Pseudoscientific phenomena and cultural thought
I think of parascience as this vibrant space where rejected ideas come in contact with new literatures, scientific developments, mythology, philosophy. And then through that engagement, they often, like, take on new forms that will come back into mainstream culture.
Alicia Puglionesi:It seems like a cyclical thing where people have this idea of removing the mediation of language by relying on images, and drawing.
Derek Lee:Hi there. My name is Derek Lee, and I'm an assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University. And we are here today to talk about my new book, The Science and Culture of the Paranormal. The best way I would explain this book is that it's a cultural and theoretical history of the paranormal. Most people don't know this, but most of the ideas about telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all of this came out of nineteenth century Victorian science and circulated pretty widely around modernist literature.
Derek Lee:I guess kind of the questions that I was intrigued in my book was how did these pretty weird ideas evolve with the emergence of new sciences like quantum mechanics and microbiology? And likewise, how did they evolve as they entered new literary genres like science fiction, ethnic fiction, and new age guides. Maybe the last research question guiding the book was, what does all of this tell us about the nature of pseudoscience? I'd say maybe that's a nice quick recap of the book, and I'm absolutely thrilled to talk more about it with Alicia Puglionesci, an expert of the supernatural whose book Common Phantoms was so informative for writing my own book. And Alicia, do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah. Hi, Derek. I'm really excited to be here and be in conversation about your book. I really loved Parascientific Revolutions, and I think it's making arguments that really helped me to conceptualize my own earlier work and where the status of this field is today. So it's incredibly valuable.
Alicia Puglionesi:More about me, I'm a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in the medicine science and the humanities program. I'm trained as a historian of science and medicine. And so as you mentioned, my first book Common Phantoms was about the history of psychical research in The United States. And my second book, In Whose Ruins, kind of extends explorations of these sort of borderlines between scientific materialist and spiritual understandings of landscape of resources and memory. And so still kind of working in that area.
Alicia Puglionesi:I'm excited to think more with your work. To get our conversation started, you already introduced some of the really important and central terms of your book, this concept of parascience and the concept of pseudoscience. So I would love to hear more about what these terms mean to you, how you're using them, and how they're related.
Derek Lee:Yeah. So these two terms, parascience and pseudoscience, play pretty major roles in this book, and actually there's a funny story. When I was first coming up with an idea for this book project, I was talking to a colleague and I said, I think I want to write about pseudoscience. And she's told me, don't do that. Like, it's right off the bat.
Derek Lee:You don't want to do that. And I think because, like, pseudoscience has such a negative connotation, in science studies I mean, pseudoscience literally translates as sham science or false science. And I think, like, I make an argument in the book that a lot of, the term pseudoscience basically, kind of blocks conversation. It kind of shuts down any sort of, any dialogue that can happen around weird or unsettling ideas. And so, the term parascience evolved over the course of the project.
Derek Lee:Essentially, I settled with the idea that parascience is kind of the realm of knowledge on the outskirts of mainstream science where a lot of rejected ideas reside. And, instead of thinking it of this, like, graveyard like, this intellectual graveyard where, like, bad ideas just go to die. I think of parascience as this really vibrant space where rejected ideas come in contact with new literatures, new scientific developments, mythology, philosophy. And then through that engagement, they often take on new forms that will come back into mainstream culture. And I give several examples of that in the book.
Derek Lee:And the way it intersects with pseudoscience is that, because it describes a realm of knowledge, I think one way of thinking about parascience is that it is the medium of pseudoscience. It the areas and the discourses and the texts through which pseudoscientific ideas are constantly moving, changing, and sometimes coming back into mainstream culture. And maybe the last point I'll make about that is that, I chose the word parascience because I want to open up conversation. In the way that pseudoscience can shut down, conversations about the paranormal, about things that scientists do not want to talk about. I really see parascience as a really unique space to engage with oddball ideas and histories of science, things that have been rejected, but still can tell us a lot about, political currents, social movements, histories that are often forgotten.
Derek Lee:And so much of this parascientific approach that I am advocating in this book is looking at the things that have been marginalized in the history of science, and shining a spotlight on them in some way.
Alicia Puglionesi:It's very much an empirical approach in the sense that this exists. There's no point in pretending that it doesn't. And I think the use of the term pseudoscience, yeah, as you said, it implies this value judgment that this is improper. This is a simulation of what actual science is. It also sometimes applies a perspective of debunking that if we're categorically regarding something as a pseudoscience, that means our approach to it is one of conclusively proving it is wrong.
Alicia Puglionesi:At the same time, you know, you do use that term in the book both to reflect the sort of situated status of these different beliefs and practices in their time period and their status in relation to more established sciences.
Derek Lee:Yeah. And I think the thing that's exciting to me is that pseudoscience is so riveting to the general population. I mean, what is on TV? It's like paranormal activity. It's like mediums going into haunted houses.
Derek Lee:It's like ancient aliens. This is the stuff that captures people's attention. And yet I feel like in, at least in science studies, which is my home field in English literature, people don't talk about that because it is bad information or stuff that has been debunked, like you mentioned, and therefore unworthy of analysis. But certainly, I think in the wider population, this stuff is just really, really fascinating to boatloads of people.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yes, and it's interesting you shared that someone kind of advised you against this. When I was starting my dissertation project, became my first book, I had a mentor who I very excitedly told about this project. And she looked at me and said, this is too weird. And I understood where she was coming from, but it didn't anyway.
Derek Lee:That is, I think like for those of us who are working in psychical research, the supernatural, there's always like this, I feel like this asterisk, which is like this subject matter is really weird. You don't have to just like, it's like part of the territory when you're working in this sort of stuff. But I think I also find it endlessly fascinating.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah, and as you said, it captures people's imaginations in a way that proper science can also do. It captures a sense of wonder, of possibility, and that's something important that tells us that something important is going on, that people have these experiences and they have a desire to engage, as you said, with all these different forms of paranormal media. I'm also hoping that you can again kind of laying the foundation of your approach in this book. You write about the concept of the paranormal mind to encompass all of these different paranormal capacities that you're exploring in the book. And as someone who was originally and still kind of is a historian of the mind sciences, I was interested in that term.
Alicia Puglionesi:So can you tell us more about the paranormal mind?
Derek Lee:Yeah, so the paranormal mind is the main subject of the book. And I got most of that concept from the Society for Psychical Research. For listeners who do not know this organization, the Society for Psychical Research was a Victorian scientific society that wanted to understand the scientific principles of supernatural phenomena. This group was studying mediums. They were going to haunted houses.
Derek Lee:They were collecting anecdotes about people's prophetic dreams and trying to create this gigantic catalog of the supernatural and trying to find patterns about why these things existed. How is it possible for one person to read another person's mind? How is it possible for someone to look into the future accurately and try and understand its principles? And so the Society for Psychical Research eventually settled on four main paranormal abilities, that basically came out of the human mind, and they were telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and precognition. And so those became kind of the four things that I looked at.
Derek Lee:And then because they also did a lot of investigations of spirit mediums who talked with ghosts, I added, spirit communication as kind of like the fifth aspect of the paranormal mind. And so those were kind of like the five main chapters in my book. So I really was taking my cue from the Society for Psychical Research's own investigators. Obviously, what counts as the paranormal today goes way beyond that. There's dowsing and astral travel and other things.
Derek Lee:I limited myself to, you know, what their scientists said. These the key concepts of the mind, and they're all interrelated. And if we understand these four, maybe five, but we do think these four things, we can understand the true psychology of the mind.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yes, that kind of lays out the classification used by psychical researchers that carries forward into parapsychology in the laboratory. And as you argue continues to circulate through these different realms of literature and culture. Another impetus driving this book that you have already touched on is that you're arguing that science studies has to look at the margins of science or what is regarded as marginal from within scientific institutions and research entities. So you're suggesting that these margins are not really marginal, that they are you described them as a laboratory. They are described by underwriters as a reservoir of parascientific ideas, but you're suggesting that there's more to it than just being a reservoir or a repository, that there is something very active going on in these spaces.
Derek Lee:Yeah. So, I'm not the first person, in either science studies or literary studies to say that the marginal is important. I know that Roger Luckhurst, who's a really phenomenal, scholar of the supernatural, made a case early on that studying pseudosciences or marginal sciences tells us more about the development of science than science itself. Because it's these border cases where scientists either glom together and say, this is truth and what you're doing is non truth. It's those border cases that shows you how scientific disciplines discipline themselves.
Derek Lee:And so, I've always been interested in those border cases as a science studies scholar. And, to your question about these marginal cases, I go through several of them in my book. I think they're really fascinating for looking at, the development of scientific fields. It tells you a lot about power relations. I think probably like a good example is going, straight into what I think is like the most interesting chapter in the book, which is about the Stargate Project.
Derek Lee:This is the Stargate Project for people who don't know is basically a 1970s and 1990s, a secret government project to spy on Cold War enemies using clairvoyance. What's interesting here is that the clairvoyance was well known for like almost at one hundred years at that point. It was considered a pseudoscience and yet the US government said if we could actually use clairvoyance to spy on Chinese missile sites and Russian bases, this could be an invaluable resource to us. And it's not gonna cost us that much money because all of our psychic spies will be here in The US. We don't have to send them by airplane abroad or risk them getting caught.
Derek Lee:And we can get real time data about what is happening in this secret Russian base, thousands of miles away. Somehow the pseudoscience of clairvoyance, it suddenly gains financial and military power and is it brought into the US government and then, people are trained for years on this project that could potentially reap amazing benefits. And so it tells you a lot about how, know, like for example, Cold War ideology, military funding, you know, all these things can affect the future of a science. That which once was an outsider's science is now, like, at the highest echelons of power, and apparently, you know, President Carter was contacting, these, psychic spies to understand what is happening during the hostage crisis in Iran and also trying to see, like, what is happening on nuclear sites on the other side of the world. Doing a parascientific review of weird sciences shows you that science is, like, deeply enmeshed with culture.
Derek Lee:It's not this, positivistic view of, you know, empirical studies happening in a laboratory and truth just emerges from a microscope or something, like there is like politics, religion, sociology, all of this is involved in the construction of science.
Alicia Puglionesi:Absolutely. I think that's a really good example and definitely captures how these different theories and practices of clairvoyance that were around in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, and were, you know, seriously considered by scientists at that time and then rejected, had this moment of resurgence this time when I think for a variety of reasons anything seemed possible thanks to the tremendous US military investments of the Cold War, thanks to the discovery of the atomic bomb, thanks to these cryptic revelations from the Soviet Union about their parapsychological experiments that they were doing.
Derek Lee:That's a great point. That's a great point. I mean, like, The US's psychic surveillance program got kickstarted because of reports that the Russians were creating their own psychic program. And that's exactly true. The Soviets did believe that the body was a human antenna that could radiate electromagnetic radiations.
Derek Lee:And if they could harness that, they could control populations, control people. And the CIA correctly got wind of this and said, Well, we've got to do something. And so they hired a couple of people from Stanford Research Institute, then the ball gets rolling. And suddenly The US has its own psychic surveillance program, which is based on a totally different methodology. So it's totally interesting how this weird science came about from statecraft and spying on, you know, what is happening around the world.
Derek Lee:So much of, like, this reinvention that you had just mentioned is, like, introducing new scientific approaches to outmoded scientific ideas. So, for example, for Project Stargate, a clairvoyance is an old idea, but if you scientificize it with cartography and give it geographic coordinates and say, Use your mind to find this degree of latitude and longitude, it suddenly kind of like professionalizes, a spiritualist technique and it professionalizes in a way that the military can make use of it. So, I think time and again, like new scientific developments, new scientific frameworks allow these outmoded ideas relevance to the current ideology, the current political situation.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah you speak of this example in the book as turning psychical research from a science into a technology very much aligned with the Cold War emphasis on applied sciences across the board from physics to anthropology. And so it completely makes sense that in the parapsychology space, there is an enterprising figure like Ingo Swan who is prepared to make that argument, you know, from these large systemic forces to the individual parascientific entrepreneur who Swan very much represents. He's getting in there. He's making these connections with researchers and folks in government and defense, to be able to conduct these studies.
Derek Lee:Absolutely. Ingo Swan is a parapsychologist who got linked up with military officials to spearhead Project Stargate. The interesting thing with him is that he was very, very well read in psychical research. He knew what William James had written, what the original, investigators from London SPR were writing, and yet he had become deeply suspicious of where the field had become. During the 1920s, 1930s, cyclical research turned towards the laboratory, and people were doing a lot of, experiments with, tossing coins, rolling dice, statistical experiments, and Ingersolland was just, like, completely out on that idea.
Derek Lee:He says, what does rolling a dice have anything to do with what I can do with my mind? He was very much into the applied sciences, like you mentioned, and he's very much a Cold War figure where at the very beginning, didn't know exactly how he could do what he could do, but he knew that it was useful to the military. And so he created this program around, spying on Cold War targets, And then he filled in the science later on. And it's interesting because I went into his archives and you can see his methodologies changing from astral travel into something else by the very end. It's a great example of the technology preceding the science.
Derek Lee:By the very end, his explanations of this cosmic data network that's shared among humanity is completely different from the idea of astral travel, where literally your mind just goes to a different space on the planet.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah, and it very much evokes an earlier tension in late nineteenth century psychical research that I'm familiar with from my own work. This tension between the desire for experimental rigor in the form of these very repetitive experiments with randomized numbers, symbols. They were doing these in the 1880s and 90s as well, trying to generate sort of quantitative evidence of telepathic abilities. And the desire of those very same experimenters to have sort of the astonishment of experience, the direct revelation of contact with another mind revealed information that they didn't have access to through any of the known senses. And those were the things that truly captured people's imaginations that motivated them in this sort of work.
Alicia Puglionesi:And so Swan is very much in the 50s and 60s making a similar argument that this is something that is unruly. It can't be necessarily verified through these statistical methods, but it has to be experienced directly. And in his case, he's arguing through the cultivation of personal parapsychological abilities. Throughout your book, the term revolutions, which is in the title of the book, doesn't mean a revolution in the sense that the current status quo is displaced by something new, and it goes away, and the new thing is now the dominant reigning thing, you evoke revolutions in the sense of cycles. And I think that's a really powerful image for this kind of phenomenon that we're discussing now.
Derek Lee:Yeah, exactly. Like I use revolutions in many ways in this book, but you just captured the main one, the idea that like we're seeing what we're seeing now has happened again. And so, yeah, we're seeing these repeats of citizen science or people who are outside the scientific establishment making breakthroughs, in the psychical realm. As you were speaking, the thing that immediately came to mind was the thing that you wrote on, which was the idea that so Ingersollan believed that by imagining by giving a geographic coordinate, he could see what was there. And then the best way to capture what he saw there was by drawing it.
Derek Lee:And this goes exactly to the research that you have done, which was the idea that drawing was the way, was a direct conduit to the mind. And so what Ingo Swan was doing was what Upton Sinclair and Mary Craig Sinclair did in their psychical research classic mental radio. When Mary Craig is sending images across her house to her husband who, I'm sorry, her husband is selling telepathic images to Mary Craig who's then like drawing those images on a piece of paper becomes empirical proof that telepathic transmissions are real. In his letters, he says like, this is revolutionary. No one has ever done this before.
Derek Lee:But like, he probably knew what the Sinclairs were doing. And like he's a very much like a self aggrandizing figure, but he is well couched in psychical history. He knew that drawings were seen as a way of direct access to the mind. And do you want to tell people about some of the research you've done there?
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah, there's definitely it was interesting to see that recurrence of drawing as this direct trace of someone's mental contents. It seems like, again, this cyclical thing where people either independently or informed by previous work have this idea of removing the mediation of language by relying on images and drawing. Yeah. And that goes back to early experiments by the American Society of Psychical Research. Indeed, they encountered a problem when trying to approach this statistically that they attempted to calculate the number of possible different images that one could draw in order to determine the probability of someone drawing a particular image at random as opposed to through telepathic reception.
Alicia Puglionesi:And ultimately that number is incalculable. But those were the experiments that people found most interesting, much more interesting than guessing cards in a deck or guessing numbers because there was something qualitatively engaging about reaching out through space into someone else's consciousness potentially in search of this image.
Derek Lee:Right. And I think I remember the idea that psychology had pioneered the idea that drawing is better than speech in terms of capturing the contents of the mind. And so again, Swan is like scientificizing what he's doing. He could point to prior studies and say like, Well, I can draw what I'm seeing in this missile site. Let me just do it with a free hand and this will be better than anything I could tell the person I'm working with.
Derek Lee:And there's the signs to back the idea that he is a direct conduit to what's happening across the world.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yes, and I think what's novel in Swan's work, he claims that everything about it is novel. But what I see as novel and what you highlight in your work is that he is framing this specifically as a military technology at a moment when advanced military technology is kind of the coin of the realm. And that is a new reframing of the paranormal mind. And you know there are precedents for it. Psychical researchers explored applications of parapsychological abilities in terms of treating mental illness.
Alicia Puglionesi:The idea that you could potentially address mental illness through cultivation of psychical reflection and mediumship, they never really had the ability to perceive that, certainly not in the way that Swan did, thanks to, again, the connections that he was able to make.
Derek Lee:Exactly. And it's funny because so Swan pioneered remote viewing, and this is where I also bring a lot of fiction into my research. And so he wrote, for those people who don't know, so Swan was a very prolific writer. He wrote many psychic guides. He also wrote a couple of novels.
Derek Lee:The And one that I spend the most time with is called Starfire. And it's probably out of print, but if anyone can get their hands on it, I totally recommend doing it because this is the best military psychic fantasy ever written. It's this thing it's out of control. I mean, so basically, he's in love with military science. Essentially, the plot of the book is that both The US and The Soviets have developed psychic technologies, which is true in real life, and they started gearing up for World War III.
Derek Lee:And it is the job of a psychic warrior who can surveil the planet, which is him, to stop World War III from happening. And he is so powerful that he can make anything happen, use his telekinetic power to destroy any files, to like look into any sort of military bunker and determine what is happening. So he becomes the marginal figure who is the the mastermind of the planet and can literally save the world because if Russia and The US actually deploy their psychic weapons, we are goners. And so his protagonist is going to save the world. I mean, it's like the militarization of psychic research for the benefit of mankind.
Derek Lee:It's a pretty stunning work of fiction and it does a good job of capturing this applied science, this movement away from science for science sake into, like, something that does things in the world, like the ultimate technology.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yes. I'm very eager to get my hands on a copy of that book. There are two things that arise looking at Swan's involvement with the military's Stargate project and then his subsequent writings, fiction and non fiction, one of them is a question of failure. What does it mean to say that something like psychical research or parapsychology or Swan's remote viewing was a failure? Because we know that the government today is not able to use psychics to look at what our geopolitical rivals are doing.
Alicia Puglionesi:And another path we can go down is the role of fiction in driving the circulation of paranormal ideas. So maybe we can address the failure question first and then turn to fiction because there are so many other amazing works of fiction that you're using in your research.
Derek Lee:Yeah. So I think, the way failure works in the book, it's not I haven't thought about it that way, but frankly, like so much of the paranormal and psychical research has failed to be reproduced in the laboratory setting. It happens spontaneously, and so its constant failure to reveal itself as a science opens a door for literature. Literature allows science to happen by other means. It allows, different types of authors, whether they're scientific authors, fiction authors, New Age authors, to imagine, you know, what could the paranormal mind do if we could ask it to do it when we want it to do in a specific way, what happens?
Derek Lee:How can we explain how telepathy works with words rather than a scientific theorem? And so it becomes a way of teasing out theories, testing out what would happen in the real world, what might happen, following those threads out. What's interesting is that literature becomes like one of the primary engines of parascience. In the book, I say that both science and literature play equal roles in perpetuating pseudoscientific ideas. One way it does that is by doing the science that science cannot do or will not do.
Derek Lee:Obviously, we know by the midpoint of the twentieth century, mainstream psychology had sworn off psychical research and you could be fired from your job or never get a job if you committed yourself to this path of research. And so if you want to explore it in any way, you have to do it through ideas and through the works of fiction rather than the test tube or rolling a dice.
Alicia Puglionesi:Another really interesting example you give of that is this idea of the sidron of the thought particle. And it was really interesting to read about the lineage of that idea because it's so omnipresent both in parapsychology and in popular culture, and you bring those together really nicely.
Derek Lee:Yeah. So the Citron, this was actually like the first chapter I ended up writing. The Citron, just, to give people a preview of what this idea is, it is the particle of precognition. It is the idea that there are particles that are traveling faster than light, that are coming from future events and, like, coming back, and moving back in time and then hitting the brain, which and then the brain then sees you know, has a moment of precognition. And it traces several lineages of thought to assemble itself.
Derek Lee:So this idea came about in the 1960s by a psychical researcher named Adrian Dobbs, and he united the idea that there was a thought particle. And in early psychology, in the early 1900s, there was the idea that there might be an atom of thought. I guess he combined the idea of an atom of thought with mid century quantum physics, which was there are weird particles out there. We have recently discovered the neutrino. We have discovered the positron.
Derek Lee:There are particles out there that we do not know all its properties, but the math says you know, they could do this. And one of the things that the math said was that you could possibly have faster than light particles. Know, says not to give you faster than light, but there's a whole lineage of quantum physicists who are saying, like, if we do the math this way, you can have faster than light particles. And so Adrian Jobs connects the thought particle with a faster than light particle, and suddenly you have particles that are moving backwards in time and can therefore tell you the future. It's a really interesting lineage.
Derek Lee:It just goes to show like how interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary this field is. He's a theoretical parapsychologist. Like he can't do the experiment on this. We don't have the technology to find citrons just yet, but I can write an article about it and these science fiction writers are going to start writing, all sorts of weird fictions about these faster than light particles that will start this ball rolling in mass culture. And as you mentioned, like, this idea is, like, pretty common in science fiction these days.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah. And seeing really the direct technical uptake of it in Philip K. Dick in the Watchmen series is really fascinating because they're very much explaining it on a technical level yet, as you're saying, not on a physical level, but like in the speculative way that you can really only accomplish in fiction, imagining how this might be explained.
Derek Lee:Exactly. And Philip K. Dick is a great test case. I mean, he was a citizen scientist also. He had read the articles.
Derek Lee:So the idea of the Citron started moving into certain trade journals, certain magazines, and Philip K. Dick picked up on this, and, he was very much a citizen scientist. For people who don't know, Philip K. Dick is a pretty interesting character in literary history. In 1974, he basically started taking massive amounts of vitamins to turn his brain into an antenna because he was certain that these particles from the future, that he could somehow capture if he just, like, attuned his brain the right way.
Derek Lee:So he was also part of, like, the whole psychedelic drug culture. So I'm sure he was also taking lots of drugs, but he was also taking vitamins to train his brain to capture all this data that is out there. And for two months, February and March in 1974, he was successful in doing that. He was getting giant gobs of information to his brain, he wasn't sleeping, and he was writing it all out into his giant journal called Exegesis. And, he has several explanations for why this was, and the one that I follow out was that he was getting hit by citrons.
Derek Lee:And so the citron gave him many ideas for many novels. And in the novel that I look at, Valis, he literally writes his semi autobiography about what he just did about all the vitamins, seeing the future, and then he takes into a religious slant because he basically finds like the next iteration of Jesus Christ as part of his journeys. But it's all because of this particle. He knew exactly what the researchers said about these particles and you know, he did a citizen science experiment to make it happen, and he did
Alicia Puglionesi:it. And there are more resonances there thinking about the paranormal as a literary space going back to the modernist occult moment, William Butler Yeats saying that the spirits were giving him ideas for poetry. And even without concrete scientific proof or acceptance, these things are clearly generating a lot of literary potentiality. I have two more questions with the time that we have left. One of them is the hard question.
Alicia Puglionesi:What's up with parascience today? And the other is what you're gonna be working on next. I'll start with the hard one. This is one that I have really been struggling with over the past few years. I think it's much easier today to make the case for the importance of understanding parascientific or pseudoscientific thought than it was when I started my dissertation project many years ago.
Alicia Puglionesi:At that time when I started to research the history of parapsychology, I think it was mostly the anti vaccine movement that was on the ascent, but it was still quite marginal. And, you know, certainly climate change denial, which is another thing that you mentioned in the book as being kind of a controversial pseudoscience. But here we are now with these ideas having a significant resurgence and an unprecedented influence in culture and politics. So I'll just put it to you as an STS scholar who focuses on parasciences. What do you make of this?
Derek Lee:Yeah, I think this is a really interesting topic and something I had to negotiate. When your research is on pseudoscience, people immediately jump to controversial and in many ways harmful movements, like climate change denialism, the anti vaxx movement, and say like, are you trying to legitimize these ideas? And I guess like one thing that I would point out from the get go is that I'm not trying to legitimize the paranormal mind, I'm not trying to legitimize climate change, nihilism. What I am trying to do is say like, we need to talk about this sort of stuff. You know, there's this view in positivist philosophy or just like modern science culture that if we don't talk about pseudoscience and if we simply just talk about hardcore science and STEM, all the bad ideas would just go away.
Derek Lee:They're gone. And if you look at the scientific record, that doesn't happen. Weird ideas continue in our culture. The important thing is to look at those weird ideas, understand the historical context, the political context, the military context, and it's through that context that you can understand why do these ideas have so much force now. I think the way to understand pseudosciences is like always to contextualize and understand where they're coming from and understand their power rather than not talking about it, because I don't think not talking about it is going to do anybody any good at this point.
Derek Lee:Like, we need to understand, you know, where these people are coming from and why they believe what they do in order to live in a society where multiple viewpoints exist. That's the line that I have to negotiate. I'm all for discussing oddball ideas rather than pretending they don't exist because frankly, these ideas affect society and we need to know about them rather than ignoring them.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah, I think that that's always been my approach as well, the necessity of understanding how this works, understanding what exactly is going on. Why do people believe what they believe? Increasingly, I have struggled with how do we prevent harm? This question of what is at the margins and what is in power or influential in policy, one's outlook kind of changes in a certain way when these things become very influential in policy. And obviously, it only further underscores the importance of understanding what exactly is going on here.
Alicia Puglionesi:As a scholar, I've definitely been grappling with this question. And I do know it very helpful to me, which I picked up from Neshay Devano and Brian Case's work about the psychedelics movement is this idea of pluripotency that the weird, the sort of marginal and these underground counter sciences or para sciences are pluripotent. They can go in any direction in terms of are they liberatory? Are they harmful? Are they both?
Alicia Puglionesi:Or even more things than that are certainly not binary. And how do we address these concerns about harm while also understanding that we need a world in which many worlds fit?
Derek Lee:Exactly. In a sense, I was lucky in my choice of choosing the paranormal mind because it doesn't have the direct political resonance that, say, the anti vaxx movement does today, but it still allowed me to talk about weird sciences and the interesting histories that come out of that. You mentioned where is my future work going to go? One area that I am pushing towards is looking at conspiracy theories. And despite the fact that we all agree that conspiracy theories can have all sorts of negative effects on current discourse, it is a super hot topic in the academy right now.
Derek Lee:The idea of the sociology behind conspiracy theories, there are books coming out every other month about why do rational people believe things? So I think your observation is correct. I think there is an opening space for people to look at weird ideas and not just to discount them, but to say, well, why is this the way it is? How did this emerge? I think one reason why conspiracy theories have become an extremely hot topic is because they've gained political power in the last couple of years.
Derek Lee:I mean, I think, for example, obviously with the rise of internet culture and internet communities, a lot of conspiracy theories have these hubs where they can grow larger than they could before. But also the people who are conspiracy theorists are gaining positions in government and in state houses, and it's becoming increasingly normalized. And so for that reason, like people are realizing like these non normative scientific ideas are gaining huge political traction, are affecting everyday life. We need to pay attention to it. And that's exactly what this entire book is about, Paracentric Revolution.
Derek Lee:It says, like, we need to highlight these marginal ideas and understand where they're coming from, how they fit into histories of knowledge, how do they fit into histories of power. Just to go back into, like, where my future work is going, the history of conspiracy fiction is really long, but I think with a lot of really interesting ideas from So Joseph Uzinski is a scholar of conspiracy theories, and there are others who are coming up alongside of him, and they're providing a lot of interesting theories that I think I can apply to interesting conspiracy fictions in history. And I see that as the next outgrowth of my parascientific approach. So whereas I started with the paranormal, I guess I'm explicitly going a bit more political and looking at, I guess, what new conspiracy theories are arising, what is the function of conspiracy fiction, how does it affect scientific knowledge? How does it affect political power?
Derek Lee:So I think that's probably like the next phase of my parascientific purview.
Alicia Puglionesi:That's very exciting. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing your take on that and especially the source material that you're working with. Is there a particular source that has sparked your interest in this topic?
Derek Lee:Yeah, I was at a science fiction conference and someone mentioned that there's a whole range of science fiction that we don't talk about at these conferences, which tend to be very progressive, but like we need to pay attention to, and like a whole bunch of these subgenres appear. There's climate change denial science fiction, there's white nationalist science fiction, and if we go back through the literary record, if you start expanding what counts as utopian thought or dystopian thought, there's all sorts of different examples. I'm at the very starting point of this project, but the more I look into it, the more I see things that could fit into a parascientific approach in both science studies and literary studies that could provide unique insights into, our political history or our scientific history.
Alicia Puglionesi:Fantastic. That sounds fascinating.
Derek Lee:Yeah, Alicia, what are you working on going forward?
Alicia Puglionesi:I'm working on a few things. Most connected to what we've talked about today, I've been working for a while with the archive of a family of nineteenth century spiritualists and mediums who were specifically advancing this practice of psychometry, reading the past in objects. There's a through line to all of this stuff in your book. These ideas that information, time, experiences are somehow embedded in the material recorded as it were in the material substances around us. And so that was their theory, which they demonstrated through channeling information from rocks and specimens and artifacts, and they kind of toured the country with this lecture presentation.
Alicia Puglionesi:So I've been very interested in that and how that fits into the weird world of nineteenth century America.
Derek Lee:That is super fascinating. I haven't read enough about psychometry. I'm generally aware of it and I'm a big comic book reader. There definitely are some comic book characters whose power is to read the histories of objects, but that's super exciting that you're going be doing some pretty brand new research in that area, so that is super exciting.
Alicia Puglionesi:Yeah, so just an aside, there's a topic that we didn't get to, which is talking about Indigenous science and ethnic fiction.
Derek Lee:Yeah, I think, Indigenous science is a really important part. I'm glad you brought that up. So much of parascience is highlighting that which has been marginal in history of science. I look towards non Western sciences. In the book, I look at things like chi and Korean shamanism, zen, and how those ideas, which have not been studied as sciences in the Western sense, have been used by BIPOC authors to re envision, like, what the mind can do, to re envision how ghosts operate and how ghosts move through the world.
Derek Lee:I thought that was a really generative way into looking at how the paranormal has evolved, I guess not only chronologically but in the non Western sense. And I guess there's a story behind that. I mean, there's a couple of origin stories behind this project. One of them is that my parents are Burmese, and my mom told me about all the ghosts she saw in Rangoon when she was growing up. She woke up late one night, and there was a ghost at the foot of her bed counting his meditation beats.
Derek Lee:And she told these stories with enough regularity that ghosts became part of just everyday life in Burmese culture. It really is, in a lot of Eastern cultures, ghosts are not these like freaks that should not be. It is part of the continuum of existence. I didn't see that reflected in a lot of psychical research research and I didn't see that reflected in a lot of Western literature, but you do see that in a lot of ethnic literature. And I saw that the way that novels by Amy Tan and Ruth Ozeki the Comfort Women novel, they were looking at ghosts in different ways that reflected non Western modes of being.
Derek Lee:And I thought that needs to be incorporated into the parascientific purview because if we're expanding our view of science studies beyond the traditional areas, like we need to start looking at these literary genres, we need to look at forms of knowing that reflect the diversity of experience in the world. And certainly, I know, like, science and technology studies have been moving more towards non Western and Indigenous, sciences, and I thought like this was an appropriate place to start thinking along those lines through fiction.
Alicia Puglionesi:I think it's really a perfect articulation of this emerging understanding in science studies of indigenous sciences as they touch the paranormal. It's really important to approach it from that angle as opposed to the tradition within Western occultism of exoticizing or extracting from non Western spiritual practices or spiritual technologies and kind of trying to rearrange them into a system of whatever occult thinker is dabbling in them. Framing this in terms of an engagement with Indigenous science is really powerful here.
Derek Lee:It's kind of funny because I think in a lot of Western literature that I had seen from most of my academic training, ghosts are either these exotic things that are just a weird part of some distant culture, or they're just symbols. And we quickly explain them away as being a representation of the Middle Passage, or is this someone's personal trauma? And that doesn't capture the way other cultures have seen ghosts, which be like different, like if it's just a continuation of the human in just a different form or a looser form. And I think it's important if we're going to expand our sciences or worldviews, to capture that richness.
Alicia Puglionesi:Definitely. And you locate that in these really fantastic works of fiction that bring together a lot of the different threads that run throughout the book. So I think it's really well done.
Derek Lee:Thanks.
Alicia Puglionesi:I really appreciated this conversation and the work that you've done, and I'm really looking forward to your future work.
Derek Lee:Yeah, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. I love talking about all these weird topics with you. It's been a blast. So thank you again.
Alicia Puglionesi:This has been a University of Minnesota press production. The book The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.