Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Milutis, Joe, Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 208 pages, 0-8166-4644-9, HB:$29.95
Reveiwed by
Loughborough University
Ether is not a book; it more like a piece of theatre. More particularly it seems to be one of those curious sideshows at an old travelling circus, a colourful booth decked with a dazzling array of marvellous sights and incredible syntheses: the jacket blurb moves through Newton, Mesmer and Poe to alchemy and industrialisation, arriving at space travel, avant-garde film and the internet, before finally fusing Fellini, Deleuze, Futurism and Shirley Temple. Often a sideshow will have similarly fuelled its audience with much expectation of marvel and mystery. Ether delivers on its promise, it is – as its subtitle notes – a book about ‘nothing’ and ‘everything.’
In purely structural terms the book is well laid out with four chapters in two parts. The first two chapters: ‘Paradigm Lost: Ether and the Metaphysics of Pop Science’ and ‘Holy Science, Film and the End of Ether’ chart the more historical situation of ether. The final two chapters: ‘Radio, Ether, and the Avant-Garde’ and ‘Ether Underground: The Postwar Representation of Outer Space’ (under the splendid heading ‘The Lovely Intangibles’) broaden out to consider ether ‘today’.
It is a vibrant read, with a bubbling humour which actually lends weight to the moments of passionate appeal that occur throughout for a more visionary approach to both art and science: ‘I think it is about time to say (although it has been said before) that, to a certain extent, everyone should have an inalienable right to illusion, or at least the responsibility toward illusion, because within it is a fundamental sense of direction and source of energy’ (160). I was reminded of Victoria Nelson’s book The Secret Life of Puppets which similarly blends literature, film and magic within a framework of re-emerging Platonic idealism against the prevalence of Aristotelian scientific materialism.
The book’s theatricality is heightened by its rather pivotal use of Strindberg’s Dream Play, the discussion of which occurs at about one third of the way through. In the same manner that Dream Play ‘marks the point where the interrogation of reality becomes so incisive that it punctures theatrical surfaces, detours through dream substance, and emerges on the brink of madness’ (56), so too Ether seems to amplify its own engagement with the topic from that point on, leading the reader through a rollercoaster of mysticism, Japanese anime and theosophy.
With the second part of the book comes the emergence of more familiar technologies such as radio, but it is the tingling unreal radio that surrounds us, everywhere and nowhere, the ethereal ‘void’ substance that acts as conduit for messages and music. An engaging short section deals with Futurism (and its underlying ethereality) and Derrida, but rather fails to realise its potential, as we are whisked away into another fascinating encounter with Cocteau’s Orpheus, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and telepathy. Here I would have expected to have seen something on the nature of ghosts in Derrida’s work (perhaps from Echographies of Television) and some inclusion of Maurice Blanchot’s work on the Orphic gaze. This highlights my only criticism, which leads me strangely back to hearty applause: the book seemed at times rushed, and the reader continually yearned for more detail. At 160 pages of actual text Ether covers vast areas of philosophical, scientific, occult, literary and artistic territory, and certainly excites and entices the reader to investigate further. I would have happily read another 160 pages and perhaps it needed this space to fully realise the potential depth of its argument.
It is a relief though to encounter a serious engagement with the esoteric underpinnings (or for some the dark underbelly) of our ‘brave new world’ of technocrats and spin-mongers. Ether highlights the fundamental ethereality of the media – primarily radio and television in the text – through which we encounter the world.
In a time where everyone is talking of ‘inter-disciplinarity’ and publishers seek ever to multiply their reading market – whilst narrowing their ‘specialisms’ for more streamlined and comprehensible marketing strategies – it is encouraging to see a book which truly synthesises a vast range of academic disciplines, radical and esoteric thought and art through a medium which retains its mystique and allure right to the very end, and hopefully beyond.