‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of ‘unconscious cerebration’
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‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of ‘unconscious cerebration’
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Alessandra Violi
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‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of ‘unconscious cerebration’
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              ‘Il corpo incantato’.
        Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of
           ‘unconscious cerebration’

                                  Alessandra Violi



Abstract
      The essay explores the notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’ elaborated by
British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in the first half of the
nineteenth century, foregrounding its hybrid genealogy and its afterlife in both
science and magic, as well as its transnational impact on the arts and psychology
as an already available alternative to the Freudian unconscious. Carpenter’s
idea of a corporeal unconscious is traced to the intersections of (occult) science,
literature and visual culture, but also comparatively as it rippled off into
European, American and Russian cultures, offering a shared notion of a bodily,
physiological nonconscious that the Freudian tradition in psychoanalysis has
long eclipsed and obscured. Italian Futurism is taken as a test case of the rich,
and still underexplored, potentials of Carpenter’s intuition for an archeology
both of ‘the unconscious’ and of contemporary returns in the humanities to
materiality and embodiment.



Keywords
    William Benjamin Carpenter; Unconscious cerebration; Ideo-motor action;
Magic; Embodiment; William James; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Between, vol. XI, n. 21 (Maggio/May 2021)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4383
                                         Between, vol. XI, n. 21 (Maggio/May 2021)




          ‘Il corpo incantato’.
    Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of
       ‘unconscious cerebration’
                          Alessandra Violi


                           History matters


      In her recent Unthought, Katherine Hayles claims that the latest
neuroscientific discoveries confirming the existence of nonconscious
cognitive processes point to a «terra incognita» for the humanities
(Hayles 2017: 1). Unlike the Freudian unconscious, the ‘nonconscious’
coincides with the materiality of bodily physiology and neuromotor
automatisms, with a corporeal unconscious whose processes, though
essential for consciousness to function, remain largely unacknowledged
and inaccessible to conscious introspection. As well as challenging
received notions of how consciousness operates, these recent findings
are described by Hayles as striking a final blow to the supremacy of the
human over other non-human biological and technical systems, thus
working in tandem with contemporary ‘new materialist’ philosophies
which, «focussing on the grittiness of actual material processes, […]
introduce materiality, along with its complex interactions, into
humanities discourses that for too long and too often have been
oblivious to the fact that all higher consciousness and linguistic acts […]
must in the first instance emerge from underlying material processes»
(ibid.: 65).
      Yet, as Marcel Gauchet and Jonathan Miller, among others, have
shown, the category of a corporeal, physiological nonconscious is by no



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means a newcomer on the scene, replacing outmoded and archaic forms
of belief. What we have is rather a «connu méconnu» (Gauchet 1992: 26),
a known disowned which emerged from nineteenth-century psychology
and has ended up «regrettably overshadowed» (Miller 1995: 28) by the
more widely-recognized Freudian unconscious. The reasons for this
cultural neglect are various, and may be partly attributable to the
elusiveness of the corporeal nonconscious, whose ambivalent status,
«neither eidetic in the mental sense of consciousness nor oneiric in the
sense of an irrational unconscious» (Austin 2018: 8), makes it especially
resistant to representation. But they certainly have to do with the
tangled, ‘undisciplined’ history of a category miscegenated with the
magic of phenomena such as mesmerism and spiritualism, as one of the
founders of French ‘psychologie nouvelle’, Pierre Janet, was ready to
admit by devoting a whole chapter of his Automatisme psychologique
(1889) to the hybrid genealogy of his science in the culture of ‘the
marvellous’ (Plas 2000).
      In what follows, I trace this knotted germination, taking as a case
in point physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter’s notions of ‘ideo-
motor action’ and ‘unconscious cerebration’, conceived in the 1850s out
of an investigation into mesmerism and table turning in spiritualistic
séances. Although it set off a materialist trajectory in British, and later
European, psycho-physiology, enabling the «imagining of the mind’s
comprehensive embodiment for the first time in history» (Rylance 2000:
80), Carpenter’s work was eclipsed in subsequent histories of the
unconscious (Gauchet 1992: 25-6), despite the enormous popularity that
the concept of unconscious cerebration enjoyed in the cultural
imaginary of the nineteenth century and beyond, travelling across
science, medicine, magic, technology and aesthetics. As Jenny Bourne
Taylor has pointed out, the state of research into the unconscious was
extremely fluid at a time when what are now our disciplinary
boundaries between science and the humanities, or indeed between the
‘sciences of the mind’ and the ‘occult sciences’, «would have been
meaningless» (Bourne Taylor 1997: 142). Thus, the conundrum whether
life and mind were mechanical – defined and dominated by
neurophysiological operations that appeared involuntary and beyond


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rational control – reverberated across the newly-invented laboratories of
experimental psychology, the clinical study of neuropathologies,
physiological aesthetics, spiritualist mediums and technical media,
originating the investigation into the life of matter and the non-
anthropocentric outlook that laid the ground for subsequent
biophilosophies.
      My snapshots from this territory are offered also as a rethinking of
the role of the nonconscious in the modernist avantgarde, in particular
in the Italian Futurists. The movement’s bizarre combination of
technophilia and occultism has been commented on before (most
eloquently by Chessa 2012), but I take Marinetti’s performing art of
«fisicofollia» (body-madness; The Variety Theater, Rainey 2009: 163) as a
creative enactment of the nonconscious energies that had emerged at the
intersection of science and magic at the turn of the century.
      Indeed, the trajectory that I hope to retrace appears, as it were,
sedimented in the Italian language, once we consider its rather peculiar
usage of the adjective ‘incantato’ (enchanted) to indicate a loop in both
the human and the motor machines. As we read in the Battaglia
Dictionary of Italian, while traditionally referred to someone or
something undergoing a magic incantation, by the second half of the
nineteenth century the Italian adjective ‘incantato’ had acquired an
added      self-reflexive   meaning      (‘incantarsi’),  denoting     the
psychophysiological condition of absent-mindedness and transfixed
immobility that was typical of the human machine when in trance or in
states of distraction; Giovanni Pascoli and Italo Svevo are among the
first to be credited with this modern usage, which, significantly, also
corresponds to an extension of the adjective ‘incantato’ to a motor or a
mechanism that is blocked and works in a loop. Here, together with
D’Annunzio mentioning a ‘mitragliatrice incantata’ – the raptured
blockage of a machine gun – it is Tommaso Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuum,
Parole in Libertà (1914) that speaks first of a ‘comando incantato’ in a
motor, setting human and non-human automatic systems in the same
entranced condition.




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                               The Carpenter effect


      What makes the human machinery work unconsciously? The
question gathered momentum for British scientific researchers during
the epidemic of electrobiology and table-turning that swept through
London in the 1850s. The altered states of mind produced by mesmerism
(newly baptized ‘hypnosis’ in the 1840s by James Braid) had been
observed before, but the practice of ‘electrobiology’, recently exported
to London by American showmen, seemed to demonstrate that, once
their will was suspended by an operator through a physical stimulus,
people could accomplish complex tasks though seeming unconscious of
what they were doing. Meanwhile, in spiritualistic séances, people
sitting round a circular table, palms facing down, became aware of their
fingers throbbing and feeling numb, after which the table began to
vibrate, tilt and rotate, as if moved by diabolical airy spirits. The idea of
unconscious action during consciousness and the fad for table turning
risked reviving magic beliefs in the agency of unknown, invisible forces
(Winter 1998: 281-294), and were therefore «quickly seized on by men of
science to dramatize the passage from belief in supernatural agents to
rational explanation» (Luckhurst 2002: 26).
      As a leading physician of the day, Professor of Physiology at the
Royal Institution and examiner at the University of London, William
Benjamin Carpenter did not cast doubt on the mysterious phenomena,
but was rather committed to giving them a naturalistic account building
on his studies in comparative physiology and on research conducted in
the 1830s by Marshall Hall (Jacyna 1981: 4; Danziger 1982: 124-25).
Beginning with the founder of neurology, Thomas Willis, and his Cerebri
Anatome (1664), the eighteenth-century had seen a flurry of researches
into the physiology of the nervous system, prompting the emergence of
what Salisbury and Shail (2012) call a typically modern, neurological
self, inhabited by the silent pulses and rhythms of physiological
processes which, from respiration, heart beats or visceral movements, to
walking, gesturing and responding to the outside world, made the
bodily machine operate unconsciously. In the works of, to cite a few,


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Robert Whytt, John Augustus Unzer and George Prochaska, nerves
were ascribed ever more complex physiological functions that
progressively dislodged the brain from its ruling position over the body,
replacing it with a fully integrated network of reflexes communicating
with each other and taking «charge of movements that could also be
volitional, could be just as ‘conscious’ of the outside world as the
volitional mind, but operated much of the time without needing to
trouble intention» (Salisbury and Shail 2010: 14; see also Canguilhem
1955: 108-131). Although they were automatic, unconscious and
unwilled, nervous mechanisms began to be seen operating «as a non-
conscious brain diffused throughout the body» (Salisbury and Shail
2010: 15), which actively interpreted stimuli rather than merely
receiving them passively.
      A further step in the autonomization of the nerves’ agency, a sort
of Leibnizian ‘vis nervosa’ discussed in just these terms at the
intersection of medicine and philosophy, was Marshall Hall’s distinction
between two separate nervous systems, the ‘Cerebral, or sentient and
Voluntary’ – the brain – and the ‘Spinal, or Excito-motory’ – the spinal
cord. But although it postulated the existence of sensory-motor acts
independent of consciousness, Hall’s system still maintained the higher
operations of the brain distinguished from «the below-stairs» (Miller
1995: 26) of the lower nervous regions. Carpenter (as well as his ‘rival’,
Thomas Laycock; see Danziger 1982) gave a final touch to this picture,
allowing the reflex action to creep up into the machinery of the brain.
      This move was the culmination of Carpenter’s previous work in
comparative physiology. Exploring The Voluntary and Instinctive Actions
of Living Beings (1837), he had taken the very basis of life itself as its
subject. Convinced that reason was no prerogative of the human,
Carpenter had searched for germs of intelligence in the simplest non-
human things (Jacyna 1981: 113; Danziger 1982), ultimately identifying
the reflex function as the basic unit of organic life, conceived of as
movement and energy without mental consciousness. His research into
the correlation of forces (see Hall 1979) persuaded him, moreover, that
vitality could be extended also to a certain state of organization in
inorganic matter, leading him to a «version of Leibniz's theory of


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sentient material units, be these called monads, atoms, or cells» (Jacyna
1981: 117). But, most of all, magic was the royal road to Carpenter’s
novel conception of a cerebral ‘ideo-motor reflex’ and to what he would
soon baptize, in the fourth edition of his Principles of Human Physiology
(1853), ‘unconscious cerebration’.
      The theory was first sketched in the paper On the Influence of
Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, Independent of
Volition, delivered at the Royal Institution in 1852 as a report of his
findings on the supposed marvel of spiritualism. Here, biologized states
were assimilated to hypnosis and artificial somnambulism, and
described by Carpenter as «reverie» (Carpenter 1852: 147), «absent-
mindedness» (ibid.: 149), or «profound abstraction» (ibid.: 152), all states
in which «the voluntary control over the current of thought is entirely
suspended, the individual being for the time (so to speak) a mere
thinking automaton, the whole course of whose ideas is determinable
by suggestions operating from without» (ibid.: 147). Once the will is in
abeyance, Carpenter claimed, the nervous machinery is responsive to
the suggestion of the operator, who «excites a corresponding idea» (ibid.:
148) in the subject’s brain inducing a «complete subjection of the
muscular power to the dominant idea» (ibid.: 149), which is then
«automatically performed» (ibid.). Although the subject is totally
unaware of the unconscious performance, his/her bodily machine
doesn’t simply mimic the outside world, but rather recreates it by
mixing the dominant idea with «emotional states» and «intellectual
operations […] diversified by the mental constitution and habits of
thought of the individual» (ibid.: 153). Carpenter’s pathbreaking move
was thus to argue that, as the «emotions may act directly upon the
muscular system through the motor nerves, […] Ideas may become the
sources of muscular movement, independently either of volition or of
emotions» (ibid.: 151-52). By what he baptized an «ideo-motor form of
reflex», ideas were themselves understood as triggering reflex muscular
movements that could either remain virtual or be acted out in the real.
In Carpenter’s view, then, what distinguished ‘automatic'’ from
‘volitional’ actions was not the mode of action itself, but the
accompanying mental state (Jacyna 1981: 114): such movements, he


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claimed, «are as truly automatic, as are those more directly prompted by
sensations and impressions, although originating in a more truly
psychical source» (Carpenter 1852: 153). The gap between the psychic
and the physical was thus bridged.
      In addition to external stimuli and suggestions, Carpenter
concluded, an idea can attain such a dominant position through the
person’s own mental processes of «expectant attention» or
«anticipation», which «prompt the muscular movement that produces
it» (ibid.: 153). In other words, as well as undergoing the ‘incantation’ by
an external stimulus, the human machine could also generate its own
loops of ‘auto-incantation’, and act them out unconsciously. As physicist
Michael Faraday would demonstrate in a rather spectacular scientific
experiment the following year, the mysterious tables tilting and turning
in séances were thus not moved by otherworldly spirits (Watt-Smith
2013). Rather, they were an effect of ideo-motor action, the little
undetected, nonconscious muscular movements of the participants’
hands acting out their expectant idea of magical communication.
      Scholars of the unconscious will have certainly recognized in
Carpenter’s 1852 account some of the issues that would feed into the
psycho-physiological debate later in the century, such as that of the
human as a ‘thinking automaton’, radicalized in 1874 by Thomas
Huxley; or of the role of suggestionability that would divide opinions
between the Salpêtrière and the Bernheim schools in the 1880s, the
former taking it as a sign of hysteria – which Carpenter denied
(Carpenter 1852: 151) –, the latter as a natural tendency to
‘ideodynamism’. But Carpenter’s early innovations on the embodied
mind took somehow more tortuous, winding paths, which I’ll retrace in
the remainder of the section before coming back to the aesthetic
potentials of Carpenter’s thinking machine.
      In one direction, ‘ideo-motor action’ was the springboard for the
much broader type of operations given over to brain reflexes that
Carpenter elaborated in various editions of his Principles of Human
Physiology and further expanded in Principles of Mental Physiology (1875).
The phrase ‘unconscious cerebration’ itself was coined to account for
non-volitional processes that, unlike dreams, characterized waking


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states, although their workings bypassed consciousness and could only
be known retrospectively from their effects. These states encompassed,
for instance, the «sudden flashing into our consciousness» of a name
when, failing to remember it spontaneously, we have given up and
thought about something else (Carpenter 1875: 519); problem-solving
after the question brooded over is «left to settle itself» (ibid.: 532), as
when we come up with a new approach to a problem through lateral
thinking, or after a good night’s sleep; and again, occasions in which
«two distinct trains of Mental action are carried on simultaneously,—
one consciously, the other unconsciously» (ibid.: 526). Here Carpenter
(quoting Frances Power Cobbe’s Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological
Study, 1870) offers the example of a performer’s hands leafing through
the «hieroglyphics» of a musical score while the fingers are also busy
playing them out automatically – that is, out of training – on the
keyboard (ibid.: 527). Along similar lines, writing is characterized as
automatic: once the mind becomes «engrossed with the subject», the
writer’s habits of mental action will take over, and ideas will «follow one
another in rapid and continuous succession, clothe themselves in words,
and prompt the movements by which those words are expressed in
writing» (ibid.: 263). Given that «the work of the Imagination [is] itself
purely automatic» (ibid.: 512), it comes as no surprise that creativity
should also be included by Carpenter among the automatisms of the
brain (ibid.: 269), a point to which I shall return. In brief, a host of mental
operations, from analysis and synthesis, to generalization, abstraction
and judgement (ibid.: 261-62) were seen proceeding automatically by
suggestion and association along engrained nervous pathways.
Carpenter observed that, because these operations could «scarcely be
designated as Reasoning processes, since ‘unconscious reasoning’ seems
a contradiction in terms» (ibid.: 517), he had to find a brand new category
for them, and «the designation unconscious cerebration is perhaps as
unobjectionable as any other» (ibid.).
     As we can infer even at a cursory glance, hypnosis had prompted
Carpenter to a model of the unconscious that was, as Miller puts it,
«enabling» rather than «custodial» as in Freud’s later version (Miller
1995: 28). Far from being simply ‘irrational’ or regressive, the


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Carpenterian unconscious was an expanded form of thinking, the sign
of an intelligent machine «actively generating the processes which are
integral to memory, perception and behaviour. Its contents are
inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held as in
strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the
effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually
require comprehensive awareness» (ibid.: 28-29). In other words, the
swift, efficient bodily processes of cerebration go on behind the scenes
to let consciousness save energy for other tasks. Carpenter’s was thus
very much «the unconscious of quotidian behaviour» (Austin 2018: 8),
what George Eliot called, in Adam Bede (1859), the «mental business […]
done by agents who are not acknowledged», much like the «small
unnoticeable wheel» in a «piece of machinery […] which has a great deal
to do with the motion of the large obvious ones» (Eliot 1996: 173). As
recently explored by critics such as Matus (2009) Ryan (2012) and Austin
(2018), discussions of Carpenter’s unconscious cerebration and its
further elaborations by G. H. Lewes and Alexander Bain, were pervasive
in nineteenth-century literary culture, with novelists accommodating
their techniques to the new tacit, pre-linguistic self, or probing, as critic
E. S. Dallas recommended in The Gay Science (1866), «the hidden thought
in the bodily functions» (Dallas, 1866: 245). Oliver Wendell Holmes,
American writer, poet and Harvard Professor of Anatomy and
Physiology, drew on Carpenter to characterize literary art as automatic
cerebration, the effect of «dictation ab extra, [… the] strange hysterics of
the intelligence […] self-evolved by a hidden organic process» (Wendell
Holmes 1871: 51); likewise in France, J. H. Rosny had the writer Servaise,
in Le Termite (1890), explain how «all forms entered in him without his
own collaboration, mixing up with breeding ground, the tissues, the
fibres where cerebral germinations engender their metamorphoses»
(Rosny 1890: 8, cit. in Enriquez 2018: 110, my trans.). The questions at
stake, for many of these thinkers, had to do with the mind’s
embodiment, the role of the will (vexed also for Carpenter), and the
agency of matter, as eloquently dramatized by Wilkie Collins:




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         I have a thinking machine about me, commonly called a "brain"
      — by what process is it set working? What power, when […] my
      will is entirely inactive, sets this thinking machine going — going
      as I cannot make it go, when my will is active […]? I know that I
      have a soul — what is it? where is it? when and how was it breathed
      into the breath of my life? (Collins 1852: 161).

     While certainly generating «anxiety […] about the threat of
automatism and the suspension of the will» (Matus 2009: 35),
Carpenter’s uplifting notion was, after all, that reflexes could be trained
and moulded, given that, as he put it, «the nervous system grows-to
particular modes of activity» (Carpenter 1875: 182). Habit, that is, the
responsive plasticity of the bodily machine to the acquisition of new
routines and automatisms, could thus offer «an exciting new and
pragmatic way to shape mind and behaviour» (Ryan 2012: 86),
foregrounding the roles of education and experience in the human
make-up. Given this pragmatist bent, it should come as no surprise that
William James (who knew Carpenter’s theory well and taught it at
Harvard) would take over from Carpenter’s unconscious cerebration in
Principles of Psychology (1890), and adopt his «philosophy of habit in a
nutshell» (James 1950: I, 112) to discuss the psychological importance of
habit formation and the roles of attention, the will and consciousness in
training the reflexive mind (ibid.: I, 402-458; II, 486-592).
     What is often underestimated, however, is how enmeshed with
magic phenomena unconscious cerebration, and ideo-motor action in
particular, continued to be in the cultural imaginary of the century.
When William James picked up Carpenter’s ideo-motor action in
Principles of Psychology, he both singled it out as a «curiosity» associated
with hypnosis (James 1950: II, 522), and at the same time normalized the
phenomenon, explaining that the hypnotic state «simply offered the
normal process stripped of disguise» (ibid.), and was thus «no paradox
to be softened or explained away» (ibid.: 527). His illustrations of the
Carpenter effect – as ideo-motor action is known today – ranged from
«the spectator [who] accompanies the throwing of a billiard-ball, or the
thrust of the swordsman, with slight movements of his arm; the



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untaught narrator [who] tells his story with many gesticulations; the
reader [who], while absorbed in the perusal of a battle-scene, feels a
slight tension run through his muscular system, keeping time as it were
with the actions he is reading of» (ibid.: 525). As an instance of the
popularity of ideo-motor action, James also mentioned illusionistic
entertainments such as «the exhibitions of so-called 'mind-reading,' or
more properly muscle-reading, which have lately grown so
fashionable», based precisely on the same involuntary, «incipient
obedience of muscular contraction to idea» (ibid.). James saw how, in
watching sports, the practices of storytelling and reading, down to
faking telepathy, ideas, as well as emotions or sensations, work as
involuntary reflexive gestures, imperceptible muscular movements
through which the bodily machine and the environment were linked
and co-constituted one another.
      At the same time, the connection between the Carpenterian
unconscious and ‘the marvellous’ was less straightforward than James –
himself an experimenter with spirit mediums – might lead us to
suppose. The other, indeed main, direction taken by unconscious
cerebration along the century was as a catchphrase for, or «standard
naturalist response» to (Luckhurst 2002: 26), the goings-on of
spiritualistic séances, especially after table turning was replaced by the
wondrous feats of ouija boards, planchette and automatic writing, used
by mediums to communicate with spirits. Carpenter, of course, had
taken these as instances of ‘ideo-motor action’ (Carpenter 1875: 297; 302),
but the concept’s trajectory was littered with switchpoints and
sideways. For one thing, it was inflected with occult significance by one
of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic Myers, for
whom automatic writing became evidence for the message-bearing
automatisms of «unconscious mentation», a process that discarded the
reflex unconscious of Carpenter to focus on psychic phenomena that
might open up to secondary personalities or, more likely for him, to
thought-transference, ‘telepathy’ in Myers’ new coinage (Luckhurst
2002: 72-73). For Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli, instead, «the
peculiar state of the brain described by Carpenter as unconscious
cerebration» (Morselli 1886: 308-9; my trans.) was the symptom of an


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early evolutionary phase of the brain that could account for «all the
states » (ibid.: 309, my italics) described in his book Il Magnetismo animale.
La Fascinazione e gli stati ipnotici (Animal Magnetism. Fascination and
Hypnotic States, 1886); these ranged from hysteria and somnambulism to
the public spectacles of hypnotic performers turning people into
thinking automata. These fashionable shows of popular magic had been
rivalling in fin de siècle entertainments the newly invented
performances of ‘mind-reading’ recalled by William James, in which
mentalists baffled their audience by showing, for instance, that if a
spectator hid something or fixed his mind on an object in the room, the
mind-reader could, blindfolded, find the object simply by holding the
person’s hand. Though perplexed, men of science were also open to the
possibility of telepathy, and in 1881 they requested Carpenter’s expertise
on what looked like blatant cases of ideo-motor action, as the mentalist
was, most likely, getting clues of the spectator’s thoughts by reading the
imperceptible muscular movements of his body acting out a dominant
idea. In fact, a very «‘uncarpentarian’ Carpenter», as Delorme wryly
puts it (Delorme 2014: 62), was surprisingly ready to assent to the reality
of thought-transference and, as he had speculated in Principles of Mental
Physiology, of nerve-force as a «special form of Physical energy» that
could exert itself from a distance, bringing «the Brain of one person into
direct dynamical communication with that of another, without the
intermediation either of verbal language or of movements of
expression» (Carpenter 1875: 633). Given that the materiality of
unconscious energies was nowhere to be encountered except in their
manifest consequences, materialism easily spilled over into the occult,
or, in Anson Rabinbach’s aptly oxymoronic phrase, «transcendental
materialism» (Rabinbach 1990: 92).
     By the time Bram Stoker’s gothic Dracula (1897) mentioned
«unconscious cerebration» (Stoker 2011: 67) as the stigma of madmen
and vampires living the archaic life of reflex automatisms and blood
pulses, the status of Carpenter’s thinking machine was wavering, to say
the least, between magic and unorthodox science. When behaviourism,
with its reductive emphasis on ‘the reflex’ as a separate unit, rather than
as a part in a processual system, began to take over in the early 1910s,


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ideo-motor theory itself was ultimately downplayed to ancient fossil-
belief: as psychologist Edward Thorndike wondered in a speech
delivered in 1912 to the American Psychological Association: «Why [...]
did the theory ever gain credence, and why is it still cherished? [...] My
answers are that the ideo-motor theory originated some fifty thousand
years ago in the form of the primitive doctrine of imitative magic […]»
(cit. in Stock & Stock 2004: 183).



                 Lyrical obsessions with matter

      Carpenter’s Janus-faced unconscious, curiously hovering between
the ‘primitive’ and the forward-looking, inspired a rich wave of aesthetic
theorizing in early modernism, making the automatisms of the body the
centre of creative experimentations at the intersection of science, magic
and the arts. In what became known, in the wake of Grant Allen’s work,
as Physiological Aesthetics (1877), we have the seeds of Marinetti’s dictum
that art is an «extension of the jungle of our veins that pours from our
bodies» (Technical Manifesto, Rainey 2009: 113), as the reflexive gestures,
pulses and rhythms of the human machine came to be seen as
participating in the creation of artworks and in their material, embodied
reception.
      Groundbreaking works by Jonathan Crary (1999) and Robert Brain
(2015) have explored the crucial role played by physiology laboratories
and graphic recording devices in measuring and transcribing the
otherwise imperceptible flows of nonconscious bodily energies and
muscular micromotions, thus substantiating a model of the embodied
subject as «a creative as well as an efficient and productive interface»
(Crary 1999: 352) with the modern lifeworld, while offering artists a new
idiom of line-forces to foster automatic imitation in viewers or readers.
With aesthetics brought back to its materialist, indeed etymological,
origins in the sentient body, the Carpenter effect (though often
unattributed) rippled across (trans)European experimental laboratories,
medical texts, social theory and aesthetic practices.


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     In France, where Marinetti made his début under the aegis of the
verslibristes, unconscious cerebration had been introduced in the Revue
Scientifique by Théodule Ribot in the 1870s (Enriquez 2018: 107),
prompting Charles Féré, an associate of Charcot at the Salpêtrière, to
measure «ideomotor induction» on hysterical patients with the aid of
technical instruments such as the dynamometer. He thus obtained
confirmation that «the idea of a movement is already an incipient
movement», causing neuromotor responses which accounted for the
phenomenon of «unconscious imitation» (Féré 1886: 14-16, my trans.;
Brain 2015: 105-106). Taken up by physiologist Charles Richet in
L’homme et l’Intelligence (Man and Intelligence, 1884), and by Ribot himself
in his Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (Essay on creative imagination, 1900),
ideomotor action famously inspired sociologists like Gabriel Tarde as
well as philosophers such as Jean-Marie Guyau, to speculate on the
harmonizing social function of ‘interbodily’ communication, given that,
Guyau claimed, «all arts can be reduced to the art of producing or of
simulating movement and action, so as to produce in us sympathetic
movements, germs of actions» (Guyau 1887: 19-20, my trans.). More
importantly for our purposes, as we shall see, ideomotor action was the
leading theory behind the experiments in physiological aesthetics
conducted from the 1880s at the Sorbonne laboratory by its director
Charles Henry, whose influence Marinetti explicitly recognized as late
as 1924 in his revised essay on Tactilism: Toward the Discovery of New
Senses (Berghaus 2006: 382).
     But the concept travelled elsewhere. As is now widely recognized
(Olenina 2020: 194; Grespi 2020: 139), Ludwig Klages’ reference to the
Carpenter effect in Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft (Expressive
Analysis and Formative Force, 1913), gave film director Sergei Eisenstein
food for thought in elaborating his theory of motor imitation, and of the
filmic montage of unconscious movements as a trigger to the spectator’s
embodied mimesis. Eisenstein’s model, as is well known, was Joyce’s
Ulysses, the corporeal book which had attempted to reproduce, in
Eisenstein’s words, not «the contents of the unconsciousness» but the
laws of its «movement» (cit. in Olenina 2020: xxxvi), the material, kinesic
processes aimed at a physical incorporation of the text into the reader’s


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body. As critics are beginning to recognise, Joyce’s use of medical terms
and his physiological prose should not be taken as mere metaphors.
Even discounting Joyce’s aborted studies in medicine, his description of,
for instance, Dubliners’s paralysis as ‘hemiplegia of the will’, the search
for Stephen Dedalus’ «individuating rhythm» (Joyce 1950: 60), or
Stephen’s own search for «an art of gesture […] I mean a rhythm» (Joyce
1963: 184), reveal his involvement in the biomedical debates of the time,
and are thus a sign of his «openness to the ways in which the sciences
and pseudosciences of his day, seemed to have come together in a
common quest to understand the mechanics of human sensation and
communication, to explore the possibility of their extension beyond
established borders» (Gordon 2004: 67).
      Despite their obvious national and idiosyncratic expressions, what
was shared by these avant-garde experiments with the corporeal
nonconscious was, as Marinetti put it in Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature (1912), the abolition of «the ‘I’ in literature» (Rainey 2009: 122).
To some Italian writers, such as Luigi Capuana, this entailed a theory of
impersonality that appealed to the automatisms of unconscious
cerebration, leaving the thoughts hidden in «muscular contractions and
sensations» (Capuana 1884: 120; my trans.) work themselves out and
generate the «organism» of the artwork (ibid.: 126): why – he wondered
– «should it be impossible to think, let’s say, with an arm or with the
fingertips?» (ibid.: 133.). Marinetti went further, advocating the
replacement of «human psychology, now exhausted, [with] the lyrical
obsession with matter […] the sensibility, and the instincts, of metals,
stones, woods» (Rainey 2009: 122); in this respect, he claimed, the
automatisms of film, phonography or radio were best suited to
«represent the movements of matter which are beyond the laws of
human intelligence, and hence of an essence which is more significant»
(ibid.: 123).
      Marinetti’s injunction not to anthropomorphise the non-human –
«be careful not to assign human sentiments to matter» (ibid.: 122) – and
his appeal to the wonders of «molecular life » (Destruction of Syntax,
Rainey 2009: 147), do not simply respond to Futurist technophilia and
antihumanism. Rather, they bring to full completion the Leibnizian


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tradition that had set off Carpenter’s early research into the
nonconscious mechanisms of Life as an inherent performative power
which, from cells to atoms, manifested itself in the various natural forces
in terms of a single overarching energy (Carpenter 1875: 696). As
historian Jessica Riskin has splendidly argued in The Restless Clock
(2016), this (anti-Cartesian) vision of matter not as «passive and
evacuated from agency», but as «containing its own sources of action
inside itself: a self-constituting and self-transforming machinery»
(Riskin 2016: 7), originated in Leibniz and persisted throughout the
eighteenth century, from La Mettrie, Diderot, Goethe and Lamarck
down to various strands of panpsychism in Romantic Naturphilosophie,
before being instantiated in neo-Lamarckian biology and Spencerian or
Haeckelian evolutionism. Dubbed as a ‘mystical’ bête noire by modern
science, this Leibnizian undercurrent is being revitalized today by new
materialisms and their premium on the ‘agency of things’, what Jane
Bennet calls Vibrant Matter (2009).
      While a discussion of this submerged tradition is well beyond the
scope of this article, it may be useful to recall that Carpenter explicitly
mentioned Leibniz at the outset of his discussion of unconscious
cerebration (Carpenter 1875: 514), while Marinetti’s fantasies in
Multiplied Man in the Reign of the Machine are infused with «the
transformational hypothesis of Lamarck» (Rainey 2009: 90). The Futurist
love for the «imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms,
Brownian movements […of] infinite molecular life» (Destruction of
Syntax, Rainey 2009: 147-48) was thus no mere alienation of the human
to technology, but the evolutionary recognition that the relation between
bodily functions and technicity was but «the stage of an ongoing
interrelation» (Brain 2015: xxiii), given that, in the feedback loop of
ideomotor action, machines were but an extension of the
neurophysiological mechanism, as well as the active propellers of «a
complete renewal of human sensibility» (Rainey 2009: 143).




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                        Dictation ab extra


      Futurism turned unconscious cerebration into a strategy for «art-
action» (Rainey 2009: 208), art as a dynamic experience. The motor
automatisms of the absent-minded, entranced body were adopted by the
movement’s physiological aesthetics as a compositional technique
without any deep (or ‘other’) self to probe, while séance-magic became
an art-installation of sorts, aimed at conjuring and transmitting the
nonconscious movements of matter. The invention of ‘vers libre’,
promoted in France by Marinetti’s patron, Gustave Kahn, in accordance
with Charles Henry’s physiological aesthetics and graphical recording
of speech, had provided Marinetti with the notion of verse as a rhythmic
organism connected with the functions of voice, a matter of phonetics
and of lips, larynx, thoracic cage, air pressure with which the body
‘intones’ the perceptual, cognitive and emotional rhythms that are
performed by the « periodicity of the poet’s physiology» (Brain 2015:
xxxi), and then materialised in the poem’s form. The artist, Henry wrote,
«is but an eye, an ear, a nervous system normally organized and
developed: he feels rhythm and because he feels it, because the idea is a
virtual realisation, he produces it externally» (Henry 1888: 15; my
trans.), inducing a sympathetic resonance in the addressee’s body.
Along with the affective import of vocal performance, Henry’s research
into the artwork as a product and conduit of undifferentiated perceptual
rhythms had also passed on to modernist artists an appeal to
synaesthesia and sensory fusion, prompting the adoption of cross-
modal techniques that would emulate the abstract, ‘amodal sense’ of
graphic inscriptions (Brain 2011: 95).
      This corporeal dynamics of artistic performance gave Carpenterian
ideo-motor action a further twist that straddled magic and science. As
regular attenders of experimental séances, (Chessa 2012: 43-70),
including those organized from the 1890s by scientist Cesare Lombroso
with the medium Eusapia Palladino, the Futurists were aware that, in
turn-of-the-century mediumship, ideo-motor action had developed into
what psychical researchers had baptized ‘ideoplasty’, namely the actual


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projection and materialization of psychological and motor energy from
the medium’s body, in the shape of formless, synaesthetic ectoplasms
often defined as ‘extras’. In France, Charles Henry himself, with
physiologist Arsène D’Arsonval, had tested a case of externalization of
sensibility and motricity during an aesthetic spectacle organized by
Colonel Albert de Rochas with the medium Lina, whose entranced limbs
would emanate luminous effluvia in response to her gestural poses and
rhythms, triggered by musical suggestions (Rochas 1900: 260). While
Marinetti enthusiastically recouched these extras as a neo-Lamarckian
fantasy of organ extension in Multiplied Man in the Reign of the Machine
(Rainey 2009: 91), to painter Umberto Boccioni these exosomatic
automatisms became a blueprint for the Futurist artwork and its attempt
at «creating something similar to what physiologist Richet calls
eteroplasty or ideoplasty. For us the biological mystery of mediumist
materialization is a certainty, a light in the intuition of physical
transcendentalism and plastic states of mind» (cit. in Chessa 2012: 26).
     It thus comes as no surprise that Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Literature (1912) is set up as a séance that turns physiological
experiments into literary experimentalism. Having dismissed the organ-
based syntax of the Latin period and its «prudent head, […] stomach,
two legs, and two flat feet» (Rainey 2009: 119), Marinetti, much like an
entranced medium, is dictated to by the swirling propeller of his
aeroplane, whose vibrating sounds (noises) intimate a new corporeal art
of «words in freedom» (ibid.: 124) that outstrips vers libre, leading, as
Marinetti puts it in Destruction of Syntax, to poetic soundscape as an
«onomatopoetic psychic orchestration, the resonant yet abstract
expression of an emotion or of pure thought» (Rainey 2009: 151).
Marinetti’s art as ideoplasty directly emanates from the swift, inchoate
rhythms of nonconscious cerebrations to mingle with the energetic
movements of vibrating matter:

          Our growing love for matter, the will to penetrate it and to know
      its vibrations, the physical bonds that tie us to machines, urge us to
      the use of onomatopoeia. Sound, which results from the rubbing
      together or the collision of solids, liquids, or gases at speed, requires



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     that onomatopoeia, the reproduction of sound, be one of the most
     dynamic elements in poetry. […] The brevity of the onomatopoeic
     words […] allows us the use of the most versatile interweaving of
     rhythms (Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor, Rainey 2009: 178-79)

      Dubbed as ‘gramophonic’ by its detractors (Brain 2015: 217),
Marinetti’s psychic orchestration affects also the materiality of words on
the page. In Zang Tumb Tuum’s onomatopoetic reportage of the war from
the trenches at Adrianopolis, the poet takes on the role of phonographic
medium and engages experimental typography, zigzagging visual
rhythms and multilineal lyricism – namely the combination of chains of
colors, sounds, odours, noises, weights, densities and analogies (Rainey
2009: 150) – to turn reading into hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling and
palpating. The poem, declaimed in a Futurist ‘serata’ to «bodies inflamed
with emotions» (Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation, Rainey 2009: 224), is
pure performance of neuromotor loops, laying bare the technical and
technological devices of a ‘corpo/motore incantato’. In this respect,
Marinetti’s embodied communication moves beyond the mechanics of
language explored, for instance, by Gertrude Stein’s grapho-motor
experiments. Rather, it foreshadows the ‘verbivocovisual’ synthesis that
Joyce would invent in Finnegans Wake (1939), drawing on Marcel
Jousse’s gestural phonetics and re-enacting his dictum that ‘in the
beginning was the gesture’, life as unconscious reflex movement (see
Weir 1977). Significantly, Joyce’s séance-text too weaves back together
mesmerism, physiology and technology, inscribing the gestures of
matter as they are, in Joyce’s own pun, unconsciously «remesmered»
(Joyce 1975: 360.24, my emphasis) in «verbivocovisual» (ibid.: 341.19)
rhythmic compounds of word-sound-image that mime gramophonic
recording.
      Examples from the modernist nonconscious may be multiplied
within Italian Futurism, or, as shown by Olenina (2020), considering the
Russian Futurists and the genealogy of formalism. But Marinetti’s
engagement with the Carpenterian nonconscious has a fascinating coda
on which I would like to conclude. In the 1920s, Marinetti returned to
«the research into touch by Charles Henry» (Berghaus 2006: 382) as an


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inspiration for a new kind of art by the name of Tactilism. The research
Marinetti refers to had concerned the so-called ‘sixth sense’, namely,
those muscular sensations (kinesthesia) that could not be traced
accurately to one of the five known sense organs, but coincided with
touch as an undifferentiated, primordial sixth sense of the body. Hinged
on knowledge through touch/the epidermis, Marinetti’s new art of
Tactilism thus consisted in the invention of special tactile tables on
which the hands of the audience, plunged into darkness, could journey
upon, fingering through the qualities of richly textured surfaces to
experience a «succession of suggestive sensations» and their «finely
tuned rhythms» (ibid.: 373). This new art would guarantee, in Marinetti’s
words, a «physio-psychic-tactile» (ibid.: 380) encounter with
materialities that ensured embodied, kinesthetic knowledge of them.
The table-turning and tilting that had set off Carpenter’s research in
nonconscious cerebration reappeared in a curious reversal of the order
of communication: it was no longer the fingers’ nonconscious
movements that moved the table, but the table(s) matters that moved the
body’s muscles in tune with the non-human world.




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                              The Author
Alessandra Violi

         Alessandra Violi is Full Professor of English Literature and
Culture at the University of Bergamo. Her research work has focused on
the points of contact among literature, aesthetics and the human
sciences, with particular attention to the medical imaginary and,
specifically, the sciences of anatomy and neuropathology, on which she
has published the volumes Le cicatrici del testo (Bergamo, 1998) and Il
teatro dei nervi (Milan, 2004). In addition, she has written books on the
theme of the body as a medium (Impronte dell’aria, Bergamo, 2008), as
artistic-anthropological material (Capigliature, Milan, 2008), and in the
cultural imaginary (Il corpo nell’immaginario letterario, Milan, 2013; (ed.)
Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts, Amsterdam, 2020).

      Email: alessandra.violi@unibg.it



                              The Article
Date sent: 15/02/2021
Date accepted: 15/04/2021
Date published: 30/05/2021



                       How to cite this article
Violi, Alessandra, “ ‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics
of ‘unconscious cerebration’ ”, Forme e metamorfosi del ‘non conscio’ prima
e dopo Freud: ‘ideologie scientifiche’ e rappresentazioni letterarie, Eds. R.
Behrens - F. Bouchard - S. Contarini - C. Murru - G. Perosa, Between,
XI.21 (2021), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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