Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III: the Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity
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Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III: The Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity Livia Monnet Mechademia, Volume 7, 2012, pp. 282-297 (Article) Published by University of Minnesota Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mec/summary/v007/7.monnet.html Access provided by The Cooper Union Library (20 Jan 2014 11:32 GMT) livia Monnet Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III: The Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity This last installment of my essay on perversion in Hans Bellmer and in Oshii Mamoru’s anime Innocence argues that the film elaborates a massive theory of the perverse structure of modernity. This theory manifests itself in three main forms: (1) the transformation of the human into a universal equivalent that promises yet fails to hold together a broad range of discourses on the modern subject; (2) the consequent stretching of the figure of “Man” to the snapping point, which is also registered as a crisis in the unities of classical animation; and (3) a moment of crisis of modernity that perversion can no longer manage, and this is where a new figure emerges, the gynoid. But rather than stepping in to ground the modern human subject and “his democracy,” the gynoid forces us to begin modernity and democracy all over again, as if for the first time, but not in the form of critical or juridical reason but in material configurations themselves. stRetching the modeRn suBject When Batou (or Batō) and Togusa arrive at Kim’s mansion, Kim hacks into their e-brains, generating three virtual-reality simulations to stall their 282 investigation. The simulations repeat with only slight variations. While Kim pretends to be dead in all three immersive VR “movies,” he appears as his “real” self—a cyborg with a mechanical-electronic body and a partly human e-brain—only in the first simulation. In the second simulation, he adopts Togusa’s appearance, and in the third, Batou’s. Both Togusa and Batou burst open during these VR simulations, revealing an artificial anatomy of titanium parts and electronic circuitry that is indistinguishable from that of the gynoid dolls—an unequivocal indication that the two Public Security detectives, like Kim and Kusanagi Motoko, differ very little from the gynoids in their basic make-up. There are other variations. In the first simulation, Motoko appears as a doll pointing to a card on the floor inscribed with the Hebrew wordaemeth (emet/truth), and in the second, she points to a similar card with the word meth (met/dead).1 In the third simulation, Motoko does not appear, but leaves behind a card inscribed with her and Batou’s secret communication code, the number 2051. These virtual reality sequences are characterized by forms of reflexivity: reflexive moments in which their computer-generated nature is revealed (the white seagulls arrested in mid-flight in the inner patio of Kim’s mansion) and explicit references to the “external memory database” in which individual and collective memories, knowledge, and sensory data are stored. In one scene, for instance, Kim zips through the simulations in an extremely rapid, “fast backward” fashion, to identify the intruder who has breached his firewalls. The sequence also entails discursive reflexivity. Kim expounds on the per- fection of soulless dolls, and on the continuity between eighteenth-century discourses on the human machine and contemporary discourses on artificial life and artificial intelligence. Referencing thinkers as diverse as Descartes, La Mettrie, Kleist, and Freud, Kim offers a rough, simplified overview of a com- plex philosophical tradition that sits at the crux of Inosensu’s philosophy of dolls and the human machine. Kim’s speech entails a database structure inso- far as various forms of knowledge, histories, and modes of thinking appear to be coeval and equivalent, within a personal “external memory database” that is but a fraction of the huge World Wide Web or “global memory database.” What is more, because Kim’s monologue takes place within the virtual reality simulations, it is situated as just another set of files within a larger database. Let us look at Kim’s speech with its database structure in mind: KIM: The human is no match for a doll, in its form, its elegance in motion, its very being. The inadequacies of human awareness become the inadequacies of life’s reality. Perfection is possible only for those without consciousness, anatomy of permutational desire, part iii 283 or perhaps for those endowed with infinite consciousness. In other words, for dolls and for gods. Actually, there is one more mode of existence com- mensurate with dolls and deities. TOGUSA: Animals? KIM: Shelley’s skylarks are suffused with a profound, instinctive joy. Joy we humans, driven by self-consciousness, can never know. For those of us who lust after knowledge, it is a condition more elusive than godhood. The doubt is whether a creature that certainly appears to be alive, really is. Alternatively, the doubt that a lifeless object might actually live. That’s why dolls haunt us. They are modeled on humans. They are in fact nothing but human. They make us face the terror of being reduced to simple mecha- nisms and matter. In other words, the fear that, fundamentally, all humans belong to the void. Further, science, seeking to unlock the secret of life, brought about this terror. The notion that nature is calculable inevitably leads to the conclusion that humans, too, are reducible to basic mechanical parts. BATOU: “The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual motion.” 2 KIM: In this age, the twin technologies of robotics and electronic neurol- ogy have resurrected the eighteenth-century theory of man as machine. And now that computers have enabled externalized memory, humans have pursued self-mechanization aggressively, to expand the limits of their own function. Determined to leave behind Darwinian natural selection, this human determination to beat evolutionary odds also reveals the desire to transcend the very quest for perfection that gave it birth. The mirage of life equipped with perfect hardware engendered this nightmare. The interest of Kim’s extended meditation on dolls and the modern paradigm of the human machine lies not only in its conflation of several symptomatic discourses but also in its evocation of what might be called the perverse structure of modernity. Kim begins by paraphrasing Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theater” (1810, “Über das Marionettentheater”)3 as well as Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (1919, Das Unheimliche). Subsequently, as he evokes “science, seeking to unlock the secret of life,” he builds on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates on the human machine (homme-machine 284 livia monnet even as Inosensu draws or man-machine) in which philosopher- on a broad range of scientists such as René Descartes, Thomas references-La Mettrie, Willis, and Julien Offray de la Mettrie par- Descartes, Bellmer, Freud, ticipated. Kim’s monologue clearly strives to genetics, AI, AL, and trace a certain lineage of the modern subject: cyborg theory, the film from the mechanistic (Cartesian-cum-En- draws on them in a manner lightenment) paradigm, to the romantic no- that highlights the tion of the man-of-imagination (via Kleist), problem of human likeness and to the psychoanalytic Oedipal subject and human as a sort of (via Freud’s theory of the uncanny). Kim “universal equivalent.” then moves from the Freudian subject to the postmodern cyborg, and finally to the utopian-dystopian notion of the posthuman, “postevolutionary” subject of hu- man genetics and advanced communication technologies and techno-science. Clearly, given its breakneck pace of historical allusion and philosophical citation, the speech aims not for accuracy but for speculative force. It thus conflates a series of subjects: the classic Cartesian subject, the subject of En- lightenment philosophies of the human machine, the disciplinary subject of the nation-state and modern disciplinary institutions such as psychoanalysis, and the “postevolutionary” subject of robotics, nanotechnology, and artificial life / artificial intelligence research. As Thomas Lamarre, Alison Muri, and other critics have noted, this type of conflation is rather common not only in postmodern and cyborg theory but in anime and critical writing on anime as well.4 But such conflation has its reasons, both “internal” (that is, related to the discursive, aesthetic, and animetic logic of the film) and “external” (that is, related to the film’s evocation of the discourses mentioned above, which come to the film as if from without). Take, for instance, the film’s engagement with Kleist’s “The Puppet -The ater.” As Bianca Theisen has shown, in the puppet’s center of gravity, Kleist sees a convergence of the dancing puppet, the puppeteer, and God.5 Yet these figures remain effectively blind to one another. The puppet, for instance, does not know that it partakes of God’s divine innocence and grace. Kim’s speech evokes a similar paradox in its reference to the grace of dolls and of God (or gods), and its suggestion of an overlap between dolls, deities, and animals. Yet, just as Kim comments that “(dolls) are nothing but human,” the film Inosensu insists on the problem of the imposition of human likeness upon dolls, gods, and animals, thus highlighting a question of the human that remains muted in Kleist’s essay.6 At stake then is the function of the human in establishing equivalency across domains. Indeed, even as Inosensu draws anatomy of permutational desire, part iii 285 on a broad range of references—La Mettrie, Descartes, Bellmer, Freud, ge- netics, AI, AL, and cyborg theory, the film draws on them in a manner that highlights the problem of human likeness and human as a sort of “universal equivalent.” In a similar manner, albeit for different reasons, Bellmer’s theory of perversion establishes an equivalency or interchangeability between the hu- man and the universe that also brings together doll, human, and universe.