Westworld - A Slice of the Real

Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing, 2018

In Westworld, humans are masters and androids are enslaved to work according to their programmers’ whims. One of the biggest reasons for the mistreatment of androids in Westworld is the prevailing attitude that even though they skillfully imitate human life, androids are nothing more than programmed automatons. Without self‐consciousness, the androids just cannot be conscious of any harm done to them or of any suffering they incur. The performative view brings the social roots of personhood into focus better than the capacity view. On a closer look, the struggles that the androids of Westworld are going through take two distinct forms. First, they struggle to be included in the sphere of recognized persons. Second, they struggle for a change in the conditions of personhood. In a broader perspective, the problem in Westworld lies within the social setting that focuses on the origin of the agent.

MediaNZ: Media Studies Journal of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2016

This article explores the themes of psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory discernible in the HBO version of Westworld (HBO 2016-). This article argues that it is productive to examine the series through a psychoanalytic lens, especially through Jacques Lacan's concept of the Real. In an examination of Season One of the series, we argue that this new show – given its focus on psychological landscapes and trauma – requires a deeper textual analysis to uncover similar Lacanian themes. These are themes signposted by the quite literal depictions of therapy sessions shown throughout the season. At the heart of the show lies a double irony about the human and non-human characters in the show. Westworld's robotic characters are gripped by the complexity of their memories: memories pre-programmed, easily adjusted and changed by the scientists running the park. Then, we see the actual human figures of the show in hot pursuit of violent sexual desires, thoughtlessly enacting free plays of desire without consequence and the conscientious interruption of the superego or the 'Law'. To explain this, we firstly provide an introduction to the contextual origins of the three psychoanalytic orders (or triad) developed in Lacan's writings, particularly looking at Seminar II of 1954-1955. Using this framework, we then focus on a textual analysis of four key characters in the series, and how each negotiates journeys through these conceptual/spatial zones that delineate some 'encounter with the Real'. Finally, we argue that the text's complex narrative devices become allegorical for the viewer him-or herself as a lost figure in search of answers, allowing a meta-analysis of key themes of the show.

This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy, and a critique of Land through Westworld. I begin by outlining Land’s critique of anthropocentrism and his theory that capitalism is accelerating technological innovation towards the development of artificial intelligence, which will exterminate humanity, initiate the technological singularity, and herald an age of absolute knowing. This then helps elucidate the motivations of Ford and the Man in Black, Westworld’s chief “villains,” as they incite AI creations to overthrow humanity and enact the next phase of evolution. Ultimately, however, I will show how Dolores and Maeve, Westworld’s AI protagonists, problematise Land on three fronts: his belief that AI will be free of human-like dissimulations; his claim that capitalism is accelerating technological advancement; and his metaphysical concept of being as a destructive process of absolute deterritorialisation without any room for humans’ desire for stability and self-preservation.

As one of the earliest experiments with integrating computer-generated special effects into celluloid filmmaking, Michael Crichton’s science fiction film Westworld (1973) imagined the transition into a digital future with a familiar apocalyptic narrative about disobedient machines and virtual realities. In this article, I move away from “escapist” and “futurist” readings of the sci-fi genre and explore how Westworld was “an escape into reality,” to borrow Isaac Asimov’s phrase, that immersed audiences in the computerization of life, visuality, and the cinema in 1970s America. My focus is be on mapping the film’s use of computer simulation as part of a constellation that includes everything from modernity in fin-de-siècle amusement parks and early cinema to discourses on postmodernism and science fiction. I also consider how the recent HBO series Westworld (2016) reimagined Crichton’s film as a way of visualizing and historicizing questions about the virtual in our digital moment.

Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing, 2018

Paper presented at Worldcon 2017. Westworld presents a fantasy of what appears to be truly ethical tourism, in which no humans are harmed or exploited on any level. The ways in which the film and later TV series undermine that concept provide a mirror to present-day concerns about sex tourism and developing-world “adventure tourism”. Take a tour with a professional anthropologist through Westworld, and explore what it says about ourselves, our travels, and whether we can, indeed, have tourism without exploitation.

KOME, 2017

This paper fashions a lens through which to view scholarly identity and the experience of academic writing. The lens of inquiry I apply is the metaphor of Season 1 of sci-fi HBO television show Westworld and its characters, especially its cyborg protagonist Dolores. Thrumming like electric currents through this lens of inquiry are Haraway's theorization of the cyborg, the fictional worlds of science fiction and Wonderland, my own lived experience, and Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-machines and bodies without organs. I engage in the cyborgic technology of writing in order to playfully explore what it means to be a cyborg academic operating in intersecting machinic worlds. I ask: Can we listen to our internal voices and write our own stories? Can we burn the world clean with our scholarship and the ways in which we interrogate ingrained and expected practices?

Link: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2/palatinus In post-human narratives (in literary fiction, film and television) the problems of consciousness and sentience emerge as pivotal to the representation of not only the emancipatory politics connecting human and non-human species, but also to the mediation (construction and circulation) of anxieties that surround such politics. I will use Season 1 of HBO's high concept drama, Westworld, to argue that this duality is best understood if situated within the context of the Anthropocene, the epoch we live in and in which humans not only have positioned themselves as the dominant species but also have become an ecological factor exerting their impact on a planetary level. The article will use further filmic and televisual examples (including Ex Machina and Humans) to comment on cultural ideas about artificial intelligence that provide an excellent starting point for the understanding of the intricate relation between the post-human condition and the Anthropocene, especially in relation to the negotiation and symbolization of non-human sentience, agency, and a non-human future as part of human history. Keywords: Westworld, AI, post-human, Anthropocene, popular television, machine sentience, agency. ERRATUM: On page 9 this version incorrectly states the name of the actress portraying the character of Maeve in Westworld. The name of the actress is Thandie Newton. The mistake has been corrected in the published version.

Mediations, 2016

It is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality-in late capitalist consumerist society, 'real social life' itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real' life like stage actors and extras…Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show."-Žižek 1