(This is a draft of a talk I gave a while back, to be expanded to article-length soon. Maybe)
Home Bodies: Prosthetic People and the Economy of Desire
In 1970, Masahiro Mori argued that, “as robots appear more humanlike, our sense of their familiarity increases until we come to a valley. I call this relation the ‘uncanny valley’” (“Uncanny”). His point was that, as the robotic moves from the commonly industrial to the more human-seeming, it generally follows an upward trajectory of acceptability. Up to a point. Mori suggests that there is a point at which the human-seeming and the human become directly at odds, as the replica draws attention to mortality and, indeed, insists in its appearance as a reminder of it. As a figure for this uncanny, he suggests the prosthesis. Clearly, a prosthetic hand, say, has its uses and its presence isn’t something most of us are going to object to. Encountering someone with a hook, for instance, serves to draw attention to a loss and may spark sympathy for the user. But as prosthetics become more complicated and more discrete,
[s]ome prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation. So maybe the prosthetic arm has achieved a degree of human verisimilitude on par with false teeth. But this kind of prosthetic hand is too real and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness. So if we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature. In this case, there is no longer a sense of familiarity. It is uncanny. In mathematical terms, strangeness can be represented by negative familiarity, so the prosthetic hand is at the bottom of the valley. So in this case, the appearance is quite human like, but the familiarity is negative.
Certainly, we can’t fault someone for wanting a prosthetic that resembles the “natural” as closely as possible. There is a matter of utility to consider. In terms of hands, the world is made by us for thumbs and fingers (this is why, after the Ape uprising, the world will look so different). But the cosmetic changes also serve a purpose, since these may help the wearer integrate with the larger social milieu without too many stares. But Mori’s point is that this is so only as long as a certain distance is maintained. When we get too close, the experience can be a little, well, creepy.
I like this idea of the prosthetic as uncanny in part because it works so nicely with a larger investigation I’ve begun into questions of what constitutes authenticity. What I’ve come to suspect is that any claim about the authentic relies on a certain distance from the object in question. For example, my own personal realization of a standard post-colonial trope happened during the last Democratic Presidential primary. During one of the debates, when the field was still large, one pundit commented that the choice of a nominee would come down to which candidate seemed most authentic to the voter. At that exact moment, I reached for a bag of tortilla chips that was emblazoned with the slogan “Authentic Mexican Taste” and, with that coincidence, realized the problem. “Authentic Mexican Taste” only makes sense outside of (a mythic) Mexico. (This distance may be very much like the distance insisted on by medieval courtly love narratives.)
My encounter with Mori’s Uncanny Valley was likewise coincidental with my viewing of two BBC documentaries, one on the Reborn phenomenon and one on RealDolls. The former are dolls created to be almost identical with (real or imagined) infant children. Some go so far as to have a small apparatus included to add movement resembling breathing. These dolls are avidly collected (almost always by women), sometimes (according to the documentary and to forums for collectors) because they are “cute,” but also apparently frequently as a kind of surrogate for “real life” infant children who are apparently unavailable. The latter, RealDolls, are likewise modeled on humans and are as detailed as manufacturing technology permits. These dolls, though, are intended as sexual partners and, probably not surprisingly, most of them are modeled as women (though there are masculine dolls). As you can likely imagine, much attention is given to forming the secondary sexual characteristics as close to “real life” as possible. Both kinds of dolls are clearly intended for different audiences, but I’m wondering if it might not be possible to talk about them both under the rubric of prostheses. The question would then shift from what they represent as a positive manifestation to what loss these dolls address.
I have to admit that I find both dolls equally unsettling and my research up to this point has served to increase my discomfort. But that may be the point. My question might be translated to “What is it that these dolls re-present that makes me want to recoil?”
At this point, I take “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” as axiomatic. If, as Lacan claims (and courtly love narratives describe), man only has a relationship with his fantasy, then the RealDoll is precisely a prosthetic. Consider, for example, Davecat, who could easily be on the poster for RealDoll acceptance. Meghan Laslocky, in her comprehensive article on the subject of RealDolls for Salon, writes:
Unlike some other doll owners who have no interest in “organic” women, Davecat says he hasn’t completely given up hope. In the meantime, though, he’s considering getting another doll—or two or three—to keep Si-chan [his one relationship] company. But if the right real woman were to enter his life, he says giving up Si-chan would be excruciatingly painful, like removing a limb. (Salon)
Of course, I’m lucky here, as this presents my metaphor so well. But I’d like to suggest that the simile isn’t a coincidence. He may very well feel like he’s losing or replacing something he owns as intimately as a hand, that is, his fantasy.
For Lacan, Man—those beings who fall under the category Man regardless of biology—has a relationship only with his fantasy and “his pleasures are limited to those allowed by the play of the signifier itself—to what Lacan calls phallic jouissance, and to what might similarly be called symbolic jouissance” (Fink 106). That is, the masculine subject has ceded or sacrificed his jouissance to the Other and the only enjoyment available to him comes by way of the symbolic Other as that which describes his lack (of a firm signifier) as loss. The lost signifier stands for what Lacan designates as castration and it is via the (empty) signifier that marks castration, the phallus, that the masculine subject is defined as such. Man ex-ists insofar as the support for his being rests on an internal inconsistency (the lack or bar) that is imposed from without as cause. The cause of desire is imposed on him before he knows it, so that when Lacan says that Woman is the symptom of Man, we should understand that Lacan is saying precisely the opposite of what is usually ascribed to him. Woman as fantasy is what causes man to ex-ist as a subject. As Bruce Fink describes it:
The castrated subject is the subject that is represented. The castrated subject is always presenting itself to the Other, looking to win attention and recognition from the Other, and the more it presents itself, the more inescapably castrated it becomes as it is represented by and in the Other. The castrated subject is the barred subject, the subject under the bar: it is a product of every attempt and intent to signify to the other. (73)
The paradox here is that, while castration institutes the cause of desire for some subjects, it is the continual re-affirmation of castration itself that instantiates the masculine subject as such. It is the very failure to get what he’s after that constitutes him as a man. To be even more Lacanian (which means, to bring in his math), consider sexuation:
top-left-line1 marks the father-function which effectively allows for the delimiting of the set of all men by positing the exception or necessarily excluded term—there is one (the Mover, God, or here the uncastrated Father) who does not fall under the phallic function, and
top-left-line2, indicating that therefore all men fall under the phallic function or, as Lacan puts it, “it is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription” (Encore 79).
Man qua barred subject can only have a relationship with his fantasy, a fantasy, moreover, that appears structured from without in order to give a body to that which he lacks. There is no such thing as a sexual relationship and so, as Zizek argues, “because of the lack of [a] universal formula, every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a ‘private’ formula for the sexual relationship—for a man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula” (Plague 7). The object to/with which a man has a relationship “is only peripherally related to another person” (Fink 107), and this is why Lacan calls the jouissance derived from this relationship masturbation, “the jouissance of the idiot” (81).
The attention to at least the significant details, the “realism” of these dolls, is a function of their place in the fantasy relationship. If, as I’m suggesting, we may consider them in terms of prostheses, it’s clearly no fun to masturbate with a hook.
But in the case of Davecat, his one RealDoll Si-chan isn’t only a sexual partner; she is also a being with whom he plays video games, shares meals, an entity who (for him) has specific personality traits and even has a Twitter account. She is, from Davecat’s perspective, realized as an object with whom he has rapport in every way that matters to him (he says he most loves “just being able to see her, you know, looking at me, regarding me, that sort of thing, and me doing the same back”; Love Me 1:55 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f59N37xH0Ng). Though she was bought on the internet (or maybe, rather, because of it), Si-chan is Davecat’s girlfriend, with whom he has normative heterosexual relations.
But what, in these terms, can we make of the desire for the ReBorn doll? For many, it may be the urge to collect, and these dolls may find themselves surrounded by other, less realistic dolls in a case somewhere in the home. Certainly, that’s possible. Of course, we might then wonder at why people form collections, suggest that collection is one way of positively addressing a lack as loss, since a collection is always (at least) one-shy and the worst fear for any enthusiastic collector is also the goal: completion. Lacan talks about this in Seminar XX in terms of Don Juan. There is something libidinal about collecting. But why do these dolls (need to) look so real? And why are they always infant dolls? Again, it has become almost a commonplace that there is something libidinal about motherhood, too, such that Irigaray writes that the mother “has the child, with whom her appetite for touching is given free reign…. In her relationship to the child she finds compensatory pleasure for the frustrations she encounters all too often in sexual relations proper” (1469). Along this line, Collette Soler argues:
[T]he great modern, anti-Sadian principle that no one has the right to dispose of the other’s body hits a stumbling block in this limit-zone of mothering: the first humanization of the body is open to excesses and transgressions. Even before the child begins to apprehend the difference between the sexes, the excesses and transgressions trap him in the ’sexual service of his mother,’ in the position of fetish, and sometimes of victim. (116-117)
If this is true, then the infancy of these dolls may indicate that it is precisely the infant that can (or must) tolerate this kind of caressing. That is, what we may find is a kind of staging of the pre-symbolic mother-child relationship Kristeva describes (in Powers of Horror and elsewhere), before the separation that engenders the abject qua remainder, a remainder that maps pretty nicely to the Lacanian conception of the lamella as a remainder in the Real such that, as Zizek makes clear:
[T]his Real is for Lacan the Real inscribed into the very core of human sexuality: “there is no sexual relationship,” human sexuality is marked by an irreducible failure, sexual difference is the antagonism of the two sexual positions between which there is no common denominator, enjoyment can be gained only against the background of a fundamental loss…. [T]he myth of lamella presents the fantasmatic entity that gives body to what a living being loses when it enters the (symbolically regulated) regime of sexual difference. Since one of the Freudian names of this loss is “castration,” one can also say that lamella is a kind of positive obverse of castration: the non-castrated remainder, the indestructible partial object cut off from the living body caught in sexual difference. (How to Read Lacan)
Zizek’s examples of lamella are drawn mostly from horror films, from Alien in particular, but also include zombies, the Chesire cat’s grin, and amputated limbs that move on their own. In a way, then, I think we can see the place of this kind of prosthesis as an object (of desire) referring to lamella, to libido, to the loss engendered by subjectivity as such, and ultimately to the Lacanian object petit a. Again, Zizek:
The object petit a is not what we desire, what we are after, but, rather, that which sets our desire in motion…desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another; through all these displacements, however, desire none the less retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object…. [T]he automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent, (libidinal) object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy-place. (Plague 39)
Here we find both the logic of collecting and the introduction of love. But is it possible to love a doll?
The BBC documentary “My Fake Baby” primarily focuses on two women who in some ways are not unlike the two women of the famous Wisdom of Solomon story. The first is a grandmother who raised her grandson through his toddler years while her daughter underwent treatment for cancer and who “lost” him when her daughter recovered, married, and moved to Australia. She commissions a doll based on photographs from his infancy. The other is a (married) woman who clearly enjoys the attention she gets when she pushes one of her pram-cradled children in the park or down the street, who enjoys spending large amounts of money on designer clothes for the dolls, but who is too busy to care for a real-life infant. These dolls are idea because, she says, they “never grow out of their clothes, never soil them. It’s just fabulous. The only difference, of course, is these guys don’t move” (Today). Our sympathies, I think (or the sympathies of the documentary), are clearly with the grandmother, Christie. We feel for her when, excited, she brings her baby home, her husband recoils from it and responds, “I don’t like it…. I’m sorry, I don’t…. It makes me think of something on a mortuary slab,” and she cries (41:41). In both cases, though, the dolls clearly occupy a pre-given fantasy space—the perfect, trouble-free infant for one and the displaced grandson for the other. Perhaps it is simply that we more easily recognize the loss the grandmother addresses? But, in a sense, isn’t the other mother’s approach to what she’s buying more honest?
The paradoxical point is that the grandmother’s investment in the re-situation of her grandson as an infant who both needs her and can never leave is precisely a fantasy that performs a kind of warping, thereby creating a distance from the object that makes it palatable for her (and for us). This explains why we may respond with distaste when the other woman buys a new doll and, after a few days of “bonding” with it, discovers cracks at the base of its skull and decides to return it. Isn’t this her right as a consumer? But doesn’t this also collapse the distance between semblance and thing on which the purchase is apparently built? Thus, the uncanny.
What should be apparent now is that, from a particular point of view, possession of a Reborn or RealDoll may not be all that weird. If we are talking about prosthetics and fantasy, then the following from Meghan Laslocky’s article discussing another RealDoll owner, Everhard, isn’t so surprising:
He says he’s driven to impress women, but he’s a failure at it, and since he’s had his dolls, he worries less about not having a real girlfriend. “Real dolls are imitation women. They are only an approximation to the real thing. To the best of the real thing,” he emphasizes.
RealDoll and Reborn lovers are not by-and-large people who have “real life” options, at least any more. Apparently, most Reborn owners are older women who have either never had children or whose children have grown and moved away. And a large percentage of RealDoll owners (“iDollaters”) have conditions that make it difficult to find living partners with whom to share their lives (literal amputees, burn victims, and at least one who suffers some form of high-functioning autism — http://www.syntheticallyyours.com/blog/).
But the fact is that many (myself included) find these situations undeniably creepy. And in many cases, they are. Some RealDoll owners, for instance, have predilections I’ve neither the time today nor the inclination to share (there are some things you can’t unlearn). Even excluding the real weirdos, there is something upsetting about all of these relationships with dolls because, by design, Reborns and RealDolls are silent, they can’t object, they can never say No.
But maybe what is truly unsettling about the relationships people build with these kinds of dolls is that they indicate, perhaps too explicitly, what kinds of relationships we all have with our children, with our wives, with everyone. That’s the horror; their absolute familiarity.
But we may object to the stillness of the dolls, to their passivity, to their almost mortuistic nature. Of course, this objection demonstrates how ready we are to project our own relationships therein. It’s very easy to see them as people, as the kind of subjects they clearly aren’t. (In the BBC documentary, when the grandmother Christie picks up her new surrogate grandson, she has a child’s car seat ready for him and my immediate response was He’s too little for a forward-facing seat, it should be rear-facing!). Masahiro Mori, in a short response written several years after his initial paper, offers:
A dead person’s face may indeed be uncanny: it loses color and animation with no blinking. However, according to my experience, sometimes it gives us a more comfortable impression than the one given by a living person’s face. Dead persons are free from the troubles of life, and I think this is the reason why their faces look so calm and peaceful. In our mind there is always an antinomic conflict that if you take one thing you will lose the other. Such a conflict appears on one’s face as troubles, and makes his, or her, expression less comfortable. When a person dies he, or she, is released from this antinomy, and has a quiet expression. If so, then, where should we position this on the curve of the uncanny valley? (On Uncanny Valley)
The fact of the dolls’ stillness may be one of the ways they relieve anxiety. If anxiety has no object, a prosthetic is about making do with what one is missing. We are talking about humans. As Matt McMullen (the creator of the RealDoll) argues:
It is not weird…. What if you lived all by yourself, and what if you didn’t want or couldn’t have a relationship, and you were just lonely, and you just wanted to feel that contact? ….You can’t possibly identify with that person because you’ve never been in that situation. To feel contact, to feel a body next to you, is a human need.