Haunted Data. Affect Transmedia - Intro

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Blackman, Lisa. Haunted Data : Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Haunted Data
Also available from Bloomsbury
Metanoia, Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig

Medialogies, David R. Castillo and William Egginton
A History of Light, Theresa Mikuriya
Against Transmission, Timothy Barker
Retroactivity and Contemporary Art, Craig Staff
Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser
Reparative Aesthetics, Susan Best
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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).
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
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)
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
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
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
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.

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Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Metanoia, Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig

Automaticity research is, broadly speaking, concerned with processes

philosophy to describe the phenomenology of what it might feel like to be

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

writings of the early twentieth-century philosopher Albert North Whitehead

subjectivity. The book specifically looks at how software-driven transactions

subject to modalities of power and mediation understood to be suggestive or

Data and affect

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

points to the propensity of straight or legitimate science to sanitize, excise or

nineteenth-century philosophers and theorists who were concerned more

explored the histories and genealogies of science within specific historical,

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

my previous contributions to critical genealogies of psychology and affect, are

Questions and challenges

Engaging with science

or ‘critical friends’ rather than as opponents or antagonistic partners. It is being

of phenomena constantly open to effects from contiguous processes. These

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

theorists were dependent upon psychological terminology and concepts

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

appear as haunted or ghostly data to be followed, re-moved and put back

The politics of data

articles, in Google+ communities, Reddit bulletin boards, emails and responses

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

Conclusion: The politics of change, truth and indeterminacy

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

a discussion of the relationship between power, status, hierarchy and the

biohumanities, anomalous psychology, the digital disruption of publishing

Transmedial Storytelling, Weird

Introduction: Weird science

present, psychic and somatic and the affective and cognitive?

psychology, or the ‘psychology of anomalous experience’, formerly known

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

appear as abnormal perceptions, signs of psychopathology or puzzling

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

Governing through the affective

invocation of common sense to describe nudge is another example of how

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

(including retroactive update). These are algorithms which attempt to change

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

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

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

Rose’s writing is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault and his

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

human subject is constituted and lives in a relation of absolute interiority. No

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

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

psychoanalysis (Lacanian and otherwise). Their writing has particularly

Speculative psychologies and ghost-hunting

bounded psychological subject as the normative position, early psychology

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

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

creation of more inventive propositions that can provide openings to what

Affective methodologies and data hauntology

The after-lives of data

often obscured by particular regimes of remembering and forgetting.

Avery Gordon (2008) describes ghost-hunting as a practice, which makes ‘a

Transmediality and hauntologies

potentiality. This includes the concept of montage, which she presents as a

example), her development of transmediality in the concept of social media is

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