Critical

Psychic Television
Author(s): Stefan Andriopoulos
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 618-637
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Psychic Television
Stefan Andriopoulos
Much of what the old fairy tales promised has been delivered by the latest technology:
radio brings distant voices into a room where no one is speaking; even television is
becoming thinkable, which, in the midst of the soberest scientific worldview, takes us
into the realms of the magic mirror.
—Ernst Bloch, “The Anxiety of the Engineer” (1929)
The occultist can reveal to the engineer the problems of the future; he can change the
blind finder of technology into a purposeful inventor. But it is the engineer who can
offer the occultist a scientific explanation for human beings’ magical faculties.
—Carl du Prel, Magic as Natural Science (1899)
On 8 March 1929, Germany’s state postal agency presented its first wire-
less television broadcast. The medium-wave transmitter at Berlin-Witzle-
ben relayed a number of moving and still images—a man smoking, a pair
of pliers opening and closing, letters of the alphabet—that were received in
various parts of the city. The picture quality was poor. Because the trans-
mitted images consisted of just thirty lines, only close-ups were recognizable
on the tiny four-square-inch screens. In addition, technical limitations per-
mitted the transmission of only twelve-and-a-half images per second. The
images appearing on viewers’ screens therefore flickered considerably.
Nonetheless, the first television broadcast in Germany appeared promising.
Three months later, Robert Bosch GmbH, Zeiss Ikon, and the British
company Baird Television Ltd. founded Fernseh AG (Television Ltd.). Dur-
ing the following years, this new company, along with its competitor Tele-
funken, and the state postal agency itself, attempted in vain to establish the
television set as a profitable mass product. Early models from this period
included devices such as Denes von Mihaly’s Volksempfänger (People’s Re-
ceiver) and John Logie Baird’s Televisor. On 30 September 1929, the British
Broadcasting Corporation began the regular transmission of an experi-
mental television program that would be interrupted only by the Second
World War. Using the Baird system, a medium-wave transmitter in London
I would like to thank Mark Anderson, Michael Gordin, Brian Larkin, W. J. T. Mitchell, and
Dorothea von Mücke for their suggestions and comments. I am especially indebted to Kelly Barry
for her insightful and perceptive readings of the text and to Brian Hanrahan for his help with the
English version. An earlier draft of this essay has been published in German as “Okkulte und
technische Television,” in 1929: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien (1929: Contributions to the
Archaeology of Media), ed. Stefan Andriopoulos and Bernhard J. Dotzler (Frankfurt am Main,
2002), pp. 31–53.
Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005)

䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3103-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
618

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2005 619
broadcast five days a week for half an hour. Since both image and sound
still had to be relayed on the same frequency, their transmission was at first
possible only in alternating, two-minute cycles. In the imagination of con-
temporary engineers, however, this technical limitation had long since been
overcome; they emphasized that, at the same time as the sound film was
expanding the previously silent cinema, television offered the prospect of
“extending the purely acoustic radio into the optical realm.”1
The hybridity of image and sound also characterized the television film
Weekend (Wochenende), recorded towards the end of 1929 and later to be-
come a model for early German television.2 The film showed two young
women, Schura von Finkelstein and Imogen Orkutt, singing a German folk
song, “Listen to What’s Coming in from Outside” (Horch, was kommt von
draußen rein). For the medium of television, the words “Look what’s coming
in from outside” would of course have been more appropriate, all the more
so as the film strip’s repeated broadcasts took place without any accom-
panying soundtrack. But the wording of the song’s opening lines deserves
to be taken seriously since the focus on what was coming “from outside”
into the living room also shaped cultural perceptions of the new medium,
often designated “home cinema” (Heimkino). In April 1929, the magazine
At Home: A German Family Paper published an article on “Telecinema in
Your Home” (Dar Fernkino im Haus), beginning with the words: “Things
which we had to run after, now come to us at home.”3 Also in 1929, in the
1. Walter Reisser, “Bildfunk, Fernsehen, und Tonfilm” (Image-Radio, Television, and Sound
Film), Rundfunkjahrbuch (Radio Yearbook) 2 (1930): 299. Unless otherwise noted all translations
are mine. For a similar point of view, see Hans Bredow, “Vor einer wichtigen Entwicklungsstufe”
(On the Verge of an Important Development), Kameraden des Films: Funk und Schallplatte, 12.
Beiblatt zum Film-Kurier (Comrades of Film: Radio and Phonography, 12th Supplement to the
Film-Messenger), 1 June 1929, p. 1: “Film and radio both stand on the verge of a new and
important stage of their development. While film has hitherto merely transmitted sense-
impressions to the eye, now the ear too will play a part in receiving sound-films. . . . In contrast,
while [radio] was solely directed toward the ear, in the future television will appeal to the eyes of a
previously ‘sound-only’ audience.”
2. On this point, see also Birgit Schneider, “Die kunstseidenen Mädchen: Test- und Leitbilder
des frühen Fernsehens” (The Rayon Girls: Early Television Prototypes and Models), in 1929, pp.
54–79.
3. Ernst Steffen, “Das Fernkino im Haus” (Telecinema in Your Home), in Daheim: Ein deutsches
Familienblatt (At Home: A German Family Paper) 65, no. 23 (1929): 3.
S t e f a n A n d r i o p o u l o s is an assistant professor in the department of

Germanic languages at Columbia University. He is the author of Besessene
Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften, und die Erfindung des Kinos (2000), now being
translated as Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of
Cinema. His forthcoming work is tentatively entitled Ghostly Visions: German
Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media.

620 Stefan Andriopoulos / Psychic Television
magazine Broadcast Eduard Rhein noted: “the world will be brought to us
in our own room.” Rhein, later to found the enormously successful radio
and television magazine Listen (Hör zu), continued euphorically: “Every-
thing that interests us will be made visible on a little screen in our own home.
. . . Our wildest dreams are now becoming marvelous reality.”4
It was with nearly identical terms, however, that authors such as Ernst
Bloch and Eugen Diesel conjured “The Anxiety of the Engineer” and “The
Uncanny of the Technical Age” (both dating from 1929). While Bloch com-
pared television’s “latest technology” with the “realms of the magic mir-
ror,”5 Diesel wrote: “that which was hitherto seen only in dreams or which
belonged to the realm of the miraculous, is now available in everyday ex-
perience.”6 In a vague reference to Sigmund Freud’s essay from 1919, the son
of the famous inventor defined the uncanny as “a sudden, ghostly appear-
ance” (“U,” p. 239). Apart from a “mechanical uncanny” arising “directly
from the machine in itself,” he further described an “uncanny ‘of the second
kind,’ . . . dissolving old measures of time and space” (“U,” pp. 241, 243).
According to Diesel, in this way “a whole new artificial world” was coming
into being, a world “in which nothing could be certain” because material
reality appeared only as a ghostly phantom on the screen or magic mirror
in the living room (“U,” p. 243).7
Television in 1929 was thus regarded as the uncanny (unheimlich) oc-
currence of the supernatural or marvelous in one’s own living room. Evi-
dence for this is not limited to contemporary advertisements depicting
television sets as magical crystal balls (fig. 1). In the same year of 1929, the
spiritualist Journal for Psychic Research printed an article on “Domestic Phe-
nomena” (Privathäusliche Phänomenik) next to pieces on “Metaplasma-
4. Eduard Rhein, “Wollen wir fernsehen?” (Do We Want to See Televisually?), Die Sendung
(Broadcast) 6 (1929): 726. See also Theodor Kappstein’s comment: “The miracle is not just the
‘dearest child of faith,’ as was said in olden times. The miracle is now also the ‘favorite child of
technology’” (Theodor H. Kappstein, “Der Zauberer Rundfunk” [Radio the Magician], Die
Sendung 6 [1929]: 22), as well as Frank Warschauer’s remark: “Of all inventions of our time,
wireless television is perhaps not only the most magical, but also the most rich in consequences
. . . . By this means, a selection of the whole world will be delivered to our homes” (Frank
Warschauer, “Rundfunk heute und morgen” [Radio Today and Tomorrow], in Fazit: Ein
Querschnitt durch die deutsche Publizistik [On Balance: A Cross Section of German Journalism],
ed. Ernst Glaeser [1928; Kronberg, 1977], p. 307; emphasis added).
5. Ernst Bloch, “Die Angst des Ingenieurs” (1929), Gesamtausgabe, 17 vols. in 18 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1985), 9:354; trans. under the title “The Anxiety of the Engineer,” by Andrew Joron, Literary
Essays, trans. Joron et al. (Stanford, Calif., 1998), p. 310; trans. mod.
6. Eugen Diesel, “Das Unheimliche des technischen Zeitalters” (The Uncanny of the Technical
Age), Zeitwende (Turning Points) 5 (1929): 241; emphasis added; hereafter abbreviated “U.”
7. Diesel’s text can hence be read as an anticipation of Günther Anders’s culturally conservative
remarks on “the world as phantom and matrix” or of Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptically charged
theories of simulation.

f i g u r e 1. Advertisement in Television (Sept. 1934).
Phenomena,” “Phenomena of Possession,” and an obituary for Albert von

Schrenck-Notzing, a famous German spiritualist and physician who had
died in February. After a short digression on occult “clairvoyance” (Hellse-
hen), the author, one retired justice Driessen, outlined various supernatural
phenomena, including “nocturnal wall-inscriptions,” “inexplicable light
apparitions,” and “knocking sounds.” These manifestations had taken place
in Driessen’s own “solidly built 1903 family house,” located not in Berlin-
Witzleben, but in Witzenhausen, a small town by the river Werra in Hesse.
Without explicitly referring to electrical television, the article specified a

“small cupboard bearing family portraits” in a corner of the living room as
the “main location” of these phenomena.8
The coincidence of texts from 1929 describing occult “domestic phe-
nomena” and the magical properties of the new technology in one’s own
home can be related to a more fundamental interrelation of television and
clairvoyance. Walter Benjamin understood spiritualism and occultism to
be the “backside” (Kehrseite) of “technological development.”9 In contrast,
I would like to establish spiritualist research into the psychic television of
somnambulist mediums as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the
invention and implementation of the technological medium. Spanning a
period from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, television’s gradual emergence in no sense relied exclusively
on “factors immanent to the technology,” as suggested by Joseph Hoppe
and others.10 The slow accumulation of technical and physical knowledge,
beginning around 1890, accelerating in the 1920s, and enabling the first wire-
less transmissions of moving pictures in the last years of that decade did not
take place in a vacuum that could be separated from its contingent cultural
contexts. Instead, occultist studies on psychic “clairvoyance” (Hellsehen)
and “television” (Fernsehen), carried out in the same period by spiritualists
who emulated the rules and procedures of science, played a constitutive role
for the technological inventions and developments of electrical television.
Placed in a larger theoretical context, such an approach to the archae-
ology of media at the same time addresses the complex relation between
technology and culture by avoiding a simple determinism, which in its focus
on a technological a priori threatens to reduce culture to a mere epiphe-
nomenon. The influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler has provided us
with important insights into how new information technologies give rise to
8. Amtsgerichtsrat i.R. Geheimrat Drießen, “Privathäusliche Phänomenik” (Domestic

Phenomena), Zeitschrift für psychische Forschung (Journal for Psychic Research) 5, no. 6 (1929): 181,
179, 180.
9. Walter Benjamin, “Erfahrung und Armut” (Experience and Poverty) (1933), Gesammelte
Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am Main,
1972–89), 2:1:215.
10.
There is an old and most likely irresolvable dispute—the question of whether technological
innovations are a reflection of social or economic needs, or if they are not instead inductively
developed from existing technical standards. As regards television at least, and indeed image
transmission in general, factors immanent to the technology appear to have been the chief
inspiration for thinking on the subject.
(Joseph Hoppe, “Wie das Fernsehen in die Apparate kam” [How Television Became Part of the
System], in TV-Kultur: Das Fernsehen in der Kunst seit 1879 [TV-Culture: Television in Art since
1879], ed. Wulf Herzogenrath et al. [Dresden, 1997], p. 26).

cultural change, yet ultimately he considers “hardware” to be more fun-
damental than the discourses and imaginations that allow for its emergence
and shape its contingent realization and appropriation. According to this
view, “literatures or fantasies are . . . irrelevant” for the conception of tele-
vision.11 Technology may generate spiritualism but not vice versa. A more
circumspect analysis, however, reveals an interdependence of electrical and
psychic television as presupposing each other. The archaeology of the me-
dium therefore testifies to a reciprocal interaction between the emergence
of a new technology and surrounding cultural discourses—an interaction
that defies representation in a simple model of cause and effect but instead
approaches the “circular causality” in complex feedback mechanisms.12 Or,
to put it in terms of classical logic: while spiritualism serves as a necessary
(but not sufficient) condition for the invention of electrical television, the
emerging technology simultaneously fulfills the very same function for spir-
itualist research on psychic telesight.
The notion that the concept of television emerged from a two-directional
exchange between occultism and technology immediately gains plausibility
when recalling equivalent coinages such as telegraphy, telepathy, telephony,
telekinesis, or teleplasty.13 Even the German term Fernsehen (television or
remote viewing), which, according to recent studies, was employed for the
first time in Liesegang’s 1891 book The Phototel: Contributions on the Problem
of Electrical Television, appeared in the same year in Charles Richet’s Ex-
perimental Studies in the Field of Thought Transmission and So-Called Clair-
voyance.14 The author, a French physician, who would receive the Nobel
Prize for medicine in 1913, also wrote novels on demonic possession under
the pseudonym of Charles Epheyre. His spiritualist study was published
11. Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien (Berlin, 2002), p. 290.

12. On “circular causality,” see Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, and Hans Lukas Teuber, “A
Note by the Editors,” in Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and
Social Systems (New York, 1952), p. xiv.
13. Wolfgang Hagen, whose work on the connection between occultism and the development
of radio has been an important point of reference for this article, has recently highlighted the
development of the concept of radio in the context of William Crookes’s 1870s experiments into
radiation as the “fourth state of matter” (Wolfgang Hagen, “Vom Ort des Radios: Vortrag zur
Eröffnung von Recycling the Future” [On the Place of Radio: Key Note to the Symposium Recycling
the Future], Vienna, 4 Dec. 1997, http://www.whagen.de/vortraege/radort/RADORT.HTM).
14. See Raphael Eduard Liesegang, Das Phototel: Beiträge zum Problem des electrischen
Fernsehens (The Phototel: Contributions on the Problem of Electrical Television) (Düsseldorf,
1891); hereafter abbreviated P. On the alleged first use of the term Fernsehen, see Siegfried
Zielinski, Audiovisionen: Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte (Audiovisions:
Cinema and Television as Historical Interludes) (Reinbek, 1989), p. 26, and Hoppe,
“Chronologie,” in TV-Kultur, p. 19.

under his own name with a prestigious medical press and examined “psy-
chic actions at a distance” (psychische Fernwirkungen) such as “telepathy,”
“telaesthesia,” “clairvoyance,”15 as well as “television.”16 In numerous, sup-
posedly scientifically verified experiments conducted by Richet, his sensitive
clairvoyants were able to transcend space and time, describing remote
buildings or objects in such detail that it was as if “they had the room and
the objects in question before their eyes. ”17 The mediums thus functioned
like a psychic equivalent to a technical apparatus for the transmission of
images, registered by Paul Nipkow as the electrical telescope at the German
Imperial Patent Office in January 1884 and intended “to make visible at any
arbitrarily chosen point B an object located at point A.”18
Nipkow’s device was based on the segmentation of an image into indi-
vidual lines, a principle first devised by Alexander Bain in 1843, a Scottish
inventor whose model for the transmission of images already contained the
idea of scanning two-dimensional surfaces line by line. However, since Bain
could not satisfactorily resolve the problems associated with synchronizing
sender and receiver, his image telegraph was rarely put to practical use.19
Forty years later, Nipkow’s “electrical telescope” depended upon a revolving
disk with holes arranged in a spiral around its edge. As the disk rotated, light
passing through the holes rendered it possible to scan an object point by
point and line by line.20 The spatial contiguity of individual pixels was
15. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, “Translator’s Introduction” (1890), in Charles

Richet, Experimentelle Studien auf dem Gebiete der Gedankenübertragung und des sogenannten
Hellsehens (Experimental Studies in the Field of Thought Transmission and So-Called
Clairvoyance) (Stuttgart, 1891), p. 2. See also Richet, “Relation de diverses expériences sur la
transmission mentale, la lucidité, et autres phénomènes non explicables par les données
scientifiques actuelles,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 5 (1888–89): 18–168 and
“Further Experiments in Hypnotic Lucidity or Clairvoyance,” Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research 6 (1889–90): 66–83.
16. “Fernsehen” appears in Richet, Experimentelle Studien auf dem Gebiete der
Gedankenübertragung und des sogenannten Hellsehens, p. 230. Earlier references are to be found in
Carl Kiesewetter, “Fernsehen und Telepathie in der älteren okkultistischen Literatur” (Television
and Telepathy in Older Occultist Literature), Sphinx 8 (1889): 97–104; Heinrich Bruno Schindler,
Das magische Geistesleben: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie (Magical Spirit Life: A Contribution to
Psychology) (Breslau, 1857), p. 139; and Eduard Stern, “Fernsehen, Fernhören” (Television,
Telehearing), Archiv für den Thierischen Magnetismus (Archive for Animal Magnetism) 7, no. 2
(1820): 161–63.
17. Richet, Experimentelle Studien auf dem Gebiete der Gedankenübertragung und des
sogenannten Hellsehens, p. 227; emphasis added.
18. Quoted in Josef Mühlbauer, Fernsehen: Das Wunder und das Ungeheuer (Television: The
Miracle and the Monster) (Basel, 1959), p. 15.
19. See Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1880 to 1941 (London, 1987), p. 6.
20. For a more detailed description of the Nipkow device, see Hoppe, “Wie das Fernsehen in die
Apparate kam,” p. 28, and David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher, Tube: The Invention of
Television (New York, 1997), p. 16.

thereby transformed into a temporal sequence of electrical signals to be
transmitted by wire before being reassembled into a coherent picture by the
receiver.
Prior to being supplanted in the 1930s by Zworykin’s and Ardenne’s com-
pletely electronic tube systems, nearly all of the early electromechanicaltele-
vision devices from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century
relied on selenium. This chemical element, discovered by Berzelius in 1817,
owed “its significance to a marvelous property by which its resistance drops
considerably under the influence of light.”21 Its photosensitivity was dis-
covered by chance in 1873 during the laying of trans-Atlantic undersea tele-
graph cables by the British engineer Willoughby Smith and his assistant
Joseph May. Two years later Werner von Siemens constructed the first se-
lenium cell, which, like the subsequent photocell, allowed for the “conver-
sion of an optical into an electrical image.”22
Translating images into signals that can be relayed and reconverted into
images—this principle was outlined in comparable form in those spiritu-
alist texts that formulated a theory of psychic television. A number of works
in the field of electrical engineering such as Liesegang’s The Phototel (1891),
Benedict Schöffler’s Phototelegraphy and Electrical Television (1898), and
Fritz Lux’s The Electrical Televisor (1903) described devices, frequently in-
terrelated and based on each another, that depended on the use of selenium
and employed mechanical systems, akin to the Nipkow disk, for the scan-
ning and generation of images.23 At the same time, a theory of occult mes-
sages or “dispatches” (Depeschen)24 was being developed in texts like Carl
du Prel’s Television and Action at a Distance (volume 2 of The Discovery of
the Soul by Means of the Secret Sciences [1895]), Walter Bormann’s The Norns:
Inquiries into Television in Space and Time (1909), and J. Körmann-Alzech’s
21. Christoph Ries, Sehende Maschinen: Eine kurze Abhandlung über die geheimnisvollen
Eigenschaften der lichtempfindlichen Stoffe und die staunenswerten Leistungen der sehenden
Maschinen (Seeing Machines: A Short Treatise on the Mysterious Properties of Photosensitive
Elements and the Astonishing Achievements of Seeing Machines) (Diessen, 1916), p. 38. See also
Ries, Die elektrischen Eigenschaften und die Bedeutung des Selens für die Elektrotechnik (Electrical
Qualities of Selenium and Its Significance for Electrical Engineering) (Berlin, 1914). For a more
detailed analysis of Ries’s treatise on “seeing machines,” see Bernhard Dotzler, “Die Schaltbarkeit
der Welt,” in 1929, p. 312.
22. H. E. Hollmann, “Fernseher von einst und jetzt” (Television, Then and Now), Helios 35
(1929): 54.
23. See P; Benedict Schöffler, Die Phototelegraphie und das Elektrische Fernsehen
(Phototelegraphy and Electrical Television) (Vienna, 1898); and Fritz Lux, Der elektrische Fernseher
(The Electrical Televisor) (Ludwigshafen, 1903).
24. Walter Bormann, Die Nornen: Forschungen über Fernsehen in Raum und Zeit (The Norns:
Inquiries into Television in Space and Time) (Leipzig, 1909), p. xiv; hereafter abbreviated N.

Telepathy, Thought Transmission, Thought Reading, Cumberland, Svengalis,
Television, Action at a Distance, Ghosts of Living Persons, Second Sight (vol-
ume 4 of Marvels and Secrets from throughout the Ages Revealed [1904]).25
Just as in electrical television, the signals of these occult broadcasts were
“transformed by the terminal station [Endstation] into perceptible images
[anschauliche Bilder].”26 Walter Bormann similarly describes “subjective vi-
sions,” in which “the telepathically affected receiver converts the message into
a perceptible image” (N, p. 98; emphasis added).
Du Prel’s treatise on the Discovery of the Soul defines “television” as “a
viewing of images” (ein bildliches Schauen) (ES, 2:1).27 Moreover, in contrast
to many spiritualist authors, he distinguishes between “clairvoyance” (Hel-
lsehen) and “television” (Fernsehen), according to the distance between
sender and receiver. Whereas clairvoyance only takes place “at close range,”
television allows “distances of many miles” to be overcome.28 In the latter
case, “a perceptible image” (ein anschauliches Bild) enters the mind of the
somnambulist medium and reveals “the finest details,” corresponding“pre-
cisely to reality” (ES, 2:79, 5).29 Of course, du Prel adds, it is not a matter of
“seeing in the physiological sense” when “one sees an event taking place at
a distance of many miles” (ES, 2:1). “Telesight” (Ferngesicht) is thus not
based “on peripheral stimulation of the optic nerves” but arises from “brain
intuitions” (Gehirnvorstellungen), which are then transformed into “images
existing in space” and projected towards the exterior (ES, 2:1).30 According
to du Prel, the brain cannot actively create this “telesight.” Instead, it can
25. See N; Carl Du Prel, Die Entdeckung der Seele durch die Geheimwissenschaften, 2 vols.
(Leipzig, 1894–95), hereafter abbreviated ES; and J. Körmann-Alzech, Telepathie,
Gedankenübertragung, Gedankenlesen, Cumberland, Die Svengalis, Fernsehen, Fernwirken,
Gespenster lebender Personen, Das zweite Gesicht, vol. 4 of Offenbarung der Wunder und
Geheimnisse aller Zeiten (Leipzig, 1904).
26. Du Prel, “Das Fernsehen in Zeit und Raum” (Television in Time and Space), Sphinx 14
(1892): 9.
27. The text is based on ibid.
28.
This close-range clairvoyance should be distinguished from “spatial television” over distances
of many miles, and also from “temporal television.” In other words, clairvoyance is based on a
process unique to itself, whereas spatial and temporal television appear both to be based on a
separate and entirely different process. [ES, 1:163]
29. In a similar vein, Bormann wrote: “everything called up by the visionary medium presents
itself directly to the eye, in motion and in full color” (N, p. 130).
30. The outward projection of internally received mental images is already described in
Schopenhauer’s Versuch über das Geistersehen (Essay on Spirit Seeing) (1853), which refers to texts
by Justinus Kerner, as well as to Kant’s Träume eines Geistersehers (Dreams of a Spirit Seer) (1766).
Schopenhauer and Kant were often quoted by du Prel, who understood television to be a
“function of the transcendental subject”; see du Prel, “Fernsehen als Funktion des
transzendentalen Subjekts,” Sphinx 15 (1893): 200–209, 305–16.

only “passively receive such impressions, which are then transformed into
perceptible images, by way of the brain’s normal functioning” (ES, 2:2; em-
phasis added).
In an effort to designate the material medium carrying these wireless
transmissions, psychical researchers referred to various categories bor-
rowed from the natural sciences. Cesare Lombroso invoked the concept of
radioactivity, which had emerged subsequent to the discoveries by Becque-
rel and Marie Curie in 1896. William Crookes considered X-rays, first ob-
served by Roentgen in 1895 and not integrated into the electromagneticwave
spectrum until 1912, as the medium underlying the “transmission of . . .
images from one mind to another, without the agency of the recognised
organs of sense.”31 Hellenbach named the “ether” and Carl du Prel the “od”
as the bearer of wirelessly transmitted messages.32
In particular, the belief in an all-pervasive “ether,” a material yet weight-
less substance, appears to have gained renewed scientific respectability at
the end of the nineteenth century. After discovering the electromagnetic
wave spectrum in the years 1887–88, Heinrich Hertz stated: “It is thus certain
that all space of which we have knowledge is not empty, but rather is filled
with ether, a substance capable of propagating waves.”33 He was not alone
in adhering to this assumption. Among English physicists, particularly
among the followers of Maxwell, Hertz’s proof that “there are electrical or
magnetic waves which radiate in the same way as light waves” was also taken
to confirm the mysterious medium’s reality.34 This belief was retained even
after Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity, which in 1905 strin-
gently refuted the existence of ether and therefore at first met with
substantial opposition.35 The category of ether, oscillating across the bor-
31. William Crookes, “Address by the President,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research 12 (1896–97): 348. On this point, see also Hagen, “Der Okkultismus der Avantgarde um
1900” (The Occultism of the Avant-Garde around 1900), in Konfigurationen: Zwischen Kunst und
Medien (Configurations: Between Art and Media), ed. Sigrid Shade and Georg Christoph Tholen
(Munich, 1999), p. 351.
32. See N, p. 97: “To explain this, Lombroso drew on the concept of radioactivity, just as
Hellenbach had used the ether and du Prel the od.” The “od” was considered by Karl von
Reichenbach to be a force that pervades all nature, manifesting itself in persons of sensitive
temperament; see, for instance, Karl Freiherr von Reichenbach, Letters on Od and Magnetism
(1852): Published for the First Time in English, with Extracts from His Other Works, so as to Make a
Complete Presentation of the Odic Theory, trans. and ed. F. D. O’Byrne (London, 1926).
33. Heinrich Hertz, Ueber die Beziehungen zwischen Licht und Elektricität (On the Relations
between Light and Electricity) (Bonn, 1889), p. 5.
34. Ibid., p. 15. On Hertz’s discovery, see Oliver Lodge, The Work of Hertz and Some of His
Successors: Being the Substance of a Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday Evening, 1
June 1894 (New York, 1894).
35. See Stanley Goldberg, “In Defense of Ether: The British Response to Einstein’s Special
Theory of Relativity, 1905–1911,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 2 (1970): 89–125. For a
1924 account of electromagnetic waves, which still took recourse to the “world-ether hypothesis,”
see Albert Neuburger, Die Wunder der Fernmeldetechnik: Über Telegraphie und Telephonie zum

derlines between occultism and physics, thus continued to serve as “sci-
entific” authentication for a variety of theories that described occult mental
rays—or for the postulation of “od-vibrations” connecting transmitter and
receiver by a “psycho-magnetic band” (N, p. x).
Yet it was not only the notion of “ether waves” that linked representations
of psychic and technical television. In addition, spiritualist texts introduced
the concepts of “sympathy” or “psycho-physical attunement” between
transmitter and receiver to address the often difficult synchronization of
image-scanner and image-generator (N, p. xiv). Electrical television could
only produce a clear picture if sender and receiver were precisely tuned to
each other, a problem that August Karolus circumvented by mounting two
Nipkow disks on a single axis when demonstrating his television system at
the University of Leipzig in 1924.36 In parallel fashion, spiritualist texts in-
dicated that occult television could only take place if a strong “personal
involvement” joined the somnambulist medium with the transmitting psy-
che. Such an involvement might occur at the death of a close relative or at
the moment of an accident, bringing about a synchronous “oscillation”
(Schwingung) of sending and receiving souls and thereby providing the basis
for occult television (N, p. xiv).
In the work of physicists and electrical engineers, references to occult
and psychical research remained—with occasional exceptions—mostlyim-
plicit. Within spiritualism, however, technical and physical concepts were
aggressively appropriated in order to confirm and legitimize the possibility
of psychic actions at a distance. In 1896, Marconi’s first successful experi-
ments with wireless telegraphy from 1896 were immediately cited as estab-
lishing the possibility of telepathy and thought transmission. The
spiritualist researcher Körmann-Alzech put it succinctly: “Since Marconi
invented telegraphy without wires, even the most determined opponents of
telepathy must allow for its possibility.”37 In similar terms, Bormann rep-
resented the “teleaesthetic band” between transmitter and receiver as “cor-
responding to wireless telegraphy” (N, pp. xiii–xiv; see also p. 114).38
Yet as early as 1895—that is, one year before Marconi’s first successful
experiments with wireless telegraphy—a model for the wireless transmis-
sion of electrical signals can be found in spiritualist texts. In his The Dis-
covery of the Soul, Carl du Prel wrote:
Rundfunk (The Marvels of Telecommunication: From Telegraphy and Telephony to Radio)
(Leipzig, 1924), p. 123.
36. On this point, see Hoppe, “Wie das Fernsehen in die Apparate kam,” p. 31.
37. Körmann-Alzech, Offenbarung der Wunder und Geheimnisse aller Zeiten, p. 3.
38. On the interrelation of telegraphy and occultism, see also Richard Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an
Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,”
British Journal of the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 421–59.

Natural science is already on the verge of providing a proof for the pos-
sibility of such an action at a distance, a proof based on the transmis-
sion of electricity through space without connecting wires. It is obvious
that this works by means of the wave movements in the ether. The fact
that this wave motion gets through to its target in the case of human ac-
tion at a distance, has at present no other explanation than that the hu-
man agent is also capable of television. [ES, 2:281]
Du Prel thus refers to scientific knowledge before its successful tech-
nological implementation. But spiritualist theories of thought transmission
also appear to have functioned as a cultural blueprint for electrical wireless
transmissions. Thus in his 1892 article “Some Possibilities of Electricity,”
William Crookes, a chemist, physicist, and occultist, had already pointed
out that Hertz’s discovery of previously unknown electromagnetic waves
might render possible the wireless transmission of Morse signals:
Whether vibrations of the ether, longer than those which affect us as
light, may not be constantly at work around us, we have, until lately,
never seriously enquired. But the researches of Lodge in England and of
Hertz in Germany give us an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations
or electrical rays . . . . Here is unfolded for us a new and astonishing
world—one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities
of transmitting and receiving intelligence.
Rays of light will not pierce through a wall . . . . But the electrical vi-
brations of a yard or more in wave-length . . . will easily pierce such me-
diums . . . . Here, then is revealed the bewildering possibility of
telegraphy without wires, posts, cables or any of our present costly ap-
pliances. Granted a few reasonable postulates, the whole thing comes
well within the realms of possible fulfillment.39
According to Crookes, the necessary preconditions for wireless telegra-
phy included an apparatus to create electrical waves of the desired fre-
quency, sensitive receivers which could be tuned to a particular wavelength,
as well as some method of concentrating electromagnetic waves at a target
point in order to facilitate their reception.
The question of whether the first wireless transmission of electrical sig-
nals was actually achieved by Marconi in 1896 or whether this had already
been accomplished in 1894 by the English physicist and spiritualist Oliver
39. Crookes, “Some Possibilities of Electricity,” Fortnightly Review, n.s. 51 (Feb. 1892): 174. This
essay by Crookes has frequently been remarked upon; see, for instance, Hugh G. J. Aitken, Syntony
and Spark: The Origins of Radio (New York, 1976), p. 111.

Lodge is therefore of lesser importance in analyzing the relation between
occult and technical television.40 In fact Lodge closely collaborated with
Crookes and conducted, alongside his studies in physics, research into
“sympathetic communication between places as distant as India . . . and
England.”41 Accordingly his texts, apparatuses, and experiments highlight
with unusual clarity the mutual interaction between occultism and the nat-
ural sciences that characterized the cultural construction of new techno-
logical media in the late nineteenth century. Both Lodge, an acknowledged
physicist at the center of Maxwellian electrodynamics, and Crookes, pos-
sibly the most important British chemist of his time, served for several years
as presidents of the spiritualist Society for Psychical Research, which in the
United States counted William James among its members. Both scientists
developed their theories in close connection with their occultist studies.42
In the same article in which he outlined a research program for the reali-
zation of wireless telegraphy, Crookes also referred to experiments with te-
lepathy and thought transmission:
In some parts of the human brain may lurk an organ capable of trans-
mitting and receiving other electrical rays of wave-lengths hitherto un-
detected by instrumental means. These may be instrumental in
transmitting thought from one brain to another. In such a way the rec-
ognised cases of thought transference and the many instances of “coin-
cidence” would be explicable.43
However, the role of spiritualist theory within the “invention” of modern
communication technologies was not restricted to describing invisible psy-
chic “organs,” thereby engendering the insight into the possibility of func-
tionally equivalent technical devices. Even in terms of material components,
byproducts of occult research played a constitutive role in the emergence
of radio and television. Thus in 1879 Crookes developed the Crookes tube—
an early cathode-ray tube intended to prove that radiation was the fourth
state of matter.44 In 1897, Ferdinand Braun transformed Crookes’s tube
40. On Lodge’s 1894 experiments, see Hagen, “Vom Ort des Radios.”
41. Oliver Lodge, “On the Difficulty of Making Crucial Experiments as to the Source of the
Extra or Unusual Intelligence Manifested in Trance Speech, Automatic Writing, and Other States
of Apparent Mental Inactivity,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 10 (1894): 18.
42. On Crookes’s spiritualist experiments, see Crookes, “Notes of Séances with D. D. Home,”
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 6 (1889–90): 98–127 as well as “Address by the
President.” See also Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London, 1874) and
Psychic Force and Modern Spiritualism (London, 1871). These texts have been republished as
Crookes and the Spirit World: A Collection of Writings by or Concerning the Work of Sir William
Crookes, O.M., F.R.S., in the Field of Psychical Research, ed. M. R. Barrington (New York, 1972).
43. Crookes, “Some Possibilities of Electricity,” p. 176.
44. See Crookes, On Radiant Matter: A Lecture Delivered to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, at Sheffield, Friday, August 22, 1879 (Philadelphia, 1879), pp. 3–5.

into a measuring instrument, while in 1906 his assistants Dieckmann and
45
Glage registered the first patent to use this “Braunian tube” as an “image
writer” (Bildschreiber). Also in 1906, Lieben and Lee De Forest developed
the triode, which was likewise based on a vacuum tube and first employed
in image telegraphy and radio for the purpose of amplifying electrical sig-
nals before and after their transmission by wire or electromagnetic waves.46
On the level of the material apparatus, one indispensable precondition of
technical television—the possibility of amplifying electric signals—can
thereby be traced back to an electrical device invented by Crookes, who
himself explicitly pointed to the “connexion” between his spiritualist re-
search and his work in the natural sciences.47 Furthermore, spiritualist the-
ory anticipated this principle of amplification on the discursive level as early
as 1894, when du Prel asserted: “by its very nature, television would be made
easier if the od-radiation were artificially amplified (verstärkt)” (ES, 1:172).
In drawing attention to such texts as Liesegang’s Contributions on the
Problem of Electrical Television (1891), Kerstin Bergmann and Siegfried Zie-
linski have noted: “everything which in the twentieth century evolved into
the media system we have grown accustomed to had already been outlined
by the end of the nineteenth century.”48 Yet this conclusion on the archae-
ology of television should include more than electrical engineering, physics,
and science fiction novels like Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century, which
in 1883 described television-like devices to be used for live transmissions of
wars and political assemblies.49 In addition, the theories and conceptions
of electrical television also presupposed the contemporary spiritualist re-
45. See Ferdinand Braun, “Über ein Verfahren zur Demonstration und zum Studium des
zeitlichen Verlaufs variabler Ströme” (On a Method for the Recording and Study of the Temporal
Sequence of Alternating Currents), Annalen der Physik und Chemie (Annals of Physics and
Chemistry) 60 (1897): 552–59.
46. See, for example, Hollmann’s statement, “Only with the improvement in amplification
technology, however, was image telegraphy able to become a technology suitable for practical
applications” (Hollmann, “Fernseher von einst und jetzt,” p. 55).
47. See Crookes, “Address by the President,” p. 338: “Is there any connexion between my old-
standing interest in psychical problems and such original work as I may have been able to do in
other branches of science? I think there is such a connexion.”
48. Kerstin Bergmann and Siegfried Zielinski, “‘Sehende Maschinen’: Einige Miniaturen zur
Archäologie des Fernsehens” (“Seeing Machines”: Sketches in the Archaelogy of Television), in
Televisionen (Televisions), ed. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler (Frankfurt am Main, 1999),
p. 33.
49. See Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle (Paris, 1883). On the role of literary “functional
utopias,” see also Monika Elsner, Thomas Müller, and Peter Michael Spangenberg, “Der lange
Weg eines schnellen Mediums: Zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Fernsehens” (The Long Journey
of a Fast Medium: On the Early History of German Television), in Die Anfänge des deutschen
Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (The Beginnings of German
Television: Critical Approaches to Development before 1945), ed. William Uricchio (Tübingen,
1991), pp. 153–206, esp. p. 158.

search into psychic telesight that was linked to the emerging technology in
a relation of reciprocal and constitutive exchange. Often taking place un-
beknownst to individual researchers, this exchange encompassed discursive
figures, concepts, theories, as well as technical components that were con-
structed in accordance with these theories. Hence a determinist approach
to the history of television could only strive in vain to locate its “origin” in
one single domain of knowledge, be it electrical engineering, physics, or
occultism. Instead, it is the interaction between these ostensibly strictly
separated spheres that marks not so much the “invention” as the gradual
emergence of the medium known as television.
The interrelation of occult and technical telesight also comes to the fore
in the appropriation of a highly influential treatise by the philosopher Ernst
Kapp, who in 1877 defined technology as “organ projection.” Kapp’s an-
thropocentric theory, still living on in Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media
as “an extension of man,” was originally taken up in both electrical engi-
neering and occultism. Liesegang opens his Contributions on the Problem of
Electrical Television with a reference to Kapp’s Outlines of a Philosophy of
Technology, according to which “almost all tools, machines, etc. are uncon-
scious copies that imitate parts of the human being” (P, p. iii).50 Liesegang,
for whom the Morse telegraph corresponded to the human sense of touch
and the telephone to the ear, thus understood his “instrument for the tele-
graphing of lens-produced images” as “imitating the sense of sight” (P, pp.
1, iv). In this context, Liesegang not only quotes Crookes but, alongside the
model of the human eye, he also invokes the “archetype” (Muster) of the
fairy tale’s “magic mirror”—a figure that, in addition to shaping the tech-
nology’s cultural reception in the late 1920s, already surfaces in most of the
early writings on television from the late nineteenth century: “Mirrors in
which we can see distant objects can be found in the fairy tales of all coun-
tries. Faust saw Helena in such a mirror. The mirrors of Amamterasu,
Dschemschid, Agrippa and Nostradamus all had the same marvelous prop-
erty” (P, pp. 111, 89).
The double model for imagining technical television—the human eye
and the magic mirror—can also be observed in Fritz Lux’s The Electrical
Televisor (1903). Lux at first refers to “(nature’s) marvelous and perfectly
realized creations” before he goes on to describe his apparatus as the tech-
nological projection of a magical process:
50. See also Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Outlines of a Philosophy of
Technology) (Braunschweig, 1877). Already in 1853 Carus had written: “The hammer is the
extended arm and fist . . . . The achromatic lens is an imitation of the eye’s lens . . . . Telegraph
currents are analogous to nerve currents” (quoted in P, p. iii).

In very many inventions of recent years we see the realization of

thoughts and ideas which have often occupied the human mind for
centuries. In the phonograph we can see Münchhausen’s post-horn,
from which could be heard the sound of beautiful melodies and songs
played long ago. Likewise in television we can see the fairy tale’s magic
mirror, the gift of a good fairy, which enables us to observe the deeds of
people faraway.51
The engineers Liesegang and Lux understood their inventions as ways to
make these tales into reality but did not go more deeply into television’s
magical models. The spiritualist du Prel, in contrast, explained mirror
magic and “medieval crystal ball gazing” as corresponding to psychic tele-
vision, which by his own account takes place as the outward projection of
internally received images: “The crux of the matter is this: under the influ-
ence of narcotic substances or due to the exhaustion of the optical nerves
when looking at a reflective surface, a condition arises in which auto-sug-
gestion or external suggestion can bring about television, thereby projecting
the image onto the mirror’s surface” (ES, 2:206).52
Du Prel did not, however, consider the magical process of psychic tele-
vision supernatural; rather, he thought it operated in accordance with nat-
ural laws as yet unknown to contemporary physics. Thus it is not altogether
surprising that he also refers back to the principle of organ projection cited
by Liesegang, additionally calling for the construction of technical devices
that imitate occult human capabilities. In the first volume of his treatise on
Magic as a Natural Science (1899), du Prel writes:
In his Philosophy of Technology, Kapp demonstrates beautifully that our
mechanical devices are merely unconscious copies that imitate organ-
isms or parts of organisms. The camera obscura, for example, can be
understood as a copy of the eye. This “organ projection,” as he calls it, is
51. Lux, Der elektrische Fernseher, pp. 6, 3.

52. See also the statement: “Such visions in mirrors and crystals cannot be objective, but must
rather be simply projections from the organs of vision” (ES, 2:194), as well as Anonymous, “Recent
Experiments in Crystal-Vision,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1889): 486–521.
For a theory of mirror magic within the explanation of psychic television, see also Heinrich
Jürgens, Anleitung zum bewußten Hellsehen (Instructions for Conscious Clairvoyance) (Freiburg,
1932), p. 19. Here, Jürgens also turns to technological analogies for the purpose of elucidating
telepathic occurrences: “In this way we are all living magic mirrors. But to put it in terms of
modern technology, we are all also walking radios. We have inside us a transmitter and we have
inside us a receiver. Unbeknownst to ourselves, we are thus constantly receiving thought-pictures
created by our fellow human beings” (p. 43; emphasis added.) On the use of radio as an
explanation for mental telepathy, see also Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio: Does It Work, and How?
(London, 1930).

of great philosophical and scientific interest . . . . The philosophical en-
gineer won’t waste his time on random speculations on aviation, but
will instead say that nature has solved the problem in the wings of in-
sects and birds and that . . . the human mind must seek out the organ
projection of the wing.53
Yet, because magic is “nothing but unknown natural science,” the prin-
ciple of organ projection undergoes an “entirely unforeseen expansion” in
du Prel’s book (MN, 1:14). Although occult human faculties such as telep-
athy or television may be “designated as magical, as long as the process is
not clear to us,” they are in fact based on natural processes. Hence, he
claims, it should also be possible to project these magical capabilities as
“technological copies” (MN, 1:15, 16).
According to du Prel, examples of such technical devices that imitate
magical processes are already at hand: wireless telegraphy is a projection of
telepathy; the X-ray apparatus corresponds to clairvoyance. For du Prel, the
productiveness of any future collaboration between occultism and the nat-
ural sciences is therefore obvious: “In place of their perpetual division, nat-
ural scientists and occultists should complement each other. Researchers in
the natural sciences should translate occult functions into technologies,
while the occultist converts technical functions into psychic ones.” Du Prel
would also integrate physiology, psychology, and anatomy into this pro-
gram of how technology and spiritualism should mutually advance each
other: “Engineers, physiologists, anatomists, psychologists, and occultists
are . . . by nature reliant on each other. The occultist can reveal to the en-
gineer the problems of the future; he can change the blind finder of tech-
nology into a purposeful inventor. But it is the engineer who can offer the
occultist a scientific explanation for human beings’ magical faculties” (MN,
1:18).
Of course, this wishful fantasy of a “purposeful” inventor attempts to
negate the contingency that marks the cultural construction of a new me-
dium. Thus du Prel scripts a teleological narrative onto a gradual emergence
of knowledge that is in fact both contingent and dependent on cultural
imaginations.54 Even today this teleology underlies numerous works on the
history of technology, which retrospectively reconstruct a medium’s “pre-
history” from the vantage point of a cultural realization and appropriation
53. Prel, Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft (Magic as Natural Science), 2 vols. (Jena, 1899), p. 13;
hereafter abbreviated MN.
54. On the decisive role of cultural imagination within the history of technology, see The
Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions, ed. Teresa De Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and
Kathleen M. Woodward (Madison, Wis., 1980).

that could easily have assumed quite different forms. Nonetheless, du Prel’s
text can also be read as an astonishing metareflection on that mutual inter-
action in which spiritualism and technology partially constitute each other,
thereby leading to the reciprocal engendering of technical and psychic tele-
vision. Du Prel’s imagining of an engineer trained in occultism and projecting
a device that imitates the occult faculty of telesight thereby reveals with ex-
ceptional clarity to what extent the conception and construction of a tech-
nological medium may depend on seemingly marginal cultural contexts.
According to du Prel, such an engineer could have invented the wireless
telegraph even before the discovery of the electromagnetic-wave spectrum:
“Our engineer, well-versed in these matters and convinced that physical
processes lie behind all magical capabilities, would have confronted the
problem of wireless telegraphy and purposefully revealed the physical pro-
cesses behind telepathy, even before the discovery of Hertz-waves” (MN,
1:22). Moreover, an engineer proceeding from spiritualism would not have
been limited to constructing a wireless telegraph: “His study of the occult
would have taken him yet another step further. Specifically, telepathy fre-
quently manifests itself in conjunction with acoustic phenomena. For in-
stance, a subject in a state of considerable mental agitation who cries out a
name may be heard by the physically remote addressee, who simultaneously
sees the sender’s phantom image as a telepathically transmitted hallucina-
tion” (MN, 1:22).
In du Prel’s account, the alliance between technological and occult re-
search could not only create an explanation for this magical process but also
function as if it were a blueprint for a technical copy supplanting the “psy-
chic lever” (psychischer Hebel) of suggestion by means of a material appa-
ratus:
For the engineer, the explanation of this phenomenon as caused by a
psychic force is not sufficient. He would conceive of the subject’s psy-
chic excitation simply as a lever for unleashing a force that acts at a dis-
tance; but this force itself is of a physical nature. For exactly this reason
he would tell himself that this natural pattern must also be imitable . . . .
Drawing on occultism, our engineer would in this way apply himself to
the creation of an apparatus which would allow us . . . to see as well as
hear a theatrical production in our own living room. [MN, 1:23; empha-
sis added]
Here, in a text from 1899—thirty years before the first television broad-
casts—du Prel imagines an apparatus for wireless image and sound trans-
missions into the domestic sphere. Thus, there are two modes of responding
to du Prel’s question: “How can we become televisionary?” (“Wie können

wir fernsehend werden?” [MN, 2:293]). First, autosuggestion, which engen-
ders psychic television but occurs only at moments of great “personal in-
volvement,” can be replaced by the “lever of external suggestion” (MN,
2:306).55 Second, this lever of external suggestion will in the future itself be
supplanted by the switch of a technical device: “The magnetizer (that is,
hypnotist) will hereafter be replaced by an apparatus; the magnetic capa-
bility will be projected as technology” (MN, 1:15).
Apart from the omnipresent categories of magic, du Prel’s fantasy of pro-
jecting psychic organs as technical devices additionally introduces the figure
of “hypnotic suggestion,” which dominated medical and psychological rep-
resentations of early cinema.56 A spellbinding, irresistible influence was sim-
ilarly ascribed to television during the 1950s, when the technology indeed
became a mass medium, often labeled as the “hypnotist in your own living
room.”57 Conversely, fifty years earlier, du Prel had already conceived of the
television set as replacing the hypnotist, thereby testifying to how closely
television’s cultural invention and reception are connected to each other.
Furthermore, we can conclude that the technological television projects
of the late nineteenth century, dismissed by Arthur Korn in the 1920s as
unrealizable and “fantastical,”58 were inextricably linked to the cultural fan-
tasies that also pervaded the contemporary spiritualist theories of psychic
telesight. The successful wireless transmission of moving images in 1929 is
therefore by no means the implementation of a medium without discursive
precedent, which would have generated itself from its own technical param-
eters.59 Instead, television gradually emerged from a surreptitious exchange
55. See also MN, 2:295: “In external suggestion, we possess a lever for releasing magic forces.”
56. On early representations of cinema as a hypnotic medium, see Andriopoulos, Besessene
Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften, und die Erfindung des Kinos (Munich, 2000), p. 99; trans. Peter
Jensen, under the title Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, Hypnotism, and the Invention
of Cinema (Chicago, forthcoming).
57. Anonymous, “Neuer Fernsehstart in Deutschland” (A New Launch of Television in
Germany), Rundfunk und Fernsehen (Radio and Television) 7 (1950): 10; see also Anonymous,
“Fernsehen: Appell ans Unterbewußtsein” (Television: Appeal to the Subconscious), Der Spiegel, 2
Apr. 1958, pp. 61–63.
58. “Aside from these copy-telegraphs . . . , there were (in the 1890s) a great number of
fantastical television projects based on the use of selenium, which had been discovered in the year
1873. In fact, only the English scientist Bidwell made serious experiments in broadcasting pictures
using selenium compounds” (Arthur Korn, “Die Bildtelegraphie und das Problem des
elektrischen Fernsehens” [Image Telegraphy and the Problem of Electrical Television], in Deutsche
Beiträge zur Internationalen Tagung der Fernmeldetechniker Como 1927 (German Contributions to
the International Congress of Telecommunications Technologists, Como, 1927), ed. P. Craemer
and A. Franke [Berlin, 1927], p. 51; emphasis added).
59. The opposite view is held by Friedrich Kittler: “Television means . . . to subject all the
complexities of the image to high tech . . . . Literatures or fantasies are therefore irrelevant. In
contrast to film, television could not be dreamed of before its development . . . . Television was no
wish of so-called man, but a civilian byproduct of mostly military electronics” (Kittler, Optische
Medien, p. 290).

across the permeable boundaries of such clearly demarcated spheres as elec-
trical engineering, the natural sciences, and occultism. The texts, experi-
ments, and technical devices of researchers like Crookes or Lodge merely
provide us with an unusually clear glimpse of these often half-hidden bor-
rowings, which did not unfold as “purposefully” as du Prel might have
wished. Despite the cultural contingencies that undermine any teleological
history of occult and technical television, or even because of these accidental
coincidences, du Prel’s metacommentary on the interrelation of occultism
and technology may serve as an apt conclusion for this essay. After all, du
Prel succinctly captures spiritualism as an epistemic condition for the emer-
gence of electric television. The interaction between occultism, the natural
sciences, and technology points, however, to a mutually constitutive re-
lationship in which psychic and technical television render each other
imaginable. Thus spiritualism, too, has no claim to any primacy as an all-
encompassing origin: “But, alas, no such engineer, well-versed in occult-
ism, has been found . . . . Valuable time was lost because it was thought
that occultism had nothing to do with technology, whereas in truth it con-
tains the very philosophy of technology” (MN, 1:23).


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Psychic Television

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Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005)

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Phenomena,” “Phenomena of Possession,” and an obituary for Albert von

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8. Amtsgerichtsrat i.R. Geheimrat Drießen, “Privathäusliche Phänomenik” (Domestic

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11. Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien (Berlin, 2002), p. 290.

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15. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, “Translator’s Introduction” (1890), in Charles

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In very many inventions of recent years we see the realization of

51. Lux, Der elektrische Fernseher, pp. 6, 3.

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