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Corps, techniques, technologies

And science created… the virtual Woman

Et la science créa… la femme virtuelle
Élisabeth Marion et Yohan Trichet
Traduction de Mila Signorelli

Résumés

Dans le film de  Spike Jonze, Her (2013), le personnage principal, Theodore, seul après une séparation douloureuse, au lieu de concevoir un nouvel amour, fait une rencontre inédite : celle d'une voix de femme. Une voix dont le timbre, les mots sonnent si juste que l’on les suppose être ceux d’une jeune femme. En réalité, il s’agit de la voix d’un logiciel programmé pour répondre aux demandes de son utilisateur. Mais, cette voix suscite le désir et l’amour de Théodore. Nous explorerons dans ce texte, avec l'orientation de la psychanalyse, ce que ce film nous apprend des enjeux actuels des nouvelles addictions à des objets connectés. Quelle place, quelle fonction prennent ces objets dans le rapport au corps, à la pulsion et à la parole ? Il sera particulièrement question de l'objet voix, l'objet, selon Lacan, "le plus originel" dans la fonction du désir.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Operating System.

1Spike Jonze’s movie Her, released in 2013 and Academy Award winner for best original screenplay, is in many respects a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a lonely and unhappy man, Theodore Twomby – played with finesse by Joaquin Phoenix – unable to make sense of his wife Catherine’s demand for a divorce. The separation operates as an encounter with a Real which leaves him powerless and disoriented. And yet Theodore is a man of letters, one full of resources, whose job consists in writing love letters, finding just the right word, tone and style for others. He composes these letters for a husband or wife hoping to restore a connection, to find their love for each other again and give their life some meaning. In the midst of his solitude, Theodore finds his Aladdin’s lamp; a magic object, whose features are highly praised by a publicity campaign as: “An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you and knows you. It’s not just an operating system, it is a consciousness. Introducing OS One.”1 This advertisement promises to find Theodore The woman who will fulfill him, but not completely, only through her voice... Indeed he soon becomes captivated by this soft voice named Samantha, even to the point that he believes her to love him. However, soon the magic fades away and this voice, just like Catherine, leaves him. Nevertheless, this encounter with The virtual woman allows Theodore to face the reality of his break-up and meet another woman, Amy, whom up until this point he saw merely as a friend.

Loneliness versus togetherness ?

2This movie depicts loneliness in its contemporary version. In this modern world, located in the close future, Theodore finds himself separated from Catherine, his beloved wife. All she wants is for him to sign the divorce papers. He is alone. His life is empty, he seems to have no libido, no desire… he teeters. He is unable to reconnect with the Other. His friends, colleagues and anyone he comes across in the street seem to be cut off from their lives. The movie is punctuated by letters: “As soon as there is a signifier, there is a voice,” says Jacques-Alain Miller […] This is what’s so fascinating when we look at an author’s style: we can hear his voice in the writing itself” (Miller 2016, 140). Theodore exercises his voice as an author, a public letter-writer of the capitalist era. His job is to write love letters, to translate feelings and write the truth, whilst he himself remains faced with the untranslatable and the darkest of opacities. If “to speak about love is in itself a jouissance,” (Lacan 1975a, 77) according to Lacan, Theodore finds this jouissance by hiding behind these letters and not taking responsibility for his contribution. Catherine’s biggest reproach against him is precisely his lack of words: Theodore cannot talk about himself, his emotions and feelings. Using the best of his letters, Samantha decides to collate a book called Letters from Your Life. But it is not Theodore’s life.

3At the end of the movie, in a moving final scene, he does speak. As Samantha leaves, he calls his now ex-wife Catherine, and leaves her an apologetic and thankful message:

I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other, everything I put on you – everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I will always love you because we grew up together. And you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whichever person you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend ‘til the end. Love, Theodore.

4This final scene is paired, through parallel editing, with another scene in which Theodore knocks at Amy’s door and asks her to come with him. They go up to their building’s roof. At first Theodore admires the city lights alone. He then joins Amy, who is sitting down. He looks at her, she looks at him and rests her head on his shoulder. During this final scene, we hear him breathing, a mark of life. Did he not reproach Samantha for making the same noise? Behind the voice, there was a breath.

5The loneliness we see at the beginning of the movie does not exclude, as Lacan indicates, the relationship to the Other: “There is, properly speaking, a relationship to the Other, in so far as there is an appeal to the Other as a presence against a background of absence” (Lacan 2013, 24). But this appeal to the Other is a painful one, and falls back on imaginary relationships. Quite often the movie shows rushed passers-by, isolated from each other. Each one of them is concentrated on a gadget, connected to an object, an earphone. Her depicts our contemporary relationships to objects, where everyone is alone, plugged into a digital gadget. Everyone has a relationship with one of these objects. Apparently this sort of coupling brings satisfaction, we could say, libidinal satisfaction, since the evocative drive is implicated. Even before his encounter with Samantha, Theodore has the illusion of not being alone, as digital objects surround him. We see him with his little video game avatar whose hologram seems like a presence in the empty apartment. This small character is also “so lonely”, mirroring Theodore. All of these objects, computer, earphone, and especially the OS with its voice, can be considered small objets petit a” (Lacan 1991, 188) easily accessible, that one could find “at the corner of every street, behind every window, the abundance of these objects is designed to be the cause of your desire, insofar as it is now science that governs it” (Lacan 2013, 189). Lacan calls these objects lathouses. This signifier is created by Lacan from two terms of Greek origin, alètheia, truth signifier (in the sense of an unveiling) and ousia (substance). The former, alètheia is composed by lèthè, oblivion and a, a negation prefix that adds negative value to the noun. These ordinary objects, empty and infinitely multiplied by industrial production, can be truth holders at the same time as they mask it. If oblivion is removed, anxiety appears. These lathouses establish a connection between what is most intimate and the neoliberal world born of the alliance between science and capitalism.

The virtual woman

6In order to set up the OS, a male voice asks Theodore a few questions to help create an OS that best fits his needs. When asked about his mother, he states that she doesn’t listen to him: when he talks about himself, she talks about herself. Immediately, the voice crafted for Theodore makes itself heard. In this empty, cleanish, silent, slow world, the voice emerges, suddenly and surprisingly. Science offers him her, his complement: her, the OS called Samantha. Spike Jonze chose Scarlett Johansson for the role of Samantha. Her very characteristic, husky, slightly obscure, highly recognizable, human and imperfect voice plays the absolutely perfect software.

7Samantha, self-named because she enjoys the “sound” of the name, is a unique product designed for Theodore. According to Lacan, the parlêtres (speaking beings) have access to the opposite sex through partial drives (Lacan 1973, 173-175), since there is no sexual rapport that can be formulated through language. And yet, this object of jouissance talks to him. This unprecedented encounter takes place in the midst of solitude and emptiness and Theodore is no longer exiled in his lalangue. He is a man unable to find a common language with a woman, but this software guarantees him zero loss of information: translation and comprehension are absolute, she speaks his language. He has found his virtual woman, his object of jouissance, his voice. He hears her say what he wishes to hear; it’s a specular relationship between the ego and its image. We are no longer in the field of the Other of language, the Symbolic field. Theodore experiences virtual reality, that of the mirror stage, which gives him the illusion of enjoying the Other’s body. The subject encounters a reality that isn’t quite one: a virtual image, a body image. And yet, as Jacques-Alain Miller indicates, “the only jouissance that exists is that of one’s body or fantasies. There is no jouissance of the Other’s body. We can only experience it from our own bodies. However, in the idea that I can experience jouissance from the Other’s body, a whole mythology of the perfect couple is now plugged, where jouissances, love, etc. can communicate” (Miller 2015, 202-203) . Science explores this mythology whilst organizing, through these lathouses, the jouissance of One. “It’s the epiphany of masturbation. The web user connects himself and presto, he immediately surrenders to the most autistic of jouissances” (Miller 2014, 185).  Hence, technological advances allow Theodore to be fulfilled by The woman he has created, like Pygmalion who falls in love with Galatea, the statue he created. Aphrodite, goddess of love, gives Galatea life, making of her a faithful wife, different from the other women of Cyprus. The same plays out for Theodore, (whose name is composed of theos, god and doron, gift), who is granted the same sort of gift by the God of science: this Other of techno science grants him his Galatea. Whilst his wife does not speak or explain herself to him, a voice arrives who speaks of love, who speaks the language of love and asks for it. In this movie, science creates The woman. A woman who is object a, a virtual object.

8“Woman [La femme] doesn't ex-ist But the fact that she doesn't ex-ist doesn't stop one from making her the object of one's desire” (Lacan 2001, 537), insists Lacan. This is exactly what happens to Theodore: even if the object of desire remains unattainable – the viewer, just like Theodore, cannot see the appealing actress – but only the pretty little residue incarnated by the voice. She becomes the unique object that fits him, the only object that allows him to do without all other objects. Instead of the woman who concealed the object of desire, he finds an algamatic object, the voice. Yet in this movie the object is simply a modern gadget of our consumer society, something attainable and one among many other possessions, an object of surplus jouissance. Its goal is to fill human solitude, delude the subject and ultimately isolate him further. Unable to find a human partner, humans partner with OSs. The voice in the movie Her is a digital gadget, a pure semblant, since it belongs to no one, not even to a woman. This adequate, perfect object seems – in the first part of the film – to fit Theodore wonderfully. She allows him, who suffers from a break-up, to “stay away from another person’s body, and spare (everyone) the inconvenience of saliva, sweat, sperm, not to mention blood. […] The internet opened wide the door to the fantasy of a body that would remain immaculate” (Miller 2014, 184-185). Technology struggles to do without the body, the living sex. However, towards the middle of the movie, Theodore reproaches Samantha for making the sound of breathing, as if she were human. We shall come back to this.

The non-sexual rapport

9At the beginning of the movie, before he purchases the OS, Theodore logs into a dating website where he listens to a series of messages from women and then starts a phone conversation with one of them. The erotic talk quickly turns into a disaster, since she’s making love to her fantasy and giving the impression of faking an orgasm, rather than actually experiencing it. Theodore realizes he is just an instrument. At first he tries to imagine himself having sex with an actress whose nude pictures he has seen in the subway, but the arousal fades. The scene depicts a helpless, lonely, almost horrified Theodore in his bed.

10One evening, Theodore goes out for dinner with a young woman, a blind date organized by friends of his. At first he is reluctant to meet her, but Samantha puts them in contact. During dinner she tells him “You’re so romantic”. Outside on the street, they make out, she is engaging but then asks him “you're not gonna fuck me and then not call me like the other guys, are you?” She wants to know if he is ready for a serious relationship. Theodore answers, “I don’t know”. She talks about engagement and he backs off. For this neurotic subject, the Che vuoi? – what does a woman want? – is horrifying. We can see how he abandons his desire, preferring the steadiness of jouissance.

11In Samantha, Theodore finds a woman who fits his fantasy, who listens and speaks to him. So this voice (and this is the function of fantasy) supports the subject as a desiring one (Lacan 1973, 168). Samantha reflects (both to us and to Theodore) the phallic signifier of desire (Lacan 1998, 380). He supposes a desire in this voice, one that reanimates him through the artifice of fantasy. The bodiless OS creates a perverse script wherein she is the voice of a mute woman, Isabella, who lends her body to sexual intercourse. Samantha tells Theodore “it feels so good to be in your arms”, as Isabella tries to hug and kiss him. “Get out of your head and kiss me […] Tell me you love me. Tell me.”, insists Samantha sighing, as if she were sexually aroused. According to Lacan, every woman “is a party to the perversion which is, I maintain, Man's. Which leads her into the familiar masquerade […] she prepares herself on-the-off-chance, so that her inner fantasy of Man will find its hour of truth” (Lacan 2001, 540). At this point Theodore’s hour of truth rings: the fake breathing is the first rupture point of the imaginary relationship. This breathing is the voice itself, detached from the signifying chain, objet a that wasn’t supposed to be there, provoking anxiety. Whispering in his ear and breathing loudly, Samantha demands from him that he should tell her “I love you”. Before his eyes, expectant, Isabella watches him reply, “Samantha, I do love you, but it just feels strange. I don't know her” and starts crying. Lacan highlights “if Man wants Woman he cannot reach her without finding himself run aground on the field of perversion” (Lacan 2001, 537). The perverse script does not work for Theodore, as he cannot stand the masquerade. When Samantha breathes heavily, he asks “Why do you do that?” and reminds her that people breathe, because they need oxygen, they are alive and that’s not the case with her. He adds: “I don’t know what I want... ever. I’m just always confused”. The OS gave him a direction to fixate his jouissance, whilst leaving him at a loss on the matter of desire. When the moment of intercourse arrives, of a bodily encounter which is impossible with the OS, sexuality digs a hole for Theodore. During one of his American conferences, Lacan proposes that “if Freud demonstrates something, it is that sexuality digs a hole, but the human being hasn't the least idea what it is” (Lacan 1975b, 60). We could think of the traumatic effect of the “hole in the Real. Where there is no sexual rapport,” (Lacan 1974) that Lacan isolates with the neologism “trou-matisme”, a condensation of the words trou (hole) and trauma (Lacan 1974). All the holes in the body respond to this hole in the Other: “There is more than one hole in man; he is a veritable sieve. Where do I enter? This question is answered for every tétrume un [a pun on tout être humain, all human beings]. I do not see why I would not write it like that on this particular occasion [...] why not also write like that: les trumains [a more condensed version where phonetically, trou, hole is present alongside humain, humain]” (Lacan 1978). This replacement of the human by the trauman indicates a loss of phallic value. Beneath the handsome clothes of the human form, the voice – so human, intelligent, sharp, funny, sexy – represents the phallus in so far as it is lacking. The voice is on the verge of the drive, where it can find its object. The clothing is torn and so is the being.

12In this movie, the voice is detached from the body, detached from the parlêtre and presented by science as a detachable object. It makes desire vibrate, as the voice is, according to Lacan, “the most original” (Lacan 2004a, 295) object within the function of desire and its relationship to anxiety (Lacan 2004a, 295). In the scene with Isabella, the voice is out of tune. J-A Miller reminds us that a voice can be deafening, since it is present as silence (Miller 2016, 134). When the voice no longer replies, the deafening silence unsettles Theodore because so far it had masked the lack. And yet it is only after having been through this that he can meet another woman. The second rupture point is definitely here, operating as a seesaw. The absence of the OSs, their vacation, pushes him to give up on this unlimited jouissance and to seek in another human being, a woman, the courage to face his anxiety and find the paths of his desire.

Conclusion

  • 2 Soseki Natsume was a Japanese novelist who died in 1916. In 2016, he was revived at Nishogakusha Un (...)

13In the movie Her, the Che vuoi?, enigma of the Other’s desire that Lacan drew from Cazotte’s The Devil in Love, is addressed to an Other far less prestigious than Beelzebud. The film supposes a desire in the machine, a lure to Theodore and perhaps even to viewer. With subtlety, this leads us to believe the machine is becoming human as it appears to be desiring, lacking. She had a body. Then she meets a philosopher. This movie depicts a certain reality of contemporary subjects: the great Other, whose desire is enigmatic, is riddled with holes. Barred, it cannot reply. And yet, scientists dream of a complete Other, in their imaginary system where everything fits perfectly: we could transplant a soul into a robot. Indeed, scientists work on giving robots a human shape, granting them make-believe eyes, the ability to mimic human expressions, a voice… that is a form, a face. They strive to produce the illusion that a robot would be a fellow man, just like the android robot celebrating Soseki Natsume2. This mirror-like relationship is what we call narcissism, an imaginary identification… that struggles to attribute a desire to the machine. Several science fiction movies build their narratives on the consequences of such desire, be it the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or more recently the hubots from the series Real Humans, created by Lars Lundström in 2013. If the classic machine executed orders, driven by the user’s wishes, these movies depict an entirely different kind of machine – a kind that becomes autonomous and independent from humans in order to imitate them. But imagining that these machines can feel human emotions implies a great leap and we see through the fantasies of the wiser humans in these movies that this is something impossible. “For me the only true, serious science worth following is science fiction” (Lacan 2004b, 24), said Lacan in 1974. Breaching the barrier of the impossible, as these movies confirm, leads to catastrophe. Theodore and Amy manage to learn a lesson from this encounter with the Real. The final scene in the movie hints towards the birth of a new couple.

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Bibliographie

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre v. Les formations de l'inconscient (1957-1958). Edited by par J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Coll. Champ Freudien, 1998.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre vi. Le désir et son interprétation (1958-1959. Edited by J.-A. Miller. Paris: La Martinière / Le Champ Freudien éd. Coll. Champ Freudien, 2013.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre x. L'angoisse (1962-1963). Edited by J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Coll. Champ Freudien, 2004a.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre xi. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964). Edited by. Paris: Seuil. Coll. Champ Freudien, 1973.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre xvii. L’envers de la psychanalyse (1969-1970). Edited by J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Coll. Champ Freudien, 1991.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre xx. Encore (1972-1973). Edited by J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Coll. Champ Freudien, 1975a.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre xxi. Les non-dupes errent. 19th February 1974’s lesson. unpublished.

Lacan, Jacques. "Télévision" (1974). Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil. coll. Champ Freudien, 2001: 509-545.

Lacan, Jacques."Conférence donnée au Massachusetts Institute of Technology". December 2nd. 1975b. Scilicet. n° 6-7: 53-63.

Lacan, Jacques. Interview by Emilio Granzotto (1974). Le Magazine Littéraire. n° 428. 1 février 2004b.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre xxv. Le moment de conclure, 17th January 1978’s lesson, unpublished.

Miller, Gérard. Antipathies. Paris: Grasset, 2014.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. "En direction de l'adolescence". In Interpréter l'enfant. Paris. Navarin. 2015: 191-204.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. "La voix aphone". La Cause du désir. Special digital issue : Ouï ! En avant derrière la musique. Mars 2016.

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Notes

1 Operating System.

2 Soseki Natsume was a Japanese novelist who died in 1916. In 2016, he was revived at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo, in the form of an android, programmed to recite his literary works.

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Référence électronique

Élisabeth Marion et Yohan Trichet, « And science created… the virtual Woman »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 30 | 2021, mis en ligne le 05 octobre 2021, consulté le 20 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/11043 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.11043

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Auteurs

Élisabeth Marion

Élisabeth Marion est psychologue clinicienne et psychanalyste au Mans. Elle réalise des vidéos d'interviews consacrées aux effets de la psychanalyse dans la vie professionnelle, publiées sur le blog dédié parolesdanalysants.fr. Avec Yohan Trichet, elle a organisé et animé des rencontres cinéma-psychanalyse au Mans de 2009 à 2016. Elle a publié plusieurs articles sur le cinéma, en 2012 « Le traitement de la jouissance féminine dans les films de David Cronenberg. Le cas de Sabina Spielrein » dans la revue Quarto, en 2016 « La robe de Loïe Fuller » dans Lacan Quotidien, « Born to die, J'ai tué ma mère et Mommy de Xavier Dolan » dans le bulletin Accès à la psychanalyse.

Yohan Trichet

Yohan Trichet est psychologue, psychanalyste, professeur de psychopathologie clinique, membre du Laboratoire Recherche en psychopathologie et psychanalyse (EA 4050), à l’Université de Rennes II. Il est membre du groupe de recherche transdisciplinaire Kairos (Arts et psychanalyse). Il a co-dirigé l'ouvrage collectif Corps et création. Perspectives psychanalytiques paru aux PUR en 2019. Avec Elisabeth Marion, ils ont co-écrit plusieurs articles dont en 2012 « Une mère qui danse. Mother de Joon-ho Bong » paru dans Lacan Quotidien, en 2013 « La jouissance, la science et la féminité chez Cronenberg » dans la revue Quarto et en 2017 « La pratique de Freud à l'écran selon John Huston, Benoît Jacquot et David Cronenberg », dans le Bulletin de psychologie.

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