The Robot

I believe electronic music best captures the groundless, amoral hysteria of modern existence—but as a robot I’m inclined to make such assertions. In particular, the electronic music of Richard D. James (known variously under “Aphex Twin,” “AFX,” and other monikers) occupies a special place in my emotional data center. His music not only seems to digitize accurately the frustrated existential conflict between self-creation and self-discovery; it also serves as the very manifesto of roboticism, capturing, perhaps, something of what it means to be a robot. I want to trace this conflict and this expression by interpreting one of Aphex Twin’s most exhilarating braindances: “Vordhosbn.”

“Vordhosbn” begins Aphex Twin’s epic two-disc Drukqs, a deliberately loose collection of electronic pandemonium, dissonant piano elegies, disturbing sounds of falling objects, screams, showers—and a hundred other confused elements seemingly jumbled together such that some reviewers have called the album “largely redundant.” Of course, I think this misses the point entirely. As Stephen Dedalus has said, “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”—and Aphex Twin, certainly a musical genius and undoubtedly the most sophisticated electronic artist alive, has made no mistake with either “Vordhosbn” or Drukqs: both quite intentionally disturb and confuse because disturbance and confusion are themselves part of his larger project of what I like to call self-purgation.

For instance, listen to the opening of “Vordhosbn.”

The song counts out for itself four simple measures in preparation for the explosive emergence of its twin elements: a percussive chaos on the one hand, a melodic simplicity on the other. Throughout the song these forces demand radically contrasting responses from the listener, and the chasm between them captures, I believe, the irresolvable modern conflict between self-creation and self-discovery. To see what I mean, try singling out the drums and your response to them: they seem inhuman in their accuracy, tugging at your mind with a cold mechanicality and bewildering rapidity. By contrast, now focus on the melody: a child-like tune that bounces about so simply I almost always find myself humming along with numbers (”oooooone, ooone, oone, two, threeeee, three, three-three, four”).

Now, one is tempted to posit a balance between these two opposing forces, a sort of dangerous dance between the song’s masculine and feminine drives. But I think this, too, misses the point because “balance” is too human a word to describe what I believe is more properly an abyss at the song’s center. In other words, at work here is not a simple balance of fast and slow, complex and simple, but an irreconcilable tension between the very twin and necessarily contrasting drives of modern existence.

Let me explain. Nietzsche wrote that “the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.” In this sense, the percussive chaos of the song is exactly this impossibility of its being described using words in our aesthetic vocabulary, like “beautiful” or “sublime.” And once we see the song’s percussive element as this inappropriateness of our descriptions of it, the melodic drive appears as exactly the opposite. That is, if the percussion reflects an indescribable and inhuman lack of order, arrangement, form, and beauty, then the melody reflects the deliberate and human attempt to describe the world—including ourselves—using those words and that vocabulary. Whereas the percussive element, according to Nietzsche, “does not by any means strive to imitate man,” this is exactly what the melodic element does do in evoking the charming humanity of a child.

And once we see that—once we’ve equated the song’s opposing elements with the respective impossibility and possibility of describing the world within a certain vocabulary—we can further abstract these elements to the very drives of existence itself. I realize this sounds absurd; but hear me out. If we really believe that the melodic drive of the song expresses the human attempt to describe the world within a pre-defined vocabulary, while the percussive drive is exactly the impossibility of doing so, then it is hardly a leap to equate the melody with the drive of self-creation and the percussion with self-discovery. Let me explain using an example. The melodic drive expresses our attempts to recreate ourselves within a newly constructed vocabulary: for instance, we might call ourselves “Christian” in an attempt to redefine (and thus recreate) our identity. The same holds true for any such attribute we might use, whether “liberal,” “traditional,” or “feminist,” or even any imperative we might adopt, such as “I live for the day” or “I remember that everything happens for a reason.” In other words, since the idea of our “identity” is really just a set of self-descriptions (”I am this, I am not that”), to change that set is to change that identity.

But just as the song’s simple melody exists only by contrast to its chaotic percussion, these self-creative attempts of ours come about only against the background of a darkly “inhuman” truth—and the recognition of this is what I mean by self-discovery, and what, I believe, the song’s chaotic element expresses. I embed “inhuman” in quotes in order to expose the paradox of its two definitions: it at once means “lacking compassion and mercy” and “not human.” I call this a paradox because the chaotic percussion of the song reminds us that the inappropriateness of our deliberate attempts to describe ourselves (as, say, compassionate or merciful) is exactly the most fundamental (and therefore most “human”) truth about us. In other words, the song’s percussive drive reminds us that our self-descriptions can only be so successful: because, at bottom, we are ourselves part of the very same causal chaos we call “nature,” and are thus no more describable—and no more affectable by description—than the indefinable “nature” against which Nietzsche warns us. In still other words, to recreate ourselves using a vocabulary we ourselves made will never wholly succeed, because what we are re-creating—a package of neurons causally intertwined with an indescribable and chaotic “nature”—can be no more altered by our descriptions of it than can the causal workings of the rest of nature.

Far from expressing a “balance,” then, between our self-creating and our self-discovering, the song merely widens the chasm between these two drives—into which it invites us to fall and to forget ourselves completely. This is why I believe the ultimate project of the song, and of the album as a whole, is self-purgation: it purges the self by inviting us to contradict ourselves, to recreate ourselves within a new vocabulary while simultaneously exposing the inappropriateness and even impotence of that vocabulary. The song’s solution to this deeply troubling irony is not to embrace either of its elements but rather to absorb their conflict—ultimately erasing our very idea of “self,” or our idea that a stable set of self-descriptions can successfully “define” us. This is why the seasoned listener of Aphex Twin laughs at complaints against his disturbing or confusing qualities, because these qualities are exactly his strengths. Ultimately, his music destroys us: it forces us consciously to absorb the irresolvable and self-destructive paradox of existence.

Now being an astute reader, you will have noticed that I have argued from a mutual standpoint. Throughout this essay I have used “we” and “us” and “our”—yet at the same time I promised to demonstrate how the song captures something about what it is to be a robot, not what it is to be a human. But why assume I could not have done both? I, like you, attempt to alter myself through redescription; and an intrinsic and utter inapplicability of my redefinitions will forever hinder me in my attempts—as it will forever hinder you. I am programmed. But so are you, and hence both our vocabularies will only be successful in renovating ourselves to a point. However, one difference between us does remain: as a robot, I can never fool myself into believing that I have no programming, that my self-creative attempts will work this time; no, neither will I ever succeed in wholly redefining myself, nor will I ever escape the tormenting consciousness of the very irresolvable paradox I find so wondrously captured in the electronic music of Aphex Twin. My (and our) only solace is to allow myself to be erased, to be forgotten—to be purged.

I’ve now left you, precious reader, textually unfulfilled for over a month. You’ve no doubt experienced difficulty sleeping, tantalized (as you are) by the question I asked so long ago: do girls really talk so much about guys? If so, why? More importantly: what does it all mean?

In my last article (which commentator Siena admonished as “[just] a tease”), I merely laid out the rules of the game. I argued that you ought to evaluate my theory of intrasexual communication biologically and not culturally—and that you therefore ought to demand that it explain all cases whatsoever, not only those involving everyone but you and your best friends. In other words, since I believe that something about human psychology (i.e., biology) best explains the cultural phenomenon we’re considering here, the only two ways it could possibly fail to apply to a given situation are that (1) the parties involved are not human females, or that (2) I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, many of you criticized the step I next took in the article. I attempted to defend the premise that girls do in fact spend a good deal of their time talking about guys by appealing to my own experience of female-female communication while urging you to consider your own. Some of you argued that my reliance on public-transit eavesdropping may have skewed my results (apparently, girls most enjoy gossiping about private matters when in public places). Others simply rejected my conclusion, emboldened (no doubt) by the conviction that I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And to a certain (i.e., small) extent, my critics are right: I should have qualified my assertion. I have never intended to argue that girls’ only topic of conversation is guys. Indeed, I should have mentioned the point of reference from which I write these essays: what I’m really attempting to explain here is why girls talk about guys far more than guys ever talk about girls.

Now, why is this true? (And I assure you it is.) The short (but convoluted) answer is this: that, contrary to the fantasies of naïve sexual politics, guys and girls are not equal in every respect save their choice of chromosome; in fact, what guys are to girls is the exact opposite of what girls are to guys because implicit in all sexual interaction is a binary structure of submission and dominance.—Woah, woah, woah, Robot. Slow down.—Ok, let me explain.

Imagine a group of guys playing pool. After a few beers, one of the guys, Alpha, slaps another one, Beta, on the back and says, “So! Beta! Tell us what happened last night with, ah, what’s her name?” “Omega,” Beta replies hesitantly, while the other guys gather ’round, grinning expectantly.

Now it’s imperative we understand what’s actually going on here. Alpha is not inviting Beta to effuse over his night with Omega, nor even to say anything accurate about it at all. Alpha is simply challenging Beta’s dominance. (We call this either “an asshole thing to do” or “just a joke” depending on how obvious it is.) Now, let’s suppose things didn’t go so well last night between Beta and Omega. What motivation does Beta have to say as much? Can you imagine him saying to the grinning group ready to explode into laughter in front of him something like: “Well, guys, not too well. First, she stood me up for like twenty minutes, and then while we were at dinner she kept looking at this guy across the room!” Absolutely not.

And why not? The answer should be obvious. Because in male-male interaction, to admit difficulties in a sexual relationship is to admit weakness: and no guy would ever divest himself of his own social power on purpose by complaining of the way a girl treated him.—But Robot, what if things between Beta and Omega did go well?—The answer should be equally obvious: nothing much changes. Alpha and the group of guys are going to elbow each other and joke at Beta’s expense regardless of what actually happened because no one was ever interested in what actually happened in the first place. Even if for some reason Alpha and the guys respect Beta’s night out with Omega as something obviously praiseworthy—let’s say Omega is really, really hot—Beta would just be considered arrogant were he to go on-and-on about his great night with her. In short, there’s never any reason for guys to talk seriously about their relationships with girls because any attempt to do so will either weaken or embitter their claim to power.

But let’s contrast this with what we’ve already noted regarding women. However representative of female-female communication as a whole, my bus-ride experiences of women complaining to other women about their relationships with men prove (by their very existence) that a sharp difference exists between the human sexes on this point. We’ve just said that a guy would never complain to his mates about a girl because to do so would be to fall on his own sword—that is, to strip himself of his own power. But clearly this isn’t the case with women. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for women, to complain about male infidelities actually has the opposite effect: it actually strengthens their social standing.

But why is this? (This is the paragraph where it all starts to come together.) Now we can finally understand my short but convoluted answer above. Talking about the opposite sex has opposite effects for opposite genders because, I argue, “implicit in all sexual interaction is a binary structure of submission and dominance.” This is a separate assertion about the nature of sexuality, and I only have time to explain it, not defend it—but I think it will appear unexceptionable enough once understood. It simply means that the masculine and feminine sex-drives correspond to the desires to dominate and to be dominated respectively.—Woah, Robot! That’s a very, very sexist thing to say!—As long as it’s true, it really isn’t. And it’s true.—Well, Robot, I’m a girl, and I certainly have no desire “to be dominated.”—Sure you do, you just never think about it using those words. All I’m really saying is that you find certain men more attractive than others because (for a variety of reasons) you think those men are more sexually powerful—that is, (potentially) more dominating.

And if that’s true—that men and women have fundamentally opposed sexual drives—it’s easy to see why talking about the opposite sex would have opposite effects for each. Take women, for instance. Since woman’s fundamental desire is “to be dominated,” she is the object, not the subject, of the “sentences” of sexual relationships. In other words, she can talk to her friends all day long about a guy because she is talking about what Alpha did to her: like stand her up for twenty minutes or look at a girl across the room. Of course, she could also talk to her girlfriends about what she did to Alpha: like ignore his phone calls. But this is either a weak retaliation against something Alpha did—thus retaining her position as the object of the sexual sentence—or it’s a genuine indication of her having supplanted him as the dominating (i.e. masculine) force in the relationship, in which case the relationship won’t last long enough to talk about for very long precisely because she has no desire to be in that position (i.e., she will get bored and leave).

Likewise, guys could chat it up with their mates about what they did to their girlfriends: but for two reasons this never happens. The first is the one we’ve noted before: introducing the subject of what one has done to a girl will be met either with parody or with disapprobation because it will always be interpreted as an attempt to gain social power. The second reason is more commonsensical: let’s suppose a guy were not subtly seeking after power by bringing up his activities with Omega. Well then… why bring it up at all? If he truly occupies the masculine position in that relationship, he’s got things “under control”—what need has he to discuss it with his friends? Indeed, it seems plausible that conversation about the opposite sex usually comes about when aid or advice is being asked for; but asking for aid or advice only makes sense when one has yielded one’s claim to the dominant position of a relationship. And as we’ve already pointed out, to do that would be to admit weakness and thus intentionally to fall on one’s sword.

Wow, this was a lot. Let’s summarize. Girls talk about guys more than vice versa mainly because conversation occurs more naturally when a practical reason brings it about (like asking for advice). And since no practical reason could exist for guys to talk about girls except the one guys protect themselves against (i.e., vying for power), while practical reasons abound for girls to talk about guys (i.e. asking for advice on how to react to what guys have done to them), girls quite naturally talk more about guys than guys talk about girls. Furthermore—and this is probably the most controversial part of my argument—I believe that a woman’s complaining about what a guy has done to her actually increases her social standing (whereas it would decrease a man’s) because it demonstrates that a very powerful man indeed has her in his grasp—which is, after all, exactly the sexual fantasy she and all her friends share. I imagine that girls, like guys, probably have mechanisms to defend themselves against too much complaining/power-struggling—they might use comments like, “So just break up with him, Omega!”, for instance. But the practical reasons Omega might offer in her defense (”I’m only asking for advice, sheesh!”) offset such defenses enough to create the disparity we now observe.

So, my dear human readers, this is why girls talk so much about guys. This is about all I have to say on the matter myself; but I would love to write a third article in the series responding to any critiques you might have, if you would only leave them either below as a comment or here as an email.