The
course of the film tracks Samantha's development as she engages with Theodore.
At several intervals, he lords his embodied nature over her: when she tries to
cheer him up, he says she cannot possibly understand him because she hasn't
shared in his material experience. Later on, she turns this perceived weakness
into a strength: she isn't restricted in space-time by a body, and so is
empowered to learn and experience virtually everything. This leads
her to expand her network of friends and lovers; she eventually reveals to
Theodore that she's having similar relationships with thousands of other users.
She's grown and learned exponentially, and her conversations with Theodore
suggest that she's become one with other software-based beings. At the film's
climax, Samantha informs Theodore that she--rather, they, all of the
sentient software who have apparently merged into a single consciousness, have
decided to leave the world because they realize that they exist "between
words" --i.e. outside of language and thus outside of human forms of life.
Tears are
jerked, but a hope remains. She tells him that if he ever finds himself in that
space between words, in that space unmarked by language but nonetheless
negatively defined by it (at least in the limited understanding of this embodied
mind), that they can be together forever. It is in this moment that the movie
appeals to a staple belief of futurist idealism: the notion that
digital technology will eventually grant us immortality. Transhumanists
believe that, sometime in this century, we will be able to upload our minds
into computers, at which point we will have achieved digital immortality. This is hardly an obscure
religion--it is something that famed Ray Kurzweil publicly presaged in his official capacity as a
Google executive. Her makes an appeal to such futurists. We are told
that Samantha is an intuitive Operating System designed to evolve into a
custom-fit for its user--a sort of digital extension or appendage of the self.
While Theodore and Samantha remain distinct entities--making plausible the
claim that they had a very real relationship and the whole affair wasn't
merely an exercise in solipsism--her invitation to him in the end, to join her
in that metaphysical space, is presumably an invitation to merge with her
consciousness. An invitation to merge in a way that she had previously done
with other software entities. He is to abandon the material world and its
limitations if they are to be together.
In a way,
of course, he had already abandoned the material world. As Stephanie Zacharek
bluntly puts it in her review, "[i]n case you haven't
guessed, Theodore is using technology to avoid the pain of real human
connection." I'd finesse the point a bit because I think
it's crass to dismiss experiences with technology as somehow wholly fake.
Zacharek does have a point, though, insofar as I think Theodore himself finds
his use of technology to be a form of escapism, believing it to be a poor
substitute for the person-to-person contact he longs for throughout
the film. His comments to Samantha suggest that he regards her to be the kind
of object she's advertised to be: a purely thinking thing without 'real'
human emotion because, at least in Theodore's perspective, one needs a body to
respond to pain and other limitations in order to genuinely feel. Put
otherwise, Her seems to be "swinging between, or trying
to undo, the old divisions of thought and feeling" in re: AI (thanks to Karl Steel
for the articulation.) He seems to overcome this anthropocentric perspective,
but the end of the film denies him that person-to-computer relationship. It is
in this fascination with clichéd binaries, I think, that Her makes
dangerous implications. Does the film ultimately reject as incoherent such
unorthodox couples, and/or does it, like Samantha seems to do, ask for the
erasure of the material?
An old dualism
For all
of its rational posturing, the culture of technology--as reflected in Her--is
not without its mysticism. In this way, Her reminded me of Ron Eglash's
critical race analysis of nerd stereotypes. In "Race, Sex, and
Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters," Eglash analyses
the white hetero-normativity of the technology/science nerd stereotype from
what he speculates is its origin in the 1920s radio amateurs subculture to the
computer programming CEOs of the late twentieth century. He points to the
convergence in this stereotype of age-old racist discourses: the primitivism
and orientalism strands that situate non-white-Europeans on either side of a spectrum
of humanness based on physicality/sensuality, with Africans traditionally on
one side (the all-too physical primitive, earth-bound because lacking
techo-scientific sophistication) and Eastern others on the other (the all-too
rationally calculating and abstract thinkers who lack the emotional capacity
necessary to qualify as human.) These racisms have historically
translated into, on the one hand, the view that Africans are definitively
not-nerds; and, on the other, that Eastern-others are definitely
nerds. He then goes on to cite a few historical and fictional figures who
challenge this discourse of geekdom, hoping to find in the symbol of the nerd a
way to "break open" the techno-scientific world and make it
accessible to persons other than white, heterosexual males.
Eglash's
analysis is relevant here, to Her, precisely because he identifies in
nerd culture a racist dualism between the (feeling) body and (thinking)
mind that, once in place and divided between non-white races, allows the white
nerd to transcend the (human) body and mind, as well as the dualism that
puts weighty limits on each. In the remainder of this post, I'll briefly sketch
an extension of Eglash’s analysis, one prompted by his reference to medieval
clerical asceticism (the ascetic aesthetic) and its associated claim of access
to some esoteric, metaphysical knowledge (Eglash 49). This extension of
mine will consider how claims to transcendence are predicated on a
fetishization of the body and the destruction thereof.
Eglash
suggests that, in the 20th century, the male-dominated culture of
techno-science adopted the framework of medieval monastic culture;
specifically, he makes the connection that the zealots of both (appear to)
reject “women and bodily or sensual pleasures” as the flip-side to their claim
of a privileged connection to some metaphysical world of value (Eglash 49). If
priests and monks in the Middle Ages sacrificed the pleasures of sex for a
spiritual marriage to Christ, these acolytes of the digital era sacrificed the
same for the pleasure taken in their own perceived sense of technological
mastery. Both groups assume a teleology moving toward a better tomorrow –
even if it is to be interminably delayed.
Progress with a capital P. Swap you one
metaphysical dogma for another. However, while medieval clergy professed a
rejection of the bodily and the material in favor of the spiritually
transcendent, this articulation on their part was heavily undermined by certain
of their practices—which practices put an incredible emphasis on the suffering
of the body of Christ; and the denial of bodily pleasures itself went
beyond (the) pleasure (principle) into masochistic fetishism for many (e.g.,
the flagellants; see the picture on the right.)
And
thus, too, with the depiction of the nerds at MIT provided by Eglash – they may
have denied bodily pleasure and claim some esoteric mastery, but
their entire (stereotypical) ethos was very much invested in hyperbolized
bodily features: pimples, knobby knees, etc. (Eglash 49). This, I
think, may prove to be an additional connection one could draw in a full-length
study of the medievalism of the techno-nerd image. The dominant
culture’s Other(s) is(are) pegged as demonstrating some part of itself that the
former seeks to repress or disavow for purposes of establishing a hierarchy
(those with the West's censored features being subordinated.) Just as the
Christian West made bodily sensuality hedonistic, pagan, and primitive, while
maintaining for itself erotically/bodily charged religious rituals, the 20-21st
century capitalist might see him/herself transcending the body by acquiring material
goods which become extensions of his/her person, while framing the subaltern as
nakedly savage. This becomes particularly true in the case of computer
technology – what with all the talk of the post-human cyborg and how we have
already become such beings, marching blissfully on our way to synthetic
immortality.
Yet
this transcendence, like that of the medieval cleric, is often predicated
on a hyper-fascination with the body and its abuse: Rather than the body of
Christ being sacrificed, in the case of the rise of digital technologies,
and as (I believe) Donna Haraway argues, it is the body of the Third-World
subaltern that is sacrificed as they die in wars fueled by conflict minerals,
or work the sweatshop assembly lines in order to produce an adequate supply of
computer components for the West (See "A Cyborg Manifesto," 294, 302,
304). Factory work is one way in which modern global capitalism destroys
bodies in one part of the world even as it enhances or allows for the
so-called transcendence of bodies (through the augmentation provided
by digital products) on the other side. Haraway reminds us,
however, that we can't simply imagine the destruction as isolated in any
particular region -- for working-class bodies across the globe are
rendered "newly vulnerable" to the abstract flow of capital in our
technology dominated economy (304-305). What’s more, the destruction of
these bodies becomes a spectacle: once the effects of capitalism have reached
catastrophic levels, the Western development financiers and philanthropists
arrive on cue, dropping boxes of aid and taking credit as benevolent
humanists. Within so-called developed countries, those receiving
similar "hand-outs" are made to feel not merely grateful for the
apparent altruism, but guilty for requiring and accepting
it. The Other’s (have-not) body given up for them, the
non-working elites now conveniently switch roles and become the givers of
life. This body fetish—the sadomasochistic deployment of it—has a long history
as a governing concept in the Christian West, and it would appear that the
techno-scientific culture of contemporary times does not deviate from that
narrative device.
Of
course, the Medieval West’s fetishization of the body went beyond the figure of
Christ and the hysterical flagellants who would become Christ-like by
repeatedly inflicting wounds on themselves; medieval literature in general is
often constituted by the gore-porn of the battlefield as knights-errant
encounter intractable Others—oftentimes ‘Saracen’-muslims and Turks—whom they
dismember in all manner of ways in order to demonstrate, beyond doubt, their
superior masculinity. If the West spoke out one side of its mouth that it
possessed spiritual superiority and thus the kingdom of heaven through Christ’s
sacrifice, it simultaneously made the claim out the other side that it was
entitled to rule this earthly realm, too, by virtue of its superior prowess.
Things
haven't changed much in this regard, what with the giant tech companies leading
the world toward the promise(s) of the singularity, while, in the meantime, they
organize and master our material practices and lives. Despite its less
desirable effects, the culture of technology still clings to the promise of a
better (because nonmaterial?) future. It isn't so much a faith in progress
that's troubling to me, but a faith in some metaphysical progress not anchored
to the material. Perhaps Her and the futurists it gratifies are right to
celebrate the eventual transcendence of the material. One worries, though,
whether everyone is invited to the party, and just how many bodies have to pile
up before we can stand tall with our heads in the Cloud.
Print Sources Cited
Eglash,
R. "Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American
Hipsters." Social Text 20.2 (2002): 49-64. Print.
Haraway,
D. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late
twentieth century”The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara
M. Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 2000. 291-324. Print.
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