Ghost in the Machine

An Archaeology of the Desire to Communicate with the Dead

April 15, 2011

Eric Alberts (3485595)

New Media Archaeology

MA New Media & Digital Culture

Imar de Vries

2010-2011

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“The so-called occult is calling. It has never stopped ringing” – Avital Ronell

Introduction

Mankind’s inexhaustible fascination with the afterlife seems almost

transcendental in its own way. The idea of a world beyond, a place where our

ancestors live on for eternity, can be found even in the remnants of the earliest,

most primitive of civilizations. Whether this world beyond is called Hades,

Walhalla, Nirvana or Heaven, the idea of the afterlife does not seem to be

confined by time, law, religion or race. This ancient and blind belief in the

afterlife has clearly faltered profoundly during the last centuries within

industrialized, mainly Western, nations. The age of reason and its coinciding shift

toward an increased reliance on science were important instigators of secularism

and a clash between science and culture. Despite the “onslaught of reason and

science” (Oppenheim 1) during the last centuries, the idea of the afterlife remains

equivalently intriguing. Searching for afterlife on Google, for instance, will give

roughly 26 million results. Looking at these search results, however, it becomes

clear that the age of reason has left an imprint on the fascination for the afterlife.

The religious and mystical aura that exclusively surrounded the idea of the

afterlife has given way to scientific associations as well. Present-day involvement

in the afterlife seems to have taken on the image of scientific research, given the

existence of the Afterlife Research Centre (ARC) and the Paranormal Afterlife

Research Alliance (PARA) for example. One of the core tasks of these institutions

is to give scientific evidence for the existence of the afterlife by getting in contact

with the world beyond. These institutions could therefor be considered as

culminations of the mergence of ancient mysticism and scientific reasoning. In an

attempt to get away from Shamanism, with its herbs, potions and spells, this

distinct scientific approach to the afterlife depends on communication technology

as a means to contact the dead. People who draw upon this form of instrumental

contact with the dead are known as Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) or

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) researchers. Media, such as the television and

personal computer, are put to use in an effort to catch the voices from beyond.

I am driven by the question where this present-day confidence invested in

communication technology, as a way to bridge the mortal and the spirit world,

comes from. William Boddy further instigated this drive when I read his article

“Archaeologies of Electronic Vision and the Gendered Spectator”, in which he

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mentions the “speculative applications of radio in communicating with the dead”

(108). In order to find answers I would like to place the desire to communicate

with the dead in its cultural and discursive contexts. By doing this I believe that it

will become clear that the utopian and dystopian fantasies surrounding early

modern communication technologies still shape the contemporary desire for

communicating with the dead. To be more specific, I believe that the underlying

motive for mediated contact with the afterlife can be traced back in history to the

turn of the nineteenth century. I draw upon the hypothesis that the ideas, hopes

and fears in Victorian every day life at le fin de siècle, still shape the

contemporary endeavour to prove that electronic communication with the

afterlife is possible.

In the field of media studies, researching media technologies by placing them in

their cultural and discursive contexts has not always been the methodological

norm. Previous attempts to grasp the origination of certain media technologies,

such as the telegraph, telephone and radio, are characterized by their sole

concern for the technological artefact. As a consequence of mainly focussing on

the artefact and the causal relationships leading to the emergence of the artefact,

crucial factors, such as social habits and traditions, were bound to be neglected.

This type of research, especially within media studies during the nineteen

nineties, was considered too narrow because of its factual focus and disregard of

important events surrounding those facts. This methodological dissatisfaction led

present-day historians, such as Tom Gunning, Carolyn Marvin, Susan Douglas

and others, to look at media history in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and

Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Their attitude towards history differs from the narrow,

fact-centred and chronological concept of history because they treated history as

a “multi-layered concept, a dynamic system of relationships” (Huhtamo 1).

I consider this paper to be a pre-eminent example of a nonartefactual approach to

media history. Searching for the underlying motives for contacting the afterlife

through electronic media is impossible by solely looking at technological artefacts

without the consideration of “a wider and more multifaceted social and cultural

frame of reference” (Huhtamo 4). I would, therefor, like to place this research in

the field of media archaeology as described by Erkki Huhtamo. Focussing on the

desire to communicate with the afterlife as a recurring cyclical phenomenon, or

topic, calls for an approach that tries to transcend specific historical contexts. I

believe that the present-day confidence invested in communication technology to

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achieve contact with the afterlife pops up again and again when looking back at

communication technologies in previous periods. Underlying this claim is Tom

Gunning’s well-known quote that “technology can reveal the dream world of

society as much as its pragmatic rationalization” (185).

As stated above, I believe that a significant part of the motivation to get in contact

with the dead through the use of electronic media lies at the turn of the

nineteenth century and continued as a scientific inquiry all the way through the

twentieth century. The powerful dreams and anxieties that accompanied the shift

towards modernity at the turn of the century still shape the contemporary belief

that the dead can be contacted by using communication technologies. In order to

substantiate this claim I am, of course, obligated to elaborate on these hopes and

fears to explain how science and technology became intertwined with the ancient

belief in the afterlife. From thereon out I will try to link these historical contexts

with contemporary EVP and ITC research in order to eventually transcend these

contexts and delve into the recurring element of the desire to communicate with

the dead. This is, in short, the roadmap to finding an explanation for the

contemporary desire for mediated communicating with the dead.

I am certainly aware that the attempt to establish instrumental contact with those

in the world beyond is not new and even precedes Victorian times. As

Konstantïne Raudive, a pioneer in EVP, states: “From time immemorial man's

mind has been preoccupied with the idea of a hereafter and has tried to gain

visual or acoustic impressions of it […] Similar attempted realisations have also

been experienced through Spiritualism, Occultism and Anthroposophy”

(Raudive). I believe, though, that some of the more lucid sentiments constructing

the desire for electronic communication with the dead are to be found at the end

of the Victorian period and in the shift towards modernity at the dawn of the

twentieth century when psychical research emerged. I am, moreover, aware that

at the same time psychical research emerged in Victorian Britain, in Russia a

similar scientific movement was very active in trying to ‘cheat’ death. As in the

Victorian period science and the occult in Russia were not separate, but “mingled

in a current of thought that aimed to create a substitute for religion” (Gray 3).

The significant difference between the two psychical movements was that in

Russia emphasis on the quest for immortal life overshadowed the desire to

communicate with those who died. In search for clues to underpin my claim I,

therefor, mainly focus on events in Victorian Britain.

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Victorian spiritualism and psychical research

In order to find the underlying motive for mediated communication with the

afterlife I will first try to unravel the complex times at the turn of the nineteenth

century and beginning of the twentieth century. By looking at extensive historical

accounts of that time it will become clear that this period was full of

contradictions driven by a shift towards modernity. In his book The Invention of

Telepathy Roger Luckhurst stipulates that within the transformation to

modernity one central aspect became prominent in the last quarter of the

nineteenth century. The practice of scientific study escaped its confining

exclusiveness and dispersed rapidly from a small group of influential gentlemen-

amateurs to all layers of society. In this period, surely, scientific authority was

extended across diverse terrains leading to a “scientizing mania” (Luckhurst 10)

with “powerful spokesmen asserting the primacy of scientific authority over

traditional, theological orientations of experience” (9). Richard Noakes notes that

in these times the construction of empirically grounded laws was regarded as

monuments of ordering physical phenomena. Victorian scientists regarded these

natural laws as authoritative accounts of the natural world and saw empirical

evidence as the supreme authorities on the natural world (Noakes 23-24).

According to Noakes it has, therefor, long puzzled historians why there was such

a resurgence of supernatural beliefs in this Victorian age of science (23). Roger

Luckhurst, in an attempt to solve this puzzle, states that “many experienced the

modernity of science in traumatic ways […] having a disintegrative effect on

traditional social and knowledge hierarchies” (10). Through the practice of

science, for instance, Charles Darwin disclosed a world in which humans were

pulled down to the same level as animals. For most people, including Darwin

himself, the thought that man would fall into oblivion after death was an

intolerable one (Gray 1). According to Janet Oppenheim, moreover, Victorians

were “fully aware that the place of religion in the cultural fabric of their times was

scarcely secure” (1). In an effort to achieve stability in these times of shaken

personal faith, “thousands of British men and women […] turned to spiritualism

and psychical research” (ibid.). The concept of telepathy from the new science of

psychical research can be seen as one of the culminations of these roaring times

in which the emergence of a scientific culture produced a variety of unforeseen

effects (Luckhurst 10).

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With the process of secularism well underway, most people, paradoxically, turned

to science in an effort to escape the world that science had uncovered (Gray 1). In

Cambridge in 1874 a group of powerful and well-connected people came together

and began investigations in finding scientific evidence for occult phenomena.

These investigations, which led to the founding of the Society for Psychical

Research in 1882, included the search for evidence that human personality

survived bodily death (ibid.). It is important to understand that the investigations

conducted a century ago were seen as a very serious business attracting eminent

people, such as the Fellow of the Royal Society, university professors, and Nobel

prize-winning scientists (Oppenheim 3). Together with other intellectuals, this

prominent group of people considered psychic phenomena as a legitimate way to

uncover the secrets of man’s place in the universe (Oppenheim 4). According to

John Gray, the séances that we so popular at the time were more than plain

superstition: “They were part of an anxious, at times desperate, search for

meaning in life” (2).

Many historians, such as Pamela Thurschwell, Janet Oppenheim and John Gray,

argue that the scientific endeavour of the Society for Psychical Research into the

occult and their search for evidence that the human mind could survive death was

an attempt to counter “the pessimism of a materialist and scientifically

determined world view” (Thurschwell 15). Moreover, it was an attempt to marry

the claims of nineteenth-century positivist science with older claims of religious

faith. The typical psychical researcher “tended towards this combination of

religious hopefulness and materialist scepticism” (ibid.). Psychical research,

therefor, can be seen as a product of the interaction between science and the

occult. These two flows came together in “two revolts against death” (Gray 6) with

the similar claim that “science could give humanity what religion and magic had

promised – immortal life” (ibid.).

As I have tried to show, the late-Victorian period was a time of great confusion, as

the rules by which people organised the world they inhabited were shaken to the

core. People turned to spiritualism and psychical research as a refuge from

emptiness and despair. It was a “widespread effort in this period to believe in

something” (Oppenheim 4). This boom of the occult became a popular theme in

literature as well. Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle and many

others delighted in telling ghost stories. According to Nicola Bown et al. “[e]ven

avowedly realist novels were full of dreams, premonitions and second sight” (1).

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The more interesting point in relation to this research Bown et al. make, though,

is that the material world the Victorian inhabited seemed somehow supernatural

as well. Modern technologies were transforming daily life rapidly and were often

felt to be uncanny. There were “[d]isembodied voices over the telephone [and]

near instantaneous communication through telegraph wires […] and apparently

real communications from the dead elicited by [s]piritualist mediums made the

world seem as if it were full of invisible, occult forces” (ibid.).

Electronic mediation with the world beyond

In order to further substantiate my claim that a significant part of the desire to

get in contact with the dead through the use of electronic media lies in the

conflicting Victorian period, I would like to argue that realised and unrealised

inventions in the field of communication technology were ‘drawn’ into this

scientific enquiry into the afterlife. To give a full comprehension of this process I

would like to start by looking at the beginning of spiritualism in 1848, roughly

four decades before the formation of the Society for Psychical Research.

Spiritualist practise and psychical research, though, are not intended to be

synonymous. Janet Oppenheim explains why: “The spiritualists, on the one hand,

were likely to attend séances in an accepting frame of mind. […] Psychical

researchers, on the other hand, trod with greater circumspection and even, in

some cases, scepticism” (3).

Steven Connor, who in his essay “The Victorian Ear” explores the interface

between technological innovations and séances, states that spiritualist practice is

much more thought of as a “phantasmal commentary upon the work of science”

or even as “embodied reflections upon the reconfigurations of the body induced

and potentiated by new communicational technologies” (23). Connor points to

the spiritualist convincement that communication with the dead was a system of

alphabetic knocks, which had to be decoded and states that “[n]o more literal

parallel to the digital system of the electric telegraph could be imagined” (ibid.).

Connor, furthermore, notes that Charles Partridge already in 1858 wrote an essay

on spiritual communication in Morse code, which was published by the Spiritual

Telegraph Office (24). Emma Hardinge Britten also lively describes this spiritual

telegraph in her book Modern American Spiritualism, stating that the apparatus

could bridge the mortal and immortal worlds, whereby “legions of enfranchised

spirits can transmit their messages of undying affection” (547). The spiritual

telegraph in this early context, though, was primarily used metaphorically, but

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gives a good indication of how the medium became a synonym for afterlife

communication.

An example of how the telegraph was physically put to use in spiritualist practices

can be found in Hardinge Britten’s work Nineteenth Century Miracles:

At a private circle held in New South Wales by a party of ladies and

gentlemen, some of whom were operators in the Magnetic Telegraph

Office, the controlling Spirits had been frequently asked if they could

not give communications through electrical signals. (254)

Hardinge Britten continues by giving several results of this session, which are

testimonies of a number of “respectable witnesses” (ibid.). One of the testimonies

included states:

Within one minute after taking our seats at the table, raps and loud

knocks were given; the armature at the instrument commenced to work

strongly, rapidly and well, spelling the alphabet down to the letter K

quite correctly. […] Question asked – ‘Would they be able to work the

instrument perfectly?’ Answer, ‘Yes’. (255)

The invention of the telephone and in lesser extent the phonograph around 1876

quickly entered the spiritualist séances. The primary reason for this was because

these media did not require attendees to decode the messages coming from the

spirits. According to Steven Connor the effect of adopting these technologies was

that the ghostliness of the new technological power became highlighted (24).

These technologies were able to “separate the voice from its source, either in

space, as with the telephone, or in time, as with the gramophone” (ibid.).

Spiritualist séances became more about hearing rather than seeing, leading to the

phenomenon of the ‘direct voice’. Voices from beyond became facilitated rather

than produced by the medium. The most interesting point Connor makes, which

is relevant to my argument, is his statement that “the flourishing of the ‘direct

voice’ during the twentieth century was undoubtedly encouraged by the

development of acoustic technologies” (26) including the telephone, phonograph

and gramophone, but also the megaphone, radio and tape recorder. With this

claim, Steven Connor underlines the hypothesis that the desire for mediated

communication with the afterlife can be traced back to the Victorian period, in

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which a basic principle was formed for mediated communication with the world

beyond.

There is, however, an underexposed element in Steven Connor’s historiography

concerning the occult and its growing interest in communication media. As I have

pointed out there was a significant shift towards modernity and an ever-growing

belief in science at the end of the nineteenth century. Where Connor omits this

shift, Jeffrey Sconce lively describes this process in his book Haunted Media. At

the end of the nineteenth century the credibility of the spiritualists and their

séances diminished profoundly under the diffusion of scientific reason. According

to Sconce even spiritualists began to doubt the idea that deceased scientists were

working in a laboratory beyond on electronic technologies to “uplift the mortal

world” (59), an idea not uncommon at the time. The reason why interest in occult

media, nevertheless, intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries was due to psychical research and their search for empirical evidence

for the afterlife. Sconce describes this shift from superstition to science as

follows: “Spiritualism’s fanciful portraits of a benevolent spirit world gave way in

the age of modernity to a program of pragmatic experimentation focused squarely

on the verifying the act of communication itself” (ibid.).

The growing confidence in science led many people, including the most

celebrated scientists of that time, to believe that one day someone here on earth,

instead of a deceased genius up in heaven, would develop a device to contact the

spirit world. There was a firm belief that an apparatus for contacting the dead was

something ‘just around the corner’. Erkki Huhtamo notes that “unrealised ‘dream

machines’, or discursive inventions (inventions that exist only as discourses), can

be just as revealing as realised artefacts” (3). His example of the telectroscope, a

never-realised device making man capable of seeing over great distances, shows

how an apparatus can become a utopian projection of the hopes raised by realised

technologies, such as electricity and the telephone (ibid.). For many inventors

and scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century it was very much

plausible, even inevitable, that devices capable of contacting the dead would be

realised (Sconce 61). Where the telectroscope was thought of through the hopes

raised by the telephone, so were supernatural devices imagined through the

telegraph, telephone and “modernity’s most startling supernatural invention –

wireless communication” (ibid.).

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The invention of Marconi’s wireless technology invigorated the belief to contact

the dead even more. Prior to the invention of wireless, Samuel Clemens (Mark

Twain), a member of the Society for Psychical Research, published an article

about mental telepathy in 1891 stating that “[we] have found that mind can act

upon mind in quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and

water” (Twain 71). Twain’s desire for immediacy, the collapse of distance,

promised to become reality with Marconi’s wireless system. The ether was

thought of as a mysterious substance, an invisible medium through which light,

electricity and magnetism moved (Sconce 61). Communication through this

mysterious medium evoked the thought that reaching the afterlife had become

ever more plausible. It was commonplace to assume a logical continuity between

the communication technologies Marconi worked on and deploying a crossing

over into the world beyond (Thurschwell 23). Marconi even allegedly worked on a

device that would “receive voices from all human history, hoping even to someday

hear the last words of Jesus on the cross” (Sconce 61).

Edison’s dream machine

Marconi certainly was not the only prominent scientist working on a kind of

supernatural communication device. The name of Thomas Edison popped up

more than once during my search for transcendental communication

technologies. In his memoir The Dairy and Sundry Observations of Thomas

Alva Edison the famous scientist devotes an entire chapter to life after death. In

this chapter, named “The Realms Beyond”, Edison states:

But that we receive communications from another realm of life, or that

we have – as yet – any means, or method, through which we could

establish this communication is quite another thing. […] [A]n apparatus

[…] should make communication very easy. I am engaged in the

construction of such an apparatus now. (233-234)

In an article in The New York Times, published on January 23 1921, Edison

discusses his engagement for the construction of such a machine. The device may

register the hundred trillion ‘life units’ that get scattered once a human dies. On

the motivation for his engagement in the construction for such an apparatus the

article states:

Thomas Edison has announced his entrance into a new sphere, that of

psychic research. […] [H]e feels that his investigations are worth while –

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whether success attends them is not the sole criterion. […] [T]en million

men and women who have lost dear ones in the war are hungering for

word or knowledge as to the existence of life after the life we know. […]

It is Mr. Edison, the scientist, that is applying all his powers and all his

knowledge to the questions life and death and life thereafter.

From the article, furthermore, it becomes clear that Edison does not wish to

describe the mysterious device in detail: “What the public is interested in, Mr.

Edison pointed out, is results only, and that is what he was striving for”. When

asked if Edison earnestly feels that communication with the dead can be

established, Edison answers as follows:

There is a doubt. I am not sure. That’s the reason why I am experiment-

ting. But if I didn’t believe, I wouldn’t try.

An article in Modern Mechanix and Inventions published in October 1933

reported on the secret apparatus Edison was allegedly working on. The beginning

of the article leaves little to be desired:

One black, howling wintry night in 1920 – just such a night when

superstitious people would bar their doors and windows against

marauding ghosts – Thomas Edison, the famous inventive wizard,

gathered a small group of scientists in his laboratory to witness his

secret attempts to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with

instruments of incredible sensitivity.

Machines that could actually communicate with the dead, of course, never met

the high expectations or were most likely never even realised. The importance of

these ‘discursive inventions’, however, should not be discarded so easily. These

dream machines represent the hopes and expectations evoked by astonishing

scientific breakthroughs. When the hopes and expectations belonging to specific

realised and unrealised communication technologies are compared it becomes

clear that similarities can be pointed out. Susan Douglas notices these

similarities, these recurring hopes, when comparing discourses at the dawn of

American broadcasting: “The early quixotic hopes for the telegraph and

telephone had deflated as the inventions came to be managed by large-scale

organizations […] But lines and wires were easy to control. […] It seemed that

wireless might be the truly democratic, decentralized communication technology

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people had yearned for” (25). According to Vincent Mosco, author of the book

The Digital Sublime, there is “indeed a remarkable, almost wilful, historical

amnesia about technology, particularly when the talk turns to communication

and information technology” (117).

The turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was a period of

astonishing and overwhelming inventions. With each new invention certain

hopes and desires seemed to reappear. Whether it is was the hope for democracy,

as stated by Susan Douglas, or the hope for contact with the afterlife, as show in

the preceding paragraphs, there are certain elements that reappear and coincide

with each new invention. Placing emphasis on these recurring elements, or ‘topoi’

according to Huhtamo, will show that people tend to forget that others looked at

earlier technologies in much the same way (Mosco 118). In other words, hereby

again citing Vincent Mosco, “we want to believe that our era is unique in

transforming the world as we have known it” (ibid.). I believe Avital Ronell

expresses this ‘wilful amnesia’ about technology and the occult quite aptly in The

Telephone Book: “The so-called occult is calling. It has never stopped ringing on

the exchanges between science and technology, urging a lineage of verification,

empiricity, invention, and proofs” (364).

The discourses that surrounded Edison’s mysterious apparatus, that would bridge

the physical and spirit world, is probably the most characteristic for the reception

of communication technologies to this day. As Jeffery Sconce puts it:

Born in the wake of radio’s discarnate voices and in the full hubris of

modernity, Edison’s project survives in each new generation of

electronic telecommunications technology that sounds and echo of this

original voice from the void […] encouraging speculation that the

technology’s power to transmute and transmit might be more than a

metaphor. Each new communications technology seems to evoke as well

the nervous ambivalence of wireless, a simultaneous desire and dread of

actually making such extraordinary forms of contact. (83)

On this quote, together with Mosco’s ‘wilful amnesia’ of communication

technology and Huhtamo’s recurring elements that seem to transcend historical

contexts, I would like to shift the focal point of this research from the Victorian

era and beginning of the twentieth century to the nineteen sixties when the term

electronic voice phenomena (EVP) was coined.

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EVP and ITC

Dr. Konstantïns Raudive was a Latvian philosopher and professor who published

his book, with the applicable title, Breakthrough in 1971. Raudive’s book, which

described a series of experiments he conducted in the late nineteen sixties,

inspired many psychical researchers across the globe, both amateur and

professional (Sconce 85). The investigation into the recording of voices later

became known as EVP. At the end of his introduction Raudive states: “It is my

opinion that the voice-phenomenon produces facts by means of which we can

break through the habitual confines of our existence and make contact with the

"opposite world" that can be regarded as the center of our life after death”

(Raudive). His search for facts through scientific experiments with electronic

media, such as the tape recorder, falls in line with the scientific approach to the

occult by the Society of Psychical Research. According to Jeffrey Sconce,

moreover, Raudive even reverts to the Victorian spiritualists by claiming to have

evidence that spirits in the world beyond had their own technologies for

contacting our world (86).

In search for the underlying motive for conducting these recordings, Jeffrey

Sconce states that the spiritual hope Raudive’s voices raised, can be seen as “one

of many responses to modernity’s increasingly unsettling model of the subject”

(90). Darwin, Freud, Sartre and others shrivelled the “transcendental dimension

of the human psyche” (ibid.). Radio and tape-recording technologies at least

offered some form of tangible evidence that there might be an immortal essence

that would live on after death. Sconce, thus, gives a similar explanation for why

Raudive conducted his scientific inquiry as Oppenheim, Thurschwell, Gray and

Luckhurst give for why Victorian scientists turned to the occult. On the one hand

science was responsible for marvellous accomplishments. But on the other hand

science demystified life itself and unveiled the unbearable image of a puny earthly

existence. The irony of EVP, as observed by Sconce, is that it, however,

“remystified the soul through the validating authority of an electronic technology”

(ibid.). The question if Raudive’s experiments are true or false, in this case, is not

important. What is interesting, though, is that Raudive was driven by the same

motives as psychical researchers at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of

the twentieth century were.

Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) can be considered a broader term than

and a more recent version of EVP. Mark Macy, author of the book Miracles in the

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Storm and seen as an ITC pioneer, states that ITC began in the nineteen seventies

when George Meek began researching EVP with the aim to achieve prolonged,

two-way communication. ITC in its current state, however, reminds more of

spiritualist séances than of the strict scientific research proclaimed by the Society

of Psychical Research and Raudive. According to Macy, “the spirit side does not

transmit text or images in the form of human alphabets or illustrations per se, but

as thought impulses which, in conjunction with the thoughts of the human

receivers, interact to arrive as words and pictures” (Macy). ITC seems, therefor, to

have assimilated the scientific psychical approach with spiritualist tradition.

Besides tape recordings, ITC depends on video, computer-text and computer-

scanned images as ‘new’ media for transferring information from the spiritual to

the physical plane.

Conclusion

As I have tried to show, the connection between communication technology and

the afterlife and the desire to communicate with the dead became explicitly

visible during the Victorian era and has popped up on multiple occasions during

the course of the twentieth century every time a new technology became within

arms reach. I believe Pamela Thurschwell describes this phenomenon quite aptly:

“[T]here is always already a ghost in the machine, a telepath on the telephone

wire” (23). This ghost in the machine has shown its elusive presence time and

time again, from the invention of the Morse alphabet, to the telephone, radio, and

all the way through the first personal computers. I have, furthermore, attempted

to unravel how and why the ghost manifested itself in the machine by explaining

how different processes in the Victorian era and beginning of the twentieth

century were of importance in constructing the mystification of communication

technology. That what is considered pseudo-science today was seen as a most

serious matter at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth

century: the search for evidence of the afterlife.

James Katz and Mark Aakhus state at the end of their article “Making Meaning of

Mobiles” that “it seems that certain conceptual perspectives arise in people’s

minds as a result of their interaction with technologies” (316). I believe that the

desire to communicate with the dead, to bridge the mortal and eternal world, is

indeed one of these conceptual perspectives that seem to reappear every time a

new ‘revolutionary’ communication technology is introduced. Research by

Vincent Mosco, moreover, has shown that, in retrospect, people seem to forget

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these conceptual perspectives with every new invention. These reoccurring,

cyclical elements are what Erkki Huhtamo calls topoi. I am almost certain that

future communication technologies will be viewed as, again, bringing mankind

one step closer to contact with the world beyond. Hard scientific evidence of

spirits floating around in the afterlife, I believe, will not change this perpetual

desire. No matter how many telegraph transcripts, gramophone records,

photographs, tape-recordings, videos or computer-texts of lost souls scientists

will collect, the desire to communicate with the voices from beyond is something

that will remain for eternity. Just like our souls.

References

Boddy, W. “Archaeologies of Electronic Vision and the Gendered Spectator.” Screen 35:2

(1994): 105-122.

Bown, N., et al. “Introduction.” The Victorian Supernatural. Eds. N. Bown, C. Burdett

and P. Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-19.

Connor, S. “Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear.” Transactions and Encounters:

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. R. Luckhurst and J.

McDonagh. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 16-29.

Douglas, S. J. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

UP, 1988.

“Edison’s Own Secret Spirit Experiments” Modern Mechanix and Inventions (october

1933): 34-36.

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