Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? by Clint Burnham

Author:Clint Burnham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

6

Her: Or, There Is No Digital Relation

(with Matthew Flisfeder)

But really, can we be so sure what Her is about? Is it concerned with the nefarious effects of technology, that is how we are infatuated with our gadgets, our devices, our Wi-Fi, and our technology? Or is it simply an old-fashioned love story, in which one of the lovers just happens to be a computer? These two possibilities suggest two ways in which we will discuss the film in this chapter, albeit in very specific critical paradigms derived from Lacan and Žižek: the infatuation, we will argue, is a symptom of a kind of incommensurability, encapsulated in the Lacanian dictum that “there is no sexual relation”; the love story, in turn, is a kind of fantasy, a necessary fantasy that we nonetheless must traverse or transcend. Key, too, is how technology in the film simultaneously confirms some of this book’s theses: we must use digital tech all of the time, both in order to connect and to withdraw; labor and sexuality are intertwined (or entangled) so that it is hard to tell what stands in for the other; finally, the Event of digital technology demands both fidelity and its betrayal: we must be faithful, but the tech will let us down, leave us in the lurch, abandon us.

Then, this logic of incommensurability derives precisely from a reading of that very infatuation with technology, our “passionate attachments” to devices and connectivity. In this, deflationary aspect of our chapter, we will argue that the very problems the film demonstrates which attend to digital relationships are actually paradigmatic of all relationships, be they sexual or economic. And it is exactly because of this incommensurability that we need fantasy (the old-fashioned love story): fantasy is what sustains us in the face of such hard, cold realities. But what Her demonstrates, in such a remorseless fashion, is how fantasy itself is always in danger of collapsing. Now, before developing these arguments, it is necessary first of all to synopsize the film, and then to situate the film in terms of competing critical discourses that attempt to account for present-day capitalist culture, which is to say, the debate between “capitalist realism” on the one hand and “capitalist discourse” on the other.

In Her, set in the near future, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) plays a sad-sack corporate writer with a recently failed marriage, who buys a new operating system (OS) for his computer, which turns out to be the seductively voiced Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), whom we never see, but only hear. They fall in love even as he keeps trying to have relationships with real women, including a blind date, his neighbor Amy (Amy Adams), and a surrogate hired by Samantha. On the one hand, such relationships seem to be normalized in the film (Theodore and Samantha even go on a double date with another couple), but it is soon apparent that Samantha is, as the cliché goes, growing without Theodore—she’s met Alan Watts and carries on 500 conversations simultaneously.

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