Tag: Unconscious

  • 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. ↩︎
  • Psychoanalyzing “Seinfeld”

    Psychoanalyzing “Seinfeld”

    Every second our senses send approximately 11 million bits of data to our brains for processing. To avoid overload, only a maximum of 120 bits is handled by our conscious selves at any one time. That means 99.9999% of the information that our brains receive is unconsciously filtered out in a process known as sensory gating. What information actually registers with our conscious minds is determined by a range of factors—our knowledge, passions, past experience and the immediate environment.

    There is no doubt that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld mastered the art of observational humour. It works by dredging up universal experiences familiar to the audience—but only familiar at the level of the unconscious. Each episode bounces like a pinball against the bulk of overlooked perceptions, fleeting thoughts and petty nuisances that form the social unconscious. In this way the fabled “show about nothing” becomes “a show about everything.”

    Less Than Nothing

    Ever had to wait a while for a table at a restaurant? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever encountered a hostile service worker? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had an encounter with a communist? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had someone call you by the wrong name? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever been short of toilet paper when you needed it most? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Any and every petty occurrence of social life is picked up and taken to its extreme end in the world of Seinfeld, where exclamation points end relationships and lunchtime calzones make-or-break careers.

    The situations in the series may seem obvious at the surface but it is no easy feat to keep the stakes spinning so high on axes so small. Seinfeld accomplishes this by removing the frictions that rub against the grain of our lives in the West. The financial stress of mortgage payments or annual rent increases; the social pressure to start a family; the heartbreak of losing a relationship; the emotional complications of friendship; depression owing to unrequited dreams; the precarity of work in the neoliberal economy—the emotional toll of life is completely alien to the protagonists of Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza, Elaine Benes and Cosmo Kramer.

    The worst financial disruption in the series occurs when an unemployed George is forced to move back into his childhood home for nearly two seasons. But this is only used as a narrative device to foreground the comically dysfunctional relationship of George’s parents. Outside of this setback for George, the characters all exist in vaguely middle class stations without need—even Kramer, who doesn’t have a job or clear means of support. 

    In the absence of economic pressures, the social world of these characters has the luxury of collapsing into the myopic. When Jerry’s girlfriend declines his invitation to a bite of his apple pie, he spends the episode investigating her behaviour and figures she is psychotic. When Kramer spots a former roommate at the airport who stiffed him on $240 two decades prior, he purchases an even more expensive flight ticket to confront the man. When Elaine realizes her apartment building is just outside of a Chinese restaurant’s delivery zone, she moves into a janitor’s closet across the street in order to get their flounder delivered. When George’s girlfriend passively receives a “thank you” for a salad that he purchased, his demand for recognition causes the dissolution of their relationship. 

    As director Tom Cherones flipped through early scripts of the show, he struggled to understand it. “This storyline all about Jerry buying a suede jacket and everyone flipping out about the lining being pink-and-white striped. Why was the lining of a jacket such a big deal? Who fucking cared?”1 Good question.

    By itself, the material comfort of the show’s protagonists does not explain their total fixation with the excruciating minutiae of everyday life. But these are people devoid of any lofty goals or long-term ambitions beyond the immediate situation before them. The Marxian psychoanalyst Erich Fromm warned “if man does not overcome his infantile strivings…he is torn between the desires of the child within himself and the claims which he makes as a grown-up person.”2

    Through the Looking-Glass

    The infantile tendencies of the characters are demonstrated throughout the series.  Jerry habitually eats kids cereal and idolizes Superman. George sobs during Home Alone and reveals his favourite drink is milk with Bosco chocolate syrup. Elaine chews Jujyfruits and likes the kid-friendly movie Sack Lunch while her more refined boyfriend, boss and friends insist on The English Patient. Kramer obsessively safeguards a game of Risk and rolls around the neighbourhood on a girls’ bike.

    The objects of the characters are torn between the social reality of adult human beings and those carried over from their childhoods. This is further reflected in their inability to form emotional attachments. The romantic relationships in the show resemble sibling rivalries more than affectionate bonds and the four friends themselves often treat one another callously unless they need something. The neuroses displayed in Seinfeld tilts toward what Sigmund Freud termed “primary narcissism,” wherein an individuals’ “only realities are his own bodily and mental experiences, and the world outside does not yet [emotionally] exist.”3 

    This neurotic presentation was fuelled by Larry David’s notorious “no hugging, no learning,” rule for the characters. These characters were condemned to be consumed by the socially unconscious “little things in life” and therefore had to be regressed themselves—their sensory gates open to a conscious mind that is less developed than the typical adult faculty.

    The universal relatability of Seinfeld thus has two layers: in the situations presented to the characters and the characters themselves. That is because primary narcissism is a psychological development stage that we all pass through en route to adolescence. This stage is shed as our personalities mature but it is embryonic and foundational to further development. Freud wrote: “The earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved; they have been absorbed in the later phases, for which they provided the material…We can only be sure that the preservation of the past in mental life is more the rule than a strange exception.”4

    We do not approve of the characters’ actions in Seinfeld but we immediately recognize the situations that confront them and follow the logic of their response. This is because, for some period of our development, we were them. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud observes that peculiarities in the infantile way of thinking “are retained in the unconscious of adults” and that “any recovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as ‘comic.’” Suspension of disbelief is achieved whenever the characters’ actions or schemes result in failure and ostracism. The self-defeat of the characters is never-ending and it imputes just enough realism to a show that would otherwise slip off a fantastical cliff.

    While some cultural creations take many years before they are appreciated—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane are some examples— Seinfeld gained massive resonance with an audience during its run by ruthlessly pulling out those perceptions normally filtered by our consciousness and throwing them to our feet. It has maintained its popularity in the years since, if Netflix’s recent $500 million acquisition for streaming rights is any indication. But it is a product of its decade.

    The Freezer of Time

    Seinfeld could not be created today because the social unconscious has changed too radically in the years since facing disasters such as the “war on terror,” accelerating environmental ruination, destabilizing refugee crises,’ COVID-19 and western deindustrialization. It is not a coincidence that the first full season of Seinfeld aired in 1992—the very same year when Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man was released. The grand Cold War ideological debates were over, neoliberal capitalism had triumphed, history had ended and “the little things” were the only remainder. Seinfeld was the ultimate statement from the yuppie middle class of the 1990s on the irrelevance of politics, its ignorance of class conflict, their indifference toward collective aspirations and the futility of fretting over the future. Seinfeld is that head space containing everything that ever was and would be. 

    The continuing appeal of this postmodernist, ‘90s-era “show about nothing” is best explained by its striking quaintness and naïveté in the eyes of contemporary viewers. To continue with Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he describes instincts as “an urge inherent in living organic matter for the restoration of an earlier state.”5 What Seinfeld offers today is a dream-like return to the apparently simpler, more pleasant social unconscious of a bygone era. Thirty years ago Seinfeld was the zeitgeist; now, it is the palpable escape.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Seinfeldia (Simon and Schuster, 2016), 49. ↩︎

    2. Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (Bloomsbury, 2020), 31. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 46. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016),51-2. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 75-6. ↩︎