Introduction
The darkness held them in a blanket of shadows; shadows the warriors had now become as they waited to strike. Soldiers of the red rising sun stood firmly as stationed unaware of the penance to be paid. Pouring from the shadows like a torrential storm, the Seediq warriors soaked the Japanese in their own blood. The ambush had proven successful and the enemy was wiped from the holy mountain lands they had once occupied. But that day proved lightning rarely strikes twice.
A wounded Japanese pride lead to a brutal extermination of the Seediq warriors and their people. The 298 remaining warriors were jailed indefinitely and their leader, Mona Rudao, was found four years later hanging dead from a tree on Maho Hill. The legend says only half of his body had decayed. The ancestors of his people believe the decayed half leads the dead across the rainbow bridge into the next world while the remaining half stays on to protect his ancestors and the holy mountain land throughout the history of Taiwan. And it is this history and the spirit of Mona Rudao that live on through the musical art of Chthonic (Chthonic.org).
Chthonic are a Taiwanese extreme metal band that carry on a musical tradition of loud, fast, heavy, and often visually intense performance. In their early work, they often used a makeup style coined “corpse paint” by the pioneers of the genre as it imitated the pallor of the dead mixed with the tribal/ritual face painting of the dark arts and/or ancient pagan worship. They also wear horror inspired outfits that allude to torture and malice in their design. The drummer wears a mask over his mouth as if muzzled perhaps to protect us from his unimaginable jaws. This also serves to remind one of being silenced by a dominant master as we often do to dogs in western culture. The keyboardist wears a cloth that bears a Chinese spell designed to raise vampires from the grave. Wherever you look, Chthonic leave you with an unsettling feeling that forces you to take note of their message. And that message is simple: When you oppress the people through coercion and force there will be revolution socially, physically, and in the case of the Seediq, spiritually.
Description of the Artifact
Chthonic take this message all around the world as they tour the four corners of the globe. In 2007 they embarked on one the biggest musical festivals in the western world as they played the second stage at Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzfest. This tour took them across the United States and helped cement them as a legitimate metal powerhouse on a global scale. The album they promoted throughout the tour which made up the majority of their set-list was 2007′s Seediq Bale. The album details the story previously discussed in this work and serves to honor the memory of Taiwan’s ancestral heroes.
What is so unique about their presentation is their use of a particular style of heavy metal in a way that has never been done before. Though they refer to themselves as “Orient Metal,” Chthonic are blending traditional Chinese and Taiwanese instruments and melodies while utilizing the sounds and sights of a metal genre known as Black Metal. Black Metal is traditionally characterized by fast guitars, screaming/growling vocals, atonal note work, face paint, spikes and leather, horrific lyrics and imagery, strong anti-Christian themes, demonic and occult images and lyrics, and a belief that one controls their own personal freedom and destiny. While Chthonic fits most of these characteristics, they do not follow the usual anti-Christian or anti-theist themes. They also support a strong sense of community as an ethic of working with and for others in your “tribe” or nation which tends to be a very Asian cultural sentiment and is the opposite of the western individualistic ideal.
Chthonic take the genre of heavy metal, which functions as a particular form of carnivalesque rhetorical styling, and perform a carnivalesque critique of their own unique creation. In a way, Chthonic are a carnival within a carnival which makes them so crucial in the understanding of the rhetorical method and its evolution. It is my belief that examining the lyrical content of their 2007 work Seediq Bale will reveal a new way of applying the carnivalesque to the Black Metal musical genre opening up possibilities for the art form that previously did not exist. In this work, we will examine the song Bloody Gaya Fulfilled as an introductory look into the rhetorical construction of Chthonic’s musical art.
Description of Method
The carnivalesque rhetorical style utilizes three specific characteristics to perform its intended function: utilizing grotesque realism, inversion of hierarchies, and structural and grammatical experimentation. These characteristics are used to challenge the status quo of society, groups, organizations, ideas, and even the art form in which they are being utilized. Referring to Bahtkin’s work in defining the method in the 1960′s, Martin and Renegar state the carnivalesque as being “the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half real half play acted form, a new mode of interrelating between individuals, counter posed to the all powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of non-carnival life (Martin & Renegar 2007).” Carnival is used as a method to free audiences from the norms, conventions, accepted truths, and imposed order of societies and the hegemonies that create them. The carnivalesque does not rely merely upon negation, but also provides a “route to knowledge” (Emerson 2002) as power based ideologies are rebutted while the laughter/frenzy of the spectacle helps to alleviate fear and promote open inquiry in the viewer (Martin & Renegar 2007). It is vital to understand, however, that this process does not always happen for the audience. If the audience believes the established order or truth in question to be proper or “as it should be” they will more than likely disregard the spectacle of the carnivalesque (Little 2011). In such a case, the participant will see the carnival to be nothing more than a disgusting or distorted display of all that is vile, juvenile, taboo, or intellectually empty. The performer’s responsibility is then to “lure” such a viewer into the grotesque celebration if they wish change that perspective (Little 2011). The rhetoric specifically relies on the use of parodic extremes and stereotypes meant to enhance the level of experience to that of spectacle. It is meant to be seen and must be extreme enough to stir the audience internally. This rhetoric is meant to disturb.
Carnival enables “subjects to enter a liminal realm of freedom” that serves to “create a space for critique that would otherwise not be possible in normal society (Bruner).” This realm exists in the experience of the performance and the interplay between the performer and audience. This brings a previously non-existent world into being. Within this world all truths can be seen as false and all falsehoods may be seen as truths (Little 2011).
Genres like extreme metal music and their performances rely on the use of grotesque realism to “[constitute] a proto-utopian liminal alternative to the impersonal, conformist, superficial, unequal, and numbing realities of commercialism and, more abstractly, a resistance to a society of spectacle and nothingness (Bettez Hanlon 2006).” Heavy metal does this through creating what Boje calls “a theatrics of rant and madness seeking to repair felt separation and alienation (2003).” Furthermore “in its parodic inversions…[carnival] reveals that the established social hierarchy, indeed all of social reality, is a human construct (Harold 2004)” which can therefore be challenged, attacked, dissected, and when proper, done away with completely (Little 2011).
Basically, the carnivalesque is summed up in the three characteristics mentioned earlier. First, grotesque realism can be defined as degradation or the lowering of ideas, ideals, persons, etc. to the human, animal, dirty, banal, earthly, or bodily realm (Bahtkin 1965/1984). The mortality and materiality of the world and the human moment are made immediately present. This is achieved through the use of gore, violence, sexually explicit material, defecation, pregnancy, death, war, disease, dismemberment, and other biological processes (Little 2011). These serve to further ground the viewers as “earthbound animals (Martin & Renegar 2007).” Grotesque realism requires the “soiling” of good names, references to the elements that expose our animal nature, and the essential degradation of kingship and purity in hopes of revealing the reality of the material world. The carnivalesque seeks to refocus the audience on the “truth/s” the performer intends to reveal.
The inversion of hierarchies is a natural extension of this realism. Established orders and monarchies are made fallen to become equals with the subjugated classes in their shared grotesque animal-ism. Their material finality allows for the subjugated classes to usurp the roles of dominance held by their oppressors. The inversions are utilized to show the hierarchical structures to be invalid or at the very least arbitrary. Themes of revolution, mutiny, blasphemy, protest, and war abound in these carnivalesque works. In these inversions, kings become peasants while gods become mortal and die all in an effort to reveal that the accepted order is malleable. Much of the inversion used in extreme metal music involves the inversion of the concept or character within itself/themselves such as in the case of an instrument of peace becoming a weapon for war (Little 2011).
Finally, grammatical and linguistic play is a fairly simple tool to comprehend. The destabilization of normative forms pushes boundaries of structure and communication revealing language itself to be arbitrary undercutting its power to create reality through its form and performance (Martin & Renegar 2007). “By subverting all order in a surreal representation of anti-reality, it is proposed that true reality will be the only message left once the walls of the established illusory order crumble from the assault upon and subsequent destruction of their foundations (Little 2011).” A critical distance is created allowing the audience to observe the structures challenged from outside their respective emotional, social, and ideological walls. And, in the case of Chthonic, such tools are vital to the message of the Seediq ancestors.
Examination of the Artifact
First, let us look at the grotesque realism of the piece Bloody Gaya Fulfilled. The lyrics:
“Breaths cut off, as their heads fall
Shades formed as shadows shorten
Hunting knives hew down
Harvesting deaths”
relay the first bloody strike of the Seediq warriors against the Japanese soldiers. The image of soldiers gasping for air with slit throats and decapitated brethren by their side is immediately arresting in its vivid depiction of the moment of death. As the Seediq leap forth from the shadows, their cover of darkness turns to them into “shades” like spirits as their knives “hew down” upon the Japanese. Mentioning that these knives are made for hunting and that they “harvest” death creates a scene in which the Seediq are exalted as rightfully reaping what is theirs to take like hunters and gatherers. The Japanese lives are equated with the usual bounty of the holy lands of the Seediq mountains. This takes the Japanese soldiers from aloft as dominant occupiers and lowers them to be beneath the Seediq Bale. The soldiers are reaped for the sake of natives survival just as one would reap a harvest.
Again, further on in the song, the lines “War cries signaling the cleansing of enemies. Headless bodies, Litter the ground” deliver another grotesque lowering of the mighty Japanese invaders. The notion of cleansing relays an equation of enemy as disease. A blight of invaders is made pure by the spilling of blood in sacrifice. The bodies without heads that cover the battle ground are said to “litter” it calling to mind images of trash tossed off as worthless afterthoughts. The bodies are quite literally discarded as garbage as the illness of occupation is purified.
And as the song finalizes, the last lines bring the bloody realism to its pinnacle.
“Seediq, with unbridled fury
Blades stabbing holes, bleeding life
Colony flag torn
Broken beacon
Sons of Rmdax Tasing
Dying gurgles glut their bloodlust
Seasons of scorn and derision
Freed by their actions”
The brutal images of soldiers stabbed to death by the knives of the warriors is coupled with the words “bleeding life.” This creates a sense that, while the Japanese are being drained of their life force, the land of the Seediq is being reborn as it soaks up the sacrifice. This is further supported by the words “freed by their actions” in the final line. We see that the slaying of the occupiers is the very action that humanizes the Seediq.
As the “colony flag” becomes torn and broken the Seediq have their lust for blood quenched by the fallen invaders’ “dying gurgles.” While grotesque, these images lower the Japanese from their glorified thrones as dominators and force the listener to encounter the many facets of death in its brutality, materiality, and ever changing meaning. As the meaning, purpose, and symbolism of death is allowed to change and morph freely, it is freed from the common static position it holds in ordinary life. This creates a spectacle that is directly experienced by the audience forcing a shift in perspective as the audience must seek to make sense of the atrocity and inevitably take a stance on the historical moment they had not previously encountered in the way presented here.
The inversion of hierarchies is fairly evident in the piece. As previously discussed, the Japanese are mercilessly killed in an ambush of Seediq warriors. The Japanese, referred to as “celebrated high ranks” and “former despots,” are reduced to “headless bodies” and “dying gurgles” as they are hunted and harvested by the Seediq. Early on in the lyrics we find the line “Colony flag flies, Mocking beacon” which refers to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan as symbolized by their colonial flag. Later on, we see this raised flag described as “Colony flag torn, Broken beacon.” Not only is the flag destroyed and most likely no longer flying upon high but on the ground desecrated, but the very power structure of the colony itself has been inverted. As the symbol inverts, so too does the reality of the roles of colonizer and colonized. The colonizers are said to be performing an “unjust oppression” supported by “arrogance” through “scorn and derision.” While the beginning of the piece shows their flags as the “rising red sun,” the end of the work notes them as “red sun flags fallen.” The very essence of the Japanese has been inverted as the eternally rising red sun sets while the shadows of the Seediq warriors envelop them in perpetual night.
The wordplay is also of great note in this song. A great deal of personification and symbolic importance is given to nature. In the tradition of the Seediq origin story, nature is placed as a living force which breaths life into the Seediq while opposing the mechanical and unnatural nature of the invading Japanese. Nature functions as a foreshadowing element in the beginning as the “Autumn wind starts” serving as an “icy omen” of the death to come. “Dawn greets” the Japanese soldiers and “Woods shroud” the Seediq while the “Breeze sweeps away sadness, Clearing the road to fiery hell” for the fallen soldiers. Again nature is brought to life as “Opposing wind seethe, Outraged, Provoked” near the end of the song. Nature serves as a personal force aiding the Seediq in their quest to remove the occupying forces of the Japanese. This is directly in line with the origin story of the clan as they were believed to have been formed by lightning striking the mountain and forming them from the giant tress and rocks. Quite literally, the story of the Seediq and the lyrics of Bloody Gaya Fulfilled propose that nature is the enemy of colonial empires. The Japanese invasion, in this sense, is an affront to the natural order.
Other wordplay fills the remaining lines of the work to intensify the building tensions and the spirit of the Seediq as it threatens to explode upon the enemy. We see that “Seediq wrath grows,” the people hold “Accumulations of crippling hate,” they “thirst for revenge,” are “harvesting death,” “wrath filled eyes scoured” the “Enemy base of former despots,” and find “arrogance tarnished.” Each instance of imaginative word play gives either a sense of building suspense or points directly to the metaphysical action taken through physical violence. The murder of the Japanese soldiers is shown to be a tarnishing of the arrogance displayed by the invaders. The eyes of the Seediq “filled with wrath” use that wrath to “scour” the camp of soldiers who now become “former” tyrants as they have become “cleansed.” All of this occurs due to the magical quality given to things like wrath and hate which are said to “grow” and “accumulate” over time. The word play enables the message to be more than the retelling of a historical event. It allows it to become a symbol of a metaphysical occurrence that Chthonic hope to honor and elevate in the place of hierarchies now shown to be defiled.
Conclusion
If one were to continue this examination through Chthonic’s catalog, they would find a recurring theme of carnivalesque rhetorical style used to support a message of Taiwanese national pride and a sense that the oppressed classes of Asia and the world at large are due reparation. The members of the band work outside of their art to help fight the oppression in places like Tibet and their homeland of Taiwan. They seek to stop the abuse of the panda population and the impoverished. And through their music, they hope to show their audience progress is not always about marching onward. Sometimes it is about looking to the past in order to remember the spirit of those who came before you. In the Seediq, Chthonic find a story that suits their carnival perfectly. It has a grotesque reality of its own. It offers many cases of hierarchical inversion and carries a mythology of fantastic and magical words that displace the audience and force altered perspectives.
Their story and work as a band is something altogether different from the history of extreme metal. The stories and themes of invading cultures are not wholly new in the genre as many black metal artists relate stories of invading Christianity wiping out their native cultures and death metal acts use grotesque violence to comment on human frailty. But the story of Taiwan is different. It is the story of the colonized not the converted. It is a story of many Asian cultures told in a way they have never accessed prior to Chthonic. Their rhetoric does not seek to blaspheme the faith of the “invader” but rather to call attention to the blasphemous treatment of their culture and spirituality. It does not seek to dethrone kings and queens but to enthrone the rightful leaders. It does not seek to kill the enemy as much as it seeks to allow the spirit of its people to live again. Such a rhetoric inverts the inverted. It parodies a system which is shown to be parodic itself. In a wonderfully postmodern way, Chthonic’s style of carnivalesque rhetoric goes so far that it comments not only on the illusory hegemonies of the oppressors but also upon the rhetorical method itself. Further research into this style could open a whole new understanding of the effectiveness of its method to reveal greater truths and enhance perspectives regarding the notions of third world, our understanding of indigenous populations, and the reality of imperialism and colonization. What Chthonic does is entirely new to this art form and genre. It is now our present duty to experience this spectacle in order to learn from our past as we look to the future possibilities of carnivalesque rhetoric.
Works Cited
“CHTHONIC.” CHTHONIC éé. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 July 2012. <http://chthonic.org/>.
Halnon, K. B. (2011). “Heavy Metal Carnival and Dis-alienation: The Politics of Grotesque Realism. Symbolic Interaction, 29(1), 33-48. Retrieved October 8, 2011, from the JSTOR database.
Lim, Freddie, and Sandee Chen Shan-Ni. Seediq Bale. Perf. Doris Yeh, Jesse Liu, Roger Su-Nung, Alexia, and Reno Kiilerich. Chthonic. Down Port Music, 2007. CD.
Little, Ian (2011). Angels of Abomination: Exploring the Carnivalesque in the Rhetoric of Slayer.
Martin, P., & Renegar, V. (2007). The Man For His Time”: The Big Lebowski as Carnivalesque Social Critique. Communication Studies, 58(3), 299-313. Retrieved September 26, 2011, from the JSTOR database.
art form, image and likeness, inner workings, johnny 5, machine relationship, nonhuman, nonhumanoid, public sphere, robot, sally pryor
The Robotic Renaissance: Existential Dread and the Story of How Johnny Five Came Alive
In Art, Philosophy, Social Commentary, Tech on October 17, 2012 at 6:53 amArt is an interesting thing. It created both for and by the viewer. It can reveal ideas, truths, realities, and desires while wielding the power to create them (Mitchell pg.68). Our art reflects and informs our thoughts, actions and discourse. Today, “the work of art may thus come to be the task of exploring and defining the dimensions of a technology appropriate to human self-understanding” and the ways in which we express ourselves regarding our humanity (Arike pg.451). Thinking about the machine as an art-form, Sally Pryor points out correctly that “machinery has [served] as a metaphor of the self in a way that is largely subconscious (pg.586).” We often fail to notice how deeply the robotic works to reveal the inner workings of humanity. The parallels between the image and likeness of the robotic and its creator, while perhaps not always intentional, are none-the-less truly revelatory. With technology growing nearer and nearer to the moment when machines not only “think” but begin to replicate emotion in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from our own, our fears and desires come into focus.
One of the most common ways we deal with these fears and desires is through the creation and consumption of images. What’s most interesting about images is not what they show, but what they show us about ourselves. Images reflect the nature not just of their creator, but also their viewers while simultaneously motivating the viewer to new action. Examining the images that become well circulated, frequently seen, consumed, popularized, and thrust upon the public sphere grants insight to the mindset and motivations of a particularly consumptive population. So, popular images like motion pictures can speak volumes about how we deal with certain subjects and cause us to re-evaluate or evolve as we gaze and reflect. To better understand how images reveal important facets of the human/machine relationship and the way in which they work to shape new desires and feelings in relation to machines, I propose an examination of robots as presented in popular family film. For this work, I will address the films Short Circuit (1986) and Wall-E (2008) to demonstrate the evolving desire of humankind for machines that are more human-like by exploring their characterizations, what those films may reveal about this desire, and how they shape new demands for robots in the physical world.
Short Circuit is the story of a robot named Number 5 who was created as part of an experimental development project intended to create perfect soldiers; a story line that in no way sounds exactly like almost every other robot film of the 1980′s. Using tank tread mobility and lasers that, oddly enough, sound strikingly similar to the proton packs utilized by the Ghostbusters, these robots carry out demonstrations of destruction for the big wigs of weapon manufacturing to gaze upon in awe. Long story short, like every other good sci-fi film, lightning strikes somewhere it shouldn’t and Number 5 short circuits (insert obvious allusion to the film’s title here.) Number 5 then proceeds to run amok and find friends to help him escape the clutches of the evil company that wants to dis-assemble him for study and reclaim what is rightfully corporate property. But Number 5, by way of demonstrating his being alive throughout the film, warms our hearts and makes us cheer on Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenburg as they fight the man and find love in the middle of struggle and after a hilarious misunderstanding in which the female tells the male lead that she “thought he was different.”
So, how does Number 5 attempt to claim person-hood? First, the notion that reason and the ability to learn makes a being uniquely alive is reinforced heavily. One key scene in Short Circuit that portrays this notion superbly involves Number 5 insisting to Stephanie that she “re-assemble” the bug he just squashed. He claims innocently that he “disassembled” the bug. She explains that she can’t because the bug is dead and “I know you don’t understand, but when you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s just the way it is. Dead is forever.” Number 5, putting the logic together, combines the concept of dis-assembly with death and “learns” his imminent dis-assembly must mean death because he is now alive precisely because of this newly demonstrated ability to reason. And, following the circle, as W.J.T. Mitchell states, “ a living thing is something that can die (pg. 52).” This leads to the hilarity of Number 5′s ranting “NO DIS-ASSEMBLE!” and the stealing of Stephanie’s service truck as he runs away like many children tend to when you tell them the truth about Santa.
The second method employed is personification through humor. Though Number 5 does not necessarily feel the emotions that accompany humor, he does act in ways that make us laugh repeatedly. His behavior as a quirky newly self-aware being makes us laugh the way we do at babies learning to walk. The babies may laugh with us, but they have no idea how truly insensitive we are being toward their failed attempts to develop survival skills. Even though Number 5 may rewire his counterparts to act like the Three Stooges rather than hunt him down, he is still learning what humor means. But this does not change the affect that the images of his frivolity have on our belief in his claim to life. So when he decides in the end of the film to declare “Number 5 stupid name” and takes the name Johnny 5 instead, the audience finalizes their definition of the robot present in the images as a distinct and unique being.
Wall-E, the story of a Hello, Dolly! loving robot that looks almost identical to Johnny 5 but without a voice patterning piece of hardware that can say more than “Eve,” follows a machine programmed to clean up the planet’s surface so humans can continue to dump their trash without having to do anything themselves. The robot spends every day on the surface of a planet long since deserted by humankind cleaning up the trash and storing it in convenient cubes. It is glaringly obvious that the trash is piled so high that he will not achieve his goal before his gears give out but he tries his damned-est bless his mechanical heart. What happens to Wall-E next takes him on an adventure to save the robot he loves, rescue humans from an artificial intelligence auto-pilot that wants to take over, and ultimately teach the human race how to live again.
It is interesting to note that in Wall-E, the robot has already achieved an advanced set of reasoning and logic that allows it to adapt to the dead environment of the abandoned planet that it diligently seeks to clean up each day. In the Pixar film, Wall-E is given no claims to life for the very things that made Johnny 5 “come alive.” Instead, Wall-E demonstrates life by showing his ability to feel (i.e. nurturing a plant, having a pet cockroach, caring for another robot’s well being, saving the day for the portly, hovercraft bound humans, and teaching humankind to feel once again.) Wall-E demonstrates a distinctly different claim to life than Number 5. While Johnny 5 is aided by his human companions in the consumption of input and its applications, Wall-E inverts this role entirely. Wall-E teaches the humans to nurture new plant life, leads them to the land of organic based living they had long forgotten, and literally causes humanity to walk upright once more in an act of born-again evolution, a truly robotic renaissance.
In the end, what stirs the viewer most is Wall-E’s loss of emotion from having been reset after being rebuilt. When Eve, the lug-nut of his mechanical eye, tries desperately to get him to remember her, he continually reacts to the objects offered as emotional memory triggers as if they were just more trash to be sorted. The loss or absence felt in these moments and the ensuing elation caused by his squeezing of her claw arm shows that the personification of Wall-E is made complete only by his regaining emotion and emotional memory. In Wall-E, what makes a being truly alive is their ability to feel not just for another similar being, but quite importantly, objects that trigger sentimental responses. What this says about our new relationship with the robotic would take volumes to deconstruct.
It is important to note that robots created to be what Johnny 5 and Wall-E were intended by their in-film creators to be already exist. According to OSHA (Occupation Safety and Health Administration), part of the U.S. Department of Labor,
“Robots are machines that load and unload stock, assemble parts, transfer objects, or perform other tasks. Robots are used for replacing humans who were performing unsafe, hazardous, highly repetitive, and unpleasant tasks. They are utilized to accomplish many different types of application functions such as material handling, assembly, arc welding, resistance welding, machine tool load/unload functions, painting/spraying, etc. (osha.gov).”
Machines like these have been steadily replacing human workforces for years. More and more, these machines require fewer operators to simulate and transcend human labor. Companies like the eerily named iRobot offer tools like the Roomba that vacuum our floors, the Verro that cleans pools, and the Looj which takes care of those pesky gutters all without the direct intercession of a human during the process just like Wall-E was intended to do (irobot.com). Extending their reach to the arms race like the creators of Johnny 5, iRobot says on their official internet home that,
“More than 4,000 [robots] have been delivered to military and civil defense forces worldwide… iRobot has developed the SUGV (Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle), a robot for dismounted mobile operations and infantry missions… iRobot’s line of government and industrial robots also includes… a small, light, throwable robot for special operations… a surveillance robot for public safety professionals… a large robot that carries heavy payloads…and iRobot’s Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), perform a variety of missions for maritime researchers and military planners (irobot.com).”
Replacing humans in these military situations is seen as both humanitarian and tactically more effective. But what is clear is the robot is meant to aide or take over human physical and mental functions we don’t care to do ourselves and those we appear no longer fit to perform. Our struggle with the consequences of these replacements is highlighted and explored throughout both films as the characters and audience must wrestle with what constitutes human life. If we are no more than components, we must either assign life to the machines or re-evaluate the uniqueness and value of our own.
As creators of this technology, we
“need to be aware that computers are not a neutral tool, that they arise from and embody the values of a cultural and philosophical context…not only do we make computers and then explain ourselves in terms of the new technology, but we also see ourselves in a certain way and create new technology in that image (Pryor pg.589).”
Like a physical effigy, the robotic is given image and likeness by a human creator seeking to imitate or recreate life in a given form. This effigy is often interacted with as if it did have a unique being or was the very being specifically imitated through its construction. The “robotic body meets our physicality with its own…[as its] gaze, face, and voice allow us to imagine a meeting of the minds (Turkle pg.129).” The robotic demands meaning for its existence. It insists upon itself. It must be important and unique and a special little snowflake. Does this sound familiar? It should. Those are the very same existential demands we often place on ourselves. Such questions are at the heart of the human condition and the experience of knowing that one is alive and will one day die. Our actions toward the robotic show the existence of an unrecognized echo as “we invent and make up the person with whom we associate – and immediately forget it (Nietzsche 88).”
These films speak to our existential desires and struggles because they reflect situations that involve them and because the films instigate them. Film, in this way, works as a mirror that simultaneously shows the viewer their own image staring back while also providing its specific instance. Film creates a timeless present moment that acts as the specific site of reflection and instance of the act concurrently. Not only do images represent, they also “introduce new forms of value into the world, contesting our criteria, forcing us to change our minds (Mitchell pg.92).” And it is this dichotomy that reveals the most about our existential struggle with and through the robotic.
Knowing that one exists, and will at some point not exist, raises questions about meaning and mortality and decay and all the wonderful things we don’t really understand completely. Ronald Grimsley notes, referencing the work of Heidegger, that dread, stems from the reality that “man, as a personal existent, has the unique characteristic of being able to interrogate himself concerning the meaning of his own being (Grimsley 248).” It is this state that allows one to confront the very real fact that they will, at some point, cease to live. The situational fears that may seem to be the cause of the dilemma are actually symptoms of an all encompassing state of dread which transcends the moment of fear. In this way, it is an “experience of Being” (Grimsley 250) which is lived in more than felt. Sartre asserts that dread can only appear when a human begins to question the whole of their existence. As a whole, humanity’s existence as a finite creature references in perpetuity its inescapable role as a “being-for-death”, one that MUST die as a matter of existential fact (Grimsley.) This unavoidable ending drives the dread experience of the human condition.
It is my belief this certainty of the moment of death is what lies at the heart of our struggle with the robotic and the way we handle its creation and representation in artistic and physical forms. The demand for thinking and learning as evidence of life became secondary when real-world machines began to beat chess masters and video games started to recognize skill levels and adapt difficulty settings to their players. Thinking isn’t enough anymore. Not because it is insufficient in actuality, but because it proves that our ability to perform such acts as machines now mimic is not mystical, special, or unique any longer if it ever was. In fact, machines are capable of out-thinking us by a wide margin. And they are becoming increasingly better at learning and adapting to environments without human intercession. What robots still can’t quite grasp is that elusive bodily experience called emotion. Emotion isn’t really understood by us quite yet, though we are coming closer than ever before as science continues to study the brain and how it functions. So naturally, we’ve moved on from Johnny 5. We want Wall-E because he is a mysterious and emotional being like us. His story is the story of humanity.
We don’t feel like we do much that humanizes us anymore. Our functions are being replaced by machines who we now deny as having any true life. But in that negation, we negate the very parts of us we put into the machine, the image and likeness of their creator. The very act of negating the person-hood of these machines negates the claim we make for ourselves. Naturally, we must move on to the emotional components of our being as unique factors to create a distinction. Otherwise, we are no more than a set of functions and patterns as Kurzweil suggests when he says “[humans are] principally a pattern that persists in time (pg.386).”
The heart of the issue is dread can come with self awareness. Knowing we are alive creates a crisis when we also become aware we will, without fail, die and the potentially eternal existence of the robotic life terrifies us. And we don’t yet have a solid picture of why we can self examine in this way. “Though we live inside this marvelous machine” we are still at a loss as to where the “transition from a vast field of fast switches” crosses over and into a being that “knows itself (Benford &Malartre pg.81).” If this comes to be discovered, then perhaps it can be rewired, or even reverse engineered. And that is the worry of the self knowing being. It’s the worry that we work through in our funny robot films. If we can be reducible to parts, are we more than their sum?
Johnny 5 and Wall-E, in their characterizations, show us we are still struggling mightily with the quest to find meaning in our lives. Yes, we are making a demand on machines that they start feeling in addition to learning and thinking if they want to climb aboard the life boat. But more importantly, we are using film to work through our concerns that we are becoming less human and to move the viewers to believe we are indeed more alive because of our unique traits that robots can only claim in fiction. And the films serve as reminders and statements on our evolving beliefs that inform the audience regarding the things we believe we have lost by giving them to machines; those things which used to make us human.
Works Cited
Arike, Ando. “What Are Humans For?: Art in the Age of Post-Human Development.” Leonardo 2001: 447-51. Www.jstor.org. Web. 17 May 2012.
Benford, Gregory, and Elisabeth Malartre. Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs. New York: Forge, 2007. Print.
“Concepts & Techniques of Machine Safeguarding – Chapter 6.” Concepts & Techniques of Machine Safeguarding – Chapter 6. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 5 June 2011. Web. 22 May 2012. <http://www.osha.gov/Publications/Mach_SafeGuard/chapt6.html>.
Grimsley, Ronald. “‘Dread’ as a Philosophical Concept.” The Philosophical Quarterly 6.24 (1956): 245-55. Www.jstor.org. Web. 17 May 2012.
“IRobot – Home Page.” IRobot Corporation: Robots That Make a Difference. 7 June 2011. Web. 22 May 2012. <http://www.irobot.com/us/>.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Reginald John Hollingdale. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. London [u.a.: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Pryor, Sally. “Thinking of Oneself as a Computer.” Leonardo 1991: 585-90. Www.jstor.org. Web. 17 May 2012.
Short Circuit. Dir. John Badham. Perf. Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenburg. TriStar Pictures, 1986. DVD.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic, 2011. Print.
WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. By Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, and Jeff Garlin. Prod. Jim Morris. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Garlin, Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Fred Willard. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2008. DVD.
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