Machinery Consciousness

The Machinery of Consciousness: A Cautionary Tale
dr. steven mentor

Evergreen Valley College, San Jose, California steven.mentor@evc.edu abstract The emerging transdisciplinary eld of consciousness studies merges transpersonal psychology with recent brain studies. In this paper, I argue that this new discipline must come to terms with the rhetorics of control in the history of brain research. I establish parallels between the discourses of lobotomy and psychosurgery, Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), and cybernetics, using the work of Jose Delgado, Norbert Wiener, and Bernard Wolfe. The rhetoric of social control remains a shadow side of brain research, of the popularization of brain science, and of attempts to apply such research. keywords: lobotomy; psychosurgery; consciousness studies; cybernetics; electrostimulation of the brain (ESB). I come to the eld of consciousness studies from a neighboring transdisciplinary land: the land of technology studies. Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that the disciplinary body of consciousness studies (CS) is itself a kind of Frankenstein, with organs and limbs taken from cognitive science, neurobiology, transpersonal psychology, and several other traditional academic areas. Joseph A. Goguen, the editor in chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, names the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, physics, sociology, religion, dynamic systems, mathematics, computer science, neuroscience, art, biology, cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, and more(Goguen 2006). In addition, like the study of technology, the study of consciousness is both very old, and radically new, especially given the acceleration of knowledge in the post-World War II era. This is evident in descriptions such as the following, advertising the University of Arizonas 2007 Consciousness: The WebCourse: New scientic ndings offer tantalizing glimpses into the ultimate mystery of consciousness. Brain imaging has made it possible to observe some of the
Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 2050. ISSN 1053-4202, 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/aoc.2007.18.1.20
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the machinery of consciousness
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physical brain correlates of both conscious and unconscious processes. How does that affect our understanding of the millennial traditions of meditation and other subjective explorations of our own experience? How does it affect the fundamental I-Thou perspective, in which one conscious being encounters another one? How does it change scientic and philosophical debates? In Consciousness: The WebCourse we will take a neo-Jamesian approach to consciousness, embracing all three classical approaches: Personal, Intersubjective, and Scientic. In Phenomenology Labs we will explore personal experiences of dreams, perceptual illusions, feelings of knowing, emotional highs and lows, the eeting present and unconscious inuences. We will also look at the second person perspective, what it means for an I to encounter a Thou. Finally, we will explore recent brain studies of higher states of consciousness. [University of Arizona Consciousness: The WebCourse, accessed Feb. 1, 2007] As in my own eld, the heady promise of using cutting-edge scientic discoveries (brain imaging, 3-dimensional tomography, and the like) to help answer previously intractable questions (What does it mean to be human? Sentient? Does this knowledge lead to any solutions for the myriad problems facing humans in collectivities?) is part of the energy that enlivens the new disciplinary body. No more two cultures; instead, the use of science and rationalism, merged with the older cultures of the humanities reecting on our lives, to both plumb and improve on human consciousness. In an article on consciousness studies at Goddard College (this volume), Francis X. Charet and Hillary S. Webb raise a number of questions about the uneasy t of elements within consciousness studies. In particular, they mention the tensions between transpersonal, engaged models of CS, and more traditional materialist views of consciousness and its study, including the explanatory gap that appears between rst (transpersonal) and third person (scientic) approaches to the study of consciousness. Using Gadamer, Turnbull, and Turner, they offer a disciplined pluralism as an alternative to the empiricist colonization of spirituality by an exclusive reliance on scientic methodologies. But there is another, shadow side to the newest transdisciplinary efforts to boldly go where no human has gone before, to plumb the neurophysiology of the brain and establish the lines between neurons and the noetic. This shadow side is the connection between a previous rhetoric of consciousness studies (cybernetics), and two elaborations of cybernetics ambitious program for studying communication and control in human consciousness: the short, unhappy, highly publicized history of lobotomy, and the equally fraught, but less wellknown, history of early brain research, as exemplied by the work of Jose Delgado. For modern consciousness studies to avoid this pitfall, it must attend to the politics of consciousness, including the rhetorics of promise and control implicit in the language and funding of brain research.
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anthropology of consciousness 18.1
In my work on the social history of cybernetics, I identify some patterns of cyborg rhetoric laid down in the very rst texts of rst-wave cybernetics. In the postwar (that is, post-World War II) world of more intelligent and complex machines, humans are often seen as machine-like and as abject, problematically conscious, while machines are represented as quasi-human, capable of sensing, deciding, and becoming conscious (Mentor 2004). As Western science begins to talk of machinic intelligence and augmenting human consciousness with an array of prosthetics, an unlikely discourse that of lobotomy haunts many of these texts. This shadow technology names several anxieties, in particular, a growing popular mistrust of Big Science and its potential for abuse, not only in medicine but in the area of technologies of social control. The original promise of lobotomy, its origin in Nobel-Prize winning science, and its eventual failure parallel in uncanny ways the promise and failure of much of the early cybernetic project of mapping consciousness. I want to argue here that this early history is relevant to consciousness studies now.
lobotomy: consciousness and the ice pick Although a revisionist history of lobotomy is sure to be written, the official history is now ensconced in textbooks such as Pinels Biopsychology. Lobotomy was a rogue and pseudo-science, which somehow escaped the normal scientic and medical safeguards for a time. It turned many innocent patients into vegetables and victims, even though its practitioners were never a large number. And nally, it was debunked and discredited, and remains a cautionary tale, the thalidomide of surgery.1 In addition to its status as poster child for bad science, lobotomy reveals many of the rhetorical moves which underlie other more respectable areas of consciousness studies and brain research. From the start, the desire for controlling behavior resides in brain research and its funding. Modern narratives of lobotomys history (Valenstein 1986; Sabbatini 1997; Breggin 1982) trace the origins of modern attempts to surgically treat the brain to 19th-century scientists. From the start, understanding the mind, and controlling behavior, are linked. Friederich Golz, in 1890, cut the neocortex of dogs and found that the animals were more tame and calmer than the unoperated ones (Sabbatini 1997; see also Valenstein 1973:266267).2 Within two years, Gottlieb Burkhardt was attempting the same operations on schizophrenics as supervisor of a Swiss asylum. Sabbatini reports the results in a neutral way; the operations seem to work, but it is hard to know for certain since some of the patients die, and the resultant criticism of Burkhardt convinces him to set aside his project. This is how Sabbatini structures his article: the scientists who observe are seen as fathers moving forward in a direct line of knowledge that continually promises control over aggression and behavior. The tension here is between containment
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of such research as restorative (we will make the insane sane and functional again) and other possible meanings of the research (asylum inmates as research subjects, rhetorics of social control that circulate within larger discourses of eugenics and punishment). So the 1930s work of Carlyle Jacobsen and John Fulton on chimps appears to show that the brain is susceptible not only to the reduction of aggression (Jacobsen) but also to the production of neurosis and aggression (Fulton). The time gap between this iteration of research and application is similarly short; based on Fulton and Jacobsen, the Portuguese doctor and neuropsychiatrist Antonio Egas Moniz proposed to cut surgically the nerve bers which connect the frontal and prefrontal cortex to the thalamus, a structure located deep in the brain, which is responsible for relaying sensory information to the cortex (Sabbatini 1997). He was able to report results by 1936, only two years later than the initial and unreplicated American experiments. Moniz won the Nobel Prize for his work, which promised so much to the hopeless, those at the end of the line, but the science behind the promises was still at the research and data-gathering stage. Nineteen thirty-six also was the rst year for lobotomies in Brazil and the United States. In both countries, the miniscule set of results was fattened by the standard scientic processes, including detailed description of results, the naming of new tools and procedures, and wide circulation of individual success stories in the press. In the United States, leukotomy came to be known as prefrontal lobotomy and was associated with Walter Freeman, a physician and neurologist, and James Watts, a neurosurgeon. Freeman coined the term prefrontal lobotomy, and proved adept in using press coverage of his treatments to gain acceptance among colleagues, many of whom were suspicious of the treatments science. Freeman sold his procedure in countless visits to insane asylums and psychiatric clinics, which had been the subject of several exposes in the press; the horric conditions of state insane asylums particularly dovetailed nicely with the promise of lobotomy. To those who had read of the lth and violence of conditions in state institutions, the notion of a patient with diminished abilities who could nevertheless return home as a safe, non-aggressive person was seen as a potential blessing. In addition, the development of crucial collateral technologies of neurosurgery, anesthesia, and asepsis, and the aggregation of information about the physiology of the brain, all meant that new procedures became possible. This notion of an ensemble of conditions, tools, and procedures leading to radical promises for restoring organ function is central to the notion of the cyborg; and of all the organs, the brain lends itself most to metaphors of control over many other functions, including socially important control over emotions. And often, the ability to move forward with last chance procedures (the doctors and patients have exhausted all other possible therapies) leads to new data that then accelerates the improvement of procedures and technologies, if not always of human beings.
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The discussion of brains in Moniz, Freeman and the popular press recapitulates many of the main themes of cybernetics: the brain as a machine that can be understood and which can be worked on; the procedures as careful, technical scientic processes with research behind them and evaluative methods built in; a line of scientists who represent the progress of the science and the pioneering fathers; a rhetoric of both last chance and the expectation of miraculous effectiveness aligned with the previous successes of the sciences involved. The articles do not typically include dissenting voices, the scale of the research or the size of the sample. And the notion of new frontiers means that often the good of the patient and the good of knowledge seem to insist that other boundariesthe boundary of a patients body, or of their right to consentmust also be breached. The Death and Rebirth of Lobotomy The next stage of lobotomy would see conict between Watts and Freeman over Freemans desire to make lobotomy a nonsurgical procedure. In fact, in both Valenstein and the Sabbatini article, Freeman is shown to be someone who develops procedures based on very little: reading Monizs paper, and then hearing about an Italian procedure which simplied the cutting of the lobe by going through the roof of the eye orbits. This trans-orbital lobotomy could be done in a psychiatric hospital by nonsurgeons in a nonsurgical setting; and indeed, Freeman traveled across the country from hospital to hospital teaching the procedure. As Sabbatini represents it, [Freeman] invented in 1945 a much quicker and simpler way: the so-called ice-pick lobotomy. Instead of a leucotome, which required a surgical trepanning, he used a common tool to break ice, which could be inserted under local anesthesia by tapping it with a hammer. The ice pick would perforate skin, subcutaneous tissue, bone and meninges in a single plunge; and then Freeman would swing it to sever the prefrontal lobe. This would take no more than a few minutes, with no need to intern the patient in the hospital. The procedure was so ghastly, however, that even seasoned and veteran neurosurgeons and psychiatrists would not stand the sight of it, and sometimes faint at the production line of lobotomies assembled by Freeman. [Sabbatini 1997] From 1939 to the end of the Fifties, more than 50,000 lobotomies were performed worldwide, with 18,000 in the United States between 1939 and 1951. With Moniz getting the Nobel Prize in 1949, lobotomy seemed poised to become not simply a means of controlling the behavior of a few deranged institutionalized patients, but as a tool of larger social control. Though there was compelling evidence for the ineffectiveness of lobotomy, and a lack of basic scientic evaluation, more lobotomies were performed between 1949 and 1952 than in all the years previous.3
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One important reason for the death of lobotomy was Freemans move to remove it from the protective authority of the surgeon; some of the rst to turn against the procedure were surgeons like Watts, who saw with horror that Freeman was putting a scalpel into the hands of low-level physicians and even medical student interns in uncontrolled settings. The notion of control embedded in lobotomy is undercut by the loss of control over its procedures. Thus, unlike in cybernetics, where the main players continued to use similar language and analogies, within the nascent science of psychosurgery, crucial allies turned against the procedure just as it was gaining legitimacy in other ways. The history of lobotomy is a history of applications for controlling aggression. In fact, the parallels between the crude science of lobotomy, promoted by scientists who became isolated from their colleagues, and the relatively more sophisticated sciences of cybernetics, championed by the whos who of 1950s science during the Macy Conferences and after, are telling. Despite lobotomys abysmal results (30 percent improvement rate at best, with a 30 percent rate of horrendous collateral effects on personality), and a large-scale study excoriating the practice, it took not only the opposition of surgeons and concerned physicians, but the development of new technologies (drug therapies like Thorazine and electroshock treatment), with as yet unblemished track records and so innite promise, to dislodge lobotomy as a legitimate medical practice (see Valenstein 1986). Lobotomy was succeeded by psychopharmacology; but the strategies of legitimization, the rhetoric of social control of aggression and violence, the ethically questionable research, and the blurred line between experiment and therapy all are passed on, as from father to son. Indeed, in the early 1970s, a second wave of lobotomy, and related psychosurgical techniques, emerge, both worldwide and in the United States. Brennan identies a third wave of psychosurgery in the 1990s (Breggin 1995). Each wave recirculates apparently dead or delegitimized rhetorics of control, shaped to t the historical and cultural concerns of the moment.4 Cybernetics and lobotomy The family resemblance between lobotomy discourse and cybernetics can be seen in some of the writings of the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. In one early text, lobotomy and the cybernetic study of consciousness are explicitly contrasted. Wiener devotes a chapter of his 1948 book Cybernetics to psychopathology. He begins by acknowledging that he is not an expert in psychiatry and that scientic knowledge of brain and nervous system function is not competent to truly theorize pathologies. Then he proceeds to write as though the analogy between brains and computers may well be accurate: machines have ways to remedy problems, by having separate parallel mechanisms checking each operation (redundancy), and by allowing for searching mechanisms to detect errors and correct them without signicant delay. When he moves from automatic
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telephone exchanges to the brain, his hedges, like increasingly smaller hurdles, allow for increasingly easy acceptance of the brain-computer analogy: It is conceivable and not implausible (that nervous systems have similar elements); We can hardly expect important messages in the mind to have one mechanism; Like the computing machine, the brain probably works with redundancy; then it is improbable that mental messages operate from end to end and . . . it is much more probable that they operate like computers, taking alternative routes via an internuncial pool. Readers of current computer magazines will recognize the similarity of this rhetoric to the analogy of the (Inter)Net is like the brain with a more sophisticated model of packet-switching standing in for the now quaint model of the 1950s telephone switchboard magically working without a human manually connecting remote users.5 Thus the cybernetic language of mental disorders challenges the materialism of the time (which assumed that disorder comes from lesion, physical trauma) and instead substitutes information-system metaphors as an alternative explanation. When Weiner writes, There is nothing surprising in considering the functional mental disorder as fundamentally diseases of memory, he has cleared the last hedge-hurdle, though of course hedging continues throughout the discussion, as only makes sense given the paucity of information about the brain-mind in 1948. He even suggests that traumas like paresis may cause material effects, not due to tissue destruction but by secondary disturbances of traffic, as the injured nervous system-telephone system reroutes messages, gets overloaded, and so on. Interestingly, Wiener sets up the cure for disorders by suggesting that when machines malfunction, humans rst clear the machine of all information, then shake or shock the machine, and nally disconnect the broken part of the machine. All this is contrasted to his vocal opposition to lobotomy. His famous pronouncement on psychosurgery runs, It [prefrontal lobotomy] has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier (Wiener 1948:148). Yet his main objection is not to such interventions per se, as it is to the crudeness of the action, which simply damages-disables function, and does not get at the more cybernetic issue, which is the mental vicious circle that obsessive messages pursue, moving from circulating short-term memory and ultimately dominating long-term memory, where even the most violent surgical interventions have no purchase. That is, the last word is given not to human bodies and selves per se, to the sacredness or status of their boundaries, but to the theoretical possibility of combining shock, pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy, the former to deal with shorter-term reverberations in the system, the latter to access long-term memories from where such vicious circles may be reestablished. In other words, functional equivalents of lobotomy are certainly approved within Weiners
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rhetoric, even as he quite rightly rejects the practice of lobotomy in his own time. And the newer brain techniques are explicitly connected, via cybernetics constant assertion that governments too are cybernetic systems, to the promise of better control of the state and society as admittedly sick, off-balanced, even psychotic systems. There are two senses in which I want to talk about cybernetics as haunted by psychosurgery and lobotomy. The rst is the social construction of science, the way science stories, like lobotomy, are repressed or marginalized as aberrant moments in an otherwise careful and constrained gathering of knowledge. The second is the way the dystopian moment of lobotomy and psychosurgery haunts the language of communication and control so central to cybernetics. Though Wiener specically condemns lobotomy and distances cybernetics from its practice, the research, the types of procedures, that lead up to lobotomy are exactly those that allow for cybernetic program studies of how the mind may or may not be like a circuit. The motive for this research, the telos of the study of the mind as a cybernetic system, is, like lobotomy therapy: the xing of bad brains, the healing of troubled souls, the release of the black butteries of depression and aggression from the mind. But motive can be unbundled from use. Cybernetics both installs the same rhetoric of social control as lobotomy, and is lobotomys successor. Cybernetics, and the era of the cyborg, point toward the control of humans with new machines, not bloody butchers knives, but radio controls, elaborate pharmacologies, ESB and a vision of mind as analogous to computers, not telephone switchboards. No more cutting the connection; instead, rewiring the insides, reprogramming the machine. Several of the best novels of the 1950s understood this link between lobotomy, cybernetics, and social control, the heritage of social engineering, eugenics, and behaviorism as rhetorical machines chugging away within new environs, using new technologies (see Wolfe 1987 [1952], below; also Ellison 1995; Vonnegut 1952). There is no lobotomy in Wieners cybernetic program; he is on record denouncing it; there is a cutting, a removing, a reorganizing. As Bruce Mazlish has it, Wiener is the father of the Fourth Great Discontinuity in human thought. First, the earth was replaced by the sun as the center of the universe, prompting a sea change in the way humans thought about their place in the universe (Copernicus); second, humans were no longer separate from animals, but instead evolved from them (Darwin); third, humans were not even in control of their minds and psyches (Freud); and nally, via Wiener, the human mind and the human being as a communicating entity is no longer separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the machines that humans have made. (Mazlish 1993:120) This displacement of the human mind is not specically argued by Wiener; quite the contrary. But in his writings, the human mind, still an unknown though not an unknowable object of scientic scrutiny in 1952, takes its place not as the apex of human organism but in a sequence that includes automatic
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telephone switchboards, modern computing devices, antiaircraft systems that meld man, gun and math into a learning circuit, and so on. For Wiener, once the mind has been removed from its obscuring organic narrative, its opaque mystied place inside the skull, it can be seen more accurately, as a technology for communication and control, and all the subsequent operations of technology are then applicable: repair, augmentation, deletion, rearrangement of parts, and so on. Doing the Limbo: A literary critique of cybernetics Wiener asserts that cybernetics, as the study of control and communication in animal and machine, will not only be useful to, but will demand the collaboration of, a wide range of scientic disciplines: engineering, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and so on. He sees cybernetics as the central gure that holds together a vast collection of scientic projects, especially the projects that came of age just before and during World War II: electrical engineering, Einsteinian physics, probability, psychology and consciousness. Many current descriptions of consciousness studies mimic this transdisciplinary reach and include similar far-reaching goals for human and social improvement. Bernard Wolfes 1952 novel Limbo is a meditation on the connection between cybernetic extensions of limbs, and psychosurgery. Written at the same time as Wieners Human Use of Human Beings (HUHB), and naming Wiener and cybernetics in both the afterword and in the text, Wolfes savage parody of ColdWar America and its psychotic rhetoric of social control through science imagines a post-atomic war world, in which some have lopped off their arms as a way of disarming humans forever. Since both the Soviet Union and the United States have survived the war, the aftermath simply repeats the Cold War logic that has not been blown up; the amputations lead to new technologies that allow humans to use potent military prostheses, making them cyborg warriors. Both sides hide this new war out of peace development from each other, employ spies, vie for control over parts of the earth that contain the raw materials for these new weapons, and, crucially, misinterpret the writings of cyberneticists. The main character, Martine, was a doctor and lobotomist in the prewar society, working to help people and the state control the aggressive and the anxious. Wolfe links cybernetics and lobotomy specically, and performs a cultural critique of science that still resonates today. Culture, that process that supposedly frees us from the animal and mere survival, turns out in Limbo to be essentially a process of lobotomy for most civilized citizens. Wolfe connects the notion of a technological imperative (computers and computerized war, atomic technology and atomic power for automated manufacturing, advances in medicine and lobotomy-prosthesis techniques) with a decidedly psychoanalytic explanation for how this technological imperative takes the form it does. Consciousness turns out to be a central problem for industrial society as much as for preindustrial social and political dysfunction. That is,
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lobotomyboth the framing story of the primitive tropical island that uses Martines high-tech lobotomy to replace previous social controls, and the main plot in which Martine is a surgeon ambivalent about the lobotomies he is trained to performis the mediating term between the two discourses, both literally (it is a technology used in service of psychiatry and social control) and guratively. Figuratively, Wolfe uses lobotomy to tell a story about the essential futility of cutting away parts of human nature; it is in the nature of a technological parable. Before there was lobotomy, for Wolfe, there was primitive brain surgery; before there was amputation, there was sacrice; before there was civilized culture with its elaborate social controls aided by technology and elaborate bureaucracies, there was primitive culture with its elaborate social controls aided by proto-technologies and hierarchies. The myth of a pre-lapsarian society simply shows how powerfully humans need to believe in a prior wholeness of selves and society and obscures for Wolfe the answer to the key questions: Why war? Why repression and psychic amputation? Why sexual malaise? Why technological advance that doesnt seem to advance basic human psychic needs, and that reproduces the repressive power arrangements of less technological societies? This dilemma mirrors the dilemma of Norbert Wiener, who was both critical of much of modern research, and yet also dependent on such research for information about human body and mental systems, upon which he hoped to base his new science. And it also calls to mind the Ur-story of the modern scientists dilemma: the story rst and foremost of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the only physicist who worked on the atomic bomb during the war and opposed it afterward. In the novel, the son of the lobotomist Martine carries on the next phase of a human science and cybernetics: he stops the lobotomies because the studies indicate they are not effective; he critiques the practice of mandunga (a primitive lobotomy) in the language of psychoanalysis: This village is built on a lie. The lie is that the healthy ones are without aggression. They cut off many of their human qualities, to pretend they are not men but gods . . . Mandunga is the aggression of self crippled men disguised as gods against those who cannot cripple themselves the same way; of the paralyzed against the berserk. It is a punishment, not a helpit calls itself therapy, but is inspired by murderous venom. [Wolfe 1987 (1952):394] In this analysis, lobotomy is the central trope for all sorts of amputations humans make in order to construct themselves in whatever ideal image their culture has constructed, whatever myth they have created to (as Levi Strauss dened it) enable imaginary solutions to real problems. Armed with this knowledge, Wolfe is at pains to critique passivism-pacism as a bogus solution to human violence and aggression, and to replace it with a series of terms: real science and knowledge (statistics, research), real psychology that nds a social role for
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aggression, rule based on science and logic and a sense of history and historical progression, the abandonment of timeless primitivism for the change-lled times of the modern. If we trade out Wolfes use of the post-Freudian Berglers psychology for transpersonalism, we end up with the same tension, and imagined co-existence, postulated in Francis X. Charets description of modern consciousness studies (this volume).6 The ending to Limbo can be read as a fable of third-world resistance to rstworld aggression; in the story, the younger people on the third-world island, replete with raw materials, do not trust the happy imperialists with the prostheses, and, spying on them, discover they have buried caches of prosthetic weaponry, atomic powered, in preparation for the future war they say has been abolished. For some societies, implies Wolfe in 1952, more aggression is needed, not less; taking the weapons of the soon-to-be-oppressor and defending oneself with them is appropriate and a sign of the health of the society. The men who pretend to be gods in the village simply anticipate those same men in hypertechnological, cybernetic societies. Lobotomy, far from being antithetical to other cybernetic approaches, is simply coextensive with the latter. All represent attempts to use control systems and technologies (including social technologies) to impose an inhuman use of human beings in the service of a false peace. Wolfe has his primitive-modern character Rambo (i.e., Rimbaud) make a speech in defense of a new kind of cutting: We must learn now to be psychiatrists, and use our knowledge to help the sick to know themselves so they will no longer be so sick. Also, to decide what is healthhow much sickness a healthy village can allow, what is sickness and what is only being different. This means: the knives of knowledge, not the knives of the butcher. [Wolfe 1987 (1952):400] This is a very different way of framing the problem of lobotomy, and indeed of the more central issue of social control and communication. Like Wiener, Wolfe allows that there might be a place for the knife of knowledge inside the head of a human, but even more, they both want to apply another knife to another area: that is, the knife of the new knowledge (cybernetics, psychoanalysis) to the social and cultural mind of human societies. After the rst industrial revolution, the overall impact of technology becomes, in Limbo, the steamroller, and humans the victims of their own machinic accomplishments (not only the computer, though that plays a central role, but the ability to perform psychosurgery, to build weapons of mass destruction, and in addition the kind of world created by cybernetic manufacturing and cybernetic language, one of rationalized systems of social control). But the central theme of Limbo is that it is our psychic technology, over which we have so little control and with which we have such little communication; that is the real danger.
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This is why rhetorics of mind, brain, consciousness, and communication-control, and the social technologies that stem from and haunt these, are the weird sister of cybernetics, of the cyborg, and of consciousness studies, that draw on histories of brain and mind research. All the other prostheses must operate in a body controlled by this organ; all the allegories of social prosthetics, and technologies, must operate within a political body controlled by those who control this organ. In Limbo, psychology, or consciousness, is the little machine that runs the big ones, much as a governor valve, with much less relative power, turns on or off a huge steam engine. Martine writes that technology has escaped human control and is crushing the human beneath the force of the machinic. The subsequent events bear out the fear of a seemingly autonomous technologythe rise of military computers that start and autonomously run a war based on cybernetic military policy objectives, using humans as components in a hideously efficient war machine. This fear of powerful cybernetic or machinic systems controlling, constructing, and amputating or murdering the humans who titularly run them is ubiquitous now. But in 1952, with Strategic Air Command jets constantly in the air and the popular press alive with stories of supercomputers and their role in the future, this conjunction of technology and war must have seemed particularly close. In these narratives, and in Limbo, the technological brain turns on the creators and attempts to amputate the human elements, though these attempts are themselves simply what military programmers have already built into their apocalyptic war machines, war-making scripts, and automated nuclear arsenals. Yet ultimately, Wolfe rejects the notion that humans must somehow escape technology in order to gain authenticity or to regain control over consciousness: Men shrink from the machine only at the expense of full humanness; until they free themselves from the backbreaking drudgery of primitive labor they have no time to carve skylights in the skull, only then can they begin to join historywithout supplementary arms and legs, no budding prefrontal lobes, no anxiety, no anticipation. [Wolfe 1987 (1952):401] Humans make technology a juggernaut or steamroller because they need to blame technology for the anxiety-producing changes it allows and invites. Technology, including brain research, prosthetics, what have you, is the Frankensteins monster, blamed for the excesses of its creator. But as Wolfe writes in various places in his text, there is no human without technology, and thus it is no more possible to excise the evil in technology than it is to excise the evil in the human mind. In case the reader in 1952 might not be convinced by a ctional account, Wolfe quotes large sections of Wiener on lobotomy from Cybernetics to support the idea that lobotomists were indeed acting in the absence of real information.
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What makes Limbo more than just a cliched exercise in the scientists are godpriests trope is Wolfes acknowledgment of two powerful drives for scientists that explain bad science like lobotomy (and much else that goes as good science). One drive is for knowledge: lobotomies, at least at rst, allow scientists to study the living brain and evade the social constraints on such work (constraints that must have been very powerful as word of Nazi experiments began to circulate in the postwar world). This permission works even when the scientist has scruples, as Martine does, and so performs pure research on animals. The second drive dovetails with the rst: lobotomy proceeds not for the patients but for the society, as a technology of social control, and even deeper, as a legitimization of the need of the scientist for psychic normality and control. [Wolfe 1987 (1952):400] Wolfes novel does work that many social critics of science do now. His perspective is that advanced science, including cybernetics and the pursuit of knowledge of the mind, is parallel to primitive cultures in the technologies of ritual and social control. Lobotomy isnt an aberrant moment in science, especially postwar science. In the science of Limbo, any ambivalence about the downsides or abuses of such research is amputated, lobotomized, either by the society or voluntarily, by the scientists themselves.7 Loss of Control in the Denition of Control Early in Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener attempts to illustrate the central metaphor of cybernetics, the study of the control, communication and reception of messages, with a humble example: In giving the denition of Cybernetics in the original book, I classed communication and control together. Why did I do this? When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he comunicates back to me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me. When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mode, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed. [Wiener 1954:16] From here, he goes on to discuss this metaphor: that messages and commands are (like) information, and information is subject to entropy and disintegration. Thus by control, Wiener the cyberneticist means the control over loss of entropy, the assurance that our signal has indeed gone through and been processed by a human or mechanical receiver.
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Clearly, one reason to word his example in just this way is to prepare us for the dominant metaphor of cyberneticshumans and machines can be seen as communication systems that, insofar as they receive and use information, increase the local organization of information, and thus decrease entropy locally. Using this metaphor also helps guide research, not only into the construction of learning machines, but also into the neurophysiological mechanisms in humans that receive and send information of various kinds, from unconscious homeostatic processes to verbal language. In addition, this concept of information and entropy allows the cyberneticist to bring the rigorous controls of physics (applicable to systems like radar and telecommunications) to the admittedly messy and inexact domain of human communication and consciousness. Cybernetics is concerned not simply with communication, but with effective communication, that is, controlof the bodys processes by homeostasis, of mechanical and human activity by negative feedback loops and transmission mechanisms, of the retention of meaning in semantics by the complex system of internuncial pools in the terminal machine called the human mind. As Porush points out, while this has powerful explanatory power for a variety of machines and prostheses, this version of Wieners so- called human use of human beings retains a chilling ambiguity that characterizes the potential of the metaphors proposed by cybernetics to promote the techniques of human manipulation and control. (Porush 1985:56) Wieners metaphors exhibit both the controlled use proper to science and the tendency of modern science, in the decontextualized language of cybernetics, to escape the controlling aims of the libertarian scientist. For Wiener and his fellow cyberneticists, including Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, the scientic controlled use of the cybernetic metaphor promised to open up important new ways to study human consciousness, the mind and neurophysiology, as well as to create new sophisticated machines capable of complex communication and action. But the study of mind as machine, and notions of control, can go very wrong, even when not directly under the inuence of funding from the military (which most cybernetic programs used) and thus militarized agendas about and relative to consciousness. One example is Wieners use of cybernetics to understand modern politics: A sort of machine a gouverner is thus now essentially in operation on both sides of the world conict, although it does not consist in either case for a single machine which makes policy, but rather of a mechanistic technique which is adapted to the exigencies of a machine-like group of men devoted to the formation of policy . . . [this is] the growing military and political mechanization of the world as a great superhuman apparatus working on cybernetic principles. . . . In order to avoid the manifold dangers of this . . . we need to know as scientists what mans nature is and what his built-in purposes are, even when
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we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him. [Wiener 1954:18, original emphasis] This prophetic paragraph from The Human Use of Human Beings reveals the double-bind mechanisms of scientic cybernetics. Based on cybernetic understandings of systems, Wiener rightly saw that beyond dangerous machines, systems thinking would evolve techniques for thinking and acting in the political world that would be superhuman, more than humans could control. Modern science thus contributes not only the atomic bomb, the understanding of the atom, but also the science of the brain, available for technologies of control. As with the bomb, Wiener the scientist could applaud the research, and yet Wiener the citizen of the republic was as pessimistic about the uses of the new research of cybernetics as many were about the uses of the new atomic technology. And a further analogy is perhaps relevant to modern consciousness studies; just as the Bomb engendered its positive cover story as atoms for peace, just as lobotomy and brain research used the promise of restorative therapies to mask more sinister agendas of control, so too modern consciousness studies must take care not to become the transpersonal cover for newer and more effective forms of control. Bull: The Politics of Brain Research The rhetoric of control is everywhere in lobotomy and the science that underpins it as a practice; and this is also true of other contemporaneous attempts to conduct brain research and plumb the mysteries of the mind. The work of Jose Delgado and others as interventions into the control of the brain provides another historical example of the dark side of the studies of consciousness. In this section I look not only at the writings of Delgado, but also at the ways in which his work is framed and reframed in popular science books and articles. Again the putative promise of brain research is continually articulated as the promise of controlling violence and other antisocial emotions; this rhetoric of promise and extrapolation have a politics, again independent of whether or not the research is funded by the military. In 1965, science writer D. H. Halacy places lobotomy at the end of the historical narrative; that is, it is the unmarked category of neutral scientic experiment, with the early successes balanced against some unfortunate negative personality traits. Indeed, the whole history of lobotomy is summed up in the new knowledge that the frontal lobes contain essential elements of biological intelligence. Though lobotomy was a hot political topic, Halacy manages to rewrite the history so that it is, like other medical practices, a station on the way to more knowledge. By the time David Rorvik, another popular science author, is writing in 1974, lobotomy is no longer a respectable narrative to place in a chapter on brain research. It has been delegitimized, like the Thalidomide examples in both books, but since it has lost its place in the march of progress, it is banished, cut
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out of the body of history, even though it is a cautionary tale about interventions into the brain. The formula for constructing scientic history and promise is, however, undeterred by the scientic debacle that was lobotomy; regardless of its failure and status as a cautionary tale of hype, empty promises, and questionable consent protocols, a collective scientic we can still move seamlessly from lobotomy to future articial brains, due to the alternative to surgical brain medicine: electricity. Both Halacy and Rorvik describe electronic stimulation of the brain, ESB, as a crucial knowledge-gathering technology likely to produce future brain connectivity and even solve the age-old problem of human violence. Both deploy Jose Delgado as a central player in the drama of the future brain. And Rorvik uncritically links Delgado and ESB research with biofeedback and meditation, to buttress a modern seventies version of consciousness studies and the dream of controlling our mind(s). Dr. Jos Delgado was a Spanish medical doctor who studied with famous histologist Ramon y Cajal after the Spanish Civil War.8 He came to Yale in 1946 and joined the department of physiology in 1950, partly due to his friendship with John Fulton.9 Delgados 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, elaborates on the links between his often outlandish experiments and the larger questions of brain research, technology, social control, and the different and contradictory rhetorics justifying such research. Delgados research interests, like Fultons, centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but later he did experiments with monkeys and humans. Delgados research at Yale took place over the 1950s and 1960s. Much of his work involved the improvement of electrode technology, but the experiments themselves focused on controlboth the control the brain has over the body and the control that one can induce externally, thus discovering where the brains different control centers are and how they work. From the dramatic display of specic motor controls (monkeys induced to freeze using permanent electrodes, humans holding their arms out rigidly), the language of Delgados experiments moves quickly into speculation about questions of social control. Delgado comments that his electrode-implanted animals behave like electronic toys; he focuses specically on rage as his example of psychological manifestations that do not depend solely on external stimuli. The success of electrostimulation of the brain (ESB) in producing such emotions and vivid memories and sensations of smellvia electrode, could lead to an epistemological abyss. After all, if we do not copy and respond to external stimuli, then . . . how does our sensorium work? From the start, Delgados work is focused on the potential of such studies in the physiology of consciousness for controlling antisocial behavior and our anxieties and conicts. The promise of such control is buttressed by Delgados intense descriptions of his experiments. We are textually watching these experiments on humans, and
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thus implicated in the proceedings. In the agentless language of science, air is injected into the cerebrum; the metal skullcap, or stereotaxic machine, is attached, with small spikes entering the scalp; X-rays lead to geometric calculation, and then to anesthesia so that small burr holes are drilled into [the] skull at appropriate points. (1969:183) As the steel electrodes are guided through the holes (painlessly because the brain has no sense of feeling, though possibly not painlessly for some readers), and the electricity is turned on for fractions of a second, the reader is put into a strange position. If he or she identies with the patient, then the sense of abjection, of loss of control, of extremity, is terric. Delgados electronic toy becomes ones self, as ones body is both treated as a machine and as an animal for experimentation, a guinea pig. The point of view in both Delgados writing and in Rorviks text about ESB moves back and forth across this line. It shifts to encouraging the point of view of the experimenter and of we humans who will use this knowledge when, after the abject description of brain drilling, the writing goes on to discuss concerns . . . not about the patients head being drilled but about the bulky immobile consoles and the problems that arise when deranged individuals tried to rip the electrode out. The evolution discussed here is in technology: the machines, the experimentersand we achieve a more natural human-machine symbiosis with smaller stimulators as backpacks or collars, solar cells for freedom from plugs, even wigs and hats that naturalize the ever-smaller units (Rorvik 1970:183184). The reader and writer move back and forth across the line of identication. From individual abjection, we move to a nightmare society of control; but this social abjection is contained as the potential for abuse in all technologies, and suddenly we are solving our problems of insomnia, of space travel, of stroke and paralysis. In fact, the abjection is what produces the promise. The intense invasion of some bodies and minds is necessary for the pioneering, the charting, the bringing back of treasure and knowledge. And yet, with the timing of a horror lm, just as we readers are feeling on safer ground, more experimentation rears up: scientists permanently attach an acrylic platform to a paralyzed monkeys skull with screws. The electrodes are permanently xed, and the scientists begin controlling the rotation of the wrist and forearm, movement of the arm, and other functions, meanwhile recording everything on a LINC-8 digital computer. Naming the monkey Bruno in fact intensies the abjection. When the monkey begins to control simple switches and thus control the machine that controls his own movements, the notion of control here has been radically denatured and estranged (Rorvik 1970; Delgado 1969). And point of view swings back again to the experimenter, as we notice the possibility of some signicant damage to the brain (not our brain any more) and so we look forward in both senses (temporally and with anticipation) to control without implanted electrodes, a control that would also get at deeper brain structures, ending with a vision of the brain stimulated by a combination of electricity,
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radiation, ultrasonics, and lasers. Stimulation stimulates the researcher, and the inevitable plot of promise, to move from mapping the brain quickly to gaining control of it. The risk here is dened as risk of abuse, a risk easily countered by the pioneer-explorer rhetoric. The frisson of the monstrous in the vivid descriptions of procedures is rescued from sadism or cruelty by the telos of science and the roll call of future applications. When such research is combined textually with phenomena of the body, like pain and pleasure, the question of bypassing the body is limited to electric anesthesia and the problems of humans addicted to pleasure control the way they are addicted to drugs or sexual desire.10 In contrast to the political threat of government control is the benign use of ESB by sociology to control the antisocial. In Delgados work with primates, he used both implanted electrodes and remote radio control of the brains. He describes this work in Chapter X, Inhibitory Effects in Animal and Man (1969). Delgado is able to produce sleep, and general inhibition. Sleep can inhibit the aggression of a rhesus monkey, and electrical stimulus of the caudate nucleus can defuse fearful and aggressive behavior of chimpanzees like Carlos. In his chapter, he moves quickly from inhibiting an individual animal to the social pacifying possibilities of ESB. Into the autocratic social structure of a monkey colony with its boss monkey and submissive members, Delgado introduces a variety of ESB. One experiment applies stimulation to the boss monkeys brain for ve seconds once a minute for an hour. This abolishes the social domination of the male, eliminates his aggressive behavior, and in fact installs a peaceful facial expression on the boss. Within ten minutes of cessation of ESB, the boss had reasserted his authority and the other animals feared him as before (Delgado 1969:164). In another experiment, the old dream of an individual overpowering the strength of a dictator by remote control has been fullled . . . by a combination of neurosurgery and electronics (Delgado 1969:166). In this case, a lever in a cage triggered a ve-second stimulation of the illtempered chief monkey, Ali. When a female monkey named Elsa learned to press the lever, she began to block his attacks on her and other members of the colony, look straight at the boss, thus maintaining a peaceful coexistence within the whole colony (Delgado 1969:166). Delgados experiments are designed as much for press and mediation, for startling iconography and drama, as they are for science, and in many ways he makes clear the otherwise hidden and obscured discursive relays of science. The simplistic notions of the role sociology or psychology would play in contrast to government, the ease with which animals and defective humans are abjected (sealed off from normal humans by a line that is crossed regularly in the history of science, as seen in IVF, among other examples), the role of scientic journalism and popularization in the extension of certain regimes of science, all testify to dangerously naive notions of society, science, and control.
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Delgados most famous experiment occurred in a bull ring, and is still well known. The New York Times article on the experiment captures the generalizations, also asserted in Delgados own writing: Dr. Delgado implanted a radio-controlled electrode deep within the brain of a brave bull, a variety bred to respond with a raging charge when it sees any human being. But when Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a transmitter, sending a signal to a battery powered receiver attached to the bulls horns, an impulse went into the bulls brain and the animal would cease its charge. After several stimulations, the bulls naturally aggressive behavior disappeared. It was as placid as Ferdinand. [Rensberger, quoted in Valenstein 1973] The accounts of this experiment are almost always accompanied by grainy black and white photographs that show Delgado himself in the ring, with another man sitting up on the fence. The bull is unquestionably large. The photo sequence shows the beginning of a charge, and then the bulls head turns away from the scientist-matador as the electricity kicks in. And in both the popular press and in Delgado himself, this experiment is said to show both remote motor control and behavioral inhibition of the aggressive drive (Delgado 1969:168). Yet it doesnt take, well, a brain surgeon, to see serious problems in this and many of Delgados experiments. Film shows that the bull stopped because, while being stimulated, it was forced to turn around in the same direction. Reection should show that a neural pathway controlling movement, and not some modication of aggression, is the most reasonable explanation of the bulls behavior (or for that matter, the boss monkey, the aggressive rhesus, or the grumpy chimp).11 These same massive leaps are made in Delgados many experiments on radically free humans, where radically free means they are able to be stimulated remotely, without wires. Control is the context. Contrary to the protestations in Halacy, Rorvik and Valenstein that technologies like ESB were unlikely to become authoritarian controls, and despite their containting metaphors and rhetoric, Delgados work from the beginning is linked to a notion of control that moves quickly from charting areas of the brain, to puppetmaster-like manipulation of animals and humans, to the signicance of this technology for social control of deviance. Delgados book laying out his notion of a psychocivilized society shows how quickly the arguments for restorative therapies likely to emerge from ESB are really the front group rhetoric, a stalking horse for the more visionary uses of ESB. The vision in Physical Control of the Mind begins with evolution and humanitys ever-increasing control over its environment. Delgado asserts that we now evolve within a technoculture, not nature per se, and we are in danger of acting like automatons if we cannot discover why we act the way we do. Delgado cites atomic war, pollution, and other global crises in order to suggest that brain
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research may lead to a greater level of intentional control over our lives and actions. His research is based on the assumptions that: (1) There are basic mechanisms in the brain responsible for all mental activities, including perceptions, emotions, abstract thought, social relations, and the most rened artistic creations. (2) These mechanisms may be detected, analyzed, inuenced, and sometimes substituted for by means of physical and chemical technology. This approach does not claim that love or thoughts are exclusively neurophysiological phenomena, but accepts the obvious fact that the central nervous system is absolutely necessary for any behavioral rnanifestation. It plans to study the mechanisms involved. (3) Predictable behavioral and mental responses may be induced by direct manipulation of the brain. (4) We can substitute intelligent and purposeful determination of neutonal functions for blind, automatic responses. [Delgado 1969:67] The slippage in this rhetoric regarding agency, who does what, is rather stunning. The brain mechanisms are responsible for activity; scientists can detect and even substitute for these mechanisms. Scientists, or some others, can learn to produce predictable behavior in the brain, located somewhere other than the crania of those who manipulate; we humans, or we scientists-others, can then substitute intelligence and purpose in some other humans, where before there were blind automatic responses in those humans. Of course, it is possible to read this reexively. Humans learn to directly manipulate their own brains, not those of others, and so substitute in ourselves purpose for blindness. In the long lens of evolution, brain implantation and remote telemetry of humans sometimes (and mostly) without their consent take an honored place beside the rest of our technical and intellectual development. But the other voice in Delgados book is clearly designed to reply to criticsnot present in the text or mentioned, but voiced in abstractwho might have concerns regarding the implications of such experimentation. Yes, ESB might be a disturbing threat to human integrity and this threat is developed almost with sadistic specicity: In the past, the individual could face risks and pressures with preservation of his own identity. His body could be tortured, his thoughts and desires could be challenged by bribes, by emotions, and by public opinion, and his behavior could be inuenced by environmental circumstances, but he always had the privilege of deciding his own fate, of dying for an ideal without changing his mind. Fidelity to our emotional and intellectual past gives each of us a feeling of transcendental stabilityand perhaps of immortalitywhich is more precious than life itself.
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New neurological technology, however, has a rened efficiency. The individual is defenseless against direct manipulation of the brain because he is deprived of his most intimate mechanisms of biological reactivity. In experiments, electrical stimulation of appropriate intensity always prevailed over free will; and, for example, exion of the hand evoked by stimulation of the motor cortex cannot be voluntarily avoided. Destruction of the frontal lobes produced changes in effectiveness which are beyond any personal control. [Delgado 1969:214-215] ESB offers the potential to annihilate personal identity, and to control the innermost thoughts and emotions purposefully. Delgado phrases the criticism so that he differentiates between extreme control and the prospect of any degree of physical control (Delgado 1969:214). The real question isnt whether we ought to map and learn to control the brain, but rather, what kinds of control we ought to consider normative, and what abusive. As science seems to be approaching the possibility of controlling many aspects of behavior electronically and chemically, Delgado asserts that beyond simply acquiescing to outside inuences over scientic research, scientists must acquire the moral integrity and ethical education now lacking in their training. With this education, they can then develop the necessary convictions to go beyond grant money, crediting others work, and being civilized towards colleagues; one can develop the clarity and strength to make therapeutic decisions related to psychic manipulation (Delgado 1969:218). Delgados subsequent vision of the brain reads almost as a pastiche of postmodern views of identity with the rhetoric of evolution, except that in Delgado, the third term, the institutions that construct cyborgs, and thus control the directions of participant evolution, are purposefully included and shaped: The mind is not a static, inborn entity owned by the individual and selfsufficient, but the dynamic organization of sensory perceptions of the external world, correlated and reshaped through the internal anatomical and functional structure of the brain. Personality is not an intangible, immutable way of reacting, but a exible process in continuous evolution, affected by its medium. Culture and education are meant to shape patterns of reaction which are not innate in the human organism; they are meant to impose limits on freedom of choice. [Delgado 1969:215] The family to which ESB rightfully belongs includes a host of normative techniques: psychoanalysis, the use of drugs such as energizers and tranquilizers, the application of insulin or electroshock. Of these, ESB holds more promise for being selective than crude electroshock and promises to be more efficient than the slow process of standard psychatry, which has the added problem of patients
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withdrawing cooperation.12 And the family of bodies to which such efficient practices will be applied is equally diverse: patients suffering with diseases stemming from brain dysfunction like epilepsy and Parkinsons disease; mental patients who are antisocial or abnormal; and antisocial or abnormal humans who are not institutionalized. Delgado uses, as an example of the dilemma facing physicians sensitive to the ethical issues of control, a mother and daughter desperate to cure the daughters abnormal sexual deviance: In the early 1950s, a patient in a state mental hospital approached Dr. Hannibal Hamlin and me requesting help. She was an attractive 24-year-old woman of average intelligence and education who had a long record of arrests for disorderly conduct, She had been repeatedly involved in bar brawls in which she incited men to ght over her and had spent most of the preceding few years either in jail or in mental institutions. The patient expressed a strong desire as well as an inability to alter her conduct, and because psychiatric treatment had failed, she and her mother urgently requested that some kind of brain surgery be performed in order to control her disreputable, impulsive behavior. They asked specically that electrodes be implanted to orient possible electrocoagulation of a limited cerebral area; and if that wasnt possible, they wanted lobotomy. Medical knowledge and experience at that time could not ascertain whether ESB or the application of cerebral lesions could help to solve this patients problem, and surgical intervention was therefore rejected. When this decision was explained, both the patient and her mother reacted with similar anxious comments, asking, What is the future? Only jail or the hospital? Is there no hope? This case revealed the limitations of therapy and the dilemma of possible behavioral control. Supposing that long-term stimulation of a determined brain structure could inuence the tendencies of a patient to drink, irt, and induce ghts; would it be ethical to change her personal characteristics? People are changing their character by self-medication through hallucinogenic drugs, but do they have the right to demand that doctors administer treatment that will radically alter their behavior? What are the limits of individual rights and doctors obligations? [Delgado 1969:217] This is exactly the rhetoric of lobotomy (which Delgado admits was too aggresively applied), and of IVF treatment (see Mentor 2004). Individuals are pictured as coming before science with real illnesses, desperate and suffering. The rhetoric of extreme cyborg biomedicine is always the last chance of IVF or lobotomy, and the willingness to take risks in order to acquire both the promise that technoscience holds out, and the actual desired result. Replace individual rights with citizens, and doctors, obligations with the obligations of leaders of a society, and then
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insert the rhetoric of emergency, last chances, and extremity, and you have a pretty clear idea of the social implications of this research. This picture contrast sharply with the notion of different stakeholders in research projects, all with selsh interests. Scientists want to gather data and get access to humans; the military wants techniques for both building up and breaking down the minds of soldiers; hospitals want scientists who bring in grant money and who do cutting edge work in promising elds; patients want to live in the republic of promise that modernity and modern science seems to represent. Brain New World Machines: The Stimoceiver The courage necessary to make difficult decisions about whether or not to control an abnormal, suffering individual using ESB easily shifts to the courage to dream of a society without violence. The political implications of ESB are masked in the rhetoric of individualism. It is likely that Delgados desire to gain access to money and patients, and thus important data, was linked to his political ideology, which nestled comfortably within the similar views of his patrons, which included the military and the intelligence agencies. Delgado is unique in some ways. He was indeed unafraid to make his views on control public. It seems likely that the arguments he uses, the technologies he pursues, and the attitudes toward patient consent he holds, are not the extremes of a Dr. Frankenstein but rather the articulation, by an important player, of a network of discourses and practices in the United States, involving mental institutions, research universities, scientists, technologists, the military, the space program, the AEC, and the intelligence community. Delgados work certainly involved the technologies of electrodes, transducers, and the like. But a key technology, Delgados crowning moment, is mentioned in his paper Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and Recording in Completely Free Patients, funded by the U. S. Air Force 6571st Aeromedical Research Laboratory, U. S. Public Health Service, and the Office of Naval Research (1968). Delgados completely free patients are free from the constricting wires of their therapy and experimentation. Based on similar work with monkeys and chimpanzees, Delgado here reports instrumentation used and clinical application in four patients with psychomotor epilepsy in whom electrodes had been implanted in the temporal lobes. The electrodes are assemblies of skull plugs, contacts, thermistor, connected to a receiver-stimulator. With this system in place, Delgado then constructed an RF transmitter for generating a pulse of electricity remotely, linking this with an EEG amplier for remote measurement of EEG, a magnetic tape recorder, a microphone mounted in the room with the subjects, and time-lapse photography. Delgado calls the radio simulation and EEG telemetry a stimoceiver, which is small enough to be taped to head bandages or even worn under a wig, so that the patient is continuously available, day and night, for brain exploration . . . (Delgado 1969).
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The four subjects were not told of the nature of the experiment, which consisted of remotely pulsing the individual with electricity, in 3- to 5-minute intervals, and then looking at photography and conversation transcriptions in order to correlate patterns of electrical activity and behavior. An amazing amount of space in the report is given to the possible electrical interferences and problems in operating the stimoceiver, and in observing the resultant behavior. This includes spontaneous, brief periods of aimless walking around the room [that] coincided with an increase in high-voltage sharp waves and psychological excitement . . . related to an increase in the number and duration of 16-cps bursts. Other effects included pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful, concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses (Delgado 1968). But the article focuses on things like the complete interruption of the patients ability to speak, feelings of faintness and fright, rage. It specically links this ability to produce behavior with animal studies regarding the inhibition of assaultive behavior and the modication of drives.13 Finally, the stimoceivers of the future will benet from microminiaturization and from batteryless instruments which could be permanently implanted, as a cerebral pacemaker. Many assessments of Delgado, and indeed of several of his colleagues at this time, laud his work in technology while deploring the lack of evidence and the overgeneralization of his conclusions, as well as the far-right leaning implications of his rhetoric in Physical Control of the Mind and elsewhere. Yet the links we can visibly see in Delgado between brain research, legitimizing rhetoric, and the dream of political applications of this work to social control, are doubly valuable, since these links are often occluded or absent from the public record. One could argue that Delgados program as set out in Physical Control is simply the misguided attempt of a biologist to venture outside his eld. After all, reception of Physical Control was tepid at best, and Delgados ideas of a NASAsized government program in brain research and control were never taken up. Or were they? Three of Delgados colleagues provide an insight into how rhetoric is made material. Psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeons Vernon Mark and William Sweet are mentioned in Valenstein (1973) as colleagues of Delgado and published a paper with him on intracerebral radio stimulation in 1968. Sweet was director of neurosurgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Mark was head of neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital. According to Breggin (1995), Mark and Ervin received funds from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for experiments in psychosurgery for violence control. In addition, Ervin was also receiving Department of Justice funding for his work on genetic factors in violent crime. Sweet was involved as a supporter, co-author, and a member of the private foundation that funneled the government funds to Mark and Ervin (Breggin 1995).
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In a 1967 letter entitled Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Mark, Sweet and Ervin asked, if slum conditions alone determined and initiated riots, why are the vast majority of slum dwellers able to resist the temptations of unrestrained violence? Is there something peculiar about the violent slum dweller that differentiates him from his peaceful neighbor? Mark, Sweet and Ervin went on to suggest that this peculiarity was brain dysfunction. They called for large-scale studies of the inner city to pinpoint, diagnose, and treat those people with low violence thresholds before they contribute to further tragedies. (quoted in Breggin 1995). Breggins language mirrors the language of Delgado. Mark and Ervin must have felt they were on a heroic, Nobel Prize-winning endeavorproviding a solution to worldwide mayhem, and especially to Americas urban uprisings (Breggin 1995). In 1968, a year in which they were experimenting (with Delgado) on implants, they asserted in print that brain dysfunction was equally important to poverty, unemployment and substandard housing as a cause of urban violence. Tens of millions of Americans might be violence prone, they estimate, due to their brain damage. Breggin notes as well that in testimony on civil disorders before a New York State legislative committee in 1968 . . . William Sweet said mass violence might be touched off by leaders suffering from temporal seizures of the brain (Breggin 1995). Sweet made a pitch for the electrical stimulation of surgically implanted electrodes as a method of calming violent people. Mark and Ervin went on to write a 1970 text, Violence and the Brain, that implies that methods (including their own surgical and remote-stimulation techniques) for controlling violence in society are not only necessary but are capable of being developed using present technologies. In particular, they claim that 1970 technologies of EEG recordings can identify areas of the brain that are during aggressive episodes of dys-control, and that the trouble spot can then be removed with current psychosurgical techniques. Valenstein (1986) connects the Mark and Ervin text, and the 1967 letter, with a controversial program of lobotomy at Vacaville Prison in California and cites a California neurosurgeon: The person convicted of a violent crime should have the chance for a corrective operation. . . . Each violent young criminal incarcerated from 20 years to life costs taxpayers perhaps $100,000. For roughly $6000, society can provide medical treatment which will transform him into a responsible well-adjusted citizen. [Valenstein 1986:286]. Valenstein points out that the debate that ensued, framed as a civil rights issue, mobilized a powerful coalition of civil rights, anti-psychiatry, and minoity groups that proved much more effective than previous opposition to psychosurgery.14 The resurgence of political aims of social control of violence with scientic research in the 1990s includes the assertion of a genetic basis to crime, and the
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ability to identify such predispositions. In addition, there is the large-scale, eightyear, $96-million Program on Human Development and Criminal Behavior, funded by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the MacArthur Foundation. Nine groups of subjects, starting prenatally and at ages 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, and 24, will be followed for eight years. A total of 11,000 people will be studied. The project will link key biological, psychological, and social factors that may play a role in the development of criminal behavior and search for biological and biomedical markers for predicting criminality (Breggin 1995). If we look back at the histories of brain and mind research from the earliest days, it is easy to speak in terms of brave new worlds and 1984 fears. Indeed, one parallel to the rhetoric of promise and medical benets Ive shown in popularizations of science is the rhetoric of science as simply Frankensteinian, or worse, simply in the service of the state. Such descriptions of Delgado, to choose just one scientist, are everywhere on the Internet, on sites devoted to victims of mindcontrol experiments, and to government military projects like Project Artichoke and MK-Ultra. which funded ESB and other brain-control experimentation. It is clear that at some schools, such as Tulane, Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, scientists were working closely with the military on secret research that radically compromised scientic ethics, and that researchers like Heath and his associates at Tulane were involved in drug experiments (LSD-25, mescaline) that offered little scientic knowledge and resembled the infamous Tuskegee experiments more than a search for healing applications or ways to protect our soldiers (Mohr and Gordon 2003; see also Marks; Gray, this volume). Instead of so-called conspiracy theory, I want to emphasize a continuum of rhetoric of control in brain research, and a skewing of research and of rationales for experiments in favor of results that appear to benet this or that problem in cultural methods of control. In particular, the Cold War changed the face of American science with its radical intrusion into any and all areas of brain research, and brought together in MK-Ultra Nazi scientists who had been doing the most horric experiments on concentration camp victims, with American scientists who, in their own way, were contravening basic elements of the Nuremberg convention and common-sense notions of informed consent. But even when scientists were in not literally in the pay of these military-scientic networksas in the case of lobotomy and some other psychosurgeriesthe same pressures to frame their work in the language of control, and the same ethical issues regarding what can be done to whom, remain. One crucial area for the development of an ethical consciousness studies, then, must be developing a consciousness of historical discourse of brain, mind, and the constantly revised promise of brain research for human good. This discourse consistently connects brain research with dreams of social control of violence, aggression, and a number of other, usually historically specic, decits among citizens. Again and again, brain research is justied based on highly
46
dubious notions of control, and it is a chicken-and-egg question about who benets more, those who hold such positions in favor of controlling blacks, homosexuals, the violent or criminal, even restless children, or those who use such rhetorics to nd funding and support for massively intrusive and often violent experiments in psychosurgery, experiments masquerading as therapies based on research. Looking at the three waves of psychosurgery, I believe that the rhetoric of social control and state interest in minding the minds of its citizens is a virus that, active or dormant, has haunted brain research from the start, as it has haunted the development of the state. Any study of consciousness must address the politics of such research, and in so doing bring a small d democracy to both current states and current brain research. We can dismiss lobotomy as a horrifying mistake that took place in a dark time in scientic history. We can distance ourselves from the proto-fascism of writers like Delgado, saying, well, scientists dont make good political scientists necessarily. We can focus on the more supercial critiques of brain researchits military funding necessarily makes it evil; it is the sad focus of wing-nut conspiracy theorists who dominate the net discussion; any attempts to understand the mind scientically will have potentially destructive uses. But the historical evidence, as embedded in the discourse of researchers still cited in textbooks and the popular press, suggests that only an active attention to the circulation of such rhetorics of control, and the research regimes and political programs which deploy them, will help modern consciousness studies gain a degree of control over its shadowed past. notes
1. Both psychosurgery and thalidomide are in current therapeutic use, though in vastly smaller cases with (supposedly) more stringent protocols. But see Breggin, 2002. 2. From the start, there never was any reliable evidence of brain pathology that would provide a strong rationale for psychosurgery. Instead, this surgery was led by presumed functional abnormalities in regions of the brain, and as such was part of a longer discussion of environment vs. organically based origins of psychiatric makeup, intelligence, and so on. In addition, early work was motivated by interests in psychiatry, and by the potential for relieving suffering individuals. Two other consistent factors are the power of animal experiments to support surgical experiments on humans, and the location of such early research in state hospitals, where early surgeries by Burkhardt (1891) and Ludwig Puusep (1910) took place. See Valenstein, 1973, 2649. 3. In 1947 the Columbia-Greystone project documented the paucity of positive results from lobotomy as well as evidence of many lobotomies performed without even a systematic psychiatric evaluation. See Sabbatini 1997. 4. Breggin 1982, in perhaps one of the most chilling descriptions of medical procedures I have ever read, surveys the world practice of psychosurgery in 1971. He lists
47
Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, West Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Thailand, India, and the worlds leaders in 1971, Japan, England and the United States. The lesson from his eight page overview (355363) is that lobotomy is used to treat radically different diseases which turn out to be culturally embedded: homosexuality and sexual deviation, agoraphobia, neurosis, restlessness and hyperactivity in children, olfactory disorder, a wide range of behaviors labeled aggressive, frigidity and promiscuity, depression, OCD, and unmanageabilityin institutional settings. Japan, Thailand and India target large number of children as candidates for surgery, with the youngest in Japan aged four. Breggin comments, Again and again, we will nd this phenomenonthat the psychosurgeon picks out the symptom that he wants to focus upon, then destroys the brains overall capacity to respond emotionally, in order to cure the symptom (Breggin 1982:356). 5. For Wiener and his fellow cyberneticists, including Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, the scientic controlled use of the cybernetic metaphor promised to open up important new ways to study human consciousness, the mind and neurophysiology, as well as to create new sophisticated machines capable of complex communication and action, even thought. Batesons later work Steps to an Ecology of Mind, an important text in consciousness studies, is based on his understanding of cybernetics. 6. For a more complete version of Berglers theories, see Bergler 1949. 7. For a fascinating vision of this process in nuclear weapons scientists, see Gusterson 1998. 8. Like Delgado, Cajals gift lay as much or more in applying technology as in designing experiments; Cajal modied the Golgi stain method to produce the rst clear visualizations of the retina, cerebellum, and spinal cord in 1888. These photomicrographs allowed Cajal to theorize that the nervous system is made up of billions of separate nerve cells, as opposed to a continuous network of laments. See Bentivoglio 1998. Cajal is considered the founder of modern neuroanatomy. In Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, Delgado names Cajal as a mentor, and inspiration: Sixty-ve years ago, Cajal said that knowledge of the physiochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make man the true master of creation, that his most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of his own brain (Delgado 1969:xix; quoted in Bartas and Ekman 2001). 9. The same Fulton whose work led to Monizs interest in leucotomy. Moniz heard of Fultons work with chimps (completely removing the frontal lobes of their brains) at a conference in London, At this same conference was Walter Freeman. In an example of the completed circle, Freeman nominated Moniz for the Nobel Prize. All three men were supporters of psychosurgery, In his 1951 book Frontal Lobotomy and Affective Behavior. A Neurophysiological Analysis, Fulton critiques Freeman and Watts radical (prefrontal) lobotomy in favor of restricted operations to differentiate between lobotomies for depression, schizophrenia, and pain relief. See Valenstein 1973:273274. 10. One of the common concerns of mapping the brain is that humans will become sybarites. Rats wired for pleasure learn to press the stimulating lever in an experiment by James Olds of McGill University; some press the lever 5,000 times a day,
48
forsaking sleep, food, drink, even sexual intercourse. Delgado and Robert Heath of Tulane apply this research to humans. 11. See Valenstein 1973, 98102. See also Pinel, 1516, where he quotes Valenstein and invokes Morgans Canon, the rule that the simplest interpretation for behavior should be given precedence. 12. Each iteration of brain research claims that its methods are more precise, while maintaining the rationales and rhetoric of the previous research. See especially the rhetoric behind the new psychosurgical procedures of the early 1970s and again in the 1990s in Breggin 1995. 13. Another type of stimoceiver was the radio injector, equipped with mutilated electrodes attached to ne tunings, forming assemblies called chemitrodes which are permanently implanted into the brain. Administration of chemicals is performed with a specially designed chemitrode pump, . . . [which] consists of two Incite compartments separated by an elastic membrane. One side is lled with synthetic spinal uid or any other solution to be injected, and the adjoining side is lled with a solution of hydrozoan. When a current is passed through the latter compartment, gas is released and its pressure pushes the drug to be injected through the chemitrode. 14. Valenstein points out that most neurosurgeons believed psychosurgery should not be performed on violent persons, and also that studies conducted by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research were generally favorable, citing signicant improvement in 7080 percent of patients and virtually no impairment due to cingulotomy (a form of psychosurgery). For a discussion of this study and its critics, see Valenstein 1986:284290; also Valenstein 1980, The Psychosurgery Debate, especially 245263.
references
Brts, Magnus and Fredrik Ekman 2001. Psychocivilization and Its Discontents. Cabinet Magazine 2 (spring). Electronic document, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/psychcivilization.php, [28 January 2007] Bentivoglio, Marina 1998 Life and Discoveries of Santiago Ramn y Cajal. Nobel Prize Foundation. April 20, 1998, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/articles/cajal/index.html, [2 February 2007] Bergler, Edmund 1949 The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism. New York: Grune and Strattion. Breggin, Peter R. 2002 Conrming the Hazards of Stimulant Drug Treatment. Center for Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. Electronic document, http:www.breggin.com/ ritalinconrmingthehazards.html [12 March 2007]
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1995 Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. Journal of African American Men 1(3):322. Electronic document, http://www.breggin.com/campaignsagainst.pbreggin.1995.html, [28 January 2007] 1982 The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery. Reprinted with a new introduction in Psychiatry and Ethics: Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1982. Edwards, R.B., ed. (Originally published in the Congressional Record, Feb. 24, 1972, E1602-E1612. First reprinted in Quality of Health Care: Human ExperimentationHearings Before Sen. Edward Kennedys Subcommittee on Health, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973.) Center for Consciousness Studies 2007 Consciousness: The WebCourse. University of Arizona, Jan. 22 to April 9, 2007. Electronic document, http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/, [1 February 2007] Delgado, Jose 1969 Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society. New York: Harper and Row. Delgado, Jose 1973 Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and Recording in Completely Free Patients. In Psychotechnology: Electronic Control of Mind and Behavior. Robert L. Schwitzgebel and Ralph K. Schwitzgebel, eds. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (Reprinted from The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 147 [4], 1968.) Ellison, Ralph 1995 Invisible Man. New York: Vintage. Goguen, Joseph 2006 Consciousness Studies. PowerPoint presentation: University of California San Diego. Electronic document, http://cseclassic.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/csencsl.ps, [1 February 2007] Gusterson, Hugh 1998 Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Halacy, D.S., Jr. 1965 Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman. New York: Harper and Row. Mazlish, Bruce 1993 The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mentor, Steven 2004 A Dissertation for Cyborgs: The Birth of a Technoscientic Monster, 19481985. [University of Washington] Mohr, Clarence L. and Joseph E. Gordon 2001 Tulane: The Emergence of a Modern University, 19451980. Louisiana State University Press. Porush, David 1985 The Soft Machine. New York: Methuen.
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Rensenberger, Boyce 1973 New York Times, Sept. 12, 1971. Quoted in Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain Stimulation and Psychosurgery. P. 98. Valenstein, E., 1973. New York: WileyInterscience. Rorvik, David 1970 As Man Becomes Machine: The Next Step in Evolution. New York: Pocket Books. Sabbatini, Renato M. E. 1997 The History of Lobotomy. Brain and Mind Magazine, June. Electronic document, public.carleton.edu/~vestc/lobotomy.html, June 2004. Thomas, Gordon. 1989 Journey Into Madness, The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse. New York: Bantam. Valenstein, Elliot. 1973 Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain Stimulation and Psychosurgery. New York: Wiley-Interscience. 1986 Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books. Valenstein, Elliot, ed. 1980 The Psychosurgery Debate. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1952 Player Piano. New York: MacMillan. Wiener, Norbert. 1948 Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1954 Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetic and Society. Revised edition. New York: Da Capo. Wolfe, Bernard 1987 [1952] Limbo. New York: Carroll and Graf.

Machinery Consciousness

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The Machinery of Consciousness: A Cautionary Tale

dr. steven mentor

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

the machinery of consciousness

anthropology of consciousness 18.1

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