1 WILLIAM JAMES’S PLANCHETTE

The Unclassified Residuum

James’s interest in the planchette, which lasted for nearly two decades at least, can be dated to 1869,¹⁴ the year he received his MD degree and the year he published an unsigned review of Planchette; or, the Despair of Science, a book by the popular journalist, poet, and playwright Epes Sargent. In his review, James laments how “the particular instrument, Planchette, which gives the name to the whole,” is “disposed of in very few lines,”¹⁵ serving only as an example through which to begin a discussion of spiritualism’s legacy. James’s comments suggest he was more interested in the techniques of spiritualism than its broader worldview. Nineteen years after his review, in 1888, James wrote in a letter to his spouse, Alice Gibbens, that he had let members of Harvard’s philosophy club leave his office “bearing away six planchettes, which I will charge to my college appropriation.”¹⁶ I begin with this span of time to not only highlight James’s interest in spiritualism, which is widely known, but also emphasize how this interest was related to a very specific, decades-long focus he possessed for a particular spiritualist toy. James was less interested in spiritualistic arguments about ghosts and mediumship, these two moments indicate, than he was in the practical methods, toys, and tools used by spiritualists and mediums. Today, James is sometimes held up as a sort of proto-hippie who wanted to make reality “weird” through an open-minded embrace of religion and the occult.¹⁷ I think this is a serious misreading. I do not believe James was all that interested in the particular metaphysical arguments of spiritualism but was very interested in the practical means through which spiritualist phenomena was produced.¹⁸ This focus on practical techniques is not only deeply pragmatic but also fully consonant with an empiricism that worked to explain the real existence of the world beyond what is immediately sensible—two things for which James is today well known. This is not to say that James was not interested in metaphysics—quite the opposite—but that the conflation of his radical empiricism and pragmatism with spiritualism is a misinterpretation of what James did, in fact, take from spiritualism.

James’s interest in the planchette initially came from his long-standing attempts at relating scientific knowledge and “unscientific” experience. Be they altered states produced by nitrous oxide or the seemingly automatic writing produced by the planchette, the “unclassified residuum” surrounding scientific knowledge—to use the term James coined for the inexplicable, illegitimate, and occult evidence and belief dismissed by his contemporaries—was that which should direct the attention of scientists in their attempts to explain human experience.¹⁹ Too often, James argued, these religious and spiritual phenomena were excluded at the outset of scientific attempts to understand and explain, ridiculed as a delusion or trick. Rather than rejecting the supernatural as unqualified error, James thought incorporating and attending to the mystical could advance scientific knowledge, though in ways that refuse speculative arguments and embrace what we would today refer to as a materialist conception of the brain. James’s comments on spiritualism and religion, at the time of the writing of his Principles of Psychology, suggested that scientific explanations for paranormal phenomena should be understood explicitly through reference to the body’s neurology.²⁰ Thus, his interests in psychical research and spiritualism were directed toward understanding the limits of psychological science, embracing the mystical as material phenomena to be explained without recourse to idealism, to any privileging of “thought” or “mind” as independent of the brain and body. All psychological experience, for James, should be explained through the physiology of the body. James’s rejection of spiritualist explanations for mental experience is pronounced at the beginning of his Principles of Psychology: “Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology. . . . It will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.”²¹

How was it that the planchette helped make these claims? The planchette is well known today as a plastic or wooden triangle that glides over spiritualist “talking boards” such as the Ouiji board, spelling out words assumed to emanate from another plane of reality. A better picture of the planchette than the one evoked by “Ouiji board,” or at least one more specific to the planchette of James’s own time, can be found in Sargent’s Planchette, the book James reviewed signaling an early interest in spiritualism. The planchette, or “little plank,”

is a little heart-shaped table with three legs, one of which is a pointed lead-pencil, that can be slipped in and out of a socket, and by means of which marks can be made on paper. The other two legs have casters attached, which can be easily moved in any direction. The size of this table is usually about seven inches long and five wide. At the apex of the heart is the socket, lined with rubber, through which the pencil is thrust. . . . The form of the planchette is of little consequence, and may be regulated by the caprice of the manufacturer. The instrument is made light, so that the slightest application of force will move it. As for the insulated casters and other “patent” contrivances, they are of no account, except to give novelty to an advertisement.²²

Sargent locates the planchette as one of many tools in a long line of techniques for communicating with spirits, a genealogical descendent of rapping, where “communications were received by the tedious process of calling over the alphabet, and noting down the letters at which the rap was given,” or tipping tables, where “by arranging a pencil at the foot of a light table, and placing a sheet of paper under it, the intelligent force that was operating might produce written sentences”²³ (Figure 4). The planchette, for Sargent, was a version of the tipping table in miniature, with the table “simplified by substituting little tables, the size of a hand; then small baskets, pasteboard boxes, and finally the flat piece of wood, running on little wheels, and called Planchette.”²⁴ The planchette would usually be placed on a tabletop—the table itself was not completely dismissed—upon which people would lightly rest their fingers, either alone or in a small group. In doing so, the planchette “will soon begin to move; and this without any conscious intent or action on the part of any individual present, as there is reason to believe.”²⁵ Blank sheets of paper would be placed underneath the planchette and the device would write, directed not by those touching it, but by the energies moving through their bodies, animating the object itself. At least this was the assumption of the spiritualists. For Sargent, the planchette was an inscription device for the communication of spirits, moving beyond conscious intention toward a spiritualist agency that exceeds the will of an individual.

The planchette of James’s time was a machine for the generation of automatic writing. Its indexical communications emerged from the scrawling of legible traces, looped into script, from which observers would uncover meaning from written signs, meaning that spoke to the presence of an otherwise absent agency revealing itself through the medium. Spirits would speak through the hermeneutic examination of a looped line, written by a pencil under the command of a plank of wood on casters.²⁶ Sargent’s discussion of the planchette uses it as “a convenient signpost,”²⁷ where the material fact of intelligible writing given by the planchette, produced by no individual author—what is “written” is not consciously intended by any particular human mind—points to the limits of science to explain what would otherwise appear to be empirical evidence for supernatural phenomena. Hence, for Sargent, the necessity of spiritualism: to explain empirical phenomena the sciences were unwilling or unable to explain.²⁸ If spiritualism would claim that a lack of conscious intention revealed the agency of spirits was acting through those touching the planchette, James would come to explain actions that occur without conscious intention quite differently—that consciousness doesn’t really matter much at all, at least beyond its role in repressing the body’s urges. It is this link between the automatisms produced by the planchette and the (repressive) role of consciousness in dictating behavior that allowed the planchette to become an influence in James’s psychological writings. Yet this effect of the planchette on James’s thought did not emerge sui generis. James, I suggest, was seeking to resolve a problem from an often-unremarked influence: the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, combined with debates ongoing in spiritualist circles.

Schopenhauer’s Will

Spiritualism was not the only source of James’s interest in a separation between consciousness and embodied action. The year James published his review of Planchette, 1869, was also a year during the period James was known to be regularly experiencing moments of what we today would recognize as severe depression, a period often termed James’s “personal crisis.”²⁹ This depression has been seen to guide many of James’s interests in both religion and emotion, and some of James’s reflections on depression are memorably described in his lecture on “The Sick Soul,” from Varieties of Religious Experience. In this lecture, James remarks that there are many who see “the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.”³⁰ This “evil” may emerge from a belief in the misalignment between one’s self and one’s environment, but it also may be so foundational for one’s belief about existence that “no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy.”³¹ While it’s possible that James was describing his own depressive feelings, these comments seem to be veiled references to Schopenhauer, which James first read when he was sixteen. James continued to read Schopenhauer for years after, into the time of his “crisis,” and Schopenhauer’s pessimism is occasionally discussed in James’s writings.³²

Schopenhauer’s central claim can be summed up as follows: existence is characterized by a complete separation and misalignment between conscious knowledge (termed “representation”) and a single, universal, nonconscious force (termed “will”). This separation leads to self-destructive misery. Hence, Schopenhauer’s pessimism: this opposition cannot be overcome, one will never be happy or satisfied, one is always working to destroy oneself because of the incompatibility of consciousness and this singular vitalist force of the world. Change is illusion and one is forever stuck in the grips of the single, self-destructive will that unites all that exists. The solution to this misery is not to resist self-destruction, but to embrace an aesthetic attitude that works to soothe the misery one inevitably experiences, cultivating an aesthetic compassion and kindness for all others, who are also caught in the grip of this self-destruction.³³ In his Will to Believe, James claims that “pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.”³⁴ While James agrees with Schopenhauer in the refusal “of the notion of moral progress,”³⁵ he ultimately disagrees with Schopenhauer in accepting the existence of a foundational and self-destructive “will” that eternally turns the individual on itself, producing the existential misery James describes in “The Sick Soul.” Yet even if James rejects the foundational function of a Schopenhauerian misery, he still follows Schopenhauer in the argument that some foundational force—Schopenhauer called it “will,” James called it “emotion”—precedes and determines conscious existence.

Some of these similarities may seem a bit specious. But ideas central to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics are genealogical predecessors to James’s arguments about emotion. James’s reading of Schopenhauer is a reading of pessimistic “will” mediated through the practical techniques of American spiritualism. James’s interpretations of both Schopenhauer and spiritualism propose an underlying, often imperceptible force or substance that guides aspects of human behavior and feeling—both pessimism and spiritualism are “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Schopenhauer argues for a churning and destructive “will” that moves and determines the misery of an individual beyond their capacity for self-mastery. Spiritualism argues for a world filled with imperceptible agencies that shape and weakly determine everyday life. James articulates and rewrites these invisible, imperceptible forces as an embodied capacity for “emotion” that precedes conscious awareness, attempting to refuse the implied dualisms that guide both spiritualism and Schopenhauer. Most significantly, James demonstrates what an emotion is—as a nondualist, even monist force that precedes conscious perception—by using a spiritualist toy. James’s somewhat unorthodox interpretation of both pessimism and spiritualism unite in his planchette experiments. The planchette becomes a material means for demonstrating the empirical existence of will and emotion—and not a technique for manifesting the agency of the deceased—using the tools of spiritualism to revise arguments about human experience derived from Schopenhauer.³⁶

My claim, that the birth of James’s theory of emotion should be taken as an articulation of spiritualism and Schopenhauer made by way of the material technique of the planchette, is unconventional. James’s relation to Schopenhauer is rarely acknowledged, even though Schopenhauer’s “will,” along with his discussion of compassion and “loving kindness,” seem deeply resonant with much of James’s own philosophies.³⁷ James’s relation to spiritualism is regularly noted,³⁸ though more often than not it’s framed either as a reason for why his psychology was rejected by his contemporaries,³⁹ as a contextual factor shaping James’s philosophy in late nineteenth-century America,⁴⁰ or, if his spiritualist enthusiasms are celebrated, as the foundations for a popular “science” developed alongside James’s institutional research.⁴¹ I’m instead emphasizing the practical, material techniques of spiritualism as an appropriately pragmatic means for grounding and revising the neo-Kantian arguments about emotion provided by Schopenhauer, among others, using the techniques—if not the metaphysics—of spiritualism to propose a monistic theory of emotion that dislodges consciousness as necessary for emotional life.

James’s Theory of Emotion

Before I turn to describe James’s planchette experiments in detail, I want to describe his theory of emotion, along with its relation to Schopenhauer. James is a major figure in a long-standing tradition that distinguishes between conscious experience and the embodied, physiological sense of an emotion, or at least he is an individual often associated with the invention of this tradition. While a dualist divide between empirical awareness and the reality of existence is foundational for most philosophical positions that descend from both Descartes and Kant, including that of Schopenhauer, James is notable for placing the physicality of the body as a foundation that grounds and precedes empirical knowledge—a body that drifts into intertwined relations that comprise what James called “pure experience,” the “one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.”⁴² What we experience as empirical reality is, then, a “particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”⁴³ James’s general ontology presumes a single, monistic substance, only part of which enters into empirical perception. What this means for psychology, however, is that conscious, psychological experience is a selection—and thus secondary to the “pure experience” that grounds all that exists.

For most theories of emotion in James’s own time, along with what many people still hold as common sense, subjective, emotional thoughts cause someone to feel a specific way. One cries because they have sad thoughts in their conscious knowledge, because thought, assumedly, happens prior to the body’s experience. Consciousness is presumed to be the motor that drives the body.⁴⁴ James, on the other hand, suggests that the body comes first (and we might say, as well, that “consciousness” of emotion is thus a selection of the material “stuff” that constitutes emotional relations). One is sad because they are crying. Pure experience precedes empirical perception and knowledge. When it comes to what James refers to as the “coarser” emotions, such as grief, fear, rage, and love, he explains in this famous passage:

Our natural way of thinking . . . is that the mental perception of some fact excites the metal affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.⁴⁵

This understanding of emotion is today referred to as the James-Lange theory, named for James and his contemporary Carl Lange, who independently proposed a similar model that shaped James’s own arguments.⁴⁶ In his suggestion that bodily intensity precedes conscious knowledge, James has been foundational for affect theorists who argue that “affect” should be positioned as a capacity of the body that occurs prior to or outside of language and consciousness,⁴⁷ even though many of the distinctions James gives here would seem indebted to Schopenhauer, who framed this nonconscious capacity of the body as that which generates misery.

For James, the physical basis of the emotions precedes and is explained through conscious reflection. For Schopenhauer, the world as “will,” meaning the nonconscious volition of the body, the emotions, the instincts, the drives—which extend beyond the body into the world as a singular force that weaves its way through all—precede and produce (though remain forever distinct from) the world as “representation” we approach consciously. If, for Schopenhauer, the will is forever beyond conscious knowledge, we can see that James turned to spiritualism to access the will beyond representations, a rejection of the strict dualism of Schopenhauer in favor of a technical mediation of an otherwise occult real. James’s theories of emotion, thus, must be understood in the con- text of his experiments with the planchette. These experiments he used as empirical support for the existence of “hidden selves,” his name for the existence of multiple states of embodied awareness, not all of which are present to conscious knowledge. This likewise, if indirectly, provides support for some of his arguments about the body and the emotions as advanced in the famous chapter in The Principles of Psychology titled “The Emotions,” along with the influential, earlier version of that chapter published as “What Is an Emotion?” in Mind in 1884.⁴⁸ James’s experiments with the planchette were designed to provide an empirically based, scientific explanation for spiritual phenomena, one that suggested multiple levels of agency within the body’s psychology, in which a “real” agency exists somewhere beneath conscious knowledge and will. And likewise, the technical mediations of approaching the world beyond conscious intention enable James to refuse the necessary dualism of Schopenhauer, a dualism that also suggests the inescapability of misery and self-destruction.

James’s Planchette Experiments

On January 24, 1889, James and his colleague Richard Hodgson were joined by William L. Smith, a twenty-one-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had been practicing writing with the planchette for two years at the time. Hodgson was an Australian who had studied under Cambridge psychical researcher Henry Sidgwick and was known as being particularly adept at detecting fraud and slight-of-hand, discrediting claims of mediumship.⁴⁹ Smith, referred to as “S.” in James’s notes, sat with his right hand touching the planchette, his face buried in the crook of his left arm. James recounts:

The planchette began by illegible scrawling. After ten minutes I pricked the back of the right hand several times with a pin—no indication of feeling. Two pricks on the left hand were followed by withdrawal, and the question, “What did you do that for?”—to which I replied, “To find whether you were going to sleep.” The first legible words which were written after this were, You hurt me.

A pencil in the right hand was then tried instead of the planchette. Here again the first legible words were, No use [?] in trying to spel when you hurt me so. Next: Its no use trying to stop me writing by pricking. These writings were deciphered aloud in the hearing of S., who seemed slow to connect them with the two pinpricks on his left hand, which alone he had felt.⁵⁰

Smith’s hands gradually became numb to sensation. James continued to prick and pinch the left hand, and then the right wrist and fingers, to which Smith gave no clear visible or audible response. When asked later, Smith apparently had no feeling of the pricking and pinching, but his hand, independent of Smith’s conscious knowledge, wrote out, “Don’t you prick me anymore,” seemingly exhausted of any molestation by James.⁵¹

The experiment continued along these lines for some time, on different days, with James prodding and poking at Smith, with Smith’s hand protesting through automatic writing, produced by planchette or by pencil, Smith apparently oblivious to much of what was going on. “Here,” James concluded, “we have the consciousness of a subject split into two parts,” a consciousness that speaks via spoken language and a consciousness that communicates through the scrawled writing of a technically augmented hand. While the mouth may be blissfully unaware of its environment, the hand may know and remember as an “automatic consciousness” that carries “its own peculiar store of memories with it.”⁵² At other times James asserts to have witnessed Smith, again with his face buried in the crook of his left elbow, writing backward, in mirror-script, and “even beginning at the right-hand lower corner of the page and inscribing every word with its last letter first, etc., till the top is reached.”⁵³ These practices, seemingly veiled to Smith’s vision while he sat, face buried in his arm on the table, demanded an explanation that need not defer to conscious awareness or knowledge.

Other cases James refers to appear to reveal similar facts about consciousness, which also demonstrate how he saw these spiritualistic experiments as linked with established psychological traditions, albeit ones distinct from the emerging American experimental tradition. James references cases of hysterical epilepsy from both his colleagues in the United States and also from one of the founders of the French tradition of experimental psychology, Pierre Janet, and his research from the Parisian Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière. James interprets both automatic writing and hysteria as nonconscious states that reveal other “selves” and other “consciousnesses” that may be hidden, only exposed when anesthetized hands write under the influence of hypnotism, drugs, or technology. Quoting a report of a colleague from Providence, James recounts the case of a young woman, Miss Anna Winsor, aged around nineteen at the time of this entry:

February 1 to 11 [1861].—Under the influence of magnetism writes poetry; personates different persons, mostly those who have long since passed away. When in the magnetic state, whatever she does and says is not remembered when she comes out of it. Commences a series of drawings with her right paralyzed hand, “Old Stump.” Also writes poetry with it. Whatever “Stump” writes, or draws, or does, she appears to take no interest in; says it is none of hers, and that she wants nothing to do with “Stump” or “Stump’s.” I have sat by her bed and engaged her in conversation, and drawn her attention in various ways, while the writing and drawing has been uninterrupted.⁵⁴

“Stump,” Winsor’s name for her right arm and hand, seems to be completely beyond her control, and is wholly numb to any sensation. Winsor writes in her sleep, in the dark, and during a period when she appears to be blind. Winsor claims no knowledge of French or Latin, and yet “Stump” can compose rhyming verses in those languages. These cases, James concludes, demonstrate kinds of agency beyond conscious will.

James draws two notable conclusions from his experiments with the planchette and examples from research on hysteria and hypnotism. First, the body can store memories completely divorced from any conscious understanding of “memory.” There is a kind of memory that is explicitly embodied and need not defer to any direct conscious awareness.⁵⁵ Memory, thus, is comprised of the same material as the rest of the body, located within the body and its movements. Second, techniques like the automatic writing of the planchette, or hypnotism, reveal how one can liberate the memory or agency of the body, enabling the body to act divorced from conscious knowledge. Discussing Janet’s research at the Salpêtrière on hysteria and somnambulism, James suggests that Janet has revealed how the body acts without conscious awareness:

He has been enabled to do this by tapping the submerged consciousness and making it respond in certain peculiar ways. He found in several subjects, when the ordinary or primary consciousness was fully absorbed in conversation with a visitor (and the reader will remember how absolutely these hysterics then lapse into oblivion of surrounding things), that the submerged self would hear his voice if he came up and addressed the subject in a whisper; and would respond either by obeying such orders as he gave, or by gestures, or, finally, by pencil-writing on a sheet of paper placed under the hand. The ostensible consciousness, meanwhile, would go on with the conversation, entirely unaware of the gestures, acts, or writing performances of the hand.⁵⁶

Be it through distraction, drugs, or “disorder,” the ability to do two things at once—without one of them directly attended to by consciousness—suggests to James a multiplicity of agencies and “selves” within one body, performing different acts in relatively independent ways. When consciousness is dislocated as the seat of agency, tools like the planchette can enable kinds of authorship beyond individual, conscious agency.⁵⁷ When consciousness is actively bracketed, the body is transformed into a writing machine, the body’s true agency is finally revealed, an agency that uncovers to James the neurology of emotion as that which precedes conscious experience.

At the same time, James did not suggest that consciousness or will was an illusion, an unnecessary byproduct of the brain, a means that forever obscures reality. He did not truly embrace the belief that consciousness fundamentally hid a “self” that would be revealed by experiments with something like the planchette. To be a bit reductive at this point, James understood consciousness as a fundamentally repressive force that exists at the same ontological level as preconscious emotions, inhibiting reactions the body otherwise performs automatically. Altered states of experience, in which the body is numb to experience and beyond conscious control, states produced by hypnotism, drugs, and tools like the planchette, were necessary to liberate the body from the repressive acts of will that characterized conscious choice. Again, this has deep Schopenhauerian resonances. For Schopenhauer, a cultivation of aesthetic judgment and compassion would assuage the destructive force of will that forever exists beyond experience.

The distinction here, which underlies the revelation of “emotion” for James, seems dangerously close to a binary distinction between two completely different levels of experience, conscious and nonconscious. But this was a binary James worked to do away with through a spiritualistic means that both embraced but also rejected spiritualist metaphysics. We have a distinction between sensation and numbness, in which the liberation of the body’s “true” emotional capacities requires the numbing of consciousness, be it through drugs, distraction, hypnotism, or spiritualist toys. Conscious knowledge of the world fundamentally limits the capacities of the body and the capacities of experience, and the empirical is a boundary that circumscribes (hence, a turn to the radical empiricism that gets beyond immediate empirical sensation). But, at the same time, James would later argue that we must understand the limitation placed on pure experience as part of pure experience itself, otherwise one ultimately embraces the dualisms of neo-Kantians like Schopenhauer. “If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier forms of dualism” like those of Descartes, “we shall have expelled all forms if we are able to expel neo-Kantisms in its turn.”⁵⁸ What might it mean to expel these dualisms, though? Between conscious and unconscious experience, between the empirical and the radically empirical?

We have with James the (unsteady) belief that conscious thought and experience are that which repress the affective capacities of the body, a belief that James would later attempt to rethink or challenge, as this interpretation of the emotions still seemed guided by the dualisms of Kantians such as Schopenhauer. With the planchette, affects are the movements the body produces automatically. Consciousness seems to obscure these movements, actively working to suppress the body’s affective capacities. In his later work, however, as he developed his radical empiricism more thoroughly, James attempted to push beyond this dualism through a perspective we might today call “materialist,” even though James does not use this term (in part because materialism, for him, was a perspective more or less consonant with the positivist empiricism of the other major psychologists at the time). Consciousness, as something that exists as “mind” separate from the reality of the world, James tells us, “That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.”⁵⁹

Even in the Principles, I should note, James did not think of this repression as a problem to overcome—at least completely. This is unlike many affect theorists today, who seem to argue that attention to the affective capacities of the body is somehow a space for political engagement or liberation.⁶⁰ Even if affect theory today presumes something akin to James’s “pure experience,” a monistic matter-energy that unites all, a break between James and those writing today can be found in an implicit politics this ontology is often presumed to carry.⁶¹ If, as I’m suggesting, the foundations for James’s theory of emotion can be found in Schopenhauer, then this idea would be fairly horrific—“liberating” the emotions (or liberating Schopenhauer’s will) would lead to self-annihilation and deep depression, feelings that probably led James to Schopenhauer in the first place. Rather, for James, the point of human development, of education and cultivation, would instill in the human body good “habits” to redirect and limit the instinctual, autonomic reactions that the body would perform without education, remaking the brain through its innate plasticity. The point of “culture,” thinking of culture as a term for the pedagogical shaping of the human being through education, was to teach proper ways of limiting and inhibiting the body’s affective capacities.⁶² Consciousness, rather than a side effect of the brain, was a mechanism for the control and management of the body. Instead of a celebration of the body’s affective capacities, James gives us an understanding of consciousness and rationality as a yoke through which the body’s desires would be channeled, without which the body is undisciplined, disordered, and even “perverted.” This is a point to which I’ll return. But first, I want to elaborate further how James’s arguments about the planchette derived from debates within spiritualist publics.

Reverend William Weston Patton’s Planchette

James was not the first person to make the argument sketched above about the planchette, will, and consciousness, even if other versions of this claim did not relate the planchette to a philosophical metaphysics like that of Schopenhauer. Rather, explanations like James’s occurred in spiritualistic and religious publics to explain (and potentially refute) the idea that the planchette was a tool for accessing a metaphysical plane inhabited by spirits. In 1868, one year before James’s review of Sargent’s book, Reverend William Weston Patton, a Congregationalist pastor and abolitionist—most remembered today for chairing the Chicago committee that asked Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, serving as the fifth president of Howard University, and for his lyrics to the song “John Brown’s Body”—published in the December 16, 1861 issue of the Chicago Tribune, glorifying the violent acts of Brown even more than previous versions of the song—would write a short article on the planchette in the Chicago-based Congregationalist newspaper he edited, The Advance. Patton began his piece with an ambivalent judgment of the planchette, which he offered in opposition to claims from the Vatican that associated it with a kind of Satanism:

This is the name of an instrument of amusement in the family . . . which may be termed a philosophical toy. Some of the Romish dignitaries, indeed, have elevated it to the mysterious and dubious honor of being an instrument of literal deviltry. But that is as near as they ever get to science. . . . Instead of being the devil’s tool, Planchette is more likely to be the means of exposing the errors and frauds of modern Spiritualism which the devil has so successfully employed to shake the faith and undermine the morals of thousands.⁶³

If the planchette is a means of exposing the fraudulence of spiritualism, how might it do so? How might it work to undermine the cause into which it is most often enlisted?

Patton, like James, accepts the basic foundations of what a planchette is assumed to do—to write without conscious intention willing that which is written. But he sees his explanation as one that disproves spiritualism in the name of a rationalist explanation for consciousness—again, much like James seems to do in the Principles. Patton’s explanation is fascinating for its similarity to James’s arguments about emotion, and I do not think is widely known, so I quote it here at length:

How, then, shall we account for the writing which is performed without any direct volition? We will give the result of our own experiments and reflections. Our method of explanation refers it to an automatic power of the mind separate from conscious volition. Life reveals its mysterious nature by two kinds of action—voluntary, as when one wills to raise his arm, and automatic, as in the action of the heart, which beats on irrespective of volition, whether we are sleeping or waking. The act of breathing comes still closer to the idea, since we can stop it and renew it by our will, at any moment, and yet it also goes on in the automatic way without conscious purpose on our part, and this latter is the usual mode. Let us call to mind the fact that the soul is also capable of simultaneous thoughts, one train of which may be connected with outward acts, and the other not. Thus a man may read aloud to others, and his mind at the same time revolve a different subject. Or one may write, in the glow of composition, and while his mind, through the pen, traces the end of one sentence, by another and simultaneous act, it is considering the next sentence. Very common is the experience of an automatic power in the pen, by which it finishes a word, or two or three words, after the thoughts have consciously gone on to what is to follow. We infer, then, from ordinary facts known to the habitual penman, that if a fixed idea is in the mind, at a time when the nervous and volitional powers are exercised with a pen, it will often express itself spontaneously through the pen, when the mental faculties are at work otherwise. We suppose then, that Planchette is simply an arrangement by which, through the out-stretched arms and fingers, the mind comes into such relation to the exceedingly delicate movements of the pencil, that its automatic power finds play, and the ideas present in the mind, are transferred unconsciously to paper. Indeed, all the phenomena of of [sic] somnambulism prove the possibility of varied and continuous inward and outward action, separated from consciousness. Consciousness goes to sleep, but the automatic powers are exercised, in walking, sewing, writing and the like. Planchette puts the consciousness into this condition of isolation, so that the will does not seem to act, and yet the mind transmits its thoughts to the pencil and moves it to write . . . The Romish bishops have been in haste in forbidding their people to use Planchette. It is but a philosophic toy, which may be used to bring to light hidden connections of the mind and body, and to refute the assumption of Spiritism.⁶⁴

I do not know if James was familiar with Patton’s arguments. The Advance was a Chicago-based publication distributed to Congregationalist churches, including those in Massachusetts and New England more broadly. Throughout the majority of 1868, James was in Germany, returning to Boston in November (Patton’s article was published on November 12). But we do have evidence that those attending to the debates around spiritualism were familiar with Patton’s interpretation of the planchette, and discussions of his explanation could be found in some relatively popular spiritualist publications. It was discussed at some length in the article “The Planchette Mystery,” initially unsigned and published in The Phrenological Journal and Packard’s Monthly, republished in 1870 as a full pamphlet attributed to “A Truth-Seeker.”⁶⁵ This pamphlet was later reprinted in the book The Salem Witchcraft, The Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism, with Dr. Doddridge’s Dream, edited by the New York–based publisher Samuel R. Wells, who also published the Phrenological Journal.⁶⁶ The writer of “The Planchette Mystery” is today known to be William Fishbough, a Universalist pastor who was a very early public defender of spiritualism in America, seeing spiritualism as completely consonant with Christianity. Fishbough was also well-known as the primary documenter of the “otherworldly messages” received by the teenage medium Andrew Jackson Davis.⁶⁷ Given James’s relation to the varied Societies of Psychical Researchers, he was most likely familiar with some of these publications and people.

My point here is not that James’s theory of emotion emerged from elsewhere, that he plagiarized Patton in some way. Patton’s explanations for the planchette’s ability to write without conscious intention precede and mirror many of James’s arguments, to be sure. But rather, I’m suggesting that the ideas James proposed about consciousness and emotion were central to spiritualistic debates about the planchette prior to their emergence into American psychology. The idea that the planchette revealed not a connection to spirits but the fact that the self could be split into multiple agencies that remain beyond conscious awareness was an argument proposed to describe how a planchette works before it was proposed to describe how the emotions work. What this suggests to me is that James’s understanding of emotion, of consciousness, of will—while more detailed than Patton’s—is an elaboration of a debate that preexisted psychological arguments about emotion, one in which a range of religious figures, spiritualists, and journalists debated the possibility of a device to write without thought. James saw how this debate was, in fact, one that spoke to the arguments of early psychologists in the United States, if one that carried with it a taint of pseudoscientific mysticism that led to perpetual questions about James’s relation to “science.”

Habit and Repression

What separated James from those discussing spiritualism was how, as I’ve been suggesting, he used these arguments not only to propose a model of embodied emotion as preceding consciousness, but also to further engage with problems of consciousness and dualism by way of his planchette experiments. Schopenhauer, following some of Kant’s dualisms, maintained a strict separation between “representation” and “will,” a fundamental reality that exists but is impossible to access. Spiritualism presumes an occult knowledge of a world beyond our own that remains unseen except in exceptional, liminal contexts, except by a few gifted and unique individuals. The planchette, in producing a form of unwilled, nonconscious agency, also seems to demonstrate a dualistic split between conscious knowledge and unconscious action. James, in his attempt to undermine these dualisms, would also work to undermine the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness.

The distinction between conscious perception and unconscious action, James claimed, “is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.”⁶⁸ The theories of James’s contemporaries had to suggest some mechanism through which a material thing is not registered by the mind—there are, after all, limits to human perception. Concepts like a threshold of visible and audible phenomena, of apperception, so central for the psychophysical work of Fechner and Wundt, inevitably suggest that the world is divided up into parts upon our experience of it. For James, these arguments drift into idealism. The experience of the human body is, in some way or another, rendered distinct from the reality of the material world, a dualism that requires an absolute divorce between sensory awareness and the reality of existence, as was the case with Kant and Schopenhauer. Thus, James argues, any argument that suggests how something in the world exists and is not registered in some way by the body should be dismissed, because material reality cannot be differentiated into constituent parts—an argument foundational for his radical empiricism.

Or, one cannot separate the brain’s activity from the total experience one has of the world—one’s awareness of the world directly and completely corresponds to what the brain registers. This assumes an empirical parallelism—what is empirically sensed correlates with the world, “a blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes . . . Such a mere admission of the empirical parallelism will there appear the wisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will remain positivistic and non-metaphysical.”⁶⁹ For James, then, there cannot be any assumption of an unconscious mind that exists beneath consciousness, at least if one wants to advance positivist understandings of mental phenomena (which, admittedly, was something James was ultimately ambivalent about). But there can be the assumption that multiple states of consciousness exist—or perhaps not consciousness, but experience.⁷⁰ The world may not fully correspond to our experience, but our empirical sense of reality, in some way, must correspond to what is happening in our brain. It is not so much that parts of the world are impossible to sense, that there are thresholds of perception or apperception. Rather, active exclusions render the continuity of empirical reality into discontinuous oppositions.

My interest here is less with how James understands the relation between sensation and the world than in how, in making this argument, he also draws upon some of the conclusions of his spiritualistic experiments to deny the significance of consciousness and intention. This selection is not grounded in a distinction between consciousness and the unconscious, about a difference between perception and apperception. It must be grounded in something else. James uses hypnotism as an example for why unconscious states do not exist, though the example of hypnotism only seems to make sense given how James has dislodged conscious- ness as the primary function of the brain—an explanation for hypnotism that follows his spiritualistic experiments with the planchette. Hypnotism suggests not an unconscious state that is secondary, but the revelation of the primary state of experience, a wholeness that is obscured through conscious experience. Seemingly “nonconscious” or “unconscious” experiences like hypnotic states demonstrate not that an unconscious exists, but that conscious awareness is not particularly essential for much of human life—consciousness is a selection of what the body responds to and reacts to, only occurring after sensation has already taken place.

We can see this even more explicitly when James turns to discuss instinct and habit. Any experience leads, intrinsically, to the body moving. Experience is fundamentally affective; it serves as a stimulus that ignites a reflex in the brain that is related to the body as a whole.⁷¹ The physiology of the body as a single, unified organism is that which receives primary consideration, not consciousness. But, as James notes, “Some of the actions aroused in us by objects go no further than our own bodies,”⁷² meaning that some stimuli do not appear to manifest as physical movement. Rather, they stop within the body—the body prevents a specific reaction from taking place. There is some mechanism in the body that enables specific reflexes to become visible through the expression of movement, while others remain hidden.

Above, I mentioned that a major distinction between James and affect theorists today is in how James denies, subtly, that an affective liberation is desirable. Readings of James that suggest his theory of emotion descends from Spinoza presume this “liberation” to be something that expands the capacities of a body (and is therefore desirable or ethical in some form). But foregrounding the relation between Schopenhauer and some of James’s arguments reveals something different—namely, how an inability to restrict and repress the body’s affective capacity can lead to violence and criminality. Some emotions are best trained out of the body. While something like the planchette can reveal the body’s imbrication with a world beyond conscious experience, this is not a state in which one should remain indefinitely. The mechanism that enables specific reflexes to hide is, explicitly, education, training, and cultivation of the body.

The brain, for James, is plastic, and he provides an understanding of neurological development that articulates a clear theory of what we would today call “neuroplasticity.” Plasticity, for James, “means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once,” and, due to the brain’s plasticity, learning instills not knowledge per se, but habit : “the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed.”⁷³ We are born with specific capacities, but, through training and experience, our capacities are shaped and transformed, changing with them the very material organization of the body and brain. Conscious thought plays no real role here, aside from inhibiting innate instincts to transform instinct into habit, where conscious thought again recedes.

James gives the following, particularly disturbing example of an instinct to be trained out of one’s body:

The boys who pull out grasshoppers’ legs and butterflies’ wings, and disembowel every frog they catch, have no thought at all about the matter. The creatures tempt their hands to a fascinating occupation, to which they have to yield. It is with them as with the “boy-fiend” Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little girl’s throat, “just to see how she’d act.” The normal provocative of the impulse are all living beasts, great and small, toward which a contrary habit has not been formed—all human beings in whom we perceive a certain intent towards us, and a large number of human beings who offend us peremptorily, either by look, or gait, or by some circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by sympathy, and by reflection calling up impulses of an opposite kind, civilized men lose the habit of acting out their pugnacious instincts in a perfectly natural way, and a passing feeling of anger, with its comparatively faint bodily expressions, may be the limit of their physical combativeness.⁷⁴

Were it not for civilization and cultivation, James seems to be suggesting, we would all be out fighting, ripping the bodies of insects to shreds, eviscerating all that which appears to us as alive—at least those living beings that appear and move in ways we find objectionable. But, thankfully, our brains are plastic, and new habits can be drilled into our bodies. We can learn “sympathy,” and though the mere existence of another may “offend” our sensibility, through proper training the only bodily response may be a minor, passing flutter of rage.

These claims are deeply Schopenhauerian. In his “Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals,” Schopenhauer argues that compassion is the basis of justice and kindness, and kindness is ultimately “reserved for one who is suffering in some respect or other. For we do not sympathize with the happy one as such; rather he remains as such foreign to our heart.”⁷⁵ And what of the anger, rage, and violence James notes? Schopenhauer makes a similar point:

For what rain is to fire, compassion is to anger. For this reason I advise anyone who would prefer not having something to regret, if he is inflamed with anger towards somebody, to think of inflicting a great suffering on him—he should vividly imagine that he had inflicted it on him already, see him now wrestling with his mental or bodily pains, or his distress and misery, and have to say to himself: this is my work. If anything is capable of damping down his anger, it is this . . . Our spiteful mood towards others is displaced by nothing so easily as when we take up a viewpoint from which they make a claim on our compassion.⁷⁶

The will (or instinct) may direct and provoke, but the role of thought (of compassion, of sympathy, of—might we say, avant la lettre—empathy, even though Schopenhauer is ultimately suggesting one to imagine the consequences of rage and violence rather than entering into another) is there to prevent and mitigate against the baser reactions of the body.

To focus on a small point in James’s example above, the invocation and defense of Jesse Pomeroy is strange. Pomeroy, known as “The Boston Boy Fiend” and “The Boy Torturer,” credited with several brutal beatings and murders that occurred in the Boston area from 1871 to 1874, is the youngest person to have ever been convicted of murder in the first degree in the history of Massachusetts (Figure 5). James is arguing that Pomeroy’s crime is a result of an inability to curtail innate human urges. The human body is inclined toward anger, toward violence. These are some of the “coarser emotions” that James argues emerge prior to conscious knowledge, emotions central to some of Schopenhauer’s understandings of will. For James, education, the cultivation of habits that transform the brain through plasticity, is there to repress these instinctual emotions through habituation, such as the desire to kill another (or, one could suppose, the desire of curiosity—as it seems that James believed that Pomeroy’s real evil was his wonderment about another’s reactions upon the infliction of a mortal wound).

[Habit] alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and save[s] the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. . . . It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing.⁷⁷

Education is there to cultivate beasts into humans, and education is that which provides the habits that then create the social divisions that are classes.

We do not have conscious thoughts with instinct, we do not consciously think when performing that which is habitual, the latter of which emerges from training early in life that modifies the plasticity of the brain. Habit forms as we are taught how to behave, and, for James, it provides the grounds upon which we tread the entire rest of our lives. Our brains are more plastic in our youth, more easily reshaped than later in life. Habits acquired in our early life determine our direction, our orientation, from which we face the world for our years to come, hammering out of us antisocial behaviors for ones that are of positive social value.⁷⁸ This, of course, is also a fascinating defense of a “cultural” explanation of violence. It’s not so much that Pomeroy, for instance, was doomed to a life of crime from his birth, but that his drift toward crime and murder emerged from his everyday life, failing to instill habits that would prevent the expression of rage, viciousness, and, perhaps, morbid curiosity.

So, what does consciousness do? Consciousness is not illusory, but a secondary epiphenomenon produced by the brain to explain its reactions. We may find ourselves inspired to act in ways that are fundamentally beyond our control, actions that lead, for James, to “perversion.” Consciousness is there to prohibit. In cases of “explosive will” the body reacts too quickly for consciousness to disallow its activity (as one flies into a rage, for instance). With “obstructed will,” a state like drunkenness may cause one to act on impulses that would otherwise be repressed. We do not act because we think, thinking prohibits acts that would otherwise take place. Consciousness is not “the prime condition of impulsive power,” it is “the prime condition of inhibitive power.”⁷⁹ This, additionally, takes place without any adjudication as to experiences like pleasure or pain:

As I do not breathe for the pleasure of breathing, but simply find that I am breathing, so I do not write for the pleasure of the writing, but simply because I have once begun, and being in a state of intellectual excitement which keeps venting itself in that way, find that I am writing still. Who will pretend that when he idly fingers his knife-handle at the table, it is for the sake of any pleasure which it gives him, or pain which he thereby avoids. We do all these things because at the moment we cannot help it; our nervous systems are so shaped that they overflow in just that way.⁸⁰

The natural state of the human being is automatism, be it with acts as diverse as breathing, fondling a knife, or generating textual output on paper. Our automatic actions come from training, in-habited within the plasticity of the brain. Nonetheless, consciousness is there to prohibit specific acts from happening, to make sure some thoughts lead nowhere, to stop some impulses in the brain from manifesting as action. It should be easy to write if we remove that which inhibits us. The training of the body should be there to remove how will prevents us from acting, maintaining good habits for a productive life.

“What checks our impulses is the mere thinking of reasons to the contrary,” suggests James, a line that mirrors Schopenhauer, “it is their bare presence to the mind which gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, impossible to perform. If we could only forget our scruples, our doubts, our fears, what exultant energy we should for a while display!”⁸¹ But James already knew of states that permitted these scruples, doubts, and fears to be forgotten: hypnotism, drugs, the ecstasy of mysticism. And, of course, the automatic writing of the planchette. The goal of the mystical, here, is to leave consciousness behind, to liberate the body from the repression of consciousness, to return to the primal state of the human being, to act without thought. But also, these ecstatic states of religious ecstasy, even if they reveal the embeddedness of an individual within the whole of pure experience, are states that likewise liberate the most base, primal, destructive urges of humanity—violence, rage, anger—which must be educated out of the body and replaced with different habits of compassion, of kindness, of concern. But ideally, once habituated, these feelings will likewise become automatic and thoughtless.

Doing and Thinking

The goal of acting is elevated to the highest authority in James’s world. Doing is more important than thinking and dwelling in a world of thoughts—without some sort of “action”—is the very definition of moral impoverishment.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better . . . There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.⁸²

Feeling is not doing. Thinking is not doing. Art may produce some emotional response, but the point should be to act on that emotion, not to think about it.⁸³ Fiction must transfer into reality. The point should be to move, not to contemplate. Thinking, living a life of ideas and imagined alternatives to the reality of this world, is the lowest form of living for James.

Later in his life, upon developing his philosophical arguments about pragmatism, James defines his perspective as the “attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”⁸⁴ Rather than speculation on ontology, truth is, in other words, what works. We can already see this perspective in his stress on action rather than thought. Truth moves. It is, for James, that which is found in action, in experience, not in conscious reflection and contemplation. The only thought that has value is that which leads to action—and, since thought often serves to repress and inhibit action, then there is little value to thought beyond that which prohibits “perversions.” Ideally, these thoughts change the brain through its plasticity, becoming habit, in which thought need happen no longer.

Planchettes, along with the other spiritualist acts James investigated, are today no longer thought by many to reveal any sort of truth, psychical or otherwise. Long explained and dismissed, be it through the discovery of the technical inventiveness by which someone was able to manipulate a tipping table, be it through the hermeneutic interpretation of the looping writing generated by “spirits,”⁸⁵ be it through the fabrication of photographic evidence of hypnotic, hysteric states,⁸⁶ the “unclassified residuum” of the psychical research that so fascinated James has been explained away. Yet his arguments about consciousness, will, and affect remain. As Bruno Latour has suggested, by way of James, “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans.”⁸⁷ Perhaps we can say that the persistence of James’s arguments about consciousness and the body is the ultimate proof of James’s pragmatism. The “truth” of the body he identified emerged, in part, from evidence supplied by an apparatus known, today, to reveal little we should regard as “true.” Psychical research has regularly been disproven by the scientific method, and yet the etchings of a planchette still provide us with normative claims about what a body is and does, and how conscious will is secondary to affect.

Ideas, for James, come from somewhere. Yet that somewhere is not conscious thought. They come from pure experience, experience that, when properly accessed, reconfigures the brain. For those who write, the words that emanate from one’s hand are not consciously willed but emanate from the “hidden self” inside. They just happen if consciousness remains at bay, not getting in the way to prohibit words written down on paper, an expression of the brain and, thus, of experience. I can only write myself once I stop talking, once I stop thinking.

“Normal Motor Automatism”

Let me conclude with a brief coda before I move on. Gertrude Stein, while a student at Harvard, performed a series of experiments with the planchette under direction of James and Hugo Münsterberg—a fact that reveals, at least partially, how James’s experimental method with the planchette was at least partially acceptable to Münsterberg, one of James’s contemporaries who was well known for lambasting James’s interest in spiritualism, rejecting much of James’s work as beyond the boundaries of a truly scientific psychology. The results of these experiments were published in 1896, the timing of which suggests that it’s possible that Stein was experimenting with one of the planchettes that James had purchased. In the article, cowritten with Leon M. Solomons and titled “Normal Motor Automatism,” Stein used a planchette to “split” her consciousness, writing while talking with others, writing while reading aloud, and so on.⁸⁸ Though not referenced in their article, Stein and Solomons worked to reproduce the conditions that James had previously performed in his experiments with Richard Hodgson and William L. Smith a few years prior—even eventually replacing the planchette with a normal pencil, just as James had done with Smith. Solomons and Stein’s re-creation of James’s experiment is well-known, in part because of its notorious location within debates about the aesthetic value of Stein’s writing. And yet the fact that Stein was reconstructing one of the most significant experiments James ever performed, duplicating its findings, is almost never acknowledged—“Normal Motor Automatism” does not even mention James once, concealing his influence on Stein and Solomons’s experiment.⁸⁹

The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner once suggested, in a 1934 article written for The Atlantic Monthly, that Stein’s Tender Buttons was the product of automatic writing performed with the planchette.⁹⁰ (This claim, I’ll note, Skinner was only able to make because his arguments were “premised on a series of factual and interpretive mistakes.”)⁹¹ Given the similarities between Stein’s descriptions of automatic writing in her article and the response of what Skinner calls the “average reader” when confronted with Tender Buttons, Skinner concludes that Stein’s writings likely have the same origins as her psychological experiments. Skinner sees Tender Buttons as having the same characteristics Stein uses to describe automatic writing, “The stuff is grammatical, and the words and phrases fit together all right, but there is not much connected thought.”⁹² Tender Buttons appears to be “the stream of consciousness of a woman without a past.” Skinner concludes:

Although it is quite plausible that the work is due to a second personality successfully split off from Miss Stein’s conscious self, it is a very flimsy sort of personality indeed. It is intellectually unopinionated, is emotionally cold, and has no past. It is unread and unlearned beyond grammar school. . . . The superficial character of the inferential author or Tender Buttons consequently adds credibility to the theory of automatic authorship.⁹³

Tender Buttons, for Skinner at least, provides a literary refutation of James’s arguments about consciousness and the body, even though he seems to be going after Stein and not James, not making the connection between Stein’s experiment and James’s own theory of emotion—James is not mentioned by Skinner, his planchette experiment neglected, the link between Stein’s automatism and James’s understanding of emotion forgotten.

I conclude here with Skinner’s questionable evaluation of Stein (and, by extension, James) to indicate one way that arguments about what an emotion is depend on a specific medium used to write the body. These media are inevitably in dispute, documenting experiences that may be seen as “more” or “less” full, “more” or “less” real, as “more” or “less” affective. There’s nothing intrinsically in these experiments that provides us with an evaluation of what is or is not “affective,” and there’s nothing in the planchette that indicates how automatism is or is not an essential capacity of an emotional body unconstrained by conscious thought. Regardless, the planchette was a tool that inscribed a truth about emotion that came to be debated since James’s initial experiments: that affect precedes the body and is more primary than conscious experience. Münsterberg eventually noted his disagreement with James on the significance of psychical research: “Mysticism and mediums were one thing, psychology was quite another. Experimental psychology and psychic hocus-pocus did not mix.”⁹⁴ I feel this claim should be taken as less about James’s arguments than about his methods and their link with spiritualism. James’s contemporaries were able to accept his arguments as long as they never accepted the material, empirical means with which he made them, and thus erased from the history of emotions the material function of a medium in grounding the ontology of the body, suggesting James merely used an “introspective” method without experimental grounding.

If we foreground the planchette, then affect is not just about the body moving, but about the body writing, without thought, without awareness —and, perhaps, without meaning. And it is this writing that is the expression of the true, inner self, uninhibited by the repression of consciousness. As I write myself, truth only emerges from the unthought, the unwilled, the unintended. Truth comes from movement, the act of writing, not the intent of writing, not the meaning of writing. It is affect that is true, not thought, not knowledge—yet affect is inextricably bound with a medium, a medium whose experimental context has been forgotten.