MD Parvez Alam

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Final Project (Research Paper)

Dr. Gavin Mueller

Neo-Luddite Research Seminar

Psycho-Pass: A Case Study on The Representation Algorithmic-Juridical Machine

‘The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two
aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting a threshold of undecidability between anomie
and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas.’

- Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

It has become a norm in contemporary popular culture to represent law and government as

mechanism or apparatus for ubiquitous control; most often in the books, movies or tv series

belonging to the cyberpunk genre. Contemporary theorists and authors who explore the relationship

between governmentality and technology have revealed the fact that cultural objects of the

cyberpunk genre generally represents a world that resembles our present world, and they often

reveals the mechanisms of control that are employed in the creation of a docile working class (Chun,

Control 183). In the age of algorithmic forms of regulations in which we live, such representations

often engenders social critique, and reveal forms of ontological relations between human being and

technological being. The combination of high-tech and low-life, which is a common feature of the

futuristic societies in many cyberpunk and dystopian cultural objects, is precisely the reality in which

majority of the current world population lives. In this article, however, I would bring into light an

extreme example, the Japanese anime Psycho-pass. In this cyberpunk anime, machine is not simply a

metaphor for the revealed hidden structure of the law, but law itself is reduced to machine. In this

paper, I would like to delineate the points of intersection between algorithmic technology and law
that the show illuminates. At the same time, my goal is to articulate how the main protagonist

Tsunemori learns to deactivate and reduce the power of Sybil without completely destroying it.

The story of Psycho-Pass takes place in a dystopian Japan, which claims to have achieved

something closest to a 'perfect human society', while the rest of the world have fallen into a

perpetual state of crisis. An artificial intelligence (AI) named Sybil functions as the juridico-

bureaucratic machine of this so-called perfect society. In the world of Psycho-Pass, the control of

Sybil system is ubiquitous in every aspects of human life. It should be noted that, Psycho-Pass is a

conscious and self-referential theoretical object which often deploys contemporary philosophical

concepts and theories in its attempt of interpreting its own world. It also often utilizes classical

philosophical and theological ideas in order to communicate its message. The use of the name Sybil is

an example of such conscious and critical representation of algorithmic form of governmentality. In

ancient Greece, Sybil was the title of the Oracles of Delphi, and the use of this name for a

governmental AI indicates a mystification of both technology and governmentality in the world of

Psycho-Pass. Such mystification bequests both technology and governmentality with divine power of

omniscience, and demands the citizens subservience to its machination. During the early stage of the

show, even the most intelligent and critical citizens governed by Sybil seems to be happy about their

freedom from juridical and career related decisions, and shows gratitude to Sybil for relieving them

off such responsibilities. The most rebellious and persecuted among the citizens also seem to accept

Sybil’s decision on social normativity, which indicates an absolute ideological control of Sybil over the

society.

Sybil collects data regarding the psychological condition and behavioral patterns of each and

every citizens in order to make decision regarding their psychological profile and work-aptitude.

Based on these information’s, it decides the career path of each citizens, classifies them in categories

of “citizens” and 'latent criminals', separates and imprisons those whose criminal co-efficiency it

judges to have reached regulation level, and eliminates those it deems too abnormal to be helped by
incarceration and therapy. It can be argued that, even though Psycho-Pass is set in a distant

dystopian future; its representation of Sybil is also a reflection of the dominant paradigm of

governmentality of our present in which law and technology have become intimately entangled.

Psychopass itself demands such interpretation, since both the protagonists and the antagonists of

the series interprets Sybil as a system of perfect control, which alludes to the Deleuzian concept of

the 'society of control'. According to Gilles Deleuze, our contemporary society is a society of control

in which 'the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable

geometry the language of which is numerical (“Postscript” 4). In episode 19, Professor Saiga, a

character from the anime quotes Max Weber to describe Sybil system as the 'bureaucrat perfected'

which controls the society through firm command of knowledge and expertise. In Kogami’s

imagination, the main antagonist Makishima interprets Sybil as 'the worst panopticon' by referring to

Michael Foucault. From an Foucauldian perspective, Sybil indeed resembles an extreme form of

biopolitical machine.

Terms such as machine, technique or apparatus have become generative metaphors in the

analysis of modern government and law, most prominently within the theoretical tradition of

biopolitics. Foucault’s paradigmatic apparatus “panopticon” is a famous example, which represents a

form biopower that utilizes surveillance technology to discipline individual citizens and regulate

social norms. For Foucault, biopower is situated between the two poles of 'disciplinary technique'

and 'regulatory mechanism', the first of which disciplines individual body and the second one

regulates the social body (“Right” 139). A panopticon like apparatus is able to complete both these

tasks through its surveillance based biopolitics. The paradigm of panopticon, however, does not help

us to illuminate certain aspects of algorithmic control mechanisms that contemporary surveillance

technologies utilize. Nor does it reveal the algorithmic mechanisms on which a system like Sybil is

grounded. Unlike the guard at the central watch tower of panopticon, Sybil is supposed to be free of

human bias (at least that’s the fiction that is propagated). The anime is perhaps conscious about this

limitation, thus it also the gives the name “panopticon” to another AI system of governmentality that
preceded Sybil and have become redundant. Perhaps, it would be much beneficial to utilize Matteo

Pasquinelli’s theoretical contribution on contemporary algorithmic biopolitics. For Pasquinelli: “in the

society of metadata, the construction of norms and the normalization of abnormalities is a just-in-

time and continuous process of calibration. Bringing Foucault to the age of artificial intelligence, we

may say that after the periodization based on the passage from the institutional Law to the

biopolitical norm, we enter now what we could provisionally define as the age of Pattern Recognition

and Anomaly Detection (“Anomaly”). Behind its veil of mystification – Sybil is also another machine

that takes bases its decision on algorithmic mechanisms of “pattern recognition” and “anomaly

detection” – which according to Pasquinelli are the “two epistemic poles” of “algorithmic

governance” (“Anomaly”).

Sybil utilizes surveillance and therapy based biopower in order to produce a particular form

of subjectivity for the citizens. However, it’s power cannot be reduced to the Foucauldian form of

biopower, which is different than sovereign power. For Foucault, the sovereign power is an older

form of governmental power, which is deductive in its essence, and represents the ancient regnal

power over life and death. Biopower on the other hand is a productive form of power. Thus, Sybil’s

power cannot be reduced to biopower only, since it not only regulates the social body through

incarceration and therapy, but also ruthlessly eliminates any individuals it perceive as ‘threats’. It

should be noted that, Foucault’s does utilize the term “excess of biopower” in order to explain the

destructive power of certain biopolitical technology (Society 254). However, it is Giorgio Agamben

who have emphatically declared that biopower is nothing new, rather the production of the

biopolitical body which he calls bare-life (life that can be killed) is one of the original function of

sovereign power (Homo Sacer 11). He also often uses the term “juridico-political machine” in order

to illuminate the technological dimensions of the political and legal regimes of our time. Agamben is

famous for claiming that “state of exception” have become the dominant paradigm of government of

our time. For him, state of exception is also an “apparatus - whose purpose is to make the norm

applicable by temporarily suspending its efficacy” (State of Exception 58). Which also means, state of
exception is a legal apparatus that makes it possible for the juridical machine to survive beyond its

own suspension. As a paradigm of government, it operates not only by the legal declaration of

emergency situation, but more increasingly through the norms of decrees, measures and executive

decisions. In other words, decision regarding the suspension of norms have become normal under

the governmental paradigm of state of exception. Throughout the rest of the paper, it will become

clear that akin to our contemporary world, the juridico-political machine named Sybil system is also

grounded on power of sovereign exceptions.

The world of Psycho-Pass may give the impression of being a post-juridical world, as there no

longer exist any traditional judiciary for trying a criminal. Sybil fulfills the function of the judge, and

also the role of the police to some extent. Juridical procedure is reduced to the decision taken by the

guns named 'dominator' which are connected to the core of the Sybil system. Sybil decides which

criminal must be paralyzed and who must be eliminated, while a human personnel belonging to the

police department pulls the trigger. The ideological consent of the citizen that Sybil enjoys is

grounded on the successful propagation of a fiction that it is an objective machine that judges

rationally and without being influenced by subjective bias. Humanity no-longer needs to shoulder the

burden of sovereign decisions. It seems like the vision of a world that emerges at the end of

philosophy, or after the end of history, a messianic world envisioned both by the philosophers and

the theologians as telos. But already from the first episode, it is represented as a cruel and blind

system that cannot separate between a criminal and his hostage. Its cymatic scan system which is

grounded on the measurement of stress level of the citizens, ends up classifying both the captors and

their hostages as criminals deserving the punishment of death. According to Sybil propagated fiction,

such limitations are technological glitches and “emergency situations”, and the human officers and

enforcers of the police department works as a safety net in order to overcome such technological

limitations.
 It can be argued that human lives are the main exceptions in the algorithmic-juridical system

of Sybil. Already from the very beginning it is revealed that the majority of the police department

personnel are 'enforcers', who are themselves classified by the Sybil as latent criminals. Enforcers are

generally demoted police officers since according to Sybil there psychological profile matches that of

a criminal. In order to survive, the police department uses them as 'hunting dogs' rather than sending

them to the isolation facility. The enforcers are the most visible sign of the anomie that is arrested

within the nomos of the sybil. Gradually we also learn that the police chief Joshu Kasei, who is a

humanoid avatar of Sybil, has the exceptional power of suspending the norms of Sybil and overriding

the original judgement given by the dominators. She overrides the judgement of using paralyzer and

murders two key characters in order to protect the secret of Sybil. Thus, through the use of

exceptional power, Sybil system as law survives beyond its own suspension. Through Kasei, Sybil

appears to embody the sovereign power of exception, at least in the sense sovereignty is theorized

by Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, the decision of exception (from norms) is the essence of

sovereign power, and both the sovereign and the state of exception paradoxically exists within and

outside the law. Agamben elaborates this situation as: 'Being-outside, and yet belonging: this is the

topological structure of the state of exception, and only because the sovereign, who decides on the

exception, is, in truth, logically defined in his being by the exception' (State of Exception 35).

Throughout the show, it becomes clear that Sybil is not a perfect decision making system. Similar to

the power of a human sovereign, its deciding power is not limited to the production and protection

of norms, but also on the power of deciding exception. Sybil is not only a predictive governmental

system that is grounded on pattern recognition and anomaly detection, but is also a system that can

nullify its predictions and judgements when its own survival is at stake.

The most astonishing revelation regarding Sybil occurs at the final episodes with the gradual

removal of the “final curtain” (a metaphor used by the hacker Gu-sung Choe) that guards the secret

core of this machine. It also turns out to be the most important exception on which the legal system

is grounded. We learn that Sybil is not entirely an artificial, but its central core is constituted by more
than 200 human brains which once belonged to the most dangerous psychopaths of Japan. The

criterion for the choice of such brain is given to the scientific belief that psychopathic brains lack

empathy and thus are capable of objective judgement devoid of emotions. Sybil categorize such

psychopathic individuals as 'criminally asymptomatic', as they do not show any symptom in its

cymatic scan while committing a crime. Sybil cannot judge them even when they commits criminal

act under its surveillance, nor does it wish to judge, rather it only wants to 'incorporate' their brains

within the system in order to upgrade further. This is precisely why Sybil fails to judge the main

antagonist Makishima, and instead of eliminating him it puts all its resources in capturing him. The

category of Criminally Asymptomatic turns out to be the name of the anomie that is inscribed within

the very core of the nomos that is the Sybil. Thus, it becomes clear that within Sybil’s paradigm of

governance, nomos and anomie, as well as life and law – have become undecidable. In this way,

Sybil’s governing paradigm crosses path with the paradigm of state of exception. However, what is

unique about Sybil’s paradigm is that, in it, life and technology also becomes undecidable. Agamben’s

conception of apparatus is also a paradigm, that crosses path with various other concepts such as

Foucault’s dispositif and Heidegger’s Gestell, and it is the ontotheological dimension of the apparatus

that concerns him. Pasquinelli on the other hand, discovers the immediate genealogy of Foucault’s

conception of dispositif in the German biophilosophy. He points out that, life and technology have

entered into an undecidability in the concept of apparatus already before Foucault have utilized it,

and Foucault kept this undecidability intact in his use of the concept (“ What an” 79-89).

The antagonist Makishima is a character that represents both a life and an anomie that Sybil

wish to incorporate within it. While Schmitt devoted his career in attempting to capture anomie such

as “pure violence” and “state of exception” within the legal body, Walter Benjamin wrestled to sever

their connections from law. Benjamin’s conception of pure violence as a “pure means” without any

relation to a legal end posited a serious challenge for Schmitt, since law grounded on the fictitious

apparatus of state of exception “falters in the face of an anomic, pure violence that refuses to be

converted into a means toward an end” (Attell 256-257). Makishima can be interpreted as a force of
pure violence that Sybil fails to capture. Perhaps the most influential and effective critique of

Schmitt’s theory of exception can be found in Benjamin’s formulation: ”the ‘state of exception’ in

which we live is not the exception but the rule” (“on the” 392). Because if exception becomes the

norm, then there is no longer any norm that can seek justification in exception. The revelation of this

disappearance of norm is what Benjamin called the “real state of exception”. In Psycho-Pass,

Makishima brings forth a “real state of exception” on the shape of a riot that ultimately forces the

self-discloser of the Sybil system. 

Towards the end of the first season, Sybil reveals its secret core to Inspector Akane

Tsunemori, but this self-disclosure is also addressed as an act towards its self-preservation. As Sybil

realize it cannot permanently survive on a fictitious apparatus, it aims toward revealing itself to a

human society that will willingly consent to its rule. It chooses Tsunemori as its first test subject,

since even though she no longer believes in the functionality of the system, she is unwilling to

dispose it in fear of social collapse. In a way, we find ourselves in a similar situation to Tsunemori in

relation to the juridico-political orders of our time, in which the state of exception have become a

norm, and politics have found itself increasingly traumatized by the task of producing consent for the

apparatus that helps law to survive beyond its own suspension. A law that perpetuate after its own

suspension becomes a figure of spectral law, and according to Agamben, characters from Fratnz

Kafka’s novels often takes part in playing with such spectral law in order to deactivate them and to

make new use of them (“State of Exception” 64). At the final episode, Tsunemori also learns to play

with the spectral juridical machine that is Sybil. Through her play with Sybil’s mechanism of

exception, she manages to make new use of it. At the end of the first season, she persuades Sybil to

grant her temporary exception so that she can override the dominators decision, in order to save

Shinya Kogami’s life. In this case, both Tsunemori and Sybil uses the legal terminology of “exception”.

The same power of exception that Syabil originally utilized to make Kogami a fugitive and a killable

bare-life, becomes the object of playful deactivation for Tsunemory, and is transformed into the

exceptional power that can save Kogami’s life.

 The law preserving formula that Tusnemory articulates at the final episode seems apparently

different from Benjamin’s conception of law preserving violence, but its telos is similar to the law

destroying violence of Benjamin's theory. According to Kogami’s summery of this formula, if

everyone begins to believe that law does not protect human beings, but it is human beings that

protects the law - then a system like Sybil will disappear. According to Agamben, subjects emerges

out of ‘the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses’ (‘What’ 14). At the same time:

“every apparatus implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as an

apparatus of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence” (‘What’ 19). Perhaps,

through the character of Tsunemory, Psycho-pass gestures towards a coming subject that has the

capacity of playing with and making new use of algorithmic-juridical apparatuses of our time which

have already entered into an undecidability with exception and life.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer; Sovereign power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford University Press, 1998.

Agamben, Giorgio. State of exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. The University of Chicago Press,
2005.

Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan
Pedatella. Stanford University Press, 2009.
Attell, Kevin. Giorgio Agamben, Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. Fordham University Press,
2015.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History”. Selected Writings, volume 4, 1938-1940. Translated
by Edmund Jephcott and Others, Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard
University Press, 1996.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. MIT
Press, 2006.

Deleuze, Giles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October, Vol. 59, The MIT Press, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. “Right of Death and Power over Life” The History of Sexuality Volume I: An
Introduction. Pantheon Books, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. "Society Must Be Defended" Lectures at The College De France 1975-76. Translated
by David Macey. Picador, NewYork, 2003. s
Pasquinelli, Matteo. “What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault,
Canguilhem, and Goldstein”. Parrhesia, Number 22, 2015.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Anomaly Detection: The Mathematization of the Abnormal in the Metadata
Society”. January 29, 2015. http://matteopasquinelli.com/anomaly-detection/