Psychic Television
Stefan Andriopoulos

Here, in a text from 1899--thirty years before the first television broadcasts--du Prel imagines an apparatus for wireless image and sound transmissions into the domestic sphere. Thus, there are two modes of responding to du Prel's question: "How can we become televisionary?" ("Wie können wir fernsehend werden?" [ MN, 2:293]). First, autosuggestion, which engenders psychic television but occurs only at moments of great "personal involvement," can be replaced by the "lever of external suggestion" ( MN, 2:306).¹ Second, this lever of external suggestion will in the future itself be supplanted by the switch of a technical device: "The magnetizer (that is, hypnotist) will hereafter be replaced by an apparatus; the magnetic capability will be projected as technology" ( MN, 1:15).

            Apart from the omnipresent categories of magic, du Prel's fantasy of projecting psychic organs as technical devices additionally introduces the figure of "hypnotic suggestion," which dominated medical and psychological representations of early cinema.² A spellbinding, irresistible influence was similarly ascribed to television during the 1950s, when the technology indeed became a mass medium, often labeled as the "hypnotist in your own living room."c Conversely, fifty years earlier, du Prel had already conceived of the television set as replacing the hypnotist, thereby testifying to how closely television's cultural invention and reception are connected to each other.

            Furthermore, we can conclude that the technological television projects of the late nineteenth century, dismissed by Arthur Korn in the 1920s as unrealizable and "fantastical,"⁴ were inextricably linked to the cultural fantasies that also pervaded the contemporary spiritualist theories of psychic telesight. The successful wireless transmission of moving images in 1929 is therefore by no means the implementation of a medium without discursive precedent, which would have generated itself from its own technical parameters.⁵ Instead, television gradually emerged from a surreptitious exchange across the permeable boundaries of such clearly demarcated spheres as electrical engineering, the natural sciences, and occultism. The texts, experiments, and technical devices of researchers like Crookes or Lodge merely provide us with an unusually clear glimpse of these often half-hidden borrowings, which did not unfold as "purposefully" as du Prel might have wished. Despite the cultural contingencies that undermine any teleological history of occult and technical television, or even because of these accidental coincidences, du Prel's metacommentary on the interrelation of occultism and technology may serve as an apt conclusion for this essay. After all, du Prel succinctly captures spiritualism as an epistemic condition for the emergence of electric television. The interaction between occultism, the natural sciences, and technology points, however, to a mutually constitutive relationship in which psychic and technical television render each other imaginable. Thus spiritualism, too, has no claim to any primacy as an all-encompassing origin: "But, alas, no such engineer, well-versed in occultism, has been found. . . . Valuable time was lost because it was thought that occultism had nothing to do with technology, whereas in truth it contains the very philosophy of technology" (MN, 1:23).

1See also MN, 2:295: "In external suggestion, we possess a lever for releasing magic forces."

2 On early representations of cinema as a hypnotic medium, see Andriopoulos, Besessene Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften, und die Erfindung des Kinos (Munich, 2000), p. 99; trans. under the title Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, Hypnotism, and the Invention of Cinema by Peter Jensen (Chicago, forthcoming).

3Anonymous, "Neuer Fernsehstart in Deutschland" (A New Launch of Television in Germany), Rundfunk und Fernsehen (Radio and Television) 7 (1950): 10; see also Anonymous, "Fernsehen: Appell ans Unterbewußtsein" (Television: Appeal to the Subconscious), Der Spiegel, 2 Apr. 1958, pp. 61-63.

4"Aside from these copy-telegraphs . . ., there were (in the 1890s) a great number of fantastical television projects based on the use of selenium, which had been discovered in the year 1873. In fact, only the English scientist Bidwell made serious experiments in broadcasting pictures using selenium compounds" (Arthur Korn, "Die Bildtelegraphie und das Problem des elektrischen Fernsehens" [Image Telegraphy and the Problem of Electrical Television], in Deutsche Beiträge zur Internationalen Tagung der Fernmeldetechniker Como 1927 (German Contributions to the International Congress of Telecommunications Technologists, Como 1927), ed. P. Craemer and A. Franke [Berlin, 1927], p. 51; emphasis added).

5The opposite view is held by Friedrich Kittler: "Television means . . . to subject all the complexities of the image to high tech. . . . Literatures or fantasies are therefore irrelevant. In contrast to film, television could not be dreamed of before its development. . . . Television was no wish of so-called man, but a civilian byproduct of mostly military electronics" (Kittler, Optische Medien , p. 290).