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Magic and media: the critical concept of telepathy (1918-1939)

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Content i
Magic and Media:
The Critical Concept of Telepathy (1918-1939)
by
Kendra Myers Atkin
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY
OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
(COMPARATIVE MEDIA AND CULTURE))
August 2023
Copyright 2023 Kendra Atkin
ii

Acknowledgements

It is impossible to offer adequate gratitude and credit to everyone who helped make this project
possible. Both directly through intellectual engagement and indirectly through other kinds of
support, this project belongs to all of you (like it or not!):

First and foremost, thank you to my advisor Akira Mizuta Lippit who believed in the chaotic
progression of this project from start to finish. Major thanks are also due to my committee:
Peggy Kamuf, who guided me to the texts and ideas that gave this project form; to Erin Graff
Zivin who took me under-wing; and Natalie L. Belisle who always offered kind guidance and
encouragement.

My deepest gratitude goes to those colleagues and friends who generously read drafts, offered
feedback, and sat with me through hours of research and writing, especially Noraedén Mora
Méndez, Brieuc Gerard, Luis Othoniel Rosa, and Michaela Telfer.

Finally, to those who enriched my writing with challenging and engaging conversation, with
love, and with friendship—I owe you so much. Specifically, my first family: Charyn, Ethan, and
Adley Atkin; my first family in LA: Keziah Poole, Nike Nivar, and César Pérez Sánchez; my
most powerful and enduring support centers: Rose Costello, Robin Smith Fedock, and Emily
Schultz; and Ingrid Leventhal and Kate Page-Lippsmeyer; my refuge: Pierre Habib and Gryphon
Sugar Klein; my other amazing interlocutors: Agam Neiman, Lisa Locascio, Claudia Joskowicz,
Aron Sandell, Jackie Sheean, Mac Watson, Sylvia Lydon, Sanders Bernstein, and Patience Moll;
and my communities within USC, LA, NYC, Lund, and my many other homes.
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE Media Studies’ Forgotten Figure: Prophecy in Classical Greece .................... 19
Séance 1—Cassandra, the Feminine Prophet ........................................................................... 19
Séance 2—Plato’s Phaedrus: “The Primal Scene of Media Invention” ................................... 33
Séance 3—Aristotle’s “On Divination Through Sleep” ........................................................... 52
CHAPTER TWO Psychic Makers: Telepathy, Modern Literature and Feminine Authorship ... 71
The Psychic Medium, “Reach out and Touch Someone” ......................................................... 71
The Narrative Relay of Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume ............................................................ 85
Pathos meets Politics: Luisa Capetillo Reads Aloud ................................................................ 95
CHAPTER THREE Mass Media’s Other Remainder: Telepathy, Psychoanalysis, and Weimar
Cinema ........................................................................................................................................ 116
Mass Media, the Other Remainder ......................................................................................... 116
Uncanny Touch in Freud’s “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy” .............................................. 120
The Expressionist Withdrawal into the Studio: Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 136
Postscript: Pathos and Delay ....................................................................................................... 149
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 152

iv

List of Figures

Figure 1: Bell Advertisement. ....................................................................................................... 71
Figure 2: Bell Advertisement. ....................................................................................................... 71
Figure 3: “The Eccentricities Of A Female Anarchist” .............................................................. 108
Figure 4: The Somnabulist, Cesare. ............................................................................................ 140
Figure 6: The Flashback Begins, Set Against An Expressionist Backdrop. ............................... 145
Figure 5: Francis Begins His Story In A Chilly Winter Garden. ................................................ 145
Figure 7: The Victory Of Dr. Caligari. ....................................................................................... 147

v

Abstract

Drawing on literary and cinema studies, media theory, and philosophy, Magic and
Media: The Critical Concept of Telepathy (1918-1939) makes a historical and philosophical
argument for understanding telepathy as a necessary concept for media studies. I demonstrate
that literature and film made between WWI and WWII in the Americas and Germany develop
new fantasies and anxieties of an expanding media landscape and bind media to theories of
gender, power, and subjectivity. I unearth a series of binary engenderings in the historical
production of the very concept of media. The relationship between gender and media is flexible,
yet the seemingly magical, irrational, environmental, and non-individualistic aspects of media
are consistently feminized and constructed as counter to authority, propriety, and logos. This
gendered structure of mediation reaches a crisis-point in the mid-19
th
century when the word
telepathy is coined. This crisis coincides with the construction of new technological ecologies,
especially advances in print and other mass media, and is the starting point of Roger Luckhurst’s
seminal investigation of The Invention of Telepathy.
1
Expanding the conversation to a broader
range of metaphorical, theoretical, and feminine-associated practices, I argue that early 20
th

century literature and cinema use telepathy to both imagine and challenge the incompatibility of
the concepts of femininity and authority in the construction of what we call media today.
Chapter 1, “Media Studies’ Forgotten Figure: Prophecy in Classical Greece,” positions
the figure of the ancient Greek prophet as a precursor to the modern concept of telepathy. We
often forget that Socrates’ famous division between logos and writing, in Phaedrus, is modeled
on a division within the figure of the prophet (mantis), between “inspired” and “technological.”

1
Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
vi

As inspired, the prophet acts as a direct channel or medium for truth delivered by the gods; but as
a reader of signs, the prophet also participates in a technology (mantike techne). The implicitly
feminized character of the prophet as a foundation for truth is problematic for Aristotle, who
argues that if inspired prophecies are channeled from gods, they should be delivered to those
closest to the gods—to the philosophers. For Aristotle, prophecy is instead associated with a kind
of mental vacancy, thereby reversing Plato’s assertion that divine inspiration is the location of
philosophy. A now naturalized concept of prophecy, very close to telepathy, thus comes to stand
for the very limit of philosophy—the medium as the body incapable of logos.
Chapter 2, “Psychic Makers: Telepathy, Femininity and Modern Literature,” considers
the ways that telepathy is linked to notions of gender difference in modern discourse. Jill
Galvan’s book, The Sympathetic Medium, shows that Victorians linked both spiritual and
technological modes of communication to women and femininity. As telegraphers, stenographer-
typists, typewriters and telephone operators, women were recruited for new jobs in expanding
media networks, where they served as passive go-betweens connecting male subjects to one
another. Simultaneously, the new concept of the psychic medium used women’s bodies as a
means for spiritual connection across any distance. Beyond Galvan’s proposition, I argue that,
although common gender stereotypes are present in the feminization of media, the result is not
simply a repositioning of media as the passive “other” of Man. Instead, I show that two authors,
Rebecca West and the Puerto-Rican born anarchist Luisa Capetillo, use telepathy as a meta-
reflection on technological media by articulating forms of spiritual mediumship that blur the
boundary between self and other, living and dead, and male and female. This chapter also
contributes to telepathy studies by recuperating a feminist impulse in the term’s critical force.
vii

Chapter 3, “Mass Media’s Other Remainder: Telepathy and Weimar Cinema,” focuses on early
20
th
century politics and Weimar cinema. Unlike Galvan’s examples of passive media, these
films offer images of media as a psychic invasion. Robert Wiene’s expressionist film, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, envisions telepathic powers as scenes of paranoia and domination. But
these films also formally assert an insidious telepathic affect. Distinct from literature or still
photography, cinematic elements like camera movement, pacing, speed, and music touch the
viewer in new and invisible ways. It is this literal tele-pathic power of cinema to move the
viewer at a distance that led both Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin to identify cinema’s
unique capacity to mobilize the masses, foundational for the populist political movements they
witnessed. Rereading Siegfried Krakauer’s essay on the film through the lens of Sigmund
Freud’s writing on telepathy, this chapter asks what is gained and lost through the affective and
telepathic features of cinema for Weimar directors and the theories they conjure. I conclude that
a syphoning away of the feminized features of mediation from the concept of mass media is the
requisite structural condition for an articulation of cinema’s telepathy as a fascist invasion.
1
Introduction

Touching at a Distance
The word “telepathy” was coined in 1882 in the context of late Victorian culture by the
poet, amateur psychologist, school inspector, and classicist, Fredrick Myers.
2
These diverse roles
made Myers well placed for developing this term, which was however already in the zeitgeist of
the late Victorian culture. “Sympathetic Clairvoyance” and even “empathy” are said to be
conceptual precursors to telepathy in the literary and romantic context. Myers was also the
president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an organization that tasked itself with the
“scholarly research” of “human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models"
3

when he delivered his speech in London introducing and defining the word. Along with the now
obsolete “telesthesia,” “telepathy” was used “to cover all cases of impression received at a
distance without the normal operation of the recognized sense organs.”
4
At once invested in a
kind of natural science epistemology institutionalizing in the late Victorian infrastructure,
telepathy is also posted as a challenge to scientific models. Telepathy is understood as an
“impression” rather than a clear thought, received without recourse to the recognized sense
organs—without touch, taste, sound, smell, or sight.
Though strongly associated with the occult, the history of telepathy holds an ambiguous
space in the cultural and techno-scientific imagination and was part of a larger series of worlding
processes taking root in the 19
th
and 20
th
century. Taken under serious investigation not only by

2
Luckhurst, 1.
3
“About the SPR,” Society for Psychical Research, accessed July 23, 2023, https://www.spr.ac.uk/about-spr.
4
Frederick Myers, “Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,” London: Trübner 1 (1883).
2

the SPR, telepathy has also been an object of investigation for technological invention, the
sciences, the military and literature. Roger Luckhurst’s book, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870-
1901, argues that to understand the emergence of the concept of telepathy also requires attention
to “the fields of science, technology, the explosion of mass print culture, the experimental
laboratory and the music hall, the drawing room and the colonial frontier, the lowly pleasures of
the Gothic and the high cultures of Modernism.”
5
Both the origins and the consequences of this
late 19
th
century concept intersect with broad cultural shifts that reorganized and determined the
structure of modernity, from the implementation of mass media networks and colonial
expansion, to the invention of psychoanalysis and the spiritualist movement. Telepathy thus
emerges in the late Victorian period in a particularly English context, even as it remains
essentially embedded also in 19
th
century American, European, and globally colonizing cultures.
But telepathy emerges as both a significant, and strangely tenacious term—outliving
many of the concepts and terms developed by the SPR and similar organizations at this time. The
term today hasn’t lost appeal given its essential role in popular culture, from David Cronenberg’s
classic Scanners and the “Jedi mind trick” of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars; to Professor X of X-
Men and various deployments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As a technological fantasy of
direct and immediate communication, the term is also used to describe the communication of
plants,
6
animals,
7
and technological innovation.
8
Even billionaire Elon Musk has plans for a

5
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1.
6
Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2013,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant.
7
Alison Abbott, “Inside the Mind of an Animal,” Nature 584, no. 7820 (August 11, 2020): 182–85,
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02337-x.
8
Corinne Iozzio, “Scientists Prove That Telepathic Communication Is Within Reach,” Smithsonian, accessed June 18, 2016,
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/scientists-prove-that-telepathic-communication-is-within-reach-180952868/.
3

“magical future” for “thought communication,” laid out in a 38,000+ word illustrated explainer
for his company Neuralink.
9

Magic and Media: The Critical Concept of Telepathy (1918-1939) takes the coinage of
the word telepathy as a starting point—but a starting point which stretches out in multiple
directions. As a linguistic and material manifestation, I contend this word signals an
intensification of a kind of undecidability built into the very idea of communication. While often
understood as a form of “mind reading,” telepathy emphasizes pathic relations—feelings—to
indicate communication without necessary recourse to language; telepathy is communication that
transmits feeling from one body to another as if without mediation or translation that language
always inserts into the distance between two bodies. Yet, the structure of meaning and
knowledge established in the epistemological framework of “mind reading” binds an
understanding of communication to interpretation and material production. Instead, I propose
telepathy as a component of communication that can open or open onto new questions about
media, mediation, and technology by foregrounding the study with the unknown, the
unknowable, and the non-interpretive. The extraordinariness of telepathy is tied here to a
circumvention of mediation and of language—of the symbolic and material flows where slippage
occurs.

Media and Technology
In one sense, telepathy might be understood as the erasure of media: the complete
circumvention of the material stuff, the middle ground, the sign systems, and substrates of

9
Tim Urban, “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future,” Wait But Why, April 20, 2017,
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html.
4

communication that carry meaning—a magical circuit that connects minds to minds. Telepathy is
a -pathic relation of direct “feeling” or “touch,” with nothing lost and no space between, no room
for misinterpretation. But it is simultaneously clear that media technology—that is, forms of
technology that store, transmit, and record communication—paved the way for the invention of
the modern concept of media in the late 19
th
century. Printing press technology, for instance,
made newspapers, pamphlets, and flyers increasingly cheap and accessible from the mid-19
th

century to the mid-20
th
century. In 1837 the first version of the telegraph was patented by
Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke in the UK, and in the United States Samuel Morse
presented his own version of the telegraph. Guglienlmo Marconi displayed the wireless (radio)
telegraph in 1891. In 1873, E. Remington and Sons manufactured the typewriter. On the same
day in 1876 Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell applied for patents for the telephone. One
year later Thomas Edison completed his phonograph. As Pamela Thurschwell argues in
Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, the emergence and spread of such
teletechnologies suggested technological modes to “help annihilate distances that separates
bodies and minds from each other”
10
and opened onto new forms of intimacy in the cultural
imaginary in the mid 19
th
century. Telepathy is entangled with the project of media expansion of
the mid and late 19
th
century that simultaneously imagines the “annihilation” of the middle
ground of mediation itself.
Corresponding with this technological shift, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites
the first use of the word medium, in its plural form, media, to refer to mass media in 1850.
11
The

10
Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 3.
11
“Medium, n. and Adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed July 3, 2020, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/115772?redirectedFrom=medium#eid. “Our periodicals are now the media of influence. They
form and mold the community.” This quote refers to an understanding of the social influence of leaflets circulating religious
circles. The OED entry on Media dates the first use of “mass media” as 1923: “Class appeal in mass media.” I’m not sure what
5

relative youth of this term is not surprising, given the growing scale and scope of new print and
photographic technologies of this time. Developing print, and other teletechnology required a
new concept to describe the plurality of dissemination, forming new means of access and
communication. A harder case can be made for the technologically specific concurrent new use
of the word medium to describe a spiritual or occult practice of communication through non-
material means. Alongside the expansion of material media networks, the 19th century is
invested in an age marked by the popularization of “spiritualism” and “psychical research.” In
1851, only one year after the concept of mass media is articulated, the OED records another new
use for the word medium: a person with psychic talents. A news article writes, “A member of the
American Antiquarian Society pronounced, ‘I have witnessed three times, one of which was last
night, the ‘Rappings &c.’. A Mr. White from Providence, a mason by trade, is the ‘medium.’”
12

Here the psychic medium is acting as a channel between the dead and the living. As an expanded
use of the concept of mediumship, the word “medium” is in quotation marks here. Soon after, as
this usage was naturalized into the English lexicon, the quotation marks around the word
disappear. Indeed, the spiritual medium remains, to this day, the most readily used understanding
of the use of the word medium to describe a person or human body.
13

distinction they are making between “mass media” there and in the OED entry on Medium, in which the plural “media” is used to
describe “a channel of mass communication” and which has several entries between 1850 and 1923.
“Media, n.
2
,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed July 21, 2023, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/dictionary/media_n2?tab=factsheet#37520622. For more on this, see John Haldane, “‘Media, Emergence,
and the Analogy of Art,’” in Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application, ed. Juliet Floyd and
James E. Katz (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 191.
12
“Medium, n. and Adj.” The quotation marks used around the word “medium” disappeared quickly as this usage naturalized
into the English lexicon.
13
This point is missing from Bernadette Wegenstein useful writing on “body” as key term for media studies. The author
recognizes the importance of the body in contemporary understandings of media and mediation, but makes no mention of the
psychic “medium.” Bernadette Wegenstein, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N.
Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 19–34.
6

In Ghostwriting Modernism, Helen Sword describes the expansion of spiritualist
practices across the English-speaking world as a discursive inheritance from occultism,
Swedenborgism, mesmerism, and magnetism that began alongside transmitting, transcribing, and
recording technologies of the 19
th
century. The famous Fox sisters of New York helped
popularize the technique of phantom knockings or “rapping,” and stimulated a fascination with
spiritualism that spread across the US and British popular imagination in the mid-19
th
century.
The introduction of human mediums that directly connect the dead and the living accelerated the
speed of communication, imitating the technological trends of the moment. By the 1860s-70s
spiritualism was more popular and lucrative and methods became more diverse and “outlandish.”
With the advent of WWI, “the paradoxical practice of mourning the dead by refusing to let them
die itself took a fresh lease on life as millions of new clients flocked to spirit mediums in hopes
of making contact with their dead.”
14
Perhaps the mid-19
th
century conceptions of media open
onto the metaphysics built into the concept of modern media. At once earthly and unearthly,
medium on the one hand inscribes within itself human technology and the materiality of
communication. And on the other hand, the psychic medium establishes a transcendence of the
phenomenal order—communication free of technology and material constraints.
Like medium, the prefix tele- confronts the problem of articulating human experience in a
world rapidly shifting with developing technological environments. In Specters of Marx
15
and
Echographies of Television
16
Derrida develops the term “teletechnologies,” emphasizing the
importance of tele-/distance for understanding technology in a broad sense. While

14
Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 1st edition (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2002), 3.
15
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York; London: Routledge, 2012).
16
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK;
Malden, MA: Polity, 2002).
7

teletechnologies in no way can be said to originate in the 19
th
century, Magic and Media
investigates this history of technological and linguistic change as a site of unfolding, at once
technologically specific and discursively global. As Akira Mizuta Lippit discusses in Cinema
without Reflection, “For Derrida, the paradox of science, its technē and media, is that far from
banishing shadows, shades, science calls them back, makes possible their return.”
17
The 19
th

century medium, rendered undecidable in their relation to tele- distance, doubly returns to itself.
The concept of telepathy, of course, predates the word—at least as far back as Aristotle,
the idea of communication beyond human sense perception emerges frequently within
philosophical and technological discourses. This dissertation focuses on literary, cinematic,
psychoanalytic, and philosophical texts to suggest the notion of telepathy particularly offers
insight about the years between WWI and WWII as key to understanding a shift in the role
technology and media occupy and encode in human life and experience. In the early 20
th
century,
new concepts of the medium become key to thinking about ways that language and
communication bonded to the technological and psychic duality. The suffix -pathy as a signifier
for tactile immediacy is at odds with the cold distance of tele-, but evokes the history of this
convergence. Telepathy, I argue, acts as a haunting figure in the rationalist effort to forget the
joint origin of the (mass) medium and the (psychic) medium; real and imaginary; phenomenal
and metaphysical; non-human and human; tele and -pathy.

17
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissim Adrift (Minneapolis; London:
University Of Minnesota Press, 2016), 7.
8

Scientific Naturalism
The institutionalization of a scientific worldview is essential to the late Victorian period
in which the term telepathy is coined. Rodger Luckhurt’s The Invention of Telepathy argues that,
although scientific naturalism can be considered a central tenant of modernity beginning in the
enlightenment, the late 19
th
century marks a shift in the institutional scope and priority of
scientific naturalism “from a small, if influential, pursuit of gentleman- amateur into an
institutional system, highly differentiated, government-funded, integrated with compulsory
education and with powerful professional spokesmen.”
18
Luckhurst argues that the concept of
telepathy develops out of this organized and foundationally scientific culture that he describes as
an ideological “settlement” reified in the 1870s. That is, it is not until the end of the 19
th
century
that the political and epistemological implications of scientific naturalism properly imbed
themselves in the broad sense that constitutes institutional and intellectual cultural domination.
This settlement consisted of the implementation of scientific education from the elementary to
doctorate level, the creation of scientific laboratories and technical colleges, and science-focused
museums.
19

While scientific inquiry helps define the long process of modernity from the
“enlightenment,” the late Victorian moment signifies a shift in privileging the authority of
scientific naturalism over the theological authority of the Christian church in England and the
US; as well as over “primitive superstitions” conceptualized in both national and colonial terms.
Scientific naturalism as an ideology is defined as a premise of uniform and monastic principles
that informed invariable natural laws. It rejected not only the realms of metaphysics and

18
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 9.
19
Luckhurst, 17–24.
9

spiritualism but also the suspension of these laws by conceiving of a singular form of existence:
matter. As Diana Postlethwaite says in Making it Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Spirit of
Their World, scientific laws were “a monistic principle that will order the universe, yoke the
multipicitous particular with the numinous general.”
20
Luckhurst and Postlethwaite describe a
uniformity of law as universal within which aberrations were particularly problematic. Any
appearance of aberration either required the reestablishment of natural laws or had to be
absorbed within existing ones.

Spiritualism
The flip side of this scientific culture is a loss of religious authority often described as a
“crisis of Christianity” at the turn of the 20
th
century. The lacuna left by the “crisis of
Christianity” was also a catalyst for the rise of the spiritualist movement in the Victorian age. In
the face of the loss of god, spiritualism is often seen to emerge as an opportunity to invest in
alternative forms of spiritual or faith practices. As Nicholas Royle says, these movements were
“a chance to believe in something.”
21
Helen Sword emphasizes that the incredible loss of life
following World War I left many mourning their dead. The losses of WWI may have intensified
the desire for spiritual practices that traversed the life/death boundary.
When modern spiritualism came to Britain from New York in 1848, the “craze” for
“rapping” and table turning was “seized on by men of science as an occasion to dramatize the
passage from belief in a supernatural agency to rational explanation.”
22
For instance, William

20
Diana Postlethwaite, Making It Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1984), xvii.
21
Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Pub, 1991), 10.
22
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 25.
10

Carpenter defined “unconscious cerebration” as a “psychological process by which the mind may
undergo modifications sometimes of very considerable importance without being itself conscious
of the process.”
23
This became a standard response to reports of spiritualist phenomena. The
unconscious thus became one place that the unexplainable was left to reside.
But by 1871, Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture articulated spiritualism as an exemplary
instance of the “survival” of “savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore.”
24
Luckhurst argues that
Naturalists “turned on spiritualism because it offered itself as a controversial terrain on which to
restage naturalist methods, to reiterate law… and to reassert their ideology.”
25
Naturalism aimed
to demarcate a distinction between these two terrains, which were undermined by thinkers such
as William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallice, Cromwell Varley, and Sigmund Freud.
Yet the popular contingent needed by the scientific community for their own expansion
was somewhat addressed by the scientific language of the spiritualist movement. Luckhurst
points out that “both science and Spiritualism opposed the ‘priestcraft’ of the established Church;
both where equally revolted by the doctrine of eternal damnation; both could claim to be
democratic, participatory, anti-authoritarian and be based on common-sense empiricism…In the
view of contemporary journalists, both were part of the same spectrum of ‘unorthodox
London.’”
26
Alfred Russel Wallace was Darwin’s co-theorist of evolution who wrote “A Defense
of Modern Spiritualism.” Cromwell Varley became an engineer for the Telegraphy Company
and alongside William Thomas helped lay the Atlantic cable network. He attempted to

23
William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology: With Their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the
Mind, and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions, second (London: H.S. King & Company, 1875), 151. Quoted in Luckhurst, The
Invention of Telepathy, 26.
24
Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Phylosophy, Religion, Language, Art and
Custom in Two Volumes, Third, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1891), 142.
25
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 27.
26
Luckhurst, 5.
11

communicate along elusive lines in telegraphic and occult contexts and introduced William
Crookes to spiritualism. This blend of science and spiritualism plays out in the postcolonial
context of Puerto Rico discussed in Chapter 2 in the writing of Luisa Capetillo as a kind of anti-
orthodoxy against both church and state.
Spiritualism itself shifted in the late Victorian moment—from table-rapping to more
spirit mediums, usually in the bodies of young women like Florence Cook, Mary Showers, or
Eva Fay. An unusual sensitivity is often assigned to the work of spiritual mediumship. Pathos,
the suffix of telepathy, comes from Greek meaning “feeling,” “touch,” “emotional state,” and
also “affliction.” Enlightenment philosopher David Hume reflected on the relationship between
emotion and passivity, which is carried down from the Greek concept of pathos, as a passive
experience of affect. This root word helps us trace the route of telepathy to pre-19th century
manifestations of the concept. Often considered a feminine quality, sensitivity allows the body
access to knowledge that seems excessive to understanding or reason. The feminine association
with sensitivity that begins as far back as Plato takes new forms in the 19
th
century, when women
are bound more tightly with technology both materially as laborers, and within the literary
imagination. This is discussed in Jill Galvan’s excellent book on the concept of the feminized
“sympathetic medium” emerging at the turn of the 20
th
century. Feminine sensitivity provided
the capacity, like radio antennae, to pick up signals emanating from either great distances or
from the worlds of the dead. With a more robust set of technological metaphors in place, the
sensitive body was understood to act as a vessel or medium for the words, thoughts, and feelings
of others. From the 19
th
century moving forward, the concept of telepathy remains tied to
expressions of this sensitive medium in literature, science, spiritual movements and in
psychoanalysis.
12

Psychical Research
Between the institutionalization of scientific knowledge and the emergence of new
spiritual practices, “psychical research” may be considered a hybrid form of research and
knowledge specific to the late 19
th
century. The Society for Psychical Research, of which
Fredrich Myers was the president when he coined the word “telepathy,” understood itself to be
both a scientific institution and a challenge to scientific naturalism’s inflexible laws. The first
definition of the word was offered by Myers in a meeting of the SPR in London in 1882:
We venture to introduce the words Telethesia and Telepathy to cover all cases of
impressions received at a distance without the normal operation of the recognized
sense organs. These general terms may, we think, be found of permanent service;
but as regards what is for the present included under them, we must limit and
arrange our material rather with an eye to convenience, than with any belief that
our classification will ultimately prove a fundamental one. No true demarcation,
in fact, can as yet be made between one class of those experiences and another;
we need the record of as many and as diverse phenomena as we can get, if we are
to be in a position to deal satisfactorily with any one of them.
27

Telepathy is explicitly left here without “demarcation.” Final classifications and definitions are
gestured towards, but left without finality. In contrast to the goals of scientific naturalism, Myers
emphasizes the need for flexibility and diversity in organizing. Part of this is the combination of
phenomena and experience—the material laws and the ineffability and multiplicity of experience
are left side by side. Luckhurst describes psychical research as a practice that “capitalized on the
fissures of scientific naturalism, exploiting uncertainty and transition in knowledge and
institutions of cultural authority.”
28
Telepathy can be thought of as occupying the space of such a
fissure in the realm of communication, responding to an intuition that the practice and experience
of communication goes beyond the material processes of each substrate.

27
Myers, “Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,” 147.
28
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 5.
13

Return of Telepathy in Literary Scholarship: “The Spectral Turn”
In more recent years, the strange contradiction of touch at a distance has led scholars to
advance the concept of telepathy as a seemingly magical aspect of literature—the idea that
writing and reading perform a kind of action at a distance that disrupts the logic of both linear
causality and the unified subject. Alongside what might be called a “spectral turn” in critical
literary studies emerging in the 1990s, and following the writings of Jacques Derrida—most
obviously, but not exclusively his Specters of Marx
29
—the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a
mounting interest in spectrality, ghosts, telepathy, haunting, and the gothic in theoretical
approaches to literature. As Derrida famously asserted in his reading of Plato’s Pharmakon, the
technology of writing has always been associated, in some sense, with death. The text acts as an
inscription of something absent. In various ways, several texts build off Derrida to understand
what the language of occultism—a discourse that can abide the coexistence of life and death—
can offer as critical models for thinking literature, philosophy, ethics, colonialism, and
modernity. For instance, Carla Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques
Derrida's Ghost Writing;
30
Julian Wolfrey’s Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the
Uncanny and Literature;
31
and Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny.
32
The imbrication of these
categories in critical discourses is also evidenced by the inclusion of the terms “ghosts” and
“secret” in Nicholas Royal and Andrew Bennet’s second edition to Introduction to Literature,

29
Derrida, Specters of Marx.
30
Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montréal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2001).
31
Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, 2001 edition (Houndmills, UK; New
York: Palgrave, 2001).
32
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2003).
14

Criticism and Theory in 1999;
33
David Punter’s article on “Spectral Criticism” in Introducing
Criticism in the 21
st
Century in 2002;
34
and the publication of Peter Buse and Andrew Stott’s
compendium, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, London in 1999.
3536

While telepathy is considerably less addressed in contemporary literature studies, and
almost not at all in media studies, there are some notable exceptions. Among them are Nicholas
Royle, who develops a critical concept of telepathy for addressing the history of literary criticism
in Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind;
37
Bishnupriya Ghosh, whose essay
“The Colonial Postcard: The Spectral/Telepathic Mode in Conan Doyle and Kipling” addresses
a “seeping” of native knowledge into colonial literature;
38
and Elissa Marder’s essay, “Mourning,
Magic and Telepathy,” which reconsiders the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to
position telepathy as “an encounter with an uncanny foreign body that forever remains
inaccessible” in psychoanalysis and deconstruction.
39

A concurrent, overlapping vein of literary scholarship traces the importance of popular
Victorian spiritualism for the production of modernism—a modernism that is both literary and
has larger implication for the production of global politics. As Stephen Ross describes it,
Victorian spiritualism saturated discourse of this period such that, regardless of an individual’s
belief or credulity in occult practices, “the artists and thinkers we now call modernists grew up in

33
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 5th edition (Milton Park, UK; New
York: Routledge, 2016).
34
David Punter, “Spectral Criticism,” in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2002), 256.
35
P. Buse and A. Stott, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999),
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812.
36
For this overview I drew on Postlethwaite, Making It Whole, xvii.
37
Royle, Telepathy and Literature.
38
Bishnupriya Ghosh, “The Colonial Postcard: The Spectral/Telepathic Mode in Conan Doyle and Kipling,” Victorian Literature
and Culture 37, no. 2 (2009): 335–57, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150309090226.
39
Elissa Marder, “Mourning, Magic and Telepathy,” The Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 2 (2008 2008): 194,
https://doi.org/10.3366/E030514980800028X.
15

this milieu and were inevitably shaped by it.”
40
“Even as modernists mock spiritualism's
ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses” says Helen Sword in her 2002
Ghostwriting Modernism, “…they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its
blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving
tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message).”
41
Perhaps not
surprisingly, all of the above avenues share an interest in both literature and teletechnologies.

Magic and Media
Following Derrida’s writings on telepathy, Nicholas Royal has reframed the idea of the
“omniscient narrator” in narrative fiction as a “telepathic narrator.” Far from the singular, all-
knowing, godlike figure omniscience implies, the narrator—cast as telepathic—is understood as
emplaced, relational, and multiple: flittering from one interiority to another. Rather than
modeling rational authority, the telepathic narrator models an irrational, almost magical
production of knowledge. Taking a cue from Royle’s observation that what comes to be recorded
as rational and authoritative is co-constitutive with an ignored, or even repressed and haunting
telepathy, this dissertation reimagines the genealogy of media by recentering authority through
the figure of telepathy.
Drawing on literary and cinema studies, media theory and philosophy, Magic and Media
makes a historical and philosophical argument for understanding telepathy as a necessary
concept for media studies. I demonstrate that literature and film made between WWI and WWII
in the Americas and Germany develop new fantasies and anxieties of an expanding media

40
Stephen Ross, “‘The Nigger of the’ ‘Narcissus’ ‘and Modernist Haunting,’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 2 (2011):
268.
41
Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 2002, 8.
16

landscape and bind media to theories of gender, power, and subjectivity. I unearth a series of
binary engenderings in the historical production of the very concept of media. The relationship
between gender and media is flexible, yet the seemingly magical, irrational, environmental, and
non-individualistic aspects of media are consistently feminized and constructed as counter to
authority, propriety, and logos. This gendered structure of mediation reaches a crisis-point in the
mid-19
th
century when the word telepathy is coined. This crisis coincides with the construction
of new technological ecologies, especially advances in print and other mass media, and is the
starting point of Roger Luckhurst’s seminal investigation of The Invention of Telepathy.
Expanding the conversation to a broader range of metaphorical, theoretical, and feminine-
associated practices, I argue that early 20
th
century literature and cinema use telepathy to both
imagine and challenge the incompatibility of the concepts of femininity and authority in the
construction of what we call media today.
Chapter 1, “Media Studies’ Forgotten Figure: Prophecy in Classical Greece,” positions
the figure of the ancient Greek prophet as a precursor to the modern concept of telepathy. We
often forget that Socrates’ famous division between logos and writing, in Phaedrus, is modeled
on a division within the figure of the prophet (mantis), between “inspired” and “technological.”
As inspired, the prophet acts as a direct channel or medium for truth delivered by the gods; but as
a reader of signs, the prophet also participates in a technology (mantike techne). The implicitly
feminized character of the prophet as a foundation for truth is problematic for Aristotle, who
argues that if inspired prophecies are channeled from the gods, they should be delivered to those
closest to the gods—to the philosophers. For Aristotle, prophecy is instead associated with a kind
of mental vacancy, thereby reversing Plato’s assertion that divine inspiration is the location of
17

philosophy. A now naturalized concept of prophecy, very close to telepathy, thus comes to stand
for the very limit of philosophy—the medium as the body incapable of logos.
Chapter 2, “Psychic Makers: Telepathy, Femininity and Modern Literature,” considers
the ways that telepathy is linked to notions of gender difference in modern discourse. Jill
Galvan’s book, The Sympathetic Medium, shows that Victorians linked both spiritual and
technological modes of communication to women and femininity. As telegraphers, stenographer-
typists, typewriters and telephone operators, women were recruited for new jobs in expanding
media networks, where they served as passive go-betweens connecting male subjects to one
another. Simultaneously, the new concept of the psychic medium used women’s bodies as a
means for spiritual connection across any distance. Beyond Galvan’s proposition, I argue that,
although common gender stereotypes are present in the feminization of media, the result is not
simply a repositioning of media as the passive “other” of Man. Instead, I show that two authors,
Rebecca West and the Puerto Rican born anarchist Luisa Capetillo, use telepathy as a meta-
reflection on technological media by articulating forms of spiritual mediumship that blur the
boundary between self and other, living and dead, and male and female. This chapter also
contributes to telepathy studies by recuperating a feminist impulse in the term’s critical force.
Chapter 3, “Mass Media’s Other Remainder: Telepathy and Weimar Cinema,” focuses on
early 20
th
century politics and Weimar cinema. Unlike Galvan’s examples of passive media,
these films offer images of media as a psychic invasion. Robert Wiene’s expressionist film, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, envisions telepathic powers as scenes of paranoia and domination. But
these films also formally assert an insidious telepathic affect. Distinct from literature or still
photography, cinematic elements like camera movement, pacing, speed, and music touch the
viewer in new and invisible ways. It is this literal tele-pathic power of cinema to move the
18

viewer at a distance that led both Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin to identify cinema’s
unique capacity to mobilize the masses, foundational for the populist political movements they
witnessed. Rereading Siegfried Krakauer’s essay on the film through the lens of Sigmund
Freud’s writing on telepathy, this chapter asks what is gained and lost through the affective and
telepathic features of cinema for Weimar directors and the theories they conjure. I conclude that
a syphoning away of the feminized features of mediation from the concept of mass media is the
requisite structural condition for an articulation of cinema’s telepathy as a fascist invasion.
19

CHAPTER ONE Media Studies’ Forgotten Figure: Prophecy in Classical Greece

Séance 1—Cassandra, the Feminine Prophet
The Greek mythological figure of Cassandra is the earliest known example of a female
prophet
42
and therefore perhaps also the first recorded example of a feminine “medium” in the
“Western” cannon. The daughter of Priam, last king of Troy, Cassandra would have been alive
around the second half of the 12
th
century BCE. She was described by Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus,
and Euripides among others. Though her story varies in different depictions, Cassandra is often
said to have been gifted prophetic abilities by the god Apollo but, rejecting his advances, was
cursed to never be believed or understood until too late. In the scene below from Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon, Cassandra predicts the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytamestra.
Chorus Leader: What man is it who moves the beastly thing to be?
Cassandra: What man? You did mistake my divination then.
Chorus Leader: It may be; I could not follow through the schemer’s plan.
Cassandra: Yet I know Greek; I think far too well.
43

While the Chorus understands that there is a plot to murder Agamemnon, they do not understand
who is involved in the plot. In asking “what man,” they show that they do not know the identity
of the prophesized killer.
When Cassandra is first introduced, the other characters describe her as
incomprehensible, animal-like, angry, and “in the passion of…wild thoughts.”
44
Agamemnon
tells the story of Cassandra’s time in Greece as a captive from Troy and brought to Greece as a
slave. Emily Pillinger writes about Cassandra’s various appearances in Greek and Roman

42
Jorge Guillermo, Sibyls: Prophecy and Power in the Ancient World (New York: Overlook, 2013), 67.
43
Aeschylus, Aeschylus II: The Oresteia, ed. David Grene et al., 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1251–54.
44
Aeschylus, 1064.
20

literature as a story that “tells of repeated marginalization in every respect: sexual, social,
cultural and linguistic.” As a woman, a slave, and a foreigner and a non-native speaker of Greek,
Cassandra sits at an intersection of structural disenfranchisement. Cassandra’s is the story of a
true prophet who is unable to translate her knowledge into language. By saying (and repeating)
“Yet I know Greek,” her character points to the potential linguistic disruption of translation, but
simultaneously emphasizes with “I think far too well” that it is not her Greek that prevents her
from being understood.
It is a recurring theme in Greek tragedy that prophecies, while truly stated, fail to be
recognized or accepted by the tragic heroes of the story. But if Cassandra speaks Greek and
knows the truth, why can’t she communicate it to others?
Cassandra, having promised herself to Apollo, breaks her word. While she still possesses
the gift of prophecy, something in Cassandra’s own use of words breaks down. In some versions
of her story, Cassandra is depicted as speaking glossolalia—sounds without any meaning—but in
Agamemnon her Greek is clear enough to be understood by the audience yet she seen as rambling
or mad by the other characters. Although she accurately predicts the fall of Troy and the murder
of Agamemnon, she is cursed by Apollo to never be believed or comprehended.
Beyond the narrative explanation of the story, problems with language, clarity, and
authority are frequently associated with the concept of the prophet in Greek and Roman writing.
Important evidence of this comes in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, where Socrates makes an
etymological association between the word for prophet (mantis) and madness (mania). Mantis
also comes from the word maínomai (μαίνομαι), which means “I am mad, raving, out of my
21

mind” but also “I am mad, angry, I rage.”
45
Cassandra speaks Greek in Agamemnon and yet a
logical meaning never emerges for the addressee. Clytamestra dismisses Cassandra as a “in the
passion of her own wild thoughts,”
46
but even the Chorus who believes what she says, “can make
nothing of these prophecies”
47
and understands her to be out of her mind or “possessed”
48
while
offering prophecies. These moments are marked by Cassandra’s shift into lyrical song and
iambic trimeters.
49
Cassandra’s character shifts between clear and cryptic speech patterns, and
between spoken and musical “wild lyric”
50
of inspired possession. Cassandra in her turn rages at
Apollo for the madness imposed on her by others. Her structural status, furthermore, is doubled
in her position as a woman, a slave, and a foreigner in Agamemnon. Cassandra’s mediumship
comes at the cost of omission from the polis, from reason, and from logos by her status in society
as a woman and a slave and finally by her cursed relationship to language. Though she speaks
Greek “far too well” Cassandra’s character constantly fails to produce logos—a message that is
received by others as both speech and logic. Although Cassandra knows the truth, her capacity
for language seems to interrupt, rather than produce, prophecy.
Cassandra models a conflict in the feminized concept of mediumship. Although male
prophets also exist in the Greek and Roman mythology (most notably there is Tiresias who,
perhaps not coincidentally, lived some of his life as a woman according to Ovid’s
Metamorphosis) in various ways prophecy is closely linked to cultural marginalization and
especially to femininity. While Cassandra’s prophecy is misunderstood, ignored, or not believed

45
“Μαίνομαι,” Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, accessed May 17, 2023,
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=mai/nomai.
46
Aeschylus, Aeschylus II, 1064.
47
Aeschylus, 1105.
48
Aeschylus, p. 1140.
49
Michael Attyah Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007),
50, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp4k4.
50
Aeschylus, Aeschylus II, 1143.
22

to the detriment of tragic heroes in tragic plays, Cassandra stands out for her inability to use
language properly to convey her meaning (again, despite her Greek). While her body is open,
acting as a conduit of divine truth and knowledge, something falters at the level of logos.
Associated with musicality, poetic speech, and feeling over reason, her character signifies a
tension in the figure of the prophet between their humanity and their role as a medium or carrier
of divine knowledge.
This failure of logos is a theme that, I argue, follows various figures of feminine
mediumship from the ancient world to the technological landscape of the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries
where the word telepathy emerges for the first time. Although a “prophet” and not a telepath,
Cassandra may serve as a model for a particular modern concept of media that centers around
women’s bodies and emerges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like the modern psychic
medium, she is a channel for the knowledge and authority of another, and relays messages across
normally impossible boundaries, in this case between the human and immortal realms. This
concept, which has a unique character in the years following WWI as part of the spiritualist
movement and the project of psychical research as a conduit to that which was lost in the “Great
War,” is central to this dissertation. My point is not to collapse the difference between telepathy,
feminine mediumship, and ancient prophecy, but rather to show the patterns that connect and
differentiate these concepts in the history of understanding the concept of mediation. These
patterns or themes are represented in literature, philosophy, popular culture and have effects in
the material lives of people within those cultures.

23

Prophecy as a Precursor to Telepathy
The ancient Greek and Roman concept of prophecy shares, in more or less obvious ways,
many of the formal features of the modern concept of telepathy. For one thing, prophecy was
largely understood as a form of possession rather than a kind of fortune telling. Although it is
common to think of prophecy as the act of predicting the future,
51
the term referred to a
specialized and rare kind of knowledge given to mortals by the gods regarding the past, present,
or future. The English word “prophet” comes from the Greek prophēteia and Latin prophetia,
derived from prophēmi, meaning “to speak before or for someone or something.”
52
“Before,” in
the sense of “prior to” articulates a preemptive pronouncement, while “speaking for” implies a
pronouncement in place of someone or something absent. Like telepathy, prophecy linked worlds
and voices that were otherwise separate: prophecy links the divine world of the gods with the
world of the mortals. I evoke the figure of the prophet at the onset of this text to suggest it is a
precursor to the modern psychic medium and that it shares many tropes with telepathy. Some of
the investments are broadly cultural and some are located in specific texts relevant to the field of
media studies. For instance, Plato links prophecy to the revelation of truth as the work of
philosophy as well as to a troubling ambivalence in the technological mediation of writing in the
Pheadrus.
Unlike telepathy, prophecy is embedded in the religious, political and primary social
institutions of its time. While a diverse range of activities falls under the rubric of “prophecy” in

51
The ancients may have been particularly interested in understanding prophecies about the future, and therefore in the
possibility of changing fate, but the Greek concept of prophecy refers to knowledge regarding not just the future, but also the past
and present. For more see Sabina Mazzoldi, “Chiaroveggenza e Telepatia Nelle Fonti Greche e Latine,” Quaderni Urbinati Di
Cultura Classica 71, no. 2 (2002): 113, https://doi.org/10.2307/20546734..
52
Marion Leathers Kuntz, “Prophecy,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 5 (Detroit,
MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 1929, https://link-gale-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/apps/doc/CX3424300641/GPS?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=6f91d669.
24

ancient Greece and Rome, prophets were consulted for military, political and personal decision-
making and prophets sat in the major religious centers. The centrality of prophecy in Greek and
Roman life was such that language to describe prophets was prolific, but by far the most
common word in Greek was mantis (μαντις).
53
Prophecy was central enough to ancient Greek
life that in a list made by Homer of community workers (demioergoi—demos, meaning village),
mantikē made the list along with doctors, carpenters, and inspired singers. Psychic mediums and
telepaths, while seriously investigated by governments and academic institutions, sit primarily
outside of the state and established religious institutions as part of a spiritualist turn in the 19
th

century.
On the other hand, the concept of telepathy is tied to scientific and technological
discourses of the 19
th
century and should also be seen within this context as an attempt to
wrangle a particular kind of metaphysical intuition into rationalist terms. Aristotle’s writing on
prophecy in sleep evokes other tropes for the psychic medium and for telepathy while illustrating
the way in which a naturalist philosophy relates to the metaphysics of prophecy as a form of
immediate and pathic or sensuous receptivity. By connecting the concept of prophecy to the
modern concept of telepathy, I want to show that both spiritual and rationalist discourses have
long been complicating our ways of understanding media and mediation. As in the modern
concept of the psychic medium, we find the prophet introduces the question of the human body
into the question of media as a carrier of meaning form one realm to another. The human body

53
The meaning of these various terms differs across geographic, temporal and linguistic contexts that fall under the very general
rubric of “the ancients.” Clear, specific meanings for each term are complicated by our temporal distance from the extant source
text historians rely on to understand these terms, as well as diverse local and historical usage. For more on the diverse meanings
and language of Greek prophecy, see Flower. Flower uses the word “Seer” as a generic term for various forms of prophet,
especially mantis. For more on Latin terms, see Guillermo. Homer, for instance, seemed to have used the term theopropos,
thuoskoos, and mantis more or less as synonyms (See Flower, 23). Some words spoke to a prophet’s reliability or status while
others associated a person with a particular institution, cult, or location. The infamous character of Cassandra is referred to as a
“beggar priestess” in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon by a chorus that finds her dialogue unbelievable, for instance; while the Roman
word sybil referred to women only, and was tied to particular oracular locations.
25

foregrounds problems of language for media by prompting the question of what role the
individual plays in such transmissions. Are media active, authorial entities or are they passive
and transparent?
Plato explores prophecy as a form of madness, in which the prophet is “out of their
minds.” While he links the madness of prophecy to the revelation of truth as a material body, I
argue that the prophet always threatens interference in or acts as a barrier to direct
communication of this truth. This leaves prophecy under suspicion—a suspicion that is taken up
by Aristotle in a different context. I argue that the prophet/medium does not have access to self-
knowledge or understanding, which is the key to philosophy for Plato. Any form of authorship,
therefore, is barred from prophecy and she acts instead as a channel for the knowledge and
understanding of others. This structure of media is carried over into the modern world. The
medium is, in fact, a threat to authorship or expression of self-knowledge.

Femininity and Prophecy
As with the modern versions of psychic mediums, femininity and prophecy seem to have
shared a profound bond in the ancient world by supporting the ideal of a vacant medium through
which the gods would speak. The real-life prophetess at Delphi, as Peter Struck emphasizes, was
both frail and illiterate: “From all corners of the ancient Mediterranean, people that had run up
against the limits of their own knowledge brought their remaining questions to a frail, illiterate
woman housed in a massive stone temple at Delphi.”
54
The qualities of fragility, illiteracy, and
femininity—perhaps ironically—signified rather than undermined her authority. In Plato’s

54
Peter T. Struck, Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity (Princeton; Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2016), 1.
26

parlance, she is an inspired prophet, delivering messages from the gods by acting as a channel or
conduit. Her illiteracy and lack of education suggested that her pronouncements were not
informed by mortal knowledge or authoritative will. Deliberate action, or deliberative thought on
her part would be an interference, rather than an asset to the faculty of inspired prophecy.
Jorge Guillermo sketches the social role of women from pre-Celtic society to prophetic
Druidesses in ancient Gaul in association with wisdom, arguing that “women might have been
leading their communities in worship for a period of time lasting as long as five or perhaps even
six thousand years before the Roman occupation of Gaul would finally put an end to this
practice.”
55
The patriarchal traditions of the Christian church have been comparatively short-
lived. Numerous figures of Ge, Gaia, or other variants of this Ur-mother date back to 30,000
BCE and Greek tradition describes the first Greek oracles as women ministrants of this central
deity. Prophets, whose wisdom and authority were widely recognized also occupied the Greek
and Roman world such as the Cumaean or Delphic Sibyls. The Greek word for wisdom, sophia,
is feminine in both Hebrew and Greek, a gendering that is retained in both the Old and New
Testaments. Noting that the transcription practices of these texts would have made it easy to alter
the gender of this concept, Guillermo suggests that prophecy and wisdom were linked terms that
held a naturalized connection both to each other and to femininity throughout the ancient
world.
56
In this capacity, like Cassandra and the prophetess at Delphi, women were placed as go-
betweens that connected the known world with that of the divine.
In this way, Cassandra can be read as a predecessor to the spiritual medium or telepath
whose social function is, in some sense, to disappear completely as a transparent carrier; yet as a

55
Guillermo, Sibyls, 57–65.
56
Guillermo, 71.
27

material form, human body, or linguistic performance, she always seems to threaten the
conceptually prioritized transparency of the medium. As with later, modern concepts of psychic
mediation of the 19th and 20
th
centuries, the Greek and Roman association with women places
prophecy in a strange relation to authority. On the one hand, inspired prophecy, as the most
direct form of communication with the gods, tied prophecy to feminine characteristics of
receptive, penetrable, and vessel-like bodies, with submissive sensitive minds. On the other
hand, fragility, domesticity, and what Pillinger calls a “marked relationship to speech language,
which includes a propensity for trickery,”
57
articulate a skepticism associated with both feminine
understanding and speech.
Beyond the broad associations of prophecy, the figure of Cassandra points to a paradox in
mediation that is similar to that of telepathy: that language and logic are not just “carriers” of
meaning from one location to another, but logos is also something that “gets in the way” or
stands between the message and the meaning—logos is a medium. Certainly, Cassandra herself
is a “medium:” she is not the source of knowledge or wisdom, but rather is a kind of channel of
divine wisdom to the mortal world. While Cassandra’s prophecy is a gift of knowledge that
would otherwise be unknowable, Cassandra’s body as the origin of speech is also in the way.
Telepathy offers a version of this same paradox, emphasizing that tele-distance is the
precondition for touch.
As Pillinger points out, Cassandra is often in the margin rather than the center of the story.
“Her rambling narratives, wandering as they do backwards and forwards through time and space,
are the product of a prophet who is always displaced....”
58
This narrative marginalization of the

57
Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), 13, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564007.
58
Pillinger, 2.
28

prophet is also seen in the writing discussed in philosophical discourses. This is true of the
writing by Plato and Aristotle discussed later, almost as if it is a doubling of the role of the
medium itself: the prophet creates a necessary context for a philosophical discourse but is then—
though unable to be made invisible—displaced or deferred.

The Body as Medium: Inspired vs. Technical Prophecy
In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound Prometheus is said to have brought mantikē technē to
the Greeks
59
in the form of various crafts for interpreting signs. Prometheus states:
I set in order the many ways of the art of divination, and I first of all distinguished
from dreams the things that are necessary to come about during working hours,
and I explained to the mortals chance utterances that are difficult to interpret and
signs that one encounters on the road, and I defined the flight of crooked-taloned
birds, which ones are favorable and which sinister, and the habitat that each one
possesses, and what enmities and affections and gatherings they have in relation
to each other; and I defined the smoothness of entrails, the color of bile that is
pleasing to the gods, and the many colored symmetry of the lobe. Having burned
thigh bones and the long chine wrapped in fat, I set mortals on the road of a skill
difficult to judge, and I opened the eyes of fiery signs that were previously
covered with cataract.
60

Prometheus is taking credit for forms of divination that involve sign reading such as dream
interpretation, augury (reading the patterns of bird’s flight patterns) and examining the entrails of
sacrificed animals. These were all common prophetic practices throughout the Greek and Roman
empires. Michael Attia Flower notes in The Seer in Ancient Greece that “possession” is missing
from this list above as “it was not perceived as being…a techne in the same sense that these other
forms of divination were.”
61
These kinds of technical or artificial divination skills, unlike

59
Historically, most matikē technē probably came to Greece from the Near East, where much more sophisticated techniques of
reading signs and prophecy were practiced (Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, 24.). This may help to explain the devaluation of
such technē in Plato as a form of ethnic aversion.
60
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. Quoted in Flower, 90–91.
61
Flower, 21. Flower uses the term “mediumistic possession” here.
29

possession, involve a certain amount of education as well as the work of reading, or
interpretation of various signs. Furthermore, mantikē technē is a willful practice that one engages
in to gain insight.
Plato famously articulated a distinction in the concept of prophecy between “inspired
prophecy”—a moment of divine inspiration in which a god speaks through the mortal; and the
technical prophecy, or mantikē technē —forms of prophecy that involved a particular craft or
knowledge and deliberate, willful effort on the part of the individual.
62
While Plato offers the
clearest extant texts on the subject, scholars tend to agree that this division is both a reflection of
larger social beliefs, as illustrated in Prometheus Bound, and an authoritative argument by Plato
that shaped the history of thought on the concept of prophecy.
Against the concept of mantikē technē, Plato says that “inspired prophecy” does not
involve any form of logic, knowledge, skill or even will. Flower calls this kind of prophecy
“possession” and other scholars also call it “mediumistic prophecy” because it requires an
abdication of the will and intellect by the mortal body used by the gods to transmit the message.
The wholly passive quality of this form of possessed prophecy was especially associated with
femininity
63
and, as a rule, in ancient Greece inspired mediums were women with some
exceptions.
64
This prophet is not one who knows the past, present, or future, but one through
whom a message or knowledge is passed. For this reason, inspired prophecy is linked by Plato
with “madness”—which will be discussed more later. Plato considers this form of prophecy the

62
In the term mantikē technē, the technical aspect is emphasized. Another term, oionistic, which is sometimes used by Plato,
emphasizes the role of reasoning, intelligence, and learning. While the precise terms shift, scholars agree that this general
distinction is important to both Plato and Greek society generally for understanding the concept of prophecy as well as
subsequent scholarship on the ancient concept. See Flower, 23.
63
Paul Andrew Roth, “Mantis: The Nature, Function and Status of A Greek Prophetic Type” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,
1982), 46–49, https://search.proquest.com/docview/303220865?pq-origsite=primo..
64
There were exceptions to the rule that women were possessed prophets. For example the mythological character Tiresus.
Historical literature also discusses male prophets of Apollo at Clarish and at the Theban scantuary of Apollo Ptous (Harodotus
8.135). Cited in Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, 89.
30

most authoritative because the knowledge is derived directly from, and through the will of, the
gods. The individual acting as an absent vessel is also out of their mind, or carried away from
themselves.
In different ways, both kinds of prophecy model forms of mediacy. The possessed
prophet models the ideal of medial transparency—the prophet disappears as the message is
carried through the body, absent of will or interpretive power. This is a medium that, empty of
agency or meaning itself, carries a message without intervening. The technical prophet, like the
inspired prophet, is a model for mediation, but in an oppositional sense: the technicity
emphasizes the materiality of mediation. Mantikē technē involves signs and sign reading, but
also the interpretive work that makes such signs legible.
These two components of prophecy are typically articulated as oppositional: either
prophecy is a natural faculty, gifted from the gods to a person who is taken over—as a vessel,
and inspired to speak on their behalf without the necessity of individual will; or divination is a
willful, skilled process that involves an intellectual process of interpretation, perhaps even a kind
of authorship. However, in the Platonic dialogues in which this distinction emerges, and which
are cited as the main source for the distinction between technical and inspired prophecy, the
distinction is swiftly undermined as we will see.
The Platonic bifurcation between “possessed” and “technical” prophecy helps articulate a
conceptual contradiction between agency and passivity also found in the modern concept of
telepathy. As Flower notes however, any practical act of divination requires both an inspired and
technical operation. For both the telepath and the prophet, the bodies of these two apparently
distinct forms of mediation cannot be separated. While divine inspiration may be the source of
creativity, knowledge or wisdom for the prophet, speaking these prophecies aloud constantly
31

confronts the problem of individual authority or interpretation. As both a human body and a type
of medium, the question of interference always remains close to the surface in Plato and
Aristotle’s writings on prophecy.
Through the figure of the prophet, and especially in the Phaedrus, Plato makes an explicit
distinction between an ideal, transparent medium, on the one hand, and authorship and the
production of knowledge, on the other. This distinction recurs in theories—both popular and
academic—of media to the present day. In the Phaedrus, Socrates establishes an image of
prophecy as a form of possession whereby a god speaks directly through the prophet’s body.
This ideal form of prophecy is contrasted with forms of prophecy that undermine immediacy like
sign-reading, interested individual will, and also the work of interpreting prophecies into clear
language. The later forms of prophecy are considered crafts or skills that involve education,
training, or historical knowledge and are termed mantikē technē. Mantikē technē include external
tools, but also individual, subjective faculties that alter the immediacy of transmission.
While drawing on other Platonic texts and other Greek literature to help support my
reading of the Phaedrus, I argue that the conflict between divine immediacy and mantikē technē
creates a paradox for the concept of authorship that establishes a legacy for the technological
phamakon discussed in this dialog. Throughout the Phaedrus the spiritual concept of direct
immediacy is troubled by the interference of the body of the medium—first as the prophet’s
body and then in the materiality of writing at the end of the dialogue. The figure of the prophet—
used as an example of both the ideal, transparent medium and the technological, interfering
medium – illustrates the indissociability between these two ideas or concepts of mediation by
enacting both simultaneously.
32

Furthermore, because both the prophet and the modern psychic are largely constructed as
feminine figures, Plato’s argument for the work of authorship and the production of truth though
self-knowledge is denied to the prophet. I argue that the history of the investments in the prophet
and her body in the historical conceptualization of the concept of media creates a new conflict in
the idea of feminine authorship in the 19
th
century.
Aristotle shows the way in which the figure of the prophet is brought into rationalist
discourses in his short essay “On Prophecy and Sleep.” Not only do we get a sense of some
familiar tropes around sleep, dreams, pathos, and sensitivity, but we also see an articulation of
telepathy itself as a terrestrial, non-spiritual concept. This naturalistic understanding of prophecy
ushers telepathy into a rationalist framework, especially through Hippocratic theory, as invisible
movement that links things at seemingly impossible distances and even enables the predictions
of future events.
Beyond contemporary discourses in media studies on the specific dialogue of the
Phaedrus, the figure of the prophet in ancient Greece acts as a foundational source in the history
of conceptualizing a particular kind of unexplained or unexplainable action or feeling at a
distance that functions outside of the structural logic of cause and effect. This is especially clear
with Aristotle, who is often cited as articulating the first theory of telepathy. Something like
telepathy emerges in many cultural and geographic contexts, however, so I do not intend on
drawing a straight line from Aristotle to the modern invention of telepathy in the 19
th
century.
Nevertheless, Aristotle is an important textual source for the aesthetic formation of the West, and
for the project of modernity as it emerged in Europe.
This chapter shows that the concept of telepathy is embedded in the rationalist discourses
of medicine, science and philosophy as early as classical Greece. Tracing the figure of the
33

prophet, we can find tropes that link the ancient concept of prophecy to the modern concept of
the psychic medium and telepathy itself. To understand the “primal scene” of media innovation
in Western thought” we need to give attention to the figure of the prophet in these texts. Doing
this will help us understand the modern concept of telepathy in relation to media as a pseudo-
materialist or rationalist theory left out of contemporary media studies discourses.

Séance 2—Plato’s Phaedrus: “The Primal Scene of Media Invention”
Plato’s Phaedrus, as a keystone text in Media Studies, is an ideal starting point for
considering the role of prophecy in the concept of media, invigorated with the emergence of
mass syndication media networks in the 19
th
century discussed in this dissertation. In the
compendium Critical Terms for Media Studies, Mark B. N. Hansen notes that many critics
consider the Phaedrus “the primal scene of media innovation in Western thought.”
65
This
argument is based on the ending of the dialogue, which contemplates the new technology of
writing, describing it as a “language of the other” and associates writing with death as a trace or
remainder of living language or logos. The Phaedrus describes a form of new media innovation
that is structured like a pharmakon: both a cure and a poison.
The argument for the Phaedrus as a “primal scene of media innovation” is based on a
passage near the end of the dialogue when Socrates questions the appropriate use of writing.
Writing here is made distinct from speech, or logos and is described as a technological invention.
Socrates asks what “makes writing good, and what inept?”
66
To answer the question, he evokes a

65
Mark B. N. Hansen, “New Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 173.
66
Plato, “Phaedrus,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1997), l. 274b.
34

story of the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt—considered by contemporary scholars to be a
reworking by the Phaedrus of Egyptian and Greek mythology. In Socrates’ telling, the bird-god
Theuth brings his inventions, or technē, to the King of Egypt—the divinity Thamus. When he
shows Thamus the art of writing he says: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will
make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for
memory and for wisdom.”
67
Theuth puts forward a media invention—writing—as a “potion” or
pharmakon for memory and wisdom. Thamus responds:
In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it: they
will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing,
which is external and depends of signs that belong to others, instead of trying to
remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a
potion for remembering but for reminding; you provide your students with the
appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.

For Thamus, the technē of writing is still a “potion” or pharmakon but one that is poisonous
rather than beneficial. The “external” marks that the new medium of writing signifies articulates
a repeated ambivalence in the discourse of media and media innovation. The technology of
writing is described as both an aid for memory, and a poison to memory that will ‘provide…the
appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.” By externalizing aspects of cognition and memory,
writing offers a kind of loss and a gain, consolidated in the word pharmakon.
The two types of prophecy—inspired and mantikē technē –structurally double both
speech and writing in the Phaedrus. However, because writing is understood in this myth as an
externalization of the human faculties of memory and speech, it is not a one-to-one relation.
Prophecy in both forms take place in and through the body. Socrates describes the dangers of
writing as a threat to self-sufficiency when one “put[s] their trust in writing, which is external

67
Plato, l. 274b.
35

and depends on signs that belong to others instead of trying to remember from the inside,
completely on their own.”
68
As an “image of a word,” for Socrates, writing produces distance
between truth and understanding, which is necessarily accessed “from the inside.” The external
system of signs leaves the text open to misinterpretation. Like a fatherless child it “roams about
everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding and those who have no business
with it.”
69

Both physical distance and a kind of indifference of the medium of “dead speech” that
“cannot defend itself” threaten the quality of truth and the authorial intent of the text. Logos has
a better chance of reaching the other as a dialogic, living interaction. Conceivably, the evident
visual and material nature of writing—like the human body of the prophet—evokes anxiety
about a displacement of the self that is resolved in the production of the concept of the
supplement and of media as other than the self. As Derrida has explored, the logic of the
supplement developed here produces a division between one’s “own” self and the “signs that
belong to others.” Yet the concept of the “pharmakon” acts in this story as both a remedy and a
poison describing an ambivalence in the concept of writing, which—rather than rejected
outright—needs to be used properly and with proper authority according to Socrates.
Prophecy takes place through the human body, though not through the faculties of
memory or logos. Mantikē technē, a form of prophecy, also acts as a supplement to inspired
prophecy. Because both the inspired and technical aspects of prophecy are in the body, there is a
different kind of ambivalence in the image of the prophet, in which the technical and divine
functions are indissociable. The question of proper authority is thus problematized by the body

68
Plato, 275a.
69
Plato, l. 275e.
36

of the prophet as a medium. At the same time, the figure of the prophet directs the value of logos,
understood as divine wisdom. The prophet is the paradigmatic site of divine wisdom. It is almost
as if built into this articulation of logos is the paradox of the prophet’s body as an association not
just of mantikē and mania but, more surprisingly, of logos and mania.

The Prophet in Modern Readings
The first reference to prophecy in the Phaedrus comes early in the dialogue with the
evocation of the Oracular location at Delphi. The Phaedrus opens with Socrates accompanying
Phaedrus on a walk in the country to hear a speech by the speech-writer Lysias. Before they
begin discussing Lysias’ speech, however, Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes a local myth
that Boreas—a personification of the north wind—carried away Orithuia—daughter of the
Athenian king Erechtheus—while she was playing with the Nymphs along the banks of the Ilisus
River. Socrates responds that it would not be out of place for him to reject such myths “as our
intellectuals do” but he goes on to say:
Anyone who does not believe in them [legends or myths], who wants to explain
them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity,
will need a great deal of time. But I have not time for such things; and the reason,
my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know
myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have
understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is
generally believed…
70

In Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus in Dissemination he notes that Socrates’s dismissal of myth
is “not in order to reject them absolutely, but, on the one hand, not bothering them, leaving them
alone, making room for them, in order to free them from the heavy serious naiveté of the
scientific ‘rationalists’ and on the other, not bothering with them, in order to free oneself for the

70
Plato, ll. 229e–230a.
37

relation with oneself and the pursuit of self-knowledge” (Derrida 67-8). Mythology signifies a
kind of institutional and historical demand—they appear to be something one must accept or
reject. But Socrates is neither “concerned” with a rationalist explanation of the myth nor a pious
acceptance of it, and turns instead to “self-knowledge.” Socrates defers to the opinion of others
without defining his own alliance to make room for his own dialogue. Despite apparently “not
concerning” himself with these myths, Derrida argues that myths at the onset of the dialogue are
“sent off”—not as a rejection but as a form of deferral, as myths are again evoked to explicate
and explore the question of writing at the end of the dialogue. Mythology returns as a kind of
authority in the story of Theuth and Thamos to explicate and explore the nature of writing. It is
as if mythology cannot be altogether ignored, but is rather the route to the expression Socrates
calls self-knowledge and the “truth”—in this case, writing.
The same may be said for the figure of the prophet in the Phaedrus. As an institutional
figure in Greek life, the prophet is neither taken to be an expression of the work of philosophy,
nor is it by any means rejected outright. The prophet is not the primary topic of the dialogue—
these are love, rhetoric, writing and, of course, philosophy. But this does not mean that prophecy
is rejected, nor is skepticism toward the prophet the primary orientation offered in this dialogue.
Here, the inscription at the temple of Delphi is actually orienting Socrates away from myth and
to the important work of philosophy, described as self-knowledge—“to know myself.” The
figure of the prophet returns repeatedly in this dialogue, not as a topic of direct concern but as a
guiding metaphor. On the one hand, the prophet instructs self-knowledge, the foundation of
philosophy itself, and the reason for deferral of myth at the onset of the dialogue. On the other
hand, the prophet is not addressed directly in the above quote. As Derrida says “this is anything
but an oracle”—what is offered here is an inscription—a piece of writing where the oracle at
38

Delphi, is housed. The prophet is centrally evoked as a harbinger of wisdom and instruction to
the task of philosophy. At the same time, she is absent and encountered not directly but as a trace
or inscription.
A form of deferral is also at work in the historical readings of this dialogue in relation to
the figure of prophecy. As Derrida has discussed, a particular kind of rationalist discourse
attempts to expunge or expel mythology from the writing of the Phaedrus in modern readings of
the text. In a similar vein, Flower argues that modern scholars have “generally been skeptical of
the role of divination in ancient Greece, and various strategies have evolved aimed at devaluing
its importance.”
71
These strategies include historically inaccurate claims that the status of
divination waned in the classical period with the emergence of Hippocratic medicine or that
political leaders consulted prophets primarily in bad faith as a method of control over their
citizens or armies. These, and similar rationalist and teleological arguments, have been made by
modern scholars that, “fly in the face of work on divination by anthropologists.”
72
Deemphasize
the role of prophecy in Classical Greek and Roman life, a rationalist myth of these cultures have
been claimed as the legacy for “Western” medicine, science, and philosophy. Flower argues, “it
is pretty clear that modern attempts to devalue the importance [of prophecy] are bound up with a
teleological view of the development of religion, that somehow divination is a primitive,
prerational practice that continued to exist alongside more sophisticated belief.”
73

In this way, scholars have been quick to argue that Plato is skeptical of prophecy in his
writings. Yet Socrates, in the next evocation of prophecy, claims prophetic knowledge for
himself. The figure of the prophet, I argue, is the central structuring metaphor in the Phaedrus

71
Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, 12.
72
Flower, xiv.
73
Flower, 13.
39

despite being almost never mentioned in media studies readings of the Phaedrus. In fact,
prophecy is mentioned in the Phaedrus more than in any of Plato’s other texts
74
and is
nonetheless overlooked in the otherwise careful considerations of this text as part of the
genealogy of media studies. I reread the Phaedrus here, along with clarifying sections of other
Platonic dialogues, to understand the role of the concept of prophecy for this “primal scene” in
“Western thought” around the concept of media.
Socrates claims the role of prophet for himself about a third of the way through the
Phaedrus, when the dialogue takes a drastic turn. Phaedrus has delivered Lysias’s speech that
argues that it is better to give one’s attentions to a man that is not in love than one who is, the
argument centering around passion. Socrates praises Lysias’s speech then adds to Lysias’s
arguments. Suddenly, Socrates pauses in front of a riverbed on their walk:
Socrates: My friend, just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar divine sign
came to me which, wherever it occurs, holds me back from something I am about
to do. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave
until I made atonement for some offense against the gods. In effect, you see, I am
a seer [mantis], and though I am not particularly good at it, still—like people who
are just barely able to read and write—I am good enough for my own purposes. I
recognize my offense clearly now. In fact, the soul too, my friend, is itself a sort
of seer…
75

Prophecy is a function of the soul and allows him to see clearly despite a lack of technical
proficiency, “like people who are just barely able to read and write.” Divine Prophecy intervenes
in the dialogue and allows Socrates to recognize that, despite his early praise, both earlier
speeches were horrible, according to Socrates, and he recognizes this through sudden inspiration.
Phaedrus’s speech “was horrible, as horrible as the speech you made me give.”
76
This realization

74
Comparison made using: Plato, “Phaedo,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 49–100. Comparison included the English words prophet, prophecy, diviner, divination, and
soothsayer.
75
Plato, “Phaedrus,” 242a-c.
76
Plato, l. 242d.
40

is possible because Socrates himself, by way of the soul, has the capacity for divine prophecy—
to receive a knowledge from the gods. Plato is unique in arguing that prophecy is a universal
capacity because it is a function of the soul and as such, closer in some ways to divine truth and
wisdom.
77
In the Phaedrus the figure of prophecy is evoked both as a metaphor for divine
wisdom and narratively in the dialogue to bring about truth in Socrates’ speech.
Despite the centrality of the prophet in the Phaedrus, the figure is rarely mentioned in
critical readings of this dialogue. Even less is the figure of the prophet taken up as a kind of
medium relevant to media studies. This could be primarily attributed to a general skepticism in
modern scholarship of the role of prophecy in classical Greek and Roman life as part of a
broader rationalist revision of the history seen as the precursor to enlightenment philosophy, as
described above. It may be useful, however, to consider the concept of the prophet in the
Phaedrus more specifically for its role in construction of the arguments delivered by Socrates for
media. My intervention means to draw the figure of the prophet back into the discourse of this
dialogue for thinking this “primal scene of mediacy.”

Madness and Wisdom
One primary way in which the figure of prophecy is evoked in Plato is as a metaphor in
relation to mania or madness as a potential route to divine wisdom. Socrates’s second speech
highlights mania as a form of divine inspiration, in which a person acts beyond their own
capacities by channeling the knowledge or will of the gods. After ascribing the role of “seer” to
himself, Socrates clarifies:
‘There is no truth to that story’—that when a lover is available you should give
your favors to a man who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of

77
This argument is made most explicitly in Plato’s Timaeus.
41

himself while the lover has lost his head. That would have been fine to say if
madness were bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best things we have come from
madness, when it is given as a gift of the gods.
78

The problem with Lysias’s text and Socrates’s first speech was that they misunderstood the
inherent value of mania. The speech here turns to the productive nature of mania. While the
central themes of the dialogue turn to the possibility for art and poetry to express truth, this is
accomplished, again, through the figure of the prophet as the primary example:
The prophetess of Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona are out of their minds
when they perform the fine work of theirs for all of Greece, either for an
individual person or for a whole city, but they accomplish little or nothing when
they are in control of themselves. We will not mention the Sibyl
79
or the others
[allous] who foretell many things by means of god-inspired prophetic traces and
give sound guidance to many people—that would take too much time for a point
that’s obvious to everyone.
80

To explain mania, Socrates draws on the most famous and authoritative prophets—the prophets
at Delphi and Dondona. The manteis
81
listed here—all women—accomplish very “little or
nothing” on their own. Their great contributions occur when they are “out of their minds.” Plato
goes so far as to say that “the best things we have come from madness, when given as a gift of
the gods.” The prophets are the primary metaphor used for the divine will and wisdom of the
gods. Plato makes the link between prophecy and divine wisdom explicit by describing the
shared linguistic features of madness (manic) and prophecy (mantic):
…here is some evidence worth addition to our case: The people who designed our
language in the old days never thought of madness as something to be ashamed of
or worthy of blame; otherwise they would not have used the word “manic” for the
finest experts of all—the ones who tell the future—thereby weaving insanity into
prophecy. They thought it was wonderful when it came as a gift of the god, and

78
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 244a.
79
The term sybil originated from the name of a particular prophetic priestess but by the time of Plato’s writing was a generic
term.
80
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 244b.
81
Manteis is the plural form of mantis.
42

that’s why they gave its name to prophecy; but nowadays people don’t know the
fine points, so they stick in a ‘t’ and call it ‘mantic.’
82

Socrates is saying that prophecy is essentially a kind of mania and a gift from the gods. Just as
he, himself, has been directed by divine will to the truth of mania in his role as a prophet, mania
turns out to be another word for prophecy as divine will.
Against the association of mantic with mania, or dispossession, Socrates contrasts “the
clear-headed study of the future, which uses birds and other signs.”
83
In other words, mantikē
technē, which Plato argues “was originally called oionoïstic, since it uses reasoning to bring
intelligence (nous) and learning (historia) into human thought; but now modern speakers call it
oiōnistic, putting on airs with their long ‘ō.’” In Theory of the Sign in Classical Antiquity,
Giocanni Manetti explains that Plato’s etymological connection between prophetic sign reading
(oionoistike) and “opinion” (oiesis) is “in order to show that only a very weak, uncertain level of
knowledge may be obtained in this way.”
84
This ties the more neutral terms of intelligence and
learning to a concept closer to conjecture as well as the interpretive work necessary for making
sense of signs. Thus some of the feminine characteristics listed by Pillinger are also tied to
mantikē technē. In reading signs, technical prophecy is open to the fallibility of opinion, poor
reasoning and flawed education. Here the feminine “marked relationship to speech and
language” and other feminine attributes also initiate a concern for truthfulness in opposition to
manic prophecy.
Only after this treatment of prophecy—both as divine possession and as mantikē technē
—does Socrates explicate the more often noted examples of mania, bacchic frenzy, possession of

82
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 244b-c.
83
Plato, l. 244c.
84
Giovanni Manetti and Christine Richardson, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1993), 22.
43

the muses and the accomplishments of poetry and other arts. Socrates argues that “if anyone
comes to the gate of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert
knowledge of the subject without the muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verse
will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.”
85
Through the
metaphor of the prophet we learn that good poetry cannot be the product of “expert knowledge”
or learned skills, but of divine madness. Plato connects the mantic prophet with the mania that
produces “adequate” poetry through divine inspiration that comes at the expense of self-
possession.
Because divine madness is evoked for poetry, this same form of manic dispossession is
also tied to arts that teach history and mythology: it is the “bacchic frenzy of songs and poetry
that glorifies the achievements of the past and teaches them to future generations.”
86
The bacchic
frenzy associated with the god Dionysus is described as a form of mania or mantic possession
that inspires song and poem that act as the conduit for knowledge of the past. At once a form of
repetition, the work of songs and poetry have a mantic quality of knowledge that here is clearly
not a prediction of the future but a form of telling history.
The didactic quality of bacchic retelling of the past for creating a knowledge of history is
even clearer the dialogue the Ion. In Ion Socrates argues that the “rhapsode” –a professional
reciter of the poetry of Homer –is gifted with a similar form of inspiration, attained without
“understating” as the poet himself. Here it is not just poetry, but also a way of discussing poetry
that is a gift of divine possession. Again, the prophet is used as the metaphor for understanding
the work of the rhapsode: “god takes their intellect away…as he does prophets and godly

85

86
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 245a.
44

diviners, so that we who hear should know they are not the ones who speak those verses.”
87
As
he tells Ion, “It is not because you’re a master of knowledge about Homer that you can say what
you say, but because of a divine gift, because you are possessed.”
88
As with the lovers and poets
in Phaedrus, Ion, who recites the poetry of Homer, does not himself have special knowledge or
mastery of mythology. Rather, the gods work through him as a form of divine possession.

Judgement of Self-Presence
In both the Ion and the Phaedrus, the figure of the prophet is used as an illustration to
describe a kind of possession in opposition to individual knowledge or mastery. Yet, can art—
much less history—be produced without oionoistike or sign reading, intellect, or knowledge?
This question is addressed in the dialogue Timaeus, which in contrast to the Ion and the
Phaedrus points to the limits of the manic possession of prophecy at the level of understanding:
The claim that god gave divination as a gift to human folly has good support:
while he is in his right mind no one engages in divination, however divinely
inspired and true it may be, but only when his power of understanding is bound in
sleep or by sickness, or when some possession works a change in him. On the
other hand, it takes a man who has his wits about him to recall and ponder the
pronouncements produced by this state of divination or possession, whether in
sleep or while awake. It takes such a man to thoroughly analyze any and all
visions that are seen, to determine how and for whom they signify some future,
past or present good or evil. But as long as the fit remains on him, the man is
incompetent to render judgement on his own visions and voices.
89

Without having “his wits about him,” without the faculty of judgment, prophecy cannot be
pondered, understood, or applied—much less recalled. Just so, Ion’s knowledge and memory of
Homer is what makes possible divine possession for his reciting of history, and it is through this

87
Plato, “Ion,” l. 534d.
88
Plato, l. 536b.
89
Plato, “Timaeus,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1997), l. 71.
45

work of recitation that the audience comes to have knowledge of the history offered by Homer.
This is why prophecy, according to Timaeus, actually requires interpretation. Divination is a
“gift to human folly” because there is a conflict between divine possession and the ability to do
anything with divine knowledge.
Timaeus argues that the aspect of prophecy that is divine is very difficult to access. He
describes this by explaining that some people who are called diviners (mantikē) are actually not
divinely inspired but are “expositors of utterances of visions.”
Only a man of sound mind may know himself and conduct his own affairs.” This
is the reason why it is a customary practice to appoint interpreters to render
judgement on an inspired divination. These persons are called “diviners” by some
who are entirely ignorant of the fact that they are expositors of utterances of
visions communicated through riddles. Instead of diviners, the correct thing to
call them is “interpreters of things divined.
90

Timaeus suggests a distinction be made between “interpreters of things divined” and “diviners.”
Here, a diviner (mantis) is matched with an interpreter (prophētēs) to bring cohesion to the
scene. And the passage of any act of divination seems to require an encounter with judgment and
interpretation. Without these faculties, divination is “folly” because self-knowledge is only
available to someone who is self-possessed, or “of sound mind.”
Because manic prophecy seems to require a supplement, we might be tempted to see
divine possession as similar to logos, and mantikē technē as similar to writing as these terms are
discussed in the Phaedrus. But what is considered prophecy proper in this quote is a vision. The
expositor has been mislabeled a diviner, apparently, and is not a prophet at all but rather an
interpreter. What sits between the vision and the interpreter is “utterance” or “pronouncements.”
In other words logos, but for the prophet this utterance is “marked” in the form described by

90
Plato, ll. 71e–72b.
46

Pillinger and illustrated by Cassandra by femininity. The utterance of the divine prophet does not
stand on its own but, itself, requires interpretation.
Furthermore, the distinction made by Timaeus and Socrates doesn’t primarily focus on
the individual practitioner, but on the faculties at work. It is not just, as Flower’s notes, that any
“practical” act of divination requires both an inspired and technical operation, but the bodies of
these two apparently distinct forms cannot be separated. Nor can a single act necessarily be
divided clearly into such categories. The Pythia at Delphi—the location of the inscription that
instructed Socrates to work towards self-understanding according to the Phaedrus—was said to
have invented the hexameter, and prophetic utterances were often in the form of poetic meter. So
while there were practical and conceptual divisions between those who interpreted signs and
those who pronounced them, even the most “authoritative” and divinely inspires manteis were
proficient in poetic verse to aid in the work of memory recall, repetition and interpretive work of
the prophētēs.
Madness poses a problem for the concept of knowledge of any form. Returning to the
Phaedrus, self-knowledge is described by the inscription at Delphi and by Socrates as the route
to wisdom. But how can a person be both “out of their mind” and “know themselves”? The
feminine association of the prophet indicates a limit to the wisdom or authority bestowed on the
prophet. Between divine inspiration and the production of logos as didactic and useful is an
expanse that is the medium.

Magnets
So then how does prophecy work, even as a metaphor, for divine inspiration as a path
towards self-knowledge? What would this knowledge look like in a material sense? A clear
47

distinction between inspired and technical prophecy is bridged in Socrates’ explanation of the
work of the rhapsode as a link in a chain, “magnetized” by divine inspiration: one unwitting link
in a chain of communicative acts. Socrates explains to Ion that he is not master of his subject, but
he is rather held, as an iron ring by a magnetized stone:
…it’s a divine power that moves you, as a “magnetic” stone moves iron
rings…This stone not only pulls those rings, if they’re iron, it also puts power in
the rings, so that they in turn can do just what the stone does—pull other rings—
so that there’s sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from
one another.
91

A kind of magnetic action runs from the epic poets who tell the stories of the past to the
rhapsodes who bring poetry to life in the present through their orations. With the prophet again
in the position of primary metaphor, the act of passing down history, mythology, and knowledge
of the past is ascribed a form of divine possession. The rhapsode, reciter and scholar of poetry, is
under the possession of the muses and connects, like a chain, divine wisdom from the gods all
the way down to the spectator. Ion, the rhapsode, is a ring in the middle:
the middle ring is you, the rhapsode or actor, and the first one is the poet himself.
The god pulls people’s souls through all these whenever he wants, looping the
power down from one to another. And just as if it hung from that stone, there’s an
enormous chain of choral dancers and dance teachers and assistant teachers
hanging off to the sides of the rings that are suspended from the Muses. One poet
is attached to one Muse, another to another (we say he is “possessed” and that’s
near enough, for he is held). From these first rings, from the poets, they are
attached in their turn and inspired, some from one poet, some from another… And
you know that the spectator is the last of the rings, don’t you—the ones that I said
take their power from each other by virtue of the Heraclean stone [the magnet]?
92

The metaphor of the magnet conjures a different organization of divine possession, which
Socrates now says is “near enough.” Perhaps because of the more masculine association to the
rhapsode being offered here, the emphasis of the metaphor of the magnet doubles the idea of the

91
Plato, “Ion,” l. 533d.
92
Plato, l. 536a-d.
48

body penetrated by a divine force with the body held within the power of inspiration. Rather than
the feminine carrier of external knowledge, the poet’s body is “held” here in divine inspiration.
With this understanding of inspired possession, a larger range of possible action opens
up: not just poetry and recitation but choral dancers, dance teachers, and assistant teachers. The
work of teaching and passing on knowledge explodes the location and performance of divine
possession as a magnetic hold. This evokes a different form of the concept of media as well—a
concept of media that is the substrate in which things float or are held. This form of holding is
closer to the form of prophecy Socrates claims for himself in the Phaedrus mentioned earlier
when Socrates is re-directed, by sudden inspiration, back towards self-examination and truth.
Recall that Socrates describes a “familiar divine sign” which “holds me back from something I
am about to do.”
93
While technical proficiency doesn’t seem to be required for this inspired
divination, Socrates’ redirection is nonetheless tied to “sign” reading as a form of “literacy” and
associated with technē and also with mantikē technē. In this act of divine possession, Socrates
sees clearly with a “literacy” “good enough for his own purposes” for a “compelling hold or
forbidding,” apparently separate from his self-aware faculties. The magnet metaphor offers a role
of prophetic mediumship as a means of transferring divine knowledge that remains dialogic and
living despite the supposedly supplemental nature of literacy, sign reading, and interpretation.
The prophet is differentiated and metaphorized here, but at the same time is a central or guiding
metaphor for directing oneself towards truth—towards the work of philosophy.

93
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 242b-c.
49

Mantic Authority
While Plato argues that “Only a man of sound mind may know himself and conduct his
own affairs,”
94
the absence of a sound mind and self-possession is precisely the root of authority
for the feminized prophet used as a central metaphor for other forms of divine knowledge in
these texts. Timaeus argues that divination is a universal capacity located in the liver saying,
“this part of the soul was not going to understand the deliverances of reason…and would be
much more enticed by images and phantoms night and day.” The liver, unlike the brain, sits low
in the body near the stomach and far from the faculties of reason. In this way, divination is
associated with images and with the possibility of illusion.
At the same time, interpretation is held out as essential for someone to “know himself”–
where self-knowledge is the work of the “lover of wisdom,” or the philosopher, as Socrates says
in the Phaedrus. In the Phaedrus, divination seemed to be associated with knowing or reading
the “writing on the soul,” by knowing oneself. Just so, in the Ion and the Timaeus, it is clear that
judgment also requires a “sound mind.” In other words, it is not only manic prophecy but also
presence and judgment that are required for the work of philosophy and self-knowledge—for the
“reading” of the writing on the soul.
So what kind of authority does the prophet herself have? The prophet seems to hold a
double position in the dialogue. On the one hand, she is the figure of inspiration—the soul’s
access to divine wisdom itself. On the other hand, the obscure quality of prophetic speech, and
the need for the supplement of interpretation open it up to the speculative problematic of onistic,
technical prophecy. As the inspired prophet is always “out of her mind” when prophesying, she
lacks the judgment or self-knowledge to properly issue the prophetic statements as logos.

94
Plato, “Timaeus,” l. 72a.
50

Prophecy is, in this sense, before logos. Inspired prophecy is more like the holding—the pause
before Socrates’ speech at the lake in the Phaedrus, prior to individual understanding. The
prophet cannot act as the “father” to the prophecies that come to her when she is “out of her
mind.”
Yet Pillinger describes prophecy itself as an act of translation: “Acts of prophecy claim to
translate from a source language that is unknowable, under normal circumstances, into a target
language that is purportedly comprehensible to mortal audiences.”
95
Part of Pillinger’s argument
is that it is impossible to think of inspired prophecy without interpretive work. The ancient
mantis was tasked with “bringing across” a message from the realm of the gods to the realm of
mortals,
96
and such pronouncements necessitate modification on the part of the medium. The
production of hexameter is one such form of translation. The act of “bringing across” alters the
“source language” in the act of making it knowable. Inevitable, but also dubious, and constantly
deferred in Plato (and in the scholarly work on the Phaedrus) is the bifurcation between
“inspired” and “technical” prophet.
Furthermore, the figure of the prophet itself is feminized in Plato, but also somewhat
metaphorized. It is not that the women prophets discussed in Plato’s writing are authorized, as it
were, to write. But rather Socrates is authorized by gods, or by the truth written on the soul, like
a prophet, to prophesize. I suspect that it is also this form of authorization that gives propriety to
Plato’s act of writing. But the prophet herself, in a practical sense then, is in a dilemma because
she can hold knowledge, or truth, but cannot necessarily speak it—is not necessarily authorized

95
Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature, 17.
96
Pillinger draws her definition from Jackobson, who elaborates a wide variety of acts as translation, including between linguistic
and non-lingusitic sign systems (or across different media). Pillinger, 16–17.
51

to deliver the message via the constructs of logos, writing or interpretive practices. This is the
problem of the prophet Cassandra.
In the figure of the prophet, we see a predecessor to the psychic medium. In the structure
of marginalia, the prophet is not directly under consideration but to the side. Her appearance is
ambivalent. We see tropes of prophecy—deferral, mania, magnets, metaphor, passivity and
medium—return in the figure of the psychic medium. As in the oxymoronic ambivalence
expressed in the word telepathy, the problem of authority for the feminized medium is expressed
in the ancient discourse of prophecy.
While Plato argues that “Only a man of sound mind may know himself and conduct his
own affairs,”
97
the absence of a sound mind and self-possession is precisely the root of mantic
authority. This is complicated by the fact that inspiration and interpretation are necessarily
enacted by a single, feminine body. In other words, there may not be a clear distinction between
the mediumistic “inspiration” and the interpretive “technical” process. Unlike the division
between writing and logos, the inspired prophet is only momentarily possessed, vacant. She is
sometimes alive and sometimes dead. This distinction between logos and writing give the
appearance of material distinction or a clarity of material distinction. The body does not have this
visual clarity. If we take the central position of the prophet into account when reading the myth
of Theuth and Thamus, inspired prophecy is divine knowledge without the technicity of
“writing” as Theuth and Thamus articulate it. But the prophet’s divine knowledge via
dispossessions is also without “logos”. The truth available in madness is not logos but telepathy
– knowledge without translation. At the same time, the prophetic act is translational in that the
knowledge passes between divine and human worlds. There is a compulsion in the search for

97
Plato, “Timaeus,” l. 71e.
52

truth, in the concept of logos as a potential avenue towards truth that is telepathy. To know
without understanding—without having the knowledge but holding it.
Or maybe being held within it or by it. This is a strange effect of telepathy—it is inflected
with reversals and contradictions. The medium as body that holds or transports knowledge is also
the body held or transported: like Socrates about to cross the river, like Orithuia carried off by
the north wind or like the throws of madness or sleep.

Séance 3—Aristotle’s “On Divination Through Sleep”
Aristotle writes most extensively about prophecy in his writing on dreams and sleep,
discussed in Parva Naturalia.
98
Aristotle’s short text, “On Divination through Sleep,” is one of
seven short pieces that comprise Parva Naturalia (PN) and one of three grouped under the
category of “On Sleep.” In “On Sleep” Aristotle offers a general theory of sleep and dreams, in
which he describes dreams as a universal but decidedly terrestrial experience. Sometimes
credited as the first writings on telepathy,
99
“On Divination” attempts to account for the
experience of prophetic dreams, which he associates with the passivity of sleep. Aristotle moves
away from Plato’s conception of prophecy as divine possession and comes to a more naturalistic
theory for the unusual knowledge attributed to prophets as a function of unusual sensitivity, or
pathos.

98
Parva Naturalia (PN) is conventionally known by its late 13
th
-century Latin name. It is thought of to be a later work in
Aristotle’s corpus, and an introduction to his work on the soul, De Anima. Parva Naturalia. includes seven sections, three of
which address the topic of sleep directly: “De Somno et Vigilia,” “De Insomniis,” and “De Divinatione per Somnum.” I use the
English translation of the last of these, “On Divination Through Sleep,” which has the most relevance here. Like most of
Aristotle’s surviving work, PN is thought to be either lecture notes or a draft because of the informal style in contrast to his
reputation as an eloquent writer (see Peter T. Struck, “INTRODUCTION.: Divination and the History of Surplus Knowledge,” in
Divination and Human Nature, A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2016), 1–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1xs0v.4.; and David Gallop, “Introduction,” in Aristotle: On Sleep and
Dreams, Classical Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 1–57, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1228gmt.).
99
This occurs in popular writing sources, including Wikipedia, though this history is not well cited or traced in either popular or
academic writing.
53

Aristotle argues that most dreams that appear prophetic have no essential, rational, or
cosmic relation to waking events or universal law. But he also allows for veridical dreams that
predict the future or offer knowledge of events taking place far away. He compares these dreams
to subtle currents in the air that move from the site of an event to the body of a sleeping person
across even large distances, invisibly, and at night when the air is stillest. Though not
“possessed,” as Plato describes, a naturally vacant mind is most receptive to these subtle currents
as there is less internal interference to disrupt their reception. Unlike Plato’s sense that prophecy
is a universal feature of the soul, Aristotle compares people with consistently prophetic dreams
to very lucky people who act on natural instinct. Aristotle describes both sleep and luck as proper
to the “nutritive soul.” Acting with such instinct requires a shutting down of the higher orders of
the soul including perception, desire and intellect, a state which sleep allows. But Aristotle also
focuses on the types of people who receive such dreams, asking why divine dreams don’t come
to the best or most intelligent people but to “simple” people. In following this question, Aristotle
makes explicit something Plato leaves implicit: the particularly feminine tropes of the prophet’s
body, including sensitivity and a low intellectual function.

Dreams and Prophecy
The ancient concept of prophecy was widely understood as connected to sleep and
dreaming. Homer often described gods sending messages to mortals through their dreams as a
form of divination. But David Gallop describes the ancient concept of the “dream” less as a
narrative experience—as we might think of them today—and more an embodiment or figuration
that one interacts with in sleep. In the Introduction to his translation of Aristotle: On Sleep and
Dreams, Gallop writes that dreams were “viewed not as a mere figment of the dreamer’s
54

imagination, but as having independent existence.”
100
Homer used the word dream (Oneirous) as
a proper noun to describe a kind of emissary of the gods that visited a person in their sleep to
give commands or instruction.
101

Like the gods themselves, dream apparitions changed guises from one visit to the next
and these dreams were not always linked to ‘truth’ in the way we have seen Plato deploy with the
concept of inspired prophecy. In the Iliad, for instance, Zeus sends Agamemnon a “wicked
dream” (aulos Oneiros), urging him to attack Troy.
102
Plato rejected the Homeric idea of
“wicked dreams” as gods do not “mislead us by falsehoods;”
103
but does describe encounters
with instructive or commanding dreams. In the Pheado,
104
Socrates describes being visited by a
recurring dream (enupnion) that instructs him to practice the arts; in the Apology, Socrates says
that oracles and dreams have enjoined him to question those “who think they are wise, but are
not.”
105
Plato’s use of the concept of dreams as a route to truth has a similar playful quality as his
use of prophecy. In the Timaeus dreams, like prophecy, are reflected off the liver—a lower part
of the soul that lacks reason but that may store forgotten divine truth. Dreams similarly also
allow for a kind of “putting aside” of the rational faculties needed to receive divine wisdom—a
maneuver, as we saw the Phaedrus,
106
that plays an important role in the work of philosophy. As
dream visions, like inspired prophecy, require wakeful judgment to be properly understood, they

100
Gallop, “Introduction,” 7.
101
Although Aristotle did not believe dreams were messages delivered by emissaries of the gods, his idea of a dream retained a
sense of being somewhat external to the sleeper. This is reflected in his attempt to naturalize the origins of dreams as external
emanations that “travel” in order to reach the dreamer.
102
Gallop, “Introduction,” 8., citing Iliad (II. 1-34). Aulos is also translated as “lying” “destructive” and “murderous” in various
versions.
103
Plato, “Republic,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Co., 1997), l. 382e.
104
Plato, “Phaedo,” ll. 60e–61a.
105
Plato, “Appology,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Co., 1997), l. 33c.
106
See earlier discussion on Plato and divination.
55

may be misinterpreted but not “deceitful.” Like other kinds of prophetic messages therefore,
dreams give the impression of being both divine and external; and simultaneously they are
knowledge that emanates, as a kind of reflection, from inside the soul itself.
107

While in earlier texts, Aristotle seems to share Plato’s sense that dreams are a function of
the soul, in Parva Naturalia Aristotle conjoins body and soul, arguing that the faculties of both
are at rest when sleeping. For this reason, dreaming cannot lead to divine truth by way of self-
knowledge as the soul’s highest function does not remain active in sleep. Sleep is instead
associated with the lower order of the soul, the “nutritive soul,” responsible for the simple urges
present in all living things such as nutrition and reproduction.
What are dreams, then, and what do they have to do with telepathy? By conceptualizing
dreams as arbitrary but terrestrial, external emanations, dreams emerge as a kind of sensitive,
pathic relation that takes place at a surprising distance and may result in unexpected knowledge.
Aristotle refers to this knowledge not as divine, but as “deamonic”—a word we will discuss
more. The passive nature of dreaming in Aristotle, furthermore, attaches to feelings or pathos
without judgment or authority. Again, we will see that there is a kind of feminization of this
pathic and deamonic dream state that Aristotle will reject as divine. Unlike Plato’s positioning of

107
The Platonic tension of divinatory truth as both “from the inside” as self-knowledge and delivered by the gods may also be
seen in Plato’s playful tension between fiction and truth. Socrates’ use of mythology in the Phaedrus, as we have discussed, has
less to do with historical accuracy than with delivering “truth” as Plato understands it. After Socrates delivers the myth of Theuth
and Thamus, Phaedrus replies, “Socrates, you’re very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!”
Socrates responds that Phaedrus should be more focused on what is true than on “who is speaking or where he comes from”
(Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 275b-c.). The potentially fictional nature of the myth is less important that the “truth” of what Thamus has
said about writing. This combination of divinatory truth and fiction is used more literally in the Republic where the word “dream”
(epuprion) articulates “the origin and pattern of justice” for his imaginary city (Plato, “Republic,” l. IV 443c.) As fictions, dreams
could also be delusional or misidentification, such as a person who confuses a likeness for “the thing itself”—confuses, for
instance, something beautiful with Beauty itself (Plato, l. V 476b-d.). As with divination, the potential suspicion associated with
dreams for Plato are not a matter of the intervention or intention of the gods, but of the wisdom—or failure of wisdom—of the
individual to discover and understand pure truth in the likenesses we encounter, when either awake or asleep.

56

prophecy as essential to the work of philosophy, Aristotle sets the prophetic act in opposition to
philosophy.
Aristotle’s specific argument for rejecting dreams as divinatory is that God
108
would send
divinatory dreams to “the best and most intelligent people:” “…the idea that it is God who sends
dreams, and yet that he sends them not to the best and most intelligent, but to random people, is
absurd.”
109
The fact that “random people” (as we will see, it is not totally “random” but actually
qualities that are in opposition to intelligence and goodness that are associated with supposed
prophetic dreams) tend to have divinatory dreams constitutes, in itself, an argument against
divine origin. In a way that is similar to Socrates’ critique of writing, Aristotle seems to be
saying that the people who receive prophetic dreams have “no business” with divine wisdom.
This is both where his rejection of prophetic dreams begins and constitutes his primary evidence
against the possibility of prophetic dreams. We can read Aristotle’s opening to “De Divinatione
per Somnum” (On Divination through Sleep, the third section of Parva Naturalia) in opposition
to the opening of the Phaedrus: where Plato “puts aside” a need for scholarly rationality,
Aristotle appeals to it directly. Aristotle is not arguing that “veridical dreams” do not exist, he is
simply arguing here that they do not have divine origin. Yet his argument depends on a particular
logic of the medium-body already established by Plato as lacking intelligence and the “best”
qualities of the philosophers. At the same time, Aristotle comes to the opposite conclusion as
Plato: that features of the prophet body make them unlikely to be divine. Aristotle seems to have

108
In Metaphysics Aristotle lays out a theory of the divine within a relation to cause and effect. Aristotle starts calling the
“primary unmoved mover” “god” in the singular, though there are other adjacent “unmoved movers.” (Aristotle, The
Metaphysics, trans. John H. McMahin (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1991), l. 12.7.) For more see David Gallop's notes in Aristotle: On
Sleep and Dreams, pp. 120–22. The notion of cause and effect is relevant in the theory of telepathy because the causal agents are
associated with both divinity and agency while the dreamer in “On Divination” is “the moved” or the receptacle of movement.
109
Aristotle, Aristotle: On Sleep and Dreams, trans. David Gallop, Classical Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996),
l. 462b20, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1228gmt.
57

made his point already—he begins with the argument that gods would not give such specialized
knowledge to “random people” and that the “veridical dreams,” or truly prophetic dreams, must
have another explanation.
Aristotle makes a similar argument to counter a divine origin of dreams later in “On
Divination:” “since some of the other animals dream, dreams could not be sent by God, nor do
they appear for that purpose.”
110
Unlike the argument against divine origins of prophetic dreams
above, here dreams on the whole are ruled out as divine or teleological. Animals and “random
people” are now placed in categories opposed to “the best and most intelligent” and constitute
the primary evidence against the divine origin of dreams. The prophetic dreamer and the animal,
in other words, are a kind of consolidation of the aspects of nature that are distinguished from
human intellect, activity and will. Aristotle is pointing not to any “random” person, but
particularly to a type of person inclined towards prophetic dreams and who acts in accordance
with lower functions of the human soul.

Prophecy and Reason
At the outset of “On Divination” Aristotle says that divination in dreams “inspires belief”
based on common experience “and yet the fact of seeing no reasonable explanation for its
occurrence makes for disbelief.”
111
Gallop’s modern and highly annotated translation of “On
Divination” notes here that “the argument against belief in divination (b18-26) illustrates
Aristotle’s approach to the whole subject. Absence of rational explanation, he thinks, makes for
disbelief.”
112
Gallop emphasizes both the “rational” nature of Aristotle’s argument and states that

110
Aristotle, l. 463b12.
111
Aristotle, ll. 462b15-20.
112
Gallop, Aristotle, 156.
58

he is “rejecting a traditional view.”
113
In his introduction Gallop also describes Aristotle as “fully
emancipated from superstitions.”
114
Gallop understands Aristotle’s rejection of divinatory
dreams as emancipatory and rational. Yet a closer look at Aristotle’s logic shows rather that it
depends not only on “traditional beliefs” about divine will and divination, but also on a particular
understanding of the dreamer’s body as a medium that encounters the kinds of dream images
described above.
Gallop’s notes on the text, considerably longer than the original text itself, only
summarizes the argument that Aristotle liberated himself form the “superstition” of the divine
origin of dreams and makes no mention of how this argument is developed. While the
conclusions Aristotle comes to align more closely with a modern conception of dreams,
Aristotle’s logic itself is no more “reasonable” from a modern perspective than the argument for
prophetic dreams in that both arguments depend on an assumption about the preferences of the
gods in relation to intelligence and the good (defined by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in relation
to philosophy). My point is not to argue that Aristotle is naive or superstitious; but to point out
that Aristotle’s hierarchal logic is very much based on tradition, and that the logical structure
Gallop deems “rational” depends—at the outset—on a logic of the prophet body as less-than-
human and lacking rational intelligence. The feminized prophet figure is therefore also obscured
in Gallop’s argument that Aristotle is here bucking tradition and producing a rational heuristic
for understanding dreams by ignoring the actual substance of Aristotle’s argument. This
obfuscation is not unique to Gallop. Divination is often left out of Aristotle’s canon. The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mentions neither divination nor dreaming in their main

113
Gallop, 156.
114
Gallop, “Introduction,” 7.
59

article on Aristotle. In a more comprehensive article on the concept of dreams and dreaming,
“On Divination” is referenced only once to say that Aristotle denied that dreams are of divine
origin
115
(in my estimation this is an exaggeration because of the undecidability of the word
deamonic). Perhaps this is because “On Divination” is a short text—the shortest in his surviving
corpus. But as Peter Struck notes in his book, Divination and Human Nature, Aristotle—unlike
Plato—is reserved in both his writing style and choice of topic so the fact that he treats the topic
of divination in sleep at all indicates that it was judiciously chosen as “most worthy of
consideration.”
116

Deamonic Nature or the Nature of the Prophet
Aristotle says that dreams are not divine, but he adds that “nevertheless, they are daemonic.
For nature is daemonic, but not | divine.” The word “daemonic” has caused problems for both
translators and scholars of this text. Modern translators often replace the word with “wondrous”
or “out of human control,”
117
helping along the common reading of this text as a “naturalistic
debunking of prophetic dreams.”
118
As with Gallop, who leaves out the reasoning for Aristotle’s
rejection of the divine origin of dreams, offering the above translations renders a naturalistic
argument clearer than it should be. Gallop himself leaves the word untranslated and compares
the term with the contemporary concept of the uncanny. This is a subtle translation that I think
has value, and will discuss more later, but Struck argues that the term nevertheless had a more

115
Jennifer M. Windt, “Dreams and Dreaming,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford:
Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/dreams-dreaming/.
116
Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 92.
117
For example Philip J. van der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature,
Soul, Health and Disease (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143. Cited in Struck, Divination and
Human Nature, 94.
118
Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 103.
60

explicit meaning, referring to “any deities not as high as gods.”
119
Struck argues that Aristotle
chose the word daemonic carefully, having many other options for concepts like “wondrous” or
“out of human control” at his disposal. Not only is the word carefully chosen here, it also appears
in the two-sentence summary at the outset of “On Sleep,” suggesting Aristotle’s deliberate use of
the term. This means that, while daemonic does imply that nature functions in a way that is
wondrous and out of human control, it does so in a way that points to a divine origin or divine
function of nature.
The word “nature” itself in the above quote has sometimes been understood as “nature as a
whole” and sometimes as “the nature of the dreamer.” The latter corresponds to the idea that the
nature of some kinds of people cause them to have more prophetic dreams, but Struck argues that
the two amount to something very similar. This is because the prophetic dreamer’s nature is part
of the natural world in opposition to “a human being that achieves rational wishes, or even as an
ensouled creature that initiates motion, just as an organism with a teleology.”
120
The prophet is
being associated with nature as a passive entity as opposed to an agent of action—functions of
the higher-order of the soul. The nature of the prophet is closer, it a sense, to nature itself. Struck
argues that binding together “nature” and the “nature of the dreamer” in the word “daemonic”
the prophet body “is steered by a divine impulse towards actualizing potential toward the good,
beneath our self-conscious awareness.”
121
Just as nature itself is daemonic, or steered by a divine
impulse, the prophet is also steered by divine impulses beneath their conscious awareness.

119
Struck, 27 n. 51. Struck also notes that it wasn’t until Augustine that the concept of the daemonic was split into a good and
evil binary. The word angel was used to refer to good deities and the word demon was taken to signify just the evil ones.
120
Struck, 98–99 n. 11.
121
Struck, 163.
61

What is unique to the nature of those who have veridical prophetic dreams is that their
bodies are “steered” more than others by this daemonic impulse. For the next sentence, given as
proof of that dreams are not divine but are daemonic, it is worth comparing the translations of
Gallop and Struck (emphasis added):
Gallop: “Here is proof: quite ordinary people have powers of prevision and direct
dreams vision, as if it were not god who sends dreams but as if those whose
nature is garrulous, as it were, or atrabilious see visions of all kinds.”
122

Struck: “Here is proof: very simple people are clairvoyant and have correct
dreams, not because god is the sender, rather in just the way in which whoever
has a nature that is talkative and melancholic sees visions of every sort…”
123

Both translations describe the “nature” of particular kinds of people—“ordinary people” who are
“garrulous” and “atrabilious” for Gallop; and “very simple people” who are “talkative” and
“melancholic” for Stuck. Struck, however, also connects “clairvoyance” to the nature of the
dreamer, where Gallop distances “powers of prevision” from the dreamer as something they
“have.” Struck’s use of the word “clairvoyant” also makes more explicit that the dreams are, in
fact, “correct”; whereas Gallop’s version is a little more difficult to parse through as “direct
dream vision.” Struck’s translation corresponds with his insistence that Aristotle does, in fact,
believe in predictive dreams—that there are people who are consistently inclined towards
clairvoyant dreams, if not always accurate in their specific predictions. Those with access to the
impulses of the nutritive soul are guided by daemonic nature that does not involve the direct
intervention of gods, but is established by gods to guide living things towards their potential
without necessary recourse to the rational human mind.

122
Gallop, Aristotle, 111. Translation of Aristotle’s “On Divination Through Sleep” 463b15-18.
123
Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 112. Translation of Aristotle’s “On Divination Through Sleep” 463b15-18.
62

Gallop’s translation rides on an argument closer to “coincidence”—which has some
evidence in Aristotle’s description of “garrulous” people as similar to gamblers who are
“fortunate” at playing “odds and evens” who, however “throw differently on different
occasions.”
124
Struck translates this same phrase as “some people steal the contest”—again, a
more decisive phrase that reenforces his reading of the example of dice connected to Aristotle’s
Eudemian Ethics. In Eudemian Ethics, consistently lucky people are understood, precisely, to be
able to produces nonrandom outcomes. Throwing “differently on different occasions” refers to
throwing what is needed to win.
125
Gallop’s use of “ordinary people” is more akin to his opening
translation of “random people,” whereas Struck translates this as “very simple people.” Gallop
downplays the clarity of Aristotle’s belief in “correct dreams” or clairvoyant individuals, as well
as the elitism implied in the phrase “very simple people” that might be alienating to modern
readers. But the degree of “simplicity” evoked by Struck, which is later described as a lack of
reason, actually accounts for the “good luck” of these dreamers and dice throwers. Being less
inclined towards reason and self-conscious desire, lucky people act on instincts that are in
alignment with a daemonic nature. By not making rational decisions, like animals, lucky people
tend to make decisions that are good for them without thinking about it. But both are significant
to this text. In my own anachronistic parlance, I would say that Aristotle is describing the
attributes of a medium-body inherent to the individual, constituted by a kind of passivity and
vacancy in the absence of higher-order human-associated rational thought.
126

124
Struck offers a reading of the example of dice connected to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics in which consistently lucky people
are understood, precisely, to be able to produces nonrandom outcomes. Throwing “differently on different occasions” there refers
to throwing what is needed to win. There again it is “empty headed” people and not the wise who have this kind of luck (Struck,
115–16.).
125
Struck, 115–16.
126
See Metaphysics 12.9, De Anima 3, and NE 10 for examples of where Aristotle connects distinctive human qualities with
rational, active and intellectual performance as the means by which we imitate the divine.
63

In fact, the comparison to “playing odds or evens” for the clairvoyant dreamer signifies
something that is not a matter of coincidence at all. Instead this kind of “luck” is associated with
the daemonic nature which, as Struck shows, Aristotle explicitly associates with divinity in
several other texts. By describing nature as daemonic, Aristotle is saying that nature itself has a
divine origin and is therefore always “veers towards the good.”
127
The daemonic structure of
luck is its allegiance with nature, set in motion by divine will and simply played out by the
passive, nutritive soul. Struck argues that prophetic dreamers follow the same nutritive “impulse”
and that “to explain how these [prophetic dreams] might be inclined towards good outcomes
requires the divine.”
128
This connection is made through the concept of daemonic nature.

Natural Signs
Aristotle spends much of the first chapter of “On Divination” offering three categories of
dreams that appear to have divine origin but do not: these dreams are either causes, signs, or
coincidence. They can also be a combination of these three categories. By “causes,” Aristotle
simply means that one may act in some way as a result of a dream one had. In this case, the
dream was not “predictive” of an event or action but caused it to occur. With coincidence, dream
images and events are linked by people after the fact but have no natural connection whatsoever.
“Signs,” on the other hand, can have a kind of predictive quality in the medical literature of
Hippocrates, which Aristotle is likely drawing on here. Dreams are used in medical diagnosis in
Hippocratic writings because people may be more perceptive than usual to small irregularities

127
Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 153.
128
Struck, 152.
64

within the body when asleep, and dreams are thus useful—as signs—for predicting future illness
already at work but not yet visible to a doctor.
129

Struck claims that Aristotle’s understanding of a clairvoyant dreamer is an extension of
this Hippocratic structure to include natural signs that come from outside the dreamer’s body. Of
course, natural signs are not always followed by the events they signal—this is true of the
Hippocratic notion of dreams because a strong immune system, for instance, may prevent a virus
from spreading in the body. Again, Struck’s translation:
That many of their dreams do not turn out to happen, is not surprising; for neither
do many of the signs (σημεία) in the body and in the sky, like those of rain and
wind; for if another stronger movement meets up with this one, the movement that
was going to happen from which the sign (σημεῖον) arose, does not happen, and
many of the things that ought to happen, although thoroughly intended, are broken
off due to other stronger origins of movement. Simply put, not everything that
was going to happen happens.
130

We can see clearly that Aristotle is referring not to “coincidence” in the taxonomy he set out
earlier in his text but to signs which have the effective potential for predicting or gathering
knowledge that is not directly available. These signs fail not because the dreamer received a false
sign or impression but because some future events get, in Struck’s words, “overrun” by stronger
forces. Prophetic dreamers for Struck are instead more like “super-sensitive instruments for
picking up vibrations in the atmosphere and producing reactions from them.”
131

129
For more on the connection between Hippocratic literature and Aristotle, See Struck who connects “On Divination” with the
Hippocratic texts, “On Regimen 4” (Struck, 104–5.).
130
Struck, 114.
131
Struck, 115.
65

Tele-Pathe
In the passages quoted by Gallop and Struck, the word “atrabilious” and “melancholic”
are translations of the Greek term pathē. Pathos, root of the suffix of telepathy, comes from
Greek and means “feeling,” “emotional state” or “affliction.” Aristotle’s use here is again tied to
medical discourse and the writings of Hippocrates. In this context the word is also a cognate with
paschein, which is a more explicitly passive expression: “to undergo,” “to be affected,” “to
suffer.”
132
While the term refers to a kind of condition of the body in question (atrabilious or
melancholic), this condition is specifically marked as passively received. This passivity is
doubled in the state of sleep described by Aristotle as the pathic body is one afflicted by greater
and more active forces—one made sick by outside forces or caused to feel some outer
movement.
133

Aristotle concludes by returning to the problem of divine intervention:
“If the sender were God, it would happen in the day-time and to clever people.
But on our account, one would expect it to be random [or very simple
134
] subjects
who have prevision. For the mind of such a person…is deserted, as it were, and
completely vacant. Thus, once set, it is led on according to the direction of its
moving pulses. The reason why some insane people have prevision is that their
own movements do not block the access of others but get beaten off. Hence they
are especially sensitive to alien movements.
135

The deliberative, day-time, rational mind of “clever people” is contrasted to “vacant mind” of the
prophet body whose own thoughts are “beaten off” by external, “alien movements.” Such people
are either very simple or ill, as in the case of “some insane people” whose active, internal
impulses are easily overwritten by external forces. In both instances, the capacity for prophecy
comes at the expense of the highest and most divine faculties of the soul, described in Aristotle’s

132
Gallop, Aristotle, 187. See glossary, pathos.
133
Pathe plays a significant role in by Eudemian Ethics and Rhetoric. For more see Gallop’s note 34 on 460a32-b16.
134
Struck’s translation.
135
Aristotle, Aristotle, ll. 464a20-27.
66

Eudemian Ethics as “intellectual function” and rational thought. The exclusion of these higher
functions is the precondition for the tele-pathic body and the passive, daemonic work of the
nutritive soul.
Aristotle's articulation of prophetic dreams highlights the passive and sensitive attribute
of the ancient prophet. For Plato, the prophet passively received and acted as an instrument of the
gods as discussed. But Aristotle was troubled by the fact that prophetic dreams came not to the
best and wisest but the “simple,” “deranged,” or “melancholic.” Aristotle’s answer to this
problem is that prophecy occurs not through the will of the gods, but because the vacant, inactive
mind of the prophetic dreamer provides with them great sensitivity to terrestrial movements
occurring outside the body.
Aristotle argues that, just as people may be more sensitive to signs of illness from within
the body while asleep, sleepers may also be sensitive to signs of events that occur outside the
body. He compares these signs to a current of water or air. For instance, if a pebble is thrown
into a still pond, the wake of that movement may be noticed at some distance, even if both the
thrower and the pebble are not perceivable. Such currents are less easily “overwhelmed” at night
as the air is stiller at night, and the body is more sensitive to both internal and external
movements at night as it is also stiller. Prophetic dreams that describe events from a “time, place,
or magnitude” that cannot be accounted for in the unusual Hippocratic theory of signs may still
be real impressions that are unperceivable by most people, according to Aristotle’s theory:
When something has moved a portion of water or air, and this in turn has moved
another, then even when the initial impulse has ceased, it results in a similar sort
of movement continuing up to a certain point, although the original mover is not
present. In this way it is possible that some sort of moment and perception
reaches the souls of dreamers…And whenever they arrive, they may be more
perceptible at night, because those carried by day are more easily dissipated (the
air being less disturbed at night, because of the night being calmer); and thus
they produce perception in the body because of sleep, people being asleep being
67

more sensitive to even slight internal movements than those awake. It would be
these movements that cause appearances (phantasmata) from which people have
previsions of what is going to happen….
136

Just as an internal bodily sign may indicate something otherwise imperceptible within the body,
events at a distance manifest as an apparition (phantasmata) to the dreamer. While the “cause” of
the apparition or dream has already occurred in time, as with inner “signs” a skillful interpreter
may be able to reconstitute the original cause from the appearance, and therefore also predict
future outcomes.
137
These perceptions are accurate precisely because they are signs perceived by
bodies closely tied to daemonic nature. By grounding the notion of prophecy in daemonic nature,
Aristotle goes further still to envelop the prophetic into something closer to the “tele-pathic” by
opening the scope of distance that Hippocrates had in mind.

Assonance
Aristotle closes with a description of those who are good at prophetic interpretation. Like
Plato, Aristotle divides “direct dream vision” from a techne of interpretative work. This occurs at
the next lowest level of the soul—between the motive function and the nutritive soul: the
perceptive function of the soul. Aristotle says:
The most skilled interpreter of dreams is one who can observe resemblances. By
resemblances, I mean the appearances (phantasmata) are akin to images in
water…indeed it would take a clever interpreter of reflection to be able to
detect…and to comprehend the scattered and distorted fragments of images as
being those of a man, or a horse, ] or whatever. Likewise in the case before us, of
grasping what this dream signifies. For direct dream-vision is erased by the
movement.
138

136
Aristotle, 464a6-20.
137
These predictions are not simply guesses, but such prediction will also not necessarily come to pass. This is because stronger
forces may override any cause’s outcome.
138
Aristotle, Aristotle, ll. 464b5-16.
68

Like Plato, there is a separation of the medium body and the interpretive faculty. The interpretive
faculty is also not the highest faculty of the soul but requires the faculty of perception to take the
degraded images of dream apparitions and understand their original cause. Although this faculty
requires an order above the function of the nutritive soul it is still associated with pathe (again,
translated by Gallop as atrabilious):
…atrabilious people are good guessers… For just as even madmen utter or
mentally rehearse things associated by assonance, eg. “Aphrodite”, “-
phrodite”…so do these people string a series onward.
139

Aristotle models an interpretive string of events. Prophetic dream interpretation, according to
Aristotle is about finding similarities, as by assonance—the repetition of sounds in words that
may or may not have meanings that are related. Distorted images can be put back together in this
repetition of sonic, non-rational association. The interpreter has a passive, inflected quality that
makes them good guessers by circumventing logos.
140

Plato’s division between inspired and technical prophecy is retained and we find a
literary dimension articulated in the theory of repetition and deterioration, as well as the project
of reconnecting Phantasma to an original source image or event through the work of assonance.
The technical and inspired prophet come closer together in some ways though an inflected,
passive vessel that works not though reason, but is guided by daemonic nature. At the same time,
the Phantasma is brought into the realm of logos through this mirror process of daemonic
association—poetic and irrational.

139
Aristotle, 464b2-5.
140
This aligns closely with Plato’s understating of prophetic interpretation, but Aristotle moves the entire operation of prophecy
to the deamonic realm of nature. This association is passive, in contrast to the higher order of the soul’s intellectual and ethical
operation of the human, with the interpreter standing between the nutritive, animal element and the active, human one.
69

Unlike Plato, Aristotle directly address the relationship between reason and prophecy.
His writing on prophecy through dreams is often registered in modern criticism as an
emancipation from the bonds of archaic faith or superstition. What simultaneously emerges is a
concept—very much like telepathy—smuggled into the logic of rationalist, specifically medical,
discourse. There seems to be a kind of excess knowledge that needs to be accounted for that is
signified by the feminized figure of the prophet body. A theory of telepathy helps Aristotle
naturalize this excess knowledge with the guiding force of the pseudo-divine, or daemonic
nature.
Gallop’s argument for reading the word daemonic as uncanny devalues the role of the
divine in Arisotle’s writing, aligning it with modern rationalizing discourse. But the term
uncanny has the virtue—as he himself discusses—of connecting Aristotle’s notion of dreams to
Freud for contemporary readers and describes an excess knowledge that is foreclosed in the
rationalist discourse both authors attempt to produce. By framing prophecy within a naturalistic
and medical context, Aristotle comes to a materialist understanding of how a pathic faculty helps
sensitive individuals experience knowledge at distances that are uncanny (daemonic). He also
articulates an interpretive capacity associated with pathos that amounts to a kind of sign-reading
that works below the level or reason and logos in the poetic space of assonance. Similarly,
Freud’s own theory of telepathy demands a sensitivity to the other, made available to the poetic
process of the sensitive sign reader that is seen in many other aspects of his writing in the role of
an analyst, from dream interpretation to the process of transference.
When we consider this discursive history of dreams and dream interpretation through
Aristotle as a legacy of the prophet, her body and her relationship to daemonic nature we find
that what is today called the uncanny is the product of an expulsion of the divine in a rationalist,
70

naturalistic discourse as much is it is a remainder of earlier beliefs about the human/divine
relationship.

71

CHAPTER TWO Psychic Makers: Telepathy, Modern Literature and Feminine Authorship

The Psychic Medium, “Reach out and Touch Someone”
From the massive expansion of media technology beginning in the 19
th
century to the
present day; from the telegraph and telephone to the Zoom app that helped many of us stay in
touch during the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020,
141
modern communication networks
promise to bring us together. In the words of the advertisement campaigns from Bell and AT&T
running in the 1980 and 1990, these technologies offer us the ability to “reach out and touch
someone” [Figures 1 and 2].
142
These advertisements illustrate a fantasy that modern technology
helps us “touch” others with increasing immediacy, less interference, and at greater distances—
perhaps even in ways that surpass the naked human capacity for connection. Plato’s Pheadrus,
discussed in the previous chapter, foreshadows the technological fantasy of direct
communication that takes on unique characteristics in the 19
th
and 20
th
century.

141
“2019 Novel Coronavirus” or “2019-nCoV” was the CDC’s designation for the disease causing the outbreak in Wuhan, China.
Lockdowns began in China, the US, and across the globe in 2020.
142
“Remember That AT&T Jingle, ‘Reach out and Touch Someone’? Hear It Again & Find out How It Came to Be - Click
Americana,” Click Americana, August 30, 2021, https://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/reach-out-reach-out-and-
touch-someone-1979-1982.
Figure 2: Bell Advertisement.
Figure 1: Bell Advertisement.
72

Alongside the development of a new globally expanding technological landscape, many
versions of contemporary media studies remind us that media are a material matter. After all,
even the most advanced, fast-moving, digital informational-technologies must be stored,
transmitted, and appear—in the words of Nancy Katherine Hayles—as a substrate, embodied in
one form or another.
143
But at the base of the concept of media may very well be a fantasy or
drive towards the metaphysical. That is, a will for an immediacy of knowledge that functions
above or below the material stuff that channels information between subjects. Developments in
modern media technology would seem to confirm this idea: media attempts to “shrink the
world.” To bring us closer and shorten the gap of time and space between us, as if to eradicate
this distance all together. This fantasy can be named telepathy as a will to touch or feel (-pathy)
at a distance (tele-).
E.M. Forster articulates some of the technological characteristics of modern
communication in his early 20
th
century novella “The Machine Stops” (1909).
144
In this story
each character lives alone in an individual cell, where they are in constant contact with others
through a networked “Machine.” As the central character, Vashti, notes from her individual cell,
“though it contained nothing, [she] was in touch with all she cared about in the world.”
145

Forster’s story got one part of this idea technology wrong, however. In “The Machine Stops,” the
transmission system through which people view and hear each other offers just a “general idea of
people” that lacks extraneous “nuance.” The main character, Vashti, speaking to her son, feels
that this system is “good enough for all practical purposes.”

143
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1999), 2.
144
E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops (Suzeteo Enterprises, 2022).
145
Forster, 5.
73

…she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not
transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea
that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The
imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual
essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the
imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial
fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race.
146

Forster suggests that the details of facial expression would be extraneous to the economy of
information relayed in a technologically advanced society. Although Vashti is content with the
Machine, the narrator seems to lament a loss of the “imponderable bloom” of direct intercourse
“long since…accepted by our race.”
147
The narrator of “The Machine Stops” toes a line between
Vashti’s world and our reality. While continuous networked communication is today a reality for
many in a way that corresponds surprisingly well to Forster’s vision, our technologies also tend
to attempt sharper sound and images that express a fuller sense of presence than Forster’s
“machine” offered, as if attempting to recuperate the “imponderable bloom” of pure presence.
Faster internet speed, sharper video, and sound quality are prioritized in today’s communication
technology. Even the return of 3D film in the mid-2000s and the prevalence of emojis to convey
some degree of emotions without language speak to an immersive, affective aspect of this drive.
What is missing from Forster’s machine that appears to be embedded in modern fantasies of
media, the reason Vashti cannot be sure if her son is sad, is pathos.
Pathos describes forms of immediacy that have to do with feeling and emotion rather than
“practical” information. While Forster remained skeptical—not unlike Socrates—of
teletechnological advances to offer an intimacy equivalent to physical presence, other literary
and real-world posthumanist fantasies argue that media innovation offers more powerful forms

146
Forster, 3.
147
Forster, 3.
74

of connection. Explicit cultural interest in telepathy includes this aspect of connection, which
functions above or below the level of linguistic communications. For 19
th
century examples,
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell—arguably the two most famous names in the
history of U.S. technological invention—both labored over “thought transference” machines to
communicate with the living and the dead.
148
This ideal of thought transference follows us to the
present day with arguments that incorporate innovation in neuro- and bio-technology. For
example, in 2019 Elon Musk promised implanted neurotechnology aiming at “eventually
achieving telepathic communication,”
149
an idea that has also been featured in an abundance of
literature and film, such as the 2002 Novel Feed by M.T. Anderson
150
and HBO’s 2021-2022 TV
series Made for Love. Ironically, while telepathy might describe the reigning fantasy of modern
media technology to help us connect, know, and understand each other better, telepathy might
also be considered the opposite of media: the complete circumvention of the material stuff, the
middle, the sign systems, and substrates of communication that carry meaning. As Hayles has
convincingly argued in How We Became Posthuman, even those fantasies that are articulated as
technologically or scientifically advanced incorporate a metaphysical dimension.
151

Beyond the oxymoron embedded in the word telepathy (touch or feeling at a distance)
Jacques Derrida describes a paradox in the concept of telepathy: that the absence of the structure
of distance between us would also reach some kind of limit for our concept of knowledge beyond
which nothing can be properly known, thought, or possible. In his essay “Telepathy” Derrida
writes, “Everything, in our concept of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be impossible,

148
“Thomas Edison, Paranormalist,” Gale In Context: Biography, 9, accessed June 5, 2023, https://go-gale-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/ps/i.do?p=BIC&u=usocal_main&id=GALE|A18535410&v=2.1&it=r.
149
Amanda Mull, “Elon Musk’s Next Wild Promise,” The Atlantic, July 18, 2019,
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/neuralink-elon-musk-silicon-valley-promises/594316/.
150
M. T. Anderson, Feed (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002).
151
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman.
75

unthinkable, unknown. If there is any, our relation to telepathy must not be of the family of
“knowledge” or “non- knowledge” but of another kind.”
152
This is not to say that telepathy is
impossible, but rather that “our concept of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be
impossible.” The act of telepathy, without the slippage of an intermediary would also be not to
know anything—telepathy cannot help us “know” each “other.” Derrida argues that our very
concept of knowledge depends on the constructs of the subject and the other, which necessitates
a tele-distance that telepathy doesn’t allow. So what if the drive for faster, more immediate
communication is also a kind of death drive? That is, a will towards something that, at its limit,
is an eradication of the self. And what if there is also another way to think about telepathy,
subjectivity, and media? Telepathy—this structure that amounts to an inability to produce
“knowledge”—may signify both a constitutive fantasy, and an impossibility in the concepts of
modern media innovation that opens up both the bounded subject and the concept of knowledge.
Without rejecting the embodied nature of media technology, I want to give attention to a kind of
metaphysics of media—a feeling, maybe even a sixth sense—that telepathy is an aspect of
communication. That it is, and always has been, embedded in the concepts we define as “media.”
Following Derrida, I argue that modern concepts of media in particular are “constructed
so that telepathy be impossible” and that, as such, telepathy is also constitutive of those concepts
that evolved and continue to evolve in our understanding of media and mediation. In this chapter,
I therefore begin to make a case for telepathy as a key term for thinking media and for media
studies. I argue that the nature of the subject as a source of knowledge—and in particular in this
chapter, as an author—is particularly at stake in the concept of media. Can the concept of
telepathy help us see media in a new way? In a way that rejects neither embodiment nor the

152
Jacques Derrida, “Telepathy,” Oxford Literary Review 10, no. 1/2 (1988): 21. .
76

material substrate of media but directs itself towards an aspect of mediation that does more than
carry, move, or store information? Can it help us develop a concept of media that works to
preserve neither the concept of the subject nor the concept of knowledge? Could the concept of
authorship persist in such a landscape?

Media, Pathos, Feminine
In their introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies, W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark
Hansen describe the “capaciousness…and historically disjunctive origins of the term media as
well as related terms like medium and mediation.”
153
The collective singular that the word
“media” signifies today marks a disjuncture from the term as a plural form of “medium,” to a
collective singular of “mass media.” Etymologically, this began in 1923, the year that the OED
records the first use of the word media as a collective singular to describe a “Class appeal in
mass media.” Hansen and Mitchell argue that the disjuncture of the collective singular also
recovers an early modern concept of medium as an intervening substance, or the stuff in-between
the materials that are said to hold knowledge. What is at stake for them is “something more than
the form of a specific content, and thus something that exceeds the pluralization of the term
medium. Something that opens onto the notion of a form of life, of a general environment for
living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling—as such.”
154
Thinking of media as an
environment for living suggests that media constitutes more than a series of technological
inventions—whether “hot” or “cold”
155
—but as a material and epistemological precondition for

153
W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago; London: University of Chicago
Press, 2010), xi..
154
Mitchell and Hansen, xii.
155
That is, whether these technologies evoke or require participation and therefore might include human affect or experience as
part of their definition or are received passively and unilaterally as Marshall McLuhan describes in Understanding Media.
77

human experience. The term “media” encompasses for them something simultaneously broader
and more specific than a collection of individual, or all, media.
To add to this conversation, I start somewhere in the middle—in the middle of the
historically disjunctive origins of the concept of media, and the middle of the changing
technological landscape
156
of the 19
th
century. I look at a neglected historical convergence in the
development of this matrix of terms for modern media: two emergent 19
th
century meanings of
the word medium—mass media and the psychic medium. The very idea of mass media (along
with the roots of contemporary theories of media) is developed alongside that of the feminized
trope of the psychic medium in the mid-19
th
century—medium is one word that comes to
describe two seemingly unrelated things: one appears to be a result of material ubiquitous
communication technologies and the other a kind of hangover of religious superstition. Both
definitions draw on the etymology of the word from Latin, meaning “middle, center, midst,
intermediate course, intermediary,”
157
but have taken such divergent paths that they are rarely
considered together today. The instability of the word medium in the mid 19th century has two
oppositional forms: one earthly and one supernatural. On the one hand, a medium inscribes
within itself human technology and the materiality of communication. On the other hand,
psychic mediums establish transcendence of the phenomenal order—communication free of
technology and material constraints.

156
While there is no room to define such a landscape here, the word “technology” should be understood in a broad sense,
including not just advancements in print and image capture technology and telephone and telegraph networks, but also
teletechnologies that may not register as media, such as train systems, psychoanalysis, occultism (including the invention of the
word telepathy) and—perhaps the modern teletechnology par excellence—colonialism, whose globalizing necropolitical
exploitation both necessitated and enabled major changes in transportation and communication technologies.
157
“Medium, n. and Adj.”
78

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first use of the word medium, in its plural form,
media, to refer to mass media in 1850.
158
The rapidly expanding technological changes of this
moment are well recorded elsewhere, but rarely in conjunction with the fact that one year later,
in 1851, the word medium is used for the first time to describe a psychic or a spiritualist who
communicates, precisely, without need of technological supplement. As with Hansen and
Mitchell’s observation that placing an antiquated concept of media next to the formulation of
mass media can open to a broader understanding of the form and function of media, the co-
production of “psychic media” and “mass media” helps us see that the concept of the
technological medium and the psychic medium are—and perhaps always were—present in the
modern conceptualization of what constitutes “media.” For one thing, the word medium comes
to designate not only material carriers outside of the human body, but also the human body itself.
Ironically, or so it might seem, rapidly growing types and ubiquity of communication
technologies required a distinction to be made between mechanical and human forms of
mediation. This fact remains central to media studies today and relates media to other forms of
technology studies from cyborg feminism to the work of Bernard Stiegler. The epistemological
nexus of media described by Hansen and Mitchel should be considered in this historical
convergence that, I argue, invests the modern concept of media with both an insistent materiality
and a kind of magic. At least since this time, media technology and a particular form of
spiritualism have shared a close relationship, even as these concepts have taken different
discursive routes.
Another part of what ties the spiritual associations of mediumship to technological media
is a distinct gendering process through the end of the 19
th
and into the early 20
th
centuries. In

158
“Medium, n. and Adj.”
79

both senses of the term, a medium comes to articulate a feminine figure that is a middle ground
between subjects—a conduit or passage through which masculine messages flow. Jill Galvan’s
important book, Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication
Technologies 1859-1919 follows ways theories of gender difference helped structure the
changing concepts of the medium at the turn of the 20
th
century—both mechanical and mystical.
Galvan links the psychic medium with technological media through a series of gendered tropes
that function to subdue anxieties around technological change. As Galvan argues, “the work of
mediating other’s transmissions” took diverse forms at the end of the 19
th
and beginning of the
20
th
century, both technological and occult. Women were seen as best suited for these jobs due to
characteristics attributed to their gender and, she argues, a “consequence of the feminization of
channeling is that a distinct feminine trope arises in literature and culture.”
159

Galvan’s exploration of gender in the fantasy and anxieties of the late 19
th
and early 20
th

centuries can also illustrate the ways in which there is not a clear distinction between these two,
nascent conceptions of medium. Women were understood to have qualities that suited them for
different kinds of mediumship, notably the quality of sympathy, which shares with telepathy the
suffix -pathy. At the same time, new gendering tropes emerged out of the technologically
changing landscape. Galvan describes an anxious relationship requiring media to maintain some
feminine features like passivity and malleability, which were intensified by the association
between femininity and mediation.
Victorian communication technologies, along with movements like spiritualism,
helped to inaugurate a modern notion of “communication” itself, with its strivings
for a kind of dialogue wherein individuals transmit their interiority to each other.
Yet this fantasy soon faltered, as people struggled with gaps between self and
other and with means for negotiating them—with language, bodies, bureaucracies,

159
Jill Nicole Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-
1919 (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 2.
80

and machines that facilitated mutual understanding but also, ironically, got in the
way of it.
160

The psychic medium was a decidedly femininized figure in the 19
th
century as both a vocation
and a literary trope.
161
Kate and Margret Fox, who gained fame for their practice of “table
rapping” in New York, are often credited with sparking a “spiritualist craze” for séances,
materialization of spirits, the planchette, and automatic writing.
162
At the same time, women
were taking over jobs in material communication networks.
163
To make the various and dispersed
forms of media syndication possible, women were especially recruited as a new source of labor
into jobs in material communication networks, taking over as telegraphers, stenographer-typists,
typewriters, and telephone operators. Between the mid-19
th
century and the beginning of the 20
th

century, women came to dominate these positions as cheap labor to meet accelerated demand.
164

The very idea of mass media, in other words, along with the roots of contemporary theories of
media, is developed alongside that of the feminized trope of the psychic medium in the mid-19
th

century—medium is one word that describes two seemingly unrelated things. Yet, the two
concepts are rooted in the technological landscape of the 19
th
century and both depend on, alter,
and intersect with contemporaneous concepts of gender difference.
165
While the figure of the
psychic suggests a form of mediation not registered in today’s conception of modern media, the
spiritual medium remains to this day the most readily used understanding of the use of the word
medium to describe a person or human body.

160
Galvan, 24.Galvan 24
161
See Galvan and Sword. A feminized trope, of course, need not be performed by any particular body or sexual identity.
162
For more robust histories, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-
1914 (Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 1985).; Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (Richmond Hill, Ont.:
Pocket Books, 1972).; and Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium.
163
Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium.
164
In reality, the women in these jobs were not as passive as the narrative of the passive medium might suggest. Workers in these
media fields lead strikes and demanded better wages as examples of agency and disruption.
165
Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium, 12.
81

And for Galvan the human body is a key change in the material practices of media at the
turn of the 20
th
century. As much as the expansion of communication networks offered new
opportunities for information connecting people across long distances, “human-relayed
communication rendered more conspicuous, more inescapable a reality, the activity of
exchanging words and knowledge.”
166
Galvan suggests that the human body becomes the
primary signifier of media activity and various associated anxieties of media interference.
Women’s roles in media practices, she argues, were thus not coincidental but produced a useful
“gendered paradigm of the disinterested conduit.”
167
This gendered paradigm helped further
naturalize preexisting conceptual allegiances between women and technology, especially the
necessary quality of “disinterest” in the form of feminine passivity and automaticity, and
structured changing concepts of mediation.
These tropes are constitutive in that they anchor both women and media to new social
roles that do not resolve, but rather build on and respond to anxieties about teletechnologies. A
similar anxiety is famously articulated in Plato’s Phaedrus when Socrates describes the dangers
of writing as a threat to self-sufficiency when one “put[s] their trust in writing, which is external
and depends on signs that belong to others instead of trying to remember from the inside,
completely on their own.”
168
As an “image of a word,” for Socrates, writing produces distance
between truth and understanding, which is necessarily accessed “from the inside.” The external
system of signs leaves the text open to misinterpretation, as it “roams about everywhere,
reaching indiscriminately those with understanding and those who have no business with it.”
169

166
Galvan, 12.
167
Galvan, 12.
168
Plato, “Phaedrus,” l. 275a.
169
Plato, l. 275e.
82

Both physical distance and a kind of indifference of the medium that “cannot defend itself”
threaten the quality of truth and the authorial intent of the text. As Derrida has explored, the logic
of the supplement developed here produces a division between one’s “own” self and the “signs
that belong to others.” Conceivably, the evident visual and material nature of writing—like the
human body in Galvan’s analysis—evokes anxiety about a displacement of the self that is
resolved in the production of the concept of the supplement and of media as other than the self.
In sum, the very concept of media passes through the bodies of women in the late 19
th
and 20
th

centuries. Women/media signify both the passive model body through which media flows and a
disruption to immediate communication.

When Women Write
While mass media may articulate a more masculine valance of control and public
influence, as discussed in Chapter 3, women’s labor stood in for the supposedly passive activity
of the material media itself. The psychic medium, at the same time, is molded around
conceptions of white, Victorian femininity. Women, it seemed, performed pathic labor in the 19
th

century, as communication—along with new conceptions of media—passed through their bodies.
The dangerous and powerful influence of mass media is hedged by the feminine, automatic, and
-pathic transmission of women, almost as if by naming both, each could be purged of the other. I
want to ask, are the non-material, spiritualist logics of the concept of media effectively syphoned
out of the concept of mass media precisely through naming the spiritual medium? And if so,
what happens to the feminine associations of media and the work and thinking of women writers
and spiritualists who, with or without institutional recognition, helped produce the concept of
media we rely on today?
83

Ironically perhaps, the feminine gendering of media suggested by Galvan reframes the
passivity and disinterest of the medium to conserve simultaneously a sense of self-possessed
authorial integrity. The historical bonding of feminine labor with the movements of the material
signifier wound both ever more tightly with passivity and transparency. This simultaneously
intensifies the overdetermined status of the transcendental potential of language—of truth as
knowledge—as masculine. Given that teletechnologies cannot be rejected outright, as Socrates is
said to have preferred, the feminine figure seems to relay indifference into insignificance,
ignorance or even absence. The passive and disinterested supplement of women’s labor mollified
concerns that one’s message might be altered in the external sign system of others. In other
words, text sent through feminized media is less likely to need to “defend itself.” But by
associating women with media, these modern conceptions of media can be seen as producing
another problem—that of feminine authorship. As disinterested and passive media, the
woman/medium poses a threat if she takes active interest in the transmission of information
entrusted to her body. Put another way, if feminine authorship is a threat to feminine/media as
interested activity, then it is also a threat to (masculine) autonomy and authorship.
At the same time that cultural fantasies invest concepts of media in feminine or
feminizing tropes, the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries also offer us an increasing number of women
authors. Do these women authors offer the same message described by Galvan about the
anxieties and potentials of women’s bodies and of media technology or is there something else to
be learned? If media is associated with femininity in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries as a passive
conduit, what happens when women write? Although common gender stereotypes are present in
the feminization of media as Galvan has shown, I argue that the result is not simply a
repositioning of media as the passive “other” of Man. Instead, I show that many pivotal women
84

authors of the time use the concept of telepathy as meta-reflections on technological media by
articulating forms of spiritual mediumship that blur the boundary between self and other, living
and dead, and male and female. My close readings center on two trans-genre writers from the
early 20
th
century, Rebecca West and Luisa Capetillo, both of whom had a relationship to
spiritualist movements. West is a British author and essayist who works with the idea of
telepathy explicitly in the plot of her novel Harriet Hume to explore the limits of narrative
subjectivity. Capetillo is a Puerto-Rican born Anarchist who published prolifically and worked
as a “loud reader” in factories in Puerto Rico and across the east coast of the USA including
Tampa, Florida and New York City. Capetillo criticizes a particular form of bourgeois spiritism
that she associates with political indifference of the bourgeois but that she uses for her unique
articulation of direct action, anarchist practice, and the work of writing to unbind the subject
from patriarchal subjectivity.
The history of media in media studies looks primarily for relevance in the history of mass
media—a history in which women, we are told, were primarily passive, ventriloquizing laborers.
As psychic media, however, women were not only the majority of practitioners, they were also
prolific writers of occult fiction. Though less likely to be canonized, occult fiction during the 19
th

and 20
th
centuries was dominated by psychics or spiritualists who, we could say, also wrote
theories of media. By broadening our definition of the medium to include the psychic medium
and our definition of theory to include this literature, what theories of media might we discover
or return to? Can the work of mediums be included in what constitutes media theory?

85

The Narrative Relay of Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume
Rebecca West’s 1929 novel, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy,
170
begins not with people
but with feet. “Their feet,” the first sentence of the novel reads, “running down the wooden
staircase from her room made a sound like a scurrying of mice on midnight adventures…” For a
novel very tightly focused on two central characters, these characters are presented, at the onset,
as something other than proper subjects. The opening of the novel may thus already alert us to
something about the status of the subject in the novel: here not directly referenced but brought to
the scene as metonymy and metaphor.
And whose feet? Indeed, the opening sentence features a body not only fractured into an
object, not only a fractured piece of the body, a division of the body as feet; but a plurality of
bodies. Rather than the fractured fetish, the metonymy of feet opens out into a plurality; a
plurality that—at least at the first instant—cannot be easily quantified. Not “her feet” or “his
feet,” signaling a singular gendered subject, but “their feet.” What kind of feet? And how many
feet, or how many “theirs” of feet—one or more pairs of feet? A productive undecidability in the
opening sentence leaves quantity, species, and gender as a series of open spectrums. The specific
animistic metaphor draws us closer still to the problem of the literary subject in Harriet Hume—
dissolving the boundaries between human and animal, the feet acting not as human feet, not even
as feet at all, but rather “like a scurrying of mice.” The gerund “scurrying” turns the verb into a
noun to complete the metaphor so that “their feet” are hardly things at all but a kind of sound and
a movement. In this way, the subject’s body traverses—or at least evades—not only the

170
Rebecca West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (London: Virago, 2008). That the novel itself is out of print and relatively
obscure (though it had some success at the time of its publication) does not suggest to me that it is historically unimportant. On
the contrary, the exclusion and disappearance of women writers as well as psychic mediums (West also practiced occultism and
participated in séances with the dead) in the structure of our living archive is consolidated in her text and posts it as exemplar for
the types of reconsiderations of media theory I am proposing here.
86

boundaries between human and animal but also the grammatical boundary between noun and
verb.
Harriet Hume will settle quite easily into a heterosexual love story as the novel continues
(to give it away: the feet belong to the two central characters of the story, Harriet Hume and her
lover, Arnold Condorex) but as a reader, as the novel opens, we cannot fully know how many or
what kind of “their” we are dealing with so that in the first sentence of the text, it is not only a
question of quantity and gender that flows though the language of the novel, but also a confusion
of flesh and metaphor. At the opening of the novel, the subject cannot be grounded into a binary
of truth and fiction, or right and wrong interpretation.
We might be tempted to think that telepathy could offer some clarity to the kind of
confusion displayed in the first lines of the novel as a form of transparent “reading.” But
telepathy is blocked in this novel from recovering lost knowledge or resolving misinterpretation
in Harriet Hume. Instead, telepathy is used to develop a meta-discourse about the relationship
between novel and reader. As Helen Sword points out in Ghostwriting Modernism, in the 19
th

and 20
th
centuries occult themes like telepathy linked low-brow and genre fiction to high
modernism through formal strategies, illustrating the historical link between two interwar
practices, “like multiple perspectives, fragmented discourse, and a manipulation of authority and
passivity.”
171
Harriet Hume bridges these discourses through the spatial and temporal
organization of the novel, narrative authority, and inter-textual reference as well as to a centrality
of textuality around which both discourses depend.
172
At the first moment of Harriet’s telepathic
engagement, Arnold registers some kind of hesitation in Harriet, and wonders if she is “going,

171
Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), x.
172
As Helen Sword argues, “Both telepathy and spiritual mediumship placed textuality at the center of their practices and drew
heavily upon literary practice as a metonym for the discursive authority and cultural empowerment of the medium.” Sword, 15.
87

after all that had happened, to be delicate about what hardly any women were delicate about
nowadays?” “’No, indeed,’ she laughed, before he had quite finished his thought…”
173
Arnold’s
failure to accurately read Harriet’s thoughts is matched with her telling response to his thoughts.
Here Harriet and the reader are aligned as telepathic readers, knowing—and without Arnold’s
knowledge—what he is thinking at the precise moment his thought is articulated as a text. As
Spitzer notes, it is only through Harriet’s telepathic gift that she is granted “rare access to male
authority.”
174
Reading Arnold’s mind, Harriet holds knowledge that Arnold lacks.
From the onset of Harriet Hume, Arnold rejects “Victorian occultism,” primarily as
“foolish pretensions.” Following Galvan’s articulations, such “foolishness” is broadly associated
with women at the time of the novel’s writing. Readers would have therefore easily understood
Arnold’s sentiment that “he disliked above all things women who laid claim to occult gifts.”
175

West associates mind-reading with women for both Arnold and her readers as she, however, sets
up a reversal of feminine foolish belief into masculine foolish denial. Arnold’s rejection of her
occult gifts, furthermore, is matched with his own benign frustration with communication. In
creating a narrative about telepathy, West links the narrative of Harriet’s mind-reading to the
structure of narrative itself. While Harriet may have direct and complete access to Arnold’s
thoughts, the narrator is far from omniscient. Fractured and unstable, the narrator seems at time
to “channel” Arnold’s inner thoughts and at others to act as a third character. While the fantasy
of total intimacy with the other is at play in the story, the narrator is never granted access to this
fantasy.

173
West, Harriet Hume, 9.
174
Jennifer Spitzer, “‘I Find My Mind Meeting Yours’: Rebecca West’s Telepathic Modernism,” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 4
(2018): 558, https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2018.0042.
175
West, Harriet Hume, 9.
88

Harriet’s authority is shown not to be individualistic but linked both to a kind of
collective knowledge and to the structure of technicity. Heather Fielding connects Rebecca
West’s theory of the “super-cortex” to a broad concept of technics
176
as a kind of collective
unconscious or a technologically-embedded store of knowledge and understanding: “The super-
cortex is the center of human efforts to better adapt to their environment through technology–by
learning to fly through designing an airplane instead of trying to grow wings.
177
The theme of
telepathy for West explicitly links messages of representation and material form of the novel as
well as a wider understanding of the contemporary technological landscape.

The Unattended Keyboard
Harriet Hume is organized around a series of encounters between the two central
characters shortly after World War I in London. Harriet is a professional pianist, frequently
characterized by her soft femininity—graceful, beautiful but also docile and meek. Her
consistently “parchment-colored” clothing seems to offer her body up as a blank medium for
another’s writing. As her lover, Arnold Condorex meditates, “if Harriet had a fault, it was that
her oval face was almost insipid with compliancy.”
178
Harriet’s “oval blandness”
179
is made-to-
fit for the Victorian framework described by Galvan:
Portraits of female media of all kinds commonly return to two allegedly
feminine traits: sensitivity or sympathy, often imagined as the product of
women’s delicate nervous systems; and an easy reversion to automatism,
or a state of unconsciousness. While the first posited the medium’s ability
to reach out feelingly to others and thus to facilitate networks of

176
The word technics is associated by Fielding with Bernard Stiegler who says, as a “‘process of exteriorization,’ technics is the
pursuit of life by means other than life.” Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard
Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17.
177
Heather Fielding, Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2018), 119.
178
West, Harriet Hume, 9.
179
West, 25.
89

communication, the second presumed that such self-extension would only
be a matter of feeling: by subtracting her intellectually from the path of
communication, automatism eased and protected others’ dialogue.
180

A bourgeois model of passive femininity, Harriet is well suited for the work of early 20
th
century
mediation. Her passive sympathy towards Arnold allows her to read his mind and articulate it for
both Arnold and the reader. Her “insipid compliancy” allows her to do so without projection or
interference. Galvan posits the trope of feminine sympathetic channeling as a way to assuage
anxiety about the interface of technological changes in media transmission. Yet, as we will see,
the articulate an emotional accuracy of Harriet’s mind reading is ultimately what Arnold
experiences as destructive and violent, disrupting his sense of coherent subjectivity.
To illustrate this point, it is easiest to consider Harriet’s use of material media to describe
how her psychic powers work. Harriet’s “ability to reach out feelingly to others” psychically is
doubled in her role as pianist. As a musician, she is able to express emotion through an aesthetic
practice that is also rendered somewhat automatic in her repetitive practice, a point made by
Francesca Frigerio in her essay on “Music and the Feminine Art of Detail in Rebecca West’s
Harriet Hume.”
181
Strangely perhaps, the piano is involved in evoking the first instance of the
uncanny for Arnold in a scene already occupied by the occult. Although Harriet has already
given clear evidence of her mind reading, and although he has expressed his disdain for
“women...telling fibs about the occult” he remains quite at ease, reflecting on “an afternoon with
heavenly lightness and benignity.”
182
It is not until Harriet uses the piano to illustrate how she
thinks telepathy works that an uncanny aspect of telepathy is brought into the diegetic space of

180
Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium, 12.
181
Francesca Frigerio, “Music and the Feminine Art of Detail in Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume,” in Rebecca West Today:
Contemporary Critical Approaches, ed. Bernard Schweizer (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 125–56.
182
West, Harriet Hume, 33.
90

the novel. Because the uncanny functions at the point of tension between magic and science, the
benign and the terrible, it is material—and not psychic—media that disrupts Arnold’s sense of
“benignity.”
The lightness and safety that Arnold experiences suggests that Harriet’s telepathy doesn’t
threaten him at this point in the novel. Though “a miracle” and “not compatible” with “the real
world,” Arnold finds what she reflects to him of his thoughts to be “good news about [his] soul,”
as what she first finds there is only within the structure of the affective gesture of their romance
and affection. When Arnold asks, “Harriet, how do you do this thing?” the question is more of an
idle curiosity than a great concern. That is, until Harriet uncovers the piano keyboard and,
standing some distance from it, begins to sing:
[Arnold] was snatched from all these [benign] occupations by his half-horrified
perception that from the unattended keyboard of the piano, whose mistress stood
ten feet away, was coming music. Not melody, to be sure, but a progression that
corresponded with the line of her voice, echoing clearly enough each note she
dwelt on for any space or with any richness. The sound was less brisk than that
which a finder evokes by striking a key. Rather was it as if some inhabiting spirit
of the instrument had resolved no longer to tolerate the age-old conditions by
which human virtuosity steals all the credit of its tunefulness, and was essaying to
make its music by itself and found its new art difficult. But that it made a sound
could not be gainsaid. He made an uneasy exclamation.
183

Harriet sings a short distance from the piano. When she holds a note with her voice for long
enough, the sound waves from her voice cause the piano strings to also vibrate. Harriet is
illustrating for Arnold the physics of sound waves that move in unison. It is this moment, when
Harriet compares her mindreading to the vibrations of a piano, that Arnold is shaken from his
idle repose. This incident interrupts both his thoughts and the happy feeling of the afternoon. But
why should this material elucidation be more frightening than Harriet’s more direct evidence of

183
West, 34.
91

mind reading? The text suggests the problem lies in the question, not only of an unexplained
action at a distance (magic), but also of object-agency.
Harriet suggests that their telepathy is working in this same way as her voice and the
piano: “Set the air shaking with a strong enough pulse, and both cords will shake alike.”
184
The
invisible, but benign physics of soundwaves that transmit Harriet’s voice through strings of the
piano give the impression of an impossible action at a distance. To Arnold the piano is an
instrument, a medium and an object, which is typically played at close proximity of the keys.
Without the strike of a finger on the keys, the piano gives the impression of acting without
“human virtuosity.” In evoking the “inhabiting spirit,” the piano’s subject position is articulated,
but articulated as uncertain: “as if.” Both object and spirit, the piano seems to claim “human
virtuosity” for itself, destabilizing the subject/object relation.
It isn’t clear if Harriet imagines herself as the piano or the singer in her illustration
because Harriet’s description of the event suggests an equal relationship (“both cords will shake
alike”). But the uncanny nature of the piano’s call and response is significant in that it only
works one way: the piano responds to Harriet’s voice. Of course, Harriet singing in response to
the sound of a piano would not pose the same problem. Telepathy between Harriet and Arnold
also does not work both ways. Arnold’s inability to read Harriet’s mind is explained by her as an
unwillingness to do so: “I have so strange a feeling that you could… if you would…”
185
Arnold’s
masculinity (or rather, his lack of feminine-defined qualities, including perhaps a willingness to
enter into sympathetic relation with Harriet) maintains his subjectivity in one sense—he does not
dissolve into the feminized role of the medium. That it should be in his power to read Harriet’s

184
West, 35.
185
West, 35.
92

thoughts, imagined as sound waves, places him in the position of the singer in Harriet’s
metaphor: he is the singer, she is the piano. But then she is also the “inhabiting spirit.” Although
Arnold does not yet realize the dangers of Harriet’s mind reading, his “uneasy startle” reveals his
reflexive feeling that the piano’s bid to “steal back” its own “tunefulness” from “human
virtuosity” is also a violation of the coherence claimed for the modern subject.
This instantiation of the uncanny dialectic of the subject/object relation shows a kind of
disruptive power of the medium that is also at stake in the question of feminine authorship.
When objects “talk back” the subject is also thrown out of place.

“The Medium is the Maker”
The third-person narrator of Harriet Hume primarily follows and perceives the world
alongside Harriet’s lover, Arnold Condorex, and, like Harriet, is able to read Arnold’s thoughts.
Like Arnold, however, the narrator cannot read the mind of Harriet. Though Arnold initially
declares Harriet’s abilities “a miracle”
186
the risks of her telepathic channel quickly become
clear. As Arnold and Harriet stroll in the gardens outside her rented apartment, “her own grace,
forsook her suddenly.” The reader, like Arnold is in the dark: “he perceived that some monstrous
blow had felled her. But what the blow was, or who had struck it, he did not guess until she
looked up into his face…then he remembered and understood.”
187
Arnold remembers, in that
moment, Harriet’s telepathic access and his thoughts are sent on a new path. Four pages later—
four pages down this new path—the narrator relays Arnold’s thoughts to the reader: his plan “to
enjoy Harriet till the last safe moment and then disembarrass himself of her.”
188
In the instant

186
West, 32.
187
West, 51–52.
188
West, 55.
93

Arnold registers the presence of Harriet, of the other inside of himself, his thoughts change. And
it is not primarily her judgment of him that alters the course of the story, nor is it ultimately his
concern. Instead Harriet’s presence leads Arnold into a spiral of confusion, anger and self-
alienation: “She bit her lip; and beside her Arnold Condorex’s mind growled that she was not
being fair to him…Despair swept through him as he realized that certainly she would not
understand; and it became absolute as he realized that neither did he truly understand himself.”
189

Harriet’s presence in his mind alters and conditions Arnold’s thoughts and feelings and produces
the context for them. This context ultimately offers up Arnold’s thoughts as text not only for the
character (his own awareness of his thoughts made legible) but also for the reader in the form of
the novel itself, showing Harriet’s mediumship to be not just the disorientation of the sovereign
subject but also the occasion for the production of the text.
As text, however, the telepathic performance at work here cannot be seen as a direct
channel from one mind to another. Her unique telepathic mediumship excludes a transmission of
her thoughts, feelings, or words. The text is not Harriet’s immediate, direct access but already
produced by the delay of her mind reading. Derrida reflects on a relevant problem in “Telepathy”
through the structure of the postcard. He says, “it is because there would be telepathy that a
postcard cannot arrive at its destination. The ultimate naivety would be to allow oneself to think
that telepathy guarantees a destination which 'posts and telecommunications' fail to provide.”
190

Derrida tells us that telepathy does not circumvent the potential failure of modern
telecommunication circuits. It does not guarantee arrival, nor the type of direct access Harriet is
supposed to have to Arnold’s mind. Indeed, it is somehow “because there would be telepathy

189
West, 56–57.
190
Derrida, “Telepathy,” 16.
94

that a postcard can not arrive.” And Harriet’s telepathy is both the occasion and the necessary
exclusion for the possibility of the text: the narrator aligns the reader exclusively with Arnold—it
does not offer us any share in Harriet’s magical knowledge.
Harriet Hume may suggest that “author” is not the right word for the feminine/medium.
West’s theory of telepathy instead indicates that the psychic may not be the source of meaning in
the same sense of the author who is, rather, closer to Socrates’ understanding of the writer who
speaks “signs that belong to others.” Harriet says very little and, indeed, often simply echoes
Arnold’s words. We know Arnold’s thoughts as a kind of consequence or output of a relay
between Arnold, Harriet, and the narrator. But as text, this relay includes the reader and the
author, until finally no priority or origin can be said to be definitive. Harriet’s telepathy
complicates rather than clarifies the relationship between reader and thought by making explicit
the opaque, invisible, and multi-directional circuits of the text. Without this relay, as Derrida
says—there would be telepathy. Telepathy would be the opposite of text—it would be to not
need a text. It would be for Harriet, Arnold, and the reader, not to know each other, but to have
no need to know each other. In other words, there would be no text. And yet, Harriet reads
Arnold’s mind. The narrator reads Arnold’s mind. Even we “read” Arnold’s mind. What to call
this if not telepathy?
Harriet Hume highlights both the revelatory force and the untenable distinction
articulated in Marshall McLuhan's truism that “the medium is the message.”
191
In the words of
Hansen and Mitchel, “McLuhan urges us to focus on media independent of its ties with content,
and in the process redefines media itself as context, not just a vehicle or channel.”
192
Harriet is

191
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Second, A Mentor Book (New York: New American
Library, 1964).
192
Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, xi.
95

the context, the occasion, and the transformative possibility of the Arnold character. Yet the
phrase “the medium is the message” also has something of an ironic gesture, seeming to
prioritize the message—or at least seek the status of the message for the medium. The psychic
medium, as West theorizes it here, also shows us that the medium is not a message. Instead,
Harriet’s liminal status as both (not) human and (nor) medium cleaves open the relation between
signifier and signified, by maintaining a context in continuous relay across dimensions—in this
case the world of the novel and the world of the reader. Harriet’s pathos is both necessary and, in
every sense, unthinkable, articulating telepathy as the resistance of the medium (in which sense
do we mean it here?) to the bounded context and to the transcendental signified in relation to the
feminine affective space of the psychic. Perhaps this is why J. Hillis Miller reformulates the
phrase, without really having an alternative ontological claim, to “the medium is the maker.”
193

Miller, following Derrida, argues that the media itself announces and performs something,
regardless of the message. It is not a question of exorcising language, but of revising, from a
broader perspective, the logic of the supplement by reordering the centrality of the message.

Pathos meets Politics: Luisa Capetillo Reads Aloud
We might ask at this point what the limits or potential of this form of feminine, passive
tele-pathic making are? A more radical performance of literary and embodied medial pathic
production may be found the figure of another early 20
th
century feminist writer. Luisa Capetillo
(1882-1922) was a Puerto Rican born anarchist, labor leader, and journalist. In addition to her
mixed-genre writings, Capetillo worked as a lectora (loud-reader or factory reader) in tobacco

193
J. Hillis Miller, “The Medium Is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies,” Oxford
Literary Review 30, no. 2 (2008): 161–79, https://doi.org/10.3366/E0305149808000278.
96

factories in Puerto Rico and around the east coast of the US. She was also a practitioner of
spiritism or espiritismo, a form of spiritualism that traveled to Latin America in the late 19
th
and
early 20
th
centuries, and took on distinct hybrid expression especially in Puerto Rico, Cuba and
Brazil.
194
After decades of obscurity, interest in Capetillo was invigorated, in part, by the
publication of Norma Valle Ferrer’s Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita in
(1990),
195
and Julio Ramos’ Amor y Anarquía in (1992),
196
both of which included scholarship
along with selections of Capetillo’s original writing. In 2005, Felíx V. Matos Rodríguez, who
edited a dual-language (Spanish/English) re-print of Capetillo’s feminist manifesto Mi opinión
sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer [A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist
Speaks Out], notes in his introduction that at the time of publication only four copies of the book
were available in libraries across the US and Puerto Rico in any language.
197

As with Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume, I see Capetillo’s obscured position in educational
archives as a symptom of a patriarchal history. Capetillo’s marginalization is bound not only to
her gender, but also her position within the colonial history of Puerto Rico, her minority position
within the anarchist movement, and the urgency of her liberatory message as a member of the
working class. In a recent article, Nancy Bird-Sotto describes Capetillo as “systematically
marginalized for her unconventional ways both by normative society and within the male-
dominated circles with which she shared prolabor ideals.”
198
This marginalization is not
reducible to an issue of identity, but of a conflict between the global, colonial and patriarchal

194
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and
Espiritismo, 51043rd edition (New York: NYU Press, 2003).
195
Norma Valle Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo: historia de una mujer proscrita (Editorial Cultural, 1990).
196

197
Luisa Capetillo and Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out, 2004.
198
Nancy Bird-Soto, “Reading Luisa Capetillo,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 3 (November 1, 2022): 77,
https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211878.
97

archival practice and an embodied—or as Roberta Hurtado would say, enfleshed,
199
experience
and modes of knowledge and pedagogy that reach to her practices of writing. For this reason,
Bird-Sotto notes, “approaching her work is learning to read from outside the canon.”
200
In part,
as I will discuss, this is because her writing praxis was never limited to writing itself; but always
had an element of the orality and the immediacy of direct action through her work as a loud-
reader and community organizer for a largely illiterate working class. Capetillo’s resurgence
among scholars offers us an opportunity to frame her writing as in a state of deferral, a position
in which we can reach out or touch the past and present by way of the spectral or ghostly trace of
the written word. In this dissertation, Capetillo is taken up as a theorist of media that articulates
the peculiar tension of psychic and material mediation. I argue Capetillo gives us an articulation
of literary telepathy as bound not only to literature but also to a political, even utopian impulse
that can be considered both as a form of possession and conjuring, as a practice of “making”
discussed in the previous section. This utopian impulse is not merely ideal therefore, but enacted,
and performed as political action. Capetillo seeks in all her literary performances to make
pathways into new realities that decenter exploitative cannons and tropes inherited by her
(post)colonial landscape. To do this, Capetillo deliberately conflates her media practice with
something like natural reason. Spiritism is the pathic authority that links this material practice
with the new potential realities she constructs.

199
Roberta Hurtado, Decolonial Puerto Rican Women’s Writings: Subversion in the Flesh, Literatures of the Americas (Oswego,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05731-2.
200
Bird-Soto, “Reading Luisa Capetillo,” 74.
98

Possession by Anarcho-Espiritismo
Capetillo stands out among anarchists in her efforts to fuse the belief of spiritism into the
typically atheistic discourse of anarchism, which she frequently admits may seem at odds with
one another. For instance, in Ensayos Libertarios she addresses her “compañeros de trabajo,
hermanos en ideas,” listed as socialists, spiritists and anarchists. Collecting a family under the
rubric of both work and ideas, Capetillo wonders why the metaphysics of the soul would be
separated from the politics of anarchism:
Compañeros de trabajo, hermanos en ideas, tanto socialistas, espiritistas y
anarquistas: muchos ignorantes dirán como pretendo unir los anarquistas y los
espiritistas. (¿Qué acaso los anarquistas no tienen alma o la tendrán constituidas
en otra manera?)
201

[Colleagues in work, brothers in ideas, both socialists, spiritists and anarchists:
many ignorant people will ask how I intend to unite anarchists and spiritists. (Do
the anarchists have no soul or will they have it constituted in another way?)]
202

Capetillo naturalizes the association by asking if anarchists are constituted differently from
others—do they have no soul? What Capetillo illuminates for me here is a series of alliances
between the beliefs and practices of anarchism and spiritism (espiritismo) that speak to the
concept of mediation, including the foundational anarchist practice of “direct action” in relation
to the act of writing.
Capetillo’s spiritism shares with European spiritism and spiritualist movements the
characteristic association with science and modern technological fascination, as well as the
central role of psychic mediums, often women. The writings of the Frenchman Hippolyte Leon
Denizard Riail (1804-1869), better known as Allan Kardec, was the foundation for the form of

201
Luisa Capetillo, Ensayos Libertarios (San Juan: Arecibo, 1907), 19.
202
My translation
99

spiritism, or espiritismo,
203
that took hold in Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United
States. Kardec’s most famous text, The Spirits’ Book, was written “with the assistance of psychic
mediums” using automatic or slate writing to channel spirits of the dead including those of
Socrates, Saint Augustine, Ben Franklin, Swedenborg, and Saint Vincent de Paul.
204
The women
who performed these slate writings attest to the feminine makers of European spiritism under the
male authorship of Kardec and his historical inspirations. We can contrast this to Capetillo’s
writing, which she also understands as possessed by historical writers. Capetillo, however,
offered up her own texts to the readers as incantation—an invitation to their own possession as
an entrance to a new reality—possession by anarcho-espiritismo that necessitates political action.
Espiritismo was the result of a creolization process with “roots in the United States,
Europe, Africa, and the indigenous Taino Caribbean,” according to Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
and Margarite Fernández Olmos, that “amplified and transformed European spiritism in its travel
back and forth from the Old World to the New” not unlike Santería and Voodoo.
205
Espiritismo
adapted popular traditions and belief systems to cultural shifts coming out of Europe, creating a
hybrid and flexible belief system that Capetillo claims is not a religion. In Latin America and the
Caribbean, incorporating “enlightenment values of reason and science to their spirituality as they
turned their backs on a religious institution too closely identified with the oppressive colonial
powers,”
206
In this way, espiritismo offered a challenge to the orthodoxies of the church. As
spiritism spread in Puerto Rico, it was adapted first by the middle class and then disseminated

203
The word “spiritism” is typically used as the English translation of the Spanish word “espiritismo,” including in the
translations of Capetillo’s writings. As discussed here, spiritism in Latin America and the Caribbean had unique features that
simultaneously fed back into its European practices. Here I use both words to distinguish between the European and Latin
American traditions. However, as Capetillo made no such distinction, it is not particularly important after this initial discussion.
All English-translated quotes of Capetillo use the word “spiritism.”
204
Allan Kardec, The Spirits’ Book, trans. E. G. Dutra, 2nd ed. edition (Sheridan, WY: Luchnos Media LLC, 2021).
205
Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, 203.
206
Paravisini-Gebert, 208–9.
100

across larger sectors of the population, combining with diverse religious and spiritual beliefs
especially ancestor worship brought to the Caribbean by enslaved Black Africans.
207

In the following section, I focus on the role of espiritismo in the titular text—a play—in
Capetillo’s last book, Influencias de las ideas modernas (first published in 1911 in San Juan, the
book is now translated in English as Absolute Equality: An Early Feminist Perspective). The
play, “Influences of Modern Ideas,” features a spiritist character, Angelina, who is the daughter
of a wealthy factory owner, Don Juan de Ramíres. In this play Capetillo offers arguments about
espiritismo in explicit relation to anarchist beliefs and practices and suggests a couple of
different routes through which to think about writing and literature in relationship to authorship
and telepathy that goes beyond the analysis offered with the reading of Rebecca West. In the
next section I will discuss the role of spiritism in Capetillo’s texts itself; but I will also consider
Capetillo’s own way of understanding the potential of text as “possession by anarcho-
espiritismo”—a text that is not a coherent, singular embodied form but acts itself as a kind of
passage that occupies and transmits rather than originates or dwells. Finally, I will discuss the
mode of distribution of Capetillo’s writing and the act of “loud reading” and other contemporary
working-class means of artistic distribution employed by Capetillo such as “Casinos” as a
disruption in the binary between logos and writing, and the propriety of each in relation to the
concept of the authorial subject.

207
Marta Moreno Vega, “Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community: A New World Recreation with the Elements of Kongo
Ancestor Worship,” Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 3 (1999): 334.
101

The Law of Nature
“The Influence of Modern Ideas” follows the character of Angelina, the daughter of a
wealthy factory worker who is also a spiritist. Through her personal experience and her
engagement with the writings of various authors including Tolstoy, Zola, Malto, and others
Angelina influences her father to peacefully hand over his tobacco factory to the workers who
create a supportive collective without the need for the circulation of money and in which
everything is provided by the community. Their success and material support also allows
workers in other factories to hold out in their own union organizations to acquire their own
rights. In the story, no violence is necessary, no tragedy occurs, and all fears are overcome by
Angelina’s gentle and persuasive logic—described as natural reason. In the course of this action,
Angelina falls in love with Carlos Santana, the factory’s union strike leader; and the play ends
with an epilogue in which Angelina and Carlos, as well as two other couples, are united in
marriage. Unlike the classic ending of a Victorian novel with several worthy marriages, this joint
wedding is a non-civil, non-religious event. The play closes with Angelina addressing young
women in the audience with a call to free love: “beautiful girls who have listened, if you wish to
be free and to be mothers of conscious generations, do not get married in civil courts or in
churches because that is like selling yourself and selling is prostitution. Love must be free, like
the air…”
208
The emancipatory logic of Angelina’s message expresses the anti-orthodoxy of
espiritismo that is beholden to neither church nor state and frees the feminized affect of love
from the logic of economic exchange (prostitution) or property possession.

208
Luisa Capetillo, “Influences of Modern Ideas,” in Absolute Equality: An Early Feminist Perspective = Influencias de Las
Ideas Modernas, Hispanic Civil Rights Series (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2009), 41.
102

Although Angelina reads political authors throughout the play and the action centers on
anarchist principles, when Angelina discusses her beliefs with Carlos, she points first to her
belief in spiritism:
ANEGLINA: I will explain to you how I started. I was studying Spiritism on my own. I
felt a desire to know something about the afterlife… I wanted to understand the diversity
of inhabited worlds and to fully accept diverse existences. This made me a revolutionary,
because it explained to me that all men are brothers, that no one has the right to hurt
others or to impose their ideas on them or to enslave them, and I also realized that luxury
was a crime as long as there was misery…So more than the grandeur of the universe, it
made me a humanitarian; something perhaps no one could have accomplished.
209

As with the closing of the play, Angelina begins with feelings associated with the concept of free
love and with spiritual knowledge like desire, acceptance and brotherhood. For Angelina
spiritism expresses humanitarianism, equality, and emancipation. In other writings, Capetillo
discusses the transformation of espiritismo in the Black Caribbean from French philosophy in a
text dedicated to her daughter, published in Mi opinión, as she develops her unique version of
anarchist-espiritismo that rejects the church and the colonial projects of Europe and the United
States. As Capetillo describes more explicitly in the essay to her daughter “our spiritual self can
see, touch, and even make itself visible, without the physical body; this is not religion. This is
Science!”
210
Unlike Harriet Hume, Angelina’s character is never accused of foolishness and is
never met with skepticism. Spiritism offers a rational route to both humanism and political action
by delivering the context of a world in which all people are connected. In Capetillo’s paradigm,
spiritism is the metaphysical link between affect, political reality, and natural science.
Though Angelina’s arguments are continuously presented as natural reason or science,
we can simultaneously understand this appropriation of enlightenment logic as a challenge to an

209
Capetillo, 29.
210
Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out / Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de
la mujer (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004), 71.
103

assumed natural order offered up as “reality” in Capetillo’s (and our current) social-political
context. As Luis Othoniel Rosa argues in his article on “Luisa Capetillo and the Pedagogy of
Unruliness,” revolutionary action requires a challenge as strong as the appearance of reality
under capitalism:
For Capetillo, reality lies. Our social world is built on a series of euphemisms: stealing is
called property; slavery is called wage labor; prostitution, marriage; murder, death
penalty; torture and imprisonment, justice. To counter these social lies, Capetillo turns to
an opposing force. Facing the “Law of Men” she brings up the “Law of Nature.”
However, Capetillo is not naïve…Capetillo’s notion of natural law is a literary artifice
that stands against the artifice of capital in a strange cosmovision of two conflicting
worlds.
211

The “Law of Nature” is the challenge that is strong enough to counteract the naturalized law of
patriarchal capitalism. It is the social authority that can counter the euphemisms that constitute
our social world. At the same time as Angelina attributes her humanitarianism to her study of
spiritism, we are also reminded later of Capetillo’s caution against dogma and totality by Carlos:
“…psychology, Christian science, spiritism and theosophy, and each one wants to be the sole
purveyor of the truth… No one possesses the absolute truth.”
212
As both Carlos and Angelina
express, what is at stake is not the absolute truth nor “the grandeur of the universe.”
213
The
advantage of spiritism is the possibility of uniting different beliefs, from the teachings of
Confucius and Jesus to psychiatry and mathematics, free of the dogma and the church, to the
practice of science under a form of natural spiritism, always embodied as humanitarian action in
the present.

211
Luis Rosa, “Luisa Capetillo and the Pedagogy of Unruliness,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 3 (69)
(November 1, 2022): 86, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211892.
212
Capetillo, “Influences of Modern Ideas,” 34.
213
See quotation above: Capetillo, 29.
104

Political action in this way is drawn into the literary logic of Natural Law, which might
otherwise appear separate from the bourgeois luxuries of education and literacy. At the onset of
the play, Angelina questions her father, Don Juan, about the nature of exploitation and the
meaning of anarchism. He offers a description which Angelina shares: “[Anarchists are] men
with progressive ideas who wish to emancipate the workers from economic slavery…through a
revolution, converting private property into common property, because that way there wouldn’t
be poverty or crime.”
214
Don Juan, as a wealthy and educated man, is aware of both the political
philosophy of anarchism and the exploitative structure of capitalism, but he sees it as neither his
fault nor his responsibility to repair the “consequences of the inevitable.”
215
As a result, he does
not act on, or even speak of, worker exploitation until provoked to do so by Angelina. Angelina
offers her father another narrative of the structure of exploitation by appealing to the unity of
humanity. In causing the suffering of his workers, he is also suffering:
you cannot be happy, as I am not happy, because we are causing a lot of pain with our
indifference. We are all brothers and sisters, and we will suffer thousands of obstacles as
long as we do not help to destroy the cause of so much pain. Humanity is a chain in
which we are the links, and when one moves, all move.
216

From the inevitability of exploitation and suffering, Angelina argues instead that what is
inevitable is the spiritual link between all people’s happiness and suffering. Inaction and
indifference are, unknown to him, the cause of his own suffering.
Angelina’s use of the metaphor of a linked chain is reminiscent of Plato’s conception of
divine prophecy’s role in the production of history.
217
For Plato, historical knowledge is
produced by divinely inspired art and bound into history through the action of human life, and

214
Capetillo, 14.
215
Capetillo, 11.
216
Capetillo, 11.
217
Discussed in Chapter 1.
105

artistic and interpretive practice. For Angelina too, people are not distinct autonomous subjects,
but held by stronger forces that work through both the human body and the text. In many of
Angelina’s and Capetillo’s arguments, this force is reason and Natural Law. Spiritism is the
foundation for the belief system that opens upon this Natural Law to construct human reality.
Criticizing the tendency of middle class practitioners of spiritism to ignore material suffering in
favor of transcendental ideals, for instance, Capetillo conjoins spiritism with anarchism through
the faculty of reason: “spiritists call themselves rationalists, and so do anarchists, nonetheless,
spiritists don’t dare attack private property although they are aware of how it came about, but
instead they allow people to die of hunger, and that is not rationalism.”
218
Capetillo’s brand of
anarcho-spiritism offers a naturalized alliance for both a spiritual and political practice, under the
conditions of urgency of human life under capitalism. Angelina goes beyond materialist
arguments and connects “the diversity of inhabited worlds” with a form of unity that links all
things in the universe, rendering revolutionary action natural logic.
This alternative is not nature “itself,” but a system still tied inextricably to the literary, to
writing, and to education. The literary is a space in which the multiplicity of worlds, a doctrine of
spiritism, may counter and encounter the language, institutions, and archives that produce the
conditions for exploitation. However, this conception of the literary is not a question of Art
above or beyond the “Law of Men” or the “Law of Nature.” Rather, it is another tool (a medium)
through which fictions such as the Law of Nature may be reconstituted. Capetillo is keenly aware
of what Miller articulates: “the Medium is the Maker,” as well as the dangers of this productive
power. Rosa continues, “A great deal of Capetillo’s revolution consists of writing and reading.

218
Capetillo, A Nation of Women, 65.
106

However, writing also enslaves our society. And that is the paradox of Capetillo’s texts.”
219
As a
material presence enmeshed in material political life, Capetillo’s literature is a means not just for
propaganda but for unmasking, defamiliarizing, and denaturalizing the fictions of capitalism,
patriarchy, and colonization. To achieve this, Capetillio does not primarily look to the archives
and genres of modern literature but uses it to open new paradigms. She does not use literature to
engage in tragedy, realism, or verisimilitude, but uses storytelling to connect a utopian vision
implied by a happy ending of the play to our world and the Law of Man.
This does not mean Capetillo’s writing is distinct from literary tradition. “The Influence
of Modern Ideas” opens with an engagement of the literary and written word. As the first scene
opens, the stage directions describe Angelina “concentrating on reading Tolstoy’s ‘The Slavery
of Our Times.’”
220
Throughout the play, Angelina makes many references to the education she
has created for herself through reading. Angelina argues to Carlos that the contemplation of
“other inhabited worlds”—such as those offered by Capetillo through the “Laws of Nature’’—
may occur simultaneously, and not only after the material sufficiency for all people is acquired.
“Other worlds” open through the medium of the text and lead Angelina towards effective
political action that counters the logic of industrial capitalism even prior to the conditions of
emancipation. Effectively, Angelina sees herself as an extension of the text. Emancipation is an
alternative world, and the medium can lead us there.
While Angelina is clearly the driving force of change in the play, she also fits reasonably
well, and in a way she acknowledges, into the archetype Galvan articulates of the feminized 19
th

century medium. Not only is she a spiritist who believes in psychic phenomenon and

219
Rosa, “Luisa Capetillo and the Pedagogy of Unruliness,” 86.
220
Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times (Forgotten Books, 2018).
107

premonition; her character is possessed throughout the play by engagement with Tolstoy,
Malato, Kropotkin, Zola, and others referenced throughout the play. At times, important maxims
or information are quoted from sources that are either made up or are uncited. For instance,
Angelina tells her friends she plans to give away a bracelet gifted to her by her father. Her
friends believe she should try to do good for the workers of her father’s factory without giving
away her bracelet. Angelina responds with an unattributed quote: “Listen, ‘Do not buy finery or
jewels, because books are worth more than they are. Adorn your understanding with their
precious ideals, because there is no luxury that dazzles like the luxury of science.’”
221
In this
scene we are told that Angelina is reading “Slavery of our Times,” but this quote does not appear
in Tolstoy’s text.
222
“Influences of Modern Ideas” is laced with ideas, some credited to specific
authors and others, like the above, unattributed—as if the source text is unimportant. Although
the play offers the audience or reader some texts to explore in their own education, the ideas
themselves are left as an amalgamation—a product of “reason” without ownership or propriety.
Similarly, because Angelina sees herself as a link in the chain of humanity, her character
takes no credit for the political action she initiates, which she instead describes as merely
reasonable based on common knowledge and her understanding of her education. For her, the
structures of natural reason and the logics of spiritism come together through political action.
When Carlos thanks her for allowing a union demonstration to stop at her house she responds,
“what have I done that you express yourself in such a manner? They are my ideas; for me there
is nothing special about that…don’t be surprised by my actions. I have read Malato, Malatesta,

221
Capetillo, “Influences of Modern Ideas,” 13.
222
Julio Ramos studies the unattributed quotes in Capetillo as an irreverence of intellectual property and follows Deleuze to talk
about Capetillo as another way of understanding “minor literature.” See Capetillo and Ramos, Amor y Anarquía: Escritos de
Luisa Capetillo.
108

Tolstoy, Zola. So I understand many things that I couldn’t understand before.”
223
Where, in
another context Carlos takes responsibility for the hunger and crime of all others, following
emperor Yao, saying “I am its author,” Angelina might be more apt to say “I am not an author,
but am compelled by reason and natural law to mitigate the need for the hunger and crime of all
others.”

Writing Otherwise
Probably the most famous image of Capetillo is a photo taken of her in Havana, Cuba in
1915 dressed in pants, blazer, tie, and short-brimmed hat. The photo printed in the next day’s
Havana newspaper, El Día, depicts her before she was arrested
for “wearing clothes made only for men” [Figure 3]. We might
think of Capetillo wearing men’s clothes as akin to her writing: a
performance that breaks open a potential reality—a reality in
which a person like Capetillo, a working-class Puerto Rican
woman, has access to the public sphere, the Law of Man, and the
authority of logos, all associated with masculinity. The affective
and performative moment crossed, enfleshed by the human
medium, brought these two worlds into contact. The newspaper
headline reads, “Las excentricidadeś de una anarquista” or “The
eccentricities of a female anarchist.” Perhaps this photo, like
Capetillo’s writing, is illegibly “eccentric” in its refusal to resolve

223
Capetillo, “Influences of Modern Ideas,” 28–29.
Figure 3: “The eccentricities of a
female anarchist”
109

the contradiction between the utopian world that possesses her body—or her texts—and the
“reality” of the symbolic system in which history is recorded.
As Norma Valle Ferrer highlights in her biography, Capetillo wore these clothes
performatively and with purpose: “her arrest was calculated and…designed to shock
conventional society, to take advantage of the impact of publicity, and create forums to further
advance her goals.”
224
Julio Ramos places Capetillo in the context of Puerto Rico’s workers
movement, women’s liberation, and the suffrage movements, and especially Puerto Rican
literature as a Nationalist/nationalizing project. The central argument, for which he offers as a
starting point the image of Capetillo is men’s clothing that got her arrested, is that a particular
kind of appropriation of dominant discourse is possible without submitting to its logic. It is not
only that Capetillo wears men’s clothing, but that she does so in a performative way that
threatens the structure of decency and categorization.

By wearing men’s clothes, she upsets and
alters an “aparato exclusivo” [exclusive apparatus] through “el desafío, la burla y el simulacro”
[defiance, mimicry, and simulacrum.]
225
Literature and literacy, he argues, is a signifier of an
apparatus that authorizes and legitimizes literature as the purview of the upper-class intellectual
elite in the context of a largely illiterate culture.
226

Capetillo’s writing was literally made to be performed. As a loud-reader, Capetillo made
money by reading aloud to factory workers. Ramos argues that “la lectora opera como una
especie de traductora, intermediaria entre la materia escrita -que progresivamente pierde
exclusividad- y un destinatario de formación oral, frecuentemente analfabeto” [the lectora

224
Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo, 42. See also Araceli Tinajero, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, trans. Judith E.
Grasberg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
225
Julio Ramos, Amor y anarquía: los escritos de Luisa Capetillo (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1992), 12. All English
translations of Ramos’ introduction come from a forthcoming translation by Jody Blanco and Raquel Salas Rivera.
226
An 1899 census indicated that 77% of the population of PR was illiterate at that time.
110

functions as a kind of translator, an intermediary between written material—which gradually
loses its exclusivity—and an oftentimes illiterate addressee whose formation is primarily oral.]
227

As a loud-speaker and as a writer, Capetillo was a medium authorized not by the bureaucracy of
Law but by a collective and working-class system cast as the Law of Nature. An 1899 census
indicated that 77% of the population of Puerto Rico was illiterate at that time. In this context,
loud-reading was more than a passtime for factory workers, it was a route to access a symbolic
code from which they were systematically excluded. Ramos argues that Capetillo’s performance
in Havana in 1915, her work as a loud-reader, and as a writer all function performatively by
taking onto her own body signifiers of the phallocentrism that help constitute oppression.
Writing, he says,
—más que un simple marcador del prestigio de los sujetos—era una tecnología,
digamos, que posibilitaba la administración de la vida pública y que decidía, en el
campo de la producción 'simbólica' y cultural, la legitimidad de cualquier discurso
de representatividad y hegemonía.
228

—more than a simple marker of prestige amongst subjects—it was, let’s say, a
technology that made possible the administration of the public sphere and decided
the legitimacy of any discourse that claimed representation and hegemony in the
first of “symbolic” and cultural production.]

The technology of writing as a “exclusive apparatus” of the elite explains why the anarchism of
the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries prioritized orality, understanding it as a more accessible and
proletariat mode of information dissemination. As a play, “Modern Ideas” was more likely
written to be performed in working-class “Cassinos” than read in cigar factories. Cassinos were
cultural institutions that fostered education and a climate of solidarity for workers. Some

227
Ramos, Amor y anarquía, 30–32.
228
Ramos, 14.
111

historians have suggested that Casinos were imitations of the customs of elite classes,
229
but they
may also be seen as part of the appropriative logic described by Ramos as a way of using
privileged cultural institutions without reinforcing the underlying power logics. The oral
performance of these texts disrupts the logic of the division between logos and writing by
performing the absence of their division in both prose and distribution of the text. Capetillo
writes as if the division never existed, enacting a new world of working-class equity.
Anarchism’s focus on direct action often avoided or excluded writing and the aesthetic
decadence of literacy as both non-democratic and intermediary.
230
Capteillo engages in a
paradox when she writes as a mode of anarchist performance. Writing is the medium of
administration posts and social institutions, which Ramos compares to the farmer standing before
the Law in Kafka’s “Trial.”
231
Capetillo, like Cassandra, occupies a series of marginalized
positions—the post/colonial context of Puerto Ricco, her gender, and her class. And writing itself
demarcates the cite of exclusion in the early 20
th
century in Puerto Rico. Capetillo’s writing
pushes against the fantasy of originality by using writing (“signs that belong to others”—but here
the positions are reversed—the other is the Law) by writing against the literary authority of good
taste, canon, and national discourse occupying Puerto Rican literature at that time. An irony
emerges: writing with immediacy or writing as a strategy of immediacy. Writing as telepathy.
Angelina is more active—and certainly more argumentative—than Harriet Hume but she
sees herself enacting reason, like a channel or conduit, presented in other texts. Where Harriet
renders Arnold’s interiority legible to their readers, Angelina can be said to manifest the ideal

229
Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo and Juan José Baldrich, Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico, ed. Pablo
L. Crespo Vargas, Revised edition (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 88.
230
Jesse Cohn, Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011, Illustrated edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press,
2015), 28–35..
231
Ramos, Amor y anarquía, 15.
112

emancipation of Tolstoy by carrying his text across to her own world with her words just as
Capetillo comes into our world in her texts. Through her engagement with texts, and by positing
her role as nothing more than an understanding of the texts written by others, she produces a new
reality. Not merely the past—she draws the future into the present through her mediumship.
While Angelina abdicates authorship, the play “Influences of Modern Ideas” offers itself up as
possessed by modern ideas, refusing authorial credit. Rosa describes this as possession. Angelina
understands herself as possessed by the writings she encounters, which dictate her action. Rosa
says,
In anarchism, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reminds us, private property is a
superstition but possession is very much real. We possess things in perpetual
negotiation with a community. [Capetillo] understood this material reality of
collective possession as something spiritual. Our minds, and our writings too, are
in a continual possessive negotiation with a collective. Capetillo is a free writer in
this sense, liberated from the prison of good taste, of authorship, of originality, of
intellectual property. A writer possessed by a mission.
232

Referring to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, this quote describes the distinction between possession and
property in What is Property? For Proudhon, possession is a temporary condition in which one
uses property, which is necessarily collective and therefore never properly owned. As Proudhon
describes possession, it is “a function which excludes proprietorship.”
233
Rosa expands this
explanation of land, dwelling, and tools to understand Capetillo’s use of “our minds” as
collective and not proper to anyone. In this case, however, the question of agency is confused by
the definition of property and use. If Proudhon describes property as possessed or used like a
tool, Capetillo is describing a situation in which the mind of Angelina (or Capetillo herself, as
described here) is possessed or used by a text, as if by an “inhabiting spirit.” Of course texts,

232
Rosa, “Luisa Capetillo and the Pedagogy of Unruliness,” 90–91.
233
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Proudhon: What Is Property?, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100.
113

under other another logic, may themselves be considered property. This form of possession holds
resonance with Harriet Hume’s demonstration with the piano in which the tool seems to have its
own agency. Yet the effect here is not uncanny because the structure of reason has been altered
sufficiently to disrupt the system of modern logic that holds fast to the distinction between author
and medium. Capetillo refuses the logic under which writing constitutes “signs that belong to
others” and the text as property that originates from, and is authorized by, the authorial subject.
As a form of possession, the text works performatively through a denial of authorship as
proprietary, and individually constructed. This literary representation offered by Capetillo is also
a political act itself. It offers itself up as Natural Reason, as accessible, as a text tending towards
the political future. This possession is neither divine nor specific. It is as if knowledge, like the
“suffering” described by Angelina, is connected through the chain of humanity that cannot be
easily traced because the absence of authorship and property also lack loci. Unlike Plato’s
articulation, knowledge is not a hierarchical, one-way event—a digression from divine thought
down to human understanding. Rather, possessed by the textual world of others, Capetillo’s
performance manifests the Natural Law she envisions as interpretive potential: as possession by
her own vision of anarcho-espiritismo.
Like Rebecca West, Luisa Capetillo uses a trans-subjective concept of telepathy to
visualize an alternative epistemic framework. Capetillo shows us how this process of world
building is also a political demand not just by representing an alternative reality in the material,
medial, and technological conditions of the present, but by making them felt as present, natural,
and material. Rosa describes it this way: “Writing is neither her revolutionary weapon nor a
medium. It is a goal. It is a place of emancipation that has been hijacked and enclosed by the
114

elites. Her revolution happens when unruly subjects like her… occupy this space of the page.”
234

When the author says that writing is not a medium for Capetillo he means that it is not a method
or means to an end just as the authorial “I” is not the origin or source of logos proper to the
subject—property. But possessed by anarcho-espiritismo, we can associate the text with the
psychic medium. Stollen back from the purview of hegemonic, white, elite, masculinity,
telepathy as a literary metaphor and as a mode of the technologies at play in literature—the text,
the novel, and the individual, but also colonialism, race, and the gender binary—make new
worlds.

Pathways
As a critical concept, telepathy sits in a space between the material and the spiritual
constructions of media—an undecidable term that nevertheless associates, brings together
without dissolving the distance between, the divergent uses of impressions recovered at a
distance: the tele -pathy of media as a historical concept. If part of the history of media is the
psychic medium, the “making” performed by psychics may register along the lines of something
like the sympathetic pathos which Galvan associates, again, with femininity and passivity. A
kind of passive tele-pathy that may “make” as much as transmit (masculine intent).
The allegiances between spiritual and technological medium are somewhat contradictory.
On the one hand, both forms of 19
th
century media share a historical and structural co-production
of the technological environment and of the associated anxieties and feminization. On the other
hand, the spiritual medium may be seen as a placeholder, a syphoning-off of the irrationality of
media produced by modernity and its teletechnologies. In both senses of the term discussed here,

234
Rosa, “Luisa Capetillo and the Pedagogy of Unruliness,” 41.
115

media announces a fear of the other, of a sense of encroachment of “signs that belong to others”
on the self in the production of the feminine medium as absence, as an attempt to circumvent
such an encroachment of media onto the author and onto the self. At the same time, media do not
just move things but produce a kind of condition or relationality: psychic “makers” draw lines,
they make touch—make pathic, make pathways. It is this fractured relation that is discussed and
performed so astutely by the early 20
th
century writers on telepathy. For telepathy always
expresses the self as other than what it is, and doubles as a literary performance. It is for this
reason that psychic media may also announce themselves as live currents, making pathways
across dimensions—temporal, spatial, textual, and embodied.

116

CHAPTER THREE Mass Media’s Other Remainder: Telepathy, Psychoanalysis, and Weimar
Cinema

Mass Media, the Other Remainder
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites the first use of the word medium to mean
mass media in 1850. Already in this first known use of the phrase, a kind of anxiety about the
power of ubiquitous new media technology can be detected. The theological Presbyterian
publication, The Biblical Repository and Princeton Review, describe the effects of a “Cheap
Presbyterian Newspaper” on their readership: “our periodicals are now the media of influence.
They form and mould the community.”
235
Here, the word media takes on an association of
authority and determination of print syndication, understood as, among other things, influential
and ubiquitous. While the article expresses anxiety about a broader array of technological
change, for instance about “the power of steam and of electricity and of the daily press and of the
floods of cheap literature,” it argues for the importance of a cheap Christian newspaper that will
“place it within the means of every family.”
236
This understanding of the word medium ties the
material, syndicated media objects (newspaper, radio, television, etc.) to a more dispersed site of
production, transmission, and influence. This definition remains central to many concepts of
mass media. For instance, in the concepts of propaganda, the dialectical apparatus of the
“Culture Industry,”
237
“control societies,”
238
industrialized “mnemotechnologies…that [render]

235
“Medium, n. and Adj.”
236
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Noeri, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002).
237
Horkheimer and Adorno.
238
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7.
117

our memory the object of knowledge-control,”
239
and most importantly for this chapter, the
notion of cinema as “hypnotic” articulated by Siegfried Kracauer.
240

The collective singular that the word “media” signifies today marks an important
disjuncture from the term as a plural form of medium, to a collective singular of mass media. In
the example cited above, the word “media” refers only to the medium of periodicals. But in
1923, the OED records the first use of the word media as a collective singular, where the
reference describes “Class appeal in mass media.”
241
If, as discussed in the last chapter, this
transition to the singular plural noun “opens onto the notion of a form of life, of a general
environment for living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling—as such,”
242
a very broad
definition of what is meant by the term technology must be applied. Furthermore, the specific
technologies of the interwar years also must mark the unique character of life at that time. Three
important technologies of the interwar period are highlighted in this chapter. The first is
psychoanalysis and the invention of the unconscious, which is discussed primarily through
Sigmund Freud’s writing on the concept of telepathy in his article, “Psycho-analysis and
Telepathy.”
243
The second is the particular form of fascism that led to the rise of the Third Reich
and WWII; and the final one is cinema as it relates to fascism in Kracauer’s writing on the 1920
Expressionist German film, Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari].
244
Each

239
Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 64–87.
240
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, ed. Leonardo Quaresima
(Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019).
241
“Media, n.
1
,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed July 21, 2023, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/dictionary/media_n1?tab=factsheet#37520348.
242
Hansen, “New Media,” xii. See Chapter 2 for previous discussion.
243
Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, vol. XVIII (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), 175–93.
244
Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920).
118

of these technologies intersect with the language and conceptualization of telepathy that is so
prominent in the interwar years and in the memory of this historical moment.
Writing just after the end of WWII, the notion of mass media as it began to be articulated
above reaches peak pitch in Kracauer’s understanding of the interwar silent film. Not quite
propaganda, Kracauer describes the tendency of German film in the interwar years as following
an escapist, apolitical operation associated with a hypnotic lull that paves the way for
totalitarianism. Both a reflection of the German psyche and wielding power over the German
imaginary, concepts of control, mastery, and the fascist dream of total domination are the
primary topics of discussion for Kracauer’s reading of Dr. Caligari. Subconscious psychic
control is precisely the anxiety around mass media—presented here as a feature of “popular art.”
This chapter focuses on the concept of telepathy as part of the constellation and technology of
psychoanalysis and argues that this conceptualization of “mass media” can be understood as an
“other remainder” after the femininized associations of media are stripped away.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the 1851 coinage of the psychic medium as a correlate
of this new concept of mass media. Expanding on my argument that there is a siphoning off from
what is unknowable and unprogrammable in the concept of media into a concept of passive,
“sympathetic” mediumship, this chapter argues that a co-constitutive risk is articulated in the
concept of mass media as totalitarianism. Having siphoned off the unprogrammable, mass media
demands a rigorous form of rationalism and insistent materialism. Fantasies of control are
evident in concepts like mass hypnosis, as well as post-humanist fantasies of techno-determinism
in which programed and programable conditions of life render the future absolute.
Beginning with Freud’s writing on telepathy, this chapter locates fissures that—much like
the film edit—both signal and undermine absolute coherence. In Freud’s writing, the concepts of
119

transference and the uncanny emerge as necessary interlocutors with the theory of the
unconscious and the unstable category of telepathy is used as a kind of stop gap between
rationalist discourse and the nocturnal territory of the unconscious that can never be reached
directly. Opening new impossible passages, the question of the medium remains as difficult as
ever to locate or explicate. Reframing both the allegorical and aesthetic or poetic gestures of Dr.
Caligari, telepathy pushes against the limits of the totalizing conception of mass media,
expressing and drawing on the fractured, irrational remainders of material control. Drawing on
Nicholas Royle, this chapter argues that telepathy offers a way of thinking otherwise from the
absolute conformity that Kracauer saw reflected in the film. What emerges is “another
remainder” in the 20
th
century conceptions of media—a kind of castration anxiety that is the flip
side of phallogocentric fantasies of control and domination. The concept of telepathy allows us
to soften the binaries so important in this story: those of gendered (feminized) mediation; activity
and passivity as the purview of subjectivity and objectivity; and other theories of
supplementarity to discuss the relationship between media and power particular to the interwar
year and the rise of fascism in Germany.
What this chapter does not do is offer a historical argument about the nature of WWII,
the Third Reich, or the unthinkable atrocities of the holocaust. The “softening” referred to above
does not refer to the actions of the Nazi regime, but rather addresses a conceptual understanding
of the technological landscape and medial epistemologies of the years of the Weimar Republic. I
do not suggest that necropolitical power
245
cannot be wielded brutally and absolutely, but rather
that our conceptions of power and technicity benefit from continuously approaching their

245
This term was developed by Achille Mbembe in 2003 article, “Necropolicis”: Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public
Culture 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.; and in his 2019 book by the same name:
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham; London: Duke University Press Books, 2019).
120

borders, if circuitously. As Roger Luckhurst argues, we can touch on technology only
tangentially, as “human Dasein, only, gives touch.”
246
To touch directly would already be within
the conditioning grounds of the subject/object relation of metaphysics that leads so many
theorists to techno-determinism. But a moment in which totalitarianism so evidently presents
itself as a political risk, such as today, necessitates such tangents.

Uncanny Touch in Freud’s “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy”
Before discussing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, we must first take a detour through
psychoanalysis and the particular use to which Freud put the concept of telepathy. The
emergence of psychoanalysis correlates historically with a series of technological, political, and
geographic events that rendered a greater degree of undecidability between the so called “occult”
and the “discovery” or “invention” of the unconscious than its founder, Sigmund Freud, may
have liked. Freud attributes the rise of occult thinking to “a loss of value” after WWI. For him
the occult served to compensate for a loss of faith directed, in part, towards God (as in the “crisis
of Christianity”). Freud adds that specific advances in scientific theory and practice such as the
discovery of radium and Einstein’s theory of relativity have also posed problems for the
“objective trustworthiness of science” itself. For this reason, sciences appear to be insufficiently
compensatory for the post-war nihilism that Freud describes.
247

Of course, psychoanalysis itself could be placed alongside this list of discourses
insufficient for such massive compensation. For some cultural critics, psychoanalysis was just
another among a series of passing pseudo-sciences peddling the revelation of a higher truth. In

246
Roger Luckhurst, “(Touching on) Tele-Technology,” in Applying: To Derrida, ed. J. Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian
Wolfreys (New York: Springer, 1997), 177.
247
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 177–78.
121

1921 London’s Saturday Review describes morphing forms of the occult culminating with the
posturing of a psychoanalyst:
Table-tapping has become suburban, respectable ghosts have gone to Birmingham
University, or to the antipodes with Sir A Conan Doyle, and astrologist and
crystal gazers have discovered a sad falling off in fees. Trance and spirit-
photographs are no longer the mode; the far seeing occultist has abandoned the
necromantic arts and now poses as a psychoanalyst.
248

Luckhurst, in his historical account of the emergence of the term “Telepathy,” describes the
general perspective of psychoanalysis in England at that time to be “… part of a flourishing
popular occult ‘counterculture.’”
249

It may seem strange, therefore, that in a manuscript written in 1921—the same year as the
Saturday Review article above—Freud seems to wish to resolve both the problem of the post-
WWI crisis of value and the scientific skepticism about psychoanalysis using the concept of
telepathy. The 1921 manuscript has no original title and was never delivered in person by Freud.
The title “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy” was chosen by the editors of Gesammelte Werke [the
German collected works] after Freud’s death in 1941.
250
Freud initially preferred the term
“thought transference” to “telepathy,” suggesting a connection between his earlier articulation of
transference and the word telepathy he develops in this and later papers. But it may also have
been a way of distancing his arguments from occult-sounding terms, which he was also anxious
to avoid in his efforts to legitimize psychoanalysis against scientific and popular distain. Freud
thus begins the lecture with an apologetic—or at least defensive—tone in his first known
treatment directly addressing telepathy.
We are not destined, so it seems, to devote ourselves quietly to the extension of
our science. Scarcely have we triumphantly repulsed two attacks—one of which

248
“Psycho-Analysis à La Mode,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, January 1, 1921.
249
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 269.
250
The manuscript is assumed to have been written in August of 1921, as indicated on the original document.
122

sought to deny once more what we had brought to light and only offered us in
exchange the theme of disavowal, while the other tried to persuade us that we had
mistaken the nature of what we had found and might with advantage take
something else in its place—scarcely, then, do we feel ourselves safe from these
enemies when another peril has arisen.
251

Freud discursively establishes a strong division between us/we as defenders of the rigors of
psychoanalytic practice, and a set of enemies—referring first to Adler and then Jung. Against
these enemies, Freud invites his colleagues to strengthen a collective resolve established in the
uncovered (“brought to light”) and uncovering principles of psychoanalysis.
Against these attacks, and established within a collective resolve, Freud introduces
“another peril”: “And this time it is something tremendous, something elemental, which
threatens not us alone but our enemies, perhaps, still more.”
252
Freud seems to be bracing,
establishing a defense against this tremendous and elemental threat. This new threat: “the study
of ‘occult’ phenomena.”
253
Freud tell us it is not occult practice but rather the study of occult
phenomena that threatens psychoanalysis, as the production of a science around mystic and
superstitious impressions increases the correlation between the occult and psychoanalysis. But in
the course of the introduction, Freud dispels any real threat of occultism to psychoanalysis by
insisting on their different methods and intent: analysis to learn, occultism to confirm. If occult
theories were to be legitimized, he insists, this would offer much more of a threat to the “pure
sciences.” The many twists in the opening pages of Freud’s texts leads Roger Luckhurst to
describe it as, “bewildering…[he changes] the status of the threat in every sentence.”
254
It is true
that Freud aligns the methods and intent of psychoanalysis with “pure sciences” under the rubric

251
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 177.
252
Freud, 177.
253
Freud, 177.
254
Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 271.
123

of enlightenment principles of exploration and discovery. But Freud also accepts an alliance
between psychoanalysis and the object of occult investigation, as both offer challenges to the
assumptions of empirical science: “they have both experienced the same contemptuous and
arrogant treatment by official science. To this day psycho-analysis is regarded as savoring of
mysticism and its unconscious is looked upon as one of the things between heaven and earth
which philosophy refuses to dream of.”
255
As enemy or ally, Freud opens up an undeniable
space for an important bond between analysis and understanding the impression of occult
occurrences that official science and philosophy neglect.
Freud, of course, had already begun the project of addressing what he sees as
philosophically neglected material associated with the occult. For instance, Akira Mizuta Lippit
argues in Electric Animal that Freud’s 1895 model of Übertragung, or transference, arising from
his study of hysteria, hypnosis, and later, dream interpretation,
256
has roots in the occult tradition
of animal magnetism: “Freud's new topography and communication have their roots in
Athanasius Kircher's and Franz Anton Mesmer's experiments with ‘animal magnetism.’…From
the analysis of hysteria and hypnoid states, Freud carefully refined the idea of animal magnetism,
transforming it into the concept of transference.”
257
Combining the non-human category of the
animal with aspects of the psyche that cannot be directly encountered through language,
Übertagung was defined by way of the premodern concept of “animal magnetism,” even as he
moved away from studies of hypnosis and suggestion with Josef Breuer.
258
Just as animal
magnetism is absorbed into the folds of psychoanalytic rationalism, telepathy emerges as a term

255
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 179.
256
G. J. Makari, “Toward an Intellectual History of Transference. 1888-1900,” The Psychiatric Clinics of North America 17, no.
3 (September 1994): 559–70.
257
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis; London: University Of Minnesota Press,
2000), 95.
258
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (Basic Books, 2009).
124

in the constellation of occult themes addressed in Freud’s writing. Yet, anxious to distinguish
psychoanalysis from what he describes as regressive superstition embedded in occult agendas,
Freud articulates instead a need to bring the scholarly and analytical work of psychoanalysis
under the rigors of scientific thinking.
Thus, Freud seems to approach the occult material cautiously, by his own account, and in
his typical circuitous fashion spends the first half of “Psyco-Analysis and Telepathy” discussing
the general relationship between an institutionalized form of scientific discourse, psychoanalysis,
and the project of occultism. Yet the manuscript focuses on case studies of “prophecies made by
professional fortune-tellers”
259
as objects of study that seem to confirm, even make manifest,
Freud’s understanding of unconscious desires. Further, Freud locates psychoanalysis as the best
method to bring sub-sensible, psychic acts into consciousness. Despite the occult associations of
telepathy, in this article Freud defends psychoanalysis against associations with the occult as a
practice of confirmation from the rigorous and scientific approach of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is, finally, a privileged approach for addressing those concerns about which
official sciences and philosophy “refuse to dream.”

Reason and Telepathy
Freud’s use of the concept of telepathy, knowingly or not, has much in common with
Aristotle’s understanding of prophetic dreams and dream interpretation discussed in chapter one.
While Aristotle is held up by modern scholars as producing a rationalist discourse on dreams,
free of the “superstitions”
260
articulated by Socrates in Plato’s writing, this argument depends on

259
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 181.
260
Gallop, Aristotle, 156.
125

ignoring a concept—very close to telepathy—that Aristotle uses to move away from the idea of
the divine providence of dreams. Aristotle’s argument depends on assumptions, such as the
phantasmata theory of dreams as apparitions, that contemporary society no longer holds.
Similarly, Aristotle’s foundational logic, that if dreams were divine, they would be sent to those
whose who are wisest and therefore closest to god, still depends on an understanding of
hierarchical divinity. In other words, Aristotle’s Naturalism does not represent the radical break
from irrational superstition to rational logic, that many modern scholars suggest. Freud may be
similarly mistaken in seeing his approach to telepathy as an erasure of the “confiming” practices
of the occult.
Aristotle argues that dreams, while sometimes veridical or accurate, should not be
considered clairvoyant—they do not predict the future. Rather, invisible emanations from an
event move through the still night air to a passive body, and especially to those who are empty-
headed, melancholic, or ill (associated with pathos). Similarly for Freud, as we will discuss,
professional psychics who claim to predict the future are instead psychically receiving powerful
unconscious desires of their clients. This is achieved by making their own psychic activity more
passive in focusing on tools such as tarot cards, tea leaves, or handwriting. For both Aristotle and
Freud, furthermore, telepathy is the mode by which something seemingly otherworldly is
absorbed into something with interpretive potential for logos. This occurs for Aristotle in the
process of dream interpretation—that second order or supplemental role that mediates between
the daemonic and the rational. Aristotle says that the best interpreters use a skill like assonance
to bring dreams back to the source images or events that caused “emanations” to travel to the
sensitive dreamer. For Freud, the psychic may be the primary interpreter in the case studies of
126

this manuscript but it is clear that he also has in mind an explanation of the work of the analyst
and the process of psychoanalytic transference.
Turning to the body of Freud’s manuscript, “Psycho-analysis and Telepathy,” in more
detail, Freud discusses three case studies that deal with “prophesies made by professional
fortune-tellers which did not come true.”
261
Freud suggests these cases are psychoanalytically
relevant because of their “extraordinary impression on the people to whom they were
announced.”
262
In the first case study, the brother-in-law of one patient is predicted to die of
food poisoning in July or August from crayfish or oysters. He does not die, but the brother is
fond of crayfish and oysters and falls sick with food poisoning from them within the predicted
timeframe. “It was marvelous!” according to the patient. In the second case, a 40-year-old
woman recounts a prediction given to her at the age of 27 that she will have two children by the
age of 32. This prediction came soon after she learnt of her husband’s infertility. She never did
have children, though her mother had given birth to two children at the age of 27. The final case
study involves a patient who was told his lover would commit suicide. She does not, but she does
break off the relationship with the patient.
In each case, Freud concludes—similarly to Aristotle—that the fortune teller’s prediction
is detailed enough that it must be based, though not on clairvoyance, on an invisible mediumistic
reception. For Freud what is transmitted, rather than an event that “disturbs the air” as Aristotle
speculates, is particularly potent desires. In the first case, a suppressed wish for the death of the
patient’s brother-in-law within an oedipal relation with his sister. In the second case a powerful
identification with her mother and the wish to be somehow freed from her marriage. And in the

261
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 181.
262
Freud, 181.
127

final case, the psychic revealed the patient’s own wish for “revenge for an attempt at suicide of
his own” when a woman from his youth rejected him.
263
One might suspect that Freud is
exploring an uncanny subjective experience of the patient to uncover their suppressed desire. So
that, although the clairvoyant act is shown to be untrue, the affective superstitious response holds
the key to some analytic truth. But Freud makes no reference to treating his patients with these
stories and instead argues that a greater truth is uncovered—something in the architectonics of
the unconscious. Based on the evidence of the psychic’s predictions and Freud’s own
psychoanalytic understanding of his patients, Freud concludes that the psychic prophecies go
well beyond coincidence. Freud says quite frankly, “we must draw the inference that there is
such a thing as thought-transference.”
264
Much like Aristotle, he subsumes the clairvoyant into
something more reasonable for human temporality: telepathy.
The unconscious desire of the patient is so strong that their thoughts physically move
from one body to another. In this way Freud literalizes some of the tenants of psychoanalytic
theory in the idea of thought transference, describing a means by which an unconscious desire is
expressed and made available for analysis. Non-linguistic desires are translated into, or latch
onto, an expressible form by means of a “medium” who may then attempt to piece the original
desire back together. For instance, astrological calculations may free the medium’s conscious
mind up to be more receptive to their client’s thoughts:
The fortune-teller’s astrological activities would in any case have performed the
function of diverting her own psychical forces and occupying them in a harmless
way, so that she could become receptive and accessible to the effects upon her or
her client’s thoughts—so that she could become a true ‘medium.’ We have found
similar distracting contrivances employed (for instance, in the case of jokes)

263
Freud, 191.
264
Freud, 184.
128

where there is a question of securing a more automatic discharge for some mental
process.
265

The “medium” here is reminiscent of Aristotle’s description of the dreamer whose own
intellectual functions are dulled, and thereby open to outside emanations. Telepathy indicates a
sub-sensible touching, here supported by the idea of the unconscious. In the case of jokes,
hypnotists distract their subject to aid in the process of unconscious transference—jokes occupy
the conscious thought of the subject so that their unconscious mind can concentrate on the
hypnotist.
266
In the parenthetical case of jokes, it seems that similar “automatic discharges for
some mental process” are being linked by Freud to telepathy as the method by which an
unconscious and conscious mind connect, concretizing transference as something beyond mere
projection. In this way, the psychoanalytic invention or discovery of the unconscious is directly
tied to thought transference.
In what is perhaps an uncanny kind of doubling, Freud’s arguments graft smoothly onto
Aristotle’s writing on prophetic dreams. In each, the clairvoyant is subsumed into the material
and naturalizing discourse— “emanations” for Aristotle and “thought transference” for Freud.
And for both, this method of movement explains a method by which otherwise unexplainable
distances are overcome in a kind of passive and pathic form of touching.

Uncanny Doubling
One key to understanding Aristotle’s articulation of both nature and dreams is the
characterization of both as daemonic. Struck was careful to point out that this word means more

265
Freud, 184.
266
Sigmund Freud, “The Group and the Primal Horde,” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, vol. XVIII (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), 125.
129

than “wonderous” or “out of human control,” as the daemonic was clearly associated by Aristotle
with “deities not as high as gods.”
267
So while Aristotle’s understanding of dreams is not that
they are sent directly by the gods to intervene in human life, they none the less retain a pseudo-
divine quality and their form as phantasmata—arriving to the dreamer from outside the body. In
the first chapter I argued that the sublimation of the daemonic, pseudo-divine idea of prophecy
into a more terrestrial, naturalistic discourse created a strange kind of “excess” in what is
understood as rational logic. This argument works well with Gallop’s use of the word “uncanny”
as a translation of daemonic—a word that in English is probably most associated with Freud and
has a bearing on Freud’s articulation of telepathy. And Freud faces a similar problem to Aristotle
in his attempt to flesh out a closed rational system for the science of psychoanalysis. In trying to
explicate the unconscious and its mode of relating to the subject through the concept of
telepathy, Freud further alienates, rather than explicates, the foreign territory of the unconscious.
Two important affective responses are at play in Freud’s retelling of the manuscript’s
case studies, patient and analyst, and both hinge on the failure of the clairvoyant prediction. First,
each patient tells a story of an event that they express as having struck them in a profound and
shocking way. But the second affective response is Freud’s. “I myself was so much struck—to
tell the truth, so disagreeably affected—that I omitted to make any analytic use”
268
of the stories.
While claiming to be “particularly poor in any occult sense,”
269
Freud ends the manuscript in an
almost ecstatic way: “consider what a momentous step beyond what we have hitherto believed
would be involved in this hypothesis alone.”
270
Freud must admit his own affective response to

267
Struck, Divination and Human Nature, 51 n. 27.
268
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 183.
269
I read this, at least in part, as Freud’s wish to distance himself from the feminized, passive conception of the psychic medium
discussed in Chapter 2.
270
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” 193.
130

his patient’s story, enough so that he failed to perform analysis. Freud is describing an uncanny
shock about the possibility of telepathy. What Freud begins as a rationalist defense against
occultist association turns into a story about Freud’s own overwhelming experience with the
uncanny (a word he uses often in this text). His feeling is so absorbing that he ignores what he
might have otherwise thought of as the patient’s symptomatic language. On the one hand, he is
describing telepathy as uncanny and shocking, and on the other hand he is expressing an uncanny
experience of his own—what he would call in his essay on “The ‘Uncanny’,” a return of the
repressed.
Telepathy itself makes only a brief appearance in Freud’s Famous essay, “The
‘Uncanny.’”
271
Telepathy is described as a narrative feature of Ernst Theodor Amadeus
Hoffmann’s novel Die Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir] as a form of uncanny doubling.
Too thematically rich to be fully covered, Freud contents himself with selecting the most
prominent themes, which he says all concern the phenomenon of doubling. This doubling, he
says, is present in every stage of development and can be traced back to infantile sources:
We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are
most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to
infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the
‘double’, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus
we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike.
This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these
characters to another—by what we should call telepathy—, so that the one
possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is
marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he
is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In
other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.
272

271
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. XVII
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), 219–53.
272
Freud, 234.
131

Telepathy is used as an example of uncanny themes in the novel as the process by which the
characters, who also look alike, experience “mental processes” that “leap” across characters
causing a confusion of “knowledge, feelings, and experiences.”
It is important to remember that as much as Freud locates the uncanny in Hoffmann’s
themes, the concept of the uncanny does not emerge as a clear object of inquiry, but as a quality
of subjective experience. Nicholas Royle writes in his book on The Uncanny, that the uncanny
is not ‘out there,’ in any simple sense: as a crisis of the proper and natural, it
disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside and what is outside…It may
be that the uncanny is a feeling that happens only to oneself, within oneself, it is
never one’s ‘own,’ its meaning or significance may have to do, most of all, with
what is not oneself, with others, with the world ‘itself.’
273

Unlike Aristotle, Freud is describing a subjective experience in a very modern sense, as an
experience of “oneself” that at the same time is “not oneself.” Yet in both Freud and Aristotle,
this broader sense of “the world ‘itself,’” something larger than the individual and unknowable to
the individual, is presented to the subject. Freud says that the uncanny is, “that class of
frightening things” that “can be shown to be something repressed that recurs”
274
and telepathy is
a doubling of the self with, in, or as another in the context in which neither “self” nor “other” can
be properly defined.

Ghosts of Medial Memory
Alongside the construction of the ego and it’s unconscious, the ego in a state of “self-
difference” emerges as a concept of the “self” that is neither singular nor self-present. This is
modeled in the post-Freudian articulation of the construction of the ego through the “mirror

273
Royle, The Uncanny, 2.
274
Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 241.
132

phase” by Jacques Lacan.
275
The mirror phase, according to Lacan, is the moment in which the
infant identifies its “self” as the image it sees in the mirror. Yet as an image, and as an object
perceived at a distance, the ego emerges at the exact moment of both identification and
misidentification. The very idea of the unconscious articulated by psychoanalysis as that which
constitutes the ego is already somewhat “other” as our conscious minds are distanced from our
selves. As Achille Mbembe describes it: “Psychoanalysis recognizes that something else that is
not I speaks; that the self is split. By privileging the existence of a “nocturnal element” at the
very core of what passes for the subject, psychoanalysis acknowledges the idea of an “otherness
within,” an unconscious that emerges from the phenomenal world of the psyche.”
276
In other
words, the problem both of tele-distance and feeling is located within the psychoanalytic model
of the subject. The concept of telepathy is necessary because this self-differentiated thing is what
we call the subject. The absence of the “self” as “one” necessitates the possibility of another
form of touching.
As Freud discusses in his writing on the unconscious and in texts like “The Interpretation
of Dreams” and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the unconscious has its own temporality,
spatiality, its own logic. The unconscious doesn’t require the appearance of phantasmata, but
nevertheless constitutes a world of its own. In his essay on this short text, “Notiz über
den ‘Wunderblock,’” [A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”]
277
Freud imagines the
unconscious as a technical apparatus that records, archives, and erases memories, both

275
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans.
Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 75–81.
276
Achille Mbembe and R. H. Mitsch, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola,” Research in African
Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 134.
277
Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in Collaboration with Anna
Freud, Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, ed. James ed Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. XIX (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, n.d.), 226–32.
133

preserving and dispersing traces of stimuli on the psychic surface. Sense impressions (from the
external world) are pressed against the body and the conscious mind, which then absorbs those
sense impressions as memories. The Wunderblock is infinitely open to new impressions, and it
also cannot be totally erased—traces on the unconscious are seemingly permanent. As Derrida
points out, if a wax slab is analogous to the unconscious, it implies that, unlike the human body
and exterior world, the unconscious has its own temporality, one that circumvents the fact of
human finitude. All the logic of the supplement applied to writing in opposition to logos
278
is
swallowed back into the body. As a technical apparatus and as a trace impression, the
unconscious enters a unique logic without finitude, one which can hardly be read.
Yet the unconscious is not simply constituted by individual memory, as suggested in the
analogy of the Wunderblock. A least some aspects of these traces are not simply individual, but
necessary repetitions or recurrences shared by anyone claiming “subjectivity.” This is part of
Freud’s concern in “The ‘Uncanny’”:
It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development
corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed
through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still cap-
able of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as
‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching.
279

The uncanny is the strike or touch of a collective animistic retelling of “primitive men,” whose
residue constitutes a doubling, retelling, or recurrence. Telepathy may not be just another
uncanny doubling, but an articulation of the uncanny possibility of relating to both the inner
world and that larger world of “primitive men,”—something we could say is both a necessary
part of subjectivity and something prior to, above, or beyond the subject.

278
Discussed in Chapter 1.
279
Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 240.
134

This makes the concept of telepathy especially relevant for the work of psychoanalysis as
a mode by which to engage the unconscious and make unconscious thoughts and feelings
available for interpretation. The “nocturnal element” that—like Aristotle’s dreamers—functions
“below” the rational, civilized mind and is also susceptible to history. The idea of the
unconscious produces a divide between self-knowledge and that which is unarticulated,
unarticulatable, or otherworldly; a world of present non-presence; a world of ghosts. Freud's
theory allows for the existence of multiple and other worlds removed from that of consciousness.
What is specific to telepathy is the uncanny fantasy of touching or feeling through this
impossible division between worlds. An impossible touch before language, connecting to both
the unconscious and the larger concept of ‘other worlds’ inside us and beyond.
Yet, telepathy is also uncanny. The double nature of telepathy, like clairvoyance, is the
strangeness of its impossibility as much as its possibility. Derrida says, “The truth, what I always
have difficulty getting used to: that non-telepathy is possible. Always difficult to imagine that
one can think something to oneself, deep down inside, without being surprised by the other,
without the other being immediately informed.”
280
The concept of the unconscious almost seems
to demand a concept like telepathy to make its role in ego formation possible. The telepathic
effect is coded through the unconscious communication between two psyches for Freud.
Between fortune teller and client, the telepathic impulse offers both the magical requirement of
language, that signs are exchangeable and repeatable, and the immediacy of pathic touch.
Telepathy fills the space of the medium, between subjects and between the unconscious and

280
Derrida, “Telepathy.”

135

conscious. The concept of telepathy is necessary because this self-differentiated thing is what we
call the subject. The absence of language necessitates the possibility of another form of touching.
Freud attempts to use the concept of telepathy to sort through some of the irrational
components of his work and argue for a rationalist discourse. Like dream images, strong desires
discussed in Freud’s essay are non-linguistic unconscious formations. A traditional concept of
transference is important to Freud but involves a difficult process of a non-linguistic transfer
across bodies, and also a kind of non-rational poetic work (something like assonance described
in Chapter 1) in therapeutic usage. Ironically, in using the concept of telepathy to subdue the
magic of the occult and the problem of transference vs. projection; Freud articulates a moment of
thinking through the uncanny. This is not just a question of smuggling the old superstitions into
the structure of logic in a way that cannot be totally closed off from the archaic and non-rational.
Freud sees the uncanny as an interruption to logic. It’s also about the experience of the uncanny
being a part of discussing transference at all—the sense that there is something excessive to
explanation of this concept and something that falters in logos in relation to the unconscious.
Telepathy is the stopgap, the object onto which the uncanny can be rested without a total
eruption of the irrational onto the system of subjectivity. In his response to Freud’s manuscript,
Derrida goes so far as to suggest that the concept of the unconscious theorized for Freud “a kind
of stoppage of a more radical idea: the interpenetration, the leaking, of other psyches into our
own, the arrival of ghosts en masse.”
281
These ghosts are the irrational presence of the absent
other, or others, from the multiple worlds which the unconscious opens unto. But it is also the
past that constitutes history—that which lives in other temporalities and lives only through
mediation.

281
Ghosh, “The Colonial Postcard,” 338–39. Referring to Derrida, “Telepathy,” 30.
136

The Expressionist Withdrawal into the Studio: Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
A particular quality of subjectivity, pathos, and the unconscious as associated with death
and delay has been present in cinema discourses from the start. Both sub-linguistic feeling and
the psychoanalytic theory of transference have an important role to play in understanding the
medium of cinema. Akira Mizuta Lippit expounds on the role of transference in cinema in
Electric Animal, writing that, “film calls into question the primacy of language in the constitution
of the human world. This is because film simulates…the effects of transference—the rapid
movement of affect from one entity to another.”
282
Film, Lippit claims, parasitizes language in
the same way that (thought) transference functions to attach an unconscious desire to another
medium. But the literalization of transference into telepathy may return the concept back to the
place from which Lippit argues that transference emerges—hypnosis. The requisite notion of the
medium to translate between the non-space of the unconscious world of language and symbolic
exchange opens up another kind of reversal of the human and the medium in cinema where
humans, and not techne, are available for suggestion or control.
This is the concern and focus of Siegfried Kracauer in his reading of the 1920 silent
expressionist film The of Cabinet Dr. Caligari in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A
Psychological History of German Film. The film is read as a political allegory for the rise of
fascism, enacted by a charismatic leader who exerts his will upon the hypnotized masses. For
Kracauer, the figure of the hypnotist is the perfect stand-in for both the fascist leader and
propaganda as an ideological technology. For him film represents both a model and an

282
Lippit, Electric Animal, 186.
137

instantiation of a dangerous reversal of the fantasy of the passive and sensitive medium discussed
in the previous chapter: the passive susceptibility of the public to a programable “destiny.”
Dr. Caligari opens upon two men in a chilly winter garden. In this realistically depicted
setting, the men exchange strange encounters with the spirit world. As a flashback, the realistic
setting soon gives way to an expressionist landscape in which the majority of the film’s
supernatural events take place. The end of the film returns us to the realistic world of the
speakers, this time with a new understanding of their situation. All the characters from the film
are, “in reality,” in a psychiatric ward. Our protagonist and narrator, Francis, a madman; and the
villain, Dr. Caligari, the resident physician. This flashback is famously read by Kracauer as a
structural move in which a “revolutionary film was…turned into a conformist one”
283
by casting
the defeat of the authoritarian hypnotist as the fantasy of a madman. Although this was later
debunked,
284
Kracauer claims this framing structure was not in the original plans of the script
writers, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. The addition placed a kind of parenthesis around the
film story that, for Kracauer, “reversed” the intended logic of the film from political allegory to
psychological delirium.
This reversal is no mere “accident,” but a nearly inevitable result of the ideological and
technological production of film in Weimar Germany. Kracauer brings together historical
accounts of the writers to establish an anti-authoritarian core to the script itself. It also seems to
suggest as ideological perspective—in this case one developed through life experience—
naturally impregnates the work of the authors. This is similar to the way he describes the

283
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 67.
284
For more conversation on the historical limits of Kracauer’s reading, see Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After:
Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London; New York: Routledge, 2000).; Dietrich Scheunemann, “The Double, the Decor, the
Framing Device: Once More on Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” in Expressionist Film: New Perspectives
(Rochester, NY; Woodbridge, UK: Camden House, 2003), 128.
138

“German people” as infatuated with the organization of tyranny and a lust for submission as well
as the idea of the “psychological history” of film. While this method of writing film history relies
on assumptions about individual and collective coherence as well as the foundations (or loss of)
private and public life, these are not simple binaries for Kracauer. The relationships of these
categories that make up modern life are interwoven: personal experience feeds into the artistic,
poetic, and aesthetic life of a society, which then reflects the tastes and desires of the individuals
in that society. Within this, material technical and economic structures play determinate roles in
how media are produced. For example, Kracauer argues that the film executive, Erich Prommer,
and director, Robert Wiene, alter, or rather, reframe the script based on commercial demands and
audience desire.
Kracauer also describes both the aesthetic and material function of expressionism in the
mid-war period in the Weimar Republic. He says,
It had the function of characterizing the phenomena on the screen as phenomena
of the soul—a function which overshadowed its revolutionary meaning. By
making the film an outward projection of psychological events, expressionist
staging symbolized—much more strikingly than did the device of a framing
story—that general retreat into a shell which occurred in postwar Germany.
285

Kracauer argues expressionism’s post war popularity can be attributed to a German cultural
tendency to withdraw from the “hard outer world into the intangible realm of the soul.” On the
one hand, he grants the expressionist mode the capacity to “tell the story perfectly;” but the
material and framing conditions of the film caused a “[disavowal of] this revolutionary meaning
of expressionist staging, or, at least, put it, like the original story itself, in brackets.”
286
Moving
from on-site filming to the “withdrawal into the studio” is a technology of filmic space,

285
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 71.
286
Kracauer, 70.
139

according to Kracauer, that also creates a condition of (nearly) total control. In other words, the
opposite vision of Cinema Verité is given in Dr. Caligari—the absence of natural visual
abundance. The “ocular unconscious” is absorbed into the techne of cinema.
While I take Kracauer’s point about a certain colonization of the film image by an
industrial machine, I want to reconsider the film’s framework, drawing on contemporary
narrative theorist Nicholas Royle’s book titled The Uncanny. In The Uncanny, Royle begins a
chapter on telepathy with a quote by narrative theorist Dorrit Cohn, who says, “narrative fiction
is the only literary genre…in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of a person
other than the speaker can be portrayed.”
287
Royle comments,
…there is an uncanny knowledge. Someone is telling us what someone else is
thinking, feeling or perceiving. That someone else may not even be aware of
experiencing these thoughts, feelings or perceptions. This history of criticism of
the novel is the history of the attempt to deal, or avoid dealing, with this
seemingly mad scenario.
288

Narrative fiction, Cohn tells us, portrays unspoken feelings and thoughts. A kind of telepathic
relation takes place between the author, character, narrator, and reader. For Royle this relation
produces an uncanny knowledge—a knowledge that is both absolutely strange and absolutely
familiar to any reader of narrative fiction. What could seem more “natural”—or at least
invisible—than the so-called “omniscient voice” that accesses the inner lives of characters for
us? But who and how these narrative voices speak is a notoriously more complex question.
Royle goes so far as to claim that the uncanny “madness” of this telepathic structure organizes
the history of critical discourse on the novel—a kind of haunting facet of the novel that is both

287
Dorrit Cohn quoted in Royle, The Uncanny, 256.
288
Royle, 256.
140

taken for granted and impossible to fully speak of or know, appearing instead, as Royle describes
it, “as a sort of somnambulism of critical common sense.”
289

Somnambulism
I’d like to linger on the figure of the somnambulist—or sleepwalker—not as an
opposition, but a refraction of this theory of the omniscient narrator. For a somnambulist is also
at the uncanny heart of Dr. Caligari [Figure 4]. He sleeps and haunts the waking—neither living
nor dead. At the beginning of this “parenthetical” story, the protagonist, Francis, is convinced by
his friend Alan to join him at
a fair in the town of
Holstenwall. Alan and
Francis are enamored by
Caligari’s show in which a
somnambulist named Cesare
is supposed to be able to tell
the future. The intertitles
read:
Herrrrreinspaziert!
Hier ist zum ersten Male zu sehen ---
Cesare, der Somnambule!
Cesare das Wunder---
Dreiundzwanzig Jare alt, schläft seit dreiundzwanzig Jaren
--ununterbrochen---
Tag und Nacht---,
Cesare wird vor Ihren Augen aus der Totenstarre erstehen ---
Herreinspaziert!”

289
Royle, 256.
Figure 4: The Somnabulist, Cesare.

141

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Cesare!! Hörst du mich?! Cesare, ich rufe dich --- Ich Dr. Caligari ---
Dein Herr –
Erwache für augen blinke aus deiner dunklen nacht -----

Meine verehrten Herrschaften! Cesare der Somnambule ---
Wird Ihnen alle Fragen beantworten – Cesare kent alle Geheimnisse ---
Cesare kennt die Vergangenheit und sieht die Zunkunft ---
Überzeugen Sie sich selbst ---
Treten Sie heran!
Fragen Sie ---

[Step riiiiiight up!
Presenting for the first time ---
Cesare, the Somnambulist!
The miraculous Cesare ---
Twenty-three years old, has slept for twenty-three years
-- continuously --
Day and night ---,
Cesare will awaken from his death-like trance before your eyes ---
Step right up!

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Cesare!! Do you hear me!? Cesare, I call you --- I, Dr. Caligari ---
Your master -
Awaken for an instant from your dark night ----

My dear gentlemen! Cesare the somnambulist ---
Will answer all your questions - Cesare knows every secret ---
Cesare knows the past and sees the future ---
judge for yourselves ---
Approach!
Ask away ---]

Cesare is granted the attribute of absolute knowledge of omniscience. He “knows every secret”
in and out of the logic of linear time. As he is part of the other world—a resident of the lands of
sleep, death, and the unconscious, he is indifferent to the structure of past, present, and future.
Alan steps to the stage to ask:
Wie lange were ich leben?

142

[How long will I live?]
Cesare responds:
Bis zum Morgengraven --
[Until the break of dawn --]
290

Indeed, Alan is stabbed to death at dawn in his bed. Francis settles himself to solve the murders
before he witnesses, Jane, the women with whom he is in love, being kidnapped by Cesare.
Cesare lets her escape, however, before dying of exhaustion. Caligari, now suspected of
hypnotizing Cesare for his own vicious ends attempts to flee but is caught.
Reformulating the claim of Cesare’s omniscience, this character also acts as a figuration
of thought transference imagined as hypnosis. Unlike in Freud’s case studies, Cesare does not act
as a psychic for Alan. Instead, Cesare channels the murderous desires of Caligari from a
distance. The impression of clairvoyance—of knowing the future—tricks Alan, Francis, and the
audience into believing that the planned actions of Caligari are, in fact, predetermined.
Simultaneously, Cesare himself signifies the “hypnotized masses” used for violence at the
command of their leader. Kracauer calls this relationship hypnotism. And it is hypnotism that
Kracauer also ends up calling Hitler’s power over the German people. Hypnotism, as we know,
is also a term given to the power of cinema. This hypnotic power is one argument for why a
film’s political message matters at all. Indeed, the posters for the film read, “du muss Caligari
werden” [“you must become Caligari”]
291
—collapsing the film’s story with the viewer’s
experience of watching the film.

290
My translations.
291
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 71.
143

For Royle, the literary concept of the omniscient narrator intensifies a totalitarian concept
of the possibility of the unity of total knowledge within the fictional realm of the story. To
replace this, in his book Telepathy and Literature, Royle suggests the concept of the telepathic
narrator—jumping from mind to mind, always fractured, specific, and without the unity of total
knowledge.
The continuing use of the term ‘omniscience’ serves to promote and protect a
thinking of the ‘world’ of narrative fiction as holistic, unified and closed. It
colludes with a thinking of the experience of reading as asserting or presupposing
a fixed and totalizing interpretation. It thus helps to ward off the transformative
possibilities of reading, to limit and close down in advance what is incalculable
and unprogrammable in the experience of a text.
292

Caligari’s control over Cesare offers the viewers at the fair a fiction of omniscience, but in truth,
neither Cesare nor Cagliari “know all.” The fiction of clairvoyance covers over the violence of
Caligari by replacing his murder with an inevitable absolute, defined by a particular kind of
finitude—death. The magical power granted to Cesare by Caligari is absolute, “holistic, unified
and closed.” He is both a tool and wields the violence of finitude. The danger in this is clear, as
Kracauer shows: passive, sleeping his entire life, Cesare is the “nocturnal element” molded into a
tool for violence until, exhausted, he dies himself.
The bracketing off of the main story of the film to make the political allegory an outward
projection of psychological events, for Kracauer, shows the inability of the German film industry
in the interwar years to produce a radical political film. But this same narrative structure of the
film, told through flashback, also places this film in a more obvious relationship to what Royle
describes as telepathic. Caligari’s Somnambulist is not clairvoyant as the narrator, Francis,
initially believes, but nor is he merely hypnotized by the pseudo-scientific technology of the

292
Royle, Telepathy and Literature, 259.
144

doctor. I’d like to consider the somnambulist rather as a telepathic dreamer, expressing the silent
unuttered desires of his master, much like the psychics of interest to Freud in his writing on
telepathy. To be sure, the result in the story’s plot is the same but where hypnotism suggests
singular and unidirectional power, telepathy defines a relation or even a vulnerability towards
another. The difference here is in the story told about the film, it’s potential and limits as a piece
of “popular art.”

Split Temporality of the Cinematic Cut
Figures 5 and 6 show the opening scene and the first glimpse of the flashback as an
expressionist landscape. The narrative is established as a story told by our protagonist, Francis,
and what we ostensibly have access to—the internal thoughts and feelings of a single individual,
Francis. Where the camera tends to render itself invisible in film, the third person narrator,
combined with the strangeness of expressionist aesthetic, loosens the apparent reliability of the
visual phenomenon. The camera as we can see, however, hardly presents what we would
normally call “point of view” shots so that the narrative framework itself –the ideas that Francis
is the narrative voice of the story—functions itself more like a fiction or metaphor in preparation
for a mystery genre film.
145

Instead, the parenthetical
film offers first an establishing shot
and then the camera follows
Caligari and Alan, as Francis
narrates the story through intertitles.
How can we account for this
narrative structure, in which the
story is supposed to belong to
Francis, though the camera follows
events to which he would normally
have no visual access? Neither the
camera nor Francis can be said to
know everything, but the story is
told in a selective, even withholding
manner. And who is writing
Francis’s thoughts out in the form
of intertitles for us? This is a mad
scenario, one naturalized through the history and discourses of film, but one that can hardly be
described by the most common descriptive language: there is no omniscient narrator, no god-like
camera eye—nor is there a clear point of view. The scene’s proximity and narrative framing
fracture temporality, space, and image through this impossible scenario.
What is on display in these shots and their relation to one another is a kind of telepathy
effect. Like all telepathic relations it is an impossible one. The eye of the machine and the human
Figure 6: Francis begins his story in a chilly winter garden.
Figure 5: The flashback begins, set against an expressionist backdrop.
146

are at once in relation and unsynchronizable. Fractured, the other cannot be absorbed into
Francis, the film itself, nor the viewer. This impossible telepathy does not solve problems or
unify the story into political allegory. Placing the narrative into the parenthetical of Francis’s
narration covers over the non-unity of these images, while the expressionist aesthetic threatens to
justify this non-unity into a coherent image of human experience—even as the experience of
madness.
In addition to plot and narrative structure, the technology of cinema adds the features of
editing and, in some cases, sound. In the production of the parenthetical story, we see an example
of how editing is used to create a sense of seamless narrative in the opening of Dr. Caligari. The
realist present and uncanny past press against each other with the interstitial stutter of a film
fade. This is a telepathic gesture in which disparate temporalities and spaces are brought together
in pathic touch. In this image we see the uncanny doubling of telepathy at work: on the one hand,
this editing creates a cut, fracture, remainder, and a reminder of the camera image. On the other
hand, as the editing technique that constructs the film’s narrative, this editing gesture also
naturalizes the totality of the film rather than undermining it. The image of totality is produced
by its opposite, the cut.
The hypnotic effect Kracauer discovers in the film and its allegorical potential attempt to
weed out the hidden truth of the film. But if, as Mary Ann Doane claims, cinema archives an
experience of human temporality,
293
this experience is far from singular. For it is not until the
end of the film that the narrative structure is fully revealed [Figure 7]. The flashback returns to
the present, as Caligari is revealed to be the director of an insane asylum in which Francis, Alan,

293
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA; London:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 78.
147

Jane, and Cesare are all patients. The
ending of the film produces a
decidedly split temporality. One is, as
Kracauer would like to read the film,
a political allegory. The other is,
perhaps, this allegory’s
circumvention. Yet these readings do
not speak to the duality of the film’s
temporality—the doubled, differential
nature of the film. At the same time the film is a resolution of the political into the private, it is
also a failure of this resolution. Both gift and demand, Dr. Caligari illustrates a telepathic effect:
a faith in the non-differential that makes differing possible. That makes the condition of the
exchange of language and communication possible.
“The cinema is objectivity in time,” writes André Bazin in “The Ontology of the
Photographic Image.” Beyond the photograph, which he likens to embalming the dead, he says:
The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an
instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in
amber... Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their
duration, change mummified as it were.
294

As both a technology of death and animation, or the animation of death, film is also a technology
of the crypt, the trace, and perhaps the unconscious—these supplements and others of the human.
Kracauer says that cinema becomes controlled—becomes mass media. This notion of mass
media, as I argued above, is what is not siphoned off in the bifurcation of psychic media from

294
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (July 1, 1960): 8,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183.
Figure 7: The victory of Dr. Caligari.
148

technological media. Kracauer describes a situation in which the conditions of Weimar cinema
could leave nothing unknown. Invested entirely in its materiality, the film moved indoors to the
studio for total control. But such fantasies of control over media does not mean that the gender
binary disappears. In the concept of mass media there is still a feminine object, that we could say
should be controlled. This is perhaps the true uncanny somnambulist of Weimar Cinema. What
Fascism and the third Reich brought forward in this film for Kracauer is the head of Medusa;
uncontrolled and unruly, even when beheaded—seemingly castrated—the power of her terrible
visage is always finally death. Medusa is the “other remainder” of mass media. Kracauer
highlights the necropolitical danger of the feminine association with media and mediation as a
passive and transparent tool as a form of castration anxiety. It is precisely from the feminization
of media and the siphoning off the feminized other as the passive “psychic medium” that the
“hypnotized masses” is made possible. The viewer in this binary is passive, castrated, tending
towards a kind of techno-determinism where technology—in its many forms—has total control.

149

Postscript: Pathos and Delay

In the previous chapters, the concept of telepathy was shown to interrupt or unsettle the
question of logos, authorship, and even the unconscious as something proper to the individual
subject. The dislocation of the subject is nothing new in literary theory. In 1967 Roland Barthes
famously argued that there is a value to loosening authority and authorship in his essay, “The
Death of the Author.”
295
But the concept of telepathy reminds us of the many things left behind,
of what is siphoned off, in two distinct but fantasies of mediumship. First, the passive, feminized
concept of the sympathetic medium that acts sub-linguistically and transparently in support of
proper authorship. And second, the insistent, material and programing idea of mass media whose
agency disrupts the agency of the individual. In each case, the question of authority and
authorship unsettles not only the question of writing, but the subject more generally as the solid
foundation of thought.
The question of telepathy, however, is as much about pathos as it is about thought or the
teletechnology of writing. As Rei Terada points out in Feeling in Theory: Emotions after the
“Death of the Subject,”
296
there can appear to be a contradiction for feelings in the idea of the
“death of the subject.” If there is no concrete, centralized “subject,” then who or what is doing
the feeling or touching? Discussing the “waning of affect,” for instance, Fredrick Jameson argues
in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that the death of “the older anomie of
the center subject may…mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every

295
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, NY: Hill and Wang,
1978), 142–48.
296
Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
150

other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.”
297
If the
medial theories posited by West, Capetillo, and Freud decenter the “bourgeois ego” invested in
the very idea of the author, or the authority of either logos or writing, where does one locate the -
pathos of telepathy? I think the concept of telepathy allows us to discuss pathos without recourse
to the subject, and to consider feeling and touch as existing within—or even created through—
the affective flows of mediation. The telepathic model of pathos that involves a passive
mediumship shows a model of feeling that requires not individuality, but touch, distance, and an
understanding that the ensuing relay is constructive.
Terada argues that the term pathos itself is not typically used to articulate just any
emotion, but specifically “second order” emotions—emotions that are mediated in some way.
Emotions that are, for instance, reflections on emotions. Emotions in states of deferral or lag.
This, she argues, is a logic of supplementarity—an idea that “first order” emotions exist prior to
pathos: “When we're aware of the second-order nature of emotion we call it ‘pathos’ and act as
though it were something other than emotion. What is disturbing in the idea of second-order
states is not finally position in sequence but supplementarity.”
298
We can think of pathos
therefore as referring to a form of mediated feeling, whether as a form of reflection or as
something experienced through a text. In this mediated state, such emotions are associated not
just with pity but also with sorrow and death. Perhaps this is one way to distinguish telepathy
from telesthesia: that along with pathos, telepathy is also associated with mediation,
supplementarity, and death. With the concept of telepathy, the logic of the supplement follows
mediation everywhere—even into the realms of feeling and subjectivity. As much as telepathy

297
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 64.
298
Terada, Feeling in Theory, 13.
151

may be a fantasy of immediacy, as we have already seen, telepathy does not avail itself directly,
but circuitously. If pathos is an already mediated form of feeling, the idea that feelings “belong”
or are “expressed” by a subject may be another kind of mis/identification, a technological one in
which the medium and subject are bound. Telepathy teaches us that this technicity is always
present in “expression,” whether as reflective pathos, mediumistic interpretation, language, or in
the trace of the archive.
152

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Creator Atkin, Kendra Myers (author)

Core Title Magic and media: the critical concept of telepathy (1918-1939)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Media and Culture)

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 08/11/2023

Defense Date 08/07/2023

Publisher University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,Film,hauntology,Literature,magic,Media,OAI-PMH Harvest,telepathy

Language English

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Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Belisle, Natalie (committee member), Graff Zivin, Erin (committee member), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member)

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