Village and city are factories for the masks with which people identify themselves… This truism stops being one once it is recognised that nothing is hidden behind the masks… There is no-one who lays on a mask to identify himself, but rather, that these masks secrete those wearing them out of themselves.¹

Vilém Flusser

This essay explores how technological interfaces deterritorialize and reterritorialize consciousness and so that they are constitutive of the subject using the film Minority Report to illustrate the points made.

This is not to presuppose in an uncritical manner that it is possible to analyse characters in a film without calling into question the conventions of constitution of characters in fiction and film. Rather, it is to treat the representations of individual subjects represented in Minority Report as in some way ‘ways of seeing, discourse positions’² or more specifically of allegories of the constitution of the subject by interfaces.

This essay does not set out to explain the differences between ‘fictional’ characters and ‘real people’, or to draw to attention the means by which fictional characters are created. Instead it is intended to demonstrate that theoretical perspectives that relate to the constitution of the subject are at play in Minority Report which are applicable to post-modern western society.

There are four main parts to this argument: Firstly to show that in relation to contemporary critical thought the interface can properly be understood as something which transforms and sets the conditions for knowledge, culture, and subjectivity.

Secondly to use Minority Report to demonstrate how the interface sets the conditions for experience, and in doing so both deterritorializes and reterritorializes the subject.

Thirdly, to show how, in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, a theory of the interface provides a context in which to understand subjectivation in relation to power, knowledge, history and the Law.

Lastly, to show how an ‘abstract machine of faciality’ provides a process of individuation that is also constitutive of the subject.

The Interface and Critical Thought

The Problem with Conventional Definitions of the Interface

Since the 1960s the term ‘interface’ has commonly come to denote some kind of mediation or connection either between different types of technological equipment or between technology and people. Whilst this definition has been extended to software objects³, most people will think of interfaces in relation to their everyday experience, which is the interface found on their mobile phones, computers, and cash machines.

An interface is not a neutral connector, as Steven Johnson explains:

What exactly is an interface anyway? In its simplest sense, the word refers to software that shapes the interaction between user and computer. The interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between the two parties, making one sensible to the other. In other words, the relationship governed by the interface is a semantic one.⁴

The role of the interface is described here as helping to make sense between one entity and another that otherwise would be incapable of meaningful interaction. It is a definition that maintains the idea of distinct, separate and singular entities. Semantic relationships do not leave entities either untroubled or unaltered, however. As the interface becomes a dominant attribute of interaction between people and other people and between people and the knowledge and information that is stored on computers, it affects our ability to remain certain of any simple ideas of the separateness or boundedness of either consciousness or knowledge.

Knowledge and Culture are Transformed by Technological Interfaces

The first step in understanding this is to realise that we are perhaps less interested in interfacing with computers than with what is stored on them. And what is on them is, or soon will be, all available knowledge and culture:

As distribution of all forms of culture becomes computer-based, we are increasingly “interfacing” to predominantly cultural data – texts, photographs, films, music, virtual environments. In short, we are no longer interfacing to a computer, but to culture encoded in digital form⁵

When considering the migration of knowledge onto computers, Lyotard pointed out that this is not simply a matter of alternative storage. Only knowledge that can be stored on computers can continue to be called knowledge:

The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation… We can predict that anything that in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.⁶

All of our interaction, through interfaces, with culture and knowledge is therefore interaction with forms of culture and knowledge whose nature has been altered by a process of translation into computer language, i.e. through a process of interfacing which necessarily entails ‘general transformation’. This interfacing not only alters or excludes that which is stored, but it determines what can be created in the future by enforcing the conditions of its creation. The interface determines what can be input, output, captured, digitised, indexed and presented. The interface is becoming the condition of cultural exchange and production.

Electronic Communications Extend Consciousness

What then, of the human side of Human Computer Interfaces? Marshall McLuhan sees electronic media as an ‘extension of man’. It’s the subtitle of his major work. Where other physical tools and technologies have extended our bodies, electronic media are a different form of human extension:

Whereas all previous technology (save speech itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain.⁷

The interface is therefore the means by which the central nervous system is ‘outered’ so that it can no longer be thought of as contained within or constrained by the brain or the body. What appears at first to be a mediating boundary between otherwise uncomprehending elements becomes a means of extending consciousness and the subject. The interface becomes a conduit via which consciousness is extended and transformed. When systems are highly networked, it can be assumed that there is the possibility for a greater intermingling of subjective consciousness, i.e. an intersubjectivity that partially destroys the possibility of enclosed individualism and that becomes the means by which consensus can arise:

electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate. Now, the world of public interaction has the same inclusive scope of integral interplay that has hitherto characterised only our private nervous systems.⁸

This is intersubjectivity rather than objectivity because ‘the world as it is given to us is only a cut, an interface, a difference inside what is real (the whole)’.⁹ In fact Rössler’s endophysics there is an inescapable ‘endo-subjectivity’. Interface and consciousness are mutually dependent:

If consciousness exists in the physical world, it apparently cannot do this without being attached to an interface.¹⁰

Just as Lyotard expected a ‘thorough exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the knower at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process’¹¹, so we can expect an equivalent exteriorization of consciousness and the processes of subjectivation. It is, as T S Eliot once wrote, ‘as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen’¹²

The interface is not a straightforward ‘cut’ between entities. It cleaves them in every sense of the word. It splits or divides them, but in doing so it also clings to them and brings them together, and it carves them in the broad sense of providing the conditions and possibility of producing knowledge or culture and in the narrow sense of shaping individual actions and thoughts that might in the end contribute to knowledge or culture:

Our writing tools are working on our thoughts¹³

The interface therefore unsettles conventional distinctions between the world and the subject and between consciousness and technology:

Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have been systematic to the logics and practices of domination… self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilised/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man…

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices… We find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of the machine and organism, of technical and organic.¹⁴

If ‘the hand as a general form of content is extended in tools’¹⁵ and is in this way deterritorialised, electronic media extend and deterritorialise consciousness and the subject. In a context where knowledge, culture, perception consciousness, and the subject, are each determined and conditioned by the interface, the interface becomes a plane of simultaneous deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The process of deterritorialization allows the boundary that is defined by the interface to be exceeded; the process of reterritorialization allows them, newly extended, to be placed within a seemingly external context of a power/knowledge complex, to surrender and to define their identity within it, and to cede an imagined sense of singularity in exchange for an illusion of increased power.

Operation of the Interface in Minority Report

Minority Report and the History of the Interface

Lev Manovich traces the history of the screen, and with it all other familiar elements of Human-Computer Interfaces from its origins in painting through the military history of the use of aerial photography and the Radar screen, ending with the computer screen itself. An important stage in this history was the SAGE (‘Semi-Automatic Ground Environment’). Manovich describes SAGE as a ‘command centre to control the U.S. air defences established in the 1950s’. Quoting Paul Edwards, SAGE was ‘a total system, one whose “human components” were fully integrated into the mechanized circuit of detection, decision, and response’¹⁶.

Minority Report presents us with a futuristic, highly technological recapitulation of the SAGE system. Its light pens (the precursors to our computer mice) are replaced with data-gloved fingers operating with a gestural interface. As for Radar systems, a great deal in Minority Report hinges on the direction of movement on the surface of water. The ‘Minority Report’ referred to in the movie’s title differs only in this respect, but the implications of this difference serve to bring down the system. A synopsis of Minority Report is provided in Appendix A.

Figure 1 - The gestural interface

Its two main ‘human components’ are the police and the precogs. They are placed on either side of a technical apparatus. The precogs are at the core of the system and their output is interpreted and acted upon by the police. The precogs are so completely essential integrated with the system that they are literally incorporated into it. At one level, the precogs themselves are the system and the rest of the technological apparatus exists as an interface to allow the police to act upon the output.

Unlike SAGE, the objective of this system is not to intercept the arrival of death from enemy countries in the form of missiles. Instead, it is to intercept the murderous intentions of its own civilians, although the film may refer to early radar systems in that the key to solving Anne Lively’s murder lies in interpreting the movement of water surfaces on a lake. A consequence of the system, however, is that everyone is disarmed of lethal weapons. Either because the precogs would not be able to withstand it or because a murder-free society has led to a renewed respect for life, even the police in Minority Report do not carry guns. They carry sonic weapons that emit sound waves strong enough to knock someone backwards and ‘sick sticks’ that, when pushed against someone, causes projectile vomiting violent enough to momentarily weaken and disorient them (it’s not pleasant for the person administering it, either). Both a consequence and a requirement of this predictive system is that all killing, by the state or by civilians, is effectively intercepted by technology.

The glass interface, and storage devices that can themselves play back their content, are in many ways an expected extrapolation from current media technology. But they are also more directly an interpretation of the ‘memex’ desk that Vanneman Bush described in “As We May Think”:

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. ¹⁷

Almost every major plot development in Minority Report involves the use of an interface. If the trigger of a gun is considered an interface, then one can say that in fact every major plot development in Minority Report involves the use of an interface. The Interface is the condition of narrative in Minority Report.

Extension, Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Figure 2 - police agents experience everything via data interfaces

Interfaces extend, deterritorialise and reterritorialise the subjects in the film in a multiplicity of ways. Individual police agents travel using jet-packs so that, according to Steven Spielberg, ‘in a sense the cops themselves are their own police cars’¹⁸. Their visors are screens, and they even have small square glass screens that can be positioned in front of one eye. As individual agents they are permanently connected to a complex network of supporting information to enable them to do their jobs. Their watches count down the minutes until the next predicted murder is to take place. Their screens and visors provide historic archive information about suspects, maps of buildings, and the latest surveillance information. Each police agent ‘sees’ the world before him or her with an almost permanent overlay of historic information and surveillance intelligence. In a technological post-modern reprise of romanticism, every surface of the world is overlaid – not with individual memory and experience – but with state collated databases. Police agents exist in a data-enriched present that separates them, through the imposition of an interface and the privileged access to information, from what might otherwise be the real world:

The world changes as our interfaces do. The boundaries of the world are the boundaries of our interface. We do not interact with the world – only with the interface to the world.¹⁹

The police agents are doubly dehumanised – once by the way in which their individual perception is supplemented by centralised computerised information, and a second time by their subordination as manifestations (in fact as interfaces) of the system itself. Besides showing us this directly, the film demonstrates this in two ways: Firstly by highlighting the human dilemma faced by policemen who have to arrest a friend and colleague but never suggesting that their individual will might over-ride the actions demanded of them by the system; and secondly by showing how the police themselves have ‘spider’ robots that they can dispense from their belts and set off searching around buildings. A police agent in Minority Report is:

The element in which are articulated the effects of a certain power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.²⁰

Interface and Subjectivity

Minority Report follows many of the conventions of detective fiction, film noir and science fiction, and also on the conventions of Hollywood blockbuster movies. One of its less conventional aspects is in an absence of characters who provide human leadership for others. There is no judge or police chief or visionary or hero whom others follow. The Interface masks an otherwise disembodied Law. Everyone is unquestioningly the subject of the system of law and to precrime as the method for enforcing it. Everyone is placed in the service of the system. The police officers are merely interfaces to that system from the point of view of everyday citizens. The prison that holds ‘pre’-criminals is in effect a database of prisoners where the individuals themselves are stored and indexed, capable of being browsed and retrieved, and monitored through screen interfaces that wrap around their heads and bodies, reporting on their intended crimes and their own physical health. Rather than a death sentence, the end-point for criminals is when they are perpetually united with the data that is stored about them and where they themselves become objects in a database.

The form of policing that is envisaged in Minority Report requires sophisticated surveillance. The form of panopticon that is chosen is one where everyone is subject to retina recognition wherever they go, and the eye becomes the security pass for every building. The eye therefore becomes both the instrument and the interface for surveillance. These technologies are not merely put in the service of policing, however, stores and billboards use eye-recognition to select and target personalised messages.

The Interface and the Spacialisation of Time

Precrime officers in Minority Report are not detectives. Their role is not generally to piece together a narrative from clues left behind after an event. Police work is entirely data-driven, and any sense of time is superfluous when the crime is known about in advance. As a tour-guide explains in the film, ‘precrime has eliminated the need for conventional detectives so most of what happens now is the verification and the protection of the future victim’. The film is more interested in here in the switch of interest from criminal to victim, but that is because it assumes that a more radical flattening and spatialization of time has already taken place:

In the 1980s many critics described one of the key effects of ‘postmodernism’ as that of spatialization – privileging space over time, flattening historical time, refusing grand narratives. Computer media, which evolved during the same decade, accomplished this spatialization quite literally. It replaced sequential storage with random access storage… In short, time became a flat image or a landscape, something to look at or navigate through²¹

By postulating the ability to see into the future, Minority Report eliminates a boundary and a linearity of time and links this with a technologised environment where data access and access to time is spacialised. The gestural interface that Anderton and others use stages a simultaneous interface to past, present, and future that are then spacialised and cross-referenced. The gestural interface that is featured in the movie is the latest form by which the hand is deterritorialised into a tool, but this time a tool that designed to enable time and data to be brought together and then spacialised. Past, present and future coalesce at the interface by bringing together the precogs’ visions, the police archive available about each citizen and where they live, and the authorising presence of witnesses via video conferencing. The dramatic conceit of the precognition is to make real-world time (past, present and future) navigable on a visual surface.

The Interface as the Condition for Experience

Technology, data and interface are not put purely in the service of police work, however. The same interfaces permeate leisure and home life, too. Anderton’s own home has much of the same technology that he uses at work, and his visit to a cyberparlour gives an opportunity to demonstrate that many people are choosing immersion in virtual environments as their preferred form of entertainment:

The interface comes to play a crucial role in the information society in yet another way. In this society, work and leisure activities not only increasingly involve computer use, but they converge around the same interfaces²²

Moving images and adverts cover almost every available surface: exterior and interior walls of buildings, smart paper and even cereal packets. For the most part, this is not merely the ‘overcoding’ and data-enriching of every available surface, since most of the messages are personalised and targeted at the viewer. They both condition and constitute experience as a reflection of the composite information available about the viewer, but operate in the service of the commercial interests of their production.

John Anderton and the Constitution of the Subject

The Interface, Interiority, Exteriority

We saw in the previous section that, like other police agents, John Anderton is the interface to the Law as far as citizens are concerned. The judicial process happens in advance of the arrest, so all that remains for criminals is arrest followed by the immediate sensory deprivation of being ‘haloed’. But in the film, John Anderton is also framed by the system that he represents. This section will examine how this framed subject relates to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s theory of subjectivation, and the degree to which this theory implies that the subject is almost entirely constituted by its interface to Foucault’s two key dimensions: Power and Knowledge²³.

A thriller in which the main character is framed from within a legal system provides a useful figure on which to examine the degree to which ‘every form is a compound of relations between forces’²⁴. It allows us to begin to understand how our conventional understanding of self and subjectivity, our idea of a ‘Man-form’, will vary with history and with the relations between forces:

Man has not always existed and will not exist for ever. For a Man-form to appear to be delineated the forces within man must enter into a relation with certain very special forces from the outside.²⁵

The problem of delineation is a problem of the interface, since the act of delineation interposes, cleaves and constitutes a form and establishes a relationship of difference and otherness. If forces operate in compounds and relation to each other and they are constitutive of the Man-form, there are two possible implications for the subject: One, that the subject is a ‘hollow’ form that exists merely in the space of its delineation; Two, that the subject is an specific kind of intensity or compound of force-relations that can be either interior or exterior - a form that is echoed by the ‘cascade of interfaces’²⁶ referred to by Diebner, Druckery and Weibel.

Deleuze explains that Foucault consistently ‘submits interiority to a radical critique’²⁷ to arrive at a point where the ‘inside’ is constituted by the ever-changing folds of the ‘outside’ so that the inside’s boundary is delineated solely by the forms and relations that these folds take:

The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up the inside. They are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.²⁸

Anderton’s discovery that he has been framed for murder is in fact a realisation that he is framed by exterior forces. Once he becomes a threat to the system that he represents, he is recoded from being a policeman to being a criminal and victim of the system. There is a crucial scene in which takes place, which is when Anderton witnesses his own precrime report and sees himself on the precrime system’s interface as a future murderer. This provides Anderton with a ‘double’ of himself and a challenge to his self-constitution²⁹.

Figure 3 - Anderton witnesses the reconstitution of his identity

The system’s representatives immediately accept the future version of Anderton as the authentic one, so that his constitution in relation to others³⁰ is radically reformulated. In encountering a criminalised future vision on himself on the interface, Anderton is encountering, in microcosm, a Foucauldian ‘double’:

The double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside.³¹

This double is projected onto Anderton from the outside in a power-relation which is specifically intended to ensure that the precrime system continues to exist.

Interface and Subjectivation

Anderton must first be framed by the system in order for its power-relations and compound of forces to be revealed to him. Until that point, Anderton thinks only in the Articulable ideal of the system of Law to which he subscribes. Agatha’s repeated ‘Can you see?’ is a call for him to enter the Visible and to unravel how he, Agatha, and the convicts (Anderton forgets how very many there are) and in fact everyone else are put into a relative distribution by the ‘strata’ or discourse of Law.

This is a challenge to Anderton’s sense of self, however, since he is reformulated from being a free individual with beliefs, moral code and intentionality into a ‘passenger in a ship on the sea’ – he finds himself on the ‘interior of the exterior’³² rather than having his ‘own’ interiority. The ambiguity of the film’s ending (see Appendix) is very important here. Either Anderton triumphs over the system and his self-hood is restored (albeit a very schmaltzy Hollywood-style one) or he remains incarcerated, indexed and contained by the system.

The obverse of being able to see is being seen, and a specific form of the panopticon operates in Minority Report as a strategy of the precrime system. Everyone, whether criminal or ‘free’, is subject to continuous surveillance through a distributed network of eye-recognition apparatus that is connected to all security systems. The film presents us with two strategies for evading the system. One can either have an eye-transplant in which, as far as the system is concerned, you adopt another person’s identity – since everyone is stored on the system and is in effect defined by their difference to all others this form of identity substitution is made possible. Or one can have one’s eyes entirely removed, which is the strategy adopted by Anderton’s drug dealer. The film exaggerates the horror of this by having the drug dealer lift his dark glasses to show fleshy hollows where there should be eyes. The imagery could not be more clear: the only way possible to establish an individuality that is not immediately tracked and filled with surveillance information is to render oneself hollow.

Figure 4 - only the removal of eyes prevents subjectivation by the differentiating gaze of the Law

Subjectivation, Deleuze tells us (via Foucault) ‘is created by folding’:

Only there are four folds of subjectivation… the first concerns the material part of ourselves which is to be surrounded and enfolded… The second is the fold of the relation between forces… The third is the fold of knowledge, or the fold of truth in so far as it constitutes the relation of truth to our being, and of our being to truth, which will serve as the formal condition for any kind of knowledge… The fourth is the fold of the outside itself from which the subject, in different ways, hopes for immortality, eternity, freedom from death or detachment.33

Anderton has absented himself from physical pleasure or desire in favour of being of service to the precrime system. There is never any suggestion of sexual desire or physical pleasure for Anderton or Agatha, and he only might be reconciled with his wide depending on which reading of the ending you prefer. Instead he has immersed himself into an entirely interface and data-driven world where his only apparent physical pleasure is his addiction to neurion which gives him ‘clarity’. The three remaining folds of ‘affect of self by self’ are all shown to be exterior because Anderton is framed for murder – everything he thought about himself in relation to Law and the outside is shown to be false. The ‘intentional’ Anderton is over-ridden by the a subject that is defined entirely by an exterior – the relation between forces is different from how is was initially imagined, the relation of truth to Anderton’s being is radically compromised, and the fold of the outside turns on him in order to eliminate him. If Minority Report began at the moment when a man is accused of a future murder he will not commit and this is done purely in the interests of perpetuating a rule of Law that has no representative, it would properly be understood as Kafkaesque. At the moment that he sees himself projected in the interface as a future murderer, he is witnessing himself as constituted by the Other.

Deleuze provides the following diagram to help elucidate how the zone of subjectivation is in fact a hollow that is carved out between the strata of the Visible and the Articulable, a ‘strategic zone’ of ‘uncertain doubles and partial deaths’ where relations between forces have yet to settle into either Visible or Articulable strata, a ‘line of the outside’ – a boundary to an exteriority on which there are ‘savage particular features that are not yet linked up’.³⁴

The Interface and the Law

This diagram and its explanation provide a theory of interfaces in relation to subjectivation. The zone of subjectivation is in effect both an interface and a fissure between the irreconcilable strata of Visible and Articulable, and the strata themselves are surfaces that the subject can traverse, or rather whose traversing constitutes the ‘strategy of interlacing’ which can give rise to a ‘reversible’ intentionality³⁵. A reversible Intentionality is described as the interlacing of the two forms of knowledge-Being, and this becomes in effect the strategic domain of power. Relating this observation to the diagram it becomes clear that the zone of subjectivation is also the strategic domain of power. In the strategic zone, the interfaces between particularities are constantly renegotiated by relations between forces.

In his description of the Line of Outside Deleuze returns again to the image of the boat on water, where the line is the water and the boat is the chamber³⁶. The intersection between the fissure and the Line of the Outside ‘the line forms a Law’. The Law is therefore the point of interface between the outside, different forms of knowledge and the strategic domain of power. Anderton’s subjectivation is entirely conditioned by the subjection of this interface in what Deleuze describes as its two present forms:

One consisting of individualising ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognised identity, fixed once and for all.³⁷

As a framed man, Anderton’s initially ‘known and recognised’ identity has a metamorphosis imposed upon it from the outside (by the Law).

Agatha and the Abstract Machine of Faciality

Organ without a Body, Body without Organs

If Anderton begins the movie as a hero who it turns out is put in the service of a system, then Agatha begins the movie as perhaps the ultimate desubjectified cyborg – not enhanced by technology but instead a component of it. She lives in a pool of milky water whose visual purpose is to make her appear only to be a face. Like Anderton, she is constantly on drugs, but hers are forcibly administered to ensure that she remains docile within the system. She is variously described as non-human, a mere pattern recognition device, and as part of a ‘hive mind’ with the other two precogs. She has lost her individuality to others like her and to the system that has been built around her.

Agatha is also at different times every component of a computer system. She is an input device, recognising patterns in what the film refers to as ‘metaphysics’ in order to predict future murders. She is a storage device, holding her minority reports inside her so that later in the cyberparlour she can be ‘hacked into’ and the contents retrieved. She is an output device, deliberately sending memories of her lost mother to a screen above her. All the precrime technology is arguably an interface to her processing abilities, a method of displaying, archiving and acting upon what she produces.

Figure 5 - Hacking into Agatha

Her body is unused and obscured, her hair and eyebrows shaved, and in the early parts of the movie she is often shown in close-up, providing the best possible example of the face close-up referred by Deleuze/Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus³⁸. Agatha traverses in the movie from being an organ without a body to being a body without organs³⁹. She is initially an organ without a body because her body is entirely disregarded whilst she is put to service as an organ of the Law. When she emerges from her ‘temple’ she goes through a process of reterritorialization and individualisation, but it is not a return to conventional humanity. She remains a body without organs to the degree that she is able to connect (in the terms of the movie) to past and future events, to other people, their knowledge and their intentions. Only if you think that Anderton triumphs over the system does Agatha go through a process of becoming human.

Figure 6 - one of the many extreme close-ups of Agatha

Faces and Interfaces

We are told (wrongly, it turns out) that whilst she is in the ‘temple’ she cannot see who is there with her. She sees only what is happening on the outside and in the future (‘I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through her head… I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is.. the world of futurity’⁴⁰). The film makes a deliberate contrast the white faciality of the facial close-ups and the murky dark screens that are above them and which display their thoughts. The temple is in this way a white screen/black hole system:

The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye.⁴¹

The architectural design of the Department of Precrime places a layer of interface between the white face and the black displays of consciousness. This is where composite narratives are constructed by the Law, and where individual identities are given to victims and murders. Between the white screen of Agatha’s face and the black hole of her thoughts and dreams, the Law operates as a system of subjectification and signifiance on all it encounters:

Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate form of expression… there is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and their subjects.⁴²

The Abstract Machine of Faciality

Figure 7 - the faciality machine at the interface situated between the precog's white faces and dark holes

The use of eye-recognition as a means of surveillance is an over-coding of the face for both signifiance and subjectification:

The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed into the black hole… The deterritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the decoding of the body implies an overcoding of the face.⁴³

The entire state apparatus is therefore an ‘abstract machine of faciality’ where the faces of subjects are first of all made into individuals through their difference from others and then computed to be either normal or deviant in relation to the Law⁴⁴ via a system of universal surveillance and cross-reference.

Conclusion

Interfaces can be understood to mean firstly the mediating and translating interface between one entity and another, but in which all three entities are transformed, deterritorialised/reterritorialised in the process of interfacing. In a postmodern technologised world knowledge, culture, and consciousness are ‘outered’ to an unprecedented degree. What is capable of being produced, exteriorised, or accessed is all conditioned by the interface.

Secondly, we have seen that beyond immanence of technological encounters, the subject is conditioned by a Law that is at the apex of interfaces between strata of knowledge and discourses of power, and that their inter-relation varies with history.

Thirdly we have seen that, with regard to faciality, a society that is dominated by surveillance and data-capture operates as an ‘abstract machine’ that brings about individuation through differentiation and judgement.

To the degree that culture, knowledge, power, history, and the processes of individuation and judgement are constitutive of the subject, the subject is constituted by the interface. Or rather, the interface can be defined as that which is constitutive of the subject and of subjectivity.

Notes

¹ Vilém Flusser, Writings, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, P.174

² Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern, Routledge, 1995, P. 262

³ Macromedia Flash ActionScript 2.0, an Object Oriented Programming language, allows the creation of Interface classes that don’t do anything except allow other classes to make use of the additional methods that they define.

⁴ Steven Johnson, Interface Culture, Basic Books, 1997, P. 14

⁵ Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, P. 69

⁶ Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, 1984, P. 4

⁷ Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge, 1964, P. 270

⁸ Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge, 1964, P. 268 - 269

⁹ Otto Rössler, The Art of the Accident, NAI Publisher, page.172

¹⁰ Otto Rössler, Endophysics: The World as an Interface, World Scientific, 1998

¹¹ Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, 1984, P. 102

¹² T S Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Complete Poems and Plays, London, 1969

¹³ Nietzsche, quoted by Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999

¹⁴ Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, 1991, P. 177 - 178

¹⁵ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1988, P.60

¹⁶ Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, P. 101

¹⁷ Vanneman Bush, As We May Think, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

¹⁸ Steven Spielberg, Minority Report: 2-Disc DVD set, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002, Disc 2

¹⁹ Weibel – Weibel (Endo), http://www.aec.at/fest/fest92e/weib.html, September 1997.

²⁰ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin, 1977, P.29

²¹ Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, P. 78

²² Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001, P. 65

²³ Deleuze summarises Foucault has addressing three dimensions whose forms vary with history: knowledge, power, and self. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 114

²⁴ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 124

²⁵ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 124

²⁶ Hans H Diebner, Timoth Druckery, Peter Weibel, Preface to Sciences of the Interface: Proceedings of the International Symposium, Karlsruhe, 2000, http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$1749

²⁷ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 96

²⁸ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 97

²⁹ A motif of the gaze and of repetition works throughout Minority Report. Eyes are cut out in the first murder shown as a prefiguring of eye transplants and issues that relate to visibility later. There is also a repeated theme of submersion.

³⁰ ‘On the one hand there is a ‘relation to oneself’ that consciously derives from one’s relation with others; one the other there is equally a ‘self-constitution’ that consciously derives from the moral code as a rule for knowledge’. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P.100

³¹ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 98

³² Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 97

³³ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 104

³⁴ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 120 - 123

³⁵ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 112

³⁶ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 122

³⁷ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Athlone, 1988, P. 105 - 106

³⁸ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 168

³⁹ a quote from Henry Miller used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 171 - 172

⁴⁰ a quote from Henry Miller used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 171

⁴¹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 168

⁴² Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 180

⁴³ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 181

⁴⁴ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 177 - 178

Appendix A - Minority Report Synopsis

The film Minority Report is set in Washington DC 2054. It is an adaptation of a novella by Philip K. Dick. Addicts to a drug called Neuroin have given birth to children who are tormented with accurate predictions of murder. People with this ability are known in the film as ‘precogs’ (for precognitive). Three of these, Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur have been incorporated into a system in a police department for Precrime. They are kept in a bath of special ‘conductive’ liquid and are permanently wired to a computer system that projects their precognitions onto a screen and captures them as video files so that they can be scanned for evidence. When the precogs predict a murder the names of the victim and the perpetrator are extracted by the system and laser-carved onto wooden balls (the wood grain serves as a unique identifier and therefore a safeguard in the system).

The film centres on a policeman, John Anderton. Whilst very effective at his job, his own child was abducted several years before the story begins and he has become estranged from his wife and addicted to the latest, synthetic form of Neuroin. Despite this, he has long enjoyed the support and encouragement of Lamar Burgess, the Director of Precrime.

The precrime system has been working well in Washington DC and there is about to be a referendum on implementing the system nationally. An external investigator Danny Witwer has been appointed to check for flaws in the system. He agrees that the system itself appears to work perfectly, but asserts, “If there’s a flaw, it’s human”.

A drug-addicted precrime investigator might well be considered to be such a ‘human flaw’, but there are systematic flaws as well as human ones. The official record of a precrime is composite based on all three precogs’ visions. If one of the versions disagrees slightly with the other two, it is denoted as a ‘Minority Report’ and disregarded. Furthermore, precogs are said to replay their version of events even after the murder has been prevented as a form of ‘precog déjà vu’. The apparently extraneous records and data feeds are disregarded. Not even the investigators who work in the Precrime Division are aware that minority reports exist. This is because their existence would shed doubt on any conviction and the system would be undermined.

When the system was being set up Anne Lively, Agatha’s mother had tried to get her daughter back. Agatha is a crucial ‘component’ of the system so Lamar prevents this by drowning Anne Lively. The precogs predict this murder but Lamar evades detection by staging it so that someone dressed in a similar balaclava to his attempts to drown her. The first attempted murder is prevented but then Lamar immediately drowns her himself in exactly the same way. Two of the precogs predict the first attempted drowning, but Agatha predicts the real drowning that Lamar commits. The small discrepancies in their account – the time and the direction of wind on the surface of water where Anne Lively is drowned – are disregarded as a ‘minority report’ and Lamar later removes them from every part of the system except Agatha herself.

On a visit to the ‘temple’ where the precogs are kept, Agatha grabs hold of John Anderton and shows him her mother’s murder on the screen. Anderton investigates and finds out about the existence of minority reports – and also that records for Anne Lively’s murder have been tampered with.

Lamar realises that if Anne Lively’s murder and the existence of minority reports were to become public, the system he helped to found would be withdrawn. Lamar sets out to frame Anderton for murder by promising money to an ex-con’s family if the ex-con, Leo Crow, pretends to have been the one that abducted Anderton’s child. The precogs predict that John Anderton will kill Leo Crow and Anderton becomes a wanted man as the countdown to Leo Crow’s death begins.

Anderton is in fact the first person to see himself apparently commit the murder on the system and goes on the run. He is sure he is not going to be a murderer and assumes that there must be a minority report that will clear him. He undergoes eye transplants to evade the surveillance devices that would otherwise recognise him and since Agatha is usually the one who holds minority reports, he takes her out of the system and gets a hacker in a cyberparlour to retrieve his records and in the process again watches Anne Lively’s murder.

Anderton does not have a minority report but finds that, forewarned, it is possible to choose to avoid one’s destiny as a murder by choosing not to kill at the predicted time. Leo Crow, however, kills himself with Anderton’s gun anyway because he wants his family to be paid off. With Leo Crow dead, Anderton is wanted for murder. The precrime system is not working without Agatha and so Lamar takes the opportunity to kill Danny Witwer and frame Anderton for that too.

Anderton, taking Agatha with him, flees to his ex-wife’s house. Moments after he realises that he has been framed because of what he knew about Anne Lively and just after he learns that Anne Lively was Agatha’s mother (i.e. establishing motive for Lamar as the perpetrator), he is arrested. He in imprisoned in the vast human database that is Precrime’s prison.

Two readings of the film are possible from this moment. In one, Anderton’s wife rescues him from prison and Lamar is exposed as a murderer. Lamar commits suicide, the Precrime system is closed down, and the precogs build a life for themselves in seclusion among books. In the other, perhaps Minority Report’s own ‘minority report’, all of the action subsequent to Anderton’s imprisonment can be taken as his own fantasy. We are told just as he is interred that prisoners ‘have visions’ and that ‘all their dreams come true’. This second reading of the film again troubles the boundaries between the self, technology, interface and the other because we as an audience are unclear about whether we are seeing through Anderton’s imagination or seeing an objective reality and set of events. We are either inside Anderton’s head or outside of it.

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