Chapter 3.

Disembodied visions: optical technology and spiritual matter

For convenience, historians often isolate the late nineteenth century in America as an age
of realism, when notions of progress rooted in simple facts and rational laws prevailed.
[…] This description, however, ignores the fact that from the beginning of the scientific
project, the technological vision of progress has overlapped with a religious vision of the
progress of the soul and millennial hopes for humanity. Likewise, the push toward realism
and mass production in the nineteenth century engendered and provided the means for
promoting a countertrend: a public taste for illusions of all sorts. […] The age of realism
was also the age of deceptions… (Nadis 2005, 135-6)

As a precursor to looking at oriental magic, the preceding chapter traced the

objectification of the Orient in the public imaginary. Similarly, this chapter seeks to understand

the performative context within which orientalised magic shows were embedded, exploring

further the nineteenth-century preoccupation with and discursive definition of the real and the

illusory, reflecting the wider dialectic separation of science and religion. Whilst the dependence

of magic on a careful mixture of optical technologies and occult pretensions was not new to the

nineteenth century, Victorian and Edwardian magic shows did reflect a new sense of urgency in

the cultural discourse on the relation between religion and science—largely as a response to the

impact of Darwinism and industrialisation. This chapter will trace how the spectacles of the

magic show—the automaton, the dismembered and transmogrified body, phantasmagoria, and

spirit manifestations—illustrate a Victorian cultural unease that extends beyond the demise of

religious certainty to questions of self-identity.

This chapter then begins where the last left off—i.e. with the construction of the viewing

subject and the mechanics of the gaze (as supported by optical devices) in late nineteenth

century. It is argued that the popular culture of the day was characterised by an uneasy relation

with the body, in part reflecting the influence of Darwinian evolution (mutability) and the

1
increasing industrialisation of production (redundancy). The body, in brief, came to be seen, by

scientists and spiritualists alike, as something that had yet to be perfected. The appeal of magic,

particularly of the magician’s illusions of corporeal dissection, is here then read against these

fears in an age of uncertainty (rather than, as others have suggested, as a remainder of premodern

fertility rites). Rapid developments in transportation, mechanization, and communication

technologies augured visions both dystopian and utopian, of human obsolescence on the one

hand and the promise of physical transcendence on the other. It is to these anxieties and desires

that the projected phantasms and artful automata speak most clearly.

disembodied bodies: automata and prosthetic restoration

Victorians were paying to see the world differently and to experience the joys of
spectatorship; and what they were paying for was undoubtedly changing them. They were
experiencing, for one thing, [...] the driving of a wedge between the real and the optical;
between seeing and believing. (Horton 1995, 13)

Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a
prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and
limitations... If it can be said there is an observer specific to the nineteenth century, or to
any period, it is only as an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive,
social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing subject prior to
this continually shifting field. (Crary 1990, 5/6)

Taking the intersection of the histories of magic and projective optical technologies as its

starting point, this chapter continues to disrupt the narrative of an over-determined realism, as

already intimated in the preceding discussion of popular theatre and exhibition. Following Crary

(1990), optical entertainments (whether Brewster’s kaleidoscope or Edison’s kinetiscope) and

their fostering of particular ways of seeing are here recognised as being integral to the formation

and replication of nineteenth century political and cultural discourse. More specifically, in the

2
production of spectacle, nineteenth-century optical entertainments materially translated the

debates of naturalism and technology, art and science.

On the one hand they sought a vivid sensuality and verisimilitude that moved the
attractions toward an illusion of reality. On the other hand, this effect of verisimilitude
also displayed a triumph of technology. Such masterful illusions demonstrated an openly
acknowledged stagecraft rather than seamlessly creating a naturalistic illusion aimed at
an effect of realism. Thus mechanical attractions delivered to their spectators not simply a
simulacrum of real events, but marvels of technology. The criteria of realism served more
as a measure of effectivity of the technology rather than simply as the final aim of
representation. (Gunning 1994, 434)

As such these optical devices are recognised as ‘sites of both knowledge and power that operate

directly on the body of the individual’ (Crary 1990, 7). Here it is seeing itself, or rather the space

between seeing and what is seen—the mechanics of the Victorian gaze, that is explored through

reference to the popular visual entertainments, and their determining role in the perception of

stage/d magic.

Though both phantasmagoria and automata clearly have histories that long precede the

nineteenth century, their coincident resurgence in the nineteenth century is significant given that

both ultimately depend upon a technological reworking of the body. That a magician’s

performance included both automata and phantasmagoria—signifying simultaneously both a

future utopian world of sublime mechanisation and anxieties of technological displacement, not

to mention of the occult—demonstrates how cleverly magicians figured themselves as mediators

of this cultural ambivalence. This chapter argues that this mediation was largely effected through

a motif of disembodiment which both drew and reflected upon physiological research, capitalist

commodification, taxonomical dissection and theosophical transcendence. This motif can be seen

in the optical devices that annexed the body (e.g. the stereoscope), automata that supplanted the

body, phantasmagoria that etherealised the body, and theatrical illusions that dismembered the

3
(e.g. the sawing in half or decapitation of the magician’s assistant). This motif then refers both to

the rarefied, disembodied Kantian gaze and to the spectacularisation of the body—whereby the

body is seen to transcend the conventions of human biology. The argument here is that automata,

the magician’s vanishing of bodies, the exhibition of the freakish (whether bearded lady, dwarf,

giant, nautch girl, mermaid, animal hybrids, hydrocephalic children et cetera (Altick 1978)) all

worked within a discourse that sought to make biology the domain of the Other—thereby

maintaining the rationalist intellect as the untainted sphere of the viewing subject. This dialectic

between the surveying gaze and the dismembered body is made explicit by Taussig’s critique of

early anthropological photography:

Where does the heart of darkness lie, in the fleshy body-tearing rites of the cannibals or
in the photographing eye of the beholder exposing them naked and deformed piece by
piece to the world? It is a clinical eye and one never so lewd as in the closeness of the
distance it maintains whilst dissecting the body of the Indian - assessing skin colour,
functionalizing, measuring breasts, observing toes, measuring penises. (1987, 117)

This distancing from (or reduction of) the body reflects a culture seeking control over the

unpredictability of the natural world, an ambition illustrated by nineteenth-century spectacular

entertainment, be it automata, world fairs or phantasmagoric magic shows; ‘the aim of the

spectacle is to make anything capable of happening realistically, to render nature—once reduced

to facts—commanded as if by magic’ (Slater 1995, 232). Yet the magic of the spectacle, the very

appeal of seeing illusion—the thrill of not knowing for sure—coincides with, but more

importantly translates, specific scientific research into the workings of human vision.

As mid- and late-Victorian prose writers struggled to come to terms with the fallibility of
the visual as grounding for the true, the Victorian public were attending optical shows in
droves, were regularly inviting street lanternists into their parlors and drawing rooms for
party entertainments, or were renting or buying gadgetry of their own. (Horton 1995, 9)

4
As scientific research began to question the veracity of the eye’s witnessing, the subsequent

confusion as to what was seen as real and what was seen as optical illusion was skilfully

exploited by magicians and their promoters of optical spectacles. Though optical gadgetry was

not invented in the nineteenth century, the physiological understanding of the means of delusion

was.

As Crary has argued in Techniques of the Observer, nineteenth-century optical devices1

(in particular the stereoscope) effectively destabilised the relation between the viewer and

referent as inscribed by the eighteenth century camera obscura2. Vision was effectively displaced

from eighteenth century ontology to nineteenth century physiology, whereby the transcendent

came to be mapped onto the empirical and was subsequently as subject to the vagaries of

anatomical functioning. Much of the nineteenth-century interest in optics was based on the

theorising of the readiness with which the eye was deceived and therefore its correction was

sought by repositioning vision ‘within somatic forces’ through a complicit annexing of the body

(Crary 1990, 129).

[W]here the perspectival tradition sought to free vision from the subjectivity of the
observer by denying the pulsings and phantasms of the body as the ground of vision,
dioramas forced observers to surrender their autonomy and become a fixture of the
optical machinery itself and the object of a predetermined optical experience. Similarly,
the stereoscope challenged the codes of monocular space and geometrical perspective by
presenting different two-dimensional projections simultaneously to each eye. Far from
imitating the coherence guaranteed by the window frame, the stereoscope simulated the
anatomical structure of the observer’s body. (Maxwell 1999: 12)

1
Of the nineteenth-century optical devices Crary charts besides Wheatstone’s stereoscope are the
thaumatrope (lit. the wonder turner), Plateau’s phenakistiscope (lit. deceptive view), and Brewster’s
kaleidoscope.
2
“The camera obscura, with its monocular aperture, became a more perfect terminus for a cone of vision,
a more perfect incarnation of a single point than the awkward binocular body of the human subject.”
Crary 1990, 52.
5
The complicity between optical device and body-as-machine is perhaps most clearly illustrated

in Muybridge’s celebrated chronophotography and “zoopraxiscope” (1880); Muybridge sought

to document the unseen movements of bodies—both human and animal—through a sequential

series of projected photographic stills. In the attempt to capture movement, the body is

fragmented into a collection of parts. The devices used for seeing then directly impacted on what

was seen: “[T]his very machinery of observation and measurement turns out to be... less an

impartial instrument than a crucial mechanism in the power established over that body, offering

up an image of the body as mechanism that is in many ways a reflection of the mechanical nature

of the medium itself.” (Willliams 1986, 508)

The nineteenth-century body was ‘industrially remapped’—segregated sense functions

were heralded as cogs in a machine or, indeed, as machines in their own right. The

mechanization of the body and autonomization of sight3 unwrote the association of touch and

sight (as described earlier in relation to the spectacle of the oriental dancer at the world fair).

Indeed much of nineteenth-century spectacle worked with this blurring of the technologized and

the natural body, in much the same way as the exhibited and the spectating bodies at the world

fair were co-figured.4 Not only were the objects of display (e.g. exotic landscapes, natives, ghosts

3
“The loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the
network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space. This
autonomization of sight, occurring in many different domains, was a historical condition for the
rebuilding of an observer fitted for tasks of “spectacular” consumption. Not only did the empirical
isolation of vision allow its quantification and homogenization but it also enabled the new objects of
vision (whether commodities, photographs, or the act of perception itself) to assume a mystified and
abstract identity, sundered from any relation to the observer’s position within a cognitively unified field.”
(Crary 1990, 19)
4
Whilst both De Bolla (1995) and Crary (1990) emphasise the heterogeneity, or interocularity, of
discursive and cultural constructions of the viewing subject, both are careful not to forfeit the cultural
embeddedness of viewing, the “field” of vision. Indeed, the nineteenth century mobilising or
6
etc.) and their aesthetics (whether baroque, naturalist, or gothic) shared by optical

entertainments, exhibitions and magic shows alike, but so too was the gaze they fostered. The

differentiated functions of entertainment and taxonomy were collapsed in spectacle such that the

means by which illusions were enjoyed were the same by which empirical data and knowledge

were accumulated.

In the move to supplement the limitations of the body with technology, to free the rational

individual from the dictates of physiological function, vision was no longer the unquestioned,

privileged tool of knowledge but was simultaneously recognised as being enslaved by and to its

embodied nature.

What was at stake and seemed so threatening was not just a new form of epistemological
skepticism about the unreliability of the senses, but a positive reorganization of
perception and its objects. The issue was not just how does one know what is real, but
that new forms of the real were being fabricated, and a new truth about the capacities of a
human subject was being articulated in these terms. (Crary 1990, 91/2)

The abstraction of vision from a fixed ground of truth (given the corporeal reality of binocular

disparity) fosters a gaze that simultaneously traverses and replicates a shifting ground of

consumption and production, where one sight (site) successively conjures another. The shifting

gaze (of materialist desire) promoted by the stereoscope, the conscious working of juxtaposed

planes into an illusion of depth (Crary 1990, 125/6), is carried over into the magician’s greatest

asset—the misdirection of the audience’s gaze. Secular magic’s extension of cause and

effect—whereby consumption (effect) is freed of the politics of production (logical

exchangeability of visual practices can in part be seen as a strategic response, as well as conditioned
effect, to changing industrial production, communication technology, dislocation of labour, train travel
and the flow of typographic and visual information etc. For the nineteenth century urban flâneur, as Crary
succinctly identifies, “there is never a pure access to a single object; vision if always multiple, adjacent to
and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors. Even the congealed space of the museum cannot
transcend a world where everything is in circulation.” (1990, 20)
7
causation)—parallels the stereoscope’s dispersal and multiplication of sign from point of

reference. Both magic and stereoscope lead to an “eradication of the point of view” (Crary 1990,

128) in that the disjuncture between perception and its object is made central.5 Although the

magician negates a singular vantage point through a conscious and continuous diversion of

attention, in both instances the observer’s reciprocity is demanded. Both magic and stereoscope

are explicitly illusionistic, in that the fabricated nature of the experience remains undisguised

(whether through the non-concealment of the technology of the optical apparatus or through the

rhetorical qualifications of the magician). The observer is (made) complicit to his/her own

delusion.

The subjection of the observer/observing is further suggested by the popularity of the

automaton, indicative of what Altick has described as the “nineteenth century penchant for

replacing man... with machinery” (1978, 158). Automata, though already popular with the upper

classes of eighteenth century France, were democratised in industrial nineteenth-century England

as public entertainments.6

Beautifully modelled on the outside... their insides consist of an extraordinary system of

cogs, levers and pulleys... [T]he most teasing thing about them is the idea they seem to
represent of the interior workings of the human being: the idea of the human being as a
fantastically intricate but completely mechanical object. (Chanan 1980, 58/9)

As the human body was being redefined by science as a machine to be perfected, machines came

to be inscribed with (nearly) human features. Interestingly, though the mechanised body (in

which intestines were substituted by clockwork) was displayed as an object of technological

5
See also Jay 1995: 355 on the unravelling of the hegemony of Cartesian perspectivalism and the creation
of alternative scopic regimes.
6
Indeed, the early automata themselves—particularly the myth making chess players—are highlighted by
some historians as inspiration for the machines of cotton production that played such a crucial role in the
Industrial Revolution.
8
wonder (perhaps even as an assuaging prototype), its outer appearance or costume was

commonly that of an ‘oriental magician’—mystical rather than rational. Only rarely, however,

were the mechanisms of the automata concealed; as with the world exhibitions, the technological

means were spectacular ends in and of themselves.7 The whirring of cogs and the wheezing of

pulleys were central to the aura of extraordinariness, for automata were perceived to be able to

transcend the very mechanics of their creation and skilfully respond to context and environment.

Programmed and yet intelligent, these ‘thinking machines’ met the ultimate challenge of

mechanical reproduction, whereby the body becomes artifice, and representation becomes

embodiment.8 Some of the most popular of these automata were von Kempelen’s chess-playing

Turk (invented in 1769, but toured by Johann Maelzel until its destruction by fire in 1845);

7
“These special effects popular on the Victorian stage all had in common... the elevation of a form of
technology into a form of culture. They fashioned what can quite literally be called a technology of
representation. According to the logic of this technology of representation, the means for producing the
world became the means of representation. Thus the Victorian stage put machines on the stage, and after a
time the machines became the stage.” (Richards 1990, 57) Automata, like magic, tend to be classified as
being either “real” or “fake”. If the automaton’s mechanics rely on concealed human agency or any other
external force (electric, magnetic, hydraulic or pneumatic), this renders the machine a “fake” no matter
how sophisticated the engineering.
8
The ambivalence of response to the automata is clearly voiced by Lewis in E.T.A. Hoffman’s Automata.
On the one hand a fear of the desacralising of the human: “All figures of this sort... which can scarcely be
said to counterfeit humanity so much as to travesty it—mere images of living death or inanimate life—are
most distasteful to me... [I]t is the oppressive sense of being in the presence of something unnatural and
gruesome; and what I detest most of all is the mechanical imitation of human motions.” Yet on the other
hand is a sense of awe, as expressed again by Lewis after his visit to the Talking Turk: “[T]his
automaton... is really one of the most extraordinary phenomena ever beheld, and... everything goes to
prove that whoever controls and directs it has at his command higher powers than is supposed by those
who go there simply to gape at things, and do no more than wonder at what is wonderful. […] Of course
all this merely implies great acoustic and mechanical skill on the part of the inventor, and remarkable
acuteness—or, I might say, systematic craftiness—in overlooking nothing in the process of deceiving us.
Still, this part of the riddle does not interest me too much, since it is completely overshadowed by the
circumstance that the Turk often reads the very soul of the questioner. That is what I find remarkable.
Does this being which answers our questions acquire, by some process unknown to us, a psychic
influence over us, and does it place itself in spiritual rapport with us? How can it comprehend and read
our minds and thoughts, and more than that, know our whole inner being.” (cited by Chanan 1980, 110/1)
9
Faber’s enunciating Euphonia (1846); Charles Hooper’s Turk-copying Ajeeb (1868); Charles

Gumpel’s chess-playing Mephisto (1875); Maskelyne’s whist-playing Psycho (1876), cartooning

Zoë (1877), and Fanfair and Labial (1878), cornet and euphonium players that would play

requested songs on cue9.

Though the automaton in itself expressed nineteenth-century anxieties concerning human

fallibility, it theoretically made fewer demands on the spectator in terms of visual complicity

than the stereoscope and the magician’s illusions. Yet, though their entrails were visibly

mechanised and displayed as a feat of mechanical ingenuity, these whirring cogs often served (by

misdirection) to conceal the flesh-and-blood human agency that pulled their strings and pushed

their buttons. Whilst the automaton may at times have concealed a human presence, the nature of

its spectacle lay in the perception of it as a superior object, separate in and of itself. This is

precisely why automata could simultaneously carry both dreams of a technological utopian

existence and anxieties of human redundancy (Marvin 1988, 141). The very appeal of the

automata rested upon an unstable appreciation: on the one hand, marvel afforded by mechanical

reproduction—its promise of liberation, and on the other fear of the machine’s surpassing of the

human—its threat of disenfranchisement. This negotiation of technology became a question of

public ethics—what did it mean to be human? Where did the line between machine and operator

lie? What were the limits to technological power?10

9
See Maskelyne 1936, 46ff; Lamb 1976, 77ff; Jenness 1967, 33ff; Altick 1978, 350f; and Christopher
1962, 57f; and Standage 2002.
10
The sense of vulnerability garnered by technological innovation is most succinctly evidenced by
newspaper advertisements for X-ray proof underwear (Chanan 1980, 124).

10
 The automated body—the body that had conquered the messiness of biology—becomes a

mascot of science’s social project of technological order. The rhetoric of nineteenth century

science professed an ambition to outrun nature; the technologized intelligence of science (as

made literal in the popular automaton) would be able to fool nature into submission—or at any

rate to push “her” into the innermost recesses of human life. “Nature” was a small sacrifice in the

name of progress and civilisation (Marvin 1988, 117). Science would instead provide a

rationalised world, where the threat of retribution could, would and should be

contained—whether that retribution be delivered by natural forces or by rebellions in the

colonies (where, it was widely believed, that atavistic natives were far closer to nature than the

enlightened Europeans).

It is significant then that this more natural being, the Oriental, should be the one to be

mechanized. Psycho’s performance of nodding, smoking, masonic hand-shakes, mathematical

calculations, whist-playing and conjuring hardly predetermined the “mild Hindu” identity he was

ascribed (Maskelyne 1936, 27). For J.N. Maskelyne the oriental garb of Psycho was professed as

a simple cosmetic gesture, a superficial invitation to the real marvel of mechanical invention:

“My automaton is not a toy but a very scientific piece of mechanism the result of many years

study and experimentalising and has taken me upwards of two years to construct after the plans

were completed. There is no trickery whatever about it, but [it is] purely mechanical and

self-acting. (cited by Jenness 1967, 33.) Yet the fact that this representation is so perfunctory in

its orientalism is itself significant. Though the accounts of the orientalised automaton and the

fabled fakir of the travel journals are critically distinct, they both participate in the same

discourse of the transcendentalized Other (see Chapter 4). As with the descriptions of the fakirs,

11
Psycho-as-oriental is denied a normal body—literally disembowelled, and thereby divested of

political agency. “Anxious both to make the spectre of the potent Indian magician disappear and

to establish the British gentleman in his place, professional British conjuring began with the

spectacle of the mechanized Hindu body.” (Beckman 2003, 41)

Though the oriental garb may be explained simply in terms of a desire to mystify the

machinery that it dresses, a further level of association is implied, for Psycho reflects the

inscrutable yet knowing oriental (Chapter 5), ‘machine masquerading as obedient servant’

(Marvin 1988, 143), though here the viewer’s (i.e. colonialist-by-proxy) frustration lies in the

foreknowledge that ultimately there is may be no secret to be revealed. Psycho substitutes the

mystery of the Orient with the superior technological abilities of the West. Psycho’s dual identity

then incorporates both the threat of technological futurism and the fear of evolutionary

regression that shadowed social Darwinism. Though on the one hand representing the benign,

mysterious oriental and being the product of western civilization—“a fetish against the

nightmarish conflictual relations of empire” (Low 1996, 119), Psycho simultaneously represents

anxieties of dehumanisation on the other—robotic super-power and/or atavistic reversal. Psycho

was represents an index of contemporary cultural anxieties; his split personality replicating the

lurid fascination with the deviant, the uncanny, and indeed the insane, identified not only in the

gothic novels of the time but in the scientific interest in phenomena as diverse as somnambulism,

clairvoyance, magnetism etc.11

11
Psycho hereby literally figures the “imperial gothic”, a term used by Brantlinger (1988) to denote the
conflation of the gothic fear of the other with imperial adventure. An example of “imperial gothic”
fiction, is Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1867) which provides a narrative of a
stolen-and-thereby-cursed Indian jewel that explicitly links mystery, crime, hallucination and colonial
appropriation/ guilt.
12
 The currency of these mechanised orientals, then, may be argued to be totems of ‘the

Empire as machine’ (Young 1995). Young cites Lord Cromer’s 1908 The Government of Subject

Races 1908 in which the latter “envisions a seat of power in the West, and radiating out from it

towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by

it. What the machine’s branches feed into it in the East—human material, material wealth,

knowledge, what have you—is processed by the machine, then converted into more power.”

Young’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the desiring machine to this imperial

metaphor can be further extended to the orientalised automaton, as product of the ambivalent

desire of colonialism. The automaton, ascribed with independent thought, literalises Deleuze and

Guattari’s collapsing of ‘the conventional epistemological distinction between materiality and

consciousness’, denying ‘any differentiation between the social production of reality on the one

hand, and a desiring production on the other’ (1995, 168).

The dialectical counterpart to the automated body, however, is the resilient elasticity of

the human body, as particularly demonstrated by the staple illusions of the magic show, where a

woman is sawn in two, where the magician is seen to be carrying his own head under his arm,

and/or where a member of the audience is metamorphosed into an animal etc. Indeed, in the late

1870s, Maskelyne and Cooke advertised their shows at the Egyptian Hall in two acts: first, “A

man’s head cut off without loss of life” (in which Mr J. N. Maskelyne demonstrates “how easy

and pleasant it is to cut off Mr. Cooke's head.”; and second, a performance by “the four

automatons” (i.e. Psycho, Zoe, Fanfare and Labial). The marvels of transubstantiation,

dismemberment, decapitation, and physical rupture owe their appeal in part to the narrative of

survival against the odds—“the death and resurrection show”. The actual human body,

13
mimicking the automaton, is here reduced to a collection of parts, which under the guidance of

the magician can be disassembled and then reassembled with the efficient monotony of cogs and

wheels.

The currency of decapitation, not simply in the nineteenth-century magic shows but in the

collective gothic imagination, belies a particular way of reading the body, or rather of the head’s

relationship with the body12. Whilst the grisly draw of decapitation is neither new to the

nineteenth century nor culturally unique to Britain, the historical continuities of this

melodramatic narrative should not be overstretched; Reynolds (1976), for one, supports a

somewhat fantastic history wherein the decapitation motif of magicians’ shows is a remnant of

primitive fertility rites and ‘atavistic remembrance’. Reynolds rests his argument moreover on

the fact that “its history dates from a time when decapitation was a fact of everyday life,

performed not for entertainment by a magician, but in earnest at the whim of a pharaoh, sultan,

king or high priest.” (1976, 3). Whilst Reynolds’ theory of ancient heritage does indeed reflect

Victorian magicians’ desire for a traceable lineage into the ancient world (Chapter 5), it thereby

fails to read from the magicians’ illusions a far more contextually pervasive discourse

concerning the unease that accompanied the widespread promotion of rationalism. Indeed, the

Victorian fascination with physical violence far exceeds the spectacles of popular culture, as

Herbert pertinently detects in The Golden Bough:

Under Frazer’s calm gaze, bodies are decapitated, dismembered, burned, pierced with
swords and pointed sticks, buried alive, scourged, flayed. The dominance of such themes
in The Golden Bough, complicit as it undoubtedly is with the Victorian fantasy of
primitive people as “savages” defined first and foremost by a propensity for violence and
cruelty, projects an image of the human body as a site of incessant torment and incipient
panic. It would be hard to decipher the cultural and libidinal dynamics that impel Frazer’s

See Hopkins 1976 (1898) for an account of various decapitation illusions: “The Three-Headed
12

Woman”, “The Talking Head”, “The Living Half-Woman”, “The Decapitated Princess” etc.
14
 seemingly obsessive fixation on physical abuse, which it is tempting to interpret as an
outpouring of morbid Swiftian or puritanical vindictiveness toward the human body.
(Herbert 1995, 137)

This Victorian propensity for flagellation and horror was however not restricted to primitive

stereotypes. The secular magic show often moves from one scene of (potential) mutilation to

another: piercings, decapitations, sawn bodies. Fischer argues that the misogyny inherent in these

magical illusions, for these acts of “torture” are most commonly performed on female assistants,

“cannot be viewed as jovial and naive demonstrations of imagined male powers, as a harmless

flexing of the masculine ego. Rather they must be regarded as symbolic acts of considerable

violence.” (1983, 346) But just as this ‘considerable violence’ is not limited to the primitive, nor

should it be decontextualised as to be solely directed against women, as Fischer seems to argue.

Though Fischer’s case for the inherent misogyny in Victorian magic shows (and late

nineteenth-century trick-films) is demonstrated by the very basic fact that men (magicians and

film-makers both) are seen to operate on women and is further supported by her astute argument

that the performance of magic is perhaps another instance of the male’s claiming procreative

powers for and of himself, it is misguided to conclude that this withdrawal from messy biology

should be read only as an act of silencing women. Though the assignation of women as

representative of nature/biology/body and men to culture/mind/thought is obviously

ideologically and politically entrenched, to focus on gender alone is to miss the wider point of a

nineteenth-century desire for physical transcendence—to be rid of the body tout court. This

desire is illustrated in both rationalist and spiritualist discourse. Thus while Fischer’s argument

indirectly draws attention to the link between magicians’ and early film-makers’

decorporealization of their subjects with nineteenth-century spiritualism, her singular focus on

15
gender weakens the significance of this link; not only were women “relegated to the level of

“spirit”... [whether literally or] as figment[s] of the male imagination” (1983, 341), but men

(particularly non-European men) were spirited too. 13 The nineteenth-century distrust of the body,

the severance of rational mind from unpredictable sensuality, is as evident in the automaton and

the exhibited native as in the decapitated, or vanishing, lady.

Nineteenth-century spiritualist and scientific discourses shared the premise of the body as

a burden or limitation—to be transcended or at least corrected. Though the magician’s sawing

and slicing may be read as a Cartesian separation of mind from body, the demands of melodrama

and narrative closure required body-mind reintegration soon after.14 But rather than seeing this

restoration as a recapitulation (literally, a re-heading) to premodern thought, particularly when

performed by the missionarily modern magicians of the late nineteenth century, we may look to

another technological innovation of the day: medical prostheses. Though prosthetics (like magic)

have a long history15, the design and functionality of prosthetic limbs was greatly enhanced

following the American Civil War in the 1860s. Erin O’Connor’s (1997) excellent paper offers

insights that situate dismemberment not only in terms of gender politics but as ‘a kind of

symbolic index of modernity’ (745).

13
This is not to deny the political differential in representations of men and women. Nor indeed that
women were displayed according to the dictates of male fantasy. The fetishization of the female body on
the magician’s stage, as with the oriental dancers of the world fair, crucially depends upon such narratival
representations of submissive, malleable but absent bodies. Indeed, as Williams (1986) study of
Muybridge and Méliès demonstrates, the female body, the threat of sexual difference, was mastered by
iconization through diegesis in ways in which the male body was exempt. What began as a scientific
impulse to measure and record the “truth” of the human body, quickly became a powerful fantasization of
the body; women were fictionalized, “already not there in themselves” (1986: 532 and 520).
14
See Chapter 8 for performances of the sawn-in-half illusion that do not rush to the same reintegrated
conclusion.
15
Indeed, both the art of magic and the art of prosthesis shared the progressivist narrative of modernity.
Both histories ground themselves in the marvels of the Ancient World, yet posit a contemporary narrative
of modern sophistication and enhanced ingenuity.
16
 Simply put, amputation exposed and ultimately interrogated the importance of physical
wholeness to Victorian conceptions of identity. In fragmenting the body, amputation
fractured ideas about the self—what it is, where it comes from, where it is located, and
whether, in the absence of a complete body, it can ever be completely present. (744)

Physicality (as distinct from sensuality) was in the nineteenth century figured as a decidedly

masculine quality; and when the integrity of the body was threatened, the body was vulnerable to

being haunted by feminine hysteria. Dismemberment, in disrupting the physical economy of

manly self-control, reduced the patient to the vagaries of hysterical stumps and phantom limbs,

raising “the unsettling possibility that the material body could be profoundly inauthentic, that a

loss of physical integrity could lead to a falsification of the self .” (O’Connor 1997, 744) This

hysteria of the phantom limb—being both real and yet not there—functioned within a dialectic of

absence and presence shared by the psychic’s spirits and, of course, the magician’s powers to

make things manifest and vanish by will.

Like the Victorian spirit medium whose ability to conjure ghosts was associated with
both hysterical susceptibility and fraudulent representation, the neurotic stump raps,
knocks, thrashes, and strains in order to make up a ghost that both feels real and is not
really there. Phantom limbs were the “spectral technologies” of a short-circuited nervous
system, the automatic—or autonomic—writing of a sensorium determined to bring its
departed member back to life. (O’Connor 1997, 751)

In this light, the magician’s s(p)licing of his female assistant can be read as a proactive

immunisation against this threat of uncontrollable (emancipated?) femininity. Yet in the

restoration to wholeness, by prosthesis or magic, both amputee and the decapitated damsel are

reduced to a mechanics of parts, to be reassembled as routinely as the automaton.16

By locking “fractions of men” in a logic that strategically fails to register certain material
and conceptual forms of difference, prosthesis claims to restore men to themselves by
merging their bodies with machines. Compensating a man by supplying him with copies

16
The shared space of automata, prosthetics and world exhibition is not conjectural. Charles Gumpel,
artificial limb maker, designed a chess-playing automaton, Mephisto, which was exhibited at the Paris
Exposition of 1899.
17
 of himself, prosthesis contends that nature can be made through mechanization—in other
words, that essence can be recreated through imitation and that identity is something that
can be attached. (O’Connor 1997, 759)

Prosthesis, in its mechanical completion of the human body, symbolised not only the apex of

modern manufacturing ability but also the freedom of the individual from his/her singular body.

Prosthetics offered a window onto a utopian world (Williams 1982, 84f) in which biological

limitations were to be displaced by mechanical expertise—artificial limbs being just one of the

new technological developments of the nineteenth century alongside cameras, telephones,

typewriters, x-ray machines, projectors, the electric power grid etc. Objectification of the body

here becomes “a viable strategy of selfhood” if not an invitation to “put the whole thing [i.e.

body] aside” (O’Connor 1997, 768 & 770).

A precursor to more recent celebrations of the cyborg and avatar, the triumphalist

narrative of the nineteenth-century’s levelling of body and machine was wedded to discourses of

purpose and collective duty rather than individualistic freedom from constraint. The assembled

body, through its re-entry into the workforce, was made authentic. This naturalization of the

mechanized (and economically productive) body was publically entertained in the figures of the

prosthetically-restored body (i.e. the resurrection of the fallen soldier) and the

mystically-enhanced automaton. Both offered a mechanically-enhanced body that not only

answered to human volition but expanded its kingdom. Both illustrated the body as fabrication

(what O’Connor terms the fetishization of flesh) and hence both offered a way to be “both body

and object, self and other at the same time” (O’Connor 1997, 770).

This ideal of complementarity, or exchangeability, between man and machine, was not

without fracture. New fears emerged of the human becoming dangerously infected by

18
mechanisation—whereby personality would become lethally split between individual thought

and robotic performance.17 The erosion of trust in and dependence upon a singular self, as

similarly expressed in the (imperial) gothic dramas of dual personalities, somnambulist crimes

and spiritualist portraits, is literalised in the magician’s sawn half-bodies that (like the phantom

limbs) magically retain independent movement. Yet whether fearful or desirous, both the

automaton and the severed woman (as too the gothic phantom, Ascended Master of Theosophy

and/or the exhibited Oriental) all figure within a nineteenth-century discourse of disembodiment

and somatic fragmentation. The mind’s autonomy of the body, its freedom from physical

constraint, arguably reinforced a popular Cartesian modernity even whilst signalling the fetishes

and illusions that this duality depended upon.

phantom spirits: technology and the medium

Phantasmagoria comes into being when, under the constraints of its own limitations,
modernity’s latest products come close to the archaic. Every step forward is at the same
time a step into the remote past. As bourgeois society advances it finds that it needs its
own camouflage of illusion simply in order to subsist. (Adorno cited by Huyssen 1986,
40)

The very popularity of nineteenth-century phantasmagoria, or spectre shows, and the

related spiritualist séances and trick films, illustrates a widespread cultural unease as to how to

know the real as real. Though magic lantern shows had long relied upon phantoms, spectres, and

various satanic illustrations since the seventeenth century, the narrative contextualisation had

17
Méliès’s 1903 film, Extraordinary Illusions is particularly apposite here, for its drama follows a
complex, surreal (arbitrary?) path of animation, physicalisation, unpredictable metamorphosis,
transubstantiation, fragmentation, restoration and disappearance, in which dismembered limbs are
reconstituted into an apparently free-thinking automaton which thereafter becomes a flesh-and-blood
woman, whose physical identity is repeatedly questioned through her concealment, fragmentation and
disturbing tendency to transmogrify into a chef with a saucepan.
19
largely been that of the morality tale. By the end of the eighteenth century however the strictures

of moral didacticism had waned in favour of a more sensationalist appeal to the mysterious and

bizarre. The champion of this shift is largely recognised as Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who

performed his Fantasmagorie to great success in turn of the century Paris, running for a full six

years and inspiring a new genre of spectral entertainment.18 Robertson’s Fantasmagorie was a

show of spooks, be they the anonymous spirits of the unseen world or the returning ghosts of

heroes and anti-heroes from the Revolution. 19 Robertson initially performed at the Pavillon de

l’Echiquier, but in an astute move took over the Capuchin convent, which lent associations not

only of religiosity, sacerdotalism, and haunting spirits, but also of the neighbourhood’s reputation

for gambling and prostitution (Mannoni 1996, 403). Robertson milked these associations to the

full, creating what Castle has described as ‘a kind of sepulchral theatre’ (1988, 36), though like

Philidor before him and Philipstahl after him, he rhetorically professed his motives to be those of

public enlightenment and scientific demonstration. Robertson led his audience through dimly-lit

monastic chambers and cavernous corridors—including the ‘Gallery of the Invisible

Woman’—which were draped in black, painted with ghostly figures and Egyptianate

hieroglyphs, and decorated with skulls which in turn were obscured by smoking braziers. His

‘guests’ were eventually led into an inner chamber where the already edgy atmosphere was

18
See Castle 1988, 34. Robertson was by no means the first phantasmagorist; it seems highly probable
that he gleaned his ideas from Philidor. However, as Mannoni (1996) makes clear, Robertson’s charisma
and eccentricity made of his copy a more successful ‘invention’. Moreover, Robertson’s wild ideas (e.g.
his scheme to defeat the British fleet by using huge mirrored structures that would deflect solar rays so as
to set the ships alight) situate him as a forerunner to those magicians employed in strategic warfare (see
Chapter 5).
19
This is not to say that phantasmagoric shows were always concerned with the spirit world. “Projections
onto smoke could be used for effects other than apparitions. The 1808 New York Phantasmagoria
program included “Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius,” and other re-enactments of spectacular fires reported in the
news. These edged the technique toward a journalistic stance, but in general the machinery encouraged a
trend to the spectral or macabre.” (Barnouw 1981, 22-24)
20
heightened by his dramatic locking of the door and plunging the room into pitch black, whilst

sound effects of thunder, lightning, funereal bell and the eerie Franklin’s harmonica travelled

through the darkened space (Barber 1989, 74f and Barnouw 1981, 19f). The audience would

begin to slowly make out ghoulish shapes that seemed to be moving towards them, increasing

and then decreasing in size as they in turn were succeeded by spirits of illustrious heroes and

pedestrian neighbours both. Robertson also employed actors and masked boards as ‘ambulant

phantoms’ who moved through the audience to emphasise the three-dimensionality of his

materialisations, spirits or not.

Robertson carefully sought to construct the audience’s receptivity to suggestion, if not

their credulity, through emphasis—both explicit and implicit—on the frailty of the human vision

and its impotency in determining illusion from reality. Though phantasmagoria (as with

automata) were often billed as spectacular effects in their own right, they were by the

mid-nineteenth century often presented in conjunction with other forms of deception and

illusion. These were not necessarily always theatrical events, but could include scientific

demonstration, lecture, or the climactic illusion of the magician’s show. Whereas eighteenth- and

early nineteenth-century performers sought to conceal the means of the illusion, Victorian

phantasmagorists sought (in theory, at least) the active participation of the audience in both the

production and consumption of the illusion—even going so far as to display the mechanical

devices on stage.20 These ghosts were produced literally ex machina. The audience’s

20
“Among the happy results of modern discoveries we may particularly notice the different use made of
whatever appertains to the wonderful, as compared to the employment with which the same would have
been subject to in superstitious ages. Our natural magic makes no pretension to an occult science, but on
the contrary tends to dissipate many vulgar errors, by disabusing the public mind, even on matters long
considered supernatural. Concave mirrors, magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, and similar optical
instruments, afford ample illustration of the happy tendency of modern investigation over the once
21
participation—not simply through the suspension of disbelief but through visual

complicity—resulted in ‘the extraordinary experience not only of seeing the world through the

lenses of optical gadgetry and toys but also of being a spectator occupying two places at once:

the double experience of having an experience and of watching that experience from the outside’

(Horton 1995, 8). This dual positioning of the spectator was exaggerated by the

mid-nineteenth-century commercialisation of optical experimental tools both as domestic toys

and forms of public entertainment; spectators became both producers and consumers of illusion

by rights of ownership. “[T]he democratization and mass dissemination of techniques of illusion

simply collapsed that older model of power [of sorcerer and petitioner] onto a single human

subject, transforming each observer into simultaneously the magician and the deceived. (Crary

1990, 133)

This doubling of vision—of seeing and watching, of seeing and yet knowing

different—was already proposed by Robertson in his early shows in Paris. Whilst Horton (1995)

rightly detects a change in the ‘sanctioning construction’ of spectral illusions in the nineteenth

century (i.e. from the divine to the scientific), she mistakenly goes on to equate the spectacles of

science with the spectacularisation of technology. Many nineteenth-century phantasmagoria

artists preferred to maintain the aura of uncertainty (i.e. the mystique of the effect) by concealing

the technological means, or indeed used a mechanical device on stage as a ruse of misdirection,

whilst simultaneously professing the goal of public edification and transparency. Philipsthal’s

(Robertson’s public successor) performative rhetoric, teetering between exposure and diversion

(cf Barber 1989, 78), was not as removed from his predecessor’s foregrounding of instruction

degrading employment of superior knowledge only to impose on rather than enlighten the ignorant.”
(Henry Dircks, creator of The Ghost, 1863: 40)
22
and pleasure as one might think. Philidor’s late eighteenth-century rhetoric, as recounted by

Henri Decremps in 1784, too disclaimed any supernatural agency.

I shall call up before you all the illustrious dead, all those whose memory is dear to you
and whose image is still vivid for you. I shall show you no spirits, because there are none;
but I shall produce before you simulacra and pictures such as spirits are supposed to be,
in the dreams of the imagination or in the lies of charlatans. I am neither a priest, nor a
magician; I do not wish to deceive you, but I will amaze you. It is not my purpose to
foster illusion, but to promote education. (cited in Mannoni 1996: 394)

Indeed, as Horton herself has argued, the improving rhetoric itself may have served to

paradoxically justify, rather than condemn, the pleasure afforded by a suspension of disbelief.

“You could watch those magic lantern shows with an easy conscience if what was “really”

happening was that you were being educated in and edified by the wonders of modern

technology.” (1995, 15)

Phantasmagoria, then, like many of the later magic shows, proffered both narratives of

supernatural origin and theses of scientific materialism, without ultimately privileging one over

the other. Rather, the apparent conflict between the visual and verbal rhetorics of these spectacles

was strategically set up so as to exploit this ambivalence. As one observer wrote of his

experience in 1800, “Reason may tell you that these are just phantoms, artfully devised, skilfully

performed and cleverly presented catoptrical tricks, but your shattered brain believes only what it

is made to see, and we believe we have been transported into another world and other ages.”

(cited by Mannoni 1996, 406.) Reason here loses out on its function as a vehicle of moral

didacticism, for it fails to counter the pleasure found in deception—the desire to believe, the

need for fantasy, the sensual thrill. Similarly, science was creating its own marvels, products of

equally arcane formulas, such that its technologies “mysteriously re-created the emotional aura

of the supernatural” even as they sought to explain it away (Castle 1988, 30). The foundational

23
logic of nineteenth-century reason existed then in dialectical play with the illogic of magic—its

free associations, its sensational reality. The ‘delight in the play of scopic fantasy’ then is as

much determined by the discoveries of the scientist as by the mystifying illusions of the

magicians. De Bolla’s work on the strategic complicity of the viewer is helpful here. In

suspending our demand for normative visual codes of realism,

we feel ourselves become a part of a social domain in which visual error, where
perception is deception, founds the basis for collective empathy; we are a part of this
social experience in so far as we allow our eyes to be deceived […] Thus the primary
entrance into visuality—the social terrain upon which vision is itself mapped—is effected
via our common suspension of the demand for optical truth.[...] Even being armed with
the knowledge that the eye is going to be deceived will not prevent the deception... [T]he
eye can only function within visuality; the ‘truth’ of the scopic regime is not some
hypothetical neutral science of optics, beams of light and a sensitized receptive bodily
surface, but on the contrary a contingent truth implicated in and by our entry into the
theatrical spacings of the spectator [...] Consequently, it does not matter that the mind
knows what the eye does not since the evidence of the eye is completely constrained and
determined by the enclosure of visuality; the eye both registers and determines its ‘truth’.
If we refuse to enter this scopic regime it will only give us grief and will in fact destroy
what the eye naturally seeks out: its pleasure. (1995: 289)

It is this willing entry into the scopic fantasy proffered by magic, phantasmagoria, the pleasure

gardens, the stereoscope et cetera that is carefully exploited by late nineteenth-century

entertainers by their melding together the progressivist rhetoric of industrialisation, empire and

science, and the cultural anxieties of alienation and a loss of faith (whether configured by

diminished ecclesiastical authority or by emergent psychoanalysis). Visual pleasure here then

operates precisely in the slippage between revelation and obfuscation, between sensation and

knowledge, between progress and loss.

Castle (1988) has argued that through incresased accessibility and affordability of optical

devices, the roles of illusionist and deluded converged in the consumer-spectator. Yet this did not

result in the ousting of the supernatural, but in the “internalization of the spectral” (1988, 29).

24
This internalization is evidenced by the expanded semantics of phantasmagoria to include not

only the spectral projections of magic lanterns but imaginative activity itself.21 Paradoxically,

then, the mechanistic model of the body and mind, as illustrated analogously by the optical

devices of popular entertainment, ‘subliminally imported the language of the uncanny into the

realm of mental function’: “Ironically, it is precisely the modern attempt to annul the

supernatural—to humanize the daemonic element in human life—that has produced this strange

rhetorical recoil. In the very act of denying the spirit-world of our ancestors, we have been forced

to relocate it in our theory of the imagination” (Castle 1988, 30).

Hence, rather than seeking to exorcise ghosts, nineteenth century authorities sublimated

them as immaterially real (i.e. as psychologically forces, spirits of the dead, or the internalized

effects of capitalism).

The good old-fashioned Christmas ghost the “Blackwood’s Magazine” was wont to treat
us to, the phantasm of the moated grange, ruined castle, or ancestral chateau, which
always made its appearance to the accompaniment of clanking chains and blue lights—is,
alas, no more! The Society for Psychical Research has successfully laid these antiquated
adumbrations of the dead, by showing their impossibility, as entities at least. The modern
ghost is quite a different affair, the result of a telepathic impact upon the brain of the
“recipient,” who sees the phantasmal appearance, but knows it to be a hallucination.
These fin-de-siècle shades are entirely too psychical to be interesting to the public. They
are not what the readers of the “shilling shocker” desire at all. (Evans 1902, 38)

21
This shift to a psychological understanding of the uncanny is also reflected in late nineteenth century
and early twentieth century fiction, wherein supernatural effect is located less in midnight graveyards with
their hungry ghosts and more often in the scientist’s laboratories and/or diseased minds. Science may have
sought to explain the supernatural away, but its discoveries of telepathy, magnetism, somnambulism, the
unconscious and insanity were no less awesome for their method.
In the dematerialisation of their subjects—the dissipation of individual agency in favour of invisible
witness, substance for ephemerality (ethereality)—nineteenth-century phantasmagoria moreover foretold
capitalism’s reduction of the individual’s labouring body to a cog in a larger machine of desire. Adorno
uses the term in explanation of commodity fetishism of late nineteenth-century capitalism such that
phantasmagoria alludes to ‘the absolute reality of the unreal’ which ‘is nothing but the reality of a
phenomenon that [...] strives unceasingly to spirit away its own origins in human labour’ (Huyssen 1986,
40).
25
Though Evans correctly identified the psychologisation of the supernatural, he was mistaken in

his reading of public interest. The charismatic medium and the spiritualist séance remained

popular into the 1930s, both on account of their entertainment value and their religious counsel.22

By the end of the nineteenth century spiritualism was not only providing the thrill of the

supernatural, but—more pertinently—offered an alternative paradigm to that of a weakening

Church and a mode of resistance against scientific materialism.

“Spiritualism was tailor-made for the nineteenth century. Beneath the rationalism and the

optimism of Victorian England, there was a wide feeling of unease. God had been dismissed

from His universe, and had left a yawning chasm.” (Pearsall 1972, 9) Spiritualism broached this

chasm largely through its rhetorical profession to be a religion based on empirically verifiable

fact rather than faith (in contradistinction to Christianity’s anti-rationalist stance on evolution and

divine revelation). Taking the lead from the already popularised and ‘scientifically established’

marvels of mesmerism23, spiritualist phenomena were proffered to scientists as a new field for

investigation—the as yet undiscovered or newly evolved capabilities of human beings, mirroring

for the human mind the recent technological advances of telegraphy and photography.

Spiritualism was thereby understood as being party to, if not a key player in, the progressivist

rhetoric of late nineteenth-century theories of social Darwinism: ‘intellectuals turned to psychic

22
The first medium to practise/evangelise in England was Mrs Hayden who arrived from America in
1852. She was closely followed by the Scottish-born émigré, Daniel Dunglas Home, whose impact was
crucial to the flowering of spiritualism in New England and Britain both. America’s instigating
spiritualists are most commonly identified as the Fox sisters of Rochester who made public their
mediumistic sensitivities in the 1840s.
23
Mesmerism laid the grounds, as did the phantasmagoria shows, for spiritualism in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Phantasmagoria, even whilst admitting their fictions, familiarised the public with
keeping company with the spirits of the deceased, whilst mesmerism, through the work of itinerant
hypnotists, accustomed audiences to the notion of an individual’s hidden qualities and/or inexpressed
sensitivities. In mesmeric trance, for example, ‘ignorant people... seemed to become endowed with a
knowledge and an intelligence that were not their own’ (Soal 1989 (1935), 214).
26
phenomena as courageous pioneers hoping to discover the most profound secrets of the human

condition and of man’s place in the universe’24. As Oppenheim’s work underlines, such

intellectual concerns, hypothesized and tested through scientific experiment, were reflective less

of a ‘lunatic fringe movement’ and more of the wider ‘cultural, intellectual and emotional moods

of the era’ (1985, 3). Spiritualism’s promise to resolve the still awkward separation of religion

and science—‘the most agonizing of Victorian problems’ (1985, 59)—resulted in applying the

meaning of religion to the abstraction of science and, likewise, the exactness of science to the

nebulousness of faith. In professing the existence of external spirit beings, and therefrom the

reality of spiritual guidance, whilst simultaneously claiming to be able to prove their existence

and works, spiritualism attempted to reconcile the warring factions by oscillating between their

prejudicial paradigms. Each was to be anchored by or reined in by the other in a timely synthesis.

Not only were scientific discoveries greeted with acclaim and widely publicized, but the
scientific method itself was hailed, almost reverently, as the surest means of attaining
truth... [Yet] no matter how much scientific terminology they employed, spiritualists
could not conceal the metaphysical implications of their pronouncements. (Oppenheim
1985, 199 & 61)

Spiritualism indeed fared better as pseudo-science than it did as a lasting religious

alternative to the dogma of Christian thought. Its religious appeal, whether accounted for by its

disparate groupings and absence of formal identity, leadership or tenets, or by its insistence on its

engagement with science, was ultimately overshadowed by occultism and theosophy whose

foundational base was far wider (and indeed more controversial) than the professed aim to

24
However, the accord given to Darwinian evolution was neither universal nor unqualified among
spiritualists: “British spiritualists and psychical researchers responded with uncertainty to the study if the
human race within an evolutionary framework. Broadly speaking, such a context supported the generally
progressive view of human development that characterized spiritualist thought in this period. At the same
time, however, too convincing a revelation of man’s animal origins threatened the very foundations of
faith in his immortal spirit, for if he had not been specially created, it was scarcely plausible that he was
specially endowed.” (Oppenheim 1985, 267)
27
communicate with the dead. Spiritualist séances—in the latter’s eyes at least—were less pious

prayer meetings and more an evening’s theatrical entertainment. The theosophists were not alone

in their equation of Spiritualism with showmanship:

[B]elievers were side-tracked and confused by antagonistic clergymen writing such books
as Table-moving tested and proved to be the result of Satanic Agency, by professional
conjurors, and by scientists who were more interested in having a knot produced in a
sealed coil of rope than in spirit forms. [...] The medium was not the message. The
audience wanted the phenomenal, the magical, they wanted to be shown their dead, and
so often they were disappointed and disillusioned. (Pearsall 1972, 10 & 65)25

Though Spiritualism, and more significantly the Society for Psychical Research (founded

in 1882), had made of the supernatural a serious consideration, attracting a considerable number

of the intellectual elite, it was not immune from the demand for spectacle. Indeed, scientific

discoveries were themselves often transmitted through spectacular demonstrations, sometimes

even creating the same “effects” as the spiritualist séance as a means to demonstrate that science

25
Pearsall’s dismissal of the medium is perhaps too hasty. By the 1870s mediums practising in England
were often no longer the matronly figures of the 1850s but young pretty women in their twenties.
Significantly, this glamorisation of the medium is contemporary with the emergence of spirit photography.
Florence Cook here is a prime example of how—given her shared likeness to her co-spirit, the apparition
Katie King, who was said to touch and even kiss the men in her audience (most famously the highly
respected chemist and physicist, William Crookes) —the male gaze became the source of both
authentification and aesthetic approval. See Gunning 1995, 53f and also Oppenheim 1985, 21f on the
séance as a sanction for sexual contact between young women and men. The gender disparity between
female mediums and male scientists/magicians is politically significant, for though spiritualism
generically sought scientific approval and the bestowal of authenticity, the accounts of these encounters
read more as contests of patriarchal control for knowledge. Female mediums were offered up by their
male managers (sometimes husbands) as voiceless phenomena/spectacles to be investigated, observed,
and marvelled at. “In the “scientific” discourse of Spiritualism, the medium became less the voice of a
new revelation than a new phenomenon demanding scrutiny. Women mediums and the phenomenon of
Spiritualism increasingly became a spectacle presented for observation, whether displayed for a scientific
investigation with circumscribed roles of experimental subject and probing scientist, or as a theme for
popular entertainment, with female assistants put in a trance by a male stage magician.” (Gunning 1995,
52)
28
could not only match the claims of the spiritualists but could better them by recourse to the

workings of electricity and magnetism.26

Do not suppose, however, for one moment that I am rash enough to imagine that the
domain of knowledge attainable by human beings has in any way been thoroughly
explored. There must be much that we can only at present class under the heading of
“The Unknown”; but I do maintain that to go to the spirit world for a clue to the why and
wherefore of all that we cannot understand, is nothing less than the most wilful
retrogression, and a wicked transplantation of ourselves back to the middle ages, in which
period scientific enlightenment was certainly not a leading characteristic.[...] I shall...
instead of floundering wildly in the deep waters of theoretical mysticism, attempt, by
wading through the ford of scientific truth, to bring myself and you safely to the firm land
of common sense and right judgment. (Weatherly 1891, 7-8)

When scientists could not replicate the séance, their dismissal of Spiritualist phenomena would

commonly involve a critique of the audience’s propensity for self-deception and/or of the sheer

cunning of the practitioner, whether skilful or exploitative (cf Oppenheim 1985, 15). Whilst

Faraday (and a few distinct others) showed great disdain for the spiritualist movement, though

deigning to prove that table-tilting was the result of unconscious muscular action, a larger section

of the scientific fraternity simply kept away. Such “tricks” were largely considered tawdry, if not

contemptible, but scientists were also checked by the difficulty in providing final proof. “If

spiritualism were true, the whole pragmatic structure of science would topple. It was surely

better to ignore the whole thing, and pretend that it had never happened.” (Pearsall 1972: 237).

Yet the demarcation between science and spiritualism was blurred not only by the

scientists’ outstripping of the spiritualists at their own game, but through the pro-spiritualist

investigations of well-reputed scientists including William Crookes27 and Alfred Wallace, and the

26
See Marvin 1988, 57f for an account of the enactment of a spiritualist séance by the Edison Company in
Boston, 1887, as an illustration of the powers of electricity. Marvin also describes Tesla’s dramatic
lectures, which also provide material for Priest’s novel, The Prestige (137f).
27
Crookes favourably investigated the spiritual phenomena and mediumship of Florence Cook
(particularly her materialization of Katie King), and the august Daniel Dunglas Home among others. “The
fact that a scientist of the eminence of Sir William Crookes should be so easily duped is astounding to
29
well-publicised work of the Society for Psychical Research. As such, the spiritualists’ claim to be

the bearers of a future science, heralding a new frontier of investigation, was not as outlandish as

it now sounds. Similarly, any boundary between real and/or theatrical spiritualist communication

was confounded by the spiritualists’ appropriation for their cause of all public performances of

the extraordinary—even when these spectacles were performed by magicians and/or

scientists—to explicitly bolster the spiritual claims of the mediums.28 “It was far less shattering

for a devout spiritualist to believe Maskelyne a cryptomedium than to admit that the Davenports

were awfully good at wriggling out of the knots that bound them hand and foot in a large

cabinet.” (Oppenheim 1985, 26).

The logic of the spectacle (what Nadis calls “the wonder shows”)—the interocularity of

science, magic, and religion in the nineteenth century—worked by unsettling older models of

authority. Marvin (1988) recounts how the abstract, literate formula of science—in particular, the

invisible passage of telegraphy and electricity—made the public suspicious of the scientists’

claims, wary of being duped by a new breed of power-brokers. What separated the exclusivist

proponents of incomprehensible theorems from the dealers in magical spells or spiritualist

invocations? Whilst scientific experts privileged disembodied reasoning over sensory judgment,

for the popular audience personal experience (whether naive or not) was still the standard bearer

for discrimination. Popular epistemology relied on tangible, direct associations of cause and

many people. But a clever scientist is really no better equipped than anybody else to discover the wiles of
a fake medium. He is not trained to detect fraud. As a scientist his work is investigating Nature; and
although Nature is often hard to understand, she does not set out deliberately to practise deception.”
(Lamb 1968, 108)
28
One such example is the claiming of Annie Eva Fay’s vaudeville performances as evidence of spirit
agencies at work when Fay herself (initially) made no such claims. Of course, to be accorded special
powers, or even simply hinting at an ambiguity of means, was a strategy that many popular entertainers
capitalized upon.
30
effect (common sense), contra the theoretical and hierarchical model of the experts (whether

these be experts in esoterica or chemical formula or theological argument). Whilst scientific

reasoning was often actively resisted, ‘since connections in scientific explanations were often as

mysterious to laymen as if they in fact were magic’ (1988, 111), spiritualists assumed a mantel of

science (albeit a redefined science) in order to overcome accusations of the unproductivity of

magic (Frazer 1993 (1922), 50). Spiritualists did produce apparitions, and according to Frazerian

logic, needed to appropriate science for their validation. However, these same materializations

required taking them at face value; if proof were needed, photography would document the

substantive happenings. Seeing was not only believing but knowing too.

3.3 spirit photography: visions and their capture

... if the photographic image can be interpreted as an analogue of visual perception, it is

not because the former is a ‘natural’ transcription, but because both are historically and
culturally coded. Indeed, the photographic image derives its evidential force not only
from its existential connection to a prior reality but from the technical and cultural
processes and discursive frameworks through which it is made meaningful.... Yet, the
camera-eye analogy helps conceal the highly pervasive assumption that the ‘normal’
mode of experiencing our surroundings is as a spectator looking at pictures. Knowledge
is thus presumed to be a relation of ‘correspondence’ between a self-contained world on
the one hand and a mental representation on the other. Yet the world does not display
itself to the observer. Representation is a complex cultural process and therefore
photographs must be understood as moments in broader discourses, or ‘ways of seeing’,
which require historical delineation. (Ryan 1997, 19)

The reassertion of the visual (and to some extent of the realist paradigm) proffered by

photography in the mid-nineteenth century, and its contemporaneity with the spiritualist

movement, resulted in various cross-fertilisations between scientific investigation and spiritualist

belief. Even those inclined to dismiss mediumship as charlatanry or mental disturbance were

(initially, at least) less sure of their rationalist argument when confronted by spirit photographs of

31
apparitions and ectoplasmic materializations (Franklyn 1989 (1935), 206). Photography, as the

mechanical recorder of events, suggested that what was seen, or indeed intuited, at the séance

was indeed real, and not simply the by-product of feminine hysteria; photography was seen to be

the technologically authenticated medium—sensitive and yet apparently stable in its function as

chronicler of events.29 However, photography did not simply or unilaterally supersede the

medium, but gave back to her, somewhat paradoxically, a claim on the physicality of apparitions.

Though the spiritualist conjured disembodied spirits, whether witnessed through table-tilting, the

eerie playing of cornets, slate-writing or as full apparitions (i.e. in line with the spectacles of the

disembodied realities of earlier phantasmagoria), spiritualists sought to claim the reality of such

ethereal beings by recourse to physical proof. Spirit photographs offered one such proof,

ectoplasm another. As Gunning remarks, “[t]he appearance of this mucous-like substance gave

séances an oddly physiological turn, as normally taboo processes—bodily orifices extruding

liquidy masses—were accepted as evidence of spiritual forces.” (1995, 56) Though ectoplasm

served to lend a physical reality to spirits, it also arguably served to spiritualise the body,

particularly the bodies of the mediums. Whilst spirits gave form to a nineteenth-century

preoccupation with transcendence, ectoplasm illustrated a sublimation of the very mess of

biology and sexual (re)production. Both spirit photography and ectoplasm, then, served as an

apparatus of both sacred epiphany and physical containment, ‘supplying a sort of pictographic

29
See Schoonover 2003, 31. That spirit photography looks so obviously constructed to us now
demonstrates how its nineteenth-century consumers willingly suspended disbelief in the same way they
did for melodrama and panorama. This suspense however was not limited to spirit photography alone, as
evidenced by Lady Tichborne’s identification in 1870 of an imposter as her long-lost son. The Tichborne
Case captivated the country, and indeed the imposter—Roger Orton, the working class butcher from
Australia—became a hero of those seeking to bring down the aristocracy such that he would make guest
appearances on the music hall circuit. (Dawson 2004)
32
code between the visible world and the realms of the invisible’ (Gunning 1995: 57)—a

representational code which served to both constitute and reiterate the real.30

Crary’s thesis that a radical repositioning of the observer took place with the invention of

stereoscope confronts the periodization of modern European visual culture according to the

abstraction of vision as exemplified by impressionism on the one hand, and to a continuously

unfolding realism, of which photography and cinema are lauded as the fulmination (whether

technological or ideological) of Renaissance perspective, on the other. Crary thereby disrupts the

conventional histories of continuity, questioning in particular the historicisation of

nineteenth-century visuality as driven by verisimilitude—whether perceived as a search for an

equivalent to “natural vision” or as an exemplar of a bourgeois ideology of possession (1990,

13). Whilst Crary admits photography’s supersession of the stereoscope in the 1850s lay in part

with the former’s reassertion of the dictates of monocular vision, photography’s perspectival

realism (indexicality) has always existed in an ambivalent relation to its phantasmagoric

aesthetics (iconicity). Indeed, Pinney writes of two interpretations of the history of photography

(and anthropology). In the “triumphalist”31 interpretation, photography “stands at the

30
Marina Warner 2003 suggests that the relationship between photography and ectoplasmic
materialization extended beyond contiguity: “Photography was above all the form of modern
communications that dominated the concept of ectoplasm as a product of the séance, far more even than
the new telegraphy or radio transmission. In many ways, the séance reproduces the camera obscura itself,
and the relations with the invisible that it stages correspond to the relation between light and the
photographic medium: ectoplasm becomes the equivalent of light, acting to leave a trace of its
insubstantial passage in material form. Ghostly inhabitants of the other side, immaterial substances that
informed the realm of the ether, impressed themselves onto the sensitive film of the here and now, through
the lens of the medium seated inside her black box in a dark room. This imitation of photography's
processes was then itself authenticated by documentary images: psychic images taken with magnesium
flares proved the prodigious character of the phenomena and the fleeting existence of ectoplasmic
apparitions.”
31
Triumphalism here should not be confused with either wholesale endorsement or persistent hegemony.
Pinney includes here the work of Virilio, Sontag and Foucault, who are profoundly critical of
photography’s epistemological claims to transparency.
33
technological, semiotic and perceptual apex of ‘vision’, which itself serves as the emulative

metaphor for all other ways of knowing” (1992a, 74)—the photograph reproduces the world as

index. “[Photography] is wedded representationally, ontologically and mechanically/ industrially

to the positive, to the world as materially given, as matter in motion. To that world and only that

world.” (Slater 1995, 223)

The second interpretation is a disavowal of photographic authority; ‘the indexical

becomes iconic and symbolic, and photography becomes nothing more and nothing less

than a kind of painting’ (Pinney 1992a, 84). This second history argues that the reproductive

certainty of photography is and always was fragile, and moreover that the very ascription of

certainty is the result of epistemological and aesthetic structures beyond photography

(1992a, 82). As Jay argues, “photo-unrealism always shadowed the camera’s celebrated

ability to provide a truthful image of the real.” (1995, 350) Whilst this photo-unrealism is

most obviously seen in ‘the deceptive doctoring of ‘true’ resemblances of the surface of the

world’ (1995, 347) (i.e. techniques of double exposure, retouching, montage et cetera—all

of which were used in the production of spirit photography in the 1860s), it has also been

argued at a more insidious level that photography’s very replication of the world was itself

perceived as an occult activity: in creating a parallel world of proliferating phantasmatic

doubles, photography dematerialized the very material reality it sought to record (cf

Gunning 1995, 42f).

The point of these two histories, however, is not their contradiction but that the

nineteenth-century spectator actively moved between the photograph-as-document and the

photograph-as-icon as context and desire required. The reception of spirit photographs, as

34
with theatrical melodrama (see Chapter 1), illustrates this skilful manoeuvring between

registers: the spirit photograph not only documents an event that occurred in the past, but

through its very replication (re-materialisation) of that event participates in an original and

constant (i.e. present) spiritual reality. The spirit photograph both depicts and recalls (i.e.

conjures).

The power of the photo, then, is the power and promise of realism, but the power betrays
the promise. Insofar as realism is possible, the real becomes reproducible in its image, a
part of the world which, lifted off the surface of the world, becomes totally translucent,
having no properties of its own, implicitly denying its own materiality, its independence
qua image: a ghostlike, uncanny presence, captured appropriately enough by those
Victorian spirit photographs, exemplars of this potent unreality at the heart of realist
representations of the real. Conversely, if the materiality of the images is conceded, it
becomes the double that endangers the original, threatening its status as original,
embodying a problematic otherness, even as its materiality subjects it to the market,
making it into the image as commodity. Thus, representing the original yet freed from it,
image becomes simulacrum: from Daguerre to Baudrillard is but a short step. (Jervis
1998, 282)

Jervis’s highlighting of the instability of photographic realism, the dialectical push and pull

between deceptive illusion on the one hand and ungrounded simulacrum on the other, is

theoretically astute; but though he explicitly references Victorian spirit photography, he does

so analogically, and thereby seemingly misses the possibility of the conscious coterminacy

of these two viewing positions within nineteenth-century spectatorship—(even whilst have

cited Mitchell’s astute argument that ‘an image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical

trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as “there” and “not there” at the same

time’(Mitchell 1986, 17).) The nineteenth-century beholder of the spirit photograph was no

less aware of this trick of consciousness than the twentieth-century cinema-goer.32 Whilst

32
This ambivalent viewing, founded upon a dialectical shift between presence and absence, technology
and fantasy, though widely acknowledged as contemporary with the cinematic illusion, has a history that
foreruns cinema. Indeed, cinema can be seen less as the fulmination of a project of triumphalist realism
35
consumers of these images were knowledgeable (however sketchy that knowledge may be)

of the chemical processes that caused a photograph to appear, the image itself (in its

combining of transparency, iconicity, indexicality) offered multiple interpretations. Just as,

the biological body of the human medium did not preclude the possibility of her channeling

non-physical beings, so too the dark room and its chemicals did not preclude the capturing

of a reality that would otherwise escape human perception. “[A] photograph, rather than

providing indexical evidence of the appearance of a spirit, becomes a model for

reduplication and the basis of recognition. [...] Photography becomes independent of its

ordinary indexical references, since supernatural forces use it primarily as a process of

reproduction and communication.” (Gunning 1995, 65-6)

The appeal of the spirit photographs was not simply as memorial images of the dead,

nor indeed as windows onto an after-life, but as invitations to scopic fantasy. These were

magical icons beyond (and co-existent with) their role as indexical portraits.

Although of a very different mood than Maskelyne and Méliès’s entertainments, such
images share with them a fascination with visual illusions, a fascination which may be
multiplied rather than diminished when separated from claims of recording an indexical
reality. [...] As visual spectacles and entertainment, such manifestations opened the way
for the enjoyment of appearances whose very fascination came from their apparent
impossibility, their apparent severance from the laws of nature. Instead of a discourse of
visuality that underwrites a new world view of material certainty with apodictic clarity,
we uncover a proliferating spiral of exchanges and productions of images, founded in a
process of reproduction for which no original may ever be produced. (Gunning 1995, 66
& 68)

This same fascination—that is, visual complicity and suspension of disbelief (i.e. beyond

mere pretence)—ran through nineteenth-century spectacular entertainments, beyond and

and more as a development of the magical realism of phantasmagoria, dioramas and the conjurer’s
illusions.
36
prior to that proffered by spirit photography. What we have seen in the theatre, at the

exhibition, at the séance, at the wonder show, is ‘a use of realism to transcend the real, and

efface its boundaries with the unreal; to produce magic, yet a magic which is known to be

the accomplishment of science; to transform science into the cultural form of magic’ (Slater

1995, 220). The spirit photograph, the diorama, the exotic dancer, the phantasmagoria and

the magician’s performance, all point to a theatrical passing between reality and illusion,

absence and presence, working within a dialectic of technological control and imaginative

freeplay, knowledge of illusion and yet experience of (its) reality: “Two simultaneous senses

of wonder are invoked: wonder at the experience of being transported to a fully realised

unreal world; and wonder at the (incomprehensible, hidden) technology which makes it all

possible.” (Slater 1995, 219)

Herein lies the ambivalence of viewing magic: the conundrum of believing its reality

whilst knowing it to be artifice. In Jervis’s terms, the ‘unreality’ of magic (i.e. the physiological

impossibility of the staged acts of painless dismemberment and transmogrification etc.) is made

real by its very independence of ‘reality’. That staged magic is divorced from the tangible

realities of the outside world—‘the absent real’—furnishes it with an alternative reality, a

hyper-reality even. Though a term of cinematic theory, Christian Metz’s term of jouissance is

important here, not only for the centrality accorded to ‘(fetishistic) pleasure’ in the cinematic

signifier, but moreso for its dependence upon the movement between the perceptual truth of the

image (i.e. the force of presence the film has) and the simultaneous knowledge that the image is

illusory (i.e. the absence on which this force [of presence] is constructed). Jouissance, then, is

37
located (or lodged) in the gap, or the intersection, of these two viewing attitudes (Williams 1986,

522).

Castle, like Slater, reads the contradiction in nineteenth-century rationalism: by assigning

spirits and ghosts to a status of impossibility and maintaining that the experience of spectral

epiphanies lay largely with mental imbalance, the products of hysterical perception and faulty

visual comprehension, sceptics seemingly reinforced the reality of the very phantasms they were

trying to dispell. Hence the unilateral conceptualisation of the nineteenth century as one driven

by secular materialism and an increased demand for verisimilitude fails to incorporate the very

popularity, indeed the centrality, of this more characteristic shifting between the realism of the

positivists and the realism of the illusionists, the realism of the indexical portrait (the record of

physical actuality) and the realism of iconic transfer (the record of spiritual communication).

Coda: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Mid-October 2016. New York. The election is still a few weeks away. But a fortune-teller

has come to town. He shows up without fanfare, reads a few fortunes at a couple of Mexican

restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, at a residence on Fifth Avenue, outside a mosque in

Queens and at a Planned Parenthood center, and then, just as unceremoniously, is picked up by a

couple of guys in a van and leaves.

His predictions, however, were dire. For this fortune teller was no mystic, but an

animatronic puppet of Donald Trump. Encased in a tempered glass cabinet, the latex Trump

(midriff up, black suit and red tie, coiffed as expected, tiny hands), would—upon pressing a red

button—pronounce “misfortunes” to passersby. Some of these predictions were in fact

38
postdictions (i.e. direct citations from Trump’s campaign trail); others addressed his proposed

policies (“Obamacare? I-don’t-care”); others were more generic (yet no less stinging) satirical

barbs. The cabinet also dispensed printed misfortunes; “If you wish to see your future… build a

fall out shelter” read one. Darker still was the puppet’s pitch-perfect promise to invest in a new

rail system—“very advanced, very fast”—so as to deport 11 million illegal immigrants “back to

Mexico”: “I build the best deportation trains, believe me. My trains are so much better than the

trains the Germans used.”

The All Seeing Trump (“Sees Everything! Knows Nothing!”) was obviously modelled on

the penny arcade fortune teller, Zoltar, popularized by the 1988 blockbuster, Big in which Tom

Hanks plays the part of a thirteen year old trapped inside a man’s body. (The political satire

works here on multiple levels). Zoltar clearly caught the public imagination back in the late

1980s and has remained a pop icon since. Zoltar machines criss-cross America—I met one on

Coney Island, but you can see them at Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, or at Google HQ or at Caesar’s

Palace in Las Vegas. Or, you can go online and order your own custom-made Zoltar.33 Clearly

this is what the four, then-anonymous artists from Brooklyn did34. In interviews with New York’s

33
At www.zoltarmachine.com, you can customize your own Zoltar depending on whether you buy in at
Economy, Standard or Premium levels. Hardware options include different quality of speakers, wheels,
cabinet moldings, bill acceptor or coin slot, and of course customized heads, hands and eyes, but you can
also choose the level of animated effect—just eyes and jaw, or head and arm movement too. Base prices
range between $5500 and $8500. Similar choices are offered by www.charactersunlimited.com, owners of
the trademark Zoltar Speaks®. These new Zoltars can speak, often with a suitably “foreign” accent.
34
Though the artists were personally named in an interview with Working Working Magazine in
November 2016, most sources stated their preference for anonymity. However, in 2018, The All Seeing
Trump travelled to London for the Design Museum’s show, Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics
2008-2018. Here The All Seeing Trump was exhibited as the work of named artists/designers: Nathaniel
Lawlor, Andy Dao, Jon Barco and Bryan Denman respectively.

39
Gothamist and Working Working Magazine however, they were keen to emphasise the

comprehensive list of individual specifications:

We took great care to add in all sorts of little Easter eggs and hidden references all
throughout the machine. Even down to the "Made in China" sticker that's on the back of
the machine which most people probably miss. There is a "Made in China" tag on his tie,
and we put launch codes in his coat pocket. He's wearing Russian cufflinks. We've laid
out some Polaroids in the way you'd see Tarot cards in the Zoltar machine, but they are
some sort of salacious pictures of him and Ivanka and one of Chris Christie. (Del Signore
2016).

We hired our own sculptor to sculpt the head, and lots of other specialists and friends for
all the other details: the custom human hair wig, the SFX paintjob on the face, the
handmade curtains and tiny MAGA hat, the hand-painted lettering on the cabinet. We
could go on and on about the details. Details are so important, they’re what separates
good execution from great execution, in any medium. (O’Donnell 2016)

The Orientalized Zoltar, even in the movie Big, was already something of a dusty relic.

Indeed, his booth stands alone on the edges of the fairground, doesn’t respond when our hero

(still a boy) puts his quarter into the slot, belatedly coming to life only after the boy has thumped

on the glass with pent-up adolescent frustration. Our boy—struggling with the arbitrary schedule

of puberty—wishes to be bigger than he is. The turbaned and bejeweled Zoltar eventually

responds; his eyes glow red and his jaw opens and closes, as though searching for words—part

yawn, part lion’s roar, part laryngitis. Luckily, the fortune-delivering vending-machine spits out a

card for the boy, “Your Wish is Granted”.35 And if this weren’t magic enough, our boy looks

down and sees that Zoltar’s electricity cable is unplugged. Zoltar is a real automaton. Sure

enough, the next morning our boy wakes up in the thirty-year old Tom Hank’s body.

35
In this respect, Zoltar is something of the fortune cookie writ large. Interestingly, the fortune cookie is
also an American invention, a history most recently told by Jennifer Lee (2008).
40
 The filmmakers cleverly infused Zoltar with an aura of nostalgia, even though Zoltar

himself did not exist before the late 1980s. Penny arcade fortune tellers were at their height

between 1900 and 1950, though these were most commonly gypsy grandmothers rather than

turbaned and mustachioed men, the exception being the Hungarian Zoltan, produced in

Massachusetts in the late 1960s. However, as one pinball clarifies, “though the name is similar to

"Zoltan", the two fortune tellers are nothing alike (in looks or operation). This is often confused,

with people claiming Zoltan is the fortune teller used in the movie "Big". This is simply not

true.” (http://www.pinrepair.com). If Zoltan is more Biblical magi, then Zoltar is orientalized

Rasputin. But Zoltar does feel like something from our childhood. Arguably, this is so because

precisely because he taps into the collective memory of the mechanical Turk and his successors.

The transnational history of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk—a gift for the

Empress Maria Theresa in 1769, destroyed by a fire in 1854—offers twists and turns of intrigue

that are still resonant today.36 A Hungarian inventor designs a thinking machine to play an Indian

game in Turkish dress for a Habsburg Queen. It is already an intriguing mix. But from Austrian

nobility, to Benjamin Franklin, to Napoleon, to Charles Babbage, to Edgar Allen Poe, the Turk

outplayed and inspired many; in the canonical lore of nineteenth century magicians, the Turk was

long mythologized for its impossible ingenuity.37 The influence of the Turk can be traced in the

visual iconography of magicians’ self-representations (e.g. the posters from Alexander c1915,

Carter c1925, and Derren Brown 2009 all bely a continuity of influence) and, more substantially,

See Standage 2002. Also, for a wider scholarly history of theatrical automata, see Reilly 2011.
36

Los Angeles-based illusion designer, John Gaughan, revealed that he only cracked the secret to von
37

Kempelen’s automaton after thirty years of research; he has indeed built an impressive replica.
41
on the automata that were made in its image—e.g. Hooper’s Ajeeb (1865), Maskelyne’s Psycho

(1875) and, indeed, Zoltar from the late 1980s.

Though the creation of Charles Hooper, a British cabinet maker, Ajeeb was best known in

New York. After a successful run in England, culminating in his exhibition at the Royal

Polytechnic Institute in 1868, Ajeeb crossed that Atlantic to enter the collection of Eden Musée

on West 23rd Street. In 1915, the collection was transferred to Coney Island where Ajeeb stayed

until 1929 when, like the Turk, he was destroyed in a fire. The automaton’s British provenance in

part explains his Urdu name (ajeeb meaning bizarre) and Orientalized identity, though it is not

clear whether Charles Hooper himself travelled to the subcontinent.38 But just as Gumpel’s

Mephisto evidences the imbricated history of prosthetics and automata, Hooper’s Ajeeb

illustrates the intersected history of cultures of concealment and cabinetry-making.39 The cabinet

is here recognised as being integral to the automaton rather than its mere support—and as such

may be seen as a device that aids both simulation and dissimulation. Prior to any chess match,

much was made of opening in sequence the numerous doors of the automaton’s cabinet’s—both

to reveal the ingenious mechanical innards and to vouchsafe that nothing (or rather no-one) was

concealed therein.40

38
The counterpart in America of the disembodied Oriental in England is perhaps seen in the figure of the
indigenous native—suggestive perhaps that both figures speak of suppressed guilt of the violence inflicted
on these populations. See Caterine 2014.
39
Cabinets became popular in the early eighteenth century, including the secretary whose sliding doors
and concealed drawers transformed it from cupboard to writing desk. The secretary was not it appeared to
be on first glance—whether as desk or trusted employee, a secretary becomes a keeper of secrets. Here
furniture reflects cultural change—e.g. the rise of individualism and the right to privacy.
40
“If simulation involves the production of an effect, then dissimulation refers to the complementary
means by which spectators are prevented from knowing about the secret methods and mechanisms behind
that effect. Importantly, dissimulation implies more than concealment; it implies that the secret methods
and mechanisms are rendered absent.” (Smith 2015, 321)
42
 But Hooper was not the only cabinet maker making a living out of magic. Cabinets were

an essential part of spiritualist acts41, one of the earliest being the American Davenport Brothers’

Spirit Cabinet of the 1850s. Though repeatedly exposed as charlatans (by Herrmann, P.T.

Barnum et al), most salient here is their exposure by Maskelyne and Cooke in Cheltenham in

1865. Cooke himself was also a cabinet maker, and thus began his partnership with J.N.

Maskelyne, that was to last forty years. Before taking over the Egyptian Hall, Maskelyne and

Cooke started out as itinerant showmen outperforming spiritualists. That the Davenport Brothers

were still performing in the 1870s shows how accommodating the field of magic was; how

flexible the public in its catholic taste for conjuring, scientific demonstration and spiritualist

séance; and how negligible the impact of exposure.

Psycho, J.N. Maskelyne’s signature automaton, neither sat upon a cabinet (rather a small

box which in turn was placed upon a glass stand) nor did he play chess; the turbaned Psycho was

known instead to calculate sums and play whist (a version of trump). Similar to the Turk,

Psycho’s biography demonstrates transnational borrowings, albeit within the magic world.42

Harry Kellar, who had started his magic career as an assistant for the spiritualist Davenport

Brothers, purchased a replica Psycho in 1878, which he sold thirty years later to Howard

41
The centrality of the cabinet to the spiritualists’ séance has led scholars to draw direct parallels with the
photographic darkroom. Magicians used similar cabinets in their mock-séances, and Houdini even went
so far as to design a special cabinet in which Margery (Mina Crandon) was made to sit during the testing
of her psychic abilities.
42
“Psycho is the figure of a small and melancholy Turk, with lack-lustre eyes, and hands having a
peculiarly unnatural appearance, even for an automaton, about the nails. He is seated cross-legged on a
box, and he has small boxes near him. On the whole, he rather resembles a Turkish gentleman who,
having determined upon travelling, had begun to pack up, and having suddenly tired of the occupation
had sat down on a trunk, and rested his left arm on a couple of small boxes.” (Punch February 20, 1875)
43
Thurston, from whom it was bought by Charles Carter, who then sold it back to Kellar, who in

1919 gave it to Houdini.43

It is this within this fraternity of magicians that the young David Bamberg (son of

“Okito”) grew up. Thurston and Kellar were mentors to the young boy, such that his chosen stage

name of Syko can surely be read as an affectionate homage to Psycho. In the interim—between

Psycho’s first performance in 1875 and Syko’s in 1917—the semantic associations of the name

changed enormously. For J.N. Maskelyne, the name was a classical reference to the Greek

psykhe—meaning animus, soul, breath or life-force. As a showman of the marvelous yet

simultaneously a gentleman committed to modernity’s rationalist project44, Maskelyne’s Psycho

stands in that uncanny middle where inanimate objects seem to live, breath and indeed think—on

the one hand, a testament to the ingenuity and advancement of human thought, and yet, on the

other, an enchanted idol. By 1884, when the establishment of the Society of Psychical Research

was established, however, the emphasis had shifted from psyche-as-animus to psyche-as-spirit.

By 1910, after years of investigating psychic and paranormal phenomena, many psychical

researchers (though by no means all) followed the psychologists’ lead in emphasizing

psyche-as-mind.45 Hence by 1917 Syko was the perfect choice for Bamberg’s apprenticeship

with Julius Zancig in mentalist magic.

43
A beautifully restored Psycho is now, along with a replica Turk, housed in John Gaughan’s private
collection of magic history in Los Angeles.
44
Louis Hoffmann’s obituary belabours this characterization of Maskelyne as a zealous exposer of fraud.
As such, he is the precursor to Houdini, and more recently to Penn and Teller, though unlike the latter,
Maskelyne himself was no atheist. “He has contributed not only to the gaiety, but to the sanity, of nations,
by his lifelong battle against the fraud and chicanery of the “spiritualistic” craft, and the morbid craze
which has wrecked the faith of so many weak minds.” (The Magazine of Magic, May 1917).
45
The more recent, slang term of “psycho” is derived from psychopathology, a term first used in the late
nineteenth century to denote “moral insanity”, but whose modern psychiatric definition only dates back to
the 1940s. Of course, Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho lent its own horror and currency to the term.
44
 However, following the horrors of World War I and a renewed interest in Spiritualism,

psyche-as-spirit returned to public culture in the 1920s. The Boston-based medium, Mina

Crandon (1897-1941), better-known both sides of the Atlantic as Margery (a name that was

ironically given to her to protect her privacy), assumed a third name to refer to her trance self:

Psyche. A favourite of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and married to a well-heeled surgeon, Margery

already moved within elect circles before the well-publicised investigations into her spiritual

abilities began in the 1922. These investigations by psychical researchers and skeptics (most

famous among them the dogged Harry Houdini) were often fraught—peppered as they were with

allegations of fraud, sexual impropriety and alcoholism on the one hand and narratives of an

authentic yet persecuted Spiritualism on the other.46 Most intriguing to the investigators was her

ability to materialise ectoplasm—a mysteriously unstable yet ethereal substance whose

production was likened to the developing of a photographic image.47 Though the requisite skills

of deception and misdirection for such productions aligned the medium with the conjurer, the

particular form these materializations took—fragmented body parts (e.g. finger, hand, embryonic

form) that were delivered from any of the orifices of her erotically charged, sometimes naked,

body—arguably linked her more with the magician’s assistant. The associations of surrender,

malleability and externalised control (whether by spirit guide or by proprietal husband or

patriarchal investigator) echo the exacting contortions of the ever-smiling magician’s assistant.48

46
See Warner 2006, Delgado 2011.
47
See Gutierrez 2003 and Matheson 2016. Spirit photography has been the subject of a spate of academic
publications and exhibitions in the last decade or so. Most notable amongst these are The Perfect Medium:
Photography and the Occult in 2005, John Harvey’s Photography and Spirit (2007), Louis Kaplan’s
monograph on William Mumler (2008), Sas Mays and Neil Matheson (eds) The Machine and the Ghost
(2016).
48
This reading is at odds with (and admittedly far duller) than Delgado’s—in which Margery/Psyche’s
performances, though clearly fraudulent, are considered acts of dissidence that exposed the limits of the
positivist and psychical knowledge-systems of patriarchal authority. Delgado’s ‘bawdy technologists’
45
 This detour from von Kempelen’s Turk (via Ajeeb, Psycho, Syko, Psyche and Zoltar) to

the animatronic Trump is of course an associative history, but not as such a facetious one.49

Beyond the disturbing continuity of coupling the automaton and the Orient (e.g. as seen in

Hollywood depictions of brainwashed suicide bombers), beyond the disturbing fragmentation of

the gendered and/or racialized body (e.g. most recently broadcast in Trump’s misogyny where

women are “pieces of ass” whom you may alternatively “grab by the pussy”) there are further

trans-historical parallels to be drawn. Surely the qualities Edgar Allen Poe identified in “the

epoch of the hoax” have some bearing on “alternative facts” in the our current “post-truth era”?

Surely prevailing uncertainty in the face of technological change and automation (whether

expressed through utopian hopes for a universal basic income or through apocalyptic fears of

human extinction/ planned obsolescence) is at least reminiscent of the anxieties faced in the

nineteenth century? Surely the epistemological insecurity of the 1860s—what and whom to trust,

what to accept as revelation and what to dismiss as illusion, humbug from sincerity—has greater

resonance for us now than prior to 2003? This is not to argue that history is merely repeating

itself, nor is it to give an impassive shrug of the shoulders; but it is to recognize the simple fact

that times of accelerated political, technological and cultural change are accompanied by a

were undoubtedly audacious women, but to translate their use of expedient means (brilliant confabulation
as much as erotic seduction) as acts of epistemological transgression and/or political dissidence is sadly
ultimately unconvincing. Dissidence presupposes an ideological alternative, and given that accounts of
the séances rarely even hint at such motive in the trance-speak and spirit messages of the mediums,
especially when these political alternatives were being voiced in the public sphere by the suffrage
movement, this would suggest strategic complicity rather than transgression. More Mata Hari then than
Annie Besant. See also Morgan 2014 and Gutierrez 2003.
49
Even stretching the association of automaton and psychopath (the mask of normalcy concealing deeper
realities) to Trump is not as cheap or puerile as it may initially appear. In the summer of 2016—the very
same timeframe in which the misfortune-telling Trump made his appearance—a rash of articles appeared
in the media (both long form and tabloid) asking whether Trump was a sociopath/conman. (See Hamblin
2016, McAdams 2016, and Konnikova 2016).
46
bewildering loss of trust in expertise (political, economic, theological, medical, aesthetic et al)

and its systems of representation. If the Turk’s symbolic function was to diminish and assuage

the threat of the Ottoman Empire for the Empress, and if Psycho’s was to assert a colonial

mastery over the Orient, then Trump-as-Zoltar’s function is to give monstrous form to this loss of

trust: his dismissal of climate change as a hoax, his quickness to identify “fake news”, his

flip-flopping on policy, his obvious lack of political experience, let alone expertise. If the Turk

inspired delight and invited its audience to make believe, Trump-as-Zoltar took nostalgic humour

and turned it into apocalyptic horror. Yet of course, this “puppet” (perhaps more grotesquerie

than automaton) represents one of world’s most powerful leaders, such that its pre-election satire

now looks much closer to the wishful thinking of the boy in Big than we may wish to

acknowledge.

What is clear is that modernity, despite its protestations, never managed to evict magic

from its basement. This was (indeed is) something to be celebrated for it is magic that unsettles

Enlightenment’s epistemological segregation of pure religion (faith) from pure science

(knowledge), and magic that reintegrates imagination and rational thought (i.e. “make believe”

and “as if..”). Secular magic, no matter its moralizing and no matter its profession to verifiable

science, muddies the transcendent with the material, such that even when magicians themselves,

as self-appointed agents of modernity, fail to take their own magic seriously (which is to say,

playfully) it nevertheless still offers a space in which things may be imagined differently. Magic

is then modernity’s fault-line.

If the nexus of Spiritualism, Darwinism, imperialism, industrialization, technological

innovation and scientific discovery (electricity, telegraphy, photography, railways, the

47
subconscious, microbes, anaesthetics et al) led to a sense of overcoming the limitations of time,

space and physical body, this was both exhilarating and deeply unnerving—Muscular

Christianity on the one hand, neurasthenics on the other; Spiritualist contact and Darwinian

evolution; colonial expansion and colonised retraction.50 In short, the body was reduced to raw

product—material to be either perfected, subordinated or discarded so that it should not impinge

upon from the more refined (i.e. rational, spiritual and cultural) pursuits of interior subjectivity.

As we have seen, the optical technologies (of stereoscope, magic lantern, camera, microscope)

not only extended sight but also operated as “instruments of imagination” providing “models of

interior thought” (Warner 2006, 14-5). One consequence of this idealization of pure rational

and/or spiritual being was the projection of the empty body (immaterial matter) onto the

gendered and racialized Other. Thus the Oriental—as dancer (Chapter 2), automaton (Chapter 3)

and indeed fakir (Chapters 4 & 5)—came to be defined by material terms (whether flesh or

cogs), and thereby legitimated colonial fantasies of both control—erotic, technological and

imperialist—and, albeit less frequent, of surrender.

Arguably, the technologies of our postmodern present have dispersed with this interiority

in the same way the body was dislocated by the telephone and mechanized labour. Memory has

been externalised by our devices—which is again thrilling to some (nothing to lose), horrifying

to others (everything to lose). If modernity imposed an either/or, postmodernity suggested

instead a both/and; by so doing it helped break modernity’s stranglehold and re-introduced

ambiguity and relativism. However, if I understand the critique of deconstruction offered by

speculative realism correctly, postmodernism has led us into a cul de sac of radical equivalences.

Excellent case studies of the cultural and psychological impact of new technologies include Stolow’s
50

work on telegraphy (2012), Forsberg on the microscope (2015) and Tucker on photography (2005).
48
Just when we are facing real problems in the world (climate change being the most pressing

example), we have lost touch with reality (no matter how constructed that reality is recognised to

be)—which is perhaps why and how a satirical puppet became president.

But surely postmodernity championed magic in the same way that modernity sought to

dismiss it? If modernity failed to take magic seriously, sequestering its deconstructive truths as

staged fictions, then postmodernity arguably played with magic too hard, exhausting the real in

favour of the endlessly repeatable copy. Magic pokes fun at objectivity and the scientific method,

but it does not forsake them. Rather magic belongs to the middle—between natural laws and

imagined perception, between fact and fetish. Magic is then most obviously a factish, Latour’s

portmanteau that describes the “wisdom of the passage”—a wisdom garnered in the moving

between the constructed and the real without ascribing full autonomy to either, without

demanding belief in either, or—more importantly—in belief itself (Latour 2010). Arguably,

however, this salubrious passage was as familiar to nineteenth century music hall audiences,

running as it did between “between Bacon and Barnum” (Walker 2013, 38), as it was foreign to

colonial administrators and the theorists of modernity.

49