| Technologies of Truth finds exigency in a post-9/11 world as deception detection is being reconceived, redesigned and reintroduced in the name of national security. My project recovers the cultural, literary and scientific origins of several truth technologies to better contextualize the post-9/11 resurgence of lie detection. My goal is to look at representations of deception detection in science and science fiction between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in order to examine how truth technologies came into being at the nexuses of physiology and psychology, discourse and materiality, literature and science. I define "technologies of truth" rather broadly: as instruments or techniques devised to simultaneously reveal not only an individual's subjectivity, thoughts, emotions and potential deceptions, but some truth about their physiological identity. Included here are technologies that range from the so-called pseudoscientific to the protoscientific to accepted scientific practice: telepathy, polygraphy, brain fingerprinting (EEG), fMRI and biometrics. Each truth technology I discuss emerged from (inter)disciplinary squabbles, uncertain legal acceptance, and problematic public/literary adaptations; thus, truth technologies unsettle claims about the authenticity of disciplinary boundaries, conceptual binaries and scientific authority. These technologies are also infinitely adaptable to various political purposes and cultural contexts. My chapters actively engage with several different types of archival material, including: polygraphy manuals; science fiction narratives such as Alfred Bester's Demolished Man (1953), Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), James Halperin's The Truth Machine (1996) and Paul Ernst's "From the Wells of the Brain" (1933); news/magazine reports, government press releases and scientific journal articles from fields as disparate as Criminalistics, Psychology, Neuroscience and Medicine. By extending feminist interventions into science and science studies, and by intervening in theories of modernity, forensics and the disciplinary divide between literature and science, Technologies of Truth illuminates the larger historical, cultural and material contexts of contemporary psychometric technologies. |
