What can the occult, the obscure, and the incommunicable teach us about the history of communications and culture? Occult Communications: On Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology, examines how spiritualism, esotericism, and occultism have shaped the dominant cultures of reason in European and North American contexts from the seventeenth-century until today. Case studies in media archaeology and historical epistemology on issues such as spirit photography, horror films, exorcisms, stage magic, surrealism, and brains-in-vats examine so-called magical thinking and its operations at the heart of modern scientific and technological reason.

Introduction

• Bernard Geoghegen, "Occult Communications: On Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology"

Occcult Premotions

• Florian Sprenger, “Insensible and Inexplicable – On the Two Meanings of the Occult”
• Stephan Gregory, “Media in Action: From Exorcism to Mesmerism”

The Spirit of Scientific Inquiry

• Erhard Schüttpelz & Ehler Voss, “Fragile Balance: Human Mediums and Technical Media in Oliver Lodge’s Presidential Address of 1891”
• Christian Kassung, “Self-Writing Machines: Technology and the Question of the Self”
• Margarida Medeiros, “Facts and Photographs: Visualizing the Invisible with Spirit and Thought Photography”
• Jeffrey Sconce, “The Ghostularity”

The Spirit of Diversion

• Katharina Rein, “Mind Reading in Stage Magic: The “Second Sight” Illusion, Media, and Mediums”
• Petra Löffler, “Ghosts of the City: A Spectrology of Cinematic Spaces”
• Tessel M. Bauduin, “The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism”

Transmedial Occultism

• Anthony Enns, “Spiritualist Writing Machines: Telegraphy, Typtology, Typewriting,”
• Simone Natale, “Spreading the Spirit Word: Print Media, Storytelling, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism,”
• Laurence Rickels, “Integration: Understanding New Mediation via Innovations in Horror Cinema,”

Articles

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