If occult practices could be said to have a radical strain, it would stem from two qualities. First, their insistence on materiality. Occultists have always defined their beliefs in terms of praxis, however dubious that praxis may be. Consequently, occultists could legitimately claim immunity from Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as a negation of this world in favor of an infinitely deferred afterlife, even if they are still subject to Marx’s more broadly sweeping critique of religion in general as the opium of the masses. But then again, occultists have never claimed large numbers, and denying oneself a little opium from time to time, if it were available, is a bit prudish is it not?

Occult practices have always made use of material means to produce material results, even if those results are granted an otherworldly nature not always subject to traditional forms of verification. As historian Alex Owen explains, occultism does not traditionally recognize a distinction between this world and another, but rather a single animistic universe where matter may be more or less tangible, but it is matter all the same. There is no such thing as the supernatural because the supernatural, by definition, cannot be accessed through the natural means to which occultists have had recourse. Rudolf Steiner, the famous German occultist and architect, expressed this continuity between the tangible and intangible (an opposition that I would like to retain in lieu of the more violent and untenable opposition between the natural and supernatural) in a 1911 lecture entitled The Temple is Man: "The temple that belongs truly to the future" Steiner writes, "will have walls–and yet no walls; its interior will have renounced every trace of egoism that may be associated with an enclosed space, and all its colors and forms will give expression to a selfless striving to receive the inpouring forces of the universe." Such a temple would be like an electronic receiver, or to revise Le Corbusier, a "machine for worshipping," or what I will designate the mechanical occult.

This brings me to my second feature of radical occultism, its insistence on reliable methodologies for accessing the invisible. Occultists could claim the status of scientists at least on this level, that they used regularized methods to achieve tangible manifestations (or data) of the intangible. Did not Leeuwenhoek achieve the same feat in his experiments with microscopes?

Rather than waiting for miracles to erupt from nowhere at the whim of a higher being, medieval and Renaissance alchemists sought experimental means for producing the "miraculous" which drew on the latest principles of chemistry, biology, and geology. It is this rigorous methodology, in fact, which allowed alchemical ideas to return like specters after being repressed by various opponents such as Baconian empiricism, Enlightenment ideology, Comtean positivism and, of course, the Church. Both William Ramsay, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904, and Frederick Soddy, who won the same prize in 1921, viewed themselves, quite literally, as alchemists. In a lecture called "Alchemy and Chemistry," Soddy claimed that alchemy "has always been, the real goal of the chemist." As outlandish as this claim may sound, with its aseptic mixing of occult and official sciences, the etymology of the two disciplines suggests otherwise. Although one would like to think that Egyptian alchemy (Egypt as the land of Khem, or black earth) came first, only to be overtaken by its more scientific successor, in fact the Greek word "chem" preceded it, which means "pouring or infusion." Greeks first began practicing pharmaceutical chemistry with the extracts of plants while Alexandrian alchemists were a subsequent development of chemistry whose practices achieved enough notoriety to become homonymically associated with the land of black earth. Alchemy, then, was not a rudimentary science but a scientific heresy whose etymological attribution took the form of a retroactive infusion with a Greek word originally signifying pouring or infusion. And, really, couldn’t one assert that pouring and infusion are not only the roots and modus operandi of chemistry, but the very figures of heresy itself? Chemistry, in its very procedures and assumptions, invites impurity of all kinds, including ideological impurity. In his otherwise illuminating essay entitled "Chemistry in the Borderland: Ramsay, Soddy, and the Transmutation Gold Rush," Mark Morrison provides an explanation more comfortable to traditional scientific ideology. He asserts that the alchemical interests of Ramsay and Soddy were tangential to their "true" scientific achievements, at one point even lamenting, "Indeed it is heartbreaking to read Ramsay’s exultant claims to have effected transmutation in his laboratory notebooks, in his letters to chemist friends and his wife, and even in his public addresses and publications in scholarly journals." But I am not sure that we can so easily extract the elixir vitae from their curricula vitae, particularly if chemistry began not as a pure science, but as an applied technology designed to artificially prolong life or, in Socrates’ case, to prematurely end it. In fact, Paul Feyerabend and others have suggested that impurity and anarchy is more characteristic of the scientific process than the insistence on well-defended procedural boundaries.

Perhaps, at this point, it has occurred to some of you that there is another practice which uses material means and rigorous methods to access intangible forces, the practice of art. Perhaps some of you would disagree that the methods of art are rigorous, that an enforced rigor might in fact kill its soul. I would like to argue otherwise. That is the provocation I would like to throw out to you tonight.

Take, for instance, the Surrealist practice of automatic writing. What can be freer than the following directions, taken from Andre Breton:

After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your

Mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive,

a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone

else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember

what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.

Even so, that’s quite a few directions for merely recording the free-flow of words that rupture the surface of one’s consciousness. It takes meditative preparation, and how many writers are going to be willing to give up their genius and talents, to abjure the art they’ve devoted their life to? But as Freud articulated, our default mode is one of censorship, and thus speaking or writing exactly the words that cross our minds requires strict adherence to predetermined rules, in other words, rigor. At least Freud’s patients were allowed to speak their mind at a reasonable rate of speed, whereas automatic writing truly requires the subject to behave like a machine in order to keep up with "the inexhaustible nature of the murmur." But that is the sacrifice mechanical

occultists make, knowing that capturing the "murmur," the mystery, the intangible, requires that they become "modest recording instruments" sensitive enough to pick these things up.

The avant-garde, well-known for its precocious and often unruly adoption of technological innovations, has often borrowed from magical or occult sources as well. Before André Breton’s description of automatic writing in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, there was his 1922 "Entrance of the Mediums" reporting a séance conducted by René Crevel. This séance

also involved automatic writing, as well as automatic speech and drawing, which prompts me to introduce the more inclusive term of automatism for such practices and to warn myself and anyone else involved in these matters from drawing too easy a distinction between the spiritual and technological aspects of automatism. Both were present at the outset of Surrealist automatism, neither would leave it, and neither spiritualism nor technology acted as mere analogies of automatic practices. Rather, automatism is imprinted indelibly by the history and nature of spirituality and technology.

This becomes even more apparent when we expand the definition of automatism to include the history of science and technology itself. For instance, the 19^th-century spiritual definition of the word "medium" (as an individual interceding between two worlds) derives from its more scientific meaning of over 200 years prior. Of course, 200 years prior, no one was sure of the difference between magic and science, just like today. Permit me the palindromic repetition of a maxim. A theory of mediums is always a theory of media, to dabble in magic is to deal in images. Or. . . a theory of media is always a theory of mediums, to dabble in images is to deal in magic.

What does all this imply for artists who work in mediums old or new? First of all, initiates into the sort of art I’m discussing must first be willing to allow magic to enter their productions, and to do so, they must follow rigorous procedures. Self expression is okay, but magic is more fun, and it is more fun because it is truly other, a surprise that can spook and amuse you at the same time. As musician, mycologist, poet, and devout Buddhist John Cage explained concerning his use of chance operations such as "mesostics" (a variant of acrostics) and the I Ching, "The freedoms I’ve given have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes." Thus, art as personal expression and mastery must be abandoned in favor of modes that permit a truly radical alterity. They are magical inasmuch as, in the words of Buddhist teacher Chugyam Trungpa, "magic is the total appreciation of chance."

Now, low tech cultivation of magical chance can require a good deal of time and effort. Cage was known to have spent every spare moment he had tossing his I Ching coins, all in the name of producing soundtracks that, when he heard them at parties, he wouldn’t recognize as his own. High-tech practices, however, are another matter, precisely due to technology’s uncanny ability to produce accidents. Photographers and filmmakers would know, from practice, exactly what I’m talking about. The camera eye is far more interesting than the human eye precisely because it does not choose what to see, producing what Ian Jeffreys refers to as, speaking from the human point of view, "fascinating irrelevancy." Walter Benjamin, also speaking as a human, called this effect the "optical unconscious," although for tonight I’ll call it the optical occult.

There is an aural occult as well, which Thomas Watson, an avid spiritualist, heard on the "dead" phone lines when Bell wasn’t around. I guess the tendency to refer to phone lines or wires in general as live or dead is itself symptomatic of a far more widespread mechanical occult, one that has outlived turn of the century inventors such as Watson, Edison, Tesla, and Marconi, all of whom believed that their respective communications technologies had major spiritual implications. In 1968, a curious book was published entitled The Inaudible Becomes Audible, written by Latvian psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive. The book was a meditation on the white noise accompanying the playback of electromagnetic tape. Its thesis was simple yet staggering, judging by the amount of attention the book received. Raudive suggested, quote, "that these [sounds] might be the voices of people who are dead." Raudive’s meditations on these accidental sounds, along with Jurgenson’s discovery of earth sounds (or spherics) on certain radio wavelengths, have since exploded into the EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon which has now rather belatedly spurred the Hollywood film entitled White Noise. Unlike the spirits in White Noise, however, whose language of choice is English, the voices Raudive and company heard often seemed to speak, quote, "in different languages, often changing to another idiom in mid-sentence. Also, longer phrases often had an improper structure or grammar." Given the likely possibility that researchers were converting—via a combination of sound similarity and projection—random noise patterns into language, one would expect this sort of avant-garde appearance. What these researchers had in fact developed were electronic means, aided by the technology of human paranoia, for producing polylingual, poetic texts in the spirit of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. They are indeed to be lauded, not just by believers in the occult, but by anyone interested in the nature of sound, psychology, and art. That these individuals made these discoveries based upon what I believe are incorrect premises about spirituality is, quite literally, immaterial.

Or is it? Is there a certain naivete, a willingness to believe, that is in fact required, although often suppressed, for discovery to occur, whatever the field? Do mediums, new-age practitioners, and scientists on the fringe know something that we don’t, that we don’t want to know? If so, perhaps it stems from their willingness to give themselves up, completely, to the idea (or the idea as praxis). This in itself is a form of rigor, even if a dangerous form that can lead to the rigor mortis of stupidity or, conversely, to the vigor mortis characteristic of fascist ideologies. Nevertheless, I feel a certain abandonment, a certain self-forgetting or ek-stasis, might be required for producing or thinking something completely new. What duration and form this abandonment might take is the risk of knowledge itself. Roland Barthes provides one answer, which might more correctly serve as a goal than as a method of the sort of abandonment I am talking about. In his autobiography, written in alphabeticized fragments which, to use Mallarme’s words, "yield the initiative to language," Barthes describes an ever-shifting critical repertoire that results in "doctrinal vibration" via a deliberately haphazard process. "In this way," Barthes writes, "words are shifted, systems communicate, modernity is tried (the way one tries all the push buttons on a radio one doesn’t know how to work)." In this last formulation, Barthes uses a desire for meaning (trying to make a radio "work") as an image of the unpredictable "results" generated by improvisational writing. As long as one remains in the act of randomly pushing buttons, one is assured of never achieving a sustained mode of sound, which I would like to equate with the flatline on a heart monitor, a death without afterlife of any kind.

So, for occultism to be radical it must be mechanical, that is, its rigor must be of a kind likely to produce accidents. As long as one can abandon oneself to that paradox, then the relationship between chance and spirituality begins to make more sense. "Why is it," Jacques Derrida asks in an essay entitled "My Chances," "when chance or luck are under consideration, why do the words and concepts in the first place impose the particular signification, sense, and direction of a downward movement or a fall?" Paradoxically, Derrida leaves nothing to chance but instead presents his answer in the form of a declaration, albeit an interrogative one: "Is not what befalls or descends upon us, as it comes from above, like destiny or thunder, taking our faces and hands by surprise–is this not exactly what thwarts our expectation and disappoints our anticipation?"(5). As everyone knows, life itself is full of accidents, some more disappointing than others, and it is always tempting to assign them to a higher force or pattern, to God or the gods. In my erstwhile role as a mechanical occultist, I do the same thing, only with the knowledge that my god is a deus ex machina designed to crash.

In my book, entitled Mechanical Occult, I discuss various communications technologies from the 19^th and 20^th centuries which, by their very nature, regularly produce accidental effects that lend themselves to spiritualist interpretations. The spectrality of automatism haunts these technologies and related practices such as automatic writing and seances, all of which disembody themselves in their capacity to go on producing long after traditional human intervention has ceased to be a factor. The uncanny atmosphere associated with spiritualist seances results as much, I would argue, from mediums’ machine-like state of receptivity as from their supposed contact with another world. For, when mediums abandon themselves to channeling, they become antennae in which their bodies, devoid of personality, are simultaneously corpse, specter, and machine. In fact, many turn-of-the-century mediums seemed to intuit this hybrid identity to the extent that it informed the content and form of their receptions. One of the most famous, Helene Smith, who became the protege of psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy, exhibited what Flournoy called a "triple mediumship: visual, auditive, and typtological," a combination which just so happens to correspond to each major communications medium at the turn of the century: film, gramophone, and typewriter. Conversely, the media that Smith simulated are ghostly in their own right. Film and gramophone in particular, as Jeffrey Sconce notes, "evoke the supernatural by creating beings that appear to have no physical form." Yet, even the ancient technology of writing had its own god, Thoth, who was a prototype of Hermes and the intimate relationship between all things technical and spiritual. The oldest surviving depiction of a print shop takes the form of a danse macabre; telegraphy leads to table rapping and other connections to the beyond; photography leads to spirit photos; telephones, radio, and sound recordings lead to spirit voices. Both Edison and Marconi, in fact, predicted from the outset that radio would be the ultimate means of contacting the dead, thus leading one to believe that the relationship between spirituality and technological means of communication may be virtually immanent rather than causal in nature. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom references the spectral qualities of technology at least three times in the "Hades" section of Ulysses, including positing a telephone system that allows those accidentally buried alive to phone the proper authorities while also wiring up the entire graveyard. Bloom thinks to himself, "Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them." In Bloom’s only half-joking formulation, the dead are themselves the engineers of communications technology.

Less sanguine explanations of the dead’s relationship to communications technology, such as those of William Butler Yeats and certain EVP theorists, suggest that the dead, eager to communicate with this world, make use of our technologies because of their ability to access the "ether," that ill-defined substance used by spiritualists and early radio pioneers alike to explain the possibility of invisible communications. Yeats, for his part, explained the many grammatical imperfections of spirits in the process of seances in terms of their forgetfulness with respect to human means of communication. To make up for this forgetting, they must make use of random phrases, no matter how deeply buried or inchoate, they encounter in the minds of the medium and her participants. It is telling that Yeats, a firm believer in spiritualism throughout his life, explains the mysterious productions of spirits in terms of the faulty technology they must use to enter this world. EVP theorists, more predictably, take a similar route, explaining the multilingual and ungrammatical expressions of the spirit world in terms of their random encounters with language floating through the airwaves.

Unless one happens to be an avant-garde writer, these communications are surprisingly useless as revelations and, even worse, often quite banal, and yet they generate great excitement among converts. There are many explanations for this, of which I will cite two. First, contact in and of itself provides all of the uncanny feelings of an encounter with the other. This idea that there is power in the connection itself is also quite technological in nature, the implicit metaphor is one of plugging into an electric generator. This is the sense that Rudolf Steiner taps into in a 1914 lecture entitled "The Presence of the Dead in Our Life":

The individual’s appearance in the clairvoyant sphere seems to resemble a physical

figure but can be as different from the being really present as the signs for the word

"house" are from the actual house. Since we can read, we do not concentrate on the

signs that make up the word "house" and do not describe the shape of the letters, but

instead we get right to the concept "house." In the same way, we learn in true

clairvoyance to move from the figure we perceive to the actual being.

While Helen Sword cites this passage in an attempt to differentiate between mediums who recognize the arbitrary nature of the signifier and more credulous spiritualists like Steiner, I would suggest that the signifier/signified relationship is not so obvious here. Rather, just as early wireless geeks were not so much interested in the content of radio transmissions as in the vicissitudes of the connection itself, Steiner recommends a deferral of attention from traditional conceptions of meaning (does the spirit resemble the one I am seeking?) in favor of the actual connection with the spirit being. Indeed, Steiner’s analogy could be said to hinge upon recognition of the arbitrariness of language even as it expresses a desire for (and a belief in) a more tactile connection to the spirit world. His not so innocent example of the house alludes to his desire for such proximity inasmuch as the architectural metaphor adds an element of spatiality to the discussion of clairvoyance. The second explanation for the excitement of such connections hinges on the very uselessness of the messages themselves. If one believes he or she has made contact with the dead, spirits who know about worlds that we do not, then perhaps the vicissitudes of their communications are parabolic in nature, meant to be hidden from the uninitiated or those unwilling to consider these messages as sacred texts. As we all know, the power of the sacred often hinges upon its inscrutability, just as prophecies only make sense when symbolically connected to the world of the present, past, or future. The excitement, then, becomes one of interpretation of a text that may be every bit as important as the notoriously cryptic Book of Revelation.

This latter approach, I would argue, is inherently poetic in nature, encouraging a mode of thinking one could define as a "poetics of montage." When a particular element of a clairvoyant experience is brought into relation with the unrelated aspects of one’s everyday life, these two fields inevitably, in the words of Sergei Eisenstein, "combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition." In his poem "Correspondences," inspired by the writings of French occultist Eliphas Levi, Charles Baudelaire explores the more spiritual feelings associated with poetic montage:

Like echoes from infinity drawn out

Into a dappled unison of light,

Beyond the dawn of day or dead of night,

All scents, all sounds and colors correlate.

I guess that, in order to shield myself from accusations of contradiction, I must posit a dialectical relationship between chance and destiny, between dissonance and correspondence, assert that chance begins to have personal meaning when poeticized, thus coming to resemble destiny or correspondence, but that destiny is only tolerable in its subservience to the dissonance of chance. The thwarting of our expectations can disappoint, as Derrida suggests, but it can also enchant. It’s the enchanting moments, stemming from this dialectic, unhinging us as true enchantment does, that we wait around for, cast spells and throw lots for, pray and curse for with radios, cameras, and tarot cards.