The Uncanny
Do you have strong feelings about the uncanny? I am beginning to, and I wrote a short blog post on the uncanny for my Rhetoric of the Future course that - of course - fits well with horror and, perhaps, everything else.
I am going to put this blog post below. It's useful, I think, to consider why the uncanny exists, how it exists even within ourselves (as the thing outside ourselves that is more us than us), which Lacan and others would call the "extimate."
I think it's useful to remember that none of us are wholly what we seem in one moment or all moments.
If you are unaware of the uncanny valley (or need a refresher) - the uncanny valley is based on a graph of A) resemblance of something (like a robot) to a human, and B)the ability of us humans to relate to that thing. As resemblance increases, human affection or relation increases up until a certain point, where it suddenly plunges in a "valley." In other words, similarity is not always a good thing. For the good old Wikipedia entry on the uncanny valley, voila: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_...
Anyways, the blog post I wrote for class deals with several articles that state the failings of AIs created as twins to people (how they are nevertheless uncanny), and then I talk about how this relates to the movie /Her/, which you should see if you haven't, and the sexual (or lack thereof) relationship. In any case, I think this one of the more interesting things I've said in the past month or so, so I'll put it up here:
Course Post #9: The Uncanny
Robot twin 1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
Robot twin 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
I recently read this article from three years ago about the inability to bridge the uncanny valley by creating robotic doppelgangers of three different people in Japan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
I found the idea to create robots as twins to people to be very strange, because I would think this would be the exact opposite way to destroying the uncanny sensation with an AI.
The uncanny valley is, of course, the sudden dip in human affection when the human similarity of, say, a robot becomes too great. In other words, there must always be a certain amount of difference between humans and robots for humans to be comfortable. Sexton claims that the “uncanny feeling relies on something strange occurring amid the familiar; it is when things largely seem normal but something is not quite right” (576). The problem, it seems - in terms of a robot - is not the amount of the strange, but rather the amount of the familiar. To get rid of this sensation, one must destroy the familiarity and keep the strange. The opposite would be true for an uncanny human: you would want to keep the familiar and get rid of the strange.
The connection between the uncanny and the extimate was made clear in class. For a good reading on the extimate, though, there is always Jacques-Alain Miller’s http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=36
According to Miller, “Extimacy says that the intimate is Other - like a foreign body, a parasite.” Miller then takes the extimate - an intimate experience that has something external to it - and shows how it lies in one’s relationship to an analyst, to God, and to the unconscious self. In terms of religion, Miller says, “There are several covers of this point of extimacy, one of which is the religious cover. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of God as interior /intimo meo/, ‘more interior than my innermost being.’ God here is thus a word which covers this point of extimacy which in itself has nothing likeable.” The intimacy of God is external, is alien, and this externality is more core to us than ourselves. We can be uncanny to ourselves.
It could be said that in the movie /Her/, a body is denied Samantha so as to avoid the uncanny (and, more importantly, to infinitely increase the sensation of the uncanny during the surrogate scene). The uncanny, then, seems to primarily live in terms of what is seen. It is the visual that creates a sensation of the uncanny. And I think this is particularly interesting in terms of the idea of Lacan’s mirror stage. There is a reason that Lacan uses the mirror as a metaphor for the split Subject. The image holds a power over the individual that, seemingly, nothing else can compete with. (There’s a reason Narcissus falls in love with the reflection of himself, rather than the echo of his voice). The image holds a power unlike anything else, and it is in the image that the uncanny valley seems to reside.
But is this true? Has there been a case where one tastes one’s normally favorite food only to find something off - perhaps there’s a sense of some underlying rottenness, or a different recipe with a strange variation of ingredients - and this is more disturbing or dissatisfying to him or her than his or her most hated food? Or how about the nail polish in /American Hustle/ - that is described as having a sweet scent with something rotten beneath it? (Is this scent “uncanny?”) Is there ever a time when the uncanny has not been in terms of the visual?
I think, perhaps, the answer to avoiding the uncanny valley is to keep the AI out of the realm of the visual - just like in /Her/ - which means to keep the strange out of the familiar. As for robots, one needs to keep the familiar out of the realm of the strange (in this sense, alien).
The need for difference does remind me of Lacan’s sexuation graph, where men and women can fall on either side of the graph (women can fall onto the masculine side, and men can fall onto the feminine side). In a homosexual relationship, there is still some form of difference maintained, where each partner resides on each side of the graph (in other words, there is no true homosexual relationship, because even if two people are of the same sex, they are nevertheless not the same). There is always a difference.
I have no idea if the sexuation graph and need for difference can be applied to the uncanny or not. I’m merely drawing a connection between the need for difference between a robot and human and the need for difference between two people in a relationship… which I think /Her/ might naturally connect.
I am going to put this blog post below. It's useful, I think, to consider why the uncanny exists, how it exists even within ourselves (as the thing outside ourselves that is more us than us), which Lacan and others would call the "extimate."
I think it's useful to remember that none of us are wholly what we seem in one moment or all moments.
If you are unaware of the uncanny valley (or need a refresher) - the uncanny valley is based on a graph of A) resemblance of something (like a robot) to a human, and B)the ability of us humans to relate to that thing. As resemblance increases, human affection or relation increases up until a certain point, where it suddenly plunges in a "valley." In other words, similarity is not always a good thing. For the good old Wikipedia entry on the uncanny valley, voila: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_...
Anyways, the blog post I wrote for class deals with several articles that state the failings of AIs created as twins to people (how they are nevertheless uncanny), and then I talk about how this relates to the movie /Her/, which you should see if you haven't, and the sexual (or lack thereof) relationship. In any case, I think this one of the more interesting things I've said in the past month or so, so I'll put it up here:
Course Post #9: The Uncanny
Robot twin 1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
Robot twin 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
I recently read this article from three years ago about the inability to bridge the uncanny valley by creating robotic doppelgangers of three different people in Japan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology...
I found the idea to create robots as twins to people to be very strange, because I would think this would be the exact opposite way to destroying the uncanny sensation with an AI.
The uncanny valley is, of course, the sudden dip in human affection when the human similarity of, say, a robot becomes too great. In other words, there must always be a certain amount of difference between humans and robots for humans to be comfortable. Sexton claims that the “uncanny feeling relies on something strange occurring amid the familiar; it is when things largely seem normal but something is not quite right” (576). The problem, it seems - in terms of a robot - is not the amount of the strange, but rather the amount of the familiar. To get rid of this sensation, one must destroy the familiarity and keep the strange. The opposite would be true for an uncanny human: you would want to keep the familiar and get rid of the strange.
The connection between the uncanny and the extimate was made clear in class. For a good reading on the extimate, though, there is always Jacques-Alain Miller’s http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=36
According to Miller, “Extimacy says that the intimate is Other - like a foreign body, a parasite.” Miller then takes the extimate - an intimate experience that has something external to it - and shows how it lies in one’s relationship to an analyst, to God, and to the unconscious self. In terms of religion, Miller says, “There are several covers of this point of extimacy, one of which is the religious cover. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of God as interior /intimo meo/, ‘more interior than my innermost being.’ God here is thus a word which covers this point of extimacy which in itself has nothing likeable.” The intimacy of God is external, is alien, and this externality is more core to us than ourselves. We can be uncanny to ourselves.
It could be said that in the movie /Her/, a body is denied Samantha so as to avoid the uncanny (and, more importantly, to infinitely increase the sensation of the uncanny during the surrogate scene). The uncanny, then, seems to primarily live in terms of what is seen. It is the visual that creates a sensation of the uncanny. And I think this is particularly interesting in terms of the idea of Lacan’s mirror stage. There is a reason that Lacan uses the mirror as a metaphor for the split Subject. The image holds a power over the individual that, seemingly, nothing else can compete with. (There’s a reason Narcissus falls in love with the reflection of himself, rather than the echo of his voice). The image holds a power unlike anything else, and it is in the image that the uncanny valley seems to reside.
But is this true? Has there been a case where one tastes one’s normally favorite food only to find something off - perhaps there’s a sense of some underlying rottenness, or a different recipe with a strange variation of ingredients - and this is more disturbing or dissatisfying to him or her than his or her most hated food? Or how about the nail polish in /American Hustle/ - that is described as having a sweet scent with something rotten beneath it? (Is this scent “uncanny?”) Is there ever a time when the uncanny has not been in terms of the visual?
I think, perhaps, the answer to avoiding the uncanny valley is to keep the AI out of the realm of the visual - just like in /Her/ - which means to keep the strange out of the familiar. As for robots, one needs to keep the familiar out of the realm of the strange (in this sense, alien).
The need for difference does remind me of Lacan’s sexuation graph, where men and women can fall on either side of the graph (women can fall onto the masculine side, and men can fall onto the feminine side). In a homosexual relationship, there is still some form of difference maintained, where each partner resides on each side of the graph (in other words, there is no true homosexual relationship, because even if two people are of the same sex, they are nevertheless not the same). There is always a difference.
I have no idea if the sexuation graph and need for difference can be applied to the uncanny or not. I’m merely drawing a connection between the need for difference between a robot and human and the need for difference between two people in a relationship… which I think /Her/ might naturally connect.
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