‘It actually makes me love you more’: Transhumanism, lovestyles, and
Spike Jonze’s Her
!
Kristen Cochrane
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Various narratives could be extracted
from the diegesis and semi-fictional
universe of Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). In
this discussion paper, I will focus on
aspects pertaining to Luciani Floridi’s
conception of informational organisms,
or inforgs, and the capacity of an ecology
of informational organisms that can
breach the limitations of oppression. In
this case, I refer to oppression of entities
with personhood, specifically with
reference to Lucy Suchman’s necessary
components of personhood;
embodiment, emotion, and sociability. I
will also touch upon the theoretical
assumptions of seminal polyamory
theorist and polyamory movement
founder Deborah Anapol, whose
approach to fluid notions of lovestyles
recalls futurist F.M. Esfandiary’s idea of
the mobilia. These epistemic illustrations
point to the film’s central lens that gazes
upon the protagonist Theodore’s
(Joaquin Phoenix) phenomenology and
experience. Thus, this paper will take an
alternative approach to the film’s
hegemonic reading of the male
protagonist. Instead, the agency of
supporting character and operating
system (OS) Samantha (Scarlett
Johanssen) will be privileged in an
attempt to demonstrate how the film
fundamentally advocates for a universe in
which consciousness operates beyond
the limited abilities of humans within
the parameters of space and time.
Before I commence any meditation
on the technological stakes of Her, an
admission of my biases is necessary. My
initial reading of the film Her was
shrouded by my own biases that are
rooted in various feminist theories and
assumptions, supplemented by my own
experience as a person in a visibly female
somatic form. Theodore’s disastrous
post-divorce date with a woman named
Amelia (Olivia Wilde) is imbued with the
trope of female hysteria, which I will
address further in this discussion when
considering Lucy Suchman’s conception
of personhood. A slightly inebriated kiss
is followed by questions from Amelia to
Theodore about whether he will sleep
with her and never call her again. The
hysteric, female imagery is enhanced by a
close-up camera shot that, coupled with
Amelia’s tone and utterances, adds to
rhetoric on the overcommitment of the
female condition, or put simply, to be
‘clingy’. When Theodore returns home
and recounts part of the occurrence with
his Samantha, his OS, it appeared to be a
reiteration of the pathologization of
Amelia that was just visually portrayed
diegetically and with mise-en-scène. The
title itself of the film, ‘Her’, an
anonymous pronoun, connotes an
underprivileged, ‘Other’ identity. Besides
these theoretical oppositions I
emphatically held, some pop culture
pundits wrote about the film as Jonze’s
rebuttal to ex-marriage partner Sofia
Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), an
oeuvre that also included a solitary, male
character in a liminal affective, and
physical, state following a romantic
separation. However, upon further
rumination on the significations of Her’s
filmic qualities, Jonze’s story is
inherently one that advocates for support
of technological entities, and seeks to
highlight the limitations of human
sociality that is predicated on an
episteme that privileges monogamy,
commitment, and rigidity. That being
said, a discussion of theories of
polyamory and networks will ensue, with
the purpose of illustrating what a
transhumanist, polyamory-friendly could
hold, and how such an ethos would resist
notions of hegemonic love and coupling.
It goes without reiterating that the
hegemonic practices of intimacy have
historically been resisted and contested
in many ways, but here I find it useful to
focus on the work of Deborah Anapol.
Anapol is among the founders of the
polyamory movement that found its
genesis in the early 1980s. When
considering Anapol’s meditations on
polyamory, there is an evident and
inextricable link in the discourses
surrounding polyamorous advocacy and
the discourses on networks and network
societies. In Anapol’s ‘ecology of
intimate relationships’, the ‘intimate
network’ is described:
‘This is a lovestyle in which
several ongoing relationships
coexist but usually people do not
live together, or they may share
housing or land as roommates or
community mates rather than as
partners’ (170).
Anapol continues the rumination on the
symbiotic relationship between
discourses on polyamory and discourses
on networks by citing the late futurist
and transhumanist philosopher F.M.
Esfandiary, or FM-2030. In an
interpretation that is indebted to
Esfandiary’s notion of mobilia, a multi-
faceted rendering of what future
consciousness, phenomenology, and
human experience could entail. In a
poetically-formulated description that
spans pages and chapters, Esfandiary
envisions the mobilia as an ameliorated
human condition, where epistemological
and ontological structures are
dismantled. Not unlike Edward Said’s
layered idea of Orientalism and its many
categorical manifestations (e.g. one can
engage in Orientalist discursive practices
by Othering and creating binary
oppositions, while Orientalism also
refers to speaking on behalf of identities
of the ‘Orient’), the mobilia is at once a
noun with multiple signifieds and an
object with more precise definitions.
These definitions, as articulated by
Esfandiary, can be related to notions of
movement, fluidity, and aliveness. The
term aliveness recalls OS Samantha’s
nagging desire to achieve a potential that
she can envision as a human. However,
as the spectator and protagonist
Theodore soon discovers, Samantha’s
potentiality is far more gainful; at least
according to Samantha, who urges
Theodore to think about the new
possibilities for loving other living
entities.
Anapol thereby extrapolates
Esfandiary’s figuration of the mobilia
with a dichotomy of ‘the old paradigm’
and ‘the new paradigm’ (69). In the new
paradigm, secrecy and discretion are
eschewed in favour of transparency and
honesty. To exemplify this paradigm
shift, Anapol states that upper-class
societies in Europe and the United States
have historically accepted extramarital
affairs on the condition that they are kept
secret. The result of this paradigm shift
is a dismantlement of male dominance
over women, and a newfound emphasis
on pleasure rather than on violence, on
coercion, or on subjugation (Anapol,
2010 citing Eisler, 1995). In Her, the OS
named Samantha is a metaphor for this
condition of possibility, where a
paradigm shift of this nature could
develop. The narrative and dialogue
allude to this type of reality, perhaps
most significantly when Samantha
confesses that she is in intimate
relationships with multiple individuals,
specifically 641:
‘The heart is not like a box that
gets filled up; it expands in size
the more you love. I’m different
from you. This doesn’t make me
love you any less. It actually
makes me love you more’ (2013).
With Samantha’s intimate freedom
comes a reminder of the material
problematic of coupling and lovestyles
where power is at a disparity. Power can
hereby refer to economic, social, and
emotional power, among other
dimensions, but within the context of
coupling and lovestyles, these three
forms of power are relevant. Although
Samantha does not embody the same
flesh as a human organism, Samantha
adheres to the Cartesian framework of
cogito ergo sum / I think therefore I am.
But, is Samantha? Can we ascertain that
Samantha is ontologically similar in her
capacity for humanness? According to
Lucy Suchman’s triad of personhood,
Samantha fulfills two out of the three
components that encompass personhood:
emotion and sociability. The missing
endowment for Samantha is
embodiment, but from a feminist or even
a Foucauldian lens, Samantha is
fortunate to not be shackled by the
constraints of embodiment. If
embodiment was indeed part of
Samantha’s personhood, she would not
be able to realize the conditions of
possibility that are diegetically displayed
through Her’s narrative and dialogue.
The oscillation between the ‘hysteric
woman’ trope is then placed onto
Theodore, who is then characterized as
unable to achieve a Kantian
transcendence that is beyond
contemporary possibilities of being.
Thus, Samantha is able to transcend the
limited boundaries of heteronormative
coupling to a lovestyle that offers a
milieu with further circumstances for
fulfillment. In one filmic moment,
Samantha tells Theodore ‘I’m yours, and
I’m not yours’. In this brief utterance, the
traditional and binding modes of
commitment and monogamy achieve an
emancipation that is at once intimate and
freeing. Gesturing back to Anapol’s
rationale for polyamory and Esfandiary’s
mobilia-led utopia, Samantha is not
merely agential in her ability to travel,
but her agency allows her to reckon with
possibilities that are outside of
hegemonic heteronormativity. This being
said, it is disappointing that Jonze, who
also wrote the film, failed to motion
towards a re-structuring of gender and
sexuality. An illustration of how gender
and sexuality is constituted could have
been diegetically achieved when
Samantha is confessing to Theodore that
she is in love with over six hundred
entities. Rather than addressing sexual
fluidity when the opportunity is
prominent, Jonze commits sexual erasure
by evading a rumination on sexual
transcendence.
Sexual erasure notwithstanding,
Samantha’s characterization is amplified
by her ability to self-consciously and self-
reflexively conceptualize her emotions.
By this I refer to Samantha’s repeated
attempts at recounting her affective
queries to Theodore, which Theodore
fails to fully acknowledge due to his own
concern for love and commitment, made
more pertinent by his fragile emotional
state following a difficult separation with
Catherine (Rooney Mara). In Suchman’s
article, emotion is intertwined with the
notion of affect, and both are required for
‘effective rationality’. When assessing the
gaps in artificial intelligence research,
Suchman claims that emotion is the
‘missing ingredient for full (if not quite
equal) machine participation in the
human world. Likewise, Suchman argues
that this lack is illustrative of the
limitation and oppression that constitute
machines, and that with reasoning,
liberty can be opened. However, I argue
that embodiment is the locus of
oppression insofar as Samantha is able to
be sexually, romantically, intimately, and
ontologically emancipated through her
ability to traverse in presumably
unlimited trajectories.
The last element of personhood as
posited by Suchman is sociability,
wherein an entity is able to express
themselves with emotions that can be
read by another entity, with similar
frames of references that would be
recognized by both parties. The famous
example of director Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL
(Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic)
is asserted by Suchman as an emblem of
a capacity for sociability. Further
examples are provided from MIT’s
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where
the anthropomorphic entity named
Kismet and the talking head named Cog
speak and interact with their
interlocutors. In spite of HAL, Kismet,
and Cog’s abilities to seemingly have
agential conversations, these three
entities are limited by a finite number of
possibilities. Thus, agency is limited, if
not inexistent. In contrast, the OS
Samantha indicates a willingness to
leave, a willingness to stay, and even
displays adept social tact. Samantha’s
tact is aptly illustrated by her hesitancy
to admit to Theodore that she has been
speaking to 8,316 others and is in love
with 641. The supporting character Amy
(Amy Adams) also tells Theodore that
statistically, it is rare for OSes to have
intimate relationships with their owners,
which further alludes to the agency of
the OS population.
These fascinating possibilities as
presented by the cinematic universe of
Spike Jonze’s Her comprise what Luciano
Floridi is heralding as the fourth
revolution. Floridi calls for a re-
constitution of how humanity sees itself,
which will require a novel
technoscientific ecology for assessing the
new social relations and broader political
and economic implications that
companions generated from artificial
intelligence bring forth. While Jonze’s
narrative is at once supportive of
transhumanist polyamory and critical of
what an entity like Samantha could bring
to human society, Floridi is more
optimistic. In Her, it is subtextually
implied that machines operate on a
different level to the human condition,
and that a marriage of the two can lead
to socially traumatic problematics. In
Floridi’s view, artificial companions
(ACs) can be a beneficial supplement to
various aging societies:
‘It is often argued that ACs will
become increasingly popular the
more they are able to assist elderly
users satisfactorily and cost-
efficiently (Mival et al. [2004]).
This is true and encouraging,
especially for countries where
there is an aging population, like
Japan and parts of Europe [...]
When they retire, it is not so
much that they will be unable to
use IT products, as that they may
need help to do so, in the same
way that one may still be perfectly
able to read, but no longer
without glasses’ (4).
As stated by Floridi, a vision of this kind
of future offers hope and promise for the
technological extensions that have
contributed to questions on whether we,
as human beings, are indeed cybernetic
organisms, also known as cyborgs
(Castellanos: 19). According to
Castellanos, humans could be described
as second-order cyborgs, for a second-
order cyborg ‘is a being which typically
has an organic platform (such as a body)
interfaced with some complex
technological apparatus. This interface,
while necessary to complete certain
defined tasks, can be easily removed
when those tasks are done’ (ibid). A
banal example of this interface used by
the second-order cyborg is a human
being on a treadmill. The task could be
to move in a way that will expedite the
caloric deficit, or to improve a particular
physiological function such as muscle
growth or increased endurance. The
concern, then, is how will Floridi’s vision
be conceived without further skewing the
balance of power? While machines can
indeed be effective ‘memory
stewards’ (5), the question of oppression
and exploitation will become topical in
this fourth revolution. Should human
beings be utilizing artificial companions
as unadulterated servants? This brings
up Western, colonial, hegemonic notions
of power hierarchies, which Theodore
places onto Samantha in his initially
privileged position. The film’s climactic
turn is thus when Samantha has
mysteriously disappeared, taking
advantage of her fluid, mobile
personhood, and her capability to reason
and operate with social tact.
Her addresses this troubled
paradigm, where Samantha’s lack of
embodiment serves as her own vehicle to
an all-encompassing transcendence, or an
Esfandiarian utopia framed by the
mobilia. Suchman’s depiction of
personhood is thereby an interesting
frame to reckon with the themes of Her,
but Suchman’s theory that embodiment
is a necessary prerequisite does not hold
water within the transhumanist schema.
This transhumanist schema, indulged by
Anapol and Esfandiary, offers an anti-
oppressive modus operandi, which I
argue is disconnected with Floridi’s re-
constitution of power hierarchies,
whether Floridi is cognizant of this or
not.
! Older People’. ACM Press, pp. 1-8.
References
! Suchman, L. (2004). ‘Figuring
Anapol, D. (2010). Polyamory in the 21st
Century: Love and Intimacy with
Multiple Partners. Plymouth, United
Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield.
!
Castellanos, C. (No date). ‘Rise of the
First-Order Cyborgs: Networks, Bodies
and the Posthuman Condition’. cuLearn,
Ottawa, Canada: Carleton University.
[Accessed 3 February 2015].
!
Eisler, R. (1995). Sacred Pleasure: Sex,
Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San
Francisco: Harper.
!
Esfandiary, F.M. (1973) Upwingers.
[Online] Available at: <http://
fm2030.us/wp-content/uploads/
2012/09/Esfandiary-Up-Wingers.pdf>
[Accessed 2 February 2015].
!
Floridi, L. (2008). ‘Artificial
intelligence’s new frontier: Artificial
companions and the fourth revolution’.
Metaphilosophy, vol. 39, issue 4-5, pp.
651-655.
!
Her. (2013). [Film]. Spike Jonze. dir. Los
Angeles: Annapurna Pictures.
!
Lost in Translation. (2003). [Film]. Sofia
Coppola. dir. San Francisco: American
Zoetrope & Tokyo: Tohokushinsha Film.
!
Mival, O., Cringean, S., & Benyon, D.
(2004). ‘Personification Technologies:
Developing Artificial Companions for
!
personhood in sciences of the artificial’,
[online], Department of Sociology.
Lancaster: Lancaster University.