{"id":166,"date":"2017-09-24T12:55:47","date_gmt":"2017-09-24T15:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/\/?post_type=avada_portfolio&#038;p=166"},"modified":"2023-12-06T01:50:26","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T00:50:26","slug":"scott-wilson-the-imitation-game-hysteria-and-the-discourse-of-techno-science","status":"publish","type":"avada_portfolio","link":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/portfolio-items\/scott-wilson-the-imitation-game-hysteria-and-the-discourse-of-techno-science\/","title":{"rendered":"SCOTT WILSON | The Imitation Game: Hysteria and the Discourse of Techno-Science."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-1 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-0 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-modal modal fade modal-1 scottwilson\" tabindex=\"-1\" role=\"dialog\" aria-labelledby=\"modal-heading-1\" aria-hidden=\"true\" style=\"--awb-border-color:#ebebeb;--awb-background:#f6f6f6;\"><div class=\"modal-dialog modal-lg\" role=\"document\"><div class=\"modal-content fusion-modal-content\"><div class=\"modal-header\"><button class=\"close\" type=\"button\" data-dismiss=\"modal\" aria-hidden=\"true\" aria-label=\"Close\">&times;<\/button><h3 class=\"modal-title\" id=\"modal-heading-1\" data-dismiss=\"modal\" aria-hidden=\"true\">Scott Wilson<\/h3><\/div><div class=\"modal-body fusion-clearfix\">\n<p>Kingston College, London University<\/p>\n<p>S.Wilson@kingston.ac.uk<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-2 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-background-position:left top;--awb-border-sizes-top:0px;--awb-border-sizes-bottom:0px;--awb-border-sizes-left:0px;--awb-border-sizes-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-padding-top:20px;--awb-padding-bottom:20px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-1 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column fusion-flex-align-self-flex-start fusion-column-no-min-height\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-title title fusion-title-1 sep-underline sep-solid fusion-title-center fusion-title-text fusion-title-size-two\"><h2 class=\"fusion-title-heading title-heading-center fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" style=\"margin:0;--fontSize:25;--minFontSize:25;line-height:1.5;\">The Imitation Game: Hysteria and the Discourse of Techno-Science<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-2 fusion_builder_column_1_6 1_6 fusion-flex-column fusion-no-small-visibility\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:16.666666666667%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:11.52%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:11.52%;--awb-width-medium:16.666666666667%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:11.52%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:11.52%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-3 fusion_builder_column_2_3 2_3 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:66.666666666667%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:2.88%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:2.88%;--awb-width-medium:66.666666666667%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:2.88%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:2.88%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><style type='text\/css'>.reading-box-container-1 .element-bottomshadow:before,.reading-box-container-1 .element-bottomshadow:after{opacity:0.7;}<\/style><div class=\"fusion-reading-box-container reading-box-container-1 fusion-animated\" style=\"--awb-title-color:#333333;--awb-margin-top:0px;--awb-margin-bottom:84px;\" data-animationType=\"fadeInUp\" data-animationDuration=\"0.5\" data-animationOffset=\"top-into-view\"><div class=\"reading-box reading-box-center element-bottomshadow\" style=\"background-color:#ecf0f5;border-width:1px;border-color:#f6f6f6;border-top-width:3px;border-top-color:var(--primary_color);border-style:solid;\"><h2>SCOTT WILSON<\/h2><div class=\"reading-box-additional fusion-reading-box-additional\"><div class=\"fusion-aligncenter\"><a class=\"fusion-button button-flat fusion-button-default-size button-custom fusion-button-default button-1 fusion-button-default-span fusion-button-default-type\" style=\"--button_accent_color:#333333;--button_accent_hover_color:#333333;--button_border_hover_color:#333333;--button_border_width-top:1px;--button_border_width-right:1px;--button_border_width-bottom:1px;--button_border_width-left:1px;--button-border-radius-top-left:25px;--button-border-radius-top-right:25px;--button-border-radius-bottom-right:25px;--button-border-radius-bottom-left:25px;--button_gradient_top_color:rgba(181,41,41,0);--button_gradient_bottom_color:rgba(181,41,41,0);--button_gradient_top_color_hover:rgba(0,0,0,0.1);--button_gradient_bottom_color_hover:rgba(0,0,0,0.1);\" target=\"_self\" href=\"#\" data-toggle=\"modal\" data-target=\".fusion-modal.scottwilson\"><span class=\"fusion-button-text\"><\/span><i class=\" fa fa-user button-icon-center\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/a><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-clearfix\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-4 fusion_builder_column_1_6 1_6 fusion-flex-column fusion-no-small-visibility\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:16.666666666667%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:11.52%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:11.52%;--awb-width-medium:16.666666666667%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:11.52%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:11.52%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-5 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div style=\"text-align:right;\"><a class=\"fusion-button button-flat button-small button-custom fusion-button-default button-2 fusion-button-default-span fusion-button-default-type\" style=\"--button_accent_color:#333333;--button_border_color:#333333;--button_accent_hover_color:#333333;--button_border_hover_color:#333333;--button_border_width-top:1px;--button_border_width-right:1px;--button_border_width-bottom:1px;--button_border_width-left:1px;--button-border-radius-top-left:0;--button-border-radius-top-right:0;--button-border-radius-bottom-right:0;--button-border-radius-bottom-left:0;--button_gradient_top_color:rgba(181,41,41,0);--button_gradient_bottom_color:rgba(181,41,41,0);--button_gradient_top_color_hover:rgba(0,0,0,0.3);--button_gradient_bottom_color_hover:rgba(0,0,0,0.3);\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/12\/WILSON-The-Imitation-Game.-Hysteria-and-the-Discourse-of-Techno-Science.pdf\"><i class=\"fa-download fas button-icon-left\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><span class=\"fusion-button-text\">PDF<\/span><\/a><\/div><div style=\"text-align:right;\"><a class=\"fusion-button button-flat button-small button-default fusion-button-default button-3 fusion-button-default-span fusion-button-default-type\" style=\"--button-border-radius-top-left:0;--button-border-radius-top-right:0;--button-border-radius-bottom-right:0;--button-border-radius-bottom-left:0;\" target=\"_self\" href=\"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/portfolio-items\/wilson-el-codigo-enigma-la-histeria-y-el-discurso-de-la-tecnociencia\/\"><span class=\"fusion-button-text\">VERSION EN ESPA\u00d1OL<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-3 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-6 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><style type='text\/css'>.reading-box-container-2 .element-bottomshadow:before,.reading-box-container-2 .element-bottomshadow:after{opacity:0.7;}<\/style><div class=\"fusion-reading-box-container reading-box-container-2\" style=\"--awb-title-color:#333333;--awb-margin-top:0px;--awb-margin-bottom:84px;\"><div class=\"reading-box\" style=\"background-color:#ecf0f5;border-width:1px;border-color:#ecf0f5;border-style:solid;\"><h2>Abstract<\/h2><div class=\"reading-box-additional fusion-reading-box-additional\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">This paper intends to review the mutual benefit between the media and psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis needs increasingly recognize its effectiveness as a theory of the media in its discussion on contemporary forms of social bonds whose effects are manifested in the clinic. Also it suggests that both Turing and Lacan, in its different forms, established that thought is an effect of symbolization that does not necessarily require a human brain.<\/p>\n<\/div><div class=\"fusion-clearfix\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-4 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-background-position:left top;--awb-border-sizes-top:0px;--awb-border-sizes-bottom:0px;--awb-border-sizes-left:0px;--awb-border-sizes-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-padding-top:20px;--awb-padding-bottom:20px;--awb-margin-top:20px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-7 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column fusion-flex-align-self-flex-start fusion-column-no-min-height\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-title title fusion-title-2 sep-underline sep-solid fusion-title-text fusion-title-size-three\" style=\"--awb-margin-bottom:30px;--awb-sep-color:#dd3333;\"><h3 class=\"fusion-title-heading title-heading-left fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" style=\"margin:0;--fontSize:20;--minFontSize:20;line-height:1.5;\">Psychoanalysis as Media Theory<\/h3><\/div><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-1\"><p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span class=\"fusion-dropcap dropcap dropcap-boxed\" style=\"--awb-border-radius:8px;--awb-background:#dd3333;\">P<\/span>ractically determining \u2018that which is feminine\u2019 \u2013 along with \u2018that which is masculine\u2019, and even \u2018that which is human\u2019 \u2013 has become an increasing concern in an age dominated by networked computers and the world of social media. This is a world of catfishing, virtual transvestitism, sexual grooming and the increasing use of robot online personae using fake profiles with convincing backgrounds and histories to infiltrate social networks for the purpose of spying, propaganda and intimate advertising and marketing. Online, the world of\u00a0<em>Bladerunner<\/em>\u00a0(Ridley Scott, 1982) is already here and the question of that which is or isn\u2019t feminine has become intimately bound to that which is \u2013 or was \u2013 human.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">All of this was anticipated by Alan Turing at the very dawn of the computer age. Turing\u2019s work founded the modern computer, the essential ingredients for machine intelligence and artificial life. Turing was of course the subject of the recent film\u00a0<em>The Imitation Game<\/em>\u00a0(Graham Moore, 2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch that tells the story of how Turing lead the team that decoded the German encryption device \u2018Enigma\u2019 at Bletchley Park in England during World War Two. The title of the film refers to his essay \u2018Computing Machinery and Intelligence\u2019 (1950) in which he outlines the famous \u2018imitation game\u2019 or \u2018Turing test\u2019 for answering the question of whether or not machines can be said to think. Turing prefaces this test with a similar one concerning the problem of distinguishing \u2018that which is feminine\u2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">The \u2018imitation game\u2019 is introduced as a game \u2018played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. (Copeland, 2004: 441).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The interrogator knows them by different labels, say \u2018X\u2019 and \u2018Y\u2019, and poses various questions to them. In order to hide factors such as tone of voice and so on, their answers must be in writing, \u2018or better still typewritten\u2019. The sample questions concern the usual conventions of gender difference in the 1940s and 50s in Europe such as \u2018please tell me the length of your hair\u2019. Since the object of the game is for (A) to try and make (C) fail to determine that which is feminine, he can give answers such as \u2018My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long\u2019. (441). The point of the example is to demonstrate that under these conditions, it is of course impossible to tell which is the man and which is the woman. Turing then goes on to describe a similar process in which he hopes to show that it is \u2013 or soon will be \u2013 just as impossible to tell the difference between machines and men and women assuming the former are equipped with enough information about signifiers of gender, say, and sufficient processing speed and power. \u2018What will happen\u2019, writes Turing, \u2018when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?\u2019 (441) The answer of course is yes.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">It is interesting that the two questions posed by Turing in the imitation game are the very same questions that Lacan says are central to the structure of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the structures that are generally associated with femininity in the former case, and masculinity in the latter. In\u00a0<em>Seminar III<\/em>\u00a0Lacan states that for the hysteric \u2018everything that\u2019s said, expressed, gestured, manifested, assumes its sense only as a function of a response that has to be formulated concerning the fundamentally symbolic relation \u2013\u00a0<em>Am I a man or am I a woman<\/em>? (Lacan, 1993: 171.) Similarly, the question \u2018can a machine think\u2019 or \u2018can a machine be mistaken for a man?\u2019 amounts to asking if it is alive or dead. This is the existential question that is central to the obsessional who has indeed reduced his being to the thoughts that afflicts him. These thoughts continually concern \u2018the question of death [that is] another mode of the neurotic creation of the question \u2013 its obsessional mode\u2019 (Lacan, 1993: 179-80). These thoughts, for Dominique Miller, constitute the \u2018automatism\u2019 of the \u2018thinking machine\u2019 that is the obsessional. (See Miller, 2005)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">In this short essay I want to argue for the mutually beneficial study of media and psychoanalysis. \u2018You are now\u2019 announced Lacan to his students in 1973, \u2018infinitely more than you think, subjects of instruments that, from the microscope right down to the radiotelevision, are becoming the elements of your existence. You cannot currently even gauge the import of this, but it is nonetheless part of scientific discourse, insofar as a discourse is what determines a social link\u2019 (Lacan, 1999: 82). Psychoanalysis, I argue, needs increasingly to acknowledge its efficacy as a media theory in its negotiation of contemporary forms of social bond whose effects are manifested in the clinic.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">As early as Seminar II, Lacan is keenly aware of this, suggesting that \u2018in so far as he speaks, the subject can perfectly well find his answer, his return, his secret, his mystery, in the constructed symbol which modern machines represent for us\u2019 (Lacan, 1988: 186). That is to say, the\u00a0<em>parl\u00eatre<\/em>\u00a0that we acknowledge today as the metaphor for the Freudian unconscious, is also always a more generally\u00a0<em>m\u00e9di\u00eatre<\/em>. We are not just speaking bodies, but mediated beings who in the computer age might also be designated as\u00a0<em>technobodies<\/em>\u00a0to indicate that the body is hollowed-out and cadaverized. While its images are simulated and displaced among a variety of screens, objects and gadgets that displace identity across a \u2018nobody\u2019 or a central void, its fleshly surface enjoys and suffers from processes of machined thought from which it is separated.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The emergence of the modern computer takes place at a moment in the twentieth century when media systems had already changed our understanding of the arbitrary nature of gender signification. Freud was one of the first to take note of this. In his seminal work\u00a0<em>Discourse Networks 1800\/1900\u00a0<\/em>(1991), Friedrich Kittler argues that both Freud and Lacan were great media theorists as well as cryptanalysts because they recognized the central importance of new systems of communications. For example, it was the appearance of the typewriter, argues Kittler, that first made manifest the fact that language is a symbolic system, and not something simply given in nature. The typewriter can thus be regarded as the \u2018technical\u00a0<em>a priori<\/em>\u2019 for those Freudian case studies that \u2018demonstrate that the romanticism of the soul has yielded to the materialism of written signs\u2019 (Kittler, 1991: 283.) Indeed, in his \u2018Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis\u2019 (1909) also known as the case study of the \u2018Rat Man\u2019, Freud argues that \u2018the obsessional command (or whatever it may be) \u2026 is known only, in waking life, in a truncated or distorted form, like a mutilated telegraph message.\u2019 (Freud, 1993: 60) Type emphasizes that letters are the a-natural keys to the unconscious, knowledge of which is hinted at in typographic errors betraying the jouissance of language in the presence of bodies \u2013 in particular female bodies. This is because the role of \u2018steno-typist\u2019 quickly became one of the main types of female employment and autonomy. The speed and mechanical efficiency of the female shorthand typist replaced the laborious handwriting of the male bureaucrat and manager who could now simply \u2018dictate\u2019 in person or via a dictaphone. In his essay \u2018Dracula\u2019s Legacy\u2019, Kittler writes \u2018if the great word emancipation has any historical meaning, it is only in the area of word processing, which continues to employ more women world-wide than any other field\u2019 (Kittler, 1997: 64). In an essay exploring the implications for female workers of this change in labour and gender relations brought about by the semiotics of the typewriter, Katherine Biers (2015) suggests that the increasing presence in the workplace of female bodies, contributed to the de-idealization of women, even as it consigned women to a highly mechanized and over-sexualized world of office work.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Colette Soler makes a similar point in her essay \u2018Hysteria in Scientific Discourse\u2019 (2002), when she remarks that the rise of techno-science has resulted in the \u2018universalization\u2019 of a subject that, while it may be gendered, \u2018knows nothing of sexual difference\u2019, and instead promotes \u2018unisex\u2019 that \u2018consequently adapts very easily to the reduction of every subject to universal worker\u2019 whose satisfactions may only be met by the goods, symbols and gadgets of commodifiable \u2013 that is to say phallic \u2013 jouissance. \u2018Unisex means the phallic jouissance that is available to everyone\u2019 (Soler, 2002: 49). For Soler, it is the female hysteric who is uncertainly located as both the symptom of this process and its signifier of (phallic) resistance.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">This is nicely illustrated by the emergence of the\u00a0<em>femme fatale<\/em>\u00a0in the Hollywood\u00a0<em>noir<\/em>\u00a0tradition of the 1930s and 40s, as Biers shows. In her essay, Biers reads two texts, Billy Wilder\u2019s\u00a0<em>Double Indemnity<\/em>\u00a0(1944) and a much earlier play, Sophie Treadwell\u2019s\u00a0<em>Machinal<\/em>\u00a0(1928), that are based on Ruth Snyder, a typist and stenographer who was executed for murdering her husband. Biers argues that unlike Wilder\u2019s film in which the<em>\u00a0femme fatale<\/em>\u00a0retains in a negative form \u2018woman\u2019 as both ideal and symptom of man, Treadwell\u2019s play draws attention to the stultifying, mechanized conditions of women\u2019s labour, suggesting that in the climactic scene, the \u2018young woman\u2019s moaning voice\u2019 provides a discordant accompaniment to the \u2018telegraphic instruments\u2019 of the journalists reporting her confession to the murder, \u2018making it impossible to decide whether the material order outside or the psychic order inside rules over her fate\u2019 (Biers, 2015: 149). The woman\u2019s voice here however, does not provide the sonorous support for the bureaucratic writing machine, but the jouissance (suffering) of its internal dissonance.\u00a0 For Soler, while \u2018our scientific civilization and the universalization it promotes engenders unisex\u2019, hysterical women \u2018have inspired psychoanalysis to keep open the question of sex\u2019 in order to provide them with a response. (54)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">But science and hysteria are not necessarily opposites. As he continued to think about discourse in the 1970s, Lacan seems to have begun to shift his position on science, moving it away from university discourse towards the discourse of the hysteric. \u2018I conclude\u2019, he states in\u00a0<em>Television<\/em>\u00a0(1974), \u2018that scientific discourse and the hysteric\u2019s discourse have\u00a0<em>almost<\/em>\u00a0the same structure\u2019 (1990: 19). By 1975 and 1977 he is stating that scientific discourse and the discourse of the hysteric are identical (<em>Scilicet<\/em>\u00a05, 1975: 7 and\u00a0<em>\u2018Propos sur \u2018hysterie\u2019\u2019, Quarto<\/em>\u00a0(1977). This is because unlike university discourse, where the truth of knowledge (S2) is power (S1), the truth of science, as with the hysteric, is the real (a). To look at this identification more closely, and to analyze its implications, requires of course that the (scientific) subject of the unconscious is placed in the position of agency. But here we are not concerned with the subject that has been occluded by science, that is to say sutured by systems of measurement or calculation. Rather, we are concerned with the subject of encryption. It is precisely this distinction that Lacan makes in\u00a0<em>Television<\/em>\u00a0between psychoanalytic and scientific method, drawing on the example of Freud. \u2018What Freud articulates as primary process in the unconscious \u2026 isn\u2019t something to be numerically expressed [<em>se chiffre<\/em>], but to be deciphered [<em>se dechiffre<\/em>]. I mean:\u00a0<em>jouissance<\/em>\u00a0itself.\u2019 (1990: 18-19).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The reference to \u2018deciphering\u2019 of course brings us directly back to Alan Turing, the greatest cryptanalyst of the twentieth century. If we look again at his imitation game, in which he juxtaposes the question of the difference between men and women with that of human and machine, we can see that the point of this juxtaposition is not only to stress the importance of symbolic differences, but also their limit. The juxtaposition acknowledges that it is not just signifiers of difference that are at issue in the question concerning femininity and masculinity, but the jouissance that these signifiers orient. Or as his biographer suggests, Turing\u2019s question was meant to imply that sex \u2018depended on facts which were\u00a0<em>not<\/em>\u00a0reducible to sequences of symbols\u2019 (Hodges, 2013: 523). These \u2018facts\u2019 of course are not essentially biological; they pertain to the fact that knowledge of sex is not a question of information, but jouissance. Accordingly, Lacan\u2019s own re-framing of Turing\u2019s question concerns not whether or not a machine can think, but whether it can be said to\u00a0<em>know<\/em>, because \u2018the foundation of knowledge is that the jouissance of its exercise is the same as its acquisition\u2019 (Lacan, 1999: 97). Turing\u2019s imitation game anticipates the distinction made by Lacan in Seminar XX where he emphasizes that his \u2018formulas of sexuation\u2019 do not map on to gender difference.\u00a0 In this essay, then, I want to stress the importance of media theory to psychoanalysis, but also underscore the correlative importance of assessing the subject of media and technology from the psychoanalytic perspective, that is to say from the perspective of the real that resists all scientific observation and measurement.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">In so doing it is necessary nevertheless to acknowledge that the particular configurations of signifiers supported by the different types of technical systems that mediate them have had significant effects on the unconscious, and what it means to be feminine or masculine. In what follows I am going to argue that Alan Turing, in spite of the legacy represented by Silicon Valley and the Americanization of digital culture, also attempted to keep open the question of sex both in his research into machine intelligence and artificial life. In so doing he managed to bring into proximity scientific discourse with the discourse of the hysteric in the manner of the true scientist in his attempt to \u2018formulate the encounter with the real cause\u2019 (Fink, 1995: 141).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-5 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-background-position:left top;--awb-border-sizes-top:0px;--awb-border-sizes-bottom:0px;--awb-border-sizes-left:0px;--awb-border-sizes-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-padding-top:20px;--awb-padding-bottom:20px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-8 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column fusion-flex-align-self-flex-start fusion-column-no-min-height\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-title title fusion-title-3 sep-underline sep-solid fusion-title-text fusion-title-size-three\" style=\"--awb-margin-bottom:30px;--awb-sep-color:#dd3333;\"><h3 class=\"fusion-title-heading title-heading-left fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" style=\"margin:0;--fontSize:20;--minFontSize:20;line-height:1.5;\">Media Theory as Psychoanalysis<\/h3><\/div><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-2\"><p style=\"text-align: justify\">In Graham Moore\u2019s film\u00a0<em>The Imitation Game<\/em>\u00a0(2014), there is a touching scene in which the young Turing exchanges encrypted love messages with his school boy beloved Christopher Morecom. The scene suggests that Turing\u2019s interest in encryption \u2013 which of course culminated in his leading the British decryption of the German Enigma machine \u2013 found its basis in the enigma of love and the impossibility of a sexual relation. Impossible not just because of its homosexual character, of course; like the poets of courtly love whose codes and acrostics emptied the object of their passion of all substance, turning her into the signifier of an \u2018inhuman partner\u2019 (Lacan, 1992: 150), so for Turing mathematics and machines became the focus of his Eros. Alan Hodges\u2019s biography, upon which the film is based, reports Turing \u2018once saying that he derived a sexual pleasure from mathematics\u2019 (2014: 161). No doubt, this Eros was also at the root of his \u2018obsession\u2019 with producing machine intelligence and artificial life in seminal essays that laid the foundations for research into both areas. Moore\u2019s film picks up on the correlation by having Turing name the Automatic Computing Engine he was building in Manchester University in the early 1950s, \u2018Christopher\u2019 after his boyhood love.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">In the 1940s and 50s Lacan was of course fascinated by the new science of cybernetics and information theory, referencing Claude Shannon and Norburt Wiener among others. Turing is not mentioned, but his thinking machines are. Furthermore, Lacan contends that their binary system is also the basis of language and the structure of the unconscious. \u2018The world of the symbolic is the world of the machine\u2019 is Lacan\u2019s mantra at this stage of his teaching and indeed, that in the unconscious mathematics is sex: \u2018while the subject doesn\u2019t think about it, the symbols continue to mount one another, to copulate, to proliferate, to fertilize each other, to jump on each other, to tear each other apart\u2019 (Lacan, 1988: 185). Both Turing and Lacan, in their different ways, establish that thought is an effect of symbolization that does not necessarily require a human brain.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The missed encounter between Turing and Lacan is ironic because even as Lacan turned to cybernetics, Turing had already undertaken psychoanalysis in an endeavour to achieve a greater understanding of the mind. It should be noted that Turing\u2019s analysis was entirely unrelated to his conviction for homosexuality and the sentence of \u2018chemical castration\u2019 that apparently lead to his suicide in 1954. According to Turing\u2019s brother, psychoanalysis was an experience that he highly praised. (Hodges, 2014: 611]. Indeed, it was during his analysis with Franz Greenbaum that he wrote a curious short story concerning the events of December 1951 that lead to his conviction. In the story Turing fictionalizes himself as \u2018Alec Pryce\u2019 who has just completed a new paper on \u2018interplanetary travel\u2019 that he considers<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;padding-left: 30px\">better than [the one] he\u2019d done since his mid-twenties when he had introduced the idea which is now becoming known as \u2018Price\u2019s buoy\u2019. Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used. The rather obvious\u00a0<em>double-entendre<\/em>\u00a0rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec could pretend that the word was spelt without the \u2018u\u2019 \u2026 Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned another gay man, and he knew where he might find one that was suitable. (Hodges, 2014: 564-5).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">\u2018Pryce\u2019s buoy\u2019 is of course code for \u2018Turing\u2019s machine\u2019 that became the familiar name for the universal machine designed in \u2018On Computable Numbers\u2019 (1938). The \u2018boy\u2019\/\u2019buoy\u2019 pun not only correlates boy and machine (in this case a nautical navigational marker and transmitter of signals), but also, given that U-Boy is a near homonym of U-Boat, condenses Arnold Murray, the boy who sunk him, on to the fatal objects he was trying to locate in the Atlantic Ocean through breaking the \u2018impossible\u2019 Naval version of Enigma. This complex signifier \u2018buoy\u2019 condenses the two main achievements for which Turing owes his much later posthumous fame (the Universal Turing Machine and the decryption of Naval Enigma) on to the object cause of his infamy and \u2013 presumably \u2013 his suicide; recognition is defined by death.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The correlation of boy and machine also suggests that Turing loved and desired phantasmatically and ambivalently in the register of the mother. Indeed in his research into how machines might \u2018learn\u2019 he took the model of a child attending an English school, subject to the same system of rewards and punishments as himself (see \u2018Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory\u2019 in Copeland, 2004: 474-5). All the more ironic and traumatic for Turing, then, that the punishment for homosexuality that was inflicted on him by the British judicial system was chemical \u2018castration\u2019 through a course of oestrogen injections that resulted in the production of breasts. Turing was thus confronted, in a very alarming and violent way, with the question \u2018am I a man or a woman?\u2019 This profound disturbance to his body image, perhaps collapsing the gap between fantasy and its actualization in social reality, may have seriously undermined the symbolic consistency of Turing\u2019s identity, resulting in its disintegration.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">While no one really knows\u00a0<em>why<\/em>\u00a0Turing committed suicide, his method has become famous. Turing took two bites out of an apple laced with cyanide, an act that was directly inspired by Walt Disney\u2019s film\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>. Turing saw the film in Cambridge, shortly after its release in 1937. It is reported that \u2018he was very taken with the scene where the Wicked Witch dangles an apple on a string into a boiling brew of poison, muttering<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;padding-left: 30px\">Dip the apple in the brew<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;padding-left: 30px\">Let the Sleeping Death seep through<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">He liked to chant the prophetic couplet over and over again\u2019. (Hodges, 2014: 189) This was the same year that his essay \u2018Computable Numbers\u2019 was published, and also the first time, according to his biographer, that he contemplated using an apple as a means of suicide. (164). In the year of his conviction, Turing again mentioned\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>\u00a0to his \u2018training partner\u2019, Alan Garner (Turing was an excellent athlete and long distance runner). Garner concurred that, as a child, he had also been \u2018terrified\u2019 by \u2018the image of the poisoned apple\u2019 and shared this secret with Turing. In 2011, Garner recalled that Turing \u2018used to go over the scene in detail, dwelling on the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, one of which gave death\u2019. For Garner \u2018their shared trauma \u2026 remained a bond.\u2019 (Hodges, 2014: xxv-xxvi)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Disney\u2019s\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>\u00a0is of course based on a tale in the\u00a0<em>Kinder- und Hausm\u00e4rchen<\/em>\u00a0(Childhood and Household Tales) collected by the Brother\u2019s Grimm. Like many of these tales it is set in a mythical milieu dominated by masters and their slaves. Indeed Jack Zipes in a forthcoming book on the many versions of \u2018The Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice\u2019 regards Hegel\u2019s famous myth of the master and slave as a \u2018variation\u2019 of the German tale obsessed by the question of mastery (see Merriam, 2015). Hegel\u2019s master-slave narrative from the\u00a0<em>Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>\u00a0is extremely important to Lacan, particularly as interpreted by Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve in seminars held in Paris in the mid-1930s, seminars attended regularly by Lacan. It is this tale that, along with Henri Wallon\u2019s work and Freud\u2019s paper \u2018On Narcissism\u2019, provides the basis for the \u2018mirror stage\u2019 and Imaginary register that enabled Lacan to replace the triangular structure of Oedipus with his own \u2018quarternary\u2019 structure of myth. The shift away from Oedipus is outlined in Lacan\u2019s paper \u2018The Neurotic\u2019s Individual Myth\u2019 (1953) on Freud\u2019s case study on the \u2018Rat Man\u2019. Lacan finds in Hegel\u2019s stand off between two combatants that results in the dialectic of the master and the slave, an essential mirror relation defined and \u2018mediated\u2019 by death.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;padding-left: 30px\">one might say that the theory of narcissism, as I just set it forth, explains certain facts which otherwise remain enigmatic in Hegel. After all, in order for this dialectic of the death struggle, the struggle for pure power, to be initiated, death must not be actualized, since the dialectical movement would cease for lack of combatants; death must be imagined. (Lacan, 1953)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The combatant who does not risk his life in the struggle for pure prestige becomes a slave and must works for the enjoyment of the other combatant who has now become his master. The slave is thus condemned to wait for the master to die if he is himself to one day live and enjoy in the image of the master. But in his waiting and identification with the death of the master he exists in the \u2018sleeping death\u2019 of procrastination and deferral familiar to the obsessional neurotic, but also for Lacan characteristic of \u2018the existential attitude of modern man\u2019. (Lacan, 1953) Lacan\u2019s \u2018quaternary structure\u2019 emerges from this tale whereby the subject ($) is directed to work by the signifier of the master (S1) in order to produce a knowledge (S2) that is mediated by an image or object of jouissance (a) mortified in death.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">In\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>\u00a0we can see how Hegel\u2019s rather macho tale is feminized. A situation of (step-)mother-daughter rivalry, played out in the absence of the father, results in the daughter being put to work in a scullery maid\u2019s rags in order to occlude her beauty. The mirror-relation is explicitly invoked in the famous scenes where the stepmother calls on \u2018the slave in the magic mirror\u2019 to adjudicate upon who is the \u2018fairest in the land\u2019. The general narcissistic structure of the film is underscored when Snow White\u2019s slavish conditions are revealed in the following scene that finds her singing \u2018I\u2019m wishing for the one I love to find me one day\u2019 into a well, the shot rising up from the perspective of the water\u2019s reflection, along with Snow White\u2019s reverberating voice, no doubt referencing the presence of Echo in Ovid\u2019s original tale from\u00a0<em>Metamorphosis<\/em>. The main part of the film is set in the mine-worker\u2019s cottage, home of the seven \u2018Dwarves\u2019 who become infantilized as Snow White\u2019s mature beauty \u2013 that the magic mirror has now conceded surpasses that of the Queen \u2013 is fully realized in a maternal register of cooking and housework. It is in this setting that Snow White remains until she receives the apple from the jealous Queen that sends her into the \u2018sleeping death\u2019 to await the arrival of her handsome prince who will awaken her with a kiss.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">David Leavitt sees this as the \u2018most obvious message\u2019 of Turing\u2019s repetition of the act of eating a poisoned apple, to evoke the romantic fantasy of the return of the master in the form of the handsome prince (Leavitt, 2007: 280), remarking on this \u2018chilling\u2019 decision to \u2018camp up\u2019 his death in this way. Certainly Disney\u2019s wicked Queen is a worthy member of the pantheon of Hollywood femme fatales that became such figures of identification or \u2018Diva worship\u2019 for the pre-Stonewall gay community. Turing\u2019s repetition of course places him at the point of a dual identification with evil mother and virtuous daughter, situated at the point of rivalry over who best embodies the signifier of the Other\u2019s desire. He both applies the poison to the apple and eats it, apparently fascinated at the binary nature of its red and green colour signifying life and death, good and evil, presence and absence and so on like the symbolic or \u2018phallic\u2019 (castrating\/castrated) function of the women themselves. A curious detail concerns Turing\u2019s own mother who refused to believe that her son could have killed himself, arguing that it was an accident caused by Turing\u2019s messiness. She was convinced that he must have got cyanide on his perpetually ink-stained hands. \u2018This was, of course, what she had always said might happen \u2026 even up to the year before his death Mrs Turing was chiding his son to \u2018<em>Wash<\/em>\u00a0your hands, Alan, and get your\u00a0<em>nails<\/em>\u00a0clean. And don\u2019t put your\u00a0<em>fingers<\/em>\u00a0in your mouth!\u2019 (Hodges, 2014: 615)<sup>\u00a0<\/sup>[1].The first act of Snow White in her new domestic role as mother of her Dwarf worker-children is to get them to wash their hands before dinner, much to their horror.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Mother-daughter-child-worker, Turing\u2019s desire is mediated, displaced and animated along this metonymic chain as if on a reel of film, unwinding around the central spool of death whose place is marked by the apple. According to Leavitt, Turing \u2018often told his friends that he ate an apple a day before going to bed\u2019 (280), presaging sleep and dreams \u2013 those animations produced by the automaton of the unconscious, its death drive. It is a coincidence that\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>, the first full-length animation, and Turing\u2019s Universal Machine were produced in 1937. Both provide in the form of a thin strip of celluloid, on the one hand, and an infinitely long thin strip of paper in which 0s and 1s can be read, erased and written, on the other, the basis for the animation of images, writing and ultimately thought. 1937 is also the date of Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s final seminars on Hegel in which he discloses how the desire of the slave to live may realize itself through work in the image of his products. \u2018It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it\u2019 (Koj\u00e8ve, 1989: 25). Pre-eminently such contemplation is drawn to, and distracted by, cinema screens and ultimately the screens of the modern computer, where the promise of life\u2019s awakening flickers in the mechanically animated dreams of death\u2019s sleep.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Turing\u2019s insertion into the mythical narrative that is animated in Disney\u2019s version of the Snow White tale can easily be plotted across the four points of Lacan\u2019s quaternary structure in such a way that it also corresponds to the Discourse of the Hysteric.<\/p>\n<\/div><div class=\"fusion-image-element \" style=\"text-align:center;--awb-caption-title-font-family:var(--h2_typography-font-family);--awb-caption-title-font-weight:var(--h2_typography-font-weight);--awb-caption-title-font-style:var(--h2_typography-font-style);--awb-caption-title-size:var(--h2_typography-font-size);--awb-caption-title-transform:var(--h2_typography-text-transform);--awb-caption-title-line-height:var(--h2_typography-line-height);--awb-caption-title-letter-spacing:var(--h2_typography-letter-spacing);\"><span class=\" fusion-imageframe imageframe-none imageframe-1 hover-type-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/09\/Wilson-01.jpg\" alt class=\"img-responsive\"\/><\/span><\/div><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-3\"><p style=\"text-align: justify\">in the positions of<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">agent\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 other<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">truth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 production<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The hysteric ($) addresses the signifier of the master (S<sub>1<\/sub>) (the hysteric wants a master to rule, according to Lacan, 2007: 33), that is placed in the position of otherness because the master is merely a signifier, a semblant of someone who is absent, or dead, or yet to be born. The hysteric wants to bring the master back to his desire which in the case of Snow White and her mother requires a narcissistic concern for being the signifier of the Other\u2019s desire in the form of an Ideal of beauty or virtue in the image of unsurpassed \u2018fairness\u2019 (imaginary phallus or\u00a0<em>agalma<\/em>\u00a0of the ideal feminine form). Beauty masters the desire of the master: \u2018the appearance of beauty intimidates and stops desire\u2019 (Lacan, 1992: 238). At the same time, the supremacy of this beauty has to be confirmed by the judgment of the \u2018slave in the mirror\u2019; it is ultimately a reflection of the slave\u2019s standard of measurement or rule (S<sub>2<\/sub>). Beauty is therefore an effect of knowledge that has to be produced, again in the case of\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>, in the mirror of culture, folk tales, the cinema and so on. She wants to produce a man \u2013 she wants her Prince to come \u2013 but the truth of this desire is the apple (a) that she actually receives, Biblical signifier both of the desire to know and the \u2018Fall\u2019 from Eden that is formalized in the absence of a sexual relation (\u2018And I will put enmity between thee and the woman\u2019 Genesis, 3, 15). For the Protestant tradition that informed both German folk tales and the British education system, Eve, like the Queen and subsequently Snow White, is the \u2018fairest of creation, last and best \/ Of all God\u2019s works\u2019 who becomes \u2018on a sudden lost \/ Defaced, deflow\u2019red, and now to death devote!\u2019 (John Milton,\u00a0<em>Paradise Lost<\/em>. IX: 896-901).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Colette Soler, in her essay on \u2018Hysteria and Scientific Discourse\u2019, argues that it is important not to simply confuse hysteria with femininity. In so far as femininity is a symptom of male desire, a masquerade in which a woman may enjoy herself as much as a man may desire, the hysteric\u2019s interest in the other\u2019s symptom \u2018means not consenting to being the symptom, and it does not mean having a symptom identical to a man\u2019s symptom\u2019. (Soler, 2002: 52) If we locate Turing in this structure in the context of his identification with\u00a0<em>Snow White<\/em>, we can see that his interest in femininity ultimately concerns the apple, the object of knowledge (of life and death and sexual difference). In his enigmatic consumption of the poisoned apple, Turing produces a desire to know the secret truth of his death in a context, at the height of the Cold War, where his life and jouissance were being violently curtailed and his achievements shrouded by the Official Secrets Act\u00a0[2].\u00a0\u2018[The hysteric\u2019s] desire is sustained by the Other\u2019s symptom, to the extent that one could almost say that she makes herself a cause thereof, but a cause of \u2026 knowledge \u2026 because she would like to inspire a desire to know in the Other\u2019 (Soler, 2002: 52).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Snow white\u2019s apple, and the apple of Alan Turing who imitated her in the fatal act of taking a bit out of it, was binary, or digital, red on one side, green on the other, one half healthy, the other half poisoned. This was a fact that fascinated Turing (Hodges, 2014: xxv-xxvi) such that in that fascination we can perhaps indeed see a symptom of the fatal character of the object of techno-scientific discourse that in its incessant desire to know its other (its object cause of desire) \u2018vapourizes\u2019 the subject into data (see Lacan, XVII: 105).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-6 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-9 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-title title fusion-title-4 sep-underline sep-solid fusion-title-text fusion-title-size-one\"><h1 class=\"fusion-title-heading title-heading-left fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" style=\"margin:0;--fontSize:30;line-height:1.4;\"><\/h1><\/div><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-4\"><p style=\"text-align: justify\">[1]\u00a0The infantilizing tone testifies to the ambivalence of Turing\u2019s relationship with his mother. Hodges notes in his biography that in Turing\u2019s \u2018analysis of his dreams, he was surprised to find that many concerned, or could be interpreted as relating to, his mother in hostile terms\u2019 (Hodges, 2014: 606). Elsewhere, Hodges claims that Turing nursed \u2018resentment\u2019 towards her (606), and \u2018if Alan\u2019s friends heard him disparage his mother, they usually heard nothing of his father\u2019 (606). As part of his analysis with Greenbaum, Turing produced two \u2018dream books\u2019 that were read by his brother John before being destroyed. His brother was apparently very disturbed by the \u2018scarifying\u2019 comments about his mother alongside detailed accounts of his homosexual activities. (618)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">[2]\u00a0The truth about Turing\u2019s acts in World War Two, for example, did not come to light for another 30 years.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-7 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-background-position:left top;--awb-border-sizes-top:0px;--awb-border-sizes-bottom:0px;--awb-border-sizes-left:0px;--awb-border-sizes-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-padding-top:20px;--awb-padding-bottom:20px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-10 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column fusion-flex-align-self-flex-start fusion-column-no-min-height\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-title title fusion-title-5 sep-underline sep-solid fusion-title-text fusion-title-size-three\" style=\"--awb-margin-bottom:30px;--awb-sep-color:#dd3333;\"><h3 class=\"fusion-title-heading title-heading-left fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" style=\"margin:0;--fontSize:20;--minFontSize:20;line-height:1.5;\">References<\/h3><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-11 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column fusion-flex-align-self-flex-start fusion-column-no-min-height\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><ul style=\"--awb-size:15px;--awb-iconcolor:#dd3333;--awb-line-height:25.5px;--awb-icon-width:25.5px;--awb-icon-height:25.5px;--awb-icon-margin:10.5px;--awb-content-margin:36px;\" class=\"fusion-checklist fusion-checklist-1 fusion-checklist-default type-icons\"><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Biers, K. (2015). \u2018The Typewriter\u2019s Truth\u2019 in Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury (eds), <em>Kittler Now: Current perspectives in Kittler Studies<\/em>. London: Polity, 2015, pp. 132-54.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Copeland, B. Jack (2004). (ed) <em>The Essential Turing: Ideas that Gave Birth to the Computer Age<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Fink, B. (1995). <em>The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance<\/em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Freud, S. (1993). \u2018The Rat Man or Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis\u2019 in <em>Three Case Histories<\/em> New York: Macmillan.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Hodges, A. (2014). <em>Alan Turing: The Enigma<\/em>. London: Vintage.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Kittler, F. (1990). <em>Discourse Networks 1800\/1900<\/em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Kittler, F. (1997). <em>Literature, Media, Information Systems<\/em>, edited and Introduced by John Johnston. London: G&amp;B Arts.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Koj\u00e8ve, A. (1989). <em>Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em> (ed) Allan Bloom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (1953). \u2018The Neurotic\u2019s Individual Myth\u2019 Text edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. The French text appeared in Issue No. 17 of <em>Ornicar?<\/em> Periodical Bulletin of the Champ Freudien.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (1988). <em>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud&#8217;s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis<\/em>, trans. John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (1992). <em>The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:<\/em> Seminar VII, trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (1993). <em>The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan<\/em> Book III 1955-56, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, tr. Russell Grigg, London: Routledge.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (1999). <em>Encore<\/em>: Seminar XX, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Lacan, J. (2007). <em>The Other Side of Psychoanalysis<\/em> Seminar XVII, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Leavitt, D. (2007). <em>The Man Who knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer<\/em>. London: Phoenix.<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Merriam, M. (2015). \u2018The Unvarshished Tales of the Brother\u2019s Grimm: A Conversation with Jack Zipes\u2019 in <em>World Literature Today<\/em>. July 29 2015. Worldliteraturetoday.org<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Miller, D. (2005). \u2018Obsession: A Name of the Superego\u2019 <em>The Symptom<\/em>. Online Journal for Lacan.com<\/div><\/li><li class=\"fusion-li-item\" style=\"\"><span class=\"icon-wrapper circle-no\"><i class=\"fusion-li-icon fa fa-minus\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><div class=\"fusion-li-item-content\">Soler, C. (2002). \u201cHysteria in Scientific Discourse\u201d en <em>Reading Seminar XX: Lacan\u00b4s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. <\/em>NewYork: <a href=\"https:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/browse\/publishers\/suny\">State University of New York Press<\/a>.<\/div><\/li><\/ul><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-8 fusion-flex-container fusion-parallax-fixed nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-padding-top:10px;--awb-padding-bottom:10px;--awb-background-image:url(&quot;http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/09\/Page-Title-Bar-Primer-Numero.jpg&quot;);--awb-background-size:cover;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;background-attachment:fixed;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1248px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-12 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"portfolio_category":[],"portfolio_skills":[],"portfolio_tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","avada_portfolio","type-avada_portfolio","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/avada_portfolio\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/avada_portfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/avada_portfolio"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/avada_portfolio\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1927,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/avada_portfolio\/166\/revisions\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"portfolio_category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio_category?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"portfolio_skills","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio_skills?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"portfolio_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matpsil.com\/revista-lapso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio_tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}