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

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 technology 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 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 conjunction 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 problematic 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 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 technology 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 connections 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 (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.

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, technological, 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 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 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 investigating 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 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 technological 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 was reported, ‘concerned spiritualism, thought-transference and the occult’.²⁸

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. 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 heterogenous 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 Christianity’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, 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 Belshazzar’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, 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