September 9, 2025 • 50 mins
Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals. Here, Lee is joined in conversation with Alicia Puglionesi.
Derek Lee is author of Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal and assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University.
Alicia Puglionesi is a lecturer in the medicine, science, and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and is author of Common Phantoms and In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire and Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science.
REFERENCES:
Society for Psychical Research
Roger Luckhurst
Stargate Project
Ingo Swann
Star Fire / Ingo Swann
Psitron
Adrian Dobbs
Philip K. Dick
William Butler Yeats
Joseph E. Uscinski
Praise for the book:
“Derek Lee engages the ‘pseudoscience’ moniker, that ultimate rhetorical insult, and seeks to replace it with a more accurate ‘parascience’—a place where science and that which is other than science meet and express themselves in literally global pathways as distinct as pulp and science fiction, environmental thought, Asian and Indigenous ways of knowing, U.S. secret espionage, and ethnic fiction. Lee shows all of this with consummate skill and rigor, pushing us beyond our present impasses. This thing is not going away. This is a revolution.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly
“Derek Lee delves into the rich history of the paranormal to instigate a captivating discussion of its influence on literature and science into the twenty-first century through SF and ethnic fictions with the unproven concepts of parascience—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy. A classic in the making!”
—Isiah Lavender III, author of Afrofuturism Rising
Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Derek Lee (00:07):
I think of parascience as this vibrant
space where rejected ideas comein contact with new literatures,
scientific developments,mythology, philosophy. And then
through that engagement, theyoften, like, take on new forms
that will come back intomainstream culture.
Alicia Puglionesi (00:24):
It seems like a cyclical thing where people
have this idea of removing themediation of language by relying
on images, and drawing.
Derek Lee (00:38):
Hi there. My name is Derek Lee, and I'm an assistant
professor of English at WakeForest University. And we are
here today to talk about my newbook, The Science and Culture of
the Paranormal. The best way Iwould explain this book is that
it's a cultural and theoreticalhistory of the paranormal. Most
(00:58):
people don't know this, but mostof the ideas about telepathy,
telekinesis, precognition, allof this came out of nineteenth
century Victorian science andcirculated pretty widely around
modernist literature.
I guess kind of the questionsthat I was intrigued in my book
was how did these pretty weirdideas evolve with the emergence
(01:20):
of new sciences like quantummechanics and microbiology? And
likewise, how did they evolve asthey entered new literary genres
like science fiction, ethnicfiction, and new age guides.
Maybe the last research questionguiding the book was, what does
all of this tell us about thenature of pseudoscience? I'd say
(01:42):
maybe that's a nice quick recapof the book, and I'm absolutely
thrilled to talk more about itwith Alicia Puglionesci, an
expert of the supernatural whosebook Common Phantoms was so
informative for writing my ownbook. And Alicia, do you want to
tell us a little bit more aboutyourself?
Alicia Puglionesi (01:59):
Yeah. Hi, Derek. I'm really excited to be
here and be in conversationabout your book. I really loved
Parascientific Revolutions, andI think it's making arguments
that really helped me toconceptualize my own earlier
work and where the status ofthis field is today. So it's
incredibly valuable.
More about me, I'm a lecturer atJohns Hopkins University in the
(02:22):
medicine science and thehumanities program. I'm trained
as a historian of science andmedicine. And so as you
mentioned, my first book CommonPhantoms was about the history
of psychical research in TheUnited States. And my second
book, In Whose Ruins, kind ofextends explorations of these
sort of borderlines betweenscientific materialist and
(02:46):
spiritual understandings oflandscape of resources and
memory. And so still kind ofworking in that area.
I'm excited to think more withyour work. To get our
conversation started, youalready introduced some of the
really important and centralterms of your book, this concept
(03:07):
of parascience and the conceptof pseudoscience. So I would
love to hear more about whatthese terms mean to you, how
you're using them, and howthey're related.
Derek Lee (03:17):
Yeah. So these two terms, parascience and
pseudoscience, play pretty majorroles in this book, and actually
there's a funny story. When Iwas first coming up with an idea
for this book project, I wastalking to a colleague and I
said, I think I want to writeabout pseudoscience. And she's
told me, don't do that. Like,it's right off the bat.
You don't want to do that. And Ithink because, like,
(03:39):
pseudoscience has such anegative connotation, in science
studies I mean, pseudoscienceliterally translates as sham
science or false science. And Ithink, like, I make an argument
in the book that a lot of, theterm pseudoscience basically,
kind of blocks conversation. Itkind of shuts down any sort of,
(04:03):
any dialogue that can happenaround weird or unsettling
ideas. And so, the termparascience evolved over the
course of the project.
Essentially, I settled with theidea that parascience is kind of
the realm of knowledge on theoutskirts of mainstream science
where a lot of rejected ideasreside. And, instead of thinking
(04:27):
it of this, like, graveyardlike, this intellectual
graveyard where, like, bad ideasjust go to die. I think of
parascience as this reallyvibrant space where rejected
ideas come in contact with newliteratures, new scientific
developments, mythology,philosophy. And then through
(04:48):
that engagement, they often takeon new forms that will come back
into mainstream culture. And Igive several examples of that in
the book.
And the way it intersects withpseudoscience is that, because
it describes a realm ofknowledge, I think one way of
thinking about parascience isthat it is the medium of
pseudoscience. It the areas andthe discourses and the texts
(05:12):
through which pseudoscientificideas are constantly moving,
changing, and sometimes comingback into mainstream culture.
And maybe the last point I'llmake about that is that, I chose
the word parascience because Iwant to open up conversation. In
the way that pseudoscience canshut down, conversations about
(05:35):
the paranormal, about thingsthat scientists do not want to
talk about. I really seeparascience as a really unique
space to engage with oddballideas and histories of science,
things that have been rejected,but still can tell us a lot
about, political currents,social movements, histories that
(05:56):
are often forgotten.
And so much of thisparascientific approach that I
am advocating in this book islooking at the things that have
been marginalized in the historyof science, and shining a
spotlight on them in some way.
Alicia Puglionesi (06:10):
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 theuse of the term pseudoscience,
yeah, as you said, it impliesthis value judgment that this is
improper. This is a simulationof what actual science is. It
(06:31):
also sometimes applies aperspective of debunking that if
we're categorically regardingsomething as a pseudoscience,
that means our approach to it isone of conclusively proving it
is wrong.
At the same time, you know, youdo use that term in the book
both to reflect the sort ofsituated status of these
(06:51):
different beliefs and practicesin their time period and their
status in relation to moreestablished sciences.
Derek Lee (06:59):
Yeah. And I think the thing that's exciting to me is
that pseudoscience is soriveting to the general
population. I mean, what is onTV? It's like paranormal
activity. It's like mediumsgoing into haunted houses.
It's like ancient aliens. Thisis the stuff that captures
people's attention. And yet Ifeel like in, at least in
(07:20):
science studies, which is myhome field in English
literature, people don't talkabout that because it is bad
information or stuff that hasbeen debunked, like you
mentioned, and thereforeunworthy of analysis. But
certainly, I think in the widerpopulation, this stuff is just
really, really fascinating toboatloads of people.
Alicia Puglionesi (07:41):
Yes, and it's interesting you shared that
someone kind of advised youagainst this. When I was
starting my dissertationproject, became my first book, I
had a mentor who I veryexcitedly told about this
project. And she looked at meand said, this is too weird. And
(08:02):
I understood where she wascoming from, but it didn't
anyway.
Derek Lee (08:05):
That is, I think like for those of us who are working
in psychical research, thesupernatural, there's always
like this, I feel like thisasterisk, which is like this
subject matter is really weird.You don't have to just like,
it's like part of the territorywhen you're working in this sort
of stuff. But I think I alsofind it endlessly fascinating.
Alicia Puglionesi (08:25):
Yeah, and as you said, it captures people's
imaginations in a way thatproper science can also do. It
captures a sense of wonder, ofpossibility, and that's
something important that tellsus that something important is
going on, that people have theseexperiences and they have a
desire to engage, as you said,with all these different forms
(08:47):
of paranormal media. I'm alsohoping that you can again kind
of laying the foundation of yourapproach in this book. You write
about the concept of theparanormal mind to encompass all
of these different paranormalcapacities that you're exploring
in the book. And as someone whowas originally and still kind of
(09:11):
is a historian of the mindsciences, I was interested in
that term.
So can you tell us more aboutthe paranormal mind?
Derek Lee (09:19):
Yeah, so the paranormal mind is the main
subject of the book. And I gotmost of that concept from the
Society for Psychical Research.For listeners who do not know
this organization, the Societyfor Psychical Research was a
Victorian scientific societythat wanted to understand the
(09:42):
scientific principles ofsupernatural phenomena. This
group was studying mediums. Theywere going to haunted houses.
They were collecting anecdotesabout people's prophetic dreams
and trying to create thisgigantic catalog of the
supernatural and trying to findpatterns about why these things
(10:03):
existed. How is it possible forone person to read another
person's mind? How is itpossible for someone to look
into the future accurately andtry and understand its
principles? And so the Societyfor Psychical Research
eventually settled on four mainparanormal abilities, that
(10:24):
basically came out of the humanmind, and they were telepathy,
telekinesis, clairvoyance, andprecognition. And so those
became kind of the four thingsthat I looked at.
And then because they also did alot of investigations of spirit
mediums who talked with ghosts,I added, spirit communication as
kind of like the fifth aspect ofthe paranormal mind. And so
(10:45):
those were kind of like the fivemain chapters in my book. So I
really was taking my cue fromthe Society for Psychical
Research's own investigators.Obviously, what counts as the
paranormal today goes way beyondthat. There's dowsing and astral
travel and other things.
(11:06):
I limited myself to, you know,what their scientists said.
These the key concepts of themind, and they're all
interrelated. And if weunderstand these four, maybe
five, but we do think these fourthings, we can understand the
true psychology of the mind.
Alicia Puglionesi (11:26):
Yes, that kind of lays out the
classification used by psychicalresearchers that carries forward
into parapsychology in thelaboratory. And as you argue
continues to circulate throughthese different realms of
literature and culture. Anotherimpetus driving this book that
(11:49):
you have already touched on isthat you're arguing that science
studies has to look at themargins of science or what is
regarded as marginal from withinscientific institutions and
research entities. So you'resuggesting that these margins
(12:12):
are not really marginal, thatthey are you described them as a
laboratory. They are describedby underwriters as a reservoir
of parascientific ideas, butyou're suggesting that there's
more to it than just being areservoir or a repository, that
there is something very activegoing on in these spaces.
Derek Lee (12:32):
Yeah. So, I'm not the first person, in either science
studies or literary studies tosay that the marginal is
important. I know that RogerLuckhurst, who's a really
phenomenal, scholar of thesupernatural, made a case early
on that studying pseudosciencesor marginal sciences tells us
(12:56):
more about the development ofscience than science itself.
Because it's these border caseswhere scientists either glom
together and say, this is truthand what you're doing is non
truth. It's those border casesthat shows you how scientific
disciplines disciplinethemselves.
And so, I've always beeninterested in those border cases
(13:19):
as a science studies scholar.And, to your question about
these marginal cases, I gothrough several of them in my
book. I think they're reallyfascinating for looking at, the
development of scientificfields. It tells you a lot about
power relations. I thinkprobably like a good example is
(13:41):
going, straight into what Ithink is like the most
interesting chapter in the book,which is about the Stargate
Project.
This is the Stargate Project forpeople who don't know is
basically a 1970s and 1990s, asecret government project to spy
on Cold War enemies usingclairvoyance. What's interesting
here is that the clairvoyancewas well known for like almost
at one hundred years at thatpoint. It was considered a
(14:04):
pseudoscience and yet the USgovernment said if we could
actually use clairvoyance to spyon Chinese missile sites and
Russian bases, this could be aninvaluable resource to us. And
it's not gonna cost us that muchmoney because all of our psychic
spies will be here in The US. Wedon't have to send them by
airplane abroad or risk themgetting caught.
(14:25):
And we can get real time dataabout what is happening in this
secret Russian base, thousandsof miles away. Somehow the
pseudoscience of clairvoyance,it suddenly gains financial and
military power and is it broughtinto the US government and then,
people are trained for years onthis project that could
potentially reap amazingbenefits. And so it tells you a
(14:46):
lot about how, know, like forexample, Cold War ideology,
military funding, you know, allthese things can affect the
future of a science. That whichonce was an outsider's science
is now, like, at the highestechelons of power, and
apparently, you know, PresidentCarter was contacting, these,
(15:06):
psychic spies to understand whatis happening during the hostage
crisis in Iran and also tryingto see, like, what is happening
on nuclear sites on the otherside of the world. Doing a
parascientific review of weirdsciences shows you that science
is, like, deeply enmeshed withculture.
It's not this, positivistic viewof, you know, empirical studies
(15:27):
happening in a laboratory andtruth just emerges from a
microscope or something, likethere is like politics,
religion, sociology, all of thisis involved in the construction
of science.
Alicia Puglionesi (15:38):
Absolutely. I think that's a really good
example and definitely captureshow these different theories and
practices of clairvoyance thatwere around in the nineteenth
century, in the early twentiethcentury, and were, you know,
seriously considered byscientists at that time and then
(15:58):
rejected, had this moment ofresurgence this time when I
think for a variety of reasonsanything seemed possible thanks
to the tremendous US militaryinvestments of the Cold War,
thanks to the discovery of theatomic bomb, thanks to these
cryptic revelations from theSoviet Union about their
(16:19):
parapsychological experimentsthat they were doing.
Derek Lee (16:23):
That's a great point. That's a great point. I mean,
like, The US's psychicsurveillance program got
kickstarted because of reportsthat the Russians were creating
their own psychic program. Andthat's exactly true. The Soviets
did believe that the body was ahuman antenna that could radiate
electromagnetic radiations.
And if they could harness that,they could control populations,
(16:43):
control people. And the CIAcorrectly got wind of this and
said, Well, we've got to dosomething. And so they hired a
couple of people from StanfordResearch Institute, then the
ball gets rolling. And suddenlyThe US has its own psychic
surveillance program, which isbased on a totally different
methodology. So it's totallyinteresting how this weird
(17:04):
science came about fromstatecraft and spying on, you
know, what is happening aroundthe world.
So much of, like, thisreinvention that you had just
mentioned is, like, introducingnew scientific approaches to
outmoded scientific ideas. So,for example, for Project
Stargate, a clairvoyance is anold idea, but if you
(17:26):
scientificize it withcartography and give it
geographic coordinates and say,Use your mind to find this
degree of latitude andlongitude, it suddenly kind of
like professionalizes, aspiritualist technique and it
professionalizes in a way thatthe military can make use of it.
(17:47):
So, I think time and again, likenew scientific developments, new
scientific frameworks allowthese outmoded ideas relevance
to the current ideology, thecurrent political situation.
Alicia Puglionesi (18:00):
Yeah you speak of this example in the
book as turning psychicalresearch from a science into a
technology very much alignedwith the Cold War emphasis on
applied sciences across theboard from physics to
anthropology. And so itcompletely makes sense that in
(18:21):
the parapsychology space, thereis an enterprising figure like
Ingo Swan who is prepared tomake that argument, you know,
from these large systemic forcesto the individual parascientific
entrepreneur who Swan very muchrepresents. He's getting in
there. He's making theseconnections with researchers and
(18:43):
folks in government and defense,to be able to conduct these
studies.
Derek Lee (18:48):
Absolutely. Ingo Swan is a parapsychologist who got
linked up with militaryofficials to spearhead Project
Stargate. The interesting thingwith him is that he was very,
very well read in psychicalresearch. He knew what William
James had written, what theoriginal, investigators from
(19:08):
London SPR were writing, and yethe had become deeply suspicious
of where the field had become.During the 1920s, 1930s,
cyclical research turned towardsthe laboratory, and people were
doing a lot of, experimentswith, tossing coins, rolling
dice, statistical experiments,and Ingersolland was just, like,
(19:29):
completely out on that idea.
He says, what does rolling adice have anything to do with
what I can do with my mind? Hewas very much into the applied
sciences, like you mentioned,and he's very much a Cold War
figure where at the verybeginning, didn't know exactly
how he could do what he coulddo, but he knew that it was
useful to the military. And sohe created this program around,
(19:52):
spying on Cold War targets, Andthen he filled in the science
later on. And it's interestingbecause I went into his archives
and you can see hismethodologies changing from
astral travel into somethingelse by the very end. It's a
great example of the technologypreceding the science.
By the very end, hisexplanations of this cosmic data
(20:13):
network that's shared amonghumanity is completely different
from the idea of astral travel,where literally your mind just
goes to a different space on theplanet.
Alicia Puglionesi (20:24):
Yeah, and it very much evokes an earlier
tension in late nineteenthcentury psychical research that
I'm familiar with from my ownwork. This tension between the
desire for experimental rigor inthe form of these very
repetitive experiments withrandomized numbers, symbols.
They were doing these in the1880s and 90s as well, trying to
(20:48):
generate sort of quantitativeevidence of telepathic
abilities. And the desire ofthose very same experimenters to
have sort of the astonishment ofexperience, the direct
revelation of contact withanother mind revealed
information that they didn'thave access to through any of
(21:10):
the known senses. And those werethe things that truly captured
people's imaginations thatmotivated them in this sort of
work.
And so Swan is very much in the50s and 60s making a similar
argument that this is somethingthat is unruly. It can't be
necessarily verified throughthese statistical methods, but
it has to be experienceddirectly. And in his case, he's
(21:34):
arguing through the cultivationof 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 statusquo is displaced by something
new, and it goes away, and thenew thing is now the dominant
(21:55):
reigning thing, you evokerevolutions in the sense of
cycles. And I think that's areally powerful image for this
kind of phenomenon that we'rediscussing now.
Derek Lee (22:06):
Yeah, exactly. Like I use revolutions in many ways in
this book, but you just capturedthe main one, the idea that like
we're seeing what we're seeingnow has happened again. And so,
yeah, we're seeing these repeatsof citizen science or people who
are outside the scientificestablishment making
breakthroughs, in the psychicalrealm. As you were speaking, the
(22:27):
thing that immediately came tomind was the thing that you
wrote on, which was the ideathat so Ingersollan believed
that by imagining by giving ageographic coordinate, he could
see what was there. And then thebest way to capture what he saw
there was by drawing it.
And this goes exactly to theresearch that you have done,
which was the idea that drawingwas the way, was a direct
(22:50):
conduit to the mind. And so whatIngo Swan was doing was what
Upton Sinclair and Mary CraigSinclair did in their psychical
research classic mental radio.When Mary Craig is sending
images across her house to herhusband who, I'm sorry, her
husband is selling telepathicimages to Mary Craig who's then
like drawing those images on apiece of paper becomes empirical
(23:15):
proof that telepathictransmissions are real. In his
letters, he says like, this isrevolutionary. No one has ever
done this before.
But like, he probably knew whatthe Sinclairs were doing. And
like he's a very much like aself aggrandizing figure, but he
is well couched in psychicalhistory. He knew that drawings
were seen as a way of directaccess to the mind. And do you
(23:38):
want to tell people about someof the research you've done
there?
Alicia Puglionesi (23:41):
Yeah, there's definitely it was interesting to
see that recurrence of drawingas this direct trace of
someone's mental contents. Itseems like, again, this cyclical
thing where people eitherindependently or informed by
previous work have this idea ofremoving the mediation of
(24:01):
language by relying on imagesand drawing. Yeah. And that goes
back to early experiments by theAmerican Society of Psychical
Research. Indeed, theyencountered a problem when
trying to approach thisstatistically that they
attempted to calculate thenumber of possible different
images that one could draw inorder to determine the
(24:23):
probability of someone drawing aparticular image at random as
opposed to through telepathicreception.
And ultimately that number isincalculable. But those were the
experiments that people foundmost interesting, much more
interesting than guessing cardsin a deck or guessing numbers
(24:45):
because there was somethingqualitatively engaging about
reaching out through space intosomeone else's consciousness
potentially in search of thisimage.
Derek Lee (24:56):
Right. And I think I remember the idea that
psychology had pioneered theidea that drawing is better than
speech in terms of capturing thecontents of the mind. And so
again, Swan is likescientificizing what he's doing.
He could point to prior studiesand say like, Well, I can draw
what I'm seeing in this missilesite. Let me just do it with a
(25:19):
free hand and this will bebetter than anything I could
tell the person I'm workingwith.
And there's the signs to backthe idea that he is a direct
conduit to what's happeningacross the world.
Alicia Puglionesi (25:31):
Yes, and I think what's novel in Swan's
work, he claims that everythingabout it is novel. But what I
see as novel and what youhighlight in your work is that
he is framing this specificallyas a military technology at a
moment when advanced militarytechnology is kind of the coin
(25:53):
of the realm. And that is a newreframing of the paranormal
mind. And you know there areprecedents for it. Psychical
researchers exploredapplications of
parapsychological abilities interms of treating mental
illness.
The idea that you couldpotentially address mental
(26:15):
illness through cultivation ofpsychical reflection and
mediumship, they never reallyhad the ability to perceive
that, certainly not in the waythat Swan did, thanks to, again,
the connections that he was ableto make.
Derek Lee (26:29):
Exactly. And it's funny because so Swan pioneered
remote viewing, and this iswhere I also bring a lot of
fiction into my research. And sohe wrote, for those people who
don't know, so Swan was a veryprolific writer. He wrote many
psychic guides. He also wrote acouple of novels.
The And one that I spend themost time with is called
Starfire. And it's probably outof print, but if anyone can get
(26:51):
their hands on it, I totallyrecommend doing it because this
is the best military psychicfantasy ever written. It's this
thing it's out of control. Imean, so basically, he's in love
with military science.Essentially, the plot of the
book is that both The US and TheSoviets have developed psychic
(27:12):
technologies, which is true inreal life, and they started
gearing up for World War III.
And it is the job of a psychicwarrior who can surveil the
planet, which is him, to stopWorld War III from happening.
And he is so powerful that hecan make anything happen, use
(27:33):
his telekinetic power to destroyany files, to like look into any
sort of military bunker anddetermine what is happening. So
he becomes the marginal figurewho is the the mastermind of the
planet and can literally savethe world because if Russia and
The US actually deploy theirpsychic weapons, we are goners.
And so his protagonist is goingto save the world. I mean, it's
(27:57):
like the militarization ofpsychic research for the benefit
of mankind.
It's a pretty stunning work offiction and it does a good job
of capturing this appliedscience, this movement away from
science for science sake into,like, something that does things
in the world, like the ultimatetechnology.
Alicia Puglionesi (28:15):
Yes. I'm very eager to get my hands on a copy
of that book. There are twothings that arise looking at
Swan's involvement with themilitary'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 psychicalresearch or parapsychology or
(28:38):
Swan's remote viewing was afailure? Because we know that
the government today is not ableto use psychics to look at what
our geopolitical rivals aredoing.
And another path we can go downis the role of fiction in
driving the circulation ofparanormal ideas. So maybe we
can address the failure questionfirst and then turn to fiction
(29:01):
because there are so many otheramazing works of fiction that
you're using in your research.
Derek Lee (29:07):
Yeah. So I think, the way failure works in the book,
it's not I haven't thought aboutit that way, but frankly, like
so much of the paranormal andpsychical research has failed to
be reproduced in the laboratorysetting. It happens
spontaneously, and so itsconstant failure to reveal
itself as a science opens a doorfor literature. Literature
(29:32):
allows science to happen byother means. It allows,
different types of authors,whether they're scientific
authors, fiction authors, NewAge authors, to imagine, you
know, what could the paranormalmind do if we could ask it to do
it when we want it to do in aspecific way, what happens?
(29:53):
How can we explain how telepathyworks with words rather than a
scientific theorem? And so itbecomes a way of teasing out
theories, testing out what wouldhappen in the real world, what
might happen, following thosethreads out. What's interesting
is that literature becomes likeone of the primary engines of
(30:15):
parascience. In the book, I saythat both science and literature
play equal roles in perpetuatingpseudoscientific ideas. One way
it does that is by doing thescience that science cannot do
or will not do.
Obviously, we know by themidpoint of the twentieth
century, mainstream psychologyhad sworn off psychical research
and you could be fired from yourjob or never get a job if you
(30:42):
committed yourself to this pathof research. And so if you want
to explore it in any way, youhave to do it through ideas and
through the works of fictionrather than the test tube or
rolling a dice.
Alicia Puglionesi (30:54):
Another really interesting example you
give of that is this idea of thesidron of the thought particle.
And it was really interesting toread about the lineage of that
idea because it's so omnipresentboth in parapsychology and in
popular culture, and you bringthose together really nicely.
Derek Lee (31:15):
Yeah. So the Citron, this was actually like the first
chapter I ended up writing. TheCitron, just, to give people a
preview of what this idea is, itis the particle of precognition.
It is the idea that there areparticles that are traveling
faster than light, that arecoming from future events and,
(31:36):
like, coming back, and movingback in time and then hitting
the brain, which and then thebrain then sees you know, has a
moment of precognition. And ittraces several lineages of
thought to assemble itself.
So this idea came about in the1960s by a psychical researcher
named Adrian Dobbs, and heunited the idea that there was a
(31:59):
thought particle. And in earlypsychology, in the early 1900s,
there was the idea that theremight be an atom of thought. I
guess he combined the idea of anatom of thought with mid century
quantum physics, which was thereare weird particles out there.
We have recently discovered theneutrino. We have discovered the
(32:19):
positron.
There are particles out therethat we do not know all its
properties, but the math saysyou know, they could do this.
And one of the things that themath said was that you could
possibly have faster than lightparticles. Know, says not to
give you faster than light, butthere's a whole lineage of
quantum physicists who aresaying, like, if we do the math
(32:40):
this way, you can have fasterthan light particles. And so
Adrian Jobs connects the thoughtparticle with a faster than
light particle, and suddenly youhave particles that are moving
backwards in time and cantherefore tell you the future.
It's a really interestinglineage.
It just goes to show like howinterdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary this field is.He's a theoretical
(33:01):
parapsychologist. Like he can'tdo the experiment on this. We
don't have the technology tofind citrons just yet, but I can
write an article about it andthese science fiction writers
are going to start writing, allsorts of weird fictions about
these faster than lightparticles that will start this
ball rolling in mass culture.And as you mentioned, like, this
(33:22):
idea is, like, pretty common inscience fiction these days.
Alicia Puglionesi (33:25):
Yeah. And seeing really the direct
technical uptake of it in PhilipK. Dick in the Watchmen series
is really fascinating becausethey're very much explaining it
on a technical level yet, asyou're saying, not on a physical
level, but like in thespeculative way that you can
(33:48):
really only accomplish infiction, imagining how this
might be explained.
Derek Lee (33:54):
Exactly. And Philip K. Dick is a great test case. I
mean, he was a citizen scientistalso. He had read the articles.
So the idea of the Citronstarted moving into certain
trade journals, certainmagazines, and Philip K. Dick
picked up on this, and, he wasvery much a citizen scientist.
For people who don't know,Philip K. Dick is a pretty
(34:16):
interesting character inliterary history. In 1974, he
basically started taking massiveamounts of vitamins to turn his
brain into an antenna because hewas certain that these particles
from the future, that he couldsomehow capture if he just,
(34:40):
like, attuned his brain theright way.
So he was also part of, like,the whole psychedelic drug
culture. So I'm sure he was alsotaking lots of drugs, but he was
also taking vitamins to trainhis brain to capture all this
data that is out there. And fortwo months, February and March
in 1974, he was successful indoing that. He was getting giant
(35:02):
gobs of information to hisbrain, he wasn't sleeping, and
he was writing it all out intohis giant journal called
Exegesis. And, he has severalexplanations for why this was,
and the one that I follow outwas that he was getting hit by
citrons.
And so the citron gave him manyideas for many novels. And in
(35:24):
the novel that I look at, Valis,he literally writes his semi
autobiography about what he justdid about all the vitamins,
seeing the future, and then hetakes into a religious slant
because he basically finds likethe next iteration of Jesus
Christ as part of his journeys.But it's all because of this
(35:45):
particle. He knew exactly whatthe researchers said about these
particles and you know, he did acitizen science experiment to
make it happen, and he did
Alicia Puglionesi (35:57):
it. And there are more resonances there
thinking about the paranormal asa literary space going back to
the modernist occult moment,William Butler Yeats saying that
the spirits were giving himideas for poetry. And even
without concrete scientificproof or acceptance, these
things are clearly generating alot of literary potentiality. I
(36:22):
have two more questions with thetime that we have left. One of
them is the hard question.
What's up with parasciencetoday? 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 reallybeen struggling with over the
past few years. I think it'smuch easier today to make the
case for the importance ofunderstanding parascientific or
(36:44):
pseudoscientific thought than itwas when I started my
dissertation project many yearsago.
At that time when I started toresearch the history of
parapsychology, I think it wasmostly the anti vaccine movement
that was on the ascent, but itwas still quite marginal. And,
you know, certainly climatechange denial, which is another
thing that you mentioned in thebook as being kind of a
(37:05):
controversial pseudoscience. Buthere we are now with these ideas
having a significant resurgenceand an unprecedented influence
in culture and politics. So I'lljust put it to you as an STS
scholar who focuses onparasciences. What do you make
of this?
Derek Lee (37:23):
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting topic and
something I had to negotiate.When your research is on
pseudoscience, peopleimmediately jump to
controversial and in many waysharmful movements, like climate
change denialism, the anti vaxxmovement, and say like, are you
trying to legitimize theseideas? And I guess like one
(37:44):
thing that I would point outfrom the get go is that I'm not
trying to legitimize theparanormal mind, I'm not trying
to legitimize climate change,nihilism. What I am trying to do
is say like, we need to talkabout this sort of stuff. You
know, there's this view inpositivist philosophy or just
like modern science culture thatif we don't talk about
pseudoscience and if we simplyjust talk about hardcore science
(38:06):
and STEM, all the bad ideaswould just go away.
They're gone. And if you look atthe scientific record, that
doesn't happen. Weird ideascontinue in our culture. The
important thing is to look atthose weird ideas, understand
the historical context, thepolitical context, the military
context, and it's through thatcontext that you can understand
(38:28):
why do these ideas have so muchforce now. I think the way to
understand pseudosciences islike always to contextualize and
understand where they're comingfrom and understand their power
rather than not talking aboutit, because I don't think not
talking about it is going to doanybody any good at this point.
Like, we need to understand, youknow, where these people are
coming from and why they believewhat they do in order to live in
(38:53):
a society where multipleviewpoints exist. That's the
line that I have to negotiate.I'm all for discussing oddball
ideas rather than pretendingthey don't exist because
frankly, these ideas affectsociety and we need to know
about them rather than ignoringthem.
Alicia Puglionesi (39:11):
Yeah, I think that that's always been my
approach as well, the necessityof understanding how this works,
understanding what exactly isgoing on. Why do people believe
what they believe? Increasingly,I have struggled with how do we
prevent harm? This question ofwhat is at the margins and what
(39:32):
is in power or influential inpolicy, one's outlook kind of
changes in a certain way whenthese things become very
influential in policy. Andobviously, it only further
underscores the importance ofunderstanding what exactly is
going on here.
As a scholar, I've definitelybeen grappling with this
question. And I do know it veryhelpful to me, which I picked up
(39:53):
from Neshay Devano and BrianCase's work about the
psychedelics movement is thisidea of pluripotency that the
weird, the sort of marginal andthese underground counter
sciences or para sciences arepluripotent. They can go in any
direction in terms of are theyliberatory? Are they harmful?
(40:15):
Are they both?
Or even more things than thatare certainly not binary. And
how do we address these concernsabout harm while also
understanding that we need aworld in which many worlds fit?
Derek Lee (40:29):
Exactly. In a sense, I was lucky in my choice of
choosing the paranormal mindbecause it doesn't have the
direct political resonance that,say, the anti vaxx movement does
today, but it still allowed meto talk about weird sciences and
the interesting histories thatcome out of that. You mentioned
where is my future work going togo? One area that I am pushing
(40:52):
towards is looking at conspiracytheories. And despite the fact
that we all agree thatconspiracy theories can have all
sorts of negative effects oncurrent discourse, it is a super
hot topic in the academy rightnow.
The idea of the sociology behindconspiracy theories, there are
books coming out every othermonth about why do rational
(41:13):
people believe things? So Ithink your observation is
correct. I think there is anopening space for people to look
at weird ideas and not just todiscount them, but to say, well,
why is this the way it is? Howdid this emerge? I think one
reason why conspiracy theorieshave become an extremely hot
(41:33):
topic is because they've gainedpolitical power in the last
couple of years.
I mean, I think, for example,obviously with the rise of
internet culture and internetcommunities, a lot of conspiracy
theories have these hubs wherethey can grow larger than they
could before. But also thepeople who are conspiracy
theorists are gaining positionsin government and in state
(41:54):
houses, and it's becomingincreasingly normalized. And so
for that reason, like people arerealizing like these non
normative scientific ideas aregaining huge political traction,
are affecting everyday life. Weneed to pay attention to it. And
that's exactly what this entirebook is about, Paracentric
(42:16):
Revolution.
It says, like, we need tohighlight these marginal ideas
and understand where they'recoming from, how they fit into
histories of knowledge, how dothey fit into histories of
power. Just to go back into,like, where my future work is
going, the history of conspiracyfiction is really long, but I
think with a lot of reallyinteresting ideas from So Joseph
Uzinski is a scholar ofconspiracy theories, and there
(42:38):
are others who are coming upalongside of him, and they're
providing a lot of interestingtheories that I think I can
apply to interesting conspiracyfictions in history. And I see
that as the next outgrowth of myparascientific approach. So
whereas I started with theparanormal, I guess I'm
explicitly going a bit morepolitical and looking at, I
guess, what new conspiracytheories are arising, what is
(42:59):
the function of conspiracyfiction, how does it affect
scientific knowledge? How doesit affect political power?
So I think that's probably likethe next phase of my
parascientific purview.
Alicia Puglionesi (43:11):
That's very exciting. I'm definitely looking
forward to hearing your take onthat and especially the source
material that you're workingwith. Is there a particular
source that has sparked yourinterest in this topic?
Derek Lee (43:25):
Yeah, I was at a science fiction conference and
someone mentioned that there's awhole range of science fiction
that we don't talk about atthese conferences, which tend to
be very progressive, but like weneed to pay attention to, and
like a whole bunch of thesesubgenres appear. There's
climate change denial sciencefiction, there's white
nationalist science fiction, andif we go back through the
(43:48):
literary record, if you startexpanding what counts as utopian
thought or dystopian thought,there's all sorts of different
examples. I'm at the verystarting point of this project,
but the more I look into it, themore I see things that could fit
into a parascientific approachin both science studies and
(44:08):
literary studies that couldprovide unique insights into,
our political history or ourscientific history.
Alicia Puglionesi (44:18):
Fantastic. That sounds fascinating.
Derek Lee (44:21):
Yeah, Alicia, what are you working on going
forward?
Alicia Puglionesi (44:24):
I'm working on a few things. Most connected
to what we've talked abouttoday, I've been working for a
while with the archive of afamily of nineteenth century
spiritualists and mediums whowere specifically advancing this
practice of psychometry, readingthe past in objects. There's a
(44:46):
through line to all of thisstuff in your book. These ideas
that information, time,experiences are somehow embedded
in the material recorded as itwere in the material substances
around us. And so that was theirtheory, which they demonstrated
(45:07):
through channeling informationfrom rocks and specimens and
artifacts, and they kind oftoured the country with this
lecture presentation.
So I've been very interested inthat and how that fits into the
weird world of nineteenthcentury America.
Derek Lee (45:24):
That is super fascinating. I haven't read
enough about psychometry. I'mgenerally aware of it and I'm a
big comic book reader. Theredefinitely are some comic book
characters whose power is toread the histories of objects,
but that's super exciting thatyou're going be doing some
pretty brand new research inthat area, so that is super
exciting.
Alicia Puglionesi (45:45):
Yeah, so just an aside, there's a topic that
we didn't get to, which istalking about Indigenous science
and ethnic fiction.
Derek Lee (45:53):
Yeah, I think, Indigenous science is a really
important part. I'm glad youbrought that up. So much of
parascience is highlighting thatwhich has been marginal in
history of science. I looktowards non Western sciences. In
the book, I look at things likechi and Korean shamanism, zen,
and how those ideas, which havenot been studied as sciences in
(46:17):
the Western sense, have beenused by BIPOC authors to re
envision, like, what the mindcan do, to re envision how
ghosts operate and how ghostsmove through the world.
I thought that was a reallygenerative way into looking at
how the paranormal has evolved,I guess not only chronologically
(46:41):
but in the non Western sense.And I guess there's a story
behind that. I mean, there's acouple of origin stories behind
this project. One of them isthat my parents are Burmese, and
my mom told me about all theghosts she saw in Rangoon when
she was growing up. She woke uplate one night, and there was a
ghost at the foot of her bedcounting his meditation beats.
(47:01):
And she told these stories withenough regularity that ghosts
became part of just everydaylife in Burmese culture. It
really is, in a lot of Easterncultures, ghosts are not these
like freaks that should not be.It is part of the continuum of
existence. I didn't see thatreflected in a lot of psychical
research research and I didn'tsee that reflected in a lot of
(47:25):
Western literature, but you dosee that in a lot of ethnic
literature. And I saw that theway that novels by Amy Tan and
Ruth Ozeki the Comfort Womennovel, they were looking at
ghosts in different ways thatreflected non Western modes of
being.
And I thought that needs to beincorporated into the
parascientific purview becauseif we're expanding our view of
(47:49):
science studies beyond thetraditional areas, like we need
to start looking at theseliterary genres, we need to look
at forms of knowing that reflectthe diversity of experience in
the world. And certainly, Iknow, like, science and
technology studies have beenmoving more towards non Western
and Indigenous, sciences, and Ithought like this was an
(48:09):
appropriate place to startthinking along those lines
through fiction.
Alicia Puglionesi (48:13):
I think it's really a perfect articulation of
this emerging understanding inscience studies of indigenous
sciences as they touch theparanormal. It's really
important to approach it fromthat angle as opposed to the
tradition within Westernoccultism of exoticizing or
extracting from non Westernspiritual practices or spiritual
(48:37):
technologies and kind of tryingto rearrange them into a system
of whatever occult thinker isdabbling in them. Framing this
in terms of an engagement withIndigenous science is really
powerful here.
Derek Lee (48:53):
It's kind of funny because I think in a lot of
Western literature that I hadseen from most of my academic
training, ghosts are eitherthese exotic things that are
just a weird part of somedistant culture, or they're just
symbols. And we quickly explainthem away as being a
representation of the MiddlePassage, or is this someone's
(49:14):
personal trauma? And thatdoesn't capture the way other
cultures have seen ghosts, whichbe like different, like if it's
just a continuation of the humanin just a different form or a
looser form. And I think it'simportant if we're going to
expand our sciences orworldviews, to capture that
richness.
Alicia Puglionesi (49:33):
Definitely. And you locate that in these
really fantastic works offiction that bring together a
lot of the different threadsthat run throughout the book. So
I think it's really well done.
Derek Lee (49:47):
Thanks.
Alicia Puglionesi (49:48):
I really appreciated this conversation
and the work that you've done,and I'm really looking forward
to your future work.
Derek Lee (49:56):
Yeah, thank you so much. This was a fantastic
conversation. I love talkingabout all these weird topics
with you. It's been a blast. Sothank you again.
Alicia Puglionesi (50:04):
This has been a University of Minnesota press
production. The book The Scienceand Culture of the Paranormal by
Derek Lee is available fromUniversity of Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.
I think of parascience as this vibrant
space where rejected ideas comein contact with new literatures,
scientific developments,mythology, philosophy. And then
through that engagement, theyoften, like, take on new forms
that will come back intomainstream culture.
Alicia Puglionesi (00:24):
It seems like a cyclical thing where people
have this idea of removing themediation of language by relying
on images, and drawing.
Derek Lee (00:38):
Hi there. My name is Derek Lee, and I'm an assistant
professor of English at WakeForest University. And we are
here today to talk about my newbook, The Science and Culture of
the Paranormal. The best way Iwould explain this book is that
it's a cultural and theoreticalhistory of the paranormal. Most
(00:58):
people don't know this, but mostof the ideas about telepathy,
telekinesis, precognition, allof this came out of nineteenth
century Victorian science andcirculated pretty widely around
modernist literature.
I guess kind of the questionsthat I was intrigued in my book
was how did these pretty weirdideas evolve with the emergence
(01:20):
of new sciences like quantummechanics and microbiology? And
likewise, how did they evolve asthey entered new literary genres
like science fiction, ethnicfiction, and new age guides.
Maybe the last research questionguiding the book was, what does
all of this tell us about thenature of pseudoscience? I'd say
(01:42):
maybe that's a nice quick recapof the book, and I'm absolutely
thrilled to talk more about itwith Alicia Puglionesci, an
expert of the supernatural whosebook Common Phantoms was so
informative for writing my ownbook. And Alicia, do you want to
tell us a little bit more aboutyourself?
Alicia Puglionesi (01:59):
Yeah. Hi, Derek. I'm really excited to be
here and be in conversationabout your book. I really loved
Parascientific Revolutions, andI think it's making arguments
that really helped me toconceptualize my own earlier
work and where the status ofthis field is today. So it's
incredibly valuable.
More about me, I'm a lecturer atJohns Hopkins University in the
(02:22):
medicine science and thehumanities program. I'm trained
as a historian of science andmedicine. And so as you
mentioned, my first book CommonPhantoms was about the history
of psychical research in TheUnited States. And my second
book, In Whose Ruins, kind ofextends explorations of these
sort of borderlines betweenscientific materialist and
(02:46):
spiritual understandings oflandscape of resources and
memory. And so still kind ofworking in that area.
I'm excited to think more withyour work. To get our
conversation started, youalready introduced some of the
really important and centralterms of your book, this concept
(03:07):
of parascience and the conceptof pseudoscience. So I would
love to hear more about whatthese terms mean to you, how
you're using them, and howthey're related.
Derek Lee (03:17):
Yeah. So these two terms, parascience and
pseudoscience, play pretty majorroles in this book, and actually
there's a funny story. When Iwas first coming up with an idea
for this book project, I wastalking to a colleague and I
said, I think I want to writeabout pseudoscience. And she's
told me, don't do that. Like,it's right off the bat.
You don't want to do that. And Ithink because, like,
(03:39):
pseudoscience has such anegative connotation, in science
studies I mean, pseudoscienceliterally translates as sham
science or false science. And Ithink, like, I make an argument
in the book that a lot of, theterm pseudoscience basically,
kind of blocks conversation. Itkind of shuts down any sort of,
(04:03):
any dialogue that can happenaround weird or unsettling
ideas. And so, the termparascience evolved over the
course of the project.
Essentially, I settled with theidea that parascience is kind of
the realm of knowledge on theoutskirts of mainstream science
where a lot of rejected ideasreside. And, instead of thinking
(04:27):
it of this, like, graveyardlike, this intellectual
graveyard where, like, bad ideasjust go to die. I think of
parascience as this reallyvibrant space where rejected
ideas come in contact with newliteratures, new scientific
developments, mythology,philosophy. And then through
(04:48):
that engagement, they often takeon new forms that will come back
into mainstream culture. And Igive several examples of that in
the book.
And the way it intersects withpseudoscience is that, because
it describes a realm ofknowledge, I think one way of
thinking about parascience isthat it is the medium of
pseudoscience. It the areas andthe discourses and the texts
(05:12):
through which pseudoscientificideas are constantly moving,
changing, and sometimes comingback into mainstream culture.
And maybe the last point I'llmake about that is that, I chose
the word parascience because Iwant to open up conversation. In
the way that pseudoscience canshut down, conversations about
(05:35):
the paranormal, about thingsthat scientists do not want to
talk about. I really seeparascience as a really unique
space to engage with oddballideas and histories of science,
things that have been rejected,but still can tell us a lot
about, political currents,social movements, histories that
(05:56):
are often forgotten.
And so much of thisparascientific approach that I
am advocating in this book islooking at the things that have
been marginalized in the historyof science, and shining a
spotlight on them in some way.
Alicia Puglionesi (06:10):
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 theuse of the term pseudoscience,
yeah, as you said, it impliesthis value judgment that this is
improper. This is a simulationof what actual science is. It
(06:31):
also sometimes applies aperspective of debunking that if
we're categorically regardingsomething as a pseudoscience,
that means our approach to it isone of conclusively proving it
is wrong.
At the same time, you know, youdo use that term in the book
both to reflect the sort ofsituated status of these
(06:51):
different beliefs and practicesin their time period and their
status in relation to moreestablished sciences.
Derek Lee (06:59):
Yeah. And I think the thing that's exciting to me is
that pseudoscience is soriveting to the general
population. I mean, what is onTV? It's like paranormal
activity. It's like mediumsgoing into haunted houses.
It's like ancient aliens. Thisis the stuff that captures
people's attention. And yet Ifeel like in, at least in
(07:20):
science studies, which is myhome field in English
literature, people don't talkabout that because it is bad
information or stuff that hasbeen debunked, like you
mentioned, and thereforeunworthy of analysis. But
certainly, I think in the widerpopulation, this stuff is just
really, really fascinating toboatloads of people.
Alicia Puglionesi (07:41):
Yes, and it's interesting you shared that
someone kind of advised youagainst this. When I was
starting my dissertationproject, became my first book, I
had a mentor who I veryexcitedly told about this
project. And she looked at meand said, this is too weird. And
(08:02):
I understood where she wascoming from, but it didn't
anyway.
Derek Lee (08:05):
That is, I think like for those of us who are working
in psychical research, thesupernatural, there's always
like this, I feel like thisasterisk, which is like this
subject matter is really weird.You don't have to just like,
it's like part of the territorywhen you're working in this sort
of stuff. But I think I alsofind it endlessly fascinating.
Alicia Puglionesi (08:25):
Yeah, and as you said, it captures people's
imaginations in a way thatproper science can also do. It
captures a sense of wonder, ofpossibility, and that's
something important that tellsus that something important is
going on, that people have theseexperiences and they have a
desire to engage, as you said,with all these different forms
(08:47):
of paranormal media. I'm alsohoping that you can again kind
of laying the foundation of yourapproach in this book. You write
about the concept of theparanormal mind to encompass all
of these different paranormalcapacities that you're exploring
in the book. And as someone whowas originally and still kind of
(09:11):
is a historian of the mindsciences, I was interested in
that term.
So can you tell us more aboutthe paranormal mind?
Derek Lee (09:19):
Yeah, so the paranormal mind is the main
subject of the book. And I gotmost of that concept from the
Society for Psychical Research.For listeners who do not know
this organization, the Societyfor Psychical Research was a
Victorian scientific societythat wanted to understand the
(09:42):
scientific principles ofsupernatural phenomena. This
group was studying mediums. Theywere going to haunted houses.
They were collecting anecdotesabout people's prophetic dreams
and trying to create thisgigantic catalog of the
supernatural and trying to findpatterns about why these things
(10:03):
existed. How is it possible forone person to read another
person's mind? How is itpossible for someone to look
into the future accurately andtry and understand its
principles? And so the Societyfor Psychical Research
eventually settled on four mainparanormal abilities, that
(10:24):
basically came out of the humanmind, and they were telepathy,
telekinesis, clairvoyance, andprecognition. And so those
became kind of the four thingsthat I looked at.
And then because they also did alot of investigations of spirit
mediums who talked with ghosts,I added, spirit communication as
kind of like the fifth aspect ofthe paranormal mind. And so
(10:45):
those were kind of like the fivemain chapters in my book. So I
really was taking my cue fromthe Society for Psychical
Research's own investigators.Obviously, what counts as the
paranormal today goes way beyondthat. There's dowsing and astral
travel and other things.
(11:06):
I limited myself to, you know,what their scientists said.
These the key concepts of themind, and they're all
interrelated. And if weunderstand these four, maybe
five, but we do think these fourthings, we can understand the
true psychology of the mind.
Alicia Puglionesi (11:26):
Yes, that kind of lays out the
classification used by psychicalresearchers that carries forward
into parapsychology in thelaboratory. And as you argue
continues to circulate throughthese different realms of
literature and culture. Anotherimpetus driving this book that
(11:49):
you have already touched on isthat you're arguing that science
studies has to look at themargins of science or what is
regarded as marginal from withinscientific institutions and
research entities. So you'resuggesting that these margins
(12:12):
are not really marginal, thatthey are you described them as a
laboratory. They are describedby underwriters as a reservoir
of parascientific ideas, butyou're suggesting that there's
more to it than just being areservoir or a repository, that
there is something very activegoing on in these spaces.
Derek Lee (12:32):
Yeah. So, I'm not the first person, in either science
studies or literary studies tosay that the marginal is
important. I know that RogerLuckhurst, who's a really
phenomenal, scholar of thesupernatural, made a case early
on that studying pseudosciencesor marginal sciences tells us
(12:56):
more about the development ofscience than science itself.
Because it's these border caseswhere scientists either glom
together and say, this is truthand what you're doing is non
truth. It's those border casesthat shows you how scientific
disciplines disciplinethemselves.
And so, I've always beeninterested in those border cases
(13:19):
as a science studies scholar.And, to your question about
these marginal cases, I gothrough several of them in my
book. I think they're reallyfascinating for looking at, the
development of scientificfields. It tells you a lot about
power relations. I thinkprobably like a good example is
(13:41):
going, straight into what Ithink is like the most
interesting chapter in the book,which is about the Stargate
Project.
This is the Stargate Project forpeople who don't know is
basically a 1970s and 1990s, asecret government project to spy
on Cold War enemies usingclairvoyance. What's interesting
here is that the clairvoyancewas well known for like almost
at one hundred years at thatpoint. It was considered a
(14:04):
pseudoscience and yet the USgovernment said if we could
actually use clairvoyance to spyon Chinese missile sites and
Russian bases, this could be aninvaluable resource to us. And
it's not gonna cost us that muchmoney because all of our psychic
spies will be here in The US. Wedon't have to send them by
airplane abroad or risk themgetting caught.
(14:25):
And we can get real time dataabout what is happening in this
secret Russian base, thousandsof miles away. Somehow the
pseudoscience of clairvoyance,it suddenly gains financial and
military power and is it broughtinto the US government and then,
people are trained for years onthis project that could
potentially reap amazingbenefits. And so it tells you a
(14:46):
lot about how, know, like forexample, Cold War ideology,
military funding, you know, allthese things can affect the
future of a science. That whichonce was an outsider's science
is now, like, at the highestechelons of power, and
apparently, you know, PresidentCarter was contacting, these,
(15:06):
psychic spies to understand whatis happening during the hostage
crisis in Iran and also tryingto see, like, what is happening
on nuclear sites on the otherside of the world. Doing a
parascientific review of weirdsciences shows you that science
is, like, deeply enmeshed withculture.
It's not this, positivistic viewof, you know, empirical studies
(15:27):
happening in a laboratory andtruth just emerges from a
microscope or something, likethere is like politics,
religion, sociology, all of thisis involved in the construction
of science.
Alicia Puglionesi (15:38):
Absolutely. I think that's a really good
example and definitely captureshow these different theories and
practices of clairvoyance thatwere around in the nineteenth
century, in the early twentiethcentury, and were, you know,
seriously considered byscientists at that time and then
(15:58):
rejected, had this moment ofresurgence this time when I
think for a variety of reasonsanything seemed possible thanks
to the tremendous US militaryinvestments of the Cold War,
thanks to the discovery of theatomic bomb, thanks to these
cryptic revelations from theSoviet Union about their
(16:19):
parapsychological experimentsthat they were doing.
Derek Lee (16:23):
That's a great point. That's a great point. I mean,
like, The US's psychicsurveillance program got
kickstarted because of reportsthat the Russians were creating
their own psychic program. Andthat's exactly true. The Soviets
did believe that the body was ahuman antenna that could radiate
electromagnetic radiations.
And if they could harness that,they could control populations,
(16:43):
control people. And the CIAcorrectly got wind of this and
said, Well, we've got to dosomething. And so they hired a
couple of people from StanfordResearch Institute, then the
ball gets rolling. And suddenlyThe US has its own psychic
surveillance program, which isbased on a totally different
methodology. So it's totallyinteresting how this weird
(17:04):
science came about fromstatecraft and spying on, you
know, what is happening aroundthe world.
So much of, like, thisreinvention that you had just
mentioned is, like, introducingnew scientific approaches to
outmoded scientific ideas. So,for example, for Project
Stargate, a clairvoyance is anold idea, but if you
(17:26):
scientificize it withcartography and give it
geographic coordinates and say,Use your mind to find this
degree of latitude andlongitude, it suddenly kind of
like professionalizes, aspiritualist technique and it
professionalizes in a way thatthe military can make use of it.
(17:47):
So, I think time and again, likenew scientific developments, new
scientific frameworks allowthese outmoded ideas relevance
to the current ideology, thecurrent political situation.
Alicia Puglionesi (18:00):
Yeah you speak of this example in the
book as turning psychicalresearch from a science into a
technology very much alignedwith the Cold War emphasis on
applied sciences across theboard from physics to
anthropology. And so itcompletely makes sense that in
(18:21):
the parapsychology space, thereis an enterprising figure like
Ingo Swan who is prepared tomake that argument, you know,
from these large systemic forcesto the individual parascientific
entrepreneur who Swan very muchrepresents. He's getting in
there. He's making theseconnections with researchers and
(18:43):
folks in government and defense,to be able to conduct these
studies.
Derek Lee (18:48):
Absolutely. Ingo Swan is a parapsychologist who got
linked up with militaryofficials to spearhead Project
Stargate. The interesting thingwith him is that he was very,
very well read in psychicalresearch. He knew what William
James had written, what theoriginal, investigators from
(19:08):
London SPR were writing, and yethe had become deeply suspicious
of where the field had become.During the 1920s, 1930s,
cyclical research turned towardsthe laboratory, and people were
doing a lot of, experimentswith, tossing coins, rolling
dice, statistical experiments,and Ingersolland was just, like,
(19:29):
completely out on that idea.
He says, what does rolling adice have anything to do with
what I can do with my mind? Hewas very much into the applied
sciences, like you mentioned,and he's very much a Cold War
figure where at the verybeginning, didn't know exactly
how he could do what he coulddo, but he knew that it was
useful to the military. And sohe created this program around,
(19:52):
spying on Cold War targets, Andthen he filled in the science
later on. And it's interestingbecause I went into his archives
and you can see hismethodologies changing from
astral travel into somethingelse by the very end. It's a
great example of the technologypreceding the science.
By the very end, hisexplanations of this cosmic data
(20:13):
network that's shared amonghumanity is completely different
from the idea of astral travel,where literally your mind just
goes to a different space on theplanet.
Alicia Puglionesi (20:24):
Yeah, and it very much evokes an earlier
tension in late nineteenthcentury psychical research that
I'm familiar with from my ownwork. This tension between the
desire for experimental rigor inthe form of these very
repetitive experiments withrandomized numbers, symbols.
They were doing these in the1880s and 90s as well, trying to
(20:48):
generate sort of quantitativeevidence of telepathic
abilities. And the desire ofthose very same experimenters to
have sort of the astonishment ofexperience, the direct
revelation of contact withanother mind revealed
information that they didn'thave access to through any of
(21:10):
the known senses. And those werethe things that truly captured
people's imaginations thatmotivated them in this sort of
work.
And so Swan is very much in the50s and 60s making a similar
argument that this is somethingthat is unruly. It can't be
necessarily verified throughthese statistical methods, but
it has to be experienceddirectly. And in his case, he's
(21:34):
arguing through the cultivationof 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 statusquo is displaced by something
new, and it goes away, and thenew thing is now the dominant
(21:55):
reigning thing, you evokerevolutions in the sense of
cycles. And I think that's areally powerful image for this
kind of phenomenon that we'rediscussing now.
Derek Lee (22:06):
Yeah, exactly. Like I use revolutions in many ways in
this book, but you just capturedthe main one, the idea that like
we're seeing what we're seeingnow has happened again. And so,
yeah, we're seeing these repeatsof citizen science or people who
are outside the scientificestablishment making
breakthroughs, in the psychicalrealm. As you were speaking, the
(22:27):
thing that immediately came tomind was the thing that you
wrote on, which was the ideathat so Ingersollan believed
that by imagining by giving ageographic coordinate, he could
see what was there. And then thebest way to capture what he saw
there was by drawing it.
And this goes exactly to theresearch that you have done,
which was the idea that drawingwas the way, was a direct
(22:50):
conduit to the mind. And so whatIngo Swan was doing was what
Upton Sinclair and Mary CraigSinclair did in their psychical
research classic mental radio.When Mary Craig is sending
images across her house to herhusband who, I'm sorry, her
husband is selling telepathicimages to Mary Craig who's then
like drawing those images on apiece of paper becomes empirical
(23:15):
proof that telepathictransmissions are real. In his
letters, he says like, this isrevolutionary. No one has ever
done this before.
But like, he probably knew whatthe Sinclairs were doing. And
like he's a very much like aself aggrandizing figure, but he
is well couched in psychicalhistory. He knew that drawings
were seen as a way of directaccess to the mind. And do you
(23:38):
want to tell people about someof the research you've done
there?
Alicia Puglionesi (23:41):
Yeah, there's definitely it was interesting to
see that recurrence of drawingas this direct trace of
someone's mental contents. Itseems like, again, this cyclical
thing where people eitherindependently or informed by
previous work have this idea ofremoving the mediation of
(24:01):
language by relying on imagesand drawing. Yeah. And that goes
back to early experiments by theAmerican Society of Psychical
Research. Indeed, theyencountered a problem when
trying to approach thisstatistically that they
attempted to calculate thenumber of possible different
images that one could draw inorder to determine the
(24:23):
probability of someone drawing aparticular image at random as
opposed to through telepathicreception.
And ultimately that number isincalculable. But those were the
experiments that people foundmost interesting, much more
interesting than guessing cardsin a deck or guessing numbers
(24:45):
because there was somethingqualitatively engaging about
reaching out through space intosomeone else's consciousness
potentially in search of thisimage.
Derek Lee (24:56):
Right. And I think I remember the idea that
psychology had pioneered theidea that drawing is better than
speech in terms of capturing thecontents of the mind. And so
again, Swan is likescientificizing what he's doing.
He could point to prior studiesand say like, Well, I can draw
what I'm seeing in this missilesite. Let me just do it with a
(25:19):
free hand and this will bebetter than anything I could
tell the person I'm workingwith.
And there's the signs to backthe idea that he is a direct
conduit to what's happeningacross the world.
Alicia Puglionesi (25:31):
Yes, and I think what's novel in Swan's
work, he claims that everythingabout it is novel. But what I
see as novel and what youhighlight in your work is that
he is framing this specificallyas a military technology at a
moment when advanced militarytechnology is kind of the coin
(25:53):
of the realm. And that is a newreframing of the paranormal
mind. And you know there areprecedents for it. Psychical
researchers exploredapplications of
parapsychological abilities interms of treating mental
illness.
The idea that you couldpotentially address mental
(26:15):
illness through cultivation ofpsychical reflection and
mediumship, they never reallyhad the ability to perceive
that, certainly not in the waythat Swan did, thanks to, again,
the connections that he was ableto make.
Derek Lee (26:29):
Exactly. And it's funny because so Swan pioneered
remote viewing, and this iswhere I also bring a lot of
fiction into my research. And sohe wrote, for those people who
don't know, so Swan was a veryprolific writer. He wrote many
psychic guides. He also wrote acouple of novels.
The And one that I spend themost time with is called
Starfire. And it's probably outof print, but if anyone can get
(26:51):
their hands on it, I totallyrecommend doing it because this
is the best military psychicfantasy ever written. It's this
thing it's out of control. Imean, so basically, he's in love
with military science.Essentially, the plot of the
book is that both The US and TheSoviets have developed psychic
(27:12):
technologies, which is true inreal life, and they started
gearing up for World War III.
And it is the job of a psychicwarrior who can surveil the
planet, which is him, to stopWorld War III from happening.
And he is so powerful that hecan make anything happen, use
(27:33):
his telekinetic power to destroyany files, to like look into any
sort of military bunker anddetermine what is happening. So
he becomes the marginal figurewho is the the mastermind of the
planet and can literally savethe world because if Russia and
The US actually deploy theirpsychic weapons, we are goners.
And so his protagonist is goingto save the world. I mean, it's
(27:57):
like the militarization ofpsychic research for the benefit
of mankind.
It's a pretty stunning work offiction and it does a good job
of capturing this appliedscience, this movement away from
science for science sake into,like, something that does things
in the world, like the ultimatetechnology.
Alicia Puglionesi (28:15):
Yes. I'm very eager to get my hands on a copy
of that book. There are twothings that arise looking at
Swan's involvement with themilitary'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 psychicalresearch or parapsychology or
(28:38):
Swan's remote viewing was afailure? Because we know that
the government today is not ableto use psychics to look at what
our geopolitical rivals aredoing.
And another path we can go downis the role of fiction in
driving the circulation ofparanormal ideas. So maybe we
can address the failure questionfirst and then turn to fiction
(29:01):
because there are so many otheramazing works of fiction that
you're using in your research.
Derek Lee (29:07):
Yeah. So I think, the way failure works in the book,
it's not I haven't thought aboutit that way, but frankly, like
so much of the paranormal andpsychical research has failed to
be reproduced in the laboratorysetting. It happens
spontaneously, and so itsconstant failure to reveal
itself as a science opens a doorfor literature. Literature
(29:32):
allows science to happen byother means. It allows,
different types of authors,whether they're scientific
authors, fiction authors, NewAge authors, to imagine, you
know, what could the paranormalmind do if we could ask it to do
it when we want it to do in aspecific way, what happens?
(29:53):
How can we explain how telepathyworks with words rather than a
scientific theorem? And so itbecomes a way of teasing out
theories, testing out what wouldhappen in the real world, what
might happen, following thosethreads out. What's interesting
is that literature becomes likeone of the primary engines of
(30:15):
parascience. In the book, I saythat both science and literature
play equal roles in perpetuatingpseudoscientific ideas. One way
it does that is by doing thescience that science cannot do
or will not do.
Obviously, we know by themidpoint of the twentieth
century, mainstream psychologyhad sworn off psychical research
and you could be fired from yourjob or never get a job if you
(30:42):
committed yourself to this pathof research. And so if you want
to explore it in any way, youhave to do it through ideas and
through the works of fictionrather than the test tube or
rolling a dice.
Alicia Puglionesi (30:54):
Another really interesting example you
give of that is this idea of thesidron of the thought particle.
And it was really interesting toread about the lineage of that
idea because it's so omnipresentboth in parapsychology and in
popular culture, and you bringthose together really nicely.
Derek Lee (31:15):
Yeah. So the Citron, this was actually like the first
chapter I ended up writing. TheCitron, just, to give people a
preview of what this idea is, itis the particle of precognition.
It is the idea that there areparticles that are traveling
faster than light, that arecoming from future events and,
(31:36):
like, coming back, and movingback in time and then hitting
the brain, which and then thebrain then sees you know, has a
moment of precognition. And ittraces several lineages of
thought to assemble itself.
So this idea came about in the1960s by a psychical researcher
named Adrian Dobbs, and heunited the idea that there was a
(31:59):
thought particle. And in earlypsychology, in the early 1900s,
there was the idea that theremight be an atom of thought. I
guess he combined the idea of anatom of thought with mid century
quantum physics, which was thereare weird particles out there.
We have recently discovered theneutrino. We have discovered the
(32:19):
positron.
There are particles out therethat we do not know all its
properties, but the math saysyou know, they could do this.
And one of the things that themath said was that you could
possibly have faster than lightparticles. Know, says not to
give you faster than light, butthere's a whole lineage of
quantum physicists who aresaying, like, if we do the math
(32:40):
this way, you can have fasterthan light particles. And so
Adrian Jobs connects the thoughtparticle with a faster than
light particle, and suddenly youhave particles that are moving
backwards in time and cantherefore tell you the future.
It's a really interestinglineage.
It just goes to show like howinterdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary this field is.He's a theoretical
(33:01):
parapsychologist. Like he can'tdo the experiment on this. We
don't have the technology tofind citrons just yet, but I can
write an article about it andthese science fiction writers
are going to start writing, allsorts of weird fictions about
these faster than lightparticles that will start this
ball rolling in mass culture.And as you mentioned, like, this
(33:22):
idea is, like, pretty common inscience fiction these days.
Alicia Puglionesi (33:25):
Yeah. And seeing really the direct
technical uptake of it in PhilipK. Dick in the Watchmen series
is really fascinating becausethey're very much explaining it
on a technical level yet, asyou're saying, not on a physical
level, but like in thespeculative way that you can
(33:48):
really only accomplish infiction, imagining how this
might be explained.
Derek Lee (33:54):
Exactly. And Philip K. Dick is a great test case. I
mean, he was a citizen scientistalso. He had read the articles.
So the idea of the Citronstarted moving into certain
trade journals, certainmagazines, and Philip K. Dick
picked up on this, and, he wasvery much a citizen scientist.
For people who don't know,Philip K. Dick is a pretty
(34:16):
interesting character inliterary history. In 1974, he
basically started taking massiveamounts of vitamins to turn his
brain into an antenna because hewas certain that these particles
from the future, that he couldsomehow capture if he just,
(34:40):
like, attuned his brain theright way.
So he was also part of, like,the whole psychedelic drug
culture. So I'm sure he was alsotaking lots of drugs, but he was
also taking vitamins to trainhis brain to capture all this
data that is out there. And fortwo months, February and March
in 1974, he was successful indoing that. He was getting giant
(35:02):
gobs of information to hisbrain, he wasn't sleeping, and
he was writing it all out intohis giant journal called
Exegesis. And, he has severalexplanations for why this was,
and the one that I follow outwas that he was getting hit by
citrons.
And so the citron gave him manyideas for many novels. And in
(35:24):
the novel that I look at, Valis,he literally writes his semi
autobiography about what he justdid about all the vitamins,
seeing the future, and then hetakes into a religious slant
because he basically finds likethe next iteration of Jesus
Christ as part of his journeys.But it's all because of this
(35:45):
particle. He knew exactly whatthe researchers said about these
particles and you know, he did acitizen science experiment to
make it happen, and he did
Alicia Puglionesi (35:57):
it. And there are more resonances there
thinking about the paranormal asa literary space going back to
the modernist occult moment,William Butler Yeats saying that
the spirits were giving himideas for poetry. And even
without concrete scientificproof or acceptance, these
things are clearly generating alot of literary potentiality. I
(36:22):
have two more questions with thetime that we have left. One of
them is the hard question.
What's up with parasciencetoday? 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 reallybeen struggling with over the
past few years. I think it'smuch easier today to make the
case for the importance ofunderstanding parascientific or
(36:44):
pseudoscientific thought than itwas when I started my
dissertation project many yearsago.
At that time when I started toresearch the history of
parapsychology, I think it wasmostly the anti vaccine movement
that was on the ascent, but itwas still quite marginal. And,
you know, certainly climatechange denial, which is another
thing that you mentioned in thebook as being kind of a
(37:05):
controversial pseudoscience. Buthere we are now with these ideas
having a significant resurgenceand an unprecedented influence
in culture and politics. So I'lljust put it to you as an STS
scholar who focuses onparasciences. What do you make
of this?
Derek Lee (37:23):
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting topic and
something I had to negotiate.When your research is on
pseudoscience, peopleimmediately jump to
controversial and in many waysharmful movements, like climate
change denialism, the anti vaxxmovement, and say like, are you
trying to legitimize theseideas? And I guess like one
(37:44):
thing that I would point outfrom the get go is that I'm not
trying to legitimize theparanormal mind, I'm not trying
to legitimize climate change,nihilism. What I am trying to do
is say like, we need to talkabout this sort of stuff. You
know, there's this view inpositivist philosophy or just
like modern science culture thatif we don't talk about
pseudoscience and if we simplyjust talk about hardcore science
(38:06):
and STEM, all the bad ideaswould just go away.
They're gone. And if you look atthe scientific record, that
doesn't happen. Weird ideascontinue in our culture. The
important thing is to look atthose weird ideas, understand
the historical context, thepolitical context, the military
context, and it's through thatcontext that you can understand
(38:28):
why do these ideas have so muchforce now. I think the way to
understand pseudosciences islike always to contextualize and
understand where they're comingfrom and understand their power
rather than not talking aboutit, because I don't think not
talking about it is going to doanybody any good at this point.
Like, we need to understand, youknow, where these people are
coming from and why they believewhat they do in order to live in
(38:53):
a society where multipleviewpoints exist. That's the
line that I have to negotiate.I'm all for discussing oddball
ideas rather than pretendingthey don't exist because
frankly, these ideas affectsociety and we need to know
about them rather than ignoringthem.
Alicia Puglionesi (39:11):
Yeah, I think that that's always been my
approach as well, the necessityof understanding how this works,
understanding what exactly isgoing on. Why do people believe
what they believe? Increasingly,I have struggled with how do we
prevent harm? This question ofwhat is at the margins and what
(39:32):
is in power or influential inpolicy, one's outlook kind of
changes in a certain way whenthese things become very
influential in policy. Andobviously, it only further
underscores the importance ofunderstanding what exactly is
going on here.
As a scholar, I've definitelybeen grappling with this
question. And I do know it veryhelpful to me, which I picked up
(39:53):
from Neshay Devano and BrianCase's work about the
psychedelics movement is thisidea of pluripotency that the
weird, the sort of marginal andthese underground counter
sciences or para sciences arepluripotent. They can go in any
direction in terms of are theyliberatory? Are they harmful?
(40:15):
Are they both?
Or even more things than thatare certainly not binary. And
how do we address these concernsabout harm while also
understanding that we need aworld in which many worlds fit?
Derek Lee (40:29):
Exactly. In a sense, I was lucky in my choice of
choosing the paranormal mindbecause it doesn't have the
direct political resonance that,say, the anti vaxx movement does
today, but it still allowed meto talk about weird sciences and
the interesting histories thatcome out of that. You mentioned
where is my future work going togo? One area that I am pushing
(40:52):
towards is looking at conspiracytheories. And despite the fact
that we all agree thatconspiracy theories can have all
sorts of negative effects oncurrent discourse, it is a super
hot topic in the academy rightnow.
The idea of the sociology behindconspiracy theories, there are
books coming out every othermonth about why do rational
(41:13):
people believe things? So Ithink your observation is
correct. I think there is anopening space for people to look
at weird ideas and not just todiscount them, but to say, well,
why is this the way it is? Howdid this emerge? I think one
reason why conspiracy theorieshave become an extremely hot
(41:33):
topic is because they've gainedpolitical power in the last
couple of years.
I mean, I think, for example,obviously with the rise of
internet culture and internetcommunities, a lot of conspiracy
theories have these hubs wherethey can grow larger than they
could before. But also thepeople who are conspiracy
theorists are gaining positionsin government and in state
(41:54):
houses, and it's becomingincreasingly normalized. And so
for that reason, like people arerealizing like these non
normative scientific ideas aregaining huge political traction,
are affecting everyday life. Weneed to pay attention to it. And
that's exactly what this entirebook is about, Paracentric
(42:16):
Revolution.
It says, like, we need tohighlight these marginal ideas
and understand where they'recoming from, how they fit into
histories of knowledge, how dothey fit into histories of
power. Just to go back into,like, where my future work is
going, the history of conspiracyfiction is really long, but I
think with a lot of reallyinteresting ideas from So Joseph
Uzinski is a scholar ofconspiracy theories, and there
(42:38):
are others who are coming upalongside of him, and they're
providing a lot of interestingtheories that I think I can
apply to interesting conspiracyfictions in history. And I see
that as the next outgrowth of myparascientific approach. So
whereas I started with theparanormal, I guess I'm
explicitly going a bit morepolitical and looking at, I
guess, what new conspiracytheories are arising, what is
(42:59):
the function of conspiracyfiction, how does it affect
scientific knowledge? How doesit affect political power?
So I think that's probably likethe next phase of my
parascientific purview.
Alicia Puglionesi (43:11):
That's very exciting. I'm definitely looking
forward to hearing your take onthat and especially the source
material that you're workingwith. Is there a particular
source that has sparked yourinterest in this topic?
Derek Lee (43:25):
Yeah, I was at a science fiction conference and
someone mentioned that there's awhole range of science fiction
that we don't talk about atthese conferences, which tend to
be very progressive, but like weneed to pay attention to, and
like a whole bunch of thesesubgenres appear. There's
climate change denial sciencefiction, there's white
nationalist science fiction, andif we go back through the
(43:48):
literary record, if you startexpanding what counts as utopian
thought or dystopian thought,there's all sorts of different
examples. I'm at the verystarting point of this project,
but the more I look into it, themore I see things that could fit
into a parascientific approachin both science studies and
(44:08):
literary studies that couldprovide unique insights into,
our political history or ourscientific history.
Alicia Puglionesi (44:18):
Fantastic. That sounds fascinating.
Derek Lee (44:21):
Yeah, Alicia, what are you working on going
forward?
Alicia Puglionesi (44:24):
I'm working on a few things. Most connected
to what we've talked abouttoday, I've been working for a
while with the archive of afamily of nineteenth century
spiritualists and mediums whowere specifically advancing this
practice of psychometry, readingthe past in objects. There's a
(44:46):
through line to all of thisstuff in your book. These ideas
that information, time,experiences are somehow embedded
in the material recorded as itwere in the material substances
around us. And so that was theirtheory, which they demonstrated
(45:07):
through channeling informationfrom rocks and specimens and
artifacts, and they kind oftoured the country with this
lecture presentation.
So I've been very interested inthat and how that fits into the
weird world of nineteenthcentury America.
Derek Lee (45:24):
That is super fascinating. I haven't read
enough about psychometry. I'mgenerally aware of it and I'm a
big comic book reader. Theredefinitely are some comic book
characters whose power is toread the histories of objects,
but that's super exciting thatyou're going be doing some
pretty brand new research inthat area, so that is super
exciting.
Alicia Puglionesi (45:45):
Yeah, so just an aside, there's a topic that
we didn't get to, which istalking about Indigenous science
and ethnic fiction.
Derek Lee (45:53):
Yeah, I think, Indigenous science is a really
important part. I'm glad youbrought that up. So much of
parascience is highlighting thatwhich has been marginal in
history of science. I looktowards non Western sciences. In
the book, I look at things likechi and Korean shamanism, zen,
and how those ideas, which havenot been studied as sciences in
(46:17):
the Western sense, have beenused by BIPOC authors to re
envision, like, what the mindcan do, to re envision how
ghosts operate and how ghostsmove through the world.
I thought that was a reallygenerative way into looking at
how the paranormal has evolved,I guess not only chronologically
(46:41):
but in the non Western sense.And I guess there's a story
behind that. I mean, there's acouple of origin stories behind
this project. One of them isthat my parents are Burmese, and
my mom told me about all theghosts she saw in Rangoon when
she was growing up. She woke uplate one night, and there was a
ghost at the foot of her bedcounting his meditation beats.
(47:01):
And she told these stories withenough regularity that ghosts
became part of just everydaylife in Burmese culture. It
really is, in a lot of Easterncultures, ghosts are not these
like freaks that should not be.It is part of the continuum of
existence. I didn't see thatreflected in a lot of psychical
research research and I didn'tsee that reflected in a lot of
(47:25):
Western literature, but you dosee that in a lot of ethnic
literature. And I saw that theway that novels by Amy Tan and
Ruth Ozeki the Comfort Womennovel, they were looking at
ghosts in different ways thatreflected non Western modes of
being.
And I thought that needs to beincorporated into the
parascientific purview becauseif we're expanding our view of
(47:49):
science studies beyond thetraditional areas, like we need
to start looking at theseliterary genres, we need to look
at forms of knowing that reflectthe diversity of experience in
the world. And certainly, Iknow, like, science and
technology studies have beenmoving more towards non Western
and Indigenous, sciences, and Ithought like this was an
(48:09):
appropriate place to startthinking along those lines
through fiction.
Alicia Puglionesi (48:13):
I think it's really a perfect articulation of
this emerging understanding inscience studies of indigenous
sciences as they touch theparanormal. It's really
important to approach it fromthat angle as opposed to the
tradition within Westernoccultism of exoticizing or
extracting from non Westernspiritual practices or spiritual
(48:37):
technologies and kind of tryingto rearrange them into a system
of whatever occult thinker isdabbling in them. Framing this
in terms of an engagement withIndigenous science is really
powerful here.
Derek Lee (48:53):
It's kind of funny because I think in a lot of
Western literature that I hadseen from most of my academic
training, ghosts are eitherthese exotic things that are
just a weird part of somedistant culture, or they're just
symbols. And we quickly explainthem away as being a
representation of the MiddlePassage, or is this someone's
(49:14):
personal trauma? And thatdoesn't capture the way other
cultures have seen ghosts, whichbe like different, like if it's
just a continuation of the humanin just a different form or a
looser form. And I think it'simportant if we're going to
expand our sciences orworldviews, to capture that
richness.
Alicia Puglionesi (49:33):
Definitely. And you locate that in these
really fantastic works offiction that bring together a
lot of the different threadsthat run throughout the book. So
I think it's really well done.
Derek Lee (49:47):
Thanks.
Alicia Puglionesi (49:48):
I really appreciated this conversation
and the work that you've done,and I'm really looking forward
to your future work.
Derek Lee (49:56):
Yeah, thank you so much. This was a fantastic
conversation. I love talkingabout all these weird topics
with you. It's been a blast. Sothank you again.
Alicia Puglionesi (50:04):
This has been a University of Minnesota press
production. The book The Scienceand Culture of the Paranormal by
Derek Lee is available fromUniversity of Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.
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