Cultures of Fetishism (34 page)

opinion all on their own—but, of course, these are carefully scripted.

Another Mark Burnett reality show is
Fear Factor
.
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Here, there is much more focus on the challenges and much less opportunity for the six contest- ants to hone their vampire aptitudes. However, one of the three challenges, the centerpiece of each episode, brings out with vivid clarity the dehumaniz- ing qualities that are inherent in commodity fetishism.

The series, which lasts for five episodes per season, starts out with six contestants who are challenged to succeed in the shortest amount of time at three tasks, all of them involving physical endurance and the courage to over- come fear (of heights, of water, of speed, of close quarters). The second chal- lenge, which also involves performing certain activities in the shortest amount of time, consists of such gruesome and demeaning challenges as sucking the liquid out of a cow’s eyeball, spitting the liquid into a glass, and then doing the same with another eyeball and then another until the glass is filled to the brim, and then guzzling down the eyeball cocktail; standing barefoot in a vat filled with live squirming earthworms and squeezing them into a liquid which flows out of a tube at the bottom of the vat into a glass and then drinking down the earthworm juice; standing before a conveyer belt covered with dishes of pig uterus, cow brains, earthworms, ground-up insects, and trying to grab up a mouthful of each “tidbit” before the conveyer belt tumbles the “food” onto the ground—then back to the head of the belt for more. All of these challenges are judged by the speed at which they are completed. The one who is fastest is the winner.

Fear Factor
, though it imitates the challenge format of
Survivor
, is basically a version of a much older Japanese show called
Endurance
, in which participants would compete to determine who could go the longest without eating, or urinating, or who could stay put the longest when standing in a pit of snakes.
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If, for the moment, we put aside the spirit of cutthroat competitiveness in reality TV, there is still another lesson to be learned about the fetishism strategy. The whole notion of the so-called reality of reality TV raises up the specter of the twisted relationship between real material reality and actual human life. As the real world is endowed with living qualities, the actual human life is transformed into a material commodity.

The prototype for these “unscripted” TV shows appeared in 1992 with
The Real World
, which featured small groups of young men and women trying to live together in the same house for a full TV season. Each season begins in a new city with a new cast of characters. People can get thrown out of the house by the other members, but the emphasis in this prototype reality show was not competition per se but real people trying to act real. Since then a variety of reality shows have garnered impressive ratings while the producers garnered Emmy nominations and enormous profits, and introduced millions of Americans to this new TV genre, where, except for the one winner in the case of
Survivor
, who gets one million dollars, the labor doesn’t have to be paid anything at all—the epitome of surplus labor value.

The Real World
, or as its aficionados call it, RW, sheds a different light on commodity fetishism. Although the RW characters are not put into situations where they are expected to vampirize one another, the very fact of appearing on this show means that they would be submitting to having all the real life drained out of them. And all for no pay. And all for a millisecond of fame. And all for
maybe
being pointed out at Burger King.

Chuck Klosterman, who
USA Today
likened to pop culture’s version of Michael Moore, wrote about
The Real World
in his “low culture manifesto,”
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.
He identifies himself as “an amateur
Real World
scholar.”
74
He explains that he calls himself an “amateur” because he has not done a serious university study of the show, but a “scholar” nonetheless because he no longer watches the show as entertainment but “in the hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civiliza- tion.”
75
Klosterman discovers a few fascinating truths about the nonreality of reality TV. After reading Klosterman, I realized that his discoveries unlock one of the “secrets” of the fetishism strategy.

Klosterman has seen every episode of each of twelve seasons of
The Real World
at least three times. He believes that the secret of understanding the characters in RW is mindless repetition.
76
If you were to try to
learn
what the characters like or don’t like, “that would make you a weirdo.”
77
You would seem ridiculous. “This kind of knowledge is like a vivid dream you suddenly pull out of the cosmic ether, eight hours after waking up.”
78
Long before the 2005 Austin, Texas, season, sometime between the RW1 in New York and RW3 in San Francisco, Klosterman had already discovered the essence of reality TV. Here are some of the things that Klosterman learned about the nature of reality in reality TV from his repetitive watching of RW. The origi- nal RW, in 1992, was supposed to be an unscripted accident where the show would be a seamless extension of reality. But then the relationship got reversed. “Theory was replaced by practice.”
79
The late adolescents in the original RW were “malleable personalities” that were “edited into flat, twenty-something archetypes.”
80
In turn, those archetypes became the nor- mal way for people of Klosterman’s generation to behave.

“Ironically,” says Klosterman, “the reason RW flourished is because its telegenic humanoids became less complex with every passing season.”
81
Future cast members figured this out. They better not be too complex. Only two types of personality mattered, and these “two archetypes would become cornerstones for late-twentieth-century youth: the educated automaton and the likable anti-intellectual.”
82

Many viewers of RW are younger than the participants. Perhaps they watch as a way to think about what it means to live on your own, away from your family? Perhaps they watch to learn what kind of personality you have to acquire to be able to get along with people of your own generation? But, finally, they are learning that becoming an automaton is the surest way make friends and influence people.

Klosterman concludes his meditation on “the questions that have haunted man since the beginning of civilization” by evaluating his own potential for being a RW character. Apparently, he is too multidimensional. Yet he fears he may have to become a real uni-person in his own real world because RW’s “unipersonal approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying.”
83

The Real World
captures a special dimension of the fetishism strategy. There is a possibility that it even predicts the robotization of the human being; and if so, it materializes Marx’s predictions about human beings becoming unreal and imaginary while, at the same time, imaginary things become real and tangible. Karl Marx never imagined this particular outcome of the commodi- fication of the human being. But, as the philosopher who predicted “All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intel- lectual life and stultifying human life with a material force,” it would not have surprised him.
84

In the next chapter we will explore how human beings think and fantasize about the possibilities of humans being transformed into robots and robots becoming more and more human. In these thoughts and fantasies about the human-robot interchange, you will recognize reflections of Marx’s predic- tion and also a few of the principles of the fetishism strategy.

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N
i n e

R
obots and
H
umans

S
ilicon and
C
arbon

The prophet Jeremiah and his son, Ben Sira, decided to study The Book of Creation. At the end of three years, they created an artificial man. On its forehead was written EMET.*The man was so human it could speak. It said to Jeremiah and Ben Sira, “God created Adam and when God decided that Adam should die, He erased the first letter, Aleph, from the word EMET
‡
and Adam died. I greatly desire you should do the same to me, and that you never again create an artificial man, so the world will never doubt that Man was created by God.” It further said to them, “Change the letters on my head and erase the Aleph” And Jeremiah and Ben Sira obeyed. And the artificial man immediately turned into dust.

—From “The Alphabet of Ben Sira,” a medieval biblical text.
1

T
hese days the artificial man created by Jeremiah and Ben Sira would be called a robot, or more accurately, an android—a robot in human form. The word
android
has been around for a few centuries, a lot longer than the word
robot
. During the eighteenth century, when the craze for mechanical human figures that could draw pictures, sing, and play musical instruments was at its height,
android
was defined as an “automaton with a human face.”
2
Two centuries later, in 1920, the Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech “rabota” meaning servile worker or serf.
3
The fac- tory workers in his play
RUR
(
Rossum’s Universal Robots
) are satisfied with their servile roles, until they are reprogrammed to think for themselves.
4
They rise up against their oppressors, take over the factory, and kill all the humans, except for the one who was “still working with his hands.”
5
After the uprising, the rebel leader declares, “The power of man has been annihi- lated. A new world is born. The time of the robots has come.”
6
RUR
was

* EMET means Truth.

‡
The word MET (EMET minus the Aleph) means Dead.

said to have started a trend for mistrusting and fearing robots, especially those with humanlike characteristics—androids.

Coming to the rescue of the much-maligned robots and also of the humans they might possibly destroy, Isaac Asimov wrote a series of short stories and novels that portray android robots as programmed with an ethical system designed to assure they would never harm humans. In his collection of short stories,
I, Robot
, Asimov constructs intricate ethical situations in which robots have to figure out how to behave within the complex con- straints of the three basic rules of Asimov’s robotic ethics. While Asimov is generally credited with the invention of the three rules, in his autobiography,
I, Asimov
, he readily acknowledges that John W. Campbell,
7
the editor of the science fiction review
Astounding Stories
, was the originator of that now- famous formulation.
8

Asimov employs the three laws to heighten the illusion that his fictional androids are alive enough and intelligent enough to remember, decipher, and obey Campbell’s ethical brain-teaser:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
   

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
   

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
   

   These laws do not apply to the millions of robots now obediently at work assembling automobiles, packaging food products, stacking prepackaged foods, assisting doctors in long-distance surgery and minimally invasive sur- gery, and performing tasks that would be hazardous for human beings, such as; exploring the deepest of deep seas, studying whales close-up and mapping coral reefs, drilling far beneath the earth where humans have never been, rescuing miners trapped underground, dismantling and cleaning toxic waste, exploring the surface of Mars, doing repairwork on the outer surfaces of spacecraft, act- ing in warfare zones as minesweepers and booby-trap searchers. These robots do not pretend to be human. They are constructed, activated, and carefully controlled by humans and thus do not require robotic ethical laws.
   

   The three laws apply only to androids, those robots that look and act as if they are flesh-and-blood human beings. Whether androids come into exis- tence in science fiction or in a research laboratory or in a factory that designs, manufactures, and sells them to the public, they are “creatures” that reside in that uncertain realm between living and nonliving matter. Because these artificial humans are intentionally designed to simulate living matter and to behave as if they have human capacities, they cast a special light on the principles of the fetishism strategy.
   

   As we encounter some of the humans who design robots, study them, write about them, or manufacture them, we will have ample occasion to look at
   

   some of the fantasies humans have about robots. Until now I have been illuminating the fetishism strategy by focusing on how the principles of that strategy emerge in the cultures that breed and nourish them, such as, personal catastrophes, footbinding, filmmaking, biography, psychoanalytic training, the production of commodities. Indirectly, but sometimes directly, I called attention to some of the fantasies that inspire people to employ the fetishism strategy.
   

   Now, with the subject of robots, creatures that spring forth from fantasies, I am going to be approaching the fetishism strategy by way of a direct engagement with the personal fantasies that evoke it. Though each of the principles of the fetishism strategy are subtly different from one another, taken together they express a central, dominating theme. Human desires, intellectual powers, emotional forces, and creative energies are, by their very nature, enigmatic and unpredictable. When they begin to assert themselves, the fetishism strategy is enlisted to tame and subdue them. The fantasy is that if these elusive energies were to be set loose, they would run amok, take over the social order, and then demolish the very universe that God and Nature had created.
   

   The necrophilic principle of the fetishism strategy is evoked by the fantasy that living, animate beings are unpredictable and potentially dangerous. They can only be contained by extinguishing their life energies or by transforming them into something dead or inanimate. When the full identity of the sexual object is alive, with all manner of threateningly, dangerously unpredictable vitalities, the desire that he or she arouses must be invested in an object that is knowable and predictable.
   

   The fantasy of machines acquiring humanlike capacities very often evokes the counterfantasy that humans might be transformed into machines. Paraphrasing Karl Marx, we ask “if we endow material things (like androids) with intellectual and emotional life, does it imply that human beings will be deprived of their intellectual and emotional vitalities?” Rodney Brooks, author of
   Flesh and Machines
   , head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, a foremost inventor of robots, owner of the iRobot factory that produces commercially viable robotic products, has answered this question with a prophecy befitting a modern-day Jeremiah. He predicts that when the robotic revolution catches up with the biotechnology revolution, “It will transform the technology not just of our own bodies, but also that of our machines.
   Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines
   ” (
   itals.
   mine).
   9
   

   Brook’s provocative prophecy, which refers to all robots and not just androids, is already a fact of life, a down-to-earth reality. With the advent of cochlea implants, biometric chips, digitized vocal chords, pacemakers, artifi- cial organs, prosthetic limbs, and chemicals that fine-tune brain functioning and emotions, we are witnessing a progressive infiltration of the mechanical into human flesh. At the very moment that we humans are incorporating machines into our bodies, engineers and technicians are constructing androids that are more and more like living, breathing humans. There is a blurring of
   

   the borders between the artificial and the organic. In this sense, Brooks’ prophecy has merit. Nevertheless, the idea of machines becoming human and humans becoming machines is also a fantasy originating in the mind of Rodney Brooks, and eagerly adopted by many other humans.
   

   Many scientists are not troubled by the machine-human interchange—for a simple reason. Their clear-eyed, hard-nosed, engineering approach to robotic research endows them with an engineering-style of thinking about these issues. Their basic premise is that humans are machines to begin with. So as humans become more like machines, the resulting changeover from the carbon-based life of humans to the silicon-based life of robots would not be all that drastic.
   

   When humans think about robots, they usually are thinking about androids and not those little helpers who act as surgical assistants, spacecraft technicians, and mine sweepers. It is often difficult for us to distinguish between androids as they exist in the actual world and those that exist in science fiction fantasy. One thing is certain: androids, whether actual or fan- tastical, are creatures of human imagination—reflections of our fantasies. Therefore, the questions that arise in connection with the robotic revolution are multilayered. The top layer has to do with the territory of Rodney Brooks, the solid, hard facts of how androids and other robots are engineered and constructed. The next layer entails the potential impact of androids on the lives of the human beings who might purchase and use them.
   

   A third layer concerns the propensities of some human beings to de-animate other human beings in order to transform them into machines that will submit to their desires, wishes, and fantasies. Closely allied is the tendency for some human beings to de-animate themselves so they will no longer be trou- bled by their desires, wishes, and fantasies. For example, Chuck Klosterman has called our attention to those confused young people who model their own identities on the telegenic humanoids on
   The Real World
   and then begin to behave as if they were one or another RW character.
   

   Once upon a time, in the middle of the twentieth century, some American psychoanalysts decided that “As-If Character” should became a diagnostic label. These psychoanalysts affixed the “As-If” label to grown men and women who, because they had not developed a secure sense of self during infancy and early childhood, managed to salvage some remnants of a human identity by becoming adept at imitating the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of other human beings.
   10
   The diagnosis also referred to the way an As-If uses other people as if they were machines. For the most part these “others” exist for the As-If only insofar as they are willing to do the bidding of the As-If. In a kind of Aladdin-genie arrangement, the Aladdin As-If summons up the genie “other” whenever he needs some emotional supplies. After he gets them, Aladdin dismisses the genie until next time he needs love, affection, cuddling, feeding, sex, adoration, or immediate relief from painful emotions like anxi- ety and depression.
   11
   Depending on who he needs for which need, an As-If can have one personality on Monday and another on Tuesday. Some of the
   

   psychoanalysts who believed in the merit of the As-If diagnosis would say that it applied mainly to actors and actresses and other glamorous and charis- matic people.
   

   Nowadays the term is rarely used—officially. Most As-If characters don’t seek psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. They are content as long as they can find people who are willing to supply them with what they need. Nevertheless, even though psychoanalysts have little therapeutic experience with a full- blown As-If, every now and then, you might still hear a psychoanalyst saying that one of her patients was behaving in an “As-If” manner. It has been sug- gested that the “As-If” refers to a wide spectrum of personality disorders. It is also widely agreed that adolescents, who are trying out different personal- ity styles on their way to becoming adults, are prone to imitating others, and behaving in an As-If manner. When they finally settle on who or what they are, they settle into their own skins.
   

   One analyst told me that she thought of the As-If as the new hysteric, sug- gesting that something in twentieth-century culture had been breeding and nourishing As-If forms of personality, in the same way that the nineteenth century bred hysterical personalities.
   12
   Perhaps Klosterman has the best for- mulation.
   The Real World
   , a kind of As-If culture, breeds and nourishes As-If personalities—telegenic humanoids for other potential humanoids to mimic. And since most of the characters chosen to be in this reality show are themselves putting off choosing a permanent adult personality, maybe some of the young people who imitate them are also going through a prolonged adolescence? Maybe their imitative behavior is just a step on the way to choosing a final shape? Or, maybe it is a permanent state of being? No doubt about it, though, androids who can never change their shape once they are constructed and set in motion are permanent As-If humans.
   

   The dehumanization of human beings on
   Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor
   , and other reality TV shows is only distantly related to the fabrication of androids in science fiction, robotic factories, and research laboratories. We cannot blame androids for the sorry fates of commodified, As-If humans. Nevertheless, for androids who are becoming more and more human and for humans who are becoming more and more like androids, the identical principles of the fetishism strategy come into play. Indeed, these As-If humans who model themselves on TV humanoids are probably the kinds of people who would prefer to have intimate relationships with cellphones, iPods, computers, and other robotic equipment than with living, breathing human beings who might threaten them with all the ambiguities and uncertainties of their all-too-human desires.
   

   In 2001 eighteen eminent scientists and religious leaders, and one robot, were given an opportunity to express their opinions, fears, and fantasies about these machine-human, silicon-carbon interchanges in
   Dolly
   , the third segment of Beryl Korot and Steve Reich’s
   Three Tales
   , a video- concert performance about three of the technological follies of the twentieth century.
   

   The first tale,
   Hindenberg
   , is about the invention and explosion of the dirigible “Hindenberg,” named after the German president who appointed Adolph Hitler as chancellor of Germany. The second,
   Bikini
   , is about the scientifically planned atomic bombing of the Bikini atoll, which entailed the evacuation of all the men, women, and children of Bikini from the ancient homeland they had inhabited for centuries. The stated objective of this inhumane experiment in advancing the cause of Humanity was to study the effects of nuclear radiation on the living and nonliving forms that were not evacuated from the atoll.
   

   Dolly
   begins with the cloning of the sheep named Dolly and then goes beyond the controversial issue of cloning to a more general debate about the wisdom of machines becoming human and humans becoming machines. Rodney Brooks participated in the
   Dolly
   segment, as did Cynthia Breazeal, his colleague at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where she was develop- ing sociable robots—robots that could learn how to interact with humans. She was accompanied by Kismet, her prototype sociable robot, whose amazing humanlike responses had already made it into a media star. It was indeed amazing to watch the adorable Kismet upstaging the erudite men and women who participated in
   Dolly
   .
   

   Breazeal thinks of Kismet as her baby. She expects no miracles from it. She wishes only that it might achieve the social behaviors of an average human toddler.
   

   The closing scene of
   Three Tales
   is an interaction between Breazeal and her baby.
   13
   As mommy Breazeal asks baby Kismet how its day is going, it makes sounds that sound as if they might be gurgles and coos, and nods its head and spreads its huge red lips apart into a facial expression that could be interpreted as a smile. Breazeal then asks her baby what it plans to do with its day. But Kismet doesn’t respond. Perhaps it couldn’t process the question? So its mother asks if it would like to play with its yellow toy. Kismet’s lips close together and its head turns away from Breazeal and her yellow toy. Were those body movements signs of wanting some other toy? Or, expressions of having been misunderstood? The last image of
   Three Tales
   is of mommy Breazeal and baby Kismet gazing at each other— with love?
   

   Kismet doesn’t get held in his mother’s arms, and even if it did, “What would her body feel like to it?” “What would it make of her odors, her warmth, her body movements?” And then what about those times when a baby might just want to be by itself and look around at its world without hav- ing to be interacting with human beings? A human infant often wants to do that. If the people in his environment understand that desire, they let him play alone with his toes and his fingers. They let him try to reach out with his hands to touch the mobile that hangs over his crib. But Kismet does not have such desires, nor fingers nor toes, nor hands nor feet. Most importantly, it has not been equipped with a repertoire of things to do when it is not interact- ing with a human being—except to “fall asleep.”