Mind Spaces

master's thesis, cultural studies, 2001

author: Cordula Daus
supervisor: Prof. Hartmut Böhme
second examiner: Natascha Adamovsky
language: German
Kulturwissenschaftliches Seminar
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
2001

„The exciting aspect of the thesis [Mind Spaces – a cultural history of extrasensorial perception] is not only to have brought together experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, information theory, computer science, media history, cybernetics with elements of occultism, hermetism, science fiction and the quite normal paranoia of scientific and political systems. The author has opened up an impressive source base from libraries (with rare sources) as well as on the Internet (…). The aim of her investigation was to present PSI-effects as the ‚positive unconscious of science‘. (…) Furthermore, the author analyses an old desire for space-transcending immediacy, still present in the 20th century which is not a ‚perception without object‘, as according to Kant and therefore a hallucination, but which can be identified and recognized as real: The dream of pure immediacy (or, media-lessness) in the midst of a totally mediatized world.“ Excerpt from written report by Prof. Dr. Hartmut Böhme, translated from German.