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Immersion as “Social Machine”- analysing the coupling Human-Machine in
the industry of entertainment
The term social machine appears in different contexts
“Social Machine” is a term that appears in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
capitalismus and schizophrenia, and in John Canny and Eric
Paulos, Tele-
embodiment and shattered presence: reconstructing the body for online
interaction. Both texts use the term to designate an apparatus that conducts our
behaviour. In Deleuze and Guattari´s text, it conducts and produces desire. In
John Canny and Eric Paulos´text, it socializes humans.
As we will see along during this article, this conceptual machinery does not need
to be technological to be considered a machine. One example of social machine
is the urban plan, the concept-city as a machinery of modernity as Michel de
Certeau puts it, in Walking in the city1. The urbanistic project in a collective mode
of administration and organization of space and practice which exposes the
concept of urbanistic ratio, when it privileges technological progress over the
individual mode of reapropriation of space considered as waste. Another is the
clock. As a social machine the clock is seen as “reproducing the canonic hours
and for assuring order in the city”2. One more example is immersion which can
be seen in the industry of entertainment.
*Yara Rondon Guasque Araujo, multimedia artist, university instructor, PhD candidate of the Program of
Communication and Semiotics of PUCSP, fellow of CAPES PROSUP and CAPES Modalidade Sanduiche,
visiting scholar at the M.I.N.D. Lab, Telecommunication Department, Michigan State University, MSU, from
July 2001 to July 2002.
1
Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the cities, an icarian fall”, in During, Simon (ed.). (1993). The Cultural
Studies Reader. London, New York, Routledge.
2
(Deleuze: 1985: 141)
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“Social Machine” could be seen in the sense of social computing used by
theoreticians of ubiquitous computing: the increase (in) of understanding (in) of
the social world being incorporated into interactive systems (Dourish 200: 16).
But also in the view of Andy Clark in Extended Minds, social machines or
collective machines, which are represented by language and culture, act as
PRoPs minimizing the overload of the brain to explore complex situations.
Desiring machines
Deleuze and Guattari use “Social Machine” to describe the coupling humammachine as a machine of desire, like we see in the industry of entertainment. For
them man is a machine, a machine of desire, the result of a machine of
production. Deleuze and Guattari see nature as producer (machine-production)
and man, as product. Indeed in Anti-Oedipus they describe different social
machines, the barbarian, the despotic, and the civilized, showing how we turned
into an organism of society, a component of a huge social machinery. Deleuze
and Guattari dismiss the controversy between machine with organs or organism
machines, and the incompatibility between machine and desire. They do not refer
to technological machines, because what characterizes modern society is the
fact that it is a complex social machine rather than technological, which
incorporates virtual and real entities in its functioning. An important point to note
is that Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that desiring machines belong to the
domain of dreams and of imaginary, or represent a lack of a lost unity.
Socializing humans
This term also appears in a different context in Canny, J., Paulos, E. (2000).
“Tele-embodiment and shattered presence: reconstructing the body for online
interaction3.” For Eric Paulos and John Canny social machines are toys that were
3
Canny, J. P., Eric (2000). Tele-embodiment and shattered presence: reconstructing the body for online
interaction. The robot in the garden. K. Goldberg. Cambridge, Mass., MitPress: 276-294
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designed to interact with people while robots were designed to interact with
objects. The task of these ‘social machines’ is to socialize humans:
“Let's look instead at today's ‘social machines.’ There is a new
generation of interactive devices targeted at young children, soft toys
with computer cores and capabilities like touch, sensing and speech.
They include Tickl-eme Elmo, Actimates Barney, and Furby, the Model T
of furry automatons. None of these devices can hug or caress, but will
respond to a variety of touch from children. They have been carefully
designed to match the behavior of preschool children. They have no
behavioral autonomy, but can participate in reasonably complex
interactive behaviors (like games of hide-and-seek) that are driven by a
child. That is, they are capable of situated activity. (Canny 2000).”
“Social Machine” as defended by John Canny and Eric Paulos promotes the
“tele-embodyment” which relies upon the confidence between two dialoguing
individuals. An embodied person is different for them than a human+robot hybrid.
“The word ‘robot’ never appears in descriptions of Furbies or Actimates
Barney. We avoided it too in the choice of the PRoP moniker. Not only
does ‘robot’ conjure up images of production-line welding machines and
1950s sci-fi tin-men intent on threatening the human race with extinction,
but its original (and still current) meaning is the reduction of humans to
simple, repetitive machines. The banishing of will, individuality, and
emotion in favor of speed, efficiency and precision. The replacement of
skilled, situated activity with mindless repetition (a robot keeps trying to
drill holes when the work-piece is missing, the drill is off, or the bit is
broken). This is the opposite of what future personal social telepresence
systems will be. They will support a wide range of behaviors, which will
be highly interactive and situated. They will be "antirobotic" in the sense
that "robot'' connotes today (Canny 2000).”
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Immersion as industry
Erki Huhtamo in "Encapsulated Bodies in Motion" exposes immersion as a
product of an experience industry and as a result of discursive formation. For him
the quest of immersion – “ the ‘collective need’ to immerse itself in realities other
than its immediate physical surroundings” - is a cultural topos and it must be
analyzed as a need of a specific society activated in ideologically specific
circumstances. For example the perspective wasn't invented in Renaissance but
was at that time imperative to achieve the illusion of a third dimensional space.
More than the need of creating a virtual reality that can substitute the real one, he
points to the necessity of annihilating the difference between real and virtual
realities. Victorian stereography, Panorama, Cinerama, Cinemascope, 3-D
movies, broadcasted TV programs, Imax and Omnimax as well should be seen
as ideological constructions. According to Erki Huhtamo, filmic experience in
Imax and Omnimax must produce the experience as authentic, and no longer as
‘real’. Since technology is gradually becoming second nature (external and
internal experienced): "There is no need to make it transparent any longer,
simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the ‘authenticity’ of the
experience (Huhtamo 1995)."
Experience as product
Following the ideology behind the immersion industry, we should observe the
human-machine coupling. The stereoscope as a virtual window is one of the
‘machine of vision’ in Erki Huhtamo’s sense. But if we pay attention to the fact
that immersion in the past was provided by painting, we will see that the
conceptual apparatus that allow us to ‘read’4 a painting, indeed belongs to the
4
George Legrady in Legrady, G. (1995). Image, language, and belief in synthesis. Critical issues in
electronic media. S. Penny. New York, State University of New York Press: 187-204. p. 189) says language,
visual reading and the concept of reality are dependent on cultural norms. “Moreover, competence in
reading visual imagery is an acquired skill similar to the process of learning language; it is a social activity
defined by the norms of a particular culture. Norman Bryson maintains that the reality experienced by human
beings is always historically produced. He says it is more accurate to say that realism lies in a coincidence
between a representation and that which a particular society proposes and assumes as its reality, a reality
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operational system of machine of vision. Examples of early immersion industry
explain how a conceptual model of representation can also be considered a
machine of vision. Tromp-l'oeil, Anamorphose and Panorama create the illusion
of space and of objects in different ways. Tromp-l'oeil mixes pictorial
representation among real objects giving the sense of experiencing a 3-D object,
Anamorphose is the illusion of the perspective considering a unique fixed pointof-view for the observer from where the distortion of perspective projected in
different surfaces is corrected, and Panorama patented by Robert Baker in 1787,
consists of a circular painting that can be viewed from its center, with the
observer inside the total apparatus. All these examples compared to cinema,
television, video, virtual reality and other forms of telepresence provided in time
an increased immersion, when the examples that use interfaces such as visual
and audio stereographic field like: Imax, Virtual Environments and CAVES, and
recently data-gloves and Head Mounted Displays allow progressively almost full
sensory perception.
According to Erki Huhtamo immersion  being interpreted as out-of-the-body 
perpetuates the split already remarked throughout our Christian tradition and the
Cartesian thought that distinguished body and soul. The promise in immersion of
a virtual voyage avoiding fatal risks and experiencing simulated situation and
universes reinforces this contradiction: to liberate the individual from the animal
condition given by the body.
Mark Seltzer, in Erki Huhtamo, emphasizes in his analyses of the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth-century culture the intimate coupling between body and
machines. This coupling includes the idea that for the administrative functionalist
ideology, man is also a machine (or must be a machine) like the worker in a
factory. According to Erki Huhtamo (Huhtamo 1995), Mark Seltzer ideas can be
involving the complex formation of codes of behavior, law, psychology, social manners, dress, gesture,
posture – all those practical norms which govern the stance of human beings toward their particular
historical environment.”
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applied to the system of immersive industry, which can be considered as
"apparatuses", technological-meta psychological machineries.
Social machine as production and not as representation
Deleuze and Guattari understand representation as something that points to a
lack of something absent, but represented by an icon. Desire is not a lack of
something else, but a form of presence in fragments with the senses as
distributed objects, which makes desiring machines live under the order of
dispersion, and this dispersion is not a totality to come. Therefore, the order of
desire is the order of production understood also as desiring-production and
social production. As a machinic arrangement in the experience industry of
entertainment, immersion should be considered as production of desire and not
as representation of desires and of virtualities.
Body without organs
In the process of belonging to the technological-meta psychological machineries,
the body turns out to be a body without organs. By having its senses dispersed
as partial objects, which can form an arrangement of machines, no formation of
an imaginary identity or structural unity is allowed5. Even though it supports signs
and codes of the unconscious, interacting (has a synergy) with desiring
machines6. Since the body is a body without organs, it can interact with desiring
machines only by means of using social constructed memory as we can see
below. “Hence the social machine fashions a memory without which there would
be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines (Deleuze 1985, p.142).”
“Partial objects are what makes up the parts of the desiring-machines; partial objects define the working
machine or the working parts, but in a state of dispersion such that one part is continually referring to a part
from an entirely different machine (Deleuze 1985, p. 322-323).”
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“It is only by means of the body without the organs (eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped
up) that something is produced, counter produced, something that diverts or frustrates the entire process of
production, of which it is nonetheless still a part (Deleuze 1985, p. 37).”
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Connective machines
Immersive apparatuses are coupled machines like an organism with connections,
which associate it to different flows.
“The synthesis of connection of the partial object is indirect, since one of
the partial objects, in each point of its presence within the field, always
breaks the flow that another object emits or produces relatively, itself
ready to emit a flow that other partial objects will break (Deleuze 1985,
p.325).”
To understand the state of connectivity as machines, we may begin with the
definition of machine of Deleuze and Guattari. A machine in Deleuze’s sense
may be defined first of all “as a system of interruptions or breaks.” Second,
“every machine has a sort of code built into it (Deleuze 1985, p. 38).” They
understand social machine as a binary relationship between two states of
machines seen as a double function: a flow-producing machine, and an interruptproducing machine, that breaks the flow.
“Everywhere it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines
driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all
the necessary coupling and conditions. An organ – machine – is plugged
into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other
interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a
machine coupled to it (Deleuze 1985, p.1).”
So speaking, every object of analysis is a result of an interrupted flow. An image,
while been observed, is an interrupted flow.
Desiring machines form the microphysics of the unconscious as coupled
machines, functioning within the social machines (Deleuze 1985, p. 183). Under
desiring machines, sexuality that flows beneath the unconscious investments in
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the social, political and religious practices, is a “molecular energy that places
molecules-partial objects (libido) in connection, that organizes inclusive
disjunctions on the giant molecule of the body without organs (numen), and that
distributes states of being and becoming according to domains of presence or
zones of intensity (voluptas) (Deleuze 1985, p. 183).”
That is why art is an important example of desiring machine. Art conceived as
desiring production is understood not as an expression or as a goal, but as a
process of production, which causes things to move and flow. For Deleuze and
Guattari, art represents “how an author is great because he cannot prevent
himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate (Deleuze 1985, p. 133)”,
nourishing a revolutionary machine to come.
Culture as artificial memory
Andy Clark7 in Being there: putting brain, body and world together again
recognizes that the computational nature of individual cognition is not suited to
deal with certain types of complex domains. Therefore, we often use external
structures such as paper and pen and instruments with greater complexity like
the computer and political social and economic institutions to solve problems.
“But it allows also that in this "reaching out" to the world we sometimes
create
wider
cognitive
and
computational
webs:
webs
whose
understanding and analysis requires the application of the tools and
concepts of cognitive science to larger, hybrid entities comprising brains,
bodies, and a wide variety of external structures and processes8.”
These structures mold in turn our behavior constraining our actions to achieve
more chances of a collective success. By creating larger external structures as
7
Clark, Andy. (1997). Being there: putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.
MITPress. ISBN: 0262032406; eBook ISBN: 0585002754; www.netlibrary.com/ebook. Pp: 186-170.
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Clark, Andy. (1997). Being there: putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge,
Mass. The MIT Press. P.218 E-books.
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external resources to simplify the overload of the brain, both physical and social,
which transmit partial solutions along the way, the role of individual rationality
and subjectivity become somewhat marginal.
There is a reciprocal relationship, a two-way interaction between the individual
and complex structures, between the biological organism and the external
resources. This reciprocity is difficult to understand. It may be possible to analyze
the scales and levels of the interaction between the individual and larger
structures, according to Andy Clark through simulations.
Desire experience industry
Although, for Andy Clark, social machines can minimize the overload of the brain
in complex problems, for John Canny and Eric Paulos, it can socialize humans,
but for Deleuze and Guattari as a collective entity, it codes the global system of
desire, coding the flows as its supreme task. That means that each member
shares the destiny, which organizes the three main syntheses of life: (the
connective) production of production, (the disjunctive) production of recording,
and (the conjunctive) production of consumption.
Immersion as a symbiotic interaction
Deleuze and Guattari trying to explain complex interactions of this coupling
human-machine states: “In a word the real difference is not between the living
and the machine, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the
machine that are two states of the living as well (Deleuze 1985, p. 286).” By
reading this, we understand the organic functionalism between two states of very
productive machines. In immersion the coupling human-machine in the industry
of entertainment works as an organ of machined desire. “But the machine
remains desire, an investment of desire whose history unfolds, by way of the
primary repression and the return of the repressed (Deleuze 1985, p. 37).” Or so
speaking, immersion, which follows other machines like the paranoiac,
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miraculating and celibate machines, is the symbiotic interaction of two stages of
machined desire.
Returning to Erki Huhtamo, I see the antinomy in Erki Huhtamo’s thought when
he points out that immersion reinforces the split between body and soul as a
limitation. This coupling humam-machine has not to be guided by the idea of a
‘totality to come’ in the anthropomorphized interaction guided by positivenegative, masculine-feminine. In immersion as technological-meta psychological
machinery we find more than just the split between body and soul of a lost unity.
The fact that in social machines the interaction occurs within the environment
through exteriorized memory, we predict immersion enables distributed senses,
thus distributed zones of presence.
This two-way mirroring interaction apparatus acts as external resources for
imagery, and the self is extended as a product in the experience industry.
References
Canny, J. P., Eric (2000). Tele-embodiment and shattered
presence:
reconstructing the body for online interaction. The robot in the garden. K.
Goldberg. Cambridge, Mass., MitPress: 276-294.
Certeau, Michel de. (1993). “Walking in the cities, an icarian fall”, in During,
Simon (ed.). The Cultural Studies Reader. London, New Yourk, Routledge.
Clark, Andy. (1997). Being there: putting brain, body and world together again.
Cambridge, Mass. MITPress. ISBN: 0262032406; eBook ISBN: 0585002754;
www.netlibrary.com/ebook
Clark,
Andy
&
Chalmers,
David
J.
The
extended
mind.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~papers/extended.html; acessed September 2001
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Deleuze, G. a. G., Felix (1985). Anti-Oedipus, capitalismus and schizophrenia.
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Dourish, Paul. (2001). Where the action is – The foundations of embodied
interaction.
Massachussets, MitPress.
Huhtamo, E. (1995). Encapsulated Bodies in Motion. Critical issues in electronic
media. S. Penny. New York, State University of new York: 159-186.
Legrady, G. (1995). Image, language, and belief in synthesis. Critical issues in
electronic media. S. Penny. New York, State University of New York
Press: 187-204.
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