Warm Bodies: Zombies in Media and Culture

The following is an essay written by Dr. Rebecca Williams and relates to the film Warm Bodies which preceded a Cardiff sciSCREEN on Friday May 17^th.

Whilst the vampire was, for a time, the most popular horror archetype in popular media and culture (see Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and more), it is the figure of the zombie who has undergone the most recent transformation from a figure often at the periphery of contemporary horror to one of the key tropes seen across a range of texts. Whilst zombies have featured in horror films including The Evil Dead, 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, the Spanish Rec series and its English-language remake Quarantine and George A. Romero’s numerous zombie movies (as well as the more parodic Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead) it is in the last few years that they have achieved a more central place in contemporary media texts. From the literary rewriting of Austen’s Pride & Prejudice to include zombies, the success of AMC’s Walking Dead adaptation, to the best-selling World War Z (soon to be a film starring Brad Pitt), and the popularity of so-called zombie walks where people dress up and ‘become’ zombies, the zombie has clearly shuffled onto centre stage across literature, television and film. Why has this been the case when, for some time, zombies appeared to be the poor relation to the altogether more attractive and intriguing figure of the vampire? Whilst vampires could easily be portrayed as sympathetic and alluring, the zombie’s apparent inability to communicate, its lack of intellect, rationality or emotion, and its oft-commented on lack of speed, seemed to render the zombie a less captivating prospect for exploration. The idea that one might appear sympathetic and as a romantic figure, as in Warm Bodies, certainly seemed unlikely.

On a broader scale, zombie films have been seen as a representation of forms of ideology. They have, according to Peter Dendle, served “as an abstract thought experiment – projected at first into religion, folklore and then eventually into film, fiction, visual arts and electronic media – for meditation what it means to be “human”” (2011:176-7). For example, in his book American Zombie Gothic, Kyle William Bishop notes that “each of [George] Romero’s zombie films provides deliberate social and cultural criticism, using the zombies and the situations they create as allegories about the perils of modern life” (2010:202). For example, Romero’s comments on race and capitalism in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, respectively, as well as his more recent films Land of the Dead (dealing with terrorism) and Diary of the Dead which deals with the impact of media culture, 24 hour news, streaming of online content and so on. Similarly, films such as Rec and Quarantine or 28 Weeks Later have been read as tapping into contemporary fears around biological warfare and the possibility of post-9/11 potential terrorist attacks involving contagion.

There are also more personal reasons for the endurance of the zombie. Horror has always been fascinated with the idea of crossing between borders and boundaries; ghosts, vampires and werewolves are clear examples of this. Peter Dendle notes that “The zombie is a creature of paradox. It is at once familiar and alien, alive and dead, human and non-human” (2011:174). As a ‘living corpse’ the zombie in its original form offers an example of a creature that crosses the boundary between the living and the dead, between the human and non-human, acting as a horrific reminder of our own mortality. The figure of the zombie also offers the possibility for rumination on the notion of the human soul; whilst the ghost offers a “disembodied soul”, the “zombie is the opposite of such as “ghost”: it is a soulless body” (Dendle 2011:177) and, therefore, frequently coded as more dangerous and destructive than the often more benevolent ghost.

Film theorist Barbara Creed has argued that the corpse becomes drawn on in the horror genre since it can represent what she refers to as the abomination of the dead body by showing the abjection of the decaying body. This can be seen in early representations of zombies such as The Evil Dead or Night of the Living Dead and its follow-ups. However, aside from their ability to visually and graphically depict the decay of the dead body, figures such as the zombie also have the potential to allow viewers to question their own mortality and a range of existential issues. As Creed notes, the horror genre offers monsters who allow us to ask “Where did I come from? Where am I going?” (1993:154) and to reflect in a more serious manner on questions about what happens after death. The insistence of several human characters in zombie films that they be ‘put down’ or killed if they are to turn into zombies themselves also offers a chance for some reflection on what it means to be alive or dead, or somewhere ‘in-between’.

Such questions are more central to more contemporary zombie narratives than to the decaying and disintegrating bodies of the zombies seen in Romero’s films and other representations.  Bishop notes that “recent developments in the subgenre have begun to bestow more personality, subjectivity, and even humanity upon the zombie” (2010:158). Much like the vampire has been reimaged as a tragic loner, as a romantic and misunderstood hero, Warm Bodies offers a more sympathetic look at the zombie. What, it asks us, is it like for a young man who is also undead? How might a relationship between a human girl and a zombie work out? In presenting a romantic story featuring a zombie character (whilst Shaun of the Dead was billed as a rom-zom-com, neither of the romantic leads was themselves, dead) the film draws on dynamics set up in countless vampire narratives such as Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries where human women falls in love with a vampiric suitor. Warm Bodies is also interesting in that the point of view is always with the zombie character ‘R’ - his desire for eating human brains is also presented in as romantic a light as it can be – the experience of consuming other people’s memories and emotions allows a temporary feeling of being ‘alive’, of a sense of connection. As Isaac Marion, the writer of the original short online story I Am a Zombie Filled With Love, notes, “As I was figuring out the story, it lined up with a lot of feelings I was having at that time in my life. It was actually about my experience with the world and trying to figure out who I am. It was trying to establish a connection to the rest of society and humanity.” R’s attempts to connect with others thus functions as a point of relation; viewers can thus empathise with this common experience. As he states at the start of the film, “I just want to connect”.

Portraying R as a sympathetic character is also made possible by the presence of something worse than zombies within the narrative. Whilst zombies in the film are undead and prone to eating humans, they are not the worst thing that the post-apocalyptic world has to offer here; worse are the so-called ‘Bonies’ who have removed their own flesh, existing as skeletal forms who are equally happy to kill zombies as they are human. In allowing the Bonies to be the “real” horror in the film, the zombie characters appear more human in contrast; encouraging identification and empathy rather than terror and fear.

Thus, as zombie narratives become more complex, “audiences are being asked to relate to the zombies in a more direct way; instead of simply seeing their own potential death in the familiar visages of the walking dead foes, viewers are being encouraged to sympathise with the zombies, recognising them as fully realized individual characters and even rooting for them in their narrative plights” (2010:167). Bishop is talking about Romero’s Land of the Dead here, but this can equally be applied to the case of Warm Bodies which offers a representation of zombies as more nuanced, benevolent and offers more rounded characterisation. 

There are, however, clear commercial imperatives to the ongoing success, and reinvention of the zombie film. Ideology is not the only way of understand the cinematic zombie revolution – the film industry is always looking for new ways to attract audiences with a twist on a popular idea and what better to try to lure in a Twilight-loving audience than with a zombie love story? It is interesting that the same company that produced Twilight – Summit Entertainment – are also responsible for bringing Warm Bodies to the big screen. Zombies are clearly big business. However, we cannot overlook the fact that the zombie has endured as a figure of fascination since the early days of cinema and with further transformation will continue to do so. After all, as Paffenroth notes, “zombie movies will constantly have to change and adapt if they are to remain a powerful and popular force in the future” (2006:133).

Academic References

Bishop, Kyle William (2010) American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine, London: Routledge.

Dendle, Peter (2011) ‘ Zombie movies and the “millennial generation”’, in Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (ed.) Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, New York: Fordham University Press, pp 175- 186.

Paffenroth, Kim (2006) Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Waco: Baylor University Press.

Warm Bodies sciSCREEN Friday May 17th 6pm - Final Details

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN will be staged in Cinema 1 at Chapter Art Centre following a screening of the film Warm Bodies on Friday 17th  May from 6pm.

After the screening there will be two ten minute talks from Dr. Rebecca Williams on Zombies and Zombie Culture and Dr. Katy Greenland on Fear and Stigma followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

 

Following this formal part of the event, wine and snacks will be made available in the foyer if you want to continue the discussion over a drink. This sciSCREEN forms part of Cardiff University's Before I Die Festival.

Tickets for the film which include the the talks can be purchased from Chapter Arts Centre.

Tickets:

£7.90 (£7.20 adv)

Concessions £5.80 (£5.10 adv)

Bookings:

Tel: 029 2030 4400

Online: www.chapter.org

Warm Bodies sciSCREEN - Friday May 17th

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN will follow a screening of the Zombie film Warm Bodies on Friday May 17th at Chapter Arts Centre. The sciSCREEN will form part of Cardiff University's Before I Die Festival.

In a post-apocalyptic world, human survivors have barricaded themselves into a safe area of the city, but outside there are a legion of shuffling, mumbling zombies who are still in a relatively human phase before they degenerate further into hideous, skeletal attackers. R, a nice member of the demi-undead, is a cute guy who falls in love with the lovely human Julie, daughter of a zombiephobe survivalist warlord. Smart, funny and sincere, Warm Bodies plays with the idea that we are all emotionally dead until love revives us.

Speakers in the evening will include Professor Jenny Kitzinger, Dr. Katy Greenland and Dr. Rebecca Williams. Information on how to obtain tickets and room venue will be provided shortly.

Memory and Identity in Robot and Frank

The following is an essay by Dr. Alex Hillman and relates to the sciSCREEN following a discussion of Robot and Frank.

A major point of interest for medical sociologists is the relationship between public understandings of illness and disease and the wider cultural preoccupations of our society.  Memory problems and cognitive impairment in later life represent two of contemporary western societies’ biggest anxieties: old age and mental illness.  Often representations of illnesses in popular culture, politics and the media can tell us more about the society we live in than the nature of the disease itself.  Accounts of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, particularly from politicians and in the national press, tend to evoke quite frightening images.  One particularly powerful and prominent image of dementia is that it is a kind of living death for its sufferers; the body remains but the person is lost.  The language of loss and determinism also shape descriptions of the growing incidents of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia amongst populations, referring to the rising tide of dementia that is suggestive of an unstoppable force that is out of our control.   Smaller, personal stories that attempt to shed light on the experience of dementia tend to focus on the extremes of the disease, making dementia freakish, something that happens to ‘them’ rather than ‘us’.  These stories also tend to take an outside view, highlighting the oddities of those with dementia and witnessing their condition as something alien.   

The film Robot and Frank does something quite different by enabling us to experience the world through Frank’s eyes.   Frank’s mistakes tend to derive from him being out of time.  For example, for Frank, his son Hunter is still at Princeton and not the grown up man with a family of his own that he is presented with.   But, we, the audience, are taken into Frank’s world so that his failures or lapses in memory are only made noticeable to us through the responses of the people around him and the physical environment that forces him to rethink his own perception. 

The problems experienced by Frank are in a sense indicative of a fraying society in which the provision of care to an increasingly aged population is problematic.  The introduction of Robot into the film is a response to the big question facing western societies:  how do we provide care for vulnerable older people?  In societies that celebrate and reward independence and autonomy, and where families are becoming increasingly fragmented, how do we meet the needs of people like Frank?   The film portrays Robot as a futuristic solution to this societal problem.  However we need not look to the future to see the growing significance of technology as a potential solution to the challenges of an ageing population.  Growing numbers of telemedicine programmes and the development of so called ‘smart homes’ that protect independent living are just two current examples. 

The relationship between the robot and Frank and the extent to which the robot is and can provide care is interesting.  It is somewhat ambiguous in the film as to whether Frank’s spiral into criminality is good or bad.  What the film does show is how the practices and activities that made up that criminal activity, such as picking a lock or ‘casing’ a building or reading and interpreting building plans, allow Frank to find part of his identity.  It is in carrying out these physical tasks that Frank recalls aspects of his past life and relationships and where we get the greatest sense of who he was and is. 

There are some existential questions raised through the relationship between Frank and the robot about memory, identity and humanity: what is it that makes us human?  It brought to mind a poem by Tony Harrison about the nature of identity and its relationship to memory in which he writes: “If we are what we remember, what are they who don’t have memories as we have ours”.  There are two key moments in the film that speak to this very question.  The first moment is when Frank argues against that robot’s suggestion of wiping its memory and at the end of the film when Frank eventually turns the robot off.  These two moments suggest an interesting contrast between the robot and Frank.  The robot represents societies’ fears about dementia, that it’s a kind of living death, that if we lose our memory we cease to be.  There are deep rooted philosophical assumptions that underpin this conception, that cognitive impairment necessarily means losing our humanity.  As a society we tend to separate and privilege the mind over the body, recognising cognition as essential to personhood.  In a sense, for the robot, which has been created to replicate this very idea of human cognition, this fear is realised in the final act of the film. 

Frank on the other hand, even with his failings and the tragic consequences of his cognitive decline, remains a person.  What remains of himself may be less fitting to the world and the people that surround him but Frank’s humanity endures.   This is because unlike the robot, Frank’s selfhood is made up of more than cognition alone.  He exists in the world differently to the robot.  There are aspects of Frank’s being that are pre-reflective, that reside below the threshold of cognition that are acted out through the body, like the picking of locks for example; that rely on emotional response, as we see through his affinity with and affection for his ex wife (although not remembering who she is); and finally that rely on the successful deployment of social practices learned through processes of socialisation that provide people with the know-how, skill and disposition to act appropriately in their social worlds. The social nature of what make us uniquely human is made clear during the party scene in the film when the robot is incapable of exchanging social pleasantries.

What is interesting about this contrast between Frank and the robot is that it highlights Frank’s enduring humanity.  This has significant consequences for thinking about dementia care, as it suggests that attending to and promoting aspects of selfhood are important and that these aspects of care are themselves humanising.  Robot and Frank, in a very light touch way, raises profound questions about the relationship between memory, identity and humanity and perhaps challenges the image of dementia as a living death.

Reading:

‘The Mother of the Muses’ a poem by Tony Harrison

Hannah Zeiling (2013) ‘Dementia as a cultural metaphor’ in The Gerontologist 

Pia Kontos (2004) Ethnographic reflections on selfhood, embodiment and Alzheimer’s disease in Aging & Society, Vol. 24, pp. 829-849

Tackling the Causes of Alzheimer's Disease

The following is an essay by Dr. Denise Harold from the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University and relates to the sciSCREEN following a screening of Robot and Frank.

Set in the near future, the film “Robot and Frank” deals with how Frank and his family deal with his decline into dementia. With only the options of robot care or being placed in the ‘Brain Centre’ available to Frank, clearly in this future, a cure or an effective treatment for dementia has not yet been developed. Unfortunately, this is a major problem that we’re facing right now, with 35 million dementia sufferers worldwide, and as a result of increasing longevity, this figure is set to double every 20 years.

Accounting for 50-70% of all cases, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. Although it’s not specified in the film, Frank may well suffer from AD; there appears to have been a gradual onset of his symptoms, a progressive decline in his memory, and he’s having difficulties with activities of daily living. While there are approved drug treatments available for AD, such as the cholinesterase inhibitors, these unfortunately aren’t disease-modifying; they treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the disease. At best, an AD patient might expect a 6-12 month delay in the worsening of symptoms. There are a number of ongoing drug trials that are aiming to target what many see as central to Alzheimer’s disease, namely the toxic β-amyloid peptide that accumulates in the brains of patient’s with AD. Unfortunately, the results from these aren’t too promising. Some of the trials have shown a reduction in β-amyloid but unfortunately without any corresponding improvement in symptoms. Others have had unmanageable side effects, and some have even worsened the condition.

One possibility as to why these drugs aren’t proving effective may be that they’re being administered when the disease is already manifest. So for example, even though Frank appears to be in the early stages of disease in terms of symptoms, he’s likely had pathological changes occurring in his brain for 10-15 years previously. Many believe that for the current round of trial drugs to be effective, they will need to be applied pre-symptomatically, and in fact, one such trial has recently been approved and should be taking place soon. The drug, solanezumab, is the first β-amyloid clearing drug to be tested in older people thought to be in the pre-symptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s; the trial will enrol 1,000 people of at least 70 years of age with evidence of β-amyloid in their brains, but who do not show clinical symptoms of the disease. Although conducting such trials in apparently healthy individuals is a risky prospect, a comment on the Alzheimer’s Research Forum  indicates there is certainly a demand for this type of approach: “I am the daughter of a 97-year-old father with Alzheimer's. All of his eight siblings' deaths were from Alzheimer's. His 94-year-old half-sister and he are left alone with the disease. My three sisters, brother, and I are all deathly afraid that we already are seeing the beginnings of it! I would be a participant in this study in a heartbeat”; post by Judy Eggerling, on the announcement of the Solanezumab A4 Prevention Trial.

However, another possibility as to why these trial drugs aren’t successful may be that there are other pathological mechanisms at work other than the accumulation of β-amyloid. If we can find these triggering mechanisms of disease, this may help us develop more effective drug treatments. In order to achieve this, we need to look at factors that cause AD, rather than looking at the end results of the disease process. A number of factors have been identified that may affect whether or not you’re likely to get AD, including a number of environmental factors such as diet, levels of physical activity, whether you suffer from hypertension/high cholesterol in mid-life, etc. However, one factor that we can’t control has a very strong impact on disease susceptibility: our genetic makeup.

There are rare mutations in three genes related to β-amyloid biology (the amyloid precursor protein (APP), presenilin 1 (PSEN1) and presenilin 2 (PSEN2)), that directly cause Alzheimer’s disease. Frank is very unlikely to have had one of these mutations, as they usually result in disease that manifests between the ages of 40 and 60; these mutations account for ~1% of AD cases. Frank likely suffers from the much more common late-onset AD, which usually occurs after the age of 60-65. Identifying genes that influence late-onset AD is complicated by the fact that individually, they usually have only a small effect on the likelihood of developing disease, i.e. while they increase risk of the disease it is certainly possible to have a particular disease-associated genetic variant and not develop disease, or conversely, to develop disease without the disease-associated genetic variant. This means that we have to perform very large studies, typically looking at thousands of AD patients and thousands of healthy control individuals, trying to find genetic variants that differ in frequency between the two groups.

The AD genetics group at Cardiff University, headed by Professor Julie Williams, has been involved in a number of large collaborations with other AD researchers from around the world. This has culminated in the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP), involving 25,580 AD patients and 48,958 healthy individuals, and as a result, over 20 genes influencing AD risk have been identified in the past 4 years. As previously mentioned, these genes individually have only a small effect on disease risk, but they act cumulatively, such that the combination of many disease-associated genetic variants and environmental risk factors will cause a person to develop Alzheimer’s. However we have many, many more genes yet to identify before we would for example, be able to predict whether or not someone will develop disease based on their genetic profile. However, we are starting to see a pattern in the types of genes indentified. For example many of the disease-associated genes play a role in immunity, and as chronic inflammation is present in the AD brain, this is very disease relevant. Similarly, many of the genes identified so far are involved in cholesterol metabolism, and we’ve previously seen that depletion of membrane cholesterol in neuronal cells affects the processing of β-amyloid. We hope that as we identify more and more genes involved in AD, we’ll start to get a more complete picture of the pathogenic mechanisms that lead to disease, and this will hopefully aid in the development of more effective drug treatments. These treatments aren’t going to be developed today, or tomorrow, but we really have cause to hope that sufficient advances will have been made in 20-30 years time, such that a story like Frank’s would have a much more optimistic outcome.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves: Narrativity, Episodicity and Identity

The following is an essay from Mubashir Khan from the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University and relates to the sciSCREEN discussion following a screening of Robot and Frank.

Robot: The truth is I don’t care if my memory is erased or not.
Frank: But how can you not care about something like that?
Robot: Think about it this way: you know that you are alive. You think therefore you are…In a similar way I know that I am not alive. I am a robot.

For John Locke, memory is the key to personal identity: it is, more than anything else, the fact that I carry within me a living awareness of my own history that makes me the person I am. In resting on memory, personal identity relies upon psychological continuity to identify a person. Locke gives the example of a prince taking over the body of a cobbler. For Locke, as long as the prince’s thoughts are transferred across to the cobbler’s body, he remains the same person – the prince – even though his physical appearance has changed. On this account what matters then is not the body or physicality but a consciousness bound by memory which over time creates a sense of who one is. But what happens when our memories become disrupted? Are our present and future so inextricably tied to our past?

In answer to this question, Locke, when referring to states of interrupted conscious, claims that, ‘in all these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and (our) losing sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing.’[i] This notion of not being able to hold on to the our own personal histories; of not being the “same thinking thing” over time, may strike us with an existential dread and a fear that it marks the beginning of the end for us giving a meaningful account of who we are. A life where we cannot rely on memory seems too much to bear. Indeed, in one telling exchange between Robot and Frank the Robot declares, “The truth is I don’t care if my memory is erased or not,” to which Frank replies, “But how can you not care about something like that?!” How else, we may ask, are we to constitute a sense of selfhood if the stories that we tell about ourselves are not grounded in psychological continuity? Do we even need a narrative as a clear foundation on which our sense of identity is established? 

 

John Locke

Some philosophers have addressed these questions by way of a distinction between two categories that act as rival claims in the construction of selfhood: Narrativity and Episodicity.

Narrativity has two main elements:[ii]

• 1)     Psychological Narrativity: This is a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives. This is how we are, it says; this is our nature. It is informed by the narratives that we create for ourselves; the identities under which we construct a sense of Self. This Self is, in the words of Jerry Bruner, ‘a perpetually rewritten story’[iii] and that, ‘in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’[iv]

• 2)     Ethical Narrativity: This states that it does not matter whether we are storytellers by nature, but rather that we ought to live our lives narratively because a richly narrative outlook is essential to true or full personhood. As Charles Taylor argues, a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story.’[v] This understanding is vital because it allows one to fully develop as a person and in turn allows others to understand who we are.

Both these narrative views of the Self broadly align themselves to what Galen Strawson calls ‘diachronic self-experience.’[vi] This is a Self whose past, present, and future has indelible continuity, stretched out across time, and is prone to think of itself in narrative terms (let’s call defenders of this position, Diachronics).

     This narrative viewpoint, however, is challenged by the concept of episodicity, or what Strawson calls ‘episodic self-experience.’[vii] Here, although the Self is perfectly aware of its continuity aspect, the narrative drive is dispensed with. One's decisions are informed by the particular demands of a situation as it presents itself and cannot be processed into an objective filter determined by a narrative of “how one has always gone about these things.” This does not mean that defenders of episodicity (let’s call them Episodics) obliterate their connection to their past. On the contrary, as Strawson makes clear:

Faced with sceptical Diachronics, who insist that Episodics are (essentially) dysfunctional in the way they relate to their own past, Episodics will reply that the past can be present or alive in the present without being present or alive as the past. The past can be alive – arguably more genuinely alive – in the present simply in so far as it has helped to shape the way one is in the present, just as musicians’ playing can incorporate and body forth their past practice without being mediated by any explicit memory of it.[viii]

Thus, the memories themselves are not the most important thing, but rather the fact that we are creatures who are able to remember.

Strawson, himself a committed Episodic, argues that narrative structures limit the ethical possibilities available to human beings, ‘Many are likely to be thrown right off their own truth by being led to believe that Narrativity is necessary for a good life. My own conviction is that the best lives almost never involve this kind of self-telling.’[ix] In a sense, then, one is freed up to be whatever one wants to be unencumbered by what they might have been in the past. Strawson continues, ‘I’m a product of my past, including my very early past, in many profoundly important respects. But it simply does not follow that self-understanding, or the best kind of self- understanding, must take a narrative form, or indeed a historical form.’[x] So, Episodics would want to claim that such a storyboard relationship with one’s past is unnecessary because it does not allow for the full flourishing of living in the present in which one is not fettered by the history narrated for it.

 But can we reasonably argue this thesis to be the case for Frank? Can we really take the position that Frank is better off without some sort of systematic engagement with his past? Can we make the claim that the past need not have a bearing on the present, and even less so on the future? I would suggest no as an answer to all these questions and that there are strands in Robot & Frank which pose problems for Strawson’s theory.

 Firstly, however much we may argue that the Self may be able to resist the construction of an ethical autobiography built to make sense of its ‘personality,’ it is still at some level in thrall to wider social objectification. Self-telling here is indelibly linked with Other-telling. In as much as all human beings are seen by others through whichever filter of assessment they may choose to use (including diachronic analysis, as well as psychological or ethical Narrativity), Narrativity appears to be a tool far more compelling in the way that we make sense of the world than an Episodic injunction to withhold from this kind of Self/Other-telling or Self/Other-assessing. This is brought home most tellingly in the film when Frank’s daughter Madison defends him against suspicion that he has burgled one of his neighbours, “Come on, that’s ridiculous. The police have been hassling him for his entire life about a few mistakes he made when he was a kid.” Of course, this does not wholly invalidate Strawson’s argument; it just makes his task of living in the moment so rigorous that it would seem difficult to say for certain that one could wholly resist some kind of Narrative evaluation of who any person is.

Furthermore, there is also a familial aspect in the film which would seem to override episodicity.  It is clear that Frank’s past has left an indelible mark on his relationships with his family, perhaps most fractiously with his son, Hunter, and most poignantly with his ex-wife, Jennifer. This suggests that not only is there the possibility of genetic pre-disposition to being a certain kind of Self, but there is also a clear Narrative strand which cannot be so easily dismissed by a call to Episodic priority. Again, this does not invalidate Strawson’s thesis. He accepts these linkages, but describes them as ‘piecemeal,’[xi] which is to say that they do not represent some definitive, objective writing on the wall about who one is. 

However, perhaps our definitions of ourselves (and each other) lie somewhere between Narrativity and Episodicity. The visceral sense of belonging which one associates emphatically with one’s own history cannot just be explained away as “piecemeal,” or as something which should be so easily discarded. Nor should we fall lazily into the bad habits of continually constructing pulp fictions about ourselves. The attempt should be instead, as Strawson quotes from V.S. Pritchett, to ‘live beyond any tale that we happen to enact.’[xii]

There is a moving scene at the end of the film when Robot convinces Frank to wipe out his memory. Does Robot do this in an episodic manner to best meet the immediate requirements of the situation? After all, we learn earlier in the film that Robot’s primary function is to best serve Frank’s health, even if that means lying, or in this case, his own extermination.  Or is there something else going on? Is there a notion of a deeper story from a shared history which emerges here? Does Robot develop memory based on that story and a narrative both for itself and for Frank based on that shared history?

References

---

[i] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, Chapter XXVII, Section 10.

[ii] The definitions entailed below are put forward by Galen Strawson. See, Galen Strawson, Against Narrativity. Ratio (new series) XVII 4 December 2004 0034–0006. pp. 428-452. Also available on: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/reviews/against_narrativity.pdf

[iii] Jerry Bruner, Life as Narrative, quoted in Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.435.

[iv] Jerry Bruner, The “Remembered” Self, quoted in Galen Strawson, Ibid.

[v] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, quoted in Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.436.

[vi] Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.430

[vii] Galen Strawson, Ibid.

[viii] Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.432

[ix] Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.437

[x] Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.449

[xi] Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.448

[xii] V. S. Pritchett, The Myth Makers, quoted in Galen Strawson, Ibid., p.450.

Who and what is Robot? Attachment, identity and the uncanniness of things

The following is an essay by Dr. Chris Groves and relates to the Robot and Frank sciSCREEN last night.

Why does Frank wipe Robot’s memory? This is a central question in a film which, in many ways, is about a man’s relationship with an ambiguous, even uncanny object – and therefore is a film that invites us to think about what philosophers might call the phenomenology of objects, that is, how objects of certain help to structure our conscious experience of the world, and their meaning within it.

Not long after meeting Robot for the first time, Frank says ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to an appliance’. It’s true we often talk to appliances, usually angrily. To some extent we tend to be a little animistic in our relationships with technological gadgets in particular, to the point where we may treat them as possessing a kind of autonomy. But Frank’s relationship with Robot develops far beyond this. By the midway point of the film, Frank has regaled Robot with tales of his past, tried to excuse his former life of crime to him (it’s the insurers who pay, he only took high value items from rich people), and has gone as far as exploiting his programming to use him as an accomplice. But he also comes to refer to Robot, while speaking to others, as ‘my friend’. After his daughter Madison has temporarily switched Robot off, Frank addresses him as ‘buddy’ while trying to wake him up. 

After this, Robot makes the entirely rational (from a certain perspective) point that Frank should just wipe Robot’s memory, so they can go on committing crimes without the risk of incriminating evidence.  If Robot were merely an appliance, would Frank hesitate? He refuses, however, as if there is something distasteful or repugnant about this idea. Is this because Robot is his friend? In what sense could Robot be a friend? In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described friendship as a kind of human relationship in which one has a desire to benefit the other person for his/her own sake. But what makes someone a friend in the first place is their character: we see something admirable in what they do, in the choices they make. They create projects that we see as worthwhile and wish to see flourish. This capacity to be source of novelty, to provide a unique ‘take’ on the world in which we see value and significance, was identified by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt as the source of human beings’ unique value. With human action ‘something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 1953[1998], pp. 177-178). 

For a while, Robot is undoubtedly something like a friend. Frank’s son Hunter buys Robot to take care of Frank’s material needs: check blood pressure, check nutrient intake, and to perform a variety of other utilitarian tasks. Yet Robot’s carrying out of these caring tasks also provides Frank with something else: Robot becomes for Frank another subject who can reflect back to him his life but also help him to see himself differently. Then he becomes an accomplice – a partner in a common enterprise, someone who shares with Frank a common fate. He helps Frank to go beyond the pointless repetition that populates his days at the beginning (stealing random objects from the candle shop), and to regain a sense of having a future that matters and that changes the meaning of the present. And this future also appears to matter to Robot: he is concerned with risks, with how things will turn out in the end, the kind of forward-looking concern that we would expect a friend to show.

Yet Frank still wipes his memory. Why? In his last conversation with Frank before his memory is wiped. Robot convinces Frank he should flick the switch. While Frank is wondering what to do, Robot relays back to him verbatim what Frank told Robot earlier about his criminal career – how only the insurers lose out, how only the big value items are worth taking, and so on. He simply mechanically repeats the words, making Frank realise that Robot is not an agent in his own right, capable of his own take on the world and capable of acting in ways which, as per Arendt, cannot be expected. This insight was prefigured in the earlier encounter between the two robots at the party: neither was able to start a conversation with the other. And so Frank realises that Robot cannot, ultimately, be his friend – that he can sacrifice him in order to escape the Sheriff and Jake. And yet... the gesture of flicking the switch is filmed to look like an embrace. Does Robot really revert, at this point, to being just an appliance for Frank? 

Our relationships with objects, especially technological ones, are often far more ambiguous than we sometimes allow. Robot is somewhat like a friend, with evident limitations. Yet he is far more than an appliance.  For Aristotle, friendship had a specific value: not instrumental, means-end value, but constitutive value. The friend is valued because she, by being an end in herself with her own ‘take’ or perspective on things, adds meaning to the world. The kind of value she has is constitutive value: her wellbeing is an ingredient in our wellbeing. Now, some things also have value in this sense. We often forget that the things around us are generally, ambiguous objects – not just utilitarian, purely instrumental things. Anthropologists and sociologists describe how, from indigenous cultures to post-industrial societies, objects always have symbolic functions as well as just use-value: exchanging and acquiring them is part of social processes that mark status distinctions, create fashions and so on. But the objects we live with are also participants within emotional, affective relationships as well as symbolic ones. The anthropologist Daniel Miller has described in his book The Comfort of Things (2009), how relationships with certain objects – as diverse as record collections, bicycles, and Christmas decorations – shape the meaningfulness of lives. Objects in this sense are not just objects, they are attachment objects. The throwaway statement that something has ‘only sentimental value’ hides a vital and sustaining connection between things and people.

Attachment in developmental psychology describes the emotional relationship between infants and their caregivers. Caregivers feed, change and settle babies for sleep. But this is more than just attending to their bodily needs. The emotional connection between them constructs, as the child develops and its needs grow and change, a ‘safe space’ from within which he or she can explore the world. The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott noted that significant objects in our lives act as 'transitional objects' – all the way from cuddly toys to religious artefacts and artworks. They extend the safe space from within which we can experience the world around us as trustworthy and reliable, and as a place we can meaningfully influence through our actions. Objects of attachment thus play a role that substitutes for caregivers. We can turn to them for reassurance about who we are and about how our actions have significance within the world. Like caregivers, we need them to fulfil various specific needs – a bike gets us to work, a record collection provides us with entertainment. But our need for them goes beyond our utilitarian needs. Objects of attachment have importance because they are a source of meaning, they are in a sense inexhaustible – we can keep coming back to them and each time they reassure us, confirm our perspective on the world, or enable us to make new sense of the world. We find in them a kind of constitutive value like that Aristotle finds in friendship. They sustain our sense of who we are and what we can do; as with friends, things can go worse or better for them; what happens to them has an effect on us. A trusted bike has to be cleaned, kept roadworthy, polished; the Xmas decorations we had when children and have inherited from our parents have to be kept safe in the attic. Damage to such constitutively valuable objects is felt as a blow against our self: as with friendship, what injures the attachment object injures the person who cares about and for it.

Frank’s conspiracy with Robot builds an attachment relationship with these kinds of features. Robot reawakens Frank’s former world, vivifying bodily memory and his use of old skills, like lock-picking. His relationships with his children change, he becomes more autonomous. In this way, Frank’s memories are seen to be embodied, not simply impressions which can be retrieved through mental acts. Doing things with Robot as part of their ‘conspiracy’ gives Frank back his sense of himself. And what happens to Robot therefore matters to Frank: what happens to him – and what he does – affects the meaning of Frank’s own life. Frank’s act of reformatting Robot’s memory (which, as I noted above, is filmed as a kind of embrace) is a breaking of attachment, done with regret and consciousness of loss, the end of a meaningful episode in his life.

Yet there is another twist in Frank’s relationship with Robot. Suppose that Robot were, indeed, a friend who loved Frank for his own sake and wanted him to remain free – a friend for whom an injury to Frank would be an injury to Robot. Wouldn’t Robot attempt to convince Frank that he is only an appliance, only capable of mindlessly reflecting Frank’s words back to him? Wouldn’t this be exactly what a true friend would do – an act of self-sacrifice? 

Perhaps this is what Frank is wondering when at the end of the film, as he returns to his room in the memory centre, another resident’s Robot glances at him, with what we could almost imagine is a look of recognition. The object of attachment is of value to us because it remains mysterious, somehow more than what it appears to be. It doesn’t simply fit into our plans as an instrument of our purposes, like objects which just have utilitarian value: it sticks out into the world. There is always something more to be said about it, it insists itself within our perspective on the world, makes demands on us. Although it is familiar, welcoming and comforting, there is something about it that reminds us of Freud’s concept of the Uncanny (Unheimlich) [PDF]. The German psychologist Ernst Jentsch, who influenced Freud’s thinking, wrote in 1906 that ‘one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him in the case of a particular character’ (Jentsch, 1997, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’ (1906) Angelaki, 2(1), pp. 7-16: p. 13). This feeling is what the end of Robot and Frank gently insinuates. Yet it is, I’d suggest, a special case of the ambiguity with which material objects of attachment in general surround us.

Robot and Frank event on Wednesday March 20th

A final reminder that the next Cardiff sciSCREEN event will follow the 6.00pm screening of Robot and Frank at Chapter Arts Centre this Wednesday, March 20th.

Speakers will include Drs Denise Harold, Alex Hillman, Chris Groves, and Professor Rossi Setchi. Themes that will be explored in the sciSCREEN discussion include the biology of Alzheimer’s; Dementia, Aging and Care; Attachment and Identity; and Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

Tickets for the film are the usual prices and can be bought from Chapter. Tickets to the sciSCREEN event , which will begin around 7.45pm, are free, but must be booked over the phone (02920 304400) or from the ticket desk in Chapter. This event will be held in the Media Point. As of Friday 15^th March there were still 25 tickets left for the discussion.

This sciSCREEN event is sponsored by the British Science Association as part of National Science and Engineering Week. It is also one of the Medical Resaerch Councils's centenary events provided by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG).

To follow Cardiff sciSCREEN on Twitter find us at www.twitter.com/sciscreen.

To follow the MRC CNGG 2013 centenary events find us at www.twitter.com/cdfmrccentenary

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Animate Earth and Us

Below is Chris Groves' write up of the Animate Earth event run by the Cardiff Philosophy Cafe in conjunction with Cardiff sciSCREEN.

How do people in industrialised, technological societies relate to nature? Do we recognise ourselves as part of nature, our societies embedded within living systems that surround and sustain us, or do we view ourselves as separated from a natural world that is nothing but malleable matter to be put to whatever use we wish? Do we feel ourselves to be closely and vitally linked to the places we inhabit, or do we increasingly find ourselves ‘in transit’ between home, work and leisure, between locations defined solely by their function rather than finding our homes in places defined by their emotional significance and cultural meaning, and in which we have our ‘roots’.

The meaning of nature and of place in our lives was the subject of the first of two Cardiff Philosophy Cafe events in March 2013, a special film night held at the Gate with the assistance of Cardiff sciSCREEN and with sponsorship from the Sustainable Places Institute at Cardiff University. The evening included a showing of the film ‘Animate Earth’, written by Schumacher Institute ecologist Dr Stephan Harding and based on his book of the same name, followed by a panel discussion sparked by the responses of human geographer Jon Anderson, artists Stefhan Caddick and Glenn Davidson, and bio-archaeologist Jacqui Mulville to the film.  In the film, Harding describes how, as a scientist, he came to see how science was practised as symbolic of how we, as humans, relate to nature. In the history of science he finds plentiful evidence of a movement away from antiquity, with its notions of the belonging-together of intuitive knowledge and reason, and towards a new model of knowledge in which mathematics and quantification represented the highest form of human knowledge. At the same time, the new science brought with a new world, one in which the inherent tendency of human beings to feel apart from the world around them was exacerbated by technological attitudes that saw nature as raw material, dead matter for manipulation.

Harding speaks of how two scientific figures, the poet and naturalist Johann van Goethe  and then James Lovelock, came to represent for him the principles of a new science in which the ancient Greek harmony of intuition and reason could be resurrected. A science for the 21st century would require, according to Harding, a return to forms of intuition both in order to reconnect us to the natural beauty to be found in the places we inhabit, but also to grasp the ways in which the natural world is a system of interconnections. At the first level, reason cannot deliver us the individuality and uniqueness of a natural form – only attention and imagination, which lie at the centre of Goethe’s conception of the scientific method, can do that. At the second, reason cannot grasp the complexity of the world system – only imagination can seize, in a moment of insight, what reason cannot see, thus guiding reason in its detailed examination of the parts of this whole. Science – and indeed our wider relationship with nature – requires that we participate in this dialectical movement that shifts from our place in the world to the whole planet and back, from an enlivened connection to the local to an enriched holistic grasp of the global.

Harding presents Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as an example of intuition-guided science at work, in which the Earth as a whole is imagined as a self-organising system. This intuition, which occurred to Lovelock in the  1960s, subsequently led him to investigate the relationships which exist, across geological time, between chemical, hydrological and climatic processes, and to produce more specific hypotheses about how these relationships work. Deploying an impressive array of interviewees, from systems theorist Frijthof Capra to physicist and environmental justice campaigner Vandana Shiva, Harding argues that only an appreciation of the material world as animated with its own vitality can effectively supplant the mechanistic view of nature as dead matter and provide us with the basis for a new relationship with nature. New forms of scientific knowledge, for Harding, are the only way to guide us into a new ethical relationship with the Earth, in which natural entities are valued for their own sake.

Following the screening, the panel offered four distinctive and diverse responses. Jon Anderson asked whether the ‘we’ implied in Harding’s film can really stand for ‘us’, or whether it represents a particular style of human experience of the world, which Jon suggested may be uniquely characteristic of the ‘tribe’ of scientists. Human geography, he pointed out, shows us that the connection with place and nature Harding sees as the end point of a journey back from the mathematical to the intuitive mind is actually always and already part of our everyday lives. It is where we start from rather than where we need to get back to , and human geography shows how humans as emotional, spatial creatures (as well as cultural ones) build meaning into their lives through attachment to place. Perhaps we need to remember this better, but the picture of estrangement Harding paints is not universal by any means.

Stefhan Caddick showed examples of his work which relate intensely to the social character of places, amplifying Jon’s point by showing how people demonstrate their attachment t0 – and often troubled, conflictual relationships with – places through collective action that itself grows out of collective history. Rather than as individuals contemplating nature, people participating in his artworks reveal themselves to be groups animated by a sense of place and acting through it.

Glenn Davidson showed examples of his work which examine the relationship between abstract data and the reality of place, and also look at the uses of data and the way it can support particular kinds of human relationship at the expense of others (government vs democracy). He asked whether Harding means something else than just ‘connection’ by the concept of intuition, and explored how the development of disciplined intuition can give us new knowledge in particular circumstances and as a component of specific practices. In particular, he pointed to how the training of artists in art colleges rests on the development of a kind of intuition, rooted in attention.

Jacqui Mulville asked to what extent the characterisation of the scientific method given by Harding was true of science generally beyond very specific examples. In her field, archaeology, she noted that intuitive methods were very important. If intuition does produce additional knowledge through the disciplining of attention and imagination, then maybe it is something that scientists make use of in their daily work anyway, although with differing levels of awareness.

After throwing open the discussion to the audience, a significant degree of scepticism was evident about the use by Harding of the idea of intuition. What, in reality, does this term mean? The value of intuition, it was suggested, seemed to be rather like the value of ‘interconnectedness’ or ‘holism’ – it seemed almost, one audience member suggested, like a ‘magic word’ which everyone could experience positive if vague feelings toward (like ‘holism’). But as to its specific meaning and how it could be actually used by others to change the way in which they experienced nature, the film had little to say and perhaps little indeed could be said. Perhaps intuition was more like an esoteric teaching, something which had to be experienced as part of a kind of apprenticeship rather than a ‘recipe’ to be simply passed on and followed.

Intuition, another audience member suggested, might be best thought of as a kind of ‘speeded up’, habituated subconscious thought that goes on in the background and enables us to make judgements without going through a series of steps. But, it was asked, weren’t Jacqui and Glenn right to suggest that intuition gives us additional knowledge that we couldn’t get from step-by-step reasoning? Doesn’t Harding’s examples of intuitive grasping of processes and relationships suggest that a kind of imaginative effort is going on in which a whole is somehow made present to us in ways that reason, with its analytical focus, cannot manage?

Finally, one audience member saw the film as a kind of ‘confession’ (in the style of St Augustine), a journey undertaken in a kind of spirit of repentance. But if this is so, then how universal can this journey be? As Jon Anderson suggested, might we need to look elsewhere for ways of connecting to nature that derive from the kinds of things we ourselves do in our daily lives, in the particular communities we inhabit? Is the journey of a repentant scientist as exemplary as the film portrays it, or is the story told by the film just another way of maintaining the privileges accorded to scientific knowledge within our society?