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The Paranormal and the Politics of Truth: A Sociological Account
This book is based on the author's ten-year research into the politics of belief surrounding paranormal ideas. Through a detailed examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying factors that constitute the contemporary paranormal debate, the book explores the struggle surrounding the status of paranormal phenomena. It examines, on the one hand, how the principal arbiters of religious and scientific truths -- the Church and the academic establishment -- reject paranormal ideas as "occult" and "pseudo-scientific", and how, on the other hand, paranormal enthusiasts attempt to resist such labels and instead establish paranormal ideas as legitimate knowledge. The author contends that the paranormal debate is the outcome of wider discursive processes that are concerned with the construction and negotiation of truth in Western society generally. More specifically, the debate is seen as an aspect of the "boundary work" that defines the contours of religious and scientific orthodoxy. The book paves new ground in understanding the nature of belief relating to a topic that has long held fascination to academics and lay people alike – paranormal ideas. It develops a discursive framework for understanding a contemporary social phenomenon, hence placing the study at the cutting edge of ethnographic development that seeks to integrate discursive perspectives with empirical accounts of sociological phenomena. Most importantly, the study is intended to contribute to the debate surrounding communicative action, by outlining a discursive perspective on the negotiation of ideational differences that goes beyond the incommensurability theories that have dominated the sociology of communication and knowledge.
- GenresNonfiction
237 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2007
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December 2, 2015
This book is so confused, I'm not even sure where to start--or if it is worth it.
The book itself begins by saying Northcote wants to understand interest in the paranormal as a sociological phenomena, but he almost instantly starts tripping over himself. First he frets that applying sociological theories to the paranormal necessarily undermines any truth claims made by the paranormal--it cannot be real if it is socially constructed. According to his bibliography, though, he's read in the history and sociology of science, so should know that sociological explanations do not necessarily vitiate truth claims: something can be socially constructed AND true!
To make matters worse, he ends up resolving this problem by saying that debates about the paranormal are not debates about evidence anyway--they are politics by other means. So even as he worried about his own biases, he concludes that neither side of the debate has any claim on truth. So, so confusing.
Further confusing matters is his understanding of what constitutes sociology. He is not interested in groups, their organization, and how their structure leads to the creation and dissemination of certain kinds of information. No. He's a died in the wool Foucaltian, and his point is to show that we have been trapped in a particular discursive formation for the past three hundred years that structures all the debate. Thus, what is going on in the debate between skeptics and believers is the mobilizing of certain parts of the discourse to delegitimize the other group. This is the politics he is discussing.
The first main chapter only adds to the confusion. He decides to root his understanding of the occult in ancient Greek notions, then moves on the the Catholic church, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, in due course. Sigh. First, his interpretations of these events are basic, and second the idea that current debates between skeptics and believers is rooted in battles from the Enlightenment shows very little understanding of the persistence of occult, parapsychological, and esoteric forms of knowledge int he 19th and 20th centuries, and their continued interpenetration with science.
Which isn't even to say that the skeptic-proponent division is hackneyed and far from useful. He admits as much, repeatedly, but persists anyway.
Nor is it to point out that he somehow never references Wouter Hanegraff, who has done fundamental work on the continuity and change of esotericism and the occult over this exact period.
He's tripping all over himself in this chapter, mentioning that the church relegated the occult tot he imagination on one page--and using imagination to mean fake--and then on the next page giving the church's definition of imagination, which was wholly different.
The next chapter attempts to derive these groups and plot them on a graph--a largely ridiculous exercise that ignores hundreds of years of history. This chapter also starts Northcote's tendency to atomize everything, to no good end. The result is a slightly modified version of the skeptic-proponent division that he sees as persisting for the last three hundred years, more or less.
He then strikes off in a different direction, completely unamenable to the techniques he brings to bear. He wants to understand why people become involved with the paranormal. He mentions biographical and psychological reasons--which people attribute to themselves and their adversaries--but more or less dismisses the possibility out of hand in order to argue that the real reason people become involved with the paranormal is because it is part of our current discourse, and so something they can talk about.
As if these are mutually exclusive! He really, really wants to show Foucault's notion of discourse shaping mentalities, and so is straightjacketing his data to fit this model. It doesn't help that his data is so limited--interviews with people currently involved in the paranormal scene. (As though the ideas of a UFO-enthusiast from the 1990s can explain the fad for Mesmerism in the 1830s!)
Chapter five is not so much an argument as a summary. The two poles of the debate seem divided--skeptic and believer. But, really, they are more alike than one would think. As he notes, David Hess made the point fourteen years before him, saying that the two sides need each other. Northcote doesn't like that formulation though. Not enough discourse! So he says that the two sides are similar because they are drawing from the same discourse and supporting it.
At this point it should be noted that though discourse is defined, it is not really explained. To the extent that I understood what it meant, it referred to the idea that both sides shared the idea that evidence and rational argument were important to the creation of truth.
The final body chapter looks at the ways the two sides end up arguing--which, to his dismay, is not strictly rational! (Call the newspapers!) He admits this naïveté in the introduction, saying that he had come to the debate over the paranormal thinking that it was conducted according to the rational rules outlined by Jurgen Habemas. (Yes, he wants to combine Foucault and Habermas.) But it wasn't. And here he outlines all of the very many non-ration elements of the debate--name-calling, delegitimization, etc.
Which finally leads to the conclusion that there should be some way to have a more civil debate, and such a civil debate would be a model for other forms of politics.
Which is just as naive, and just as insensitive to power differentials--and this from someone who reads Foucault. Calls for civility are almost always calls by the more powerful to restrain the actions of the less. It's a ridiculous conclusion to a very confused book.
The book itself begins by saying Northcote wants to understand interest in the paranormal as a sociological phenomena, but he almost instantly starts tripping over himself. First he frets that applying sociological theories to the paranormal necessarily undermines any truth claims made by the paranormal--it cannot be real if it is socially constructed. According to his bibliography, though, he's read in the history and sociology of science, so should know that sociological explanations do not necessarily vitiate truth claims: something can be socially constructed AND true!
To make matters worse, he ends up resolving this problem by saying that debates about the paranormal are not debates about evidence anyway--they are politics by other means. So even as he worried about his own biases, he concludes that neither side of the debate has any claim on truth. So, so confusing.
Further confusing matters is his understanding of what constitutes sociology. He is not interested in groups, their organization, and how their structure leads to the creation and dissemination of certain kinds of information. No. He's a died in the wool Foucaltian, and his point is to show that we have been trapped in a particular discursive formation for the past three hundred years that structures all the debate. Thus, what is going on in the debate between skeptics and believers is the mobilizing of certain parts of the discourse to delegitimize the other group. This is the politics he is discussing.
The first main chapter only adds to the confusion. He decides to root his understanding of the occult in ancient Greek notions, then moves on the the Catholic church, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, in due course. Sigh. First, his interpretations of these events are basic, and second the idea that current debates between skeptics and believers is rooted in battles from the Enlightenment shows very little understanding of the persistence of occult, parapsychological, and esoteric forms of knowledge int he 19th and 20th centuries, and their continued interpenetration with science.
Which isn't even to say that the skeptic-proponent division is hackneyed and far from useful. He admits as much, repeatedly, but persists anyway.
Nor is it to point out that he somehow never references Wouter Hanegraff, who has done fundamental work on the continuity and change of esotericism and the occult over this exact period.
He's tripping all over himself in this chapter, mentioning that the church relegated the occult tot he imagination on one page--and using imagination to mean fake--and then on the next page giving the church's definition of imagination, which was wholly different.
The next chapter attempts to derive these groups and plot them on a graph--a largely ridiculous exercise that ignores hundreds of years of history. This chapter also starts Northcote's tendency to atomize everything, to no good end. The result is a slightly modified version of the skeptic-proponent division that he sees as persisting for the last three hundred years, more or less.
He then strikes off in a different direction, completely unamenable to the techniques he brings to bear. He wants to understand why people become involved with the paranormal. He mentions biographical and psychological reasons--which people attribute to themselves and their adversaries--but more or less dismisses the possibility out of hand in order to argue that the real reason people become involved with the paranormal is because it is part of our current discourse, and so something they can talk about.
As if these are mutually exclusive! He really, really wants to show Foucault's notion of discourse shaping mentalities, and so is straightjacketing his data to fit this model. It doesn't help that his data is so limited--interviews with people currently involved in the paranormal scene. (As though the ideas of a UFO-enthusiast from the 1990s can explain the fad for Mesmerism in the 1830s!)
Chapter five is not so much an argument as a summary. The two poles of the debate seem divided--skeptic and believer. But, really, they are more alike than one would think. As he notes, David Hess made the point fourteen years before him, saying that the two sides need each other. Northcote doesn't like that formulation though. Not enough discourse! So he says that the two sides are similar because they are drawing from the same discourse and supporting it.
At this point it should be noted that though discourse is defined, it is not really explained. To the extent that I understood what it meant, it referred to the idea that both sides shared the idea that evidence and rational argument were important to the creation of truth.
The final body chapter looks at the ways the two sides end up arguing--which, to his dismay, is not strictly rational! (Call the newspapers!) He admits this naïveté in the introduction, saying that he had come to the debate over the paranormal thinking that it was conducted according to the rational rules outlined by Jurgen Habemas. (Yes, he wants to combine Foucault and Habermas.) But it wasn't. And here he outlines all of the very many non-ration elements of the debate--name-calling, delegitimization, etc.
Which finally leads to the conclusion that there should be some way to have a more civil debate, and such a civil debate would be a model for other forms of politics.
Which is just as naive, and just as insensitive to power differentials--and this from someone who reads Foucault. Calls for civility are almost always calls by the more powerful to restrain the actions of the less. It's a ridiculous conclusion to a very confused book.
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