Poltergeist
The Crisis of Civility in the Shadow Realm
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that.
—Walter Lippmann
Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or super-celestial body.
—Carl Jung
You are hallucinating. Half of what you see springs from your own store of images. In every scene, your perceptual system executes a kill chain: judgments are made, visual information is eliminated—in milliseconds. The noble eye flenses the raw spectrum of visual data. Everywhere, you perceive a collage of fact and fiction. All this carnage is pre-rational, non-verbal, unconscious. The mind's eye mirrors this process in metacognition. Even you—your consciousness—is a phantom of real and supernal images, a projection of metals, mercury, and salt, dissolved and reformed in an unknown star. You have never touched a material world, bur only the smoke of God, a chiasmus of matter and images spilling into the eye, making dead vision resort to life.
The artist, architect, engineer and weapons expert of Ludovico Sforza and Cesare Borgia grasped well the power of the image. Considered the proto-architect of military technology, Leonardo da Vinci was essentially a court wizard who designed and deployed programmable robots, tanks, and multi-barreled cannon systems, yet he said that through the image, “lovers are moved to speak to the figure of the beloved object; through them, the people are stirred to seek with fervent vows the images of the gods; this is not done by the sight of works of poets who might present those same gods with words.” (da Vinci 1909).
The image enters through the noblest sense, Sight, as a simultaneous, concentrated harmony that serves the eye in a moment of time. Da Vinci contends that it is only the image which evokes religious fervor, and not the words of poets. The image rules this world, “and through them (even) animals are deceived. I have seen a painting that deceived a dog by the appearance of its master, and the dog showed it great joy and honor; likewise, I saw how dogs barked and wanted to bite at painted dogs, and I saw a monkey engage in endless follies against another, painted monkey. I have seen how swallows flew up and wanted to settle on painted iron bars” (da Vinci 1909). Not only is the dog and monkey deceived, but also man’s innocent heart. He speaks, with pride in his warrior art, of poor souls falling in love with paintings,
And if the poet says that he can inflame men with love, which is a principal thing among all animated beings, the painter has the power to do the same, and more so, since he places the image of the beloved before the lover; and often the lover kisses this image and speaks to it, which he would not do were the same beauties represented by the writer; still better, the painter so affects the minds of men that they fall in love and come to love a painting that does not represent any living woman. And it happened to me that I made a picture with a religious subject that was bought by a lover who wished to have the divine attributes removed so that he could kiss it without scruples ; but at last conscience overcame sighs and desire, and he had to remove the image from his house.
Traktat von der Malerei, by Leonardo da Vinci (1909) (emphasis mine)
Da Vinci is compelled to note this innovation, this technology for making men fall in love with women who don’t exist. If the Image-maker wants to summon beauties that drive man to love, he is master over bringing them into existence, and if he wants the people to see things monstrous, frightening, or comical and laughable, the engineer of the Image is master and god over them. Thus, the warrior-artist enters the chamber of images and makes his dominion there.
In Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann gives the example of an experiment demonstrated at a psychology congress in Göttingen, which showed how stereotypes (fixed images) distort perception. During a staged incident, a clown and a masked man enacted a brief fight. Forty trained observers were asked to write reports immediately. Only one report contained less than 20% errors, while most had between 20% to over 50% inaccuracies. Many reports included details that were pure invention. The observers, instead of accurately recalling the scene, projected stereotypes of similar brawls they had encountered in their lives.
Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority saw a scene that had not taken place. What then did they see? One would suppose it was easier to tell what had occurred, than to invent something which had not occurred. They saw their stereotype of such a brawl. All of them had in the course of their lives acquired a series of images of brawls, and these images flickered before their eyes. In one man these images displaced less than 20% of the actual scene, in thirteen men more than half. In thirty-four out of the forty observers the stereotypes preempted at least one-tenth of the scene
—Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann
Lippmann was the first to plainly state, in a way that could be cleanly integrated into the social sciences, “We do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world, we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” (Lippmann 1922)
In his chapter Stereotypes, Lippmann repeatedly uses the painting to illustrate his points, he speaks of the displeasure when a painter “does not visualize objects exactly as we do,” and how our difficulty in appreciating medieval art arises because “our manner of visualizing forms has changed in a thousand ways.” He describes how the human figure, as shaped by Donatello and Masaccio, became a new standard: “People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, and to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented.”
He comments on the “strange connection” between our vision and the facts. A man might rarely look at a landscape except to consider its division into building lots, but he has seen landscapes hanging in parlors. “From them, he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon.” When he goes to the country, he may not notice any landscape until the sun sets rosy, at which point he recognizes it as a “landscape” and exclaims that it is beautiful.
Yet when he tries to recall it, “the odds are that he will remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor.” He did see a sunset, “but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the oil painting taught him to observe” than what an impressionist painter or a Japanese artist might have seen.
“In untrained observation, we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects.”
The effort to see all things freshly and in detail is exhausting and impractical in busy lives. Classification is necessary, yet “we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own.” The most subtle and pervasive influences are those that establish and sustain these stereotypes, leading us to imagine much of the world before we actually experience it.
Lippmann's observation that "types acquired through fiction tend to be imposed on reality" anticipates Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. His reflection on the influence of the cinema, where the moving picture "steadily builds up imagery... then evoked by the words people read," will be echoed by Baudrillard more than half a century later: “Every day the media pretend to make the masses speak, but in reality they only reaffirm their own self-referentiality.”
Lippmann anticipates concepts like the autopoietic and self-referential hyperreality, by coining the term "pseudo-environment." This pseudo-environment feeds the shadows of Plato's cave, mediating between the individual and the environment. Humans reconstruct reality through narratives, often using unconscious images or previous experiences. Fiction, for Lippmann, is not a lie but "a representation of the environment fabricated by humans themselves" (Lippmann 1922). Public Opinion regards the stereotype as inevitable and natural, because "we are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations," all the blooming and buzzing which confront us in the mediasphere,
”And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They are aroused by small signs, which may vary from a true index to a vague analogy. Aroused, they flood fresh vision with older images, and project into the world what has been resurrected in memory. Were there no practical uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life.” (Lippmann 1922)
Bridgerton Poltergeist
I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was the wound itself.
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1939)
The example of the Bridgerton Poltergeist illustrates the consequences of disregarding a single, longstanding stereotype—the "demon"—which has faithfully served humanity since ancient times in every civilization prior to the modern era. When such a functional stereotype is deliberately excised by managerial decree, the resulting void, the perceptual wound, may come to define one’s entire reality.
The Bridgeport Poltergeist case involves the Goodins family—Jerry, Laura, and their adopted daughter Marcia—in a small bungalow on Lindley Street, Connecticut. After adopting Marcia in May 1968, the family began experiencing unexplained phenomena, including moving objects, loud banging noises, and eerie footprints. On the night of November 21, 1974, these activities climaxed, attracting police involvement and the attention of renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Multiple police officers, firefighters and neighbors reported witnessing the strange phenomena, such as televisions falling, refrigerators sliding, and furniture moving on its own. Attesting to the credibility of the four officers first to arrive, Lieutenant Leonard Coco stated, “Together they have more than 100 years of experience. If they said they saw something, they saw something. I just don’t know what it was.”
