True You: A History of Mental Taxonomy 

If a photoresistor lies in your hand, you may use it to build a light-sensing device that activates a motor in the presence of light, or conversely, a darkness-sensing device that emits a shriek when the light source disappears. In short, depending on what purpose one expects a single component to serve, one may assign different names to the same circuit. Calling a “lie detector” a “truth detector” is no different. The fundamental operating principle of the two devices is identical. The only difference is that whereas the lie detector treats agitation and anxiety as evidence of lying, the truth detector interprets calmness and indifference as signs of truthfulness. If so, the truth detector could also function as an “antisociality detector,” characterized by the absence of agitation and the lack of empathy. The question “Are you telling the truth?” becomes indistinguishable from “Are you a psychopath?”

The film Charade cross-edits a contemporary media clip—one of those emblematic moments announcing the dawn of the so-called “post-truth” era—over Audrey Hepburn’s trembling line, “Why do people have to tell lies?” In footage from 2017 during Trump’s election, the wavering gaze of the then–White House senior advisor who inadvertently uttered the phrase “alternative truth” in response to a news anchor asking, “Why did the president instruct the press secretary to lie?”, is overlaid with suspenseful sound effects that bleed into Cary Grant’s meaningful stare at the camera as he buries a sobbing Hepburn in his shoulder. For a bit of local resonance, the graduation-certificate forgery scene from Parasite, as well as news clips concerning the current Korean First Lady’s master’s thesis, are added. It becomes clear that this performance—claiming the genre of lecture-performance—proposes a kind of “educational service” that concerns a certain deadlock around the very possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Among these, the performance focuses not on fact but on truth—specifically affective or emotional truth, which has often been accused of substituting itself for objective fact. Christiane Kühl, who introduces herself as a professor in the Department of Affective Analysis at Google University—founded under the belated motto “When you search Google, Google searches you”—and an expert in affective computing, shifts the performance’s emphasis from tedious disputes over political truth to the matter of the other’s mind. What we must understand, she insists, is not whether a mediocre graduate thesis from some design school was plagiarized, but the mental system that makes us take something as fact. Exposing the white masculine hegemony embedded in the myth of rationality, Kühl laments that the field of affective analysis has invited a double dose of ridicule—both because she is a woman and because the object of analysis is emotion. Yet rather than shattering the myth of positivism, she mounts it.

If every possible form of bodily vibration—vocal tone, micro-movements of facial muscles, even brainwaves—could be recorded and mobilized, then we might finally arrive at truth: the truth about emotion, which has always led us astray from truth. “If you are a witch, you will float; if not, you will sink.” Twisted medieval positivism, which ended only by killing both witches and non-witches, drowned not witches but rationality itself. As a corrective attempt to rectify the history of failed mental taxonomy, more sophisticated pre-emptive prediction takes the place of post-hoc verification. Fact is no longer a passive object waiting to be discovered; it becomes an active adversary requiring pre-emptive counteraction. Terror has not yet occurred, but precisely for that reason it can occur anywhere, anytime. As pre-emptive measures to prevent potential attacks, random searches, total surveillance, and typological classification become justified.

The polygraph—commonly but mistakenly known as a lie detector—is originally a device designed to record blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductance in real time and graph these physiological changes. The idea of using this medical recording device for policing and the apprehension of criminals is known to have come from Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist. Lombroso, who also coined the term criminology, grounded his self-proclaimed “positivist” criminology in phrenology, which assumed that the predisposition toward mental illness was detectable through outward appearance, and in typological taxonomies such as the atavistic inheritance of criminality. The biological determinism he championed was, needless to say, mobilized to legitimize fascism.

Despite numerous revisions since its earliest versions, the judicial validity of the polygraph remains in question. Is this because of the device’s inaccuracy or defect? If we fault the polygraph for its lack of precision while retaining the belief that technological progress will ultimately lead to the development of an almost perfectly accurate lie detector, then we are effectively inheriting Lombroso’s premise. This premise is physical reductionism: the assumption that mental states can be reduced to visible, tangible indicators. The wishful belief that the ultimate detection of lies (or truths) will be realized once the appropriate technology is developed becomes ever more desperate as the arts of synthesis and manipulation advance on all fronts.

The physical reductionism symbolized by the polygraph conceives the human being as a transparent input-output mechanism that maintains homeostasis under any circumstance. If you chew a handful of uncooked rice and the expelled grains are dry, this means your mouth has dried from tension, which becomes evidence of lying. Primitive though it may seem compared to a lie detector, rice divination rests on the same premise as the polygraph in its use of physiological indices to make the invisible visible.

Chris Kondek, invoking ancient rice divination and a truth-verification smartphone application, keeps the audience’s mouths and hands busy while repeatedly asking, “Are you a psychopath?” Adding the “statistical” fact that 2% of the population are psychopaths, he notes that at least one or two people in the audience must therefore be psychopaths. We satisfy our self-regard within the comforting range where we believe ourselves to be only slightly deviating from the center of a normal distribution—special, but not pathological. But within the algorithmic regime of mental classification, a single person walking through the city is simply a psychopath or not, a terrorist or not, a protest participant or not. The probability that a person is a person of interest may be quantified, but the indicators that constitute this probability are binary yes/no outputs. Your probability of being a psychopath may be low, but in a particular moment, a gesture you make may align 100% with that of a psychopath. The machine captures your true face—one even you do not know.

True You presents a contemporary realization of the lie detector’s wishful fantasy: an unconvincing facial-analysis application, a dubious startup project that claims to determine whether a subject is answering truthfully by analyzing the trajectory of a finger moving across a touchpad. Most ominous among these is the “search algorithm that estimates whether a person is heading toward a protest site.” According to Kühl’s research team, by analyzing not only overt facial expressions but small bodily gestures and even minute adjustments in how a scarf is worn, they have developed a technology capable of distinguishing whether someone walking through the city is merely stopping by a nearby market or heading toward a site of protest. Whether this is true remains unknown. As soon as this technology was developed, a Middle Eastern state expressed interest in purchasing it, but Kühl says, “I want to sell it to a democratic country.” As if the holder of a technology could determine the intention with which it will be used. But as Carl Schmitt reminds us, what matters in the hollow neutrality of technology is what form of politics is powerful enough to seize control of it. The closing line—“It is time to go back. Into the dark.”—suggests that the last weapon left to us may be the negative tactic of remaining undiscovered.

• This essay is a review of True You by Double Lucky Production, performed at Art Sonje Center in November 2022 as part of the OPSYN Festival. True You premiered in 2019 in Weimar, Germany, and was scheduled for performance in Korea in 2020 but was canceled due to COVID-19.