Spirits made to order: The obscene-supplemental entrepreneurship of modern Spiritualism in Victorian Britain

By integrating Žižek’s concept of the obscene supplement with cultural entrepreneurship, this paper reveals how legitimacy and ideological contradiction imbricate and interact in the making of markets. Drawing on an analytically structured history of the modern Spiritualism movement that proliferated across Britain in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, we reveal how resources which appeared to contradict the Victorian moral and rational order were harnessed to achieve consumer interest. Departing from previous accounts of the material acquisitiveness of Victorians, we emphasise transgressive, experiential and anti-materialist aspects of their consumption, markets, and marketing. Our analysis extends business history scholarship by showing how, for some movements, market formation and cultural traction are achieved not by alignment with a dominant ideology but through exploiting its disavowed, incongruous underside. Several features of ‘obscene-supplemental entrepreneurship’ are identified – ‘re-articulation’, ‘respectability’, ‘revel-ution’, and ‘reification’ – which emphasise traversing the dialectic between official discourse and its non-official obverse.