by Erik Davis
From the first working of the spiritual telegraph by which invisible beings were enabled to spell out consecutive messages, they [the spirits] claimed that this method of communion was organized by scientific minds in the spirit spheres; that it depended mainly on the conditions of human and atmospheric magnetisms.23
Reflecting the confident enthusiasm that technology sparked in so many nineteenth-century Americans, Britten implied that the inhabitants of the spirit world actually invented the spiritual telegraph, and that its status as a technology imbued it with “concrete and scientific characteristics” lacking in the oracular mumblings of earlier occultists. Britten even claimed that the spirits chose the Fox cottage because its “aura” made the abode a good battery.
The electromagnetic imaginary thus continued to shape the image of the human soul, although now the seat of vitality had passed, perhaps significantly, from the living to the dead. The conflation of mediumship and the electric telegraph also served as palpable proof that science and engineering would penetrate the invisible realms and make the marvelous real and pragmatic. Spiritualists were united in their rejection of supernaturalism, their belief in natural law, and their conviction that the afterlife was just another frontier to be conquered by the march of progress. This can-do pragmatism was reflected not only in the “inventions” reportedly handed down by some spirits, but also in the movement’s anxious attempts to present itself as an empirical science. Aping scientific rhetoric, Spiritualists took records of séances using the same objective, value-free language of names, dates, and factoids that still marks the annals of parapsychology. As the scholar R. Laurence Moore points out, Spiritualists “slavishly imitated scientific method to the point of shunning subjectivity and inwardness as things which really didn’t count.”24
All this might help explain one of the many parallels between Spiritualism and today’s New Age channeling: the banality of most of the chat emerging from beyond the veil. During séances, the dullest of information played an important role, since mediums needed to produce concrete chunks of data unknowable through other means—events, names, dates—in order to prove to séance-goers that their dead relations were truly in the house, and that neither the spirits, nor the mediums themselves, were frauds. Séance-goers were also treated to vague techno-utopian prophecies that claimed that social progress and spiritual uplift would ride in on the back of technological advances. Like most New Agers today, Spiritualists held quite progressive views, embracing abolitionism and other reforms as well as loosening the straitjacket of gender roles and Christian sexual mores. The movement played a particularly pivotal role in kickstarting the emancipation of women, who for the first time were able to gain a public voice, albeit a borrowed one. But while séance-goers shared the progressive temperament of the New England Transcendentalists, they had none of that more elite group’s aesthetic inwardness, and Emerson damned the movement as “the rat hole of revelation.”
Reading through Spiritualist material, one can come to the conclusion that death does little more than dull ones wits. Neither the mediums nor the spirits on the other side undergo any significant transformation or evince much insight. But the tedium of this otherworldly datastream is itself deeply indicative of American culture’s tendency to view technical systems of communication under the sign of the sublime. Because of this, the system itself (be it a spiritual telegraph or a computer network) carries a “revolutionary” charge more potent and substantial than any of the actual messages that pass along the line. Just as the early radio enthusiasts were often more excited about establishing a link with some far-flung fellow geek than in having an interesting conversation, the mere delivery of information from the spiritual world was sufficient to establish the divine reality of the spiritual telegraph itself. As the New England Spiritualist Association declared in 1854, “Spirits do communicate with man—that is the creed.”25 The medium really was the message.
By the 1860s and 1870s, mediums had become the professional pop stars of the Victorian era. Though contacts with relatives who had “passed on” remained a crucial draw, attendees were increasingly treated to occult sideshows, as tables rapped and danced across the room, mediums levitated, hands and gooey ectoplasm materialized out of thin air, and musical instruments played creepy jigs in the dark while the medium remained bound and gagged. The loquacious spirits of the earlier years gave way to more rambunctious ghosts, suggesting a tendency all too familiar today: the transformation of a communications medium into consumer spectacle.
As charismatic mediums brought their increasingly elaborate stunts into the homes of the gentry here and abroad, scientists and debunkers inevitably came a-calling. Though countless mediums were revealed as frauds (without necessarily diminishing their subsequent business), a surprising number of serious scientists and engineers wound up as enthusiastic Spiritualists, even in the face of condemnation and official ridicule. Returning from the tropics, where he concocted a theory of evolution roughly parallel to Darwin’s, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace plunged into controlled empirical studies of Spiritualism. After seeing mediums like Mrs. Guppy pop six-foot sunflowers out of nowhere, Wallace came to the conclusion that some of its phenomena were “proved … quite as well as any facts are proved in other sciences.”26 C. F. Varley, an electrical engineer who worked on the Atlantic telegraph cable, was an ardent believer who attempted to demonstrate the existence of materialized spirit by hooking them up to galvanometers. In his later years, Thomas Edison tried to hack a radio device that would establish a telepathic channel between the worlds. Even expert magazines like the Electrical Review, which mocked amateur electricians and their cranky ideas, occasionally included stories of ghostly entities who intervened to operate electrical equipment.
Perhaps the most prominent scientist to fall for the spirits was Sir William Crookes, one of the most visionary physicists of Victorian England. When Crookes announced his intention to expose “the worthless residuum of Spiritualism,” the more sober wings of society applauded; little did they know that the man had already satisfactorily used mediums to contact his drowned brother. Crookes employed various electrical instruments in his investigations and took scores of spirit photographs—one of the more popular uses of the new technology. Crookes’s Spiritualist imagination even seeped into his science. Experimenting with the effects of electricity on gases enclosed in otherwise evacuated tubes, he discovered ghostly effects similar to the flashing, smoky lights he had witnessed at many séances. Crookes thought he had found another way to communicate with the dead; what he had actually discovered was the phosphorescent effect that cathode rays have on certain materials in a vacuum tube—a discovery that would eventually conjure up those rather vacuous ghosts that came to flit across television tubes for over half a century.
This strange feedback between magic and machines was hardly unprecedented. As a few historians have observed, the popular scientific demonstrations that packed public lecture halls during the late nineteenth century were sometimes difficult to distinguish from the spectacles of occultism. According to one contemporary account, the “Finale” of a Boston lecture given by representatives of the Edison Company in 1887 was nothing less than a séance: “Bells rung, drums beat, noises natural and unnatural were heard, a cabinet revolved and flashed fire, and a row of departed skulls came into view.”27 Of course, such performances were framed in the context of science’s technological conquest of mystery. But as far as popular perception was concerned, it was just the new shamans chasing the old ones out of town. As the cultural theorist Avital Ronell points out, “Science acquires its staying power from a sustained struggle to keep down the demons of the supernatural with whose visions, however, it competes.”28
In this sense, the fact that Spiritualism’s occult fun house sucked in so many prominent scientists simply reflects the larger cultural confusion caused by the explosive growth of science and technology during the industrial revolution. Consciously or not, many Victorians were co
ming to realize that the empiricism and materialism that was handing over so many goodies was also eroding the metaphysical ground of their immortal souls. Mere Christianity, bereft of magic and sputtering before the selection pressures of Darwinism, would hardly suffice to stem the tide of a meaningless cosmos. What better salve than Spiritualism, the most materialistic and empirical religion imaginable?
Such considerations help us understand the otherwise rather paradoxical fact that the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the machine age was plunging full steam ahead, were actually boom years for pop mysticism, occult science, and decadent romanticism. On the one hand, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science all expressed the desire to ensoul science, to overcome the growing divide between rationalism and religion. But the occult cosmologies and consciousness-tweaking practices of these groups also helped create new and sometimes eerie ways of imagining and experiencing the self at a time when the ghostly demarcations of identity were shifting in the face of new technologies of information and reproduction. Daguerreotypes, phonographs, telegraphs, telephones—all these nineteenth-century media siphon a bit of soul into an artifact or an electric herald. The story of the self in the information age is thus the story of the afterimages of the psyche, of those reflections and virtual doubles that are exteriorized, or outered, into technologies. The astral body of the Theosophists was simply the imaginal form of the “you” that appears on a photographic plate.
Such technological doublings also triggered the ancient dread of the doppelgänger, that psychic simulacrum of the self that moves through the world on its own eerie accord. Freud dubbed the dread produced by the doppelgänger “the uncanny,” though the original German word unheimlich carries the additional meaning of feeling not at home. Freud himself connected the unheimlich to the queer feelings one gets from dolls and automata, but in The Telephone Book Avital Ronell also links Freud’s technological uncanny with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary device. Ronell’s text is a fascinating and typographically brazen book that grounds an extended meditation on electric speech, schizophrenia, and Martin Heidegger within the history of Bell’s technology. But the occult portion of her tale centers on Bell’s own shadowy double: Thomas Watson, the electricity geek immortalized in Bell’s famous (though probably mythical) cry: “Watson, come here! I want you!”
Though Bell came up with the notion of translating the vibrating pressures of the human voice into an electrical signal that could pass along a wire, Watson actually built most of the man’s early devices. Like a lot of the electrical hackers at the time, Watson combined loads of practical know-how with weak and frequently wacky theories about the mysterious fluid itself—theories that, in Watson’s case, were mixed up with occult notions. Watson’s diary shows him glimpsing auras and having chats with morning glories; as Ronell writes, he was “capable of rendering public such statements as ‘believing as I do in reincarnation.’ ”29 As a member of the Society for Psychical Research, Watson treated Spiritualism as a nonmystical science, and he initially concluded that, just as “a telegraph instrument transforms pulsations of electricity into the taps of the Morse code,” so too did mediums transform energetic radiations into raps and knockings.30 Later Watson accepted the “disembodied spirit” theory, a theory that, as his diary notes, leaked into his researches with Bell. “I was now working with that occult force, electricity, and here was a possible chance to make some discoveries. I felt sure spirits could not scare an electrician, and they might be of use to him in his work.”31 Attempting to create a phone line that could both send and receive signals, Bell and Watson “talked successfully” by sending a weak current through a séance-like circuit made up of a dozen people holding hands, and in their later demonstration lectures, the dynamic duo conjured up various telephonic tricks that delivered all the thrills and chills of a magic show.
In a sense, the telephone is the ultimate animist technology. We associate sentient life with what communicates, and here was an inert thing full of voices. As the emperor of Brazil exclaimed when he first heard the gadget, “My God, it talks!” These days, of course, we are used to talking machines, and the ubiquity and pragmatism of the telephone has chased such animist perceptions back into the bush. And yet a spectral ambiguity continues to linger about the device. Does it talk, do we talk through it, or are those vibrations only the ghosts of ourselves? When we pick up a receiver and hear no dial tone, why do we say that the line is “dead”? A phone ringing in the middle of the night can be a terrifying thing, and not only for the ill tidings it may bring. Crank callers have long exploited the dread produced when we pick up the receiver and find “no one” there. Or think of the outgoing messages left on answering machines or voice mail. “I am not here right now,” we say, which of course begs the inevitable question: if we are not there, then who is speaking? Such an apparently trivial question becomes palpably eerie to anyone who has reached the voice mail of the recently deceased and heard the chipper messages of the dead.
The telephonic uncanny has a political dimension as well. Throughout the twentieth century, modern state institutions have often deployed their power through intelligence organizations devoted to surveillance, and the telephone served as a prime site for such activities. Today’s agents of surveillance, corporate as well as state, have also colonized the electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared cameras to spy satellite frequencies to devices capable of reading the electromagnetic impulses vibrating off of distant computer screens. But the telephone, cellular or otherwise, remains paradigmatic, since the mere possibility that unknown and unseen agents are bugging your line is enough to puncture the psychological intimacy afforded by a phone call, transforming your humble handset into an insidious tentacle of unwanted and invisible powers.
However legitimate, fears of electromagnetic surveillance also inform one of the great schizophrenic motifs of the twentieth century: the conviction that nefarious quasi-telepathic forces are using transistor radios, TVs, dental fillings, or microwave signals to colonize brains and manipulate behavior. Such paranoid possibilities are usually couched in stories of KGB agents or extraterrestrial probes or CIA mind-control experiments—secular mythologies appropriate for the now outered electronic self, open and exposed to the attentions of those unseen agents who lurk everywhere in information space. But the motif can be traced back to the very onset of the telephonic era, to the 1870s, when Thomas Watson met a man who swore that two prominent New Yorkers had connected his brain to their telephone circuit in order to harangue him incessantly with all sorts of “fiendish suggestions—even murder.” The man even offered to let Watson lop off the top of his head so that the electrical engineer could see how the contraption worked.
As daemonic allegories of media manipulation and modern propaganda, these scenarios of electromagnetic mind control are hardly inaccurate. But their essence remains thoroughly occult, bound up with the hypnotic specters and mesmerizing powers that have always inhabited the electromagnetic imaginary. The characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, are constantly mediating themselves through telephones, phonographs, telegraphs, and typewriters; as Sadie Plant explains, “The vampires return to a ticker-tape world of imperceptible communications and televisual speeds.”32 Half a century later, the Swedish researcher Konstantins Raudive claimed that magnetic tape recordings of silence often turn out, on repeat listenings, to contain distinct voices; devotees of “electronic voice phenomenon” have tuned in to similar murmurs on nonbroadcast radio frequencies, sounds that some interpret as the voices of the dead. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military would even fly helicopters over Vietcong villages, blasting eerie tapes of the “ancestors” in an attempt to rattle the enemy’s nerves.
The fact that such phantasms, concocted and not, continue to haunt the fringes of the electronic world underscores an argument running throughout this book. Modern media fire up magical or animist perceptions by technologically stretching and foldi
ng the boundaries of the self; these perceptions are then routinized, commercialized, exploited, and swallowed up into business as usual. To tune in to such fears and glimmerings, you need to crack open the mundane casing of ordinary technologies and trace their archetypal wiring. Then you might find yourself, if only for a moment, tapping into the electromagnetic unheimlich. The spirits speak: in the information age, you are never at home.
Like a Flash of Lightning
Throughout the nineteenth century, the symbols and practices surrounding electricity kept something of the old alchemical fire alive. Electric vitalism and magnetic trances nursed the spirit of animism in an age of rising mechanism. Electrical communication, the photographic capture of light waves, and the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum all helped dissolve the world of atomic materialism into a spectral cosmos of disembodied vibration. But electricity and the electromagnetic spectrum also came to embody the more Promethean and techno-utopian dimension of the alchemical mind.
Like the ancient metallurgists before them, the Renaissance alchemists worked contra naturam, against nature, artificially accelerating the evolutionary potential of matter. Christian alchemists identified this labor, not only with the immortal redemption of the individual, but with the creation of the celestial kingdom glimpsed at the close of Revelation. It’s a good bet that for many alchemists this millennialist lapis corresponded to a mighty potent state of mystic consciousness, but the symbol of the celestial city hovering at the close of space-time was also interpreted as a blueprint for material history. And it was in this meatier sense that the millennialist urge slipped into the modern ideology of technological progress, especially in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, when electricity began to generate power and “faery castles” of lightbulbs fought back the ancient enemy of night, electricity itself took on this millennialist charge.
