Cybermedia by Carol Vernallis;Holly Rogers;Jonathan Leal;Selmin Kara;

Author:Carol Vernallis;Holly Rogers;Jonathan Leal;Selmin Kara; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501357053
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2021-08-10T21:00:00+00:00

Cognitive Maps, Late Capitalism, and Freefloating Postmodernism

Thus far, this essay has focused on particulars—the hosts’ bodies, affects, and voices. But these hosts also exist in a slowly unraveling system. Westworld attempts to construct a fully rendered, immersive environment under the auspices of late capitalism. All the bodies, human and android, exist aesthetically and materially within its diegesis. Westworld posits a question left relatively unexplored: what does it mean to situate visions of AI futures within a frontier mythology? Westworld’s temporality isn’t specified, but the world outside the park partakes of today’s slick, anonymous corporate stylistics—cool whiteness, smooth walls, bright, wide screens. Yet perhaps whatever’s exterior to Westworld is a façade. We never see the entrances, laboratories, or surveillance facilities necessary to maintain the park’s order. Westworld’s temporality shifts perpetually; the narrative manages multiple timelines withheld, except in part, from viewers, until they collide, when the past invades the present. The narrative of William, initially portrayed as a reluctant guest to the park, exists thirty years prior to Dolores and Maeve’s awakening.

In one of the show’s striking narrative reveals, the earlier, younger, good-natured William morphs into the cruel, obsessed Man in Black of the present. Jameson notes that one of late capitalism’s key elements, its postmodernity, is a flattening of time that creates an information flow so insistent that humans are forced to exist in a perpetual present: “we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic … our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time.”20 Atemporality is a phenomenon both of the Westworld theme park and the show itself. Guests continually step out of time to exist in a place of pure, simulated space. As Dolores poignantly laments in episode 7, she does not want to look forward or back, desiring to “just be in the moment I’m in.” Ultimately, she reaches cognition by altering her spatial relation to the park, and to the temporality of the Western. This act, extending both her and our experiential confines, is radical.

Dolores wishes to fold her past traumas and her present experience into a temporal foundation from which she can assert linearity. Yet her desires work against the logic of late capitalism, in which commodity culture manipulates and re-molds the past in service of a sense of play and perpetual present. As Westworld’s Wild West theme park creates an internal spectacle, the past loses all sense of use value. Jameson argues that postmodern society in late capitalism is “a society bereft of all historicity, one whose putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles … the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”21

The frontier myth becomes a commodity itself, a playground for the obscenely wealthy. Within the park, capitalist structures reassert themselves. The hosts function as the proletariat, and the capital stays outside of the park. A daily ticket to visit Westworld costs $40,000 and privileges are capped at two weeks.

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