The Progress of the Influencing Machine
That God established a cosmic order which existed according to observable laws was the keynote of ancient physics. That men could make such systems for themselves, without reference to God, and only to reason, was the conceit of the Enlightenment. And new systems could create new men. The French Revolution became consumed with this spirit and lit a fire for forging a second humanity. But the byproduct of this great revolution of rational systems was madness.
The situation is brought into focus by a series of arresting examples. James Tilly Matthews was a prosperous Huguenot merchant with Enlightenment sympathies who was living in London when the Revolution broke out. He traveled to France, hoping to meet notables from the new Republican government and persuade them of England’s goodwill, thereby averting the prospect of war. He arrived just in time to make friends among the Girondin faction before it was overthrown by the Jacobins. Matthews was imprisoned, and the Jacobins launched the Terror. Three years later, the Jacobins themselves were overthrown by the Thermidorian Reaction, and Matthews was returned to England. His mission had totally failed, but the experience had affected him profoundly.
Matthews became convinced that a conspiracy of Jacobins was at work in England, unseen but everywhere. He attempted to alert the authorities, but they completely ignored him. He became desperate. Eventually, he crashed a session of Parliament in order to denounce Lord Liverpool, then Home Secretary, as a traitor in league with the Jacobins. He was arrested and thrown into Bedlam.
Matthews’ relatives maintained that he was sane and wanted him freed. Along with Matthews himself, they claimed that he was being persecuted for political reasons. They even hired several doctors who attested to his mental stability. The man in charge of Bedlam, James Haslam, disagreed, and to prove his case wrote an entire book on Matthews, Illustrations of Madness, documenting the particulars of his condition. This volume is now regarded as the first case study of schizophrenia in the history of psychology, and the first to describe in clinical detail what would become a characteristic feature of paranoid persecutory delusions, the ‘influencing machine.’
Matthews maintained that he was being persecuted by a gang operating an “air loom,” a machine that could induce mental and physiological states in him from a distance. This Air Loom Gang had cells all over London and was systematically influencing affairs of state in the interest of promoting Revolution.
Matthews didn’t win his freedom but he did succeed in getting transferred to a different asylum, where he lived until his passing in 1815. Articulate and insightful when he wasn’t describing the machinations of the Air Loom Gang, his notes on his period in Bedlam helped lead to major reforms in psychiatric treatment in Britain. Haslam, notwithstanding his brilliant and groundbreaking work in medicine, was lacking in the credentials demanded by the new order. He was fired, and left penniless in old age, selling his books for food. He died in poverty at 80 in 1844, and the world moved on.
Revolution succeeded revolution. Although different in details, they were united by the principle that traditions could be simply cast aside for the cause of progress. Irrationality could be excised from life and man and his world would be shown to be explicable as scientific constructs which could be shaped into superior systems by the architects of progress.
Victor Tausk was among them. An early disciple of Freud, who wrote a series of groundbreaking studies on mental illness after joining his circle in 1900, he later served in the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI. The war affected him deeply and helped inspire his final work, On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia, wherein he expanded upon Haslam’s study in describing the particular and peculiar characteristics of the mechanism of persecutory delusions. For Tausk, ideas like Matthews’ “air loom” originate in projections of the self, particularly the genitals, imagined as a copy of the person. This gradually morphed into something more abstract and mechanical, a machine with fantastic powers.
Although the afflicted individual would go to great lengths to learn enough science to understand the technical specifications of the device, it would always remain more complex than he/she could grasp. Whatever it was, it enabled its operators to engage in a comprehensive conspiracy involving personal associates of the patient and distant impersonal agencies, the power to both read and insert thoughts into the patient’s mind as well as to induce physiological states.
For Tausk, this conceptualization corresponded to a breakdown in the barriers of the ego and an erosion of the boundaries between the self and the world. The patient felt himself naked in the face of forces over which he had no control and which he could not exclude even from the inner recesses of his mind. He was neither subject nor object, but some ill-defined nether-being wholly at the mercy of incomprehensible systems, the machine itself, and the conspiracy that operated it.
Three years after the death of Matthews, in 1818, Mary Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote her most famous book, Frankenstein. A brief detail in Victor Frankenstein’s description of his monster is worth noting. Frankenstein says that “his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.” The body of the monster was translucent; his inner workings could be seen, and the horror of his appearance was thus intensified. The monster could hide by withdrawing from human society, but he could conceal nothing. The story concludes with the death of his creator and his self-immolation.
Similarly, shortly after completing his most famous and penetrating work, Tausk tied a curtain rope around his neck while standing on a chair, and shot himself in the temple so that his body would continue hanging after death. The contrivance turned his death into a system, an ad hoc suicide machine of a type anticipating more sedate modern conveniences. Freud publicly eulogized him, but in private, to Salomé, admitted that he was glad Tausk was gone. He’d fulfilled his function, but the romantic and unhinged doctor would be obsolete in the cold and clinical future of psychology.
Today it is an unquestioned assumption of modern psychology that the influencing machine is an artifact of mental illness and that anyone mentioning an “air loom-like” device can be presumed as delusional. Yet centralized systems of mind control are foundational to modern life. Modern societies understand themselves as shaped by natural forces like evolution and controlled by credentialed and sophisticated operators: technology exists to facilitate this. Believing that unseen agents are influencing one’s thoughts is insane, yet this is exactly what is happening. Of course, it isn’t a question of intelligence agencies literally hearing your brainwaves; at least, not yet. But the nature of the line between internal and external life and the self and projection: that’s the great question of the age.
Did someone actually build an influencing machine? Jerry Mander, the late activist, thought that television fit the clinical definition. Junger, Foucault, and Ellul all offered critiques of modernity that analyzed the blurring distinction between system and self. Finally, with the internet, we arrive at a paradox where the theme of the influencing machine is discussed in a format that mimics the actual mechanism of the influencing machine. The self is projected into a virtual space where the liquidation of boundaries between the individual and the masses is constitutive. Thoughts are manipulated and commodified in a perpetual struggle between individual will and collective energies. Sinister forces representing state and corporate power monitor all interactions, mining them for data. Mental illness proliferates, and the most normative features of human life become zones of contention.
What if Matthews was simply ahead of his time, and the agents of revolution really are beaming thoughts into our heads?
Max von Bücher writes on substack.com/@librarianofcelaeno and can be followed @ExLibrisCelaeno.
