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Picturing Aura - Jeremy Stolow ***

This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seems to suggest.) I was highly doubtful when someone mentioned this as a popular science book, but they argued 'Plenty of phenomena have been treated with gravity by the sciences without being deemed real in any kind of empirical sense. For example, today we wouldn’t implement any medicine based on the model of the four humours – but it’s important to reckon with that history as part of the history of biology.'

Okay, so were this about the dodgy history of the concept that people have auras - invisible coloured glows around them that can be seen by sensitive souls and captured on camera, it arguably is about psychology and history of science. But I'm not sure the book really does this. What does it even mean, for example, to photograph an aura? Jeremy Stolow tells us that when he had his aura photographed, 'expert' Guy Coggins 'was reticent to offer details about how exactly his system functioned'. Apparently, it combined a photo from a digital camera with data from a metal plate touched by a hand that allegedly measured galvanic skin response. The end product was a portrait with a fuzzy multi-coloured glow around the sitter.

Stolow makes it clear that what resulted was very much part of the new age view of reality, using the aura image both to provide a 'chakra analysis' and the explaining the meaning of his aura colours 'drawing upon a long-established New Age discursive and visual canon.' Hmm. After a second, more technical-sounding approach giving Stolow training in 'human energy field analysis' it feels like he became somewhat more of a convert while remaining sceptical.

We then get a couple of hundred pages of detailed exploration of the pre-scientific history of auras and related phenomena such as haloes, plus various wild related technical developments, such as Kirilan Photography and the whole eastern-philosophised approach to science that was popular in some US West Coast universities in the 60s and 70s. Stolow appears to treat this all as open-mindedly as possible, reporting in a largely uncritical fashion. There is an appendix headed 'The Aura debunked' which opens 'It seems almost impossible to avoid encountering the verdict on pictures of aura (again that odd non-plural) as pseudoscientific nonsense and the stuff of medical quackery'. 

But note the ambivalence in Stolow's comment. He is not saying this is pseudoscientific nonsense, just that it's almost impossible to avoid encountering this verdict. He seems reluctant to support what he describes as the view of 'mainstream science'. Bear in mind Stolow is not a scientist, he is a professor of communication studies.

In the end, while there are elements of the book comparing this historically to theories that have long been discarded, it doesn't really account for all the modern pseudoscience. Stolow's account is not incredibly readable, heavily laden as it is with the academic language of the humanities. I can't say that it's a book I would recommend, except in the same sense I'd recommend reading Alan Sokal infamous paper Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Only, this isn't intended as a joke. But for some it will be interesting.

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