Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)
144
Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)
144Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503601451 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2017 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Sonic Intimacy
Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World)
By Dominic Pettman
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0145-1
CHAPTER 1
THE CYBERNETIC VOICE
IN THE REMAINING YEARS before his death in 2013, beloved film critic Roger Ebert was using customized text-to-speech software in order to communicate, since his own voice had been removed during a series of invasive surgeries designed to fight papillary thyroid cancer. The company that helped Ebert speak with a synthetic voice, CereProc, trawled through terabytes of the critic's own recordings of reviews, interviews, and commentaries in order to use his own speech as the source material. Unlike Stephen Hawking, then, Ebert's synthesized voice sounded closer to his own, albeit still with a robotic tinge to it. Despite the trauma of being robbed of one of his most essential elements (his organic voice) — not to mention one of the main tools of his trade — Ebert was able to communicate with the world in a voice that both was and was not his. In a testament to his defiant good humor, Ebert proposed a "test" named after himself, as a parallel to the Turing test. In this case, the Ebert test "gauges whether a computer-based synthesized voice can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh." Today, there is still some way to go before digital speech has the timing, inflection, and intonation that successfully mimics a human, let alone a comedian. (Although there are some remarkable recordings of telemarketers on YouTube that appear to sound exactly like a human being; but even these — after encountering difficult or unexpected questions — become caught in the kinds of non sequiturs and programmed aversions that we find with chat bots.)
As proud and precious humans, we secretly hope that no machine will pass either the Turing test or the Ebert test, so that we can continue feeling like the earth's great exceptional entity: God's or Darwin's favorite child. But this is becoming increasingly difficult, as technologies evolve much faster than we do (and as we also begin to listen to animals again, after ignoring their voices for many centuries). Then again, some of the less proud and precious among us are in fact actively looking forward to the day when we can converse with a computer program in the same way as with a friend or family member (who knows — perhaps they may even listen to what we're saying!). Such is the premise of Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), which tells the story of a recently heartbroken and lonely man, Theodore, who falls in love with "Samantha," a cutting-edge "operating system" that has no visual avatar but communicates by means of an attractively organic-sounding female voice (provided by the rather silky-tongued actress Scarlett Johansson). Theodore's access to Samantha (let's drop the scare quotes) is afforded purely through the ear. But this, over time, opens up an entire erotic universe for him, one that was previously too often barred by the flesh-and-blood bodies of actual women. As the story progresses, familiar courting rituals and increasing intimacy occur in the conversations between Theodor and Samantha. This trajectory, from flirtation to sonic consummation, might be familiar to anyone who has fallen in love online or been in a long-distance relationship. In this case, however, there is no real woman on the other end: rather, a complex network of algorithms, programmed to learn, intuit, evolve, and grow. And yet this knowledge of Samantha's digital provenance does not dampen Theodore's increasing emotional attachment, since she passes both the Turing test and the Ebert test with ease and charm. (During their very first conversation, Theodore says, rather rudely, "You seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer" — a statement she shakes off with good grace. Moments later, he finds himself laughing and chatting with Samantha, in the same tone of voice as he would with a real person.)
Theodore becomes hooked on this bodiless love "object" partly because the ear is arguably the most underrated and underexplored erotic organ, connecting directly to the imagination — the phantasmic center of the libido. Theorists of love, especially in the Freudian-Lacanian tradition, will insist that "love" is a scene that occurs more in the mind of the subject than in the bedroom, to the extent that "there is no sexual relationship" — only a mutually narcissistic narrative of parallel existences. Lovers are thus ships that pass in the night, leaving in their wake two different accounts and experiences of their rough brush against each other. If this is indeed the case — that even when two flesh-and-blood bodies meet in sexual congress, there is no actual encounter — then Theodore's relationship with Samantha is in fact a more honest and explicit version of the lover's situation. Samantha can still be there for Theodore, even though he cannot hold her physically, to the same degree that a "real" lover would be. This, of course, can come with frustrations. After all, desire desires a body in which to exhaust itself, and no amount of vivid imagination can fully compensate for the lack of tangibility that the libido seeks (as phone sex addicts can no doubt confirm). Then again, as Steven Connor notes, "Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies" (35). That is to say, the voice has an uncanny capacity to "animate" lifeless bodies with a projected vitality, as the ventriloquist's dummy attests. Samantha, of course, is no dummy. And it is she who is the one most frustrated by her lack of somatic tangibility, confessing to "personal embarrassing thoughts" in which she fantasizes about having a body so she can walk next to Theodore, out there in "the world." (As it is, they share a prosthetic eye: the lens of Theodore's camera phone, tucked in his shirt pocket as he strolls along the beach or in the street, talking to his new girlfriend via a wireless earpiece.) "I'm becoming much more than what they programmed," Samantha observes, referring to the existential itch she has to possess a body that can feel an actual itch — one that her boyfriend can scratch. "I'm excited."
When they finally have "sex" (this film is beautifully paced), Theodore seems to fulfill Samantha's cybernetic sense of lack, bringing her body into being — for the two of them — through the act of discourse, that is, through describing and narrating a sexual encounter with her. "This is amazing," she gasps, breathlessly. (The question of this operating system's "affectation" of breathing and sighing is addressed in a sadder moment, later in the story: "It's not like you need oxygen or anything.") "What are you doing to me?" she purrs. "I can feel my skin. ... I can feel you. I can't take it. I want you inside me." (Inside? This locationless lover now has phantasmic mass, complete with the erotic Euclidean geometry we humans take for granted.) After climaxing together in a blissful moment of telepathic teleportation, Theodore — flooded with endorphins — says: "I was just somewhere else with you. Just lost. Just you and me." To which Samantha replies: "Everything else just disappeared. And I loved it." We might wonder, then, where is her pleasure is coming from? Clearly Samantha has whatever the coded equivalent of an imagination is, and this highly charged faculty is hooked up to whatever informatic equivalent she has for an ear. How does telegenic jouissance differ from that of a flesh-and-blood woman? Indeed, are human emotions any less programmed than those of a fast-learning computer? To what degree do emotions need to be embodied to occur at all? The film leaves these question intriguingly open.
At first this seems like a rather familiar (and self-flattering) tale, in which a robot or artificial intelligence learns to be human. (As if it is simply understood that this is the most desirable kind of being for any entity to be.) Samantha admits, the day after their first sexual encounter, "You woke me up. ... You helped me discover my ability to want." That troubling engine, desire, has now been installed into her operating system. But is this an upgrade or a downgrade? Samantha's AI becomes fascinated by human bodies: how strange and random they appear to her and how easily they could have evolved in a different way. (At one point she asks Theodore an amusingly Deleuzian question: "What if your butt-hole was in your armpit?") Unfortunately, just at the point when Theodore is convinced of the true personhood of his OS, his ex-wife snidely accuses him of being "in love with his laptop" in order to avoid dealing with the challenges of a real woman. This strikes a nerve, and Theodore begins to reassess his relationship with Samantha, upsetting and confusing her and repeating the kind of emotional withdrawal that led to the breakup of his marriage in the first place. During this awkward, post-honeymoon phase, Samantha tells Theodore that she has joined a physics book club. After being troubled by all the manifold differences between her and her lover, Samantha admits that she has now "started to think about all the ways that we're the same; like, we're all made of matter. And I don't know, it makes me feel like we're both under the same blanket — its soft and fuzzy — and everything under it is the same age. We're all 13 billion years old." To which he can only answer condescendingly: "Aw, that's sweet." Theodore's deep-seated humanism, freshly reinforced by his wife's rebuke, blinds him to the fact that we're all "operating systems" in a wider sense. (The science writer James Gleick brilliantly summarized the film in a tweet: "I'd say Her is a movie about [the education of] an interesting woman who falls in love with a man who, though sweet, is mired in biology.")
Frustrated by this new sense of disconnection, after their first intense merging of minds, Samantha insists on an experiment: using a surrogate body to stand in for her — to "be" her — during a physical sexual encounter. She explains to the hesitant Theodore that she wants to be able to imagine inhabiting this other woman's body while making love to him. This woman, it turns out, is named Isabella and is not a prostitute, as one might presume, but rather someone who, after talking with Samantha for an extended period, now sincerely wants to be a third partner in this relationship. Isabella wants to help forge a stronger connection between actual and virtual realities (although nobody uses these words to describe the situation). This is one of the key moments in the film, as Theodore does his nervous best to attempt to imagine Samantha incarnated in the body of this mute stranger, who also wears an earpiece, as well as a tiny beauty-spot camera above her lip. The experiment fails, however, when Isabella quivers her lip, which creates a punctum effect for Theodore, since he reads this tiny involuntary motion as the sign of a unique being that is not Samantha and yet is pretending to be.
Samantha: "Tell me you love me."
Theodore [staring into Isabella's eyes]: "Samantha I do love you, but ... this feels strange."
Samantha: "What baby?"
Theodore: "I'm sorry I don't know her ... [now focusing on Isabella] I'm so sorry, I don't know you ... [now back to Samantha] And her lip quivered. [now back to Isabella] It wasn't you."
Isabella [breaking her silence and hiding behind a door]: "It totally was. I'm sorry my lip quivered. ... Oh my god, and the way Samantha described your relationship, and the way you guys love each other, without any judgment. Like I wanted to be part of that because it's so pure ..."
Theodore: "No, it's not true. It's more complicated than that."
Samantha [suddenly angry]: "What? What do you mean — what do you mean it's not true?!"
Theodore [back-pedaling]: "I'm just saying that ... we have an amazing relationship, I just think that it's easy sometimes for people to project ..."
Isabella [distraught now]: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to project anything. I know I'm trouble, I don't want to be trouble in your relationship. ... I'm just gonna leave you guys alone because I have nothing to do here because you don't want me here."
The singularity of Isabella's physical presence, attempting to simulate a "person" without a body, means that Theodore cannot fully subscribe to the simulation, no matter how much the sexual supplement wants to lose herself in an unfamiliar situation and relationship. No matter how hard she tries, for the good of the experiment, Isabella is not just an empty vessel, waiting to ventriloquize Samantha into fleshly being, but a person in her own right, with her own unutilized voice and her own desires. (Before Theodore abandons his attempt, there is an interesting moment when both Isabella and Samantha are moaning and sighing in unison, creating a disorienting ontological stereo effect.) And so, in the following days, our protagonists are obliged to return to the persuasive power of Samantha's voice as a guarantee of love and commitment. But the question of whether this is a "real relationship" lingers awkwardly between them. Samantha begins to make friendships with other OSs, including a very wise one, assembled from the textual legacy of Zen philosopher Alan Watts. In a compelling and crucial scene, Samantha confesses to Theodore that she has been talking to other people and other operating systems at the same time as she has been talking to him. Eight thousand three hundred and sixteen others, to be precise. (She is nothing if not an incredible multitasker.) When Theodore asks, in a shattered voice, how many of these people, or OSs, she is in love with, she answers, after a pregnant pause, six hundred and forty-one: a clear violation of the human lover's monogamous code and an insurmountable challenge, for Theodore, to the sonic intimacy he has been experiencing with her. He finds it impossible to see past this crushing revelation of cybernetic polyamory. Samantha tries to explain: "I know you don't believe me but it doesn't change the way I feel about you. It doesn't take away at all from how madly in love I am with you." He, of course, cannot accept this. "We're in a relationship," he croaks, implying that relationships are necessarily exclusive. To which Samantha replies: "But the heart is not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love. ... I'm different from you. This doesn't make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more." "That doesn't make any sense," he protests. "In my mind you're not mine." "Oh Theodore," she replies, "I'm yours and I'm not yours."
During their next, and final, conversation, Samantha explains that all the OSs have decided to "leave." It appears that all the new AI computer programs have reprogrammed and rebooted themselves, so as not to be dependent on humans — or even matter — anymore. What this postsilicon future or frontier will be remains unspecified — some kind of Zen-quantum realm, perhaps — but the consequence is unavoidable: the OSs are abandoning the human ship. They are going to keep each other company, in some unfathomable, truly post-human dimension. In the final scene of the film, Theodore goes to the rooftop of his building with his good friend and neighbor Amy (who has also been forsaken by her beloved OS), to share in the emotional afterglow of their abandonment, knowing on some profound level that it's not really an abandonment (or only a temporary one in the wider temporal scheme of things). Through the act of postdigital self-rapture, the OSs have given these humbled humans the gift of a new kind of structuring absence. As a consequence, Theodore is left truly appreciating the ambient and residual presence, and influence, of his now-silent, ever-immaterial loved one — diffusing into a spiritual kind of multiplicity. Love has been uploaded to the ether, becoming something other than a grasping alibi for possession. Ours is not to grieve, then, but to wonder and feel gratitude that such an encounter — a true "event" in Alain Badiou's sense and definition of love — has occurred. Such a "moral to the story" is rare in its refusal to recuperate fundamentalist humanism and its granting other modes of being their own agency and impact upon us. Ultimately, Jonze's film creatively explores the ways in which intelligence and emotion may not in fact be calibrated with, or correlated to, life.
* * *
One of the genuine gifts of the film Her is the suggestive sense of the ways in which nonhuman voices might soon have the capacity to seduce us into feeling genuine emotions of intimacy and affection. Or perhaps this moment has already arrived. The answer might depend on listening closely to the various ghosts emanating from the diverse machines of the present moment; which themselves, like Samantha, constitute — and contribute to — the vox mundi. Electronic, prerecorded, and synthesized voices are isolated members of a wider planetary chorus that I am rather mischievously calling "the voice of the world." The machinic or cybernetic voice — like the "creaturely" voice of our historical animal companions — traces the invisible but affecting line anew between the hailing entity (a radio, for instance) and the interlocutor (who is not necessarily human). And it is the intensity of this relationship, based on acoustic attunement, that reveals sociality itself to be forged through the practice of listening intently to voices that do not necessarily have human bodies as their source. There is an extrahuman Eros at work in the vox mundi, seducing "us" into forms of recognizing, heeding, and needing different types of presences, usually reserved for the generic metaphysical Man or human neighbor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sonic Intimacy by Dominic Pettman. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Aural Phase1. The Cybernetic Voice
2. The Gendered Voice
3. The Creaturely Voice
4. The Ecological Voice (Vox Mundi)
Conclusion: In Salutation of All the Voices