TechGnosis
Page 9
Chinese acupuncturists also treat the body as a landscape of energetic flows, or chi. While the meridian lines that channel chi somewhat overlap the electrochemical grid of the nervous system, the stuff also seems to leak out of whatever conceptual maps Western medicine tries to impose on it in order to explain its efficacy. Like the electromagnetic image of the energy body, chi seems to vibrate in the tingling gap between meat and soul. But in the 1950s, the physician Reinhardt Voll found that healers could map and realign acupuncture points with electrical devices; today computerized versions of his bioenergetic machines abound in Europe, and many acupuncturists also charge up their needles with low levels of electric current.
Probably the most famous example of a modern vitalist technology is Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator. Reich believed in better living through orgasms, and his groundbreaking research into the muscular basis of anxiety and neuroses set the stage for many of today’s schools of therapeutic bodywork. Reich also believed that the pulsing, bluish vesicles he glimpsed in high-quality optical microscopes in the 1940s were bions, the basic unit of a new kind of energy, a vital force that Reich named the “orgone.” Reich held that pulsating waves of orgone energy permeated the universe, and that they could be captured in a box he created from alternating layers of organic and inorganic material. Once so confined, the orgone could heal cancer and produce low-level electric current. But though some people swear by Reich’s contraption to this day, the FDA was no more impressed with these orgone accumulators than they were with their inventor’s orgasmic theories. In the 1950s, the feds impounded and destroyed Reich’s equipment, literally burned his books, and threw the doctor in prison for contempt of court. He died there a few years later, a broken man convinced that Christ was a messenger from the cosmic orgone and that UFOs were ripping off earth’s vital energy.
Though most Western doctors continue to reject the idea of bioenergy, many are coming to recognize the power of alternative healing therapies such as acupuncture, breathwork, visualization, and post-Reichean bodywork. In a large part, these practices depend upon the archetype of the living and communicating bodymind, a field of vital psychic energy that can be tapped and redirected by patient and physician alike. The technocultural paradox is that, in the West anyway, this premodern image of the vital soul was kept alive during the reign of reductionist medicine partly through the language, example, and even technologies of electricity, which thus took on a certain heretical charge it retains to this day. Though few practitioners of alternative medicine actually exploit electric current today, electric flows and magnetic fields have provided fruitfully fuzzy analogies for those energetic, psychological, spiritual, or erotic dimensions of life that healers engender and improve through their treatments.
But it now appears that the balsam of nature may be biting back. Today your average human body bathes in a discordant symphony of weak magnetic fields, produced by battery-powered gadgets, microwave transmitters, airport security systems, mobile phones, and the almost universal background buzz that leaks out of the electric power grid that feeds radios, televisions, stereos, and computers. A number of people, both within and outside of the alternative medical community, have come to suspect that some of this electromagnetic radiation—especially extremely low frequency (ELF) waves—is producing subtle but nasty effects on biology and behavior. A number of controversial studies suggest that living near beefy power lines or staring at electronic screens all day long may produce a variety of disorders, ranging from severe depression to ragged immune systems to having kids with leukemia. Though most scientists write off such fears as “power line paranoia,” these scientists are part of a system that places physics above mind and life force, and that has spent nearly a century deliberately marginalizing research into bioenergy. The result of this is that even the most hardheaded and legitimately concerned investigators of “electropollution” find themselves forced into the shadowlands that border the electromagnetic imaginary, where paranoia and conspiracy lurk.
Some mystics are worried as well. One particularly dark reading of electropollution is provided by William Irwin Thompson, whose writings navigate the treacherous waters between science, myth, and cultural history. One of Thompson’s crankier notions concerns the contemporary status of our “etheric body,” which Thompson argues acts as a kind of subtle energetic armor that protects physical reality from the terror, chaos, and devouring phantasms of the astral plane. Because we are now bombarding our vibrating etheric wet suits with the “electronic noise” of ELFs and microwaves, and rending them even more porous with consciousness drugs, synthetic mediascapes, and, yes, loud music, “the astral plane is leaking into the threadbare and worn-out physical plane.”15 With our etheric body in tatters and the techniques necessary to navigate the astral realms long forgotten, postmodern culture is joy-sticking its way into the ferocious maw of collective hallucination.
For Thompson, the vampirization of our etheric juices reaches its apogee with the gloves, bodysuits, and head-mounted displays of virtual reality technologies—gear that allows for the total electromagnetic colonization of the energy body and the astral body alike. But while some see the inbreeding of virtual and energetic bodies as perverse, even demonic, others find it can be almost angelic. One of the most evocative and visceral virtual reality technologies to date remains Osmose, a high-end electronic art installation created by the Canadian Char Davies in the mid-1990s. Exploiting the same graphics programs that conjured Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs to life, and running on SGI hardware normally reserved for big-budget science and military simulations, Osmose swallows the participant—suitably swathed in electronic gear—into a sensuous, luminous, and deeply enveloping dreamworld of cloud forests, dark pools, and verdant canopies. Using spatial ambiguity and tricks of light, Osmose conjures up the perceptual high of a walk in the woods; many “immersants” feel at once immaterial and embodied, like angels moving with animal grace. Some immersants emerge from Davies’s dappled and vibrating pixelscape weeping or lingering in trance; others have compared their trips to lucid dreams or out-of-body experiences.
With its simultaneously intuitive and sophisticated virtual aesthetic, Osmose is a powerful example of how technological environments can simulate something like the old animist immersion in the World Soul, organic dreamings that depend, in power and effect, upon the ethereal fire. Besides pointing to a healing use of virtual technologies, Osmose also reminds us how intimate we are with electronics, in sight and sound, in body and psyche. Our language drips with electromagnetic metaphors, of magnetic personalities and live wires, of bad vibes and tuning out, of getting grounded and recharging batteries. Whether or not the body radiates a polarized energy soul, the self is now swaddled in electromagnetic skin.
Specters of the Spectrum
In the middle of the nineteenth century, electricity underwent a rather alchemical transformation that was destined to transmute modern society as well. The medium of this revolutionary change was the brain of one Samuel Morse, a man who, historians of technology note, had a fairly crude grasp of the electromagnetic mysteries. But though Morse lacked the seat-of-the-pants hacker spirit so prevalent in the early days of electrical invention, he was without a doubt blessed with a formidable insight: if electric current could be squeezed through a wire, then “intelligence might … be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.”16 The ethereal fire was about to be stepped up, as it were, into an even more incorporeal realm. Energy would vaporize into information, and this in turn would change the way that humans found themselves reflected in technology.
After convincing Congress to plow $30,000 into his project, Morse strung up a wire between Baltimore and Washington, DC. The first official message careened along that Baltimore–DC line in 1844, and it was a strangely oracular pronouncement: “What hath God wrought!” This bit of scripture was suggested by the daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents, though Morse himself surely concurred with the sentiment; besid
es being the son of a staunch evangelist, he would later transfer a good portion of his considerable fortune to churches, seminaries, and missionary societies. Still, the first telegraphed message reads as much like an anxious question as a cry of glee, and today we know the answer: what God wrought, or rather, what men wrought in their God-aping mode, was the information age.
Morse’s system was not just electrical (and hence, effectively instantaneous); it was digital. The electric current that ran along telegraph wires was itself an analog medium, flowing in the undulating waves that everywhere weave the world. But by regularly breaking and reestablishing this flow with a simple switch, and by establishing a code to interpret the resulting patterns of pulses, Morse chopped the analog dance into discrete digital units, dots and dashes that signified. But what really defines the telegraph as the first neural net of the information age was how rapidly it infiltrated and changed the world, especially the exuberantly industrializing United States. With Morse code in hand, railroads improved their ability to move goods over America’s vast distances, newspapers sped up the perceived pace of historical events, businesspeople upped their managerial control (and their stress), and stock markets started pulsing in synch. A decade after Morse’s first line, thirty thousand miles of wire webbed the United States; by 1858, the first transatlantic cable snaked through the inky depths; and well before the end of the century, the British had stitched together their global empire, laying cable from London to Yemen to Darwin, Australia.
As with most new media of the nineteenth century, the telegraph charged the popular imagination. Even before Morse laid his first cable, F. O. J. Smith, one of his most vocal supporters in Congress, was weighing in with the kind of information puffery that later would grace the lips of Internet boosters:
The influence of this invention over the political, commercial, and social relations of the people of this widely extended country … will … of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences.… Space will be, to all practical purposes of information, completely annihilated between the states of the Union, as also between the individual citizens thereof.17
It’s tempting to chalk up this garrulous hype to the fact that Smith was a secret partner in Morse’s project, but that would misrepresent the intensity of the telegraphic enthusiasm among both the masses and the elite. After the transatlantic cable was laid, fifteen thousand New Yorkers—few of whom would benefit directly from the wire—celebrated with the largest parade the city had ever seen. One newspaper complained that the cable was “pronounced next only in importance for mankind to the ‘Crucifixion.’ ”18
The analogy was apt, for in nineteenth-century America, the enthusiasm for religion and for technology fed off and amplified each other. It was an era of tremendous technological utopianism, when books appeared with titles like The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. And accomplishments like the Erie Canal seemed to justify such hopes. But this techno-utopianism also drew its spunk from the same religious enthusiasm that made the young nation a fiery carnival of revivalism, spiritual experimentation, and progressive communes. The gray-faced Calvinism that dominated workaholic American Christianity became flush with perfectionism—the belief that both self and world possessed a boundless potential for improvement. The revivalist spirit, with its dreams of the coming millennium, was in turn confirmed by the explosion of new machines and engineering feats. These accomplishments gave rise to what the historian Leo Marx called the “technological sublime,” as the awesome and frightening grandeur that the Romantic poets associated with nature became attached to new technologies. The telegraph, with its instantaneous transcendence of space, was embraced as a particularly glowing sign of the young land’s self-imagined destiny: to build heaven on earth.
Later in this book, we will show how such sublime technological utopias came to roost inside those contemporary data networks whose roots lie in Morse’s wires. But what interests us here is how the telegraph’s “annihilation” of space and time also started chipping away at the boundaries of the American self. For as is always the case with a powerful new medium, the mere existence of the telegraph shook up the established containers of identity. Writing about the telegraph in Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argued that “whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself.”19 For McLuhan, Morse’s electric ganglion was only the first in a series of media—radio, radar, telephone, phonograph, TV—that served to dissolve the logical and individualistic mindframe hammered out by the technologies of writing and especially the modern printing press. Instead, the telegraph sparked the “electric retribalization of the West,” a long slide into an electronic sea of mythic participation and collective resonance, where the old animist dreams of oral cultures would be reborn among electromagnetic waves. But McLuhan also saw the collective “outering” caused by the telegraph as the technological root of the age of anxiety. “To put one’s nerves outside,” he wrote, “is to initiate a situation—if not a concept—of dread.”20
Both religion and the occult derive much of their power from simultaneously stimulating and managing dread: the anxieties that dog the perpetually shifting boundaries of the self, and especially the ultimate borderland of death. As new technologies begin to remold these very same boundaries, the shadows, doubles, and dark reflections that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well, many of them taking up residence in the virtual spaces opened up by the new technologies.
So while daylight America confidently telegraphed its exploding commercial designs, the nightside of the American mind found itself wrestling with ghosts. In 1848, the Fox family started hearing creepy knocks and mysterious thumpings in their humble Hydesdale cottage in upstate New York. Such eerie rappings pop up regularly in folklore, and they are usually attributed to the poltergeists still tracked by contemporary ghost busters. But the three Fox sisters did something unprecedented in the annals of strange phenomena: they started rapping back. To improve communication, the sisters convinced the spirit—supposedly a murdered peddler whose bones lay beneath their home—to respond to their queries with a simple code. One knock for yes, two for no—a spectral echo of the dots and dashes then hurtling through wires across the land.
The cottage in Hydesdale was the launching pad for Spiritualism, a modern quasi-religion of necromantic information exchange that would grow so popular as to pose a genuine threat to mainstream Christianity. By the 1870s, there were approximately eleven million Spiritualists in the United States and countless more across the world, a large number of them among the upper classes. Following the Fox sisters’ simple astral telegraphy, Spiritualist media improved considerably: more complex alphabetic codes, chalk slates, spirit-scopes, automatic writing, Ouija-like planchettes, and, of course, the human vocal cords of the usually female medium. Spiritualist séances were all about vibes; solemnly plunging rooms into darkness, and frequently asking sitters to join hands to get the currents flowing, mediums would conjure up sentiments of dread fascination. Though many of the spirits spouted the sort of vapid utopian prophecies found in many channeled teachings today, most Spiritualist chat served a far less metaphysical goal: to establish an intimate link between living souls and their departed friends and family.
Spiritualism did not arise from thin air. Humans have probably been ringing up their ancestors since the days of flint and moonbones; by the time of the Fox raps, the United States already had Shakers channeling Native American hierophants and stateside mesmerists interrogating spirits through their zonked-out patients. But Spiritualism’s own John the Baptist was one Andrew Jackson Davis, an American visionary who channeled Swedenborgian travelogues of the incorporeal worlds in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1845, Davis, who attributed supernatural powers to electromagnetism, c
laimed that a “living demonstration” of spiritual communication was at hand; and that “the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established such as is now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.”21 We’ll pick up this note of science fiction later in this book; what’s worth noting here is that, just as McLuhan held that electric technologies “outered” the central nervous system, so did Davis associate extraterrestrial spiritual communication with the unfolding of the interior self.
Whatever the status of Davis’s prophecy, and whether or not the Fox sisters were faking it, as they themselves sometimes later claimed, Spiritualism was the first popular religion of the information age. As such, it was bound up from the beginning with the electromagnetic imaginary and the telegraph’s groundbreaking transformation of electricity into information. During the 1850s, the movement’s most popular newspaper was called the Spiritual Telegraph, and Isaac Post, one of the earliest investigators of the Fox phenomenon, concluded that “the spirits chiefly concerned in the inauguration of this telegraphy were philosophic and scientific minds, many of whom had made the study of electricity and other imponderables a specialty in the earth-life.”22 (Benjamin Franklin was a frequent caller.) Spiritualists like Allan Kardec and scientists like Michael Faraday—a nonbeliever—both looked to electricity to explain the raps, creaks, and table-hops that occurred during séances. In a history of the movement penned in 1869, the Spiritualist Emma Hardinge Britten wrote: