Part 1: Surrogates
A genre of film which deals with the effects of technological disembodiment—a dislocation or displacement of mind, self, soul, from a fixed body—has become somewhat popular over the past 20 years. While it largely deals with the social and political threats of bio-genetics, genetic cloning, and simulated sensory experience, it could be seen to also function as a warning against the danger of a Cartesian dualism(substantial separation between matter and mind) which has taken itself to new overzealous extremes. The matrix originally dealt with the possibility of a totalizing sensory experience, which is in actuality just a computerized simulation; you think you are eating a steak but in reality your brain is taking in pieces of information which simulates the sensory experience of a steak. More recently two films which dealt with these issues in a more sophisticated manner were Surrogates starring Bruce Willis and Bladerunner 2049.
Both of these films deal with crisis not just in what is real but also in why it matters. For example, in Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist played by Ryan Gosling has a relationship with a hologram—or artificial intelligence lover. In Surrogates, people walk around in a perfected machine-bodies while their minds are plugged into a computer, controlling their artificial body. Their real body remains out of sight and (literally) out of mind, somewhere in a home office in the tranquil suburbs, while their machine-bodies controlled remotely from their brains walks around, socializes, works and does all of the day to day tasks of modern life.
The fascinating thing about Surrogates and BladeRunner, is—Unlike the Matrix where there is this naïve lack of awareness that my matrix(artificial)-self is in fact not real—they (Surrogates and Bladerunner) reject the naïve assumption that if only we knew this wasn’t real, we would all leap out of our stupors and into a state of shared moral outrage; and do something. Rather, the two later depictions of dystopia(Bladerunner and Surrogates), depict a world where the people are totally aware of their inauthenticity or falsity. They are totally aware that their machine body or machine lover are not real, yet nonetheless they lack any framework or reason to care. Life goes on, not so much as a lie—but without any reason to care about the distinction between what is real and false.
The issue with cloning, bio-genetic manipulation and synthetic experience is perhaps not one of a simple concern for what is real, but it concerns the issue of embodiment. Does the mind and body need to be connected, in some sort of direct and even intimate relationship?
Shells, capsules, containers all replace bodies; the implicit statement being that the body is simply a functional extension of the human will. This lack of concern about the reality of sensory experience or connectivity between my material experience and my mental experience could stem from the modern assumption that the mind is where life is. Logos, truth, subjectivity, reason; are all centred firmly in the mind or correspond primarily (exclusively or at least initially)to the mind (or brain as we say today lacking any understanding of a spiritual afterlife); and so the extended body becomes merely functional.
Under this dualistic treatment, the body is separated from the higher pursuits of mind, and even degraded to an animalistic functions of evolution. The message being, without the mind, we are no different from simple animals. The obvious result of this unshakable dualism, is that we seem to assume that as long as the rational mind is aware of what’s real and what’s not, everything is fine. We keep on living through filtered and augmented experience without any nagging metaphysical doubts or moral conflicts. Because we are enlightened; we know.
In Surrogates, the justification for the widespread use of surrogate bodies is that of a perverse fusion of security ideology and personal fulfilment or enjoyment; In one scene we hear an advertisement from the company making the machines, they state;
‘Surrogates mixes the durability of machines with the grace and beauty of the human form to make your life safer and better.’
Safety and ethical, social improvement are of course assumed to be mutually exclusive. It continues;
‘Get ready to live your life without any risk or danger. You can live without limitations.’
Surrogates or artificial bodies(a more durable and replaceable house for the mind) are sold as both a security measure (risk avoidance, people are dirty and unpredictable, outside world in ‘dangerous’) , while also selling us the late capitalist consumer ideologies; the seduction of personal fulfilment, unlimited personal enjoyment and so on. The highest point of prudishness, and reactive fear of the other, is infused with total rejection of duty, social roles, inhibition in the name of individual choice and pleasure.
Moreover, all of the characters in their surrogates appear constantly frigid, rigid, sterile, corporate but also extremely restrained. The key here is that this is not collective discipline or stoic self mastery, but what this technology offers is a sort of social discipline and cooperation which only operate because feelings of fear, desire, impulsive emotion such as anger, are all outsourced to the surrogate; they are degraded to the lesser world of the res extensas.
We needn’t feel these troubling or unpredictable emotions because the surrogate deals with it for us. It vents the emotion of fear, anger and desire in an environment which is harmless. We can be as aggressive as we want with each other because nobody is acting with their real bodies; nobody is actually going to get hurt. We see this logic expressed most horrifically with the drone strike programmes of the 2000s and 2010s. Militarism without the need to risk one’s life, we could say. The mind of the soldier is safely in a military base thousands of miles away while the drone—which acts of behalf of the soldiers body—moves for him (or her!) The strength and skill of the body is, of course, degraded by such an exchange.
Furthermore, the technology of a disembodied mind, offers us the opportunity to fulfil all erotic desire because there is no real connection between people anyway (nobody will get attached or hurt). The Security state and personal fulfilment fuse together to take on this perverse form of prudish plasticity. There are no limits…..we are told…but only because absolutely nothing is at stake. Because everything is totally safe, totally controlled. In this world of disembodied hedonism, we can enjoy everything on the condition that harm reduction is the grounding for everything.
The main theme in the film is not the loss of a natural, pre-technological existence but rather the loss of an embodied self. It brings up the question of what comes of the human when they no longer have a fixed exterior..when the body becomes a commodity; a matter of choice rather than birth.
Those with a sharp ear will have already made the connection between surrogate machine-bodies and the surrogates, in terms of women who carry the child of other parents with the use of IVF medical technologies. Of course, the use of surrogates wombs has been criticized as it has—at times—been used, not just by women who are infertile but also by wealthy women who would rather not endure the bodily discomforts, risks and scars of childbirth.
If we are speaking of the motif of Pods, the ability to create an artificial womb is an unignorable topic for a critique of Pod-life. This is because it does more than simply aim for risk reduction. It also comes with the potential to re-create a space which is designed for comfort, nourishment, protection, (womb like analogies of life-creation) while stripping it of the very bodily intimacy which makes a space more than merely a place of what Agamben called ‘bare life’, sort of animalistic re-production detached from higher ends(legal or divine). Perhaps the consequences of removing the intimacy of shared space which causes scars, and wounds, potentially even kills—all things cosmopolitan liberals shiver at the thought of—is that it also sterilises and neuters the bonds which makes that space into more than what could easily be (having reduced its function to the most efficient and safest form of reproduction of life) be easily carried out inside a laboratory…or by a machine.
Part 2 Aristotelean Flesh
Continuing on from the theme of disembodiment, we will now look at Bladerunner 2049, as an example of an attempt to re-value the exterior…by exterior I mean both the phenomena of—and the material reality of having—a mind inside a fixed body…inside skin or flesh. We will then look at Aristotle’s view of touch as a unique sort of sensory perception which totally obscures the mechanistic understanding which seems reasonable for its other sibling senses, like sight and hearing.
In bladerunner 2049 disembodiment is the unrecognized theme running through the movie. A brief synopsis: K, the protagonist, is part of a genetically modified class used for slave labour. He works as a police officer, tracking down genetically modified defectors who have escaped or rebelled. He ultimately hunts his own kind. His life is, however, totally regulated and controlled. He is not a full citizen, but rather a privileged version of a slave with enhanced genetic abilities, thus showing that genetic enhancement and the democratizing projects of progress do not always move hand in hand…..In other words, he represents the point where the advancement of politics and technology meets a schism.
When K is not working—hunting down others like himself—he spends his time with a strange device containing an AI girlfriend; a hologram of a perfectly programmed lover. Although, rather than provide happiness, we could argue that she makes his servile, unethical, (even traitorous) existence, bearable.
What does this digital love interest signify? It signifies the suspicious form of servitude which unlimited fantasies of technologically advanced peoples are underwritten by. The catch with his digital lover—her being an extremely sophisticated hologram—he can’t touch her. This is not due to some moral or social prohibition, but because she lacks an exterior, he literally can’t touch her. She is pure mind(at least pure intelligence..artificial intelligence).
The paradox is very clever. One could only imagine the unbound sexual fetishes which would be played out with such a technology. There’s already concerns with deep fake technologies and the potential for people using a real face to simulate pornographic experiences; to disembody ones face onto another’s body; a pornstars body for example. In this world, every fantasy is allowed, even encouraged—but touch itself, the meeting of the exterior, is impossible; totally prohibited, not just as a moral prohibition but an ontological prohibition.
This awareness that his lover is not real comes about in tandem with his realization of his political position as a slave. After the device which contains his digital spectral lover is destroyed, he realizes that the pet name she gave him (he has no real name just a serial number), is simply the name of the brand. (Joi) She is a product and his name is simply the repetition of what she knows; her brand.
We could go so far to say that touch (which is the meeting of two exteriors) was the sense (perceptive faculty) in which should K (the genetically enhanced salve) had he been able to feel it with a real woman, would have forced upon him the realization that he is totally prohibited from pursuing a real ‘ human experience’. Another biological note to the class of genetically enhanced slaves in this universe, is their inability to sexually reproduce. In this sense, touch is detached from its natural end(at least its natural erotic end). Yet, paradoxically, touch is also the thing which would stimulate the awareness of this very privation. A subtle critique of the health and safety obsession of contraceptive mechanisms of medical technology which could be argued to do the same thing; but also, an even more potent analogy for a sort of existential contraceptive which this technology plays out on a psychological level; constantly obfuscating your self awareness of your position as a (un)free man.
Proximity to a real object, often is, what is needed to remind one that that very proximity is prohibited. ‘You don’t feel the chains until you move’, so to speak. The message here is that a spectral object never invokes this painful awareness of the real limitation, and thus never opens up the possibility to go beyond it. This is censorship through fantasy rather than censorship of fantasy. A fitting transition for an era in which surveillance and unbound personal fantasies embody digital technology, simultaneously.
At the end of the film, after having gone through this painful awareness and rebelling, K lays on the ground feeling the snow hitting his skin…. The message is the opposite to Cartesian theories of subjectivity. It’s not ‘I have an immaterial mind, therefore I am real (a human with all the authentic claims to freedom, love justice ect.)’…but that I have an exterior, therefore I am—I am embodied, therefore I am. Unlike his spectral lover, he does have a mind inside a body, (an embodied soul as Aristotle would say)—and comprehends this only through the experience of the exterior (that which was with his hologram lover was prohibited).
The film picks up on an interesting shift in the ethical and cultural tension between mind and body. The traditional Christianized suspicion of bodily inclination and desires; to control or maybe repress it—has been totally replaced by a different form of somatic hierarchy. Today, with the free flow of information, the digital mediation of so much of human contact and communication, we don’t see a higher intellect or immaterial self being lowered—or fallen—by a lack of bodily control..a fallenness of sin through sensuous experience. Rather, the undisciplined, lesser (fallen) element is in fact in the abstraction, in the representation and in the mind.
For example, attention economies, mass advertising, homo-economicus with an Iphone, are all not issues of bodily experience but rather of appetitive and addictive mental fixations. For example, dating apps. Statistically, these apps have not led to either high rates of long term partnerships or an increase in sexual activity as a whole. The introduction of these apps actually coincides with generational lack of sexual activity or long term relationships among young people. This is not because young people have simply become socially awkward or lost attraction to each other, but because the very telos (or end) of these technologies is not sensuous experience, nor biological reproduction. It is distraction; a techno-cultural coping mechanism for a deep sense of privation of which getting too close may stir.
It simply uses the bodily stimulation through images of flesh, but its technological design is to stimulate enough distant and detached bodily arousal, exactly so that the viewer, does need to properly seek out—the actually real—sensuous experience, itself. Just like with K, the hologram offers enough comfort or arousal through a mere representation, which is enough to avoid the realisation of the total lack of any contact at all. (he is after all ultimately a slave and probably wouldn’t even be allowed to have actual relations and is genetically incapable of producing offspring). The film catches onto to an increasingly common motif; one that forces us to realize that ownership of property alongside technological advance in distribution are not the same thing as freedom.
So what do we make of this modern wish to disembody the mind from body?
The wish for a disembodied mind of which Gnosticism is the greatest advocate—and which digital Gnosticism(Ray Kurzweil) is the most recent formulation of (putting our minds on computer to live forever ect.)—seems to be not only a reformulation of faith—putting religion under a technologically friendly veil—but also expresses a wish to avert some crippling realization which is not simply stored in the mind but also the body. Marx famously said that religion was the Opium of the people. Today, a disembodied mind is the true opium; and this is not exclusive to the religions of the past. It’s far more prescient for the secular world. Today the highest point of averting a hard truth, or delaying or supressing a creeping awareness, is a desire for disembodiment, and not merely an escape to mechanism or sensuous experience. With the loss of metaphysical outsourcing of hope, love and anger to a paradise after death, we simply allow technology to promise us ‘liberation’ from the responsibility of bodily existence.
The actual message here is that there is no more room for sensuous experience, only highly controlled simulations of such a thing. Virillio’s emphasis on claustrophobia emerges here as prescient, as the spatial ‘room’ to grow, for example, is both materially spatial but also dramatically symbolic. (ritualistic, ethical, political ect.) This goes both for human maturity and also for any notion of history.
This is not a humanistic sentimentalism for closer human connection (as Hollywood films unfortunately moves towards)…rather these warnings could be seen traversing onto the grounds serious ontological problems.
So how do we re-interpret the exterior to free it from this disembodied Gnosticism of the 21st century? Did you know that skin, the exterior which we are talking about here, was argued by Aristotle, to not be an organ but a medium?
In De Anima, Aristotle argues skin is not just another exterior layer which has organ functionality. (Eyes function to see, ears functions to hear and so on) Rather, skin is a medium for a perception (touch) by which living creatures(life forms) affirm existence. For humans beings this never stops as a simple yes or no question answered through empirical observation. But existence as the question of what form they should live. A life structured through speech and actions (Bios)… should include touch as one of the primary ways in which that form is thought.
Aristotle claimed that the things which are already in the world and make sensory perception possible—for example the light makes seeing possible, the air makes smell and sound possible (there is no sound in a vacuum). Skin is not an organ which we feel through as modern medicine tells us, but rather a part of the world (like air or light) which makes the sense of touching, possible. Weirdly enough, skin is that which is both part of the external world and part of our body. We could say it blurs the distinction between both. Its obvious role in intimacy, contact and beauty, blurs the distinction between body and mind and obscures a mechanistic reduction.
While one could replace hearing or sight with certain alternative inputs (brail for reading for example), a GPS for seeing—replacing the perception of the exterior (skin), would be like trying to replace spatial reality itself, or at least the air and light which make it up. The argument for this is far more complex and Aristotle himself doesn’t really spend more that a few paragraphs on it. Although, he does actually end De Anima—interestingly—on the sense of touch.
Aristotle incorporates touch into his theory of a mean; like in Ethics where a balance of emotions is necessary for virtue. Aristotle argues that, like hearing or sight, where excess could damage the sense organ (for example explosion could damage hearing or staring at the sun through binoculars damage sight). Touch in an excess—of heat, cold or hardness like blunt force traumas—destroy the life form itself. In this sense smell, sight, sound are all mechanistic functions which make a body functional. But touch perceives existence itself; life itself. Its role is more than simply inputting data to the mind to perceive for bodily function(sensory organ). It has some valid perceptive capacities which are somewhat distinct from mind. Or in other words, while other senses are replicable as they are reducible to function (data input of objects into a central system), touch responds directly, not just to material mechanistic systems, but to life directly.
Modern medicine has forgotten that the body is not just a mechanistic product of evolution but is also uniquely formed to interpret, read, unify, and pursue any other form of ontological understanding; of which the term body-politic, especially exemplifies. Medical technologies will assume that the perceptive powers of senses which technologies simulate in cybernetics is simply the task of data input and calculation. Skin, will be the frontier which robotics struggle the most (or completely fail to copy) .