"A Bat, or Two Dead Chinese"*

The Turing test and the Rorschach test might seem to be two diametrically opposed reading of web dynamics, at least in terms of Benjamin's dynamics of `information' versus `storytelling' or context-free versus context-bound transmissions. The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in a paper in 1949, posited a human in one room and another entity in another room, either a human or a machine. The point of the test was for the human to decide whether or not, through a series of questions, the entity in the other room was in fact a machine rather than a human. (The first part of the test had to do with determining whether the other entity was male or female).

The Rorschach Test was developed by psychologist Hermann Rorshach in 1921 as a diagnostic for various mental disorders. It consists of a series of cards upon which a spot of ink has been centally placed and the cards creased down the center so as to make a symmetrical ink blot. The patient is to give an immediate response to what she sees. From her answers may be determined certain diseases or in the case of normal persons, certain propensities.

The Rorschach test corresponds to the detecting of a certain sort of PERSON while the Turing test to the detecting of a certain sort of INTELLIGENCE or, to body, narrative, storytelling in the former and to information and disembodiment in the later.

(It should be noted that both fall prey to contaminations peculiar to their respective projects: the Rorschach is not thought to be efficacious with Borderline Personality Disorders, a very rapidly growing category, and Alan Turing himself was wary of the idea that his test could be faulted by TELEPATHY; that is, neither functions very well at the perimeter, where porosity sets up unstable oscillations in the results. Another source of instability for both systems might perhaps be explored in their originary conditioning: Rorschach is thought to have been influenced in conceiving of his test by a children's game called `klecksgraphie' which was a telling of stories by ink spots,and the fact that his nickname was `Klek'; Turing's test starts out attempting to distinguish between a man and a woman then moves to differentiating mind and machine. The `integrity' of the Rorschach is threatened by some sort of a priori `primal mind' while the Turing is fated to meet its Other as a `primal body'.)

In the case of the Rorschach test, we have a case of storytelling run amuck, so much so, that it fact it can't really be called `storytelling.' As Hermann Rorschach himself put it in "Psychodiagnostics", "We deal in these cases not with an interpretation but with a perception in the strict sense fo the word." For Rorschach, imagination had little to do with a patient telling what the symmetrical ink blots looked like, that is, "...subjects do not interpret the pictures, they name them." A type of story emerges but it is not, strictu senso, `made up'; that is, it bears a necessary relation to the patient's illness (or normalcy), her `constitutive interiority' we might say. It is some sort of verbal analog to an internal state which the ink blot elicits, as ice cubes necessarily reflect the shape and conditions where they congealed. And through the phenomena of `reflex hallucination,' movement, the `m-response,' could be discerned in the static responses.

`Imaginative reconstruction' is left to the analysis, childhood sucked up into the ink blotter which is the clinician, just as the female is sucked up into the male interrogator. (I am reminded of Benjamin's comment, when queried as to the extent of the theological in his writing, that it was the same as the relationship of the ink blotter to the ink.)

Both tests, under the banner of detecting and differentiation, manage to serruptitiously incorporate and detour the object of their study.

`Web objects,' whether journals or whatever, would seem to utilize effects of `projection' , `detection', and `incorporation,' a blend that has caused many to focus on the `psychoanalytic' of the net as addictive medium, or arena for `acting out' and/or `exposing one's self,' or the very opposite, as an incubation medium for the darkest impulses of the human spirit: fascism, child pornography, conspiracy, occultism, and so on. The perceived danger here is the `infectious' quality ascribed to these stories. What was once a private vice becomes visible, and hence attractive, to all those whose stories are somehow similar but are not yet recognized. The great fear is that the `scene of recognition' only goes in one direction: `down' intto he animalistic and the primal. The Rorschach test in fact bets on this primal recognition scene for the strength of its analysis.**

There does seem to be a conflict between the need and desire to tell stories and spread them as wide as possible, and the scientific imp[erative toward the dissemination of what was once thought of as `value-free' information (that is, information which has no `story,' no personal, social, historical, or national `baggage' attached to it; however the component which does inexorably attach itself to information is the story of the `cyborg', a border creature -- and we know that trouble / doubles / oscillations always arise at the border.) The net/web might be seen in fact as a huge fractillating and mobiated serpentine border crossing over and through all obstacles (the very nature of its founding technological charter as Arpanet), whether public or private, `truths' or conspiratorial `lies', bodies or minds, authenticities or disengenuities, constantly assembling, disassembling, and re-assembling.

Private journals on-line might even be seen as the mucronate process inscribing this mobius-effect into everyday life.

Notes

*(The title of these sections comes from the ink blot responses of a patient that Rorschach terms `hebephrenic'.)

**From a web site devoted to Rorschach diagnostics: ""Among philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1945) also makes the observation that imitation involves a capacity for immediate motor identification. Indeed, his concept of body image is defined in terms of the capacity to translate motor schemata between different possible action perspectives. This capacity corresponds to the "amodal" perception postulated by recent theorists. It is well known that Merleau-Ponty stresses the point that our mastering of action schemata is primary to our knowledge of objective ("Cartesian") space. Taken together, his arguments imply that our knowledge of other minds may be prior to our knowledge of objective space (cf. Malmgren 1976)."

BACK................................................INDEX