Disenchanted Enchantment

Jordan Williamson investigates Derek Lee’s “Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal” and Joshua Comaroff’s “Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore.”

By Jordan WilliamsonNovember 6, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Cultural Studies

“THUS RATIONALITY DOES not always seem as rational as it claims to be,” remarks Theodor Adorno in “The Stars Down to Earth,” his 1957 study of the Los Angeles Times astrology column. Many behaviors officially sanctioned as rational, Adorno suggests, are ultimately deeply irrational—saving for the future, say, as you work within a system that renders the future of the planet itself unstable. Intuition of this contradiction, for Adorno, is widespread, generating an epistemic crisis. Many, faced with the sense that things are not as they should—or could—be, “have lost faith in the effectiveness of their own reason and in the rationality of the total set-up.” Rationality degraded, they turn to “irrational panaceas,” such as the astrology column, to navigate this disconnect.

As Adorno traces the irrationality produced by the perversion of reason, he offers an account of the persistence of supernatural beliefs, such as astrology, well beyond what Max Weber described as the “disenchantment of the world.” For Weber, technology and rationalization had rendered the world calculable and instrumentalized, emptied of spiritual significance. Many theorists over the past two decades—including Jane Bennett, Charles Taylor, Bernard Stiegler, and Silvia Federici—have taken up Weber’s narrative to advocate for the reenchantment of the world, a recovery of a noninstrumental reverence and spiritual significance. Others, such as Jason Josephson Storm, have cast doubt on the notion that we were ever disenchanted, arguing that enchantment has covertly persisted in spite of secularization. Adorno, though, in his attention to the irrational panaceas that remedy the contradictions of rationality, suggests an interplay more complex than narratives of disenchantment often allow. Writing elsewhere about television, Adorno describes a state of “disenchanted enchantment,” a mass misapprehension braced by the feeling of sophistication that the use of modern technology elicits—enchantment deepened by disenchantment.

This formulation—disenchanted enchantment—anticipates a range of phenomena observable today, perhaps none more so than the hothouse of Silicon Valley. While, for Weber, technoscientific development drove disenchantment, Silicon Valley conjures weird enchantments precisely through its faith in technology. This center of modernity is where rationalists run amok, where technologies of control and surveillance are named for children’s fantasy novels, and where the mystical powers ascribed to artificial intelligence take forms both weird and quotidian: murder victims and dead celebrities are given a second life by Frankenstein AI, while even savvy users lapse with uncanny rapidity into chatbot-induced psychosis, their hallucinatory revelations prompted by a technology itself prone to “hallucination.” The disturbing enchantment of tech—the supposed paragon of disenchantment—preempts reenchantment.

Two recent books help make sense of this paradox, examining occult presences in two of the most seemingly hyperrational spaces of modernity: science and Singapore. In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee probes a series of paranormal phenomena—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy—that, though officially disproven and disavowed by mainstream science, nonetheless remain undead, continually reanimated by cultural works that frequently draw on the very scientific fields that delegitimize the supernatural. Joshua Comaroff’s Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore, meanwhile, reveals how speculative finance summons a spectral world in Singapore and elucidates the beliefs and practices through which Singaporeans navigate the unnerving centrality of their city-state to financialized late capitalism. Investigating the uncanny presence of the paranormal in these paradigmatically rational spaces, Lee and Comaroff illuminate contemporary manifestations of disenchanted enchantment.

¤

Lee’s usage of the term parascience condenses several key strands of his argument as it invokes the outside status of the term pseudoscience, the unsettling possibility of the paranormal, and the scientific investigation of phenomena such as telepathy, organized under the heading of parapsychology. Most importantly, though, for Lee’s purposes, the prefix para- suggests spatiality, locating parascience “as the epistemic realm on the borders of establishment science where heterodox concepts can hybridize with other areas like literature, myth, philosophy, theology, non-Western thought, and novel research programs to produce new knowledge forms that persist across modern science and culture.” Para, translated from Greek as beside, alongside, or beyond, thus denotes, in “parascience,” objects of inquiry marginal to mainstream science, as well as cultural works that draw on scientific investigation but remain outside of science proper. By leveling the discursive playing field, Lee refuses to assume the primacy of mainstream science, instead attending to “the circulation of knowledge alongside establishment science—neither less than nor greater than it, but at all times surrounding and coexisting with it.”

This spatial reorientation is key to the titular “revolutions.” Here, Lee invokes Thomas Kuhn’s landmark text in the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). While Kuhn famously outlines a model of scientific progress in which “extraordinary science” interrupts “normal science,” setting new paradigms and research agendas, Lee’s revolutions look less like Kuhn’s paradigm-shifting events than like processes of revision or recycling occurring just beyond mainstream scientific inquiry: “Parascientific objects remain outside traditional science, but they do not fade away as predicted because they exist as re-evolutions, perpetually circling through fresh networks of myth, literature, and science as hybrids of the ancient past and technoscientific future.” Attending to discourses beyond the scientific, Lee posits a temporality characterized not by the extraordinary moments that, for Kuhn, puncture and reorient scientific inquiry but by the zombielike persistence of concepts supposedly dead. Lee’s argument centers on the networks that vitalize and revitalize these phenomena, assembling an impressively wide archive to track exchanges between mainstream science, its pseudoscientific fringe, non-Western epistemologies, philosophy, theology, and, perhaps most importantly, literature.

Lee outlines the trajectory of parascientific revolutions by tracking shifting iterations of what he terms the “paranormal mind,” an emblematic parascientific object developed during the late 19th-century “scientification of the supernatural.” This scientification occurred as spiritualist phenomena such as mediumship and telepathy, subjects of enormous public interest in the Victorian period, were subjected to scientific scrutiny by organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in Great Britain. Deriving prestige from its scientific methods and esteemed membership—including the philosopher and political economist Henry Sidgwick; scientists such as William Crookes; writers such as John Ruskin, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and even the prime ministers William Gladstone and Arthur Balfour—the SPR theorized the powers of mind underpinning these occult faculties. Key SPR texts such as Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living (1886) and especially Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) developed conceptions of a “subliminal self” occluded by everyday consciousness but capable of the strange faculties that fascinated spiritualists and psychical researchers: in excess of the normal limits of consciousness, this self could commune with other minds and even persist beyond bodily death.

Offering accounts of telepathy and ghostly apparitions derived from scientific experimentation and observation, and presented in scientific terms, psychical research presents Lee with an exemplary case of parascientification, perhaps especially in the failure of these ideas to penetrate mainstream science. Lee traces the history of psychical research beyond the SPR, which waned, he says, as a split within the movement between spiritualists and scientists cracked the movement apart (due in part to the consistent problem of falling for various huckster mediums). The scientific iteration of psychical research found other institutional homes, reincarnated as parapsychology at J. B. Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. But while Rhine’s research produced some astonishing results, and lives on in the public consciousness in the form of extrasensory perception (a term coined in Rhine’s lab), his findings could never be replicated, and eventually the lab left the university, a move that, concludes Lee, “proved disastrous from a disciplinary perspective because parapsychology no longer enjoyed Duke’s academic prestige, institutional connections, or ability to confer degrees.”

The end of institutional parapsychology, though, marks the beginning of parascientific revolutions. Lee’s book picks up its history of the paranormal mind here, tracking it across chapters centered on its various powers and the discourses and texts that probe, expand, and revitalize these powers. The strength of Parascientific Revolutions is the networks these chapters assemble, which frequently exhibit the conceptual inventiveness and strange constellations that can come together on the epistemic fringes. First, Lee turns to precognition, a preoccupation of psychical research reinvigorated by quantum physics: the psychical researcher Adrian Dobbs, writes Lee, “proposed the existence of a faster-than-light ‘thought particle’—the psitron—as a fundamental unit of consciousness and the master key for explaining divination.” Never empirically observed, this speculative thought particle is nonetheless subjected, Lee argues, to a different kind of inquiry in SF novels like Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (1981) and graphic novels such as Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987).

Subsequent chapters follow a similar trajectory, as discredited powers of the paranormal mind are refreshed through surprising discursive channels. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, for instance, in which the Earth is posited as a living being with intelligence and agency, emerges as a striking incarnation of the paranormal mind, while the CIA program Project Stargate, centered on developing and deploying adepts in the practice of remote viewing during the Cold War, offers a strange afterlife to clairvoyance. The final chapters turn to non-Western epistemologies and fiction by writers such as Amy Tan, Nora Okja Keller, Ruth Ozeki, and Sesshu Foster. Through readings that illuminate the non-Western epistemologies—including Korean shamanism, Zen Buddhism, and Mesoamerican religion—at work in these novels, Lee pushes back against a tendency to reduce the paranormal to Western terms: ghosts, for instance, are frequently read as “symbols for something else: collective trauma, invisibility, historical violence.” Instead, reading “ghosts qua ghosts,” Lee emphasizes the challenges these presences pose to Western epistemology: Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997), from this point of view, become “epistemological novels seeking to expand our understanding of mind, metaphysical realities, and ghostliness beyond a strictly Western lens.”

This call for epistemological pluralism or “epistemological justice” is central to the project of Parascientific Revolutions. Excavating the epistemologies posited by parascience and literary engagements with it performs the invaluable work of documenting and preserving alternative perspectives. At the same time, though, Parascientific Revolutions would have benefited from pursuing more systematically the political and material factors that favor the development and privileging of certain epistemologies over others. While positing a mosaic or plural epistemology offers an important rejoinder to Western chauvinism, it can also ignore the structures and interests that install a hegemonic epistemology. As the anthropologist Michael T. Taussig puts it, the “mode of perception” is dialectically entangled with the “mode of production”—socioeconomic arrangements engender epistemologies while epistemologies advance social interests. Changed material relations thus drive epistemological revolutions, and epistemological revolutions are secured by changed material relations. Ultimately, though, Lee’s book offers a rigorous, insightful study of the lively margins of science, and a compelling theorization of the incomplete disenchantment effected by Western scientific inquiry.

¤

For its part, Comaroff’s study takes up the relationship between modes of production and perception, examining the strange fit between the enthusiasm for speculative finance capital and the belief in spectral presences that exists in contemporary Singapore. With its mix of antidemocratic politics and economic liberalism, Singapore is often held out as a blueprint for the future. Spectropolis originates, though, in experiences out of step with this futurity. While employed as an architect in Singapore, Comaroff found a project he was working on snagged: the demolition of an old bungalow was “abruptly halted” as “bulldozer drivers were stricken with an odd malady like the effects of radiation sickness. The events resulted in a standstill, with the contractors refusing to continue and a Taoist spirit medium being called in.” While Singapore’s illiberality and emphasis on efficiency might suggest that such an obstacle could quickly be dismissed, “such cases are common,” says Comaroff. “They occur with regularity in the building sector and on government projects especially—to the extent that ceremonies to placate resident spirits are performed as a matter of routine.”

The scene of ritual exorcism Comaroff describes is at odds with the disenchanted, technocratic image Singapore projects. As Comaroff notes, Lee Kuan Yew, the city-state’s first prime minister, saw an exaggerated appearance of stability as crucial to Singapore’s economic fortunes: the island lacked the resources, space, and population for an industrial economy, and so instead would have to rely on “more immaterial sources of revenue,” the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate). To attract these sectors, the Singaporean government emphasized security: it was insulated from democracy, and dissent was muffled by the continuation of colonial-era laws curtailing free speech. An “attentive, competent” state planned at length and in detail, projecting stability down to a zealous program of landscaping meant to display “visual evidence of state capacity for potential investors.” This emphasis on security, Comaroff notes, is ultimately in the service of risk: stability attracts speculative finance—a key, but inescapably risky, source of wealth in the absence of productive capacity. “[T]he central contradiction of Singapore today,” writes Comaroff, is “a paradoxical desire to balance risk with certainty, and probability with determinism. Having mostly given up on industry, its leadership has allied itself with chance while promulgating a nanny-state political culture that would seek to curtail destabilizing events before they arise.”

When a ghost shuts down a construction project, Singapore’s image of emphatic rationality and security is at stake. No wonder, then, as Comaroff points out, many state agencies have resident “‘ghost-busting’ teams on retainer to act quickly in case of uncanny happenings at their buildings.” Ghostbusters might seem an unexpected unit of Singapore’s security state, but as the city-state strives to project rational control and predictable returns, the ghosts that interrupt development projects mark an unnerving intrusion. These specters, however, cannot be fully exorcised, Comaroff argues, because they are generated by the tension between security and risk, by the dynamics of speculation itself. Singapore’s relentless property development—the endless remaking of the island’s limited space—inevitably disturbs cemeteries, stirring up the dead. “Ghosts,” writes Comaroff, “have quite literally been produced as unintended by-products of the nation’s economic ascendancy.” At the same time, ordinary Singaporeans appeal to ghosts to help them manage the risks they run through participation in speculative finance. Spectropolis proceeds with impressive attention to the ways in which ghosts both complement and disrupt the workings of Singaporean capitalism.

Central to Comaroff’s analysis, as in Lee, is an emphasis on the ghostly dynamics that operate in pointedly different ways from a Western conception. As in Parascientific Revolutions, ghosts here “are not merely agents of traumatic recollection.” Comaroff draws particular attention to one fascinating aspect of the Singaporean conception of the ghostly: ghosts are “imagined to be economic agents and partners”—“a complexly projected social being, a species of homo economicus.” Outlining a syncretic Singaporean Chinese belief system that incorporates elements of “Taoism, Buddhism, Confucian philosophy, and evolving popular tradition,” Comaroff describes an afterlife characterized by “inherent scarcity and lack, with ever-present dangers of ‘hunger’ and of wasting away.” The economic nature of these ghosts makes them useful allies. Spectropolis details a range of ritual and material practices through which Singaporeans satisfy ghostly wants and needs in order to foster their own speculative endeavors. Through procedures such as burning “hell money” (a simulacral currency meant to be ritually burned) and various “spectro-commodities” (paper miniatures of goods including “computers, smartphones and tablets, designer shirts, credit cards, unusual pets, and domestic workers”), practitioners channel luck and value to themselves by intervening in the afterlife. By offering a means to curry favor for speculative enterprise, ghosts thus offer a source of security in Singapore’s risky economy.

Across Spectropolis, Comaroff expands on this central logic in chapters that examine how ghosts and the practices through which they are invoked work with and against the financialization of everyday life. As ghosts provide a sense of security amid rampant financial risk, they encourage speculative practices; however, as Comaroff shows in the second part of Spectropolis, these spectral presences also assert “alternative regimes of ownership and social power.” Just as in the example of a suspended construction project that initiated Comaroff’s investigation, ghosts represent an unruly force that can disrupt not just individual projects but also the rational, disciplined governance through which the Singaporean state claims legitimacy. Particularly compelling is Comaroff’s extended account of a “site ceremony,” a ritual through which these forces are appealed to, and a scene in which the complex nature of belief in Singapore comes to the fore.

As Comaroff describes the rite performed by Master Goh, a medium who operates a syncretic blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and popular beliefs at the behest of a property developer seeking to encourage an auspicious project, he outlines a complex network of belief, skepticism, and pragmatism at work in a scene that otherwise seems out of place in Singapore’s ostensibly disenchanted real estate market. Chen, the project manager, is a believer for whom “the offerings and chants are principally about purifying the site and identifying possible problems. But they also, crucially, establish a sort of goodwill contract between any resident spirits and the living participants of the development process.” Beatrice, on the other hand, a “devout Methodist” and the daughter of a property developer, sees the ceremony in more practical and affective terms, as “important for the climate of sentiment on-site. At the least, she feared that the failure to make offerings would be poisonous for morale.” Though she does not participate in the rite, Beatrice believes “that not performing the obligatory propitiations would cast a pall over the enterprise and would lead the workers to feel that their safety had not been given proper consideration.” Comaroff observes in many of the stakeholders “a sort of Pascal’s wager in operation: although the whole thing might be mere superstition, there was nothing to lose in blessing the works.” After two hours of “chants, trances, and pacing, Master Goh entered the excavator and pressed a button to start its engine.” In spite of some skepticism, his ritual performance is regarded not as unproductive or inefficient but as a crucial safeguard against risks, both the vicissitudes of the market and the potential antagonism of disturbed ghosts.

For Comaroff, believers like Chen, the project manager, have more “nuanced” orientations to the Singaporean spectral economy than the “relative skeptics” making a Pascal’s wager. This latter group, though, acquiescing in spite of skepticism to a ritual delay in order to better the chances of future return, inhabits a state of disenchanted enchantment that poses pointed questions for any prospective theorization of what the author terms in his title the “enchantment of capital.” Acting in spite of an incomplete faith in the ritual, these skeptics also suggest an incomplete faith in the “total set-up,” as Adorno put it: even the savviest operators and beneficiaries of capital seem not to buy its logic fully, and so require a supernatural hedge. While the believers who particularly interest Comaroff see little contradiction between the spectral and the speculative, these pragmatists point to a deeper paradox, a system whose operations are inscrutable even to those most in the know. Though these skeptics receive relatively little attention from Comaroff, Spectropolis as a whole offers a detailed, theoretically sophisticated account of an instance in which capitalist calculation comes into a fascinating relation with more esoteric beliefs.

The disenchanted enchanted who uncertainly witness Master Goh’s ritual represent a counterpart to Lee’s parascientific researchers, who elaborately reimagine mainstream science to revitalize and legitimize the paranormal. Taken together, Parascientific Revolutions and Spectropolis offer valuable insights into the lacunae through which the supernatural persists, whether the generative fringes of scientific endeavors or the occult operations of finance. Amid hints that artificial intelligence is a spectral bubble floating a hallucinatory economy, these books suggest just how weird things will get as the “total set-up” becomes even less convincing, as an irrational system frays our rationality further. Tech and capital will intensify, rather than dispel, our disenchanted enchantment, but Parascientific Revolutions and Spectropolis develop crucial resources to conceptualize the uncanny forms these forces conjure.