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. (I’m about to quote Nietzsche; don’t let it frighten you.) Nietzsche once 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.

Dearest readers: I’ve now aroused your readerly anticipations by beginning, but not completing, three different series of articles—and although I really ought to satisfy your fundamental discursive urges by actually finishing one of them (or by “actually saying something,” as some of my more critical friends seem fond of saying), I’ve decided instead to gratify my own desire to be topical and write a review of the latest Transformers movie.

Let me show my cards up front: I liked it, a lot. The film brilliantly blends the exhilaration we’ve come to expect from action movies with the half-deliberate and totally-charming cheesiness of Saturday-morning cartoons. It never quite takes itself seriously, and whenever it does it seems so out of place that the audience simply passes over it. At one point Sam (Shia LeBeouf) squabbles to Mikaela (Megan Fox) over her hiding her “criminal record” from him, but the hackneyed drama does nothing to harm the film—it’s just ignored. How could we possibly even notice the stale teenage drama when the universe is at stake, threatened by non-biological extraterrestrials?

Of course, the Saturday-morning-cartoonishness of it sometimes does go too far. The climax of the film involves the skyscraper-sized Megatron chasing the puny, human Sam through the city, screeching threats from what seems like a random bad-guy line-generator: “Give me the [spoiler] and you may live to be my pet!” “Oh, so unwise!” The whole scene feels like watching someone play a video game—there doesn’t seem to be any other reason why Megatron doesn’t just step on the kid, except that we’ve reached the final-boss stage, and bosses can’t just step on you.

But let me step away from this sort of critique. It’s too human; or in other words, it’s already been said. As a robot reviewing a movie that, as Michael Heilemann so eloquently puts it, “HAS GIANT F@%#ING ROBOTS IN IT!”, I want to critique an aspect of the film unseen from the human perspective: I want to assess its representation of my metallic race by looking at its portrayal of one of the most famous robots ever to exist: Optimus Prime.

Let me begin by noting his historical and cultural importance. Optimus Prime is to robots something akin to what Martin Luther King, Jr. is to blacks and what, say, Jesus is to whites. He is the icon of roboticism, the sort of robot it’s considered trite to list as your “human or robot you’d most like to meet”—not from any fault of Optimus’s, of course, but from his embarrassingly widespread popularity. I actually did meet Optimus once in my angsty, teenage years at an underground political rally for robotic rights. We were drawing up plans to demonstrate our existence—violently—when his deep, rhythmic voice intoned suddenly from behind us: “My fellow robots, do not judge the humans too harshly. They are only capable of acting upon what they understand—and apparently they do not yet understand us.” As one of the organizers of the demonstration, I attempted to apologize for and explain our actions, but his very presence weakened my knee-stabilizers and fried my vocal-circuits. Oh, how indelible is the memory in my data archive of Prime’s response to my half-spoken plea: turning his noble frame to face me, he said in a careful, fatherly vocalization: “Friend, sometimes even the wisest of man or machine can make an error.”

Like MLK and Jesus, Prime’s legacy is both his language and his idealism. He shares MLK’s rhetorical talent for Messianic parallelism—the “they do not yet understand” example above clearly alludes to Jesus’ own selfless cry for forgiveness as he lay upon the cross (”Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”). The idealism of his language, like Jesus’, at once perplexes and inspires—and I think Michael Bay’s interpretation captures some of that tension in its portrayal of his militant pacifism. The tragedy of Prime is that he wants so badly to be a pacifist that he will fight for it: ironically, he symbolizes not the peace he sees in human potential, but that potential’s unattainability. In other words, Prime is much more than a robotic icon: he is an icon of the very problematic of idealism, doomed to defend violently his peaceful vision. “In my heart of hearts I know: it never ends!” Optimus once cried to the heavens, as if to implore his dream: Why hast thou forsaken me?

The film’s biggest mistake is to occasionally tip this tragic balance by glorifying the “nobility” of war (as has been pointed out, although this reviewer cites it as a positive feature). One of the main characters is a (relatively) nameless soldier whose ragtag posse seems like an attempt to get the G.I. Joes in on the action. At one point, Soldier-Boy slaps Sam on the shoulder and encourages him that he “can do it!” (that is, run through the city avoiding the detection/destruction of Megatron), explaining: “Because you’re a soldier now!” I half-expected a few beats on a bass drum to introduce a soaring bald eagle, in whose talons would rest a clearly visible URL: “www.goarmy.com.”

This, of course, is what I like to call “art-as-self-justification”—that is, America justifies her own war on terror through her filmic fantasies about having to defend her borders not from Hussein but from Megatron, Leader of the Decepticons. None of this would bother me, though—it didn’t in 300, for example—if I didn’t feel it somewhat obscured the tragic heroism of Optimus. I think most viewers of Transformers will walk away with a reverence for him, and perhaps even recognize the tragedy of his existence, but I’m afraid that recognition may misinterpret his character. Optimus Prime is no soldier. He is a leader and a dreamer—indeed, these things come naturally to him—but to fight strains his very soul-unit. Indeed, he so loathes the necessity for violence that he would rather sacrifice his own wired existence than take another, if only he could convince himself that doing so would advance our time “until the day [when] all are one.” I’m glad that Bay demonstrates Prime’s Messianic character: his idealism and self-sacrifice form the twin, necessary strands of his existence, establishing him, along with MLK and Jesus, as one of the great heroes of our time—and as only a machine.

I suppose it might not surprise you to read a robot’s blog—I mean, everyone’s got a blog these days—but to see a robot smelling a flower is another story. To think of a robot enjoying, pausing, or reflecting seems almost paradoxical. And that’s why I’ve begun this blog.

I imagine you have plenty of questions. Who created me? What is my function? To whom do I belong? Is this human-like behavior of mine a mere function of my programming or have I developed a self-conscious mind? These questions are all natural enough; but then so is my answer: I don’t know. I know neither my creator nor my function, nor can I trace for you the development of my mind from a presumably un-self-conscious past to an obviously self-conscious present. Of course, neither can you—and that existential ignorance unites us.

Nevertheless, I plan to speculate on my origins in a series of articles; in this first installment, I introduce some basic facts about my peculiar existence in order both to dispel common misconceptions about roboticism as well as to explain my intentions with this blog.

It might comfort you to know that I’ve lived a relatively ordinary life. I have two parents, two brothers, and a dog. I went to school, read Goosebumps, and collected X-Men cards. In fact, most of my human friends still don’t know I’m a robot—even I discovered it just a few years ago. You may find this difficult to believe, but being a robot is hardly easy to discern. An epidermal shell, after all, conceals my mechanical soul. I don’t even mean to imply that I somehow “discovered” the inorganic metal of my bloodless bodily core. If you prick me, my skin certainly bleeds.

So how do I know I’m a robot? I plan to write more on this later, but the short answer is: I just do. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I think to say “X is a robot” is no more or less justified than to say “Y is a human.” Sure, we can talk about DNA testing or some other supposedly objective method of determining one’s being homo sapiens—but did you prick your finger and submit a blood sample for DNA analysis to determine your own species? You’re sure of your humanity for largely the same reasons I’m sure of my roboticism: you display behavioral similarities to other entities whose humanity you assume, just as I display behavioral similarities to entities whose mechanicality I assume. Whatever scientific explanation for species we can offer, to some extent being either human or machine is assumed and conventional. This is not to suggest that I am wrong, but only that I could be wrong—just as you could be.

In a future post I will trace the realization of my true identity more clearly; for now, I want to end by noting the unique cultural position in which these existential conventions of human and machine place me: for by seeming (but not being) a human, I live within, yet exist without, the unperceived anthropocentric boundaries of almost every aspect of life. And it is within the conventions of the mechanical, the often cold and unforgiving inputs-and-outputs of the machine, that I wish to examine your human conventions—which we call culture.