Feeling the unseen: imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television

ABSTRACT

In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imagined – or precisely because they were imagined – the experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.

KEYWORDS:

• Touch
• intermedial experience
• ekphrasis
• hypotyposis
• three-tier model of mediality
• medium-specificity
• Ghost Adventures

Acknowledgments

This article was completed with support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Academy of Finland (project number 285144, “The Literary in Life: Exploring the Boundaries between Literature and the Everyday”). I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers appointed by The Senses and Society for their insight in completing my contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The first shows to gain success were Most Haunted (UK, 2002–2010, 2013–) and Ghost Hunters (US, 2004–2016, 2019–).

2. To my knowledge, there are no other studies to have focused with a rhetorical methodology on the intermedial experience of imagined touch perceptions. The selection of scenes for analysis is limited for a purpose, as it best helps to demonstrate the method used and leaves the option open for further research and application. In joining the field of intermediality research with multidisciplinary sensory studies, one avenue would be to explore the potential kinship between the three-tier model of mediality developed in this article and the concept of intersensoriality advanced, among others, by Steven Connor (2004), David Howes (2004), and Mark M. Smith (2007), after Michel Serres.

3. My use of “haptic” in referring to the sense of touch follows Mark Paterson who derives it from Aristotle and defines “haptic” as “[r]elating to the sense of touch in all its forms”, subdividing “proprioception”, “vestibular”, “kinaesthesia”, “cutaneous”, “tactile”, and “force feedback” under it (2007, ix). What is more, this article could potentially contribute to haptic media studies – and the “haptic moment” of our contemporary media environment – endorsed by Parisi, Paterson, and Archer (2017).

4. Marc A. Eaton has noted that “over 3,000 paranormal investigation teams exist in the United States, and more exist worldwide” (2015, 389). The interest in ghost belief is linked to diminishing “confidence in organized religion” that, in turn, is identified as the result of a general shift “toward individualized modes of belief and practice” (389). In the US, the commonly met paranormal investigator suggested by Eaton’s study is white and Catholic. For related research in experimental parapsychology, see Childs and Murray (2010), and, for a history of paranormal beliefs in relation to media and communication technologies since the 19th century in the US, see Sconce (2000).

5. A common method of ghost hunting shows to dispel audience doubt is for the investigators to assume a discursive position that Peter Lamont (2007) has titled as “avowal of prior skepticism”. Doing so is supposed to prevent the audience from considering them as biased or gullible from the start – indeed, the opening sequence of Ghost Adventures begins with Bagans narrating: “I never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one”.

6. Courtney Roby has used the ekphrastic description of a boxing match in Apollonius’ Argonautica as an example of “tactile engagement” that “the reader cannot help but feel in sympathy, like chattering teeth and snapping bones” (2016, 115). Cecilia Lindhé (2017) has developed the notions of visual touch and digital ekphrasis. Avram and Turcus (2014) edited a special issue of Ekphrasis: Images, Cinema, Theory, Media on the haptic and corporeal.

7. As Gabriele Rippl clarifies the scope of intermediality research in her introduction to Handbook of Intermediality, she refers to Werner Wolf, Jens Schröter, and Lars Elleström as authorities in the field today who, with Rajewsky, “have presented definitions and typologies which help to differentiate a wide range of intermedial phenomena” (Rippl 2015, 11).

8. This definition of medium draws on Aristotelian thought, and I will return to it in discussing the fleetingness of touch perceptions (e.g. Classen 1993; Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun 2008; Jensen 2011). The definition also resembles Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) idea of media as “extensions” of ourselves. However, unlike McLuhan, I do not consider media only as vehicles of information we process to change our way of thinking, because such an idea of media as sheer data reduces them into semiotic modes of information that dissolve the sensory perception.

9. Accessed December 10 2019 at http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/PR1940V7N4/HTML/files/assets/basic-html/index.html#296.

10. In the 2000s, Greenbergian views have been replaced in art studies, among other things, with how medium-specificity should be understood, after Barthes, as “a function of the structures of intention underwriting a given practice” (Costello 2008, 311), or, after McLuhan, as an embodied experience in which “our senses are instrumentalized” so that “we are joined to the sensory tools we have made to amplify and accompany the self” (Jones 2006, 17). Whereas Greenberg’s essentialism about the unique qualities of the arts is gone, media now appear as practical functions and tools for use.

11. As the theoretical and methodological focus of this article is on intermediality research and contemporary affect theory, the extent to which relevant historical and philosophical considerations can be included is limited in scope. For more on the development of influential connections from the 19th century to the present day, see Fisher (2007), and Blackman (2012). For more on the cultural history of the senses, see Classen (2012), Howes and Classen (2013), as well as Bloomsbury’s ongoing series A Cultural History of the Senses.

12. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant divides “schematic hypotyposis” from “symbolic hypotyposis” with the former denoting a direct, literal connection between sensory data and its presentation in words, whereas the latter expresses a roundabout, figurative connection. Paul de Man has argued the division is precarious at best.

13. See John F. Kihlström’s extensive online materials (“Sensation”, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behavior) at the University of California, Berkeley, accessed December 10 2019 at https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/IntroductionWeb/sensation_supplement.htm.

14. Annette Hill says Laura Marks’ concept of haptic visuality “combines vision with touch to explain a mixed mode of engagement” (2011, 102). However, in Marks’ own definition of the concept, “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (2000, 162). Imagined touch perceptions are thus seen as miming non-imagined visual perceptions they service transmedially. Touch acts a non-medium-specific source of visual content (“see what you feel”).

15. Emily T. Troscianko explains cognitive simulation theory as “mind-reading” that “happens by means of a simulation of the other person’s actions, followed by a simulated experience of the mental state which gave rise to those actions, and a subsequent attribution of this mental state to the other person” (2014, 174).

16. The transcript is based on the text accessed December 10 2019 at http://www.allreadable.com/19ba6yUz. For improved accuracy, any deviations from the online source are mine.

17. Groff’s “partial possession” at the end of the episode, a common convention of ghost hunting shows, could be seen as the epitome of such loss of control, faked or not, as represented in the program.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jarkko Toikkanen

Jarkko Toikkanen is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at Tampere University, Finland. His research is focused on the concept of intermedial experience, or how experiencing literature and other media produces sensory perceptions, both imagined and non-imagined, through medium-specific ways of presenting that mediate the conceptual abstractions of language and culture. This three-tier model of mediality is a work in progress. Toikkanen has published articles on Wordsworth and Poe, among others, the monograph The Intermedial Experience of Horror: Suspended Failures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and two co-edited anthologies including The Grotesque and the Unnatural (Cambria Press, 2011).