The Truth Machine (35 page)

When he drew up the plans for
Wonder Woman
in early 1941, Marston introduced many of the psychological ideas he had developed throughout his career into the comic's moral economy. In addition to structuring her cosmos between the polarities of dominance and submission, he also equipped his heroine with a lie detector of her very own, one that encapsulated his utopian philosophy of psychology. Should any of her enemies become captured by the Golden Lasso of Truth, they would find themselves incapable of lying. Fashioned from “fine chain links” from Queen Hippolyte's magic girdle (itself a constraining garment), the lasso was “as flexible as rope, but strong enough to hold Hercules!”
²⁵
In the 1944 adventure, “The Icebound Maidens,” for example, Wonder Woman used the golden lasso to compel the scheming Prince Pagli to explain his devious motivations, thereby allowing Wonder Woman to free his captives. Like the equally mythic lie detector upon which it was modeled, the lasso was intended to be one of Wonder Woman's principal weapons against the forces of crime and injustice. Wonder Woman would instantly lose her special powers were she to become trapped in her own lasso. For Marston, liberation and subjugation were an essential tension, different sides of the same coin.

As the golden lasso evidenced, Marston was aware of the lie detector's dual qualities as an instrument of liberation and domination.
²⁶
He, therefore, acknowledged a feature of the lie detector that very few advocates were prepared to admit: despite its reputation for scientific humanitarianism, it was a coercive and illiberal technique. Marston believed that the price for obtaining freedom from truth was submission. Although Wonder Woman's community was set on “Paradise Island,” he also provided the Amazons with “Reform Island,” a penal facility where women prisoners learned “ways of love and discipline”—two categories that, for Marston, were not in opposition. On Reform Island, Wonder Woman's sisters transformed “through discipline and love,
the bad character traits of women prisoners.”
²⁷
Every prisoner on the island was forced to wear a magic Venus girdle, a belt designed to make the wearer enjoy living by peaceful principles and to “submit to loving authority.” Marston recognized that the lie detector was the center of an ideological dilemma that had freedom at one pole and subjugation at the other.

It was clearly a tool promoted and possessed by those in authority: the police, the state, private businesses, and so on. The lie detector test, one might argue, was another disciplinary technique in the arsenal of “technologies of the self” held by those authorities whose responsibilities include classification, regulation, and normalization.
²⁸
But this only captures part of the story. Although this repressive interpretation certainly delineates some useful orienting lines of perspective, it misses some notable features of the machine's modus operandi. Use of the instrument disciplines those unfortunate enough to be subjected to it, but that is not all it can do. Marston suggested that the instrument could be used as a “love detector,” a therapeutic tool in relationship counseling, and Larson never abandoned his belief that the instrument could be used in psychiatric diagnosis. Rather than being an exclusively coercive technique, the machine had the potential to cure, to heal, and to encourage. And it could nurture freedom. What could be more liberating than a technology of truth, especially one that promised to reveal affections of which subjects themselves were unaware?

Michel Foucault began his paradigm shifting
Discipline and Punish
by contrasting two forms of power: capricious, violent sovereign power and institutionalized, anonymous disciplinary power.
²⁹
Having described the bloody spectacle of a typical mid-eighteenth-century display of torture and execution, he then presented a series of meticulous codes that were regulating the actions of young prisoners eighty years later. Whereas the former regime used tyrannical sovereign power, by the time the latter were being used the social contract was in place and, in France, a new egalitarian relationship between the state and its citizens had been forged. Foucault traced the shift from a jurisprudence centered on the charismatic authority of the king to one in which numerous controlling mechanisms had been distributed anonymously throughout society. Two emblematic forms symbolized the shift from one regime to the other: the dark dungeon in which prisoners were left to rot at the king's behest and Bentham's “Panopticon” prison design, which aimed at their enlightened rehabilitation.

But Foucault's dichotomy between the spectacle of public punishment and the disciplinary prison, it has been argued, overlooks the similarities between
the two modalities.
³⁰
Because spectacular punishment and disciplinary panopticism are both mediated by the imagination, both require the distribution of semiotic codes to function. Jeremy Bentham incorporated theatricality into his prison designs: “lose no occasion of speaking to the eye,” he wrote. “In a well-composed committee of penal law, I know not a more essential personage than the manager of a theatre.”
³¹
Prisoners should experience “a permanent subjection to the conditions of being onstage, albeit with none of the sense of an approving audience.”
³²
Prisoners should be led by their reason to imagine their own surveillance within the panoptic prison. Because the Panopticon produced its effects through fictional means, its success was not founded on its materialization: it didn't have to be built to be effective.
³³

Theatricality is not an unusual element in the discourses agitating for reform of punishment, even those ostensibly effecting transformations from spectacle to discipline. It was the perceived ineptness of sovereign power's myth making that directed calls for the reform of punishment. Already part of an increasingly public and theatrical court process, English punishment did not replace, but instead transformed those spectacular strategies applied to punishment.
³⁴
Thus against Foucault's stark (but rhetorically charismatic) demarcation between the spectacular violence of sovereignty and the routinized regime of discipline can be counterposed an account of the massive production of a highly public image of the law through rich scientific and literary narratives of criminality.
³⁵
Homo criminalis
was nothing if not charismatic. Penal and criminological thinking has always contained spectacular elements. The authority of the modern bureaucratic state materialized in the disciplinary settings of bureaus of records, circulars such as the
Police Gazette,
newspapers, court reports, in the reign of rules and regulations, and in the designs for prisons has been fully humanized only through illusionism.
³⁶

In his analysis of the guillotine in postrevolutionary France in the 1790s, Philip Smith finds a continuing role for symbolism in popular, political, and expert discourses on punishment.
³⁷
Although the elevated angled blade was intended to provide a scientific, humane, and egalitarian form of execution— reflecting the Enlightenment's cult of reason, efficiency, and novelty—the instrument was also a deeply mythical and totemistic object, a ritualized and magical device. The guillotine's advocates failed to create an authoritative self-contained punitive technology devoid of ambiguous significations. Once released into the public domain, the guillotine's definitive meaning became contested within a discourse of images and symbols.
³⁸

The symbolic and mythic qualities of punishment and disciplinary technologies
have been overlooked. The lie detector's primordial symbols and mythologies did not arise later, post hoc, but were essential parts of the discourse from the beginning. Representations can have a constructive power as well as merely reflect the order of things after the fact; metaphors can fabricate reality while they translate. Essentially a semiotic technology, the lie detector was a network of signs demanding interpretation, a “book to be read.” This “Golden Lasso of Truth” signified many things. It represented the authority of the superhero whose powers were magical. It was threatening and coercive. It promised to eradicate crime. It encapsulated the notion that the price of freedom was slavery.

One function of the spectacle is to conceal contradictions.
³⁹
Lie detector discourse was inherently dilemmatic. Although it was an apparently humane technology—insofar as it was designed to replace the third degree—it also threatened violence. Although ostensibly gender neutral, a strict gender demarcation undercut its workings: the male gaze scrutinized the female body. Although the discourse appealed to science for legitimacy (through its instrument fetishism, the accuracy statistics and graphs, and the pictures of “inventors” wearing white coats), the practice required theatricality to function. Although the discourse privileged the abilities of the instrument to detect hidden lies using scientific instruments alone, suspects' external behaviors and demeanor had to be scrutinized before a diagnosis of guilt could be obtained. Although the machine was depicted as an impassive, automatically-functioning scientific instrument, it could acquire magical agency whenever necessary. The detection of discrete emotion was often presented as the sine qua non of polygraphy, but the most desirable outcome was inevitably a verbose confession.

As in a sovereign technology, the ambition of the lie detector's advocates was the securing of an admission of guilt. But like a disciplinary technology, it rendered subjectivity calculable and promised scientific objectivity somewhat at a distance from the authority of the police. The Golden Lasso's foundational axiomatic paradox was that truth will bring freedom, but truth must be obtained coercively. The essence of the lie detector is neither its promise to produce freedom nor its threat to oppress. Rather the integrity of the lie detector is captured by the dilemmatic choice between the liberal and the illiberal. Considering all these structural antagonisms, it is appropriate that the logo of the American Polygraph Association (“Dedicated to Truth”) is essentially dilemmatic: because Justice wears a blindfold she is incapable of interpreting the polygraphic scroll she holds in her hand.

The twin dilemmas the lie detector inherited from criminology concerned how to do science and what to govern. It is not that criminology is a spectacular science; rather it is that criminology's dilemmas of science and governance lead to two contradictory impulses, one undermining the other. Science aims at truth but governance requires spectacle. Criminology becomes trapped in an antagonistic circuit between the will to truth and the will to power. The greater the promise of the new technologies, the more they capture the popular imagination. The more the public clamors for solutions to the problem of crime, the greater the pressure that comes to bear on criminology. The constant antagonism between the scientific and the spectacular is the principal dilemma to which criminology has been subjected throughout its short history. The most successful figures in the history of criminology have therefore been those individuals whose charismatic authority has enabled them to negotiate the boundary between the scientific and the spectacular.

This chapter opened with a quotation from Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
.
⁴⁰
Early in the story, which is set in 2019, the Blade Runner Rick Deckard is called upon to locate and “retire” a number of Nexus-6 “replicants” who have recently escaped from an off-world colony. Echoing Nietzsche, the bounty hunter Deckard tells the android Rachael, “A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it's not our problem.” “But as a hazard,” Rachael replies, “then you come in.” The first images the audience sees in the movie are shots of an eye in extreme close-up and a magnificent panoramic vista of a futuristic city.
⁴¹
The eye might be the “eye of power,” scrutinizing and governing the vast cityscape. We soon learn, however, that the eye is Leon's, a suspected Nexus-6 android in the process of being tested with the “Voight-Kampff Empathy Test.” The apparatus is used to discover if a suspect is an inhuman replicant.
Blade Runner
thus opens with a lie detector test that poses the movie's central question: “What does it mean to be human?”

Throughout the film, the ocular theme serves to rearticulate the central anxiety of the human-machine opposition. The Voight-Kampff apparatus focuses on the eyes of its suspects. Replicant eyes have a subtle red glow. Seeking information about “Morphology, Longevity, Incept dates,” two replicants go to Chew's Eye Works. “If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes,” says Batty before executing the eye designer. Eyes are “windows to the soul,” but who can possess a soul? The film introduces an interesting complication to this human-machine binary opposition when it suggests that because
androids have developed empathy and emotions, it is no longer possible to demarcate between humans and machines. Replicants should, therefore, be able to fool the Voight-Kampff machine, and Rachael, another sophisticated replicant, nearly does so. In a scene replete with film noir signifiers, Deckard explains to Rachael that the instrument “measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-called ‘shame' or ‘blushing' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate.” He shows her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light: “This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of —” “And these can't be found in androids,” Rachael added.
⁴²