December 21, 2005
Some Things Coming
Tags: Carnivals, due dates, Daddy-hood, destiny, “a mean house in a dull street.”
Something Historic This Way Comes: I will be hosting the 23rd edition of the History Carnival here at OitNN on January 15th. (Carnival No. 22 is up at Jonathan Dresner’s Frog In A Well.) If you read (or write!) any interesting history-related blogging between now and January 15, please let me know by commenting or emailing a link (I’m at electromail-way at-way obmacdougall-ray ot-day org-way.) It doesnât have to be academic-style history or the work of a professional historian—quite the opposite. The guidelines say: “It must be stressed that the Carnival is not just for academics and specialists, that entries certainly don’t have to be heavyweight scholarship. … They may be focused on a historical topic, on the author’s particular research interests or, alternatively, they may be reflections on the particular challenges and rewards of studying, researching and teaching history. Other examples of possible candidates for inclusion could include reviews of history books or web resources, discussions of ‘popular’ histories (films, dramas and documentaries, novels, etc).” A few submissions have already trickled in—thanks for those, keep them coming, and tune in here on the 15th!
Something Else Historic This Way Comes: Impending parenthood comes at us in funny ways.* I was checking out some library books yesterday, and as the librarian stamped and demagnetized them, she said, “the due date is April 22nd.” And a thrill of excitement and panic washed over me. Because the due date is April 22nd! (Or possibly April 29th, depending on how we calculate.) So there are now library books in my possession, checked out by feckless childless me, that may well be returned by somebody’s Daddy. Man oh man! Thus was my borrowed copy of Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era imbued with a poweful sense of destiny.
*Or, at least, it comes at me in funny ways. I suppose L possesses more strenuous reminders of her condition.
Something Ghostly, If Not Particularly Historic, This Way Runs: As a coda to my twin posts on spiritualism and photography, I rummaged around in the basement and found my own personal foray into ghost photography, this accidental double exposure from 1980 or so. (I didn’t match my socks to my t-shirt as a rule—I’m in my soccer uniform here.)
The angel of death comes for Rob.
Mr. Osbert Sitwell informed us the other day that ghosts went out when electricity came in; but surely this is to misapprehend the nature of the ghostly. What drives ghosts away is not the aspidistra or the electric cooker; I can imagine them more wistfully haunting a mean house in a dull street than the battlemented castle with its boring stage properties.
—Edith Wharton
December 18, 2005
The Medium is the Message
Tags: the supernatural is political, suffragists from the Great Beyond, Ghostbusters, ectoplasm, creepy retro bondage gear.
(Part Two of Two. Read Part One.)
My post the day before yesterday described The Perfect Medium, an exhibition of spiritualist photographs on this month at the Met. I talked about spiritualism as a technology, or at least a technological endeavor, and about the funny place the Gilded Age spiritualists tried to occupy between science and religion. I didn’t talk, yet, about what it was that I found unsettling about the exhibition—and no, it wasn’t the gallery of surprisingly portly Victorian ghosts.
Besides the infatuation with technology that I talked about in the other post, another thing that makes the spiritualists an interesting bridge between the Victorian and the modern is their relationship to gender. Not that you can really separate their ideas about gender from their ideas about technology. Jeffrey Sconce’s book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television has a fine first chapter that argues for understanding spiritualism as, essentially, a dialogue about women and technology and the relationship between them.
The new media of telegraph and telephone, Sconce reminds us, were every bit as important to nineteenth century spiritualism as the medium of photography. Consider the various necrophones and necrographs, the Morse-coded table-rapping, and the ubiquitous figure of the female medium, operator at the switchboard of an electrically charged spirit world. “While the technology of the telegraph transformed America into a wired nation,” Sconce writes, “the concept of telegraphy enabled endless displacements of agency, projecting utopian possibilities onto a disembodied, invisible community, and recasting an often radical political agenda as an act of supernatural possession.”
A radical political agenda disguised as supernatural possession. I like that. Western Union’s telegraph carried news of commerce, banking, and other masculine affairs. But the spirit telegraph, if we can describe spiritualism in those terms, was principally used to talk about affairs concerning women. Often, this meant making connections with lost loved ones, but just as often, it meant feminist politics. A remarkable number of departed souls, not known in life to be politically active, returned from the Great Beyond to offer lectures, through a female spirit medium, on temperance, women’s suffrage, or progressive social principles. Spiritualism, Sconce argues, exploited the novelty and mystery of electrical communication to offer women a new kind of public voice.
The display text at the Met exhibit is good on the relationship between spiritualism and photography, but silent on these questions of sex and gender. And because the exhibit jumbles together photographs from several decades of occult enthusiasm, it took me a little while to recognize the trajectory of the images over time. By the turn of the twentieth century, a divide was opening in occult circles between traditional spiritualists, who believed they were communicating with the souls of the dead, and animists, who believed they were accessing some kind of supernatural life force generated by living things. The spiritualists really just wanted to talk to their departed loved ones. They read Ouija boards and peered into crystal balls and decoded the rapping of tables in hopes of some final message from Aunt Lucille. The animists, on the other hand, were all about the ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm, made famous to my generation by the movie Ghostbusters, is a mysterious slime that mediums in a state of trance were said to emit from their nose and mouth—and other orifices too. (Obligatory Simpsons ref: Dr. Hibbard: “By all medical logic, steam should be shooting out of Homer’s ears.” Krusty: “His ears, if we’re lucky!”) The straight-faced display text at the Met notes that ectoplasm was “not dissimilar” to cotton smeared in goose fat or similar concoctions.
Judging by the photographs at the exhibit, the production of ectoplasm was a dramatic affair: all dark rooms, contorted faces, naked bodies, unflattering lights. And here, finally, is the creepy part. The woman mediums of the 19th century had names. They may not have been wholly respectable in Victorian society, but they were public figures of a sort. They lectured and wrote books about the spirit world. As spiritualism slid out of the mainstream in the 20th century, the female mediums got younger and poorer. They often appeared as “subjects” or “patients” of a male parapsychologist, and were identified only by aliases or first names. If you’re sympathetic to Sconce’s portrait of a progressive, woman-centered spiritualism, the transition is not a happy one.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the young women in the ectoplasm pictures were almost invariably naked, or else trussed up in skintight retro bondage gear. Ostensibly this was to demonstrate that the mediums weren’t faking, because they had no place to conceal the ectoplasm. But sometimes a leather hood is just a leather hood, you know? I don’t have any good examples to show you—all the pictures I could find online are all from the kindler, gentler spiritualists of the 19th century—but frankly, I’m not too upset about that. The later photos are not lovely to behold. And there’s a lot more psychosexual stuff going on in them than “nothing up my sleeve.”
I’m midway through Ann Douglas’ book, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Douglas believes that a central project of 1920s culture was the destruction of the moralistic middle-class Victorian matriarch, the symbolic mother figure that the moderns associated, rightly or wrongly, with everything they disliked about the previous century. I wasn’t sure if I was going to buy that argument until I saw the exhibit at the Met. I know Douglas isn’t really talking about spiritualism. She’s talking about Freud and Eliot and Hemingway and even Frederic Wertham (the psychiatrist who saved the Baby Boomers from horror comics in the 1950s). But the matricidal mean streak Douglas describes is on display in those photographs in a stark and unpleasant way. From primly-dressed matrons bathed in halos of light, to naked, hooded girls, tied up and vomiting goo: I’m not a big McLuhanite, but in this case it certainly seems the mediums are the message.
December 16, 2005
Spirit Fingers
Tags: ghost cameras, necrophones, the no man’s land between faith and reason, a pirate’s daughter.
(Part One of Two. Read Part Two.)
I was in New York last week, and I got a chance to see The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, an exhibit of spiritualist photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I enjoyed it, as I knew I would, but there was something disquieting about the exhibit too. It’s taken me a couple of days to put my finger on what that might have been.
The angel of death comes for Martin Sheen.
That title, “The Perfect Medium,” puns on the close ties between spiritualism and early photography, ties that the exhibit makes beautifully clear. A thick aura of the uncanny clung to photography in the 19th century, and spiritualists and others had high hopes that the camera would improve upon the human eye in documenting things unseen. Certainly the camera could be used to trick the eye. The most entertaining pictures in the exhibit were the out-and-out fakes: double exposures like the one above, and ghosts and fairies that look like nothing so much as paper cutouts from a Monty Python animation. The Met’s curators, amusingly, bend over backwards not to take a stand on the authenticity of the photographs. Sometimes you feel they must be putting you on—when, for instance, a spectral figure bearing a remarkable resemblance to the medium in the very next photograph is identified, “possibly erroneously,” it says on the display card, as the ghost of a 17th-century pirate’s daughter.
But there was also sincere belief in the days of the spiritualists that new technologies like photography, telegraphy, X-rays, and others might open up the invisible world to human understanding. Several prominent technologists were also spiritualists, or at least sympathetic to the project. I’ve mentioned before the persistent legend that Thomas Edison spent his final days working on a “necro-phone” to talk with the dead. I’ve never actually seen any reliable evidence for the necrophone, but Edison did believe in life after death, and imagined a kind of particle physics of tiny soul molecules that would reconcile Newtonian mechanics with the spirit realm. “I am working on the theory that our personality exists after what we call life leaves our present material bodies,” Edison told American Magazine in 1920:
Take our own bodies. I believe they are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life, and that these units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them—and that these infinitesimally small units live forever.
I’d love to see somebody in the history of technology—possibly me—write seriously about spiritualism as a technology. Not as a response to technology or a dialogue with technology, but as a genuine, if failed, technology in its own right. I donât think that’s been done. There has been a push among historians of technology in recent years to study failed technologies as carefully as we study successful ones. (Ken Lipartito’s great article on the TV-phone is my favorite in this genre.) And if we’re committed to the idea of studying technological failures? Well, there aren’t many failures more complete than the ghost camera or the necrophone.
Spiritualism is a prime example of the 19th century impulse to reconcile science and religion. The Victorian spiritualists flatly refused to be satisfied with any kind of half-way détente between Faith and Reason. They wanted complete consistency between the two, a unified field theory that explained everything in their lives. Yet in their eagerness to unite science and religion, the spiritualists did such violence to the orthodoxies of both that they ultimately helped achieve the opposite. This is one argument of Corinna Treitel’s A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. When spiritualists and other occult practitioners tried to bridge the gap between religion and science, established religions and newly professionalizing scientists recoiled—in particular, those in the emerging science of psychology, eager to escape their early association with mysticism and the paranormal. In walling themselves off from the spiritualists and their ilk, orthodox scientists and religious leaders cordoned off the no man’s land between science and religion that is characteristic of 20th century modernity.
That’s all very nice, Rob, but what did you find disturbing about the exhibit at the Met? Well, I’m getting to that.
