Human Programming

The third chapter considers how technological ideas about “programming”—in cybernetics, computer science, and genetics—broadened the applications of automaton discourse and images. Such ideas were used to represent devalued forms of labor, Asian Americans, and post-Cold War fundamentalism.Selisker analyses the history and discorses that inform stereotypes such as hypertechnologicalorientals and new philosophical concepts like posthumanism.

Enemies of Freedom

The introduction uses the news story of John Walker Lindh, who was described as in 2002 “brainwashed” in news media, to give a historical and aesthetic background to automatism as a means of representing freedom and unfreedom. The author examines the aesthetics of automatism and its role as an American representational paradigm in times of war.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers whether we can think our way beyond U.S. culture’s pervasive dialectic of free, democratic selves and unfree, totalitarian others. Daniel Suarez’s science fiction novel Daemon offers a way of putting automatism in conversation with actor-network theory. Drawing on the two, Selisker attempts to reconcile automatism with agency by exploring the contingency and interconnected nature of the latter.

Cult Programming

The fourth chapter turns to links between religious and political extremism. First, it examines how WWII-era science was used to describe cults in the 1970s, starting with Ted Patrick and Patty Hearst. It then describes how cults function in popular and literary fiction.

Fundamentalist Automatons

The fifth chapter describes the roles that automatism has played in Islamophobic discourses since 9/11. It particularly focuses on texts that try to describe fundamentalist consciousness, such as Homeland, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and BattlestarGalactica. All three texts draw out the commonality between citizens and terrorists, in opposition to portraying the latter as a brainwashed subject.

Anti-institutional Automatons

The second chapter argues how much of New Left culture, broadly defined, used images of automatism as a way to turn anti-totalitarian rhetoric against the U.S. establishment, including work by Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey, Charles Reich, and Betty Friedan.

Uniquely American Symptoms

The first chapter explores how 1940s and 1950s ideas about totalitarianism and brainwashing established a way of talking about free American selves as opposed to unfree, totalitarian others in political science, propaganda, fiction, and films like The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The chapter analyses representations of totalitarianism, brainwashing, and the military. It explores these in discourse around the Korean War, communist China, and African American prisoners of war.