Where the paranoid meets the paranormal: speculations on spirit photography

Speculation is always fascinated, bewitched by the specter.--Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Conjuring Ghosts

One of the most fascinating genres in the history of nineteenth-century photography is the suspect practice of spirit photography. It was "discovered" by a Boston engraver turned photographer named William H. Mumler in March 1861, when he took a photograph of himself alone in his studio only to find that a second figure (or spirit extra), described by some accounts as the ghost image of his dead cousin, appeared next to him on the developed plate. With its origins set against the background of life (and death) during the Civil War, spirit photography would help many mourners cope with the tragic losses around them. Riding high on the wave of enthusiasm for spiritualism that swept through American popular culture at mid-century, with its attendant seances, table tipping, and other occult manifestations, spirit photographs reinforced the familial function of photography by purporting to expose the ghosts of dead friends and relatives to their survivors. In this manner, spiritualism's belief in the afterlife and the possibility of communication with the dead manifested itself in the realm of the visible by means of these spirit photographic proofs imprinted upon glass-plate negatives, But the hermeneutics of suspicion and demystification practices would not allow the spiritualists an uncontested space for these ghostly revelations. Whether derided as the outgrowth of foolhardy religious beliefs or double-exposure frauds, their faith in exposure would produce rationalist and rationalizing accounts for these paranormal photographic phenomena. This essay considers how spirit photography conjures a state of paranoia and paranoiac knowledge for both skeptics

and believers in these photo-apparitions. In this way, it appropriates a dictum from D.A. Miller that "one understands paranoia only by oneself practicing paranoid knowing" and applies it to all who would speculate on spirit photography. (1) As such, these speculations overlay the discourse of paranoia onto the production and reception of paranormal photography.

It should be recalled that the discourse of spirit photography functions as an analog to scientific photography--whether astronomic or microscopic. It is another way of articulating photography's ability to see the invisible and reveal truths beyond the powers of the naked eye. In this regard, James Coates, member of the Society for the Study of Supernormal Photography, entitled his 1911 book Photographing the Invisible. (2) This believer's account argues that the recent scientific discovery of invisible X rays had bolstered the truth claims of spirit photography and enabled it to "dismiss the fraud hypothesis" of the skeptics. (3) In this way, Coates enlists experimental science in the service of the spiritual truths revealed via the new photographic technology. The discourse of spirit photography revolves around such paranoid questions as "Are we seeing the truth?" or more complexly, "Can such a truth be seen at all?" The believers assert that paranormal photography provides access to a "spiritual truth" beyond the normal powers of perception. That is why Mumler begins his memoirs: "In these days of earnest inquiry for spiritual truths, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to contribute what evidences of a future existence I may have obtained in my fourteen years experience with Spirit-Photography" (4) [emphasis mine].

The paranormal photograph confronts the viewer with this paranoid question: "Am I really seeing a spiritual truth?" The cantankerous debate over spirit photography in the nineteenth century staged between skeptics and believers revolves around giving either a positive or a negative response to this inquiry The goal of this essay is to formulate these contrary positions (with the help of psychoanalysis and other theories) and to sketch the spectral borders between them. For the discourse of spirit photography operates according to the spooked logic of what Jacques Derrida calls "hauntology" (5)--a neologism that marks being by that which spectralizes it, that which haunts it. Spirit photography is writing in light haunted by specters--read suspiciously or seriously, but always under the sign of paranoia. These speculations on spirit photography play out the ways in which both skeptics and believers in paranormal phenomena become haunted by paranoia and by each other.

The Paranoia of the Skeptics

In "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," Eve Sedgwick discusses the paranoid as a prevalent contemporary mode of critique. She writes, "The methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia." (6) This paranoid critical mode of reading claims to "offer unique access to true knowledge," (7) and it is compulsively driven to unmask any suspicious characters that pose obstacles to its line of inquiry. One might ask what is the paranoia that drives the hermeneutics of suspicion. Perhaps it is the skeptic's fear of not being as scientific and rational as possible, that there may still be some murky occultism at large in the world. Or perhaps it is the fear that the believer in spirit photography might not be such a fraud after all and the compelling need to extinguish that paranormal possibility. Among the attributes of paranoid knowing that Sedgwick lists, it is the final one, "paranoia places its faith in exposure," (8) that is most relevant to those skeptics out to get spirit photography For the skeptics want to expose its machinations and sleights of band. They want to challenge the believer's claims to the photographic exposure of the invisible and to unmask so-called supernatural images as frauds.