Senior Research Seminar with Professor Gregory Delaplace (Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes)

Senior Research Seminar with Professor Gregory Delaplace (Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes)Projecting force. Technology, criticism, and concealment in early 20th century spiritualist mediumship

 

Mediumship is not always about making dead people speak. Even within the European Spiritualist tradition, famous for its lively and mostly uplifting discussions with spirits of the departed, some seances are rather about moving stuff around. In the interwar period in England, physical mediumship was all the rage indeed. The purpose of such occasions was for a “force” to be produced in a room, in front of an attendance expecting musical instruments to be lifted and played at a distance, trinkets to be shifted by an invisible hand, furniture to be overturned or broken, and even ectoplasm to materialise. Was this “force” really channelled by the medium from the other world? Was it an emanation from their own mind powers? Or was it just produced through tricks and sleight of hand? These questions were the subject of intense debates, far beyond the enthusiastic circles of Spiritualist associations. Psychical researchers rivalled in the designing of technological apparatuses intended to prove a medium’s authenticity or expose fraud; amateur scientists and professional magicians concurred or went at each other’s throats over the assessment of a séance. Retracing the career of two famous physical mediums (the Schneider brothers) and describing their successive validation and exposure by rival psychical investigators throughout the 1920s, I will reflect on the configuration of these curious rituals, whose conditions of felicity revolve around radical criticism – performances that can only succeed if properly undermined, as it were. This case study will also give us an opportunity to explore how the invisible might come to be produced, through a politics of attention that derives power from the staging of concealment.

 

Gregory Delaplace is a visiting fellow at Trinity College and a professor of the anthropology of religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He has worked on ghosts and the invisible, both in contemporary Mongolia and in 20th century Great Britain. He is the author of La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts (Seuil, 2024).