In an afterword to a book titled Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler writes of

...a series of paradoxes: that the past is irrecoverable and the past is not past; the past is the resource for the future and the future is the redemption of the past; loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression. And we are considering different kinds of losses here: the losses of genocide, the loss of "humanness" under slavery; the loss that is undergone with exile; the loss that is effaced through colonization; the loss of culture that is performed by the mandatory production of a colonized subject; the loss defrayed through mania; disavowed loss and its visual and textual effects; the redemption that animates loss; the longing to which loss gives rise. And perhaps most difficult, the loss of loss itself: somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one's way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full "recovery" is impossible...

[emphasis mine]

Now, I'll be the first to admit that Judith Butler -- as Ringo once said in an entirely different context -- is way too 'eavy for my 'ead. I've tried her before, and I always feel as if I'm missing something: my best guess is the six or so years of postgraduate study it takes for people to write this way without apparent shame or embarrassment. And yes, this is a cheap shot (mea maxima culpa) that marks me as a hopeless philistine. But all that's beside the point. While I think this book would likely drive me nuts -- or just lie about more unread than most of them remain anyway -- this passage does speak to me, if more through a kind of emotional braille than by the words it uses. I know what loss is, and the loss of loss.

I've only ever heard about the latter from the Rolling Stones in a song called Blue Turns To Gray. I guess that nails my coffin shut on this score and proves once and for all I never would have made it through a university, even if I hadn't dropped out my freshman year -- trying to read Oswald Spengler while smoking Panama Red convinced me I just wasn't cut out for this intellectual stuff. And I bet Judith Butler would have a bird if she ever read this, because Mick's just talking about some girl, not genocide or colonialism or anything so weighty as all that.

It was only recently that I discovered Spengler was a despicable piece of... work. So maybe I wasn't as much a dope as a dope fiend. Oddly, it didn't occur to me until years later that Mexican marijuana and Teutonic pessimism just don't go that well together. Anyway, it's all water over the dam now, and though I suppose all this too-much protesting argues that I feel the lack of a bona fide Ph.D. (I also wish that at some point I'd set my hair on fire), it's really the least of my deeply felt losses.

Which I do have. As do you, gentle reader. As do we all, unless we're wandering wraithlike in loss denied or "defrayed through mania." All been there, all done that. Her face at first just ghostly... You know? Chaucer or Procol Harum, take your pick. So finally we come around to some sort of point (which would have been less pointed without taking the long-cut): wraiths and ghosts and spectral agencies. All of them disembodied memories of irreparable unrepresentable loss.

I'm trying to unpack the 19th century and retrack it into the present, more unconvinced than ever -- if I ever thought about it much -- that history is anything approaching a simple linear storyline. Granted, this is no big insight, in itself. But just saying there are X million stories in the Big City doesn't say much about any of them. Now, does it? (You may take this as a qualified slur on The Postmodern, should there, in the 42 dimentias of space and time, have been anything so tangible by that name to Capitalize On.) So many threads, so little social fabric. But one that is ubiquitous -- and which everyone here in the Blog-O-Sphere never tires of hearing about -- is technology. So, while we could begin nearly anywhere, let's start there. Why not?

Without having read it yet, I'm going to guess that Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television is about one long sustained response to an enormous loss. An unspeakable loss. The failure of Reason, the death of God, or something deeper and older that that modern pair only hints at. It's easy if you backtrack from artificial intelligence. AI dreams (this is your Freud) as frustrated poltergeists of irrational desire (this is your Freud on C++). Just say no.

But ah, if only it were that easy. It's not. In addition to telegraphy, the Internet, and every communications technology in between, Haunted Media also includes, seven pages with references to mesmerism and 46 pages with references to spiritualism. Hmmm. It seems The Enlightenment was never sure if wanted to be free of gods or just free to create its own. And this becomes less clear as we move from then to now. Anton Mesmer was a monster hit in the mid-1900s, even though, or perhaps because, he was such an outright fraud. Is science always pure discovery or is it sometimes (how often?) driven by dreams of recovery. Mesmer did indeed discover something, but like Heinrich Schliemann, he dug right through his Troy -- down to the spirits of the dearly departed, the chthonic lost, the living dead. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain contains, unsurprisingly, 313 pages with references to mesmerism, but also 22 pages with references to spiritualism.

As The Cars once said: it's all mixed up. In this case: science with mysticism; spiritualism with bogus science. And it gets more difficult, not easier, to sort them out as we get closer in to real time. I'm backtracking to learn how old the New Age really is. It wasn't just too much of too many drugs in the '60s. That much is certain. Nor did it all start (not hardly) with Shirley MacLaine, as Janet Oppenheim shows (among many other things) in The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914. But we're still dealing with science here, or attempts anyway to be "scientific" -- as much as that's possible with things that go bump in the night. By the time Madame Blavatsky enters New York City stage left, circe 1875, all bets are off with respect to any division between desire and de facto. And this tradition survives right up to this very moment, reflected in the so-called Metaphysical sections of Borders and Barnes & Nobles everywhere. You can be what you want to be: on cloud 9.

So much for progress then. So much for Carl Sagan's warnings about burning the candle at both ends in the Demon-Haunted World. We are in the dark as much as ever, only more so, having retreated from illusions of "enlightened" disenchantment into a New Age medievalism so chock-a-block with spooks and spirits that there's hardly room for us chickens, boss. Welcome to The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England and its continuation in the 21st century as bohemian bourgeois "shamanism," saccharine angelmongering, ultrachic channeling, out-of-body trips, near-death brushes with God, intelligent DMT basketballs (no kidding), UFOs, aliens, and weirdest of the weird: self-esteem based on cultural insecurities so deep there's no fathoming them. Step right up. Get your snake oil here. Get your "fair" share of the kozmik pie. Get your needs met.

from: Minds over matter by Gillian Gill
source: The Women's Review of Books, 1 November 1999.
via: HighBeam™ Research

As the twentieth century draws to a close, historians have become increasingly fascinated with the strange, interconnected worlds of nineteenth-century mesmerism, spiritualism, mind cure and radical politics.... Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920, Beryl Satter's thoughtful and innovative new book on American women and the New Thought movement around the turn of the last century, makes an important contribution to this exciting field....

New Thought was the name adopted by a large, loose grouping of late nineteenth-century American men and women who practiced and proselytized spiritual healing or mind cure, a radical form of what is usually known as alternative medicine....

Satter shows the underside of the belief that health, wealth and success were each individual's natural heritage....

Before the beginning of the twentieth century, New Thought had left its socialist and feminist ideology behind, and was increasingly focused on justifying material prosperity as an outward sign of spiritual health. The search for God had transmuted into the love of gold: "The poor man is not honest. The honest man is not poor," wrote popular New Thought journalist Ida Nichols in 1891. New Thought became increasingly identified with the racist far Right, insisting on individual effort as the only motor for social progress, equating possessions with virtue and virtue with racial purity, arguing that "for the sake of race improvement...poverty and suffering must not be alleviated by the state."

[emphasis mine]