John Cussans Testimony Transcript

Tom McCarthy: I understand you want to use a slide projector.

John Cussans: Yes.

TMcC: Thank you very much for coming in. We've asked you here today because your work and research, as a writer and as a cultural theorist, artist, has always concerned itself with the relationship between code, artifice, death and transmission. Before we look at your own projects we'd like you to help us to outline the history of that relationship. You've started with a picture of Houdini: I understand he's quite an important figure when one begins to think about this.

JC: Yes. Is this microphone okay?

TMcC: Yes.

JC: How's the sound?

TMcC: Great.

JC: Yes: I started getting interested in mediumship and spiritualism through a visitation by Harry Houdini while I was finishing off a project called 'Buried Alive'.

TMcC: Was this an art project?

JC: Ish. And it was... I don't want to go too far into the project, but I was also finishing off a PhD which was looking at the work of the philosopher Georges Bataille, particularly in the context of video nasties, broadcast horror. And there were two trajectories that really came together through Bataille's work on... kind of... acephalic revolution, and anxieties about mimetic contagion through the mass media.

TMcC: Acephalic revolution in a soundbite would be horizontalisation, anti-ego...

JC: Yes: ego-loss, contagious, mimetic, orgiastic behaviour.

TMcC: Contagious... and the second term...

JC: Orgiastic.

TMcC: No, the other one...

Zinovy Zinik: Mimetic.

JC: Mimetic.

TMcC: Mimetic contagion.

JC: Precisely: mimetic contagion. That was coming more through looking at mesmerism and the history of hypnosis, basically, and somnambulism, because there's a double process takes place there around issues about channelling and imitation and suggestion, and the hypnotist relationship, the hypnotist-somnambulist relationship kind of prefigures a lot of debates about the use of mass media as mass manipulation. It threads right through discourses of group psychology. It goes through Debord's thesis on the crowd: the masses are suggestible somnambulists, they're incapable of reasoning, and you can kind of pass kind of mimetic potentialities through them when they're induced into a hypnotic, trance-like state. And, yes, so I was very interested in a lot of these issues. At the same time there was a lot of work going on about hoaxing, and I was particularly interested in the ways in which people could be made to believe, and this process of being made to believe. So for instance snuff movies was a big issue, and also Mondo movies, which are very much about playing with plausibility, and also raise fears and anxieties about certain kinds of mimetic behavioural contagion through representation.

TMcC: Okay. So where does Houdini come in?

JC: Houdini comes in... I thought he was going to lead me out of the labyrinth, but he actually probably put me further in. But Houdini's important for lots of reasons. It was kind of like a visitation, and the project I was working on was called 'Buried Alive', and I realised that I had a very strong spiritualist thematic or whatever, there was a strong spiritualist energy going through me, and Houdini seemed to kind of work in terms of that. And also, a couple of people close to me had died in the years preceding that show, and there was a very strong reflection, I was reflecting very intensely on the issue of death and afterlife, and this was a major preoccupation of Houdini.

TMcC: Houdini was anti-spiritualist, right?

JC: He wasn't anti-spiritualist: he was, he wanted to believe desperately. I mean, that's why this slide of his mother is so important. I can give you a little kind of background history about Houdini.

TMcC: Please.

JC: Houdini became an escapologist partly because of his terror that when his mother died he would go insane, and that in order to prepare himself for being incarcerated and put in a straight jacket he tied himself up in straight jackets and learnt how to escape from them - much to his wife's dismay because he spent most of his time up in the bedroom in a straight jacket. And so he was very very concerned about the loss of his mother, and in order to try to overcome that anxiety he agreed with his mother that there'd be a code (it's called 'The Mother Code'), that she would transmit to him, if indeed there was an afterlife...

TMcC: Can we get [switch off] that [ringing mobile phone]?

JC: ...and she would... Is that her?

TMcC: It's Houdini's mum.

JC: Pick it up and check.

TMcC: So: Houdini and his mum established a code between them so that she could...

JC: Yes. And hence Houdini would, you know, go from séance to séance, and he was the scourge of the spiritualists in the early part of this, the last century, because, you know, he would debunk them basically, one after the other, because none of them could actually deliver the Mother Code.

TMcC: So he went there desperately wanting to believe, wanting to contact his mother, and when they couldn't give the proper code he knew they were frauds and he set out to show how they were frauds?

JC: Precisely. Including, importantly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's wife, who was a medium, and you know Houdini was close to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So he was closely involved in psychical research and very open to possibilities and very keen to, for it to be the case that consciousness survives death, but unfortunately it didn't for Houdini.

TMcC: Around the same time was Thomas Edison not also working on a machine?

JC: Yes. I've got a picture of Edison. I think I've got a picture of Edison. Yes: this is from a Scientific American article from 1920, and it was the first time Edison went public on his attempt to create an 'apparatus' as he called it for making contact with the souls of the dead. He worked in close collaboration with a guy called Hutchinson, who luckily, fortunately... well, yes, fortunately - died during the experiment, which was very handy for this particular, for the establishment of this apparatus because Hutchinson could go to the other side and help, you know, perfect the mechanism. That's something that I did, I've done a lot of research into: this idea of creating a two-way bridge and a technology being built from both sides of death, the life-death divide.

ZZ: Just to establish the... the system, so to speak: why do you think Houdini believed that the message would be coded?

JC: He deliberately coded it so that, I guess, clever mediums wouldn't be able to come up with a simple message. So no one knows what the code was apart from Houdini and his mother, and presumably Houdini took that code to the grave. I'm not sure about that. But, so no one knew what the message was, because it had to be a secret code that only he and his mother knew.

ZZ: Why?

JC: So that it couldn't be frauded.

AA: It's a kind of password.

ZZ: Password.

JC: It's basically a password, yes.

TMcC: Did Edison have any success...

JC: Well...

TMcC: In terms of communicating with Hutchinson?

JC: I think what he was trying to... It was very, there was some kind of very sensitive dial that was super-super-sensitive. It's about sensitivity. And some dial that was... I don't have descriptions of the exact mechanism, but it was something that was hypersensitive, some hypersensitive mechanism that would...

TMcC: ...oscillate...

JC: ...would oscillate, prettymuch, yes, if a message was coming through. It wasn't, you know, I don't think they got very far in the kind of... it certainly wasn't patented.

ZZ: Talking about the technicality of it: I mean, because I am interested in the intensity of certain effects and the depending on the locality... Because he, finally, he was connected with inventing of electric bulb... So it's just that the electric bulb, I don't know, very much depends on what is it inside the bulb...

JC: Yes.

ZZ: Do you know anything about his experimentation with what we are talking about now, to what extent his experiments differ from different locality or atmosphere, was he talking about evil presence or non-evil presence, that it would accelerate...

JC: There was no... As far as Edison' beliefs go there was no... demonology involved, unless you take the kind of, you know, the idea of the soul as a demon. But it was much more a kind of... a kind of... yes: as a spiritualist, the survival of the personality beyond death was what he was looking for. That's what he believed in: that the personality survived death specifically. But as for the mechanism: it's interesting that there is... I'm not, I don't know about the technicalities of the machinery, the mechanisms that they were using, but there is this kind of interesting... because many of the people that have been involved in psychical research have been inventors and scientists: people like William Crooks, who invented the vacuum tube. And there is a lot, it's a lot to do with certain kinds of matter-energy configurations, subtle matter-energy configurations, which in fact goes right back to Anton Mesmer and the notion of animal magnetism and the aethereal substance. William Crooks talks about an 'aetherium'. So definitely luminosity, electromagnetic radiation... in fact, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light was hugely important, 1868, for opening up this idea of a fourth state of matter as well. I'm probably running on from your question. But yes: so the idea of ectoplasm was coined in the 1880s by another scientist, physiologist, researcher called Charles Richet in France. So there are scientists very much involved with the shift from a classical notion of matter-energy to a kind of more quantum universe. And it seems to be this kind of scientific shift that seem to be very rich in suggestions and possibilities for spiritualist transcommunication.

TMcC: But also very tied in to this technological era. I mean, wasn't Marconi, when he invented radio, or developed radio, was there not also a link with, again, with code, obviously with code, but also with death? Did he not believe that...

JC: For your purposes, I think one of the, an interesting point in the history of instrumental transcommunication, which is the name the spiritualists use for communication with the dead by technical, technological means, is the emergence of spiritualism in America in 1848 with the events in Heightsville, the Fox Sisters, which marks the...

TMcC: Can you tell us about that?

JC: Well, that's, historically that's when the Spiritualist Church was founded, in around 1848, and it's got very strong links with this history of the kind of Mesmeric Diaspora if you like, which was very much about the French Revolution. A lot of the Revolutionaries in France were Mesmerists. And there's also these interesting issues about the Haitian Revolution, 1790, being potentially triggered by Mesmeric practises going wrong. That's... but the point is that in the Americas, Washington was actually deeply resistant to the Mesmeric ideas going through America. But they kind of... what Mesmerism and hypnosis and the kind of somnambulistic relationship shared with spiritualism was this idea of going into a trance, that when the person hypnotised, or when the somnambulist is in a trance, they're able to tune into subtle communication channels that would be otherwise shut down to somebody who was of normal waking consciousness. And so this idea of going into a trance, channelling through a trance state whatever kind of spirits, forces, voices, messages, is something that spiritualism shares with Mesmerism. And what happened with the Fox Sisters in 1848 is that they started receiving messages. And in terms of your interest in Morse and coding, these spirit rappings... you know, the [taps underside of witness table rhythmically]...

TMcC: Yes...

JC: ...are basically Morse code. And the first telegraph, obviously, had been established around that time. By 1850 there was a spiritualist journal called 'The Celestial Telegraph'. You know, so there's an explicit relationship there between...

TMcC: A journal: so there was a big enough following in America for there to be... a what, a weekly, a monthly...

JC: Oh, spiritualism is a massive church. It has a huge following.

TMcC: You're speaking in the present tense: so this is still...

JC: Oh yes: the spiritualist church is still very widespread. It's still very strong. In the north of England, where I come from, there's a rich and strong tradition of spiritualist churches. It's not... it's quite underground, I mean there's a spiritualist church in Camden, there are spiritualist churches all over.

Anthony Auerbach: Have you been able to trace the... like the discourse of spiritualism, and this process of... All the metaphors you're using seem to belong to spiritual traditions as much as they do to radio. And it seems to me there's an extraordinary constellation, especially in the early twentieth century, of the spiritualist beliefs that become besotted completely with technology. And they...

JC: Yes...

AA: Adopt wholesale a discourse that is associated with radio technology and so on.

JC: Yes.

AA: So there is a wholesale remetaphorisation of the spiritual quest in terms of technology.

JC: Yes.

AA: And there's something also in what you suggest that interests me, is the idea of, and perhaps we'll come to it later interviews, is the idea of radio as mass hypnosis that's used for propaganda.

JC: Yes.

AA: So you've got this strange sort of correlation between the technology and the potential of radio to do the same kind of, produce a kind of psychosis...

JC: Yes...

AA: That is also part of the spiritualist ideology. But have you been able to trace a shift in the discourse of spiritualism that you can correlate with developments in technology in the early twentieth century?

JC: Yes. Explicitly... I mean, I'll move forward a little bit with this slide [projector]... This is a guy called Friedrich Jurgensen, and Jurgensen was a Swedish film producer I think, also an ornithologist, and I think as far as I can tell Jurgensen's was some of the first work in the nineteen-sixties, not till the nineteen-sixties, that radio technology... in fact it was using magnetic tape, and picking up on the white noise on magnetic tapes. Jurgensen had been taping bird calls, as an ornithologist will, and when he got the tapes home and listened to them he heard these voices in the white noise between... he thought he heard, well he picked up, he tuned into these voices, and eventually found, you know, decoded them, and interestingly enough also it was his mother that was speaking to Jurgensen, calling his name. And Jurgensen wrote a book, what's it...? Yes: Radio Contact with the Dead in 1967. And that was the first work on EVP.

TMcC: So did this predate Raudive's work?

JC: Yes. Raudive was inspired, Raudive's work... I think I've got a... yes, Raudive...

AA: Perhaps you could say what...

JC: Sorry?

AA: EVP.

JC: Oh yes: EVP is Electric Voice Phenomena. The other technological term is ITC: Instrumental Transcommunication. And, yes, Raudive read Jurgensen's book, and that's what inspired him to do more and more research into the field. And it was Raudive who first encountered something called Radio Peter, which is the first documented claim that there are actually sending stations, radiotechnology, on the other side; that the people who are involved in ITC research, when they die they all meet up on the other side...

TMcC: ...and set up radio stations?

JC: ...and set up radio stations on the other side. And Radio Peter is that radio station. Also I think interestingly, and I don't know where this goes, but I think in terms of the [International] Necronautical Society's Interests, Raudive concluded that, because the Raudive voices were very strange and peculiar, they spoke in lots of different languages, that for some reason when you went to the other side - and they start talking about astral planes at this point too, I mean there's a language of astral planes comes through, and I'm not sure where the astral planes discourse is, that terminology is...

AA: That's theosophy or something now.

JC: Yes. But they start saying that they believe, Raudive believed that when you die you lose your larynx. So you have very difficulty making normal speech patterns. So that's why the voices are so peculiar... if indeed you think that they are the voices of...

TMcC: But why are they multi-lingual? Did he have a...

JC: No, I can't remember what he speculated on that. But they were coming from, you know...

ZZ: Is there any suggestion that, let's say, Anglophone world has taken over the other side.

JC: Any suggestion that...?

ZZ: That Anglophone world...

TMcC: The Anglophone world.

JC: Ah, the Anglophone world! No...

ZZ: Yes, so that they will speak not French but English.

JC: Well, Raudive was Latvian, and his mother certainly spoke to him in Latvian, and I think in terms of getting publicity for the book Breakthrough... I mean, I don't want to get cynical about this, so I'm going to hold back on that.

ZZ: Is it true, I mean there is a theory that human voice, the moment it's getting to the outer space, it would travel indefinitely, and sometimes come back. Is there any geography of sort of concentration, migration, kind of map of the..?

JC: Yes... Unfortunately I don't know enough about Raudive's theories to... but I'm sure he speculated, I mean about where the location... but of course the location of the voices of the dead raises all kind of questions about the afterlife and, you know, purgatory and, you know, the spatialisation of the dead.

TMcC: Is it not the case...

JC: It's certainly extra, it's going to be extra-geographical.

TMcC: But is it not the case at a basic, empirical, technological level that a radio telescope like Manu and Mukul's that is powerful enough to travel very fast into outer space can pick up, can quite literally, in an empiricist, positivist way, pick up voices of the dead, or is this not...?

ZZ: Because it's past automatically.

JC: Yes. I don't know what, whether Raudive speculated about that possibility. I mean, if you hear Raudive voices it's kind of, I don't know if you've heard any of them, but they're hard, it's... Raudive tried to encourage people to tune their ear into the voices, because if you listen to them with a cold, neutral ear they don't sound like very much at all. But he said that the voices were actually informing us how to listen. We don't know how to hear. So in fact we need to perfect our own biological apparatus too; our sensitivity needs to become much more subtle, in order to... and then so there's this kind of continual dialogue of the increasing sensitivity of the mechanisms by which... So in fact that seems to be the direction that the kind of, the research goes into, like 'How do we make a more sensitive mechanism for...?'

AA: Was this idea of tuning already present in the spiritualist tradition before radio technology became well known as an every day phenomenon?

JC: Well, my understanding of the relationship between spiritualism and advances in communications technology is that with each new phase in communications technology evolution, so spiritualism...

AA: Upgraded itself.

JC: Yes, upgraded accordingly.

AA: Right. That's interesting. I think then there will be some... yes, I mean how spiritualism deals with digital encoding and transmission, this kind of becomes interesting.

JC: Yes. Well I can go, I can move on a little bit to that if you...

AA: Do we have time?

TMcC: Sure.

JC: Well I mean just, there are people working in Luxemburg, and I think as well for your own purposes too a very important event was 1982, Radio Luxemburg did a live EVP broadcast with someone called...

TMcC: Electro Voice Phenomenon...

JC: Yes, with Hans Otto Konig, and that was a live broadcast, and many people heard it, were tuned into the radio, and the radio presenter at the radio station absolutely said there was no trickery as far as they could tell. So this is one of the most kind of plausible events for the existence of EVP phenomena. And Hans Otto Konig spoke to Raudive in this communication in 1982. I could go on. But basically, these people [on the next slide], this is someone called one of the Harsh Fishbacks.

TMcC: Sorry?

JC: The Harsh Fishbacks. Yes: Maggie Harsh Fishback. These are Luxemburg researchers. So there was an EVP research set-up in Luxemburg after this, and...

TMcC: Government funded?

JC: Oh I don't think it's government funded. I don't... but I don't know actually where the funding's coming from for it. But they're definitely receiving images on computers. In fact those images of... of... yes, Jurgensen were received on video and computer technology. There's also a website called spiricom, which is named after another radio station that was apparently set up.

TMcC: We've only got a couple of questions left, and before you go I want to ask you about your own, about your PKD event in, it was last year, wasn't it? and what you did there.

JC: Well, the PKD event was really...

TMcC: PKD being...

JC: Philip K Dick. Yes, we did an event that was in honour of Philip K Dick's death, the twentieth anniversary of his death, and it was a commemorative event. And we, it wasn't, I don't think it was a serious attempt to channel the spirit of Philip K Dick, but in many ways it kind of was. We had a live link up with Vancouver and everybody was operating in the spirit of Philip K Dick, and we tried to create a feedback between the two events, because this idea of creative feedback, video feedback loops seems to have a hypnotic, trance-like effect. And so if you can kind of create that kind of trance-like environment with multi-media environment, the likelihood of people hearing voices or receiving messages or channelling is much more likely. And I do think we actually did channel Philip K Dick.

ZZ: Can I ask one question, which is: sometimes you can listen to the radio and not hear it, so to speak, because you are not conscious of it...

JC: Yes.

ZZ: You kind of... And sometimes you can concentrate and you would indeed listen to it. Is there any description of these stages of mind, I mean it has been studied, or...?

JC: Well...

ZZ: It's just, in relation to the spiritual world...

JC: Yes. Theta-waves are, I was going to play some theta-waves but we didn't have the technology set-up. But Hans Otto Konig used low-level audio frequencies, theta-waves, which are the waves on which these voices apparently travel the best. It's also interestingly the waves that the brain function has, the waves of the brain functioning when one is in a trance, in a hypnotic trance. So this relationship again between trance, brain functioning and this channelling of messages operate on this theta-wave frequency.

ZZ: Any cases where it's damaged, the mind is damaged by these voices? Or it's a virus? I know you've worked with viruses...

JC: Yes. It's a long story...

TMcC: We have to move on. Thank you very, very much for coming in.