Abstract

Purveyor of paranoiac science fiction, Philip K. Dick, once characterised paranoia as “a modern-day development of an ancient, archaic sense that animals still have…a lingering sense that we had long ago, when we were—our ancestors were—very vulnerable to predators…” Commenting on the paranoiac lives of the characters in his novels, Dick then observed that “[t]hey’re living like our ancestors did. I mean, the hardware is in the future, the scenery’s in the future, but the situations are really from the past.” Viewing Dick’s remarks as an opportunity to examine the deeply historical— even biological—origins of paranoia, this paper proposes paranoia not as a psychopathological reaction to contemporary surveillance technics, but as an ancient surveillance technic in its own right. It will examine Dick’s implicit claim that paranoia might be viewed as a kind of parachronism whose uneasy ‘situation’ in the present—and whose proximity with futuristic hardware—might be characterised, across time, by its vestigiality. In this context, this paper examines the interrelation of biological models of self-surveillance (such as the ‘immunosurveillance’ mechanism of the immune system), the powerful visual technics of contemporary biological surveillance (X-rays, PET scans, diffraction photography, bio and other close-monitoring procedures) and their relations to paranoia. In doing so, it will offer an alternative theory of paranoia in which it is understood to (re)animate the unseen—and thus to identify the predatory—even in the context of those medical technics that profess, by ‘revealing all’, to exhaust the possibility of any such an identification.

Conference Paper

1. PARANOIA, EVOLUTION AND SURVEILLANCE

This quotation from a 1974 interview with Philip K Dick suggests not only that paranoia connects us, as primates, with other paranoid species on the planet, but also that paranoia is an advantageous phenotypic trait: something that may have evolved or mutated in order to assist us in survival; to guide us away from predation or as against negative events more generally. I open up my talk with this quote, and I make this same claim as Dick, not simply as a humanities student reading science fiction, but as someone that is for some probably a lot worse: a postmodern humanities student that dabbles in reading science itself. To justify this position, and to clarify the way in which I approach literary texts and science, I repeat –but slightly alter—what Raymond Chandler once said about fairy tales, which are a bit like science fiction texts. He said that “[t]he spirit of an age is more essentially recorded in its fairy tales than in its most painstaking chronicles”. PKD’s texts are insightful fairytales about medical and biotechnological developments that began in and around the time of his science fiction writing in the 70s. It is arguable that his works more essentially record the spirit of his time than any later histories of those technological, scientific and medical developments do themselves.

Dick’s paranoia, for example— like that which may be identified and is also described in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari in the first half of the 70s—especially in Anti-Oedipus—is interesting and worth reexamining precisely because his represents a vision of technological surveillance that is on the hand thematically and narrationally very disturbing—and indeed, it has been mined by Hollywood for such films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and the Adjustment Bureau, all PKD adaptations—but on the other hand, Dick’s vision of technological objects (or technics) has largely materialised and quite closely, albeit rather grandiosely, represents the reality in which we now, and will, live. While we do not yet, other than rather theoretically, understand ourselves to be cyborgs that dream of electric sheep, many of the ideas PKD had about the nature of time—for instance that in an evolutionary sense our bodily and psychological reactions to technology stem from both an ancient and a futuristic ontology or ontologic—or about medical technics and objects—that their behaviour or misbehaviour has become more threatening and more disturbing to us, at least psychologically, than other humans—these are ideas with which we are increasingly familiar. Dick’s novels are also a way in which we can reconnect with that spirit of the 70s and to speculate as to whether we have simply become acclimatised to objects and technics, and to the way in which we interact with them psychologically and bodily—or whether, on the other hand, it is simply the case that PKD was overparanoid and should have sought treatment.

In this sense, like the worlds that his novels animate are atavistic, reading Dick is an atavistic practice and a Jamesonian retrogression into the pre-history of many of our current technologies. In reading PKD we thus step into the past and into the future in this double sense: his works are atavistic, and so is our reading of them. In Dick’s novel, A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist, an undercover police operative known as known as ‘Bob Arctor’ – real name Fred— reflects on whether the ‘scanners’ that monitor his undercover drug-bust might assist him in regaining control of his life. Bob/Fred has become increasingly paranoid and disassociated under the influence of a psychotomimetic drug known as Substance-D; in the context of maintaining two personalities, Bob and Fred; and in wearing, when not undercover, a so-called scramble suit that serves to disguise his body to human eyes, as a scrambled multiplicity of bodies. The holo-scanners that watch Bob/Fred can see through scramble suits, and see directly into the reality that lies beneath. In his state of disassociation, Bob/Fred is lead to ask what a scanner sees, and to anxiously question whether it might see into himself, since he no longer can do so. The love-hate relationship that Bob/Fred has with the holoscanners in A Scanner Darkly prompts us to consider how surveillance through scanning technics and medical and scientific imaging might engender security and trust in the clinic, but also, albeit in a less obvious sense, the same feelings of paranoia, loss of identity, and hostility, as arise in Dick’s novels.

Before I move on to the scientific aspects of paranoia, I will talk about paranoia in surveillance studies. Paranoia, as Nicholas Holme writes—is a much vexed term in surveillance studies and, which “haunts the academic study of surveillance.” Its significations in the academic setting are only ever generally identified. In the academic setting, as David Harper points out, we can understand paranoia as productive in some ways in that it may be seen to engender critical thinking and specialist research on a given subject. However, as Harper also notes, the work that surveillance researchers do—and her refers to one particular researcher who tried to count in a single day of their life all of the devices that recorded her—is often criticised as paranoid and delusional scholarly activity in itself, dismissed as “unwarranted and meaningless suspicion…” In another, even more theoretical way, we might think of surveillance and paranoia studies in evolutionary terms as the very means by which vigilance is exercised against an otherwise invisible threat to our independent subjective, conscious and intellectual experience of the world so that, like meerkats that are visually impaired—that is, who cannot possibly, despite their vigilance, see all of the possible threats against them—and who use quiet surveillance vocalisations to alert their peers to possible predators–surveillance researchers, undertake a sentinel duty in carefully and intellectually identifying the  range of threats to our subjective positions and freedoms as individuals. The task is inevitably cross-disciplinary and also involves questions related to public ethics. The discreditability of some  sureveillance research is also perhaps linked to the cultural imaginary that surrounds paranoia, and the fact that beliefs associated with conspiracy theorising and paranoid thinking, far from rare, are actually very common within the population; as Harper argues, it is only the preoccupation and distress associated with these beliefs varies between clinical and everyday kinds of paranoia. Paranoia studies and paranoia more generally thus needs to be reimagined in the popular imaginary as something, like language itself, that may be positively utilised as much as it may become dysfunctional. In the context of a hospital, extreme paranoid and delusional reactions to medical intervention and scanning and radiation technics, are treated very seriously, and often discussed as unusual responses to the empirical logic of science, medicine, and the technologies that facilitate their pathologies and diagnostics.

However, if one understands the clinic in the way Foucault describes it in The Birth of The Clinic, also written in the early 70s, in 1973 —as a power structure in which the medical gaze and the enforcement of bio-power attempts not only to make the invisible pathological body visible and readable, but also to treat the body and disease as an object that transcends time, as it is linguistically converted into lesional signs (which we now would understand as genetics), from whence these symptoms emerged. Treating a disease could now be seen in terms of a ‘history’ and a ‘case’ rather than simply as a symptomatology. In this context of increasing surveillance of the body as an object, it is perhaps not so surprising that extreme paranoia in the form of, for example, Intensive Care Unit psychosis—or ICU psychosis—sometimes occurs whereby delusions that one is being victimised takes place. Nevertheless, a review in the Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews entitled ‘Social threat perception and the volution of paranoia’ from 2004 analyses the array of varied tests undertaken to determine the detection of threats by humans in the social environment, and, as the authors claim “The neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for fast and efficient threat detection may…have survived as an adaptive advantage in accord with Darwinian evolutionary theory.”[1] While we may think of other species when considering potential predators, and when thinking of Dick’s remarks, which seem to suggest the threat of another species obliterating humans, it is interesting to consider the extent to which paranoia functions as a means of protecting us against the actions undertaken and the actants created by agents within our species: by other humans. This is especially interesting when we put paranoia into the context of surveillance, and immunosurveillance technologies. It is all the more interesting to consider how the battery of tests created by the humans and life sciences themselves to measure illness – for example PET and CT scans—may in fact serve as examples of cases in which paranoia is increased by those undergoing such tests.

The paradox, predictably, is whether the tests that make us better, and that survey our bodies at extremely close-ranges, also play a role in activating vestigial paranoiac anxieties, not simply because we are consciously fearful of the results, or of even these medical technics or technologies themselves, but because, rather, of something other, and something prior to our conscious recognition of our own impulse or compulsion to be paranoid, and perhaps the impulse to respond to social, as well as physical, threats. I claim that paranoia—a much vexed term in surveillance studies and, as Nicholas Holm suggests, “a theme, an undefined noun [and] a vague proposition [that] haunts the academic study of surveillance”—can be seen to signify, in all of its academic and non-academic valencies, and in its meta-signification, so to speak, a hyper-rumination or an excess of mental activity on precisely that which we do not know, and that this activity is often framed in a negative, fearful, or anxious narrative. If we put paranoia into the Hegelian dialectical terms (thesis, negative, and synthesis) then paranoia might be seen as useful for developing the negative—for making a very strong case for the negative—but it might also postpone the development of a synthesis since it would resist the thesis, which, in everyday life, might compare to the resistance by the paranoid person of logical explanations, or rational hypotheses, for certain events they perceive as negative or certain actions they regard as persecutory or predatory. It follows from this proposition that paranoia might possibly arise in a patient undergoing surgery involving close-range body surveillance technics—for instance, there is a syndrome called ICU delusional syndrome wherein a patient in an intensive care unit begins to fear the medical clinic, and which is characterised by delusions and hallucinations within the clinic.

Of course, ICU is just as likely to arise because the patient is fearful of their medical diagnosis, or of the surgical procedure itself, or of their ability to recover from the surgery, and they may experience these feelings either before or after any surgery or diagnosis has taken place. My interests in these close-range surveillance technics, however, relates to the point I flagged earlier about our increasing knowledge of that which we have hitherto not known. While medical technologies offer us the opportunity to know and to see that which we could not normally know or see—there remains a crucial gap—always—in knowledge about the self, and that this fear of the gap, of the unknown, is the domain of paranoia. The paradox I want to underline here is that while we are fearful of that which is unknown, and which may in fact be made known, now, by these surveillance technics—Does the cancer exist or not? Is my child healthy and well?—there is perhaps another way in which these technics engender paranoia: they remind us of all we do not know. One qualification I wish to cite is that I am thinking of paranoia, in a rather Freudian way, as a psychopathology in ‘everyday life.’ Just as surveillance may exist in everyday life as well as in prisons and high-security offices, and so on, so it is with paranoia. While, of course, medical scanning technologies are not part of our everyday, this may not be the case for long. And as many studies of paranoia in non-clinical populations note, most people handle paranoia, notwithstanding its constant presence: most of us do not catastrophise, and are able to gain emotional distance from paranoid feelings or ideations. Those, however, who become susceptible to paranoia, both clinically and non-clinically, are said to “perceive themselves, whether accurately or not, as having inferior social standing”, and by bottling-up such feelings, “maintain a state in which external attributions and anomalous experiences are more likely, thus leading to the persistence of persecutory ideation.”[2]

In instances of conventional surveillance paranoia, in the face of something like the increasing abundance of CCTV cameras, or the fear of being monitored via social networks, and so on, arguably, the paranoia that one might feel arises as a result of a number of relatively explicable instances of non-knowledge—what might be described as imagined threats—including: Who is he or she that surveils me? Why is he or she surveilling me? How might their knowing about my private life, or the lives of my online avatars, be used against me, or for another’s benefit? In contrast, these non-knowledges or questions seem well-explained by the circumstances of the medical setting: the answers are, respectively: he or she is a doctor; they are surveilling my body because I am pregnant, or because I am suspected of having a disease; and the knowledge attained by the surveyors will be used for my benefit. In the medical setting, however, it is arguable that, for some, certain paranoid questions begin to arise at an interpersonal level about the nature of the medical surveillance regime itself: Does this technology have any negative side-effects or risks? Is the conclusion the doctor may draw in respect of her examination of this medical imaging an appropriate and medically sensible conclusion? Like Dick says, the hardware and scenery’s in the future—for it is now a medical age—but the situations are really in the past—for this situation, as Foucault’s argument in The Birth of the Clinicattests, are thoroughly political, and are governed by relations of power, which are designed to overcome bodily threats, and often, the threat of death itself. These questions are wotrth asking because it gets to the heart of what it means to be paranoid in the face of all surveillance regimes, be they understood, by cultural theorists, as positive or negative.

2. COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL STUDIES OF PARANOIA

As a slightly more recent study argues, “the perception of threat is a central feature of paranoia almost by definition.” However, this more recent study, when considering a range of empirical tests undertaken in relation to paranoia that are similar to the aforementioned word and story tests, suggests that “there is considerable evidence that paranoid patients have indeed actually experienced an abnormal frequency of adverse events such as discrimination and victimisation.”[6]In other words, paranoid patients may indeed be expressing a conditioned avoidance response (or ‘CAN’) in relation to experiences quite realistically and actually already had by them previously. As the study explains,

Not only does this [past experience and memory of past experiences] affect evaluations of the past, but also, because there is a tendency to rely on recollection of past events when making predictions about the future (called the availability heuristic….) it also tends to inflate estimates of future negative events.[7]

In addition to this, there is evidence that paranoid patients have a tendency to preferentially recall threat-related, as opposed to simply neutral, information[8] and that, finally, paranoid patients make inflated or exaggerated assessments or estimates about future negative events even after controlling for the above events (or for the availability heuristic), as well as for the effects of comorbidity—that is, the possibility that these memory-based influences may coexist with another syndrome or syndromes, such as depression or anxiety. As this later study claims, it is the somewhat inexplicable origin of the inability of the paranoid patient to desist in making inflated assessments about the immediate threat-quotient in relation to future and current events, notwithstanding his or her apparently fully conscious psychical resolution of past-threats, that is suggestive, for neuroscientists, that a “specific abnormality in the mechanism responsible for aversive processing” exists in paranoid patients which makes a “large contribution to the formation of paranoid delusions.”[9] Of course, before we speak of the abonormalities that characterise paranoia—in terms of biochemical or physiognomic abnormalities—it is worth considering the behavioural and psychological habits that are facilitative of the same. For example, attribution theory considers how events are explained—or to what causes paranoid and other so-called normal people attribute them. Since most normal people are thought to attribute negative events to external causes—a phenomenon known as the self-serving bias, which is said to buffer against self-esteem loss in the face of failure and other threats to the self—there is thought to be a natural tendency to regulate or self-serve qua self-surveil one’s levels of paranoia. Some studies have suggested that paranoid patients tend to attribute negative events to excessively external causes[10] and especially external personal causes.[11] However, because of the inconsistency across paranoid people in relation to self-esteem, models of paranoia have linked inconsistent or unstable self-esteem itself to paranoia—paranoid patients are not excessively low or high in self-esteem, and in most instances there is no bearing of self-esteem on the existence of paranoia.[12]

Studies involving humans and rats in relation to avoidance conditioning have shown that once successful avoidance of, for example, an electric shock, has been achieved, the avoidance response – for instance, this may involve pulling a lever to avoid the electric shock—becomes “resistant to extinction”:[13] that is, when the aversive stimulus—the electric shock—is magnified, repeated more often, or otherwise made prevalent—the avoidance response becomes less likely to discontinue. In this context, I would like to charecertise surveillance – and, first of all, standard CV surveillance as a kind of aversive stimulus – but, more than this, I would like to suggest that in our increasingly medicalised world, and with the increase of devices and instruments suited for surveillance of our bodies—consider those medical technics with which we are familiar: scanners of all kinds, including x-rays, functional imagery with positron emission topography, in which a radionuclide is introduced into the body, and traced throughout it to produce an image of a functionality, notwithstanding a small risk of radiation poisoning, as well as FMRI scans, and so on. There is a sense in which these technologies might also be regarded as surveilling technologies—quite easily—but also in which they might be considered as aversive stimuluses to which we might develop psychological responses, or avoidance conditions. It is not simply because these devices are misread as predators, either, although this might be the case; but, moreover, because, in a very real sense—and in the sense that Dick’s remark implies—these technologies might be repurposed as instruments of the state, as well as by the medical profession, as instruments of oppression and of exclusion. This is what Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, described as the medical gaze, which separated the patient’s identity from the medical body he or she inhabited.[14]It is a scopic regime whose purpose, while putatively for the good, is arguably as much liable to mistake, accident, exclusion, oppression, and to depersonalising or identity-shifting effects—some of which result in paranoia. However, how might this be said to occur?

3. PARANOIA IN SOCIETY AND PHILOSOPHY

While I have thought of paranoia as a vestigial trait that might be reactivated or reanimated by medical technics in the case of ICU, philosophical understanding of paranoia regard it more as an ideological position or reaction to an historical situation or episteme. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, describe paranoia in Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus as a ‘reactionary arrest’ by which the ‘deteritorializations’ of identity and subjectivity brought about within capitalist societies are ‘reterritorialized’, or are resisted by a paranoiac.[15]As they suggest, recalling Dick’s thinking on the atavistic societies that his characters inhabit, and the distinction between the archaic and the futuristic—the ancient and the modern (their book was written two years before the interview—1972):

modern societies…are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them towards an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship…[and] they are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia.[16]

It is interesting to consider the way Deleuze and Guattari contrast the symptoms of schizophrenia and paranoia as different logical responses—or causes and effects— of capitalistic territorializations in modern society whereas the DSM-IV-TR, regards paranoia as a subtype of schizophrenia[17], as well as a separate disorder, namely, Paranoid Personality Disorder[18], both of which are relatively uncommon among the general population, and have, as a two-part classification, developed out of Emil Kraeplin’s nineteenth century textbook of psychiatry, in which “dementia paranoides” (qua paranoia) and “dementia praecox” (quaschizophrenia) were distinguished. Notwithstanding contrasting classifications, the most salient difference between the diagnostic or clinical understanding of paranoia, and the philosophical and cultural studies understanding, is the extent to which the phenomenon is linked to modern societies, as opposed to an archaic, special or phenotypic trait. As Kenneth Paradis writes,

As an epistemological rather than nosological descriptor paranoia is a term that participates in the discursive management of the individual’s tendency to remythologize modernity’s disenchanted cosmos; it is a wrong way to find personal meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. Paranoia is a modern grotesque: it reveals the modern ideal of objective knowledge as shot through with desire, and the modern ideal of effective, even-handed administration as shot-through with presumptions of hierarchy, privilege and exclusion…[19]

As a response to this, I would argue that the paranoia is activated by medical technics with which we have been made to become very quickly familiar, and which we have perhaps misperceived as threats, not directly, but because of the range of social meanings that accrue around these technics, and a desire to avoid these threats.  As an Christine Hassenstab’s consideration of the ultrasound as a

“technological nexus where visibility could join with some form of subjectification or end in actual subjectification.”

As she suggests,

“we need to understand how patients, especially women, negotiate medical images. We need to remember that while images are dependent on culture and society for their meanings, these images can have multiple meanings.”[20]

Given the multiplicity of meanings engendered by medical and other close-range surveillance technics, how one negotiates these meanings epistemologically is not as clear-cut or as stable a task as Paradis suggests. Indeed, the remythologising of modernity’s so-called disenchanted cosmos seems often already to have taken place; both the popular media and even the medical literature, which, for legal reasons among others, conveys and discloses the full range of possible side-effects, risks, and other threats in relation to almost all medical procedures and operations. Far from an individualist modern grotesque, then, paranoia seems, in this medico-legal context, to be a mythology that is generated in the form of a collective unconscious about the nature of medicine and of public health more generally.

Abstract

Throughout the intersubjective, oral history of modern science, there runs a psychotropic trace. Discerning this trace focuses our attention on the discovery of LSD, as well as its ingestion by certain scientists seeking their own aporetic discoveries. By their own accounts, Francis Crick, the pioneering co-discoverer of DNA, and Kary Mullis, the inventor of DNA sequence replication, self-administered LSD to access ontological or inventive modes beyond the field of their immanent, embodied sensoria.

Having identified this ‘psychotropic trace’, my paper will consider LSD as a pharmakon in the context of Derrida’s quasi-transcendental theorising on the nature of ‘invention’ in his essay ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’ (1989).  For Derrida, ‘invention’ occurs as a limited form of production in “only two possible, and rigourously specific registers”: the ‘tekhnē’ and the ‘fabula’. Whereas the tekhnē-invention summons the possibility of further invention, and “is capable of a certain self-reproductive recurrence and even of a certain reiterative simulation,”[1] the fabula only “recites and describes itself [and] presents itself from the start as a beginning.”[2]

By reference to these distinctive registers, my paper examines how LSD — little understood or examined by contemporary science, and almost always comprehended through the lens of its ignominious history — resides interstitially between an unpotentiated tekhnē and an oblique fabula. I conclude by suggesting LSD as a pharmakon that is “not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination,”[3] and by focussing on the conditions of indeterminacy and interstitiality in relation to scientific ‘invention’ more generally.

[1] Jaques Derrida, Psyche: Invention of the Other, p. 30.

As if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggrel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buzz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage.

—S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

Not a great deal of literary historical scholarship has been devoted to examining the connections between science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the romantic literature produced during this period. Instead, “literary history” has “drawn principally on the fellow humanities of philosophy and history” and only “superficially…on the history and philosophy of science”[1] to develop an essentially incomplete and unidisciplinary account of the Romantic period. As Nancy Easterlin succinctly points out, scholars in the “humanistic research paradigms have remained largely immune to the influence of science”, maintaining the “two-cultures tradition, by virtue of the body of knowledge they adopt—and…by what they implicitly exclude—to frame our understanding of” literary and other “written works.”[2] The recent works of such literary historians as Alan Richardson and Trevor Levere, however, has started to address this elision in literary history by mapping out the connections between literary Romanticism and neurological scientific discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levere’s study demonstrates how the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment “made ‘mechanical’ a term of abuse, with both poets and scientists “dismissing it in favour of ‘organic.’[3] Richardson, similarly, in British Romanticism and The Science of The Mind, aims to show how scientists in the period of approximately 1770-1880 departed from the dualist understanding of language and cognition, and embarked upon a more holistic and universalized vision of the ‘embodied’ individual, complete with a totalized and yet organically differentiated brain.

In my own paper, I aim to elaborate on the accounts generated by Richardson and Levere by closely examining the way in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge interacted with new neurological principles proposed by Romantic scientists of the mind. More innovatively, I aim to show that Coleridge’s underlying motivation for rejecting certain scientific models of the mind, while avowing others, is related to the potential Coleridge sees in neurological models to demean the position of poetic language and imagination. I have chosen to focus specifically on Coleridge and his text, Biographia Literaria, for three interrelated reasons. Firstly, Coleridge’s changing critical stance toward scientific knowledge about the mind reflects the distinctive shift in Romantic scientists away from Enlightenment principles. The voracity with which Coleridge’s initially opposed the relation of science and poetry, and his trenchant rejection of David Hartley’s scientific programme[4], for instance, contrasts significantly with Coleridge’s ultimate view that “scientific learning was essential to the writing of an epic poem.”[5] Secondly, Coleridge’s bias “toward the centrality of language”, and his initially intransigent attitude regarding the “transcendental subject” of the poet – that “only a profound philosophical mind could hope to achieve poetic greatness” – illustrates Coleridge’s view that poetry and science alike should both direct themselves to a “discovery or statement of truth.”[6] Lastly, I will show that Coleridge’s unique self-experimentation with the unconscious sensations of the body, evinced most clearly throughout Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (but further illustrated by Coleridge’s self-experimental praxis in composing poems such as Kubla Kahn) provides a fascinating insight into Coleridge’s conception of the poetic and “organic” imagination while demonstrating his close association with science, more generally.[7]

A definitive shift in epistemological thought distinguished the ideas of the Romantic neurological scientists from those of their Enlightenment predecessors. As Irving Massey has summarized, “during the later eighteenth century, psychology moved from a Cartesian mind-body dualism on the one hand, and Lockean tabula rasa principles on the other, through what might be called a mechanistic phase among some of the French idéologues, to arrive at…a typically Romantic—and modern—view of the mind.” [8]As Massey elaborates, this post-Kantian view “unites mind and body, operating as a single activity entity in which affect and thought” are unified in their experience of the world, so that, “in a Wordsworthian phrase, we “half create” what we perceive, or, better still, in Shelley’s terms, learn to imagine what we know.”[9] In Richardson’s opinion, in the Romantic era, the mind, with all its instincts, faculties, or “modules”, is no longer seen as a passive and fully conditionable organ, but rather as an one that encounters the world already prepared or “primed” to “deal with it”: by “organizing it, emotionally, perceptually, and linguistically to the greatest advantage of the organism.”[10] In this epistemological setting, key questions apropos of the “mind-body fusion” became paramount for both Romantic literary figures and scientists alike. In all disciplinary fields, the question came to be asked:

what kind of relationship exists between sensuality and mental representation, and what role does imagination play in it?[11]

In the early stages of its development, however, work on the mind and imagination produced by post-Enlightenment scientists, “[p]articularly in its association with materialism” had the effect only of inspiring “a good deal of hostility and anxiety” in literary writers, with scientific texts, “remaining open throughout the period not only to” their embrace “but to their attacks as well.”[12] Moreover, Coleridge – arguably more than any other poet – vehemently attacked the early texts of Romantic science, in his Biographia Literaria, impugning David Hartley’s Observations on Man[13] by maintaining that Hartley’s “associationism” characterized the mind of man as a bleak, mechanistic and “passive” organ, governed by “mere lawlessness”[14]. For Coleridge, such models of associationism condemned the Romantic subject to “the despotism of outward impressions, and that of a senseless and passive memory.”[15] This criticism presaged the long period over which the development of Coleridge’s more nuanced understanding of the mind took place: an understanding that would always deeply oppose the materialist or associationist position, and yet come to allow for a kind of language that could imitate or represent the internal relations of the body and mind. Essentially, however, Hartley’s attempt – “often considered the first” – to write a psychology of the brain which was based on physiological characteristics, represented an interstitial text, situated uncomfortably between the “mechanistic” impulse of the Enlightened materialists and the universally embodied account of the mind proffered by the science new Romantics.

In a somewhat crude prefiguration of the modern theories of neurological connectionism (and in a model structurally similar to Nikolas Luhmann’s theory of systems[16]), Hartley, in his Observations, attempt to “explode post-Cartesian Dualism” by reducing all mental functioning to the single, material “practice of association.”[17] “Motions” from the external environment, Hartley argued, inundate the senses in such a way as to cause vibrations throughout the nerves in the body. In turn, these vibrations trigger even smaller vibrations (“vibratiunicles”) throughout the nerves and nerv-endings, which could persist in the brain as “dispositions”, especially if “reinforced directly (by repeated exposure to the sensory data) or indirectly (by association).”[18] As Richardson points out, Hartley’s system of the mind and body advances what may now be called a “’medical model’” psychology, one aimed at securing the “common Consent of Physicians and Philosophers.”[19]

Initially, Coleridge had been fascinated by the relatively progressivist view advanced by Hartley, a view that overturned such foundational Enlightenment principles as Cartesian mind-body dualism. In fact, after reading the Observations in around 1790, Coleridge had been so inspired, that he named his first son after Hartley.[20] Subsequently, Coleridge wrote, in an enthusiastic letter to Southey, that he believed his own philosophy was able to reach “farther than Hartley [‘s]” – not simply could the actions of the mind be seen as corporeal – governed by Hartleyan “motion”. Rather, as Coleridge professed, he “believed in the corporeality of thought – namely, that it is motion.”[21] Not long after this initial enthusiasm, however, Coleridge in his Biographia dismissed Hartley’s theory of a “disposition in a material nerve” as “absurd”[22] and altogether disavowed Hartley’s “undifferentiated” and “passive” model of the brain, which left no room for what Coleridge saw as the overriding ability of the brain to organize the senses and perception in a self-reflexive or meta-systemic way. As Coleridge suggested, Hartley’s model allowed the brain only to function in a passive state, operating ceaselessly and without supervision, in a “phantasmal chaos of association.”[23] For Coleridge, therefore, Hartley’s passive model of the mind was fundamentally short-sighted. It did not afford the brain with the overruling powers of “will and reason” so important to intellectual development, and reduced the brain to a “blind mechanism” devoid of its own autonomous and “distinct powers.”[24]

In addition to such formal reasoning, Coleridge also presented ideological grounds for rebuking Hartley’s system of the mind. For instance, Coleridge averred that Hartley’s account had neglected to observe that spiritual force inherent to every man – a force by which the “infinite spirit” and the “intelligent holy will” of God and divine inspiration was able to enter into the mind.[25] As Levere implies, this kind of position may be generally attributable to Coleridge’s deep philosophic “idealism”, which was “more thoroughgoing than that of most scientists.”[26] Furthermore, as a terser Levere contends, Coleridge “believed that human reason was God-given, and that the human mind and nature, divinely ordained and created, were similiarly informed, ideas of mind corresponding to laws of nature.”[27] In his poem, Religious Musings, for example, Coleridge states in a tone that is particularly liturgical that “There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, Omnific.”[28] Coleridge’s more scriptural dismissal of “Hartleian” science, then, may be understood as an example of how Coleridge wished not to reduce poetic language to the mere association of thoughts in the mind, but rather to maintain that it was the effect of deep and “superintending” “reflection” by the “Omnific” organ of the mind, about itself. The mind, for Coleridge, was capable of self-reflexion and unconscious creativity, and this was not entirely without a spiritual or transcendental power in itself.[29] Ultimately, in Coleridge’s view, Hartley’s system of ‘Memoria Technica’ left no “idenitifiable locus for the soul”, reducing it to a “mere ens logicum” and failing to account for the “imperishable” and self-reflexive nature of human thought.[30]

Although the dispute between Coleridge and Hartley is significant, the patent hostility represented by such Romanic writers as Coleridge in reaction to such materialist and mechanistic accounts of the brain as Hartley’s, appears to have generated a rather misleading picture of the way in which the majority of Romantic writers connected with the more characteristically ‘Romantic’ neuroscience of the time. As Easterlin suggests, the scholarly “Work on the romantic mind has, for the most part, drawn selectively on Hartleyan associationism, psychoanalysis, and the German idealist tradition within epistemology”, and has mystified, in doing so, the reality of the Romantic brain scientists’ new epistemology.[31] As Easterlin further suggests, the focus of most literary historical scholarship has remained relatively microscopic even though “the historical period of British literary romanticism (roughly 1789-1832) corresponds with an unprecedented development of theories of the brain and nervous system.”[32] In reality, as Glenda Sacks affirms, the “ideas of scientists such as Gall, Dawrin and Cabanis” about the physiognomic structure of the brain and about “neuroscience”, are deeply “reflected in Romantic literary culture” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which “foregrounded feeling and emotion at the expense of reason, reassessed the significance of the natural environment on the body, emphasized sensation and sensibility, and postulated an active and creative mind.”[33]. As we have seen, the “new notion of an embodied and differentiated brain” wholly transfigured “Romantic era discourses” on the human brain, turning them “toward a more materialist view of the mind”, to “one that supported organic over mechanistic theories of human nature and art.”[34]

As Hans Eichner has confidently argued, almost all of the Romantic literary figures can be seen to have rejected the “mechanistic assumptions” of the preceding Enlightenment generation, and to have “abandoned” the Lockean ethos of human uniformity and sameness, displacing the “timeless, the universal, and the general” in human nature with the “temporal, the local, and the individual.”[35] Although problematic, Coleridge’s critique of Hartley, in this broader context, can be made to reconcile with the general epistemological shift towards ‘universal embodiment’ in Romantic scientific thinking. In essential terms, Coleridge’s disavowal of Hartley represents not the wholesale rejection of Romantic brain science, but only the somewhat misleading rejection of Hartley’s more or less idiosyncratic materialist inheritance, at this time.[36] As Richardson suggests, although Hartley firmly argues for the embodiment of the mind in the brain – as “the Organ of Organs[37]” – in a fashion most akin to materialists “such as Diderot and LaMettrie” – there is much else in Hartley’s writing that demonstrates his departure from the materialist tradition and that prefigures the “anti-dualistic” psychological approach of the Romantics such as Darwin and Cabanis, such as, for example, his emphasis the importance of ‘unconscious’ mental activity in mental life.[38] In this sense, Coleridge’s decision to attack Hartley’s outmoded system of the mind in his Biographia (rather than the more sophisticated analyses of Gall or Darwin) can be seen as a strategic move by Coleridge, ensuring that his own political ambitions to prioritize poetic language and the human imagination were met: in attacking Hartley, Coleridge could “evade” the “full weight” of the challenge posed by the new “biological accounts of the mind”[39], whose principles of language, the body and unconsciousness, Coleridge would nevertheless later come to experiment with and in many ways adopt, as his own.[40]

Many of the new neurophysiologists of the Romantic period provided clear alternatives to the view of the mind as passive to which Coleridge had objected in Hartley’s formulation of the ‘Memoria Technica’. As Easterlin notes, “in contrast to Hartley’s 1749 Observations”, Erasmus Darwin in his text 1794 text, Zoonomia,

posits the centrally active nature of mind, and diverges as well from the Lockean inheritance in asserting the internal nature of sensation as well as the actuality of innate desires and unconscious processes.”[41] Similarly, as Joseph Gall argued, the mind was an active and differentiated “assemblage of particular organs,[42]

always capable of self-reflexion and cognition, even while unconscious; its “vital strength” interminably “concentrated in a single organ or a small number of organs” even “whilst the others sleep.”[43] In all of this writing, the practices of Romantic scientists exhibit a new focus on embodied experience, or, as Richardson suggests, ‘Embodied Universalism’, proposing (in a way that foresees the telos of Lacan’s psychoanalysis and his theory of the mirror stage[44]) that human experience begins where sense impressions are made upon the body. For Richardson, the importance of this shift from a “mechanistic and dualistic to a biological, embodied view of human nature” was of such import, that it entailed “not so much an abandonment as a radical reformulation of human universals.”[45] In allowing new reformulations of the intrinsic nature of man to emerge, then, the new “corporeal and emotive approach to human nature” in neuroscience “enabled Romantic writers to reassert shared human features rejected by an earlier generation of thinkers.”[46] Wordsworth, for instance, “argues for a “universal” moral sense in the face of Locke’s wholesale dismissal of transcultural “moral principles.” [47] As Richardson goes on to note, the Enlightenment had “fostered its own version of cultural relativism, stemming from distaste for innate or universally embodied propensities and a consequent overvaluation of the effects of culture, education, and climate.”[48] In the neuroscience of the Romantic period, conversely, universal embodiment was seen as the shared factor of the human condition, and, as an ideology, universal embodiment promised to extend human inclusion and mutual comprehension beyond the limits set by the paradigms of the Enlightenment.

Privileging the relation of the mind and body in this way contradicted the primacy that Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers had afforded to the more or less passive mental experience of the world, an experience, they argued, that could only be properly understood with the assistance of culture, learning and education – and universalized, only in natural language and with logic.[49] More importantly, the Romantic neural science of Darwin, Gall and Cabanis, departed from Locke’s account of the mind in other ways:  it divided the brain into a multi-faceted and multi-functional organ, for example, capable of both conscious and unconscious thought, of institutionally cognitive or unconscious ‘bodily’ learning. In relation to language, many of the new romantic brain scientists argued for a form of thought that preceded language – for a cognition that was rooted in the body as prelinguistic sensation and only ever manifested consciously by the idea and use of language.[50] Gall, for instance, identified arguments of this nature in Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which Hobbes describes a kind of “mental discourse” that precedes language – a language that could be internally exercised, reflected upon, and then transferred into verbal discourse if necessary.[51] Moreover, Gall himself –following Spurzheim – chose to write an extensive sketch on a person who could not speak language (a ‘mute’) in order to illustrate the extent of his wide-ranging mental powers.[52] In opposition to logocentrists such as Condillac, who perpetuated the Enlightenment’s attempt to universalize man via language, Gall asserts that “emotions find distinct expression in a bodily language of “natural” signs, “anterior to spoken language.”[53] Others, furthermore, such as Pierre Cabanis, emphasize the role of “instinct” and intuition, stressing that role of the “entire sensitive system” including the “internal organs,” in the “formation of thought” as in the generation of “gestures, voices, looks, physiognomy” that constitute a system of core-language “common to the entire human race.”[54]

This interest in a prelinguistic thought – in a form of thought without language – presented new possibilities to Romantic poets such as Coleridge, but especially to Wordsworth, whose sublimely silent or mute poets were celebrated for their heavenly, yet soundless and imagistic, language– “Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,/ the thought, the image, and the silent joy.”[55] As Piper suggests, Wordsworth’s poem is a good indication of the way in which many Romantic poets, however lamentably, adopted the new science’s philosophy about language and its seemingly tenuous or incidental relation to an authentic human subjectivity.[56] Unlike Wordsworth, however, who empathized with the “mute poets” of the world and their form of non-language, Coleridge saw a direct connection between language and the imagination, and, as a result, considered those not capable of expressing themselves in language as incapable of possessing the poetic imagination: for example, he finds “idiots and wild children equally repulsive.”[57] This – Coleridge’s implicitly logocentric ideology – was founded in his “post-Enlightenment bias toward the centrality of language and the integrity of the subject”[58] and it led him to remain apprehensive throughout his life about the potential of categories of unspeaking men to write or comprehend poetry – those that Richardson has called the “cognitive others of the Enlightenment anthropology”[59] (such as those placed in Locke’s category of the “Children, Ideots, Savages and illiterate People”[60]).

When Wordsworth presented an empathetic and unique portrait of a so-called “idiot” in his poem “Idiot Boy”, for instance, Coleridge stressed that “although a fine poem”, Wordsworth’s lyric did not “guard sufficiently against the “disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy.”[61] While for Wordsworth, the figure of Johnny – the ‘idiot boy’ – provided an alternative to the eviscerated and rational subjects of Enlightenment anthropology and literature, (and reflected the perspective on idiocy being advanced in the biological science of his time), for Coleridge, in contrast, Johnny represented the antithesis of the “transcendental figure of subjectivity” that he had sought to develop in his own literary poetics. Even the figure of Johnny’s mother – empathetic as she is with Johnny’s mute expressiveness- becomes for Coleridge a “burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage…the impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment.”[62] As Richardson suggests, for Coleridge, Wordsworth “granted the unconscious, emotive and instinctive mental acts far more validity and efficacy than [he] is even remotely willing to accept”[63], denying, for Coleridge, the “best part of language”, which is created not simply by “sounds”, but certain transcendental “forms of the human mind.”[64]

In his Biographia Literaria, for example, Coleridge devotes much of chapter XVII to generating an account of language by attacking Wordsworth’s ideas on the relation between poetic language and “rustic life”. Throughout this chapter, a general priority is afforded to the brain over the body in the generation of a language (“properly so-called.”) Essentially, Coleridge objects to what he describes as “an equivocation in the use of the word ‘real’” in Wordsworth’s account of the “real language of men.”[65] Whereas Wordsworth implies that “the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived” are “objects” in the sense of an external or referential object in the world, Coleridge insists that “the best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself…the products of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds.”[66] For Coleridge, therefore, the best parts of language are derived from an interiorized form of thought that organizes and reflects upon the inner-workings of the brain itself, rather than from external things or their direct interaction with the senses of the body. More specifically, however, Coleridge distinguishes between “discriminating sounds”—the phonemic organization of language by the voice and the body—often created by animals and uncivilized humans – and the internal language of his “reflection.” As he plainly states, “It is more than probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, other than metaphorically.”[67] In Coleridge’s view, then, only those sense-impressions that can be properly turned into language by a particular and detached mode of “reflection” by the mind upon its own operations may be properly called the stuff of poetic imagination. The undesirable effects that this mode of ontological and autonomous “reflection” – so important to Coleridge understanding of the poetic imagination- generated, however, subsequently led other literary writers to criticize Coleridge’s own poetry.

As Coleridge was composing his Biographia, for example, his “erstwhile friend and correspondent”, John Thelwall was developing his own “theory of English rhythmus in conjunction with his speech-therapy practice.”[68] The importance of rhythm in poetry for Thelwall eventually led him to write to Coleridge in 1796, accusing him of violating the “elementary principles” of “oral utterance.”[69] As Thelwall asserted, “It is difficult to bear the affectation that blurs almost every one of your poems—I mean the frequent accent upon adjectives and weak words.” Later, in his 1810 treatise on English prosody, Thelwall was to attribute precisely such an error to “the habits of silent study, and silent composition, to which the literati of modern times (who know their own language only by the eye) are almost universally devoted.”[70] In Thelwall’s view, then, Coleridge’s act of “reflection on the act of the mind itself”, rather than serving as Coleridge’s criterion for the “ideal” poetic imagination, was, for others writers, itself the cause of “verses that look smooth and pretty upon paper, [but] are yet revolting to the ear” and of poems that “discourage, by their ear-cracking harshness, every attempt of the reader to give them vocal utterance”[71] For Thelwall, then, Coleridge’s own poetic theory, with its “mentalist and transcendental bias”, had paid insufficient attention to the fact that poetic language, ultimately, is to be exteriorized : not a product of the mind but a ‘performative’ and sensorial extension of the bodies rhythm, an embodied form of “nerve-language.”[72]

As Celeste Langan has argued, Coleridge in his unfinished text Logic, describes the gradual process by which a subject moves from “the fondness of children for rhymes” to a more complex understanding of “the mental elements or factors of likeness”; an “accidence,” or principles of grammar determining inflections of words, replaces an alphabet.”[73] In this text, Coleridge may be seen to affirm a rhythmic definition of poetry that relates to the bodily experience of language, to the instantiation of an ‘embodied’ form of poetry. However, in this account, Coleridge presumes not only a knowledge of the English alphabet, but of the relations between grammars as well, allowing only for poetic bodily rhythms of sound to emerge after the formal aspects of language have been mastered. In this sense, as Langan avers, Coleridge’s purpose in Logic (as in Christabel and Kubla Khan) “is to detach poetry from the instrumental purposes associated with [everyday] speech”[74] and the “real language of men”, languages that for Coleridge could not conceive formally of the “divine logos” and thus redundant for poetic appropriation. As Langan continues, “Coleridge derives the “best part of language”—the language of poetry—from “incompetencies and pathologies of communication”, concentrating upon the kind of “performance phenomena” that contemporary “linguists regard as irrelevant to the question of whether a given sentence is “speakable” or “unspeakable.”[75]

Such outmoded “performance phenomena”, asserts Langan, includes Coleridge’s “pronounced interest in echo and vibration” which he used as an experiment “designed to test [his own] belief in the “voluntary” and creative power of [the] imagination against the lingering influence of materialist (associationist) theories of subjectivity.”[76] In his experimention with such sound sensation, for all of the potential that Coleridge observes in the vibrational and rhythmic aspects of poetry, he remains certain to point out in his Biographia that when the “object” that meter calls to our attention and so “intensifies” is not worthy – “when the language is prosaic, in other words”[77] -the result is deeply unsettling: “There must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.”[78] Here, Coleridge reaffirms his “bias toward the centrality of language”, reinsuring that the rhythmic sensations of the body are not privileged above the axiomatic position the “reflective” and active “rhythm of thought”[79], which, for Coleridge, constitutes the language of poetry. As Coleridge further suggests, the “power” of volitional activity, during the act of writing poetry, “first put into action by the will and understanding, and thereafter “retained under their irremisive, though gentle and unnoticed controul (laxis effertur habenis)”, ever maintains a connection with the conscious mind and with “judgment ever awake and steady self-possession”, revealing “itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.”[80]

By way of illustrating just how uncomfortably this conclusion may be seen to sit alongside the rest of Coleridge’s writings, Richardson astutely observes how “seldom [it has] been remarked that the introductory notice” to Coleridge’s celebrated Kubla Khan seems quite distinctly inconsistent with the holistic account of “poetic creation” Coleridge provides in his Biographia[81], as above. The infamously dubious circumstances in which Coleridge composed Kubla Khan – in a “profound sleep, at least of the external senses” – would suggest not that the “whole soul of man” had been active in its literary creation, but that, on the contrary, some exertion of thought “in the absence of a conscious thinker” had taken place, a form of cognition that clearly departs from Coleridge’s earlier model for the creation of “the best language” through the highly intentional and volitional “reflection on the mind.” As Richardson elaborates, the mind’s ’“peculiar independence from…conscious control” throughout Kubla Khan, creates an intriguingly confused account of Coleridge’s understanding of the conscious mind and the poetic imagination and its distinction from the sense-perceptions of the body.[82] Elsewhere, Coleridge defines unconscious activity as the “Genius in the man of Genius” and describes the work of art as one in which the “Conscious is so impressed on the Unconscious, as to appear in it.”[83] And yet in the artistry of Kubla Khan, as Richardson remarks, conscious activity appears decidedly absent, and no such thing as the “interpenetration” of “spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose”[84], as described by Coleridge in the Biographia, seems to make itself known. Rather, the poem seems almost altogether devoid of the kind of “volitional” and “irremisive…controul” of authorial consciousness that Coleridge explicitly avows in Biographia.

In relation to poetic experimentation, Coleridge – perhaps more than any other Romantic poet – represents the full extent to which the literature produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged with the scientific ideas of the time. As Noel Jackson states, “when critics speak of the Romantic poets’ as pioneering literary ‘experimentation’, it “generally refers…to the innovation of the [literary or poetic] work rather than to any experimental protocols per se.” As Jackson further attests, the deep connection that poets of the Romantic period maintained with self-experimentation and “metaphysical inquiry”, however, is evidence, of “a fuller—and more fully literal—connection to philosophic and scientific experimentation in this period.”[85] Coleridge’s confession to have performed “a multitude of little experiments on my own sensations and on my senses” some of which had given him “reason to believe” he had caused “injury to [his] nervous system”, as well the fact that Wordsworth had begged him to stop his “experiments with Light and Figure” which had left him “nervous & feverish” in a letter of 1801, reveal the extent to which Coleridge’s was prepared to experience suspension from the very mental consciousness and self-reflexivity that his bias toward language would imply. The dream-like opium-induced state in which Coleridge was to later write Kubla Khan seems the obvious culmination of his fascination with the unconscious mind and the way in which the internal and dream-like rhythms of the body, as opposed to those borne out of the” reflection on language itself”, might be constituted in language.

In an 1818 entry on the “Language of Dreams”, Coleridge directly refers to contemporary “physiologic ideas” of scientists about dreams and speculates on the divisions between the cerebral, ganglionic and “sympathetic” systems, emphasizing the “paramouncy of the Gangionic over the Cerebral in Sleep”, replete as it is with the “language of Images and Sensations.”[86] As Richardson, among others, has suggested, this passage “reads like a moralized, confessional variation on the new biological theory of dreams being developed by Darwin, Cabanis and other early neuroscientists.”[87] In addition to this reading, Coleridge’s moralistic remarks demonstrate that his new view considers the mind to be capable, if not extremely well-adapted to, the creation of imagistic or poetic language during the dreaming or unconscious state.[88] As Levere hypothesizes, “part of the fascination of dreams for Coleridge was the question of how far volition was involuntarily suspended in dreaming. How far were dreams dependent on waking thoughts? And how completely were dreams unconnected to conscience?”[89]

In the Romantic scientific discourse produced by Darwin, Cabanis and Gall, dreams had been identified as the effect experienced by a “fragmented subject” – as a form of bodily cognition that takes the place of the voluntary or conscious supervision of wakeful thought. Furthermore, such scientific discourse routinely emphasized the considerable extent to which “bodily processes – not least those related to sexuality – impacted on the movement and the unconscious psychic life of dreams.”[90] In his very modern account of the dream, for example, Cabanis implies that “the continuous activity” of the mind during sleep allows an individual to experience the uninterrupted experience of restfulness – a necessary part of human existence.[91] As Cabanis explains, rather than constituting a suspension of thought, dreams are in fact “produced” by “a real and peculiar action” of the brain[92] in which the subject is capable of rational activity, even to “continue its research” on intellectual matters of the day “in dreams.”[93]

Similarly, in Francois Joseph Gall’s formulation, dreams take place as an instance of intense brain activity, although in his account only a select few of the cerebral organs remain active while other are “suspended” in the “assemblage of particular organs” that constitutes the whole of the brain.[94] In his account, Gall hypothesizes that “The whole vital strength is concentrated in a single organ or a small number of organs whilst the others sleep; hence their action must be of necessity more energetic”, often calling upon the “internal sources” that generate “sentiments and ideas” (as available in sleep as in wakefulness) to generate “invent” new ideas or conclusions.[95] Although, as Richardson notes, such “neurophilosophical” theories of dreaming presuppose an active brain and the continuity of neural activity during sleep “expressing the claims of the body”, they also entail the suspension of volition during sleep and the loss of the mind to the body as the primary organizational human organ. As Richardson continues, this kind of scientific background provides an “important context” within which to examine what has been called the “the “discovery of the unconscious” within literary Romanticism.”[96]

In addition to the texts of Gall, Cabanis and others, Coleridge’s own discovery of the literary and scientific unconscious relied most of all upon the writing of Erasmus Darwin on the subject of dreams in Zoonomia. As Elisabeth Schneider makes clear, Coleridge drew directly upon Darwin’s text to formulate his lecture notes on The Tempest, where Coleridge considers dreaming to entail a “suspension of the voluntary…power” that characterizes daily thought.[97] Together with Coleridge’s own experimentation with a semi-unconscious from of thought in Kubla Kahn, Coleridge had also “learned from recording and interpreting his dreams” that the poetic imagination was a faculty distinct from others in the mind.[98] As Jennifer Ford shows, Coleridge used his account in the Biographia Literaria of a water-insect winning its way up against the stream “by alternative pulses of active and passive motion” as an “emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.”[99] More importantly, scientific theories of dreams would have been of particular interest to Coleridge, whose earlier attribution, in Biographia, of the origin of language to precisely the conscious, volitional acts that amounted to a “reflection on the acts of the mind itself” seemed as absent in the occurrence of his later, and philosophically troubling dreams, as much as in his absent conscience in Kubla Khan. Ultimately, Coleridge attributed his continual experience of the bodily unconscious in his own disturbing nightmares to a “diseased imagination” – an imagination that had perhaps lost the capacity for that self-reflexive and volitional activity Coleridge had characterized as the basis of the poetic imagination throughout his Biographia.[100] As Levere contends, therefore, Coleridge, in the end, adopts a supremely scientific position that may be seen to unite the poetic, transcendentalist and scientific impulses, as well as realizing Coleridge’s aim, to show that “thought is motion.” In recording and interpreting his own unconscious in dreams in his literary notebooks, Coleridge ultimately came to acknowledge that his mind, too, was embodied – that the “Imagination could be seen as an organ of the body, a physical and medical faculty” both “material and spiritual, medical and poetic.”

In Neil Burger’s film Limitless (2011), a Hollywood adaptation of Alan Glynn’s novel The Dark Fields (2001), the protagonist, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), a writer, is suffering an existential and professional crisis, and is specifically embattling a severe case of writer’s block and, in more diagnostic terms, suffering from depression. Having not attended a mental health advisor or other clinician, Eddie is drug-free, but, in a pivotal moment is offered a special kind of drug by an unofficial force which, it is promised, will turn his life around.

Eddie is not prescribed this drug by a doctor, and he is not in the business of soliciting drugs himself. Rather, Eddie chances upon the drug when he meets its dealer on the street, one Vernon Gant (Johnny Whitworth), the brother of Eddies’ former wife. Vernon is concerned that Eddie looks terrible, and seems depressed, and so offers Eddie a sample of a newly developed and enigmatic pill, called NZT-48: a miracle drug alleged by Vernon to be in its final stages of FDA approval, and currently undergoing its last round of clinical trials. NZT-48 is a tiny, colourless (clear) pill and it’s novel looks seem to visually signify both its ‘designer-drug’ status, its illicitness, its inventiveness, and its desirability, but also its pharmacological indeterminacy. On the other hand, NZT-48′s clean minimalism and consistency imply the officialdom of pharmaceutical-grade medicine. In either case, NZT-48 is new, unknown, and enigmatic, from the start. Similarly, Vernon, the dealer, might be seen to signify the drug in as equally an official way; he smiles dependably and communicates to Eddie clearly and coherently, presenting himself as a professional, well-groomed in a dark suit. On the other hand, there are glimpses of the underground: Vernon also has somewhat the look of a salesman, glances to and fro paranoiacally, and hurriedly leaves the scene of the deal. In all events, NZT-48 is symbolically vexed, and in this way Eddie’s decision to use the drug amounts to a kind self-experiment, and as a means, perhaps, of grounding the mystery and illusion of the drug’s potently vexed signification.

According to Vernon, who introduces himself as a consultant to a major pharmaceutical company, NZT-48, binds to (or activates) previously undiscovered neuronal receptors and circuitry in the brain (and presumably the CNS), and enables the user to use or activate one hundred per cent of their neuronal brain activity and potential, as opposed to the mythological ten per cent that Vernon reminds Eddie is all that is ordinarily available to humans.[1]

Having taken his chance on NZT-48, the following twelve hours entail a wholesale change in Eddie’s habitual life: he organizes and cleans out his overwhelmingly messy and apartment, writes almost half of his first to-be-published novel, a work which he had been unsuccessful commencing during the three years prior to this day, and restores his relationship with his landlord—or, rather, his landlord’s wife, with whom he sleeps— but only after seducing her with his suddenly undeniable expertise in and knowledge of the law and jurisprudence of the Unites States, and after lending his newfound legal skills to her to assist her with a university law assignment.

With NZT-48, however, we notice that not only do Eddie’s actions and habits change, but so do his perception of the world around him, and of his own understanding of his unique place within it. On NZT-48, Eddie is enabled to ‘see himself in a new light’, as if from a completely new angle. The effect of this new view is enhanced by Neil Burger’s cinematographic and special effects, which heighten the sense in which Eddie’s subjective and complete self, including his body, has suddenly been fractured, multiplied and enlarged. While Eddie cleans his apartment, for example, multiple Eddies appear on screen, working together and as a team. Whereas before the singular Eddie was pale, dishevelled and tired-looking, the multiple Eddies are bright, energetic and saturated in colour, and so is the scene in which these Eddies participate. Similarly, at the point of his first meeting (and coming into conflict with) his landlord’s wife, Eddie perceives a shadow of himself, like a double or a doppelganger, entering upon the scene from another angle. Eddie then watches himself and his landlord’s wife come into conversation as they really are. In this scene, Eddies undergoes an OBE, or an outer body experience: an occurrence associated both within and without of the medical literature on psychopharmacology with tryptamine-based and phenythylamine-based compounds, or, psychedelic drugs. This break with and detachment from the habitual and thoughtless mechanics of Eddie’s everyday life, prompted by the neuronal action of NZT-48, then, signals a recalibration of his individuality, mind and subjectivity, but a psychedelicisation of his consciousness, or literally, a drug-fuelled hallucination.

In many ways, then, Eddie’s perceptions replicate the experience operations of psychedelic or entheogenic[2] drugs in prompting one to see oneself in a new way, disconnecting or remodeling the ego, and engendering with new significance the mundane routines of everyday experience. However, in the case of NZT-48, none of the politically maligned associations and medically studies affiliations that have been made between LSD and schizophrenia, suicide, damage to the brain, etc. have been conclusively made about NZT-48. Having experienced the wonder of NZT-48, and craving to rediscover his multiple self, or his OBE, Eddie calls Vernon to request another dose of the as the illegal chemical admixture.  Although Vernon agrees to provide him with more NZT-48, when Eddie goes to Vernon’s apartment, he finds Vernon dead, shot in the head, his apartment in disarray. Having called the police in desperation and panic, Eddie quickly realises that whomever shot Vernon was in search of NZT-48. After a protracted and frenzied search, Eddie finds a stash of NZT-48 in the oven alongside a book with several names and some money, which he steals for himself.

Equipped with a large stash of NZT-48 and an initial sum of money, over the coming months, Eddie creates a new image for himself, completes his book, which to the delight and incredulity of his publisher is brilliant, and then abandons writing to enter the stock market, intent on making a fortune. Eddie succeeds in entering and making an impression on the trading business and becomes rich at a remarkably fast pace. After a series of impressive interviews and meetings, Eddie is soon employed by one of the most powerful businessmen in the US, Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro). In the course of his uphill climb, Eddie also gets back together with his ex-girlfriend, Lindy. Meanwhile, Eddie perceives that he is being stalked or followed (and in fact he is) by a man in a tan coat (Tomas Arana). It is later revealed that this man is in fact the agent of Van Loon’s business rival, a man, as it turns out, whose highly successful career in business is attributable to the effects of NZT-48.

NZT-48 represents a pill to solve all ills, to turn one’s life around. As such, NZT-48 is a kind of apotheosis of the ‘limitlessness’ of psychopharmacological innovation and invention. Nevertheless, in Limitless, as in reality, the wonder drug has severe side-effects which cause us to question the benefits of the drug. As Eddie soon finds out in the course of his climb to the top, NZT-48 induces, over time, memory loss, time-lapses, and hallucinations. As the story advances, Eddie realises that he may never recover from having taken NZT-48 and may be destined for a short life of debilitating mental laziness (an after effect of the drug), depression, and physical weakness. Ultimately, however, Eddie succeeds in slowly weaning himself of NZT-48, slowing down his dosage to the extent that his body and brain are able to adjust and survive after NZT-48, intact and unharmed.

In the final scenes of Limitless, Eddie is a candidate in the United States federal presidential election, and is tipped to win. At this point, Eddie’s old boss, Carl Van Loon, arrives at Eddie’s campaign office, to meet with Eddie, and to disclose to Eddie that he knows of Eddies use of NZT-48, that he in fact now owns the pharmaceutical company that is responsible for manufacturing NZT-48, and that he has only just that morning shut-down Eddie’s own illegal laboratories, whih manufacture NZT-48 in underground, private settings. Now attempting to enter into a deal with Eddie, to blackmail him with NZT-48, Van Loon is surprised to learn that  Eddie is no longer using the drug, but, it seems, has learned how to use his mind in a way that imitates the neuronal action of the drug. For instance, Eddie exhibits hyper-perceptional powers in being able to predict a truck crashing into a taxi, and in examining, by touching his chest, the condition of Van Loon’s heart.

The conclusion of Limitless is an ambiguously framed point in support of psychopharmacological enhancement, implying that certain ways of using the mind can be learned from experiencing the action of the drugs themselves. But what does this conclusion say about our contemporary attitude to psychopharmacological invention and drug-use? More specifically, how does this ending reflect on contemporary attitudes to nootropic or ‘smart drugs’, and other medications whose purpose is not at all to treat, soothe, medically relieve, or heal, but rather, to enhance, improve, advance, and reshape the user?

For the early scientific discoverers and researchers of psychedelics, drugs such as LSD—and psilocybin, the neuroactive hallucinogenic compound discovered to reside within certain species of mushrooms, and successfully separated by Albert Hoffman in collaboration with R. Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim in 1957[3] – were seen as valuable tools with which to newly comprehend the core of the subjective self and to interrogate the human experience of consciousness. For these early researchers, the discovery of psilocybin served to shed light on important historical and anthropological practices of the Mazatecs in their divinatory and curing rights. However, as the experiences and curiosity travelled to the University’s in the US and elsewhere, ‘psychonauts’ such as Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and others also learned that “by focusing the awareness on itself, the aspect of human consciousness beyond the doors of perception—the infinite—would emerge as an experiential rather than conceptual phenomenon…a perceivable though not verifiable “non-Euclidean” (Fischer) aspect of human subjectivity could come into relief.”[4] Strangely enough, it is a very similar aspect of self-awareness, of fractured, multiple and split subjectivities, all of which are immediately experienced and controlled, that Eddie Morra seems to experience in Limitless.

In the very character of the NZT-48 experience as both hallucinatory (indeed, one of the side-effects of the drugs are LSD-like hallucinations of light, colour and distance) and intellectual (in the order of a nootropic or ‘smart-drug’ experience, without amphetamine-like qualities), we encounter a new drug experience that signals a shift forward in the perspicacity of human consciousness. At the same time, NZT-48 blurs categories of existing drugs, combining existing side-effects attributable to illicit and scheduled psychedelics with the advantages and beneficial effects of contemporary smart-drugs. Like Aldous Huxley’s Island, then, Limitless represents a utopian vision of psychopharmacological achievement, a way in which the individual can rise to the top. On the other hand, we encounter many scenes along the way that represent the failure of NZT-48 to remain controlled, to be properly introduced to society and adjusted to by its users. Is the issue with psychopharmacological innovation, then, like those relating to other forms of technology, one that concerns the regulation of a danger, or the political and legal administration of a certain technological, or biotechnological, and yet a disembodied and external, power?[5]

Indeed, NZT-48’s blurring of chemical categories represents the uncontrollability of drugs not only at the level of the user’s experience, but at the level of taxonomical expression, or legal categorization or regulation. Indeed, categories of drugs are blurred all the time. It has been argued for instance that with methylenedioxyyamphetemine (MDMA) or ‘ecstacy’, a drug which has been traditionally considered by chemists as a psychedelic, based on its chemical structure and its relationship to other psychedelics (having a nuclear core of a phenythylamine), a new class of drugs is produced that have been variously described as empathogens or entactogens “because of their ability to enhance empathy or psychological communication.”[6] The difference, then, between an entheogen or an LSD type psychedelic and MDMA, might be the nature of one’s communication on these respective drugs. If, as Slattery notes, the prolixity sympotomatised by LSD and other psychedelics is to be regarded as a kind of “problem discourse”, then surely the nature of the discourse on MDMA would be similiarly prolix and similiarly problematic? And yet, in Limitless, the successful novel Eddie writes over a period of a month or so would seem to suffer not from prolixity, but if anything, only from its sometimes grandiosity, as his publisher is quick to point out upon first reading it.

The questions, then, in terms of literary creativity and psychedelic drugs, come to be: what is the value of ‘psychedlicised writing’? Is it something to be understood as valuable for its comparatively heightened sense of perceptual expression, or is it to be understood and valued as a more documentary form of writing, something to be valued for the way in which it represents a certain, seemingly ‘altered’ state of mind or consciousness? Similarly, what can be made of literature like Island, or films, like Limitless, that seem to directly comment on the value of the use of drugs for literary creation and expression?

Traditionally, psychopharmacology is not an subject with which Hollywood qua commercially scaled and distributed film-makers engage. However, the increasing nature of psychopharmacology as a cosmetic choice to be made by the user, rather than a necessary treatment to be prescribed by the psychiatrist, provides writers and film-makers plentiful fodder with which to imagine such dystopian worlds as the world of Limitless, in which the uncontrolled and uncertain uses of psychotropic and other mind-altering drugs seems to create a world different to classic political dystopias, in which the state controlled all of the information and expertise relating to individuals. In psychotropic dystopias, rather, or in what might be called the genre of the ‘psychotropia’ or ‘psychotopia’, not even the government, the scientists who work for the government, or the richest or most powerful figures or companies in society are able to control, or understand how to control, the power of the drugs often available to their protagonists. The central issue of psychotropias, then, namely, the power of drugs and the move toward “cosmetic psychopharmacology”[7] also

immediately raises a range of conceptual (or metaphysical) questions about the nature of the entities that are used by psychiatrists: How do we best define medical and psychiatric disorders? Are psychiatric disorders a kind of mental disorder, or are they a different kind of category?  Canpsychotropics change personality, and if so, what are the implications for our concept of self?[8]

These and most any other questions that relate to psychopharmacological philosophy and the creative literature that engages with it would be thought to require thorough theoretical analysis from literary critics and theorists, however, not a great deal of material has emerged from the humanities schools and departments, and a relatively greater amount of work has been done in this area in the scientific and science-philosophy circles. For some in the humanities, such as Diana Reed Slattery, psychedelics have become a ‘problem discourse’, not only because of its illegal nature, but also because of its “paradoxical prolixity” in the face of the “ineffability” of the experiences that psychedelic drugs are often expected or observed to produce in their users. It is precisely the nature of this paradox that may have led some writers, such as Phillip K. Dick, to regard psychedelic drugs as deconstructive in their promotion of literature and communication.

As Albert Hoffman noted during his self-experiment with ‘LSD-25’ in the 1943, “I had to struggle to speak intelligibly.”[9] If speaking intelligibly about a given subject is an aim of the rhetoric of science and the self-experiments that take place within the regime of science, or if it might also be regarded as an aim of the modernist (or the postmodernist) literary creative, or for literary theory and theories of rhetoric, then the prolixity, or ‘struggle to speak intelligibly’ occasioned by LSD is problematic across a number of vectors, including at the level of expressing ideas, expressing consciousness, or expressing something meaningful about human subjectivity. However, at the level of understanding consciousness, understanding subjectivity, or understanding literature, the prolixity occasioned by LSD and other entheogenic drugs, be it in the form of ‘trip-reports’–or alternatively as interview answers in the a clinical-trial, i.e. in accumulating scientific data—might also be regarded as useful informatically: that is, at the level of providing evidence or information about the mind itself, about subjectivity, and about the subject. In this sense, literature, like science, serves to expand the information available in the noosphere about consciousness, about science, and about human nature itself.

Information science, informatics, and other pseudoscience(s) through which the so-called ‘infoquake’ – that is, the explosive accumulation of information since the late 1980s – might be understood and measured, in the form of internet and telecommunication and in tandem with the evolution of other digital technologies, is discussed by Richard Doyle in the context of molecular biology, DNA, hallucinogens and the rhetoric of science, as well as by Antonio Ceraso in the context of rhetoric, intellectual property and R. Gordon Wasson’s discovery of the use of psilocybin mushrooms among the indigenous people in Mexico.[10] Why might both these literary theorists and rhetoricians be concerned with hallucinogenic drugs, rhetoric, and informatics, as quite different subjects, at the same time? Essential to both of their academic practices, both thinkers seem to understand that the value of literature and the value of writing itself derives not from a meaningful explication by the writer of a certain experience by which the reader may then be changed, or learn, but rather that the value of writing in our contemporary informatic moment, across all disciplines, derives from its potential to invent information that is pragmatically useful and purposeful in its expression of multiple literacies, or in its polyvalence – its creation of multiple meaning and knowledge that spans across multiple disciplines, or across multiple institutions, and which may also be extrainstitutional.

As with all knowledge that traverses boundaries between institutions, however, certain practices of knowledge making and knowledge giving must authorise those receiving and giving the knowledge. For R. Gordon Wasson and his discovery of the sacred rituals of the Mazatecs, and his research and writing on the subject, ceratin practices of secrecy come to bear on knowledge creation. Furthermore, different literacies must be apprehended and understood, which in a sense mark another form of secrecy. As Ceraso argues, the capacity to understand formerly unknown information as it might properly and usefully be recorded by anthropologists, rhetoricians, historians, scientist, sociologists, writers, and others in the academic setting, requires (as R. Gordon Wasson knew as the first non-indigenous person to participate in the ritual of the sacred practices of the illiterate Mexican indeginouspeoples) “the capacity to flow between disciplines [which] derived from a diversity of literacies” and “illiteracies”, and to open access to new information by observing “the need to move between the specialist knowledges within the sciences, and the need to step outside the specialist knowledge of science”, which requires in both instances “a methodological transformation.”[11]

As Richard Doyle similarly observes on the concept of the self-experiment, self-experiments experiments hold a particular significance in decision-making and ontological knowledge making in which practices of science and practices outside of science (‘non-reason’) must be observed and practiced. In closely examining Albert Hoffman’s first use of LSD-25, for example, Doyle notes that the decision to self-experiment is “of necessity itself an experiment, one that emerges not from any deliberative logic but from an incalculable action, a breakage in a change of reasoning: just do it.”[12] Like Eddie Morra’s ‘taking a chance’ on NZT-48, then, Hoffman’s decision to self-experiment, whether exercised with reckless disregard (if there can be any other way) or (if possible, as Hoffman seems to attest it is) to exercise extreme caution, instantiates a mode in which “repetition” is regarded as “the most high-fidelity and compressed procedure for resolving the matter” and, in which reversals of scientific reason are mandatory, since “usual experimental protocol demands that everything is involved in an experiment except the self, and yet here it is precisely only the self and its responses that are the very assay of LSD-25.”[13]

In both Doyle’s and Ceraso’s conceptions of the opening up and the construction of deinstitutionalised knowledge networks, affect and secrecy play significant roles. Ceraso, for instance, notes that the openness “that the Wassons write into their texts” and their “citation practice”, is “treated with a sort of affection…[and] there is an affective charge to the citation practice that exceeds its informational value”.[14] As Ceraso continues,

Often, the excess of citation itself marks this affective excess; the naming practice that provides the entire story of the Wassons’ coming to hear of the Mexican mushroom rites…serves as an example. At other times, this excess is marked by the presence of affectionate terms, the presence of a friendship, a compliment, or by the insistence that a contribution is crucial to the overall knowledge network.

In addition to Wasson’s affective writing practice, Ceraso describes one relation between informatics and secrecy that charecterised Wasson’s writing practice, and the building of his knowledge network in the context of his study of the Mazatecs. As Ceraso notes, Wasson’s writing practice

enter[ed] into resonance with two forms of secrecy: the movement and connection of information and its excess on the one side, and the itinerant practice of the mystery, with its rich capacity for reproduction, its incommunicable blockages, and its information scarcity on the other.

For Doyle, in his analysis of science and rhetoric, secrecy and affective states are imbricated with one another and come into confluence at the level of what he observes as one natural human response to the discovery of essential differences between human knowledge and life, a difference that is a product of the unpredictable character of science, and which sometimes occasions a response “which is periodically associated with laughter”.  In the context of examining “rhetorical practices implicated with technoscientific innovation”, then, and in whose zones the “traffic between culture, nature, and knowledge becomes less undecidable than indiscernible”, Doyle thus attempts to

map the rather willy-nilly itinerary of molecular biology’s rhetorical and conceptual evolution and its debts to these forms of agency best exemplified by laughter but available to many extraordinary affects proper to the rhetorical practices of even the scientific will: laughter, terror, ecstacy. Such modes of response…were crucial to a conceptual evolution whose feedback loop arrives at cloning and tends toward a nanotechnological threshold: DNA information, at first understood by molecular biology as a fundamentally stable semantic phenomenon or “secret,” became a spectacularly mutable technology of replication and differentiation by the early 1980s.[15]

For Doyle, central to the development of scientific knowledge about replication, cloning, nanotechnology, information, and the evolution of other digital technologies, is the self-experiment. It is interesting to think, then, that Albert Hoffman, R. Gordon Wasson, Eddie Morra, Tim Leary, Phillip K. Dick, and many other literary creative writers, have this very thing in common: the desire to self-experiment. Doyle charecterises this desire to self-experiment, as a desire to informaticise the organic, the embodied and human experience of consciousness and of life into “inhuman, inorganic andextraterrestrial realms”, thus commencing a writerly “undoing of life.”

For Doyle, it seems, this undoing of life has concomitant effects on the body: informatics conspires with practices of knowledge making to gesture toward a disembodied narrative in which the integrity of the human body is undone, and the essentialism of one’s subjectivity or self-identification, is lost:

The undoing of life, and the concomitant “loss” of integrity of the organism, wrought first by recombinant DNA and then Polymerase Chain Reaction, seems to occur in response to an undoing and doing of identity sculpted by that most tabooed and double entendred scientific enterprise: the self experiment. In particular, the necessary role of the self-experiment in the scientific study of hallucinogens, an inquiry not into life but into consciousness, provides the ecology for the emergence of these ecstatic modes of interaction. [16]

The history of English literature is overrun with writers both obsessed with and addicted to mind-altering drugs, and whose writings may be regarded, similiarly as an “inquiry not into life but into consciousness”; studies of the effect of certain drugs on their writing and their subjectivity. Indeed, as Danielle Knafo has noted, the “connection between creativity and addiction is nearly as legendary as that between creativity and madness…writing has become synonymous with alcoholism…the chemical playing both muse and demon.”[17] It seems only natural in the circumstances under which many writers throughout history have written, then, that their views on psychopharmacology should be an important springboard for their fictional and non-fictional works.

From William Blake’s notorious opium use, Coledridge’s laudanum addiction, to Baudelaire’s monograph on cannabis-induced synaesthesia, On the Artificial Ideal[18], through to Thomas De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, through to both the fiction and essays of Phillip K. Dick, a self-confessed user and critic of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) who has said that it is impossible for him to write under the influence of LSD, and then further through to William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, and then many others more: should not literary analysis of these writers’ works seek to historicize the impact of psychoactive substances upon them and their writing? What do their experiences, their views, and their writings, tell us about psychopharmacology in general and about their literature, or literacies, in particular?

Of course, not all writers view psychotropic discovery and experimentation as a good thing. Indeed, Phillip K. Dick’s portrayal of extremely bad acid trips seem to reflect his experience and his view about LSD, despite the fact that, as he explains, he had imagined none of his writing about horrifying acid trips after he had taken the drug, but only before. Dick’s imaginary fiction about LSD, particularly The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, stemmed only from what he had read about acid, prior to his own use. Upon later taking the drug, however, Dick’s reaction was not positive. As he reported in an interview with Vertex magazine in 1974,

[a]ll I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn’t seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.[19]

Despite Dick’s aversion to LSD, his novels and short-story’s render remarkably engaging and symbolic dystopic psyhcotopias in which the government use drugs, as much as any other mind-control technology, to control the citizens of the state. In one sense then, it is curious that Dick so disliked his experience of LSD and one may be led to conclude that it was precisely his ‘set’—averse and distrustful of the drug from the beginning—which led to his experience of wanting to get out of the acid-trip fast, and yet being unable to escape. Alternatively, Dick’s works illuminate one aspect of LSD in particular which is tied to its historical context, namely the use of the drug by the CIA in its top-secret project MK-ULTRA, in which specialists were enlisted to test LSD on University students and others for the purposes of assessing its suitability to practices of interrogation and manipulation of its users/subjects.[20]

From another angle, Dick’s aversion to LSD may stem from the notion that it takes something away from the development of a universal collective unconsciousness, or consciousness. For Dick, one’s failure to create “empathic linkage[s]” with others, which is signaled by hallucinations in general, is the hallmark of an instance in which too much is emanating neurologically, but not enough is explicable verbally. In this instance, the individual is alone in his or her state, which is a derangement of the quantity of thought rather than of the quality of thought. As Dick notes,

[h]allucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc. may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity [...] No name entities or aspects begin to appear, and since the person does not know what they are – that is, what they’re called or what they mean – he cannot communicate with other persons about them. The breakdown of verbal communication is a fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons.[21]

It is unsurprising to read, alongside Dick’s notes, that early triallers of LSD hypothesized and ultimately recommended its use by therapists as a virtualization or simulation of the state of schizophrenia.

Although, then, there have been many literary works dealing with psychotropic and psychopharmacological drugs, the most interesting and significant analyses of this creative literature in this area sometimes seem to emerge from within the scientific texts on the subject, rather than from within the humanities. Daniel Perrine’s work, The Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs: History, Pharmacology and Cultural Context, for instance, cites endless examples from the creative literature, and from the personal biographical writings of well-known literary figures, which describe their personal experiences with specific drugs.

On the other hand, some scholars, such as Bradley Lewis, have concentrated on the way in which mental disorders and psychiatric disorders are categorized, embarking on poststructuralist and semiotic analyses of the structures that authorize the scientific practice itself, and calling into question the authority of science[22], others, some from the science community, have looked beyond the medical and scientific manuals and literature within their own fields, and have encountered that the creative English literature provides more meaningful answers to questions of human subjectivity. For instance, MHN Schermer’s study of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island seeks to show that while a dystopian view of psychopharmacology is dominant in our cultural marketplace of ideas, an alternative utopian vision of psychopharmacological invention is possible as well. As Schermernotes,

If we see fiction as a way of imagining what the world could look like, then what can we learn from Huxley’s novels about psychopharmacology and how does that relate to the discussion in the ethical and philosophical literature on this subject?[23]

The movement toward utopian understandings of psychopharmocological invention and development may enable new, legitimate (or ‘official’) epistemologies of experimentation and self-experimentation to emerge, at the very least, within the sciences. Aldous Huxley is often maligned for thinking that certain psychotropic drugs should be freely accessible, but only to a select group of elites whose intellect authorised their use of drugs. One way of reconstituting Huxley’s view is to reapply it to those who may be presently so authorised in the sciences, and whose will, with the opening up of the humanities discourse on the subject of psychotropics, might be turned to reconceptualise the role of entheogenic experience in our contemporary and future worlds.

In examining these vectors in Spielberg’s version of the text, my paper will generally invoke posthuman literary theory, which regards the various relations between genetics and computer science, data and flesh, binary code and DNA, as a more axiomatic, singular, relation between the human and the machine. Posthuman accounts of the body, like those augured by critical feminism, often emphasise the importance of the body’s performance and its language in engendering subjectivity. However, as the body morphs into a site of multiple enhancements by various biotechnologies—ranging from the deeply profound to those that may be seen as merely cosmetic—posthuman understandings seek to apprehend what is the increasingly problematical and complex relation between enhanced bodies and the human condition.

Posthuman interrogations of subjectivity play an important, although sometimes misunderstood, role in countering and assessing the truth-claims made by sciences such as pharmacology and psychiatry (and psychopharmacology) about enhanced bodies, and their owners. As Eugene Thacker asserts, posthumanism, seeks to acknowledge that the “doubled contingency of human and technology will always require critical gestures, ironic gestures, even ludic gestures, which will turn upside down, and render impure and noninnocent, our views of the human condition.”[1] Such critical gestures also rail against another stream of posthumanism—sometimes referred to as extropic posthumanism—which perhaps somewhat biasedly posits the endless rewards to be gotten from biotech development. Adopting the critical mode, then, my own study of Spielberg’s Minority Report will focus on how in 2054 the extropic dream of a biotech Utopia remains unfulfilled. In exploring the paranoid and traumatic narrative of John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), I consider what critical posthumanism has to gain in adopting psychotropics into its remit.

Posthumanism and Psychotropics
In Minority Report as in elsewhere, psychotropics signify the theoretical interface between psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the body. Designed and simulated on computers, tested on animals, and finally operating within human bodies, psychotropics, in Lacanian terms, inspire an immediate and automatic Otherness in their user, generating mood, cognitive and perceptive shifts once regarded as possible only in instances of spiritual or metaphysical enlightenment.The dependence by scientists on computing technologies in developing and testing psychotropics is some evidence of their imbrications with the regime of computing. However, by in large, posthuman accounts of the digital subject have not persistently examined the role of drugs in their critique of science.

The distance sometimes implied in posthuman critiques between the language of pharmacological science and the language of the humanities and literary theory offers one reason for this relative silence. A second reason is offered in terms of the illicitness of the subject, which in the “penalty laden politics of knowledge” is often regarded as having a dangerous even unacademic valency – as Diana Slattery notes, it is the “discourse of the unmentionable by the disreputable about the unspeakable.”[2] One means of approaching psychotropics from a critical posthuman perspective may be to reconsider the historical emergence of psychiatry within a wider epistemological frame and identify the importance of psychoanalysis, for instance, in psychiatry’s genesis

Psychoanalysis and psychotropics

In Prozac On The Couch, Jonathan Metzl avers that rather than there having been a shift during the late twentieth century from from ‘Freud to Prozac’ psychiatry rather inherited the presuppositions of psychoanalytic thought. While Metzl’s argument focuses on how presuppositions specifically about women and gender roles were subsumed into the diagnostic practices of psychiatrists – “even the briefest or most prescriptive clinical encounters”, influencing their prescriptions of drugs—Metzl’s thesis represents a more general attempt to decenter or reread psychiatric discourse as always already psychoanalytic, and psychoanalytic discourse as in the first place biased.

Metzl’s approach to psychotropic drugs and psychoanalysis is instructive for my research because— while it deepens the contingency of psychiatric knowledge, making visible traces of the Freudian unconscious (or the Lacanian symbolic)— it also gestures towards the gender bias of many psychoanalytic formulations, and thus attempts to destabilise scientific knowledge in ways more radical than other post-structuralists accounts have done.Bradley Lewis’s semiotic reading of the Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders  (the DSM), for example, challenges the empirical claims of psychiatry, but only by identifying the contingency of its language. Similarly, Peter Kramer’s Listening To Prozac and Carl Elliot’s Better Than Well, locate instances of contingency and uncertainty within psychiatric practices, but do not impose or offer a wider historical or epistemological perspective.

Metzl’s account, while not explicitly ironic or ludic, then, echoes the telos of critical posthumanism, by apprehending the ‘impure’ and ‘noninnocent’ dimensions of scientific discourse, identifying in science a political and academic disreputability more often assigned to – or reserved for – humanities-based critiques of drugs.

The Symbolic of Neuroin

In Minority Report, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), the head of the trialled Precrime system within the District of Columbia Police Department, is addicted to an illicit psychotropic known as Neuroin, which is said to induce a supreme calm in its user. Similarly, the film’s most explicit posthumans, a triad of clairvoyant subjects known as the precognitivies, or precogs: at once the tragic and gifted offspring of Neuroin addicted parents.In an inexplicable twist of teratogenic drugs and evolution, the precogs were born with the gift qua burden of pre-visualisation. When asleep, the precogs cannot but dream of future acts of murder. Now utilised by the state, the precogs serve as the mystical murder police of Washinton, where no murders have occurred under their watch in the six years that they have served the Precrime cause.

Within Precrime headquarteres, the precogs live in an elaborate, womb-like temple, which visually hybridizes an anechoic sound chamber and an operating surgery. Bathed in nutrient water, and with sensitive neuron amplifiers attached to their heads, the three creatures are fed sedatives and dopamine to keep endlessly in slumber, dreaming and predicting acts of murder. Partnering the temple is a separate observation room, in which unique computational and biological devices enable Anderton to decode the precog nightmares.

Neuroin signifies a powerfully symbolic bridge between Anderton and the precogs. While Anderton’s addiction to Neuroin is attributable to his own sense of loss – for instance, we learn that the disappearance of Anderton’s young son prompted his decision to join the police—the illicitness of Anderton’s addiction also suggests an underlying and cavalier experimentalism, and his experiences demonstrate his desire not to resolve the trauma of his past, but to revisit it, and to re-experience it. The precogs, who are similarly trapped in a recurring nightmare, and yet must also continually look to the future, allegorise the atemporality of the Neuroin experience.

Thus, Anderton and the precogs share in an alterity that is not only signified by their common power to control the future under Precrime, but embodied in Neuroin particular trip – which re-enlivens the past, ossifies the present, and controls the future.

* It is worth noting that, among many other major differences, in Dick’s novel, the pre-cogs do not predict murder, but all crime.

The Poetics of drug-dealing

The symbolic associations of Neuroin are elaborated in a scene in which Anderton buys the drug from Lycon (David Stifel), a riddling drug dealer in the seedy underbelly of DC. When during the deal Lycon calls Anderton “Chief”, recognising him as the head of Precrime, he reassures Anderton that his secret is safe. At the end of the rushed deal, Lycon recalls an addage his father had rehearsed: “In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King.” One possible reading of Lycon’s poesy is that while Anderton cannot quite previsualise the murders like the precogs, his power to decode their dreams, confers upon him one eye – an enhanced sense of vision – in a land in which others are blind. In then revealing his ragged and empty eye-sockets, his beard and hair assisting the penumbra already half-disguising his face, Lycon’s identity becomes equivocal, and his prior recognition of Anderton, supernatural. In the context of an exchange of Neuroin, moreover, Lycon – a warlock figure whose spectrality and whose ghostliness further encodes the symbolic powers of Neuroin, which now seems tethered to impossible forms of seeing and knowing, to bodily disfigurement, and to an equivocal loss of identity.

The drug-deal is also a ‘symbolic-exchange’ in the sense in which Jean Baudrillard describes in his schema of the object value system. A ‘symbolic exchange’ represents not only an exchange of objects defined by their use-value, but also an exchange of signs, which may be encoded in the identities of the parties and the symbolic value og the object. In Anderton’s drug-deal, the sign of Neuroin is bounded to its illicitness and illegality: Lycon’s suggestion that it would be ‘good to have some juice on his side’ signals Lycon’s ability to blackmail Anderton, and underlines the dyadic power-play constituted in drug-deals more generally. Just as in this street-deal, metaphors of power affect clinical and psychoanalytic encounters, in which inequity may be parsed in terms of doctor-patient, woman-man, analyst and analysand, and in terms of the risks, side-effects, symptoms, and powers, of the drug itself.

Interface Value

Structurally, psychotropics may be seen to operate in analogous ways to the computing technologies more routinely evoked in posthuman accounts of the digital subject. In a memorable paronomasia, for instance, Sherry Turkel notes in respect of the ubiquitous computer screen, that in the posthuman era, we “take things at their interface value.” For Slavoj Zizek, similarly,

“If the modernist universe is the universe, hidden behind the screen, of bytes, wires and chips, the postmodernist universe is the universe of naïve trust in the screen which makes the very quest for ‘what lies behind it’ irrelevant. To take things ‘at their interface value’ involves a phenomenological attitude, an attitude of trusting the phenomena.”[3]

For Anderton, trusting the phenomena of the psychotropic, which is emphasised in his unquestioning trust in Lycon’s offer of ‘the new and improved clarity’, like his trust in the glass screen on which he decodes the precog visions, calls for a  trust in certain invisible operations. Similarly, in trusting Neuroin, Anderton must sublimate anterior knowledge – his paranoia that Neuroin inflicts violence on the body, and that this violence is addictive, and that it killed the precogs’s parents. As Zizek suggests, however, how or why objects really function is irrelevant in a world in which one perceives objects only ever at secondary levels of exteriority, and in when interiorities are so complex and unpredictable as to be invisible, literally and figuratively.

If trusting the phenomena prompts a sublimation of anterior knowledge, then how is this sublimation, and the traumatic gap left by this imagined loss of visibility, resolved? In the case of the computer screen, the invisibility of the wires and chips behind it, seems quite obviously substituted by the visibility of images appearing upon the screen’s surface, which stand in for its underside. In the case of Neuroin, the invisibility of Anderton’s synaptic activity is displaced by similar stand-in visions. Thus, when he is ‘high’, Anderton watches holographic films of his lost son and reenacts moments of remembered intimacy with his estranged wife. Anderton’s immersion in these 3d, almost halluconegenic, worlds, figures as an appropriate screen qua substitute for two losses, then – at one level the loss of his son and his wife, but at another level the more immediate loss of visual control of his mind. More broadly, the virtuality of the holographic screen serves as a fitting analogue to the virtuality of Anderton’s interiorised, supreme calm.

Visibility and invisibility

When Anderton, decoding a precognitive vision, discovers that he himself is to murder Leo Crow, a person he does not know, he flees the Precrime building, fearful of his arrest and believing he has been framed. Until he is able to exonerate himself, Anderton must formulate a disguise, and must bypass the panoptical eye-scanning technology ubiquitously placed throughout Washington. Confused and on the run, Anderton visits Iris Hineman (Lois Smith), an eccentric and bewitching biologist whom he knows to be responsible for creating the precog’s current environs and for designing the Precrime system. On Hineman’s cryptic advice, Anderton employs a disreputable street-surgeon to replace his eyes in a grubby tenement house on the outskirts of the city. Anderton is blinded for twelve hours, and is threatened with losing his sight forever if he removes the bandages that protect his new eyes, previously belonging to a Japanese man. In a curiously eastern philosophical sense, in order to be invisible here– to disappear—Anderton must first become blind.

From Hineman Anderton learns that while the precogs are ‘never wrong’ about murders, they do sometimes disagree. As Hineman explains, the precogs may occasionally see things differently, but to maintain public confidence in the system’s infaalibility, these dissenting visions are immediately destroyed. However, as Hineman explains, when she designed the system she arranged for the original of any variant data stream, known as a “minority report”, to be stored within the mind of the precog creating it.

Seeking his own minority report, Anderton decides to return to Precrime headquarters. Before he enters, he radically distorts his face with a nerve retardant shock device. Using his own eyeballs to accesses Precrime, Anderton sequesters Agatha—the most powerful of the precogs—from the building. On the verge of capture, Anderton, like a magician performing an act of bodily disappearance, escapes by flushing himself and Agatha down the drain of the nutrient pool.

In these scenes, Anderton’s distorted face and his unconventional uses of his old and new eyes, recalls Lycon’s image, his poesy and the power of Neuroin and biotech more generally to consubstantiate, to unite, Anderton and his precogs. Just as children on excursion to the Precrime building are not allowed to ‘see the precogs’, who remain invisible, neither can they see Anderton whose face—nerve endings deadened, feeling nothing—echoes the precogs’s numbness. When Anderton drops one of his own eyeballs out of its zip-lock bag and into a sewerage drain, Lycon’s poesy also seems to attain more literal meanings: Washington is now even more so the metonymic land of the blind, its sightlessness a symptom of Anderton’s Other Japanese eyes, and Anderton, now quite literally the ‘one-eyed man’, escapes triumphant as a “king”, with Agatha, his precog queen, at his side. Taken at ‘interface’ value, Anderton’s disguise is a screen, concealing the Real identity that lies beneath. More generally, Anderton’s discovery of minority reports emblematises the wider invisibility of error within the Precrime system, and unmasks the falsity of the messages expressed symbolically throughout the city, screened on video-billboards that proclaim: “Precrime: It Works”.

Bio-Codes

In both science fiction texts and our own historical moment, then, the realities underlying biological and computer science is encoded by their mythic projections. Reading into these code and biocodes, WJT Mitchell asks, in his essay entitled The Work of Art in the age of Biocybernetic Reproduction:

“What is the structure of scientific and technical knowledge itself? Is it a set of logically validated statements and propositions, a self-correcting discursive system? Or is it riddled with images, metaphors and fantasies that take on a life of their own, and turn the dream of absolute rational mastery into a nightmare of confusion and uncontrollable side effects? To what extent are the widely heralded technical innovations in biology and computations themselves mythic projections or symptoms, rather than determining causes?”[4]

Mitchell defines the term ‘biocybernetic’ in terms of its Greek etymology: as a word for the ‘steersman’ of a boat, and further explains that the word ‘bios’ “refer[s] to the sphere of living organisms which are to be subject to control, but which may in one way or another resist that control, insisting on a life of their own.” Not only is Micthell’s definition of ‘bios’ resonant with Anderton’s biological resistance to eye-scanners and other technologies, it also resonates with an acronym used in computer science, which refers to a computer’s ‘basic input and output system’: a BIOS.

Mitchell’s formulation may thus be thought of as offering alternative readings of Precrime as an intelligent machine, whose components – the precogs and Anderton – together form an organic basic input and output system. In this context, a minority report may be read as an instance of emergence, that is, as an instance of what Kate Hayles describes as programs that

“appear on their own, often developing in ways not anticipated by the person who created the simulation. Structures that lead to emergence typically involve complex feedback loops in which the outputs of the system are repeatedly fed back as input. As the recursive looping continues, small deviations can quickly become magnified, leading to complex interactions and unpredictable evolutions associated with the emergence.”[5]

Emergences in systems thus express fragility and the sense in which the Real, often ensconced behind a screen, may visibly symptomatise as error, deviation, or the Real. At the core of this symptomotology lies the material reality – constituted not only by visibility – but by the complexity and semiotic difference entailed by relations between different languages.

In the Precrime department, Anderton inteprets the precogs, but never communictaes directly in a shared tongue. Similarly, computer programmers communicate with machines by means of code, never sharing a common or native language with their machines. Thus, the semiotic complexity of communication between humans and machines instantiates an essential difference, the origin of which forms the basis of Hayles’s enquiry into Jaques Derrida’s understanding of language and differance and computer code.

Code and Complexity

As Hayles observes, Derrida generally regards the origin of difference in language as between the primordial absence, where nothing is expressed, and a metaphysics of presence, which languages imposes upon this absence, with its complex history of referentiality, appropriation, and complexity. In this way, Hayles notes, Derrida reaches an ‘impasse of complexity’, in which the possibility of interrogating the origin of meaning and difference is impossible. Deconstruction thus seeks to identify the foundational meanings of texts to which its language refers, while it also seeks to demonstrate that the language system itself is irreducibly complex, unstable, and unfit for the task of meaning.

In view of Derrida’s impasse, Hayles argues that code is contradistinctively simple – that its foundational meaning is no more or less than its function within a computer. Indeed, for Hayles, the birth of code offers an opportunity to better understand complexity, which resides elsewhere than with language. As Hayles asserts,

“For code, complexity inheres neither in the origin nor in the operation of difference as such but in the labor of computation that again and again calculates differences to create complexity as an emergent property of computation. Humans, who have limited access to their own computational machinery…create intelligent machines whose operations may be known in comprehensive detail.”[6]

From Computation to ‘Medication’

For Hayles, then, code enables new ways of seeing complexity. As she writes,

“The advantages of the computational view, for those who espouse it, is that emergence can be studied as a knowable and quantifiable phenomena, freed both from the mysteries of the Logos and the complexities of discursive explanations dense with ambiguities.”[7]

The spirit in which Hayles celebrates the examinability of emergence through code—what she sometimes describes as the ‘clarity of code’—recalls Anderton’s similarly empowered readings of the future by means of encoded technology, and of the past by means of the biotechnology of Neuroin. In thus considering the recursions and resonances between code and biology, literature and theory – both systematic and bios-based – and the extent to which computer science and psychotropics engender different kinds of clarity, we might also reflect on what remains hidden and invisible to us within these discursive structures, the mystery and unpredictability of what soon might emerge, and therefore, the importance of advancing posthuman critiques of biotechnology rapidly toward the research area of psychotropics and other drugs.

[1] Thacker, Eugene, ‘Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman, Cultural Critique 53, Winter 2003, 79.
[2] Slattery, Diana Reed., ‘Psychedelics: My Problem Discourse’, Configurations, 2008, 16:283-296, 283.
[3] Zizek, Slavoj., The Plague of Fantasies, Verso: London, 1997, 168.
[4] Mitchell, W.J.T., ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction’ in What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 311.
[5]Hayles, N. Katherine, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1999, 225.
[6] Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subject and Literary Texts, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1995, 41.
[7] Ibid.

For Hayles, the Regime of Computing entails a larger system than simply that which is entailed at the level of computer operations, “digital manipulations, binary code, or silicon”[2]. In introducing the Regime of Computation, Hayles recognises that computational performance –or (if anthropomorphised) ‘computational performativity’—tends towards complexity as a broader systematic rule. So, computer coding begins “with a parsimonious set of elements and a relatively small set of logical operations”, and then, when “[i]nstantiated into some kind of platform” become “structured so as to build up increasing levels of complexity, eventually arriving at complexity so deep, multilayered, and extensive as to simulate the most complex phenomena on earth” right up to “reasoning processes one might legitimately call thinking.”[3] Instantly, here, it is apparent that Hayles’s work alludes to an exploration of the possibility of artificial intelligence, or an investigation of ‘thinking’ by intelligent machines.  However, Hayles’s analysis is reluctant to directly compare intelligent machines with human intelligence in any broad sense. Rather, Hayles’s analysis of code proceeds by way of comparing the significative modes of purely human language of writing and speech, and the language by which humans communicate with machines, that is to say, code.

Hayles’s introduction of, and her work on, the Regime of Computation forms a synecdoche for the relatively amorphous area of research and discourse about complex computer operations and computer performances that may be described as ‘organic’, such as the phenomenon of ‘emergence’ in computing, in which an unpredictable and unprogrammed computer process evolve for no apparent reason out of a directly programmed operations, and about the evolution of computer processes that begin to perform above and beyond their intended hierarchical order. Hayles variously refers to the movement of computer processes within and without of their programmed structures as “complex dynamics” that take place within “feedback loops” between analog and digital languages, and between codified programming and uncodified random and seemingly independent computer actions. In the broader framework of Hayles’s analysis, however, the Regime of Computation serves as a “context in which [the language of] code takes shape within the worldview of computation.”[4] As Hayles indicates, the Regime of Computation is to code as Saussurean semiotics is to speech, and as Derridean grammatology is to writing. Indeed, these are the worldviews Hayles directly engages with in her three analyses of speech, writing and code.

In her analysis of Jacques Derrida, Hayles considers how Derrida’s understanding of one of the most important aspects of the Regime of computation, complexity, might be rearticulated or reappropriated for her own purposes. Her aim is to show that as with speech and language, code is capable of seeming to represent the complexity of the world in a way that humans often regard as “adequate” or useful. As Hayles’s summary suggests, the  understanding of complexity Hayles reads into Derrida’s writing is embedded within his broader metaphysical philosophy of presence, which apprehends the structure of language as an all-inclusive body that insists upon ‘being’ as presence, rather than absence. Difficultly, however, this insistence on presence so intrinsic to language is itself absent, or appears as though it is absent, because the immediacy of the communication instanced in writing and speech obscures our perception of it.

For Derrida, then, deconstruction enables the recognition of absence. To this end, deconstruction is intended to be used to simultaneously enact the destruction of presence, and the construction of absence, in reading. The way deconstruction apprehends absence in language is by locating, or conceptualising, what Derrida describes as the ‘trace’. However, as Derrida notes, the trace is more akin to an act of deconstruction than a phenomenon readily observable within language. Thus, the trace is ‘conceptualised’ rather than perceived. Nevertheless, it is probably best understood as neither precisely an act or invention of deconstruction nor a phenomenon of language, but as something in-between, like a re-conceptualisation of the language systems of writing and speech.

As Hayles suggests, Derrida’s analysis of language makes clear that complexity is “vested traditionally in the Logos, the originary point conceptualized as necessarily exceeding the world’s complexity, since in his view the world derived from the Logos.”[5] In Derrida’s grammatology, then, complexity inheres in the “trace” of the Logos, which marks the position of language as a means of expression that always already includes a critique of language within its own structure – or, as Hayles states, language critique and comprehension is the “subtle analysis that detects the movement of the trace”, and enables humans to understand one another.[6]

Derrida’s use of ‘trace’ is contingent and provisional, however, because in its traditional usage ‘trace’ implies a number of ideas the impossibility of which Deconstruction seeks to expose. As Derrida makes clear,

“The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace….In this was the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read.”[7]

In reference to Saussurian semiotics, Derrida avers that as an effect of the dislocation, displacement and refer-ence of the trace, the signifier must always simultaneously differ and defer from the signified in a way Derrida characterises as “différance.” For Derrida, “Différance is the non-full, non-simple “origin”; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.”[8]

While for Derrida, then, différance is “non-simple”, the nature of Hayles’s project as a comparison of speech, writing, and code, enables her to simplify différance for the framework of such a comparitive project. Both Derrida and Hayles are interested in examining the origin of differences. However, Derrida generally regards the origin of difference in language as rooted within a concept of absence, where nothing is or can be represented. Language, however, in creating presence, represents its objects in a way that is more complex and thus unfaithful to this absent origin. In this way, Derrida reaches an ‘impasse of complexity’ in which the possibility of interrogating a complex origin is made impossible. In contrast, Hayles views the origin of difference in code as a place of in which complex, content filled dynamics and feedback loops are intelligible and observable. Indeed, Hayles diminishes Derridean difference by confining its practical functionality to the study of intermediation. As Hayles remarks,

“Writing, unlike speech (before recording technologies), is not confined to the event of its making. It can be stored and transmitted, published in dozens of counties and hundreds of different editions, read immediately after its creation or a hundred years hence. In a sense it is no surprise that Derrida summarizes this difference between writing and speech by fusing “difference” with “defer”, for the ability to defer indefinitely our encounter with writing leaps out as perhaps the most salient way in which it differs from speech.”[9]

Hayles’s consideration of différance as the binary between writing and speech, rather than as a binary between absence and presence, focusing on the temporal deferability of writing, and the unavoidable immediacy of speech, leads her to reduce Derrida’s theory of difference to its constitutive root. As Hayles argues in respect of difference, Derrida “complicates and extends this commonplace idea by linking it with a powerful critique of the metaphysics of presence—but these complexities have their root in something most people would identify as a constitutive difference between speech and writing.”[10] Hayles’s reduction of différance serves not to resist the full complexity of Derrida’s metaphysics of presence, however, but to focus on the temporal aspects of different signifying modes in a comparative reading of speech, writing and code. For Hayles, the locus of complexity inheres in the recurring calculations by machines between its components and its states, a conceptualization that is perhaps intrinsically temporal, and which although applied to each signifying mode, always emphasises the temporal aspects of that system’s element of difference, wherein its complexity always lies. For Derrida, in contrast, complexity inheres in the language system itself, which is always different to and more complex than what it seeks to represent. In this sense, Derrida’s reading of difference is a broader critique of language systems in general, and hence his position that writing and speaking is the physical enactment of something Other, that is irreducible in its complexity, is metaphysical in its presence, and is transcendentally predestined by a transcendental signified in its attempt at signification.

In so focusing upon the temporal difference between speech and writing, Hayles does not directly address another important way in which it language differs from speech. In addition to the choice in time one makes to read a piece of writing, there is also a choice of what content to read within a particular discourse. One may read the introduction and end of a book without reading it’s middle. One may also re-read parts of a book it has missed or not paid attention to in an original reading. In the apprehension of speech, on the other hand, it is arguably more difficult skip to the content one wishes to hear, or return to particular content of which one wishes to be reminded. In this way, writing, more than speech, enables one to more readily create the very differences in experience by which new connections in thought may be determined. In as much as Hayles’s focus on the temporal or deferment aspects of difference stages an original exploration of the complex and entangled interactions between writing, speech and code – interactions she describes as instances of “intermediation” – it also neglects other aspects that are arguably signaled by such an analysis, such as the ability to generate through readerly selections of content the very differences, not only the deferments, which take place in the act of reading. Furthermore, in considering the broader question of why such differences and deferments and readerly selections take place, it is arguable that we return to the impasse of complexity that is augured by Derridean deconstruction and grammatology.

The impasse of complexity is the reason language, and its structure, seem so impermeably matriced in Derrida’s grammatology. Even though Derrida alludes to the trace of complexity, we can never fully understand complexity in language. Thus, the trace is one of the conceptualised devices Derrida suggests that we may deploy in reconstituting the impermeable matrix of language through deconstruction, however, the trace can never be grasped as a thing in itself, since it is always referable to, and embedded within, the system of language that deconstruction seeks to reconceptualise. Together with the term “supplement”, trace and difference thus form essential terms that Derrida uses to indicate the strategy of deconstruction, which attempts reconceptualise the structure of language. In his words, these terms “indicate a way out of the closure imposed by the system…”.[11]

As Derrida indicates, and as Hayles briefly remarks, the movement of the trace can never be found as a thing-in-itself. This does not present a problem for Derrida, since for him deconstruction does not wish to observe complexity other than as the originary point of the Logos, which for Derrida is more complex than the world itself, and the ‘non-place’ from which the world, as it is understood by humans, has derived. Deconstruction thus seeks to dismantle the Logos and to reveal that its very complexity is an invention of the logocentric insistence on presence, which, by its essence, cannot be grasped. In Hayles’s analysis of code, however, complexity is imagined as far more interrogable. Indeed, for Hayles the birth of code suggests an opportunity for us to better understand complexity in language and the logos, even if only metonymically. As Hayles asserts

“[f]or code, complexity inheres neither in the origin nor in the operation of difference as such but in the labor of computation that again and again calculates differences to create complexity as an emergent property of computation. Humans, who have limited access to their own computational machinery…create intelligent machines whose operations may be known in comprehensive detail.”[12]

In this introduction to her analysis of code, Hayles deftly elucidates the way in which the invention of code signifies a break from the deconstructionist impasse of complexity at the same time as it allegorises both the human response to such an impasse (in the building of intelligent machines), and the aim of her project in interrogating such machines within her project of intermediation and complexity.

If, in Derrida’s grammatology, complexity resides in the trace of the Logos, which cannot be understood as a thing in itself, and never explicitly examined without becoming enslaved immediately to the automatic complexification of the world by the logos, then it is supremely promising for Hayles that in the Regime of Computation, complexity resides in the labor of computation, whose ongoing calculation of differences between its states, unlike those that take place within the human mind, or in language, may be slowed down, simulated, analysed, and examined in comprehensive detail. Hayles’s analysis also implies that is so examining code in language – two different signifying systems – code is not represented in language that is neither more simple nor more complex than itsown, but incompatible altogether. For Hayles, the essential difference between code and language, like the essential difference between code and speech, enables an escape from the impasse of complexity instanced by Derridean différance.

For Hayles, then, the greater observability and interrogability of the locus of complexity in code than in language may instruct us about the mysteries of language itself, and about the complex way in which meaning emerges from within all signification systems. As Hayles suggests,

“The advantages of the computational view, for those who espouse it, is that emergence can be studied as a knowable and quantifiable phenomena, freed both from the mysteries of the Logos and the complexities of discursive explanations dense with ambiguities.”[13]

These two propositions about significations – the interrogability of code, or what Hayles calls the ‘clarity of code’, which we encounter in The Regime of Computation, and the insoluble complexity of language, which I argue we encounter in Derrida’s Writing and Difference and with deconstruction – are synthesised in my project, which in reference to signification focuses on a kind of hybrid of code and language, namely, the use and nature of scientific, medical language, and clinical discourse and literature. Unlike Hayles or Derrida, however, my interest is not in comparing or observing interactions between different signifying systems at a systemic level. Rather Hayles’s systemic analysis of code and the locus of complexity forms a springboard for my own analysis of the relations between language as a complex system and the human subject as another instance of complexity. Both Derrida and Hayles countenance the frontier of meaning in attempting to locate the origin of complexity as it relates to language. In this regard, I am interested in the same kinds of questions Hayles has in mind when she asks “where the complexity might reside that makes codes (or computers or cellular automata) seem adequate to represent a complex world?” [14]

More specifically, my study reappropriates this question by enquiring where the complexity might reside that makes psychiatric clinical discourse (or psychiatric drugs, or nootropic/smart drugs) seem adequate to represent a complex world, or a complex being. Just as Hayles’s project examines the Regime of Computation in a more elaborate way than simply studying the signification system of code, or, the language of computers, so my project is more elaborate than simply an examination of psychiatric language. My study appropriates psychiatry and its attendant modes of self-help and its worldview of human enhancement  as a Regime of Enhancement, which includes a spectrum enhancement technologies including psychiatric medicines, genetic modification technologies and even cosmetic enhancement surgery, rather than simply only the signifying system used by psychiatrists and other clinicians in their prescription of drugs and their interpretation of patient’s symptoms. Central to my project, however, as is the case in Hayles’s book, is an attempt to analyse the interaction between the worldview of the Regime of Enhancement and ‘creative’ literature in which such a regime attains its meaning in literary language, and in which it is given new expression by the literary imagination.

It is notable that what may be described as meaning in the context of language, is often described by Hayles as ‘emergence’ in the context of computation and code. The schema of emergence in code may tell us more about the nature of meaning in language. The presumption that meaning resides in language, or precedes it, and the attendant presumption that language exists to articulate such a meaning, has no parallel in Hayles’s analysis of computational emergence. What develops and materialises as an ‘emergence’ from within a complex structure of components, which enact operations according to a code, is not so much a ‘meaning’ as a phenomenon, or an effect. This identifies a range of implications for our understand of ‘meaning in language and literary texts.

I have thus far described Hayles’s project of examining code as analogous to Derrida’s project of examining written language, and have placed code alongside writing as different kinds of signifying systems. However, I have also suggested that these systems are not strictly analogous in their operations. In fact, the distinctions between the structures, or worldviews, of language and code are so different that they often seem essentially incompatible. Indeed, from a Derridean perspective it may be argued that the moment at which analogy starts to inform our understanding of the relations between language and code is the moment in which Logos assumes its power, making overly complex in the insistence on a “non-full, non-simple” presence a moment in reality is metaphysical and “absent” by its nature. Likewise the movements of the Logos as they trace a path toward such complexity can never be grasped as a thing in itself, and so iseven more complex than the moment it seeks to represent.

For example, it is difficult to directly analogise the structure, or structuration, of code and language. In the ideas that:

1. a computer component is equivalent to the mind or human subject;
2. the language spoken between computer components is equivalent to the language spoken as between humans;
3. the written code as a result of which computers enact their operations is equivalent to a written code as a result of which humans enact actions (which would be our DNA, or our machinery); and
4. the range of components and their environment is equivalent to the human environment, or, the world;

we start to both simplify and complexify the relation between human language and code. We simplify this relation by nominating specific instances of analogy in writing that may represent more complex thoughts or understandings of such instances of analogy in the mind, and we make the relation more complex in committing such thoughts, which are extremely complex, to language, which is itself a representation, and an inadequate one, for such a complex thought, and is never axiomatically possessed of the same meanings for all persons or for all subjects. And yet, in addition to this, it is also impossible, as Derrida points out, to trace at any level of theoretical adequacy, the procedure by which the complex thought, on the one hand, and the simplistic logos, on the other, come to be. Furthermore, it is also impossible to state that language is ‘more simple’ and that thought is ‘more complex’ since neither language nor though can ever be grasped or examined without reference one to the other.

Conscious of the divide between language and meaning, in La Parole Souflee Derrida conceptualises the relationship between logos and complexity, or between language and meaning, as a relationship characterised by theft. As he instructs,

“all speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as a spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech. [It b]ecomes a signification which I do not possess because it is a signification. Theft is always the theft of speech or text, of a trace.”[15]

Later in this essay, Derrida charecterises meaning as a submissive agent upon which signification actively acts out its own function: “the signifier on its own says more than I believe that I mean to say, and in relation to it my meaning-to-say is submissive rather than active.” Even though Hayles seems to propose that comprehensive analysis is not directly possible in the examination of writing,  but only directly  possible in analyses of code, when read in the context of his analysis of Artaud’s writings, Derrida’s continuous and flexible insights instantiate an analysis of language and poetry that is in many ways comprehensive in detail. However, the flexibility of Derrida’s analysis depends upon a continuous reinforcement that the trace left by signification is slippery ungraspable.[16]

As Hayles asserts,

“the notoriously slippery nature of the trace has authorized the widely accepted idea, reinforced by thousands of deconstructive readings performed by those who followed in Derrida’s footsteps, that meaning is always indeterminate and deferred.”

In contrast, she argues, with code

“the generation of meaning happens in ways that scholars trained in the traditional humanities sometimes find difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept.”[17]

Although not specifically identified by Hayles, such broad considerations about the essential distinction between the slippery nature of language and the predictable nature of code, enable her to emphasise those aspects of code that are unique to it as a signifying system, not only in terms of its operation, but in terms of its wider structure, or ‘worldview.’ As I have augured, however, such attestations about code as unique from language depend upon structural analogies that are themselves problematic and not directly or comprehensively addressed. For example, in the context of identifying how code is unique from language in generating meaning in ways language does not and which are difficult for humanities scholars to accept, she employs the word “meaning” to describe the complex, observable effects of computer language, whereas she elsewhere characterises these same effects in her thesis as “emergences” and “noise.” In this way, it is arguable that Hayles’s project never quite transcends the Derridean impasse of complexity in its own right. On the other hand, in resisting the impasse of complexity by approaching Derridean difference/deferral from the point of view of code, Hayles, in an interesting way, recharecterises difference as more broadly applicable to signifying systems, and recharecterises deference as an activity that must be seen in light of different practices within specific mediations.

In this vein, Hayles returns to Saussurian signification, which in its unfettered or tacit acceptance of the metaphysics of presence – that is, in not considering or acknowledging that absence might be relevant to signification – shares more in common with code than does Derridean grammatology.  As Hayles points out, however, Derrida acknowledges the metaphysics of presence by acknowledging the “the very idea of the signified [i]s conceptually distinct from the signifier…[and thereby] gives credence to a transcendental signified, and to this extent reinscribes classical metaphysics.”[18] As Derrida himself argues, the idea of a signifier “leaves open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is to a relationship to a system of signifiers.”[19]

As Hayles summarises, since Derrida’s idea of this transcendental signified asserts that there is nothing else, above or beyond that one, totalizing signified, “the dynamic of signified-becoming-signifier”, which Hayles seems to understand as axiomatic in Saussure’s theory, “threatens to undermine the absolute authority given to the transcendental signified.”[20] As Hayles’s conclusion suggests, in response to Derrida’s concept of the transcendental signified, deconstructionist criticism has tended to observe only signifiers, since however many possibilities of signifieds exists are reduced to a singular, totalizing, overarching, and transcendental signified. As a result, as Hayles states, it is probably not a bad “guess that in contemporary critical theory, “signifier” is used thousands of times for every time “signified” appears. “[21]

The language of code, therefore, resists the totalizing signified since within the computational worldview, “it makes no sense to talk about signifiers without signifieds”, since every positive voltage charge must have a precise meaning to have an effect on the machine, for “without signifieds, code would have no efficacy”, and “[f]or the machine, obsolete code is no longer a competent utterance.”[22] Of course, this does not directly contradict Derridean deconstruction, which insists not on the efficacy or competence of the utterance, but on the fact that language is immediate, at least insofar as it represents the metaphysics of presence, and in this way calls for immediate access to meaning, reinforcing an ontotheology that priveleges presence over absence. Within deconstruction, then, it seems irrelevant whether meaning exists, or is locatable in the utterance. It is more important that meaning is called for, and this, according to Derrida, is consubstantial with the act of uterring itself, and thus automatic.

Despite what similarities may be identified between code and language, however, for Hayles, the worldview of code is far too distinct from language for their structural similarities to be regarded as relevant. For example, in contrast to the illustration developed in which writing was regarded as not only deferrable by virtue of its fixity over time, but also manipulable in that it can be read in the order alongside any other kind of work, that is, it may be read in effect outside of its own context, Hayles attests that the same is not necessarily true in the world of computing, in which code by contrast “may be rendered unintelligible if transported into a different context…only at the high level of object oriented languages such as C++ does code recuperate the advantages of citability and iterability (i.e. inheritance and polymorphism. In the discoure of programming language) and in this sense become “grammatological.”[23]

While it is arguable then, that code’s inherent insistence upon immediate meaning presents not a contradiction with the deconstructionist understanding of the metaphysics of presence but the apotheosis of that ontotheology, in that code it emblematically seems to insist most directly and most immediately the existence of an higher being, a transcendental signified, or a function, and it does so merely through its pre-programmed operation, and without regard to any experience of that transcendental signified whatsoever.  On the other hand, code’s position as just such an emblem for the metaphysics of presence, demonstrates just how different such a metaphysics of presence is in practice. Code does not insist on the immediacy of meaning merely rhetorically, like language, which in the absence of meaning, would seem, at least putatively, to be permitted to exist nonetheless. On the contrary, code’s existence is its meaning, and its meaning is its existence.  Again, the term meaning, here, is better replaced by the term function, or effect, but the general conceptualisation is the same. As Hayles notes, when Ellen Ullman, a high level programmer is asked if code is a lmaguge, she responds by stating that

“We can use English to invent petry, to try to express things that are very hard to express. In programming you really can’t. Finally, a computer program has only one meaning: what it does. It isn’t a text for an academic to read. Its entire meaning is its function.”[24]

To understand literary meaning in the same way – as an effect only – such that it does what it does, and that is precisely it’s function, is an extremely appealing start in my theorising of the Regime of Enhancement.

Derrida, Jacques and Ronse, Henri (1972), Positions; entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Collection “Critique”; [Paris]: Éditions de Minuit) 133p.

Derrida, Jacques and Bass, Alan (2001), Writing and difference (Routledge classics.; London: Routledge) xxiii, 446 p.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2005), My mother was a computer : digital subjects and literary texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 290 p.

Moran, Dermot and Mooney, Timothy (2002), The Phenomenology reader (London: Routledge) x, 614 p.

[1] N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 290 p. at 41.

[2] Ibid.  at 18.

[3]Ibid. at 18.

[4] Ibid.  at 30.

[5] Ibid.  at 41.

[6] Ibid.41

[7] Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, The Phenomenology Reader (London: Routledge, 2002) x, 614 p. at 569.

[8]

[9] Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts at 40.

[10] Ibid.

[11]

[12]Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts at 41.

[13] Ibid.41

[14] Ibid.  at 41.

[15] Jacques Derrida and Alan Bass, Writing and Difference (Routledge Classics.; London: Routledge, 2001) xxiii, 446 p. at 220.

[16] Nevertheless, Derrida’s analysis of a dialogue in this essay between what he calls “critical discourse and clinical discourse” will be useful for my research.

[17] Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts at 46.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Jacques Derrida and Henri Ronse, Positions; Entretiens Avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Collection “Critique”; [Paris]: Éditions de Minuit, 1972) 133p. at 19.

[20] Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts at 47.

[21] Ibid.47

[22] Ibid.47

[23] Ibid.  at 48.

[24] Ibid.48

“a world of integrated contradictions, of broadband empires and wireless tribes in which the rational is co-penetrated with the mythic; a hyperrationalized global technological system that provokes its own auto-rejections from within a world managed for transparency of resources and efficiency in their exchanges.”[1]

While Koivukoski urges that there should be a level of thinking that is deeper and more significant than a “technical manual concerned with network maintenance, but at the same time more rational than the mythic grand narratives that are having their renaissance”[2], it seems difficult for Koivuskoski to elucidate precisely what this meaning consists of.

Koivukoski’s book is a work of political science, so it unsurprising that his views focus largely on the inability of democratic, or technocratic, citizens to feel enfranchised, to enforce their political rights and freedoms from within a zone that is effectively depoliticised, disenfranchised, and unfamiliar: the world in which technological dependence is not only the status quo, but invisible, and only effectively understood in times of crisis, when technology fails . Thus, Koivukoski’s understanding of technology in our historical moment is that it  may be understood as a political threat, as a Foucaldian force of disempowerment (invisible, unwritten, unannounced), which emerges from our deeper fear of technological governance, of total control being placed in the hands of those who are unsympathetic and automatic machines, or at least in the hands of those whose job is to program and operate such machines. For Koivuskovsi,

“[a]s citizens become estranged from the apparatuses of technocratic decision- making, and as technology itself becomes increasingly efficient and invisible in its ongoing operations those system of human artifacts [sic] upon which public order and private satisfactions depend start to seem more and more magical in their operations. And with the new superstition that has technology operating on automatic comes a heightened sense of fatalism, which is itself a cultural product of a hyperrationalized world shading into mythic modes and orders.”­[3]

The fear that technology will assume human functions and become, as it were, a government in its own right, may be seen as even more insidious and invisible in its operations when Koivukoski’s definition of technology as devices and machinic artifacts is expanded to include science and technology. In contemplating the totality of advances in pharmocological medicine, cosmetic surgery, and other forms of scientific interventions into the human body, it is inadequate to conceive of the operations of technology as functioning only ‘outside’ of the mind or the body in the form of devices or networks. Similarly, it is not enough to perceieve that technology acts materially from within the human body, say, only in such forms as the ‘mirco-chipped’ human, the nanotechnological human, and the chemically rebalanced human (by SSRI’s, or even nootropics). Technology, rather, in addition to these examples, functions at the level of our thinking – we ’know’ technology, and by means of technology, we are enabled to encounter, or apprehend, further ‘ways of knowing.’ In this sense, technology may also be seen to form, at least metaphorically or analogically, a technological epistemology, which is actively ‘thought’ by its users.

It is possible that Koivukoski’s difficulty in elucidating the character of the kind of human thinking he seeks in relation to technology stems from his non-recognition of the epistemological ramifications of digital, and other, technology.  And while it may be true that machines may not ever think ‘as’ humans (as Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus have argued),  it may yet be possible to better understand how in many ways contemporary epistemologies, ways of knowing and what we know, are indebted to technological artifacts and their ability to prosthetically ’protect’ our knowledge, and to enforce, authorize and legitimate new techno-epistemologies. As Koivuskoski poetically notes

“[I]n this relationship between human beings and their protective prosthesis, it is important to be aware of the metaphorical likeness that shapes each in the image of each. For as we see technology as an extension of human functions, performing routinized or dangerous tasks for us, similarly we in turn appropriate technological functions to open up a reflective distance on our own operations , such that thinking may be conceived of as computing, remembering as data retrieval and willing as cost-benefit calculation.”[4]

Jean Baudrillard, of course, prepared an essay on the way in which Andy Warhol resembled a machinic mutant, a “Snobbish Machine”, in the late 1990s. For Baudrillard, Warhol’s practices were automatic, unsympathetic, inhuman.

The interrelationship between people who think, at least analogically, like computers, and those who materially imbibe other forms of science, such as by means of genetic manipulation or in the form of present-day psychiatric drugs, shall be a persistent guide in my further reading of Koivukoski.

[1] Toivo Koivukoski, After the Last Man : Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008) xvii, 121 p. at xiv.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.  at 28.

My view – in contrast to the prognostications of science fiction – is that we must now consider the possibility that machines or computers may ‘never think like people’[1] and, accordingly, and contiguously, consider not only the ways in which humans are becoming ‘enhanced’ in “evolving”, ontologically and otherwise, to computers and machines, but also the ways in which humans might be seen as “devolving” into ‘computer states’. It seems a standard discussion consists of describing just how humans are ‘evolving’ to the ‘cyborg-state’, but, more radically, it is interesting to consider how the use of drugs, such as Prozac, Ritalin, and the like (often considered as enhancement technologies, or as ‘cosmetic medicine’), are also inviting of the same questions about evolution and devolution, and similarly capable of being understood as effecting kinds of ‘disenhancement’ rather than enhancement only.

I use the term devolution not to signify a real devolution so much as to strike against the evolution-centric discourse on enhancement technologies, especially those in relation to Prozac and other enhancing drugs. If, as Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus argues, computers cannot employ human reason, then it is important to consider Dreyfus’s thesis as against the changes that occur in the human subject who does enhances itself through enhancement drugs and other forms of technology. Is it possible that, like computers, cyborgs, transhumans, posthumans, or simply, enhanced humans, lose their capacity to function and/or learn in the same way as “people”? Or, by contrast, do Prozac and other technologies enable common sense to prevail over and above the previously dominating tendencies of the subject, tendencies which are themselves defective or devolutionary, to begin with? These are some of the questions with which my research concerns itself.

To assess the effect of enhancement technologies in this broad sense, however, calls for a broader understanding of human subjectivity and also a means by which to assess its evolution and devolution. In this paper, that broader understanding and attendant means of assessment is found in a psychoanalytic-based, language-based and intelligence-based theory of subjectivity. In other words, my discussion of subjectivity will invite scholarship from the psychoanalytic, the ‘language’ and the ‘intelligence’ communities in its pursuit of understanding human nature. In this way, my research, although it is technically for degree in English (and more formally, it is expected to be a degree in English Literature), advances confidently toward other disciplines such as literary theory, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, psychiatry, anthropology, cultural studies, and certain scientific understandings of evolution and the body.

My work also uses close reading of certain literary texts to adjudicate and explicate its own proclamations about the human subject. My method of reading such texts reflects my theoretical understanding of human subjectivity – if the subject is enhanced by technology, and enhancement may be assessed in and of itself by language, then, can we not read language as a kind of technology as well; perhaps even as the ‘original’ enhancement technology? Furthermore, can we not then understand or reduce the effects on language by psychopharmacological drugs and by computers and other technologies as enhancing or not enhancing? Could the question of ‘enhancement’ itself be described as as subjective as a question of literary or aesthetic quality?

The answers to these questions become complicated when language is seen as an inadequate, partial, and readily contestable reflection of the subject (or of the ‘soul’), rather than a clear and totalising representation of it. Indeed, language may be appropriated for all kinds of uses. A person may say one thing and mean another, just as he or she may say one thing and think or feel another. Most significantly, the subject may also describe itself in one way and in fact be another. Language, in this sense, is not directly reliable in assisting analysis of the subject and subjective experience. However, it is important to note that, for the purposes of the rubric of my research, language is in fact often the only means by which the subject is analysed for the purpose of characterising it in the many fields I will discuss. In this sense, my research not only depends on language as a means by which to analyse and assess the subject, but it also problematises the ways in which language has been and is already used as a means for doing the same thing. In this sense, my research is classically literary-theroetical in that it distinguishes its own practices of language-reading from those of another reader. It differs from the classic model only in that the ‘other reader’ does not always view itself, or is not always viewed, as a reader, as such, but rather, may be a medical doctor, an evolutionary scientist, a psychoanalyst, and so forth. I am interested in the intersection of these disciplines and language.

In the Dreyfus’s short article ‘Why Computers May Never Think like People’[2], the writers propose that the limitations on computers to learn to adapt to certain real-life circumstances prevents computers from ‘thinking’ in the sense that people can. For the Dreyfus’s, what defines adult humans is their ability to apply specific rules, learned in the practice and performance of one activity (‘analytic behaviour), later, in a more universal and analogical way, in the performance of other unrelated activities (skilled behaviour). Adults, then, are different from children, in that they are not only ‘analytic’, but ‘skilled’:

“their progression from the analytic behavior of consciously following abstract rules to skilled behavior based on unconsciously recognizing new situations as similar to remembered ones. Conversely, small children initially understand only concrete examples and gradually learn abstract reasoning. Perhaps it is because this pattern in children is so well known that adult intelligence is so often misunderstood.”[3]

Adults, therefore, employ a kind of analogical reasoning, which enables them to compare previous scenarios with new ones, despite certain differences in the details of the scenarios. Children, by contrast, employ an imitative, mimetic intelligence, which thinks only of mastering their skills as the owners of a body, or a voice, and not of any historical goal or outcome.

Here, the Dreyfus’s draw an interesting distinction between child and adult reasoning. For adults, the acquiring of skills is based not upon examples, as with children, but upon the successive application of certain abstract rules. In this sense, it is arguable, at its broadest, that adult intelligence depends on linguistic rules, whereas childhood intelligence relies on the imitation of examples. Furthermore, since for many children language is itself a skill yet to be fully mastered, many of the examples imitated by children might be visual, not linguistic. Where such examples are linguistic in nature, it is likely that language will be copied from examples of its use rather than from remembered rules of use, although simple rules may guide the child. This is obvious in observing the differences in intelligence operations between an adult who learns a new language as compared to a child who learns its first language.

The purpose of so distinguishing adult and children intelligence is not to set in stone a typological distinction between these forms of intelligence. Indeed, the differences between these two concepts are as various and as slippery as their similarities. Rather, this distinction serves to provide reference-points or yardsticks along the continuum of intelligence, upon which childhood intelligence consists of these analytic attributes and adult intelligence consists of skilled attributes. Whereupon the continuum an individual subject may reside will not necessarily depend on whether they are a child or an adult, but upon the activity at play.

It is interesting, in any event, to compare the Dreyfus’s analysis of the skills they associate with adult and children intelligence as to their analysis of the skills they associate with the novice, the competent performer, and the expert. For the Dreyfus’s, only the novice follows certain rules unwaveringly or strictly in the pursuance of learning a new skill, and only the novice, therefore, who also employs adult intelligence in the sense that the Dreyfus’s define it: by following the rules. Interestingly, however, competent performers, and to a greater extent than they, expert performers, employ a different kind of intelligence as they advance in their skill level. As the Dreyfus’s argue, experts do not so much follow rules as identify the many subtle exceptions thereto: “the skills of experts have become so much a part of them that that they need no more be aware of them than they are of their own bodies…When [expert chess players are] playing rapidly, they sidestep dangers as automatically as teenagers avoid missiles in a familiar video game.”[4] For the Dreyfus’s, experts understand that there can be no thought, no application of the rules, because the time it takes to think about such a rule, and whether or not to apply it, may actually jeopardise the application of the action, whether it follows the rule or not. In this sense, it is arguable that expert intelligence shares some of its characteristics with the child intelligence that the Dreyfus’s describe.

Whereas children imitate the actions of others in their advancement, experts imitate the actions that they themselves have taken in the past, and which are contained in memories. The kind of reasoning that is quickly applied by experts is both analogical in that it compares the present task with a past performance of a similar kind of task, but also imitative in that it imitates the past performance. The extent to which an expert applies an abstract rule or reduces his or her present task to a semiotic principle in the performance of that task is bound to be very short indeed.

At this point, it may be apposite to flag one aspect of childhood learning to which I will return later and describe in more detail but for the moment I shall only mention. Jaques Lacan described in his 1949 lecture in Zurich at the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, a concept named The Mirror Stage (le stage du mirroir), which was formative, in the subject, of the ‘I’ function.[5] In this lecture, Lacan returned to a theory that he had introduced thirteen years earlier (in 1936), which simply argued that the stage at which the infant indentifies his or her self in the mirror (which may be a real glass, reflective mirror, or the image of another person, as apprehended by the infant) is the stage at which the infant jubilantly assumes “his specular image” and whose function is “a particular case of the function of the imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality – or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.”[6] the mirror stage enables the infant to engage with the world, intellectually. It enables the infant to consider itself independent of the rest of the world, and yet also human. In this sense, the mirror stage also triggers in the infant his or her desire to imitate the rest of the world: s/he thereafter rapidly learns to use its body and voice by imitating those around them, knowing it can be done. For the infant, there are no rules, and no thoughts – only action, only instinct.

For the Dreyfus’s, adults who reason things out, who ‘take a step back’ from certain intellectually challenging situations to deliberate upon them detachedly and rationally, often revert to the behavior of a “novice, or at best, a competent performer”, rather than an expert. Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, in situations where an expert, in all of his or her instinctual performativity, based as it is upon their lots of experience and rooted in their unconscious recognition of situations, yet cannot prevail over their opponent, it may be useful for the expert to revert to “deliberative rationality.” Nevertheless, in the usual life of an expert, such difficulties do not arise. In this sense, experts exhibit some of the characteristics that the Dreyfus’s also attribute to children, except that whereas children imitate the actions of those around them, experts imitate those acts that they have made before. I hope that I may develop these links between the mirror stage, the development of children intelligence, and the application of so-called expert intelligence in the coming months.

Moreover, it is important for me to rearticulate the Dreyfus’s argument that computers are capable only of applying ‘analytic’ reasoning and can only follow rules. It is interesting, here, to consider the well-known expression ‘computer skills’, which usually applies only to the skills of the human user of the computer and not the skills possessed by the computer itself. For the Dreyfus’, this would make perfect sense, as computers cannot acquire ‘skills’. I hope to re-examine this proposition in my research in the coming months, particularly in relation to skills often associated with computer networks, and the web.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1992), What computers still can’t do : a critique of artificial reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) liii, 354 p.

Kaplan, David M. (2004), Readings in the philosophy of technology (Lanham, Md. ; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) xvi, 512 p.

Lacan, Jacques and Fink, Bruce (2002), Ecrits : a selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) xi, 372 p.

[1]Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do : A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) liii, 354 p.

[2] David M. Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Lanham, Md. ; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004) xvi, 512 p. at 397-413.

[3] Ibid.  at 401.

[4] Ibid.  at 400.

[5] Jacques Lacan and Bruce Fink, Ecrits : A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002) xi, 372 p. at 4-9.

[6] Ibid.  at 6.

the notion that biology replaced psychoanalysis is undone in moments when biology is expressed as psychoanalysis, or performs the cultural work of psychoanalysis, or assumes the same definition of civilization as psychoanalysis…

Metzl’s point is deceptively simple and it is that rather than there having occurred – as many have bluntly perceived – a shift during the late twentieth century from psychoanalysis to medical psychiatry – that is, a shift from ‘Freud to Prozac’– psychiatry, by contrast, during its climb in becoming the ubiquitous institution, industry and research and development strength that it is today, subsumed the psychoanalysis into the architectures of its own knowledge, and adopted in its practices, albeit insidiously, all of the ideological character and foundational knowledge of twentieth century psychoanalysis. I refer to Metzl’s argument, here, as deceptive because although it seeks to recharecterise the so-called ‘shift’ from psychoanalysis to psychiatry as a assumption by psychiatry of psychoanalytic knowledge, it can be difficult to perceive the precise ways in which psychiatry has done so. After all, are not psychoanalysis and psychiatry completely different kinds of sciences: the former, a social, academic, and creative science, and the latter, a hard, neurological, and medical science?

In my view, the locus at which these divergent sciences converge, ultimately, is in (and through understandings of) the body. Metzl supports his argument by writing about the way in which the psychiatrist has adopted the role of the psychoanalyst, and has thereby changed the structure and method of the analysis of the human subject. However, there is perhaps more to be learned from examining ways in which to synthesise both disciplines. In looking to the body, then, we must ask why the body – and not just the mind – is important in analysing contemporary psychoanalytic and psychiatric understandings and expressions of subjectivity. While the foundational paradigm of dualist thought, which inscribes the mind-body dualism, pervades the structure of knowledge-making throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the point at which this dualism (often referred to as Cartesian Dualism) becomes problematic, is in examining it as against the findings of twentieth century medical science. Indeed, the problematic of dualist thought is made evident in both psychoanalytic and psychiatric scholarship throughout the early twentieth century to the present.

The idea that the subject owns a mind which is ‘rational’ and perceptive, and knows or that may know the subject entirely, and a body which serves as a receptacle of sensory glands and a vehicle for the mobility of the brain is untenable in the face of medically documented cases of the emergence of an unconscious mind, or in cases of behavioural change in the subject which reflect a force beyond merely either the mind or the body. Indeed, the unconscious emerged in the twentieth century as precisely that place whose unknowability, whose mysteriousness and estrangement to our own cognition, to our conscious mind, is also the very place in which the subject’s conscious minds, or this subject, overall, is constituted.

Thinking, then, in literary terms, the unconscious may serve as a broad metonym for all that is unknown or unknowable by a subject about itself, and to others. It is not a finite place within the mind, or even within the brain, in which the real, subjective brain does its work, behind the curtains as it were, and without the observation of the active, thinking, and percipient mind. Nor is the unconscious the grand processor of the brain that both oversees our senses, governs and produces those thoughts not recognised by the mind, and about which or through which there can be no thought in and of itself. Rather, it may be understood metonymically as the very site of non-knowledge, the very container of all of the unobtainable aspects of the mind, and which may only be witnessed, if ever, in the medically inexplicable acts of its subjects, or may only be understood as reflected in activity and discourse by the subject which is aberrant, uncanny, unknown. Thinking about the unconscious not as an aspect of the mind, then, but, rather, as the very number of aspects that are unknown about the subject, enables the terms of discussion to be reframed in such a way that strikes at dualism and reveals the inadequacy of dualism for conceiving of the subject. As such, psychoanalysis engenders new interest in the body, at the very least, as a place in which clues toward the unconscious may be found.

In a different way, and in a way that is less commonly the subject of research, psychiatry similarly disposes with dualism by conceiving of the subject as, for example, contingent upon the effectiveness of the neurotransmission of certain neurotransmitters within and throughout the brain. While psychiatry, in this sense, conceives of the subject as dependent upon its mind, and in a way that appears to suggest that the subject’s body is enslaved to its brain, it similarly analyses the causative and ramifying effects of the subject through its language, including its body language. In this sense, psychopharmacological analysis of the subject proceeds by way of asking the subject particular questions about its body, related to its sleeping patterns, its sexual and other physical activity(/ies) and while assessing its general bodily performativity and its physical health. In this way, psychiatry is both more productive and more reductive: it is productive in that it observes the patient holistically as a subject governed by all things, not simply its mind and/or its body, but it is reductive in that it locates the precursor to mind/body (and all other) subjective change as within the brain itself in the form of neurotransmitter intervention.

If it is accepted that the unconscious constitutively resists signification, or is unamenable to the comprehension of others, since, by this definition, any utterance that is capable of comprehension is no longer an iteration of the unconscious, but rather an iteration that must be subject to interpretation within a particular contextual structure, (and, thus, is not aberrant or uncanny, but – in terms of its comprehensibility, is ‘appropriate’, logical, rational, or ‘makes sense, etc., such as, for example, an iteration that takes place within the context of a patient/doctor meeting (“I feel depressed”)), and, therefore, must be understood to represent not a specific feeling, but a broad and underdetermined symptom of a specific condition of circumstance, how does one even identify, or begin to assess, the revelation of the unconscious at all? While medical journals and psychoanalytic articles often focus on schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders and the like to examine the different articulations made as between the subject that suffers from a condition and the subject that does not, such studies also engage in a discussion about what is essentially unknown (both in terms of the (bio)linguistic scope of such studies, and the content of the articulations themselves). Furthermore, such studies proceed on the basis of observation, drug prescription, and then further observation, and depend on dialogical ‘change’ – this is an overdetermined and regulated form of trial and error. Of course, such studies also are written by the observer and in the observer’s own particular kind of scientific language, and in so doing, lose much of the substantive content related to, and offer little specialised analysis of, the subject’s use of language.

In the case of Prozac, Metzl has observed the particular effects Prozac has had on the language deployed in descriptions of subjectivity, not only in medical and scientific journals, or only in academic articles, but in the general discourse about the self. As Metzl observes,

the success of Prozac capped a shift in the discussion of selfhood away from symptoms, words, and understandings that implied prior events. In their stead, a language developed that focused on the here and now and on symptoms immediately observable and quickly treatable. Over the course of the revolution, men were replaced with medications, case studies by MRI scans…In the process, “I am in pain because of where I have been” became “I am in pain.”

In To Speak Is Never Neutral, the psycholinguist (psychoanalytic linguist) and semiotician Luce Irigaray examines the language of schizophrenics in order answer her question “does schizophrenic discourse exist?” In her study, Irigaray notes that language

includes a class of elements that permit passage from, or conversion of, language into discourse. These elements have a double function: on the one hand, they are part of language defied as a system of signs, and as the syntax of their combinations; on the other had, they belong to language as activity manifested in instances of discourse.

Discourse, then, may be conceived of as those elements of a language that refer not only to the structure that signifies and which conveys language with significance, but as that which assumes – in making general reference to certain unspecified ‘givens’ about the episodic place of enunciation – the very totality of the context in which the subject’s enunciation takes place. In so doing, particularised discourse indices (for example, the personal index of the ‘I-you’ relation, or demonstrative or place indices such as ‘this’ or ‘here’ – things that would only make sense to an immediate party to the enunciation) enable one to examine what may be called the ‘immediacy’ of the subject’s subjective experience.

Speaking generally, and hypothetically, then, it could be that a subject whose enunciation of certain discourse indices is frequent may suggest a certain immediacy of subjective experience; an awareness of their present, both temporally and ontologically.Alternatively, a subject whose enunciation of discourse indices is infrequent may suggest that their subjective experience is in some way ‘disconnected’ – that their narration of time takes place in ‘another place’, whose character reveals itself as symptomatic of depression or some other mental condition.

In many ways, Freud’s psychoanalytic project opened up the broad and contingent psychological territory within which the “repressed” Other returns. For Freud, the repressed element (often described as the “uncanny” but, in other places, given the character of a “trauma”) always remains “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alien from it only through the process of repression.” Freud’s assertion that the uncanny resides “in the mind” allegorises the broader ambition of psychoanalysis (and other earlier “hermeneutics of suspicion”) to enter into the interior space within which external events and traumas might be experienced and relived. His project also had specific implications for the development of the Gothic: for instance, what if the return of the repressed has less to do with an external event or “Other”, and more to do with a prior, embodied condition which can be identified as pathological, such as, say, a paranoia? In his close study of Freud, for example, John Farrell asserts that Freud’s analysis of repression is itself foregrounded by paranoia: “[t]he concepts of paranoia and projection…are themselves instruments of repression, and that repression consists of nothing other than the psychological effects of accepting paranoia.” Similarly, Freud himself describes, “the distinctive character of paranoia” as a “mechanism by which the symptoms are formed or by which repression is brought about”.

Given that there is a foundational link, then, between paranoia and repression, it is fascinating and telling that Freud, in his early case studies, identifies an analogue between the hermeneutical operations of psychoanalysis, and the ego’s constitutive operation, or elicitation, of psychological paranoia itself. In his essay on one Dr Schreber – an “ambitious, yet paranoid” man who dreams of himself achieving ‘racial purity’ as a woman – Freud observes the “striking similarity” between Schreber’s so called “persecutory” paranoia and Freud’s own psychoanalytic and philosophical theorisation of paranoia. As Freud specifically observes, “the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the system of our philosophers.” The conclusion to be drawn from Freud’s comparison is that, as Sedgwick has also identified, paranoia may function both as something that can be read—as a thematic construct, or a topos, within a (Gothic) narrative; as well as a theoretical or hermeneutical method for the practice philosophical observation. It is notable, also, that these uses often, if not typically, overlap. In relation to literary Gothics more particularly, it may similarly be observed that by charting and measuring the mental experience of horror, and by locating these affective apprehensions in the idiosyncratic pathology of the individual subject, psychoanalytic readings and other similarly interiorizing, or ‘subject-based’ discursive methods essentially localise the pervasiveness of paranoia as a Thing by reducing the whole experience to the category of the individualised, and possible aberrant, symptom. It is thus possible for Judith Halberstam to “read Freud’s two case histories of paranoia” as examples of how “psychoanalysis degothicizes the Gothic tales of mental breakdown” by reimagining mental breakdown as a gothic from within rather than from without.

Significantly, in this regard, Deleuze and Guattari have argued that Freud’s essay about paranoia performs an erasure of history, since it performs a “flattening out” of the political motivations for Dr Schreber’s delirium, and sidelines important political (materio-historical) issues. As they assert,

Schreber’s memoirs are filled with a theory of God’s chosen people, the Germans, who are threatened by the Jews, the Catholics, and the Slavs…All paranoiac deliriums stir up similar historical, geographic, and racial masses. The error would lie in concluding, for example, that fascists are mere paranoiacs.

While the American, or paranoid Gothic concerns itself with precisely just such political issues (in Wieland, for instance, Carwin is an appropriation of the conventional “Faust- and Wandering Jew-like” figure, intruding upon the Germanic family ), albeit usually metonymically, it does so with a view to blurring and subverting the distinctions which maintain such racist attitudes; its “strategy”, in other words, is to renounce the idea of racial power and to reveal, or gothicise, “[such] suspect ideological stakes of quests for purity.” While in Freud’s sexualised discourse, the paranoia of Dr Schreber, and in the psyche, more generally, is grounded constitutively in a desire to defend the self from a homosexual “attack”, paranoia “within description[s] of Gothic structures” is, as Halberstam observes, “the fear that simultaneously blurs boundaries and calls for their resurrection”, a means by which affectively cognises “both fear and the fear of fear.”

The value of reading paranoia in texts, and reading paranoiacally, lies in the potential for such a mode to enact, as Eve Sedgwick powerfully argues, the practice of “reparative reading”, that is, a practice by which the individual may read, by some kind of Dionysian instinct (as with Bergson’s “vitalism” or Derrida’s différance) as an individual, highly attuned, super sensitive, instrument and conduit for all of a text’s possible psychological, cultural and political influences. As Patrick O’Donnel similarly observes,

Paranoia, like power after Foucault, ranges across the multi-discursivity of contemporary existence…Since [it] has so much to do with the mystified, hegemonic enactments of power, the representation of paranoia in the artificial plots of fiction can, indeed, be seen as a site where epistemology and ideology meet.

An obvious instance in which epistemology and ideology so meet, occurs relatively early in the story of Wieland. As Clara, the text’s narrator, notes, her story is set somewhere “between the conclusion of the French and the beginning of the revolutionary war.” This uneasy historical period, however, does not imply disturbance in the family setting, however, since, as Clara notes

revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those who occupied the scene, contributed in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity and furnishing causes of patriotic exultation.

What Clara describes as an agitation of the mind (notably in the collective pronoun “our”), is a clear instance of the extent to which the family take pleasure in their own collective paranoia. Similarly, as Clara notes at a later stage of the text, neither she nor the family is unsaddened at the thought of her father’s mysterious death because of its stimulating and thrilling aspect (43); elsewhere, Clara observes that she is pleased that her friend is grief stricken at the death of his lover, because it has rendered him as a more steady and sober companion for her (45).

In this context of ‘normalised calamity’, increasing tension arises between Clara’s and Theodore’s perspectives. Clara’s descriptions of her meeting with the narrative’s villain, Carwin, for instance, reveal her increasing fear of her own brother, rather than of the villainous Carwin himself:

Had I even begun the conversation with an account of what befel me in my chamber, my previous interview with Wieland would have taught him to suspect me of imposture; yet, if I were discoursing with this ruffian, when Pleyel touched the lock of my chamber door, and when he shut his own door with so much violence, how, he might ask, should I be able to relate these incidents? (169)

Despite his constant foreclosure of her voice and his implicit insistence that Carwin represents a villain and a threat, Clara (and the reader) is increasingly led to consider that Theodore’s view of Carwin is a misapprehension, a paranoid delusion. As Allan Llloyd-Smith argues, “whereas in the European novels [such] misapprehensions are largely gratuitous…Brown enlarges their scope of implication to significant psychological and political conclusions” , conclusions that characterised paranoia as itself a villainous character. As Brown himself was to later suggest, “men are liable to error, and though they may intend good, may commit enormous mistakes in the choice of means…To avoid such simple conspiratorial beliefs” wrote Brown, we must “be conscious of the uncertainty of history” and recognize that “actions and motives cannot be truly described, for they are not always integrally related.” Brown, in a way, then, may be seen to espouses a mode of dry, observational reasoning, and to warn against and gothicise any conclusion not in this way drawn. Thus while Clara’s initially embracing attitude to Carwin is inviting and promising, in later attributing to him her brother’s craziness, and, by extension, the fact that her brother has committed murder, reveals not her paranoia, or even her irrationality, but rather, as Korobkin has argues, her judicious, “yearningly legal”, and, even, her ‘Brownian’ mind.

Although, in Wieland, neither Clara nor Theodore explicitly identify themselves as paranoiacs, the Gothic “repressed” can be seen not to return from those strange and unfamiliar Other exterior spaces as in the classic Gothic, but rather to emerge (to reappropriate Kant’s phrase) from within the “sublime imaginations” of the primary characters, which is itself attenuated by what Deleuze might describe as their ‘familial tension’. The novel thus “contains a family destroyed from within, though [the] agency [of destruction] is ascribed to outside forces.” Meta-textually, then Wieland represents a narrative in which the new American “family-republic” is endangered—indeed, it is gothicised—by its own inner potential for destruction. In his obsession with the task of proving God’s existence and realizing his own will, for instance, it becomes clear that Theodore’s delusions are produced by his own imagination. In even broader meta-textual terms, Theodore’s paranoia represents the contemporaneous fear about the dangers of fiction. As James Dawes notes,

The protagonists of Wieland are susceptible to “wonder and panic” as a first response. It is as if the mind were programmed to believe all new data, and could only achieve and maintain disbelief through special effort. Unsurprising is the protagonists’ recreational focus on oratory rather than fictional theatre [sic.]—indeed, the one play they intend to stage never takes place, as if they cannot finally enter the realm of fictions acknowledged as fictions.

The double bind, of course, is that Theodore’s paranoia (and Clara’s complicity with—or vulnerability to—it, for the first half of the novel) insists on maintaining the very fiction it fears: prior to “collecting and investigating the facts which relate to that mysterious personage” (56) Theodore fictionalises the figure of Carwin as an evil Other. Thus, Theodore’s eventual murder of his immediate family and their servant, more than anything, represents a malicious expression of his realization—the realisation he had known, but transferred to Carwin—that his belief system is fictitious, and that his utopian project of a puritanical family life is untenable.

Indeed, the impulse for his murders is, in reality, a radicalised perversion of his avowed God (he hears Carwin’s voice as the voice of God (208)). As Halberstam acknowledges, “Paranoia…forces the subject to gothicize “others” while attempting to elevate or purify the self. Paranoia is precisely a Gothic mechanism, a production of a demon who represents a multitude of fears.” In Wieland, ultimately then, Theodore’s persecutory paranoia forces Clara (and others) to Gothicize Carwin, even as her narrative voice resists and as his own narrative, in its persecutory violence, becomes infinitely more monstrous.