Chapter 4: Post-Machines … or, When the Machines Went Mad

The first three chapters of this book have situated the machine over a network of disciplinary practices, discourses, and epistemological registers that took us from the shop floors of an industrialized metropolis that ruled with terror and death over a vast colonial Empire. Discourses that construct machines are vast and arise in the most unlikely places. From schools to colonial practices to the 19th-century factory, machines have been enacted, imagined, and actualized across a diverse range of social practices, discursive traditions, theoretical frameworks, and dominant ideologies. In this chapter, however, we see that machines take on a much more sinister role in torturing, influencing, and disciplining the bodies of those deemed “mad,” specifically people afflicted with what has been called schizophrenia, melancholia, or autism by psychological discourses and practices. Blended with the rise of institutionalization during the 19th century, a machinic understanding emerged from institutionalized bodies, occurring under the auspices of “modernism.” Essentially one of the guiding frameworks within the Eurocentric tradition, modernism completely shifted the meaning and understanding of contemporary life that had Western science as its foundation in which to understand and “know” the world in which we live. Richard Berman (1988) gives an excellent account of the rapid and drastic changes that modernism had for Europeans, with changes in medicine, science, communication, immigration, market ideologies, consumption, education, incarceration, State structures, and demographics (p. 16).