The Spiritual Medium Is The Message: Some Notes on Marshall McLuhan and Siegfried Zielinski

This paper used Zielinski’s thoughts on ‘the magical way of thinking’ as a playful route into the influence of spiritualism not on the history of media but those who theorize it. As Tom Wolfe muses, McLuhan always had something of the performing medium about him – relating back to the séances his mother held when he was a boy. This aesthetic, I suggested, has impacted the language and tone of the media scholars who have come after him, from Flusser through to Zielinski. By riffing around Zielinski’s celebration of ‘illusion’ as dissemblance but also the willingness to risk one’s reputation and ideological moorings, I considered the media scholar as pioneering trickster figure – deep-digging, prophesying and engaged at all times in play. More specifically, by playing around with its register myself, I connected the performance of deep-time (an)archoleogy to the nineteenth century art of communing with the dead to consider what comparable desires and needs it was responding to.