Wires

Steven Connor

This is an expanded transcript of a talk broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on January 16th and January 19th 2000, as the second in a series of four 'philosophical adventures in the everyday' entitled Rough Magic. The programmes were produced by Tim Dee.

Listen to Wires listen.


We surely need no reminding that ours is a wired world. We are urged on all sides to get ourselves wired up. The sociable motto offered by the novelist E.M. Forster in his novel Howard's End seems to apply, but with a different meaning: 'only connect'.

The funny thing about all of this is that I grew up thinking that we were at last entering a fully wireless world. The wireless world that opened up at the beginning of the twentieth century would be a world of communications effected by waves, radiation, vibration, emanation; we would live as the angels had once been thought to live, in a world of instantaneously transmitted thoughts and impulses. The wireless world promised to cut our connection to the sluggish and impeded and annoyingly chopped-up world of time and place and bodies and distances and matter.

Such a possibility quickly entered the consciousness of psychotics as well as visionaries; for example Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge who published in 1903 an extended account of the elaborate delusions he had suffered during long periods of madness. Schreber believed that his body was being systematically transformed from the inside out by God into the body of a woman. This process was effected by rays or waves along which spirits travelled. But Schreber also thought of these rays or waves as filaments, or telephone wires, plugging into his head and body. This was Schreber's explanation for how it was that the voices he heard so clearly were inaudible to everybody else. Nothing more natural, at the beginning of this century than to think of such an effect on the analogy of the telephone. Now, a wire and a wave are rather different things. A world of communication by waves and vibrations and emanations is a world of permeated lives, in which individual identities are dissolved, ecstatically or uneasily as it may be, in universally shared experiences. A world of communication along wires offers the delights of communication across vast distances, but with the preservation of intimacy and secrecy. The person on the end of the telephone line, whether God or grandma, could speak to you and to you alone. Waves belong to the magic or angelic otherworld; wires knit us tightly into this one.

But nowadays, in a bizarre inversion, the word `wireless' has acquired a distinctly antique flavour, conjuring up associations of crystal radios, Glenn Miller and Churchillian broadcasts to the nation. When I think of the word 'wireless', I think, not of the newly immaterial world of virtual, or out-of-the-body experience opening up for us once again, but of a vast, mythical apparatus, the wireless which occupied most of our rather cramped council-house living room in the 1960s. I remember it mostly as a thing of textures; the dark, glassily-polished wood of its frame, that seemed both to solicit and to countermand the smeary, mortal touch of fingers; the bonier feel of the hard plastic knobs; the coarse, hempy roughness of the fabric stretched over the loudspeaker, which would well and gulp and belly as though taking breath when you turned up the bass. And, most of all, the thing I remember about the thing we called our wireless was the electric cable that connected it to the mains: insulated with tough, woven fabric, inside which was a rubber sleeve, which in its turn enclosed the copper wire along which the power passed. I played perilously with this and other wires, razoring through the epidermal layers, laying bare the gleaming copper ore at their hearts, which, still unsatisfied, I spread and splayed and plaited.

Nearly everything is much older than we think, including and especially electricity. The word electricity comes from the Greek word for amber which was known to produce sparks when rubbed. Strange and powerful though it is, human beings habituated themselves early to electricity, adjusting themselves readily to the notion that it might be a specifically human power. By the end of the eighteenth century, the effects of electricity on and in the human body were being intensively investigated by curious physicists, such as the Abbé Nollet, who memorably performed an experiment to determine how fast electricity travelled; he got lots of monks to join hands in a line, applying a current to one end and seeing how long it was before the monk at the far end yelped. The Abbé's speciality was bodily electricity, but he was followed by many others who tried to find or imagine ways of taking this new force into the body. (He himself thought that electricity back and forth, in a sort of breathing pattern.)

The history of mesmerism in the nineteenth century throws up many examples of people starting to conceive themselves as kinds of electrical apparatus formed by wire-like connections. The inventor of mesmerism, Anton Mesmer, would conduct therapeutic séances, in which the members would join hands to conduct and contain the force. If we sometimes think of wires as the world's nervous system, pulsing with messages and information, then this is amply anticipated in the ways in which human bodies began to be thought of, not as a hydraulic mechanism, but as wired together, and therefore sometimes capable of being rewired. It was believed that mesmeric trance, for example, could bring about a relocation of the sense organs, so that people who became deaf and blind could nevertheless see and hear from their stomachs. An early nineteenth-century investigator called Pététin claimed to have demonstrated the electrical basis for this phenomenon; he said that a subject who would show no sign of response to a question directed to her ears, would respond if the mesmeriser placed the fingertips of one hand on her abdomen and whispered his remarks to the fingertips of the other hand.

Spiritualist practice inherited from mesmerism the idea of bodily-etheric wiring. This idea took its most spectacular form in the images of the speaking teleplasm associated with the a medium called Mina Stinson Crandon, who was extensively investigated in Boston during the 1920s. Margery, as she was known, specialised in producing the voices of her dead brother Walter, sometimes producing for the photographer a rather ghastly-looking talking head made of ectoplasm for the purpose. In one remarkable photograph, the teleplasmic larynx sits on her head like a caul, while a thin but perfectly visible thread runs into her ear; in others the miniature teleplasmic mass rests on her shoulder, connected to her by a thick cable that runs into her nose. Hearing, speaking, eating, telephoning, excretion and birth are here wired up in a fantastic and grotesque synthesis, as though in an attempt both to keep up with the changelings and redispositions of the body being actualised in the communicative technologies like telephones, phonographs, typewriters, radios and cinema projectors, which were promising and threatening to change the human body's experience of itself.

If an umbilical cord offers one way of breathing through a wire, the venerable metaphor of the Aeolian harp offers another way of imagining the susceptibility of wires to the action of the breath. This metaphor was sometimes transposed to telegraph and telephone cables, in an effort to link the new and uncanny sound they made in the wind to the messages they were conveying. Even before the transmission of sound by electrical impulses had become possible, it was popularly believed that, if one got close enough, it was possible to hear the humming of the messages in telegraph wires. Others imagined telephone wires as Aeolian harps that could be played by the wind.

Wires seem like magical objects because they are so small, and capable of wreaking effects far disproportionate to their size and fragility. Human beings are captivated by the idea of infinite force moving through near-infinite littleness. Wires effect transformation, carry messages and impulses. They bring the world to life; they transmit sentience itself. The life that wires transmit passes into them: all wires are live wires, they are all life-forms. In my house, we always religiously unplugged all our electrical apparatus during thunderstorms, in an acknowledgement that our domestic wiring hooked us up to the skies. Lightning, which can turn anything into a conductor, seems to be the confirmation that nature craves the chance to disclose its hidden wirings. Wires not only transform the things they connect, they are themselves subject to all kinds of imaginary collusion and metamorphosis. Wires are like threads, like pipes, like threads, nerves, veins and stems: Dylan Thomas memorably twists together all these ideas in the poem that begins and is titled 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower'.

We live in a wireless age that has reinvented the wire, as though it performed some kind of binding, connective service for us. A few years ago, there was an extraordinary spasm of marvelling at the possibility, now becoming routine, of sending voice across the internet: as though forcibly to reawaken amazement at the thought that sound could be transmitted along - yes - telephone wires.

We know perfectly well that wires are different from threads and strings and ropes that we can handle, but we seem not to be able to do without the sense of physical involvement with wires. Somebody who turns aside from one mobile phone to take a call from another may still refer to the caller 'on the other line'. When we invite somebody to stay in touch, we are likely to have in mind the special kind of attenuated touch involved in contact by wires. Telephones are linked to touching in a way that radio is not: your interlocutor is at the end of the line, which is perhaps why telephones have retained such surprisingly various erotic possibilities. Callers are asked to 'hold', or left hanging on; the telephone thins our being into a thread.

If wires suggest the possibility of binding, they are also closely associated with ideas of hanging. Creatures who hang, like bats, spiders and monkeys, are creatures who live in the worlds of earth and air at once. For all our dreams of flight, we seem to find hanging a more congenial way of occupying the air. The fact that wires are almost not there at all makes them aerial as well as eerie. Our networks of wires, though buried under the ground or even under the ocean, form an imaginary latticework that seems to hold us ecstatically suspended in thin air, even as we go our ways about the earth. During the nineteenth century there were slack-rope and tight-rope walkers in the circuses: by the end of the century, they were just as often known as high wire artists. We had all come to know something of the giddiness of walking on wires. Wires suggest fragility and vertigo, theirs and ours, as well as power. If the connection is cut, if the line goes dead, then we may fall back to earth.

Wires, which we will sometimes also call lines, have the magical power of the straight. Although nature everywhere implies and approximates to straight lines - in the force of gravity which pulls a plumbline into straightness, for example - it rarely actually supplies them. Because the idea of the straight is an absolute or counterfactual ideal, straight lines imposed upon nature seem to imply the possibility of magical power. Lines - the lines of architecture and geometry, laylines, songlines - outnature nature. Lines signify mortality and the irreversibility of time. Wires have the magical property of being able to preserve their inhuman straightness amid convolution. You can knot and wind wires together, but you cannot fold a wire in on itself like clay or dough. The wire retains its linearity through every contortion and insinuation. It is for this reason that the discovery of the electromagnetic properties of the coil was both so momentous, and so expected too. The possibility of making coils, that strange amalgam of the straight and the curved, had always been full of marvel. It is perhaps no surprise that the phonograph, invented almost simultaneously with the telephone, in 1876, should depend upon the principle of coiling, spiralling and winding up, as though it were itself based upon the powers of the wire to store up time. Winding and unwinding continued to be the principles which governed recording and playback when the gramophone record replaced the cylinder-phonograph as well as in the tape-recorder and cine-camera, which turn the line of time into a loop or coil. The neat reversibility of recording and playback is the promise of Ariadne's thread, that will lead us safely out of the labyrinth. Wiring preserves and recapitulates the long-established magical possibilities of weaving and fishing, combined as these are in the idea of the net. In a network, any part can communicate with any other part. As with a textile, what matters to a network, and gives it its strength, are not the lines of which it is made, but the manner in which the lines are knotted, noded or crossed over.

Because of their associations with the umbilical cord, wires connect times as well as places. In Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus imagines the generations linked into an umbilical telephone, which might enable one to dial the beginning of history at Edenville 001.

Wires effect their actions very largely invisibly, like our veins and nerves. Whenever and wherever a wire becomes visible, ideas of injury and obscenity stir. A cut or disconnected wire, seems dangerous and pitiable at once; something has bitten it, but its wounded condition makes it look dangerous, too, as though it were about to bite. The invention of barbed wire,and the use of electric wires for fencing of animals and human beings actualised some of this buried threat visible and explicit. This is why, for the most part, wires are so elaborately and decently, as we say, 'clad'; it means that we can be spared the sight of the wire itself, the copper performing its ferocious, invisible and unthinkably fast ministry inside the wire.

If wires are life-forms, and borrow some of the features of our bodies, they are alien life forms, whose bodies are organised like those of snakes, worms, or other memberless creatures. Wires are venomous; verminous; parasitic parody-life. For me there has always been a peculiar disgust associated with the expression 'wire-worm'. The laying of the transatlantic telephone cable in the nineteenth century was accompanied by much heroic fanfaring, but I think that what haunted people most was the idea of that wire lying there, indifferently full of our lives, out of sight, but never satisfactorily out of mind, amid the cold and dark that were its natural element. Wires, like serpents and dragons, belong to unseen, inhospitable, inhuman places; they make our words and impulses and feelings pass through invisibility and uninhabitability. The magic of the coil - which associates Faraday's electromagnetic coil with the power invested in amulets showing interwoven forms - is itself tangled up with the peculiar, phobic fascination with the bodies of creatures capable of coiling over themselves and others of their species, creatures whose singularity is dubious, creatures of the labyrinth whose bodies are themselves labyrinthine. No matter what I do with bits of sellotape and string, the connections behind my audio system insist on writhing together into a snaky tangle.

For centuries, it was believed that snakes and eels bred spontaneously from mud and ordure. One of the maddest of all the marvellously mad things written and thought about wires and electricity is a pamphlet published by one William Coldbrook in 1891, called The Invention of the Telephone Predicted By St. John, which suggested that in the following passage from the Book of Revelation, 16.12-14, the reptilian analogies shadow forth the action at a distance effected by electric wires: 'And I saw out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits, as it were frogs'. If wires suggest a simplified, abstracted, rationalised world, a world arranged in clean lines and squares, it is in their nature to betray that into complexity; for wires breed on themselves; they seem to touch themselves up, and touch each other off. They are all middle, heads and tails obscenely muddled.

If a wired world is the promise of the world recomposed as a vast telephone exchange, in which everything can make contact with everything else, all calls will be returned, and everything will loop magically back on itself; but there is a vileness that breeds within wires, and whispers of dropped stitches and disconnections, crossed wires, mazes and counter-magic.