Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical… are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.¹

Ada Lovelace

Introduction

Unlike Turing, I do not propose to attempt to answer the question, ‘Can machines think?’² or even necessarily to propose a test for it. Instead, this dissertation sets out to examine how a fascination with the idea that machines might think, and a fear that they may even be capable of madness – that a ‘psychotic machine’ is possible and inevitable, has both shaped and been shaped by the history of psychiatry, warfare, and technology. Throughout these histories, cinema is implicated in this idea.

The Psychotic Machine (as theory and practice) is an exploration of subjectification, through the deliberate examination of disordered, marginal, or exceptional states, interrogating a set of technologies, cultural constructs and conventions (dispositifs) that relate machines to bodies, computers to brains, and software to intelligence. It is also, crucially, an examination of the role that cinema plays in sustaining these constructs and cinema’s own status as an analogy for the imagination and the imaginary.

Psychiatry, warfare, and technology correspond to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe when they claim that ‘up to now we have known three major types of human organization: lineal, territorial, and numerical.’³ Psychiatry has always concerned itself with family lineage because in looking for the causes of disorders it shares with psychoanalysis a tendency sometimes to explain them Oedipally as a reaction to family (or its symbols); sometimes as a consequence of physical damage inflicted by the family (such as drug abuse during pregnancy or violence); and sometimes as direct genetic inheritance. Warfare is by definition territorial. Technology’s heritage and operation is numerical.

In the 1830s Charles Babbage invited a number of luminaries of the time – including Charles Darwin and William Henry Fox Talbot (a pioneer in photography) to his house in Dorset Street in Marylebone to see two machines. One was a clockwork automaton - ‘a mechanical danseuse who would perform little pirouettes and arabesques for the benefit of her audience’⁴; the other was the Difference Engine that Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace’s mother, described as a ‘thinking machine’⁵. Babbage was fascinated by automata, as were many other people in the early 19th Century. This fascination, however, also has its own history and philosophical significance. As Norbert Wiener has explained:

At every stage of technique since Daedelus or Hero or Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living techniques of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of the Golem… In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the human muscles. Finally the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to the pace at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation… The clockwork automaton... has played a very genuine and important role in the early history of modern philosophy, although we are rather prone to ignore it… Descartes considers the lower animals as automata.⁶

Babbage showed two machines: a dancing machine and a ‘thinking machine’. In other words, a mechanical body and a mechanical mind. In many ways the “Imitation Game”⁷ that Turing later proposes is a move from bodily imitation to mental imitation, from convincingly dancing like a woman to thinking and speaking like one. Babbage’s two machines, at this point in history, are the consequence of Cartesian dualism because the walls between them mark a cut between body and mind. The Difference Engine itself is also a nascent materialist challenge to Cartesian spirituality because there is no distinction in its own operation between the ‘mental’ and the ‘material’. The Difference Engine is pre-software. Unlike the Analytical Engine, its proposed successor, its program was embodied in the machine. We shall see later how a myth of software as being non-material (a myth challenged by Kittler in his essay There is No Software⁸) assists in sustaining non-materialist beliefs that relate to the construction of identity: mind, imagination, intelligence, and nationality. We shall also see how the materialist view of software serves to support materialist views the subject, particularly in psychiatry.

Where does the trope of the Psychotic Machine come from? At the most superficial level, it would appear that the fear of the Psychotic machine is an Oedipal one: ‘Oedipus is first the idea of an adult paranoiac, before it is the childhood feeling of a neurotic.’⁹ We are paranoid about being superseded by own creations. In 1872, Samuel Butler, who pre-empted Macluhan¹⁰ by describing machines as extensions of man, and anticipated Flusser¹¹ and Kittler by suggesting that machines follow an evolutionary path that inspired by competition between machines and is merely assisted by people, re-wrote his essay Darwin among the Machines (1863) as a chapter in his dystopian satire Erewhon and asked, “Are we not creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth?”¹²

Cinema has done most to articulate this apparent paranoia concerning the possibility of psychotic machines. It is a standard plot device in a great number of science fiction movies that are concerned with computers to either envisage a computer that goes mad or a future where authoritarian computers have taken over (such as The Colossus of New York (1958), Alphaville (1965), 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Westworld (1973), Terminal Man (1974), Futureworld (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Tron (1982), Runaway (1984), The Terminator (1984) and its sequels). Cinema does not begin to do this until after computing technology has been deployed militarily (the dancing female robot in Metropolis (1927) is a continuation of the tradition of female automata that includes Babbage’s clockwork danseuse and Coppélia (1870)). Cinema does not simply project people’s own fears of technology or use it as a metaphor for political totalitarianism; it also seeks to disavow digital technology as a result of its own fear of being replaced. Before Peter Weibel describes it in The Intelligent Image: Neurocinema or Quantum Cinema¹³, Cinema imagines and articulates a future – after film - of digitally stored interactive images played directly into the nervous system: Total Recall (1990), Strange Days (1995), Existenz (1999), The Matrix (1999).

Specifically, the conditions for a Psychotic Machine depend on the development of real-time computing, and to some extent on technologies that could predict outcomes, such as those that were developed to track and anticipate aircraft in World War 2. Babbage proposed that if a machine could play a game of skill then it might be considered to possess human reason.¹⁴ Ada Lovelace takes Menebrea to task for suggesting that machines might possess ‘conceptions of intelligence’ by arguing that this would overstate the case: a machines ‘can follow analysis but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths’.¹⁵ The following section will look more closely at technologies of war and their complicity with cinema technologies.

War

The acronyms for the computer systems that created the cultural conditions for the image of the psychotic machine were themselves given names whose acronyms were contrived to articulate the possibility of intelligence and psychiatric disorder. Norbert Weiner helped to develop the anti-aircraft system SAGE (Semi Automated Ground Environment), and Nicholas Metropolis together with John Von Neumann built the precursor system for the H-Bomb and called it MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Computer).

War is one of the means by which, as is explored by Deleuze and Guattari¹⁶, proto-fascist regimes are able to bring into being the desiring-production for oppression. Wars conjure a dangerous Other on the outside, and bring about the production of ‘masses’ on the inside. Freud defines normal brain function as a cathexis of incoming energy¹⁷ from the outside. Lacan describes psychosis as fundamentally a mechanism of defence.¹⁸ Deleuze and Guattari state that the War Machine reinvents the status of belonging as not necessarily to do with family relationships but instead to do with being within a boundary that define the limits of national identity, ‘In the war machine, the family is a band vector instead of a fundamental cell.’¹⁹

The contribution of anti-aircraft technologies such as the SAGE system is to virtualise these limits. The condition for their invention is both the invention of piloted manoeuvrable aircraft and, more precisely, the invention of the idea of airspace. In 1934 Albert Speer famously used anti-aircraft searchlights pointed skywards as a replacement for stone pillars at Nuremberg. The idea of airspace projects national boundaries up from the ground and into a virtual space above it. Whereas previously national boundaries may have been considered a product of the Real (such as is case territories demarcated rivers, seas, mountains etc.) or the Symbolic (the product of treaties, economic interests, previous wars), the invention of airspace projects, cinematically, an aspect of the construction of identity into the Imaginary.

All war therefore has this psychological aspect, at least in relation to the construction of the subject and identity. War brings into the Imaginary the prospect of the subject belonging to a group that is not defined by family. “There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception.”²⁰

War is the systematic engendering of paranoia by a state to the point where the subject and reality are redefined by it. The war machine operates through the paranoiac method:

I believe that the moment is at hand when, by a process of thought which is active and paranoiac in character, it will be possible to systematise confusion and to contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality.²¹

The tactics of war, and of the war machine, are emphatically not just the obvious ones. Decoys, fakes, camouflage, disinformation, propaganda, disguise, covert operations, infiltration, deterrence and deception are part of the war machines ‘systematic confusion’ that, through paranoia, may ‘discredit reality’.

Besides its history of use in creating strategic fictions, military hardware shares a family resemblance with cinema technology. Remarking on Marey’s chronophotographic rifle Kittler observed that the history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets.²² Paul Virilio wrote at length about the relationship between the relationship between the apparatuses of war and of cinema. Discussing the first ever use of a searchlight in 1904, he observed:

Trained on the heights of Port Arthur, the focused incandescence of war’s first projector seemed to concentrate all the torches and all the fires of all the wars before it. Its beam pierced more than the darkness of the Russo-Japanese war; it illuminated a future where observation and destruction would develop at the same pace. Later the two would merge completely in the target-acquisition techniques of the Blitzkrieg, the cine-machineguns of fighter aircraft, and above all the blinding Hiroshima flash which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war’s recording surface, its film. And from this would come directed light-weapons, the coherent light-beam of the laser.²³

On the field, the war machines return the gaze with technology derived from that other apparatus of subjectification – surveillance²⁴. Both Kittler and Virilio have argued that a chief military advantage is gained from the deployment of visual technologies in aircraft, whose product can be analysed either real-time or later by computers and their operators on the ground. Fitting cameras in planes, Kittler has suggested, made it possible for World War II to be won by ‘superior reconnaissance’.²⁵ Camouflage and other forms of military deception must be supplemented with its electromagnetic equivalents and also by extending disinformation to all available media.

In terms of the Psychotic Machine and modern warfare, the field of battle is not necessarily the field of war. War is fought to induce a sense of identity among subjects through the generation of paranoia. The threat may or may not be genuine; the fear is constructed. The distinction between war and peace is re-written as the distinction between war and the fear of war. A perpetual war of images and information is waged inside and outside the ‘band vector’ precisely aimed at constructing the boundaries between identity and otherness:

Previously, wars were MATTER WARS, wars of matériel… Since the era of nuclear deterrence, however, international war has become a light war,… that is, obeys the real time of an instantaneous interactivity that no longer allows for a distinction, as once was the case, between offence and defence, but also, between the inside and outside of the real space of confrontations.²⁶

Whilst important advances in technology were no doubt precipitated by those aspects of the war machine that are devoted to defining and maintaining the outside, a much earlier application of computing technology was used to define who qualified as being on the inside. Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality that the State became increasingly interested in counting and documenting other statistics regarding their populations.²⁷ By the end of the 19th Century punch-card based counting machines were used in the US to process the data that was collected:

There were so many inquiries and so many new geographic entities in the census of 1880 that it took almost a full decade to tabulate and publish the results. This led to the first use of tabulating machines in the 1890 census, which counted nearly 63 million people. These punch-card machines, invented by former Census Bureau employee Herman Hollerith, evolved into computers when Hollerith founded what was to become the IBM Corp. Throughout its existence, the Census Bureau has played a pioneering role in the use of technology to fulfil its role as "America's Fact Finder."²⁸

‘The war machine’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.’²⁹ Real-time weapons systems fulfil the first of these by defining the ‘band vector’ and establishing it as a space marked out in the world. Technology that would be recognisable to Babbage fulfils the second of these aspects in that the compilation of population statistics, the definition of who is in and who is out, and the computation of firepower. The war machine’s inherent capacity for dissimulation, interfaced to media technologies, and directed at subjectification either of its existing population or by colonies that it conquers or establishes, provides its affective aspect.

Today (2004), the ‘War on Terror’ defines the enemy as both potentially on the inside and on the outside of national boundaries. A war therefore rages at the interface where information about known citizens (i.e. census type information) is combined and cross-referenced with reconnaissance and foreign intelligence from allies. Two primary uses of technology by the state have become integrated at the state boundaries, at our airports. The technology of the inside is combined with the technology of the outside and the consequent paranoia is distributed through all available media. Paul Virilio quotes the Supreme Commander of NATO, General William Kernan in August 2000: ‘Henceforth NATO will fight illegal immigration, ethnic violence and international crime’.³⁰. The predictive, stochastic mathematical techniques that were pioneered in anti-aircraft technology are now also deployed in the statistical profiling of populations and their behaviour in the hope of intercepting potential terrorist activity.

Technology

Given the discursive inter-relationships between war, computer technology and cinema, it is reasonable to characterise an interactive media piece that explores Psychosis as being concerned (i) with a military paranoia perceiving hidden weapons when none are there, (ii) with camera-based vision, and (iii) with confused memories of noises that might be normal life or that might be military in origin. This is not a simple emulation or demonstration of human psychosis; it is intended to explore the possibility of a specifically machine-based psychosis derived from the nature and culture of machines themselves.

Norbert Wiener claims that ‘the realisation that the brain and the computing machine have much in common may suggest new and valid approaches to psychopathology and even to psychiatrics.’³¹ It’s certainly the case that this analogy has been pursued productively by both psychiatric and technological discourse, but whilst there is much to be gained from exploring the degree to which the analogy is useful in terms of similarities, it is also helpful at this stage to consider the possibility of a distinct radical otherness of machines and their evolution. By avoiding momentarily the temptation to substitute brain for computer and back again in terms of functions such as perception, symbolic interpretation, arithmetic memory, etc. it becomes possible, by entertaining the idea of relational difference between people and computers to understand how they are distinct and how they might influence each other’s development and evolution.

A key issue here is the question of the body. Positivist Artificial Intelligence experts and philosophers such as Daniel C Dennet sometimes state that ‘It is unlikely, in [his] opinion, that anyone will ever make a robot that is conscious in just the same way that we human beings are.’³² This appears to me to be a recapitulation of Descartes, and can be challenged in a number of ways:

Statements such as these repeat the Cartesian cut, separating and abstracting consciousness away from the body. If, on the other hand, consciousness is an embodied process, it is inevitable that machines that have very different bodies from us will experience consciousness in the same way. ‘There are, in other words, some things humans know by virtue of having a human body’³³. The ‘mental’ of machines failings and their psychiatric disorders must always therefore be somewhat different from our own.

Dennet’s statement, with its implication of an unfulfilled wish, echoes Descartes’ belief that non-human consciousness may not be consciousness at all, since for him animals and machines were incapable of having consciousness at all because precisely because they are not human. Rather than continually test the ability of machines to imitate human consciousness, we should look more closely at the interactions between advanced machines to see if a more ‘species-specific’ consciousness might not be said to exist. A similar issue pertains to tests of animal intelligence that judge animals on their ability to mimic people by performing human communications and computational tasks. Our examination of psychotic machines could then begin to look at the possible sociopathologies that might exist between machines.

There is an implicit assumption that machinate consciousness is necessarily bounded within the limits of a single machine rather than, potentially, distributed among several different machines that may be physically connected at times or connected via an information network.

There is also residue of a belief that the any kind of body is somehow intact and entire, yet as Norbert Wiener suggests this rests on a fallacy: "Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves"³⁴

The point here is not the straightforward recapitulation of Plutarch’s paradox of the Ship of Theseus where all parts are eventually replaced but the singular identity apparently continues. The point is instead more Deleuzian, the patterns of organisation that we designate as conscious are constantly in a state of flux and exchange with other patterns of organisation that we designate as animate or inanimate, conscious or non-conscious. Consciousness becomes much more a matter of the distribution of intensities than of the boundedness of bodies. This effectively extends Bergson’s vision of the nervous system as ‘everywhere conducting lines, nowhere any centres’ and ‘the body [as] only a place of meeting and transfer’³⁵ beyond the body so that Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of boundary-breaking schizophrenia as ‘break through’ rather than a ‘break down’ becomes possible. They suggest that psychiatric disorder (either in its own terms or in the motivation of its diagnosis) is effectively the operation of a State apparatus that seeks to resist break-through to differently ordered construction of subjectivity and consciousness:

Schizophrenia as a process, deterritorialization as a process, is inseparable from the stases that interrupt it, or aggravate it, or make it turn in circles, and reterritorialize it into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis.³⁶

Lastly there is an assumption that machine consciousness would necessarily be univocal. This can be challenged in two ways. Firstly, alongside the computational technological genealogies offered by Kittler, Virilio and Manovich that find computational origins in military technology (screen as radar screen, pointing device as light gun, machine architecture as H-bomb, Internet as Arpanet, ray-tracing as radar surface elimination) or in media technology (punch card as derivative of Jacquard loom, movie film as program tape in Zuse’s early machines, screen as frame, keyboard as musical keyboard) and the relationship between the two (computer vision as cinema and surveillance) there is an evolutionary model of machines that is presaged by Samuel Butler and developed for the information age by Marshall Macluhan and further developed by Flusser and Kittler again.

According to this evolutionary model, machines develop as if they are their own species and, as Butler has it, ‘May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?’³⁷. Kittler suggests that

Technical media don’t arise out of human needs, as their current interpretation as bodily prostheses has it, they follow each other in a rhythm of escalating strategic answers.³⁸

And Flusser argues that even the humble camera enslaves its user in order to guarantee that subsequent camera generations benefit from increased automacity³⁹. Deleuze and Guattari quote Butler approvingly as he suggests that machinic reproduction, since it depends on human intervention, is analogous to plants who require the reproductive assistance of bees⁴⁰. They note, too, that in this case the plant benefits from displaying its own trace of the code of this other helper species. This is not conspiracy theory or one that even implies consciousness; it is simply a logic of escalation and evolution.

A second argument against a univocal consciousness of machines is their multiplicity of authors. Their process of reproduction and their process of being instructed necessarily engages many programmers over many years until any notion of design or knowability becomes out of the question:

These gigantic computer systems have usually been put together (one cannot always use the word “designed”) by teams of programmers, whose work is often spread over many years… It is precisely when such systems begin to be used that their inner workings can no longer be understood by any single person or small team of individuals.⁴¹

‘The many automata of the present age are coupled to the outside world both for the reception of impressions and for the performance of actions. They contain sense organs, effectors, and the equivalent of a nervous system to integrate the transfer of information from the one to the other.’⁴²

Polyvocal, multiple, connected, their modes of reproduction and development outside of the oedipal family, machines are always already schizophrenic. Outside of the possibility of engagement with ‘questions of right and wrong… or any theory with which one can agree or disagree… [providing] no basis on which “the machine says” can be challenged,’⁴³ they are also more generally psychotic.

Psychiatry

If technology has assisted the movement of warfare away from materiality towards the virtual, it has worked in the opposite direction for psychiatry. When Lacan and Freud were writing they were content to describe themselves as both a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. These are now different careers and the discourses are increasingly distinct. Psychiatry is increasingly materialist and less convinced that the notion of the ‘psyche’ and psychoanalytic narrativisation is necessary, useful, or even valid. Psychoanalysis is, in computational terms, about the software; whereas psychiatry is concerned with the hardware. The ‘talking cure’ for ‘mental’ patients has been rationalised, for many people, to drug-based therapies that are predicated on the material nature of the disorders. The famous McLean Hospital at Belmont where Sylvia Plath and many other artists spent long periods in in-patient, residential care has sold off much of its land. The requirement for patients to reside in the grounds of the hospital has reduced and the length of psychiatric sessions have reduced from being long conversations to being shorter meetings focused on balancing the medication. Their interest in the physiological basis for psychiatric disorders shows in their investment in media and imaging technologies. The hospital now boasts one of the world’s largest and most advanced Neuroimaging research laboratories.

Sander L Gilman⁴⁴, in his book Seeing the Insane, has shown that since at least the 13th century there has been a fascination with depicting mental disorders, derived primarily from a belief in physiognomy. One of England’s pioneering psychiatrists, Sir Alexander Morison, commissioned a series of portraits of lunatics to support lectures that he gave in 1823. ‘There is no class of diseases,’ he wrote, ‘in which the study of physiognomy is no necessary as that of Mental diseases’⁴⁵. Of course he wanted to know what was going on in the brain, too, but lacked the technological visual apparatus and could only hope to make use of autopsy. The first attempts at imaging the living brain were in 1896 when Edison attempted it using X-RAYs⁴⁶.

a short history of physiognomy⁴⁷: 1. Melancholia (1551) 2. Nymphomania (1843) 3. Various insanities (1892) 4. Basedow’s Syndrome (1935)

‘War has always already been madness, film’s other subject’⁴⁸, and there is a long history of psychiatrists using photography and film as the most reliable method of recording psychiatric disorders. Kitter describes how in 1883 Charcot filmed the mentally ill, how Albert Londe, ‘anatomised the “large hysterical arc” with serial cameras⁴⁹, and how Dr. Hans Hennes preferred filming because it was ‘more visual and more complete’ and because ‘the person doing the filming is in a position to wait calmly for the best possible moment to make the recording’⁵⁰. Cinema is complicit, therefore, in serving to capture those behaviours that the clinician most wants the patient to exhibit. The machine is used to define a psychosis that has been conceptualised before the event. Technical apparatuses conspire with the discourse of psychiatry to depict madness when it is at its most mad.

Cinema has not been used merely to record and depict psychosis. It has become a metaphor for mental processes and their possibilities, particularly to Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari. Contrasted with the discourses concerning cybernetics and artificial intelligence there is a curious polarity – one might say a left-brain, right brain polarity – between the aspects of action and creativity that cinematic images of the brain inspire and the aspects of data processing and arithmetic that computational models suggest. There is a perpetual dichotomy between creativity and computation in the discourse of machine intelligence. ‘We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.’⁵¹

The experience of seeing a film at a cinema, where one sits more or less still whilst your senses are highly stimulated by ‘unreal’ images and sounds, enacts Bergson’s definition of insanity:

Is it not likely, therefore, that the loss of mental equilibrium in the insane is simply the result of a disturbance of the sensori-motor relations established in the organism? This disturbance may be enough to create a sort of psychic vertigo and so cause memory and attention to lose contact with reality. If we read the descriptions given by some mad people of the beginning of their malady, we find that they often feel a sensation of strangeness, or, as they say, of “unreality”, as if the things they perceived had for them lost solidity and relief.⁵²

‘Movie-goers “respond to the projection screen like a retina inverted to the outside that is remotely connected to the brain”’ ⁵³. ‘Already,’ Duhamel remarked around 1930, ‘I can no longer think what I like. Moving images substitute themselves for my own thoughts.’ ⁵⁴ ‘The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.’⁵⁵ ‘‘”Our psychic apparatus reveals itself in these transformations,” wrote Balázs. “If fading, distorting, or copying could be executed without any specific image, that is, if the technique could be divorced from any particular object, then this ‘technique as such’ would represent the mind as such”.’⁵⁶ Cinema is doubly portrayed as the perfect model for mental processes and also as possessing a direct connection to the mind, circumventing or rendering irrelevant sensory organs or the real:

In psychosis the unconscious is at the surface, conscious.⁵⁷

The development in cinema from movement-image to time-image⁵⁸, from rational, narrativising cuts demonstrating causality to irrational edits that express the interiority of an inability to make sense and to react to perceptions is a movement from an arguably false order to an arguably false disorder, and again a movement from exteriority to interiority. With the time-image in particular, Cinema technologies are the machines that project the unconscious onto a surface. They are the bringing-into-being of psychosis. Cinema is therefore a very special kind of Psychotic Machine, one that generates the psychotic condition as its normal operation.

In Gramaphone, Flim, Typewriter⁵⁹, Kittler considers that Freud had no use for film since his method metaphorically depends on ‘cutting up film’ into stills and, through the psychoanalytic method, transcribing these still images into text – ‘‘decod[ing] the puzzles of their signifiers’⁶⁰. Kittler suggests that there is a repression of cinema in Freuds methods, and that Lacan can be distinguished from Freud because they are ‘separated by the the computer’ and my Lacan’s willingness to embrace cinematic metaphors. For Kittler, Lacan’s real, symbolic and imaginary correspond directly with media technologies: the gramophone corresponds with the real since it captures all sound as a continuous uninterpreted signal, the symbolic corresponds with the typewriter since the typewriter is concerned with discrete structural differentiation between letters, and, cinema corresponds with the imaginary. Thus cinema functions as a dispositif with ‘curves of visibility’, ‘curves of enunciation’, ‘lines of force’, and ‘lines of subjectification’.⁶¹

To Dali, the relationship between cinema and the imaginary would effectively define cinema as the paranoid method par excellance:

It is through a decidedly paranoiac process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: that is to say, the representation of an object which, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely different object, itself also devoid of any kind of deformation or abnormality betraying some arrangement.⁶²

Cinema is always the double image of the cinematographic images that is ostensibly presenting alongside at the same time as its own pure depiction of mental processes. ‘Cinema has always been trying to construct an image of thought, of the mechanisms of thought.⁶³

Just as for the war machine, the 20th century has seen an increasing movement in psychiatry from capturing images of the exterior to capturing images of the interior. A variety of technologies has been developed⁶⁴, including Pneumoencephaloography in 1919 (which showed that schizophrenics’ brains were not ‘normal’ but also damaged them in the process), and on to Echoencephalography (ultrasound), Computerised Tomography (CT scans), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR scans), Positron Emission Tomography (PET scans), and Single-Photon Emission Computerised Tomography (SPECT scans).

These imaging techniques and technologies have served to support a materialist view of Psychosis, suggesting that ‘diseases formally known as the functional psychoses [my italics] have an organic base’.⁶⁵ Machines are used to assert the machinate nature of psychosis and therefore of minds generally. Yet in when discussing the possibility of consciousness we are apparently content to believe that our brain-machines set the standard for what it is to think.

At the same time that psychiatry is deploying imaging technologies that undermine the very idea of ‘psyche’, genetic science is providing arguments that proceed on the basis of code that provide a further material basis for psychosis and creates greater distance – even antipathy - between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In August 2004, Reuters reported that apparently psychotic behaviour had been created in mice through genetic engineering. According to the report, ‘These mice display certain deficits that are potentially consistent with schizophrenia. Normally, caged mice will climb over and sniff one another, but the mice with the genetic mutations failed to socialize. One small group of the mutant mice darted around wildly, avoiding their siblings’⁶⁶. The code change to the mice was inspired by genetic analysis of a Canadian family (of people) with a history of schizophrenia. Psychotic mice, and perhaps even people, can now be genetically engineered through the manipulation of code.

Conclusion

Man [is] a machinate animal⁶⁷, wrote Samuel Butler. We have seen how the apparatuses of war, technology, and psychiatry, each inextricably permeated with cinema, cause us to re-think the bounds of our bodies, the operations of our brains, the construction of our identities and call into question concepts such as ‘psyche’, ‘mental’ or ‘mind’. Regardless of whether particular elements of these apparatuses are conscious, capable of thought or capable of madness, there is an element of psychosis in their operation. It is a pure and generalised form, a psychosis that eliminates the concept even of a psyche. ‘Psychosis’ without ‘psych’ is pure disorder. They effect multiple psychiatric conditions (anxiety, neurosis, paranoia, schizophrenia) so that the human subject is constructed as a coherent and entire whole organism with a mind and intelligence and simultaneously deconstructed as a materialist ‘schiz’ where the human organism reduced to the status of a machine, or rather an unbounded set of machines connected to other machines. War, technology, psychiatry and cinema are therefore the conditions for anti-Oedipus schizoanalysis.

Karel Capek, who gave the world the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R. (1923), describes how chemically constructed workers stage a violent uprising after they are given, not a soul, but a ‘physiological correlate’⁶⁸. The discourse of the possibility of a ‘thinking machine’ is perpetually coloured by the possibility of an immaterial aspect to existence and the apparent proof that machines could never have it. This has flowed backwards, however, to demonstrate that this same feature is unlocateable in people precisely because it is externally constructed by the operations of state, technological, medical and media discursive practices. ‘Persons are simulacra derived from a social aggregate whose code is unconsciously invested for itself.’⁶⁹

Kittler’s essay There is No Software makes the case very strongly that the idea of software separate from hardware is merely a convenient fiction. Of course all software is, at the level of circuitry, the existence or not of electrical charge or magnetic trace:

Criminal law, at least in Germany, has recently abandoned the very concept of software as mental property; instead it defines software as necessarily a material thing. The high court’s reasoning, according to which no computer program could ever run without the corresponding electrical charges in silicon circuitry, can illustrate the fact that the virtual undecidability between software and hardware by no means follows, as systems theorists would probably like to believe, from a simple variation of observation points. On the contrary, there are good grounds to assume the indispensability and, consequently, the priority of hardware in general.⁷⁰

There is an obvious analogy here for the priority of hardware in general in the construction of the human subject, and for the status of such concepts as ‘psyche’ and ‘mind’ has having a ‘material base’. It is the possibility of this distinction - between mind and matter - in terms of the human subject that has divided psychoanalytic practice from psychiatric practice, and established levels and orders of magnitude of subjectification by the war machine, technology and cinema that correspond to the different levels and assumptions that are built into the programming languages and operating protocols that define not simply a machine’s operation, but also the boundaries of it’s being or the interaction of its components, virtual machines, peripherals and sub-machines in relation to other machines either a physical or virtual a network. However, the use of the cybernetic analogy is not simply to map hardware elements, processes or modes of perception from one technological machine onto another, human machine, but to allow the analogy to be extended so that the discursive and non-discursive elements of any apparatus is understood to operate together in the construction of the human subject.

Thus this is not an issue of a ‘simple’ dialectic between mental and material that is in the process of resolution that says that the material is somehow universally real and true and the mental or theoretical is not. The same conditions of technology and cinema have led war towards virtuality psychiatry towards materiality. A consequence of a ‘philosophy of social apparatuses (dispositifs)’ is the ‘repudiation of universals’.⁷¹ The materiality that is constructed by a technological dispositif in relation to psychiatry should not be confused with the real, or given special status because its claim to reality appears to be a claim to truth. To recognise such a claim is to be already within the apparatus that makes it.

An important aspect of the clinical diagnosis of psychosis is that the psychotic holds an apparently irrational belief that cannot be corrected or contradicted in terms that satisfy the psychotic. Whatever you say to a psychotic will be either incorporated into a set of pre-existing beliefs or challenged as a conspiracy to trick them. The psychotic admits of no truth outside of the psychosis. A social apparatus becomes a psychotic machine, such as is the case with forms of theoretical or religious fundamentalism, if its lines of force operate to either resist or assimilate all other apparatuses into its own terms.

Notes

¹ Ada Lovelace, Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq., by L F Menebrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, translated with notes by A A L, http://www.fourmilab.to/babbage/sketch.html

² Alan M Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, 59, P. 433 - 460

³ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 388

⁴ Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter, McGraw Hill, 1999, P. 129

⁵ Lady Byron, Ada’s mother, called it the ‘thinking machine’. Simon Schaffer, Babbage’s Dancer, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, Ed Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Faber and Faber, 1996, P. 62-63

⁶ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT, 1948, P. 39 - 40

⁷ Alan M Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, 59, P. 433 - 460

⁸ Friedrich A. Kittler, Literature Media: information systems, Amsterdam, G+B Arts, 1997, P. 147 - 155

⁹ Gilles Deleuz and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1977, P. 274

¹⁰ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London & New York, Routledge, 1964

¹¹ Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London, Reaktion Books, 1983

¹² Samuel Butler, Erewhon, (originally published 1872), Dover, 1901, P.126

¹³ Ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, MIT, 2003, P. 594 - 601

¹⁴ Simon Schaffer, Babbage’s Dancer, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, Ed Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Faber and Faber, 1996, P. 62-63

¹⁵ Ada Lovelace, Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq., by L F Menebrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, translated with notes by A A L, http://www.fourmilab.to/babbage/sketch.html

¹⁶ in both Capitalism and Schizophrenia and in A Thousand Plateaus

¹⁷ see Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, P. 196 - 231

¹⁸ Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, France, Routledge, 1993

¹⁹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 366

²⁰ Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Verso, 1989, P. 6

²¹ Salvador Dali, Oui: The Paranoid Critical Revolution, Exact Change, 1998, P.115

²² Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.124

²³ Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Verso, 1989, P. 68

²⁴ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London, Penguin Books, 1997

²⁵ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.125

²⁶ Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, Athlone, 2002, P. 136

²⁷ Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge - The History of Sexuality 1, London, Penguin Books, 1976

²⁸ http://www.census.gov/acsd/www/history.html

²⁹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1987, P. 380

³⁰ Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, Athlone, 2002, P. 138

³¹ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT, 1948, P. 143

³² Daniel C Dennet, Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds, MIT, 1998, P.154

³³ Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, Penguin, 1976, P208-209

³⁴ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Anchor Books, 1954, P.96

³⁵ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Zone Books, 1991, P.173

³⁶ Gilles Deleuz and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1977, P.318

³⁷ Samuel Butler, Erewhon, (originally published 1872), Dover, 1901, P.123

³⁸ Friedrich A Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, G+B Arts International, 1997, P. 121

³⁹ Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London, Reaktion Books, 1983

⁴⁰ Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, London & New York, Continuum, 1983

⁴¹ Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, Penguin, 1976, P232

⁴² Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT, 1948, P. 43

⁴³ Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, Penguin, 1976, P208-209

⁴⁴ Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane, University of Nebrasca Press & London, Bison Books, 1982

⁴⁵ Sir Alexander Morison, Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, Arno Press, 1976, Preface

⁴⁶ Radiography, Cinematography and the Decline of the Lens, in Zone 6: Incorporations, Ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone, 1992, P.191

⁴⁷ images 1, 3 and 4 taken from Sander L. Gilman, Seeing the Insane, University of Nebrasca Press & London, Bison Books, 1982 and image 2 from Sir Alexander Morison, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, New York, Arno Press, 1976

⁴⁸ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.140

⁴⁹ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.141

⁵⁰ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.144-145

⁵¹ Ada Lovelace, Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq., by L F Menebrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, translated with notes by A A L, http://www.fourmilab.to/babbage/sketch.html

⁵² Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Zone Books, 1991, P.174

⁵³ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.122

⁵⁴ Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Verso, 1989, P. 30

⁵⁵ Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York, 1916, P. 41

⁵⁶ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.166

⁵⁷ Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955-1956, P. 11

⁵⁸ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, 1986 and Cinema II: The Time Image, 1989, Athlone

⁵⁹ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.166

⁶⁰ Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, 1999, P.143

⁶¹ Gilles Delueze, What is a Dispositif, in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, Ed. Timothy J. Armstrong, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992

⁶² Salvador Dali, Oui: The Paranoid Critical Revolution, Exact Change, 1998, P.116

⁶³ Gilles Delueze, Negotiations, Columbia, 1995, P. 64 - 65

⁶⁴ Eve C. Johnstone, ‘Neuroimaging Techniques’ in Companion to Psychiatric Studies, Ed. R. E. Kendall and A. K. Zealley, Churchill Livingstone, 1993, P. 473 - 485

⁶⁵ Eve C. Johnstone, ‘Neuroimaging Techniques’ in Companion to Psychiatric Studies, Ed. R. E. Kendall and A. K. Zealley, Churchill Livingstone, 1993, P. 473

⁶⁶ Reuters, Psychotic Mice May Aid Study of Disease – Report, August 30, 2004.

⁶⁷ Samuel Butler, Erewhon, (originally published 1872), Dover, 1901, P.136

⁶⁸ Karel Capek, R.U.R., Dover, New York, 1923, P. 42

⁶⁹ Gilles Deleuz and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1977, P.366

⁷⁰ Friedrich A Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, G+B Arts International, 1997, P. 152

⁷¹ Gilles Delueze, What is a Dispositif, in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, Ed. Timothy J. Armstrong, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992

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