Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford, Oxford UP. 2002. 324 pages. ISBN: 0199249628
Reviewed by
Roger Luckhurst's The Invention of Telepathy is concerned with the birth of a rather curious fin-de-siècle psychic practice. Coined in 1882 by the polymathic Frederic Myers (a poet, classicist, and school inspector), the term telepathy is compelling for Luckhurst because it is so enduring—why, he wonders, when other late Victorian neologisms have faded (one rarely hears “mattoid” uttered these days) should “telepathy” have so fully established itself in the vernacular? Luckhurst cultivates the word with sensitive, Foucauldian attention, analysing the truth regimes that allowed the telepathic to become formed and disseminated. Luckhurst notes that the word enacts an oxymoronic instant in which distance (tele-) is married with intimacy or touch (pathos). Embedded in “telepathy” is thus a kind of latent cultural history—one that Luckhurst explores within a constellation of modern knowledge structures (ranging from analyses of occultism/scientific naturalism to studies of mass print culture to figurations of the colonial frontier), and finally presents the notion of the telepathic as an apposite metaphor for the vicissitudes of modernity and its on-going historicization.
Luckhurst argues that the 1870s represent a dynamic historical decade in which the Spiritualism movement adopted new scientific methods and—through a hybridized, popular commingling of theories of spirit and matter—challenged official institutions of scientific inquiry. He reads telepathy as emerging not so much against scientific naturalism (that is, against theories based on observable, testable nature), or against new “legitimate” scientific technologies (like X-rays, for example), but rather directly out of the extraordinary uncertainties that these new epistemological modes and scientific tools produced. The “distant-touch” is an ideal analogue for the contradictory experiences of modernity, and Luckhurst insists that telepathy becomes most compelling (most visible, even) precisely “where confident demarcations between truth and error, science and pseudo-science” (2) begin to vanish.
Telepathy, for all its mind-to-mind invisibility, works as a vivid indicator of a knowledge-experiment running, as Luckhurst phrases it, “in advance of theoretical paradigms” (36). Connotative of experimental, unbordered potential, telepathy thus becomes a rich paradigm to apply to innovative/avant-garde arts. And Luckhurst points out that telepathy held serious attraction for a number of late Victorian literary and intellectual luminaries, including Sigmund Freud, Henry and William James, and Oscar Wilde. He also illustrates that Myers’ conceptualization of thought-processes as fluid (in his treatise on telepathy, “The Subliminal Consciousness”) owes much to William James’s The Principles of Psychology. Like James, or even like James’s younger brother, who in the “The Art of Fiction” conceives of mental experience as a huge spider web comprised of infinite silken threads, Myers’ treatise hypothesizes that the modern subject’s habitual and/or empirical consciousness is merely a single selection from a vast potentiality of consciousnesses. Luckhurst reveals that such ideas radically undermined the notion of unitary selfhood so important to turn-of-the-century constructions of nationalism and Empire. He explains further that telepathy found uncanny correlatives at the edges of Empire—such as the purported hidden communication systems of the “Hindu Secret Mail”—revealing palpable English anxieties about the precariousness of colonial rule. At its most pliable, the telepathic thus becomes a fruitful means to read the complications of modernity as they coalesce around nexuses of gendered and racialized otherness.
Luckhurst’s charting of the figural heterogeneity embodied by telepathy ultimately exposes modernity as a space of competing liminalities. Indeed, the paradox of “distant-touch” can be read as the enduring puzzle-binary of modernity and its tentative post-. That is to say, if the economic forces of globalization have radically re-figured our sense of space and time in bringing the once-distant closer, these forces have also (and often violently) worked to widen the gulf separating the here and the there. Moreover, the West’s current preoccupation with “virtuality”—the quality of what could be called “distant-being”—can be understood, I think, as a fin de millennium extension of Luckhurst’s late Victorian psychic event. What makes The Invention of Telepathy such a vital resource is its own ambitious border-work at the thresholds of cultural history, literary studies, philosophical enquiry, feminist investigation, and post-colonial interrogation. Luckhurst not only illuminates the aggregated knowledges of late Victorian and early modernist society, but also resonantly redraws our sense of the technologies and imperatives of contemporary culture.