Event Title
Becoming who you never were: Co-produced selfhood in the Dollhouse
Start Date
28-6-2010 9:00 AM
End Date
28-6-2010 10:30 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.
In this paper, I use Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse” as a prism to illuminate three questions at the intersection of theories of technology, selfhood, and embodiment: 1. How is technology enacted and embodied through the people who animate it? 2. What conceptions of selfhood are forwarded through the practices of technological transformation imagined in “Dollhouse”? 3. How might current understanding of the relations among bodies, minds, and technologies offer us traction for thinking about the theory of selfhood and bodiedness offered in the Dollhouse?
Technology is always animated by use – in significant ways, technology is use: people create and deploy technologies for human purposes and thus shape the possibilities of technological being. At the same time, technologies in their enactment mold our bodies and our selves – our animation of technologies necessarily implies their animation of us. “Dollhouse” provides a provocative extension of this insight through its imagining of a technology that braids together quite overtly how others might constitute our selves through technology. The machine used to imprint new somatic capacities and muscle memories, along with more usual markers of selfhood – memories, self-conceptions, and so on – hyperbolizes the transfer of self-practices arguably already a part of our usual practice of being or becoming our selves.
“Dollhouse” conceives selfhood, then, as a co-produced work of art mediated by technology (or, in parallel fashion, a co-produced work of technology expressed as a work of art). In the show, the first level of this production is quite blunt: the computer scientist/neuroscience wizard Topher exalts as he patches together new and improved selves for dolls on assignment. As Season One unfurled, though, viewers witnessed a more nuanced vision of the co-production of selfhood as dolls retained fears of their rapists and loyalties to their handlers, crushes on other supposedly blank slates and desires for information they didn’t know they wanted. Thus, selfhood is figured in the show as more resilient than we might expect – and simultaneously more radically dependant on the will and existence of others than we often assume.
Finally, all of this rests on an ambiguous and perhaps inaccurate vision of the role of embodiment in shaping the conditions for technological transformations of selfhood. Drawing on Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noe’s work on how the body shapes the mind, I finally consider how accounts of bodily being show up in light of “Dollhouse’s” conception of “where” selfhood resides. Attending particularly to the sites at which embodied resilience is an important part of the show’s narrative, I reflect on how personhood and memory are interlinked at the site of bodies. I explore a deeper conception of technologies of embodiment, noticing in particular the orientalist commitments the show maintains to disciplines like yoga, meditation, and bonzi trees.
Becoming who you never were: Co-produced selfhood in the Dollhouse
This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.
In this paper, I use Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse” as a prism to illuminate three questions at the intersection of theories of technology, selfhood, and embodiment: 1. How is technology enacted and embodied through the people who animate it? 2. What conceptions of selfhood are forwarded through the practices of technological transformation imagined in “Dollhouse”? 3. How might current understanding of the relations among bodies, minds, and technologies offer us traction for thinking about the theory of selfhood and bodiedness offered in the Dollhouse?
Technology is always animated by use – in significant ways, technology is use: people create and deploy technologies for human purposes and thus shape the possibilities of technological being. At the same time, technologies in their enactment mold our bodies and our selves – our animation of technologies necessarily implies their animation of us. “Dollhouse” provides a provocative extension of this insight through its imagining of a technology that braids together quite overtly how others might constitute our selves through technology. The machine used to imprint new somatic capacities and muscle memories, along with more usual markers of selfhood – memories, self-conceptions, and so on – hyperbolizes the transfer of self-practices arguably already a part of our usual practice of being or becoming our selves.
“Dollhouse” conceives selfhood, then, as a co-produced work of art mediated by technology (or, in parallel fashion, a co-produced work of technology expressed as a work of art). In the show, the first level of this production is quite blunt: the computer scientist/neuroscience wizard Topher exalts as he patches together new and improved selves for dolls on assignment. As Season One unfurled, though, viewers witnessed a more nuanced vision of the co-production of selfhood as dolls retained fears of their rapists and loyalties to their handlers, crushes on other supposedly blank slates and desires for information they didn’t know they wanted. Thus, selfhood is figured in the show as more resilient than we might expect – and simultaneously more radically dependant on the will and existence of others than we often assume.
Finally, all of this rests on an ambiguous and perhaps inaccurate vision of the role of embodiment in shaping the conditions for technological transformations of selfhood. Drawing on Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noe’s work on how the body shapes the mind, I finally consider how accounts of bodily being show up in light of “Dollhouse’s” conception of “where” selfhood resides. Attending particularly to the sites at which embodied resilience is an important part of the show’s narrative, I reflect on how personhood and memory are interlinked at the site of bodies. I explore a deeper conception of technologies of embodiment, noticing in particular the orientalist commitments the show maintains to disciplines like yoga, meditation, and bonzi trees.