The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies

This article is a footnote to Nicholas Royle's "Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the "Reading Mind" and other writings on telepathy, notably Royle's translation of Jacques Derrida's "Telepathy" and Derrida's "Archive Fever"; it argues not that the medium is the message but that it is the maker. It distinguishes the telepathy of everyday modern telecommunications from the direct clairvoyant knowledge of others' minds which concerned Freud, and focuses on the many forms of modern telepathy such as the Internet, computer networks, and electronic surveillance. The latter, however, i.e. direct clairvoyance, is the subject of George Eliot's novel "The Lifted Veil" and an opera called "The Medium" by Gian Carlo Menotti - who wrote another opera about the telephone, one of the modern forms of telepathy, and Freud points out the analogy between telepathy and telephone; Freud also uses the analogy of insect communication, which seemed to him to be an occult telegraphy. We have less interest nowadays in the spiritualist medium - the subject of Robert Browning's poem "Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'" than in mechanical recording techniques - than in mechanical media like the CD.