In the Mar. 8 group activity to design questions for distinguishing humans from replicants, I had an idea that involved a series of repeated questions, slightly modified each time and appearing at regular intervals. It wasn’t appropriate for the exercise we were doing, but I still tried to describe it to my group. I wasn’t articulating myself well. I think I came across as wanting to measure accuracy and catch lies the same way that some interviews already do, by asking the same question a number of ways, and tripping up the subject. As a group, we followed that idea to ask a question about lying, with the assumption that the subject would have already lied by that point in the interview. Some interesting discussion followed.

But that’s not at all what I meant when I first blurted out my half-formed idea.

I’ve thought about it more and I think I was trying to accumulate similar questions in the subject’s mind to test whether or not the subject created a narrative out of it. My idea was that for a human subject, related questions would line up in the brain to become parts of a story, even if random unrelated questions were interspersed between them. My thinking was that forming narratives, linking events (or questions) first into causal relations and then into meaningful stories, was a uniquely human habit. I have no idea, really, if a replicant could do this. But I think I was clinging to it as an idea because I see it as so very human.

Of course, this idea of mine would have failed, just as the questions should have failed, which is in fact the success of the experiment. We don’t have a definition of humanity, much less a test of it.

But the narrative as proof is still intriguing to me, especially as I see the relationship it has to memories—both real and fabricated. In Blade Runner, replicants need memories, even if they are made up, to develop a story of themselves and therefore to create their own sense of identity and subjectivity. The ability to do this, create a story from a sequence, might not be proof of humanity, but it still might be the way that anyone—human or replicant—creates personhood.

The ability of the human (and newer model replicant) to create narrative from memory is crucial to identity and subjectivity. Memory, whether we call it prosthesis or not, and whether it is based on actual events or simulated, creates a trajectory. The brain puts memories into a sequence, (often somewhat linearly but not definitively so), and that sequence creates a trajectory of a life. It creates a past that can be carried through the present and lets an individual carry a sense of self through time. Without memories there could be no sense of a unique and individuated self that stays together through time.

The trajectory created by memories creates a past, spreading out from the present in a straight(-ish) line. The line doesn’t stop at the present, however, but carries through to the future. The trajectory which leads to the future also leads to death, which creates the dread of death. Without the trajectory created by the narrative of the past (which is created by the sequence of memories), you can’t know of your own death. And you must suspect an impending death in order to dread it. But there’s more to it. The trajectory is also required to see death as a bad thing. If memories, which are unreal, become a part of you and feel real, think about how they reflect across the line of the present you. Death destroys that future and therefore destroys a part of you that currently exists.

In my current understanding of memory as prosthesis (which is not very sophisticated) I think these ideas apply to the way we can see memory as prosthesis and certainly to the way “the future” is really another type of prosthesis. I’m fully expecting later course to material to contradict and complicate these opinions.

Since I did not have the chance to bring this up during our last class, I thought I’d share this facebook exchange I had while watching Blade Runner that might be of some interest:

I was familiar with the video my friend posted.  You can find it here:

Let’s Enhance

And here is the web site for Lytro.

Enhance!

Are Women Real?

In this post, I attempt to tie together many of the works we have discussed so far.

It wasn’t until I studied Frankenstein for the third time (with this class) that the issue of women and their status in society came to the forefront. I’m a little surprised I didn’t realize what was happening with the women in the novel before, but now that I have, I often find myself mulling the issue over, especially as it continues to resurface in many of our subsequent readings. One of the threads that connect the majority of works for me is how the status of women in society affects their “realness.” I find myself questioning the realness of the female characters in Frankenstein and it seems that Nathanael does the same in The Sandman. I thought this might an issue characteristic of the 19^th centuries that could be solved by the passing of time, but the more contemporary works, Blade Runner and Patchwork Girl offer solutions that are ultimately not satisfying.

I don’t think any character in the novel questions whether or not Caroline Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Justine Moritz are real (as in human), but their lack of defining characteristics and their seemingly implicit death wishes do give them an unreal quality. In the novel, women are given as gifts that ultimately die untimely deaths. Caroline Frankenstein is the daughter of Mr. Beaufort, Alphonse Frankenstein’s close friend, and when Beaufort dies, his daughter is given to Alphonse. That’s a rather unsettling exchange. It’s not stated, but I imagine she was a teenager when her father died, and because her mother is not mentioned, I assume she’s also dead, so the only place for the orphaned Caroline is with her father’s best friend? I realize that marriages where there is a sizable age gap between the husband and wife were certainly more common in the late 18^th century than present day, but that uncomfortable thought aside, Caroline had no choice in what her future would be. Elizabeth Lavenza is also given as a gift. She is the child of Alphonse’s sister and an Italian man. When her mother dies, her father remarries and gives his infant daughter to her uncle, and that is the last we hear of Mr. Lavenza. Elizabeth from her arrival in the Frankenstein family is promised to their son Victor. These two women seem simply to be items that are exchanged at the whim of men.

We don’t get any indication that Caroline is displeased by her fate from Victor’s description of her as a perfect domestic angel (so perfect that this interferes with Victor’s idea of women). However, I want to suggest that one of the reasons Caroline cared for Elizabeth when she was sick with scarlet fever is she didn’t actually care if she too caught the disease and died. Victor portrays this as another example of Caroline’s selflessness, but I think her weariness with her life can be detected in what she says. On her deathbed, Caroline gives her position to Elizabeth, “Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to your younger cousins” (26). Supply is an interesting word choice, it brings to mind the idea of production; Caroline is a producer of domesticity and can easily be replaced by a new producer, Elizabeth. Victor remarks on his cousin’s new role:

“Since the death of her aunt, her mind had acquired new firmness and vigour. She determined to fulfill her duties with the greatest exactness; and she felt that that most imperious duty, of rendering her uncle and cousins happy, had devolved upon her” (27) So Elizabeth’s reason for being is to make one man and three boys (Alphonse, Victor, Ernest, and William) happy.

The third unreal female character, Justine Moritz, does not begin her life or a marriage as a gift, but she is made to give the gift of her life. Because Justine seems completely resigned to die for a crime she didn’t commit, perhaps she too has realized that in the world in which she lives, her value is only in how she can serve men. Elizabeth is uncomplaining about her role of subservient caretaker and her death was the most sudden, so we don’t get her opinion on it, but maybe it was not only Victor who harbored a secret death wish for her? I do not believe she wished to die in the way she did, but I do not think it is too far a stretch to suggest that women welcome leaving the oppressive patriarchal society in which they live. Death does seem to be the only escape from a society where women are simply gifts, essentially domestic servants, no matter their station, and in every way, supplemental to men. Mary Shelley’s critique of patriarchal society is so strong and harsh, that I may yet be understating it.

The Sandman is a variation on the issue of realness. The main issue may be about Nathanael’s fear of his losing his eyes, the trauma this causes, and ultimately, whether Nathaneal is even a real human or not, but the issues concerning women are remarkably similar to those in Frankenstein. Whether or not Nathanael is real (I don’t think he is, but that’s another post entirely,) he is a proper patriarchal male in that he has a lot of trouble differentiating between the real and unreal women in the story: Clara, is a strong female, intelligent, sensible, and practical and Olympia who is nearly nonverbal, awkward, frequently referred to as stupid by her “father.” Nathanael, annoyed that Clara challenges his wild ideas, accuses Clara of being an automaton. That is quite an accusation to render on a person! A woman challenges a man must not be a human woman. I wonder how Victor would have responded if Elizabeth dared to challenge him? (She didn’t challenge him and he still did nothing to prevent her death, so imagine if she had been more aggressive!) Nathanael prefers to spend his time chattering away to Olympia, and he probably never would have realized she was an automaton had he not come upon Spalanzani and Coppola fighting over her lifeless (and eyeless) body. Nathanael’s preference for the subservient female who appears to be absorbed by all his ridiculous babbling makes complete sense in a patriarchal society. He thinks he has the issue sorted out, Clara is real and Olympia is not, but he once more becomes confused, tries to kill Clara, whom he is again convinced is an automaton, but he ends up killing himself. Perhaps this is a statement on how dangerous it is to buy into a society where woman are supplemental to men. There are other issues the lead to his death, but had Nathanael never been taken in by the false allure of Olympia, he may have resisted the Sandman.

The more modern works offer solutions to the issue of real/unreal women:

Blade Runner presents us with an alternate reality that curiously features no human women. This may be a solution: in an unchanging patriarchal society, women may need to take a different form to change society. Unfortunately, this futuristic reality is no different from the reality of Frankenstein or The Sandman. The two leading female characters, Rachael and Pris, are both replicants, and as such, must be “retired” to preserve humanity’s safety. Pris presents us with a different kind of female character, one who is aggressively sexual and acts to actively subvert the patriarchal society. Of course, she is not acting alone, but with (or, really it seems, under) Roy, and for me, that lessened her impact as a new kind of woman. It seemed as though she would likely follow any command that Roy gave her.  Her aggressive sexuality does make her more dangerous and it is no shock that she is killed. Rachael, the one replicant who survives is naturally the most submissive, which in turn, makes her the most human. I found her character to be drawn much like the women in Frankenstein, beautiful, subservient, and uncomplaining. Rachael does seem sassy when she’s first introduced, but by the time Deckard has claimed her, that characteristic is all but gone. So, nothing has really changed from Frankenstein to Blade Runner:

In Patchwork Girl, the title character, who I find to be the most compelling female we’ve encountered thus far, is not truly a woman. The Patchwork Girl is a radical departure from the norms of patriarchic society, a girl made of man, woman, and animal sewn together. Perhaps she can change or at least break free from patriarchic society. The Patchwork Girl is charming, seductive, and the first female character that is truly independent, but she still isn’t fully a member of society because society has not changed. I think the Patchwork Girl is meant to be an example of a woman who breaks free from society be living outside of it, but as we see especially in her longing for Mary, this is often a lonely life. Despite that setback, the Patchwork Girl is the most fully realized of the female characters because she acknowledges her position and is able to surpass it. She is not able to change society but she is able to live independently, travel, escape the fate of being subservient to a man, and most important of all, she experiences the true friendship and true love with both Mary and Elsie, and these relationships are only possible between equals. (It may be argued that Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein attained true love, but because Caroline is not his equal, I do not think the argument holds.) The Patchwork Girl accomplishes much, but for her to fully succeed, she would need to be accepted by society, and perhaps change it from within.

I’ve learned that being human is not enough to make women real in patriarchic society, and a woman has to be more than a gift, domestic servant, sexually aggressive threat, and so on, to be real.

Prior to starting this week’s reading, I ran a mental inventory of my preconceptions surrounding these texts and their shared themes. After dropping “feminism” in the center of the mental Venn, my next thought was in the temporal lobe, so to speak: “Vindication” was published in 1972, and “Manifesto” in 1980. As Lit folks, we often find a text’s birthday is of relative relevance…while temporal location grants us access to historical context, we can get anachronistic with it: distance in time between two texts is not necessarily indicative of distance in relevance or theme. We put texts in conversation across centuries, often with fruitful conceptual results. And that’s certainly the case with “Vindication” and “Manifesto.”

Inspecting further through the lens of temporality, I think these women can signpost distinct moments in the chronology of the US women’s rights movement. Here’s my stab at a timeline:

Sure, I’d agree this is reductionist, but it can be helpful nonetheless: and I think the very process of considering markers in the evolution “the woman question” facilitates access to some further ideas.

For example, perhaps we can look at Wollstonecraft as the pioneer of the first phase – moving women socio-spatially from “fringe” to “center” – and Haraway as a pioneer of another ( I hesitate to say “second”) phase, one insisting on blurred spaces, as well as a reality that is irreparably complicated, simultaneously interconnected and fractured. Similarly, we do not locate in Haraway a distinct jumping-off point for a discussion of woman; no cohesive definition of what she might have been, and this connects with her sentiments that “the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense” (150). This, she finds, “is actually “a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space” (150-151). The modern cyborg is at once a realization of ideological evolution, and a contained-self processing unit (…a new CPU?)

When we’re looking at something like “womens rights” in “society,” there seems to be a strain between WOMEN [laws, gender and societal norms, and metastructures] and the WOMAN [actual, individual female bodies and minds]. So how have the stakes evolved, really? Are we actually comparing apples to apples…were “women” in 1792 the same as “women” in 1980?

Authorial intent surely differs as much as historical context. Wollstonecraft has her eyes on the equality prize, and must rely on a certain degree of us-them either-or logic; Haraway needs a dichotomy-free framework.  For Haraway, we’re simply beyond gender duality, and beyond long-held stereotypes of the female reality that have, in fact, ironically grounded much feminism and related identity politics, as well as the cultural meta modus operandi. Perhaps, then, Wollstonecraft’s vision of gender equality becomes realized in the blurring of the human condition to which Haraway gestures? “We are all cyborgs now,” she says…and while I’m not sure this generalization jives, exactly, with her concern that “the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality,” I rather like to think that this could stand in as some perverse resolution to Wollstonecraft’s call for a social focus on the moral development of all humans. Under Cyborgism  we can be equal parts in communication…we can tune our moral monitors to the same program…by escaping dualism, we can stride towards species actualization, and become “more human than human,” a la Blade Runner?

Wollstonecraft’s concern for women’s moral development walks in hand with the topic of power: ultimately that women need power over their whims and vices, and need to make an autonomous claim for their personal development. Women must fight the oppressive emphasis on feminine passion and pathos, and foreground strength. This is a hardness in place of a softness, an agency in exchange for cloistered virtue. Haraway’s cybernetic organism I think is a very pleasing image of hardness and softness (at least in its human animal/machine breakdown), representing a constitutive code quite distinct from the code underlying dominant social functions and territories. The appeal of Haraway’s breakdown is evident aesthetically in a contemporary example, the Borg Queen:

New Woman is not a helpless creature, but a power system: for Wollstonecraft, in fact, one which needs cultivation and moral cultivation as much as if not more than man. Woman‘s virtue is overstated, says Wollstonecraft, and quite frankly is plagued by “ignorance and slavish dependence”. Woman’s fondness for pleasures is not pure and innocent, but uncultivated and immature. 

Is a cyborg a cultivated and mature female? Ultimately, it is hard what to make of this new Woman: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (164). Contradictions are constitutive in the new politics. 

Like our Blade Runner replicants, the problem lies in the question – what IS human; what IS woman? Is “the woman question” a lower-tier problem than the “human question” – or a point of access to it? Ultimately, does modernity…post-modernity…meta-modernity?…does our time need a “Vindication the Third: Of the Rights of Cyborgs”?

**A fair warning that this post contains spoilers for the TV show Dollhouse.**

**Also a warning that this is a long post, for which I apologize.  I attempted to cover a lot of ground in this essay; frankly, I think there is more I would like to cover.**

One concept we have not yet touched upon in our discussion is that of mimesis.  I’d like to use this essay to tease out some questions about mimesis, and explore it as a fundamental concept in Frankenstein, and use it to draw comparisons between Frankenstein, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., and the television show Dollhouse.  Common to each of these stories is the intermingling of birth narratives with mimesis.  How are these two related?  What might each of these, as drawn out in our various texts, tell us about notions of what it means to be human, and the borders between human and not-human?

Promotional Image for the TV show Dollhouse, copyright the Fox Broadcasting Company

Kara Reilly touches on many of these issues in her book Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, including a thorough examination of Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).  Reilly notes in her introduction that “mimesis is among the oldest theoretical terms in theatre and performance theory and is often inadequately translated as ‘imitation’ or representation’; more often than not, mimesis is considered synonymous with realism.  However, mimesis has a genealogy that has shifted and changed over time.  Part of what is at stake in debates about mimesis is an ongoing tension between art and nature. . .Underneath this conversation about art and nature are anxious questions about the very make-up of reality.” (Reilly, 5)

Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, in their book Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, track this shift or change in the meaning mimesis over the course of western history.  They approach mimesis from a variety of angles. Mimesis is miming.  Mimesis is imitation.  Mimesis is emulation.  Mimesis is replication.  Mimesis is metaphor.  Mimesis is rehearsal.  Mimesis is becoming like someone.  Mimesis is aesthetics.  Mimesis is teaching.  Mimesis is about making images.  Mimesis is about making plot.  Works of art are even RECEIVED using mimesis.  Mimesis involves, most importantly for modern times, self-referentiality

So, if mimesis is imitation, mimicry, emulation, replication, then, the monster in Frankenstein learns via mimesis; he is mimetic.  But Frankenstein is also a birth story, with Victor attempting to usurp women’s role in creating human life – how much does mimesis have to do with birth?   Does what Victor attempts in creating the monster involve mimesis in relation to the birth narrative?  Is he doing mimetically what should never be done mimetically?  Also, of course, Shelley’s own writing involves mimesis.  And I wonder what could be said about the questions regarding how much of the novel she wrote, as Percy’s handwriting is all over the manuscript, which our class has come to see as we attempt to encode the manuscript into a digital archive using xml (this encoding is also mimesis).  How mimesis might help us understand Victor’s actions in the story, for I find him to be a supremely unsympathetic character (unlike the character of Mary Shelley – not the author but the character – in Patchwork Girl).

Of course, our Frankenstein is now just as likely to be mechanically-based, as sewn together from other body parts.  One of the first works to imagine that scenario is R.U.R., the Czech play that coined the term “robot” (from the Czech word robota, meaning “servitude” – Reilly also notes that “robotnik is Czech for both worker and serf or peasant.”)  (Reilly,148)  As Reilly summarizes: “while other early science fiction tales, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Rabbi Loew and the Prague Golem, involve creatures rising up against their creators and harming them, R.U.R. is the first tale that shows the total destruction of human beings by their own technology.” (Reilly,148-9)

Briefly, R.U.R. is set on an island at a factory where Robots are manufactured as a replacement for human workers – with a Robot workforce, humans now have more time for leisure activities.  The humans do not see the Robots as having souls, and when a Robot on occasion refuses to work or expresses emotion, it is seen as a product defect.  Human birth rates are already plummeting, but the Robots, even as they rise up and kill their human creators, also cannot reproduce (this might also remind some readers of Battlestar Galactica).  The two things that separate human beings and Robots at the beginning of R.U.R. are emotional response and the ability to procreate.  These two distinctions disappear over the course of the play.  More thorough plot summaries can be found online, but this is enough to see that mimesis is integral to the plot of R.U.R., as well as its performance.

WPA Marionette Theater Poster for R.U.R.

And notice too the anxiety over reproduction inherent in the story.  The play ends on a hopeful note that the last pair of Robots, who manage to fall in love, will be able, because of that love, to procreate.  (Alquist, the last human alive in the play and a builder of the robots, ends the plays by saying “Go, Adam, go Eve.  The world is yours.”) (Gassner, 433)  All of the Robots in R.U.R. look alike – an obvious bit of Freud’s uncanniness – so will this new race all look like exact copies of each other?  Has the phenomena of love between these two Robots somehow changed them into human beings?  What is the difference between human and Robot now?

Reilly includes an interesting letter in her chapter on R.U.R., written by an audience member of the New York production and included in the program.  The audience member tries to give a nickel to a waitress when a machine (from an automat restaurant) dispenses his muffin but returns the coin.  The waitress is so stuck on following protocol at the restaurant, that she will not accept the nickel.  The letter writer concludes:

“To myself I said ‘She is one of those Robots that are being manufactured down at the Garrick Theatre in R.U.R.  One of those creatures who can only do what they have been trained to do.’ We all come in contact with Robots every day.  The human being who has been turned into a machine.  They are one of the problems of our time.” (Reilly, 154-5)

Ultimately, this a shared anxiety in Frankenstein, in “The Sandman,” R.U.R., and in the TV show Dollhouse – what makes humans human, and what separates us from monster or from machine?  We have seen one exploration of this in Blade Runner, and there are many others (Battlestar Galactica and Caprica, Terminator, Doctor Who – to name a few that come to mind right away) and procreation is a constant theme in all of them.  Specifically, procreation wound up in mimesis.

Dollhouse premiered on the Fox network in January of 2009.  Starring Eliza Dushku, the show was created by Joss Whedon, a television and film producer, writer, and director, with a loyal fan base (possibly there are a few in our class).  The premise of the show is that there are 20 dollhouses around the world where human beings, known as “actives” or “dolls” are wiped of their identities in order to be imprinted with other temporary identities and sent on a variety of missions.  The dollhouses are owned by the Rossum Corporation (a direct reference to one of the shows inspirations – R.U.R.), a powerful global entity with deep ties to governments around the world.  The “dolls” have come to Rossum through a variety of means (some by choice, some coerced or forced).  The missions can also range from the innocent and altruistic, to the sexual and devious.

When the dolls are in the dollhouse, without an imprint, they walk around calmly saying things like “I try to be my best,” and “friends help each other out.”  Over the course of the TV show, we realize that the main character, played by Eliza Dushku, is not necessarily Caroline, Dushku’s political activist who stumbles upon the Dollhouse and is forced to then become one herself, but Echo, originally the imprint-less doll played by Dushku (each dolls name is based on military alphabet – Echo, Whiskey, November, Victor, etc.).  The dolls develop personalities and relationships in spite of the science, which becomes important as they realize Rossum has a large plan for this imprinting technology (that, of course, causes the end of the world).

Dollhouse can be looked at through the lens of the Frankenstein story, and there are many moments of parallel imagery.  In re-watching a few key episodes one of the most obvious is the chair in the Los Angeles house where the dolls receive their “treatment,” meaning where they are imprinted or de-imprinted with a personality.  This is similar to how the novel imagines and the films visualize Victor’s lab, and the use of some sort of machinery or electricity to bring life into the monster.  In this case, mimesis is instantaneous, as the human brain (and body) is equated to a computer that can be programmed. But the dolls themselves also become aware to some extent.  In the episode, Needs, Adelle, the head of the Los Angeles house, and her staff hatch a plan to allow some of the dolls who are “glitching” to wake up as their original personalities in order to satisfy whatever primal need is causing the “glitch” before shutting them down and restoring them to their imprint-less selves.

The dolls are clearly Frankenstein’s monsters, always cycling through birth and death.  Mimesis happens during the imprinting process, mimesis is the imprinting process.  And, despite the best efforts of the scientists at Rossum (particularly the genius programmer, Topher, played brilliantly by Fran Kranz – a Frankensteinian name if there ever was one), mimesis “happens” to these dolls or through these dolls.  Topher is the most obvious referent to Victor, for he is the one who imprints the dolls (at one point in the series, a distressed Topher asks, “If I think I can figure things out, is that curiosity or arrogance?“), but the show actually takes this idea further.  In one of the most well constructed episodes of the first season, The Man on the Street, the main story is intersected with interviews of citizens on the streets of L.A.  This episode reveals that the dollhouse is a persistent urban myth in LA – a secret lab under the streets of the city, where people are deprived of their personalities and put to work for those who can afford it.  The people react in a wide variety of ways – while some are horrified, many other are tantalized by the idea of being a doll or hiring one, and others think of all the good that could be done so long as the dolls are all human volunteers.  Near the end of this episode, an imprinted Echo has her first encounter with Paul Ballard, an FBI agent (played by Battlestar Galactica’s Tahmoh Penikett) who has been searching for Caroline and the dollhouse.  She has been sent to beat him up and delay him from returning to his new girlfriend and neighbor (who is at that moment being assaulted by an agent from the dollhouse).  But someone inside the dollhouse has corrupted Echo’s programming and she is able to deliver a message to him.  She tells him he is going about his search the wrong way.  She tells him the dollhouse’s business is pleasure and “that is their business but that is not their purpose.”

The audience glimpses that larger purpose in the unaired season one finale Epitaph One (funny enough, my DVD of that episode opens with a trailer for Wolverine – the creation story for the X-Men favorite).  Epitaph One opens in Los Angeles in 2019 (perhaps a nod to Blade Runner?) to a post-apocalyptic scene where the tech that had imprinted the dolls has gone worldwide (via phones, mobile phones, computers, radios, etc. – “ditch the tech” is a common refrain) and brought down the end of civilization.  As a character states in an earlier episode, “We’re all just cells in a body.”  When another character asks, “Interchangeable?” he answers in the affirmative.  As several characters note – the technology exists, there is no going back; it is out there – perhaps now with a mimetic life of its own.  Epitaph One follows an unfamiliar team of un-imprinted humans trying to find safety in L.A.  They would like to escape L.A., to what is known as Safehaven, where, as one character states, “you die as you are born.”  They find a set of tunnels and accidentally stumble on the underground dollhouse, now empty.  A familiar face eventually shows up, but we learn it is not Caroline, but Echo/Caroline, now a compilation (a patchwork?) of her imprints and a unique personality (is she human?), who is leading a resistance and can get the team out of L.A.

This is the world of forced mimesis.  Birth and death are blurred by the imprint technology.  Those who could – the wealthy and the powerful – could eventually take advantage of this technology, not to hire dolls, but to become them.  If you can be, not who you are, but who you desire to be, in whatever body you desire to be (originally known in the show as an “upgrade”), the multiple “who” who you desire to be, a series of “who” whose personality never has to die, is that a line between human and not-human?  (In 2019 L.A., the resistance team will ‘birth mark’ you – tattoo your name on your back.  If you begin to act abnormally, they can ask you who you are and check this against your tattoo.)  If we can each birth ourselves, then we have no need for motherhood, or for mimetic phenomenon anymore?  Each story we have examined seems to indicate that attempting shortcuts to either leads to the end of what we know as human.

LaRonika Thomas

Works Referenced:

Capek, Karel. R.U.R. Trans. Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair. A Treasury of the Theatre (from Henrik Ibsen to Arthur Miller). Ed. John Gassner. 1950. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. 411-433. Print.

Gerauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. Trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.

Reilly, Kara. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Whedon, Joss. Dollhouse. DVD. California: 20th Century Fox Television, 2009-10.

“The body is not one, though it seems so from up here.” – Shelley Jackson, “Stitch Bitch: the Patchwork Girl.”

One thing, or many? Is a monster a fully integral creature, or literally or etymologically, several? Stitches mark the external evidence of internal division in Frankenstein’s monster, suturing together a gathering of disparate parts made animate. As the parts are ill-fit together, the monster is ill-fit to the world, internal relations forming, foreordaining outer.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the chimera to illustrate the disunity he perceives in a work of literature that seems patched together. The chimera exemplifies what he calls “mechanical form” in literature, the lesser of two kinds of artistic production, the more capably integrated and naturally constructed counterpoise to which he calls “organic.” Frankenstein’s monster breaches this distinction of Coleridge’s, dissolving the boundary between an exalted formative principle and a deprecated one, between the interwoven textures of life and assembly in the style of gears and gadgets.

Chimera depicted on plate

How stable, though, is the category of the “organic?” If something organically formed is somehow uncontrived and with better fit among its various parts than the chimera, we should be able to see how its parts make sense together.

Look at this bird:

Bald eagle

And this:

Pumpkin the presidentially pardoned turkey

Or this:

Hornbill bird

Or the mandrill:

Mandrill

How could you say, if you had never seen a hornbill, or a mandrill, that these creatures’ parts fit together beyond their apparent points of attachment? The head of the bald eagle looks to me entirely out of place in its coloration and just as ill-fit to the body as the head of a chimera to its. A turkey’s head, a mandrill’s face? In their superficial anatomy, they visually clash with their bodies.

By contrast, the digital image artist Martin of Humandescent.com unites visually disparate animals’ parts, using morphing techniques to blend and metamorphose images of different creatures into graceful conjunction with one another. One of my favorites from this site is Kittguin, formed from a blend of a penguin’s body and a black-and-white kitten’s head, the color patterns of head and body assimilated with one another. Fetch! seems to have brown fur, rather than feathers, continuing the dog’s facial texture across its body, and Crog, the crow-dog, has black feathers that blend texturally with the salt-and-pepper jowls of a hound.

Kittguin from Humandescent.com

Fetch! from Humandescent.com

Crog from Humandescent.com

The techniques Martin applies in these pictures answer a question that Coleridge’s use of the chimera only implies: What is a chimera’s graphic opposite? Applied to a living creature, what does the formal transformation from chimerical to organic look like when visualized? In electronically morphed images like these, the Coleridgean chimera rehabilitated boils down to a kind of mixing or exchange of surfaces and textures, or of finer-scale parts among larger-scale ones. Taking these images as examples, a distinction of organisms from badly integrated synthetic creatures seems at least in part to be about texture and scale.

By performing these cosmetic operations on grafted-together images, though, does Humandescent.com defuse the affective potency of composite creatures, taken as monsters? Can we really call Kittguin a monster, as a grafted-together creature? Isn’t it just cute? How does Dowlog (below) look to you? Monster? Not a monster? What about Robin Red Thug? To my eyes, it is not texture per se that makes these images a little disturbing, but the presence of a head that I do not expect in its bodily context. Is it evidence of a composite status what gives Dowlog its affective impact? Or the inclusion of the almost otherworldly ferocity of an owl’s visage?

Dowlog from Humandescent.com

Robin Red Thug from Humandescent.com

If we see a monster like Frankenstein’s as an assemblage of mismatched parts, a Coleridgean chimera brought to life, and then apply pressure to this model, we find weaknesses in it: actual organisms in the world are not always morphologically unified in the way Coleridge imputes, while visibly unified organisms, unchimerical in appearance, may still appear monstrous to us. The chimera, if taken as a model for monstrosity, has properties that turn out to be insufficient to account for monstrosity itself. But are they necessary? The abstracted, formalized idea of the chimerical does not take into account the acculturation that has made some animal forms familiar to us but others bizarre. It does not take into account the deeply embodied nature of our minds and our capacity for revulsion and fear, something we can feel so readily for loathsome creatures, unified in appearance or not. Textural unity after all does not efface the strangeness, the mismatch with expectation, that a novel creature presents. Some morphed creatures still resist unification.

It makes a kind of formal sense that a monster unassimilable to the world around it can be made of parts unassimilated to one another. Beyond this, Coleridge’s rough equation of chimerical form with mechanical has another advantage, when we turn it back on the question of what is monstrous: it gives us the kernel of an explanation of why we would see something entirely inorganic, a robot, also as a monster.

Magnus, Robot Fighter with giant robot

While I unfortunately had to miss tonight’s post-bootcamp festivities, I thought I’d bring to our table a happy-hour-inspired Ngram:

Despite a few foreseen quality concerns for this run (such as the various meanings of “spirits” and “liquor” in context), and surely unforeseen others, I am  officially convinced that modeling tools are powerful provocateurs of interesting questions…crucially, for example: should we be avidly investigating vintage year ~1673?

Have a good weekend, all!

Frankenstein and the Female

The film really uplays the role of women to the plot.  One of the major film additions was that Victor Frankenstein chose to reanimate the recently slain Elizabeth.  While he viewed his original creation as an abomination, he chose to forgo all of his “morals” and resurrect his wife.  It raises the interesting question, what is the difference?  Is it because he loved Elizabeth that it would be alright for her to be brought back to life, and thus she would be a ‘good monster’?  If he could give her a chance, why was he able to give up so quickly on his own monster?  Is it that the monster was a collection of random flesh?  The monster (in the film) did, after all, contain his deceased mentor’s brain.  Would he not retain some of those memories and recognition? This scene offers an interesting addition to the plot.  Frankenstein and his monster are now fighting for the affections of the same woman.  Victor wants her to cling on to humanity, the monster wants her to embrace monstrosity.  It is both a philosophical and physical tug of war.

In the end Elizabeth resolves the issue herself; she realizes what she is and destroys herself.

I felt the movie did a real disservice in downplaying the scene in which Victor reneges on creating a mate for his monster.  There is no reflection on the fate of the world and future generations.  There is no consideration to the possibility of a female monster’s possible rejection of her mate or potential for procreation.  There isn’t the episode where Victor gets halfway through creating the female, sees the morbid delight in his first monster’s eyes, and then chooses to destroy it right in front of him.  The monster’s agony is of key importance in the novel, and it lends more weight to his threat of being with Victor on his wedding night.  The film chooses to have Victor object to making a female monster because he can’t stand the idea of using Justine’s body.  The monster’s threat that follows, while he does stay true to his word, somehow doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact.  I will recognize, however, that the change, the monster choosing Justine’s body, is an interesting one.  Victor’s scientific method used random body parts, largely from people who were strangers to him.  But now he is presented with this pretty young thing that he has known all his life.  Is his refusal because he knows her or is it because he has never had to “dissect” a female before.  The monster even taunts him with the notion that it is just raw material.  I wonder if the monster chose this body in order to torment Victor or because he truly found her beautiful.  Victor doesn’t voice the reason behind his refusal, but the understanding should be that it is because he knew her.  But what is the full extent of the refusal.  Is it that (as I mentioned above) that he couldn’t stand the fact of working on her?  If reanimated, would she curse him for her existence?  Could he not stomach the idea of his monster having his way with this once lovely girl?  Whatever the reason, the audience is not let into the inner workings of Victor Frankenstein’s mind, and the monster doesn’t seem to lament the decision like he did in the novel.

A key depiction of the monster in the film is that he is somewhat lustful.  While the novel monster is a lonely outcast looking for companionship and understanding, the film monster is very touchy-feely with the females he comes across.  When he encounters Justine in the film, he waves his hand over her as if longing to touch, and the sound of dogs and searchers in the background interrupt him from whatever lengths he was preparing himself to do.

Additionally, it is Justine who he later chooses to be his bride.  In the book, while he does stare at her and notice her beauty, he is more angered than anything, knowing that someone like her could never want him.  He frames her and moves on.  When it comes to Elizabeth, in the novel the reader is only given two screams and the monster escapes.  In the film, the monster lies on top of Elizabeth (he even tells her not to scream), a position Victor was in only a few moments before.

The monster stares longingly at her for a considerable time and even compliments her beauty.  Once again, loud noise in the background interrupts him from whatever else he might have done, and he kills her right in front of Victor.  He vies for her affection when Victor revives her, but like Frankenstein pondered in the novel, she rejects him.  Love and lust is never fully reciprocated for any of the characters.  The females of Frankenstein are destroyed, and the males continue the rest of their lives as wretches.