Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Tue 07 Oct 2008 07:14 PM PDT
Disciplinary man provided energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continous range of different orbits. Surfing has taken over from all the old sports (Deleuze, 1995: 180).
In his 'Postscript on Control Societies,' Deleuze marks our emergence from the disciplinary, panoptic societies Foucault studies. He describes a movement from a society 'equipped with thermodynamic machinces presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage' to a society functioning 'with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination' (Deleuze, 1995: 180). Deleuze's observations suggest more than a shift in the metaphors by which we understand society; they indicate a shift in the material relationship between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari's work has extensively explored this relationship, from molecular proto-machines of desire to the molar assemblages of the state. Their work operates, in part, on the shifting boundaries between aesthetic and technological paradigms. Science Fiction has also worked upon this boundary. Though the generic term 'Science Fiction' only hints at the multiple possibilities for communication (and contamination) between the two, Deleuze and Guattari recognize its potential, noting that the genre 'has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegatable and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things impreceptible' (1987: 248).
Deleuze and Guattari's process of becoming connects with one of sci-fi's most recognizable tropes: the emergence of machinic intelligence, sometimes in the form of a super computer, other times contained within a human-like body. Narratives extending from this trope invoke our fears of facing technological creations that are, in certain ways, superior to humans. Some of these narratives (e.g. the Terminator films) validate those fears; some assuage those fears by creating friendly, almost cuddly, cyborgs (Star Trek: Next Generation's Data); still others ask us to question the ethics of maintaining the boundary between 'Man' and 'Machine.' While these narratives generally speculate about the development of machinic intelligence in the future (with some comment upon the present), Deleuze and Guattari map the machine as an integral, historical element of human consciousness. As a result, where the conventional sci-fi narrative might speculate upon the similarities between human and machine, the two remain very different forms of consciousness; the 'deleuzoguattarian' approach however marks human consciousness as being already machinic. Rather than recognizing a schism between the human mind and machinic intelligence, they see human consciousness as sharing the same material space as the machine, mutating along with machinic developments (what Guattari terms 'heterogenesis').
However, where most sci-fi narratives produce visions of the future, Marge Piercy's He, She and It (published as Body of Glass in the UK) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine turn these speculative methods upon the past. Piercy's novel covers two parallel stories, one set in a dystopic twenty-first century and the second in 1600 Prague, where she recounts the golem myth from Jewish folklore. Gibson and Sterling's text is set almost entirely in 1855, in an alternate London that has constructed steam-driven computers. These novels use this historicizing technique to explore the development and maintenance of the boundaries between human and machinic consciousness. They link the anti-Semitism of Christian Europe, the racism of eugenics, the exploitation of the industrial worker, and the homogenizing force of corporate culture with the definitions of 'man' and 'machine.' Their texts question the history of technology as well as our current and future motivations regarding technological development; in doing so,they ask us to recognize human-machine relations as an important site of political struggle, co-extensive with the struggle over the articulation of humanness itself.
Piercy, Gibson, and Sterling's selection of 1600 Prague and 1855 London is not haphazard. These locales make useful landmarks in the construction of the modern, capitalist state, particularly in terms of scientific and technological achievement. 1600 Prague plays an important role in the Copernican Revolution, and 1855 London marks the Darwinian Revolution-two of the more significant scientific events of Western history. These events had obvious implications on their culture's understanding of humanness, and each, in its own way, moves the human closer to the machine, stripping humanity of some divinity. As the novels explore, this mechanization of the human accompanies a shift in the uses of power.
In The Difference Engine, the connections between Darwinism and scientific racism form a backdrop for the plot. Eugenics are implicit in the techno-meritocracy that governs England and its colonial empire, and the eugenicist Egremont and his associates in the Central Statistics Bureau's Department of Criminal Anthropometry form the shadowy villains of the novel. The criminal anthropometrists are dangerous because they have access to the 'Great Engine,' London's massive steam-driven computer. The Great Engine is the epitome of biopower technology, a computer which can store and process England's citizenry--their physical attributes, their criminal records, their social activities--the ideal panopticon. The eugenicists wish to use the engine's tremendous information about England's population, as well as the computer's prodigious data-processing capacity, as a tool for regulating evolution.
In He, She, and It, the Copernican revolution serves as a backdrop to Piercy's retelling of the golem myth. This retelling provides a productive context for the story of Yod, a twenty-first-century cyborg caught in a struggle between a small Jewish enclave and global corporations. The golem may not seem to be technological, but it is certainly machinic. The arcane language that animates the golem is no less alien than the programming language that animates Yod. Living in Prague's Jewish ghetto, the golem's narrative reveals that the province of human-ness has not only excluded machines but many homo sapiens as well. While the golem can pass for human, he cannot pass for Christian, and as such, like any machine, is relegated to performing society's undesirable labor. Even within the Jewish community, he has no rights. However the Copernican revolution threatens to deterritorialize this hierarchy as the outward-looking, telescopic eye threatens to turn back upon humanity and question the placement of the Christian in the universe. As a result, scientific law, which had set the Christian Man at rest in the center of a universe built for 'him', would now throw all humans into motion.
Where the Copernican revolution marks one of the more salient shocks to European culture, one that would lead to the development of Foucault's disciplinary societies, the second half of Piercy's novel, set in 2059 Tikva, describes a world fully enmeshed in a Deleuzain control society. In 2059, nation states have been replaced by global corporations, which each provide 'biodomes' for their citizen-employees and govern them according to customized biocybernetic ideologies. Tikva stands as one of a few independent towns, surviving by balancing one giant corporation against another. The rest of the world is comprised of wastelands and urban TAZs ('temporary autonoumous zones') collectively termed the 'glop'. Piercy's dystopic future points to the dangers of rhizomatic mutations within a control society and reflects Charles Stivale's observation that Deleuze and Guattari's 'discomfort with the transformation of humans into "dividuals" under "control societies" suggests that if it is not any enemy, the "cyborg" might well be an additional "machinic assemblage" to regard with caution' (1998: 125). Just as panoptic technologies, operating on a molar, 'all-seeing' level, provide a means to exercise biopower, control societies circulate power through the rhizomatic, molecular attachment of cyberoptic technologies.
Through these narratives, Piercy, Gibson and Sterling confront the material dangers and ethical dilemmas of machinic consciousness and, in doing so, explore what Félix Guattari terms the machinic's protoethical dimension. The novels do not simply narrate their machinic characters' capacity for human thought or behavior, or reveal the mechanistic attributes of human consciousness. Instead they map the machinic production of consciousness with its schizophrenic tendencies toward becoming a tool, a mechanism for doing the work of the state, or becoming a weapon, a mechanism for escaping state regulation.
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