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Amazon Summary
A media archaeology that traces connections between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, considering topics that range from Kant's philosophy to somnambulist clairvoyants. Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology. Stefan Andriopoulos examines the relationships between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant's philosophy and the magic lantern's phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television. As Kant was writing about the possibility of spiritual apparitions, the emerging medium of the phantasmagoria used hidden magic lanterns to terrify audiences with ghostly projections. Andriopoulos juxtaposes the philosophical arguments of German idealism with contemporaneous occultism and ghost shows. In close readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he traces the diverging ways in which these authors appropriate optical media effects and spiritualist notions. The spectral apparitions from this period also intersect with an exploding print market and the rise of immersive reading practices. Andriopoulos explores the circulation of ostensibly genuine ghost narratives and Gothic fiction, which was said to produce “reading addiction” and a loss of reality. Romantic representations of animal magnetism and clairvoyance similarly blurred the boundary between fiction and reality. In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe adapted a German case history that described a magnetic clairvoyant as arrested in the moment of dying. Yet even though Poe's tale belonged to the realm of literary fiction, it was reprinted as an authentic news item. Andriopoulos extends this archaeology of new media into the early twentieth century. Tracing a reciprocal interaction between occultism and engineering, he reveals how spiritualist research into the psychic “television” of somnambulist clairvoyants enabled the concurrent emergence of the technical medium.
John Dee is a fascinating character from a fascinating age: the early enlightenment. It was a time (in Europe) when early science, both orthodox and heretical Christian theology, occultism, medieval grimoires and folk magic, imported ideas from the East, and loads and loads of other things were swirling together in this crazy brew. It's the primordial soup from which modernity and the industrial revolution emerged.
Oversimplified "pop" narratives of the enlightenment often taught in school tend to edit out all the wild-ass spooky shit. The reality is that the enlightenment was not a linear transition from medievalism to modernism but a period of extreme experimentation and "counterculture" similar in character to say 1920s Germany or 1960-1970s California.
I've come to believe that this is what periods of extreme creativity look like. They are not "pure" in any way. They're not linear movements toward something. They are chaotic soups of wild and often contradictory ideas merging and fracturing and fighting and being synthesized together.
In a learning sense we would say that they are not stuck at a local maximum; they are exploring state space. When new local maxima are found you get convergence there. That's when things get once again more stable, but less creative.
Here's a BBC documentary that goes into some of Isaac Newton's other interests:
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