Abstract

Turning away from the recent critical interest in spiritualism and its connections with the telegraph and wireless radio communications, this essay examines the mediumistic practices of Élise-Catherine Müller (or ‘Hélène Smith’) and the psychical faculty of clairvoyance. Smith’s capacity to project her mind to the shores of an alien world allows media scholars to consider the ways in which occult media afford alternative ways of imagining the relationships between self and other, actual and virtual, and presence and absence. In Smith’s accounts, detailed in transcripts of her séances produced by the noted Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, and in a series of startling watercolour paintings produced by the medium herself, clairvoyance appears not as the uncanny other of the electric telegraph, a means of conveying coded signals from one place to another in real time, or even as a kind of psychic television, affording the viewer an opportunity to see and hear distant scenes. It models, instead, a kind of tele-presence, a mode of being in which the self and other, no less than the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of tele-communications, are shown to be deeply imbricated in one another. In the world of occult media, the essay concludes, communication is never as simple as sending and receiving – it is a problem of being.

中文翻译：

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火星上的生活？：海伦·史密斯，千里眼和神秘学媒体

摘要

摆脱了最近对唯灵论及其与电报和无线电通讯的联系的关注，本文考察了埃莉斯·凯瑟琳·穆勒（或称“埃琳·史密斯”）和千里眼心理学系的媒介实践。史密斯有能力将自己的思想投射到异世界的海岸上，这使媒体学者可以考虑利用神秘主义媒体提供的其他方式来想象自我与其他，实际与虚拟以及存在与缺失之间的关系。在史密斯的叙述中，详细记录了著名瑞士心理学家蒂奥多·弗洛诺（T​​héodoreFlournoy）所写的她的圣言抄本，以及由媒体本人所制作的一系列惊人的水彩画，千里眼似乎不像电报那样诡异，一种将编码信号从一个地方实时传输到另一个地方的方法，甚至可以作为一种心理电视，使观看者有机会看到和听到遥远的场景。相反，它是一种远程存在，一种自我和他人（不小于远程通信的“这里”和“那里”）的一种存在方式，被深深地融合在一起。这篇文章总结说，在隐秘的媒体世界中，交流从来没有像发送和接收那样简单，而是存在的问题。