Aquarius

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds. Andrew Gaedtke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 
Victor Tausk’s famous 1919 paper, “On the Origins of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” identifies a delusional formation in which a “machine of a mystical nature” takes over the subject’s mind, draining its contents and replacing them with alien messages. Consisting of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries,” this diabolical apparatus emits “waves or rays” that enslave the subject’s will to the whims of a persecutory cabal.1 In describing this contraption, its victims draw on all the latest innovations in technology while insisting that the machine’s miraculous workings exceed the grasp of the human intellect.

In Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds, Andrew Gaedtke situates the influencing machine at the intersection of modernism and psychiatry. With its implications of mechanization, telepathy, and mind control, this paranoid delusion corresponds to modernist anxieties about communicational technologies, such as the radio, the telephone, and the tape recorder, which substitute mechanical transmissions for the living voice. Instances of this mechanization, Gaedtke argues, can be found in both modernist fiction and autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia, of which the most famous is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, whose author claims to be under the control of “divine rays” that deprive him of “man’s natural right to be master of his own nerves.”2