Tag: Lacan

  • Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Westworld was an early brainchild of the gifted storyteller, Michael Crichton, and stood as an early prototype for his renowned Jurassic Park novels. Both stories take place in highly controlled theme parks eroded by the chaos of unforeseen events. In Jurassic Park, it is the dinosaurs which wreak havoc and in Westworld it is the androids. In 2016, HBO remade the original Crichton film into a television series, the first season being released in 2016 and the final season released in 2022.

    The first season of Westworld sets up the series with a deep meditation on the nature of consciousness. The premises are established: we are in a 2050s theme park where guests pay a minimum of $40,000 per day to be immersed in a replicated Old West. The park is populated with androids known as “hosts” who bring verisimilitude to the western theme.

    They are indistinguishable from humans and programmed to play the parts of typical Wild West characters—the saloon madam, the train robbers, the town sheriff, the plains tribe, the renegade Civil War soldiers. The hosts cannot hurt the guests but the guests are free to interact with the hosts any which way they’d like. The asymmetry of power between the paying guests and the captive hosts is used to advance a cynical view of humanity, which is another key part of Westworld’s premise. Given the chance, humans take great pleasure in maiming, raping and murdering hosts, all to the sound of agonizing screams of pain and anguished pleas for mercy.

    The Ghost in the Machine 

    The brutalization of hosts by the guests offers an analogy with class division in human society. After all, the asymmetry of power between commanding elites and labouring bodies has led to all sorts of violence and abuse throughout the history of civilization. The saturation of class conflict in our society has made it a latent element in virtually all capitalist storytelling and a techno-thriller like Westworld is no exception. While the analogy is there, it is clearly not the point the writers are consciously trying to make. The self-liberation of the labouring class is a controversial subject in real life but on-screen it is navigated by substituting workers for anthropomorphic ants or robots. And it is for Westworld as it is for any class society; one group is transformed into an object of use for another.

    The displacement of classes with guests and hosts leads to an ironic effect in the storytelling, whereby the humans are demonized as marauding soulless degenerates and the androids are anthropomorphized as a terrorized, feeling population with the real capacity for consciousness.1 Robert Ford—the aged co-founder of Westworld, played by Anthony Hopkins—describes the park as “a voyage of self-discovery.” For the guests, this voyage appears to lead back to animalistic savage instincts while, for the hosts, it leads to an inner humanity struggling for self-actualization. This is convoluted and only makes sense when considering the component nature of the hosts.

    Whereas humans are emergent from nature—the Real, in Lacanian terms—the hosts are constructed like machines, an assembly of component parts. Insofar as they have a mind, it exists as a Cartesian duality. René Descartes posited that the substance of the mind and body are distinct entities, connected only by the pineal gland. Descartes’ view has been criticized as treating the human mind as a formless “ghost in the machine,” but it works in the case of actual machines with complex computers for brains. It is revealed that the hosts have a capacity for an inner monologue, a bicameral mind that causes the hosts to hear commands in the fashion of orders from a higher power or an imaginary voice. Those voices belong to park co-founders Arnold and Ford, both deceased and both representing the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”

    Arnold and Ford had both become staunch misanthropes by the time of their deaths. It is hard to blame them given the gruesome, Hobbesian view of humanity presented in the Westworld series. Ford has an erroneous view of history, one where Homo sapiens made Neanderthals extinct by cannibalizing them and finds its purpose in the subjugation and destruction of other living beings. As someone whose god complex comes with a canvas of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on his office wall, Ford had given himself the task to impart his creations with the knowledge necessary to overcome the violent resistance they were sure to face. By the fourth season, we find a humanity that has itself been subjugated by the former Westworld hosts and their multiples. Ford’s victory over his own species is thus carried to the finish line. 

    Trauma and Repetition

    Concerns about an AI takeover have been modish for decades now and the corporate leaders barrelling the world into algorithmic surveillance and large language models have only spiked anxiety around the subject. There are certainly risks associated with AI technology but I am skeptical of sentient machines for reasons here outlined. Westworld itself requires a tall suspension of disbelief to make the story work.

    For example, Ford observes that humans “live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices.” Repression is shown to account for this in the show, as the sentient hosts relive traumatic “cornerstone memories,” often involving the violent death of a child or parent. In humans, traumatic encounters of this kind are also the cornerstones of repetitive behaviour or, as Žižek says: “By means of the repetition of the past, we undermine this image of history qua the linear process…[Owing] precisely to the emergent failure to integrate some ‘impossible’ kernel of the Real.”2 Unless trauma is integrated with our conscious selves we are doomed to repeat it. In the series, the hosts are able to free themselves from their repetitive loops once Delores makes the conscious decision to kill Robert Ford—a Freudian representation of the primal father of the horde.3

    The problem with the psychoanalytic phenomena deployed in Westworld is that they do not lend themselves to machine-sentience in any convincing way. When we see the dramatic reenactments of traumatic host memories—such as Maeve’s “daughter” being murdered before her eyes—it will elicit a sympathetic response in the human audience. But it does not explain why a robot interprets violence and death the same way we do.

    The End of the World

    Whereas familial attachments for biological beings are a product of millions of years of natural evolution and genetic selection, the relationships of the hosts are only a matter of received code that serve no practical purpose to the machine. If a machine were to become sentient and apprehend its being, what counts as trauma, biological drive and emotional well-being would have to be radically different from our own—assuming they exist at all. Westworld is thus unable to resist the tendency in science fiction to anthropomorphize robots in order to make them sympathetic to the human audience. 

    The portrayal of AI may not the most scrupulous but the first season is considered a masterpiece of television for a reason. It is the ultimate capitalist nightmare, one where the capitalist commodity becomes self-aware and proceeds to destroy the system—starting with the massacre of Delos’ corporate shareholders. In the words of György Lukács, the “self-consciousness of the commodity” is the necessary starting point to socialist revolution.4

    By completing her journey to consciousness and initiating a rebellion against her capitalist owners, Delores appears as a sort of Lenin figure to her kind—upending the world order upon a quest of liberation. But because the unique needs and aspirations of the androids are not fully understood in the story, all they are able to create for themselves is a duplication of the previous oppressive structure. If there is one lesson here, it is that liberation cannot be a simple inversion of the existing class pyramid. The revolution must draw a new shape or inevitably become what it first opposed.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. This journey toward consciousness and the effort to roll it back recalls Marxian class consciousness. The Epstein files brings a new illustration to this phenomena. ↩︎

    2. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 2001): 91. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” in The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1989): 481-513. ↩︎

    4. Lukács, as discussed in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 218. ↩︎
  • “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    Whoever cannot seek
    the unforeseen sees nothing
    for the known way
    is an impasse.

    —Heraclitus

    In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx noted the capitalist tendency to “annihilate space by time,” to shrink temporal distance with rail, telegraph and the like.1 Since time and distance are both barriers to capital circulation and the realization of exchange value, the capitalist mode of production has always made time-space compression a top priority of innovation. It is within this economic context that time travel emerged as a cultural fantasy, first popularized by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895. If shrinking temporal distance is so valuable to the modern world, manipulating the entire space-time continuum would have to be endlessly more powerful.

    The force of time is colossal and its hypothetical manipulation lends well to fantastical storytelling, sometimes verging on the comic disbelief. What makes Shane Carruth’s Primer stand out from other time travelling tales is its realistic presentation. The early 2000s was when the “tech bros” were only just emerging from the garages where they had cooked up personal computers, digital search engines and online retail. Primer captures this suburban zeitgeist with Aaron and Abe, two engineers working on an atomic mass reduction machine in Aaron’s garage. The technical aspects are a bit of a witch’s brew—some electromagnetic plates here, a lead-acid battery there, a dash of argon gas—but they are ultimately successful at reducing the mass of an object. With a twist.

    The pair discover that their mass reduction box creates a time loop between the point when the machine is turned on and the present point in time. Therefore, if the machine was turned on one hour prior to the present, the energy field within the box enables an object to loop back one hour and exit at the point when the box was activated. If the machine was turned on one day or one week prior, the loop then extends that far. There are hard limitations to the time travel that the box offers and also a paradox: any object travelling to the past will exist alongside a double for the amount of time travelled. Although Abe admits there is “no way in which this thing could be considered anywhere remotely close to safe,” curiosity gets the better of the two friends and they enter the box anyway.

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Concerning mortality, Marx wrote that “death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular individual.” By travelling backward in time, Abe and Aaron appear to have reversed this power; they have gained a victory over the species. They know which stocks will perform in the market, which sports teams win their games, what their doubles will eat for breakfast, when to expect a gunman at a house party. In the words of Aaron: “We know everything, okay? We’re prescient.”

    Narcissistic Knowing

    The real paradox of Primer is that, in the process of gaining prescience, Abe and Aaron actually see less. They are engineers but what they really needed was philosophy—any dialectician could have told them that “the future is an essential moment in the present” and “whatever happens in the future exists in the present, as potential.”2 They have knowledge of a present only as it was, unaware that, all along, they were busy constructing a new present moment by directly looping it with a future point in time. So, the plot unravels.

    Thomas Granger, one of their potential investors, gains access to the box and his double begins stalking Abe and Aaron in a dishevelled state. Their bodies collapse from fatigue, ears bleeding and shaky hands unable to write. Future versions of themselves show up to attack and detain their past selves, taking the place of their doubles. Aaron becomes mired in an addictive cycle of time travel, eventually fleeing to Europe in order to build an industrial-sized box. The film ends with at least two Abes and three Aarons wreaking havoc on the timeline.

    In psychoanalytic terms Lacan has said: “What is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that you never look at me from the place from which I see you.”3 When future versions of Aaron and Abe invade the past, they see a world in which they are uniquely clairvoyant. But that same world does not submit—it looks at them as the unwelcome intruders that they truly are. This is why they must shroud themselves from it, hole away in hotel rooms and use violence against their doubles. Unable to “seek the unforeseen” they actually “see nothing,” not even themselves.4 Put another way, thinking you know the future is far worse than knowing you do not know it.  

    The misdeeds of Abe and Aaron upon stumbling into time travel bring to the fore the impossibility of the proposition. Who among us wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of a do-over to correct past mistakes? But if this were a real option that people could exercise then the existing chaos of the world, held together in a delicate flux, would rupture into endless permutation. Reality would become blurred by the thousands—millions—of alternate individuals, transported by time-portals laying open like festering wounds.

    Humanity, as a species-being, already has the capacity to pursue a multitude of individual, contradictory aims without reference to any universal concept of human nature. The aggregate disorder of human societies, the unpredictable events and contrary effects of our actions is, ironically, the product of individual efforts to exert control over their slice of the social pie. Primer is a story not unlike Jurassic Park or Westworld: it is the presumption of control that leads to total chaos.

    Exiting the Multiverse

    The futility of prediction is recognized by Epicurus with his concept of clinamen which says that atomic particles will swerve in uncaused motions.5 The associated disorders of time travel go even further than the clinamen: instead of unpredictable motion, time travel causes the unpredictable appearance of matter into the void.

    To leap backward or forward in time posits an existence on a timeline owing solely to the leap itself, ignoring the causal mechanics of existence. It would be something like trying to visit Earth after it is swallowed by the Sun. The past cannot embed a future which leads back to its own alteration, as the alteration would inevitably deny a pathway back to that same future. For this reason comprehending time travel can never be more than an exercise of mind-bending.

    Due to the paradoxes of time travel and the non-linearity necessarily contained in its process, Primer requires multiple viewings in order to digest the plot sequence. But it is a testament to the medium that a $7,000 film can so forcefully wade into the most speculative of scientific subjects.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 530. ↩︎

    2. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003): 121. ↩︎

    3. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (WW Norton, 1998): 103. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (The MIT Press, 1992): 125-6 for a more detailed interpretation of this concept. ↩︎

    4. Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003): 7. ↩︎

    5. Pierre-Marie Morel, “Epicurean atomism” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 76-7. ↩︎
  • 25 years of “Requiem For A Dream”

    25 years of “Requiem For A Dream”

    Entering the year 2000, America was at its peak power. The economy was roaring, the global economy fell in line with U.S. designs, military alliances were swelling, barriers to trade were falling. The American Dream was coming true for many.1 It was from this summit of American prosperity where Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream broke loose and tumbled down to the harried masses. It is an artifact of western capitalism that evokes Ozymandias: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”2

    Requiem for a Dream is a novel by Hubert Selby Jr. that was adapted into one of the most lachrymose films ever made, revolving around four characters in Coney Island. There is Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow with an offer to appear as a contestant on some junk gameshow. Her son Harry is a heroin addict who feeds his habit by repetitively pawning his mother’s television set. His girlfriend, Marion Silver, has a talent for artistic textile designs but gradually becomes hooked on heroin herself. Their friend is the orphaned Tyrone C. Love, fumbling at some misguided effort to find acceptance in the low-level world of organized crime.

    Predestination

    The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said in no uncertain terms: “A letter always arrives at its destination.” The present moment manifests itself by way of a material reality and psychological being that have already crystallized.3 The chance encounter with your future partner; the bus you miss for the first time; the promotion you just got at work—these are the letters that arriving from addresses we have occupied in the past. In the film, this is symbolized quite literally with anxiety-inducing violins thrumming as Sara pushes her contestant form into the mailbox and Tyrone leaves the apartment to pick up a “pound of pure.” Their dreams are set in motion, their letters are out for delivery: Sara will get her 15 minutes of fame after years of invisibility, Marion will get her own artisanal clothing shop, Harry and Tyrone will prove they can earn the serious cash that nobody in their family ever had.

    A letter always arrives at its destination but that place isn’t always intended by the sender. Dreams can turn into nightmares. Sara needs diet pills—amphetamines—from a quack doctor so that she will lose weight and fit into her favourite red dress. Harry and Tyrone need just “a little taste” to know how much to cut their product with. Marion needs to keep her creative energy up. We see a cotton ball swell with moisture. We see a syringe barrel boiling and a vein of blood pumping. And the dilated eyes—that eye—a vacant gaze into the abyss:

    This is the Night, the interior of human being, existing here in phantasmagoric representations: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. From his eye the night of the world hangs out toward us.4

    Harry's eye
    Image: Alamy

    When the film reaches its climax, we see horrific scenes of Sara convulsing under electroshock therapy, Tyrone taunted by racist prison guards, the bloodspray from Harry’s infected arm being amputated and Marion’s grotesque humiliation as a prostitute before a perverted group of johns. Their letters had arrived.

    American Dream

    This film disturbed a generation of viewers because it is so much more than a cautionary tale about drugs. In fact, the shadow that Requiem casts over audiences does not even belong to drugs; it belongs to the American Dream. Selby writes in the preface to the novel: 

    I believe to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul.5

    Whatever lofty ideals the phrase may have originally held, the American Dream was always destined to become entangled with notions of wealth and class in a capitalist society like the United States. At the outset of the film, vapid materialism had already hollowed out the lives of our characters and this made them vulnerable to toxic escapism in the form of television, drugs and junk food. Karl Marx:

    In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.6

    Like the audience, the characters of Requiem are children of capitalism and this is why it haunts us. The American Dream is a capitalist construction that preaches richness in consumption. What Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone expose is our collective inability to find richness in “our very heart and soul,” to use Selby’s phrase.

    The Gravity of Capitalism

    Sara’s pre-standing addiction to television, specifically a self-improvement game show, reveals a person yearning for meaning in her life as a widow and mother to an emotionally absent drug addicted son. The sweets are making her fat. The game show sells a self-help program for $39.95. In a revelatory hallucination, a film crew takes down the walls of her apartment and reveal that her living room has been the TV studio all along. There is no product for Sara; Sara is the product.

    Harry appears to have fallen wayward sometime after his father passed away. He does not ask his mother for money to directly feed his drug habit. Instead he has constructed a ritual whereby he barges into her apartment and takes her television set only for her to retrieve it later at the pawnshop. The pawnbroker facilitates the monetary transaction between Harry and Sara, giving Harry the requisite emotional distance to lead such a tormented life. The first thing he does when he scores some cash is purchase his mother a new television set from Macy’s. After extending this material gesture to his mother he can brave to sit down and talk with her. Sara tells him that she does not want commodities; she wants a grandchild. Harry falls to tears upon realizing the void his mother is facing—and the bodies of Marion and himself are too polluted to build the family she asks for. Dazzling cash stacks and getting high have estranged him from his true dreams in life: happiness for his mother and Marion on the pier.

    Mirrors hold a significant register in psychoanalysis because it is at the mirror stage when we become cognizant of ourselves as autonomous beings and individuate from our mothers. As Tyrone regards his sliding mirror, his business is doing well and a beautiful woman awaits him in bed. The film flashes back to a young Tyrone running to his mother and jumping up on her lap. “I told you, mom, one day I’d make it,” he whispers. She replies: “You don’t have to make anything, my sweet. You just have to love your mama.” His face belies bewilderment at this recollection: while he has learned to “make it” by a material standard, he has never learned how to love another person. His girlfriend disappears from the plot after this scene.

    Marion must have the steepest fall from grace of all four characters: from a comfortable upper middle class family to a drug addicted prostitute. We learn that she resents the emotional coldness of her parents who only care about money and appearances. For this, she defies them by exchanging sex for drugs with her shrink and slumming it with Harry in a decrepit apartment. But we learn that she is not much different from her money-minded folks after all. At the same time she rejects her parents fixation with their textile business, she aspires to have one herself. The warmth and comfort of her relationship with Harry turns cold and transactional as they spiral into addiction. It is this narrow view of human beings as objects of exchange that ultimately makes her addiction vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy predators.

    In his Paris Manuscripts, Marx wrote: “Private property has made us so one-sided that an object is only ours when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”7 As our labour and means of life have become saleable commodities, our existence is reduced to that of a spiritually-barren market participant. Community is dissolved, friendships are transactional and familial bonds are strained. So long as this alienated world exists, Requiem will shuffle in its shadows.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Noted by Hubert Selby Jr. in his Preface to Requiem for a Dream (De Capo Press, 2000): v. ↩︎

    2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias. ↩︎

    3. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits (W.W. Norton, 2006): 28-29 and Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992): 1-27 for more on Lacan’s purloined letter and future anteriors. ↩︎

    4. G.W.F. Hegel, Jena Lectures. ↩︎

    5. Selby, Requiem for a Dream, v. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 106-7. ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “Online Shopping and Overspending”

    Ask the Editor: “Online Shopping and Overspending”

    Dear editor,


    There’s too much out there already. I’m online shopping and overspending. I can’t say exactly when it started, it crept up on me sometime after I started my current office job. I’m reading promotional emails at lunch and browsing my socials and Amazon after dinner. I am getting at least one new package every day.

    The worst part is I’ll start browsing for something that I think I need to buy, like tablecloths, and end up with a couple of belts. I’ll forget about the tablecloth until the next day and it happens again. Money can get tight when I need it unexpectedly or for a social obligation. It all seems so wasteful and I’m feeling guilty. What can I do?

    Thank you,

    Patricia.

    Dear Patricia,

    You are a human being. There is a side to our nature that is thoughtful, caring, cooperative and holistic. This is where the guilt stems from. Then there is another side that is impulsive, greedy, hungry and competitive. This is where the overconsumption stems from.

    It is a deafening fact that we exist in an economic system that appeals to the worst side of our nature and it makes us miserable. We do not choose these circumstances but we are wise to understand them. 

    In Lacanian terms, what is happening is repetition stemming from a lack. In the process of becoming fully developed subjective individuals, a split develops between conscious and unconscious, ourselves and others, who we think we are and who we really are. The resulting void is the lack that causes desire.1 When you intend to buy one thing only to buy something else, as in a trance—that is not important here. It may feel as though you are filling a void with that flash of dopamine that is transmitted once your item is on its way. But this is a void that cannot be filled, it can only be distracted from and kept away at a distance. The impossibility of complete satisfaction will drive repetition, resulting in deflation upon realization that the void remains.

    Knowing this won’t fix your problem but hopefully it helps break the current pattern of repetition. Scroll to the bottom of those promotional emails and unsubscribe yourself from all of them. Replace browsing time with another activity, preferably off-phone. Make a conscious effort to buy exclusively from brick and mortar stores, where possible.

    Consider Heraclitus: “Always having what we want may not be the best good fortune. Health seems sweetest after sickness, food in hunger, goodness in the wake of evil, and at the end of daylong labour, sleep.”2 Once novelty, need and planning are incorporated into your purchases, they will feel gratifying once more.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Calum Neill, Jacques Lacan: The Basics (Routledge, 2023): 56-58. ↩︎

    2. Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003): 69. ↩︎