by Rob Gallagher
Anyone else find the screen grab of Matt Lucas’ ex-husband’s Facebook page, showing friends ignorant of his suicide commenting on the status update ‘Kevin McGee thinks that death is much better than life’ uncomfortably compelling? How awkward the responses to someone using a forum meant for peacocking and matey badinage to announce their suicide were (“that a bit dark Kev”)? How queasily no-longer-appropriate the infinitive ‘thinks’ grammatically was?
I’ve been reading up recently on the technologies used in Victorian séances – i.e. on devices that were meant (as Facebook kind of ended up doing in McGee’s case) to facilitate interfaces between the living and the dead. From cameras to phonographs, pulley systems to telegraphic motion detectors, ear trumpets to ouija boards, all manner of devices were deployed in order to bring about/simulate contact with the departed.
As Steve Connor has argued, it’s a mistake to see the Nineteenth century séance as a reaction against Victorian society’s obsession with technology, science and rationality; Spiritualism was all about applying scientific principles to supernatural phenomena, using technology to collect and collate documentary evidence. Winnipeg occultist T.G. Hamilton had his special séance cabinet equipped with a battery of twelve cameras, primed to record anything in the least resembling a teleplasmic manifestation (teleplasm, by the way, was considered a more scientific name than ectoplasm, spectral mucuswise) that might occur. The séance, came into vogue at roughly the same time as the telegraph, a technology mediums quickly incorporated into their meetings. It was even claimed spirits had inspired telegraphy’s invention in order to facilitate communication between this world and the next. If this all seems a bit dotty and quaint, then it’s maybe worth bearing in mind that not everyone did take séances seriously; for many they were merely a creepy, fashionable mode of entertainment, like an infinitely more interesting version of hosting DIY Come Dine with Me nights. Its also worth considering that in a century which had seen humans acquire the ability to conduct and harness electrical impulses, to dissociate voices from bodies and transmit them at incredible speeds, to chemically trap photons, it might not’ve seemed so incredible that ether or teleplasm would be discovered, that there’d be some bandwidth or wavelength out there on which spirits could subsist. The naivety of some Spiritualists is tempered by a jarring degree of scientific nous – one participant in an 1870s séance testified to the spirit’s having manifested an ectoplasmic larynx – because it would just be stupid to believe a ghost could say something without a material means of causing air molecules to vibrate, right?
The idea of an afterlife – the question of whether there is an afterlife, of whether and in what form anything of the person survives the body’s death – was, of course, central to Victorian spiritualism, and to more recent attempts to conjure the dead such as Konstantin Raudive’s 1960s experiments in Electronic Voice Phenomena, which led to him putting out an LP reputedly comprising messages from the spirit world. But technologically-mediated interfaces with the dead retain a certain uncanny quality even if you don’t have any truck with notions of the hereafter. The ability to see and (recordings of) people is still pretty new, and sometimes you’re reminded just how strange and obscene-feeling it can be (I’ve already chatted in a comment piece about how amazing I think Herzog’s Grizzly Man is in terms of addressing film’s necromantic capacity). It’s not the (nevertheless weird and lovely) SFX ghosts that make Hamilton’s photos so fascinating; it’s their mediation of bygone and increasing opaque people and cultural waypoints. Its something Susan MacWilliams, the Irish artist who’s got a bunch of stuff about parapsychology at the Venice Biennale right now, and has worked with Hamilton’s photos, understands. Anyway, it feels somehow apt to finish with a tribute to teenage Spiritualist sensation Florence Cook, a Hackney resident who found fame as a medium in the early 1870s, conjuring C17th pirate’s daughter Katie King. Dressed in diaphanous white robes (though sometimes – in the name of Spiritualist inquiry – she could be induced to do away with the robes and manifest more or less in the ectoplasmic altogether) and bearing a marked resemblance to Florrie herself, ‘Katie’ would entertain guests with songs and swashbuckling anecdotes and harmless flirtation, sometimes going so far as to perch on the gentlemen’s knees. Somehow she avoided being rumbled. Basically, she got pretty close to inventing pop stardom roughly a century early, and if someone wants to fund a biopic I’m pretty sure doing justice to her memory would be worthwhile and lucrative both.
