Psychophysics to Literary Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Neural Composition

The last chapter returns to automatisms and the concept of the reflex arc as they were investigated and rethought in Gertrude Stein’s early writings. Critics frequently analyze Stein’s work by reference to William James, one of her teachers at Harvard. Only a few think it important that Hugo Münsterberg, the German physiological psychologist, supervised most of her work in the Harvard psychology laboratory. I argue that Stein sided with Münsterberg against James’s interest in split personalities and his belief that they explained automatic writing. Stein conducted an experiment to discount such ideas, and in the process she discovered her process of allowing automatism to foster invention in composition. But, eventually recoiling from Münsterberg’s aim to exploit unconscious physiological automatisms for industrial efficiency and social order, Stein later experiments in Tender Buttons with ways to escape such determined responses in the creation of meaning.

Introduction

After staging the stakes of the mid-century turn towards psychography in W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” the Introduction provides a pre-history of “psychography,” a term coined in the Victorian Era to describe a series of disparate practices of recording and materializing individual psychology. These practices—including telepathic communication, automatic writing, and the literary methods of Stracheyan psychobiography—demonstrate “mind-writing” as an emergent literary concern long before the invention of modern polling. Even in this protean stage of psychography, writers worried these new practices might empower malignant actors to weaponize psychographic power against the nation. Invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an exemplar of this phenomenon, I highlight that the vampire frightens not only because he will feed on London’s “teeming millions,” but also because his infectious power will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons.” In effect, Dracula weaponizes his telepathic power to execute psychological control over the masses. At the time Stoker was writing his novel, the science of public opinion was understood by sociologists only through such tropes of spiritualism, disease, and contagion. The chapter traces the transformation of this early modernist vision of psychographics to its reprisal in the mid-century institutionalization of public opinion polling, using Auden as a touchstone to demonstrate the radical and rapid institutionalization of group psychology into everyday discourse and institutions.

EXPERIMENTS IN DIGITALLY ENHANCED AUTOMATIC COLLABORATIVE WRITING AND PERFORMING

In the following paper, the case of Experiments in Automatic Writing, a festival-project that took place in October 2011 at Fournos Centre for Digital Culture in Athens, Greece, and involved collabora-tive writing and performance with the use of digital media, is presented and discussed. The project lasted for 4 days and involved 42 writers, playwrights, journalists, artists, poets, chat users, performers, actors, musicians, a visual artist and a chat bot. The article reflects on the so-cial, theoretical, writing and performative circumstances that gave rise to the project as well as its intentions and outcomes. By analyzing in depth the project, a reflective contribution to the field of digitally enhanced performance and theatre gamification practices is intended, from the point of view of the designer of the event as well as that of the practitioner. Some suggestions are made with regards to possible future uses of the methodology developed within the project framework in the arts and education sectors.

A Contemporary Scientific Study of André Breton’s Automatic Writing

This paper proposes a new scientific way to study the concept and technique of automatic writing in Surrealism. Based on the specialists of André Breton’s work and the experts of automatism, we expose here the literary, psychiatric, neurological and parapsychological influences that Breton had to create his own concept and writing technique. We suggest here that we have to add to all these influences, the spiritist one, specifically, that of Allan Kardec, whose doctrine and concepts, such as psychography, were a direct impact to the surrealist automatic writing, even when Breton wanted to dissociate his movement from Kardec’s doctrine. Automatic writing has been studied from many angles, specially from literary and art theory and criticism, but also from history of science, philosophy, neurology, psychology and psychiatry and even from occultism, hermeticism and esoterism. Nevertheless, we don’t know any contemporary scientific experiment on this surrealist practice, maybe because materialist principles that support traditional Neurosciences are unable to study automatic writing. For this reason, we propose to study automatic writing, not from regular Neuroscience principles that we disapprove here, but from a post-materialist Neuroscience viewpoint, which agrees with the values that Surrealism defended

Thought-Forms Gone Rogue: A Theory for Psi-Critics and Parapsychologists

It is argued that psi-critics Reber and Alcock have lifted the debate from the impasse concerning the evidence for the existence of psi phenomena, toward focusing on understanding the nature of the phenomena. This focus concerns the demand to show that statistical findings are not anomalies but reflect real cause and effect relationships and to find a common theoretical framework for what otherwise appear to be heterogeneous rogue phenomena. It is maintained here that the demand for showing causal relationships is already met by a methodology using real-time recordings of changing target imagery along with receiver mentation. The demand by critics for a theoretical understanding linking all or most of the rogue phenomena, led to the proposition advanced here concerning thought-forms and co-conscious states. According to this, the many “rogue phenomena” both in psychology and parapsychology (such as automatic writing, lucid dream characters, spirit possessions, and entity experiences in psychedelic states) are to be understood as representing dissociated thought-forms with varying degrees of co-consciousness and in some cases the development of a genuine degree of autonomy and identity. Keywords: altered states, thought-forms, consciousness, psi, skepticism, automatic writing, co-consciousness, possession

Early Psychical Research Reference Works: Remarks on Nandor Fodor’s Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science

Some early reference works about psychic phenomena have included bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and general overview books. A particularly useful one, and the focus of the present article, is Nandor Fodor’s Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (n.d., ca. 1933 or 1934). The encyclopedia has more than 900 alphabetically arranged entries. These cover phenomena such as apparitions, auras, automatic writing, clairvoyance, hauntings, materialization, poltergeists, premonitions, psychometry, and telepathy, but also mediums and psychics, researchers and writers, magazines and journals, organizations, theoretical ideas, and other topics. In addition to the content of this work, and some information about its author, it is argued that the Encyclopaedia is a good reference work for the study of developments before its publication, even though it has some omissions and bibliographical problems. Keywords: Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science; Nandor Fodor; psychical research reference works; history of psychical research