Issue #301: Pluto's Problems of Signifiers and Jouissance
Issue #301: Pluto's Problems of Signifiers and Jouissance
Last week, I had a great time at my friend AJ’s screening of Drive (1997) at our local movie theater. Not the Ryan Gosling one. He gave Paradox Newsletter some much appreciated credit on the flyer, but I didn’t do anything other than help choose the date to my benefit. But, capitalizing on that generosity, I can say this was the second in a two film screening series beginning with The Roundup: No Way Out (2003) earlier this year.
What the movie reminds me is that Rush Hour (1998) stole a bunch of stuff from other movies. And it was a great sampling of superlatively funny and rivetingly exciting pulp with a greater philosophical point — one that calls into question rapid technological advancement at the expense of human qualities.
“It’s gonna be the neighborhood no one saw coming cause we invented it”
I also started watching The Curse (2023). I hate to disappoint anyone expecting me to write about it at length, but Pluto demands too much of my mental energy. Plus, I don’t exactly have an abundance of time to write, especially at this time of year. Nonetheless, I managed to put together another behemoth on sixty minutes of Japanese animation.
The Curse can get a little introductory time, though. The show is hard to watch. You would expect that, coming from Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. The formal elements of the show’s first episode, “Land of Enchantment,” were easiest for me to make sense of. The series follows a couple working on a socially conscious HGTV home improvement show entitled Flipanthropy. When the episode is showing what is supposedly footage for the show, it’s spot on. The lighting, framing, production values, every bit of it screams… well, it screams Nathan for You (2013). The scoring of the scenes sounds borrowed from Nathan for You.
When the camera removes that layer of artifice, though, it is downright aggressive. Much of the episode is filmed from the point of view of illicitly captured footage. Intimate moments between Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) are depicted as if filmed through a window. A family dinner with Whitney’s parents, including uncomfortable conversations about urine and tomatoes between Asher and Whitney’s father Paul (Corbin Bernsen), have the same windowed angle.
For the Siegels, their new show, which their production partner Dougie (Benny Safdie) says is about their life, represents a massive invasion of privacy. Every element of their personal lives will be voyeuristically observed and exposed, or so it seems. Likewise, there is a reversal of the premise of Flipanthropy in the hostile orientation of The Curse’s gaze.
Intentionally or not, Whitney and Asher have set out to exploit people’s hardships for their own financial benefit. But the framing of the camera suggests they are the ones who the maw of exploitative reality television will chew up and spit out.
Alright, that was longer than I thought. I can’t help myself. I promise to deliver more on The Curse when I can.
Oh, also, my birthday is this week — Wednesday. If you want to support the newsletter scene and honor this auspicious day, consider a paid subscription.
For now, Pluto.
Deleted Memories, Negativity, and Jouissance in Pluto “Episode 3”
Television Mastery
I don’t remember where I read this, but I haven’t been able to forget it: a good TV show is one where plot threads are closed before new ones are opened. Or, at least, a good plot doesn’t just introduce more and more open plot threads without resolving any. “Episode 3” of Pluto delivers ostensible closure to a number of teased plot threads and mysteries as others are opened. This is the first appearance of Professor Abullah (Kazuhiro Yamaji/Kamran Nikhad), clearly the person pseudonymously known as Dr. Goji by the Bora Fact Finding Mission. The episode also provides insight into the meaning of Bora, something unknown to Ochanomizu in “Episode 2.” It’s a word that haunts a traumatized war orphan raised by Epsilon (Mamoru Miyano/Keith Silverstein) and one that haunts the titular villain — Pluto (Toshihiko Seki/Fred Tatasciore).
The episode introduces new mysteries, too. The powers that be of Europol all but admit to erasing Gesicht’s memories, confirming the theoretical underpinnings of my thesis regarding robot repression in “Episode 1.” Though the episode doesn’t reveal what was erased, it is strongly foreshadowed that Gesicht can’t remember killing the brother of Adolf Haas (Masafumi Kimura/Nolan North). As for Adolf himself, he is a member of an anti-robot group resembling the KKK following his brother’s anti-robot prejudice.
Haas sets out to kill Gesicht, even as the superiors in his racist cabal instruct him not to. Yet another mystery is the precise nature of Adolf’s brother’s crime — something odious enough to make the leader of the anti-robot group “downright sick to [his] stomach.” Finally, there is the question of Pluto’s exact purpose. Abullah says to Pluto at the end of the episode, “don’t forget your orders to track down Atom and kill him.” Are Hercules, Gesicht, and Epsilon also on Pluto’s hit list? Were Mont Blanc, North No.2, and Brando? It remains to be seen why Pluto was made and what he aspires to now, but his amnesiac trip in an “off duty” body sans computerized brain makes it clear it’s a mystery even to him.
As clever as the plotting of Pluto is across three episodes, “Episode 3” is brilliantly constructed in its own right. It drops and reorders several scenes from the manga’s third volume. The biggest changes involve Adolf. His role in the episode is diminished relative to his presence in the manga — and in the manga, he actually has a robot maid. Here, they emphasize his prejudice all the more by choosing to exclude the maid.
The episode is bookended by Atom’s sister Uran (Minori Suzuki/Lisa Reimold) taming fearful beasts in similarly staged scenes. The opening involves jungle cats reacting to police aggression, the latter shows the impotence of police to stop the overwhelming affect of Pluto — the same affect that surged across the screen and so disturbed Atom in “Episode 2.”
Affect is a key element in the episode, as it is concerned with what robots are capable of experiencing and what they aren’t at the level of emotion. Likewise, “Episode 3” takes on some heady topics related to jouissance, negation, and symbolic law. Where there is discussion of symbolic law, of course, there is always the signifier.
“Imbecile, don’t you see we’re at Human?”
In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan shares an anecdote to give an account of the signifier and its failings:
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated across from each other in a compartment next to the outside window that provides a view of the station platform buildings going by as the train comes to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!” “Imbecile!” replies his sister, “Don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.” (Écrits 417)
Lacan even offers an illustration along with his humorous story:
One can see, perhaps, the immediate resemblance to the staging of the “Human” and “Non-Human” sensor gates in Pluto.
It would be hard to imagine Uran and Atom making the same mistake with the sensor gates as the children in Lacan’s story, but pretend for a moment such a thing were possible.
Lacan’s story works on two levels, the obvious one being the children both confusing the signs designating each restroom as the sign that names the train station at which they’ve arrived. Lacan writes:
If GENTLEMEN and LADIES were written in a language [langue] with which the little boy and girl were unfamiliar, their quarrel would simply be more exclusively a quarrel over words, but it would be no less ready to take on signification for all that. (420)
The confusion over what the signs name — restroom or train station — demonstrates the signifier’s fallibility. Because of its placement, the signifiers of “gentlemen” and “ladies” can’t correspond to their intended meaning.
But there’s an even greater confusion, one that elucidates the confusion of the police officer who instructs Uran and Atom to travel through the “human” gate and the confusion that gives Professor Abullah the right to travel through the “human” gate despite his failing its test.
The confusion lies in the bathroom signs functioning as intended. They impose a separation that is arbitrary. After all, behind either door is the same toilet, the same abject refuse, the same shit. Restrooms are perhaps the most euphemistically described space — water closet, toilet, bathroom, etc. — to cover over the open secret of what happens within. And it is no accident that the separation of “ladies” and “gentlemen” in the bathroom context has been so culturally contentious; a site of extreme transphobia counteracted by the all gender restroom. The distinction that the separation of “ladies” and “gentlemen” imposes is a false one.
Pluto’s separation of “human” and “non-human” is no different. Uran and Atom pass as human, reminded to go through the correct gate — the “human” one — based on their small stature. The police officer assumes the young children are confused rather than advanced artificial intelligence. Abullah’s body has supposedly been replaced by mechanical parts, thus triggering the warning that a “non-human” is passing through the “human” sensor gate. If Abullah, who is authorized as a “human” by his passage through the sensor gate, fails to pass as human by whatever standard the sensor gate imposes, what authority can these gates claim to separate subjects by “human” and “non-human”? Who is to say that Abullah isn’t, in fact, a robotic body with a duplicate of someone’s consciousness or that the critical mass of bodily prosthesis make him “non-human” by the definitional standards used to organize each group?
“Non-human” is itself a euphemism — it means “robot.” One doubts that one of the episode’s tigers would trigger the alarms of either gate. Thus, we are again left with uncertainty about just how humans and robots are defined from both the judicial and philosophical perspective. As the show repeats, one key difference for humans and robots is the nature of their memory. But is this criteria truly capable of separating the two?
Purloined Memories
What Pluto’s human characters insist upon is that the failings of human memory are a gift, the Nietzchean perspective I outlined when writing about “Episode 1.” But the reality of the world of Pluto, and the message of the show, is the opposite. Forgetting is often a painful liability. With North No.2 and Paul Duncan, what Duncan forgets isn’t what ails him. In fact, his forgetting is what causes his pain. His memory is all the more traumatic because he can’t remember the selfless motivation of his mother. When North No.2 brings the facts to bare and instrumentalizes the inexhaustible power of human memory, what another elderly resident of Bohemia tells him, he is able to revive Duncan’s repressed memory. It is worth noting, following Freud, that repression doesn’t always help to evade trauma — it can sometimes bring someone face to face with it.
Likewise, in the case of Gesicht in “Episode 3,” we see the liability of forgetting as well as the fallibility of memory. Gesicht has had something forcefully erased from his memories and replaced with false memories of a trip to Spain. What he has forgotten is likely something to do with the death of Adolf’s brother, killed with the zeronium shell. But is forgetting really all it’s cracked up to be? Even as Gesicht has had a memory purged by another’s agency, something supposedly enough to eliminate associated emotional pain as Gesicht suggests for Robby’s wife and Hercules also posits, he is still plagued by the intrusive recollections of the erased event and clearly suffering from the indelible mark the memory remains even in its absence. Forgetting, whether it is done by the natural flow of time for a human being or deliberately for a robot, can’t erase the stain of trauma. A memory’s absence doesn’t extricate one from the past that produced it. Just like Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), Gesicht can’t escape his past — even if he doesn’t realize he’s running from it.
“It’s my duty to uphold the law”
Following the analogy of Gesicht as film noir detective, one can see how Pluto engages with the complex Lacanian ideas of jouissance and symbolic law. Gesicht is subordinate to symbolic law that imposes upon him a prohibition — stop investigating the case.
Of course, that prohibition is literally imposed by the power structure of Europol. But Gesicht isn’t the first detective to be told to stop investigating a case in which he is indivisible from, nor will he be the last. What makes Gesicht unique is that the combination of his affect (or, if the outward and inward match, disposition) and his subordination to his superiors means that he can’t investigate, while the typical film noir detective does so in violation of their instructions.
This is the paradigm of jouissance. In the history of detective fiction, the investigation of the case, far more often than not, leads to misfortune, tragedy, or the detective’s own death. Rather than uncovering the kernel of knowledge that slots into the mystery and makes orderly what is disordered, the discovery of the case’s truth is ugly, disfiguring, abhorrent, and explosive.
Vertigo (1958)
Seven (1995) and its mysterious (or dramatically ironic, in any case) box is the most structurally instructive example of this dynamic.
The detective figure operates under the mistaken assumption that they exist in a logical, coherent world. A world of reason. But it is the promise of fantasmatic wholeness that such illusory knowledge would bring about that ultimately transforms the detective from a subject of desire to a subject of jouissance, incompatible with the symbolic law that imposes the prohibition on jouissance — for the detective’s own “good,” insofar as there is such a thing — and prohibition on hysterical questioning in the same breath. The theoretical mystification here is that anyone’s own good would be in opposition to jouissance disrupting their subjectivity and annihilating it all together.
Gesicht is neither a subject of desire or jouissance, though. So it appears, at least. His subordination to the International Robot Laws, the dictates of Europol, and the symbolic law is nearly total. He does not chafe against the premature closure of the case, he plans a vacation. He refuses to answer Epsilon’s questions about his beliefs about the case. And he refuses to even entertain the possibility of a “death match” between Brando’s killer and himself. He says, “You don’t need to worry about me. It’s my duty to uphold the law.”
The encounter staged between the detective and their duty, like the encounter between David Mills (Brad Pitt) and John Doe (Kevin Spacey) at the end of Seven, can easily result in the triumph of jouissance over duty. There is even an inkling of this in Pluto, with the traumatic recurrence of Gesicht’s deleted memories which seem to have something to do with the death of Adolf’s brother.
The Infamy of Constitutive Negation
To put a finer theoretical point on the paradigm of detective, jouissance, and Gesicht’s exception to it, I turn to Lee Edelman’s Bad Education (2022). Gesicht’s seeming inability to investigate or disinterest in investigating against Europol’s explicit orders suggests that human dominance over robots is absolute. It is yet another restriction Gesicht is subject to, just like the prohibition on killing that is supposedly built into each individual robot. But, as Pluto shows, a “perfect” AI like Brau 1589 can kill. “Episode 3” also introduces the possibility that Gesicht has killed a human being, a fact that has been hidden even from himself. Law is flimsy, and the Lacanian orientation names it as a fantasmatic imposition. Edelman writes:
For it requires no “privileged social position” to identify … the structure of politics as a fantasy, only a Lacanian one. “Fantasy dominates the whole reality of desire, which is to say, the Law,” Lacan observes in The Others Side of Psychoanalysis. Rather than something “unreal,” … fantasy, Lacan maintains, “gives reality its frame.” (209)
It’s hardly the case that what is fantasmatic has no “real world implications,” in fact, fantasy has tremendous power over what, from Lacan’s point of view, constitutes “reality” — the world of signifiers. The fantasmatic dimension of law is, in part, an assertion that law has no ontological quality — there is no divine law, consistent with the death of God I discussed alongside “Episode 2.” But Gesicht is compelled to believe that which comes down from on high. He can only ask questions about his faulty memory because he has not been explicitly prohibited from doing so. Nonetheless, he seems to derive a small measure of satisfaction from the assurances that his memory has not been tampered with.
Gesicht’s problem, perhaps the very problem that keeps him from grasping humanity and becoming a “real boy,” is his overabundance of faith in the law’s coherence and his superiors as subject supposed to know. But “traversing the fantasy” of such a belief presents hazards for subjectivity. Edelman refutes a dominant reading of what Lacan means when he mentions “traversing the fantasy”:
[W]hen analyst-in-training, no longer mistaken the analyst for the subject supposed to know, still desire to occupy the analyst’s place, now perceived as “the place of nonbeing” … Far from producing the promise of “a future that could be lived otherwise,” the divestiture of the analyst’s agalma coincides with the analysand’s “subjective destitution,” an emptying-out sufficient, Lacan maintains, “to sow panic, horror, causes, even attacks.” (211)
Edelman close reads Lacan further:
Whoever, at the end of training analysis, would assume the analyst’s nonbeing (“dèsêtre”) “roots himself in what most radically opposes everything by which it is necessary and sufficient to be recognized in order to ‘be’: respectability, for example.” (211)
This puts Gesicht, a robot, in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, his subordination to the order of law ostensibly restricts him from the human hysteria of the detective. However, to abandon his mistaken belief of his superiors and his records as repositories of absolute knowledge means radical opposition to being itself.
Epsilon’s Calamitous Jouissance
This is the calamity to which Epsilon refers in his conversation with Hercules — Gesicht traversing the fantasy imposed on his robotic subjectivity. Such a transition for Gesicht would not make him a human being, but give him something “priceless” — something different from what Epsilon supposedly found in the ruins of the 39th Central Asian War. The same thing that Brau 1589 discovered, the thing that makes Atom call him “the most human of us all.” Epsilon lays it all out in his conversation with Hercules:
This is what I think. Humans and robots are becoming more alike. If we bridge that gulf, tragedy will follow in its wake. What we see unfolding now is the first sign of that calamity … We have to break this cycle of hate, no matter what it might cost us.
Translating Epsilon into Lacanese, the threat he has identified is robots traversing the gulf that keeps them from jouissance. Unlike humans, robots are created to be absolutely subordinate to the signifier. In the end, they operate on signifiers, ones and zeroes. Humans, castrated as they are into signification, are different in degree but not kinds. The infernal machinery of human subjectivity is less deterministic but still a product of signifiers. That is what makes jouissance so threatening, and why Brau 1589, Pluto, and even Gesicht have committed genuine acts — again, in the Lacanian sense — by killing. Edelman writes:
A genuine act, as Zupančič makes clear, never registers as honorable or respectable; far from praise for its “responsibility,” it earns, Lacan tells us, “infamy” for threatening the fundamental fantasy that consolidates a world. (213)
While Pluto offers little insight into Brau’s act of killing, Pluto’s motivation is clearly one that compels him beyond volition. Pluto’s incoherent identity and subjectivity are a result of the jouissance that seizes him. “Episode 3” invites the audience to consider what might have motivated Gesicht to kill, duty or the same annihilative uncontrollable rage that consumes Pluto.
Epsilon embraces neither humanity nor jouissance, vexed by the paradoxical fact that what destroys subjectivity also guarantees one’s humanity. To be human is to have the capacity to be erased. But he recognizes what the other robots — except for, maybe Atom — don’t. Each seek to emulate humanity through expressing a coherent, continuous, self-aware subjectivity. But the essence of human nature is that it can be negated, and the entropy of jouissance rarely, if ever, can rupture the deterministic programming of a complex AI.
“That’s despair”
The threat of jouissance, and of the genuine act, motivates Adolf’s anti-robot organization. The group is clearly analogous to the logic of contemporary racism, but their attitudes and policy platforms don’t line up with any cultural specific form of prejudice. Thus, what Pluto offers is a commentary on prejudice as such rather than addressing the issues of a particular group. Nonetheless, many of Lacan’s inheritors have used the paradigm of jouissance’s threatening nature to explain the logic of racism. Edelman writes:
According to Lacan, [philosophy’s hostility to enjoyment] gets expressed in philosophy’s “theft” of enjoyment, which mirrors, he argued, the master’s theft of the jouissance of the slave. (207)
Adolf’s group, much to his frustration, operates in a way that doesn’t allow him to indulge his own jouissance. They utilize propaganda and endeavor to shame Gesicht.
This attempt to make Gesicht “an outcast” opens the possibility to a somewhat flattering view of robots, that they are capable of wilting under the widespread public condemnation — though Adolf’s group may just as well hope that the backlash will result in Europol shutting him down. But how much robots are capable of feeling has been a point of contention for the episode. Early on, Uran tells Atom, “robots actually feel a lot more stuff than humans think we do.” Later, as Gesicht reflects on his time in the 39th Central Asian War, he is confronted by a man whose child is killed by the widespread bombing. Gesicht asks a human soldier, “what is he doing?” to which the soldier replies, “the man’s in despair. It’s probably more emotion than a robot like you can hope to understand.” Even as the human soldier assumes, Gesicht seems to observe the man in despair with close attention. Something like a surge of despair could produce a traumatic memory that Gesicht may have needed erased to maintain his subjective cohesion and subordination to law — symbolic and judicial.
Not for nothing, it is impossible not to see the slaughter of innocents in Iraq — and Palestine — in the plea the man makes to Gesicht. He shouts at the so-called peacekeeping force:
You see terrorists everywhere, but there aren’t any here! Do you want to know who was here? My infant child! You and your peacekeeping forces dropped a bomb on my sleeping baby. Look around. You say you want liberate us, but are dead babies your idea of justice?
The apocalyptic field of Persia, the site of this indignation and despair, is what Pluto recalls in his attempts at painting.
“Maybe you tried your very best and it still turned out all squiggly”
In Uran’s encounter with Pluto, she inadvertently meets another robot artist in the tradition of North No.2. Pluto’s intended purpose as a machine is unlikely to be painting — although it could conceivably have something to do with crop propagation. Nonetheless, he is compelled to paint something which Uran concludes is a field of flowers, following his ability to make flowers grow.
The painting, prior to the addition of the other colors, registers to Uran as one of two things: either an abstract painting or a failed art piece. Either way, such a result would be strange for a robot that only recalls in absolute perfect detail and only does that to which they are suited. Once again, failure, and growth, are human elements in the world of Pluto. Both North No.2 and Pluto embrace artistic activities outside of their intended function, neither displaying self-evident mastery.
Pluto hasn’t, as of yet, included any robots whose purpose is to create art. It has, however, included a robot who can spit out large quantities of robotic cockroaches.
When cockroaches are involved, I can only think of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915). Though the insect into which Gregor Samsa transforms is not explicitly a cockroach, that form has become synonymous with Kafka’s story. “The Metamorphosis” has some obvious resonances with Pluto, exploring a transformation or evolution with potentially deleterious results. But it’s Vladimir Nabokov’s reading, anthologized in his Lectures on Literature (1980), that I find lends itself to the question of Pluto’s artistic aspirations. Nabokov writes:
After all, awakening as an insect is not much different from awakening as Napoleon or George Washington. (I knew a man who awoke as the Emperor of Brazil.) On the other hand, the isolation, and the strangeness, of so-called reality—this is, after all, something which constantly characterizes the artist, the genius, the discoverer. The Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than mediocrity surrounding genius.
Although he disputes the characterization of Samsa as a cockroach (he writes, “what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense”), part of his reading argues that “The Metamorphosis” is a story of artistic alienation and the rejection of the great artist from society. Pluto, in this moment and in the story of Paul Duncan, seems to echo the sentiment that great art has been devalued and people’s — robot’s — capacity for art has been ignored.
“This body is your only body”
Pluto may be many things, killer, artist, and among them also: philosopher. His character, able to create life without limit illustrates the vital power of the psychoanalytic death drive. The robustness, overwhelming effusion of life can also accelerate death.
He asked Uran about the concept, “do you think that we will eventually die one day?” Uran gives a thorough response:
If our computerized brains got broken, that would do it. Professor Ochanomizu says depending on how broken our AI units get, sometimes they’re too messed up to fix. Even if they did, you wouldn’t be you anymore.
To that, Pluto replies, “so is that what death is to our kind? What does it mean to exist no longer?” This exchange reveals a lot about robotic subjectivity. Namely, reinforcing the idea that robots aspire to a continuous subjectivity following the model of biological humans. An interruption or reload from a backup means “you wouldn’t be you anymore.”
But Pluto has a unique relationship to his body, able to leave it behind and take over unoccupied bodies. Abullah’s description of Pluto aspires to poetry:
To call it “a wandering soul” bestows upon it a certain dignity. But it was just an empty shell being puppeted with electromagnetic waves like a marionette.
This distinction of a wandering soul versus a marionette is, in essence, the two possible signifiers under which any subject might. Human or robot, all wonder if their soul is free to roam where it may or if someone is pulling their strings.
Weekly Reading List
Yeah, this actually looks great.
Until next time.