7th Annual Conference of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Chicago, IL (Nov. 2005)
Panel description
In April 1927, a New York Times reporter commented on the first demonstration of the television and speculated about other fantastic possibilities: “Perhaps fifty years hence there may be other developments, needing no apparatus whatever, by means of which human thought may be transmitted at the will of the sender by the process which now we dimly recognize as telepathy.” Indeed, as new technologies of recording and transmission transformed the dream of seeing and hearing from a distance into reality, numerous scientists, authors and artists were drawn to the possibilities of other mysterious communications. If dreams of long-distance communication had led to the telephone, radio and phonograph, it seemed that more mysterious transmissions—telepathic, ghostly, spiritual—might also someday soon become reality. While modernism has often been associated with technocratic and scientific cynicism, it can also be understood as a myriad of anticipatory responses to new communicative possibilities. Indeed, cynics, scientists, spiritualists and occultists alike shared an enthusiasm for exploring distant worlds and mysterious phenomena. Seances, telephones, radio waves and spiritual mediums were all seen as forms of transmission which enabled communication with previously inaccessible worlds. This panel will consider some of the channels through which artists, authors and scientists theorized new and mysterious forms of intimacy and transmission beyond the realm of rational explanation.
In “Electromagnetism and Modernism” Lara Vetter explores modern conceptions of electricity as a transmissional medium of communication and sensation. Vetter argues that electromagnetism – its mysterious fluidity and eroticism, its spiritual and scientific significance – offered writers such as H.D. and Mina Loy an apt metaphor for imagining a mystical conduit between heaven and earth and the means to both receive and disseminate spiritual and aesthetic wisdom.
In “Psychoanalytic Transmissions Beyond Direct Communication” Eliza Slavet explores how Freud’s theorization of intergenerational transmission of Jewishness and memory in Moses and Monotheism was shaped by his earlier investigations both of telepathic communication and of the psychoanalytic concept of transference. More specifically, she will examine Freud’s recurrent use of telephonic metaphors in his discussions of uncanny and inexorable transmissions via media which were paradoxically both material and immaterial.
In “Early Surrealist Experiments in Thought Transmission” Megan McShane considers the Surrealists’ experiments with collective drawing-- the exquisite corpse-- as forms of scientific research into subjects such as psychoanalysis, collective creation, and ludic activity. Designed to achieve a collective “pooling” of “unconsciousness” by the individual participants in the game, the exquisite corpse can be understood as part of the Surrealists’ quest for encounters with the “strange possibility of thought.”