"you are sleeping; you do not want to believe!"

Music: Armageddon Dildos: Homicidal Maniac (1993)

A broken record: For the past couple of weeks I've had a lot of trouble sitting down and writing. I have everything I want to say in my head, I just cannot make it come out. I am never in need of ideas; I find I am frequently in need of something akin to a mental diuretic.

Frustrated and "blocked," I also tried my hand at editing: sitting down just to cut it out. That task seemed even harder. The "Father Trouble" essay has been given a green light, I just need to cut 3,000 words. The "Speech is Dead" essay has also been given a green light, I just need to cut 3,000 words. I usually don't have trouble cutting, but this time it's like someone telling me I have to cut a toe off: pick one. So, the only thing I'm good at doing lately is prepping for class. If not inspired, at least my recent lectures have been tidy.

One of the things I decided to do to jump-start writing is read Konstantin Raudive's Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead, published in English in 1971 (it was published in German as The Inaudible Becomes Audible in 1969). The book is long out of print, but I managed to find a copy online. It's simply a fascinating book, and a window into the "structure of feeling" of the early 1970s: Raudive's statements about life after death are so adament. It's as if he had been locked in a room with Jean-Paul Satre for a week---Existential Big Brother, as it were---and then wrote this thing when he got out. Hell is other people, but heaven, well, that's where voices from the dead come from.

I think as a result of reading this weird book that purports to document EVP in scientific terms, today I managed to eek out a few paragraphs for that essay I have Explorations in Media Ecology in mind for. I'm pasting in the section I crafted below (with some of the dross from the review essay). But before that . . . I have a very special bonus!

When Breakthrough was first published, it came with a 7" vinyl record. A lot of the voices that Raudive analyzes in the book are on this record with his commentary. His remarks are read by a stuffy Nadia Fowler. I have some MP3s of that record that I uploaded (about ten minutes a side). This is fun stuff: Side A is here, and Side B is here. If you listen to the whole thing, some of you with more exotic musical tastes will recognize some of the "translations" are used as sound-bites by the immortal industrial/dub king, Jack Dangers, in some of his Meat Beat Manifesto records. If you've ever wondered where that "you are sleeping!" sample came from, now you know. How hot is that?

Finally, and this is only tangentially related, last night I played with my shortwave radio in search of "numbers stations" broadcasts. I didn't find any. I know this is the most exciting thing you've ever heard of for a Friday night's fun: scotch and shortwave. Woohoo. I'm a party animal. I was trying to stay up for Coast to Coast, but alas, was in bed by ten.

The Voice of An Angel: "Raudive there!"

So here is the story: at a German book fair in 1969, an English publisher Colin Smythe approached Professor Peter Bander and handed him a copy of Raudive's Unhörbares Wird Hörbar (The Inaudible Becomes Audible [1968]) with the suggestion that they may want to translate and publish it in English. The former German-born Senior Lecturer in Religion and Moral Education at a Cambridge-affiliated college had resigned to become an editor and translator at Smythe's publishing house. His initial response to the book was negative:

Browsing through the pages, without actually reading the complete story, I formed the opinion that Konstantin Raudive, the author, had joined the host who are set on telling us that life after death is a reality which can be scientifically proven. I don't think I would have given the book a second thought but for the section containing letters and comments by scientists I personally know to be of the highest integrity, and incapable of supporting anything scientifically suspect . . . . (in Raudive vii)

Nevertheless, after translating a few of the "how-to" passages from the book, Bander decided they should not republish it and told Smyth so, whereupon the publisher produced a tape he had made following Raudive's instructions. Smyth insisted that there was a voice on the tape and that he wanted Bander to listen to it. "As far as I can remember," reports Bander,

I must have listened to the section on the tape which had been pointed out to me for about ten minutes, and I was on the point of giving up when suddenly I noticed the peculiar rhythm mentioned by Raudive and his colleagues. After a further five or six play-backs, out of the blue, I heard a voice. It was in German, and . . . I believe this to have been the voice of my mother who had died three years earlier. (Bander 10)

Astonished, Bander assembled a number unsuspecting guests at his home for a dinner party and invited Raudive to join them. He wanted to make sure the voice phenomena were real, and he wanted others to confirm that his astonishment and growing convictions were justified.

The scene Bander proceeds to detail in the preface to Raudive's Breakthrough is, rather unsurprisingly, reminiscent of a séance from the nineteenth century. As John Durham Peters has argued, a centuries-old belief in "soul-to-soul" communication, rooted in Plato and extended through the work of Christian theology, was literally amplified to a popular, Spiritualist craze by the technological innovations in the Nineteenth century (63-108). The "dream that electricity can mingle souls" was exacerbated by the advent of telepresence-via telegraphy and telephonics-and led to a popular movement with mediums claiming to be psychic telegraph and telephone operators to the hereafter (94). It is not a surprise, then, that EVP "experiments" resemble a Spiritualist séance with "experimenters" asking questions of disembodied spirits, only instead of a Ouiji board, tarot cards, or a crystal ball the medium wields a microphone.

Bander describes a group of twenty people sitting around a dining room table. On the table is a reel-to-reel recorder, a microphone, and various instruments that are inspected and operated by an sound engineer Bander invited to come. After a jovial and excited dinner conversation, Raudive tried three distinct methods of capturing dead voices over a period of some hours. First the group tried simple microphone recording; ten minutes of recorded ambient air was scrutinized. To the disappointment of everyone, all that was heard was the deafening tick of a clock on the mantle. Raudive then tried recording the static of a radio tuned to an unused frequency. Still nothing. Finally, the Latvian professor resorted to his favorite, microphone-less method, the use of a germanium diode with a short, three inch aerial stuck into one of the tape recorder's inputs. Nothing. But then:

I think the tape had only been running about two minutes . . . when Dr. Raudive asked Stanley [a recording engineer Bander had at the party to run the machines] to play the recording back. With about twenty people talking and wishing each other a Merry Christmas, it was most surprising when four of them suddenly rushed to the tape-recorder. There, clear and without a shadow of doubt, a rhythmic voice, twice the speed of human voice said "Raudive there" . . . . there was a voice and it called the name of the one person who was most concerned with it all. (in Raudive xxi)

At that instant Bander became a true believer, and drew up a contract to translate and publish Breakthrough, which Raudive signed the very next day.

Reading the accounts of the early days of EVP research, one frequently encounters a similar narrative form: disbelief becomes profound conviction---"I was deaf, but now I hear!" Today we know that such conviction is built upon human habits of cognition, habits that prioritize sound as a stimulus and which are "hard wired" in our brains. Because humans are "the only species that is wired to understand speech fully," argue Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, we depend on speech as a (if not the) principle means of identifying one another: personality, likeness and difference, competence, gender, and related attributions are made involuntarily by listening to someone's voice (1-2). Research on the brains of infants has demonstrated, for example, that we begin processing human speech very early in life:

Even before birth, a fetus in the womb can distinguish its mother's voice from all other voices (demonstrated via increased heart rate for the mother's voice and decreased heart rate for strangers' voices). Within a few days after birth, a newborn prefers his or her mother's voice over that of a stranger's and can distinguish one unfamiliar voice from another. By eight months, infants can tune in to a particular voice even when another voice is speaking. (2)

Although early infantile perceptions of speech do not rely on a distinction between "inside" and "outside," we eventually learn to associate voice with "interiority," that a voice indexes the consciousness of another person.

For decades brain research has demonstrated that the human brain, and the left side in particular, is so deeply dependant on speech for information that "people even process nonsense syllables and speech played backwards as if they were normal speech" (Nass and Brave 11-12). Nass and Brave argue that the brain has a "very liberal definition of speech" that predisposes listeners to regard "all speech . . . as a communicative act, and people will struggle through assigning meaning to sounds even when they are garbled or unclear" (11-12). In other words, when one apprehends sound she often attributes to it a sense of presence; if that sound even remotely resembles speech, her brain is likely to attribute consciousness to it (the brain makes these attributions even if one consciously resists it). Hence, many have dismissed EVP as the aural equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test, which also operates on a "hard-wired" human tendency to find patterns in otherwise nonsensical sensory stimuli (Banks 80; Nass and Brave 2-7).

In addition to our well-documented and researched cognitive tendencies, however, the vocalic attribution that underwrites these postmortal preoccupations also participate in the emotional processes of projection. As a common defense mechanism, projection typically refers to a practice whereby "qualities, feelings, wishes or even 'objects' which the subject refuses to [recognize] or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing" (Laplanche and Pontalis 349). Projection, in other words, is the psycho-affective counterpart to cognitive attribution. As Joe Banks has detailed, studies from Gestalt psychological perspectives identify projection as a central mechanism of listening, such that our cognitive tendencies to "read familiar shapes into clouds, or melodies into the monotonous rattle of a train" are motivated by "emotional agendas," of which an individual may not even be conscious aware (78-79). For example, although an individual cannot help but recognize a pattern in a Rorschach inkblot, the character of what she sees is shaped by latent and overt fears and desires. Hence, projection is not simply a process whereby an individual displaces things she does not like about herself onto another, but is at the same time a form of wish fulfillment.

From a secular standpoint, then, EVP is a practice of acoustic or vocalic projection that relies both cognitive and psychological/affective predispositions. These dispositions, however, still do not explain the desire that propels the skeptic toward true belief, nor explain how it was (and remains) that well-educated scientists, professors, and engineers heard polyglot poltergeists from the Beyond. "Even if their messages were often bleak," argues Jeffrey Sconce, "the Raudive voices did speak of an immortal essence that transcends the alienating modes of Darwin, Freud, Sartre, and all other demystifying assaults on the transcendental dimension of the human psyche" (90). In other words, Sconce suggests that these voices seemed to promise hope in the increasingly bleak intellectual climate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when existential outlooks reigned supreme, a war in Vietnam was seemingly endless, and a stabbing at Altamont killed off the counter-cultural dream of a new Age of Aquarius (Wood 336-351). Yet there is something about recorded speech itself that defies theory (after all, the Greek theoria bespeaks "a viewing of"), something that resists a familiar, party-line, scholarly agnosticism. Dr. Raudive, after all, was an Oxford educated scholar, but he had a powerful desire to believe in spiritual speech. Indeed, Dr. Raudive's scientistic rationalizations often invite incredulity and wonder at his willful lack of discernment:

The main difficulty for effective research lie in the "listening-in" process. Because the ear has only a very limited range of frequency, I have found that it takes at least three months for the ear to adjust itself to the difference: to begin with, though it may hear speech-like noises, it cannot differentiate words-let alone understanding what they mean. . . . listening-in tests have shown that children and people with a musically trained ear have least difficulty in following the voices; military-trained radio-operators achieve a high degree of accuracy and for some unknown reason specialists of internal diseases and Catholic priests also seem to be able to discern the voices with relative success. (20)

We know that if one stares at patterns in the wall long enough he may soon see the visage of God; Stewart Guthrie has even argued that visual anthropomorphism is the basis of all religious thought (1-38). But what about sound? Raudive's curious mention of the discerning yet catholic ears of priests does suggest another rationale for his gullibility, for it is an obvious one that many of us share: an unwillingness to accept mortality or, alternately, a strong desire for immortality. This fear or hope is that which motivates what Jacques Derrida has dubbed the "metaphysics of presence," a soul-deep ideology of Western thought that privileges speech as presence, as interiority, and as the vehicle of the soul. Recording the speech of the dead is thus a peculiar form of writing, a feverish scribbling toward presence and a defiant denial of death.

Next section: from metaphysis to archive-mania . . . .