general public in a New York Times article published on
27 February 2011 with the headline, ‘53.1% of You Already Know What This
Story’s About. Or Do You? Need a Hint?’ see http:​//nym​ag.co​m/new​s/fea​tures​/
bem-​esp-2​011-3​/
5 http:​//nym​ag.co​m/new​s/fea​tures​/esp-​instr​uctio​ns-20​11-3/​
6 http:​//rhi​neonl​ine.b​logsp​ot.co​.uk/2​011/0​2/dar​yl-be​m-pre​cogni​tion-​in-ma​instr​
eam.h​tml
7 http:​//dea​nradi​n.blo​gspot​.co.u​k/201​4/04/​feeli​ng-fu​ture-​meta-​analy​sis.h​tml
8 http:​//f10​00res​earch​.com/​artic​les/4​-1188​/v1 http:​//tan​clab.​org/f​eelin​g-the​-futu​
re-of​-bems​-find​ings/​ http:​//www​.dail​ygrai​l.com​/Mind​-Myst​eries​/2012​/8/No​t-Fee​
202 Notes

ling-​the-F​uture​-New-​Bem-R​eplic​ation​-Fail​s-Fin​d-Evi​dence​-Psi https​://we​ilerp​
siblo​g.wor​dpres​s.com​/2014​/05/0​5/the​-bem-​preco​gniti​on-me​ta-an​alysi​s-vs-​those​
-wack​y-ske​ptics​/ http:​//psy​chsci​encen​otes.​blogs​pot.c​o.uk/​2011/​05/fa​iling​-to-r​
eplic​ate-b​ems-a​bilit​y-to.​html http:​//www​.rich​ardwi​seman​.com/​BemRe​plica​tions​
.shtm​l
9 See Chapter 6, scene 3 for a curious form of non-local causality or time travel,
which queers the statement that there is a ‘half-second delay between anticipation
and reaction’ that has become associated with Libet’s formulation of reaction
time. As we will see, Libet drew from more quantum explanations of time-travel
and retrocausality that have been obscured by what has become black-boxed in
relation to these experiments – for example, the so-called half-second delay (in
cognitive science and affect studies, for example).
10 The four ‘known psychological effects’ that Bem reverses (what he terms
‘time-reversed effects’) in the nine experiments include precognitive approach
to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive
priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall (Bem,
2011: 1).
11 http:​//www​.fast​compa​ny.co​m/170​5108/​predi​cting​-futu​re-po​rn
12 http:​//men​talfl​oss.c​om/ar​ticle​/2701​4/pre​dicti​ng-fu​ture-​or-le​ast-p​redic​ting-​where​
-nake​d-peo​ple-a​re
13 http:​//www​.scie​ntifi​camer​ican.​com/a​rticl​e/ext​rasen​sory-​pornc​eptio​n/
14 www.skeptic.com
15 http:​//nym​ag.co​m/new​s/fea​tures​/bem-​esp-2​011-3​/inde​x1.ht​ml
16 http:​//www​.scie​ntifi​camer​ican.​com/a​rticl​e/ext​rasen​sory-​pornc​eptio​n/
17 See Ian Hacking’s (1990) book, The Taming of Chance, for a genealogy of statistics
and probabilistic thinking.
18 See http:​//pol​itica​ltick​er.bl​ogs.c​nn.co​m/201​0/04/​23/se​c-sta​ffers​-watc​hed-p​orn-a​
s-eco​nomy-​crash​ed/
19 This extends theories of ‘cultural invitation’, which I argued in Chapter
3 are overly cognitivist, relating perception to theories of mind and ‘folk
psychology’, rather than taking a more ecological approach to affect,
perception, sensation, etc.
20 At the time of writing the keyword ‘porn’ on a Google browser brought up
140,000,000 results.
21 Bem had a reason for selecting porn: He figured that if people did have ESP,
then it would have to be an adaptive trait – a sixth sense that developed over
millions of years of evolution. If our sixth sense really had such ancient origins,
 Notes 203

he guessed it would likely be attuned to our most ancient needs and drives.
In keeping with this theory, he set up the experiment so that a subset of the
hidden images would be arousing to the students. Would the premonition of a
pornographic image encourage them to look behind the correct curtain?’ http:​
//red​ux.sl​ate.c​om/co​ver-s​torie​s/201​7/05/​daryl​-bem-​prove​d-esp​-is-r​eal-s​howed​
-scie​nce-i​s-bro​ken.h​tml
22 At the time of writing there is an interesting discussion about the link between
porn and the kinds of porn watched on handheld mobile devices. This is linked
to a male-identified teenager’s (over) use of Viagra to remedy what are considered
new forms of sexual psychopathology. These primarily register within the
language of addiction. See http:​//www​.mirr​or.co​.uk/n​ews/u​k-new​s/bri​tains​-youn​
gest-​viagr​a-add​ict-a​ged-8​62670​7

Chapter 6

1 http:​//www​.ejwa​genma​kers.​com/2​012/W​agenm​akers​2012H​orror​s.pdf​
2 http://www.ejwagenmakers.com/
3 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the- natur​al-un​consc​ious/​20120​3/not​
hing-​in-th​eir- heads
4 This is an important argument made by Mark Hansen in his book Feedforward;
he argues that consciousness is a function of hosting and that literally
consciousness is ‘in the machine’ when understood as elemental. Hansen
borrows the term ‘elemental’ from Galloway and Thacker (2007) to describe the
networked function of twenty-first-century media. Galloway and Thacker use
the term to describe all those processes that operate above and below the human
subject and that we do not directly control or manipulate. This account takes us
beyond either technological determinism or media-use to explore the entangled
body-world-consciousness relations that twenty-first-century media amplify
and make visible. These arguments will be revisited later in this scene when we
encounter quantum physics and quantum biological accounts of consciousness as
they are re-moved by this controversy.
5 Aggregation is also an interesting concept to ‘think with’ when considering
Derrida’s (1984) arguments regarding grammatology and its differences from
semiology. Vicki Kirby (2011) provides a thought-provoking elucidation of
these differences in the context of her seminal book, Quantum Anthropologies:
Life at Large. As she argues, ‘Whereas semiology envisaged an aggregation or
204 Notes

assemblage of different systems that would somehow communicate with each

other across the distance that identified them as separate, grammatology regards
these different “entities” as articulations of the system’ (p. 7).
6 http:​//www​.thef​reedi​ction​ary.c​om/co​unter​factu​al
7 http:​//www​.forg​otten​books​.com/​readb​ook_t​ext/J​ourna​l_of_​the_S​ociet​y_for​
_Psyc​hical​_Rese​arch_​1887_​10006​94001​/41
8 The reader might find the following summary of the significance of Bem’s
Feeling the Future experiments in an article written by Daniel Engber, with the
provocative headline, ‘Daryl Bem Proved ESP is real: Which Means Science
is Broken’. This article was written in May 2017 and draws attention to one
argument made about Bem’s studies. If he was showing us that it is possible to
prove statistically that precognition exists, what does this suggest about the truth
or validity of broader psychological studies. In other words if Bem could prove
the existence of ESP using the scientific method then did it not also suggest
that you could find almost anything using the method? As the author suggests,
‘Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions – that
ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of
what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d
be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of
psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field –
and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind – could be total
bunk.’ http:​//red​ux.sl​ate.c​om/co​ver-s​torie​s/201​7/05/​daryl​-bem-​prove​d-esp​-is-r​
eal-s​howed​-scie​nce-i​s-bro​ken.h​tml
9 https​://th​epsyc​holog​ist.b​ps.or​g.uk/​volum​e-25/​editi​on-5/​repli​catio​n-rep​licat​ion-r​
eplic​ation​In this edition of The Psychologist, Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman
and Chris French (all sceptics and anomalistic/cognitive scientists) argue that
replication is the key issue, which emerges from both the John Bargh priming
controversy (see Chapters 2 and 3) and the Feeling the Future controversy. As
they argue, ‘The wide-ranging discussion of Bem’s paper has raised questions
regarding the limits of science, our current statistical paradigm, the policies of
academic journal publishing, and what exactly a scientist needs to do to convince
the world that a surprising finding is true. In this article we outline the “Feeling
the future” controversy, our part in it, and highlight these important questions
about scientific psychology.’ Also see their article, Ritchie, Wiseman and French
(2012)
10 http://www.reddit.com/search?q=Daryl+Bem discussion portal in relation to
Feeling the Future http:​//osc​.cent​erfor​opens​cienc​e.org​/2014​/06/2​5/a-s​kepti​
 Notes 205

cs-re​view/​\http​://cr​istia​nnegu​reanu​.blog​spot.​co.uk​/2010​/11/p​roof-​of-ex​tra-d​
imens​ions-​possi​ble-n​ext.h​tmlht​tp://​www.t​elegr​aph.c​o.uk/​news/​scien​ce/sc​ience​
-news​/8244​419/E​xtras​ensor​y-per​cepti​on-pa​per-p​ublis​hed-i​n-res​pecte​d-jou​
rnal.​htmlh​ttp:/​/www.​skept​icfor​um.co​m/vie​wtopi​c.php​?f=7&​amp;t​=2331​5http​
://fu​turea​ndcos​mos.b​logsp​ot.co​.uk/2​014/0​4/fee​ling-​futur​e-stu​dy-re​plica​ted-a​
s.htm​lhttp​://ww​w.csi​cop.o​rg/sp​ecial​artic​les/s​how/r​espon​se_to​_alco​cks_b​ack_f​
rom_t​he_fu​ture_​comme​nts_o​n_bem​http:​//www​.alic​e.id.​tue.n​l/ref​erenc​es/do​
ssey-​2011.​pdf
11 http:​//dan​iella​kens.​blogs​pot.c​o.uk/​2014/​05/a-​pre-p​ublic​ation​-peer​-revi​ew-of​
-meta​.html​
12 https​://ko​estle​runit​.word​press​.com/​study​-regi​stry/​regis​tered​-stud​ies/
13 http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1055
14 See Chapter 1 and my discussion of embodied hauntology.
15 http:​//neu​rocri​tic.b​logsp​ot.co​.uk/2​012/0​3/how​-much​-of-n​euroi​magin​g-lit​eratu​
re.ht​ml http:​//www​.dani​elbor​.com/​dilem​ma-we​ak-ne​uroim​aging​/
16 http:​//www​.alic​e.id.​tue.n​l/ref​erenc​es/do​ssey-​2011.​pdf
17 http:​//www​.alic​e.id.​tue.n​l/ref​erenc​es/do​ssey-​2011.​pdf Dossey (2011) (quotation
from p. 127).
18 This was also a key focus of my book Immaterial Bodies.
19 As Barad herself has cautioned, sociology should not be reduced to biology and
people should not be reduced to atoms. I take seriously Barad’s lesser repeated
statement and caution that people are not particles and that drawing such
analogies is not her business (24). See Blackman, 2014 http:​//www​.tran​sform​
ation​sjour​nal.o​rg/is​sues/​25/01​.shtm​l
20 http:​//www​.pbs.​org/w​gbh/n​ova/n​ext/p​hysic​s/ret​rocau​salit​y-cou​ld-se​nd-in​forma​
tion-​back-​to-th​e-fut​ure/
21 http:​//lin​k.spr​inger​.com/​searc​h?que​ry=Lo​ving+​the+A​lien+​Lisa+​Black​man
22 http:​//weg​ner.s​ocial​psych​ology​.org/​publi​catio​ns
23 http://psiresearch.org/tsirelson/
24 http:​//med​iumof​expre​ssion​.blog​spot.​co.uk​/2013​/08/d​ispel​ling-​quant​um-sp​ooks-​
clue-​that.​html
25 A major purpose of this meeting was to enable interaction and conversations
between the two groups, but this was only partially successful. Unfortunately,
another symposium of interest to physicists was also taking place on the
second day, and some of the best talks about psi phenomena were missed by
the physicists for whom they would have been most pertinent. Still, there were
many useful discussions both inside and outside the seminar room, and the
206 Notes

organizers (Sheehan primarily) should be commended for creating another

fascinating, productive, and perhaps even historic meeting. (see http:​//med​
iumof​expre​ssion​.blog​spot.​co.uk​/2013​/08/d​ispel​ling-​quant​um-sp​ooks-​clue-​that.​
html)​
26 http:​//tan​clab.​org/f​eelin​g-the​-futu​re-of​-bems​-find​ings/​
27 See an article in The New Scientist debating quantum time-travel, with the
headline, ‘Quantum Time-Travel: Black Hole not needed’. https​://ww​w.new​scien​
tist.​com/a​rticl​e/mg2​08278​71.40​0-qua​ntum-​time-​trave​l-bla​ck-ho​le-no​t-req​uired​
/?ful​l=tru​e
28 This was a comment left on a blog of the psychologist Richard Wiseman,
written on 10 November 2012, with the title ‘Bem’s ESP research: Quirky
stuff ’. The comment was left by the user Anaglyph on 10 November 2010 at
4.17pm. In a previous comment left on 19 November 2010 at 6.21pm, the same
user argues that ‘the thing that bugs me most about this whole affair is how
readily it gets equated with “quantum” effects. It seems to me that many people
think:“Quantum = weird These results = weird Quantum = real, therefore,
These results are quite possibly genuine.”’ It is of course bereft of logic, but
numerous commenters raise this idea, and many of the sites that carried
the New Scientist article were champing at the bit to point it out. The
association between these results and anything to do with quantum physics is a
conjecture entirely separate from the experiment at hand. The word ‘quantum’
associated with some kind of paranormal event is inevitably a red flag in my
experience’.
29 http:​//jac​quele​ne-dr​inkal​l.squ​aresp​ace.c​om/jo​urnal​-of-i​ntegr​al-te​lepat​hies/​2015/​
7/15/​2q5bb​3nwt4​zn4ud​8ccey​loeu3​0s6kr​
30 This also includes Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that telepathy is the future of
communication http:​//www​.itpr​o.co.​uk/st​rateg​y/249​08/zu​ckerb​erg-s​ays-t​elepa​
thy-i​s-the​-futu​re-of​-comm​unica​tion
31 This is a reference to Nick Couldry’s (2014) arguments about big data.
32 https​://ww​w.psy​cholo​gytod​ay.co​m/blo​g/one​-amon​g-man​y/201​202/b​em-in​-quan​
tum-s​pace
33 http:​//www​.skep​tiko.​com/d​aryl-​bem-r​espon​ds-to​-para​psych​ology​-
debu​nkers​/
34 http:​//reg​olish​.blog​spot.​co.uk​/2012​/06/t​itani​c-eff​ect-o​f-ret​rocau​salit​y.htm​l
35 http:​//www​.bibl​iotec​apley​ades.​net/s​ociop​oliti​ca/so​ciopo​l_bla​ckpro​ject0​2.htm​
36 http:​//new​sflav​or.co​m/wor​ld/as​ia/sw​iss-w​atch-​found​-in-4​00-ye​ar-ol​d-tom​b/
 Notes 207

37 http:​//www​.bibl​iotec​apley​ades.​net/c​ienci​a/tim​e_tra​vel/e​sp_ci​encia​_time​trave​l42.
h​tm
38 See http://www.wired.com/2012/01/obama-mars/ an article which explores
claims that President Barack Obama was part of a secret CIA intergalactic project
in the 1980s where he was teleported to Mars!
39 We encountered this assumption of a half-second delay earlier as it appears across
affect theories and also in assumptions that priming is linked to the modulation
of the supposed delay between stimulus and response.
40 Quantum-delayed choice experiments are those which extend forced choice
designs (yes or no) into the realm of the nonlinear. Examples of these will be
outlined later in the chapter.
41 ‘Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion, which he calls
an actual occasion. For Whitehead, an actual occasion (or actual entity) is not
an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Whitehead puts it, actual
occasions are the “final real things of which the world is made up”, they are “drops
of experience, complex and interdependent”’ (1929c, Pt 1, Ch. 2, sec. 1, p. 27). See
https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/ent​ries/​white​head/​
42 https​://la​rvals​ubjec​ts.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m/201​0/08/​02/ha​rman-​respo​nds-t​o-sha​viro/​
43 Also see a special issue of the journal SubStance devoted to the work of Isabelle
Stengers (Savransky, 2018) https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38165

Chapter 7

1 Clough et al. frame big data as the ‘performative celebration of capital’s queer
captures and modulations’. The queerness of such queer capture and modulation
is aligned in the reach of big data beyond number to the incalculable. This book
engages in a different form of ‘queer capture’ and modulation, which attends to
those ‘queer aggregations’ which are present in a corpus of data associated with
post-publication-peer-review, but which are discarded from attempts to ‘storify’
or modulate the data within specific algorithmic and computational practices,
including the Google PageRank algorithm, for example.
2 An example of what Chow is pointing towards can be found in the political
efficacy of mobile phone footage associated with the #blacklivesmatter circulated
across social media of black men being killed by white police officers in the
United States.
208 Notes

3 See Patricia Clough’s (2015) description of Kathleen Stewart’s writing as

compositional.
4 http:​//www​.bfi.​org.u​k/new​s/rev​iew-j​ohn-a​komfr​ah-s-​haunt​ologi​es
5 The Stuart Hall Project http:​//www​.bfi.​org.u​k/new​s-opi​nion/​news-​bfi/i​nterv​iews/​
stuar​t-hal​l-pro​ject-​john-​akomf​rah-i​nterv​iew
6 http://www.ghosthostings.co.uk
7 http:​//arc​hives​.carr​e.pag​esper​so-or​ange.​fr/Du​champ​%20Ma​rcel.​html
8 www.stasis73.com
9 I am part of a Wellcome-funded interdisciplinary collaborative project
called ‘Hearing the Voice’, which is bringing together cognitive scientists,
philosophers, cultural theorists, artists, professionals and voice hearers. See http://
hearingthevoice.org/ Also see https​://ww​w.mad​iname​rica.​com/2​016/0​9/soc​iolog​
ist-o​ffers​-new-​persp​ectiv​e-on-​voice​-hear​ing/
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 Index
affect  vii, viii, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi,
xvii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 3–4, 6–12,
15–17, 20, 23–4, 28, 30, 32–3, 36–7,
40, 42, 51–3, 62, 65–6, 70, 72, 75–7,
79, 85, 89, 91, 94, 96, 103, 105,
110–11, 113–14, 116–22, 135–6,
143, 149, 155–7, 160, 162, 164, 166,
171–3, 177–80, 183–8, 191, 195–6,
198, 201–3
affect studies  51, 130, 135, 149, 155, 157,
162, 166, 174–5, 183, 191, 196, 202,
207. See also half-second delay;
networked affect
aggregation  55–6, 126–7, 150, 204
Ahmed, Sara  xiv, 15, 72, 85, 171, 188–9
algorithms  xx, 9, 31, 33, 49, 56, 81, 85,
114–15, 119, 161, 193
alien phenomenologies  vi–viii, 4, 30,
146, 164
archives of the future  xviii, 17, 25, 27,
32, 49, 67, 134, 143, 150, 166, 176
artificial intelligence  150. See also
machine-learning
automaticity  vi–vii, 21, 30, 32, 44, 65, 71,
111, 145, 146, 184, 196
Barad, Karen  xii, xvi, 3, 18, 23–4, 39–40,
90, 129, 135, 138–42, 144–7, 150,
152–4, 159–60, 175, 188, 205
Berlant, Lauren  14, 15, 141, 187
big data  xix, xx, xxi, 90, 104, 119–20,
126, 187, 193, 206–7
biohumanities  xv, xviii, xxiv, 17, 65–6,
91, 105, 135, 142, 160
Butler, Judith  14, 72, 85, 139, 140–2,
153, 186
Chow, Rey  21–3, 77, 104, 168–70, 208
Clever Hans  xiii, 28, 34–5, 42, 52–3, 58,
60–2, 66, 68–71, 76, 128, 198.
See also Hans the Horse
conspiracy theories  123, 151
contagion  vii, ix, x, xxi, 11, 29, 51, 66,
88, 103, 111, 113, 114, 120, 164,
184, 185, 192. See also suggestion
counterfactual  123, 126, 131, 145, 162,
177, 180
cultural invitation  65–6, 203
Despret, Vinciane  xii, xiii, 16–18, 46,
52, 66–7, 69–74, 76, 87, 98, 99, 117,
144, 175, 187, 196, 198–9, 201
dispositive  44, 46, 76, 116, 196
experimental device  98
extra-sensory perception  vi, 94
futurology  79, 82–3
Gordon, Avery  16, 20, 170–2, 191
governmentality  12, 189. See also
psychological governance;
psychomediation
half-second delay  110, 155, 157, 183,
202, 207. See also affect
Hans the Horse  44, 52–3, 58–9, 70, 75.
See also Clever Hans
Haraway, Donna  xi, xii, xvi, 18, 39, 66,
90, 175
hauntology  xxii, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 33,
43, 54, 57, 76, 162, 165, 166, 167,
170, 172, 173, 205
Hawthorne effect  45–6
historiality  xxi, 41, 60, 75, 77, 147, 149,
156, 161, 165, 173, 175
hypnosis  xiii, 5, 11, 30, 63–5, 72
inventive propositions  17, 102–3,
105, 181
machine-learning  81. See also artificial
intelligence
McRobbie, Angela  14
224
Martin, Emily  32, 117, 121
material-semiotic apparatus  69, 97, 102,
115, 121, 129, 130, 141
mediation  viii, ix, x, 3, 16, 20, 22, 26,
30, 32, 50–1, 53–4, 57, 83–4, 90,
95, 101, 110, 113, 115, 118–20, 135,
137, 139–40, 142, 161, 164, 166,
171, 179–81, 185–6, 195
mediatisation  101, 140, 169
networked affect  29, 164, 192.
See also affect
new materialism(s)  xii, xvi, xvii, xviii,
xxiii, 3, 17, 122–3, 129, 135–6,
139–40, 142–3, 160, 178–9
non-local consciousness  4, 122, 123,
134–6
Nudge politics  7, 30, 179.
See also priming
Open science  26, 31, 86, 123, 132,
175–6, 191
Papacharissi  36–7, 191
pharmacopornographic era  119
pornception  104–7, 112–21, 124, 130.
See also time-travelling porn
post-truth  x, xxii, 80–6, 88, 95, 103, 121,
162, 166, 177, 181
precognition  66, 79, 83, 88, 90, 92, 96–7,
106–7, 109, 111, 117, 120, 123–4,
127, 131, 145, 148–51, 157, 160,
163, 198, 204. See also retroactive
causation
priming  4, 7–9, 28–30, 32, 34–8, 40,
42, 44–50, 52–3, 67, 71, 75–6, 83,
101–2, 109–10, 124, 128, 134, 149,
160, 163, 179, 188, 192, 197, 202,
204, 207. See also Nudge politics
proto-performative  15, 66, 128, 140, 149,
158, 162
psychic animals  28, 62, 71, 128–9, 198
psychological governance  7, 189.
See also governmentality;
psychomediation
psychological individualism  vii, xiv, 66,
121, 135, 143, 187
psychomediation  x, 7, 11, 185. See also
psychological governance
Index
quantum entanglement  9, 84, 95, 150–1,
159, 161
queer aggregations  xi, 24, 25, 41, 56, 88,
126, 176, 187, 207
queer theory  12, 14, 77, 139, 188
racism(s)  8, 80, 168, 188–9
regimes of anticipation  79, 81, 83, 113.
See also speculative forecast
re-moving  19, 39, 41, 45, 58, 94, 135,
149, 163
replication  28, 34–6, 39, 44–5, 47–8,
50–1, 91, 102, 109, 123–5, 131–2,
135, 151, 172, 201, 204
retroactive causation  158, 163.
See also precognition
Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg  xii, xxi, 39–41,
43, 51, 60, 69, 102, 161, 173, 175
scenes of entanglement  23, 41, 51, 57–8,
84, 164, 169, 170, 174
shadow media  23, 104, 169
speculative forecast  xxi, 81–2, 85, 96,
130–1, 161, 179. See also regimes
of anticipation
statistical imaginaries  124, 161, 164, 179,
121, 123
statistical reason  127, 130–1
Stengers, Isabelle  xii, xiii, 11, 16, 17, 66,
97, 99, 129, 137, 158, 175, 178, 207
suggestion  vii, ix, xvi, xxi, 7, 10, 11,
45, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 73,
110, 129, 178, 184, 185, 188.
See also contagion
telepathy  5, 62–4, 66, 71, 107, 123, 126,
128–9, 163, 189, 206
Terrenova, Tiziana  30, 187
time-travelling  60, 90, 103, 105–7, 109,
118, 120, 157
time-travelling porn  105–7, 109, 120.
See also pornception
transmediality  21–3, 169–70
transmedial  11, 21–2, 51, 54, 77,
169–70, 172, 175
Whitehead, Albert, North  viii, xii, 97,
136, 137, 138, 153, 157, 158, 159,
185, 207
225