I dedicate this post to the occult. I have never known quite how to interpret the word occult, but I am using it to mean things unknown - not measurable by science and not occurring within modernist temporal imaginings. Perhaps the dedication will flatter processes enough that they will reveal themselves to me.
When considering and theorizing the occult in academic settings (which happens more frequently than I could have predicted), I have been squeamish. It could be because I have felt threatened by this undeniably allusive topic-afraid that appreciation for forces beyond my current awareness may stay outside of my perception and comprehension-but I think it is more likely that secretly, I wish to be the 'anti-colonial' 'progressive' feminist activist/academic who can write about alternative spiritualities... and I haven't been able to get into it.
I remember intro-level methodology at UBC when my professor began the first class by asking us if we find our daily horoscopes accurate. If I remember correctly, I spoke up saying no, and probably explained my skepticism about relying on unmeasurable things. Horoscope skepticism aside, my positivist education was palpable.
The myth of scientific objectivity/neutrality (and any reference to observing through the senses as truth-making) was busted by my feminist/critical sociologist educators years ago, but sacred power has (for me) remained obscure, and unattractive in its mysticism. A few months ago, I read Chandra Mohanty's Third World Women, Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds, and M Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing, all of which at least allude to the occult or the sacred or alternative memory work in ways that assume problematic colonial ties to what is valued as knowledge in Western feminism(s). Reading the works of these admired scholars, I have been asking 'why the occult?' in prominent contemporary feminist/cultural theory. The most obvious answer to me is it is a necessary component of any resistance/anti-colonial project: to resist the displacement of indigenous knowledges by colonial temporal and spiritual understandings (that are framed as modern and therefore factual and desirable), but for some reason my curiousity is not allayed.
Recently, upon great recommendation from a professor, I have turned to cinema studies (Bliss Cua Lim, among others) in my exploration of the occult and temporal critique. Perhaps it is the media combination of film and narrative that allows me to see the power of the occult and alternative temporal imaginations, or maybe I'm just reading persuasive writers, but whatever it is, film studies is helping me understand lots about clocks, the unknown, and my own experience of being haunted. I'll continue to explore my relation to writing on the occult, but for now I am interested in how through memory (or, rather, a willingness to engage in memory work), we might snap ourselves out of a linear experience of time. We might experience "past leaning on the future" or simultaneous presents that occur outside of "5:00am" flashing on the digital alarm. I might accept the memories that haunt me as living in my present and determining my future - a future that continually combines my past and present lives - a future that need not attempt to reject hauntings of the past - a future that is more livable because it is haunted.
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