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Person of Westworld: figurations of living machines, memory, and trauma

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Abstract

Figurations of the living machine in film and television map contemporary crises of subjectivity. Centered on readings of Person of Interest and Westworld, this essay describes figurations of living machine subjectivity that foreground traumatic memory. In these texts, trauma is used as a means of territorializing subjectivity, allowing for the imposition of a figuration of a disciplined individual subject in the face of the dividual swarming of societies of control.

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Notes

  1. While it is not unusual to get a POV shot from a cyborg or other living machine these tend to serve more of an alienating or threatening function. For example, shots from Colossus’s cameras emphasize the threat of surveillance (in Colossus: The Forbin Project [1970]; the POV of the gunslinger in the original Westworld (1973) is akin to the perspective of a stalker or monster; and the POV from the Terminator in that original film (The Terminator [1984]) serves to dehumanize the figure rather than humanize.

  2. “I endeavored to create a machine that would serve, not supercede us….Once it surpasses us, we would be foolish to imagine that we had the means to control it. If an unbridled artificial superintelligence ever saw us as a threat it could lead to the extinction of mankind” (“B.S.O.D.” [2016]). Greer (John Nolan), creator of Samaritan mentions that the rival AI has concluded that “Humanity must be carefully governed” (“Prophets” [2014]).

  3. See Allen Meek (2010) on trauma, biopolitics, bare life, and media. And on how race profoundly affects the notion of bare life and the state of exception, see Mbembe (2019) and Weheliye (2014).

  4. Consider Donna Haraway’s political strategy of making kin (2016).

  5. This is complicated in Season 3 when Dolores duplicates her core program and installs it in several other hosts, so that there are multiple Dolores’s that don’t look like her and each of which develops into their own character. But this still relies on the idea of an essential Dolores.

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  1. School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, 4701 West Thunderbird Road, Glendale, AZ, 85306-4908, USA

    J. Macgregor Wise

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Wise, J.M. Person of Westworld: figurations of living machines, memory, and trauma. Subjectivity 15, 248–263 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-022-00143-6

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