The machine and the ghost: Technology and spiritualism in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century art and culture 9781526112118

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E D I T E D B Y S A S M AY S A N D N E I L M AT H E S O N

THE MACHINE AND THE

GHOST

TECHNOLOGY AND SPIRITUALISM IN NINETEENTH-TO T W E N T Y - F I R S T - C E N T U R Y A R T A N D C U LT U R E

The machine and the ghost

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The machine and the ghost Technology and spiritualism in nineteenthto twenty-first-century art and culture

Edited by Sas Mays and Neil Matheson

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 07190 9006 6  hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Galliard by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby

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Contents

List of figures List of contributors Preface Acknowledgements

page vii xi xvii xix

Introduction: technologies, spiritualisms, and modernities Sas Mays and Neil Matheson

1

1   ‘It’s organisms that die, not life’: Henri Bergson, psychical research, and the contemporary uses of vitalism Justin Sausman

16

2  Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph: recording ­technologies and automisation Aura Satz

37

3   ‘Miraculous constellations in real material’: spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic Leigh Wilson

57

4 Ectoplasm and photography: mediumistic performances for camera Neil Matheson

78

5 Invasions and fakes Susan Hiller in conversation with Alexandra Kokoli

103

6 Image, technology, enchantment Marina Warner in conversation with Dan Smith

123

7 What happens in the gaps An interview with Suzanne Treister by Roger Luckhurst

140

v

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vi  Contents 8 The ghosts of media past and present: spirit photography and contemporary art Ben Burbridge

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9 From the premodern to the postmodern: mnemotechnics and the ghost of ‘the folk’ Sas Mays

180

10 Ruskin’s haunted nature: art and the spectre of ecological catastrophe Charlie Gere

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Index

223

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Figures

2.1 Spiritoscope, from Professor Robert Hare, Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations, New York: Partridge and Britten, 1855. Reprinted with permission from the Museum of the Macabre. All rights reserved. page 39 3.1 Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin lebt zu Hause (Tatlin at Home), 1920. From Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele, Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900–1933: Unveröffentlichte Briefe Texte Dokumente aus den Künstler-Archiven der Berlinischen Galerie, Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Eva Züchner, Hatje und Berlinische Galerie, 1998, p. 332. Reproduced with the permission of the Berlinische Galerie. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2012. Image © The British Library Board (YA.2000.a.23052). Original in colour.

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3.2 Materialisation produced by Eva C., January 1913, and charged with being a cut-out portrait of President Woodrow Wilson. Reproduced from Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, Materialisations-Phaenomeme: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Mediumistischen Teleplastie, Munich: Verlag von Ernst Reinhardt, 1914, p. 386. Used with permission of the IGPP. Image © The British Library Board (8633.dd.3).

72

4.1 Susan MacWilliam, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009, video, detail (teleplasm of the word ‘FLAMMARION’). Courtesy of the artist. Original in colour.

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4.2 Susan MacWilliam, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009, video, detail. Courtesy of the artist. Original in colour.

80

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viii  List of figures 4.3 Materialisation of the spirit ‘Katie King’ by the medium Florence Cook, ca.1870s. Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price Collection.

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4.4 The Davenport brothers, ca.1864. Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price Collection.

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4.5 Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph, 1978/2009. From a series of fifteen photographs (chromogenic prints), in an edition of five, each 35.5 cm × 25.4 cm. Copyright Mike Kelley. Courtesy of the Mike Kelley Studio.

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4.6 Paul Laffoley, Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara, 1967. Mixed media/canvas. 186.69 cm × 186.69 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Kent Fine Art, New York. Original in colour.

97

5.1 Susan Hiller, Homage to Yves Klein, 2008; archival dry prints individually framed, overall: 67 in × 67 in / 170 cm × 170 cm. Photo: Todd White Art Photography, London. 105 5.2 Susan Hiller, detail, Homage to Yves Klein, 2008; archival dry print, 6 in × 4 in / 15 cm × 10 cm. Photo: S. Hiller.

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5.3 Susan Hiller, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983–84; twenty-minute video programme and installation, dimensions variable. Collection: Tate, London. Photograph: D. Clarke. Original in colour.

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5.4 Susan Hiller, Midnight, Baker Street, 1983; three C-type photographs enlarged from hand-worked photo-booth images, each 30 in × 20 in / 76 cm × 51 cm; edn 2/3. Collection: Arts Council of England. Original in colour.

117

7.1 Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039 / Diagram (detail), 2006; Rotring ink on paper, 84 cm × 48 cm. Courtesy of the 143 artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London. 7.2 Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039 / GRAPHITE / U.S. Phased-Array Radar, Thule, Greenland, 2006; graphite on paper, 29.7 cm × 21 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

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7.3 Suzanne Treister, NATO / NSC 9915 / Black Square Kasimir Malevich, 2007; watercolour on Arches paper, 29.7 cm × 21 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

148

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List of figures  ix 7.4 Suzanne Treister, Rosalind Brodsky in her Electronic Time Travelling Costume to rescue her Grandparents from the Holocaust ends up mistakenly on the set of Schindler’s List, Krakow, Poland, 1994, 1997; archival giclée print on Hahnemühle paper, 50 cm × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

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7.5 Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0 / Literature / The New World Order, H. G. Wells, 1940, 2011; pencil on Arches paper, 21 cm × 29.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

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8.1 Installation image from ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, 23 January–14 March 2004; Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University, curated by Leslie K. Brown, photograph by Jim Dow and courtesy of PRC. Original in colour. Featuring from left to right: Carol Golemboski, from the series ‘Psychometry’, toned gelatin silver prints, courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery and the artist; Chrysanne Stathacos, from ‘The Aura Project’, inkjet print from Polaroid originals, courtesy of the artist; and Shannon Taggart, from projects on spiritualism at Lily Dale and Arthur Findlay College, C-prints, courtesy of the artist. 160 8.2 Installation image from ‘Seeing Is Believing’, 23 Nov­ember 2007–27 January 2008, The ­Photographers’ Gallery, London. © Jason Welling / The Photographers’ Gallery. Original in colour. Featuring from left to right: Clare Strand, Unseen Agents, 2004; Florencia Durante, Envelopment, 2005, with a view through to the darkened room containing material from the Harry Price archives. 161 10.1 Andy Goldsworthy, Sheepfold at Cautley Spout, Cumbria, 2003; photograph by the author. Original in colour.

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10.2 HeHe, Nuage Vert, Salmisaari, Finland, 2008; with permission of HeHe. Original in colour.

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10.3 Adam Sutherland/Grizedale Arts, London Transport Oyster card wallet, 2007; photograph by the author. Original in colour.

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Contributors

Benedict Burbridge is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. He has been the curator of a number of exhibitions, including ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’ (Permanent Gallery, Brighton), and ‘Daily Nice Take Away’ (Kunsthaus, Essen). Ben has written widely on photography, its histories, and its role in contemporary art for Photoworks and Grafik, and has contributed essays to publications including Henna Nadeem: A Picture Book of Britain (2006), and Pavillion Commissions 2007 (2007). He is the Deputy Editor of Photoworks magazine; a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld; and co-founder of ‘Ph’, a UK-wide network of emerging academics working in the field of photography. Charlie Gere is Professor in New Media Research and Head of the Department of Media, Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster. His main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to art and philosophy. He has been involved in curation, events, and conference presentations. His recent publications include: with Michael Corris, Non-Relational Aesthetics: Transmission, the Rules of Engagement 13 (2008); Art, Time and Technology (2006); and the second edition of Digital Culture (2008). Community Without Community in Digital Culture was published in 2012. Susan Hiller is an internationally renowned artist living and working in Berlin and London. She is represented extensively in international private and public collections, including, among others: Tate; the British Council; the Henry Moore Sculpture Collection; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Government Art Collection; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the xi

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xii  List of contributors Ella Fontanals Cisneros Foundation, Miami; the UBS Collection; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Her most recent collection of talks and texts, The Provisional Texture of Reality, was published in 2008. Hiller cites minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of surrealism, and her previous study of anthropology as major influences on her work. Her work is also an important influence on a generation of younger British artists. Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture – Fine Art, Middlesex University. Her research, which has been published in n.paradoxa, the Art Journal, and Performance Research, focuses on feminist art history, theory and practice, contemporary artists including Susan Hiller, Monica Ross and Tracey Emin, and the history of the ‘woman artist’ as a distinct classification. She is the curator of ‘Burnt Breakfast’ and other works by Su Richardson (Goldsmiths, 2012) and the editor of Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference and Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977–2007. Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He writes on popular literature and film, and on the intersections of science and culture. He is the author of The Invention of Telepathy (2002) and Science Fiction (2005), and editor of an anthology of Victorian materials, Marginal and Occult Sciences (2011). Neil Matheson is Senior Lecturer in the Photography Department of the University of Westminster’s School of Media, Art and Design, and the Co-Investigator for the project that initiated The Machine and the Ghost. An art historian specialising in surrealism, photography, and contemporary art, he has presented his work at numerous conferences in the UK, continental Europe, and the United States. He is the editor of The Sources of Surrealism (2006), a major sourcebook of surrealist writings, and has written on Belgian surrealism, the English surrealist movement, contemporary German photography, memory, and spirit photography, and the late drawings of Artaud. Other publications include: ‘The Phantom of Surrealism: Photography, Cultural Identity and the Reception of Surrealism in England’, in Surrealism and Photography, a special issue of History of Photography (2005); ‘The Ghost Stamp, the Detective and the Hospital for Boots: Light and the Post-War Battle Over Spirit Photography’, in Early Popular Visual Culture, 4:1 (2006); ‘Amazing Stories from the Future That Never Was: Neo Rauch and

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List of contributors  xiii the Haunted Spaces of Science Fiction’, in Maria Helmgren Troy and Elisabeth Wenno (eds), Space, Haunting, Discourse (2007); ‘Gursky, Ruff, Demand: Allegories of the Real and the Return of History’, in Damian Sutton, Ray McKenzie, and Sue Brind (eds), The State of the Real: Essays on Aesthetics (2007). Sas Mays is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Critical Theory in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. He was the Principal Investi­gator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council project that served as the basis for The Machine and the Ghost. He also leads the ensuing online and offline research events and publications project ‘Archiving Cultures’, which is located within Westminster’s Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture. He has been an invited speaker at, and the developer of, a number of conferences and colloquia intersecting with his overall research interest in the mediation of cultural memory through technological and archival forms, from the textual to the visual, and from the analogue to the digital. Publications related to this research area include: ‘Ansel Adams: The Gender Politics of Photographic and Literary Archives’, in David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher, and Sas Mays (eds), Literature and Photography in the Twentieth Century (2005); ‘Consigning Badiou to the Past: The Encyclopaedia and Philosophy’s Gendered Thought of the Endless Archive’, in Cultural Politics, 5:1 (2009); Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net, a special issue of New Formations (2013); and the edited collection Literatures, Libraries, Archives (2013). Aura Satz is an artist and writer. She completed a theory/practice PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Sculpture Fellowship. She has taught at the Slade, Central Saint Martin’s, and the History of Art Department of University College London, and has been Fellow at the London Consortium since 2004. She has been invited to speak at venues such as the Henry Moore Institute, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, the Hayward Gallery and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a regular contributor to Tema Celeste, and has published in a variety of journals, including Performance Research, New Formations, and New York Arts magazine, and the Financial Times. She is co-editor of Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance (2008) and has published essays on tableaux vivants, iconoclasm, automata, phantom limbs, and spiritualism. She has performed, exhibited, and screened her work nationally and internationally, including at FACT (Liverpool), Site

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xiv  List of contributors Gallery (Sheffield), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento (Italy), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland), Whitechapel Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). In 2008 she had solo shows at B ­ eaconsfield Gallery and Artprojx Space. Justin Sausman is co-editor of Marginal and Occult Sciences, a forthcoming volume of Pickering and Chatto’s ‘Victorian Science and Literature’ series, and is included in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010). He is currently completing a book entitled Modernism and the Meaning of Life, a study of literary modernism’s use of the term ‘life’ in the context of vitalism, occultism, physics, and the development of evolutionary genetics during the first half of the twentieth century. He has previously taught literature and critical theory at Birkbeck, Royal Holloway, and the University of Westminster, and in 2012 was visiting researcher at the Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, University of Amsterdam. His research explores the connections between nineteenth- and ­twentieth-century occultism, spiritualism, science, and literature. Dan Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, and editor of the online publication Altertopian. His book Traces of Modernity was published in 2012, by Zero Books. Recent work includes ‘Wells’s First Utopia: Materiality and Portent’, a book chapter in Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (eds), Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice (2007), and ‘Horizontality’ in Art Monthly (2008). His A World of Uncertain Seasons, a book on contemporary art and utopia, is to be published by Peter Lang and Agamben Reframed is to be published by I. B. Tauris, both in 2013. Suzanne Treister studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978–81), and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981–82), and is now based in London having lived in Australia, New York, and Berlin. Primarily a painter through the 1980s, she was a pioneer in the digital/new media/web-based field from the beginning of the 1990s, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Her practice deals with notions of identity, history, power, and the hallucinatory. Her investigations into the life and research of the fictional character Rosalind Brodsky, most recently explored in the multi-venue project HEXEN 2039, were described by Art in America as ‘One of the most sustained fantasy trips of

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List of contributors  xv contemporary art’, which belies a deeper mission: to explore how we make sense of history and the politics of war. Recent projects include: ‘Nato, Alchemy, CORRESPONDENCE: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, War Artists’ and ‘PSI_NET’. Exhibitions from 2006 have included: ‘3 Projects’, Annely Juda Fine Art, London; ‘Alchemy P.P.O.W.’, New York, USA; Alma Enterprises, London; ‘HEXEN 2039’, CHELSEA space, London; Warburg Institute, Ognisko Polskie; Science Museum, London; British Museum, London; Dana Centre, London; Skolská 28, Prague; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany; Basekamp, Philadelphia, USA; Galerie Lorenz, Frankfurt, Germany; and Jewish Museum, New York. Recent publications include: HEXEN 2039: New ­Military-Occult Technologies for Psychological Warfare (2006); NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World (2008). Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism, and history, particularly, in this context, concerning the mythological and arcane. As well as her well known Phantasmagoria (2006), recent publications include: ‘Who Can Shave an Egg? Foreign Tongues and Primal Sounds in Mallarmé and Beckett’, in the Times Literary Supplement (29 February 2008) and in Raritan (spring 2008); ‘The Writing of Stones: Roger Caillois’s Imaginary Logic’, in Cabinet magazine (spring 2008); ‘The Compass of Story – Eastern Bearings in Western Literature’, in What Is the West? (2008); and ‘Phew! Whaam! Aaargh! Boo!: Sense, Sensation, and Picturing Sound’, in The Soundtrack, 1:2 (2008). ‘Memory Maps’, a collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Essex, to which she is currently affiliated, was launched in 2006. Her book about magic and magicians, called Stranger Magic, was published in 2011. Leigh Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her present research interests centre on modernism and on contemporary British fiction. She is currently writing a monograph, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, for Edinburgh University Press. Publications relevant to this collection include: Modernism (2007); ‘Gender, History and the Cross-Correspondences’, for a special issue of Critical Survey, ‘Modernist Women Writers and History’ (2007); and ‘The Cross-­ Correspondences, the Nature of Evidence and the Matter of Writing’, in Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion on Victorian Spiritualism and the Occult (2012).

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Preface

This book represents the culmination of a research project entitled ‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’, which was initiated, developed, and conducted by the editors of this volume. The project was held within the University of Westminster’s Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities between 2009 and 2010. It was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council award, under the Beyond Text scheme for Networks and Workshops. Through this support, the project invited speakers and participants to a series of themed seminars and a final public conference. These platforms brought together literary, visual, and cultural critics, contemporary artists, and specialists in the field, in order to proceed in cross-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary modes. In this way, the project was designed to respond to a particular moment in cultural studies and aesthetic production that appeared to be marked by a particular attention to matters of spiritualism, the paranormal, the magical, and the arcane, and which thus also concerned the histories of these forms. The aim of the project, then, was to critically encounter the field of discourses of spiritualism and related areas, in order to understand better their historical and contemporary significance in aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political terms. Such an attention is evidenced in this collection, through the critical, aesthetic, and historical practices that are analysed and enacted within it. Indeed, a number of the authors included in this collection have been drawn from the project’s events. In continuity with the project’s critical engagement with the related fields of historical and contemporary spiritualism, the chapters in this volume address in various ways the problematic and generative relation between the past and the present, as much as they gesture towards and engage with issues of the future. xvii

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Acknowledgements

As the Principal Investigator and the Co-Investigator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project that formed the groundwork of this collection, the editors would like to acknowledge their gratitude to a number of persons and institutions. We would like to thank, at the University of Westminster, the members of the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies who were involved in the early stages of the project’s application and development; those involved in research support in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities; and the Regent Street campus estates staff who facilitated the setting up and running of the project’s events. In this context of research support, we must thank the AHRC Beyond Text team, particularly Prof. Evelyn Welch and Ruth Hogarth, for their inclusion of the project within the Networks and Workshops awards, and for their help and guidance with the project. Their development and management of the Beyond Text scheme, and the way in which this scheme brought together all the award holders for discussion and networking, was instrumental not only in understanding the scope and remits of other projects, but also in understanding those of our own. Thanks should also be given here for the initial support for the project, because it has seed-funded the development of an ongoing online and offline research events and publications project run by the Principal Investigator, entitled ‘Archiving Cultures’. Tom Ruffles and Melvyn Willin, participants from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which was the project’s Partner Organisation, must be given special thanks here. The long, rich, and complex history of the SPR, and its consistent analysis and archiving of matters of the paranormal, makes it the key historical institution in this field xix

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xx  Acknowledgements of research, and its centrality is marked by attention to its role in a significant number of contributions to this collection. We were thus privileged to involve members of the SPR in our discussions, a participation that gave the project’s seminars a character, breadth, and particularity that they would otherwise have found lacking. Consequently, we would also like to thank the invited speakers at the project’s seminars and the final conference: Carolyn Burdett, Roger Cardinal, Robert Eaglestone, Amy Evans, Charlie Gere, Monica Germanà, John Harvey, Susan Hiller, Martyn Jolly, Tatiana Kontou, Peter Lamont, Roger Luckhurst, Susan MacWilliam, Olivia Plender, Aura Satz, Suzanne Treister, Marina Warner, and Leigh Wilson. All of these speakers’ presentations brought to the project a productive diversity of methodological, historical, and critical perspectives through which to develop understanding of the issues at hand. Not least, we would also like to thank all those who attended the seminars and the conference for their participation and contribution. The conversations, conflicts, and negotiations of such interaction were instrumental to the project’s progress, and its intellectual outcomes. Lastly, then, we should express our gratitude more generally to all those involved, including the contributors to this collection, for giving us the opportunity to engage in a process of intellectual endeavour that has positively developed our critical and cultural understanding of the field of study under consideration here, as well as our understanding of the politics of cultural and technological forms more generally. We hope that our contribution to this field, as represented by this book, is as generative and thought provoking for its readers.

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Introduction: technologies, spiritualisms, and modernities Sas Mays and Neil Matheson

The world often looks quite spectral to me; sometimes, as in Regent Street the other night (my nerves being all shattered), quite hideous, discordant, almost infernal. (From the journal of Thomas Carlyle, July 18351)

The Machine and the Ghost emerged from a research project entitled ‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’, convened at the University of Westminster during 2009–10 in conjunction with members of the Society for Psychical Research. Through a series of seminars and a plenary conference, the project aimed to critically analyse relationships between various forms of spiritualism and technology during our own turn of the century, through attention to such forms at the turn of the nineteenth century. The need for an analysis of more recent manifestations of these relationships could be registered, for example, in the turn towards technologic­ally mediated religious fundamentalism in international politics, as well as in a number of cultural practices, including, significantly for the present collection, the work of contemporary artists and cultural critics. Indeed, such practices have themselves been marked by a turn towards the historical relationship between spiritualisms and technologies, and in this light we aimed to consider our own time through the cultural interest in spiritualism and photography, telegraphy, and phonography around the previous fin de siècle. The project’s approach to the question of our relationship with tech­ nology is suggested in the metaphor of the ‘ghost in the machine’, which was first proposed by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, in order to embody the ‘official dogma’ of the ‘Cartesian myth’ concerning the relationship between mind and body.2 For Ryle, the Cartesian conception of the 1

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2  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson relationship is a ‘category-mistake’, made because Descartes balks morally at accepting ‘mind’ as simply a more complex form of matter than ‘body’, from which ensues the misleading repre­sent­ation of a person as ‘a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine’.3 The con­ junction of the terms ‘ghost’ and ‘machine’ has since passed into cultural and academic parlance in instances and configurations too numerous to list. Nevertheless, we might provide a schema. For Descartes, the dualism of body and mind would sug­gest their parallel existence; for Ryle, ghost and machine cannot be understood as separate categories. Hence, our approach to the issue of the relationship between technology and spirit concerns not only their prob­lem­ atic intertwinement, but, as suggested by our reversal of the terms, the problematic question of technological effectuation. In order to provide both concepts and knowledge by which an assessment of technology and spiritualism in historical and contemporary art and culture might be pursued, this collection brings together key national and international art practitioners, and academics and specialists in the field, presented here in a number of different formats: academic papers, artists’ papers, and interviews. The emphasis of the collection thus concerns art practice, including photography, film and video, performance, and sound. Indeed, what sets this collection apart from the many publications that address relationships between the machine and the ghost is this emphasis on contemporary art practices; yet the collection also engages with textual practices, indicating the complex relationships between such cultural and critical fields. In this light, the collection aims to consider such practices as ones that may attest to, and be witness of, their times. That is, they are taken as creative and critical practices that may shed light on wider cultural, economic, and political forces, as they reflect both upon historical instances of spiritualism and upon contemporary concerns. Such work is, in this sense, the primary object of the collection, since it critically and reflexively links past and present, tradition and modernity, continuation and disruption. Contemporary arts and the paranormal Within the visual arts, speculation concerning the paranormal, haunting, spiritualism, and spirit photography expanded enormously in the first decade of the twenty-first century, seeing a wide range of exhibitions focusing upon those topics, either in themed shows or in more historical exhibitions. Interest in these areas around the time of the new millennium is evidenced, for example, in Tony

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Introduction  3 Oursler’s spectacular light projections of sinister faces, bodies, and texts, made on trees, buildings, and on artificially produced clouds of smoke, which were staged in parks in London and New York, and published in 2002 as The Influence Machine.4 The projections in London’s Soho Square were made close to the house at 22 Frith Street, where, in October 1925, John Logie Baird first demonstrated a TV broadcast, transmitting a spectral face across the attic room of the house – fittingly that of a somewhat sinister ventriloquist’s dummy known as ‘Stooky Bill’, evoking fears of the animation of the inanimate – followed by the blurry image of a moving human face. A related example could be noted in David Hall’s installation piece, 1001 TV Sets (End Piece) (1972/2012), a reworking of an earlier work, comprised of 1,001 TV sets tuned to five analogue channels, which coincided with the termination of the analogue TV signal in the UK. Here, amid the Babel of noise and images erupting from the TV sets laid helplessly on their backs, was the ghostly presence of Stooky Bill, returned to expire once more as the transmission signal was finally turned off. Photography too has figured centrally in this attention to tech­ nology and spiritualism, as with the major exhibition ‘The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult’, which was staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2005, following a successful showing in Paris, and which presented a historical survey of the photography of spirits, ghosts, and mediums, and the production of ectoplasm. The exhibition ‘Seeing Is Believing: Photographing the Unseen Past and Present’, held at the Photographers’ Gallery in London (2007–08), brought together the work of contemporary artists, such as Clare Strand and Roger Ballen, and historical work investigating paranormal phenomena from the collection of Harry Price. There have also been exhibitions embracing a wider range of media, as with ‘Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal’ (Baltimore, 2006) and ‘The Message: Art and Occultism’ (Bochum, 2007), which, in addition to mediumistic and spiritualist work, also embraced outsider art and the work of mystics such as Hilma af Klint. More recent exhibitions have included ‘Hauntology’ (Berkeley Art Museum, 2010), as well as more broadly themed shows such as the Guggenheim Museum’s ‘Haunted’ (New York, 2010). We should also refer here to important projects by individual artists. Suzanne Treister’s ‘HEXEN 2039’ (2006) proposed con­nec­ tions between such diverse subjects as witchcraft, Hollywood cinema, Chernobyl, and paranormal investigations by the US and Soviet military authorities. Susan MacWilliam’s F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N

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4  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson (2009), first shown at the Venice Biennale of that year, explored a particular episode in the history of spiritualism involving the manifestation of ‘ectoplasm’ in the form of a text. Aura Satz, in her films and performance works, has explored the history of sound-making technologies in the interaction of the human and the machine, while Olivia Plender’s ‘The Medium and Daybreak’ project (2005) involved historical and pseudo-sociological research into spiritualism and mediumism. Susan Hiller’s major Tate retrospective of 2011 ranged across automatic writing, haunted technologies, Raudive’s voices of the dead, and the visualisation of multi-coloured human ‘auras’. A recurring voice running through many of the above exhibitions and articles in journals such as Cabinet and Parkett has been that of Marina Warner, who situates psychic phenomena and spiritualism within the longer cultural history of our imaginings of the soul and our fantasies of haunting, and whose ideas have been more comprehensively developed in her book Phantasmagoria (2006).5 Much of this artwork could usefully be explored from the perspective of the role played by technologies in the generation, transmission, recording, and storage of what we might loosely refer to as ‘paranormal’ phenomena. The recent shift from the analogue to the digital age, whether in the mass take-up of digital cameras and the gradual disappearance of photographic emulsions and films, or the move to digital TV and termination of the analogue signal, mark further developments in the relationship of our culture to the spectral. Just as the failure to properly clean glass photographic plates spontaneously generated spectral figures in early photographs, or as crossed wireless signals and the dead spaces between frequencies generated ghostly voices in radio transmissions, so too will the continued mutations of technologies generate their own manifestations of what is unexplained or what returns to disturb and disrupt. The existence of electronic and computer glitches, unprogrammed errors, bugs, and malfunctions occurring on anything from TV and computers to video games has proven a source of creative and disruptive potential in the form of ‘glitching’, opening up the possibility of breaking the constraints of programmed systems and of acting in unauthorised ways or outside legal geographical limits. Such work, overall, thus brings into question the conceptualisation of technology, and technologies, for example, whether they are thought of as merely mechanistic and repetitive, or as errant and unpredictable. Such artwork also calls into question what we might mean by the ‘spirit’ or essence of technology, as much as we might thus begin to think of the paranormal in a more quotidian sense than is usually understood by the term.

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Introduction  5 Machines and ghosts: concepts, relationships, and histories We should specify here the distinction made here between technologies, thought of as specific configurations of devices, and technology more broadly conceived. It is of course a commonplace to understand technologies of communication and recording as, effectively, gadgets – typewriters, cameras, audio recording devices, etc. An initial complication should be registered here, in that writing is also a communications and recording technology, just as much as we should recognise that the first cultures to use inscription also had technologies of architecture, horticulture, and so on. As this indicates a broader sense of the concept of technology, we might turn to Martin Heidegger, for whom the term derives from the Greek technikon. Technē refers not only to craft skills, but also to ‘the arts of the mind and the fine arts’, and to poiēsis, and therefore designates ‘the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alētheia, truth happens’.6 But with modern advanced technology, reality is transformed via ‘enframing’, a process of ‘challenging’ and ‘ordering’, turning nature into a ‘standing reserve’, such that the former process of revealing is no longer able to take place, hence the ‘danger’ posed by technology for Heidegger.7 We might then pause here to think of that challenge to traditional conceptions of the division of nature and technology given in the discourse of cybernetics, in which, in Donna Haraway’s reading, human, tech­no­ logical, and natural systems are part of a complex, interpenetrated, and non-unified assemblage.8 Given its impact on art history and art theory, we might also mention here the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for whom the ‘rhizome’ is a machinic assemblage of the organic and inorganic.9 Deleuze and Guattari’s thought here offers itself as a response to the idea of the machine of capitalism, which, of course, finds one of its key moments in the work of Karl Marx. The attention to the machines of capitalism develops in left-wing thought through, for example, Louis Althusser’s theory of the ideological and repressive state apparatuses, which reproduce ideological subjects in the service of capital.10 And Michel Foucault, in Althusser’s wake, developed his theory of technologies of surveillance and their role in the production of an orderly and productive society.11 In an extension of this kind of analysis, Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer analysed the way in which specific technolo­gies, like stereoscopic photographics, were implicated in capitalist subject formation.12 Indeed, Friedrich Kittler’s attack on Foucault concerns precisely this point about the specificity of technologies. While Foucault wrote of optics and power, his method

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6  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson was, according to Kittler, essentially textual and inapplicable to sound or film.13 As Kittler’s response was to think of the specificity of tech­nologies in their historical formation, we might turn towards Jacques Derrida’s argument, in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, that the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the psyche is inherently technological and historical, in being thought in part through the ‘mystic writing pad’.14 Derrida’s argument thus problematises the traditional binary opposition of spirit and technology, in which spirit, in its various forms, is seen as something fundamentally different from, and independent of, technology and matter. What, then, of the term ‘spiritualism’? Modern spiritualism as a religious movement is usually traced back to the rappings in Hydesville near New York in 1848, claimed as communication with the dead and as evidence of some form of post-mortem existence, a phenomenon that expanded rapidly as a response to the post-Enlightenment faltering of faith in more conventional forms of Christian worship. But the term ‘spiritualism’, rooted in the Latin spiritualis as pertaining to spirit or to the higher moral or religious domains, is also of course used far more broadly, to designate a tendency towards ‘a spiritual view of things’, particularly in relation to philosophy or religion. And it is upon that uncertain terrain, lying between those two interlinked uses of the term, that many of these debates – the relationship of the spiritual to our culture’s attitude towards death and the concept of an afterlife; the connections between spiritualism and new technologies; and the inter-relationship of science and spirit – have been fought. Spiritualism’s relationship with science and technology is complex and in some ways paradoxical. Janet Oppenheim argues that, for spiritual­ists and psychic researchers, ‘scientific modes of thought posed the outstanding challenge to the foundations of Christianity’ in their promotion of a ‘materialist philosophy’, as against the claims of the spirit.15 Nonetheless, regularly claiming the vindication of science and a basis in reason, spiritualism was, from the outset, imbricated within the worlds of science and technology, with its rapped codes echoing those of Samuel Morse, while its subsequent development would claim the support of every emergent new technology, from photography and telegraphy to radio and TV broadcasting. By 1882, the Gallery of Spirit Art, a New York magazine devoted to spirit photography and painting, could somewhat smugly proclaim that: the recent inventions of the photograph and the telephone, the introduction of the electric light, and the improvements in photography and telegraphy, are so many indications of the incoming tide of

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Introduction  7 spiritual illumination; they are so many evidences of the new order of things, and are just as much evidences of the ‘descent of the spirit’, as are the speeches of our trance mediums.16

Technology was thus at the forefront of this spiritual revolution, and in the same magazine E. Lawrence describes the materialisation of a spirit at a séance, where the spirit ‘arranged the camera to suit herself, then stepped off the platform and took a seat folding her arms’.17 The spirit had emerged, like others, from a ‘cabinet’, shaken hands, answered questions, and then had her photograph made as a ‘tin type’ (a cheap form of photographic image made on a metal plate). Conversely, spiritualism itself attracted the intervention of prominent scientists from the fields of physics, psychology, and psychiatry, and the deployment of the latest technologies in investi­ gating its claims. Seeming to promise to scientists the potential discovery of hitherto unexplained ‘forces’ and powers, the world of séances, mediums, and spiritualism in turn attracted the deployment of the latest technologies, instituting a two-way dialogue between the often-incompatible worlds of science and spirit. Long linked to the idea of unexplained and ‘special’ powers, mechanical and technological devices readily lend themselves to association with ideas of animism, haunting, and the ‘otherworldly’. Considered from a psychopathological perspective, machinery figures prominently in persecutory delusions and fantasies, as for example in Viktor Tausk’s classic paper ‘On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia’, which analyses a mysterious device able to generate images as well as to both induce and remove feelings and ideas – a phenomenon that finds regular visual expression in areas such as ‘outsider art’.18 The notion of some animating force or spectre returning to haunt technology itself is explored at length in Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, where he engages with the ‘cultural mythology about the “living quality” of such technologies’ as TV and radio, where the implication is that those technologies ‘are animate and perhaps even sentient’.19 The vitalising force of electricity served to suggest ‘analogies between electricity, consciousness and information’, conceived in terms of ‘flows’, ‘currents’, and ‘streams of consciousness’.20 Sconce analyses that animation in terms of ‘electronic presence’, a core condition of our own times in relation to the heightened simulation effect of electronic media and their increasing immersion within everyday life.21 Both Sconce and Kittler note how the development of Morse code and the first public test of an electromagnetic telegraph line in

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8  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson 1844 were followed in 1848 by the first spirit raps of the Fox sisters, after which spiritualism attempted to align itself with science, using the analogy of the ‘spiritual telegraph’.22 Roger Luckhurst, in The Invention of Telepathy, demonstrates how, just as science increasingly separated itself from non-scientific and irrational phenomena during the latter part of the nineteenth century, rooting itself in ‘scientific naturalism’, spiritualism came to blur those boundaries in claiming an affiliation with technologies such as the telegraph, X-rays, and wireless waves.23 At the same time, respected figures from the world of science – William Crookes, Charles Richet, Oliver Lodge, Camille Flammarion, and others – looked to the territories opened up by psychic phenomena as the terrain of suspected new forces and powers to be colonised by science. Within literature these ideas have been explored by Tom McCarthy in his 2010 novel C, which traces the short life of Serge Carrefax from his birth on the family estate of Versoie, with its school for the deaf and a domineering father experimenting with early telegraphy, to the trenches and prison camps of the First World War, culminating in drug-fuelled oblivion during the 1920s.24 Surrounded by the products of nascent communications tech­nologies – ‘manometric flame and typesetting machines, phon­autographs, rheotomes, old hotel annunciators and telegraph station switches’ – Carrefax inhabits a world permeated by the constant buzzing of invisible currents, pulsing through networks of trailing copper wires.25 And it is a tech­ no­­logical world haunted by death. We encounter it in the dead cat reanimated by the ghoulish experiments with electricity conducted by Serge’s sister Sophie, as well as in Serge’s nightly trawling of the radio waves, in which ‘[w]ireless ghosts come and go’, and where, one night, amid the ‘whine and crackle’, he picks up a sinking ship’s distress signal, and thinks he hears ‘the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them’.26 The obvious cultural reference here is to the sinking of the Titanic, firmly entrenched in myth after the commemoration of its centenary in 2012, ‘forever imprinting on the mind’s eye’, as Sconce observes, ‘the image of unfortunate souls spread across the icy void of the Atlantic, struggling to stay above the surface’.27 Luckhurst notes that the prominent journalist W. T. Stead, a fervent spiritualist as well as a great advocate of new technology, was among the passengers who went down with the Titanic, ‘but his death was picked up by Spiritual­ist circles more rapidly than wireless operators’, adding that Stead’s ‘last dinner conversation’, it ism, thought-­ transference and was reported, ‘concerned “spiritual­ the occult”’.28

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Introduction  9 André Breton, in 1924, pointing to the more utopian implications of radio communications for the cultural imaginary of an era, would observe that: ‘The expression “wireless” has too recently found its place in our vocabulary, has had too rapid a career, for much of the dream of our epoch not to go along with it’.29 The alternative, more dystopian conception of radio as introducing a vast anxiety-­inducing ‘etheric ocean’ is one of the central concepts of Sconce’s book and derives from the work of Catherine Covert, and the paradox that modern communications simultaneously introduce a note of ‘melancholy’ and ‘estrangement’, a vertiginous sense of the vastness of the etheric universe through which signals flow, and of the corresponding isolation and insignificance of the individual.30 Sconce also cites Rudyard Kipling’s tale ‘Wireless’, in which a radio operator listens in on two warships at sea that are unable to make radio contact.31 Kipling’s protagonist comments ‘“It’s quite pathetic”’, and likens the exchange to a spiritualist séance, ‘“odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere – a word here and there – no good at all”’.32 Hence, the disillusioned conclusion: ‘“mediums are all impostors”, said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway […]. “They only do it for the money they can make. I’ve seen ’em”.’33 In McCarthy’s book, there are echoes of this cynicism: having survived wartime service as a pilot, Carrefax drifts listlessly through post-war London’s nightlife, its cabarets and drug dens, visiting a séance at Hoxton Hall, where the bereaved are seeking contact with dead husbands and sons, and where to his disgust the tilting table is discovered by Serge to be controlled by a concealed transmitter. Kipling and McCarthy’s cynicism suggests a polarisation of attitudes to the spectral and the role of spiritualism based on an opposition between rationality and illusion. Comparably, as David Martin puts it in Curious Visions of Modernity, the ‘age of modern scientific rationality […] staked the worth of its knowledge claims on a transparency supposedly guaranteed by the visual’.34 Nevertheless, if modernity’s impulse was to homogenise the visual field, it could not eradicate heterogenous elements. In his conclusion, Martin states that: Such heterogeneity need not manifest itself in a sense of ‘otherness’ or in radical difference; far from it, in fact. Thus, […] we need not to turn to the margins, the post-colony, to the ‘strange tales’ of modernity, as our starting point: not to the UFO sightings in Armenia, mass radio hypnotism in Russia […]. Rather, this book has directed our attention to the less overtly ‘vengeful incursions of the heterogenous’ (to paraphrase Bataille) which manifest themselves in the very structures of Western knowledge production and subject formation.

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10  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson We can see it in our commonplace memorialisation of loved ones, and in our subsequent defacement of such monuments.35

Martin’s insistence on a quotidian and fugitive sense of the heter­ ogenous should of course remind us that the other here is a projec­tion of the modern European self, and that it too requires analysis – one of the topics discussed in this collection by Dan Smith and Marina Warner (chapter 6). Furthermore, as Simon During indicates in his history of secular magic, Modern Enchantments, the attempted abolition of the archaic and the arcane characterises early Christi­ anity’s attitude to older religions. Thus we might think that the issue of the arcane, the irrational, and the occult, is not only a question of the historical period of modernity, but is constitutive of the sense of the modern as such. And we must not only think that modernity comprises the attempted exclusion of the non-­normative: as During argues, secular magic, which ‘popularized new technologies’, and stabilized ‘hierarchies of taste’, for example, ‘helped shape modern culture’. 36 What we are suggesting, then, is that while there might be specific historical configurations of the relationship between technology and spirit, as indicated in the preceding discussion of spiritualism, the idea of a rational modernity being haunted by its supposedly archaic origins is in fact a consistent feature of modernity itself: modernity is that which has to deny the past, rendering it archaic, arcane, occult, premodern, in order to come into existence. But this is not only an issue of the past. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, Socratic rationalism contests previous and existing philosophical positions, and positions its verbal form against the dangers of writing, as a techne which may generate indeterminacy. Whatever might be said about the classical Greeks’ lack of theorisation of history, it is clear, then, that Socratic rationalism positions itself against a previous doxa, and against a technological future. We might hazard, then, that any contemporaneity, or any modernity, is a Janus haunted by the temporal relationships of the past and the future, and, indeed, is constructed as the difference between these things.37 If the complex temporality of modernity thus involves an attitude to technology – technophobic, as in Plato and Heidegger, or technophiliac, as in some of the spiritualist thinkers already discussed – we should also raise questions concerning the technologies of our own modernity. The digitisation of communications and memory, and the fearful, positive, and complex cultural attitudes to such are of course key here. Any internet search would swiftly show that various discourses of the paranormal, occult, and spiritualist find their place in this scene,

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Introduction  11 and, indeed, digital tech­nologies have spawned their own forms of apparition just as much as analogue forms have been transcribed into their milieu. Thus, the dual orientation of modernity towards the past and future finds its place here too. Themes, contributions, and questions The following collection, adopting a range of theoretical and historical strategies, further develops many of the issues set out above concerning spiritualism and related psychic phenomena in their relationship with technology, developing much of that analysis within the context of the visual arts. For instance, in chapter 8, Ben Burbridge interrogates curatorial strategies in a number of recent photographic exhibitions showing work on spiritualist and paranormal themes. Resiting spirit photography and the production of ‘ectoplasm’ within the theatrical tradition of melodrama, Neil Matheson in chapter 4 considers spiritualist manifestations in terms of ‘performances for camera’, exploring that history through its restaging in the work of contemporary artists. Charlie Gere, rooting his analysis in the writing of John Ruskin, develops the theme of the ‘haunted landscape’ in relation to the idea of ‘ecological catastrophe’ (chapter 10), in a discussion that ranges across land art, photography in its relationship to the spectral, and the experience of the sacred. The multiple roles of contemporary artists – whether as producers of work, theorists or cultural commentators – is a distinguishing feature of this collection. Susan Hiller, in conversation with Alexandra Kokoli in chapter 5, discusses the significance of the various tech­nologies that are embedded in her works – for example: websites in relation to her work on auras; TV in her piece B ­ elshazzar’s Feast; or radio in the case of her use of Raudive’s recordings of the voices of the dead. Suzanne Treister, in an interview with Roger Luckhurst in chapter 7, further develops the question of the spectrality of new technologies – video, computing, virtual reality – in the context of the connections that are made between the military–industrial complex and the occult in her artwork. In chapter 2 Aura Satz, herself an artist whose work has often explored the role of music and sound, considers automatic writing in the context of the typewriter as a haunted technology, and the manifestation of music at séances, shifting our focus from the visual to the tactile and aural, while exploring the less well known strand of ‘direct voice’ phenomena and the technology of the phonograph. Questions of history and of the siting of the debates around spiritualism in relation to the histories of modernity, modernism,

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12  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson and postmodernism also run through a number of contributions. In a study based on the vitalist writings of Henri Bergson in their relation to psychical research in chapter 1, Justin Sausman considers the question of ‘how ghosts work’, or, put differently, ‘if mediums are like machines, then what might be powering them?’, thus foregrounding questions of the historical relations between vitalism and mechanism, spiritualism and technology. In chapter 3, Leigh Wilson analyses the unacknowledged links between Dada photomontage and séance photographs, through a discussion focused upon the concept of materiality, and via conflicts in the period between religion, magic, and science. The question of the role of magic recurs in Dan Smith’s conversation with Marina Warner in chapter 6, where the principal focus is ‘a set of collisions between belief and technology’, posed in terms of the interwoven histories of photographic, ethno­graphic, and archival apparatuses. Their discussion embraces the shift from analogue to digital, particularly in photography and film, returning us again to the question of materiality, where the indexical ontology of the analogue is contrasted with the excessive compensatory impulse of the digital to find embodiment in an increasingly de­materialised age, as evidenced for example in the visceral bombardment of ­computer-generated imagery (CGI) and 3-D films. In relation to this issue, in chapter 9 Sas Mays situates psychical research – and, more broadly, the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘spectral’ – in relation to the political question of the status of ‘folk’ knowledge, in both traditional and contemporary, digital contexts. The shift from the analogue to the digital suggests further mutations of technologies and cultures that will see further mutations in the forms of, and relationships between, machines and ghosts. In contribution to our developing understandings of such changes, at this juncture of the past and the future, we thus open this collection. Notes 1 Cited in Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium, London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995, p. 193. 2 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [1949], Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 17. 3 Ibid., p. 19. 4 Tony Oursler, The Influence Machine, London: Artangel, 2002. 5 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 6 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ [1954], in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1977, pp. 12–13.

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Introduction  13 7 Ibid., pp. 18–19, 28. 8 Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ [1985], in Simians, ­ Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi, New York and London: Continuum, 2004. 10 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ [1969], in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays [1971], New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 11 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random House, 1977. 12 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [1990], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 13 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 5. 14 Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ [1966], in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1978. 15 Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychic Research in England, 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 2. 16 E. Lawrence, Editorial, ‘An Illustrated Quarterly Magazine Devoted to and Illustrative of Spirit Photography, Spirit Painting, the Photographing of Materialized Forms and Every Form of Spirit Art’, Gallery of Spirit Art, 1:1, August 1882, p. 1. 17 E. Lawrence, ‘Spirit Photography at Terre Haute’, Gallery of Spirit Art, 1:1, August 1882, p. 11. 18 Viktor Tausk, ‘The Influencing Machine’ [1919], in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, New York: Zone Books, 1992, pp. 542–69. 19 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media. Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Tele­ vision, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 7. 21 Ibid., pp. 4–6. 22 Ibid., pp. 21–2; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 12. 23 Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 12. 24 Tom McCarthy, C, London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. 25 Ibid., p. 35. 26 Ibid., p. 67. 27 Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 74. 28 Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, p. 139. 29 André Breton, ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ [1924], in André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont, New York: Pathfinder, 1978, p. 17. 30 Sconce, Haunted Media, pp. 14–15, 61–74. 31 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’ [1902], in Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King, London and New York: Penguin, 2011, p. 376. 32 Ibid.

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14  Sas Mays and Neil Matheson 33 Ibid. 34 David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, p. xviii. 35 Ibid., p. 191. 36 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 2–3. 37 For further discussion of these issues, see, for example: Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance’, in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [1985], trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998; and Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [1986], Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Bibliography Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ [1969], in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays [1971], New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. André Breton, ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ [1924], in André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont, New York: Pathfinder, 1978. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [1986], Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [1990], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi, New York and London: Continuum, 2004. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ [1966], in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1978. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random House, 1977. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-­ Reassurance’, in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [1985], trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ­ ocialist-​ Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and S Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ [1985], in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ [1954], in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium, London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’ [1902], in Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King, London and New York: Penguin, 2011.

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Introduction  15 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey ­Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. E. Lawrence, Editorial, ‘An Illustrated Quarterly Magazine Devoted to and Illu­strative of Spirit Photography, Spirit Painting, the Photographing of ­Materialized Forms and Every Form of Spirit Art’, Gallery of Spirit Art, 1:1, August 1882. E. Lawrence, ‘Spirit Photography at Terre Haute’, Gallery of Spirit Art, 1:1, August 1882. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Tom McCarthy, C, London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychic Research in England, 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Tony Oursler, The Influence Machine, London: Artangel, 2002. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [1949], Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1963. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Viktor Tausk, ‘The Influencing Machine’ [1919], in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, New York: Zone Books, 1992. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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1

‘It’s organisms that die, not life’: Henri Bergson, psychical research, and the contemporary uses of vitalism Justin Sausman Technologies of the ghost How do ghosts work? In 1903 F. W. H. Myers suggested ‘instead of describing a ghost as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy, or as an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death’ (emphasis in original).1 Myers’ work was the culmination of investigations by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) since its formation in 1882 in order to subject late-Victorian occultism to the experimental methods of the natural sciences. In this context, a number of studies, exploring parallels between electrically transmitted living voices and mediumistically transmitted dead voices, suggest that spiritualism was viewed in technological rather than super­ natural terms.2 Yet less attention has been paid to the ways in which psychical researchers used this technologised language not only as an analogical explanation but as a direct description. In other words, if mediums are like machines, then what might be powering them? For writers such as Myers, the answer appeared to lie in an area that has received little attention within histories of spiritualism: the life forces associated with vitalism. Vitalist theories asserted that life cannot be reduced to a mechanistic explanation: there is an unknown force that animates the living and that has eluded scientific naturalism. In this light, Myers’ language suggests an explanation of spiritualism which is at root technological: ghosts are not supernatural presences but animated – one might say powered – by vitalist forces. The most prominent vitalist theory of the period was Henri Bergson’s élan vital, as discussed in his Creative Evolution of 1907 16

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  17 (English translation 1911). As Sanford Schwartz has noted, Bergson’s influence spread ‘to artists, scientists, theologians, and, at the peak of his fame, to educated society in general’.3 Yet if Bergson’s influence is more readily associated with modernism than with spiritualism, he did also become a cause célèbre for psychical researchers. There has been little sustained discussion of this aspect of Bergson’s thought, although many studies acknowledge that he was president of the SPR in 1913.4 My aim in this chapter is thus to situate Bergson’s vitalism in relation to the networks linking spiritualism and technology during the late nineteenth century. In one of few in-depth discussions of Bergson’s interests in mysticism and occultism, G. William Barnard positions ‘non-­ ordinary’ experience in Bergson ‘against the reigning materialistic nihilism that is so prevalent in many subjects of our contemporary culture’.5 This chapter takes as its starting point a different aspect of contemporary culture, the resurgence of Bergsonian vitalism within critical theory. As Scott Lash has noted, ‘lebensphilosophie, or vitalism, would seem, for social scientists and intellectuals more generally, to be back on the agenda’.6 This revival of vitalism can be traced to Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism, in which he argues for ‘a renewal or an extension of his project today’ in relation to ‘the new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by molecular biology’.7 John Mullarkey has argued for ‘the need to return to the ideas of Bergson himself, separating his own arguments from the multitude of impressions that have attached themselves to the term “Bergsonism”’ and for ‘retrieving his thought from such “philosophical ghettos” as “vitalism”, “spiritualism” and “psychologism”’.8 Exploring Deleuze’s vitalism, Clare Colebrook has described vitalist critiques of the way logical systems or humans become ‘alienated from the order of living’, while Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter synthesises vitalism with an environmentalist critique to declare ‘I believe in one matter–energy, the maker of things seen and unseen’.9 If vitalism places ‘life’ at the centre of its thought, this logic can also be traced in the recent turn to the meaning of ‘life’ as a problematic in critical theory. Extending the genealogical projects suggested by Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, Louis-Georges Schwartz, in an issue of Discourse devoted to the meaning of ‘life’, has argued for the need to ‘subject “life” to a transvaluation by historicizing its previous semantics’ and argues that ‘writing “meaning” […] indicates the differential shifts disclosed by genealogies’.10 Vitalism in contemporary theory shifts away from its origins as the literal description of life forces towards a more metaphorical understanding, in which it signals resistance to

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18  Justin Sausman closure: as Deleuze puts it in an evocative phrase, ‘it’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks’.11 There would seem to be little direct connection between Bergson’s élan vital as an example of Victorian spiritualism’s belief in life forces, and these more politically and philosophically oriented theoretical discourses in which the élan vital plays an important metaphorical role. However, as will become apparent, Bergson’s engagement with spiritualism was complex and cannot be easily categorised in terms of belief or unbelief. What interests me here is a mutual exchange of ideas in which Bergson saw points of convergence between spiritual­ism and his own vitalist project, while psychical researchers saw confirmation of their own theories in his vitalism. Although we tend to consider Bergson as a modernist figure, this chapter will demonstrate that he was also directly engaged with those late Victorians who sought scientised or technologised explanations of spiritualism. The aim here is not to argue that Bergson was a spiritual­ist but to explore the dialogue between spiritualism and vitalism, and to locate the élan vital in the context of other vital forces that emerged during the late nineteenth century. I then consider the biographical links between Bergson and late-Victorian occultism, before turning to Creative Evolution to ask why it would have appealed to psychical researchers despite the lack of any direct reference to spiritual­ism. I then trace these ideas to a work that does directly address spiritual­ ism, Bergson’s presidential address to the SPR, showing how he seemed to find in the Society confirmation of his own critique of scientific naturalism. The chapter concludes by returning to the role of vitalism in contemporary theory, reflecting on what Bergson’s interest in spiritualism suggests about the historical and theoretical complexities that lie behind the current uses of vitalism. Vitalism, occultism, and the eclipse of Darwinism Vitalist theories were by no means a Victorian invention. Biologist Ernst Mayr has pointed out that they can be traced back to ancient animistic beliefs, as well as eighteenth-century physiologists. Mayr defines vitalism as ‘essentially an anti-movement. It was a rebellion against the mechanistic philosophy of the Scientific Revolution and against physicalism from Galileo to Newton. It passionately resisted the doctrine that the animal is nothing but a machine’.12 Vitalist theories spanned a range of disciplines, and one might productively trace a philosophical genealogy of Bergson’s discussion of life in Friedrich

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  19 Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and German natur­philosophie. Of more direct relevance to this chapter are the ways vitalist ideas were ambivalently located between science and occultism. The eighteenth century has been the focus of a number of studies in this respect. Peter Hans Reill has shown how vitalism was central to arguments about the construction of nature in Enlightenment France, while Sharon Ruston has discussed how medical debates about life forces were central to Frankenstein.13 This language which tied together natural forces with a mysterious spark of life was adapted to more directly spiritual concerns among the electrical theologians explored by Ernst Benz, while Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has argued that ‘the idea of a living nature predisposes esotericism especially towards concepts of energy as an origin in divine power’.14 There has been less focus on the late nineteenth century, when vitalism once again became prominent in response to what Peter J. Bowler has termed the ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ in the 1880s, when although the process of evolution was acknowledged, the mechanism – whether natural selection or some other means – was still open to question.15 We can also tie the language of vitalist force or energy to the unstable boundary between physics and occultism during this period. As Iwan Rhys Morus has argued, ‘to many people physics was on the verge of delivering answers to fundamental questions of life and death’, and discoveries such as X-rays or cathode-ray tubes were seen by many to be on a continuum with the more occult forces investigated by psychical research.16 We might begin tracing a genealogy of the synthesis between vital forces and spiritualism with the emergence of mesmerism during the 1770s, in the theories of Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer claimed discovery of a new invisible ‘fluid’, animal magnetism, said to penetrate all living bodies; disease was attributed to a blockage of this vital force, which the mesmerist was able to heal through inducing a trance. Mesmerism quickly splintered into materialist versions, in which animal magnetism was viewed as a natural force, and a spiritual version, in which the powers of clairvoyance that some patients displayed were seen as evidence of communication with spirits, ideas that paved the way for the widespread interest in spiritualism during the 1850s.17 Like other vital forces, the animal magnetism of mesmerism sat uneasily on the borders between scientific legitimacy and occult marginality during the nineteenth century. Baron Karl von ­Reichenbach’s Odic force, visible to ‘sensitives’ as flames issuing from the ends of magnets, emerged during the 1850s, while the physicist Sir William Crookes, after investigating the famous medium Daniel

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20  Justin Sausman Dunglas Home, proclaimed ‘the existence of a new force, in some unknown manner connected with the human organis­ation, which for convenience may be called the Psychic Force’.18 These ideas can be detected in the works of a number of writers who during the period attempted a synthesis of science and spiritual­ ism. Edward Cox, founder of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, a forerunner of the SPR, set out to investigate through spiritualism ‘all of the forces that move and direct the mechanism of man – Life – Mind – Soul’.19 For Cox, life was something that ‘is subject to the same forces as is all other molecular structure, it is also manifestly moved and directed by another force, distinguished from the physical and organic forces in this, that it is not, like them, a blind force, but an intelligent force’.20 Vitalism offered epistemological as well as scientific challenges to mechanistic explanations of life, developing alternative evolutionary theories within a framework that mixed strictly scientific questions with broader social, spiritual, and philosophical concerns. In these terms, its marginal status might be seen as symptomatic of what Bruno Latour has termed ‘purification’, in which modernity tries to separate nature and culture, science and society, humans and non-humans. In contrast to this, the translation of ideas ‘creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture’.21 Vitalism is precisely the kind of hybrid that Latour identifies, refusing a purified version of science in which only experi­ mental criteria are considered to be relevant. Latour identifies a similar process at work in the development of new technologies that become successful through addressing concerns outside of strictly techno­logical questions: ‘every time a new group becomes interested in the project, it transforms the project – a little, a lot, excessively, or not at all. In the translation model there is no transportation without transformation’ (emphasis in original).22 This is a productive way of shifting the focus from technological objects to the processes of technologisation. While Bergson’s élan vital is not a technological object itself, its assertion that life is something animated by a force recasts living bodies in technological terms. For psychical researchers it was the ease with which Bergson’s ideas could be ‘translated’ into spiritualist terms that ensured vitalism’s prominence during the early twentieth century. In other words, the élan vital not only appeared to offer a technological explanation for spiritualism, but was itself subject to the strategies Latour identifies in the dissemination of new technologies. In the following section I will begin unpicking this process of translation by examining Bergson’s links with psychical research.

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  21 Bergson and late-Victorian occultism In addition to his presidency of the SPR, Bergson investigated the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino at four séances between 1905 and 1908. Although he seems not to have produced any writings that discuss her, he was noted as one of the investigators in the Bulletin d’Institut Général Psychologique.23 He also had interests in anomalous psychological phenomena: SPR co-founder Frederic Myers published a report on Bergson’s investigations into a claimed case of telepathy in 1887, in which Bergson suggested that enhanced perception rather than telepathic transmission was more likely.24 Bergson himself published two articles in the Hibbert Journal, a British periodical focused on religious topics that carried a number of articles on spiritual­ ism and science by psychical researchers.25 Family connections with occultism also existed: Bergson’s sister Moina was married to Samuel MacGregor Mathers, founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888, the magical society of which poet W. B. Yeats was a member. However, his sister’s interests seem to have held little interest for Bergson: Mathers complained that ‘I have shown him all that my magic can do and I have no effect upon him’.26 Moina was also a member of G. R. S. Mead’s Quest Society.27 Mead was an important figure in late-Victorian occultism: he had been the private secretary of Madame Blavatsky, the charismatic Russian émigré who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Mead resigned from the Theosophical Society over sexual scandals, and went on to found the Quest Society to promote esoteric subjects. That Society attracted a number of high-profile figures from the worlds of esotericism and literary modernism, including Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Dora Marsden, Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill, and Jessie Weston, whom T. S. Eliot said he was indebted to in his notes to ‘The Waste Land’.28 Mead also edited the Society’s quarterly periodical, The Quest (1909–31), and included Bergson as part of the ‘rising psychic tide’.29 There is also a direct link between the two figures: Mead had been one of Bergson’s pupils from 1887–88 at Clermont-Ferrand before Bergson had published his well known works, and Mead saw Creative Evolution as an example of ‘what the mystics would call the “sacred marriage” of the intellect and the intuition’.30 The publication of the English translation of Creative Evolution in 1911 was received enthusiastically by psychical researchers. The physicist (and after the First World War a committed spiritualist) Sir Oliver Lodge, president of the SPR in 1901–03 and 1932, saw in Bergson’s challenge to mechanism a way to unite the impulses

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22  Justin Sausman of science and belief: ‘M Bergson has found something that to me, at any rate, from a distance, looks very like a key. We have yet to clamber to its hiding place, to clear away the marl with which it is encrusted, and then try whether it will fit the lock’.31 Bergson was aware of Lodge’s work, and expressed a reciprocal admiration in the Huxley Lecture given at the University of Birmingham (where Lodge was principal) in 1911: ‘The aspirations of our moral nature are not in the least contradicted by positive science. On this, as on many other points, I quite agree with the opinion expressed by Sir Oliver Lodge in many of his works’.32 Arthur Balfour, British Prime Minister 1902–05, and president of the SPR in 1893, saw Bergson’s élan vital as part of a progressive, positivist development: ‘If I understand him aright, the vital impulse has no goal more definite than that of acquiring an ever fuller volume of free creative activity’.33 It has often been noted that the modernist critic and poet T. E. Hulme was a key figure in the dissemination of Bergson’s views in England.34 But it seems that psychical research also played an important role in publicising Bergson’s views. Indeed, reporting on Bergson’s popularity, Mead’s The Quest suggested ‘it was entirely due to Mr Balfour that he had come to be recognised; that in England we required our politicians to direct our attention to our philosophers’.35 One should also note Bergson’s friendship with William James, the renowned Harvard psychologist and philosopher and elder brother of novelist Henry. William James produced a large body of writing on psychical research and religious mysticism, and founded the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884. He included a chapter on Bergson in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), while Bergson wrote the introduction to the French translation of James’ Pragmatism (1907). Although there is no direct reference to their shared interest in psychical research in James’ published letters, it is clear that Creative Evolution had a strong impact on him; he wrote to Bergson, ‘you are a magician and your book is a marvel’.36 Perhaps most apt for a work concerned with the life force was James’ simple verdict: ‘I feel rejuvenated’.37 The links between Bergson and figures connected with psychical research are clear, but the question still remains of why they should turn to Bergson with such enthusiasm. One answer to this may lie in Bergson’s celebrity status in the years before the First World War: ‘Society figures used Bergsonism as a kind of intellectual calling card: their use proved they were current with the ideas of the day’.38 Recent scholarship has moved away from seeing psychical research as a pseudo-scientific misappropriation of ‘authentic’ scientific language to considering it as one among other marginal sciences

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  23 which occupied the borderlands of legitimacy during the nineteenth century.39 Latour has suggested that the networks through which scientific theories are disseminated are as significant as experimental practice: success ‘no longer comes from their breaking away from society, connections, mediations, but from the safety provided by the circulating references that cascade through a great number of transformations and translations’.40 Following this we might see Bergson’s pervasive presence in the networks of psychical research as a reflection of his wider popularity and a typical strategy of the marginal sciences, in which the support of more centrally positioned cultural authorities is enlisted. Indeed, Mary Ann Gillies’ discussion of ‘Bergsonism’ suggests that it was a popularised (and by implication simplified) version of Bergson that was adopted by the wider public. This is certainly an important element in understanding Bergson’s appeal to psychical researchers, yet it still leaves unanswered the question of what in Bergson’s writing seemed to speak directly to their aims. It also fails to account for Bergson’s own interest in spiritual­ ism: as the biographical evidence already considered suggests, he was not merely appropriated, but actively contributed to debates and investigations. With this in mind I now turn to Creative Evolution. The reading here will be of necessity highly selective; it does not aim to give a summary of his thought but to identify those moments in the text that may account for Bergson’s popularity among those psychical researchers seeking scientised or technologised explanations of spiritualism. Creative Evolution and psychical research Creative Evolution was Bergson’s most popular work, and its appeal stretched beyond the confines of academic philosophy; in the wake of its publication he gave lectures to large audiences that were covered in depth in the Times.41 Gillies suggests this popularity in Britain was because he articulated broad cultural anxieties that ‘new discoveries in science degraded the position of humans as central forces in the world’, an anxiety also voiced by psychical research.42 A critique of scientific materialism was indeed central to Creative Evolution: Bergson argues that mechanistic versions of late-­nineteenth-century science operate with a notion of spatialised time that reifies both the real experience of time itself (Bergson’s much discussed concept of duration) and the objects science investigates. Whereas duration means ‘we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change’, Bergson’s conceptualisation of science refuses

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24  Justin Sausman to acknowledge this dynamic process.43 Instead, he claims that ‘science is concerned only with the aspect of repetition. Though the whole be original, science will always manage to analyse it into elements or aspects which are approximately a reproduction of the past’.44 In other words, in order to carry out a series of repeatable experiments that should be able to predict how a material object will react, science has to reify the processes of change, which for Bergson are central to life: ‘All our belief in objects, all our operations on the systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them’.45 However, Bergson is also resistant to a reactionary movement towards an ineffable spirituality: ‘The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest […] they were placing it beyond the attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage!’46 This is a position that was shared by a number of writers associated with occultism, such as Bergson’s old pupil Mead: ‘When we say “spiritual”, it is of course not to be supposed that this means a condition of things absolutely removed from all possibility of manifestation; that is, spiritual in an absolute sense, as entirely divorced from every other thing than itself’.47 Bergson admits that ‘a strong instinct assures the probability of personal survival’ but believes that instinct needs more than belief to sustain it: ‘if there exist “souls” capable of an independent life, whence have they come? When, how and why do they enter into this body which we see arise, quite naturally from a mixed cell derived from the bodies of its two parents?’48 It is not that Bergson is critical of mechanism per se, but of mechanism that assumes that the parts of the natural world that do function like a machine can be substituted for the whole. In contrast to Latour’s process of purification, Bergson is seeking instead a science immersed in networks, which will become a hybrid by translating spiritual ideas into scientific terms and vice versa: ‘that life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it a mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it a mechanism of the real whole?’49 Bergson’s answer to this was the much-discussed élan vital, the force that was said to have created life on earth: We must no longer speak of life in general as an abstraction, or as a mere heading under which all living beings are inscribed. At a certain moment, in certain points of space, a visible current has taken rise; this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organised one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  25 amongst species and distributed amongst individuals without losing anything of its force.50

Bergson’s description of life as a current could be read as hydraulic or electrical: in either case, the collision of this force with matter has animated the material bodies it has passed through, suggesting that evolution can be explained by a turn to topics more usually associated with physics. As has already been noted, the identification of life with electricity spans scientific and esoteric writers during the nineteenth century, and a statement such as this would certainly have located Bergson within this vitalist tradition. At the same time, Bergson’s appropriation by psychical researchers would seem to downplay the more radical elements of his thought, in which the life force is splintered in unpredictable ways: ‘[Evolution] proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on from time incommensurably long’.51 If Bergson’s philosophy is one of continual change, his adoption by psychical researchers seeking confirmation that human personality continues after death would seem to be based on a rather partial reading. In fact, if we follow Bergson’s criticisms of science, those who affirm the existence of life after death may in fact reify the processes of life and end up producing an objectified, static version of identity, much as science ends up producing a reified version of objects it investigates. We might note as an example Raymond, by the physicist Oliver Lodge, the book that proclaimed his conversion to spiritualism as a faith in personal survival after his son’s death in the First World War. After receiving communications from Raymond’s spirit, Lodge claimed that after death ‘it is unlikely that character and personality are liable to sudden revolutions or mutations. […] Likening existence to a curve, the curve has changed but there is no other discontinuity’.52 When read through Bergson’s philosophy, Lodge’s assertion that ‘the dead are not dead but alive’ actually results in the reverse: subject to the same fixed identity, they are reduced to the status of the dead, unchanging matter that characterises Bergson’s criticisms of mechanistic science. By the time Lodge wrote these words, Bergson’s popularity was waning, among both psychical researchers and the wider culture. His assertions of a depersonalised life force and emphasis on continual change were of little consolation to those, like Lodge, who turned to spiritualism through grief in the wake of the war.53 Thus, although there are no direct references to spiritualism within Creative Evolution, statements such as ‘the whole of

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26  Justin Sausman humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and behind each one of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death’ were clearly suggestive of a view that would find sympathy among the members of the SPR.54 Of course, this is far from a clear acknowledgment of spiritualist beliefs: in Creative Evolution the application of the élan vital to the technologies of the ghost are only ever implied. However, it is precisely this lack of direct acknowledgement that makes Bergson appealing to psychical researchers, who were able to point to thinkers outside the confines of their own specialism as evidence that their own views were gaining wider acceptance. However, this implied connection became more explicit when Bergson became president of the SPR in 1913. Bergson can be seen applying his critique of ‘purified’ science from Creative Evolution to psychical research: ‘wherever it [science] must limit itself to a description or to an analysis of its object, it arranges to set before itself only that side of the object capable of one day becoming measurable’.55 In fact, much of Bergson’s presidential address was taken up with questions of disciplinary boundaries that suggest he valued psychical research not for the subject of its investigations, but for the challenges it offered to a purified form of science. Bergson stresses how the method of psychical research is explicitly tied to questions outside laboratory practice, ‘midway between that of the historian and that of the magistrate’.56 This is something that had also concerned Bergson in Creative Evolution, where he had argued that ‘theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal’. As Bergson goes on to note, the networked thinking discussed by Latour is fundamental to the development of this new discipline: ‘But philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day. […] It will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also’.57 In other words, as psychical researchers appropriated Bergson for their own project, Bergson is in turn appropriating the SPR, seeing in its researches a test case for what this new hybrid knowledge might look like. It is in fact only towards the end of the talk that Bergson directly addresses the question of spiritualism, arguing that as ‘the mental life is so much more vast than the cerebral life, survival becomes so probable that the burden of proof comes to lie on him who denies it’.58 It is here that Bergson finally makes a direct link between the élan vital and psychical research:

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  27 The most general laws of mental activity once discovered […] science would have passed from pure mind to life: biology would have been constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations.59

Indeed, Bergson goes even further, speculating that ‘there would have arisen a medical practice which would have sought to remedy directly the insufficiencies of the vital force; […] healing by suggestion or, more generally, by the influence of mind on mind might have taken proportions of which it is impossible for us to form the least idea’ (emphasis in original).60 In fact, it is quite likely that Bergson’s audience would have been able to form some idea of such a practice. The idea of healing the vital force would seem to be a restatement of the healing principles of mesmerism discussed previously. Bergson seems to be finding confirmation of his own views, perhaps unwittingly, in the occult forces of the earlier nineteenth century. Afterlives of vitalism All this still leaves us with the question, was he really being serious? Did the life force really exist for Bergson or should it be understood in more figurative terms? This is less flippant than it might sound: Bergson’s contemporary interpreters continue to grapple with the question of whether he was or was not a vitalist. In the introduction to the centenary edition of Creative Evolution, Keith Ansell Pearson argues that ‘if vitalism entails an appeal to some mysterious vital “stuff ” that is then held to be the transcendent motor of evolution, then Bergson is no vitalist. Bergson explicitly eschews any appeal to vital force or principle’.61 In a special issue of SubStance also marking the centenary, Michael Vaughan notes that ‘Bergson’s creative evolution contains elements of all these [competing evolu­ tionary theories], and can by no means be simply categorised under “vitalism”’.62 In contrast to this is the view of Hisashi Fujita, who acknowledges that ‘incontestably there is a kind of vitalism in Bergson’ and that the question should be ‘what kind of vitalism is at work’ (emphasis in original).63 It seems that vitalism, as much as in the period of Creative Evolution’s publication, remains a contested issue. It is tempting to read these views as another example of the work of purification that Latour identified. While we might be content for unfashionable Victorians like Frederic Myers or Oliver Lodge to produce awkward hybrids of physics and spiritualism with

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28  Justin Sausman little respect for disciplinary boundaries, that a still influential figure like Bergson should do so seems to generate a certain amount of discomfort. It would seem that Bergson’s thought itself as well as the élan vital it describes turns out to be the kind of hybrid object that Latour identifies, difficult to locate within a single field and formed of heterogeneous resources. If, as Vaughan argues, ‘more than any other work in the philosophy of science, this text is predominantly understood in light of what came after it’, then locating Bergson’s text in light of what came before it has provided a different understanding of the trajectories of his vitalism.64 In the context of the networks that draw together late-nineteenth-century spiritualism, technology, and evolutionary debates, there was nothing particularly unusual in the idea of a vital force. For spiritualists, Bergson’s theories were easily adapted to their own beliefs, extending the technological analogies: living bodies were seen as temporary manifestations of life, plugged into the vital energy and switched off at the moment of death, while that energy itself persisted. The return of the dead becomes a manifestation of this power, an expression of the persistent personal energy that Myers suggested at the beginning of this chapter: it seems that the dead may in fact turn out to be powered by life. This is not to argue that Creative Evolution is in some sense a covert spiritualist work but that it might be read as a translation of technological theorisations of spiritualism that had flourished since the 1870s, and it was certainly seen this way by many of Bergson’s contemporaries. It is certainly clear when the earlier work is read through his SPR presidential address that Bergson viewed his own ideas as compatible with the technologised and psychologised explanations of spiritualism offered by the SPR. However, this is of course a retrospective construction, albeit one carried out by the author himself: it appears it was only afterwards that Bergson publicly addressed the links between the élan vital and psychical research. But if, on the one hand, the élan vital might be read as a fashionable interdisciplinary challenge to intellectual boundaries, it can, on the other, also appear as vaguely defined and founded on a linguistic trick. Brian Vickers has argued in relation to Renaissance occultism that ‘in the scientific tradition […] a clear distinction is made between words and things and between literal and metaphorical language. The occult tradition does not recognize this distinction: Words are treated as if they are equivalent to things and can be substituted for them’.65 As the theories of Latour suggest, this is too simple a definition of what counts as scientific, yet it does point towards a useful way

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  29 of identifying the shift in rhetorical strategies that occurred when spiritualists moved from using technological analogies to claiming that ‘life’ is directly responsible for the appearance of ghosts. In a curiously circular movement, it turns out that spiritualists are also attempting the work of purification, divesting ‘life’ of its hybridity by insisting on the survival of individual personality after death. This is also implied by Ernst Mayr’s critique of vitalist logic: ‘“life” suggests some “thing” – a substance or force […]. In reality the noun “life” is merely a reification of the process of living. It does not exist as an independent entity’.66 This was also noted by Bergson’s contemporaries: William James, briefly tempering his admiration, warned that ‘the élan vital all contentless and vague, as you are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of’.67 This was indeed the case for the biologist Julian Huxley, one of the key figures behind the emergence of modern genetics during the 1930s that would spell the end of vitalism, at least in terms of evolutionary biology. Huxley described Bergson as ‘a good poet but a bad scientist’ and mocked the child-like simplicity of the élan vital: ‘To say that biological progress is explained by the élan vital is to say that the movement of a train is “explained” by an élan locomotif of the engine’.68 Bergson’s vitalism can thus appear as both reified and alive, an entangled hybrid and a purified object, contradictory in itself and generative of conflicting interpretations: it is technological and organic, mechanical and spiritual, analogical and literal. Indeed, we might read the title of Bergson’s presidential address as symptomatic of this over-determination. ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ was a nod to one of the foundational works of psychical research, Phantasms of the Living (1886), a voluminous study of hallucinations and apparitions whose title indicated a shift away from a spiritualist explanation. Bergson’s title might be read in another way, however: as suggesting that ‘life’ is itself a phantasm, fleeting and uncertain, whose exact nature cannot be determined, despite the hopes of the SPR. We arrive, in other words, at a characteristically modernist literary aesthetic emerging from these debates in Victorian spiritualism, and, as the prominent position that ‘life’ occupies in the writings of Henry James, Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence testifies, the term continued to resonate through the early twentieth century. Bergson the modernist and Bergson the psychical researcher may be more compatible than appears at first sight. To conclude, I want to suggest that reading Bergson’s élan vital through his engagement with spiritualism highlights the complex genealogy of vitalist thought in contemporary critical theory. While vitalism has been revived in figurative terms as a tool of theoretical

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30  Justin Sausman and social analysis, its ambivalent terminology remains available for less critical uses. For example, life forces continue to play a role in the esoteric discourses associated with the new age movement, whose genealogy can be traced through to late-Victorian occultism.69 A clear example of this can seen in chemist James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, first proposed in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). Named after the Greek goddess of the earth, the book argued that the earth maintains a complex system of self-regulation between different ecological systems, resulting in the optimum conditions for life on earth. Lovelock argued this cannot be explained in terms of mechanical causality, leaving open the question as to why these separate systems reach this state of delicate balance. Although Lovelock’s intentions were scientific and Gaia was initially intended as an analogy, as Olav Hammer notes, it was enthusiastically adopted by new-age thinkers ‘through an over-interpretation according to which the earth is actually a living entity’.70 There appears a clear vitalist element at work here, in which intelligent life is extended beyond humans, as Lovelock regretfully acknowledged when discussing his own scientific marginality: ‘It seemed to bring back to life the dead monsters of animism and vitalism, beliefs in the magical properties of living matter. […] Belief in Gaia was seen as an evil religion that would proselytise the nascent environmental movement and undo the painfully established culture of rational knowledge’.71 In this respect, it is significant to find a similar challenge to instrumental reason being mounted within critical theory. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, mentioned briefly at the beginning of this chapter, provides a striking example of a Bergsonian–Deleuzian-derived vitalism put to directly eco-political uses. Bennett’s aim is to theorise the ways in which ‘edibles, commodities, storms, metals’ are not inert material substances but ‘quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own’.72 The aim of this is to undermine the separation ‘of the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)’.73 Bennett calls for a vibrant materialism that will pursue the ‘vital materialities that flow through and around us’.74 There is a clear metaphorical vitalism at work here, in which the divide between the living and non-living is challenged, and material objects are reconfigured as if they were also animate actors within a socio-political framework. Indeed, Bennett is careful to distinguish her vitalism from more literal interpretations: ‘material vibrancy is not a spiritual supplement or “life force” added to the matter said to house it’.75 Vibrant Matter argues for the necessity of re-engaging with what Bennett calls ‘critical’ or ‘modern’ vitalists who challenged the

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  31 idea of a spiritualised vital force, and traces a genealogy in Kant’s Bildungstrieb (formative drive) that mediates between inert mater and organic life.76 Her two key examples of modern critical vitalism are Bergson and Hans Driesch, a German biologist whose notion of ‘entelechy’ provided an alternative vitalist theory to the élan vital. The significance of Bergson’s interest in psychical research has already been demonstrated, and Driesch too became president of the SPR, in 1926, although Bennett does not explore this aspect of their thought. Bennett’s concern is not with the historical construction of vitalist discourses but with the ways in which they might function as a critique of the contemporary separation between life and matter that she believes ‘feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’.77 To this end, the élan vital is valued by Bennett because ‘its distinctive activity is to increase the instability of material formations’.78 Yet there seems a surprising continuity of purpose between Bennett’s use of Bergsonian vitalism and Bergson’s use of spiritual­ ism. Bennett is also engaged in a Latourian project (she discusses Latour’s neologism ‘actant’ to describe these hybrid objects) to undo the purification of modernity that has resulted in the separation of the world into humans and things. For Bergson and Bennett, the topic under discussion, whether it be spiritualist investigations or Bergson’s élan vital, is valued not so much for its content as for its ability to disrupt the work of intellectual purification and produce disciplinary hybrids that will unsettle the division between humans and non-humans, science and non-science, life and death. If Bergson’s vitalism continues to play a significant role within critical theory today, then the genealogical perspective adopted by this chapter has demonstrated how we might productively move beyond questions of belief and proof to consider how late-Victorian spiritualists also raised wider questions about the role of science, technology, and disciplinary boundaries that continue to play a significant role in critical vitalism today. Notes 1 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903, vol. II, p. 703. 2 See for example Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Jill Galvan, The Female Medium: Female Channelling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies 1859–1919, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010; Richard Noakes, ‘Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley

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32  Justin Sausman

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, British Journal of the History of Science, 32, 1999, pp. 421–59. Sanford Schwartz, ‘Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism’, in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 240. For Bergson’s influence on literary modernism see Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1996. G. William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011, p. 259. Scott Lash, Intensive Culture: Social Theory, Religion and Contemporary Capitalism, London: Sage, 2010, p. 22. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 115. John Mullarkey, ‘La Philosophie Nouvelle, or Change in Philosophy’, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 3. Clare Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, London: Continuum, 2010, p. 1; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 122. Louis-Georges Schwartz, ‘Introduction to the Meaning of Life’, Discourse, 33:2, spring 2011, p. 135. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 143. Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 9. Peter Hans Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005; Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ernst Benz, The Theology of Electricity, Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ‘The Esoteric Uses of Electricity: Theologies of Electricity from Swabian Pietism to Ariosophy’, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 4:1, 2004, p. 69. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983; for a discussion of scientific vitalism in the early twentieth century see Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 166–87. Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 174. This is the trajectory traced by Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874, p. 9. Edward Cox, The Province of Psychology: The Inaugural Address at the First Meeting, April 14 1875, of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, London: Longman, 1875, p. 4. Cox, The Province of Psychology, p. 7. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Brighton: Harvester, 1993, p. 10. Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 119.

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  33 23 Henri Bergson, Melanges, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972, pp. 673–4. 24 F. W. H. Myers, ‘On a Case of Alleged Hyperacuity of Vision’, Mind, 12, January 1887, pp. 154–6. Myers reprinted this in Human Personality, vol. II, pp. 477–9. 25 Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, Hibbert Journal, 10:1, October 1911, pp. 24–44; Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War’, Hibbert Journal, 13:2, January 1915, pp. 465–84. 26 Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses, Rochester, NY: Park Street Press, 1995, p. 141. 27 Ibid., p. 56. 28 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 94–118; Leon Surrette, The Birth of Modernism, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1993, p. 233. 29 G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Rising Psychic Tide’, The Quest, 3:3, April 1912, pp. 419–20. 30 G. R. S. Mead, Quests Old and New, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913, p. 277. 31 Oliver Lodge, ‘Balfour and Bergson’, Hibbert Journal, 10:2, January 1912, p. 294. 32 Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, p. 44. 33 A. J. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, Hibbert Journal, 10:1, October 1911, p. 8. 34 Gillies, Henri Bergson, pp. 42–6. 35 Eric Clough Taylor, ‘Henri Bergson: A French Impression’, The Quest, 3:2, January 1912, p. 333. 36 Henry James (ed.), The Letters of William James, 2 vols, Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, vol. II, p. 291. 37 Ibid. 38 Gillies, Henri Bergson, p. 38. 39 For a fuller discussion of these ideas see the introduction to Roger Luckhurst and Justin Sausman (eds), Marginal and Occult Sciences, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. 40 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 97. 41 Gillies, Henri Bergson, pp. 28–30. 42 Ibid., p. 30. 43 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1911], trans. Arthur Mitchell, Basing­ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 2. 44 Ibid., p. 19. 45 Ibid., p. 7. 46 Ibid., p. 153. 47 G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Resurrection of the Body’, The Quest, 1:2, January 1910, pp. 283–4. 48 Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 153. 49 Ibid., p. 20. 50 Ibid., p. 17. 51 Ibid., p. 64. 52 Oliver Lodge, Raymond, or Life and Death, New York: George H. Doran, 1916, p. 298. 53 For a discussion of spiritualism in relation to the First World War see

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34  Justin Sausman Victoria Stewart, ‘War Memoirs of the Dead: Writing and Remembrance in the First World War’, Literature and History, 14:2, autumn 2005, pp. 37–52. 54 Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 173. 55 Henri Bergson, ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ [1920], in Mind–Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 16. 56 Ibid., p. 63. 57 Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. 58 Bergson, ‘Phantasms of the Living’, p. 77. 59 Ibid., p. 78. 60 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 61 Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Introduction’, in Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. xii. 62 Michael Vaughan, ‘Introduction: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution’, SubStance, 36:3, 2007, p. 9. 63 Hisashi Fujita, ‘Bergson’s Hand: Toward a History of (Non)-Organic Vitalism’, SubStance, 36:3, 2007, p. 115. 64 Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, p. 23. 65 Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 95. 66 Mayr, This Is Biology, p. 88. 67 James, The Letters of William James, vol. II, p. 292. 68 Julian Huxley, Letters of a Biologist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1923, p. 33. 69 Wouter J. Hanegraaf, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. 70 Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Leiden: Brill, 2004, p. 275, n. 9. 71 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 212. 72 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. viii. 73 Ibid., p. vii. 74 Ibid., p. 62. 75 Ibid., p. xiii. 76 Ibid., p. 64. 77 Ibid., p. ix. 78 Ibid., p. 80.

Bibliography A. J. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, Hibbert Journal, 10:1, October 1911. G. William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Ernst Benz, The Theology of Electricity, Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1911], trans. Arthur Mitchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  35 Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, Hibbert Journal, 10:1, October 1911. Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War’, Hibbert Journal, 13:2, January 1915. Henri Bergson, Melanges, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Henri Bergson, ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ [1920], in Mind–Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Henri Bergson, ‘Presidential Address, Delivered May 28th 1913’, trans. by. H. Wildon Carr, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 27, January 1914. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Clare Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, London: Continuum, 2010. Edward Cox, The Province of Psychology: The Inaugural Address at the First Meeting, April 14 1875, of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, London: Longman, 1875. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Hisashi Fujita, ‘Bergson’s Hand: Toward a History of (Non)-Organic Vitalism’, SubStance, 36:3, 2007. Jill Galvan, The Female Medium: Female Channelling, the Occult, and Com­ munica­tion Technologies 1859–1919, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 1996. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ‘The Esoteric Uses of Electricity: Theologies of Electricity from Swabian Pietism to Ariosophy’, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 4:1, 2004. Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses, Rochester, NY: Park Street Press, 1995. Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Leiden: Brill, 2004. Wouter J. Hanegraaf, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Julian Huxley, Letters of a Biologist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1923. Henry James (ed.), The Letters of William James, 2 vols, Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920. Scott Lash, Intensive Culture: Social Theory, Religion and Contemporary Capitalism, London: Sage, 2010. Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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36  Justin Sausman Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Brighton: Harvester, 1993. Oliver Lodge, ‘Balfour and Bergson’, Hibbert Journal, 10:2, January 1912. Oliver Lodge, Raymond, or Life and Death, New York: George H. Doran, 1916. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Roger Luckhurst and Justin Sausman (eds), Marginal and Occult Sciences, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. G. R. S. Mead, Quests Old and New, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913. G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Resurrection of the Body’, The Quest, 1:2, January 1910. G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Rising Psychic Tide’, The Quest, 3:3, April 1912. Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. John Mullarkey, ‘La Philosophie Nouvelle, or Change in Philosophy’, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903. F. W. H. Myers, ‘On a Case of Alleged Hyperacuity of Vision’, Mind, 12, January 1887. Richard Noakes, ‘Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, British Journal of the History of Science, 32, 1999. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Introduction’, in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1911], trans. Arthur Mitchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Peter Hans Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Louis-Georges Schwartz, ‘Introduction to the Meaning of Life’, Discourse, 33:2, spring 2011. Sanford Schwartz, ‘Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism’, in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Victoria Stewart, ‘War Memoirs of the Dead: Writing and Remembrance in the First World War’, Literature and History, 14:2, autumn 2005. Leon Surrette, The Birth of Modernism, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1993. Eric Clough Taylor, ‘Henri Bergson: A French Impression’, The Quest, 3:2, January 1912. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Michael Vaughan, ‘Introduction: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution’, SubStance, 36:3, 2007. Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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2

Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph: recording technologies and automisation Aura Satz It is well known that the raps of the Fox sisters in 1848 in the United States inaugurated spiritualism’s profusion of percussive sounds spelling out words, corresponding to and indeed on occasion adopting the Morse code of telegraphy, first transmitted in 1844. The rapping sounds themselves, produced either by knocking on a hard surface (or, as the Fox sisters later confessed, by the cracking of knuckles or joints), were a gestural pre-figuration, echo, and imitation of the ways in which the new technologies of telecommunication and writing would choreograph the body, particularly the hand, into new kinds of jerky micro-movements and haptic engagements. Spiritual­ ism and the technological advancements which run parallel with its heyday proclaimed a new intermediate figure, the enactor of these gestures, the medium and the operator, who were closely related and in many ways comparable.1 As the major theorist of French spiritisme, Allan Kardec, would write in 1857, ‘Mediums are simply electrical machines that transmit telegraphic dispatches from one point which is far away to another which is located on earth. Thus, when we wish to dictate a communication, we act upon the medium just as the telegraph employee does upon his apparatus’.2 The medium was essentially an apparatus possessing a passive hand, detached from the will of its owner/author, automatically writing and recording – an incarnate echo of the proliferating inscription technologies. This chapter aims to examine these twitching gestural engagements with a variety of devices, instruments, and technologies, including the typewriter, the pianola, the slate, and the phonograph, drawn from experiences and experiments in the varied practices of spiritualism, and in parallel the advancements of the technologies of the time. In tracing a trajectory from one haptic encounter to another, we see the operating hands become more disengaged, touching the keys 37

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38  Aura Satz only to prove the marvel of ‘look, no hands!’ Indeed, as the hands exercise a lighter touch, so too writing becomes more automatic, until with phonography the sound inscription has become illegible to the naked eye, and the detached hand of automatic writing is replaced by the cautious lowering of a tone arm and placing of a needle in a groove. Hands and automatic writing I had attained to hear audible angel voices near me. I was directed to get a typewriter which writes by keys like a piano. This I did, and applied myself vigorously to learn it, but with only indifferent success […] one morning the light struck both hands on the back and they went for the typewriter, for some fifteen minutes, very vigorously. I was told not to read what was printed, and I had worked myself into such a religious fear of losing this new power that I obeyed reverently. The next morning, also before sunrise, the same power came and wrote (or printed rather) again. Again I laid the matter away very religiously, saying little about it to anybody. One morning I accidentally (seemed accidental to me) looked out of the window and beheld the line of light that rested on my hands extending heavenward like a telegraph wire toward the sky. Over my head were three pairs of hands fully materialized; behind me stood another angel with her hand on my shoulders. My looking did not disturb the scene; my hands kept right on, printing – printing. For fifty weeks this continued every morning, half an hour or so before sunrise, and then it ceased, and I was told to read and publish the book Oahspe. The peculiar drawings in Oahspe were made with pencil in the same way. (J. B. Newbrough, letter to The Banner of Light, New York, 21 Jan­uary 18833)

John Ballou Newbrough, a well known medium and exponent of automatic writing, published Oahspe: A New Bible in 1882. The book was dictated to him, ‘mechanically written’ through his hands, puppeteered by heavenly telegraphic wires, and printed on one of the first typewriters, which had appeared on the American market in 1874, just a few years prior to the invention of the phonograph in 1877. Newbrough’s letter provides a useful illustration of how various technologies and practices of automatic writing had by this time begun to engage in a peculiar cross-fertilisation. By way of elucidation, Newbrough relates the then unfamiliar typewriter to the piano, a comparison that is justified by the presence of a keyboard, but that also pre-empts the imminent vogue of the player-piano

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  39 or pianola, which enabled another kind of automated writing and performance, as I will come to discuss.4 The telegraph is then called upon to describe the author’s supernaturally inspired automatic writing, thus weaving a complex web of devices and activities, all of which announce a certain detaching of subject from agency, and a gradual distancing and mediation between the hand and its author, the gesture of inscription/performance and intention. Writing was beginning to travel far beyond its writer with a temporal immediacy it had never before achieved, and this same feat suggested the reverse, that is to say, that the writing originated from some far-away agent. The mediated distance of these technologies runs parallel with the concurrent prevalence of spirit writing, slate writing, and talking boards, or Ouija boards, in spiritualism, where authorship is relayed to the distant afterlife. All of these varied manifestations share an attention to the physical act of writing, almost more so than to the written content. The writing was repeatedly dissociated from its writer by the appearance of distinctly unfamiliar handwriting, the use of a foreign alphabet or language, the blind production of text without the correlated use of sight, the restraining of the medium’s hands, and the emergence of self-writing texts. New devices were constructed to further isolate hand and writer, such as the ‘spiritoscope’, a dial plate device intended to function much like a complex planchette and Ouija board, but to all appearance far more scientific (see figure 2.1). Invented by Professor Robert Hare in

2.1  Spiritoscope, from Professor Robert Hare, Experimental Investi­ gation of the Spirit Manifestations, 1855.

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40  Aura Satz 1854, the ‘­spiritoscope’ used weights, pulleys, and cords to eliminate unconscious influence between the medium and the spirit dial, whose letters were made to face away from the channeller. The illustration of the device shows a woman operating a contraption that clearly brings to mind the telegraph, the typewriter, and the piano. The technology of the typewriter already in itself disengaged the hand and eye in such blind writing, and typing or keying was used to elevate the automatism of typewriting to the skill of musical performance, as the eyes rest ‘not on the keys but on the copy, as the eyes of the pianist rest on the score’.5 Later spiritualist manifestations involved the handless use of a typewriter held up in the air by partici­ pants, for example in the séances of the Bangs sisters, who, in 1893, produced typed spirit messages in sittings with G. W. N. Yost, the inventor of a typewriter. Likewise, Madame Blavatsky’s Posthumous Memoirs  were allegedly produced handlessly by a fast-typing self-­ operat­ ing typewriter, although those holding the hands of the medium Franek Kluski during a séance in 1919 noticed that ‘they twitched during the writing’.6 In the emphasis on the relation of the writing to an absent/mediated author, the associated noises of writing come to the foreground, highlighting its material quality, the sounds of its ‘mechanical’ or ‘automatic’ workings reinforcing the authenticity of mediumship. Often the séance participants’ aware­ness was focused on the sounds of the scratchy pencil markings of automatic writing or slate writing, or the scraping of the Ouija planchette, of involuntary collaborative authorship (the layout of the Ouija board itself recalls a keyboard of sorts). Likewise, one might read the recurrence of raps and knocks at the séance table as an echo of the ways in which writing and its transmission were to be re­configured, compellingly heard as a percussion which evokes or indeed uses a key or keyboard – the telegraph’s rhythmic trans­ mission of dots and dashes through Morse code, or the discrete taps of the keys of the typewriter. The overarching trope of ventriloquism and its written counter­ part, ghost writing or mediated writing, might be seen to infuse the various ways in which voices were disconnecting from their utterers, and writing was torn away from the hand in both the technology and the spiritualism of the time. Technology was engaged in an ongoing, ever more effective project of disembodiment, successfully facilitated by the telephone (patented in 1876), which could transmit the voice over great distances, but even more effectively embodied by the phonograph (1877), which could record (or sound-write, phonograph) and reproduce the voice, thus distancing it not only from its source but also from its own time. Sound was wrenching free of its

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  41 embodied origin, and yet the freer the voice, the more disembodied and visually unanchored the sound, the more it returned to haunt the very technological media which had enabled its liberation. One might say that the distancing between sound and source, text and writing hand, created the opposite effect of a persistent reassertion of the sense of presence heralded by the disembodied voice, and the tangible tactility of the hand. Thus, the hands of the medium are seen to remove themselves from the subject as they operate unconsciously, without volition, ‘printing’ rather than ‘writing’, to quote Newbrough, and yet the entire experience is characterised by the reiteration of disembodied materialised hands floating nearby. Similarly, as we will see shortly, many musical manifestations took place during spiritualist sittings, and featured disembodied voices coming out of floating trumpets, disembodied hands playing musical instruments, or handless performances of a floating guitar, or a self-playing drum or piano, and so on. The space between writer and text became more mediated and at the same time more distanced (as evidenced by the many concomitant inventions prefixed by the Greek word for ‘far,’ tēle), while hands, the original agents of tactile proximity, were to become the operators of tele-presence, and this new role was visually and acoustically reiterated during spiritual­ ist meetings. Disembodied hands proliferated and manifested them­selves through various palpable encounters. Hands, both those disembodied, disassociated from the visible living bodies in the room, and those that served as passive transmission entities, could in fact be said to be the true agents of spiritualism. There were the many knuckles rapping out messages on tables in telegraphic code; the hand of the medium scribbling out automatic writing; the touching fingers of participants placed upon the planchette of the Ouija board; the interlocked sweaty palms in the circle of the séance sitting; and the tied, manacled, or chained wrists of the medium. Then there were the spirit hands materialised by mediums, the disembodied hands which manifested themselves by levitating things, stroking heads and knees, strumming guitars, striking drums, ringing bells. These floating hands were often luminous or invisible, though palpable. Séances took place in the dark or in the semi-light of flickering oil lanterns or gas lamps, and the threshold of the visible tended to manifest itself through manual gesticulation. In the darkened séance room it was not the sense of sight that was privileged, but the tactile, dactylographic evidence provided by hands, called upon time and again to demonstrate the truth of events. People insisted they could recognise the soft touch of a deceased family member or loved one, see the gentle gestures of their outstretched hands, that

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42  Aura Satz their faces were patted or their beards and hair pulled. Male and female bodies, material and immaterial, brushed up and touched one another, subverting the polite conventions of gendered contact of the time. Human agency was embodied by the haptic choreography of nimble fingers, so that while the hands of the séance sitters were gripped tightly in a chain of clasped hands laid plainly above the table, invisible fingers moved about, making themselves known as presence, and substantiating the claim of a possible afterlife. And so, just as the disembodied hands touched in order to make themselves manifest, they equally emphasised a mode of handless, touchless contact, music which plays by itself, or writing produced of its own accord. Mediumship implied a transparency and permeability of the subject, who was spoken and written through, as it were, without volition, dictated from elsewhere, the mouthpiece or scribe of another author, his/her hands acting passively, disconnected from the body, all the while encouraged by a multitude of disembodied hands. Handless music Much has been made of spiritualism’s reliance on the visual evidence of spirit photography and full-body materialisations, but in fact from the 1870s onwards these visible materialisations were eclipsed by a distinct emphasis on ‘direct voice’ phenomena, as they were known, voice becoming the highest form of spiritual communication, and the most immediate and immaterial guarantor of presence.7 These voices, divorced from their owners, floating in the ether, were the ultimate evidence of a vocalic life after death. Much like spiritualist automatic writing, the voices often had very little of substance to say, but provided just enough intelligible speech to hint at a presence of sorts, through signs, initials, names, and so forth. What spiritual­ ism had to say of spirits was insignificant in comparison with ‘the practices that composed its sayings’.8 Musical instruments have often been overlooked, and yet they provided an extension of these vocal manifestations, where, again, the spirits were challenged to produce mere sound as presence, and the faintest hint of melody was an extra bonus.9 Combining both hand and sound, musical performances became a prominent mode of communication with the dead from very early on in spiritualist circles, and frequently used the rhetoric of automatic writing, musical sounds being produced without the player’s volition, by disembodied hands, or completely of their own accord. Again it is Kardec who, in his 1861 handbook for mediums,

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  43 describes the role of the automatism of the medium as parallel to the mere handle-turning of the organ-grinder, recalling the role of the operator mentioned earlier. Equally, the spirit could animate the instrument to play of its own accord, much like a mechanical instrument.10 Kardec writes: ‘when the spirit places his fingers on the keys, he really places them there, and what is more, he moves them; but it is by no muscular force that he presses on the key; he vitalises the key, as he vitalises the table, and the key obeys his will, moves itself, and strikes the string’.11 Many descriptions of self-playing music emphasise the effortless performance of the medium, who might have little or no musical knowledge or skill, and they do so by highlighting the mode of manual contact with the instrument, or the distancing of hand from instrument. Amateur handless music was common practice in spiritual­ist circles, as was the conjoined, indistinct group authorship implicit in the passing of the instrument from hand to hand, at once charging it with handfuls of added energy, while proving its handless autonomy. Daniel Dunglas Home, a famous Scottish medium known among other things for his levitating skills, describes a séance during one of his tours in New York, in 1854, during which a guitar is first heard to move in its case; then it is unlocked and placed under the table, from where it is played repeatedly, ‘not, to be sure, in the highest grade of the art, but with very fair average skill’.12 Finally the guitar is passed from hand to hand among the people present, until it is removed by ‘invisible agency’. The frail Lord sisters performed musical feats of the most astounding physical force, playing a double-bass violon-cello, guitar, drums, accordion, tambourine, bells, and more, at times singly, at others in unison, climaxing the per­formance with the lights turned back on to reveal one of the sisters seated silently in her invalid chair surrounded by a pile of musical instruments.13 Similarly, the famous Davenport brothers toured an act which consisted of entering a cabinet with their arms tied or manacled while instruments would float and play in the darkened room, and hands, seemingly human, would be felt and seen, before they would ‘dissolve, melt into air in the very grasp and tinder of the spectator’.14 The instrument was for the most part self-operating, or if there were luminous hands they remained detached and bodiless, floating alongside the instrument. As one spirit communicated, as if to clarify a continuity between the tactile and the musical, ‘This is my hand that touches you and the guitar’.15 The hands of the medium could likewise be termed self-playing, as they would frequently play automatically, as if with a life of their own, while the medium was in trance, channelling an ‘invisible piano-forte player’, for instance.

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44  Aura Satz Musical instruments, especially pianos, often served similar roles to tables, floating, rocking, and being rapped upon. Now and then, in echo of Newbrough’s comparison above, the piano keys were used like a typewriter of sorts to answer questions. Much of the mystery centred upon the proximity or distance of the musical instruments to the hands, and the tension generated by insulating one from another. Music would leak out despite all efforts to isolate contact between the instrument and the medium: piano keys and strings would be played while the lid was locked and the keyhole sealed with wax. Mediums were frequently restrained in a variety of ways. But, equally, the expert medium could channel a spirit and play music with minimal contact, effortlessly, by merely resting one hand on the piano while it was turned so that the keys faced the wall.16 Home’s spiritual powers produced the famous case of a self-playing concertina accordion, which played hymns and tunes ‘without any visible agency’.17 Again, efforts were made to reduce contact between his hands and the accordion, and yet his hand was the powering force, the animating plug, as it were, for he could hold the accordion from the bottom with one hand, the keys being out of reach, while leaving the other on the table, and even so the instrument played many a tune.18 To add energy to the accordion it was then passed into the hands of the sitters while it continued to play of its own accord. The eminent scientist Sir William Crookes subjected Home to a series of scientific experiments in 1871. He placed a brand new accordion within a drum-shaped metal cage wrapped in copper wire and ran an electrical current through the wire, but, rather than block Home’s psychic force, it seemed possibly to energise it – for it certainly produced no resistance. The medium was still able to make the accordion ‘expand and contract’, produce music, and even float, leading Crookes to believe that Home possessed a genuine psychic force.19 Crookes also attested to actually seeing invisible fingers playing the keys of an accordion while both hands of the medium remained visible.20 The debunking theory is that Home was performing ventriloquial misdirection of sorts, as he possessed a small, one-octave mouth organ, which he could hide within his mouth and play rather skilfully as though the sound were coming from the accordion.21 As suggested earlier, ventriloquism can be viewed as the prime metaphor for the shifts in technology that took place in this period, many of which were engaged in the prying apart of sound and source. For as the sonic manifestations of spiritualist sittings became more sophisticated, music itself was on the cusp of losing its body – its resonating instrument body as well as the anatomical body that

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  45 played it – to transform into the incisive indentations on the tinfoil of Edison’s cylinder phonograph. Around this time sound technology shifted from attempting to create sound production machines modelled on the mouth to sound transduction machines modelled on the ear, one of the phonograph’s most evocative precursors being the 1874 ear phonoautograph, which used a real ear from a cadaver to record (but not yet reproduce) sound.22 This change in anatomical focus also coincided with a move from efforts at the imitation of sound to efforts at the preservation of sound, such that it could then be reproduced. Preservation implies an entombment of the acoustic event, which becomes relegated to its past-ness, clearly corresponding to the idea of spiritualist voice-channelling, bringing the voices of the dead back into the present. And yet, both prior to and concurrent with these shifting sonic paradigms, there were a series of curious anatomical in-betweens of music reproduction that were not quite disembodied, nor exactly ears or mouths. These accomplished self-playing musical machines were still somewhat anatomical, inasmuch as they simulated the hands of the musician skimming lightly over a piano or a violin, ringing a bell, or striking a drum, or the air breathed into a wind instrument. And indeed a view of the musical automaton’s inner workings revealed the viscera, lungs, and mechanical fingers of pneumatic tubes, heaving bellows, cranking arms, and mechanically articulated joints. For a moment – before Edison’s thin iron diaphragm, which he himself termed a ‘tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx’, was to visualise sound frequencies as an indecipherable script – sound still had a body of sorts, and looked like itself, in the form of music automata.23 Before (and even while) the higher fidelity of the phonograph rendered them obsolete, these short-lived technological marvels seemed inhabited and animated by invisible hands, much like the musical manifestations of spiritualism. Indeed, both types of self-playing musical manifestations were conflated in some séances, as described in one of the many denouncing exposures of spiritualism from 1891, where instructions are given on how to play musical instruments handlessly at a séance, and we are told how to construct a self-playing guitar that could house ‘a small one-tune spring music box […] affixed to the wood forming the top, just under the strings’, which could produce the effect of a guitar ‘performing a tune upon itself. It does not sound exactly as though the music was produced on the strings; but near enough’.24 There are similar descriptions of autonomous guitars playing alongside a large Swiss mechanical music box (which, among other things, was made to float, despite its weight), but perhaps even more curious was the use of its winding

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46  Aura Satz up and switching on as a cue to invite and announce the spirits into the room.25 In a sitting with the medium Willy Schneider in 1922, Thomas Mann was among the participants to witness the telekinetic movement of a music box while he heard an invisible hand clatter noisily upon a typewriter.26 Thus, the unsung technology of mechanical music runs parallel to and features as part of the automatism of spiritualism, alongside the typewriter and other technologies of detached agency. The Illustrated London News reported on 5 July 1851 on the exhibition of Friedrich Kaufmann’s Orchestrion at Buckingham Palace: ‘flutes, flageolets, clarionets, cornets, bugles, trumpets, bassoons, horns, oboes, trombones, drums &c. […] it is almost miraculous to hear […] this invisible instrumentation’.27 Such lavish Orchestrions were descended from the barrel organ and similarly used pinned barrels to store musical data, until perforated paper rolls were introduced in 1887. The self-playing organs from 1882 onwards enabled the understanding of pneumatic action, and paved the way for the most famous exponent of mechanical music, the pianola (or player-piano), the wonderful self-playing piano which experienced a golden age between about 1890 and 1930, until it was displaced, like the rest, by the phonograph. Piano playing, the distinctive trait which made the middle-class woman all the more marriageable, joined the general technological impulse towards automated domesticity, enabling a degree of liberation of the servitude of female hands but nonetheless retaining the pedalling agency of the feet. The device played of its own accord, initially a separate push-up appliance attached to the piano, playing the keys with prosthetic felt-covered metal fingers, until in 1901 Melville Clark invented the first player-piano in which the piano and the player were a complete unit, and the piano keys were operated imperceptibly from inside. Thus the keyboard became graced with invisible fingers, though rhythm, tempo, and emphasis were provided by the feet. The pianola did wonders to democratise the performance of music, allowing the musically ignorant to enmesh their performance of listening with a performance of playing, before the more passive mode of listening was established by the phonograph. Pedalling away, the pianolist had to find the tune, incorporate it into the pace of the lower half of their body, and channel it. In 1891 wavy notation lines were introduced, printed alongside the perforations of the pianola roll, to provide a more precise indication of how to lever tempo, and to lend the pianolist a role some claim was almost akin to that of music conductor. A guide for pianola players from 1907 even went so far as to state that the pianolist was afforded a more musical experience of music, whereas the pianist was bound to the

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  47 incessant drudgery and labour of mastering mechanical technique, often choosing a repertory which aims to ‘limber up the little finger’ rather than to satisfy an aesthetic taste in music – ‘The technique, the substitute for that finger facility which only years of practice will give, is the pianola’s; but the interpretation is yours!’28 Music was still to be felt and interiorised, performed in a semi-automatic fashion, in order to be heard. The imaginary fingers lost their anatomical map, the left thumb playing perhaps the place of the right, or melodies could be played by extra invisible fingers ‘more capable than the ten human fingers’.29 What did it matter when all that one saw were the keys pressed down by a sequence of digits removed from anatomical constraints? Indeed, the pianola offered the possibility of composing music unhindered by the limitations of the human hand, which enthused composers such as Igor Stravinsky. Kardec wrote of the varying degrees of dissociation between the writing hand and the writer’s intention in those mediums who possessed what he termed a ‘psychographic’ ability, a talent for auto­ matic writing. ‘With the mechanical medium, the thought follows the act of writing; with the intuitive medium, it precedes it; with the semi-mechanical medium, it accompanies it’.30 One might read these different negotiations of agency, volition, and the think­ing mind in relation to the technologies discussed above. Like the pianolist who accompanies and inhabits the mechanical per­form­ ance of music, the semi-mechanical medium is engaged in the act of digesting and reading the self-writing text that flows from their hand, and he or she is not a completely transparent and permeable conduit. The writing medium, the typist on the typewriter, and the pianolist on the pianola are detached, dissociated from the performance of writing, yet still attached to the hands (or feet) that operate. These semi-mechanical enactments were characterised by a temporal unity – the medium could read while ghost-writing, just as the pianolist could listen while performing. This would soon change. Initially the pianola inherited the technology of the barrel organ, whereby written music was translated into sequential patterns, on a pinned rotating surface in the case of the barrel organ, or in the case of the pianola a perforated scrolling paper. But from 1894 there were real-time perforating machines which could instantly produce rolls from the live performance of pianists, thus incorporating the nuances of tempo and dynamics. In this way the reproducing piano attempted to catch up with the phonograph in the quest for higher fidelity, and the authentic, transparent, purely automatic inscription of each miniscule temporal deviation of the live pianist’s performance.31 Electrical pianos led to

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48  Aura Satz reproducing pianos, which removed the legwork and preserved the works of composers ‘exactly as played by them’, as the advertisement for the Apollo Reproducing Piano states, accompanied by an illustration of a semi-translucent Beethoven playing the piano with nebulous fingers.32 Or in the words of the advertisement for the ­Welte-Mignon, one could have ‘The Master’s fingers On Your Piano’, the image of the piano graced with ghost-like hands of a bodiless pianist.33 Later the technology advanced to enable the removal of almost all human agency, so that the mere flick of a finger could trigger an entire musical composition with the first electric piano in 1898 (one year later, coin-operated pianos such as the Tonophone would play at the drop of a penny). These technologies of sound reproduction, so intent on making handless music, on producing automatic music parallel to the automatic writing of mediums, could even channel the performance of a famous dead composer.34 And yet the live performance was to be temporally disconnected from its original source, severed from its author and from the need for a semi-mechanical performer. Slate writing and sound writing Halloa! Halloa! Mr. Phonograph, are you there? This salutation, which might have been addressed with great propriety to the ghosts at a spiritual séance, was faithfully echoed back by the phonograph a few moments later, after the cylinder had been turned back. The voice of the instrument was weak, but it was evidently there.35

This 1878 invocation of the disembodied response of the infant talking machine indicates a clear resonance between phonography and spiritualism in the mind of audiences of the period. Both were intent on performing the disembodied voice. The phonograph exhibition was soon followed by a demonstration of the machine’s literacy, which proved it to be ‘strong on the alphabet’ and spelling (though less successful in the recital, or rather, reproduction, of nursery rhymes and song). The shift traced here from typewriting to perforated paper rolls storing musical data, to phonograph groove, illustrates the profound transformations of the concepts of text, writing, readership, interpretation, and performance. As Theodor Adorno would reflect in 1934, with the phonograph ‘music, previously conveyed by writing, suddenly itself turns into writing’.36 Phono-graphy, sound-writing, was at first the term used to describe shorthand, stenography, the swift and abbreviated mode of

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  49 writing language, often based on phonetics, capable of keeping up with the quickness of speech.37 However, the skill and automatism of the stenographer were rapidly surpassed by the technology of the phonograph. In a short piece of writing entitled ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, Edison enumerated the possible uses of his newly invented phonograph: 1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenog­rapher. 2. Phonographic books, which would speak to blind people without effort on their part. 3. The teaching of elocution. 4. Reproduction of music. 5. The ‘Family Record’ – a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family, in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons […].38

The phonograph would enable writing devoid of the mediating writer’s hand, directly enmeshing speech and text; it would allow the blind to read; teach people how to speak; reproduce music beyond the paper score; bring the dead back into speech – to name but the first few uses on Edison’s list. Such purely automatic writing, with no intervention of any human medium as such, was no longer a semi-mechanical mode of psychographic writing, but rather equivalent to the wholly mechanical medium. Not only were the sound inscriptions microscopically small, they were indexical scribbles which lost all connection to the symbolic code, and as such they had no possible reader other than the phonographic machine. The resulting sound script was so detached from its writer that it no longer required human readership, as the tremulous abstract scrawls of such automatic writing became illegible and indecipherable. Any hopes of decoding the grooves had been crushed early on with the predecessor of the phonograph, the 1857 phonoautograph (‘self-writing of sound’). This device produced phonoautograms, which its inventor, Léon Scott, had hoped to establish as graphologically legible written imprints of speech sounds, and yet they remained impossible to read (and could not yet be played back).39 Edison himself reflected that the Assyrians and Babylonians had chosen baked clay cylinders inscribed with cuneiform characters as the medium for perpetuating records, but his wax cylinders were far superior in that they could ‘speak for themselves’ and did not ‘have to wait dumbly for centuries to be deciphered’.40 The sound inscription written by the phonograph stylus (‘writing implement’) was not to be read or decrypted but rather played back, reproduced.

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50  Aura Satz The hand of the spirit writer, though less automatic than the phonograph needle, likewise enacted scribbled automatic writing, and the arm would tingle, stiffen, and involuntarily convulse in becoming a mechanical contraption at the service of another author and agent.41 At times the hand was uninvolved in the production of text, and the writing would simply appear on paper or on the highly popular rewritable surface of an ordinary school slate, suitably apt for its didactic purpose. The resulting automatic texts often bordered on the illegible, requiring interpretation, translation, and deciphering. Indeed, the more the scribbles seemed foreign and distinct from the handwriting of its medium, the more authentic they were deemed. Such calligraphic alienation would often culminate in a linguistic alienation, generating unintelligible writing, unknown tongues, or polyglot manifestations. One example is the slate-­writing communica­ tions produced by the medium Fred Evans in 1886, which included twelve languages, among them Hebrew, Greek, and Chinese.42 A small bit of slate pencil had been sandwiched in between two blank slates, which had then been held firmly in place by the participants, the slate frame’s outer edge touched only briefly by the medium, followed by loud raps to signal the writing was over. Slate writing was frequently practised according to a similar routine, a small fragment of slate pencil enclosed between either two slates locked or sealed together, or inside a slate pressed hard against the underside of a table. In a successful séance a scratching sound would then be heard, the ‘authentic’ sound of writing, and the withdrawal of the slate would reveal a message. On some occasions the writing noise was accompanied by tremors which could be felt if one placed one’s hands near the slates.43 Slate writing was the ultimate performance of handless textuality: the hand’s writing grip is unnecessary, the writing instrument is reduced to a mere graphite tip without its handled pencil body, a crumb of slate pencil. Slate writing was hugely popular thanks to its foremost exponent, Henry Slade, whose séances were described by fellow medium Stainton Moses as follows: The slate-writing occurred under any suggested condition. It came on a slate held by Dr. Slade and myself; on one held by myself alone in the corner of the table farthest from the medium; on a slate which I had myself brought with me, and which I held myself. The latter writing occupied some time in production, and the grating noise of the pencil in forming each word was distinctly audible […] my slate was taken out of my hand, and produced at the opposite side of the table, where neither Dr. Slade nor I could reach it; the accordion played all round and about me, while the doctor held it by the lower

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  51 part, and finally, on a touch from his hand upon the back of my chair, I was levitated, chair and all, some inches.44 

The practice of slate writing was largely discredited after Slade was denounced as a fraud, prosecuted, and found guilty in 1876, just two years before Edison patented the phonograph.45 His texts were found to be produced by hand, carefully prepared in advance, and to have very little automatic about them. The rigorous scientific experiments he was subjected to revealed how his manual manipulation had been carefully staged to appear hands-free – nonetheless, his hands proved guilty of writing. In the shifting performances of writing examined above one can trace a distinct emphasis on the engagement of the hand, which was at once gradually detaching in becoming more automatic, all the while visually reiterating its disembodiment as if to pre-empt its own imminent vanishing act. This was symptomatic of automatic writing, typewriting, spiritualist musical manifestations, and mechanical music, where hands were both significantly absent and yet anatomically implicit. The phonograph, and to a certain degree slate writing, features as a slightly distinct mode of script, in that it no longer requires the hand of a writer, nor, more importantly, the deciphering eye of a reader. It is to be read or, rather, played back by the machine alone. In being truly automatic it withdraws from reading. The automatic writing heralded by the phonograph no longer required an operator or medium as such. The automatic hand was supplanted by the careful placing of a needle on a groove, the machine’s tone-arm poised in the act of inscription or reproduction, writing or reading back. Interestingly, early phonographic recordings were full of scratchy surface noises and barely audible, as if faintly emanating from some distant place and time, even in the days in which listening to recordings was a newfound experience. These exposing noises of the technology of sound writing and reading were to be gradually erased in the quest for higher fidelity, as the automatic writing of sound reproduction was intent on effacing the audible sounds of its own existence. The scraping noises of mechanical action were no longer synonymous with authentic automatic writing, signalling the distance yet mediation between writing hand and author – instead, these noises indicated the interference of technological presence. Notes 1 Though not the focus of this chapter, it is worth noting the significant role of women mediums, and likewise the way the typewriter, telegraph, and

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52  Aura Satz

2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

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telephone were gradually assigned to the female workforce. See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in ­Nineteenth-Century America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002; and Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. On the typewriter see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, particularly ch. 4; and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, second edition [1857], Paris: Éditions Dervy, 1994, pp. 289–90. English translation in Lawrence Rainey, ‘Taking Dictation’, Modernism/Modernity, 5:2, 1998, p. 127. Susan B. Martinez, The Hidden Prophet: The Life of Dr. John Ballou Newbrough, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2009, appendix, pp. 369–70.  The first prototype pianola to mechanically record and play back music was Jules Carpentier’s Mélographe Répétiteur, from 1880. See T. L. Southgate, ‘On Various Attempts That Have Been Made to Record Extemporaneous Playing’,  Proceedings of the Musical Association, eighth session, 1881–82, p. 193. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts,  Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 217. The Bangs sisters’ typewriting séances are described by Quaestor Vitae in Light, 25 January 1896, cited by Nandor Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, London: Arthur’s Press, 1934. Available at www.spiritwritings. com/​fodorm.html (consulted 20 January 2011). See also ‘A Ruined Man: Inventor Yost the Prey of Mediums’, Los Angeles Times, 6 July 1895. See Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 364. Daniel Cottom, ‘Wording the Subject of Spiritualism’, in Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 109. The following section draws in part on Aura Satz, ‘Music of Its Own Accord’, Leonardo Music Journal, 20, 2010, pp. 73–8. Allan Kardec, The Medium’s Book [1861], trans. Anna Blackwell, Brasília: Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB), 1986, p. 259. Available at www.geae.inf. br/en/books/codification/mb.pdf (consulted 2 March 2011). Ibid., p. 74. From Daniel Dunglas Home’s autobiography, Incidents in My Life, New York: Carlton Publisher, 1863, p. 85, in which he described his own mediumship through a report in the New York Conference of 26 December 1854. Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits, third edition, New York: published by the author, 1870, p. 201. This is one of the most significant literary efforts to collate spiritualist manifestations, and, like many other books of the time, features extensive citations of newspaper accounts. Thomas Low Nichols, A Biography of the Brothers Davenport, with Some Account of the Physical and Psychical Phenomena Which Have Occurred in

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  53 Their Presence in America and Europe, London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1864, p. 47. 15 Richard Cope Morgan, An Inquiry into Table-Miracles, Their Cause, Character, and Consequence; Illustrated by Recent Manifestations of ­Spirit-Writing and Spirit-Music, Bath: Binns and Goodwin, 1853, p. 15. 16 Britten, Modern American Spiritualism, pp. 104, 155, 202, 288, 463–4 and more. See also many cases of musical manifestations cited in the two volumes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The History of Spiritualism, London: Cassell, 1926. 17 Home, Incidents in My Life, pp. 102, 110. 18 Ibid., pp. 202, 226, 253. 19 William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874, pp. 10–14. 20 Ibid., p. 92. 21 See James Randi, www.randi.org/site (consulted 2 March 2011). 22 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 33. 23 Ronald W. Clark, Edison: The Man Who Made the Future, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977, p. 81. 24 Revelations of a Spirit Medium; or Spiritualistic Mysteries Exposed: A Detailed Explanation of the Methods Used by Fraudulent Mediums. By a Medium, St Paul, MN: Farrington and Co., 1891, p. 116. 25 Ibid., p. 276. 26 Heather Wolffram, ‘In the Laboratory of the Ghost-Baron: Parapsychology in Germany in the Early 20th Century’, Endeavour, 33:4, 2009, p. 155. 27 Cited in Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the Pianola, from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to Orchestrion, London: Allen and Unwin, 1973, p. 199. 28 Gustave Kobbé, The Pianolist: A Guide for Pianola Players, New York: Moffatt, Yard and Company, 1907, pp. 47–9, 12. Kobbé warns the pianolist not to abandon the performance to the pianola’s mechanical capacity – ‘as the instrument on which he plays relieves him of all burdens of technique and enables him to play anything, no matter how difficult, with absolute technical accuracy, it is all the more his duty to play with as much expression as he can call forth from his inner nature’ (p. 163). Only one year earlier John Philip Sousa wrote in dismay of the menace of mechanical music and with it the disappearance of the amateur musician, a prophetic sign of the times when a little boy might exclaim with great surprise: ‘O mamma, come into the drawing-room; there is a man in there playing the piano with his hands’ (my emphasis). John Philip Sousa, ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’, Appleton’s Magazine, 8, 1906, pp. 278–84. Available online at www. phonozoic.net/n0155.htm (consulted 3 April 2011). 29 Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music, p. 268. 30 Kardec, The Medium’s Book, p. 191. 31 See David Suisman, ‘Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure”: Rethinking Musical Mechanization Through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano’, Social Text, 28:1, 2010, pp. 13–34. The short-lived term of the ‘phonologram’ paper roll points to this hybridity between phonography and player-pianos. See Julia Kursell, ‘Visualizing Piano Playing, 1890–1930’, Grey Room, 43, spring 2011, p. 73.

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54  Aura Satz 32 Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume, Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano, London: Allen and Unwin, 1984, p. 344. 33 From the private collection of Rex Lawson. 34 Elsewhere I have illustrated other examples of self-operating musical instruments, such as violins, drums, accordions, and triangles. Satz, ‘Music of Its Own Accord’. 35 ‘The Phonograph. An Exhibition of Edison’s Wonderful Talking Machine. Many of the Experiments a Positive Success – Others the Reverse. The Instrument Must Be Regarded as Only in Its Infancy’,  Chicago Tribune, 23 May 1878. Available at www.phonozoic.net/n0064.htm (consulted 20 January 2011). 36 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’ [1934], trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, 55, 1990, p. 59. 37 See Gitelman, Scripts, p. 24. 38 Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, North American Review, 146:379, 1888, p. 646. 39 Patrick Feaster, ‘Daguerreotyping the Voice: Léon Scott’s Phonautographic Aspirations’, in Annette Stahmer (ed.), Parole #1: The Body of the Voice/ Stimmkörper, Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009, pp. 18–23. 40 Edison, ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, p. 645. 41 William Romaine Newbold, ‘“Spirit Writing” and “Speaking with Tongues”’, Popular Science Monthly, 49:35, 1896, p. 514. 42 J. J. Owen, Psychography: Marvelous Manifestations of Psychic Power Given Through the Mediumship of Fred P. Evans, San Francisco, CA: Hicks-Judd Co., 1893, p. 44. 43 Lewis Spence, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology [1920], Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007, pp. 244–7 on ‘direct writing’. 44 Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, vol. I, ch. 13. 45 See Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert, Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887; and William E. Robinson, Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena, New York: Munn and Company, 1898. See also Johann C. Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, trans. C. C. Massey, London: W. H. Harrison, 1882.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’ [1934], trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, 55, 1990. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-­ Century America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits, third edition, New York: published by the author, 1870. Ronald W. Clark, Edison: The Man Who Made the Future, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Typewriter, pianola, slate, phonograph  55 Daniel Cottom, ‘Wording the Subject of Spiritualism’, in Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874. Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, London: Cassell, 1926. Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, North American Review, 146:379, 1888. Patrick Feaster, ‘Daguerreotyping the Voice: Léon Scott’s Phonautographic Aspirations’, in Annette Stahmer (ed.), Parole #1: The Body of the Voice/ Stimmkörper, Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, London: Arthur’s Press, 1934. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Daniel Dunglas Home, Incidents in My Life, New York: Carlton Publisher, 1863. Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, second edition [1857], Paris: Éditions Dervy, 1994. Allan Kardec, The Medium’s Book, third edition [1861], trans. Anna Blackwell, Brasília: Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB), 1986. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey ­Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Gustave Kobbé, The Pianolist: A Guide for Pianola Players, New York: Moffatt, Yard and Company, 1907. Julia Kursell, ‘Visualizing Piano Playing, 1890–1930’, Grey Room, 43, spring 2011. Susan B. Martinez, The Hidden Prophet: The Life of Dr. John Ballou Newbrough, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2009. Richard Cope Morgan, An Inquiry into Table-Miracles, Their Cause, Character, and Consequence; Illustrated by Recent Manifestations of Spirit-Writing and Spirit-Music, Bath: Binns and Goodwin, 1853. William Romaine Newbold, ‘“Spirit Writing” and “Speaking with Tongues”’, Popular Science Monthly, 49:35, 1896. Thomas Low Nichols, A Biography of the Brothers Davenport, with Some Account of the Physical and Psychical Phenomena Which Have Occurred in Their Presence in America and Europe, London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1864. Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the Pianola, from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to Orchestrion, London: Allen and Unwin, 1973. Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume, Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano, London: Allen and Unwin, 1984. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. J. J. Owen, Psychography:  Marvelous  Manifestations of Psychic Power Given Through the Mediumship of Fred P. Evans, San Francisco, CA: Hicks-Judd Co., 1893. Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert, Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887. Lawrence Rainey, ‘Taking Dictation’, Modernism/Modernity, 5:2, 1998. Revelations of a Spirit Medium; or Spiritualistic Mysteries Exposed: A Detailed

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56  Aura Satz Explanation of the Methods Used by Fraudulent Mediums. By a Medium, St Paul, MN: Farrington and Co., 1891. William E. Robinson, Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena, New York: Munn and Company, 1898. Aura Satz, ‘Music of Its Own Accord’, Leonardo Music Journal, 20, 2010. John Philip Sousa, ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’, Appleton’s Magazine, 8, 1906. T. L. Southgate ‘On Various Attempts That Have Been Made to Record Extemporaneous Playing,’ Proceedings of the Musical Association, eighth session, 1881–82. Lewis Spence, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology [1920], Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. David Suisman ‘Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure”: Rethinking Musical Mechanization Through the Phonograph, the ­Player-Piano, and the Piano’, Social Text, 28:1, 2010. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Heather Wolffram, ‘In the Laboratory of the Ghost-Baron: Parapsychology in Germany in the Early 20th Century’, Endeavour, 33:4, 2009. Johann C. Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, trans. C. C. Massey, London: W. H. Harrison, 1882.

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3

‘Miraculous constellations in real material’: spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic Leigh Wilson Debates about the relationship between photography and spiritualism have at their centre an either/or structure which has tended to distort any accurate picture of that relationship. If the focus is on the formal and aesthetic questions raised by particular photographic practices, or by photography per se, spiritualism is often used as a trope rather than being considered as a specific historical practice. In work which does take spiritualism seriously as a historical discourse, any investigation of its relation to photography tends to marginalise formal questions, often undermining the power and strangeness of such images as images. In her seminal essay on Nadar (­Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) from 1978, Rosalind Krauss, who elsewhere is so insistent on photography’s role as challenging the assumptions of a formalist art history, falls into the former category through her resistance to taking seriously the fully historical status of spirit photography.1 While Krauss, like Nadar, is committed to historicising photography, and that historicising finds at ­photography’s heart an imbrication with the spectral, Krauss’s own sense of spiritual­ ism as a historical and historicisable discourse falters. Her attitude to spiritualism reveals not so much the difference that history makes as an embarrassment at historical difference. In her essay, spirit photography, while only a ‘baby step in logic’ from conceptions of photography per se, cannot be passed over swiftly enough.2 After a brief consideration of ‘spiritualism’ and spirit photography, Krauss is relieved to leave this ‘somewhat freakish idea’ of ‘rather limited’ currency for the slightly more respectable arena of deathbed photographs. Spiritualism as a historical discourse, rather than as a useful trope to illuminate photography’s history, is indeed, as Krauss admits, ‘easy enough to patronise’, and the mark it makes on photography ‘hard to understand’.3 Krauss goes on to argue that, 57

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58  Leigh Wilson for Nadar, such questions of the relationship between the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead, which spiritualism and spirit photography raised and made legible in the end were only viable ‘as an aesthetic (rather than a real) basis for photography’.4 For Krauss, then, a historicised consideration of the formal constructs of photography precludes any detailed consideration of spiritualism as a real historical practice. More recent work on spirit photography, however, has provided such historical detail in plenty. In the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition ‘The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult’, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2005, the opening essay, by Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, acknowledges the important effect that avant-garde theory and practice have had on the collecting and valuation of spirit photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 However, despite this acknowledgement, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue mark a rejection of a formalist approach: To consider only the aesthetic qualities of these images, to disregard the original motives for their production, ignoring the environment in which they were produced and removing them from their documentary context, is to risk rendering them incomprehensible, like beautiful objects stripped of meaning. The aesthetic approach must be replaced, therefore, by a different kind of analysis.6

This ‘different kind of analysis’ must be, they say, ‘resolutely historical’.7 While, as with Krauss, their focus is on the history of photography, the editors of this collection are explicitly agnostic, rather than embarrassed, with regard to the credibility of spiritualist claims. For them, occult phenomena reveal things about photography not despite but because of their enmeshment with certain beliefs, and the aesthetic as the basis of the construction and reading of these images lacks the taxonomical rigour necessary to learn about ‘human nature, its relationship to technology, its valorization strategies, its hopes and beliefs’.8 Apraxine and Schmit acknowledge the extent to which in many occult photographs can be seen as ‘echoes of symbolist, surrealist, or simply modernist compositions’, but for them a focus on the relationship between occult photographs and avant-garde work would somehow diminish the power of the former.9 At the heart of their claims for the historical approach is that it alone has the ability to restore to the images their force.10 This chapter will argue, in contrast to both Krauss and Apraxine and Schmit, that a consideration of the aesthetic and the historical in tandem releases precisely the very particular power of these images

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  59 of spiritualist phenomena. Indeed, at the heart of the historical dis­­course of the occult in the early twentieth century was an attempt to reconceptualise matter in a way that is powerfully linked to the formal innovations of the avant-garde. By looking at two very different visual practices – one from the avant-garde, and one central to occult discourse in the early twentieth century – I will show how both, in their attempts to transform the represented into an object in itself, to animate rather than copy matter, engage with the very particular potency that is magic. The most powerful definitions of magic during the period – institutionalised through an anthropology that was constituting itself as a discipline precisely around such definitions – emphasised the relationships between magic and the material world. Anthropologists who differed in their theories about the temporal relationship between religion and magic – which came first – agreed nevertheless that what distinguished magic from religion was its materiality. When belief and practice transcended the material, they no longer constituted magic but religion. So, for James Frazer, while magic, like science, has faith in ‘the order and uniformity of nature’, religion, on the other hand, ‘clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable’ because the gods, if persuaded, can alter it. Magic, unlike religion, takes ‘for granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically’.11 Andrew Lang, despite his disagreements with Frazer, also asserts that ‘magic is materialistic’.12 More than this, magic is crucially seen by contemporary anthropology as based on a particular view of relations between things, that of sympathy. Frazer’s two brands of sympathetic magic – that based on similarity and that based on contiguity – have at their heart an idea of representation.13 If magic is matter whose power is effected by copying something or by possessing a part of something, the matter of both the ‘resolutely historical’ and of avant-garde innovation are implicated in it. Magic as defined in the early twentieth century, then, changes our conception of matter and what it means to represent it. While the essays of Krauss and of Apraxine and Schmit both focus on materiality – of photography and of avant-garde form, of historical practice – they are both, on their own, an inert materiality. A sense of the magic of materiality is, however, both ‘resolutely historical’ and has significant implications for the materiality of form. The sense of magic demands an acknowledgement both of history and of the aesthetic – both the fact and its representation – and in so doing can suggest new ways of reading the images of both the avant-garde and the occult.

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60  Leigh Wilson The photomontage practice of Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann and the photographs of the ectoplasmic phenomena produced by the medium Marthe Béraud before the First World War both have at their centre portraits cut out of contemporary magazines and newspapers. In both practices, the mimetic status of the photographic portrait is at stake; its status as matter is forced to take pre-eminence over its status as representation. Of course, these two types of image are usually seen as antithetical. Spiritualist phenomena are, on the whole, for us the result of mendacity on the one side and credulous belief on the other; Dada photomontage the result of painfully keen-eyed despair and a powerful drive to experiment – a privileged avant-garde practice that remains influential. However, all these cut-out images share a position on the cusp of representation and materiality, which is precisely the place of magic. In historicising spiritualism, my aim is, rather than to expel the aesthetic, to historicise it too, to show how tightly imbricated the two are during the period, that is, to argue that the magical conception of matter that underpins spiritual­ist practice in the early twentieth century is precisely that which attracted those experimental visual practices interested in the formal and aesthetic questions of photography. Photomontage and ‘contact with matter’ The relationship between Dada and the material is usually acknowledged to be at the heart of its significance, but the precise meaning of that relationship is often contested. In his influential study of Raoul Hausmann, Timothy Benson argues for the central place of materiality in Hausmann’s intellectual and practical projects: ‘Desiring a direct and neutral encounter with his material and cosmic surroundings, Hausmann was at the forefront of the Dada efforts to reduce art, culture, and language to its pure material existence’.14 By the middle of 1918, Benson argues, Hausmann’s conception of the experience of the material had moved from a religious to a positivist one.15 However, as we have seen via Frazer’s definition of magic, the positivist and the magical view of the material world share many things (unlike the positivist and the religious). Both privilege the direct experience of the material world, and what Benson takes for positivism in Dada’s treatment of the material can more usefully be seen as the practice of magic. Randall Styers has suggested that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernity was to a significant extent constructed through the mobile and shifting ships between three worldviews: that of science, that of relation­

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  61 religion, and that of magic. The disciplines of anthropology and the social sciences, he argues, established themselves during the period in part through a disavowal of magic and an identification with the methods and worldview of the ‘hard’ sciences. Religion could coexist with science, for post-Reformation religion was individualised, spiritual, and transcendent. Magic, on the other hand, vied with science for control of the material world. For Styers, the dynamic of repulsion and identification seen in writing from the period produced a more general and more significant effect than the establishing of disciplinary boundaries. In the marginalisation of magic – left in the care of ‘primitives’, peasants, and the psycho­logically weak – and the privileging of religion, Styers sees a strategy to cede complete access to the material world to capitalism and its facilitators, science and technology.16 The methods of science, then, are not the opposite of magic, but its competitor. The materialism of Dada can, thus, be seen as a challenge to capitalist modernity rather than an accommoda­tion with it. In contrast to Benson’s reading, Richard Sheppard has argued in Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism that in Berlin Dada can be found an affirmation of ‘the interpenetration of the material and the spiritual and the possibility of the impossible’.17 This view of Dada, as he states in an earlier version of this argument, is in obvious ‘defiance of the conventional wisdom that labels Dada “nihilistic”’.18 Sheppard demonstrates his claim by detailing the interest of the members of Berlin Dada in Eastern and Western mysticism, and their own claims to the metaphysical and the transcendent, in manifestos and essays. Sheppard acknowledges that Berlin Dada differs from Western mysticism because of the latter’s emphasis ‘upon the dynamic activity of God within the world of matter’ and from Eastern mysticism because Dada’s ‘language is more naturalistic; its concept of the life force more material’.19 However, this does not really acknowledge the extent to which Berlin Dada practice, in particular in photomontage, with its aggressive materiality, its black humour, and its fascination with technology, seems to contradict mystical readings, and to suggest instead those nihilistic readings that Sheppard is challenging. Indeed, Sheppard’s chapter on Berlin Dada and mysticism bases its claims predominantly on influences and on manifestos. He does acknowledge elsewhere that Dada had an engagement with magic, though he sees this thematically, in the trickster and magus figures of Dada poetry, rather than in terms of form.20 Sheppard says very little about the effect of these influences on the aesthetics of Berlin Dada, or the work produced by it. Indeed, in his earlier chapter on experimental poetry, Sheppard argues that much Dada poetry acts

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62  Leigh Wilson out a radical use of language, where the Saussurean sundering of sign and referent – rather than magical sympathy between object and copy – is celebrated.21 This reading of Dada practice seems at odds with his argument regarding Dada engagements with mystical thinking. Berlin Dada, his differing claims suggest, uses mysticism to speak of its vitalist engagement with matter, yet produces works which are sealed off from reference to the world. This confusion around the relation of Dada practice and materiality is not surprising. ‘What’s the point of mind in a world that just goes on mechanically?’ asked Hausmann, claiming that Dada ‘was a declaration of basic primitiveness’, that it is ‘the total absence of what is called mind’, and that Dada, ‘born as it was of the unfathomableness of a happy moment, is the only practical religion for our time’.22 This nicely demonstrates the strange coming together of the material and the spiritual in Dada. Hausmann’s statement – with its jumbling together of the primitive, the mechanistic, and the religious – suggests that part of what Dada does is to act out, rather than answer, the tensions and conflicts between religion, magic, and science that Styers argues are so crucial to the period. It is in precisely the materiality of Dada practice, the violence its radical materiality does to sense and to the formal conventions that maintain it, that links it to the marginal and disruptive practices of magic. Dada’s aesthetics, then, can be read as magic through a historicised reading of the magical. In his exhortation which ended the inaugurating performance of Berlin Dada in April 1918, Hausmann makes the privileging of materiality central to Dada practice, but the status of this materiality is contradictory and strained: In Dada you will recognize your real situation: miraculous constellations in real material, wire, glass, cardboard, fabric, corresponding organically to your own utterly brittle fragility, your bagginess […]. Through the exquisite punch of our deployment of material as the newest art of a progressive self-presentation captured in motion with the relinquishment of the traditional protections of those standing around in the vicinity, as embodied atmosphere [sic].23

Materiality is evidence for human vulnerability and testament against the transcendent ‘I’ of idealism, but it is also, as suggested in the complex final sentence, this very materiality that guarantees the power of the work, the ‘exquisite punch’ which begins to explain the ‘miraculous’ nature of material suggested earlier in the quote. Material is inert flesh; but at the same time material is miraculous because it has effects in the world, effects which make obvious the

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  63 extent to which the body is alive – that ‘exquisite punch’. Hausmann’s oxymoron – ‘embodied atmosphere’ – enacts exactly this strained materiality. Brigid Doherty has read the final sentence as constructing Dada art as a ‘counterpart to the exactness of photography, a new kind of art that would at once mimic cinema and instantiate the “real situation”’.24 Here too can be seen a tension in just what materiality in art means. The history of thinking about photography focuses in great part on the status of the medium as representation, in particular on the question of whether, in C. S. Peirce’s terms, photography is icon or index, whether its representational mode consists of resembling the world or of physical connection to it.25 The materiality of Hausmann’s speech suggests a practice rooted in the matter of the world, not picturing the world, but of it. Doherty’s suggestion that Hausmann’s ‘new materials’ are linked to the documentary nature of photography implies that what is mimicked from photography and film is as much its choice of subject as the manner of its coming into being. The ‘exactness’ of photography, then, is more about its faithful reproduction of the surface of the world than its material contiguity with it, and yet Dada practice both acts as a counterpart to this and itself enacts the real of the world. As Doherty notes, the Dada pieces that most closely resemble the use of new materials as set out in Hausmann’s speech were actually produced quite some time after it. In the meantime, the practice that came to dominate Berlin Dada involved the use, not of ‘wire, glass, cardboard, fabric’, but ‘of materials, including photo­graphic illu­strations, appropriated from the print media’.26 In other words, the new materials that dominated photomontage were not those sharing the matter and substance of the real world, but rather those whose primary purpose was representation. In ‘Return to Objec­ tiv­ity in Art’ (1920) as well as in ‘Photomontage’ (1931), however, Hausmann depicts Dada as being that which reproduces the reality of the world. The problem with the experimental painting which preceded them, that of ‘post-futurist expressionism’, was that it was ‘non­representational’.27 Photomontage, on the other hand, which Hausmann retrospectively defined as ‘photography and printed texts combined and transformed into a kind of static film’, was a ‘mirror image wrenched from the chaos of war and revolution’.28 Unsurprisingly, as the central practice of Berlin Dada, the representational status of photomontage and its engagement with the question of materiality are complex and paradoxical, but an alternative reading of this question of materiality is made possible by going back to accounts of the inception of photomontage, and then by thinking about what contemporaneous photographic practices in the i­nvestigation of

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64  Leigh Wilson spiritualist phenomena can tell us about these imbrications of matter and its opposite. Accounts of the origins of photomontage are contradictory, but they do agree on the importance of consolatory images of soldiers in its genesis.29 Hans Richter, for instance, claimed the first photo­ montages were postcards, aping those sent between home and Front, remade by Dadaists by adding advertisements, labels from consumer products, and ‘photographs from picture papers’.30 Hausmann and his lover and fellow Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch retrospectively located the origins of photomontage as a Dada practice in a holiday they took together on the Baltic Sea in 1918. On the walls in nearly every house in the area, Hausmann and Höch saw examples of ‘soldier portraits’ – generic images of military figures against inspiring backgrounds, onto which the cut-out heads from photographs of those in the family in military service had been stuck.31 These portraits were incredibly popular in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a revival in popularity during the First World War. As Matthew Biro has argued, such images glorified the figure of the German soldier by transforming individual soldiers through the imposition of their head onto an idealised body made invulnerable through well defined musculature and armour.32 Such portraits brought consolation to families through their ideological work. The fragile bodies of their family members were transformed into invulnerability through the effects of German military might and the robust values of the German monarchy. In the portraits, fragile matter is paradoxically given substance and strength by the intangible, by ideas and beliefs, by a state of mind which asserts a particular view of the world. Photography is a sign both of the vulnerable matter in need of transformation, the steely intangibles which will effect transformation, and finally of matter transformed, that is, the portrait as a whole which attempts to secure a final image of invulnerability. However, this transformation which produces an invulnerable totality – invulnerable inasmuch as it is a totality, not open to leakages from within or penetration from without – also involves, although masked, a dislocation. The cut-out, transposed heads never quite match the plane, texture, size, or angles of the picture; they are never quite one with it. In other words, the cutout-ness of the soldier’s head which makes possible his incorporation into the protective embrace of an ideology of invulnerable wholeness also produces the image of his dislocation, his body as partial, dismembered, as finally vulnerable materiality. Such conflicted images of wholeness were present in many forms throughout Europe during the war. Not much ground needs to

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  65 be covered to move from German ‘soldier portraits’ to the images produced in British spiritualist photography during and after the war, revealing dead soldiers as still present, hovering around their family, or more generally called up by corporate acts of commemoration. Perhaps the most famous of these were by the spirit photographer Ada Emma Deane, who, beginning in 1921, took a number of photographs of Armistice Day ceremonies during the two-minute silence. The resulting images purported to show faces of dead soldiers hovering above the living. Her photograph of the ceremony in 1924 caused a scandal when it was suggested by a newspaper that the faces were of well known, and still living, sportsmen.33 That Deane could have simply cut the faces from magazines and newspapers was hotly denied by her supporters, including Arthur Conan Doyle, and those who recognised dead loved ones.34 Another supporter, a spiritualist, put the scepticism around Deane’s photographs down to that fact that ‘people as a whole are steeped in materialism’.35 For him, the materiality of the photograph would deny its plausibility as proof of spiritualist beliefs, for newspaper images were symbols of a degraded quotidian. This judgement of the matter of newspaper is of course significant in the Dadaists’ incorporation of it into their work. However, this could be read as an assertion of the very deadened materiality that the spiritualist supporter of Deane criticised, or as an exhortation to go beyond the material. Benson reads Hausmann’s use of photography as moving towards the latter: ‘Hausmann’s monist, quasi-mystical philosophy led him to expect the new language of art, now incorporating photography, to transcend the mechanical laws of matter and attain contact with an acausal state of universal experience’.36 At the same time, as Benson acknowledges, Hausmann saw the Klebebild (glued picture) as a ‘contact with matter’.37 As I have argued, though, Hausmann’s material practice and the images it produced have more in common with a magical conception of matter than either a quasi-mysticism or a nihilistic despair. In magic, matter is not degraded and inert but alive, and its reorganisation and manipulation produce not more inert matter but the miraculous. In his account of the production of his photomontage Tatlin at Home (1920), Hausmann stressed both the ordinary material of its construction and the material concerns of its subject, the Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin (see figure 3.1): One day, I thumbed through an American magazine absolutely ­absent-mindedly. All of a sudden, the face of an unknown man struck me, and I don’t know why I automatically made the association

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66  Leigh Wilson

3.1  Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin lebt zu Hause (Tatlin at Home), 1920.

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  67 between him and the Russian Tatlin. […] I wanted to make the image of a man who had nothing in his head but machines, cylinders and motors, brakes and car steering wheels […]. But now something is needed to the right. I drew a tailor’s mannequin on my painting […]. I cut the interior organs of the human body from an anatomy book and placed them in the mannequin’s torso. At the foot, a fire extinguisher. I regarded it one more time. No, nothing must change. It was good. It was done.38

By focusing on the material, this account shifts from inert materiality towards magic. The image of the ‘unknown man’ is connected to Tatlin through a version of sympathetic magic. So while the ‘portrait’ of Tatlin nowhere includes his literal likeness, through the juxtaposition of the most material of things, those things which con­ ventionally stand in for a deadened materiality – machines, in­testines – an image is produced which, as Hausmann says, is a ‘kind of static film’, which has animation and life. The movement and animation of film are produced by static images. The cut-out photo­graph in the foreground, an anonymous face cut from that most obvious purveyor of the lies of representation, an American magazine, is transformed by its incongruous proximity to the matter of the world into vitality. The end of the passage quoted above mimics God’s words in Genesis after his act of creation. There matter is created and invested with life through fiat. In Hausmann’s portrait, no matter is created. Instead, it is metamorphosed and vitalised through startling juxtaposition. Timothy Benson reads the inclusion of machines in photomontage as evidence of its privileging of a non-magical material reality: ‘The materialism of Berlin Dada was doubtless to some extent a continuation of Huelsenbeck’s extolling of life in the everyday urban industrialized world in opposition to the exotic primitivism of the Zurich group’.39 However, the opposition is not as straightforward as Benson’s comparison implies. The cut-outs of Berlin photomontage enacted the recreation of matter as alive, as constitutive of all that was miraculous in the world, not as a denial of the miraculous but as its demonstration. Schrenck-Notzing and ‘the fraudulent representation of non-existent things’40 If magic consists of those practices and beliefs which dangerously focus on materiality and its animation, its autonomous power, spiritual­ists’ beliefs during the period can be seen as strangely at odds

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68  Leigh Wilson with their practices. While their beliefs suggest an attempt to save the religious from scientific materialism, and have often been read as such, their practices have at their centre the nature of matter, and it is here that spiritualism most clearly approaches magic.41 According to this taxonomy, when spiritualism and its investigators most strenuously champion science and its methods in the investigation of supernormal phenomena, this suggests more clearly spiritualism’s obvious imbrication with magic. Moreover, this move towards magic is furthered by an increasingly common element of both the production and the investigation of such spiritualist phenomena in the early twentieth century – the use of photography. Spirit photography had been practised among spiritualists for some time, beginning with William Howard Mumler in the United States in the early 1860s, and had been introduced to Europe by Frederick Hudson in the early 1870s.42 For Mumler, his practice was ‘the science of spirit photography’, and for millions of spiritualists photography provided objective proofs of their beliefs.43 Photography provided too membership of that area of science and technology which through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries opened up the natural world to show how much was still mysterious, how little human beings yet understood.44 At the same time, the images of the supposed spirits themselves mediated between, and effectively secured, the mobile and conflicted relationship during the period between ideas of materiality and that which might be beyond it. The ‘extras’ – as the images of spirits came to be called – were often veiled, draped in swathes of fabric, or else were very faint and shadowy. Both of these effects provided a softening of edges that produced a graduation from the material of the actual photograph – the clothes, flesh, and hair of sitters, furniture, background walls – to the ‘bodies’ of the extras. The veils functioned, too, however, as material delimitations of the world of matter and the world of spirit. While, as Martyn Jolly reports, a witness for the defence at Mumler’s trial for fraud in 1869 asserted that the ‘extras’ could be spirits ‘because everything had some form of materiality, even spirits, so there was no reason why they could not be photographed’, the ethereal veils of nineteenth-century spirit photography insist on a graded materiality, which allowed their wearers to be both in the world of matter, and so able to be photographed, but also from a world beyond contemporary conceptions of matter.45 On the whole, in the nineteenth century, detractors claimed that spirit photographs had been exposed twice.46 Dolls, or complicit assistants, were the most likely models for the ‘extras’, disguised by the drapes and veils. In the early twentieth century, while the

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  69 mise-en-scène of production varied, from the photographing of mediums by investigators to the production of images by ‘medium photog­raphers’ during development, the portraits produced were not the veiled double exposures of William Mumler, Frederick Hudson, and so on, but, as in the photographs of Ada Emma Deane discussed above, clearly portraits cut from magazines and newspapers. A later essay in the catalogue from the exhibition ‘The Perfect Medium’, by Andreas Fischer, recounts an important example of such photographic practice as it became enmeshed with ‘cut-out’ portraits. The psychical researcher, psychiatrist, and sexologist Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing became famous throughout Europe just before the First World War for his investigations, and for the criticisms and ridicule they provoked. In 1914 Schrenck-Notzing pub­lished an account of his four-year investigation of the French ation medium Marthe Béraud, who used Eva C. as a materialis­ nym. Schrenck-Notzing had become interested in such pseudo­ phenomena in the 1880s, and more recently his investigations had made the evidence of photography central.47 In his work of 1914, Materialisations-Phaenomene: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Mediumistischen Teleplastie, Schrenck-Notzing argued that at the heart of his investigation were images of Eva and her materialis­ ations ‘objectively recorded by free photography’.48 In the same year, Schrenck-Notzing’s collaborator in his investigations, Juliette Alexandre Bisson, with whom Eva C. lived and who acted as her guardian, also published her account of the phenomena, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation: étude expérimentale. These works were full of photographs of Eva, taken by both Schrenck-Notzing and Bisson. Eva’s materialisations consisted in the main of either ectoplasmic emanations draped over various parts of her body, or of materialised faces, leaning against her body or sometimes attached to the curtains covering the medium’s cabinet. It was these photographs of materialised faces that became the site of charges of fraud against the medium. Soon after the publication of Schrenck-Notzing’s and Bisson’s accounts, the journal The Psychic Magazine, based in Paris, published an article claiming that the materialised faces were in fact roughly cut out and amateurishly doctored photographic portraits from the magazine Le Miroir. These claims centred around a photograph of Eva taken by Bisson and Schrenck-Notzing at a sitting in Paris in November 1912. The medium is seen from one side, and the materialisation covers the other side of her face, furthest from the viewer, so that the back of the materialisation is visible. The letters M, I, R, and O can be clearly seen, in a typeface highly suggestive of the magazine’s masthead. The article in The Psychic Magazine went on

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70  Leigh Wilson to claim that various of Eva’s materialised faces were almost identical to portraits of famous people – actresses, President Poincaré, and President Woodrow Wilson – which had appeared in Le Miroir. The article concluded that, among the photographs presented by Bisson and Schrenck-Notzing as evidence for the authenticity of Eva C.’s mediumship, ‘there are no real materialis­ations, but only representa­ tions of faces’.49 Rather than being made of a supernatural matter that would prove their non-material and miraculous origin, then, the faces were mere copies and not the real thing.50 Fischer’s account of the photographs of Eva C., and of the Miroir scandal in particular, is, in the words of Apraxine and Schmit, ‘resolutely historical’. However, rather than recreating the potency of the images of Eva C., it focuses on the extent to which, at the time, they were read as just images. Even before the revelations in The Psychic Magazine, people were ‘disconcerted by the flatness of some materializations and by the fact that they looked like paintings or drawings, some even bearing the marks of folds and crumpling’.51 For viewers of that period, the formal construction of the images precludes the possibility that the phenomena represented are ‘true’; and in Fischer’s account too, in recalling these historical details ‘straight’, without giving any attention to the images themselves, any power that the images may have is undermined and deflated. In the faces produced by Eva C., the veils and drapes of Mumler and Hudson have disappeared almost entirely. Instead, the faces are bare of any mediation of the material and the immaterial, or they are sometimes draped with small pieces of ectoplasm, itself an intermediary between the two.52 While the criticism of The Psychic Magazine was that the phenomena were ‘representations of faces’ and not ‘real materialisations’, the magical materiality we have seen at work in the cut-out faces of photomontage suggests that, in fact, their materiality is precisely the point.53 Rather, paradoxically, the unmediated presentation of the cut-out faces turned them from representation into matter, or rather they were representation as matter. After the furore over claims of fraud, Schrenck-­Notzing published another work in 1914, Der Kampf um die ­Material­is­ations-Phänomene, which included more results collected since he had finished his earlier work, and, crucially, contained his most detailed rebuttal of the criticisms.54 Schrenck-Notzing’s belief in the supernormal causation of the phenomena was not dented by the charges which appeared in The Psychic Magazine, and which had been repeated in many other newspapers, because he was utterly convinced that no extra material could have been smuggled into the séance room. Both Eva C. and the séance room were thoroughly and rigorously

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  71 examined before and after each sitting. His rebuttal depended, then, on showing that the material nature of the cut-out faces was not proof of their fraudulent but of their miraculous nature. If the faces could not have been smuggled in, or produced in a normal way, then the fact of their materiality is evidence of their supernormal origins. This, as I have argued, is precisely what the images of Dada photo­ montage attempt – to reveal the miraculous not via the material, but in it. Schrenck-Notzing’s defence of himself, Bisson, and Eva C. in Der Kampf goes further. Following the claims, he went to Paris, he says, cut out pictures from copies of Le Miroir, and then photographed them on Eva’s body in the same conditions as in the original sittings: ‘in all these tests the Miroir pictures came out uniformly so feeble, so devoid of vivacity and relief and markedly less defined than the reproductions shown in this work, that, for this reason alone, [The Psychic Magazine’s] hypothesis is untenable’.55 The undermining of the charge that Eva C.’s cut-out faces were representations, and the assertion of their status as material, as the thing itself, is supported by further evidence put forward by Schrenck-Notzing. Der Kampf contains the testimonies of a number of photographers who were involved with the original investigations, or luminaries who were asked by Schrenck-Notzing to compare the original photographs with the mock-ups he had made with his own cut-outs from Le Miroir. In particular, one such testimony responds to the charge, central to The Psychic Magazine’s case, that one of Eva C.’s materialisations was a cut-out and inexpertly doctored image of President Woodrow Wilson (see figure 3.2). Professor Hermann Urban asserts that, not only do the materialisation and the portrait in Le Miroir not resemble each other that closely, but that the status of the latter as reproduction, as representation, was impossible to erase when trying to reconstruct Eva’s image using normal means: it was impossible to alter the position of the head, which shows at once that this picture cannot have been used fraudulently for the phenomenon picture. It also appears to be impossible to hide the marking of the half-tone screen by drawing, especially in the light and middle tones, while, in the enlargement of the phenomenon head, I discovered no indications of the half-tone screen, as would have been the case if the Wilson portrait had been drawn over and thereafter exposed.56

The marks of representation are absent from the materialisation, asserting its status as a thing itself. Schrenck-Notzing never denied that the phenomena produced by Eva C. looked like normal material. In concluding his Phenomena

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72  Leigh Wilson

3.2  Materialisation produced by Eva C., January 1913, and charged with being a cut-out portrait of President Woodrow Wilson.

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  73 of Materialisation, he agreed that ‘Most of the products and objects photographed recall well-known objects familiar from our own observations’, and that in the faces the ‘pictorial, mask-like, diagrammatic character predominates’.57 However, his firm belief that they could not have fraudulently entered the séance room, and the lack of traces of reproduction on the images, together transfigure the faces into matter that is alive, despite their ‘mask-like’ appearance. Spiritualism has been seen as a reaction against the materialism of nineteenth-century science and nineteenth-century thought in general, and its phenomena have, given this assertion, been subject to a range of dismissal and wry mirth due to their often abjectly istic nature. Eva C.’s hastily cut-out faces seem, on this material­ account, a particularly poor riposte to the certainties of materialism. Dada photomontage, on the other hand, enjoys a status at the heart of the historical avant-garde, championed for its scathing denunci­ ation of the mendacities of German, and European, bourgeois culture, and for the resulting experimental practice which blew apart conventional ways of representing the world. However, a rethinking of the nature and status of the material in both spiritualism and Berlin Dada – in both the historical discourses of the occult and in the formal innovations of avant-garde practice – enables a changed reading of the cut-out faces: neither inert matter nor mediated representation, the cut-out portrait disturbed viewing and remade matter as magical. Notes 1 See, for example, Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. 2 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, October, 5, summer 1978, p. 37. 3 Ibid., p. 38. 4 Ibid., p. 42, emphasis in original. 5 Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, ‘Photography and the Occult’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 12. 6 Ibid., p. 13. 7 Ibid., p. 14. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Ibid., p. 17. 11 James Frazer, The Golden Bough [1922], London: Penguin, 1996, pp. 58, 61, 62.

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74  Leigh Wilson 12 Andrew Lang, Magic and Religion, London: Longmans, Green, 1901, p. 47. 13 Frazer, The Golden Bough, ch. 3. 14 Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986, p. 80. 15 Ibid. 16 Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, especially p. 212. 17 Richard Sheppard, Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism, Evanston, IL: North­ western University Press, 2000, p. 281. 18 Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities’, in Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1979, p. 92. 19 Sheppard, Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism, pp. 281, 286. 20 See Sheppard, ‘Tricksters, Carnival, and the Magical Figures of Dada Poetry’, in Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism, pp. 292–303. 21 Sheppard, Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism, pp. 131–44. 22 Raoul Hausmann, ‘DADA in Europe’ [1920], in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, trans. Timothy Adès, London: Tate, 2006, p. 92. 23 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Synthetisches Cino der Malerei’ [1918], reprinted in Michael Erlhoff (ed.), Texte bis 1933, vol. I, Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1982; English translation from Brigid Doherty, ‘Berlin’, in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2006, p. 89. 24 Doherty, ‘Berlin’, p. 89. 25 Tom Gunning, in a response to Rosalind Krauss’s article on Nadar, suggests that spirit photography, and photography per se, are uncanny not because they are indexical but because they are iconic. See Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. 26 Doherty, ‘Berlin’, p. 90. 27 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’ [1931], in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989, p. 178. 28 Ibid., pp. 178–9. 29 See Benson’s explication of the tangle of retrospective accounts, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, pp. 110–16. 30 Ibid., p. 111. 31 For an account of the various origins of photomontage see Doherty, ‘Berlin’. 32 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 123ff., 181ff. 33 See Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London: British Library, 2006, pp. 111–39; Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Most Disreputable Camera in the World”: Spirit Photography in the United Kingdom in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, pp. 72–9. 34 Fischer, ‘“The Most Disreputable Camera in the World”’, p. 77.

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  75 5 3 36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48

9 4 50 51 52 3 5 54 55 56 57

Quoted in Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, p. 119. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, p. 175. Ibid., p. 116. Raoul Hausmann, ‘Tatlin at Home Prend Forme’ [1920], in Michel Giroud, Raoul Hausmann: ‘Je ne suis pas un photographe’, Paris: Chêne, 1975, p. 52; English translation in M. Goodwin, Dada: Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980, unpaginated; quoted in Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, p. 186. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, p. 187. Ibid., p. 265. See for example Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; John J. Cerrulo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain, Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982. See Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead; Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium. Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, p. 16. These are claims that Mumler made in his memoirs – see William Mumler, The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography Written by Himself, Boston, MA: Colby and Rich, 1875, pp. 64–8. Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, p. 14. See Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, p. 15, for the various possible methods of production given by the prosecution at William Mumler’s trial in 1869. For an account of Schrenck-Notzing’s Munich laboratory, which Thomas Mann described as ‘this strange room that was like a photographic studio even down to the objects to distract the children’s mind with’ (Thomas Mann, ‘An Experience in the Occult’ [1923], in Three Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Knopf, 1929, p. 234), see Heather Wolffram, ‘In the Laboratory of the Ghost-Baron: Parapsychology in Germany in the Early 20th Century’, Endeavour, 33:4, 2009, pp. 151–6. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ‘Preface’ [1914], reprinted in English in Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1920, p. vi. Quoted by Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation, p. 292. For another short account of the Le Miroir episode, from the point of view of the role of the photographs of the phenomena, see Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead. Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena”: The Photographic Recording of Materializations’, in Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, p. 179. As it was seen by the inventor of the term ‘ectoplasm’, Charles Richet. See Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research [1923], New York: Arno Press, 1975, p. 469. Quoted in Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation, p. 292. This second work was included in the 1920 English translation of the ­Materialisations-Phaenomene. Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation, p. 297. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., p. 261.

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76  Leigh Wilson Bibliography Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, ‘Photography and the Occult’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986. Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Juliette Alexandre Bisson, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation: étude expérimentale, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1914. John J. Cerrulo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain, Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982. Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Brigid Doherty, ‘Berlin’, in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2006. Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Most Disreputable Camera in the World”: Spirit Photography in the United Kingdom in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena”: The Photographic Recording of Materializations’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. James Frazer, The Golden Bough [1922], London: Penguin, 1996. M. Goodwin, Dada: Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980. Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington and ­Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Raoul Hausmann, ‘DADA in Europe’ [1920], in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, trans. Timothy Adès, London: Tate, 2006. Raoul Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’ [1931], in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989. Raoul Hausmann, ‘Synthetisches Cino der Malerei’ [1918], reprinted in Michael Erlhoff (ed.), Texte bis 1933, vol. I, Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1982. Raoul Hausmann, ‘Tatlin at Home Prend Forme’ [1920], in Michel Giroud, Raoul Hausmann: ‘Je ne suis pas un photographe’, Paris: Chêne, 1975. Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London: British Library, 2006. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

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Spiritualist phenomena, Dada photomontage, and magic  77 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, October, 5, summer 1978. Andrew Lang, Magic and Religion, London: Longmans, Green, 1901. Thomas Mann, ‘An Experience in the Occult’ [1923], in Three Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Knopf, 1929. William Mumler, The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography Written by Himself, Boston, MA: Colby and Rich, 1875. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research [1923], New York: Arno Press, 1975. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Der Kampf um die Materialisations-Phänomene, Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1914. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Materialisations-Phaenomene: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Mediumistischen Teleplastie, Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1914. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1920. Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities’, in Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (eds), Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1979. Richard Sheppard, Dada–Modernism–Postmodernism, Evanston, IL: North­ western University Press, 2000. Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Heather Wolffram, ‘In the Laboratory of the Ghost-Baron: Parapsychology in Germany in the Early 20th Century’, Endeavour, 33:4, 2009.

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4

Ectoplasm and photography: mediumistic performances for camera Neil Matheson

Why this dark cabinet? The medium declares it is necessary to the production of the phenomena ‘that relate to the condensation of fluids’. (Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, 1907)

A major preoccupation of the astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion in his late work of the 1920s was the idea of the independent existence of the soul, the special powers with which such an entity might be endowed, and its capacity to survive the destruction of the body. This idea of the persistence of existence after death and of contact with the dead is one of the central ideas with which the artist Susan MacWilliam engages in her 2009 video work F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N. First shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N draws upon the artist’s extensive investigation of psychic phenomena, and in particular of the role of the medium. MacWilliam based this work on the psychic investigations and photo­ graphic records made by the Canadian psychic researcher Thomas Glendenning Hamilton in 1931, while recording a ‘teleplasmic’ manifestation at a séance, when the word ‘FLAMMARION’ appeared in the form of a material string of letters on the wall of the séance cabinet (see figure 4.1). Hamilton’s own notes refer to Flammarion’s Mysterious Psychic Forces (1907), suggesting some familiarity with his writings and that the manifestation was perhaps intended to evidence some form of contact with the dead astronomer himself.1 Such post-mortem communication, as John Gray discusses in The Immortalization Commission, was a major concern of a number of prominent late-Victorian figures such as Henry Sidgwick and F. W. H. Myers of the Society for Psychical Research, seeking incontrovertible proof of the purposiveness of existence as the essential foundation of the 78

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4.1  Susan MacWilliam, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009 (detail).

moral order.2 In order to try to prove the persistence of ‘human personality’ after death, both Myers and Sidgwick made attempts to ‘communicate beyond the grave’, leaving sealed messages – a system of ‘cross-correspondences’ – which it was hoped would verify messages claimed to be received from them after their deaths, through séances.3 The teleplasm ‘FLAMMARION’ could therefore be read, like the cross-correspondences, as an attempt to prove post-mortem existence in the form of a kind of material ‘signature’ – a paradoxical message whose sole content is the subject’s proper name. As MacWilliam’s video cuts rapidly between shots of cameras and archival images of Hamilton’s séance room, revealing a bank of now-archaic camera equipment, the enormous weight attached to photographic evidence in those investigations is made apparent. Hamilton’s work extends into the 1930s the tradition of earlier psychic researchers, where the quintessential object of the camera’s gaze is the body of the female medium; but a gaze that MacWilliam now turns back upon the two male protagonists of the work as they reflect upon those events. The Irish poet and writer Ciaran Carson speaks from inside an open-fronted wooden cubicle, like the séance cabinet in Hamilton’s photographs (see figure 4.2) – a miniature theatre, from which he declaims, in an incantatory chant that invokes the power of language, a series of photographic terms: ‘viewfinder, wide angle lens, work print […] zoom’. This monologue is interwoven with another spoken by the parapsychologist Dr William G. Roll, who

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4.2  Susan MacWilliam, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009 (detail). reflects on the manifestation itself – ‘ectoplasmic voice’, ‘ectoplasmic voice’ – his words echoed back to him as though transported through the ether, creating interference, and asserting language as an intensely material phenomenon. These are highly staged performances, where the interpretation of the phenomena is left open by the two men – ‘You can see anything at all in anything at all, I think. If that’s how you think’, suggests Carson – like a doorway left ajar, opening onto another space, such that the teleplasmic phenomenon is itself transformed into poetry and visual art. The question of paranormal communication lies at the very origin of modern spiritualism, rooted in the rapped messages reported by the Fox sisters at Rochester in 1848, but shifting rapidly to the register of the visual in the spirit photographs of the Boston engraver William Mumler, during the early 1860s, when wraith-like forms began to appear in his portraits.4 Rooted in the ritual of creating a portrait, the subsequent history of spirit photography is one of increasingly spectacular manifestations, culminating in the bodily extrusions of the substance known as ‘ectoplasm’, and the pivotal figure in all of this is the medium. The theatricality of those manifestations, generated in the overheated atmosphere of a darkened room, makes clear that, notwithstanding any religious or social function that they fulfilled, these were essentially performances – more specifically, in the investi­ gations discussed here, they were performed precisely in order to be photographed – and this intrusion of the camera inevitably shaped the nature of the performance itself. Medium and photographer came

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Ectoplasm and photography  81 to constitute a kind of ensemble, forming a complex of intersecting subjectivities, demands, and desires, echoing the situation found in contemporary photographic interrogations of the hysterical female body made at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under the direction of J. M. Charcot. Focusing on the French experience, this performative ensemble will be traced through the work of scientists and psychic researchers such as Flammarion and Charles Richet, and the ontological status of that imagery explored in the context of the increasingly sharp distinction being made between orthodox science and paranormal phenomena. And I want to return again to consider the continued relevance of that history and the imagery that it generated for contemporary artists. Primal scene: Victorian melodrama Spirit photographs had first emerged in Britain in 1872, from the collaboration of the professional photographer Frederick Hudson with the somewhat eccentric spiritualist Georgiana Houghton. In Houghton’s account, the medium, a Mrs Guppy, was ‘mesmerised’ inside ‘a kind of extemporised dark cabinet’ set up in Hudson’s London studio, while Houghton sat for the portraits on which spirit figures would appear.5 The paradigm for the highly problematic relation­ship between medium and scientist, though, was established by William Crookes, an eminent chemist and physicist, who carried out tests on the young medium Florence Cook in his own home during 1873–74, using as many as five cameras. The intense theatri­ cality of Cook’s manifestations is readily apparent in the resultant images, as ‘Katie King’ emerges from the curtained-off ‘spirit cabinet’ (see figure 4.3). Such cabinets – whether a separate room, a curtained-off partition, or an actual wooden cabinet – in which the psychic forces were claimed to be ‘concentrated’, became a standard feature of mediumistic performances, a kind of inner sanctum within which the medium would fall into a trance or admit privileged spectators. Emerging dramatically from the cabinet, the medium would perform before an expectant audience, and in the case of ‘scientific tests’ would perform precisely in order to be photographed. Séances were often conducted in red light, echoing the practice of photographers following the introduction of ortho­ chromatic film in 1873, while some spirit photographers also used the cabinet as a darkroom. Tom Gunning suggests that the cabinet itself doubles as a kind of camera, where the ‘medium retires into a dark

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4.3  Materialisation of the spirit ‘Katie King’ by the medium Florence Cook, ca.1870s. chamber (camera obscura) and produces a double of herself which emerges into the light’, and that, with the production of ectoplasm, the medium herself ‘became a sort of camera, her spiritual negativity bodying forth a positive image’.6 But more than simply ‘theatrical’, these performances drew more specifically upon the popular stage tradition of Victorian melodrama,

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Ectoplasm and photography  83 a form that flourished in both England and France in the wake of the French Revolution. In Peter Brooks’ classic account, melodrama is not so much a ‘genre’ as ‘a coherent mode of imagining and representing’, and could thus be argued to be directly transferable to the context of the séance.7 Brooks poses melodrama as ‘a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict’ make legible the big choices in ‘ways of being’, a scenario immediately recognisable in the several dichotomies played out in the experiments of Crookes, conducted in an era of shaken faith: science versus religion, rationality versus superstition, high versus low cultural forms, and so on.8 The valedictory melodrama of Cook ‘sobbing hysterically’ as ‘Katie King’ prepares to leave for the last time sites the episode squarely within popular theatre, while straining to provide narrative closure to the entire episode.9 Tatiana Kontou has argued that ‘the truths of spiritualism form strong links with the Victorian theatre’, where the séance both fed on the stage while exercising a reciprocal impact upon theatre, as in the spectral­is­ation of the actress and the resort to psychic themes.10 Kontou argues that the work of the Society for Psychical Research shifted the focus from physical manifestations at séances, in favour of ‘the inner hauntings of the mind’, and that a corresponding shift is found in fin-de-siècle theatre, away from exaggerated physical and emotional gestures and towards a more psychologically nuanced style of acting, as pioneered in the work of Henrik Ibsen.11 Outside the Society though, physical phenomena assumed ever more spectacular forms at séances, while melodrama remained a powerful force in popular theatre, feeding directly into early cinema, and retaining the centrality of the body in what has been termed an ‘aesthetics of embodiment’.12 And a body, Brooks adds, often on the verge of hysteria, ‘since hysteria gives us the maximal conversion of psychic affect into somatic meaning’.13 The theatre of charm: mediums and hysterics in France A central problem for any ‘scientific’ investigation of mediumistic activity – quite apart from its rootedness in the irrational and the regular exposure of fraud – was, as Pascal Le Maléfan has demonstrated, its close association with mental pathology.14 Le Maléfan traces how, during the nineteenth century, psychic states were broadly divided between ‘waking’ and ‘sleep’, with the latter posed as the ‘abnormal’, non-conscious state, and how, from the beginning of the century, as for example in the work of Maine de Biran,

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84  Neil Matheson abnormal states such as catalepsy, somnambulism, and delirium were conceived in terms of automatism.15 As a kind of ‘doubling’ of the personality, mediumism came to be conceived in terms of either lower, more instinctual or automatic forms of functioning of the mind, or, alternatively, and more positively by some, as the operation of another part of the psyche. The founder of modern spiritism in France, Allan Kardec, in his 1861 Le Livre des médiums, posed the medium as a kind of passive instrument of some ‘foreign intelligence’, and warned of the dangers of obsession and even insanity, though he also stressed the potential therapeutic benefits of séances and considered the dangers to be exaggerated.16 The medical schools too warned of the threats posed to mental health, and mediumism soon attracted the attention of alienists and psychologists, with some viewing the mediumistic trance as a form of hallucination that posed dangers of mental disintegration.17 The ‘second state’ of the medium, argues Le Maléfan, was in effect viewed as a ‘transitory delirious state’, closely resembling that of spiritist delirium, albeit intentionally willed and of a temporary nature.18 As Le Maléfan demonstrates, mediumism entailed the ‘disaggregation of the subject’ and its substitution with a plurality of entities, as evidenced by its long association with hysteria. Charcot, in his research into hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital during the 1870s and 1880s, together with followers such as Paul Richer, D. M. Bourneville, and Charles Richet, believed that mediums fell within the same category as somnambulists, cases of possession, and ecstatic states.19 Charcot and Richer’s Les Démoniaques dans l’art (1887) analysed how artists had represented such states, and sited the hysteric within that same visual tradition.20 The psychologist Pierre Janet, too, argued that mediums ‘are neurotics, when not frankly hysterics’, and conceived mediumism as a form of mental automatism.21 Yet even a sceptic like Janet insists that one has to distinguish between patently fraudulent phenomena and those incidences reported by credible witnesses – phenomena that may yet prove, he suggests, to be part of some as yet unknown ‘future science’.22 In this, Janet echoes the claim made as early as 1869 by Flammarion that: ‘We are witnessing the dawn of an unknown science’.23 According to the French occultist Gérard Encausse (‘Papus’), in his 1896 investigation of the medium and prophetess Henriette Couédon, the celebrated ‘voyante de la Rue de Paradis’, who prophesied in a rhyming chant under the control of the Angel Gabriel, the medium occupies two different states: a ‘normal state’, and a ‘second state’ distinct from that of hypnosis, and that it is only in this second state that mediumistic powers are manifested.24 Papus

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Ectoplasm and photography  85 too draws an analogy with science, claiming that ‘the sensitivity of the medium vis-à-vis the consultant is determined according to laws analogous to those that rule magnetism and electricity’.25 The attitude of the person consulting the medium is, he argues, crucial: in the case of a sceptic, it would be like putting together two magnets of the same polarity, resulting in opposition, whereas the non-sceptic would produce a ‘sympathetic’ current between the two. Couédon herself, soon abandoned by fame, suffered severe psychic problems in later life, eventually being certified as insane in 1920, and became the subject of a further case study by the prominent alienist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault.26 According to Clément Chéroux, following Kardec’s death in 1869, his successor at the head of French spiritism, Pierre Gaëtan Leymarie, strongly impressed by Crookes’ experiments, concluded that ‘photography could be the prime instrument of their project to rationalise spiritualism’.27 Spirit photography was introduced to France in 1873 by Edouard Buguet, who combined the roles of photographer and medium, transforming the making of a spirit photograph into a theatrical ritual, where, after long delay to create expectation, he would enter the studio in a trance, proclaim incantations, and make ‘magnetic passes’ over the camera, before making the sitter’s spirit portrait.28 Buguet’s successful prosecution in 1875, when he admitted that his spirit photographs were a total fraud, destroyed all credibility in the practice in France, although the spiritists refused to acknowledge they had been duped, testifying to the strength of the mutually reinforcing ensemble inculcated through Buguet’s theatrical performances. It is no coincidence that while photography was being deployed in the investigation of mediums, Charcot should have been similarly using photographers such as Paul Régnard at the Salpêtrière during the early 1870s to visually realise his model of the hysterical attack.29 Photography, posed from the outset as the ‘mirror of the real’, was embraced by researchers such as Duchenne de Boulogne and Dr Hugh Diamond as a scientific tool, and was likewise deployed at the Salpêtrière, where the photographer Albert Londe would claim that: ‘the photographic plate is the scientist’s true retina’.30 However, as Georges Didi-Huberman observes, Charcot’s positivist method was not simply one of neutral observation, but was rather intended, following the contemporary formulation of Claude Bernard, to ‘bear an idea’, and this idea was made to emerge by ‘provoking its observation’; observation in this method is thus, firstly, ‘the art of obtaining facts’, and, secondly, ‘the art of putting them to work’ (emphasis in original).31 Hysteria was widely perceived, even

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86  Neil Matheson at the time, to be confined largely to the Salpêtrière, the product of suggestion and the ‘training’ of selected patients, to which Charcot retorted: ‘It would be truly fantastic if I could create ailments as my whim or fancy dictate. But […] in this I am nothing more than a photographer; I inscribe what I see.’32 Charcot is surely being dis­ ingenuous here, and there is a clear analogy to be drawn with Crookes’ parallel construction of paranormal phenomena in the photographs of Florence Cook, in that, in each case, we have the eroticis­ation of the young female body while in a ‘second state’, whether under hypnosis or in a mediumistic trance, and the construction of highly voyeuristic tableaux for the camera. Such a fantasy scenario is posed by Didi-Huberman as the product of the reciprocal ‘charm’ exerted by both hysteric and physician, and is thus ‘provoked’ to assume visual form, fixed by the camera, and then put into circulation as a photographic image claiming the status of ‘scientific evidence’.33 Theatricality, or what Didi-Huberman character­ ises as a ‘silent dramaturgy’, is thus intrinsic to the interplay of ‘charm’ and seduction through which visual ‘evidence’ is generated in the case of hysteria – a model equally applicable, I want to claim, in the case of the investigation of mediums. One of the people at Charcot’s clinical demonstrations of hysterical attacks was the young Sigmund Freud, whose early work with Joseph Breuer focused upon hysteria, and which was first introduced to England in a report made to the Society for Psychical Research by Myers in January 1893. As Gray relates, Myers developed his own alternative to the Freudian model of the unconscious in his concept of the ‘subliminal self’, an area of the mind operating below the level of consciousness and endowed with particular capacities, including telepathy and clairvoyance.34 Such special abilities also embraced a ‘capacity for impersonation’ and for dramatisation, as evidenced in the performances of mediums when projecting their ‘spirit controls’, thus further reinforcing their association with the theatrical.35 Despite widespread scepticism of psychic imagery at the time, other scientists were tempted by the idea that the field of psychic phenomena might actually offer potential for expanding the scope of science and that its investigation could be brought within the fold of mainstream, positivist science. Prominent French scientists such as Richet, Flammarion, and Pierre and Marie Curie, as well as Cesare Lombroso and Dr J. Ochorowitz in Warsaw, all carried out tests on Eusapia Palladino, the most celebrated medium of her time. Conversely, mediums and spiritualists had recourse to a scientific vocabulary to justify their activities, variously invoking rays, waves, and fluids, or the example of technologies such as telegraphy, radio,

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Ectoplasm and photography  87 and X-rays. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel argue, for example, that the Curies’ demonstration of the strange glow of radium, an unknown form of radiation operating without loss of matter, at the International Exposition of 1900, served to suggest that the emanations from mediums’ bodies, including ecto­ plasm, might have some scientific justification.36 The imagery generated by these psychic researches falls within the same pattern as that established by Crookes and Charcot, where, in Didi-Huberman’s argument, bodies are exhibited within ‘a staging aimed at knowledge’, incorporated into rituals that manifest ‘a certain kind of theatricality’, within a photographic encounter that operates somewhere between ‘real space’ and ‘psychic space’.37 In their intense corporeality such scenarios surely engage a whole range of fantasies: eroticism, the exertion of power over bodies, and the accrual of knowledge. Photography, in effect, destroys its own evidential qualities through its theatricality, and is ultimately dismissed by Didi-Huberman as ‘an apparatus of subjectivity’: ‘It ruins evidence’, he asserts, ‘from a theater’.38 Flammarion and the temptations of ‘unknown natural forces’ Camille Flammarion is best known as a populariser of astronomy and related scientific fields, but as early as 1861 he came across the work of Kardec and soon became involved in séances alongside such writers and dramatists as Théophile Gautier and Victorien Sardou.39 Sardou had written while in a mediumistic trance of the inhabitants of Jupiter, and produced drawings of the houses there of Mozart, Zoroaster, and others, and Flammarion’s approach to astronomy was similarly highly imagistic, influenced by developments in photography and spectroscopy, and in marked contrast with the mathematical approach that then dominated the field. Flammarion cultivated an accessible, narrative style that relied heavily on lyrical description and imaginative projection, as for example with his very early work La Pluralité des mondes habités (1862), where he speculates on the possible existence of life on other planets, posing the human being as part of the immensity of the universe and the night sky as ‘the future theatre of our immortality’.40 Flammarion claimed to have received spirit messages via the mediation of Galileo, a figure with whom he strongly identified, particularly by way of psychographie, a form of ‘automatic writing’ in which the movement of a pencil was claimed to be controlled by spirits.41 In his 1865 study of the celebrated American performers the Davenport brothers, Des

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4.4  The Davenport brothers, ca.1864.

Forces naturelles inconnues, Flammarion explored spectacular forms of apparently paranormal performance, in which the brothers were able to manipulate a range of musical instruments while tied up inside a cabinet (see figure 4.4).42 The ‘spirit cabinet’ inside which the brothers operated anticipates that used by mediums, though the Davenports claimed to be neither mediums nor magicians, and Flammarion used the term ‘unknown natural forces’ to characterise their powers, later adopting the term ‘psychic’ forces. Peter Lamont, using ‘frame analysis’ – essentially the social frameworks within which we make sense of any experience – has argued that the Davenports’ performances were framed within the category of mediumship (for example in being introduced by a talk on spiritual­ ism), further reinforcing the case for treating their cabinet as the Urform of the medium’s spirit cabinet, while also explicitly treating séances as ‘performances’.43 On Kardec’s death in 1869, Flammarion delivered the funeral oration, openly declaring that ‘spiritualism is not a religion but a science, a science of which we scarcely know the a, b, c’ (emphasis in the original), after which he withdrew from public involvement in the paranormal for over twenty years.44 In returning to psychic phenomena during the 1890s, Flammarion again rejected the idea

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Ectoplasm and photography  89 of spiritualism as ‘religion’, and was concerned only with providing explanations within the parameters of positivist science. From 1899 he again began to write regularly on psychic phenomena, and in L’Inconnu et les problèmes psychiques (1900) set out to demonstrate the existence of what he claimed as ‘facts’ using ‘the methods of scientific observation and analysis’, while acknowledging the disapproval of mainstream science.45 And Flammarion claimed support from the shift in science away from the fixed, Newtonian conception of the universe, observing that matter was no longer the solid entity it had traditionally been conceived, but that bodies were composed of billions of atoms in perpetual motion, such that the claims of spiritualism became more plausible. In 1898 Flammarion organised a series of tests with Palladino, widely regarded as providing the most convincing evidence of psychic forces, followed by further sessions in 1905 and 1906. Palladino was illiterate, and confined her displays to a set routine of physical phenomena, including the levitation of tables, movement of objects, and the playing of musical instruments. But despite finding these stolidly material phenomena ‘rather vulgar’, Flammarion was convinced that they were the product of some ‘invisible force derived from the organism of the medium’, able to act outside the body. Among Flammarion’s guests at those séances was the dramatist Jules Clarétie, also present at the performances of Charcot’s hysterics and included in André Brouillet’s celebrated painting Une Leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887). For Lombroso, Palladino was a case of hysteria, originating in a childhood injury to the head, and Flammarion too refers to her ‘hysterical crises’.46 The psychic researcher Guillaume de Fontenay also attended, with a profusion of photographic equipment. When Eusapia promised ‘something which has never been accomplished by any other medium’ and amid high drama manifested a ‘third hand’ clasping a violin, she urged him to take the photograph quickly, but Flammarion reports that ‘the apparatus does not work […]. We all vehemently clamor for the photograph. Nothing moves.’47 The performance is repeated. There is a feeble flash. But ‘the photograph gives no picture’. It could hardly be made clearer that the ‘photogenic’ had become a prime consideration and that such phenomena were generated precisely with an eye to their being photographed. De Fontenay’s account of séances with Palladino makes clear the constructed or ‘provoked’ nature of the phenomena, citing the claim that: ‘with higher mediumism it is not sufficient to observe, one must also help to create the object of observation’.48 And he strikingly cites the characterisation of the medium as ‘an instrument, a delicate

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90  Neil Matheson instrument that we must know how to balance and regulate, while avoiding foreign influences that could vitiate her functioning’. The high melodrama of those sessions is also apparent in Fontenay’s account, with Palladino constantly sighing, groaning, and calling for less light – Meno luce! While accepting the possibility of fraud, de Fontenay argues that the photograph at least confirms the ‘objectivity’ of the phenomena recorded, excluding the possibility of collective hallucination.49 Flammarion reported those séances in a text translated as Mys­ teri­ous Psychic Forces (1907), where he suggests that human beings possess some ‘psychic force’ capable of acting upon matter at a distance, and which he compares to the ‘effluvium which emanates from electrified bodies’, controlled by some ‘subliminal’ part of the mind – though he leaves open the question of spirit intervention as unproven.50 Flammarion had conjectured in 1869 that: ‘we are living in the midst of a world invisible to us, and that it is not impossible that there may be living on the earth a class of beings, also invisible to us, endowed with a wholly different kind of senses’ – a claim that would be directly echoed by André Breton in his ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto’ (1942), where he invokes the existence of the ‘Great Transparent Ones’.51 Theatricality, melodrama, and the invention of ectoplasm The claimed discovery of a new substance, ‘ectoplasm’, is rooted in the psychic investigations conducted by another eminent French scientist, the physiologist and writer Charles Richet. Richet had a long-standing interest in somnambulism but became more seriously interested in psychic phenomena in 1884, after observing the experiments of the Russian scientist Alexander Aksakof, prompting Richet to travel to Milan, where he began attending the séances held by Palladino. Sensing the existence of some new force, Richet began to write of ‘psychic forces’, attempting at first to make psychic research conform to the methodologies of mainstream science, but when it became clear that this was not possible, in 1905 he proposed that it be considered a separate discipline, which he christened the métapsychique. Earlier that year Richet had attended a number of much-ridiculed séances at the Villa Carmen in Algiers, with the young medium Marthe Béraud, featuring the improbable manifestation of a draped, ghostly figure named Bien-Boa, together with a pretty blonde who claimed to be an Egyptian princess. Richet recalls how, on the appearance of Bien-Boa, the audience cried out ‘Bravo!’

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Ectoplasm and photography  91 and that, ‘like an actor who has well played his role, he reappeared a further three times […] saluting the audience’.52 Science, though, was already increasingly detaching itself from paranormal phenomena: in 1905 the psychological profession, concerned to enhance its scientific status, banned spiritualists from its international congress and in the same year psychologists Henri Piéron and Pierre Janet ridiculed Richet’s experiments. Nonetheless, during the early twentieth century ectoplasm came to play a central role in Richet’s ‘metapsychic’ model, as a substance emerging from the body and assuming the form of material objects. The term ‘ectoplasm’, rooted in Mesmer’s animal magnetism and in the notion of the transfer of powers through fluids, begins to appear during the 1880s, and derives from the Greek ektos, ‘outside’, and plasm, from plassein, ‘to mould’. French spiritism had developed the idea of the ‘perisprit’, a ‘fluidic material envelope’ said to surround the immaterial soul, and through which mediums were able to ‘see’ and to communicate with spirits.53 As Nicole Edelman observes, Kardec conceived this bodily envelope in terms of a kind of an ‘electric conductor’ of thought, posing the medium as a kind of ‘mediumistic machine’ or bio-device through which such invisible powers were manifested.54 Ectoplasm thus derives from such conjectures, posing the medium’s body as the generator of a mysterious new form of matter. This posited new substance was first systematically studied in Paris by the writer Juliette Alexandre Bisson, between 1909 and 1913, with the collaboration of the German psychic investigator, doctor, and sexologist Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. Bisson’s experiments claimed to provide proof of the existence of a white, ‘semi-liquid’ material, a ‘living substance’, which, she said, issued from the body of the medium.55 The tests were conducted with Marthe Béraud, former medium of the Villa Carmen, now operating under a new identity, ‘Eva C.’ (Eva Carrière), with Bisson described as the medium’s ‘protectress’, a term suggestive of the Gothic melodrama, though Bisson might be better designated her stage manager, given her controlling role in her protégé’s performances. Photography was again central to the credibility of the ‘tests’, beginning with two cameras but culminating in the use of eight, and published in 1913 as Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation, heavily illustrated with photographs, through which Bisson claimed to evidence the ‘irrefutable material existence’ of the phenomena.56 During those séances the ectoplasm appeared in increasingly spectacular form, emerging as skeins of white, veil-like material, from the medium’s nostrils, mouth, breasts, and from between her legs. Again, with

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92  Neil Matheson Eva C., the manifestations became even more overtly theatrical, with the medium installed inside a curtained ‘cabinet’ from which she eventually emerged to perform, producing mobile displays of ectoplasmic forms that became increasingly imagistic. The rapidly moving substance is regularly described as suggesting ‘something living’, or as like a ‘reptile’ or ‘a living serpent’.57 From the medium there are complaints, cries, and sighs, interspersed with moments of high drama whenever anyone attempted to touch the substance itself. The photographs, though, often painfully reveal the gap between what the observers believe they saw – mysterious faces, apparitions, ‘reptilian’ forms – and the crudely drawn figures, tawdry remnants of drapery, and crumpled newspaper cuttings revealed by the camera. The phenomena could be said to truly exist only in the context of live performance, where, in the overwrought ambience of the séance, they become sufficiently plausible for a predisposed witness. Schrenck-Notzing produced his own, more speculative account of those séances in his Materialisations-Phaenomene (1914), which takes as its premise the ‘abandonment of the materialistic conception of the universe’ in modern physics, and its displacement by a model of constant motion, dominated by the idea of energy, claiming support in the ideas of Henri Bergson.58 Photography was again claimed to vindicate the textual reports of the séances, with as many as nine cameras, including several stereoscopic cameras, trained on the medium. What was unexpected, though, was that the crude and crumpled figures revealed in the photographs – among which were faces traced to the Paris journal Le Miroir – rather than providing objective evidence, instead attracted enormous derision, and, as Andreas Fischer observes of such deployment of photography, ‘in almost every case it tended to discredit such experiments and those who conducted them’.59 Schrenck-Notzing’s melodramatic account also reinforces the sense that hysteria had migrated from the clinic to the séance room, referring specifically to the medium’s ‘un­favourable heredity’, and her ‘hysterical disposition’, which he judges to be ‘beyond doubt’.60 But if it is hysteria, as with the Salpêtrière, it is clear that this becomes a ‘theatre of hysteria’, where the medium is put on stage and given constant hints and prompting as to what is expected – in Didi-Huberman’s terms the phenomena are provoked – with the entire performance stage-managed and pushed towards the generation of faces and full figures, frequently straining the medium’s capacity to meet those demands. The investigators, too, as integral components of the ensemble, fail to escape this hysterical ambience, and, as Dr Ernest Dupré observed in a discussion of hysteria and analogous ‘second states’: ‘The hypnotised and the hypnotiser form

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Ectoplasm and photography  93 an indissoluble morbid couple, where the most interesting subject for the alienist is not the hypnotised!’ 61 As Friedrich Kittler argues in relation to hysteria and technology, it is precisely this obsessive focus upon aberrant phenomena that exacerbates their production. While ‘distraction’, says Kittler (citing Dr Hans Hennes writing in 1909), serves to diminish their frequency, conversely ‘it is enough to draw attention to phenomena, or for the physician to examine the patient […] in order for dysfunctions to appear with greater intensity’.62 This, says Kittler, is how psychiatry first discovered ‘Charcot’s simple secret’, what Foucault came only later to realise, ‘namely, that every test produces what it allegedly only reproduces’. For Hennes, Kittler adds, ‘it is quite likely that there would be no madness without filming it’ – an observation we might extend to the séance room.63 With the publication of Gustave Geley’s L’Ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance in 1924, psychic researchers now made clear that they were investigating ‘biological phenomena’, and not any manifestation of the supernatural or ‘marvellous’ – precisely at the time when surrealism launched its own celebration of the marvellous. Geley, director of the Institut Métapsychique International, proposed abandoning the term ‘materialisation’ and instead substituting ‘ectoplasm’, which he defines more radically in terms of ‘a physical splitting of the medium’, whereby, during the state of trance, a portion of the organism of the medium is externalised.64 Investi­gators considered it to be of the same substance wherever it was observed, and again claimed the support of new technologies. Geley traces the first accounts of ectoplasmic phenomena to Professor Morselli’s Psychologie et spiritisme (1907), where it is suggested that ‘a sort of human radio-activity’, directed by the medium’s sub­conscious, might be able to give birth to the ectoplasmic substance. But it was Richet, observing ‘protruberances’ from the body of Palladino, who first referred to the substance as ‘ectoplasm’. Geley conducted his own experiments with Eva C. between 1916 and 1918, deploying a ‘dark cabinet’ – purportedly to protect the medium from the light – but also rather suggestive of the medium as some vampire-like creature liable to shrivel on exposure to daylight, or, again, like photographic emulsion that must be kept in darkness.65 The ‘substance’ itself, white or grey, was also thought to be light sensitive, with an ‘innate tendency to organisation’, assuming the form of faces or figures. According to Geley it assumed two basic forms – one solid, the other like a gas – and its appearance was always heralded by loud moans, suggestive of a woman in childbirth, reaching a paroxysm on the appearance of the manifestations. The

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94  Neil Matheson substance was malleable and ‘essentially polymorphous’, emerging, claimed Geley, from the bodily orifices, particularly from the mouth, as well as from the extremes of the body.66 ‘Everything proves’, Geley concludes, ‘that the ectoplasm is the medium herself, partially exteriorised’.67 And we should recall, too, the curious practice of making paraffin castings at séances – of hands, body parts, objects – as a substitute indexical trace for that of the camera. Geley’s sudden death in an air crash while leaving Warsaw in July 1924, with the casts of Polish spirits in his suitcases, came as a major blow to the French movement, and left his theories without an advocate. But whereas the participation of mainstream scientists in psychic research found some justification at a time when science was still separating itself from such hangovers from an earlier era, by the time of the First World War such involvement had become almost wholly untenable, and Geley’s deployment of photography appears decidedly anachronistic. The Catholic Church had condemned spiritism in 1917, and the death of Palladino in 1918 effectively marked the end of the era of spectacular physical mediumship. Richet’s 1922 Traité de métapsychique somewhat belatedly surveyed the entire field, claiming that evidence as the basis of a ‘new science’.68 This consisted of phenomena which appeared to be the product of ‘unknown intelligent forces’, operating as though driven by will and intention, and which suggested that human beings possessed some mysterious faculty of knowledge that he termed cryptesthésie. Together with ‘tele­ kinesis’, the movement of objects at a distance, ectoplasm provided the main material evidence of this new field of knowledge.69 Richet’s voluminous text, though, relies almost wholly upon reports by ‘credible’ observers, and makes only sparse use of photography, and, just as the book appeared, psychologists at the Sorbonne carried out tests with Eva C. that failed to produce any evidence of the existence of ectoplasm, thus immediately casting doubt on the entire concept.70 These tests, organised by the journalist and writer Paul Heuzé, were followed by similarly disastrous trials with the medium Jean Guzik in 1923, and are judged by Le Maléfan to have had a ‘catastrophic’ impact upon Richet’s ‘metapsychic’ research.71 The tide had by now turned against the wartime upsurge in the production of spirit photographs, and the intensive deployment of photographs in the publications of Bisson and Schrenck-Notzing had clearly proven counterproductive. Heuzé, in his Où en est la métapsychique? (1926), observes that no human eye had ever contemplated what is seen in these prints, as the magnesium flash cuts through the gloom of the séance chamber, and that, directly counter to their intentions, they clearly expose the fraud being perpetrated.72

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Ectoplasm and photography  95

4.5  Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph, 1978/2009.

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96  Neil Matheson The conception of photography indexically recording the ‘unseen’ is now being used to counter the idea of it capturing paranormal phenomena. The 1920s therefore saw what Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel characterise as a ‘brutal’ hardening of the boundaries around positivist science, and increasingly firm rejection of paranormal phenomena as a valid field of enquiry.73 Staging authenticity: ectoplasm and performance Although long discredited as science, the mediumistic photograph has migrated to the field of art, both as a visual archive from which new works have been created – as with Susan MacWilliam, or Susan Hiller’s Auras – and as a mode of investi­gation or performance. It is in this latter role that Mike Kelley assumed the role of medium in order to stage the production of ectoplasm in his Ectoplasm Photographs (1978/2009).74 In these images Kelley appears eyes closed or ecstatically uplifted, as though in a trance, as streams of white substance absurdly pour from his ears, mouth, and nostrils, in a clear restaging of the performances of Eva C. (see figure 4.5). Kelley’s photographs return us to the performa­tive aspect of mediumism explored by MacWilliam, suggesting faux documentation of the various stages of possession. And while clearly parodic, anticipating postmodern strategies such as appropriation and pastiche, Kelley’s work nonetheless suggests a certain cultural nostalgia for the ‘miraculous’, as evidenced in more recent works such as his Exploded Fortress of Solitude installation (2011), which realised scenarios from the world of science fiction. Francesca Woodman’s photograph Self-portrait (Talking to Vince) (ca.1975–78) is a similarly performative work, part of a body of spectral, fugitive self-portraits, where the body of the artist again assumes the central role, as a stream of thread-like material pours from her mouth, a zigzag of signs suggesting the eruption of something repressed, or a scene from a dream. Unstable and enigmatic, the eruption of ectoplasm from the mouth – suggestive of some untranslatable pictogram whose import we can only guess at – inevitably also raises questions of textuality and meaning, vouched by the authenticity of the body. The visionary artist Paul Laffoley, too, references mediumism in his Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara (1967), where he revisits the photographs produced by Schrenck-Notzing of the Polish medium Stanislawa P. extruding ectoplasm from her mouth (see figure 4.6). In Laffoley’s painting that imagery is invested with new meaning, as the flame-like streams of ectoplasm echo the flames of the Tibetan

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Ectoplasm and photography  97

4.6  Paul Laffoley, Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara, 1967.

‘wheel of life’ depicted below – a fiery circle dominated by an Eastern deity, referring to the cycle of birth, death, and becoming. ‘Samsara’, derived from Sanskrit, denotes a ‘continuous flow’, a concept found in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Indian religions, such that ectoplasm here suggests the externalisation of some inner, spiritual state, and is thus returned to its origins in spiritual­ism, where it refers to the continuity of life after death. What all of these works explore is our culture’s historical investment in the photographic image and its contradictory relation with the ‘unseen’ – more specifically, as performed through the body, invoking the ‘authenticity’ that the body inevitably bears with

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98  Neil Matheson it. In particular, they reference the indexical role of the photograph in providing verifiable evidence of the reality of paranormal phenomena. And at a time when we are experiencing the demise of the analogue photograph and the disappearance of film, when artists such as Tacita Dean and Moyra Davey explore issues of materiality and indexicality in photography and film, we might expect that the image of ectoplasm will continue to pose questions about how we should conceive and represent what is claimed to lie beyond the visible boundaries of our everyday world. Notes 1 See notes reproduced in Susan MacWilliam, Remote Viewing, ed. Karen Downey, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009. 2 John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, London and New York: Allen Lane, 2011, pp. 50–2. 3 Ibid., p. 11. 4 See Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005; John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, London: Reaktion Books, 2007; Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London: British Library, 2006; Claudia Dichter, Hans Günter Golinski, Michael Krajewski, and Susanne Zander (eds), The Message (exhibition catalogue), Bochum: Kunstmuseum, 2007. 5 Miss (Georgiana) Houghton, Chronicles of Spirit Photography, London: E. W. Allen, 1882, p. 2. 6 Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 56, 58. 7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1976; republished 1995 with new preface, p. vii. 8 Ibid., p. viii. 9 William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874, pp. 110–11. 10 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 15. 11 Ibid., p. 16. 12 Peter Brooks, ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, London: British Film Institute, 1994, pp. 11, 17. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Pascal Le Maléfan, Folie et Spiritisme. Histoire du discours psychopathologique sur la pratique du spiritisme, ses abords et ses avatars (1850–1950), Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. 15 Ibid., p. 39. 16 Ibid., p. 24.

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Ectoplasm and photography  99 7 Ibid., pp. 28–38. 1 18 Ibid., p. 13. 19 Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, guérisseuses et visionnaires en France, 1785–1914, Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1995, p. 184. 20 J. M. Charcot and Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art [1887], Paris: Editions Macula, 1984. 21 Edelman, Voyantes, p. 184. 22 Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique [1889], Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998, p. 431. 23 Camille Flammarion, Discours prononcé sur la tombe de Allan Kardec, cited in Clément Chéroux, ‘Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief’, in in Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, p. 47.  24 Papus (G. Encausse), Le Cas de la voyante de la Rue de Paradis, d’après la tradition et la magie, Paris: Editions de l’initiation, 1896, p. 17. 25 Ibid., p. 18. 26 Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, La Fin d’une voyante [1920], Le ­PlessisRobinson: Institut Synthélabo pour le progrès de la connaissance, 1997. 27 Chéroux, ‘Ghost Dialectics’, p. 47. 28 Ibid., p. 49. 29 Bourneville and Régnard’s first volume of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière was published in 1876–77. 30 Albert Londe, cited in Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière [1982], trans. Alisa Hartz, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003, p. 32. 31 Ibid., p. 19. 32 Ibid., p. 29. 33 Ibid., p. 175. 34 Gray, The Immortalization Commission, pp. 48–9. 35 Ibid., p. 49. 36 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, Des Savants face à l’occulte, 1870–1940, Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2002. See Introduction. 37 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, pp. 62–3. 38 Ibid., pp. 63, 65. 39 Philippe de la Cortadière and Patrick Fuentes, Camille Flammarion, Paris: Flammarion, 1994. 40 Camille Flammarion, La Pluralité des mondes habités, Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie, Editeurs, 1862, p. 431. 41 Cortadière and Fuentes, Camille Flammarion, p. 81. 42 Camille Flammarion, Des Forces naturelles inconnues à propos des phénomènes produits par les frères Davenport, Paris: Didier et Cie, Libraires-Editeurs, 1865. 43 Peter Lamont, ‘Magician as Conjurer: A Frame Analysis of Victorian Mediumship’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 4:1, 2006, pp. 22–7. 44 Camille Flammarion, Les Forces naturelles inconnues (1907), translated as Mysterious Psychic Forces, Boston, MA: Small, Maynard and Company, 1907, p. 31. 45 Camille Flammarion, L’Inconnu et les problèmes psychiques, Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Editeur, 1900, pp. ii, vii. 46 Ibid., pp. 143, 150. 47 Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, p. 123.

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100  Neil Matheson 48 Guillaume de Fontenay, A propos d’Eusapia Paladino. Les séances de Montfort-L’Amaury (25–28 juillet 1897), Paris: Société d’Editions Scien­ ­ tifiques, 1899, p. 25. De Fontenay is here citing an article from the Annales des sciences psychiques, March–April 1896. 49 Guillaume de Fontenay, La Photographie et l’étude des phénomènes psychiques, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1912, p. 13. 50 Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, p. 422. 51 Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, pp. 31–2; André Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto, or Not’ [1942], in André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan, 1969, p. 293. 52 Charles Richet, Traité de métapsychique, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1922, p. 660. 53 Edelman, Voyantes, p. 95. 54 Ibid., pp. 95, 98. 55 Juliette Alexandre Bisson, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation, Paris: Librairie Alcan, 1914, p. i. 56 J. Maxwell, ‘Preface’, in Bisson, Les Phénomènes, p. v. 57 Bisson, Les Phénomènes, pp. 249–52. 58 Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner, 1920, p. 2. 59 Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena”: The Photographic Recording of Materializations’, in Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, p. 181. 60 Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation, pp. 37–9. 61 Cited in Paul Heuzé, Où en est la métapsychique?, Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Cie, Editeurs, 1926, p. 79. 62 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 145. 63 Ibid., p. 145. 64 Gustave Geley, L’Ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance. Observations et expériences personnelles, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1924, pp. 189–90. 65 Ibid., p. 197. 66 Ibid., p. 198. 67 Ibid., p. 205. 68 Richet, Traité de métapsychique, p. 11. 69 Ibid. 70 See Heuzé, Où en est la métapsychique?, p. 79. 71 Le Maléfan, Folie et spiritisme, p. 271. 72 Heuzé, Où en est la métapsychique?, p. 105. 73 Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Des Savants face à l’occulte, p. 14. 74 Mike Kelley, Photographs/Sculptures (exhibition catalogue), Tokyo: Wako Works of Art, 2009.

Bibliography Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, Des Savants face à l’occulte, 1870–1940, Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2002.

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Ectoplasm and photography  101 Juliette Alexandre Bisson, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation, Paris: Librairie Alcan, 1914. André Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto, or Not’ [1942], in André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan, 1969. Peter Brooks, ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, London: British Film Institute, 1994. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1976; republished 1995 with new preface. J. M. Charcot and Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art [1887], Paris: Editions Macula, 1984. Clément Chéroux, ‘Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, La Fin d’une voyante [1920], Le Plessis-­Robinson: Institut Synthélabo pour le progrès de la connaissance, 1997. Philippe de la Cortadière and Patrick Fuentes, Camille Flammarion, Paris: Flammarion, 1994. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874. Claudia Dichter, Hans Günter Golinski, Michael Krajewski, and Susanne Zander (eds), The Message (exhibition catalogue), Bochum: Kunstmuseum, 2007. Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière [1982], trans. Alisa Hartz, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003. Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, guérisseuses et visionnaires en France, 1785–1914, Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1995. Andreas Fischer, ‘“The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena”: The Photographic Recording of Materializations’, in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Camille Flammarion, Des Forces naturelles inconnues à propos des phénomènes prod­ uits par les frères Davenport, Paris: Didier et Cie, Libraires-Editeurs, 1865. Camille Flammarion, La Pluralité des mondes habités, Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie, Editeurs, 1862. Camille Flammarion, Les Forces naturelles inconnues (1907), translated as Mysterious Psychic Forces, Boston, MA: Small, Maynard and Company, 1907. Camille Flammarion, L’Inconnu et les problèmes psychiques, Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Editeur, 1900. Guillaume de Fontenay, A propos d’Eusapia Paladino. Les séances de ­MontfortL’Amaury (25–28 juillet 1897), Paris: Société d’Editions Scientifiques, 1899. Guillaume de Fontenay, La Photographie et l’étude des phénomènes psychiques, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1912.

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102  Neil Matheson Gustave Geley, L’Ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance. Observations et expériences personnelles, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1924. John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, London and New York: Allen Lane, 2011. Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington and ­Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Paul Heuzé, Où en est la métapsychique?, Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Cie, Editeurs, 1926. Miss (Georgiana) Houghton, Chronicles of Spirit Photography, London: E. W. Allen, 1882. Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique [1889], Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998. Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London: British Library, 2006. Mike Kelley, Photographs/Sculptures (exhibition catalogue), Tokyo: Wako Works of Art, 2009. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey ­Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Peter Lamont, ‘Magician as Conjurer: A Frame Analysis of Victorian Medium­ ship’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 4:1, 2006. Susan MacWilliam, Remote Viewing, ed. Karen Downey, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009. Pascal Le Maléfan, Folie et spiritisme. Histoire du discours psychopathologique sur la pratique du spiritisme, ses abords et ses avatars (1850–1950), Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. J. Maxwell, ‘Preface’, Juliette Alexandre Bisson, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialis­ ation, Paris: Librairie Alcan, 1914. Papus (G. Encausse), Le cas de la voyante de la Rue de Paradis, d’après la tradition et la magie, Paris: Editions de l’initiation, 1896. Charles Richet, Traité de métapsychique, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1922. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner, 1920.

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5

Invasions and fakes Susan Hiller in conversation with Alexandra Kokoli

Alexandra Kokoli: Your most recent work that explicitly addresses spiritualism and technology is Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp [2008], an installation of photographic portraits with ‘auras’, clouds of colourful light surrounding and sometimes partly covering the faces of the people photographed. Susan Hiller: Yes, and I also collected them into a little book [Auras], alongside Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein [ICA/ Book Works, 2008]. These portraits illustrate, I think, the old metaphysical proposition that each living thing is surrounded by energy fields emanating from their being. Auras are supposed to be wholly individual, like a transcendental fingerprint, and detectable only by clairvoyants (and a few scientists) until, that is, photography came into the picture. Walter Benjamin counted on the rich resonances of this term when he described the loss of aura as symptomatic of the artwork in modern times. But while there have been many ‘subjective’ representations of human auras by painters and psychics, there were also attempts to document the phenomenon by the ‘objective’ means of photography as far back as the 1890s. Today, a variety of photographic media are available that can apparently record auras, making visible what is invisible to the naked eye. The radiant emanations we refer to as auras are created by liquid crystal arrays, triggered by electrical frequencies recorded from the subject’s body, and which are then translated into colour equivalents by a computer attached to a special camera. AK: And the collected photographs were made using such electronic media? SH: Yes, they use a combination of computer technology and photography to create a final image. I find their reliance on 103

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104  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli photography to document what’s invisible most intriguing, the persistence of an indexical link to ‘truthfulness’ or to the ‘real’. Personally, I also enjoy these photographs not as documentary proof of anything but as delightful visual objects, as colourful as a bag of sweets. And at the same time, they embody a complicated history: they are presented to us as visible traces of the normally unseen, of the phantasmal. I think of them as the most recent manifestation of an ancient but persistent desire to experience, to make some kind of sense of, and to document spectral phenomena. This desire has a complicated and ongoing connection with the history of science as well the history of art – and is implicated in many of their intersections. And finally, I think of them as metaphors for ourselves in a digital age, their ubiquity perhaps a symptom of the extent to which self-­representation is becoming virtual. AK: According to the work’s subtitle, the Auras collection is in homage to Marcel Duchamp. How does this diverse material relate to his experimentations? SH: Marcel Duchamp adapted various forms of esoteric discourse to his own purposes. He is best known of course for his use of alchemy, alchemical vocabulary, and quasi-alchemical manipulations in The Large Glass [a.k.a. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–23] but he also was very familiar with other elements of occult and esoteric thought of the time, as were many other artists. In a particular painting of his friend, the Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel [1910], he used the symbolism of the aura as it had been defined in Hinduism, which came into Europe through Annie Besant and the theosophist movement. If you look at any of the Theosophical Society’s publications of auras, with their beautiful colours and so forth, you can see the relationship to that particular painting by Duchamp: he has surrounded his friend with various coloured auras, and the doctor’s healing hand has a white aura around it. I could link contemporary spiritual thinking around that subject to an art historical source, which is why I evoked that element of Duchamp’s work. I don’t think he had seen or ever experienced auras personally. He experimented with the notion of coloured fields surrounding the human body as a painting device. And, of course, for Duchamp and many others, the anatomy of the invisible was to be the starting point of a new art – and a new function for art. AK: Duchamp used aura-like effects in photographic projects too…. SH: I’m sure he was very well versed in all the esoteric and occult thinking of his time, like all the surrealists. But he never mentioned

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Invasions and fakes  105 it. He was very secretive – for example, he never mentioned alchemy but he clearly had read all the available texts. AK: How does the collection of levitation photographs relate to Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void? As you have noted, photography occupied a different place in the popular imagination in 1960 when Klein faked his levitation, especially since nowadays the kinds of digital alterations that help create these levitation pictures are so accessible and widespread [see figure 5.1]. SH: It’s interesting to realise that now it’s relatively well known that Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void is actually a skilful photomontage that convincingly creates the effect of him leaping into space. For

5.1  Susan Hiller, Homage to Yves Klein, 2008; archival dry prints individually framed, overall: 67 in × 67 in / 170 cm × 170 cm. Photo: Todd White Art Photography, London.

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106  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli a number of years the way the image had been produced wasn’t so well known and several artists tried to copy the Leap. I know that Bruce Nauman did some very funny video performances called Failing to Levitate in the Studio [1966] and apparently Paul McCarthy tried to levitate in a public performance, when he was a student. And I think that perhaps they didn’t know – although they must have suspected – that it was a photomontage. Of course, with the advent of Photoshop and other easy-to-use ways of altering photographs, anybody can make themselves look as if they’re levitating. You don’t even need to use Photoshop since with flash photography, if someone jumps up in the air and someone else takes a quick picture, they can seem to be frozen in mid-flight. And there are some young scientists working on levitation devices that create the same effect. There’s also stage magic…. So why do people go to all the trouble of showing themselves in a photograph, apparently levitating, when we all know very well that all these tricks are available? I think it’s partially a very lighthearted kind of joke, and partially, rather like the auras, a wishful desire to transcend the human condition, defy gravity, show that you have a spiritual aspect to yourself, even in a jokey sort of way. That you’re not earthbound, that you’re imaginative…. So my series presents a lot of very interesting, playful contemporary photographs of people apparently levitating, I would say in a knowing and ironic way, for the most part: ‘This is me, I’m levitating. (You know, I’m not really levitating but, hey)’ – that kind of thing. And I find it quite fascinating that there’s such an enormous number of these images, of people joking around with the spiritual notion of the saint or the shaman, or the yogi with special powers. Joking and yet wishfully aspiring at the same time. That’s what interested me. AK: How did you source the material for Auras and Levitations? And how did you pick out the images that made up the collections from all the material that you found? SH: I used the internet, which I’ve used quite a lot in the past, because I consider it to be like a giant confessional: people do things online that they probably wouldn’t normally do. I first started just looking up the two subjects, auras and levitations, and this led me to all sorts of sites that are online for different groups of people that produce these kinds of images, and I simply collected them online, no problem. It took quite a while and then, when I finished the book, we wrote to people and asked them if we could use their images, and everybody seemed to be very happy to have their images reused.

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Invasions and fakes  107 AK: So everyone responded…. SH: Most people did. A couple of the websites were already gone but as far as I know we didn’t actually use anything we didn’t get permission for, although the final responsibility rests with the book’s publisher. Basically, the answer to your question is that I went online and sourced images from the internet, which I then edited in the sense of the necessary recropping and editing that had to be done to make them usable in my work. AK: Did you just look up ‘levitations’? SH: You know how it is when you do research, it leads you off into different directions, which is very interesting: saints, flying, experi­ menting with gravity, various things like that. There were some good images on religious sites which I ended up on the whole not using because they were historical prints or paintings, but it was very interesting reading the different theological explanations of the powers of various saints. I so enjoy the way in which doing basic research can become quite educational. You start off with something simple and it leads you off into very deep waters. So I enjoyed it, though I did spend months and months and months stuck at my computer. AK: By what criteria did you pick out the images? SH: Initially I didn’t make aesthetic judgements. I was making a collection and when you’re making a collection in the first instance you just collect everything relevant. And that really was the main activity initially, followed by sorting, selecting, adjusting, editing, arranging, etc. When it came to the book, I selected images that seemed to represent types or styles of self-representation, styles that seemed to recur. AK: I suspected there was a kind of classification system underlying this. Did you feel that each category needed to have some representation? SH: The classifications emerged from the mass of material rather than me imposing my own preconceptions. I wanted to show representative types, and since it is about self-representation, that’s the only fair approach to what emerges as the field here, because, as I was saying before, people’s attitudes towards representing themselves in this way seemed to range from the fully lighthearted to the fairly serious. And it’s not up to me to question their motivations; I’m just dealing with how they represent themselves. So, they’re all there. One or two of the Levitations are from religious practices: this man, for example, is a Taoist monk sitting in a yoga position in the Azure Clouds Temple on Tai Shan mountain, while this young girl is imitating this. She or someone

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108  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli

5.2  Susan Hiller, detail, Homage to Yves Klein, 2008; archival dry print, 6 in × 4 in / 15 cm × 10 cm. Photo: S. Hiller.

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Invasions and fakes  109 had used Photoshop to make it look as if she was levitating in a yoga posture. AK: And her T-shirt says ‘Got Slime?’ SH: Something like that [laughter]. And this man in the autographed picture is a famous Brazilian levitator, Carlos Mirabelli, who purported to be experimenting with levitation but obviously was using stage magic of some kind [see figure 5.2]. And there is also a famous English example, Colin Evans, who performed levitations that were photographed in infra-red light at several séances in London in the 1930s. There are a number of different photographs of him doing this, some others of which I used in my studies for the Levitations, and also a couple of different images of levitation events by David Blaine. It is very interesting that no one else can repeat Blaine’s experiments because they require such rigorous preparation, a bit like Houdini. A shaman always has tricks up his or her sleeve that they can fall back on, in case their supposed real magic doesn’t work. I think the same is true of contemporary debunkers: they’re very special, their self-training and self-­discipline is extraordinary. So what they show us does verge on the miraculous, if you like, in that it seems not to be possible for the rest of us to do this. There are a lot of websites, which I discovered in my research, where people discuss the debunkers and attempt to subsequently imitate their demonstrations themselves. Some of the levitation photos are of people trying to emulate, say, David Blaine’s stage presentations when he appears to levitate. There’s a whole range of behaviours that I find very interesting. AK: My favourite image of the levitation series is the one with the nuns, one of whom is levitating on a chair with the rest rejoicing. It seems to have been torn into pieces and then reassembled…. SH: That’s all fake. I think the tearing is also fake. Isn’t it wonderful? AK: Quite – there’s even a partial fingerprint in the corner. SH: Yeah, it’s all there; it’s presented as evidential, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. The flying nun – on a chair! There was a film called The Flying Nun. But it is still an image of aspiration. It has a poetry about it that I find charming. One of my favourites is the young man in a hoody levitating as his cat walks by. I found this on a student fundraising site called Students for Bhopal, the place in India were they had the terrible chemical spillage. He made this picture of himself as part of their fundraising project, as a kind of student prank … it’s a charming image, I think. AK: Some of the images are weirdly domestic and everyday – they could well be stills from America’s Funniest or a similar programme.

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110  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli SH: Absolutely, or they could be, if you want to take them more ­seriously, envisionings of a kind of paranormal invasion into normality. My video Belshazzar’s Feast [figure 5.3] has been des­cribed several times as an uncanny intrusion or a disturbance in a dom­ estic space. That’s what people find so disturbing, that it’s an eruption into the ordinary. So, similarly, these levitation images could be stills from a horror movie: you know, there you are with your cat and you suddenly start to levitate. Some of the most fun pictures, I think, are of people who appear to be startled [laughter]. This is Ian-John Hutchinson, a young artist in New Zealand who is quite literally reproducing Klein’s Leap into the Void. And this one is, of course, also one of my favourites, the levitating cowboy. The fact that they make one feel like laughing is interesting, because horror and humour can be quite close – both are reactions to excess, and this combination of reactions is provoked by these images. Here are a bunch of people who I think are all saying hallelujah, and probably standing on a pane of glass. I don’t really understand how that one was made. Some of fundamentalist ­religious sites have levitation obsessions, as do some yoga sites. AK: Some images look very studiedly effortless and others not at all. A few people are clearly jumping up rather than levitating and their exertion shows. Again, what’s fascinating is the mix of magic and sheer labour. Maybe the trick is actually hard work. SH: Well, I think prior to Photoshop it definitely was hard work. And for some of these people who are doing it athletically, there is an amount of skill and practice involved. I don’t even know how many pictures they would have taken of themselves before achieving just the right effect, because you don’t see them falling, you see them flying. If you try to follow the end of the implied narrative, they fall flat on their face – it must have hurt [laughter]. But you’re right, there are a range of modes of self-representation and some of them are very easy to penetrate as fakes and others are not. Here is one that was an attempt to delude other people, to convince them that this man, who’s a kind of fake yogi, had special powers. There are a few like that. The last one in the book is a young man who seems to be levitating above his family house, looking as though he’s trying to escape in some way into another sphere, leaving it all behind. AK: This one’s quite ambiguous, I think, because he could be escap­ ing, coming out of the family home, but he could also be hovering above it like a guardian angel. SH: Hovering thoughtfully. He’s pondering his circumstance. Yes, there are many different modes. But basically, they all defy gravity,

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5.3  Susan Hiller, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983–84; twenty-minute video programme and installation, dimensions variable.

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112  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli they’re all leaving the earth, they’re not earthbound, they’re light. And there’s something in that, it’s dreamlike: that’s the only time you would see yourself levitating, within a dream. So many of these images are an attempt to actualise something that probably most people have some experience of in dream, and here we have a real photograph of it. It’s got an interesting complexity, I think. AK: Do you expect people to follow up, to go to some of these web­sites? SH: I don’t know what people would do; I listed them in the book to acknowledge the sources in case anyone wanted to contact them. AK: Shall we return to Belshazzar’s Feast: The Writing on Your Wall, made in 1983, which you briefly referenced before? This was a very important work in that it seemed to bring together many central concerns. In Belshazzar’s Feast, the television screen is taken up by a close-up of a burning fire, while your and your son’s voices can be heard in the soundtrack. You created a living-room space for it in galleries, and it was also shown on Channel 4, reaching a wider and perhaps not wholly prepared audience…. Shall we talk about the title to start with? SH: The biblical story is about a feast, in the middle of which a hand mysteriously appeared and wrote ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’; in the English Bible these words appear as they were in the original, as a set of nonsense signs, untranslatable, and therefore untranslated. King Belshazzar held a competition to find somebody who could interpret the writing. The prophet Daniel, who was a very old man at the time and had to be brought out of retirement, succeeded. He said they meant that Belshazzar and his friends had been judged and found wanting for worshipping the false gods of gold and silver, and that their kingdom would be destroyed, which is in fact what happened in the story. What I find particularly interesting is the distinction between literally reading and somehow interpreting signs – Daniel did not read the inscription but was able to make out its meaning, as I understand the story. There is a Rembrandt painting on the subject of Belshazzar’s feast, which is what my son is trying to describe from memory on the video soundtrack. But he isn’t simply describing it, of course; the image is filled out in his mind with memory fragments from the story that the painting represents. AK: What links this story to the material you used in the video? SH: I’ve written about the idea of dreaming and reverie by the hearth, before the fire, and the way the television set has come to acquire many of the functions of the hearth or the fireplace. Not only do we point ourselves at the television set in the seating

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Invasions and fakes  113 arrangements of our homes, but we also leave it on all the time in the corner, so that it’s this flickering presence that we don’t pay attention to consciously, but it’s there. What I wanted to do with Belshazzar’s Feast is re-establish for the audience the ability to dream, to create images out of these free-floating, ever-­ changing shapes of the fire, to allow the audience to become aware of their capacity to imagine and to project images. The basic materials for the work were some newspaper articles I accidentally came across about people seeing ghost images late at night on their television screens after transmission was over, which no longer happens of course. I’ve located that within a very ancient tradition…. AK: The biblical story is one of threatened or rather, as it turns out, foretold retribution – and the subtitle The Writing on Your Wall underlines this menacing element. SH: I’ve been told by some people that they found the work very frightening when they saw it, especially if they caught it on TV at home. But it’s not the insights that may come through individuals which are frightening, but the forms that they take: if they’re warped or twisted, the insights are rejected, discarded, edited out. Repression is the source of what has been described as the uncanny or bizarre mood of the piece. What Freud called ‘the uncanny’ is just this sort of potentially frightening projection, which leads us back to something old and familiar in our personal, social, cultural past. The weirdness or fright or bizarre effect is due to something repressed, probably collectively repressed. AK: Yes, and of course the unsettling contrast between the comfort and familiarity symbolised by the domestic and unwelcome but inevitable intrusions of the old familiar is signposted in the very etymology of the ‘uncanny/unhomely’ (das Unheimliche). Your voice can be heard in the soundtrack, chanting or singing in an improvised, indecipherable language that references divine inspiration, speaking in tongues. You have used this type of voice-over before…. SH: Yes, before and since; originally in Élan [1981–82], an installation with sound, and Magic Lantern [1987]. The raw materials for the soundtracks of these works were sound tapes of a series of experiments done by the Latvian scientist Konstantin Raudive, which he referred to as ‘voices of the dead’ experiments. Raudive left tape-recorders going in empty rooms and found that, for him at least, they recorded some trace sounds which, when amplified, could produce actual coherent voices. He interpreted these as being the voices of dead human beings who had lived

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114  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli in these places. I’d first heard of these experiments in the 1960s, before my practice was very well developed. The poetic idea of amplifying silence and finding it isn’t silent at all but full of sound was fascinating – the realisation that ‘nothing’ was in fact ‘something’ seemed to support ideas I was forming about how to pay attention to what was out of sight, or beneath or beyond recognition within our culture, and as an artist to try to picture it for myself and others. I was also very attracted to the idea of using or misusing a scientific methodology in pursuit of what science would consider too mad or abject to bother with. AK: In Clinic [2004], the voices surrounding the ‘viewer’ are not of the dead, as they allegedly are in Raudive’s experiments, but very nearly: the installation consists of tape-recorded reports of out-of-body experiences by people of all creeds and cultures, in a variety of languages. The viewer is led to behave as in a church – always looking up, to locate the sources of the voices but also their meaning. Clinic is a great example where the physicality and potential spirituality (or at least the disembodiment) of the voice are brought together. Psychoanalysis has similarly recognised a special role for the voice – embodied but also curiously free-­ floating. Lacan tellingly noted that we can never block our ears as effectively as closing our eyes, as had McLuhan before him. You’ve spoken many times about the voice as being of the body, in a way we choose to forget when looking at images (many of which are also of course handmade), but also the voice is free-floating, because our sight need not give us confirmation of where it comes from; for infants that’s actually a very common experience – they hear free-floating voices. SH: All that is the core of the work, so what more can I say about it? Clinic does raise the question of what is a disembodied voice, what is disembodiment – it is there, that’s the work. AK: These are recordings of people delving into spiritual experiences, but, at the same time, Clinic was made possible thanks to a kind of technology that we now take for granted – because we can record voices and then play them. SH: Yes, but, as I’ve said so many times, that is already uncanny and nobody recognises that. We listen to voices and half of the time they’re dead or whatever; we don’t even think about that. That’s another irritant that’s been made into a pearl. Technology makes some things invisible; you could almost see it as a kind of cultural plot, if you wanted to, but I’m not going to be that paranoid. It is very strange, sound, and the human voice is very interesting when it’s taken away from visual representation, and technology

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Invasions and fakes  115 of course makes that possible. Clinic, Witness, all these works of mine are dealing with those kinds of paradoxes. They’re not dealing with them on the surface of the work but I think they’re dealing with them in an embedded way within the work. I think to have voices floating around on the ceiling, as I do in Clinic, so that people must look up all the time, creates a situation that, to my mind, raises those issues in people’s awareness. AK: As well as using sound, your work often creates spaces – and periods of time – for meditation: for example, the almost hypnotic web project Dream Screens 1 bathes the viewer in coloured light while a voice narrates sequences from films with the word ‘dream’ in their title, mixed in with your memories and actual dreams. There are also other background sounds, Morse code, heartbeat, and pulsar. At the time of the making of Dream Screens in 1996, ‘net art’ was still relatively new. This is the only web project you’ve made – why? SH: At that time, the idea of making art for the web was relatively new, and it was an exciting challenge; now it wouldn’t be such a stimulus for me. I think in Dream Screens I managed, I stumbled on perhaps, the power of the voice and the way it can be used online and usually isn’t. I couldn’t repeat that again; that’s the reason I never made another piece like it, but also because it was an intervention into the proliferation of imagery which, I felt, was already inundating us on the internet. So I made my intervention and I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to contribute to the proliferation of images on the web. I guess I’ve said what I had to say about the web as a medium for artists. But of course I still use the internet as a resource. I think it’s a wonderful resource for information. AK: The viewer/user of Dream Screens can select any language from English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish, as well as change the tone of the colour field by clicking on the screen. I personally prefer listening to languages that I don’t understand. Witness also includes recordings in different languages, as have other works. Is incomprehension an important element here? SH: I like listening to different languages too, and I also like calligraphy in languages I can’t read. I think then you get the basic appeal – say with calligraphy you get the basic appeal of the hand, the writing, the rhythm, and it’s the same thing with listening to languages you don’t understand: you get the texture of the voice, you get the trace of embodiment without having to think about literal meaning. And I think these are very interesting subjects. The musicality of the voice is its appeal, really. And

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116  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli the incredible varieties, the infinite varieties of musicalities and voices and languages. But I’m not trained musically and my work doesn’t usually address musical issues. I use sound because of its physicality, because there’s something archaic, regressive about it. But I use it like I use colour or spatial arrangement; it’s part of a repertoire of possibilities, a palette of options. AK: It also makes you consider the whole range of sound and what sound can do, because you’re not listening to music, you’re listening to phonemes that may not exist in your language. SH: When I said musicality before I was meaning things like rhythm, timbre, the kinds of sounds that the voice can produce. Nobody has notated all the many different kinds of sounds. This is what linguists try to do, of course. I studied linguistics and learned all the symbols to transcribe languages and so forth, which was absolutely fascinating, but there are still many permutations and individual variations that nobody has noticed, noted or notated. AK: They really get you thinking about how in your language you’re using a very limited range of what your mouth can produce…. SH: mouth, throat…. AK: … your lungs can produce in order to make meaning, but others have used other capabilities of the human body. SH: Yes, and they haven’t all been notated, given that so many languages have disappeared.2 Interestingly, the human infant only has a very limited range of cries, and they can apparently, according to experiments that have been done, be identified by mothers from different cultures. The sound of an uncomfortable baby, the sound of a hungry baby, an angry baby, a baby in pain, these are all generic, really generic, and the human body is constant. On that is built this incredible range of possibilities. AK: Both automatism and collecting have been very important tropes in your work. You were a collector of abandoned photomat pictures for a while, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. You have also made many series of altered photomat self-portraits, some named after the location of the photo-booth used and the time the pictures were taken, such as Midnight, Euston [1982], Midnight, Baker Street [1983] [see figure 5.4]; another series was titled after something American President Ulysses Grant wrote while suffering from a painful and fatal illness, Sometimes I Think I’m a Verb Instead of a Pronoun [1981–82]. You used a kind of ‘crypto-linguistic’ automatic script on magnifications of these portraits that is between writing and drawing, the calligraphic equivalent of your indecipherable singing on Élan and ­Belshazzar’s Feast. These works have often been discussed in terms of debates

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5.4  Susan Hiller, Midnight, Baker Street, 1983; three C-type photographs enlarged from hand-worked photo-booth images, each 30 in × 20 in / 76 cm × 51 cm; edn 2 / 3. Original in colour.

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118  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli around identity but they are also of course an intervention in the genre of (photographic) portraiture.… SH: Yes. At the time I located the now nearly extinct photomat in the tail end of the great tradition of portraiture. What it had come down to was this miniature head-and-shoulders view, complete with draperies in the background, available for anyone to use cheaply and quickly, as a form of identification. But in this particular form of portraiture, there is no intervening photogra­ pher. You’re asked to engage in a private capacity with the automatic camera and to project your own self-image towards it, as towards a mirror. The booth is almost like a confessional, with the camera as silent witness. Precursors to the Midnight series originally retained the miniature scale of the originals but, in this series, these were enlarged up to the point where the heads became almost life-size. I also deliberately rejected some of the formal constraints of the format. The inner space of the photo-booth imposes constraints on the pose, which I subverted by using my hands as a substitute for the face, turning my back to the camera, allowing the frame to cut off bits, presenting body parts rather than wholes. I then highlighted the flesh or other parts by hand, in ink or pastels, rephotographed the altered image in colour, and enlarged it. This was my kind of playful reference to photography as a meta-medium, as against the claims made for the return of painting: in other words, I made photographs that purloined something of the supposedly exclusive pleasures of painting. At the time, I was also interested in the gendered aspects of representation and self-portraiture in particular: I realised I couldn’t present my face in the literal sense, because that’s not how one experiences it from inside. The solution I came up with was to overlay the photographic sign of body parts with my own self-authored automatic script. Visually, this gave the impression of tattoos. What I did was to deliberately obfuscate the ‘me’ by introducing the first-person action of mark-making, to have the pronoun quite literally overwritten by the verb. AK: Sisters of Menon [1972; 1979] was your first work that used automatic writing. ‘Menon’ is deliberately opaque – the navel of the work, perhaps – although this doesn’t stop the viewer from speculating, which is part of the fun. Lucy Lippard noted that it’s an anagram of nomen, Latin for ‘name’, and you remarked that it may also be interpreted as ‘no men’. Would you say that this is one of your more explicitly feminist works? SH: Perhaps, insofar as the Sisters of Menon script reformulated the encounter between the Sphinx and Oedipus, and psychoanalysis

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Invasions and fakes  119 was of course a major issue for feminism at the time. Sisters of Menon proposed an alternative, relational approach to the question of identity – identity as a collaboration, the self as multiple. As I’ve said before, ‘I’ am a location, and the work is deeply rooted in this understanding. It was also an attempt to link up and even combine the analytic and the ecstatic, in a way that hadn’t yet been widely accepted or even recognised at the time. What is more, the experience of producing these punning, hieroglyphic scripts in 1972 led me to look again at surrealism and the repressed history of automatism within modernism. Surrealism wasn’t really spoken of at the time; it didn’t seem to be a meaningful model for anybody. So this is how I discovered Ad Reinhardt, who had in the late 1950s been influenced by Pollock (or he had the desire to work like Pollock) and was interested in the idea of spontaneous expression. He made calligraphic works which are called the Kufic drawings because the marks look like Arabic. But I’ve spoken of all this before, as well as on Sisters of Menon.3 Clearly, Sisters of Menon was a major turning point in my work and forced me to invent the term ‘paraconceptual’ for what I was doing.4 AK: There are so many more works we could discuss…. Your postal art project Draw Together [1972] was partly inspired by the telepathy experiments of Upton Sinclair, one of America’s most prominent socialists, celebrated author, political activist, and ESP enthusiast. Is spiritualism a political issue? SH: Actually, the telepathy experiments of Upton and Mary Craig Sinclair weren’t part of the spiritualist movement because the Sinclairs were sceptics who didn’t believe in spirit intermediaries. They were interested in instances of direct mind-to-mind com­ munication of images and ideas, and took a scientific, experimental approach to their project. But to answer the basic question you’re asking, whether there’s a political significance to movements like spiritualism, I would say yes. We need to somewhat broaden the discussion to include various other occult and quasi-religious groupings from the modernist period onwards in Europe and the English-speaking world. These movements had important political implications. The spiritualist movement in particular made visible unacknowledged issues of gender and class relations, and, in fact, most of these otherwise varied groupings enabled women to take leadership roles and develop very public profiles. But sociology aside, other aspects of this very pervasive and widespread ‘field’ are just as significant in the long term. All these groups had a single aim, which of course was defined and described very differently in the specialised terminology of each group. This aim was simply

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120  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli to achieve, one way or another, direct evidence of a transcendent reality, such as proof of survival after death. Spirit guides or Ouija boards at one end of the spectrum, or complex esoteric teachings and techniques at the other, were always the means to a single goal. A lot has been written about the sociology of the spiritualist movement, and about the influence of other, more middle-class occult groups on art and literature. But the deeper political implication of all this is almost always overlooked. We need to look at the reasons aside from religious nostalgia (or rabid nationalism in the case of Germany, where there was a strong link between fascism and ‘the occult’) that drew intellectuals and scientists to support some of these groups and to join others. An interest in exploring clairvoyance, telepathy, hypnotism, trance states, and related phenomena attracted many sceptics interested in particular elements embedded in movements whose trappings could be seen as superstitious or misguided. There was a desire to concentrate on these specific elements, to be rational about what was usually denigrated as irrationality, which motivated some very impressive non-believers to investigate phenomena muddled over or disguised within the groups’ ideology. When Gertrude Stein wrote her thesis on automatic writing, or the Sinclairs ex­ perimented with transmitting images by telepathy, they were focusing on themes that popular movements were embroidering with complicated belief systems; they were clearing out the rubbish. Scientific research into these same themes flourished alongside all this. We’re in a period now where there’s an enormous interest in these same elements, as seen not just in a resurgence of various esoteric groups and practices, but also in considerable attention from some scientists, from the media, and even from the military establishment’s research into the instrumental value of so-called paranormal human abilities, which is far more troubling. There are important political implications here for everyone. AK: Your work persistently draws connections between the centre and the margins, the everyday and the transcendental, the mainstream and the fringes. It’s always struck me that, for example, Wild Talents [1997] and Psi Girls [1999] delve into the paranormal – telekinesis – but also – and more importantly, perhaps – into the popular film genre of horror. Your Auras and Levitations tread the fine and highly permeable line between art and science, a false albeit highly invested divide. And what is more, not only do you persistently refuse to dismiss people’s fascination with the supernatural and the unexplained, but you’ve admitted to sharing much of this fascination in the past. Do you really?

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Invasions and fakes  121 SH: I admit to being a sci-fi fan – the first interview I ever did for an art magazine was called ‘Elements of Science Fiction’ – and in science fiction it’s taken for granted that telepathic com­ munication and other paranormal abilities will eventually become normal and commonplace. Science fiction has always been amazingly prophetic. I think the politics of the human, what’s defined as human nature, human capacity, human potential, is the most basic politics there is. Any reductive definition of what’s human is tyrannical, even totalitarian. I think it’s good politics for everyone to explore and develop their human mental capacities. Letting the military dominate research into these capacities and allowing conventional wisdom to ridicule and denigrate them is dangerous. Possibly, phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance are inherited from our primitive origins and link us to the animal world – and to each other – in an important way. Possibly, they are, on the other hand, advanced capabilities available only to especially talented people. Possibly, these abilities can be developed and learned through training. Possibly, they are inherent in all humans but atrophied in most of us. Or, possibly, they’re only infantile fantasies. A discussion ought to be taking place. But vested interests want us to find all this ridiculous, silly, and stupid, and to accept a reduced version of what’s normal. Why? That’s why this entire subject is inherently political. London, November 2009 Notes 1 Dream Screens (1996), Dia Center for the Arts, http://awp.diaart.org/ hiller/dreamscreens.html (accessed 23 March 2012). 2 See also Susan Hiller, The Last Silent Movie (2007), video and etchings. 3 See Susan Hiller, ‘The Performance of the Self: Hidden Histories (Jackson Pollock)’, ‘3,512 Words: Susan Hiller with Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert’, and ‘On Surrealism (Interview with Roger Malbert)’, all three chapters in Alexandra M. Kokoli (ed.), The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977–2007, Zurich: J. R. P. Ringier; Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2008. 4 Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Moving Sideways and Other Sleeping Metaphors: Susan Hiller’s Paraconceptualism’, in Ann Gallagher, ed., Susan Hiller, London: Tate Publishing, 2011, pp. 143–53.

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122  Susan Hiller with Alexandra Kokoli Bibliography Susan Hiller, Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp/Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein, London: Bookworks/ICA, 2008. Susan Hiller, ‘The Performance of the Self: Hidden Histories (Jackson Pollock)’, ‘3,512 Words: Susan Hiller with Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert’, and ‘On Surrealism (Interview with Roger Malbert)’, all three chapters in Alexandra M. Kokoli (ed.), The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977–2007, Zurich: J. R. P. Ringier; Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2008. Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Moving Sideways and Other Sleeping Metaphors: Susan Hiller’s Paraconceptualism’, in Ann Gallagher (ed.), Susan Hiller, London: Tate Publishing, 2011.

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6

Image, technology, enchantment Marina Warner in conversation with Dan Smith

Dan Smith: I’d like to discuss a range of topics that arise in your work. But the focus here is the integration of mythic and sacred elements within photographic and institutional technologies. I want to think about this in terms of the impact of ethnographic work and folklore studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can think of these as discourses that popularised and disseminated the belief systems of different cultures. Your work often reflects upon forms of technology and memory, so I’d like to follow a path that suggests the absorption of photography and memory systems, as technological forms saturated by the presence of magic, into archival and museo­ logical structures. I’m also interested here in the sustained presence of magic, enchantment, and alterity in contemporary art, as well as some tendencies within recent art practice to make use of and reflect upon various dimensions of magic, references to spiritualism, and the exoticism of shamanic ritual within a twenty-first-century context. But firstly, I thought we could start with the phenomenon of ghost portraiture as a very obvious intersection of spiritualism and technology. In particular, I want to ask if ghost portraiture can be thought of in terms of function? Marina Warner: Yes, it quite demonstrably had a function – consolation in bereavement. However, when I first began looking at the albums, I realised that not only are they very touching, but they reveal the different kinds of bonds people felt, and were permitted to feel, in that less self-consciously sexualised society. As well as the parents of dead soldiers killed in the trenches, you also get many people wishing to conjure up dead friends, some of which suggests elements of homoeroticism, both male and female. There are a lot of different types of relationship, across 123

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124  Marina Warner with Dan Smith generations, reflected in spirit photographs. Then they are set in these albums, and are very numerous. This was not a particularly esoteric pursuit: it was a high-street activity. It was found in many provincial towns, not just the capital.  Obviously, there was a greater commitment to these beliefs among the spiritualists, but the beliefs and interest spread far beyond the spiritualists. Ada Deane’s Cenotaph photograph [1922], for example, had a far-reaching impact. The exposure taken for the duration of the two-minute silence on Armistice Day had apparently captured the faces of the fallen among the gathered crowd, dead soldiers looking comfortingly benign. She never admitted perpetrating a deception here, and remained committed to the consolatory power of the image. We can also see how there are examples of well known and widely respected figures associated with these beliefs – Conan Doyle, Kipling, Oliver Lodge, and so forth, who all lost children one way or another, either from war or illness. In these cases there is a sense of wanting to know that the spirit was quiet. In another respect, and to bring the story back to an earlier point in time, there was an attempt to answer some questions that were then raging, and that still persist in different forms now. There was then a very deep desire to demonstrate the existence of some form of material spirit, some sort of material soul. And people gave it different names. This is evident in the work of William Crookes, who coined the term ‘radiant matter’. Crookes was a very important chemist and had an influence on the development of many technologies. His work was delicate and scrupulous, involving the rare-earth elements, which are important to the development of television and mobile phones, relating to microscopic weighing. But we can see how this connects to the idea of a microscopic weight of the soul, of how the body might weigh slightly less after death because this part that makes life itself has flown.  DS: This preoccupation still persists today in popular culture. An example would be the film 21 Grams [2003], which takes its title from a 1907 experiment to determine the weight of the soul. It posits as fact the claims made by Duncan MacDougall that he had determined an average loss of mass in humans after death. These claims, despite no scientific credibility, have somehow survived as popular myths.  MW: The idea of this spark or essence can be seen in the experiments Thomas Browne conducted with animals in the seventeenth century. He would weigh a chicken, strangle it, then weigh it

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Image, technology, enchantment  125 again. In his book Pseudodoxia Epidemica [1646; The Epidemic of False Thought] he systematically goes through false beliefs and tests them in empirical experiments, yet all the while remaining quite gullible himself. Browne is an interesting figure in this way, and exemplary for the purposes of my interests, showing how reason and a commitment to empiricism are not safeguards against belief. His reputation was tarnished for centuries after he gave evidence in a witchcraft trial, in which he stated that, as witches existed in the Bible, they must be real, condemning the accused to the gallows. An example like this reveals the basic principle of my interest in magic and enchantment: it is extremely hard to escape the influence of enchantment, to stop being affected by it, and we need to accept that this is the way we are. Earlier on today we were talking about Richard Dawkins, regarding his recent claims made in the cause of an apparently rational approach to atheism, and the ways in which his own argument in The Selfish Gene appears irrational, and relies on metaphor. To my mind the use of metaphor is one of the main ways in which we are ensnared by enchantment. It is very hard to conceptualise without using metaphor. How that metaphor applies to phenomena can vary, leading us to ask whether in some instances the metaphor is standing free, without determining a referent. It can be hard for us to realise that we live in an intricacy of metaphors that indeed don’t have referents. Most of the time people are trying to find the referent. In this way, spirit photography was a form of attempting to ascertain that spirit might have a material existence. It seems that photography proved that it did. The light touched the paper, and there was this thing that somehow became object.  DS: So that is a property of the apparatus? The technology itself was already proving the presence of spirit before any attempts to create ghostly visual effects? MW: Yes, and it was of course creating this strange relationship to time, fixing it. Preserving a moment of time was unbelievably innovatory and strange. We’ve got so used to it that we don’t even see it.  DS: It is hard to imagine how that would have been experienced at the time, the challenge offered by photography in the nineteenth century to modes of thinking, modes of being. Not only to the experience of the present and past, but also to relationships with the dead. Suddenly there was this fixed record of the dead.  MW: Also, you have a transmission, or perhaps transmuting of something that is both ethereal and palpable, something that had been a great goal of Egyptian rituals of the dead, which of course

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126  Marina Warner with Dan Smith have influenced subsequent Western practices very profoundly, which is of course mummification and eternal preservation. There is this idea of keeping people as they were. There is cultural specificity here, of an idea that became widespread across the Mediterranean and then further afield. It wasn’t there in Aztec culture for example, or in ancient India. This idea of the preservation and resurrection of the body, the body coming back in all its glory, is a very Egyptian idea. Judaic and Christian theology is affected by these ancient Egyptian ideas. DS: In terms of other factors that were shaping the practice of spirit photography, I’d like to turn to the developing fields of ethnographic research and folklore studies during this period. What kinds of relationships were there between spiritualist discourses and these other fields, and what would the impact have been upon manifestations such as spirit photography? MW: I’ll begin the response to this by talking about folklore studies first. The development of folklore studies in Britain was rather slow, particularly in comparison to somewhere like Germany. It began in Germany much earlier than in England, and took hold to a far greater degree. This slowness is an inverted reflection of the vigorous growth of empire. So, in a sense, this tardiness in investigating narrative, showing curiosity about belief, was compensated by the outward spread of imperial influence.  DS: So you would suggest that an overall focus on the expanded sense of empire distracted from an attentiveness to home? MW: Things were coming back, travelling inwards towards the centre, towards Britain, relating to narrative and belief, but perhaps this process was operating at unconscious levels. Actually, your question wouldn’t have been posed twenty years ago. Rather, there was a solid and fairly consensual perspective that read imperial endeavours as nothing but the imposition of a way of life on other people. It was read as a simplified imposition of ‘our’ way of life upon an ‘other’. However, the shortcoming of this was the failure to recognise how deep the entanglement was, how deeply affected Europeans were by the encounters they had abroad.  But to get back to folklore studies, the success and establishment of the field in Germany had a profound influence upon British practices, and it was spread by the increasing popularity of the romantics. This influence from Germany can be seen in particular as coming from the Grimm Brothers and their contemporaries collecting stories and developing this idea of Volk. The English equivalent term comes much later. It is a far more recent invention. But once it spreads in Britain, we eventually

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Image, technology, enchantment  127 get to Andrew Lang, the most prolific and well known collector of folklore. The romantics had started collecting ballads and acknowledged the fairy as native to Britain, but Lang, the most prolific British folklorist, is far later, working at the end of the Victorian period and across the Edwardian.  Interestingly, Lang is a contemporary of J. G. Frazer, which is very significant. In particular, their methods are similar. They are very encyclopaedic. Frazer doesn’t use native informants, but uses questionnaires that are disseminated by servants of empire. Frazer asks his questioners to gather beliefs about the dead, about the afterlife, about the soul, to find out and record their myths of creation, of spirits and so on. Information about belief starts pouring back in the same way that folklore studies gathered stories. Early anthropology is rather crude and very flattening in this way, and is limited by these methods, which are essentially similar to those of folklore studies. Yet there is a sense of popular fascination, and there seem to be two things going on here, which represent the core of what I am currently writing about in my book Stranger Magic, and which explain that title. One is that the Victorians and Edwardians don’t want to think of themselves as given to irrationality. They see this as marginal. They want to exclude it, expel it. So what we have here is an opportunity to allow this notion of irrationality to thrive by entirely investing it in others, in cultures that can be patronised and looked down upon. There is a flattering illusion of control at work here. It is the illusion that ‘we’ are in control, while ‘they’ are clearly not; ‘they’ are poor unfortunates who believe that if they see their face in a mirror they will die, whereas ‘we’ are far above that. This is a projection and an expulsion, an elaborate rejection designed for the purpose of denying what is already familiar, negating and inverting what is actually already native.  The other side of this is a quantitatively substantial set of false recognitions. This false recognition concerns the levels of ignorance regarding what people did believe. In most cases, there was an inadequate knowledge of the languages of the cultures supposedly studied. There was no real effort made to gain the trust of informants. As a result of such factors, there is obviously little certainty regarding the reliability of information. Indeed, it is safe to say the information must have been extremely unreliable. This situation was compounded by forces from the other direction, that what you are getting much of the time is actually a reflection of belief from home. This is precisely the issue here regarding mirrors as objects of superstition. The idea that some

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128  Marina Warner with Dan Smith non-European cultures believed that there was a harmful magic at work within mirrors was a misrecognition. The actual source of this is that there is a very strong Celtic/British native belief that mirrors possess dangerous supernatural powers. This is a very European quality of belief, projected upon this space of the other. DS: So this outward-looking gaze, this prejudicial regarding of the superstitious behaviour in others, had already been shaped and determined by deeply set traditions of belief from within? MW: Yes, but it had been evolving. An interesting place to see this happening is in ghost stories. If you think about ghost stories as a popular manifestation of the concerns of spiritualism, and as efforts to direct the forces of narrative and belief that emerged out of the newly formed terrain of folklore, you find that there is a focus of magic upon things. It is the work of M. R. James that best exemplifies this. He was, of course, a great scholar too, of Christian and Judaic law, but was responsible for the most powerful and successful of ghost stories. This focusing upon things is acted out by stuffy academics finding antiquarian objects which, in one way or another, often seem to come alive, to perform some form of agency, usually with terrible consequences. This was supposed to be something that happened in other cultures, to other, less developed people, in far-away, hostile countries. The British them­selves were far too rational to believe in such things, and the landscape too orderly to allow them. But James brought it back home through the means of the story, through these things that move, that somehow talk, that have life. Another great example of this would be the W. W. Jacobs story The Monkey’s Paw [1902]. Here you have a relic from India. It includes foreign magic, whereas James’s is home grown, but the setting is so domestic and familiar, and all the more terrifying because of it. Now, of course, this form of uncanny fear is absolutely endemic in cinema, as film can animate objects so well.  DS: It also seems consistent with this idea of materially verifiable presences of the ineffable, in particular of notions of soul or spirit, of that which would seem to be beyond materiality. Here we have discourses and disciplines that are attempting to find material evidence of such presences, and at the same time there are these narratives which project onto objects, as hauntings.  MW: And they were given a great impetus from another direction, not folklore, ethnography,  or the realm of culture and the imagination per se, but from science. Between the 1880s and 1900s, there was an absolute explosion of discoveries that revealed invisible forces. The discovery of the electromagnetic

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Image, technology, enchantment  129 field, for example, was revolutionary, changing the terms of our relationship to the world. The idea that the air between you and me is not empty is something we are now familiar with through mobile phone technology, and the very fact that we have mobile phones, which in turn enable us to talk to friends in the middle of nowhere, communicating along these imperceptible waves can still be thought of as miraculous.  DS: And H. G. Wells was a great translator of these forces, replacing magic with science in his stories from the 1890s. These new theories, models, and technologies are present, reconfigured, and described just enough to create a convincing enough illusion to provide his stories with the necessary apparatuses. These invisible forces become the novum, the new and shocking element, of his tales. MW: He is so original and exciting because he makes everything banal. That was his great innovation. I really enjoy the way that in The War of the Worlds [1898], you look out of the window and see Martians coming across the unexciting landscape of Surrey. This is a lesson that needs to be learnt by contemporary cinema. Films now create these elaborately fantastic, incredibly distant scenarios, whereas this thrilling presence of the horror in something completely familiar and humdrum offers so much more. DS: He wrote about this in the 1930s, in a preface for a new edition of The Invisible Man – that he sought to domesticate the impossible. This was an absolute necessity, the vital component in his ‘scientific romances’, written between 1895 and 1901. In a world where anything can happen, there is no investment, there is nothing at stake for the reader. If fences can get up and walk, cats and dogs can talk or fly, how can a reader engage with and commit to the fantasy? There are no real consequences. But what Wells sets out to create, in contrast, is a world where only one thing is odd, out of place, exaggerated, and everything else is exactly as the reader knows it from their own experience. It is solid, real, familiar. And this is the issue with the fantastic in contemporary cinema that you mentioned, with the dominance of computer-generated imagery [CGI].  MW: Yes, it is fantasy unleashed.  DS: It is the opposite of Wells’s logic. Because they can do anything, they choose to do anything. The audience can expect to see anything. Whereas when cinema relied on a more material basis, the slightest deviation from the norm, from familiar expectations of that reality, could be shocking and disorientating. Now it is very hard to shock and disorientate. 

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130  Marina Warner with Dan Smith MW: Things need to be bounded. And something else that spec­ tacular CGI cinema misses out on is a sufficient grounding of fantasy in character. In Wells, it is not just the banality of landscape, or the familiarity of locations, interiors, and material details, it is also that his characters are ordinary people.  DS: He takes forms of popular adventure fiction but instead of populating it with heroes, his protagonists are more like … MW: … clerks, or Pip from Great Expectations. DS: Yes, exactly; they are flawed and ordinary people. They are capable of mistakes; there are consequences for their actions.  MW: It is strange to think about The Time Machine in the context of our discussion as it has, strangely, become even more of a prophetic form in recent times. I’ve noticed that documentaries using archival footage have become peculiarly astonishing because of the relationship of film footage to the subject. I saw recently a biography of the dancer Anna Halprin, who was born in 1920, and is still alive and able to appear ‘in person’. Living in California, she was surrounded by cameras. From the time she was five years old, there was this visual record accumulating of her life. This footage was miraculous, a time machine. There was an unbelievable relationship here between this footage of her as a child, and then the alternative scene of the 1960s. This was the first time I have experienced this, to see somebody so old, alive in the present of the making of the documentary, and to be able to see so far back into her early life. This wasn’t reconstruction. Instead, we have the Wellsian time machine, able to travel across a life that spanned most of a century.  DS: So we have the time machine as technological apparatus, but also as a means to capture the spirit, to see and hear the dead, and a psychic reconstruction of past. But this issue that we have been discussing in relation to the moving image, regarding popular cinema and so on, also has correlations with photography, particularly if we acknowledge the idea that perhaps digital technologies have transformed the photograph too. What was always inherently an aspect of the still photograph – that it is a fictional form of image making, that it is a creation of something that looks an awful lot like what we think of as reality – has been accentuated by the conflation of photographic technologies with an increasingly ubiquitous presence of digital technologies. This saturation of the digital can be found in all photography’s forms, from the photojournalism and fashion images to the commonness of computers at home. Using what are now cheap and familiar processes, there is an enormous amount of control over the photograph, from the

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Image, technology, enchantment  131 taking of a picture to its editing and printing. Again, this is not new, but the degrees and qualities are. There is a supposed opportunity to ‘improve’ the image, but also to allow the fantastic to happen. The believability of the photograph has been renegotiated. Or at least that is the appearance of things. Perhaps this is merely an updated configuration of what had always been the case? MW: It has changed. It is different, and as the limitations in Wells’s fiction contrast with saturation of digital imagery in popular manifestations of the fantastic today, we can see a concrete shift in relation to still photographs. The indexical trace of the photograph was the sine qua non of the medium, an embodiment of physical material, and that has definitely changed. There was an embodiment of physical materials. And there are artists who are not only interested in this, but concerned by it. You can see how Tacita Dean, in her exhibition in Basel, ‘Analogue’ [2006], takes an ethical view on this. It is a Platonic view of this indexicality, in both photography and film. She wants to capture the physical trace of light, not the shadow. This also applies to the sound wave. The digital, as a lack of embodiment, is fraudulent. It is an anxiety that I have written about, particularly in Phantasmagoria. This excess of the fantastic that emerges with the digital seeks to embody itself, to make itself feel present. I’ve heard that the film Avatar [2009] is very visceral, an intensely physical experience, and full of violence that mirrors this fraudulent seeking of embodiment. We are now so dematerialised. What you are doing there, recording this conversation in digital form, writing notes on a laptop, is so dematerialised.  DS: If we could turn now to the figure of the exotic spirit guide, why is this figure so important within spiritualist discourses and the surrounding contexts? MW: It continues to be so. For example, the word shaman or shamanic has been naturalised in our culture. I seem to come across it every day in one context or another. And the shaman is precisely the exotic spirit guide. This idea of the spirit guide has a curious acceptability, as opposed to magicians or wizards, which are outside of the terms of the permissible. They are too eccentric or seem overly childish. Instead, there is and has been a general acceptance that what were thought to be the belief systems of some other cultures contained some genuine understanding of the relationships between phenomena, which we have lost. There was a sense of Western life having been stripped. In very broad terms, this is to do with the crisis around Christianity, the impact of Darwin on the Victorians, the crisis around ethics which

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132  Marina Warner with Dan Smith followed the First World War. If you think of the way in which the European powers rushed into that war, so convinced of it as the right course of action, and then having to come to terms with the consequences and the aftermath, you can get a sense of how great a crisis that must have been. We are still living in times of similar concerns and anxieties. These are times of no less significant moral and ethical questions, concerning relationships to fellow human beings and to nature itself. So these conditions have been going on for quite a while. These spirit guides turn up as repositories of alternative wisdom, and then movements like theosophy actually migrate to India, to tap the wisdom of the East. It is a fantasy with links to the actual practices of some cultures.  The shamanic and the spirit guide also have a relationship to the obliterated, to the massacred ghosts of our victims. Many are from the Indian subcontinent, but more are Native Americans. These are figures from cultures which have been irreversibly altered by the forces of colonialism, their habitats and customs destroyed. But these interactions have been going on for a long time. These stories of the received wisdom of nature are all part of a collective hopeful dream on the part of the colonisers, and now on the part of ourselves. There are examples among the Native Americans, such as the ghost dance at the Battle of Wounded Knee, of spirit beliefs forged out of contact. This was a strange splicing of evangelical cults and shamanic animal mimicry that led to the wearing of ghost dance shirts at the battle. Yet these then went on to feed the fantasies that surrounded how these beliefs were perceived. Buffalo Bill’s circus takes the survivors on tour, disseminating these fantasies, which then find their way in great numbers into spirit photographs. And we continue to shape these stories; the interactions are so deeply imbedded.  DS: Outside of spirit photography, how could we see photography more generally disseminating these ideas? MW: There were various popular organs that disseminated knowledge of other cultures in particular ways. A popular form of this can be seen in National Geographic as it once was, which itself followed on from Victorian precedents. It was presented as encyclopaedic, an enlightened vision of the world, democratic and tolerant, but actually it was voyeuristic, a place to indulge a love of peculiar practices. There was a pedalling of a very crudely presented depiction of other cultures. But this kind of armchair travelling developed from both engraved illustrations and literary travel narratives. It came after the steel engraving magazines in which you would have found similar scenes. W. G. Sebald has a

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Image, technology, enchantment  133 passage in Austerlitz [2001] which describes how this character, probably referring to himself, loved to look at these engravings of strange worlds opened up. This visual armchair travelling was a powerful imaginative incentive to all kind of cultural attitudes, as well as literary impulses. DS: So photography is a continuation of far older forms of travel narrative and illustration? MW: A good example of how this transmission works is Edward Curtis, and this is something that leaves me reeling, and wondering how to ever get outside of our imaginative preconceptions that structure the ways we select visual information. Curtis is the great photographer of the ‘vanishing’ Native Americans. Despite being well intentioned, his own sense of a vanishing culture determined how he would photograph these people. He tended to photograph them in full native dress. He never photographed them working, or contributing to the new conditions in which they lived. They were always these museum effigies, noble and beautiful. These monumental photographs, despite their amazing qualities, were performing his own fantasy and fears, rather than acknowledging the acts of transformation and metamorphosis that were taking place as these people learned to live under new conditions. Instead, he creates this projected act of memorialisation. DS: I’m wondering if emerging here is a sense of the visual as something to be distrusted, as implicated in the constructing of mythic and fantastic agendas? In particular, I want to suggest a question that involves a form of opposition here. To think this through, it would be useful to imagine an Edwardian and post-Edwardian context, in particular the destruction that took place in Europe and its aftermath, and then to think of Bronislaw Malinowski, escaping to the Pacific at the same time. Although he was initially excited and influenced by Frazer’s work, he essentially invents the modern form of ethnography, which has little to do with the projections of folklore studies, is distinct from the construction of viewpoints we find in visual technologies, but is instead a sustained period of engagement. It is in some ways the opposite of how you described the gathering of information in folklore studies. It requires that you learn the language, observe behaviour, and try not to impose Western fantasies and narratives upon the other. But at the core of this is the act of writing. And this is where the idea of a potential opposition comes in. So my question is this: is there a defined and identifiable opposition here between the ethnographic as a form of writing and technologies of the visual?

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134  Marina Warner with Dan Smith MW: I’m sure that is what Malinowski thought he was doing, but there is still a sensationalist element of projection here. So perhaps it is not possible to sustain much of a sense of opposition as put forward in your terms. His book Sex and Repression in Savage Society [1927] certainly achieved a form of notoriety by the tone of its title alone. And overall, the suggestion of a more sexualised world in faraway places has sensationalist connotations. DS: I was thinking more of the initial work done in Argonauts of the Western Pacific [1922], which is a truly revolutionary book, and is the document that invents modern ethnography. But I would really defend Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society too, as there is this questioning of a Freudian perspective, pointing out the cultural specificity of the Freudian model. In this, he challenges the imposition of such a European notion on the other. This applies not only to limitations of Freud’s n ­ ineteenth-century European familial repression upon non-Western cultures, but identifies those projections of fantasies that we’ve been discussing. There may well be a construction of myths of sexual freedom in this, but they are far from sensationalist.  MW: Well there may well have been different and better codes referring to sexuality.  DS: He had experienced first hand an alternative to the familial models of repression described by Freud. But it seems that at the root of Malinowski’s ethnography is a form of critical analysis which tries to undermine those forms of colonial projection. There is a rigorous approach that resists value judgements regarding an inferior other, that offers both new and convincing accounts of alien cultures, and provides radical re-readings of home. MW: Well, the reason that dissident surrealists like Caillois, Bataille, and Leiris were so drawn to anthropological documents, including photography, was precisely because they saw it as a challenge to very conventional, binding, trammelling values of their home culture. When they founded the Collège de Sociologie to investigate the presence of the sacred in society, they weren’t doing that from a position of belief. Rather they had internalised a position of outsider status. They saw themselves as the anthropologists looking at European culture as if it were exotic. The dates correspond to Malinowski. So by this stage, we are getting out of the Victorian era of projection and are beginning to accept the permeation of magical thinking in the structures of the apparently rational, secular Western society. I’m very pleased by the recent increase in books and exhibitions that explore this idea. There is not only a growing interest in these areas, but a growing acceptance that

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Image, technology, enchantment  135 magic permeates so-called rational and secular Western thought, practices, and society. It is only by working with it that you can make it work for you. We are captured by imaginative forms. If you said to Dawkins ‘spit on your mother’s photograph’, he might find a rational argument not to, like it is not good manners, but the real reason would be a spirit sense that you shouldn’t do that. Proust dramatises a scene of that kind, profaning the mother’s photograph, and there is this uncanniness to the photograph. In recognising that irrational thoughts have presence and meaning, we can begin to work with this in different ways. And we can see many artists trying to understand this rather than expel it – to make it richer, rather than leading to fundamentalism, rejection, or repression, leading us to revealing and poetic forms.  DS: And we also have legal structures in place that seem to legislate behaviour according to spirit, belief, and profanation.  MW: Absolutely. We can see it in the idea of hate-speech.  DS: Yes, and forms of obscenity, defacing of property. There was a recent tabloid storm about a drunk teenager peeing on a war memorial. A photograph of this event was published on the front pages, and calls were made for his imprisonment. How can we have such an outcry about this without acknowledging the presence of the sacred? MW: This relates to the magic of words, which is something I’m writing about in my book Stranger Magic. This takes us back to the question of a difference between writing and visual represen­ tations. This is a huge topic which would take too much time to really address here, but I can say that I think the magical character of writing has returned. Inscription, partly through the influence of Derrida, has become something to hold on to in the era of digital technology. We need documents that are tangibly real, and it is odd that we still rely so much upon signatures. DS: This is a strange trace of the authentic. And there are notions of authenticity that emerge in your work, which could also be thought about in terms of the museum, collections, and archival forms, as well as in the legal power of the signature. Are we looking at an investment in a mythic presence? MW: I’m in some ways a sceptic of authenticity. When it comes to literature, The Arabian Nights, which I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about, is a text where you don’t have to look for the authenticity of the text. It is a text in constant flux. It has no author; it is sort of an Arabic text, but is also Persian, Indian, French, and various other things. This is an alternative form of authenticity, not anchored in authorship or verifiable origin. I’m

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136  Marina Warner with Dan Smith very keen on this as an object, and very committed to that thought. This is a metaphor without a referent, a flux of experience without fixed borders. In this way it is an exemplary book. But at the same time I’m very aware of authenticity as something changed by its origins. I’m very interested in talismans, and the difference between something that is or is not a talisman is entirely to do with the authenticity of its making and its origin. Money in that sense is talismanic. It only has its correct value when inscribed in an authentic way. Branded goods are an even better example. The distinction between two Prada handbags, one authentic, the other not, is only a matter of the correct form of inscription. Many things are increasingly defined by their authenticity, and we are caught up in it. Now we are to be digitally fingerprinted, have prints of our irises on our passports as a more precise form of authentication. A person with this form of passport benefits, is granted a more convenient access to travel, from being much more precisely authenticated, moving through queues faster, and so on. This is a condition of modernity, and we are seeing more and more of these kinds of systems. This is a site of struggle, a source of potential conflict, antagonism, and anxiety.  DS: Authenticity can therefore be thought of as something that is actively contested. If we think of a space like the Pitt Rivers Museum, our relationship to it relies on an investment and belief in authenticity. It is a place of holding for objects of magic, a repository for talismans, which have a relationship with the authentic. Yet so much of their power comes from our engagement, often close and intimate, with the actual, the verifiable, an investment with the authentic. The inalienable ‘thereness’ of the encounter.  MW: The Pitt Rivers Museum is a very interesting example of the complexity of authenticity. It is a place where labelling, which itself has a very particular and enticing form in that museum, transforms ordinary things. I have been especially interested in one particular object there. It is a hoop of iron with tiny antlers, and it comes from a shamanic costume from Siberia. The label, which is dated 1904, describes the form and function of this object, and explains that this is a shamanic crown. The public could not be relied upon, particularly at that time, to recognise what this was. Without the label, this object would be read as a very humdrum thing. It doesn’t have anything special about it as a crafted object. It is rather inconspicuous.  DS: In a sense, that is the criterion for inclusion in the Pitt Rivers collection. It has to be ordinary, something from everyday life rather than an extraordinary object. 

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Image, technology, enchantment  137 MW: This is something that a lot of artists do now – they authenticate things into the order of art. Of course it begins with Duchamp, but it continues now. The act of selecting, defining, and labelling changes the object. This act makes it belong to the artist, arranging in a different context, creating a new form of value, investment, and authenticity.  DS: And there is a relationship between the audience, the form of display, and the artist that has come about through long-­ established relationships with collections. A relationship between the ‘present’, of the experience itself, and the idea of ‘presence’, the presence of something else, something other, which can be found in a museum. The gallery, as the site of contemporary art, is inheriting and enabling the same situation. So, in a way, even in Duchamp, there is nothing radically new about these gestures.  MW: There is a move towards archival tendencies that I find interest­ ing in contemporary art. Mark Dion’s work endows collected material with power. These things become numinous. The detritus he found in his Tate Thames Dig [1999] is nothing on its own. When these bits of glass and plastic are organised into a mahogany cabinet, they acquire aura.  DS: What I’d like to add to that is that although Tate Thames Dig is in part defined by the mahogany cabinet, Dion has also incorporated photographic documentation of the process as a technology in itself, and I feel that this gives it as much aura as the display case. It is the use of the technologies of archaeology that help this found material, this base stuff, to acquire a value, to give it presence, to make it of interest. In particular, it is a social dimension recorded in images, enabling us to see how the material has gone through human hands. This is archaeology as apparatus, made up of social as well as material elements. But for the last part of the discussion, I’d like to turn, or return, to the idea of the fantastic. You have in your work articulated many ways in which we can find the fantastic as a haunting presence in the past, but you also make it clear that this is an active force within the present. In your introduction to Wells’s The Time Machine, you use the following description, relating to the fantastic, as ‘the impulse to reconfigure social realities in dream geographies’. For me, this sums up much of what I find interesting about both contemporary art and narratives which would include folklore, science fiction, and much in between. It is a description that overlaps with Ernst Bloch’s notions of utopian impulse, which is an idea that is very important in my own research. Do you see this

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138  Marina Warner with Dan Smith as a far-reaching term? Do you think that dream geographies are a way to reconfigure social reality?  MW: I do. Fantasy in these terms can be emancipatory. Unfor­ tunately, this can also be conservative. It is not intrinsically one thing or the other.  DS: It would be easy to make a distinction, and there are many who do, to say that it is only within realism that you have the ability to imagine and enact a change in social reality. In contrast, all that fantasy can do in this situation is disable change, by focusing upon some unrealisable thing, while fixing the values of an ideological order. But I read this as a completely artificial opposition. We also need to recognise that a story does more than one thing at any one time. This makes me question a position such as that of the critic Darko Suvin when he opposes the modern tradition of science fiction, as cemented by Wells, with the earlier forms of fantasy exemplified by the fairy tale and folk story. But I see this as an unnecessary opposition if we recognise the presence of conflicting narratives in any one form. And in the same way, we can see conflicting forces at work in the Pitt Rivers Museum. But I suppose the main question here, and I will make it the final question, is whether you would refute the opposition between fantasy and realism, this idea that only in the latter is it possible to imagine and enact any form of shift or change in the world? MW: Certainly, attempts at realistic representations tend to bind you into what is already there, rather than give you a chance of thinking how it might be different. Of course, this isn’t always the case. Dickens, for instance, offers realism, albeit with a streak of fantasy, with a reforming zeal. I would agree with you and say that I find it hard to go along with such an opposition. I have a tendency to see analogies rather than oppositions anyway, and would certainly want to align myself with the possibility of fantasy as this kind of critical force. Kafka creates fantasies that are highly resistant to the world that he knows. As well as being these expressions of resistance, they have qualities of prophecy, relating to society, judicial process, consumption, and so on. He is the supreme artist of the form, but there are others. For instance, I’ve recently been reading Leskov, who is the subject of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ but is someone I have not read before. Like Kafka, he writes fables, in a language that veers between baroque and nonsense. While preposterous, they never leave behind the burden of what is going on externally. They are a critique. And that is precisely the reason for him being the subject of ‘The Storyteller’. What Leskov does is a continuation of the

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Image, technology, enchantment  139 oral, popular folklore tradition. You present stories about kings and queens, castles, and all manner of supernatural forces. Yet actually you are talking about money, sex, family; you are talking about real things. London, January 2010 Bibliography Marina Warner, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Time Machine [1895], London: Penguin, 2005. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, London: Chatto and Windus, 2011.

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7

What happens in the gaps An interview with Suzanne Treister by Roger Luckhurst

Suzanne Treister was born in London, daughter of a Jewish-Polish exile. She trained at St Martin’s School of Art (1978–81) and Chelsea School of Art (1981–82). She lives in London, but has spent time in Berlin, the United States and Australia. She was a pioneering digital artist, always interested in the science-fictional possibilities of computers and computing, and in 1995 she developed an avatar called Rosalind Brodsky, named after her grandmother. Brodsky was a time traveller who worked at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. Brodsky investigated the traumatic history of the twentieth century, travelling to its pivotal moments. This passage through time was partly driven by an openly autobiographical attempt to ‘rescue’ Treister’s grandparents, who had been killed in the genocide of Polish Jewry during the Second World War. As a patient possibly suffering from obsessional delusional fantasies, Rosalind Brodsky was apparently treated by Sigmund Freud in 1886 and 1928, by Carl Jung in 1958, by Jacques Lacan in 1970, and by Melanie Klein in 2058 (after Klein had been transported into the future), all of whom left case notes on Brodsky. Installations, art works, case histories, a book, a website, and an interactive CD-ROM emerged from this project. The last Brodsky project was HEXEN 2039, which appeared in 2006 as an internet site, a movie, a series of exhibitions, and interventions into places like the Science Museum, London, as well as a book. In a style that sometimes echoes the obsessional mapping and drawing associated with ‘outsider art’, HEXEN unravelled a host of links between military research, occult ritual, and mass popular culture. The diagrams included in the work make frenetic links between Second World War American rocket research, the smuggling of Nazi technicians, the black magic occultism of Aleister Crowley and other 140

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What happens in the gaps  141 self-proclaimed masters of the dark arts, weird psychical research experiments, science fiction, The Wizard of Oz, and the Jewish kabbala. Since HEXEN, Treister has explored the NATO codification system (the military numbering system that categorises every object that exists in the world into a four-number code, even including category 9999, ‘items which cannot conceivably be classified in any existing classes’). MTB [Military Training Base] explores the use of virtual-reality technology to train American soldiers for conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and extends her manic mappings of hidden connections to epic scale (the exhibition centred on a diagram over seventeen feet long). These projects are all offered in a deadpan style, leaving one uncertain about the level of irony in the conspiracy theories and density of interconnections that are being mapped out. That some of the connections made in the pieces are true is unnerving, for it is now well established that the American security services have often invested time and money in psychical and occult research programmes (projects that have become the basis for popular culture like the X-Files television series). Where, though, does Treister leave documented history and enter the realms of paranoia, fantasy, or aesthetic transformation? Paranoid structures are notoriously difficult to disentangle from rational forms of interpretation, as both Freud and Lacan commented in their psycho­ analytic studies. In the era of the internet, Treister’s combination of interests in the history of technology, the military–industrial complex, and magical thinking about occult interconnectedness makes her work an important reflection on our weird and wired condition of being. Most of Treister’s work is accessible in online form at ­www.­suzannetreister.net. Roger Luckhurst: Like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] or Stewart Home’s use of the occult in his avant-garde provocations, your work leaves the viewer uncertain about where fact stops and fiction starts, or just how ironic the sketching of these intricate connections really is. Suzanne Treister: A friend warned me recently, ‘Make sure you want to go over the line, because there’s no coming back’. He was talking about knowing too much, too much basically about US military and security history and programmes. He himself is way over the line, although according to an NSA [US National Security Agency] friend of his, there would be no way they could have a conversation together where they were both talking about the same things and knew what each other meant when it came to anything since 1945.

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142  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst So, firstly, there is the issue of how informed the audience is, how able they are to distinguish between what might be actual and what might be invented, and because my work contains a lot of information unfamiliar to many people there are varying degrees of slippage, and that is interesting in itself. With the HEXEN project [figures 7.1 and 7.2], hardly anyone in the art world seemed familiar with the material I was referencing. Most of the reviewers assumed that I’d invented the whole thing, which I clearly hadn’t. There really were men in the basement of Stanford Research Institute [SRI] and at Fort Meade in Maryland carrying out experiments with ‘remote viewing’ for a military programme, and there is no question that MKULTRA took place, and that it involved all kinds of experiments with drugs and the paranormal.1 They used the facilities of many US universities, there are records to prove it, and the links between rocket scientists and the Ordo Templi Orientis have become public knowledge in books about the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons. You’d have to be incredibly imaginative to invent all this stuff. Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats [2004] was one of the more interesting sources for the project because he was one of the only guys who’d interviewed people in the US military who were doing the occult-based research. His work validates much of the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’: these are real people doing real research. The American military have been interested in psychical warfare for a long time, since the Second World War at least. Some of those guys believe in it and others don’t, but one of the reasons they do it is in case the other side are doing it. I read pretty widely on the history of military–occult relation­ ships, from the druids, through Rasputin, Dr John Dee, the Soviet experiments, and up to the present day, and a lot of that material is in HEXEN 2039. It was just a matter of threading it together with the other areas I was investigating for the project, like current neuroscientific research, and coming up with my own theory of potential future technologies and objectives within this strand of military research, and where that might take us. What happens in the gaps is the art bit. RL: The other difficulty of reading the work is that it’s often filtered through a persona, so these are actually the researches of Rosalind Brodsky, rather than of Suzanne Treister. It’s another level of mediation or ironic displacement: Brodsky sets up another screen in front of the information. ST: The fiction and also the twist in HEXEN 2039, made possible through the Brodsky/IMATI construct, is the idea that this

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What happens in the gaps  143

7.1  Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039 / Diagram (detail), 2006; Rotring ink on paper, 84 cm × 48 cm.

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144  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst

7.2  Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039 / GRAPHITE / U.S. Phased-­Array Radar, Thule, Greenland, 2006; graphite on paper, 29.7 cm × 21 cm.

research into the military’s (actual) historical involvement in the occult and alternative belief systems is itself part of a British military operation called HEXEN 2039, which takes place in the future and whose outcome is the development of new mind-­control technologies, which enable the military, in turn, to remotely (at a distance) alter belief patterns in the subject, whether military or civilian. HEXEN 2039 was the last Brodsky project of many, and in this instance she was somewhat in the background. But it’s important to know how the work has developed because it’s a sort of unfolding narrative. If you read Brodsky’s diary, which I wrote back in the 1990s, and navigated the CD-ROM of her time travels, you’d know what the Institute of Militronics was about, and something of the nature of its research. It’s kind of like an imaginary SRI International of the UK. IMATI is based in the near future, and the more recent projects focus on the programmes of the Institute rather than the life of Brodsky. So

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What happens in the gaps  145 the work is like a vast diagram or web that you have to follow. The whole thing is a sci-fi construct, like a series of novels set in the future but drawing upon the past. RL: How would you characterise your relationship to this material: ambivalent? ST: In terms of the military material and focus it’s not really about ambivalence but more about ideas of complicity, since we are all complicit. My father ran a defence spares business and, com­bined with my family’s wartime history, I developed a love–hate relation­ ship with things associated with the military, which is different from ambivalence. And there is the issue of science fiction writers who imagine new military technologies and whose ideas may in turn contribute to the military’s research, which may or may not have been their intention. I certainly never wanted to make didactic, political work that’s against war per se; it’s unrealistic. I’m not a straight-down-the-line pacifist, nor am I an artist activist. I can’t make that kind of art, but my work is political. I’m interested in difficult complicities, collusion, ideas of responsibility and accountability, and knowledge. RL: And does this position extend to your use of the occult? You have not only documented the military’s use of the occult but in HEXEN you have experimented with it yourself…. ST: I’m not completely about suspending the question of belief in my work. I have no fixed beliefs. I don’t believe in binaries like normal–paranormal. We are all chameleons and we have moving, shifting parts, and that includes our brains. About three times a year in synagogue I can feel like a total Jew; I can even believe in God. For a few seconds I am tuned into a different level of understanding. Then, on other occasions, when for example I made my own remote-viewing experiments for HEXEN 2039, I experienced a hit; the first time I visualised the target so accurately it blew my socks off. I’ve heard that’s common, and then you apparently have to undergo training [laughs]. Other times I am a total cynic, but days later I may feel the world is a place of strange paranormal forces and fantastical mysteries. RL: I get the sense that you want to fully investigate the practices of what might be called ‘subjugated knowledges’ – whether it’s remote viewing, or using the kabbalah, or the manic drawing methods typical of ‘outsider art’. ST: I want to appropriate them. Yes, I want to use these methods myself; I’m not a hands-off person. It’s territorial; I like owning things. If I can get my hands on the crystal the Elizabethan alchemist John Dee used for his scrying from the Science

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146  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst Museum, I’m going to use it. When it comes to ‘manic drawing methods’, these come about quite naturally when you have to include so much information and you are doing it by hand on a plain sheet of paper. Unless of course you mean the drawings where I have appropriated existing alchemical drawings as a structural/conceptual device. RL: In Alchemy and A Time Line for Science Fiction Inventions, for example, did you do deep research or do you just appropriate these alchemical and kabbalistic structures aesthetically? ST: A Time Line for Science Fiction Inventions uses the kabbalah’s tree of life. I know what it’s about. I had to, to make the decision to use it; it’s part of the work. But some of the source material for the Alchemy project comes from a book of alchemical drawings by Alexander Roob that I bought when I was living in Berlin and it’s in German, which means I can’t understand each caption fully. So when I chose which alchemical drawing to use in conjunction with information from a specific newspaper I was deliberately half in the dark. I’ve read widely on alchemy, but this semi-random way of choosing specific drawings made the process more exciting and opened up each work to additional, undetermined readings. RL: Do you have any responses from people who claim to know the magical tradition, who praise or complain about your uses of it? ST: I haven’t had any complaints from religious or spiritualist groups, but I do get a lot of interest from people who write blogs and various types of conspiracy-theory websites. Many of them have copied my images onto their pages, and in some cases have made links from their own sites to the HEXEN site, in order to substantiate their data. In most cases I don’t think they realise it’s an art project. For some of them it isn’t: it’s an information site similar to theirs. But then again, some of their sites look like other people’s art projects. I keep a record of these blogs and what they’re saying. There was a long review on one of them which was incredibly interesting. Someone like that is so well informed about the subject matter, compared to an average art critic, that they could discuss it at great length, so this guy wrote a really rigorous and critical review of the material without any sense of it being art whatsoever. Once when I was doing a public gallery talk on HEXEN 2039 in a regional museum there was an elderly couple who looked really angry throughout the talk. During question time they erupted and demanded to know why I hadn’t included so-and-so or referred to such-and-such. They were infuriated. According to them, I had edited various people out of history. I enjoy this kind of interaction because it becomes part of the

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What happens in the gaps  147 work. If you work on webs of information and connectedness, and especially if you put them online, then you can’t control the boundaries of whether it is perceived as art or not. That said, the same thing could go for an FBI agent looking at my work as for a conspiracy-theory blogger. RL: Yes, there’s no way to negate a conspiracy theory, because the refusal or denial itself becomes part of the conspiracy: however odd, every position is incorporated. ST: Well, at this point I think we should define what we mean when we say conspiracy theory. It’s not a simple category. The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ can include on the one hand people who believe the Illuminati are camping out in their neighbour’s flat, and on the other hand can include people who have access to facts which others, out of ignorance, deem hallucinatory. RL: Let’s talk about your family background. Rosalind Brodsky is named in memory of your grandmother, who died in the Holo­caust in Poland. Your father got out, fought in the French Resistance, and after the war went on to set up an arms dealership. ST: Yes, after the French Resistance my father escaped to the UK to join the Polish Army in Scotland and then the Polish Govern­ment in Exile in London. After the war, in the UK, he couldn’t immediately use his qualifications in law and political sciences [from the University of Lwow and L’École des Sciences Politiques in Paris] so he went into business selling equipment left over from the Second World War. It was supposed to be a temporary measure. I was brought up being told he was director of an electronics import/export company. That’s what I put on the forms I had to fill in at school. I can’t remember when I found out what it actually was – sometime in my teens. My father had me when he was quite old and I sometimes feel like I’m out of sync with my generation in terms of historical events. When my friends talk about the Second World War, they’re usually talking about their grandparents’ time. My school friends came from settled, middle-class families; their parents all seemed to work for the BBC. Some were hippies (albeit of the 1960s Hampstead variety), while my dad was this authoritarian Polish aristocrat who didn’t want to read any more books, had a drawer full of Holocaust photos, and traded in spare parts for military equipment. RL: And the Brodsky project shows you’re very aware of psychoanalytic ideas about transmission, the idea that the children of Holocaust survivors have the trauma passed on, what’s sometimes called ‘transgenerational haunting’.

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148  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst

7.3  Suzanne Treister, NATO / NSC 9915 / Black Square Kasimir Malevich, 2007; watercolour on Arches paper, 29.7 cm × 21 cm.

ST: Yes, I know. It is all true. I can confirm it. In the past, some people have become angry when I’ve mentioned the war, and accused me of trying to get some sort of mileage out of it, but they don’t understand that it’s real. I think it’s had an effect on a lot of decisions I’ve made in my life, good, bad, and in between. I had to come back to all this in 2000, when my father asked me to design his company website. I was ideologically against the idea and fought with him but eventually I agreed. As he was always too busy, I had to do the research myself, going round the whole company gathering material. The only thing he insisted on explaining to me was the NATO codification system. It was crucial to identify all of the parts he sold, which were often simultaneously listed under completely different numbers in other coding systems. He was obsessed with all this cross-referencing; his manuals were yellowed and frayed like heavily thumbed Bibles. When I did the website, I felt uneasy about it; for weeks my brain was full of pictures of tanks, warrior ships, and other images from Jane’s defence annuals. When the site was up, as a way of

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What happens in the gaps  149 negotiating my complicity, I decided to acknowledge it as one of my art projects, so I put in a link to it from my homepage. Then, by way of explanation, I added an intermediary page which included biographical details about my father and the company, and my childhood stamp collection, which had come from mail sent to the office. The company has now been sold and the current owner’s webpage is different, but I’ve kept the original files and debated whether to put the original website back online as part of my own site. Legally, though, that would cause serious difficulties. RL: So lots of projects since have been a product of that experience? ST: The NATO project [figure 7.3] came directly out of making the company website because that’s where I came across the codifica­ tion system. It’s totally surreal: it’s like a Borges novel. I mean, NATO probably have no idea how odd it looks, from the outside; they think they’re being logical and business-like, but, to me, the idea of giving a four-digit military group classification number to everything from works of art to live animals is disturbing. Apparently it’s becoming a universal system. RL: Not HEXEN, then? ST: Not specifically. That comes out of the Rosalind Brodsky and the Institute of Militronics project, which I began in 1995, and which came out of the broader family experiences you were talking about. For five years, I was working on the historical materials, Brodsky’s biography, the book, and the CD-ROM, which came out in 1999. During that time I was living in Australia, and, being a long way from Europe, roots became very much more important. It was during this period that I went to Ukraine (in the area that was part of south-east Poland before 1939) with my brother to try and find my father’s village. In 2000, while I was moving more frequently between Australia and Europe and the Brodsky CD-ROM was finished, I decided it would be interesting to try and expand on the hypothetical and supposedly controversial activities of the Institute. Back in Australia I developed a couple of early research projects of the Institute, one of which was Golem/Loew: Artificial Life, and then, when I moved to Berlin in 2003, Operation Swanlake. While living in Berlin I became obsessed with the weird underbelly of German culture. My relationship with Germany is inevitably ambivalent, and I was trying to confront the reality of Germany now. It was another one of those love–hate relationships. There’s something about Berlin that is horrifyingly stimulating because of its weight of history; everything is in your face, not

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150  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst only the Holocaust but the DDR period [Deutsche Demo­ kratische Republik], and also much older histories and aspects of the culture. I became fascinated by the history of witchcraft in Germany. I decided in Berlin that I wanted to do a project on the occult, and I came across a lot of interesting material in the flea markets. Although to some extent the Golem/Loew and Operation Swanlake projects had touched on the occult, it wasn’t until 2005 that I decided to make a project that encompassed it more fully. Before that, I’d say that science fiction and history were the main interest. The occult stuff really only began to make sense in Germany. You might say it was an evasion tactic, away from the historical political realities, and into the belly of the beast, and it was when I first went to the Harz Mountains, which has a huge witchcraft tradition linked to it, that I decided to go back with my video-camera for Walpurgisnacht the following April. While gathering material for what was to become HEXEN 2039 I was simultaneously developing the narrative, which, due to the nature of the Institute, had to have a military imperative. And then, once I’d decided that HEXEN was to be set in 2039, it was a matter of working out a hypothetical future military research project that could potentially develop out of the material I was investigating. I had been interested in ideas of the occult as a teenager, but it was really being in Germany that brought it back out. For a long time, I think, my interest in science and technology substituted for it, because science and technology are always moving towards things we don’t understand. RL: Your work seems to very consciously move with technological developments. You’ve worked on CD-ROMs, designed computer animations, were involved in digital arts very early on, and your website is now a crucial part of your practice. ST: I actually got into computers because I became fascinated by the idea of video games. I’ve talked about that a lot in other interviews. As soon as I could afford to get a computer that could do graphics I got one. That was in 1991. But it was much more analytical at that stage; I was interested in a cultural commentary on computer games and new technologies. I got my first computer, an Amiga, while I was reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984]. The thing about Gibson is that it’s not just science fiction but was about defining our contemporary environment. It seemed to me that so-called science fiction was doing this better than art. When I went to Australia, I couldn’t take the computer with me, so I backtracked a little and returned to painting. I made a series of software boxes, hypothetical software packages that might exist

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What happens in the gaps  151 in the future. In a way, at the time, this seemed more interesting than anything that computers could actually do, since they were quite limited back then. RL: So, by HEXEN, had the technology caught up with the idea? ST: Well, to turn that around a little, the future technology that HEXEN 2039 hypothesises may not be that far away, according to a scientist I met at a conference in 2007. Apparently it’s currently being researched in Maryland. But the thing about the current tech world, which, unlike twenty years ago, is the world most of us are now immersed in, is that it’s so much about being at the cutting edge of the latest gizmo, and the latest gizmo is more and more about government and corporate control of content and information, and so I got less interested in taking part in that. I’m interested in technology as a phenomenon, an ongoing trajectory into the future, but not necessarily in using the latest technology itself to make art. Nor am I a net activist or part of the open source movement, although I’m for both of these in principle. I felt it was more important to stand outside of these environments, not end up incorporated into them. I like the idea of going back to old technologies to think about new technologies. This is why HEXEN 2039 and MTB [Military Training Base] use drawing, sketching out networks and links in pencil, making a physical work outside of the internet, something that can’t be deleted by the flick of a switch. These projects have related websites with remote links to other sites and so on, but I want them to end up as books too; I’d be very depressed if there wasn’t some outcome in book form. The process is like writing a book, a graphic novel, a piece of science fiction. Science fiction is full of all these meta-commentaries and info-dumps, and I love that capacity. So they’re on the internet, but also it was very important that HEXEN existed in the old technology of the book. One day way in the future, if the planet survives, or let’s say the Unabomber gets out of his prison cell in Colorado and destroys the complete worldwide technological infrastructure, maybe someone will pick up HEXEN in a second-hand bookshop, if such things remain, and wonder ‘What the hell was that? Is that all true?’ RL: Every modern technology seems to have an occult double – the telegraph and spirits, the tape deck and voices of the dead, the internet and its deities and ghosts. Is there something intrinsically spooky about technology? ST: I think one of my future software boxes had ‘Spooky’ written on it….

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152  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst Well, by its very nature technology is spooky: it preserves the dead, in film and video, on tape, on CD, on the internet. Every day, millions of dead people or ‘ghosts’ are walking around doing things: shopping, chatting, having coffee, going on holiday, discussing the meaning of life. In the same film, one of the players may be dead and another alive; there is nothing in the technology of video, for example, to differentiate, to tell us which is which, whereas online a site can be updated to reflect changes. Perhaps in this sense the internet is not as intrinsically spooky as film or video or audio recordings. But in another sense it’s spookier, especially now that we have the idea of the all-encompassing cloud to look forward to, a massive techno space where all our data could end up under government lock and key, with corporations like YouTube co-owning everyone’s home movies. You only have to use your imagination to wonder what may become of all this stuff one day. The future is getting weirder. There doesn’t need to be a master plan for it to happen. There is something spooky for us about technology because it transcends the human body. The whole idea of virtual reality is spooky. I used to go to the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus and play on all the state-of-the-art VR [virtual reality] games they had there in the 1980s. In video games you die time and again in a virtual space but you remain alive in the real world. And now the US military are training soldiers using the multi-user computer games inspired DARWARS Program, ‘allowing continuous on-demand training anywhere, anytime, for everyone’. That sounds pretty spooky to me.2 RL: I suppose the big claim about your work would be that it’s all an attempt to understand the trajectory of post-war history: its personal, familial, and national consequences; its military and domestic technologies; and the rise of the military–industrial complex. Perhaps the only way to tell aspects of this hidden history is to go to the occult or other kinds of marginal knowledges, because it is a means of getting outside the official history, the record of the victors. ST: That’s a big question. But as I’ve said earlier, in terms of the military, the occult is now an acknowledged part of the official history. Anything you can do, they can do better. I guess when I started working with new technologies they were a marginal knowledge, and I thought I was going to discover something about where they were taking us, while trying to control and make use of them myself. The first text I wrote about the Brodsky project in 1995 contained this paragraph: ‘Rosalind

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What happens in the gaps  153 Brodsky comes from a mixed background, part Anglo-Christian, part Eastern European Jewish. Brodsky fetishizes history. She becomes a necrophiliac invader of spaces containing the deaths of her ancestors, through the privileged violence of technology’. That was very much 1990s techno-speak but I think it means something quite real. Since I was a teenager I always wanted to change the world, but then some people say maybe the world doesn’t want to be changed. And we all know one man’s utopia is another man’s hell. When I explored the whole fantasy through Brodsky of travelling back in history to rescue my grandparents from the Holocaust, it was a fantasy intervention into history [figure 7.4]. There are things both in the past and in the future which you can’t change. As you say, you can just try and get a better understanding of them, and knowledge can be empowering, but it can also be depressing. With the HEXEN project, and the sequel, HEXEN 2.0 [figure 7.5], it’s on one level about trying to imagine a worst-case scenario of what the military–industrial–academic–scientific– media complex might do to us and how we might, in turn, attempt to alter the course of history. I was told as a child that people went to the gas chambers like sheep, and since the age of five I’ve been planning how not to be a sheep. Maybe I am a paranoid conspiracy theorist. For example, I refuse to join any social networking sites, as that would implicate my friends in my activities. For most people this isn’t a problem. But for me, the fact is that the National Socialists did come and get my grandparents. If, for example, the political situation in the UK changed significantly, it would be quite possible to find yourself in a category that some people didn’t want to have around. This is what happened in Poland. This is what happened in 2004 in the US to the artist Steve Kurtz.3 RL: So you take a dystopian view of the future? That techno-culture is an ever-encroaching, inhuman totality? ST: It’s obvious. Ultimately, the larger the weapon, the greater the threat. That doesn’t mean a lot of people aren’t going to benefit in all kinds of ways before we get there or something else gets there first. RL: Are we back to ambivalence then? About never being sure about the epistemological status of the knowledges you map, whether it’s true or false? ST: True or false is not the point. All the information in my work is on one level or another true. There is no invention, just

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154  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst

7.4  Suzanne Treister, Rosalind Brodsky in her Electronic Time Travelling Costume to rescue her Grandparents from the Holocaust ends up mistakenly on the set of Schindler’s List, Krakow, Poland, 1994, 1997; archival giclée print on Hahnemühle paper, 50 cm × 70 cm.

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What happens in the gaps  155

7.5  Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0 / Literature / The New World Order, H. G. Wells, 1940, 2011; pencil on Arches paper, 21 cm × 29.7 cm.

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156  Suzanne Treister with Roger Luckhurst re-­ ­ presentation. There is so much recent art commentary rhetoricis­ing this supposedly fascinating blurry area between fact and fiction. These people are missing the point. It’s an academic fence-sitter position. There is no fence. Nowhere is a fence. There is only exposure of the horror and the joy, and the bits in between, but there are no fences. London, December 2009

Notes 1 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was an independent scientific research institute whose clients included government agencies, commercial businesses, and other types of organisations. The SRI used to be part of Stanford University until the time of the Vietnam War, when there was a lot of protest from people within the university who felt that the part of its work that was funded by the US military (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA) was co-opting the university into the military–industrial complex. For more details about the SRI International, see www.sri.com/about. 2 DARWARS Program: www.darpa.mil/dso/archives/darwars/index.htm. 3 For details of the Steve Kurtz case see www.caedefensefund.org. The site www.strangeculture.net, promoting the 2008 film Strange Culture by Lynn Hershman Leeson that dramatises the events, gives the following: ‘The surreal nightmare of internationally acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call deemed Kurtz’s art suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected “bio­terrorist” as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife’s body. Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date.’

Bibliography Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, London: Studio Vista, 1972. Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman, Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Richard Grayson, ‘Only Connect’, in Suzanne Treister, 3 Projects: Alchemy, Correspondence from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and War Artists, London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2008.

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What happens in the gaps  157 Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, ‘From Concretism to Metaphor: Thoughts on Some Theoretical and Technical Aspects of the Psychoanalytic Work with Children of Holocaust Survivors’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39, 1984. Stewart Home, Mind Invaders: Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997. Peter Knights, Conspiracy Culture From Kennedy to the X Files, London: Routledge, 2001. Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The Secret Life of Control: Suzanne Treister’s Radical Enlightenment’, in Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction’, Science Fiction Studies, 25:1, 1998. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. David Maclagan, Outsider Art: From the Margins to the Marketplace, London: Reaktion, 2009. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], London: Picador, 1975. Jyanni Steffensen, ‘Doing It Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity’, in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds), Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Suzanne Treister, ‘From Fictional Video Game Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky 1991–2005’, in Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds), Videogames and Art, London: Intellect Books, 2007. Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012. Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039: New Military Occult Technologies for Psycho­ logical Warfare, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. Suzanne Treister, NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008. Suzanne Treister, … No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999. Includes CD-ROM.

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8

The ghosts of media past and present: spirit photography and contemporary art Ben Burbridge 1

I have no doubt that there are those within the sound of my voice who will live to see the time when photographic reproductions will be sent from country to country as quickly as telegraphic messages to-day. In conclusion, may I not ask, who shall say that the camera, adjusted by the hand that feels, and focused by the sensitive eye that sees beyond, with the aid of the intensely sensitive dry plates, shall not bring to light and view the forms of our departed friends, and solve the problem of immortality and life? (Judge Bradwell of Chicago, ‘Address to the Photography Congress and the Chicago World’s Fair’, 18932) What exactly is the status of the worlds created by radio, television and computers? Are there invisible entities adrift in the ether, entire other electronic realms coursing through the wired networks of the world? (Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media, 20003)

The first decade of the 2000s appeared to see spirit photography embraced by the art world as never before. An online display of nineteenth-century spirit photographs organised by the American Museum of Photography in 2000 was followed by a major historical survey of similar pictures, produced by La Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004.4 A further set of exhibitions aimed to draw links between the early photographs and the interest shown in occult and paranormal phenomena by a range of contemporary artists. In this chapter I will be focusing on five such exhibitions, staged in galleries in the UK and the United States between 2003 and 2007, which paired spirit photographs with examples of contemporary art photography. ‘The Disembodied Spirit’, curated by Alison 158

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The ghosts of media past and present  159 Ferris at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2003, juxtaposed early photographs from the estate of Dame Jean Conan Doyle, held in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, with art photography dating from the mid-1960s to the present.5 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ was curated by Leslie K. Brown for the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University in 2004.6 It displayed work by contemporary American photographers alongside examples of spirit photography, also drawn from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and a collection held by Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (see figure 8.1). ‘Seeing Is Believing’ was curated by Camilla Brown, Clare Grafik, and Stephanie Braun for the ­Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2007–08.7 It displayed work by an international list of artists next to photographs from the collection of the early-twentieth-century sceptic and psychical investigator Harry Price (see figure 8.2). ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’, curated by Mark Alice Durant at the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland in 2005, included work by more than twenty artists working in a variety of media.8 ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, an exhibition I curated at the Permanent Gallery in Brighton in 2007, featured work by contemporary British and American artists alongside recent vernacular imagery.9 Although this, and the University of Maryland show, did not include specific examples of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century spirit photography, the text panels and catalogues made explicit reference to such work, in order to establish a dialogue with the contemporary art displayed.10 The exhibitions shared a number of elements. Several of the historical collections and contemporary artists appeared across shows. As is conventional for such surveys, the artists varied in stature, with work by established practitioners set alongside projects by lesser-known figures.11 Each was held at state- and university-­ funded galleries, which helps to explain the academic approach of the curators, who combined interests in contemporary art with interests in niche areas of photographic history.12 Where the photographs had once aimed to provide objective proof of a communion between living and dead, they now took their place in the annals of the official history of photography. The exhibitions thus raise a number of questions, particularly regarding the consequences of reframing spirit photography within a museum environment, and the reasons for the seeming ‘paranormal turn’ in artistic and curatorial practices.13 While none was particularly high-profile, the striking similarities which exist between them make for an interesting object of study. They

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8.1  Installation image from ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, 23 January–14 March 2004; Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University, curated by Leslie K. Brown, photograph by Jim Dow. Original in colour. Featuring from left to right: Carol Golemboski, from the series ‘Psychometry’, toned gelatin silver prints; Chrysanne Stathacos, from ‘The Aura Project’, inkjet print from Polaroid originals; and Shannon Taggart, from projects on spiritualism at Lily Dale and Arthur Findlay College, C-prints.

160  Ben Burbridge

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8.2  Installation image from ‘Seeing Is Believing’, 23 November 2007 – 27 January 2008, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Original in colour. Featuring from left to right: Clare Strand, Unseen Agents, 2004; Florencia Durante, Envelopment, 2005, with a view through to the darkened room containing material from the Harry Price archives.

The ghosts of media past and present  161

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162  Ben Burbridge also border onto wider discussions about the relationship of the medium’s current place in the art world to its circulation elsewhere in culture. In this chapter, then, I begin by addressing the treatment of the spirit imagery as indicative of a concern with individual creativity and self-reflective modes of photographic practice, and go on to examine how curators’ invocation of the phantasmal provided a symbolic vocabulary through which to express anxieties regarding a pervasive ‘digital image’ world. My approach aims to couple the specific with the schematic, noting what the exhibitions shared and what made them distinct, in order to place them within a single typological framework. If this methodology has the tendency to value uniformity over difference, I hope this is offset by the broad terrain it permits me to address: identifying overarching concerns representative of a wider-reaching tendency than the preferences of any individual artist or curator. It also offers a counterpoint to the concern with single artists’ practices that continues to dominate scholarship in this field. Otherwordly art What, precisely, were spirit photography and contemporary art supposed to share? The text panels and publicity materials of the exhibitions provide an indication. ‘Seeing Is Believing’ set out to ‘explore, through archival images and contemporary art practice, photography’s strong relationship to the non-rational, the unknown, the intangible and the ethereal, through a diverse selection of materials’.14 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ considered how historical and present-day practitioners utilise and reference intrinsic mechanics of light-sensitive media to achieve spiritual allusions and illusions […]. Playing upon the idea of the psychic and the séance, the modern manifestation highlights what has been unique to photography since its invention: its simultaneous straddling of science, magic, and art.15

My exhibition looked to work ‘influenced, in different ways, by a sense of the intangible, those aspects of experience which lie outside the normal confines of photographic representation’.16 ‘The Disembodied Spirit’ exhibition proved more specific in its focus, exploring ‘art and culture in the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century involving the depiction or suggestion of ghosts’. It focused, in particular, on the ways in which ‘artists in both the

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The ghosts of media past and present  163 late nineteenth and late twentieth century have represented absence while still indicating presence’.17 ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’ cast its net wider, looking at artists whose work employs modern communication technologies […] to explore culturally inbred questions/superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own […]. Seduced by the invisible in the face of the medium’s relentless and dull dependence upon the physical, photography as a tool of fact (in science), fantasy (in spirit photography), and invention (in the hands of artists) is exploring new frontiers once again.18

Such texts underline the essentially negative characteristics the work is said to share: an interest in absence, the intangible, the invisible, the non-rational – that which lies outside the normal confines of photo­graphic representation. In a 1974 essay, the Italian sociologist Marcello Truzzi proposed that the difficulties of understanding the occult as a discrete field of study resulted from its essentially negative character: A common denominator for most (if not all) perspectives labelled occult […] is that they have in some way concerned themselves with things anomalous to our generally accepted cultural storehouse of ‘truths’. That is, we are here dealing with claims that contradict common sense or institutionalised (scientific or religious) knowledge. This contradiction of accepted beliefs is the very thing which makes the occult somehow strange, mysterious and inexplicable. It is the very character of the occult that it deals with dissonant or contradicting knowledge claims.19

More recently, Annette Hill suggested that the term ‘paranormal’ has fallen victim to similar problems, for it, too, refers not to any positive characteristic, but rather ‘to the anti-/non-rational and ­scientifically inexplicable’.20 The term thus covers a wide category of phenomena, including ‘extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, ghosts, poltergeists, life after death, reincarnation, faith healing, human auras, and so forth’.21 In a similar way, the subject matter addressed in the recent exhibitions can be seen to share as much in what it is not – rational, scientific, visible, tangible – as in what it is. The fact that curators aimed to address these subjects in relation to photography introduced a common paradox to the shows: a medium most often seen as providing a mechanical depiction of the visible world was used to represent seemingly invisible subjects. The text panels and publicity material had much less to say about the nature of the dialogues manufactured by curators, or how viewers were expected to engage with the photographs displayed.

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164  Ben Burbridge In consequence, this must be inferred through a series of decisions regarding the exhibitions’ installation and the types of contextual material provided. With all of the exhibitions presenting photographs displayed in frames on walls, the primary relationship between them appeared to concern formal and aesthetic resemblance. This adopted one of two forms. In the first, artists hinted at occult forces principally through the influence they appeared to exert on material bodies. For instance, Ben Judd’s stereoscopic photographs, displayed in the ­Photographers’ Gallery exhibition, showed a female figure alongside various levi­tat­ing objects, while Victoria Emes’ Psychomanteum, exhibited in Brighton, depicted sitters gazing blankly into the middle distance within a specially constructed ‘spirit chamber’; Gregory Crewdson’s work, displayed in ‘The Disembodied Spirit’ and ‘Blur of the Other­ worldly’, staged tableaux to show the inhabitants of American suburbs engaged in extraordinary activities; and Anna Gaskell’s 2003 series ‘Half Life’, also shown in ‘The Disembodied Spirit’, traced the movements of a shadowy figure through the interior of an old house.22 The fact that the work made no particular revelatory claim for the camera itself, but hinted at a non-rational or paranormal presence through the behaviour of material entities, suggested links with an earlier tradition of séance photography, particularly in terms of subject matter. Here, the camera was used to document evidence of paranormal activity through pictures of table tipping, levitation, and the behaviour of psychic mediums as they were said to channel the presence of spirits. The artists also extended the tradition, drawing on more recent representations from mass culture. Gaskell and Crewdson exploited cinematic forms of lighting to build atmosphere: the former playing with the haunting potential of warm light and shadow, the latter simulating the condition of twilight. Gaskell used dramatic cropping and unusual camera angles to obscure the action depicted, creating a sense of psychological disturbance as viewers attempted to orientate themselves in space. Here, the artists rely as much on the visual conventions of cinema as on the iconography of the séance. In the second mode, conventions of photographic realism – the depiction of figures in sharp focus and modelled by light in three dimensions – were set against areas of blurring, transparency, and more indeterminate forms. Clare Strand’s 2006 series ‘Photisms’, shown at the Permanent Gallery and the Photographers’ Gallery, used an ‘aura camera’ to depict adolescent girls surrounded by an ethereal-looking grey mist, Chrysanne Stathacos’ The Aura Project/ Invisible Colours, included in ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’ and

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The ghosts of media past and present  165 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, showed figures drawn from different cultures surrounded by transparent colour fields; Shannon Taggart’s project ‘The Spiritualists’ (2003–06), shown in Brighton and Boston, combined people preaching and praying with blurred forms and semi-transparent human figures; and Florencia Durante’s 2005 series ‘Envelopment’, included in the London exhibition, showed household furniture that appeared to have been forced onto its side by luminous traces of light.23 Such work can be linked to examples of spirit photography, which similarly combined the depiction of human subjects with translucent ‘extras’. The formal parallels suggest shared solutions to common sets of representational problems, with both practices drawing on an existing iconography of the otherworldly. In his 2007 book Photography and Spirit, John Harvey traced the representations of the departed in spirit photography to descriptions of ghosts in antiquity: Marcus Aurelius writing that ‘all that is of the soul [is] as dreams and vapours’ and Homer describing ghosts as ‘insubstantial as smoke’.24 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, graphic illustrations were published in spirit histories that built on previous representations in Christian art, depicting spirits hovering above the observer, ‘enclosed in a luminous cocoon of light’ or ‘enfolded in cumulus cloud’.25 The introduction of fine-line engraving on steel plate in 1820 allowed for increasingly sophisticated representations – ‘a language of light and shadow, surface and texture, and hard and soft outline, material density and distinctions between opaque, transparent and translucent objects’ – which meant ghosts could ‘be plausibly represented as airy, ethereal, incomplete and partially present’.26 Writing in 2007, Stephen Eisenman observed how iconographic conventions established by classical sculpture can be seen to have fed through early-twentieth-century modernism into a variety of image practices in mass culture, which emerged as the dominant visual field after the Second World War.27 In a similar way, the history of representations described by Harvey has informed more recent representations of ghosts, from Ivan Reitman’s 1984 film Ghostbusters to Paramount Studios’ 1950s cartoon series Casper the Friendly Ghost. Part of the novelty of the contemporary art works lay in the dressing of familiar mass-cultural motifs in high-cultural form: Crewdson transforming Spielberg-type sets into Jeff Wall-style tableaux; Strand evoking the Hollywood interest in possessed adolescents with classical black and white photographs; and Taggart’s series coupling the melodramatic atmosphere of ‘reality’ television shows such as Most Haunted with a nod to a history of artistic photo manipulation. The pairing of the work with examples of older spirit photography

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166  Ben Burbridge began to draw the latter away from its instrumental origins towards a space where art met entertainment. The medium On the face of it, an emphasis on formal resemblance prompted by the framing and display of the images located viewers’ likely engagement at the level of aesthetics. Such a contention echoes earlier critiques of photography’s assimilation into the art museum. In essays by Douglas Crimp and Susan Sontag, the transition of non-art photog­ raphy from the page or archive to the museum or gallery wall in the late 1960s and 1970s was shown to have obscured understanding of the pictures’ initial functional character, due to a superficial concern with form.28 My motive for resurrecting the spectres of theories past resides in a capacity to usefully frame the pairing of art and non-art photographs, while the curators’ treatment of spirit photography both complicates and confirms this particular position. Where Sontag and Crimp saw the transposition of photography onto the wall as accompanied by a stripping away of instrumentality – obscuring the specific functions the photographs were originally produced to perform – the curators of the exhibitions I am concentrating on here went to some lengths to maintain such understandings. The text panels offered historical overviews of spirit photography and its offshoots, ranging from a short paragraph in the catalogue for ‘Seeing Is Believing’ to the more substantial texts produced for ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ and ‘The Disembodied Spirit’. The captions provided further information regarding what the pictures had initially set out to demonstrate. Such efforts extended to the exhibitions’ installation. The ‘Seeing Is Believing’ curators chose to display the two types of photography in different rooms, with the earlier pictures displayed in low light and the contemporary work brightly illuminated. While the decision was primarily rooted in the need to avoid material decay of the fragile prints caused by light exposure, it also helped to avoid the homogenising effects of showing the earlier photographs as though art.29 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ presented the nineteenth-century photographs in a separate space to the contemporary works, with all of the pictures shown in low-lit conditions. Again, this coupled a practical need with the desire to create an environment that corresponded to the images shown, using heavy velvet drapes to reinforce the faux-gothic atmosphere.30 ‘The Dis­ embodied Spirit’ subjected the earlier photographs to a Victorian

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The ghosts of media past and present  167 ‘salon style’ hang, in contrast to the contemporary works, which were provided with the wall space generally deemed appropriate for large-scale art photography.31 The consequences of such efforts can be better understood through reference to related curatorial approaches. Writing on a poignant exhibition of identification photographs of Cambodian citizens murdered by the Pol Pot regime, Thierry De Duve commented on the potential difficulties entailed in any such effort to deploy curation as a means to foreground the non-art status of the photographs being displayed. The efforts to exhibit pictures in ways that meant they would not be regarded as art resulted in the creation of what, in many ways, resembled an art work. The exhibition’s curator, Christian Cajolle, ‘had made a number of precise aesthetic decisions […] much less conventional and thus much more artistic than the ones usually made by a curator hanging a show. He behaved like an installation artist, a good, politically conscious and responsible artist’.32 The treatment of the spirit photographs can be seen as indicative of a similar tendency. The low-lit environments previously discussed, while necessitated by print preservation, also had the effect of recreating the experience of the séance within the gallery, as though a curated installation work. In attempting to foreground the function of the images through their display, creative agency passed briefly from the pictures’ makers to the exhibition curators. The specific forms of interpretation and response prescribed for the earlier photographs were shaped by competing claims, regarding their previous utility and aesthetic potential. It is here the exhibitions both unsettled and reinforced the earlier curatorial model critiqued by Crimp. Focusing on John Szarkowsi’s 1964 exhibition ‘The Photog­ raphers’ Eye’, Crimp identified efforts to impose a ­Greenbergian notion of medium-specificity to a wide and varied set of photographs, in order to establish the medium as autonomous in the modernist sense. For Crimp, the concern with media ontology came at the price of instrumentality: photography would ‘no longer primarily be useful within other discursive practices […] no longer serve the purposes of information, documentation, evidence, illu­ stration, reportage’.33 The exhibitions of spirit imagery first inverted this model, by insisting on the original function of the pictures. Yet an ontological definition of photography remained a primary aim, a point determined by the wider socio-cultural contexts within which the exhibitions took place. The plausibility of the claims originally made for spirit photo­ graphs resulted, in part, from their resemblance to images produced through the advances made in mainstream science and technology

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168  Ben Burbridge during the second half of the nineteenth century. The invention of photo­ micrography in 1839, photo-telescopy in 1840, the instan­ taneous photographs produced by Muybridge and Marey in the 1870s and 1880s, and the invention of radiography in 1895 radically expanded the possibilities of vision beyond the realm of what the human observer could ordinarily perceive.34 This context was in­ voked by the spiritualist James Coates, in 1911: To say that the invisible cannot be photographed, even on the material plane, would be to confess ignorance of facts which are commonplace – as, for instance, to mention the application of X-ray photography to the exploration of muscles, of fractures of bone, and the internal organs. Astronomical photography affords innumerable illustrations of photographs of the invisible.35

Spirit photography exploited the combined imaginative and scientific possibilities set in place by such developments, and popular understandings of the medium as capable of surpassing the usual limitations of human vision to produce objective records of its subjects. According to a number of recent polls, almost half of the British population and two-thirds of American people say that they believe in the paranormal in some form.36 It is therefore conceivable that a substantial proportion of the exhibitions’ visitors shared the belief in the afterlife and possible communion with the dead that also informed the production and reception of earlier spirit photographs.37 It is understandings of photography which have transformed dramatically in the period that has elapsed since the pictures’ creation. The visual literacy of twenty-first-century gallery-goers surpasses that of spirit photography’s original audiences, if only because they have lived with the medium for longer, become well accustomed to its potential for manipulation, and witnessed its displacement by more advanced imaging technologies such as ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).38 When spirit photography was paired with examples of contemporary art that had, for the most part, substituted ‘irony for faith’, it was further framed in terms of its failure as a record of the paranormal.39 It was necessary for viewers to understand what the pictures were intended to show, in order to recognise an inability to show it. This recognition was essential to the images’ assimilation into a wider narrative, regarding the distinct representational possibilities – and impossibilities – of photography. By undermining a distinct mode of photographic ‘seeing’, the exhibitions underlined what the camera cannot depict: the irrational, the paranormal, that which ‘normally falls outside the confines of photographic representation’.40 The

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The ghosts of media past and present  169 re-contextualisation of the earlier work absorbed it as part of a meta-statement concerned with the nature, not of the paranormal, but of photography as a medium, reforging a familiar curatorial trope in novel, paradoxical terms. The perceived failure of the images had further repercussions. In the introduction to Photography and Spirit, John Harvey explained how, for him, ‘the value of these works – as photographs – is not diminished by disbelief’, for ‘one is (still) struck by the sumptuous tonalities, detail and compositional elegance of the original artifacts’.41 As visual objects, they were always open to the possibility of aesthetic encounter, but Harvey proposes a different model through his stated aim, to dignify the photographs as artifacts of creative consciousness […] [treating] the photographs as other than only spectacular illustrations and evidence of paranormal activity, or curious examples of conspicuous fakery, an embarrassing and best-forgotten anomaly of photographic practice and history.42

Considering the full impact of the exhibitions, we can go further still, and recognise how the realisation of the particular type of artistic or creative potential appeared dependent on a diminished belief. The perceived ‘art’ of the majority of scientific images resides in their technical and representational innovation, and the unexpected aesthetic forms produced within the confines of objective repre­ sentation.43 In spirit photography, the ‘creative consciousness’ of its producer is made manifest through inverse means, owing to the types of manipulation that undermine the status of the photograph as evidence.44 It is only after they are understood to have been faked that this particular type of creativity might come to the fore, and the pictures can operate as a prototype for the constructed c­ ontemporary photographs. This is why ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ discussed the nineteenth-century and contemporary works as constituting a single, unified field, defined by utilisation ‘of the intrinsic mechanics of light-sensitive media to achieve spiritual allusions and illusions’.45 In this way, fabrication was recast as artistry, attempts to deceive as creative acts. While the texts provided histories of spirit photography, they could not withstand the more fundamental historical and institutional re-contextualisation of the photographs as art-world spectacle. Rather than unsettle the formalist aesthetic potential of the images – in the manner proposed by Crimp – the contextual material relating to their intended function serviced, and was assimilated as part of, narratives familiar to contemporary art audiences: focusing on

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170  Ben Burbridge a self-reflexive medium-specificity, and the creativity of individual makers, prising the photographs away from the complex web of socio-cultural forces that had informed their production and circulation in the first place. Spectres Reflecting on the recent string of books and exhibitions on the paranormal in photography, Beth Saunders posed the question, ‘why spirit photography now?’46 The dialogue with contemporary art manu­factured by curators provides a range of possible answers. The texts produced to accompany the shows aimed to explain the paranormal turn with specific reference to the artists’ projects. Yet several of the exhibitions cast their nets wide, drawing in work that may not have strictly adhered to the framework provided by the proposed dialogue with spirit photography, or which might have been placed with equal or greater effectiveness in alternative interpretive contexts. Durante’s work, for example, is concerned principally with tracking paths of light by using long exposures, while Crewdson appears indebted more to Hollywood film and a concern with the suburban uncanny than to the legacies of ­nineteenth-century spirit photography.47 The paranormal turn may be more accurately understood as a curatorial conceit, providing the explanations offered by curators with a reflexive character. The literature produced to accompany ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’ and ‘Seeing Is Believing’ offered little comment regarding the contemporary appeal of nineteenth-century spirit imagery. Rather, the texts focused on the particular representational capacities of photography – a tendency that has already been discussed here in some detail.48 Such concerns can still be placed in a historical and cultural context, through their relation to a number of the factors determining photography’s place in the contemporary art world. The paradoxical medium-specificity proposed by the shows suggests an inversion of Greenberg’s modernism, refracted through the ‘auto-­ critique’ identified by Jeff Wall in 1960s conceptualism.49 Photography is shown to find its value as contemporary art by reflecting on aspects of its character and applications as a medium. The paradoxical character of the particular form of medium-­specificity at play tempered the high-seriousness that accompanied earlier modernist efforts at onto­ logical definition, in a manner more palatable to audiences raised on a diet of contemporary art-world irony.50

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The ghosts of media past and present  171 The interest in qualities specific to photography as a medium can also be considered in the context of digitisation, and the pressure this has placed on traditional ontological understandings. Writing in the catalogue for ‘The Disembodied Spirit’, Alison Ferris described a ‘crisis of the Index’, consisting ‘in part, of the inability to recognise the difference between the “artificial” and the “real”’.51 The statement suggests two possibilities. In the first, digitisation is said to have opened up new and sophisticated forms of manipulation through post-production, so issues of photographic truth and falsity have been drawn to the forefront of scholarship, debate, and the popular imagination.52 A similar point was made in several of the essays produced to accompany ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’.53 Viewed in this light, the earlier pictures served a dual role for contemporary audiences. The transparency of their deceit, first of all, reassured them of their own sophisticated photographic literacy, when compared with the apparent gullibility of certain nineteenth-century audiences. At the same time, they confirmed the increased sophistication of modern imaging technologies, along with a renewed potential to deceive. In either case, the exhibitions can be linked to a wide range of recent art practices rooted in a nostalgic return to antiquated technologies and a period of relative mechanical certainty.54 This leads towards a final explanation, relating to the effects of digitisation upon the dissemination of images more generally, and to issues of their potential truth or falsity in a philosophical sense. In an essay published in the catalogue for the ‘Disembodied Spirit’ exhibition, Tom Gunning suggested that the ‘failure’ of spirit photography to objectively capture the unseen may reveal that in some ways the opposite occurred. Modern tech­ nology may not have succeeded in materialising the spirit world, but in many ways it may have de-materialised the modern-life world […]. As the techniques of virtuality continue to expand our photographic images beyond all imagining, and more and more of our time is spent staring at images on screens of various sorts, the difference between our daily existence and that of phantoms becomes attenuated.55

For Ferris, too, ‘the cultural space that cybernetics and virtual reality have opened up’ suggests ‘the manifestation of ghosts’.56 While it may be possible to understand specific art works as cultural symptoms, in the way the texts appear to prescribe, it may be more productive to consider the comments as reflective of the curatorial intentions that underpinned the exhibitions. In which case, both contemporary art and earlier spirit photography provided a symbolic vocabulary

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172  Ben Burbridge through which curators articulated anxieties prompted by recent technological change. The utility of such symbolism is twofold. First, the evocation of spirits suggested the seemingly immaterial character of the ­digital-image world, as what was once solid and tactile appeared to be less so. Second, the proposed substitution of images for reality, and the conflation or confusion of the two, extended the types of critique that runs from Guy Debord, through Jean Baudrillard, and to Fredric Jameson: the ghostly alluding to the conflation of a series of binaries – real and false, material and immaterial, living and dead. Viewed in this light, the spectral is the spectacle of capital.57 Questions remain as to how effectively such allusions diagnose the consequences of recent technological change. The materiality of the digital image is a complex and under-researched topic, for which scholars are only now beginning to formulate an adequate vocabulary to describe. For Harriet Riches, Sandra Plummer, and Duncan Woodbridge, the screen-based digital image exists in a new, but nonetheless material form, while touch-screen devices have arguably increased tactile engagement with photographs.58 The ghostly allusions to the spectacle may similarly obscure as much as they reveal. Marina Warner’s 2006 book Phantasmagoria also used spirit imagery as metaphor, framing an extended exploration of nineteenth-century spiritualism in relation to anxieties caused by ‘contemporary media of representation – including above all digitisation’. These media ‘convey a plural theory of consciousness that installs virtual presences, phantoms, hauntings and doubles in the ordinary way of things’.59 Here, the critical potential of her analogies resides in the forms of reflection the symbolic vocabulary can encourage: knowing I am a zombie or – since it is not possible for a zombie to judge – realising that at best I am fast moving towards zombiedom, demands an act of self-consciousness which in itself means the state is not yet highly advanced in my case, not yet properly terminal.60

The recognition of the spectacle through recourse to the spectral is thus configured as a critical act, prompting an identification of a contemporary condition that, in itself, may constitute a form of resistance. The phantasmal is invoked as an analogy, again, by Jeffrey Sconce in his 2000 book Haunted Media. Here it is used in a different register: For Baudrillardism, television has collapsed public and private, interior and exterior, medium and audience, and just about any other binary

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The ghosts of media past and present  173 one cares to invoke. It leaves behind a phantasmagoric landscape of simulation, an imploded real now wholly interpenetrated by electronic circulation of another ‘reality’ where anything can seemingly become anything else […]. As a theoretical salvo, this is a provocative tool for confronting the cultural dynamics of electronic media’s growing presence in social life. To believe it as literally true demonstrates nothing less than faith in the supernatural.61

Although Warner and Ferris stop well short of such literalism, Sconce’s argument may still function to highlight the risks of technological essentialism implicit in the symbolic narratives of digital phantasms.62 The symbolic invocation of spirits offers a means to articulate anxiety, and to identify some of the challenges presented to social life through the virtual images that increasingly pervade it. This identification is crucial, as Warner rightly suggests; but it must be the first stage of many. The limitations of the implicit pessimism of the ‘spectral as spectacle’ model lie in its transposition of a critical framework forged in the context of the 1960s onto a changed situation, without closely scrutinising how the new situation acts, reciprocally, to transform critique. In particular, it treats the ­digital-image world as a single, coherent entity, when the reality concealed beneath the metaphor is considerably more complex. Writing in 2006, Julian Stallabrass observed that the advent of Web 2.0 technology had unsettled the ‘broadcast model’ of spectacle associated with Baudrillard and Debord, creating new and partici­ patory image practices.63 Viewed cynically, these have democratised the spectacle, promoting narcissism, and producing alienation through the pursuit of online celebrity, in what appears a nightmarish internal­is­ation of the situation described by earlier Marxist critics.64 Such an impression finds its antecedent in the use of technologies to challenge aspects of the system that, elsewhere, those technologies serve. Much of the civil unrest that followed the global financial meltdown in 2008 – from the student protests in London to the revolution in Egypt – gained publicity, support, and momentum through the use of social networking sites, not least through the use of photographs. Yet, as activists bent pictures to radical use, re­connecting an image world to the reality of its citizens and a capacity to effect change, they simultaneously fuelled the circulation of spectres in the neo-liberal media sphere.65 The participatory flow of images online has reshaped the distinction between agency and spectacle in new and complex ways, which we are only now beginning to comprehend. The dynamic of haunting and haunted may never have appeared so unstable.

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174  Ben Burbridge Notes 1 I would like to thank Julian Stallabrass, Alice Compton, and Olga Smith for their useful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 Judge Bradwell of Chicago, ‘Address to the Photography Congress and the Chicago World’s Fair’, 1893, cited by Andrew Glendinning (ed.), The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography, London: Whittaker and Co., 1894, p. 164. 3 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 4. 4 See www.photographymuseum.com/believe1.html (accessed 3 December 2010); and Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhibition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. 5 See Alison Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003. 6 Leslie K. Brown, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, at www. bu.edu/prc/spirit.htm (accessed 17 December 2010). 7 ‘Seeing Is Believing’, press release, Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2007, n.p. 8 Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2005, pp. 36–40, 42–5, 78–83. 9 ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, at www. permanentgallery.com/?p=93 (accessed 10 October 2010). The fact that I curated the show might raise issues regarding its inclusion here, a point I aim to counter by subjecting it to the same types of critical analysis as the other exhibitions. 10 The catalogue Blur of the Otherworldly featured essays by Durant and Marina Warner, outlining photography’s historical relationship with spiritualism and the occult, with particular reference to technological develop­ments. See Mark Alice Durant, ‘Adrift in the Fluidium’, and Marina Warner, ‘­Insubstantial Pageants’, in Durant and Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly, pp. 56–73, 92–111. In the text panel and exhibition pamphlet produced for ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, I suggested the contemporary work could ‘be traced to the nineteenth-­ century origins of the photograph, when spiritualists and psychical researchers harnessed the supposed objectivity of the camera to assist in their pursuit of empirical proof of paranormal phenomena, be it the presence of spirits, levitating objects or strange emanations’. ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, exhibition pamphlet, Brighton: Permanent Gallery, 2007, n.p. 11 Such a process is designed to benefit all the parties involved. While the presence of the established artists serves to boost the credentials of the lesser-known practitioners, owing to the prestigious company they are now shown to keep, the less familiar names ensure the more established figures continue to appear at the cutting edge of artistic practice. The curators who manufacture these encounters also benefit, by demonstrating their ­famili­arity with, and access to, the art world’s big hitters, along with their

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The ghosts of media past and present  175

12

13

4 1 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 9 2 30

1 3 32 3 3 34

capacity to identify and promote new work by lesser-known and emerging artists. Such exhibitions also generated a substantial body of literature, while additional books and articles examined spirit photography in a variety of contexts. These included a special issue of The Art Journal, Marina Warner’s book Phantasmagoria, and Photography and Spirit, by John Harvey. See The Art Journal, 62:3, autumn 2003; Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; and John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, London: Reaktion Books, 2007. I borrow this phrase from Annette Hill’s study of the ‘paranormal turn’ in contemporary mass culture. See Annette Hill, Haunted Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 1. ‘Seeing Is Believing’, press release, n.p. Brown, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’. ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, exhibition pamphlet, n.p. Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit (back cover). ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’, at www.umbc.edu/cadvc/blur/index.html (accessed 10 January 2010). Marcello Truzzi, ‘Definition and Dimensions of the Occult: Towards a Sociological Perspective’, in Edward A. Tiryakian (ed.), On the Margins of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and the Occult, London: John Wiley and Sons, 1974, pp. 245–6. Hill, Haunted Media, p. 4. Terrence Hines, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence, London and New York: Prometheus Books, 1988, p. 7. This is merely a representative list, which could also have included work by artists Tracy Moffatt and Nancy Burton, among others. Again, the list is representative, potentially extending to work by Mariko Mori, Ann Hamilton, Adam Fuss, and Laurence O’Neal. Harvey, Photography and Spirit, p. 19. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., p. 19. Stephen Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject’ [1982], in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993; Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Books, 1977. Clare Grafik, correspondence with the author, 30 March 2012. Leslie K. Brown, correspondence with the author, 1 May 2011. See also the installation photographs from ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ at www.flickr.com/photos/prcboston/sets/72157600432728753 (accessed 20 February 2011). Bowdoin Museum Archives, exhibition plan, undated, n.p. See Thierry De Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, October, 125, summer 2008, pp. 1–21. Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old’, p. 7. On this history see Corey Keller (ed.), Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 5–75.

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176  Ben Burbridge 35 James Coates, Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture and Other Rare But Allied Phenomena, London: L. N. Fowler and Co., 1911, pp. 2–3. 36 See the 2008 World Values Survey cited by Hill, Haunted Media, pp. 6–7. Hill provides an overview of a number of recent surveys that have produced similar findings. 37 This was indicated by the interest in the shows within publications such as The Fortean Times, which reviewed ‘Seeing Is Believing’ and ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’. A seminar I attended at the Photographers’ Gallery had at least two practising spiritualists in the audience. 38 Tom Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Keller, Brought to Light, p. 63. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, exhibition pamphlet, n.p. 41 Harvey, Photography and Spirit, p. 149. 42 Ibid., p. 9. 43 John Szarkowski, The Photographers’ Eye, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966, pp. 100–1. See also Penelope Curtis and Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Foreword’, in Philip Brookman (ed.), Eadweard Muybridge, London: Tate Publishing, 2010, p. 7. 44 Harvey, Photography and Spirit, p. 149. 45 My emphasis. See ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ at www. bu.edu/prc/spirit/essay.htm. 46 Beth Saunders, ‘The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer’, Photography and Culture, 13:3, November 2010, pp. 359–62. 47 Florencia Durante, correspondence with the author, 28 October 2010. Crewdson has suggested his ‘themes are defamiliarisation, the uncanny, and probably for me, most interestingly, the relationship between nature and domesticity, particularly some kind of disturbance of normality’. ‘Gregory Crewdson Interviewed by Bradford Morrow’, in Gregory Crewdson, Dream of Life, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2000, p. 27. 48 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’, at www.bu.edu/prc/spirit/ intro.htm; ‘Seeing Is Believing’, press release and text panel; ‘We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science’, exhibition pamphlet, n.p. 49 Jeff Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’, in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–75, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 246–66. 50 On the place of irony and ‘camp’ in contemporary art, see Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 88–9. 51 Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, p. 38. 52 The literature on this topic is extensive. See, particularly, Martha Rosler, ‘Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations’, in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writing, 1975–2001, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 259–319; and Fred Ritchin, After Photography, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009. 53 See, particularly, Jane D. Marsching, ‘Synthetic Spectres’, in Durant and Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly, pp. 14–57.

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The ghosts of media past and present  177 54 See, for example, FILM by Tacita Dean, shown at Tate Modern at the end of 2011 and the 2011 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography’. A related set of practices form the core of a special issue of Photoworks magazine. See Photoworks, 18, spring/summer 2012. 55 Tom Gunning, ‘Haunting Images’, in Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, p. 18. 56 Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, p. 38. 57 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 1992; Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983; and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 58 Harriet Riches, Sandra Plummer, and Duncan Woodbridge, ‘Image/ Object: Photography’s New Materiality’, Either/And, at www.EitherAnd. org. 59 Warner, Phantasmagoria, p. 375. 60 Ibid., p. 378. 61 Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 182. 62 Ibid., p. 204. 63 Julian Stallabrass, ‘Spectacle and Terror’, New Left Review, 37, January/ February 2006, p. 105. 64 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, London: Basic Books, 2011; Allan Sekula, ‘Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea’, October, 102, autumn 2002, p. 4. 65 While a fierce debate has focused on the roles played by social media in the civil unrest, surprisingly little has been written on photography specific­ ally. Negar Azimi, ‘Regimes of the Image’, ArtForum, December 2011, is a welcome exception. For a positive account of social networking sites as a political tool, see Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London and New York: Verso, 2012, pp. 127–52. For a critique, see Mark Andrejevic, ‘Estrangement 2.0’, World Picture, 6, 2011. On the networked photographic image, see Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, ‘A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image’, ­Photographies, 1:1, 2008, pp. 9–28.

Bibliography Mark Andrejevic, ‘Estrangement 2.0’, World Picture, 6, 2011. Negar Azimi, ‘Regimes of the Image’, ArtForum, December 2011. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983. Judge Bradwell of Chicago, ‘Address to the Photography Congress and the Chicago World’s Fair’, 1893, cited Andrew Glendinning (ed.), The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography, London: Whittaker and Co., 1894. Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (exhi­ bition catalogue), New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005.

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178  Ben Burbridge James Coates, Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture and Other Rare But Allied Phenomena, London: L. N. Fowler and Co., 1911. Gregory Crewdson, Dream of Life, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2000. Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject’ [1982], in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Penelope Curtis and Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Foreword’, in Philip Brookman (ed.), Eadweard Muybridge, London: Tate Publishing, 2010. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 1992. Mark Alice Durant, ‘Adrift in the Fluidium’, in Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2005. Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2005. Thierry De Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, October, 125, summer 2008. Stephen Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Alison Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003. Andrew Glendinning (ed.), The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography, London: Whittaker and Co., 1894. Tom Gunning, ‘Haunting Images’, in Alison Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit, Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003. Tom Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Corey Keller (ed.), Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008. John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Annette Hill, Haunted Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Terrence Hines, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence, London and New York: Prometheus Books, 1988. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Corey Keller (ed.), Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Jane D. Marsching, ‘Synthetic Spectres’, in Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2005. Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London and New York: Verso, 2012. Fred Ritchin, After Photography, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009. Martha Rosler, ‘Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations’, in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writing, 1975–2001, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, ‘A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image’, Photographies, 1:1, 2008.

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The ghosts of media past and present  179 Beth Saunders, ‘The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer’, Photography and Culture, 13:3, November 2010. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Allan Sekula, ‘Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea’, October, 102, autumn 2002. Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Books, 1977. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Julian Stallabrass, ‘Spectacle and Terror’, New Left Review, 37, January/February 2006. John Szarkowski, The Photographers’ Eye, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. Marcello Truzzi, ‘Definition and Dimensions of the Occult: Towards a Socio­ logical Perspective,’ in Edward A. Tiryakian (ed.), On the Margins of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and the Occult, London: John Wiley and Sons, 1974. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, London: Basic Books, 2011. Jeff Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’, in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–75, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Marina Warner, ‘Insubstantial Pageants’, in Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (eds), Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2005. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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9

From the premodern to the postmodern: mnemotechnics and the ghost of ‘the folk’ Sas Mays Introductory notes: spectres, mnemotechnics, and epistemological politics In Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a ghost is a figure of memory – retrospective or anticipatory – and thus a figure of tradition and history, and of inheritance.1 As the complex, heterogeneous field of inheritance imperatively enjoins us to ‘filter, sift, criticise’ – to make sense of our inheritance – a ghost is, therefore, immediately an issue of judgement and of classification.2 We might be reminded that such an activity is, in Archive Fever, a matter of the archive. More precisely, it is a matter of consignation – the taxonomic gathering of signs inscribed on a substrate – and a matter of exegesis – the interpretation of the signs by an archon, a figure of judgement and normative law.3 The injunction of the spectre is thus an issue of the archive, because it asks us to reconsider a tradition that must necessarily be remembered by forms of inscription, in texts and documents collected, sorted, and maintained (and dispersed, disordered, and destroyed) in archival institutions – repositories, collections, museums, libraries, data banks. We might then be minded here of the common logic shared, in their own ways, by two key figures within these texts. In Specters, the event of an appearance, whether we think of this as the appearance of a ghost or of an idea, like ‘Marxism’, and the impression of the archive, the mark made by the inscription of an event in Archive Fever, are both characterised by precision and diffusion, dint and blur, singularity and repetition. The event and the recording of the event, and their relation, are thus marked by ineluctable self-contradiction, by self-differentiality – that is, by différance. The ghost in Specters is likewise a figure of différance – through its problematic questioning of the present in which it arrives, the past to which it refers, and the 180

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From the premodern to the postmodern  181 future that it raises. Located in no one temporal location, the ghost thus resists classification in its traditional sense (as a taxonomy of identifiable, stable, self-same things). And the archive, constructed through the accumulation of writings of various kinds that are also structured by différance, is itself differential, and therefore spectral, through and through. Documents appear from the past, raising questions about their meaning, and about the meaning and reality of the present, as much as of the future. In the face of this complexity of event and archive, Derrida proposes, against traditional ontology, and its attempt to exorcise difference in the name of categorisable, essential being, a hauntology that would allow the différance of the spectre to retain its problematic force. In regard to this association between Specters and Archive Fever, three qualifications need to be sketched out here. Firstly, such a link, between the spectre and the archive, might also be articulated in terms of the relation between experience and memory. If spectres are figures of the temporal différance of the present, we might think of the ghost as a historical avatar of the ‘originary technicity’ of phenomenal experience, caught up in differential relations of memory, monitory and premonitory.4 As Derrida puts it in Echographies of Television: What we call real time is simply an extremely reduced ‘différance,’ but there is no purely real time because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and, consequently, of traces: the condition of possibility of the living, absolutely real present is already memory, anticipation, in other words, a play of traces.5

If experience is thus constructed at the intersection of past and future memory, of retention and protention, these are not only effects of experience but techniques of memory, and in this sense, experience is technical, and technological. And the link between technology and the spectral is given, for example, in Derrida’s discussion of spiritualism in Copy, Archive, Signature, in the understanding that: this medium (photocinematography, teleperception, teleproduction, telecommunication) was the very site, the proper element (also properly privileged), of a fantastical phantomaticity, of the phainesthai in its originary link with technê. The revenant is not confined to the culture of the manor house or to the spiritualism and fantastic literature from the last century. Every culture has its phantoms and the spectrality that is conditioned by its technology.6

I might add that, to the extent that our psyches are constructed through the internalisation of socially institutionalised, recorded, and archived languages, they, too, are technical and political, through

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182  Sas Mays and through. By way of an analogy, and as Jacques Lacan argued in ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, the apparent internality of the unconscious in fact reflects (or poetically distorts) the externality of language systems that have been internalised in the processes of psychogenesis.7 The inside is, and emerges from, the outside; the ‘organic’ ‘interior’ emerges from the technical exterior. Such languages are, in the Saussurean understanding of linguistics that Lacan inherits, governed by social laws and social institutions, and may be distorted by written memory. Hence, the question of the event or impression of the ghost cannot be disintricated from questions of the institutions of inscribed memory. Indeed, what is at issue here is the problematic relation between these two tech­ nicities – the institution of the ‘internal’ psyche, and the institutions of ‘external’ memory. As I will argue, the ‘primary’ or ‘direct’ experience of the ghostly is preceded by inscribed memory, which gestures towards the material form of the book, and its taxonomic gathering in the institutional form of the library. In this context, we might say that the archive comes before experience: technical memory precedes experience, just as what experience gestures towards is its becoming memory in the future. Secondly, as much as traditional ontology, the attachment to traditional epistemology runs a certain archival risk, as Derrida says, in addressing the spectral legacy of Marx: ‘What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work’. Such neutralisation would be performed by ‘an old concept of reading’ that claims to treat Marx ‘calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia’. The effect of such taxonomic, archival, and institutional neutralisation is, of course, to exorcise the spectre’s power to remain in the present, and future, as a problematic force. If such is the power of the spectre, the idea of a traditional taxonomy of ghosts is a contradiction in terms. For Derrida, rather, spectres ruin taxonomy in its traditional sense (and thus ruin the library inasmuch as it is defined by its taxonomic function). As he says of Marx’s own attempt to classify spectres in a typology: haunting is associated with a hunting that attempts to bring the ghost close (taxonomise it) in order to send it far away (exorcise it), but because the spectre resists classification, Marx cannot classify (classer), only chase (chasser), in an ‘endless, relentless pursuit’.8 Thirdly, and in development of the two preceding points, this spectral resistance to taxonomic rationalisation bears on the problem of modernity that is given in Jean-Michel Rabaté’s account, in The

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From the premodern to the postmodern  183 Ghosts of Modernity. This connection concerns the relation between Spinoza’s epistolary discussion of ghosts with Boxel, and Marx and Engels’ discussion of Stirner in The German Ideology. Both cases are defined by an opposition to a premodern doxa defined by opinion and myth, and by the affirmation of a modern, rational attitude. In both cases, the latter emerges out of, and against, the former. The figure of the ghost for Spinoza appears in ‘numerous stories’ in which credulity is assigned to ‘old wives’ tales’ as against ‘men of talent and judgement’. Likewise, the ghost appears in Stirner’s opposition between ‘The traditional wisdom of old women’ and ‘the skepticism of mature men’.9 Of course, Derrida’s argument concerning the failure of taxonomy, as thus far discussed, can only indicate the impossibility of a fully rational modernity. Yet what I want to emphasise here is the way in which such premodern doxa is gendered and classed, and situated within a specific political economy: the discourse of ghosts is properly located in the degraded feminine folk knowledge of the feudal peasantry. This is also a metacritical issue, given that a number of the analyses to be discussed, as the main labour of this chapter, appear to reiterate the antipathy to ‘the folk’. In this analysis of the critical literature of the ghostly that intersects with the issue of the archive, there are two main sections: in the first, following Rabaté, I will attend to the problematic relation between the premodern and the modern in critical accounts of the spectral; in the second, again developing Rabaté’s critique of history, I will turn to the no less problematic relation between the modern and postmodern. What links these analyses will be, as indicated through Rabaté, the problematic distinction between critical culture and folk knowledge, as it appears through the figures of the spectre and the archive. The appearances of ghosts, in this chapter, will thus be understood within this conflux of issues: of the archival problems of taxonomy and classification as the condition of experience; and of the politics of class knowledges. Spectral modernity: experience, literature, and the library In ‘The Other Side of Plato’s Wall’, Ralph Noyes, Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) from 1990 to 1998, begins by discussing the existence of ghosts via a language of money and exchange. Here, paper promises to indicate only further ‘faery’ signs of value or summons to the police – no gold – in comparison to the tokens that have ‘been passed from hand to hand (from mouth to ear) for millennia past in all societies for which we have records’.

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184  Sas Mays Kipling’s term for ghost, ‘token’, under the assumption, as it is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, that it is a ‘local word’, might thus be exchanged for profit if put in the ‘right slot’ – that is, if it is properly categorised and understood. It is in this context that a study of ‘the language in which ghosts have been reported’ might thus yield the gold standard of ‘evidence’ – proof, beyond normative science, of their ‘independent existence’.10 Noyes proceeds to discuss a partial list of the cognates, synonyms, and related terms for ghosts, indicating the extent to which they pre­ suppose characteristics or impose hypotheses a priori (like reven­ant, as that which returns; visitant, as that which returns deliber­ately; phantom, implying unreality), and emphasising, in their stead, an­ other partial list of terms that might be less presumptive (spirit, relating to the experience of breath; apparition, as a ‘neutral term’). As Noyes states: ‘I will be trying […] to adopt what has been called a “phenomenological” approach, that is to say “a plain description of direct experience […] of the ghost by ordinary people”’, that would be ‘“free from prepossessions, speculations and theories”’. Ghosts are, writes Noyes, ‘orders of magnitude more complex than rainbows or any other reducible phenomenon of human experience; something more sophisticated than mere technology will be needed to accommodate them to an enlarged understanding of how the world works’.11 We should see emerging here a series of oppositions that concur with those indicated in Rabaté: oral culture and folk tradition in opposition to scientific culture and normative bibliographical recognition. But, on the other hand, this is still the matter of a normative order – of terminology, typology, taxonomy, and the archive. The correct term for the ghost, and the ‘right slot’ for the token, should remind us here of the literal meaning of the Greek bibliotheke, the ‘slot’ in which books are deposited – the library shelf.12 Indeed, the archival dimension of Noyes’ writing occurs at both a speculative and an institutional level. Discussing the displacement of the pre-scientific understanding of rainbows, Noyes speculates that, had they been less widespread, their existence, like that of ghosts, might have been similarly in doubt: There will be occasional reports from single witnesses who were travelling in the desert at the time; these reports may, with luck, be supplemented by a few cases of multiple-witnessing, some of them may be recorded, perhaps, even in the suburb of a city. Historical records may provide some dubious collateral. But the reports will be far too few and probably far too badly documented to convince determined sceptics.13

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From the premodern to the postmodern  185 It is against such a condition of archival lack that Noyes discusses the function of the SPR. Against the tendency of ‘placing’ ghostly phenomena, a priori, ‘in the ad hoc category of “mere imagination”’, Noyes refers to Edmund Gurney’s analyses of a specific ‘category’ of ghost, pre-mortem ‘crisis apparitions’, for which he ‘collected some 700 cases by an assiduity of correspondence and personal visits’, which were published in Phantasms of the Living in 1886. Crisis apparitions, problematically explained by F. W. H. Myers’ concept of telepathy, involved situations in which ‘the “ghosts” of distant individuals in crisis were not infrequently seen by witnesses in circumstances that precluded “normal” means of communication’. As Noyes states, this type of apparition appeared within a specific historical context, its decline being related to the contraction of the British empire, and the development of communication technologies.14 Noyes’ discussion shows that the methodological problems of Gurney’s categorical definition of the term ‘living’, to cover the twelve hours before and after death, was followed by a turn towards post-mortem phenomena, and towards the past. As Noyes states: ‘Inevitably, the Society did not rest content with studying apparitions of “the Living”’, because ‘the folklore of all societies is far richer in supposed apparitions of the long dead than in those of the recently living’.15 This attention is described as having a specifically archival destination: Much has been placed on record about these phenomena in the Society’s Proceedings and Journal, and all of this material is readily accessible in the SPR’s library and archives for those who wish to study it […] it is enough to say that the Society has amassed a good deal of not-too-bad evidence for such things […] which plodding leg-work has not infrequently authenticated, at least in the sense that the study of parish registers, birth and death certificates, obituary notices, family records and the like seem to provide collateral.16

But this shift towards the dead, towards the past, towards archives in which ‘the folk’ are inscribed, and towards the SPR archive, does not only involve a shift towards folklore, and the kinds of social and textual inscriptions pertinent to its forms. It is contiguous with a shift towards a specific textual form, literary fiction, and its archival repository, its place or ‘slot’: the library. As Noyes argues, ‘Literature, even when not explicitly of the ghost-fiction genre, is filled with echoes and intimations of the “supernatural”’. Thus, psychical research turns towards the institution of literature in order to give itself a ‘second chance’ – to renew or reinstitutionalise itself, in the wake of the problems involved with its more empirical researches.

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186  Sas Mays ‘[T]he findings of psychical researchers and the intimations of imaginative writers – however counter-intuitive to brute common sense’, Noyes suggests, might thus ‘find an entirely rational locus’. Despite the claim that literature, and Henry James is of course listed, is for the folk, there is implicit here a distance from ‘ordinary’ experience and its literary appropriation, which is also seen in Noyes’ wariness regarding ‘folk vocabularies’ in terms of the typologisation of ghosts.17 As stated by Noyes, the purpose of the SPR was (and is) to provide records, and thus an archive, of evidence for the paranormal, and one that would be taxonomically precise. Nevertheless, there have been a number of historical shifts within the institution: from trans­ cendental spiritualism to psychical research, and within that latter, a shift from the living to the dead, and from primary experience to textualism. This latter move involves a movement away from folk discourse (and its forms of social and textual inscription) to literature, generally understood through the ad hoc category of imaginative fiction and its archival form, the library. It is clear, then, that generic literary classification filters and constructs the understanding of paranormal phenomena.18 But, of course, literature is structured by traditions other than those of evidential truth, and relates to itself through its own archival record. R. C. Finucane, for example, cites an example of an apparition in Athens written by Pliny the Younger in the second century CE, and another version in which the main narrative elements appear almost verbatim, from Spain in 1570.19 What Finucane refers to as ‘imitation’ is thus a matter of writing, records, and archival memory, as much as it comes with ‘the associated difficulty of distinguishing “literary” from “true” stories’. But it is evident from Finucane’s discussion that the ‘distortion’ of the ‘evidence’ is not simply a post facto effect of written inscription. An SPR investigator of a haunted house wrote that ‘the frequent repetition and re-examination of […] experiences has produced a more vivid impression of the minute circumstances than originally existed’; a set of written accounts by four persons of one apparition, published by the SPR, evidenced ‘imitative’ language in which the ‘percipients’ drew on each other’s ideas.20 Thus, the idea of direct experience becomes essentially problematic: the percipient, then, is not only a receiver of sensory data, but a witness whose testimony of the ‘event’ produces the ‘experience’. This issue of witnessing bears precisely on the issue of the experience of ‘the folk’. While such were sometimes given credence because they lacked imagination to invent stories, ‘It was acknowledged that the lower classes, even servants, deserved a hearing,

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From the premodern to the postmodern  187 but their testimony was often treated a priori as suspect’. This kind of sentiment can be seen in the commentary of an SPR member in 1889, in terms of a privilege accorded to the knowledge of the ‘educated’ over that of the ‘peasantry’.21 The shift from the evidence of the folk to the imaginations of literary authors is thus contextualised as a matter of education and class. But such antipathy appears to occur at a critical level here too. We might see something of a repetition of this attitude in Finucane’s rejection of a typology of apparitions (‘spirit’, ‘ghost’, ‘apparition’, ‘spectre’, and so on) because ‘popular usage has been haphazard on this matter’. It might also be seen in Finucane’s description of the SPR archive’s contents: ‘report after report, letter after letter, anxious folk trying in their spidery or stubby or sloppy handwriting […] to convince someone they really had seen an apparition’.22 Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism initially appears to be distinct from the kind of antipathy towards the folk registered in Finucane: it approaches the issues of spiritualism and textuality from both sides of the problematic divide between canonical literature and the ‘otherworldly narratives’ of popular writing. The latter, while ‘devoid of formal experimentation’, nevertheless reiterate modernist tropes concerning textuality: ‘reading, writing, literature, authorship, publication, libraries’. Indeed, along with Sword, we should note here the spiritualist sense of life as one conditioned and produced by the material culture of the book: “‘We are not merely short stories on the pages of the earth’”, as the spirit of Myers puts it (via the medium Geraldine Cummins); “‘we are a serial, and each chapter closes with death’”. The paradox of this attention to the materiality of textual culture, Sword argues, reiterates ‘modern spiritualism’s central metaphysical conflict: its paradoxical proclivity to materialize the spirit world even while trying to spiritualize the material one’.23 Here, we might remember Specters of Marx: this conflation of the material and ideational is the contradiction of the commodity.24 Thus, the spectral in this sense is no mere dematerialisation, and no mere decategorisation, given the market’s systems of classification. Indeed, spectrality for deconstruction is never a matter of simple diffusion, for such would be to fall into the binary opposition of formlessness over form. Nor is it a matter of simple dematerialisation, for such would be to metaphysically affirm the ideational over the material. We should also, then, think of the codex form of the book as, precisely, a type of spectral commodity, given its incorporealis­ ation of ideas and its idealisation of the sense of a corpus.25 We might think, then, that the relation between literary and popular modern writing indicated by Sword is not a matter of the latter’s imitation

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188  Sas Mays of the former, but rather a matter of a shared response to, precisely, the marketisation of literature, the industrialisation of printing, and the material proliferation of texts around the previous fin de siècle. Indeed, the issue of proliferation is key to the effect of such popular writing in Sword’s account: otherworldly narratives undermine the very institutions of authorship – copyright law, bibliographical conventions, the cult of the Great Writer – with which literate mediums have so eagerly sought to ally themselves. If the Author is, as Michel Foucault puts it, ‘the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’, then a spirit medium who claims to ghostwrite for the dead is that proliferation personified, the ideological figure for everything that, according to Foucault, the author-function holds in check: ‘the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, recomposition of fiction’.26

But, as Sword also indicates, it is not just a matter of quantitative proliferation as such, but of the production of texts that are quali­tatively disruptive of the organisation of literary meaning – specifically, of the taxonomic order of the library: copyright law, which was formulated with living writers and their heirs in mind, has little to say about the legal status of literary texts supposedly authored in the spirit world. Similarly, library card catalogs, which codify and legitimize the institution of authorship, are not generally designed to accommodate books attributed to spirits.27

The legal status of the text is thus brought into question, just as much as library taxonomy, and law is subject to a ‘proliferation of rules to cover specific cases’. This has a number of consequences for Sword, of which two should be emphasised here. Firstly, it problematically places the definition of the text in terms of its authorship in the hands of the librarian. Secondly, librarians’ cataloguing of books according to the name of the spirit claimed by the medium to have communicated with him or her effectively endorses the claims being made by the spiritualists. Overall, Sword argues that spiritualist texts written by female authors undermined law and taxonomy (while also petitioning them), creating the writing of a dispersed ‘I’, both conservative and iconoclastic.28 Hence: Like modernist writers, spirit mediums frequently subvert their own invocations of eternal truths by means of an endlessly shifting subjectivity. Conversely, like spirit mediums, modernist writers counter a sense of ontological crisis with fragments of history – dead ancestors, ancestral texts – shored against the ruins of an alienating, disjointed present.29

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From the premodern to the postmodern  189 Thus far, in terms of this affirmation of proliferative writing and endlessly mobile subjectivity, Sword’s discussion appears contiguous with a kind of deconstructive sense of the spectral, but Sword also marks a distance from différance, understood by her as the endless deferral and evasion of meaning. Here Specters is represented by a list of figures (mourning, the future, religion, imagination, and so on) closed by this assertion: ‘as these examples make evident, Derrida deploys the words “specter” and “spectral” so often, in so many different permutations and contexts, that they threaten to become verbal specters themselves: suggestive, thought-provoking, ethereal entities drained of all stable referential meaning’. Sword hence places deconstruction within a wider tendency in criticism and culture that appropriates the insubstantiality of the spectral to ‘escape semantic precision’. What is specifically problematic for Sword at the end of this book is that such a diffusion of spectral terms obscures or displaces the cultural visibility of modernist ‘literate mediums’. Indeed, the book ends by mourning, or, perhaps, being melancholic for, the ‘consolatory’ function of literature and literary institutions (‘lineage’ and ‘influence’, for example).30 The consolatory status of literature here is determined by developments in globalising communications technologies, which may have rendered it ‘no longer necessary’.31 In this context, the internet is also described in terms of spectral dematerialisation: ‘texts become increasingly ghostlike and ephemeral’.32 As this is articulated against contemporary popular forms of the paranormal – televisual, for example – we thus return to the opposition of literary and folk practices. Sword’s defence of a complex form of modern literary authorship, and nostalgia for literary tradition, thus also proposes, implicitly, another association of terms: contemporary popular culture, technological globalisation and digitisation, the proliferation of suspect texts, and taxonomic diffusion. These terms, of course, gesture away from the modern, and towards the postmodern. Haunted times: postmodernity and technological memory The supposed historical shift from modernity to postmodernity is significantly problematised by Rabaté’s discussion of Samuel Beckett towards the end of The Ghosts of Modernity: Beckett’s historical perception of our moment as that of the ‘ghost’ would tend to assert that our present postmodernity is spectral. This can be understood in two senses, either that history is haunted by a specter that resists any rational reduction, or any modernity or

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190  Sas Mays postmodernity will be in themselves ‘spectral’, endlessly generating ghosts ready to haunt an unwitting future, sweeping beneath a stream of virtual images everything that will be conceived as rationality. The first case would simply be rehashing a psychoanalytic truism affirming that no movement intent upon abolishing the past can avoid the return of a particular historical repressed (in the same way as the construction of a united Europe must put up with the return of the most commonplace sorts of nationalism and religious fanaticism). In the second sense, this metahistorical haunting suggests in less conventional fashion that modernity is the effect of a retroactive projection, of a ‘future perfect’ that plays with its fictions and ghosts as much as with prospective hypotheses and wagers.33

Here, Rabaté compares a modernity haunted by the return of its historical repressions, and a postmodernity haunting the future through a spectacular ‘multiplication of images’. The spectral position is thus at the ‘junction’ between the haunted birth and the haunted future, postmodernity being the ‘indefinite interregnum’ between the impossibility of being born or dying. We should thus be reminded of Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the temporal complexity of the modern and postmodern: ‘Postmodernism […] is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’.34 Turning towards Lyotard would also allow development of the issue of the separation of folk and scientific knowledge, and their relations to memory. In discussion of the former, Lyotard suggests that: By way of a simplifying fiction, we can hypothesize that, against all expectations, a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence has no need to remember the past. It finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives, but also in the act of reciting them. […] It is in this sense that this mode of temporality can be said to be simultaneously evanescent and immemorial.35

In this context, ‘popular sayings, proverbs, and maxims […] are like splinters of potential narratives, or molds of old ones, which have continued to circulate on certain levels of the contemporary social edifice’. In comparison, scientific knowledge ‘classifies’ narrative knowledge as ‘opinions, customs, authority, prejudice […] fit only for women and children’.36 In opposition to the immemorial evanescence of folk narrative, science stores or archives information, the contemporary forms of these being mechanical and electronic memory.37 Traditional criteria for the validity of knowledge – truth or justice, for example – no longer operate in context of the

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From the premodern to the postmodern  191 contemporary ‘­ mercantilization of knowledge’. But, as Lyotard continues: ‘Seen in this light, what we are approaching is not the end of knowledge – quite the contrary. Data banks are the Encyclo­ paedia of tomorrow. […] They are “nature” for postmodern man’. In this scene, ‘traditional memory banks (libraries, etc.)’ are drawn into telematic systems of knowledge. Such systems are designed to improve performance, and to make users’ aspirations and imagina­ tions germane to such requirement.38 In this sense, then, what appears to the subject as its own desire is in fact a reflection of the capitalist machine. Such a reflection can be seen in Clive Bloom’s discussion of the history of modern occultism and its relationship to the ‘spectral economic and legal body’ of the corporation, in which he argues that ‘the topography of the supernatural is itself of a nature with the specter of capital that it appears to oppose’. The higher planes of the spirit world coincide with the management levels of the corporation; the spirit-guides help manage, teach, and benevolently promote those climbing the hierarchy just as those might be helped in climbing the rungs of the business ladder; and the goal in both is secret knowledge and inner enlightenment when, on meeting the Chairman of the Board (both alien and familiar), we too are let into the inner sanctum among those secret books of accounts. It is no surprise that in both the corporation and the modern occult the guiding principles are those of law and management following from guidance and enlightenment.39

In this context of secret knowledge, in which I should emphasise the archival material of these ‘secret books and accounts’, Bloom refers to the amalgamation of ‘orthodox Christianity, theosophy and extraterrestrialism’ in the claimed near-death experiences of Betty J. Eadie’s popular self-help confession Embraced by the Light. The acquisition of knowledge is exampled through a citation which I expand upon here: I saw a large machine similar to a computer, but much more elaborate […]. I was taken to another large room similar to a library. As I looked around it seemed to be a repository of knowledge, but I couldn’t see any books. Then I noticed ideas coming into my head, knowledge filling me on subjects that I had not thought about for some time – or in some cases not at all. Then I realised that this was the library of the mind. By simply reflecting on a topic, as I had earlier in Christ’s presence, all knowledge on that topic came to me. I could learn about anybody in history – or even in the spirit world – in full

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192  Sas Mays detail. No knowledge was kept from me, and it was impossible not to understand correctly every thought, every statement, every particle of knowledge. There was absolutely no misunderstanding here. History was pure. Understanding was complete.40

At once quotidian (reflecting the worlds of the book and the computer) and transcendent, it is an image of immediacy. Such ‘pure knowledge’ is, elsewhere, ‘communicated from spirit to spirit – from intelligence to intelligence’, as a form of ‘telepathy’.41 Embraced by the Light, as well as standing here as a figure of a certain kind of ‘folk’ knowledge, is clearly structured by an idealist affirmation of the creative power of divine and human thought, by an effectively Platonic idea of anamnesis as the recollection of divine knowledge (‘I understood, or rather, I remembered’), and by the desire for totality (‘I wanted to know everything’).42 Such knowledge is inscribed in two forms, both linked by the idea of inscription – one in the textual form indicated by the library, the other biological. Memory is latterly located ‘in the cells of our new bodies’; ‘all thoughts and experiences in our lives are […] recorded in our cells, so that, not only is each cell imprinted with a genetic coding, it is also imprinted with every experience we have ever had’.43 The soul as the site of divine inscription is of course a Platonic motif, and, as Derrida argues in Dissemination, this indicates the problematic precedence of writing for the soul. It is problematic because of the différance of the chora as the original substrate, the original surface of inscription, a surface that prob­lemat­ises dis­tinc­tions such as space and time, a surface that retreats from categorisation.44 We should also note that, in Plato’s Phaedrus, writing is described as an undead, ghostly form that, in getting into the wrong hands, and repeating itself endlessly, spreads confusion. In Eadie’s benevolent account, however, the indeterminacy of books has here been eradi­ cated: God chooses ‘the publisher’ and ‘the media’, and solves the book’s taxonomic difficulty, or what Eadie refers to as ‘the placement problem’. Being ‘too Christian’ and ‘too New Age’ for some bookstores, the book ‘could be anywhere, and was usually in more than one section at once’ – ‘under religion, self-help, inspirational, New Age, non-fiction, or maybe philosophy, or death studies, or grief’. God, then, gives it ‘its own shelf to rest on’ by being at the top of the best-seller list.45 It is the very eradication of the problems of taxonomy and memory here, and the sense that everything in knowledge and life has its place, its ‘slot’, that gestures towards its inverse. Indeed, the moral messages of Eadie’s book, concerning broken homes,

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From the premodern to the postmodern  193 abortion, healthcare anxiety, and the loss of social laws, all reflect the economic and social instabilities of the capitalist scene. Contiguously, as Lyotard argues, those theories that see the postmodern scene as the disintegration of the social bond are ‘haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost “organic” society’.46 But the ghostly image of organic society, as a replete, unified commonality, is of course a myth: as Lyotard argues elsewhere, the organic community is itself haunted by political versions of Oedipal violence – the peasants’ service to the feudal masters is ironic.47 Lyotard’s point here is that such violence should be remembered, and deployed in the world of archival communications technologies. And it is to this scene of contestation that we will now turn. In his discussion of contemporary internet cultures of the ghostly and paranormal, John Potts shows that this contemporary form of interest in the ghostly is broadly characterised by a pseudo-scientific attachment to typology and to the construction of evidential databases whose supposed proofs of the paranormal are invented by the very technologies claiming to document them – either intentionally, or by contingency. Aura cameras are an example of the former type; chance effects of lenses, loss of focus or detail, or digital interpolation are examples of the latter. Furthermore, such recording devices are merchandised by commercial ventures specifically targeting the paranormal market.48 In this sense, then, contemporary amateur culture, placed in the position of ‘the folk’, is modelled on the normative structures of order and memory as a distorted reflection not only of the world of science, but of capital. As with Sword, then, ‘the folk’ are thus associated with a proliferation of suspect information and a proliferation of spurious taxonomies ‘based on the whims of individual amateur ghost researchers’.49 Other than indicating the persistence of the mystical in rational societies, and that the disenchantment of modernity could not be complete, the contemporary scene does not appear here to gain a positive potentiality. Indeed, in this context, there is little positive in what might be termed here a version of ‘folksonomy’, but such might be developed through Potts’ discussion of historical ghosts.50 One of the broader definitions of ghosts that Potts argues for is as something that keeps the past alive in the minds of the living as a form of ‘local history’ – a ‘site specific popular memory, a way for a community to preserve the knowledge of those who once lived there, or of that which happened there’.51 Configuring individual and social identities in the name of local memory is a move that has occurred, culturally and academically, as a counter to globalising homogenisation, and it thus reflects its own economic historicity. It

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194  Sas Mays is problematic in the context of the internet, where community no longer relates to geographical location quite as it had done, despite the persistence of the category ‘location-based haunting’ in ghost hunters’ classification systems. But in Potts’ other descriptions of historical hauntings, there is a sense of the ghost as a figure of justice that will begin to draw us towards a more generic, and indeed more specific discussion of law, archives, and politics in deconstruction: such ghostly memories ‘draw on the popular belief that official justice is imperfect […] and that sometimes action beyond the law is needed to ensure justice’.52 What this description also suggests is a matter of conflict between different institutions of memory: of a counter-memory inscribed at a level of folk practice that is positioned against the codified legal archive. This kind of conflict is also suggested by Potts’ differentiation of ghostly apparitions from Christian theological identifications such as ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ and, thus, from what is elsewhere referred to as the ‘admini­ strative authority of the Church’.53 Spirits, then, are bureaucratically sanctioned, theologically legalised entities. Thus, while folk culture and theological bureaucracy are partially joined by their attention to typology, these institutions of memory may be in conflict. Indeed, as an image of the question of law and justice, of wrongs unrectified, for example, ghosts would be, ‘essentially’ and a priori, a matter of typology – a matter of things that had not yet found their proper place: their ‘slot’. As with Derrida, then, the ghost is that which calls for, and raises questions of, a different future. Concluding notes: ‘the folk’ and the digital archive Before turning in more detail to this issue of ghosts, traditional or contemporary, as figures of legality and justice, I might first reiterate the historical schema thus far discussed in order to summarise the injustices associated with the figure of ‘the folk’. It is clear that, as much as the historical discourse of ghosts has been constructed through texts, and has thus been formed through their technological forms – the book, the taxonomy, the library – the contemporary forms of popular ghostly discourse are also created through the contemporary technologies of recording and archiving that they might claim to analyse – digital photographics, electronic voice phenomena, internet data accumulation, and so on. Non-professional participants, in terms of such cultural forms, tend to find their place in contemporary critical literature as an issue of indeterminacy and proliferation. In terms of the relation between the premodern and postmodern,

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From the premodern to the postmodern  195 ‘the folk’ appear as the bearers of old doxalogical knowledge – myth, opinion, family stories – deprived of the finality of scientific or critical fact. In the relation between the modern and postmodern, their contemporary forms appear as figures of the endless proliferation of spectralised discourses within the datasphere – merely another form of doxa. On the one hand, then, ‘the folk’ haunt the modern as a sign of the failure of its own classificatory epistemological aims, reconfigured as the persistence of a past state. On the other, they haunt the postmodern as a sign of the excessive proliferation of meaning and the failure of taxonomy in an encroaching future that is nevertheless a projection of the problems of determinacy in the present. On the one hand, they represent nature; on the other, the machine. They represent feudalism; they represent capitalism. In both cases, they appear as an excessive affront to taxonomy and classification – a ghostly imagining, a figure produced by the failures of rational determinacy. There is a tendency, then, for ‘the folk’, whether in their traditional or in their contemporary form, to be significantly aligned with endless indeterminacy (which, as we have also seen, is one of the criticisms associated with deconstruction). Thus, while participants in the contemporary popular cultures of the ghostly are really not the same as traditional notions of ‘the folk’ (historically, culturally, politically, or demographically), they are considered as such in the symbolic logic of much of the contemporary critical literature discussed here. In denigrating ‘the folk’, such writings thus beg the question of their aristocratic or bourgeois tendencies, and thus their reiteration of the political conditions of knowledge that they might claim to analyse. ‘The folk’, then, are an ideological image projected against the social complexities of epistemology, as we might see through Rabaté. Nevertheless, such images are always implicated in social practices: symbolic and cultural denigration are intimately linked. It is perhaps only through Lyotard, here, that we might find a positive image of ‘the folk’ figured as a resistance to feudal mastery or postmodern economism. Hence, while all of the critical accounts discussed here indicate that there is nothing outside the archive, generally understood – and that culture will continue to be constructed through and by the technologies that it claims to produce – there might nevertheless be a resistance, a partial exteriority, within it. In order to develop this possibility, let us return to the issue of law and justice as it relates to the deconstructive reading of the contemporary scene, technological-archival and spectral, with which this chapter began. In ‘Force of Law’, Derrida begins by stating that the conjunction of the terms deconstruction and justice ‘brings together

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196  Sas Mays words, concepts, perhaps things that do not belong to the same category’ and that defy ‘order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic’.54 Indeed, as Derrida makes clear here, deconstruction, as a subversive force, operates in order to bring law into question. Here, Derrida engages with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, a text that ‘exhibits and archives the very movement of its implosion, leaving in place what one calls a text, the ghost of a text’ that ‘ruins itself and contaminates itself; […] becomes the specter of itself’.55 For Derrida, this spectral text ‘tells a ghost story, a history of ghosts’, and the specific ghostly object of this text is the police. Being everywhere and nowhere, the police thus become ‘the very element of haunting, the milieu of spectrality’.56 Derrida questions here how such diffusion may be ‘because modern technologies of communica­ tion, or surveillance and interception of communication, ensure the police absolute ubiquity, saturating public and private space’, and because of the ‘monopolization by the state of technologies of protection of private life secrecy’.57 As this reminds us, the spectral is always a matter of the materiality of institutions and technologies. And this police haunting of the archives of communications technologies indicates a degeneration of democracy. Hence, ‘Benjamin’s discourse, which then develops into a critique of the parliamentarism of liberal democracy, is therefore revolutionary, even tending towards Marxism [marxisant], but in two senses of the word “revolutionary”, which also includes the sense “reactionary” – that is, the sense of a return to the past of purer origin’.58 In response to this impetus, Derrida’s discussion of revolutionary means here also concerns the archives of communications technologies: Today, the general strike does not need to demobilize or mobilize a spectacular number of people. It is enough to cut the electricity to a few privileged places, such as the postal service, radio and television, and other networks of centralized information; to introduce a few efficient viruses into a well-chosen computer network.59

In these subversions, as well as the blocking of systems, we might see the putting in place of a thing that does not have a designated place or slot, a virus that permeates and subverts the techno-archival system. Such subversion might not gesture merely towards endless meaninglessness, nor merely towards an addition to the postmodern panoply of spectres, nor merely to the extension of the capitalised archive. It might gesture towards the possibility of a different future.60 In this context, and in extension of the idea of digital folksonomies, let us begin, finally, to consider another discourse, another set of practices, and the more tendentious forms of contemporary spectral

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From the premodern to the postmodern  197 subversion. For example, against the national, international, and transnational forms of capitalist order, spectral as they are, let us consider the kinds of the ‘ghostly’ form of the numinous hacker collective, Anonymous.61 Notes 1 This attention to deconstruction here is in part derived from its impact on the field under consideration in this collection – it has been argued, for example, that the publication of Specters ‘spawned a minor academic industry’ (Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psycho­analysis and the Return of the Dead, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 10). A number of works that respond in various ways to deconstruction in this sense are discussed or referenced in this chapter. In addition, such work has not of course been simply positive: resistance to the spectral has been articulated in calls for a return to historical specificity – see, for example, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, New York and London: Continuum Books, 2010, p. x. For a deconstructive critique of this claim, see Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psycho­ analysis, History, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 15–16. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 16. 3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression [1995], trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 2–5. 4 For an opening discussion of originary technicity, see the introduction to Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley (eds), Technicity, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. 5 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews [1996], Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p. 129. 6 Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography [2000], ed. Gerhard Richter, trans. Jeff Fort, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 39. 7 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ [1957], in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. 8 Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 31–2, 141. 9 Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity [1996], Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010, pp. 218–19, 223. 10 Ralph Noyes, ‘The Other Side of Plato’s Wall’, in Buse and Stott, Ghosts, pp. 244–5. In terms of a literary connection that no doubt signals a common concern with capitalist modernity, the language of money here has a strong identity with that in F. R. Leavis’ Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930). 11 Noyes, ‘The Other Side’, pp. 247–9, 256. 12 See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Book to Come’ [1997], in Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine [2001], trans. Rachel Bowlby, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 6.

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198  Sas Mays 3 1 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Noyes, ‘The Other Side’, p. 251. Ibid., pp. 251–4. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., pp. 256–7, 260–1. In fact, James’ antipathy to the modern folk and their archives is evident in a number of the short stories. ‘The Birthplace’ articulates a denigration of the public library, just as ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ denigrates railway literature, and just as ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’ denigrates the endless material accumulation of texts. The gendering of this denigration could also be read through ‘The Real Right Thing’. In all of these, there is an overriding typological distinction between the forms of high literary publication and mass cultural texts, and between ideal meaning and material accumulation. For a discussion of James’ relation to technology, and ‘the new, primarily female, human storehouse of informa­ tion as exemplified by the telegraphist’, a figure of ‘the archive as human being’, see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Think­ing, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 86–114. This turn towards the library mirrors, in archival terms, the way in which the SPR’s interpretations of correspondence with the dead were conducted through literary-critical methods. See Leigh Wilson, ‘The Cross-­ correspondences, the Nature of Evidence and the Matter of Writing’, in Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. R. C. Finucane, Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation [1984], New York: Prometheus Books, 1996, pp. 2–3. Ibid., pp. 205–6. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., pp. 3, 203. Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 11, 17, 18. See Derrida, Specters, pp. 150–1. On the codex as a materialisation of language that appears to limit phantas­ mality, in its apparently definite and finite material form, but which is nevertheless within the spectral, see Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp. xi–xiii. For Derrida’s early complexification of the codex form, see the Translator’s Introduction in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Allan Bass, London: Routledge, 1978. Such complexification is also part of the subject of Derrida’s Paper Machine. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, p. 12. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., pp. 27–31. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., pp. 162–6. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 157. Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, p. 230. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi, Manchester: Man­ chester University Press, 1992, p. 79. Ibid., p. 22.

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From the premodern to the postmodern  199 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 1 5 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., pp. 50–1, 62–4. Clive Bloom, ‘Angels in the Architecture: The Economy of the Super­ natural’, in Buse and Stott, Ghosts, p. 241. Emphases in original. Betty J. Eadie, Embraced by the Light: What Happens When You Die? [1992], London: HarperElement, 2007, p. 74. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., pp. 41–2. Ibid., p. 91. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone Press, 2000. Eadie, Embraced by the Light, pp. 151–3. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 15. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Domus and the Megalopolis’ [1988], in JeanFrançois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. John Potts, ‘The Idea of Ghosts’, in John Potts and Edward Scheer (eds), Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny, Sydney: Power Publications, 2006, pp. 85–8, 90. Ibid., p. 88. A contraction of ‘folk taxonomy’, referring to collective, user-based tagging, and thus the interpretation, of online information. Potts, ‘The Idea of Ghosts’, p. 83. Ibid., pp. 82–4. Ibid., p. 80. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ [1994], in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 231. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 271. In addition to rejecting the simple association of deconstruction and the postmodern proliferation of capitalised media given in Sword, then, this point militates against the association of deconstruction and capitalism which is given in Blanco and Peeren, Popular Ghosts, pp. xiii–xiv, where the spectral is said to reduce the ghost to a museal commodity. For a useful introduction to the milieu and practices of this diffuse entity, see Nicolás Mendoza, ‘A Tale of Two Worlds: Apocalypse, 4Chan, WikiLeaks and the Silent Protocol Wars’, Radical Philosophy, 166, March/April 2011.

Bibliography Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley (eds), Technicity, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, New York and London: Continuum Books, 2010.

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200  Sas Mays Clive Bloom, ‘Angels in the Architecture: The Economy of the Supernatural’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression [1995], trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography [2000], ed. Gerhard Richter, trans. Jeff Fort, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone Press, 2000. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ [1994], in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine [2001], trans. Rachel Bowlby, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Book to Come’ [1997], in Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine [2001], trans. Rachel Bowlby, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Allan Bass, London: Routledge, 1978. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews [1996], Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Betty J. Eadie, Embraced by the Light: What Happens When You Die? [1992], London: HarperElement, 2007. R. C. Finucane, Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation [1984], New York: Prometheus Books, 1996. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ [1957], in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Domus and the Megalopolis’ [1988], in Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Nicolás Mendoza, ‘A Tale of Two Worlds: Apocalypse, 4Chan, WikiLeaks and the Silent Protocol Wars’, Radical Philosophy, 166, March/April 2011. Ralph Noyes, ‘The Other Side of Plato’s Wall’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999. John Potts, ‘The Idea of Ghosts’, in John Potts and Edward Scheer (eds), Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny, Sydney: Power Publications, 2006. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity [1996], Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010.

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From the premodern to the postmodern  201 Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Leigh Wilson, ‘The Cross-correspondences, The Nature of Evidence and the Matter of Writing’, in Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002.

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10

Ruskin’s haunted nature: art and the spectre of ecological catastrophe Charlie Gere On 26 April 1986 the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, exploded, sending a plume of radioactive material into the atmosphere. The radioactive caesium in the fallout spread across Europe, as far as the north-west of England, Scotland, and north Wales. The soil in these areas is mostly peat based, with a high organic content and a low mineral content, and so did not bind the caesium well, meaning that it appeared in relatively high concentrations in the grass, thus contaminating the livestock on the hills. Cumbria was one of the worst-hit areas in the United Kingdom and, as of 2010, farmers were still having their livestock tested for the effects of radiation and were still receiving compensation. The most disturbing aspect of this radiation is that it works invisibly, leaving no physical mark or other visual evidence of its presence. Thus the Lake District, which occupies most of Cumbria, remains one of the most beautiful landscapes in England and perhaps even in the world, while being in a sense haunted by the aftermath of what was probably one of the twentieth century’s most ecologically destructive events. The use of the word ‘haunting’ in this context is more than merely a metaphor, and it is its implications that I pursue in this chapter. In Cumbria, a handheld spectroscopic device is used to determine radiation levels in sheep. The term ‘spectroscopy’ is related to ‘spectre’, which examples the implicit connections between haunting and ecological catastrophe. Indeed, this chapter acts as a kind of spectroscope, or perhaps ‘spectre-scope’, detecting various spectral emanations moving across space and time, and across different discourses. The Lake District’s beauty famously attracted visitors and residents such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, a little later, the great nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, 202

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  203 who was, of course, one of the great advocates of the importance of looking and the visual, especially with his advocacy of the ‘innocent eye’. But, since Ruskin’s day, art is no longer capable of celebrating nature as an innocent domain opposed to culture, and the great tradition of painting and drawing the natural landscape which he did much to promote is no longer widely professionally practised, not least because of our increasing awareness of the complexity of the rural landscape, which makes an innocent or naïve engagement more or less impossible. But this does not mean that art has abandoned engagement with the environment. Since the late 1960s, artists have been dealing with the environment, especially with so-called ‘land art’ or ‘environmental art’. Some of this work has been radical and critical, such as that of Robert Smithson, best known for his ‘earthwork’ Spiral Jetty. Other such work appears less critical and engaged. Here, artists such as James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, and Richard Long may be cited. Much of the work of such artists still emphasises experiences of the ‘natural’ world, rather than the complex imbrication of the human and the environment, and as such tends to repeat romantic conceptions of nature as a privileged domain separate from human activities. This sometimes remains true of contemporary practices such as ‘eco-art’, which often seems more concerned with fostering awareness of ecological issues of a fairly narrow and predictable sort than with producing art of any great complexity or interest. As such, much of it avoids any engagement with the more complex questions that phenomena such as pollution and global warming invoke. A problematic example of this, with particular relevance to the Lake District, is Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheep Fold series of site-specific works. Funded and supported by Cumbria University, this was a project that ran for six years, from 1996 to 2003, at which point forty-six derelict sheepfolds had been repaired and enhanced by Goldsworthy’s ‘sculptural response’ (see figure 10.1). The website for the projects claims that this enabled Goldsworthy to ‘connect directly with the farming tradition and history of Cumbria’.1 This suggests a somewhat romantic notion that sheep grazing on a hillside might be a throwback to an earlier, more innocent age. But, as Karl Marx points out in Capital, the unpopulated hills given over to livestock are often a result of the rural clearances that were a prelude to the Industrial Revolution: ‘The labourers are first driven from the land, then come the sheep’.2 Thus, such landscapes are haunted by the memory of those labourers whose coerced move to the cities made the Industrial Revolution, and their emptiness and quiet, far from being opposed to industrialisation, are its direct results.

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204  Charlie Gere

10.1  Andy Goldsworthy, Sheepfold at Cautley Spout, Cumbria, 2003; photograph by the author. Original in colour.

There are, however, exceptions to this emphasis on the ‘natural’ world, particularly among artists involved in the use of new technologies and new media. Such work often deals with the social and political implications of environmental issues. For example, the art partnership HeHe, based in Paris and comprising Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, is particularly interested in making work that looks at questions of energy consumption. In 2008 they realised the first version of their Nuage Vert project, part of ‘Pollstream’, a larger series of works dealing with these questions in relation to atmospheric emissions. HeHe describe ‘Pollstream’ as ‘a collection of ideas, forms and images that explore man-made clouds’. They declare that they are ‘fascinated by clouds because of their movement, and because of their natural undefined form – which makes them difficult to be fixed in time’, and that in their projects ‘clouds are used as a visual metaphor to aestheticise emissions and chemical toxins’. Following the various meanings attached in popular culture from the nineteenth century to now, ‘Pollstream’ ‘offers alternative meanings for today’s man-made clouds, which, hopefully, challenge the ideologies of our times’.3 The Nuage Vert project involved the vapour emissions from the Salmisaari coal-burning power plant in Finland being illuminated

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  205

10.2  HeHe, Nuage Vert, Salmisaari, Finland, 2008; with permission of HeHe. Original in colour.

with a high-power green laser animation every night for a week in February 2008 (see figure 10.2). ‘The laser drew an outline of the moving cloud onto the cloud itself, colouring it green, turning it into a city scale neon sign, which grows bigger as local residents take control and consume less electricity.’ This event was supported by other activities, including presentations to schoolchildren and engagements with the local community. One of the results was that the power consumption by local residences dropped signifi­cantly over the week. This had no appreciable effect on the amount of energy produced by the plant, but it did highlight the question of energy consumption in a visible and interesting way. But, that said, the project avoided any simplistic polemical point-scoring about such phenomena. ‘As a transmitting architecture, Nuage Vert conveys multiple ideas: could this green cloud be a toxic cloud or an emblem for the collective effort of the local community? The meaning is left open for each and all to decide, and will depend upon the level of engagement.’4 It is perhaps unlikely that Ruskin would have recognised this as art, let alone art that has anything to do with nature or even what we now call the environment. Nevertheless, not only does some of

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206  Charlie Gere Ruskin’s later work prefigure HeHe’s preoccupation with ‘man-made clouds’, but the issues their work invokes haunt our current reading of Ruskin, like the revenant that, in Jacques Derrida’s words, returns from the future.5 Clouds, man-made or otherwise, are also in themselves quasi-spectral phenomena, which are appropriate objects through which to think about questions of haunting, especially in relation to the environment, as Ruskin himself was well aware. It is through the work of Ruskin that I explore some of the relations between haunting and ecological catastrophe. It is my view that Ruskin articulates a prescient understanding of that relation in some of his later texts, notably ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, in which he anticipates some of the apocalyptic, messianic, and spectral themes of Derrida and Walter Benjamin. It is possible to say that Cumbria, and the north-west of England more generally, is haunted by the spirit of Ruskin. His house Brantwood, now a museum dedicated to his memory, is in the Lake District, while his grave is in Coniston, on the other side of the lake from which the house is sited. The window next to where I write faces directly towards Ingleborough, one of the famous ‘three peaks’ of the Yorkshire Dales, along with Pen-y-Ghent and Whernside. Ruskin gave the name ‘Looking Down from Ingleborough’ to the first issue of Fors Clavigera, the series of letters addressed to ‘the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’, which also was intended to support the work of the Guild of St George, the utopian society Ruskin, then fifty years old, founded at the same time.6 (The title was given to this first letter by Ruskin some years later, and it does not actually describe the experience of looking down from Ingleborough.) Fors Clavigera in turn is haunted by the spirit of Ruskin’s inamorata, Rose La Touche, whose memory is invoked in cryptic forms in many of the letters. Nor is the invocation of haunting merely meta­ phorical. Ruskin was profoundly affected by the tragic early death of La Touche, the girl he first met when she was ten, and whom he was determined eventually to make his wife, against her parents’ better judgement. As Philip Hoare shows in his book E ­ ngland’s Lost Eden, it was his grief over Rose that led Ruskin to dabble in spiritualism, and to believe that she had indeed been contacted during a séance at his friends’ house.7 There is, indeed, a contiguity between the idea of an individual spirit and Ruskin’s sense of nature. As a (sometimes reluctant) heir to romanticism, Ruskin imbued the natural world with a spectral trace of divine presence. For Ruskin, when young at least, the visual experience of natural beauty was a form of theophany, in which nature was haunted by the divine and the sacred. A passage from Ruskin’s Modern Painters describes ‘an instinctive awe, mixed

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  207 with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit’, and, later, how ‘the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit’.8 This passage is quoted in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, and it examples what Otto calls a ‘numinous’ experience (a word he derived from the Latin numen, meaning ‘spirit of the place’).9 Hence, passages such as this demonstrate how Ruskin was concerned to assert the capacity of art to reflect the glory of God as manifested in nature. But, as Peter Fuller pointed out in his book Theoria, this natural theology became increasingly untenable as the nineteenth century wore on, and developments like Darwin’s theory of natural selection seemed to bring such religious thinking into doubt.10 Ruskin felt the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ‘Sea of Faith’ that Matthew Arnold described in his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867). In midlife he abandoned his parents’ evangelicalism and became, in his words, a ‘pagan’, before developing, in old age, an idiosyncratic and personal version of Catholicism.11 A more materialistic and less joyful vision of a landscape being haunted by the dead can be found in Ruskin’s description, also from the third volume of Modern Painters, of the Roman Campagna at dusk, written as part of a polemic against what he saw as the fundamental lack of truth in neoclassical, Claudean landscape painting. Having described in satirical terms Claude’s painting Il Mulino, he then gives the reader a vivid word-painting of the actual Campagna. Here, the earth yields and crumbles beneath the foot, ‘for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men’; the long knotted grass waves and tosses ‘feebly’ in the sun; ‘Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep’; and, finally, ‘the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier’, melt ‘into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation’s grave’.12 Ruskin’s point here is to show that the idealised classical landscape painted by Claude, and beloved of critics of J. M. W. Turner, is a travesty of the actuality and also an attempt to keep alive a classical world that is firmly and thoroughly gone. What is interesting here is that the landscape is no longer haunted by a divine presence but by the traces of dead men, and the joyful experience of landscape Ruskin remembers from his earlier years is replaced by something far darker. That this takes place as part of an argument about the need for realism in art is also noteworthy, and suggests something disturbing about that realism and its relation to death and spectrality.

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208  Charlie Gere Here we should engage with Ruskin’s relation to photography. Ruskin, though he did not believe that photography could be an art, used and advocated the use of photographs as an aid. Moreover, his close attention to the singular details in nature made both Ruskin’s drawings and paintings and his verbal descriptions photographic in ways with which he was perhaps not comfortable. In Fors Clavigera he attacks photography in a manner that anticipates his ecological concerns in his great polemical lecture ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’: You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you. That was also a discovery and may some day be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but green and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them then, not one of you cares for the loss of them now when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box.13

Ruskin intuited something in photography, that we may now think of as being true of all media and of all discourse, that it always involves spectrality, death, the dead, and that it is not possible, as Ruskin so fervently wished, to oppose life to death. As such, photography, as has been remarked many times before, also invokes haunting and ghosts. As Derrida points out, there is a close relation between contemporary technologies of reproduction such as photography and film, and the spectral. In an interview, Derrida declared that ‘spectrality is at work everywhere, and more than ever, in an original way, in the reproducible virtuality of photography or cinema’.14 Perhaps Ruskin’s antipathy to painting of this sort and to photography is related to an anxiety about contingency and time. This antipathy towards photography may be compared to his hostility to other examples of representation, including ­seventeenth-century Dutch art and the work of John Constable. The former he regarded as largely concerned with the mechanical reproduction of reality and the latter as barely even second or third rate. Both may also be considered forms of ‘proto-photography’, in that they anticipate the kind of representation made possible by photography. In Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, Peter Galassi’s essay for the catalogue of his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Galassi argues against the normal historical conception, in which photography is understood to have been developed out of artistic practice and aids to painting and drawing such as the camera obscura, and then, once invented

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  209 as a technology, to have influenced painting. Instead, he says photography is ‘a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition’. But it is developed out of the use of perspective not to produce, for example, the ‘timeless perfection of the imaginary townscape’ found in a work of Piero della Francesca, but to convey the sense, found in pictures such as Emmanuel de Witte’s Protestant Gothic Church of 1669, that ‘we are participants in the contingent experience of everyday life’.15 This is also conveyed in similar works such as Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s The Grote Kerk, Haarlem of 1636–37, which exhibits a ‘wilfully fragmentary and internally discontinuous view’ that was not a common option for painters until the late nineteenth century. By the nineteenth century also, landscape painting, hitherto regarded as low in the hierarchy of art, in which history painting was the highest class, had become far more respected. Indeed, Galassi shows that by the 1830s, John Constable could declare in a letter that the ‘sound of water escaping from Mill dams, […] willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts & brickwork – I love such things […]. These scenes made a painter (& I am grateful)’.16 For Galassi such thinking is represented in pictures that ‘take forthrightly as their subject a single, nameable thing: the trunk of a tree […] a cloud […] a humble gate’.17 Hence, Constable asserted a new vision of painting, also writing in 1836 that ‘painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, should not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments’. As Galassi argues, such thinking led to a ‘new and fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms. It is the syntax of an art devoted to the singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable. It is also the syntax of photography’.18 In support of his point about photography and the landscape sketch, Galassi discusses and illustrates two sketches by Constable, both of which are not just dated but have actual times of composition in the titles, namely A View of Salisbury, from the Library of Archdeacon Fisher’s House, 4.00 p.m., July 12, 1829, and The Close, Salisbury, 11.00 a.m. – Noon, July 15, 1829. Here we might invoke Derrida’s idea of the ‘enigma of the date’, which he discusses in his essay on Paul Celan’s poems.19 For Derrida, the date presents an ‘enigma’, in that it must be both unique (it signifies a unique time) and repeatable, in order to be readable.20 At the same time, ‘It is necessary that in the date the unrepeatable […] repeat itself, effacing in itself the irreducible singularity that it denotes. It is necessary that, in a certain manner, the unrepeatable divide itself in repeating itself, and in the same stroke encipher or

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210  Charlie Gere encrypt itself’.21 He continues that ‘The date must conceal within itself some stigma of singularity if it is to last longer than that which it commemorates […]. And so what must be commemorated, at once gathered and repeated, is therefore, at the same time, the date’s annihilation, a kind of nothing, or ash […]. Ash awaits us’.22 Dating is made possible by ‘coded signs’ and ‘“objective” systems of notation and spatiotemporal plottings’ such as the calendar and the clock, which ‘mark only insofar as their readability announces the possibility of return’.23 Citing Celan’s mention of 13 February in his poem ‘In Eins’, Derrida points out that, at every date, ‘what one commemorates will be the date of that which could never come back’, including the ‘multiplicity of events, in dispersed places’ that ‘may have come together at the heart of the same anniversary’.24 On 13 February 1962 Celan was in Paris, which was also the date and location of the funeral of the victims of the massacre of anti-OAS demonstrators in the Charonne metro station some five days earlier, which was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners.25 Derrida also discusses Celan’s poem ‘Huhediblu’, in which the phrase ‘Nimmermensch­tags im September’ (‘Nevermansday in September’) occurs; he points out that Celan has named and ciphered an event that he alone, or alone with but a few others, is able to commemorate, and, inasmuch as those who commemorate are mortal, it is thus destined one day ‘to no longer signify at all for the survivors’, that is to say, the poem’s readers.26 There is ‘mourning in the reading itself’. Or, alternatively, nothing is lost or encrypted. September comes round again. This is the madness of dates, that they are both singular and repetitions. ‘There is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour. Every hour counts its holocaust. Every hour is unique, whether it recurs […]’.27 It is impossible, for me at least, to read these passages or the poem to which it refers without thinking of the events of 11 September 2001, which may be widely commemorated, but also can and may well be forgotten in the future. The familiar pictures of the smoke clouds billowing from the towers of the World Trade Center echo Ruskin’s most apocalyptic vision of haunting, that of the ‘StormCloud of the Nineteenth Century’, the name of the lecture he gave in 1875, which is bound up with the dates of his various observations of the phenomena he describes. Ruskin was fascinated by clouds and other phenomena, as is evinced by his many studies of clouds, as well as in his study The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869). One of the points he is making in the Storm-Cloud lecture, and perhaps the reason for emphasising the use of dates, is that these phenomena are new and unprecedented,

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  211 a point he attempts to demonstrate in the lecture by reference to earlier descriptions of clouds in literature. While recovering from the mental stress of his relationship with Rose La Touche at Matlock Spa in Derbyshire, Ruskin made one of these observations, which he first mentions in the July 1871 issue of Fors Clavigera. Obviously, Ruskin’s response to the weather was somewhat determined by his feelings about his relationship with Rose, and his projection of his psychological state onto his experience of storm-clouds is perhaps a good example of the temptations of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a term coined by Ruskin himself in Modern Painters.28 Though it is midsummer in mid-England, Ruskin declares that: ‘It is the first of July, and I sit down to write by the dismalest light that ever yet I wrote by’. He continues with an apocalyptic description: the ‘sky is covered with […] a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or colour of its own’. This is accompanied by the fitful shaking of the leaves of the trees because of ‘a strange, bitter, blighting wind’. Ruskin declares that this experience of weather is both new and dreadful for him after fifty years of gleaning the best hours of his life in spring and summer mornings. He claims not to care what science might be able to tell him about the moon and stars but ‘I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this bitter wind comes from, and what it is made of’. It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls – such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them […]. You know, if there are such things as souls, and if ever any of them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us, just now, displeased enough!29

The mad brilliance of Ruskin’s observations of the storm clouds is evident in his conflation of environmental observation and tropes of haunting. La Touche died in May 1875, and it is unsurprising that, a little later in the same year, Ruskin again finds the weather haunting and doom-laden. In the storm-cloud lecture itself Ruskin quotes from his diary to describe a recent experience of the modern plaguecloud, including the place and date of the entry, ‘Bolton Abbey, 4th July, 1875’. He describes the shaking of the leaves at his window, which turns into a continuous, trembling, falling, and returning in ‘fits of

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212  Charlie Gere various forces’. Ruskin claims that ‘This wind is the plague-wind of the eighth decade of years in the nineteenth century; a period which will assuredly be recognized in future meteorological history as one of phenomena hitherto unrecorded in the courses of nature, and characterized pre-eminently by the almost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind’.30 We have here perhaps a hint of the mysterium tremendum (‘overwhelming mystery’), a term originally coined by Rudolf Otto to describe our experience of God as the ‘Wholly Other’.31 Derrida describes it as a ‘Frightful mystery, a secret to make you tremble’. The word tremendous is a gerundive derived from tremo, ‘that which makes one tremble, something frightening, distressing, terrifying’.32 Trembling, unlike quivering, for example, takes place after an event has happened, such as an earthquake, with its tremors, even if it continues to threaten us: We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated; anticipated but unpredictable; apprehended, and this is why there is a future, apprehended precisely as unforeseeable, unpredictable; approached as unapproachable […]. We tremble because we don’t know which direction the shock came from […] and we tremble from not knowing, in the form of a double secret, whether it is going to continue, start again, insist, be repeated.33

He suggests that ‘One doesn’t know why one trembles’, much as one does not know why one weeps.34 The mysterium tremendum, that which makes us tremble, perhaps, or weep, is ‘the gift of infinite love, the dyssymetry that exists between the divine regard that sees me, and myself, who doesn’t see what is looking at me; it is the gift and endurance of death that exists in the irreplaceable, the disproportion between the infinite gift and my finitude’.35 The disciples work towards their salvation in fear and trembling, because their salvation lies in God, ‘whom we don’t see and whose will we cannot know’, and ‘Without knowing from whence the thing comes and what awaits us, we are given over to absolute solitude’.36 This is because ‘God is himself absent, hidden and silent, separate and secret at the moment he has to be obeyed’. He does not have to give reasons, or share motivations, or anything, with us. If he did, he would not be God, and ‘we would not be dealing with God as wholly other’.37 Ruskin treats the meteorological phenomena he describes as the actions of an unknowable God, and at the end of the lecture he becomes positively apocalyptic:

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  213 Blanched Sun, – blighted grass, – blinded man. – If, in conclusion, you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things – I can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time. Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, ‘The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.’ All Greek, all Christian, all Jewish prophecy insists on the same truth through a thousand myths; but of all the chief, to former thought, was the fable of the Jewish warrior and prophet, for whom the sun hasted not to go down, with which I leave you to compare at leisure the physical result of your own wars and prophecies, as declared by your own elect journal not fourteen days ago, – that the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never set, has become one on which he never rises. What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain. Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can the signs of the times. Whether you can bring the sun back or not, you can assuredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your own honesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, ‘Peace; be still,’ but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, and the troubling of your own passions. And all that it would be extremely well to do, even though the day were coming when the sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths of rectitude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promise of old time would not be found to hold for us also? – ‘Bring ye all the tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord God, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it’.38

A Victorian audience would have had no problems in recognising the biblical allusions in these passages, not least ‘the light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining’, a motif that occurs a number of times in the Old Testament, as a sign of God’s displeasure, as does the day when the sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood, which, apart from describing a phenomenon associated with lunar eclipses, signifies the day of the coming of the Lord, as in Joel 2: 31. Perhaps more interestingly, the passage from Joel is quoted in Acts 2: 20, in relation to Jesus’ return. The final quotation is from Malachi 3:10, one of the Old Testament books intended to bring the Israelites back to their righteous ways, with the warning that, come the ‘eschaton’, the end of days which

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214  Charlie Gere brings the final judgement, the difference between those who served God faithfully and those who did not would be obvious. Thus, unsurprisingly perhaps, Ruskin’s proto-ecological polemic is cast in eschatological, apocalyptic, and messianic terms, and his apocalyptic proclamations are also thoroughly ecological. In his short address The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, Ruskin presents an apocalyptic view of our relation to time in terms of judgement that also invokes cloud-like and spectral images, especially of our lives as a vapour liable to vanish away. He talks of the ‘enthusiasm’ with which he was able to ‘dwell on the beauty of the physical clouds’ but he is now endeavouring to ‘trace the form and beauty of another kind of cloud than those; the bright cloud of which it is written – “what is your life? It is even as a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away”’.39 Is there but one day of judgment? Why, for us every day is a day of judgment – every day is a Dies Irae, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses – it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst of judgment – the insects that we crush are our judges – the moments we fret away are our judges – the elements that feed us, judge, as they minister – and the pleasures that deceive us, judge, as they indulge. Let us, for our lives, do the work of Men while we bear the form of them, if indeed those lives are NOT as a vapour, and do NOT vanish away.40

The somewhat ambiguous last sentence seems to offer a hope of survival after death, in keeping with Ruskin’s interest in spiritualism, as well as an existential anxiety about finitude. This rhetoric of judgement being possible at any moment, and thus Ruskin’s messianism in general, might be considered as evincing a connection to one of his less obvious heirs, Walter Benjamin, who also uses storm imagery as a means of indicating apocalyptic themes. In his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin famously invokes the Angel of History as being propelled into the future by a storm blowing from Paradise, while the pile of debris we call progress ‘grows skyward’.41 In the same essay he also writes in terms that echo Ruskin’s notion of every day and, indeed, every moment as a day of judgement, in particular for the Jews, prohibited from investigating the future, but for whom nevertheless ‘every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter’.42 In a sense, Benjamin is a mirror image of Ruskin. Against Ruskin’s attempts to save art for God, Benjamin proclaims the end of the aura of the work of art, an end bound up with technical r­ eproducibility. It

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  215 is perhaps simply that Benjamin celebrates what Ruskin has intuited, that techniques of mechanical reproduction have a close relationship with the death of God, and the triumph of nihilism, not least because they engage with contingency and time. At the same time, Ruskin also perhaps intuited something else; that the death of the nineteenth-century God of ontotheology opens up another space, for a spectral messianism that can be glimpsed in his storm-cloud lecture. In The Arcades Project Benjamin describes the lightning flash of the ‘dialectical image’, which must ‘be held fast as it flashes its lightning image in the Now of recognizability’.43 The lightning flash echoes Ruskin’s storm-cloud imagery but also invokes the camera flash, which captures the contingent instant before it disappears. This is where Ruskin and Benjamin differ, with the former denigrating photography in relation to art, while the latter sees it as having a liberatory and radical potential. In his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, Benjamin suggests that the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic: it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal but the end. Therefore the order of the profane cannot be built up on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and therefore theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning.44

In order to develop a sense of the ecological dimension of Benjamin’s thought, we might remember that Jacob Taubes compares Benjamin’s messianism directly to St Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he talks about the ‘groaning of creation’. This is not, Taubes points out, any kind of ecological concern. Paul is not interested in ecology or the glory of nature. ‘He has never seen a tree in his life’, as Taubes puts it. But, for Paul, nature is a very important category, an eschato­ logical category: ‘It groans, it sighs under the burden of decay and futility’.45 Taubes sees Benjamin, in the ‘Fragment’, as the exegete of nature as decay in Romans, 8.46 We might also recall here Benjamin’s discussion, in the short essay ‘Unpacking My Library’, of his children’s books as ‘seeds’ of a collection that would both remember maternal and familial relations, and gesture to a redemptive future. Following Benjamin, Derrida writes about what he calls ‘the messianic without messianism’, which ‘is the very place of spectrality’.47 It is in relation to his engagement with the messianic and the spectral that, in his book Specters of Marx, Derrida coins his neo­ logism ‘hauntology’, which suggests and deconstructs the supposed

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216  Charlie Gere stability of ontology, and invokes both Marx and Engels’ spectre of communism haunting Europe and the ghost of Hamlet’s father.48 Hauntology is Derrida’s name for the way in which the present is constitutively haunted not just by the past, but also by the future. Ruskin’s death-haunted storm cloud prefigures the spectral messianisms of Benjamin and Derrida. In place of his youthful theophany he developed a darker vision of nature as the site of singularity and event, and of the unprecedented and unexpected arrivant. Even Ruskin was haunted by the spectre of communism. Not long after the publication of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867, and inspired by the Paris Commune, in the seventh letter of Fors Clavigera he claimed that ‘I myself am a Communist of the old school – reddest of the red’.49 Though perhaps problematic, given his antipathy to communism in the lecture ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ of 1864, Ruskin’s claims to be a communist are perhaps of a piece with his incipient messianism, which looks with both trepidation and hope towards the future. In turn, our present, which would have been the future Ruskin feared and trembled before, is haunted by Ruskin’s spectre, particularly because Ruskin, unlike Marx, was haunted by the spectre of future ecological catastrophe, which makes him perhaps more prescient than Marx. Ruskin is one of the figures invoked by those concerned with ecology and sustainability. But rather than see Ruskin’s man-made clouds as a deadly intrusion into a previously pristine living nature, it may be more pointed to suggest that that nature is already constitutively haunted by death and decay, and environmental threat. Perhaps Ruskin’s texts gesture towards something like Derrida’s concept of ‘autoimmunity’, which he increasingly engaged with towards the end of his life. Derrida used this term to indicate the way in which that which enables life and growth also presupposes death, or, in Martin Hägglund’s useful gloss, ‘everything is threatened from within itself, since the possibility of living is inseparable from the peril of dying’.50 Geoffrey Bennington makes a similar point in his discussion of growth in his (anonymous) essay ‘Personal Growth’, in which he remarks that Growth grows always towards death. Growth is exposure to a mortal and mortified outside. The plant produces bark and dead wood as part of its living and dying. This production is part of the dying that is an intrinsic moment of living, the dead material residue that is part of the life of life.51

Bennington here criticises the concept of ‘sustainable growth’, which, he points out, is an oxymoron, ‘as if growth could be growth

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  217 without outgrowing itself, without outgrowth, self-contained, without relation to the other’.52 Given that death is an ineluctable part of life and of ‘nature’, the concept of nature as ‘sustainable’ is absurd. It is its very unsustainability, the impossibility of preserving it from its potential and, indeed, inevitable nonexistence that makes life possible at all. Ruskin’s anxiety and despair about the effects of pollution run parallel to his antipathy to the spectral, mechanical reproduction techniques of photography. Both are haunted by the dead, and by the death that Ruskin was so determined to resist. But, of course, as any reader of Derrida will know, deathly mechanical repetition is at the heart of life itself. But, as Richard Beardsworth puts it, ‘the absolute future of technical determination, the “messianic” promise that trembles in every technical invention, delivers the latter over to contingency, a contingency that marks, precisely the finitude of all organisations, thereby giving human organisation its chance’.53 ‘Subordinated to the passage of time, technics is […] finite and the future contingent’.54 This is perhaps why those artists, such as HeHe, who use new media and technologies are best suited to engage with ecological issues. We can, perhaps, find an example of how Ruskin’s insights find artistic expression in an arts organisation based in the heart of the Lake District itself. Grizedale Arts is to be found in a farmhouse once owned by Ruskin, directly above Brantwood, on the edge of Coniston Water. (Full disclosure: I am currently chair of the board of trustees.) Grizedale Arts (GA) is the successor of the Grizedale Sculpture Trust, which was well known for siting sculptures by, among others, Andy Goldsworthy, in Grizedale Forest. GA follows a very different remit in terms of responding to the arts in a rural context and in relation to the environment. According to its website, GA ‘has neither studios nor exhibition space, but rather provides artists with the opportunity to realise projects using the social, cultural and economic networks of the area’ and the programme actively engages with the complexities of the rural situation […] aiming to create a finished art product we place an emphasis on process and the dissemination of ideas to a wider audience. We work alongside the local community to develop and realise the work with artists, and consequently the projects often challenge the artists as much as the local (participatory) audience and beyond.55

Among its aims is a ‘project of evolving projects that aims to rethink the work of’ Ruskin ‘in a contemporary context’, building ‘particularly on his later writings and actions that move away from

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10.3  Adam Sutherland/Grizedale Arts, London Transport Oyster card wallet, 2007; photograph by the author. Original in colour.

218  Charlie Gere

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  219 conventional aesthetics towards a complex of radical and moral activity that incorporated performance, lectures, activism, politics, sociology, agriculture and art’, and reintroducing Ruskin as ‘a key figure in the formation of contemporary culture and society’.56 Among the smaller projects GA has undertaken was a commission from London Transport to design a holder for its Oyster card travel pass that would promote the arts. In a typically provocative move, GA director Adam Sutherland produced a design showing a view of the beautiful Langdale Valley, near GA’s base, which happens to feature the farmhouse which was allegedly the training base for the terrorists who bombed the London Underground on 7 July 2005 (see figure 10.3). Here again we encounter a date that now names a catastrophic event, especially in its telegrammatic form, 7/7. As mentioned above, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously described communism as a spectre haunting Europe. Terrorism, climate change, and environmental catastrophe are some at least of the spectres that haunt not just twenty-first-­ century Europe, but the world. Sutherland’s gesture is to show how they haunt even the most apparently idyllic of landscapes, a point perhaps first intuited by Ruskin in his storm-cloud lecture. As with the fallout from Chernobyl with which this chapter starts, this haunting remains largely invisible, spectral, like the storm cloud of dead men’s souls Ruskin believed he could sense. But we must greet such spectres as we would Derrida’s ‘monstrous arrivant’, which is ‘absolutely foreign or strange’ but which must be welcomed and accorded hospitality, in order to be open to the future, as that which arrives (l’à venir/l’avenir), beyond what we can know, expect, or programme for.57 ‘A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow.’58 This includes the very possibility of catastrophe, ecological or otherwise, as necessary for there being a future at all.

Notes 1 See www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk (accessed December 2012). 2 Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. I [1867], Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 556. 3 Helen Evans, ‘Nuage Vert’, 2008, hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/texte/nv/index. html (accessed 4 February 2011). 4 Ibid. 5 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 99.

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220  Charlie Gere 6 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London: George Allen, 1907, vol. 27, pp. 11–26. 7 Philip Hoare, England’s Lost Eden, London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2006, pp. 272–6. 8 Ruskin, The Works, vol. 5, pp. 367–8. 9 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950, pp. 215, 5–7. 10 Peter Fuller, Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, London: Chatto and Windus, 1988. 11 Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002. 12 Ruskin, The Works, vol. 3, pp. 42–43. 13 Ibid., vol. 27, p. 86. 14 Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, Palo Alto, CA, and London: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 158. 15 Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981, p. 14. 16 Ibid., p. 25. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Celan, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 5. 20 Ibid., p. 2. 21 Ibid., p. 15. 22 Ibid., p. 20. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 32. 26 Ibid., p. 36. 27 Ibid., p. 46. 28 Ruskin, The Works, vol. 3, pp. 201–20. 29 Ibid., vol. 27, pp. 132–3. Emphases in original. 30 Ibid., vol. 34, pp. 30–1. 31 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 25. 32 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 54–5. 33 Ibid., p. 54. 34 Ibid., p. 56. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 57. 37 Ibid. 38 Ruskin, The Works, vol. 34, pp. 40–1. 39 Ibid., vol. 18, p. 146. 40 Ibid., p. 180. 41 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1973, pp. 259–60. 42 Ibid., p. 266. 43 Gary Smith (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 64. 44 Quoted in Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 71–2.

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Ruskin’s haunted nature  221 5 4 46 47 48 49 50 51 2 5 53 4 5 55 56 57 58

Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 65. Ibid. Ruskin, The Works, vol. 17, p. 116. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 9. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Personal Growth’, Oxford Literary Review, 23, 2001, p. 145. Ibid., p. 151. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 150. Ibid., p. 149. See www.grizedale.org/about (accessed 5 April 2012). See www.grizedale.org/projects/force.of.culture (accessed 5 April 2012). Jacques Derrida, Points … : Interviews, 1974–1994, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 387. Ibid.

Bibliography Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1973. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Personal Growth’, Oxford Literary Review, 23, 2001. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, Palo Alto, CA, and London: Stanford University Press, 2005. Jacques Derrida, Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Celan, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Peter Fuller, Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, London: Chatto and Windus, 1988. Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Philip Hoare, England’s Lost Eden, London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2006. Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. I [1867], Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950.

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222  Charlie Gere John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London: George Allen, 1907. Gary Smith (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to main entries; italics indicate page numbers of images. Adorno, Theodor 48 Agamben, Giorgio 17 Aksakof, Alexander 90 alchemy 104–5, 145–6 Alice Durant, Mark 159, 174n.10 Althusser, Louis 5 American Society for Psychical Research 22 Ansell Pearson, Keith 27 apparition 29, 92, 184–5, 186–7, 194 Apraxine, Pierre 58, 59, 70, 98n.4, 174n.4 archive 12, 79, 96, 123, 130, 135, 137, 162, 166, 180–7 passim, 190–7 passim Arnold, Matthew 207 auras 4, 11, 96, 103–4, 106, 120, 163 automatic writing 4, 11, 38–42 passim, 47–51 passim, 87, 116, 118, 120 automatism 40, 43, 46, 49, 84, 116, 119 avant-garde 58–60 passim, 65, 73, 141 Baird, Logie 3 Balfour, Arthur 22 Ballen, Roger 3

Barnard, William G. 17 Bataille, Georges 9, 134 Baudrillard, Jean 172–3 Beckett, Samuel 189 Benjamin, Walter 103, 138, 196, 206, 214–16 Bennett, Jane 17, 30–1 Bennington, Geoffrey 216 Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette 87, 96 Benson, Timothy 60–1, 65, 67 Béraud, Marthe (‘Eva C.’) 60, 69–71, 72, 73, 90, 91–4, 96 Bergson, Henry 12, 16–31, 92 Bergson, Moina, 21 Bernard, Claude 85 Besant, Annie 104 Biro, Matthew 64 Bisson, Juliette Alexandre 69–71, 91, 94 Blaine, David 109 Blavatsky, Madame 21, 40 Blondel, Christine 87, 96 Bloom, Clive 191 ‘Blur of the Otherworldly’ exhibition (2005) 3, 159, 163–4, 171 body (human) 1–2, 24, 37, 42, 44–5, 46, 63–4, 67, 69–71, 78–9, 81, 82–3, 86, 89, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 103–4, 114, 116, 118, 124, 126, 152, 156n.3, 164, 191 Bourneville, D. M. 84 Bowler, Peter J. 19

223

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224  Index Breton, André 9, 90 Brooks, Peter 83 Brouillet, André Une Leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887) 89 Browne, Sir Thomas 124–5 Buddhism 97 Buguet, Edouard 85 Caillois, Roger 134 Calinescu, Matei 14n.37 Carlyle, Thomas 1 Carson, Ciaran 79–80 Catholic 94, 207 Celan, Paul 209–10 Charcot, J. M. 81, 84, 85–7, 89, 93 Chernobyl 3, 202, 219 Chéroux, Clément 85 Christianity 6, 10, 21, 126, 128, 131, 153, 165, 191, 192, 194, 213 clairvoyance 19, 86, 120, 121 Clarétie, Jules 89 Claude Il Mulino (The Mill) (1648) 207 Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de 85 Coates, James 168 Colebrook, Clare 17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 202 communism 216, 219 Conan Doyle, Arthur 53n.16, 65, 124 ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Photography’ exhibition (2004) 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 169, 170 Connor, Steven 52n.7 Constable, John 208 A View of Salisbury (1829) 209 Cook, Florence (‘Katie King’) 81, 82, 83, 86 Couédon, Henriette 84–5 Cox, Edward 20 Crary, Jonathon 5 Crewdson, Gregory 164, 165, 170 Crimp, Douglas 166, 167, 169 Crookes, Sir William 8, 19, 44, 81, 83, 85–6, 87, 124 Crowley, Aleister 140 Curie, Pierre and Marie 86–7 Curtis, Edward 133 cybernetics 5, 171

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Dada 12, 60–7, 71, 73 Darwin, Charles 18–19, 131, 207 Davenport brothers 43, 87–8, 88 Davey, Moyra 98 Dawkins, Richard 125, 135 De Duve, Thierry 167 Dean, Tacita 98, 131 Deane, Ada Emma 65, 69, 124 death 6, 8, 19, 25–6, 31, 78–9, 97, 185, 187, 191, 192, 207, 208, 212, 215–17 see also life, after death Debord, Guy 172, 173 Dee, Dr John 142, 145 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 17–8 dematerialised/dematerialisation 12, 131, 171, 187, 189 Derrida, Jacques 6, 135, 180–3, 189, 192, 194, 195–6, 206, 208–10, 212, 215–17, 219 Descartes, René 2 Diamond, Dr Hugh 85 Dickens, Charles 138 Didi-Huberman, Georges 85–7, 92 différance 180–1, 189, 192 digital technology 4, 10–11, 12, 104, 105, 130–1, 135–6, 150, 162, 171–3, 189, 193, 194–7 passim Dion, Mark Tate Thames Dig (1999) 137 ‘Disembodied Spirit’ exhibition (2003) 158, 162, 164, 166, 171 Doherty, Brigid 63 Driesch, Hans 31 Duchamp, Marcel 104, 137 Duchenne de Boulogne, G.-B. 85 Dunglas Home, Daniel 19–20, 43 Dupré, Dr Ernest 92 Durante, Florencia 165, 170 During, Simon 10 Eadie, Betty J. 191–3 ecology/ecological 11, 30, 202–3, 206, 208, 214–19 passim ectoplasm 3, 4, 11, 60, 69–70 passim, 80, 82, 87, 90–8 passim Edelman, Nicole 91 Edison, Thomas 45, 49, 51 Eisenman, Stephen 165

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Index  225 élan vital 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–9, 31 electricity 6, 7, 8, 16, 19, 25, 37, 44, 47, 48, 85, 91, 103, 196, 205 Eliot, T. S. 21 Encausse, Gérard (‘Papus’) 84 Engels, Friedrich 183, 216, 219 enlightenment 191 Enlightenment, the 6, 19 epistemology 20, 153, 182, 195 esoteric 19, 21, 25, 30, 104, 120, 124 ethnography 12, 123, 126, 128, 133–4 Eva C. see Béraud, Marthe Evans, Colin (medium) 109 Evans, Fred (medium) 50 extra-sensory perception 163

ghost/ghostly 1–3, 4, 8, 12, 16, 26, 29, 48, 90, 113, 123, 125, 128, 132, 151–2, 162–5 passim, 171–2, 180–97 passim, 208, 216 ghost writing 40, 47, 188 Gibson, William 150 Gillies, Mary Ann 23 Goldsworthy, Andy, 203, 217 Sheep Fold series (1996–2003) 203, 204 Gothic 91, 166, 209 Gray, John 78, 86 Greenberg, Clement 167, 170 Grimm, Brothers 126 Guattari, Félix 5 Gunning, Tom 74n.25, 81, 171 Gurney, Edmund 185 Guzik, Jean 94

fantasy/fantastical 4, 7, 31, 86, 87, 121, 129–34, 137–8, 140–1, 145, 153, 163, 181 Ferris, Alison 158–9, 171, 173 fin-de-siecle 83 Finucane, R. C. 186–7 First World War 8, 21, 22, 25, 60, 64, 69, 94, 132 Fischer, Andreas 69–70, 92 Flammarion, Camille 8, 78–9, 81, 84, 86–90 passim folk/folklore 12, 123, 126–8, 133, 137, 138–9, 183–7, 189, 190–6 folksonomy 193 Fontenay, Guillaume de 89–90 Foucault, Michel 5, 17, 93, 188 Fox sisters 8, 37, 80 Frazer, James G. 59, 60, 127, 133 Freud, Sigmund 6, 86, 113, 134, 140, 141 Fujita, Hisashi 27 Fuller, Peter 207 future 10–11, 84, 87, 140, 142, 144–5, 150–3, 181–2, 189–90, 194–6, 206, 210, 212, 214–19

Habermas, Jürgen 14n.37 Hall, David 1001 TV Sets (End Piece) 3 hallucination 29, 84, 90 Halprin, Anna 130 Hamilton, Thomas Glendenning 78–9 Hammer, Olav 30 Haraway, Donna 5 Harvey, John 98n.4, 165, 169 haunt/haunted/haunting 2, 4, 7, 11, 83, 128, 172, 182, 186, 194, 196, 202, 207–8, 217 and communism 216, 219 and ecological catastrophe 11, 202–19 passim and hauntology 181, 215–16 of history 10, 137, 189–93 passim, 216 and popular culture 165, 193–4 transgenerational 147 ‘Haunted’ exhibition (2010) 3 ‘Hauntology’ exhibition (2010) 3 Hausmann, Raoul 60–7 Tatlin at Home (1920) 65, 66 HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) 204–6, 217 Nuage Vert (2008) 204, 205 Heidegger, Martin 5, 10 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 21 Heuzé, Paul 94

Gaia 30 Galassi, Peter 208–9 Gaskell, Anna 164 Gautier, Théophile 87 Geley, Gustave 93–4 gender 42, 118–19, 183, 198n.17

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226  Index Hill, Annette 163, 175n.13 Hiller, Susan 4, 11, 96, 103–21 passim Auras and Levitations (2008) 106, 120 Belshazzar’s Feast (1983–84) 11, 110, 111, 112–13, 116 Clinic (2004) 114–15 Draw Together (1972) 119 Dream Screens (1996) 115 Élan (1981–82) 113, 116 Homage to Yves Klein (2008) 103, 105, 108 Magic Lantern (1987) 113 Midnight, Baker Street (1983) 116, 117 Midnight, Euston (1982) 116 Psi Girls (1999) 120 Sisters of Menon (1972; 1979) 118–19 Sometimes I Think I’m a Verb In­stead of a Pronoun (1981–82) 116 Wild Talents (1997) 120 Hinduism 97, 104 history 10, 11–12, 57, 59, 141, 153, 183, 189, 192, 214–15 of art 5, 57, 104 of automatism 119 cultural 4 of magic 10, 59–73 passim military 141–2, 146, 152 of photography 11, 57–8, 60–73 passim, 78–98 passim, 159, 169 of science 104 of sound technologies 4, 37–51 passim of spiritualism 4, 16–31 passim of technology 141 of witchcraft 150 Hoare, Philip 206 Höch, Hannah 64 Holocaust 147, 150, 153, 210 Houghton, Georgiana 81 Hudson, Frederick 68–70 passim, 81 Huelsenbeck, Richard 67 Hulme, T. E. 22 Huxley, Julian 29 hypnotism 9, 120 hysteria 81, 83–6 passim, 89, 92–3

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Ibsen, Henrik 83 immaterial 42, 58, 70, 91, 172 index/indexical 12, 49, 63, 94, 96, 98, 104, 131, 171 Institut Métapsychique International 93 Jacobs, W. W. 128 James, Henry 22, 29, 186 James, M. R. 128 James, William 22, 29 Jameson, Frederic 172 Janet, Pierre 84, 91 Jew/Jewish 140–1, 145, 153, 213–14 Jolly, Martyn 68, 74n.33 kabbala 141, 145–6 Kafka, Franz 138 Kant, Immanuel 31 Kardec, Allan 37, 42–3, 47, 84–5, 87–8, 91 Katie King see Cook, Florence Kelley, Mike Ectoplasm Photograph (1978/2009) 95, 96 Exploded Fortress of Solitude (2011) 96 King, Katie see Cook, Florence Kipling, Rudyard 9, 124, 184 Kittler, Friedrich 5–7 passim, 93 Klein, Melanie 140 Klein, Yves Leap into the Void (1960) 105, 110 see also Hiller, Susan, Homage to Yves Klein (2008) Kluski, Franek 40 knowledge 9, 26, 30, 87, 94, 183, 187, 191 cultural 127, 132 folk 12, 183, 187, 191–3 passim, 195 occult 163 public 142 rational/scientific 30, 190 subjugated/marginal 145, 152–3 Kontou, Tatiana 83 Krauss, Rosalind 57–9 passim Kurtz, Steve 153

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Index  227 Lacan, Jacques 114, 140–1, 182 Laffoley, Paul 96 Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara (1967) 96, 97 Lamont, Peter 88 land art 11, 203 Lang, Andrew 59, 127 Lash, Scott 17 La Touche, Rose 206, 211 Latour, Bruno 20, 23–4, 26–8 passim, 31 Lawrence, D.H. 29 Leiris, Michel 134 Levitation 89, 105–6, 109–10, 164 Leymarie, Pierre Gaëtan 85 life 16–31 passim, 61, 67, 124, 128, 158, 187, 192, 208, 214, 216–17 after death 6, 16, 25, 28–9, 42, 78–9, 97, 120, 124, 163, 214 artificial 149 everyday 7, 67, 126, 131, 136, 173, 196, 209 extraterrestrial 87 tree of 146 wheel of 97 Lippard, Lucy 118 Lodge, Oliver 8, 21–2, 25, 27, 124 Lombroso, Cesare 86, 89 Londe, Albert 85 Long, Richard 203 Lord sisters 43 Lovelock, James 30 Luckhurst, Roger 8, 11 Lyotard, Jean-François 190–1, 193, 195 MacDougall, Duncan 124 MacWilliam, Susan 78–80, 96 F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009) 3, 78–80, 79, 80 magic/magical 10, 12, 21, 30, 59–62, 65–8, 70, 73, 106, 109–10, 123, 125, 128–9, 131, 134–6, 140–1, 146, 162 magnetism 19, 85, 91 Maine de Biran (Pierre-François Gonthier de Biran) 83 Maléfan, Pascal Le 83–4, 94 Malinowski, Bronislaw 133–4

Machine-Ghost.indb 227

Mann, Thomas 46 Marey, E.-J. 168 Marsching, Jane D. 174n.8, 176n.53 Marsden, Dora 21 Martin, David 9–10 Marx, Karl/marxism 5, 173, 180, 182–3, 196, 203, 216, 219 material/materiality 12, 24–5, 30–1, 40, 42, 58–73 passim, 78–80, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 124–5, 128, 129–31, 137, 164–5, 168–72 passim, 182, 187–8, 191, 196, 202, 216 materialisation 7, 38, 41–2, 69–73, 82, 91–3 materialist/materialism 6, 17, 19, 23, 30–1, 59, 61, 68, 92, 207 see also dematerialised/­ dematerialisation; immaterial Mathers, Samuel MacGregor 21 McCarthy, Paul 106 McCarthy, Tom C (2010) 8–9 McLuhan, Marshall 114 Mead, G. R. S. 21–2, 24 mechanical/mechanism/ mechanicity 4, 7, 12, 16, 18–25 passim, 29–30, 38–51 passim, 59, 62, 65, 162–3, 169, 171, 190, 208, 215–17 media/medium 3, 7, 41–9 passim, 63, 103, 115, 118, 131, 158–73 passim, 204, 208, 217 mediums/mediumism 3–4, 7, 9, 12, 16, 19, 21, 37–51 passim, 60, 69–70, 78–98 passim, 164, 187–9 memory 10, 112, 123, 147, 180–94 passim, 203, 206 Mesmer, Franz Anton 19, 91 mesmerism 19, 27, 81 military–industrial complex 11, 141–53 passim mobile phones 124, 129 modernism/modernity 2, 9–11, 17, 20–1, 29, 31, 60–1, 136, 119, 165, 170, 182–3, 187–95 passim, 211 see also postmodern Morse, Samuel 6 Morse code 7, 37, 40, 115

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228  Index Morus, Iwan Rhys 19 Mullarkey, John 17 Mumler, William Howard 68–70, 80 Muybridge, Eadweard 168 Myers, F. W. H. 16, 21, 27–8, 78–9, 86, 185, 187 mystic/mysticism 3, 6, 17, 21–2, 61–2, 65, 193 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 57–8, 74n.25 Newbrough, John Ballou 38, 41, 44 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19 Noyes, Ralph 183–6 occult 3, 8, 10–11, 19, 27–8, 58–9, 73, 84, 104, 119–20, 140–2, 144–5, 150–2, 158, 163–4, 191 occultism 16–21 passim, 24, 28, 30, 140, 191 Ochorowitz, Dr J. 86 Old Testament 213 ontology 12, 167, 181–2, 216 Oppenheim, Janet 6, 75n.41 Orchestrion 46 Otto, Rudolf 207, 212 Ouija 39–41, 120 Oursler, Tony 3 The Influence Machine (2002) 3 Palladino (Paladino), Eusapia 21, 86, 89–90, 93–4 paranormal 2–4, 10–11, 80–1, 86, 88, 91, 96, 98, 110, 120–1, 142, 145, 158–9, 163–4, 168–70, 175n.13, 186, 189, 193 Peirce, C. S. 63 ‘Perfect Medium’ exhibition (2005) 3, 58, 69, 100n.59, 174n.4 performance 2, 4, 11, 39–43 passim, 46–8, 50–1, 62, 80–2, 85–92 passim, 96, 106, 121n.3, 219 phonoautograph 45, 49 phonograph 1, 11, 37–8, 40, 45–51 photography 1–3, 6, 11–12, 57–69 passim, 85–7, 91–8, 103–6, 118, 123, 125–6, 130–3, 134, 158–73 passim, 208–9, 215, 217 see also spirit photography photomat 116, 118

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photomontage 12, 60–7 passim, 70–3 passim, 105–6 pianola 37, 39, 46–7 Piéron, Henri 91 Plato 10, 131, 183, 192 Plender, Olivia 4 ‘The Medium and Daybreak’ (2005) 4 Pollock, Jackson 119 poltergeist 163 portraiture 60, 64–5, 69–71, 73, 80–1, 85, 96, 103–4, 116, 118, 123 postmodern/postmodernism/ postmodernity 12, 96, 183, 189–91, 193–6 Potts, John 193–4 Pound, Ezra 21 Price, Harry 3, 159, 161 psyche 6, 84, 181–2 psychic 4, 6, 8, 11, 20, 21, 44, 78–9, 81, 83, 85–91, 103, 130, 162, 164 psychical research 12, 16–23 passim, 25–6, 28–31 passim, 69, 87–90, 93–4, 141, 159, 174n.10, 185–6 Psychological Society of Great Britain 20 Pynchon, Thomas 141 Quest Society 21 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 182–4, 189–90, 195 radio 4, 6–9 passim, 11, 86, 158, 196 Raudive, Konstantin 4, 11, 113–14 Régnard, Paul 85 Reichenbach, Baron Karl von 19 Reill, Peter Hans 19 Reinhardt, Ad 119 Richer, Paul 84 Richet, Charles 8, 81, 84, 86, 90–1, 93–4 Richter, Hans 64 Roll, Dr William G. 79 Ronson, Jon 142 Ruskin, John 11, 202–3, 205–19 Ryle, Gilbert 1–2 Saenredam, Jansz 209 St Paul 215

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Index  229 Sardou, Victorien 87 Saunders, Beth 170 Saussure, Ferdinand de 62, 182 Schmit, Sophie 58–9, 70 Schopenhauer, Arthur 19 Schrenck-Notzing, Albert von 69–73 passim, 91–2, 94, 96 Schwartz, Louis-Georges 17 science 6–8, 12, 16, 19–28 passim, 31, 59–62, 68, 73, 81, 83–6 passim, 88–91, 94, 96, 104, 114, 120, 128–9, 150, 162–3, 167, 184, 190, 193, 209, 211 science fiction 96, 121, 137–8, 140–1, 145–6, 150–1 Sconce, Jeffrey 7–9 Scott, Léon 49 séance 7, 9, 11–12, 21, 40–3, 45, 48, 50, 70, 73, 78–9, 81, 83–4, 87–94, 109, 162, 164, 167, 206 Sebald, W. G. 132 Second World War 140, 142, 145, 147, 165 ‘Seeing Is Believing’ exhibition (2007–08) 3, 159, 161, 162, 166, 170 shaman 106, 109, 123, 131–2, 136 Sheppard, Richard 61 Sidgwick, Henry 78–9 Sinclair, Mary Craig and Upton 119–20 Slade, Henry 50–1 slate writing 39–40, 48, 50–1 Smithson, Robert 203 Society for Psychical Research (SPR) 1, 16–22 passim, 26, 28–9, 31, 78, 83, 86, 183, 185–7 Sontag, Susan 166 soul 4, 8, 20, 24, 78, 91, 124, 127–8, 165, 192, 194, 211, 219 spectral 1, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 57, 83, 96, 104, 172–3, 181–3, 187, 189–91, 195–7, 202, 206–8, 214–17, 219 spectre 7, 166, 173, 180–3, 187, 191, 196, 202, 216, 219 Spinoza, Baruch 183 spirit photography 2, 6–7, 11, 42, 57–8, 68–73, 80–7 passim, 125–6, 158–73 passim

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spiritoscope 39, 40 spirits 3, 19, 42, 46, 68, 87, 91, 94, 127, 151, 164–5, 172–3, 188, 194 Stallabrass, Julian 173 Stanislawa P. 96 Stathacos, Chrysanne 160, 164 Stein, Gertrude 120 Stirner, Max 183 Strand, Clare 3, 164, 165 Photisms (2006) 164 Unseen Agents (2004) 161 Styers, Randall 60–2 supernatural 16, 39, 70, 93, 120, 128, 139, 173, 185, 191 surrealism 93, 119 Suvin, Darko 138 Sword, Helen 187–9, 193 Taggart, Shannon 160, 165 Tatlin, Vladimir 65, 66, 67 Taubes, Jacob 215 Tausk, Viktor 7 taxonomy 68, 181–4 passim, 188, 192, 194–6 telegraph/telegraphy 1, 6–8, 37–41, 86, 151, 158, 198n.17 telekinesis 94, 120, 163 telepathy 21, 86, 119–21, 185, 192 telephone 6, 40, 51–2n.1 teleplasm 78–80 television 3, 4, 6–7, 11, 112–13, 124, 141, 158, 165, 172, 196 theatre/theatrical 11, 79, 82–3, 85–8 passim, 92 theology 126, 207, 215 Theosophical Society 21, 104 theosophy 132, 191 trance 7, 19, 43, 81, 84–7 passim, 93, 96, 120 trauma 140, 147–8, 212 Treister, Suzanne 3, 11, 140–56 passim A Time Line for Science Fiction Inventions (2008) 146 Alchemy (2007–08) 146 Golem/Loew (2001–02) 149–50 HEXEN 2.0/Literature/The New World Order, H.G. Wells, 1940 (2011) 155

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230  Index HEXEN 2039 (2006) 3, 140–6, 149–53 passim HEXEN 2039/Diagram (detail) (2006) 143 HEXEN 2039/GRAPHITE/U.S. Phased-Array Radar, Thule, Greenland (2006) 144 MTB [Military Training Base] (2009) 141, 151 NATO/NSC 9915/Black Square/ Kasimir Malevich (2007) 148 Operation Swanlake (2004) 149–50 Rosalind Brodsky in her Electronic Time Travelling Costume … (1997) 154 Truzzi, Marcello 163 Turrell, James 203 typewriter 5, 11, 37–8, 40, 44, 46–7 uncanny 74n.25, 110, 113–14, 128, 170 Underhill, Evelyn 21 Urban, Hermann 71

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Vaughan, Michael 27–8 virtual reality 11, 104, 141, 152, 171 vitalism 12, 16–20, 27–31 Wall, Jeff 165, 170 Warner, Marina 4, 10, 12, 123–39, 172–3, 174n.10, 175n.12 Phantasmagoria (2006) 4, 131, 172 Stranger Magic (2011) 127, 135 Wells, H. G. 129–31, 137–8, 155 Weston, Jessie 21 Woodman, Francesca 96 Self-portrait (Talking to Vince) (ca.1975–78) 96 Woolf, Virginia 29 Wordsworth, William 202 X-rays 8, 19, 87, 168 Yeats, W. B. 21 Yost, G. W. N. 40

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