The Truth Machine

by Geoffrey C. Bunn

  A central irony of Blade Runner is that one apparently sentient machine is used to test the vital integrity of another, further critiquing the apparent human-machine opposition. The term “humanoid android” suggests that the distinction is problematic from the outset. In the film’s final scene, the replicants’ charismatic leader, Roy Batty, commits an act of such moral commitment that through his actions he has become indistinguishable from a human being he so wants to become. Deckard, the Blade Runner bounty hunter, it emerges in a dramatic twist, might not be human either, but also a replicant.47 Ultimately the film suggests that what defines the human is the possession neither of memories (for these can be implanted); nor emotions (for these can be acquired); nor even self-knowledge (for this is gained through agency): it is the capacity for ethical action. In this sense, the film concludes, the replicants have indeed become human through their acquisition of a capacity for empathy and self-sacrifice. The film’s message is that being human is a matter of ethical action, not genetic inheritance.

  The lie detector also raised questions concerning the demarcation between the human and the machine—a consequence of the network of binary oppositions that made its emergence possible. It was the very essence of sober science, but it was a prized resource for entertainers, advertisers, and utopian visionaries. It was a humane technology of truth, although it sought confessions through intimidation. It represented the dreams of a criminology in support of the law, but it promised to replace the due processes of law altogether. It offered to explore the deep recesses of the body yet operated through a veneer of signs. The human subject was construed as possessing mechanistic autonomic responses, but the machine was attributed with humane agency. While the lie detector enjoyed autonomy and charisma, the suspect was regarded as an anonymous automaton. Machines, like dreams, can “fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly.” But the problem was not so much deciding when the lie detector was beneficial to humanity and when it was hazardous. The problem was deciding where the machine ended and the human began.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, for permission to quote from the August Vollmer Papers; the Dibner Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., for permission to quote from the William Moulton Marston papers; and the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, for permission to quote from the Boder Museum Papers.

  I can trace the origins of this book to a stimulating period I spent with Geoffrey Cantor, John Christie, Jon Hodge, and Bob Olby at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. At York University, Toronto, and at the University of Toronto, I was privileged to be able to study with some outstanding scholars including Ray Fancher, Paul Fayter, Chris Green, Ian Hacking, Trevor Levere, Bernie Lightman, and Mariana Valverde. My Ph.D. dissertation supervisor, Kurt Danziger, was, and remains, a great inspiration. My fellow graduate students made my time in Toronto both intellectually invigorating and great fun. I am grateful to my cousin Stacey Crinson and her family for looking after me while I lived in Canada. Ben Harris was an early champion of my work and has continued to send me newspaper and magazine cuttings ever since.

  I am grateful to David Borwick, Geoff Bunn Sr., Erica Burman, Hugh Hornby, Mark Jepson, and Graham Richards, all of whom provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to Steve and Wil Bunn for helping with the production of the initial book proposal. At the Johns Hopkins University Press I have been fortunate to work with Robert J. Brugger, whose timely interventions have been critically important for the success of this book; and Helen Myers, whose patient copy editing greatly improved the text. My wife, Janet Bunn, has been a perceptive editor and critic. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of my parents. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Florence Bunn.

  NOTES

  Introduction. Plotting the Hyperbola of Deception

  1. “Lie Test Shows O. J. Didn’t Do It!” The Globe, February 7, 1995, 5.

  2. Mark Nykanen, director, “OJ’s Voice Stress Test,” Hard Copy, January 30, 1995.

  3. “Lie Test Shows O.J. Didn’t Do It!”

  4. See, for example, Paul V. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” pts. 1 and 2, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 29 (1939): 848–81; 30 (1939): 104–19; Eugene B. Block, Lie Detectors: Their History and Use (New York: David McKay Co., 1977).

  5. David T. Lykken, A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 2; F. Allen Hanson, Testing, Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Evidence suggests that this number has increased since 1988, even though in that year the U.S. government banned use of the lie detector for private preemployment screening, exempting itself, a public employer, from the ruling.

  8. Thorn Bacon, “The Man Who Reads Nature’s Secrets,” National Wildlife 7 (February-March 1969), 4–8.

  9. Ibid., 7.

  10. For the contemporary status of polygraphy, see Anthony Gale, ed., The Polygraph Test: Lies, Truth and Science (London: Sage, 1988); Gershon Ben-Shakhar and John J. Furedy, Theories and Applications in the Detection of Deception: A Psychophysiological and International Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).

  11. Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 2007).

  Chapter 1. “A thieves’ quarter, a devil’s den”: The Birth of Criminal Man

  Epigraph. J. B. Thomson, “The Hereditary Nature of Crime,” Journal of Mental Science 15 (1870): 489.

  1. Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203.

  2. Ibid., 217.

  3. Ibid., 229.

  4. Brian Marriner, Forensic Clues to Murder: Forensic Science in the Art of Crime Detection (London: Arrow, 1991), 162.

  5. “Cruentation (from cruentare: to make bloody, to spot with blood) was a test used to find a murderer. Bleeding was considered a “Judgment of God,” manifested by the “indignation” of the corpse when the murderer was in its presence. Dating from the period following the overthrow of the Roman Empire, it was used in Europe until at least the seventeenth century. See Robert P. Brittain, “Cruentation in Legal Medicine and in Literature,” Medical History 9, no. 1 (1965): 82.

  6. David Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain,” in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22.

  7. Ibid., 25.

  8. Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Unrepentant Horse-Slasher: Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology,” Criminology 42 (2004): 979–1008.

  9. Sir George Onesiphorus Paul (1809) quoted in Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 104.

  10. Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 18801945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 32.

  11. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 100.

  12. Ibid., 103.

  13. Michel Foucault, “The Dangerous Individual,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 127–28.

  14. Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).

  15. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  16. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 162.

  17. Michael Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture: On Cerebral Biographies of Scientists in the Nineteenth Century,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 195–218.<
br />
  18. See for example, “R,” “Social and Moral Statistics of Criminal Offenders,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 2, no. 6 (January 1840): 442–45; Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

  19. Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals,” 26.

  20. Quoted in Peter J. Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001), 172.

  21. Quetelet (1835) quoted in Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 163.

  22. Piers Beirne, “Adolphe Quetelet and the Origins of Positivist Criminology,” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 5 (1987): 1160.

  23. Quoted in Beirne, “Adolphe Quetelet,” 1163.

  24. Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Numbers,” Humanities and Society 5 (1983): 279–95.

  25. Mayhew (1856) cited in Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 183.

  26. Mayhew (1851) quoted in Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 31.

  27. B. A. Morel quoted in Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66, citing Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration, trans. from 2nd German ed. (London: Heinemann, 1895), 16.

  28. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal, 19–20; Rafter, “The Unrepentant Horse-Slasher.”

  29. Rafter, “The Unrepentant Horse-Slasher,” 1002, 991.

  30. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 229.

  31. Ibid., 338.

  32. Ibid., 166.

  33. John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004); Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler: Criminology, History and the Problem of Phrenology,” Theoretical Criminology 9, no. 1 (2005): 65–96.

  34. Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler,” 65, 66.

  35. Hewett Watson (1836) quoted in David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 146.

  36. On “technologies of the self” see Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  37. Some examples are: James Simpson, The Necessity of Popular Education, as a National Object; with Hints on the Treatment of Criminals and Observations of Homicidal Insanity (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1834); George Combe, Remarks on the Principles of Criminal Legislation and the Practice of Prison Discipline (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1854); Marmaduke B. Sampson, Rationale of Crime, and its Appropriate Treatment: Being a Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization (New York: D. Appleton, 1846); James P. Browne, Phrenology and its Application to Education, Insanity and Prison Discipline (London: Bickers and Son, 1869).

  38. Quoted in Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture,” 200.

  39. A Member of the Phrenological and Philosophical Societies of Glasgow, The Philosophy of Phrenology Simplified (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1838), 185–86.

  40. A Member, The Philosophy of Phrenology Simplified, 192.

  41. Thomas Stone, Observations on the Phrenological Development of Burke, Hare and Other Atrocious Murderers (Edinburgh: Robert Buchanan, 1829), 13.

  42. For a recent account of this case see Zbigniew Kotowicz, “The Strange Case of Phineas Gage,” History of the Human Sciences 20 (2007): 115–31.

  43. Quoted in F. G. Barker, “Phineas among the Phrenologists: The American Crowbar Case and Nineteenth-Century Theories of Cerebral Localization, Journal of Neurosurgery 82 (1995): 678.

  44. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal, 17–18.

  45. James De Ville, Manual of Phrenology as an Accompaniment to the Phrenological Bust (London, 1828), 31.

  46. De Ville, Manual of Phrenology, 32.

  47. Combe, Remarks on the Principle of Criminal Legislation, 36.

  48. Ibid., 37

  49. Frederick Bridges, Criminals, Crimes, and their Governing Laws, as Demonstrated by the Sciences of Physiology and Mental Geometry (London: George, Philip and Son, 1860), preface, n.p.

  50. Ibid., 8.

  51. Ibid., 18.

  52. Ibid., 22.

  53. Ibid., 23.

  54. Combe (1841) quoted in Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler,” 77.

  55. Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler,” 79.

  56. de Giustino, Conquest of Mind, chap. 7.

  57. Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  58. Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler,” 75.

  59. Not everyone read benevolence and reform into phrenology, however: “Because we should be able to identify on a person’s skull the marks of serious villainy, the state should prescribe an examination of the skull for everyone who reaches the age of twenty-five. Everyone found guilty of having a dangerous predisposition should be hanged or confined preventively, depending on his anticipated offense!” Gustav Zimmerman (1845) quoted in Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8.

  60. On the importance of character in the nineteenth century see Warren I. Susman, “Personality and the Making of Twentieth-century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271–85; Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series 35 (1985): 29–50; Melanie White and Alan Hunt, “Citizenship: Care of the Self, Character and Personality,” Citizenship Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 93–116; Ben Weinstein, “‘Local Self-Government Is True Socialism’: Joshua Toulmin Smith, the State and Character Formation,” English Historical Review 123, no. 504 (2008): 1193–1228.

  61. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 45.

  62. Ibid., 91.

  63. Charles Bray, “The Physiology of the Brain,” Anthropological Review 7, no. 26 (1869): 271.

  64. Ibid., 275.

  65. Ibid., 277. On the phrenologists’ organized opposition to the transportation of convicts, see de Giustino, Conquest of Mind, 153–62.

  66. Weinstein, “Local Self-Government Is True Socialism,” 1199.

  67. T. S. Clouston, “The Developmental Aspects of Criminal Anthropology,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 23 (1894): 216.

  68. Girard de Rialle, “French Anthropology,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 9 (1880): 234.

  69. Ibid.

  70. J. B. Thomson, “The Hereditary Nature of Crime,” Journal of Mental Science 15 (1870): 488 (emphasis in original).

  71. Ibid., 491.

  72. Ibid., 497–98.

  73. Ibid., 489.

  74. Ibid., 490.

  75. Ibid., 494.

  76. Ibid., 498.

  77. Lombroso in Mary S. Gibson, “Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology: Theory and Politics,” in Becker and Wetzell, Criminals and their Scientists, 139.

  78. Thomson, “The Hereditary Nature of Crime,” 487. See also J. B. Thomson, “The Psychology of Criminals,” Journal of Mental Science 17 (1870): 321–50.

  79. Thomson, “The Hereditary Nature of Crime,” 489.

  80. Ibid., 496.

  81. Ibid., 498.

  82. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 35.

  83. Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 5th ed. (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1892), 28, quoted in Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 232.

  84. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind (London: Macmillan, 1873), 135.

  85. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 29–30. On Maudsley see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 203–16, and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Cu
lture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987).

  86. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 22.

  87. Rafter, “The Murderous Dutch Fiddler.”

  88. Ibid.

  89. I owe this charismatic anecdote and much of what follows to Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 9.

  90. Ottolenghi (1908) quoted in Gibson, Born to Crime, 135.

  91. Lombroso (1879) quoted in Gibson, Born to Crime, 135.

  92. Gibson, Born to Crime, 135.

  93. Ottolenghi (1914) quoted in Gibson, Born to Crime, 138.

  94. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, Briefly Summarized by his Daughter Gina Lombroso Ferrero, with an Introduction by Cesare Lombroso (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), xiv.

  95. Gibson, Born to Crime, 27.

  96. Gibson, “Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology.”

  97. David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (London: Routledge, 2003).

  98. Gibson, “Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology,” 151.

  99. Marvin E. Wolfgang, “Cesare Lombroso,” in Pioneers in Criminology, ed. Hermann Mannheim, 2nd ed. (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1972), 250.