The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity by Jeffrey Sconce (review)

The Technical Delusion does not only offer, as its title suggests, a compelling and fascinating account of the multifarious ways in which mad people have incorporated technology into their delusions over the last two centuries. It is also a much broader analysis of a series of technical imaginaries located at the crossroads of madness, technological invention, science fiction, and utopianism and that have altogether constituted, as Jeffrey Sconce forcefully argues, a hidden but nevertheless spectacular counter-discourse to technological modernism.

Sconce frames his argument as a contribution to psychopathology. A thorough reader of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, in the first chapter of the book he argues that technical delusions should not be seen as distorted reflections of existing technologies. Rather they productively create a world of their own. They reveal specific and complex ways of thinking about both technology and society. For historians, this means that technical delusions are symbolic productions that ought to be studied as such.

That would be enough of a theory, but Sconce digs deeper in his attempt to explain the dynamic process through which certain people actually experience technological delusions. Building on Sigmund Freud's idea in Civilization and its discontent (1930) that technologies might turn human beings into "prosthetic gods," he suggests that technical delusions result from a dilution of the ego as it is confronted by the inertia of its media prosthesis. In other words, technical delusions emerge whenever technologies eventually beset their users. Here Sconce shows his debts to Louis Sass's classic Madness and Modernism (Harvard University Press, 1994) when he suggests that a tension inherent in modernity might be the reason for the diffusion of technological delusions in the twentieth century.

The extent to which this theory effectively highlights the genesis of technical delusions will be left to the appreciation of its readers. It is fair to say that it offers little guidance within the body of the book, which is organized around a seemingly endless collection of stories of delusional, imaginary, and sometimes existing technologies. Sconce borrows his material from an amazingly varied array of sources: literature and film, including classics as well as B or Z movies; psychiatric and criminal cases reported in psychiatric journals and in newspapers; and histories of technology, real and phantasmagorical. While the book relies exclusively on published material, its scope is immense, and most readers will be amazed by Sconce's ability to dig out obscure treatises or films to trace the development of cases across decades and make connections between stories that seem to have nothing in common but a weird relationship to technologies.

The stories are loosely sorted by type, both of technology and delusion. In four chapters the book covers respectively: electronic chips, waves and fluids, circuits, and remote control, constituting a comprehensive history of communication and power in the modern era. In each chapter Sconce shows how a set of techniques and ideas have travelled on the border between science, fantasy, and madness. A major theme of the analysis is not only the ways in which many technologies have been anticipated, deconstructed, or reconstructed in the content of delusions expressed by people clinically diagnosed as suffering from mental disorder. Sconce also points out that the dynamic of technological invention itself is penetrated by an interrogation over its rationality; he reveals that a number of scientists have been the target of conspiracy theories or delusional contents, and a range of theories and techniques have caused true mental pathologies.

We might regret that Sconce does not seem to be aware of the ways in which science and technology studies have rejuvenated the study of failures over the last fifty years. He is a historian of ideas, and he pays little attention to the actual technological practices of his actors. In the end, The Technical Delusion is a striking, ambitious, and demanding book that makes for an at-times revelatory and often entertaining, albeit sometimes lengthy, reading, while its innovative and original approach to technical delusions will add a significant...