The Truth Machine

by Geoffrey C. Bunn

  Whether the epistemological impetus was to produce truth or to generate profit, here was a dilemma that different actors responded to differently, depending on their prior commitments. Early in his career, for example, Marston had pursued an open science strategy as he attempted to establish an academic career for himself based on his experimental research on the emotions. From the 1930s on, however, as he moved more into the domain of popular psychology, he adopted the proprietary knowledge-making strategy, positioning himself as a “consulting psychologist,” a priestlike purveyor of esoteric psychological knowledge. In claiming to have discovered an important technique of lie detection—and not laying claim to have invented the instrument—Marston was attempting to underpin his populism with scientific respectability. Wonder Woman, his greatest creation, embodied this dilemma of expertise. Although she professed to have no special supernatural powers (her athletic abilities being the result of sheer hard work and dedication), she was adept at operating mysterious technologies that law enforcement authorities were keen to exploit. Her Golden Lasso of Truth was a form of esoteric proprietary knowledge, yet it produced truth in a pure and systematic (albeit mysterious) way.

  Marston’s advocacy of the lie detector-as-therapy was unique. He maintained that the technique could become a tool of psychotherapy for families in crisis and insecure lovers. Having detected the subconscious secrets of the subjects, Marston would then confront them with the results. Forcing them to acknowledge their “repressed feelings” would be therapeutic: the truth would set them free. Neither Marston nor any of the machine’s advocates ever realized this ambition. Its therapeutic liberating potential was restricted to popular psychology texts and speculative magazine articles. The lie detector did not have the psychotherapeutic potential for governing the self, because that project required the willful and enthusiastic consent of its subjects. Collier’s assertion in 1924 that there was “no immediate danger of the lie detector following the talking machine and the radio set into the intimacy of domestic life” remained true for the whole of the instrument’s history.24

  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 c
riminalis 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

  The movie’s designer explained that he wanted the Voight-Kampff apparatus to look like “a giant tarantula on a desk lamp.” It was a weird idea, he recalled, but it made him “realize that what could give this sophisticated lie detector a definitely threatening air was to suggest that it was alive.” He also devised a small rectangular lens on a stalk that focused on the eye. People were more body-conscious about their eyes than any other organ of the body, he explained. This gave the Voight-Kampff machine an intimidating appearance. “I also designed a set of bellows on the side of the device;” he said, “it breathed. Actually, this breathing had a functional aspect, as the machinery was taking air samples of its subject for analysis. When you’re nervous you sweat and exude a distinctive airborne chemistry.”43 Syd Mead placed his futuristic lie detector within an august tradition. The machine was alive; it could breathe and smell fear. It possessed agency and was extremely threatening. As
if to emphasize the gaze of the “eye of power,” a small screen on the side of the instrument showed a close-up of the suspect’s pupil. The eye reacted automatically to stimuli, in the manner of a “primary autonomic response” that “can’t be controlled voluntarily.” “The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human,” the original 1982 Blade Runner press kit explained, “by measuring the degree of his empathic response through carefully worded questions and statements.”44

  The lie detector represented the dreams of criminology in support of the law. But it also promised to replace the due processes of law altogether. Image from “The Simpsons.”

  At the heart of the film lies the problematic status of Rachael, the highly evolved replicant femme fatale. She is the spider woman, the dark lady who is central to the film’s key theme of what it is to be human. Like a long line of female suspects before her, she is unfathomable, enigmatic, and inscrutable. Possessing a heightened capacity to deceive, Rachael is the ultimate manifestation of the cultural positioning of women as duplicitous. From Eve to Pandora, it has been suggested, woman is framed as the perennial problem confronting the will to truth in spite of—or indeed because of—their inscrutability.45 Film noir habitually places the problem of “woman” herself, not merely the solving of a crime, at the heart of the investigative quest effected by the male detective.46 The enigmatic status of woman has haunted criminology since its inception in the nineteenth century. “Woman” was the puzzle that the lie detector promised to solve. The scene in which Rachael is interrogated with the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test is crucial to the film’s narrative, because it reveals that she is unaware of her status as a replicant. The test breaks Rachael’s spirit, shattering her confidence and poise. Later on Deckard reveals that the story she invoked as evidence of her humanity— the dream of a swarm of baby spiders that consume their own mother—was nothing but a false memory, a factory-set implantation. Rachael is crushed by the disclosure.