Esther Peeren ---- Other Visions: The Politics of Mediumship

ABSTRACT Esther Peeren, “Other Visions: The Politics of Mediumship” The paranormal is supposed to exceed the ordinary, the rational and the explicable, yet it is not without its own expectations and conventions. There is, in Michel Foucault’s terms, an ‘archive’ or ‘system of enunciability’ that governs what can and cannot be said – or, more aptly, seen – in the paranormal paradigm. In relation to mediumship, which is my focus here, certain visions and materializations make sense – enabling them to appear with enduring brightness – while others, considered senseless, cannot attain event-status. Looking at two contemporary British novels featuring female mediums from different centuries – Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999), set in the 1860s, and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005), which unfolds in the 2000s – I ask what counts as a psychic vision in each historical context and when such visions become too “other” to be considered sensible as emanations of the suprasensible. When does the paranormal shift to the abnormal, leaving intelligibility behind? And what potential does the medium’s supposedly superior eye have for illuminating not just the credible-incredible (the amazement expected of the supernatural) but also the archive’s truly unanticipated and unarticulated outside? It is my contention that the medium’s claim to an “other,” superior vision can amount to a political act in Jacques Rancière’s sense, capable of challenging the existing partage du sensible, the partition or distribution of the sensible that determines what can and cannot be perceived (sensed) and what is and is not intelligible (make sense) in a particular community.