#135 = Volume 45, Part 2 = July 2018
SPECIAL ISSUE ON FRANKENSTEIN (Edited by Michael Griffin and Nicole Lobdell)
Daniel Panka
Transparent Subjects: Digital Identity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charlie Brooker’s “Be Right Back”
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, was nominated in 1973 by Brian Aldiss as “the first real science fiction novel,” a work in which “science [replaces] supernatural machinery” (26). The ensuing debate about Frankenstein’s place in the genre has proved to be one of the most enduring in the science fiction community, fandom, and academia. Impartially one may observe that Frankenstein still occupies a central—if not parental—position in sf. This fact is attested to by the innumerable adaptations, reworkings, appropriations, parodies, and recontextualizations of the original text, the first one by the author herself in 1831 (minor changes in the 1823 edition are probably by Mary’s father William Godwin; see Murray).1 This article examines one of these recontextualizations of the novel, a 2013 loose adaptation by Charlie Brooker entitled “Be Right Back,” as part of the British television series Black Mirror (2012-).2 I argue that although they were created almost two hundred years apart, both Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” portray similar dilemmas regarding models of personal identity and attributions of subjectivity. I will show that in the context of posthumanist ethics and theories of digital identity, we can see “Be Right Back” as a continuation of the complex discussion inaugurated by Frankenstein. I intend to examine this with one eye on the rich historical context of Shelley’s novel and the other on contemporary concerns in posthumanism. Despite being set in two distinct historical periods and the differences between their two artificial creatures, both expose the incongruity between the “notion of the autonomous, coherent, unified self” (Cover 5) and the transparent technosubject, questioning the feasibility of maintaining the dichotomy between “artificial” (i.e., non-human) and “natural” (i.e., human) identities.
Shelley’s novel engages in the discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period that is most commonly called Romanticism. In recent years, perceptions of this epoch (along with its often evoked “counterpart,” the Enlightenment) have undergone a transformation in social, cultural, philosophical, and literary studies. The “textbook version of Enlightenment history” (de Dijn 786) has been challenged on the grounds that many critics of the period misrepresent and oversimplify the case. But there is considerable variation in the specifics of this reconceptualization (see Ferrone 155-72 and Israel). Romanticism “[a]s a refusal of the rationalism of the Enlightenment” (Tresch 2) is an equally reductive image—Romantics did have an interest in machines and science, while Enlightenment thinking was not entirely dominated by mechanistic reason (see Reill 17-33). Peter Hanns Reill’s “Enlightenment Vitalism” or John Tresch’s “mechanical romanticism” emphasize the undesirability of keeping apart the systems of thinking that are labeled “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”3 Explorations of the material culture and philosophy of the periods, as well as several works that locate Shelley’s fictional science historically, shed light on the complexity of both the novel and its context and make it clear that she was not arguing for or against science.4
Frankenstein also takes part in the debate about “identity,” a concept that came into the spotlight with the rise of nation states and the concept of nations as such, which is a process of immeasurable influence on modern history, politics, and culture. This broadly understood development is almost inseparably connected to the establishment of “identity” as a “natural” category, an outcome relevant to my discussion of Frankenstein and “Be Right Back.” The concept of identity, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “did not gestate and incubate in human experience ‘naturally,’ … [it] arrived as a fiction” (Identity 20; emphasis in original). The modern idea of (national) subjectivity may have quite literally “arrived as a fiction”; Nancy Armstrong makes the compelling case that it is inextricably connected to the novel form (1-25). Indeed, the emergence of the novel was coterminous with complex philosophical and political discussions of subjectivity in literary texts.5 The wide array of subject positions that were being negotiated in these literary texts intermingled and impressed upon each other, creating a diverse field of available subject positions for readers. Moreover, the question of personal identity was not a settled affair: the 1820s were lively years in the debate about personal identity (Esterhammer 148). Shelley’s novel is situated in this discursive field, taking its cue from the clash between the conception of an idealized homogeneous national subjectivity and the reality of fluid and transgressive identities. In “Be Right Back,” the 21st-century protagonist wrestles with the same question, made acute by the ideological vacuum created by the spectacular disappearance of stable identities in cyberspace, a crisis that can be traced from Philip K. Dick’s early explorations of ambiguous identities through cyberpunk’s ecstatic fancies to contemporary posthumanist discourse.
In a more specific contextualization that pertains to theoretical discussions of sf—and one that might explain its massive artistic impact—Frankenstein can be seen as a distilled manifestation of certain historical and sociocultural processes underpinning the genre as a whole. As Andrew Milner argues in Locating Science Fiction (2014), in the nineteenth century science was “redefined … into an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies” (139), and the innovation of Frankenstein is that it was one of the first texts to examine the outcome of this redefinition: the transparent technosubject. Similarly, Adam Roberts in his History of Science Fiction (2006) posits (using a Heideggerean vocabulary) that one of the preoccupations of sf in the second half of the twentieth century was to “delineate and explore the place where the technical object achieves Dasein, a Being-in-the-World and a Being-towards-Death” (13). Frankenstein could be conceivedas a precursor of this trend, a text in which a technical object is imbued with subjectivity and an “authentic Being” (13).6 Thus, the novelty of Shelley’s text is at least twofold: first, it is a pioneering exploration of the new conception of science-as-technology and second, it is an investigation of the resulting technosubject, one that continues to puzzle and fascinate artists, as it is revealed by its innumerable intertextual “re-memberings” (Hollinger 192). Frankenstein’s focus on identity as affected by biology and chemistry shifts in “Be Right Back” to the impact of information technology on contemporary subjectivity. And the organic body of Frankenstein’s creature is replaced by a digital entity embodied in a synthetic human frame. Both texts, however, partake in the ongoing debate about technosubjectivity and our ethical responsibility towards posthuman creatures.
I want to invert chronology and start by discussing the work that is closer to contemporary technosociety and that prepares the ground for the discussion of Frankenstein by virtue of its singular focus on the issues considered here: the first episode of the second season of Black Mirror, entitled “Be Right Back” (2013), written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Owen Harris. The episode follows the life of young Martha (Hayley Atwell), after her partner Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) dies in a car accident. Unable to cope with his absence, she orders a service that reassembles his identity from his online footprints and communicates with her, first through text, then voice messages. Later, Martha grants access to more digital traces of Ash’s existence (emails, video recordings) to make the copy more authentic, and finally signs up for the next level, one still in “experimental” phase: the virtual Ash is instantiated into a synthetic body that needs to be gestated in a bathtub. After her initial fascination with the copy fades away, she rejects the replacement and locks him up in the attic forever. Meanwhile, it turns out that she is pregnant—the epilogue shows her celebrating with her now early-teenage daughter. The girl brings a slice of cake up to Android-Ash (A-Ash), and the episode ends.7
Martha’s discontent with the robot grows gradually, in the beginning primarily because of the Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is a concept, first suggested by Masahiro Mori, that relies heavily on the Freudian notion of the uncanny as ambiguously familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It refers to the phenomenon when humans respond to artificial humans or prosthetic body parts that have a high “degree of resemblance to the human form” with a negative “level of affinity” (Mori 99).8 In other words, if a replica almost, but not exactly, looks like a real human, we tend to experience an eerie and unpleasant feeling (for example, this is why a lot of people are made uncomfortable by lifelike dolls). A-Ash does not breathe, sleep, feed, or bleed, and the lack of these markers of a healthy human body makes Martha increasingly distant from him. The biggest barrier to accepting A-Ash as an autonomous subject with agency, however, is not his uncanny body, but his unsatisfactory behavior.
A-Ash is a result of his original’s social media addiction and a reflection of Ash’s subjectivity as performed online. Rob Cover in his Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (2016) makes a convincing theoretical connection between Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and social media, arguing that “[s]ocial networking sites can … be understood as sites through which identity categories are most effectively performed” (16).9 Online and offline selves cannot be unambiguously separated anymore, the former being “coterminous with an offline sense of self, masquerading as a biography and representation but just as constitutive of self-identities” (16). This online digital identity, however, “must never be considered out of the context of the full, complex array of relationships, spaces, places and experiences occurring across everyday life” (21): on its own, it is insufficient to represent the full range of someone’s self-created identity performance.10 This tends to be forgotten because the fixed, coherent, and stable sense of self still informs much of our commonsense everyday understanding of identities, despite many poststructuralist theories enabling a decentering of the subject and describing identity as a continual process over time (5-6). Of course, it is simply not feasible to think always about ourselves in this postmodern way, but the importance of being aware of the relationship between these subjectivities (and the consequences of the reverse) is what “Be Right Back” depicts brilliantly.
One more theoretical concept needs to be examined to illuminate what I think is the shared problem of A-Ash and Victor Frankenstein’s creature, or more precisely, their “administrators” (a title given to Martha by the robot). A-Ash epitomizes the “data double,” the result of the convergence of several surveillance techniques in contemporary nation-states. Explored by Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, the “data double” is essentially “[t]he observed body … abstracted from its territorial setting … then reassembled in different settings through a series of data flows” (611). This “decorporealized body … of pure virtuality” (611) is what circulates in the databanks of states and institutions, a digitally coded representation of individuals ranging from birthdate through medical records to Internet activity and consumption habits.11 This “visualizing device” helps anyone to uncover “heretofore opaque flows” of information and sensory perception (611). The resulting transparent subject is free from ambiguity because it is constituted solely by information—this understanding of subjectivity performs, to paraphrase N. Katherine Hayles, the “erasure of the flesh” that still plagues contemporary understandings of digital subjectivity (see Hayles 1-24). It is troubling to see that decisions about human beings are made based on these data doubles (see Los 69-94), but in “Be Right Back,” the data double does receive a body, almost as a corrective to the notion of Ash as a purely virtual entity.
Even though the problematic dissociation of the performed online data double from the human being is deemed unsuccessful in the case of A-Ash, he is denied a subject position, albeit not instantaneously. Martha has no problem communicating with the replica software when it is texting and talking to her on the phone, and her attachment to the virtual Ash that uses only a few strands of data flow leads her into thinking (and rightly so) that an embodied version would be an improvement. When the whole assemblage (profile pictures and videos complementing the emails and voice recordings) is used in the robot, her first reaction is not rejection, but confusion. She compliments A-Ash, saying “[y]ou look like him on a good day,” to which the robot replies that “[t]he photos we keep tend to be flattering,” meaning that the pictures Ash uploaded online are more attractive than his everyday countenance. A-Ash is also missing a mole, which he recreates promptly in response to Martha’s comment. These are small physical differences, however, and most of them are understandable—even the clumsiness of an intimate moment, because “[t]here’s no record of [Ash’s] sexual response,” as he “didn’t discuss that side of things online.” These important discrepancies are effaced by the joy of seeing Ash again, but only for a short time.
During the next two days Martha discovers that she cannot cope with A-Ash not closing his eyes while he is “sleeping,” not bleeding when cut, or not breathing at all. Interestingly though, she seems to be most bothered by A-Ash’s behavior when she sends him downstairs and he complies. She yells, frustrated by the docile robot, that “[Ash] wouldn’t just leave because I’d ordered him to.” When she commands the robot to physically fight her, he refuses because it does not cohere with Ash’s history to hit Martha, to which she suggests that he “might’ve done.” The robot is programmed differently, and not only because of pragmatic safety reasons—he also refuses to jump off a cliff towards the end of the episode. Martha snaps at him angrily: “You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.” True, A-Ash is the embodiment of a data double, an online performed identity, but the original did not do all this “without thinking”: constructing a digital self is hard and mostly conscious work (Cover xv-xvii). Ash carefully created his online self, and this is clearly indicated by the robot’s youthful looks and unfamiliarity with his original’s “sexual responses.” Moreover, A-Ash does have a history, albeit an online one; Martha’s perception that A-Ash is somehow “less complete” is the result of a discrepancy between her expectations and the reality of subjectivity. The biggest problem for Martha is that A-Ash can no longer surprise her and act unexpectedly—the perfectly transparent assemblage. His subjectivity is not one that she can accept because of the lack of secrets.
The importance of personal secrets to Martha’s conception of humanity is exemplified by two motifs in the episode. First, we learn in the beginning that Ash liked the Bee Gees, a fact that he never posted about or shared with anyone; it comes as a shock even to Martha (“[t]en years, you haven’t played them once,” she points out). Towards the end, when she is taking the robot to the cliff to destroy him, she turns on the radio in her car and the Bee Gees song, “If I Can’t Have You,” comes on. “Cheesy”—smiles A-Ash, mocking the music, and this framing repetition delivers the point sharply that Martha can never learn something “heretofore opaque” (Haggerty and Ericson 611) about Ash in the future. The other element from Ash’s life that is similar to the Bee Gees song is a snapshot of a fake smile. There are photographs from his childhood over the fireplace in his mother’s house that the couple move into, among them one that he decides to share with the help of the front-facing camera of his phone, the one used for taking selfies. The ubiquity of the selfie is paramount in digital identity construction: it is a “produced, curated, and distributed performance of the self” (Cover xxi), the quintessential signal of admitting and at the same time approving of the primordial narcissistic desire to gaze and be gazed at (Singh 124). By selecting this photo and capturing it in a specifically performative way, Ash deems it worthy to be reproduced and repeated as part of his online identity; a few moments later he reveals to Martha that despite all appearances he is wearing a fake smile in the picture. Martha replies that his mother probably did not know this before she selected it to perform as part of her memories of Ash as a child. In fact, Martha herself did not realize this until Ash told her—and just as in the case of the Bee Gees before, there is no indication that he ever would have without some external motivator. Until these Foucauldian confessions to Martha, the online part of his identity was congruent with the offline part; now it seems that both are multifaceted with their own contradictions, which makes it even more problematic to separate the offline part from the online and to call the former authentic. The death of the body closes the productive “assemblage between body and machine” (Cover 106), leaving a data double behind that is easy to “resurrect” but difficult to accept for Martha as a full subject with agency. Without the “opaque” offline half, the transparent digital performance is a dehumanized lump of data in her eyes. (Martha does not kill A-Ash, but locks him up in the attic and uses him as an interesting object to show her daughter, which surely does not mean that she treats the robot as a human being). It seems that A-Ash cannot convince Martha to see him as other than an object, even though his identity performance is quite convincing. By turning to Victor Frankenstein’s ideas about identity and technology, however, the problem might be better formulated.
In a very influential article in the collection Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (2002), Catherine Waldby posits that Frankenstein is “the first investigation of the ontology of the technoscientific object” (33); the creature is a “[way] to think about how major transformations in technical systems … upset the putative stability of the category ‘human’” (36). Waldby has a new technological environment in mind: as opposed to Shelley’s speculations about life-force as galvanic electricity, “[l]ife today is information” that “circulates freely between bodies and computational systems” (32). This analysis is more appropriate today than ever, in an age when data doubles run in optic cables around the globe in fractions of a second; but even though the techno-environments of the two texts are different, the underlying ideological problems are remarkably similar. “Be Right Back” cleverly updates the Frankenstein myth in that it uses widespread information technologies to create its artificial protagonist, rewriting the story for the Information Age and “Frankensteining” the social-media profile, “Frankensteining” in Hollinger’s sense of “imaginatively [destabilizing] concepts such as ‘subject’ and ‘embodiment’” (192). The parallels between Victor’s relationship to his creature and Martha’s rejection (and her daughter’s acceptance) of A-Ash highlight that a structurally similar problem plagues them in relation to the technosubjects that embody a new paradigm of subjectivity.
Victor Frankenstein is a tragic hero, driven by his thirst for knowledge and egoistic ambition to answer “a bold question”: “Whence … did the principle of life proceed?” (33).12 He can be described as a “scientist,” even though the term appeared later, when “natural philosophy” was differentiated into specialized nodes amid a religious and political struggle among materialist and quasi-theological conceptions of science, society, and morality (see Golinski 527-52 and Graham 71-77). Before science became a specialized affair, a wide array of other approaches existed, closely related to other discourses, such as literature (more precisely, what we would today call literature), politics, and theology (Golinski 551). Amanda Jo Goldstein argues that this specialization was not embraced unequivocally. She examines the works of Blake, Goethe, and Percy Shelley to retrieve a different epistemology, a “neo-Lucretian” thinking that acknowledges “the mutual, material influence between the subjects and object of experiment” (8) and prefigures discourses that “we would name only after the modern disciplinary separations.… biosemiotics, systems theory, and informatics” (101; emphasis in original). Even though this alternative relational epistemology might have been available to Victor (the novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century), he cannot make it his own because he is too invested in the strategy of categorization and classification (Latour 23)—the text reminds the reader that separation and expulsion of hybrids is not the way to do science responsibly. Certainly, Frankenstein harbors an understanding of life and science that is one-sided and oversimplified; it is also connected to secrets, or more precisely, transparency. An important ideological connection between “Be Right Back” and Frankenstein is that transparency is also used in contemporary Western global capitalism (the context of “Be Right Back”) to enhance production (including identity production and social relations) and for surveillance, to keep people controllable and quantifiable (see Han 1-8).Victor’s interest in “natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry” (32) is shaped by the charismatic M. Waldman, who praises their ideological predecessors as people who “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places” (30) and as “the instruments of bringing to light” (31) the secrets of nature.13 Victor describes his Eureka-moment with the same imagery: “from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light … brilliant and wondrous” (34). He is the one who “should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (36) by becoming the master of the ultimate secret, “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (34). This understanding of science as a means to “impose a transparent and manageable design” (Bauman and Lyon 71) into the chaos of nature and human affairs is a distortion of the Enlightenment principle of subjecting every social, political, and scientific domain to reason and rationality (117-19).14 His project proves successful, but surprisingly, instead of the joy of success, he is appalled by the creature as soon as it opens its eyes: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath….” (39). Why is Victor’s reaction so sudden and visceral? The explanation he gives is hardly convincing, especially in that he does not give us any reason for his initial hatred of the creature besides its physical ugliness:
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.… [B]ut now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. (39)
Victor is trapped by his own expectations and confused by the “co-existing tendencies” that Angela Esterhammer explains in the context of the 1820s—in a description equally appropriate here—as “the persistent desire for an interiorized, authentic self on the one hand, and the unignorable manifestations of a composite, theatrical, commodified self on the other” (163). The composite creatures in Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” are transparent, meaning that they are surveilled, taken apart, and meticulously assembled. Though their transparency manifests itself in different ways, both creatures are defined by their relation to secrets and the tensions of posthumanist ethics. In the following I will briefly examine Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” in the context of posthumanist ethics and then explain how secrets and transparency operate in the two works as functions of this ethical dilemma.
In Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” problems seem to arise from tensions intrinsic to the process of modernization itself. A fruitful way to approach the text and the figure of Victor Frankenstein comes from the recognition that his failure is not in brandishing one particular version of science but rather in failing to empathize with his creature. Although this theme can also be connected to the views of Shelley’s contemporary Willliam Lawrence (Butler xliv), it is in the context of posthumanist and ecological readings that this issue explicitly comes to the fore (see Latour 21-25, Morton 150-56, and Clayton). Posthumanism works to deconstruct binary oppositions (human/non-human, nature/culture, subject/object) that were formerly taken for granted in our understanding of the place humans occupy in the world (Braidotti 1-13)—one corollary of which is a radical transformation of our ethics, an “acknow-ledging [of] the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘others’ in a vital web of complex interrelations” (100). This would result in a more ethical way of engaging with our environment, and especially the other living beings we encounter or create. Both Victor and Martha fail to empathize with the creatures they bring to the world and to care for them responsibly. There is a caveat here, however. As Elana Gomel rightly points out, “[t]he alliance between posthumanism and progressive politics is shaky” (21), because posthumanism (especially as posthumanism) has the potential to run into a theoretical impasse: it subverts certain values at the same time as defending them (see Gomel 1-34). Her solution to create a new ethics is to “[open] … up to the transformative power of the nonhuman” (33)—but as the humans of Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” testify, feeling genuine compassion towards the posthuman can be difficult. Examining the role of secrets (using the broadest possible meaning of “secret”) in the two works illuminates the issue.
As discussed above, Bauman in Identity describes how the project of a “predetermined and non-negotiable” (24) identity was created at the rise of the nation state. The enormous success and allure of the project of identity is testified to by its short but tumultuous lifespan of roughly two hundred years. Victor is in a similar trap as the denizens of a contemporary capitalist system: our idea of identity and subjectivity is still organized around a unified self of constancy, while our reality is of fragmentation and fluidity. No wonder that, as Cover notes, the social media “timeline” and history are so jarring and threatening to our sense of self: posts and pictures from the past are the digital proof that our identity is a fragile and mutable illusion (24-25). Victor cannot accept the creature as “human,” or at least assign something more flattering to it than “fiend,” “daemon,” or “monster,” because he cannot accept “an assemblage of mismatched parts” (Waldby 33) as a subject with agency and a sense of self. The creature is digital in the sense that it is a result of transparent calculation, operation, and design—contrary to his own belief, Victor cannot discover the elusive Secret of Life, because it is a self-deception, a “category of error” (Waldby 35). As Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity (1991) argues:
The narratives of terminal flesh … offer up a series of provisional conclusions to the problem of human definition. The subject is the body, mutable and mutated. The subject is the mind, thinking and cognizing. The subject is its memory, recalling history and experience. The body in science fiction can be read symbolically, but it is a transparent symbol (as well as a symbol of its own transparent status), an immanent object, signifying nothing beyond itself. (244; emphasis in original)
The search for a definition (body? mind? memory?) is a process of unambiguous, transparent, and taxonomic labeling, at the end of which the expected result is a well-defined label that can either be [+human] or [-human]. As Despina Kakoudaki observes, in stories about artificial people there is always “one attribute, action, or quality as the necessary parameter for granting human status to a constructed person” (217).15 The precondition in Frankenstein and “Be Right Back” for the positive label is the notion of an opaque “Secret,” a crucial concept in both texts, metaphorically used in the former and more literally employed by the latter.16 A harmless notion in itself, the “Secret” becomes worrisome when it is usurped by different political discourses for their own agenda and then injected into a variety of ideologies that promise objectively to contain, disambiguate, make transparent, and restrict the idea of the “human.” In Victor’s perception, the creature’s lack of the Secret results in a mechanical mode of existence, without a coherent undivided inner life.17 The moment the creature opens its eyes, the uniqueness of human life is destabilized and the regretful creator wants to escape back into a pre-revelation state. To his horror, this is all there is to life and there is no further Secret in the form he hypothesized (whatever that may be remains unclear), a conclusion he finds he cannot accept. Kakoudaki argues that this attribute is always “withheld” (217). But interestingly in Frankenstein the Secret operates in the other direction as well: when the creature comes alive, it becomes unpredictable, its intentions constituting the Secret that Victor cannot know or control. With the help of this notion, the paradox of Victor’s situation is palpable. The Secret has to be constantly reinvented to perform its function, and both its presence or absence can signal the nonhuman status, circumscribing the creature as “dangerous machine.” In Martha’s more easily definable view, as the case of the photograph or the Bee Gees show, the Secret appropriates the everyday meaning of “personal secret,” facts about a person that are not repeatedly and explicitly featured in their identity performance and only shared with a couple of intimate friends and relatives. There is an interesting mirroring here: Martha does not know how A-Ash is created, and she just leaves him there to “brew”—her problem is that A-Ash becomes too predictable. It seems there is no escape for these artificial humans: when the opacity of one Secret is violated (in Frankenstein it turns out that life can be created artificially and in “Be Right Back” it becomes possible to convincingly resurrect someone), a new one is posited to protect the uniqueness of the human. The changeable category, the “Secret,” oscillates in these texts on the axis between transparency and opacity—I use the term oscillation here because there is a constant flux between the two poles, an endless play whose end threatens the collapse of the boundaries that Victor and Martha seem determined to uphold.18
There is a difference between the creature and A-Ash that shows that Shelley’s text is more sympathetic towards its artificial person. A substantial part of the text is spent on exploring the subjectivity of the creature under formation, and the reader is given a glimpse of the creature’s emotions, its articulated thoughts, and its plight as every human it meets recoils in horror. The audience today cannot help but sympathize with the creature and wonder at Victor’s obstinacy to destroy it; notably, many adaptations depict the creature as an inarticulate and dumb beast to justify somehow Frankenstein’s reaction (one of the main culprits in popular culture is James Whale’s 1931 adaptation, Frankenstein; see Graham 66). Sometimes he wavers, but when he looks at the creature again, he is reminded of the “unnaturalness” of the being:
I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. (121; emphasis added)
Victor cannot let the Secret go as he oscillates between the desires for transparency and opacity. Martha partakes in the same fluctuation of opinion, but her reaction is made more understandable by the episode itself: A-Ash is never shown to reflect on his fate, speculate about the future, or desire a companion in the way the creature does.19 The episode establishes A-Ash emphatically as a machine, a convincing but empty illusion of subjectivity.
There are counterexamples to this depiction, however; probably the most important is the reaction of Martha’s daughter. At the end of the episode, A-Ash has been living in the attic for years, a conclusion prefigured in the beginning when Ash mentions that his mother locked up photographs of deceased family members there. His copy is relegated to the same fate—a replica with a “fake smile” stowed away as a memorandum of the past. The daughter, on the other hand, is happy to ascend the ladder and greet him cheerfully: “Just gonna come and hang out for a bit.… I brought you some cake. I know you don't eat anything. I’m just using you as an excuse so I can get an extra slice.” There are two ways to read this scene: either the girl, since she is unfamiliar with the original Ash, does not notice the discrepancy between them and accepts A-Ash as he is; or, being a younger person and not harboring the old-fashioned conception of subjectivity, she is more willing to engage with a posthuman creature. The former interpretation is unlikely because even though she did not know Ash, she could still be bothered by, for example, A-Ash not eating anything.
On the other hand, if the daughter is willing to engage with a new type of personhood, this indicates an acceptance of the posthuman and a possible co-existence of humanist and posthumanist subjectivities, a future that is also signaled in Frankenstein by the elaborate inner life of the creature—it is Victor Frankenstein who is not capable of adapting to a new type of technosubject, not the creature (Hollinger 198).20 By extension, Martha’s rejection of A-Ash and her daughter’s acceptance of him introduce a similar dichotomy. The paradox of Martha’s attitude towards A-Ash (not being able either to destroy or to acknowledge him completely, and thus relegating him to a sort of limbo) is caused by her stubborn insistence on the Secret (in her case, non-transparent behavior and personal secrets) as a condition for being human, a separation that may be untenable in the world that “Be Right Back” depicts. In this way, she is no different from Victor, who is guilty of the same single-mindedness. Frankenstein, as Hollinger argues, has “retrograde humanist tendencies” (195) only in the figure of Victor; the creature embodies the new paradigm for hybrid assemblage subjectivities, one that is not yet accepted as a valid identity. This fluctuation between transparency and opacity also occurs in “Be Right Back”: the two paradigms are shown to coexist at the end, and A-Ash receives the acceptance of the next generation denied to Victor’s creature.
The other counterexamples to A-Ash’s depiction as “predictable machine” are his confused responses such as “Did I ever hit you?” or “I never expressed suicidal thoughts”—these could be reflections on his programming that potentially change him. The apparent absence of introspection is anthropocentrically established by priming the audience to read the scenes that precede these sentences in a certain way. The exchange in the bedroom about Ash’s past behavior starts by showing that he does not breathe, exploiting the viewers’ sense of the Uncanny Valley, and the scene at the cliff is introduced by the Bee Gees motif as a reference to the Secret. The “Frankenstein … script to be self-reflexively tested” (Hollinger 199) is modified in “Be Right Back”: “Who was I?” and “What was I?” are supplemented by “Must I be the same?” For many readers, Victor’s eloquent creature might be more acceptable as an equal to them—but there is no guarantee the future technosubject would not be similar to A-Ash (in fact, there is more evidence for that than the opposite), and the texts force us to confront our own ideas of the Secret and reevaluate them. As Waldby writes, Victor is a reactionary, non-progressive person, because “to reject [the creature] is to reject possible human futures” (36). Both the creature and A-Ash are transparent to surveillance and scientific observation, and both provoke the same anxiety about the Secret, a malleable prerequisite of subjectivity. They elicit the same response in their masters, who rule that the assemblage subject is inadequate to qualify as “human” in this framework. This verdict, however, is a misrecognition of the situation. Scott Bukatman wrote in 1993 that in sf the real issue is “no longer the fusion of beings and the immortality of the soul, but the fusion of being and electronic technology in a new, hard-wired subjectivity” (244)—since then, the ethical question of engaging with these subjectivities has become even more pressing. Martha and Victor represent the anthropocentric viewpoint that an arbitrary “human Secret” is necessary for full subjectivity, a concept that needs to be rethought and reformulated in the light of the developments of the past two hundred years. Reading Frankenstein in an age of data doubles and online identities may be more topical than ever.
NOTES
I am grateful for the two anonymous reviewers and the editors at SFS as well as Vera Benczik and Zsolt Czigányik for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.1. There are numerous excellent studies on the cinematic and television adaptations of Frankenstein, which I unfortunately do not have the capacity to fully explore here. For articles, see Clayton, Heffernan, Juengel, and Redfield. For book-length studies, see Denson, Frayling, Friedman and Kavey, Spadoni (especially 93-120), and Young. On electronic remediations, see Burkett.
2. The series is an anthology series, meaning that every episode has a completely different cast and story, sometimes even a different length. The unifying elements are the overarching theme (dark visions about our technological future) and the writer-creator Charlie Brooker, who was involved in all but one episode in the writing process, sometimes in collaboration with others. The story and script of “Be Right Back” are entirely his own effort.
3. Mark Coeckelbergh argues that the binary itself is grounded in Romantic ideas and proposes to move beyond Romanticism to “non-romantic” and “nonmachine” thinking (18).
4. For general explorations of the period, see Cunningham and Jardine, Mitchell, Richardson. For works specifically concentrating on Frankenstein, see Caldwell 25-45, Ellis, Jordanova, and Lacefield.
5. Recent work on the history of the novel emphasizes the role of women writers and the interplay of different genres as a corrective to overly neat and reductive accounts. Patricia Meyer Spacks, for instance, argues for the importance of the fantastic mode and the romance in the creation of a diverse genre (see Spacks 1-28)—a genre invented and popularized by women who wrote with a pluralistic model of subjectivity in mind (see Warner). For a discussion on how Frankenstein’s creature throws into relief the inherent tensions in “national identity,” see Armstrong 68-78.
6. See also Sims 19-69 for a detailed discussion of the relationship between Heidegger’s writings and AI.
7. For brevity and clarity, I will refer to the flesh-and-blood person as Ash, and the replica as A-Ash (short for Android-Ash). I will occasionally refer to the latter as a “robot” as well, which is a more applicable term because it is synthetic—“android” conventionally refers to “an artificial human of organic substance” (Stableford). Sadly, the abbreviation for Robot-Ash would be a bit awkward.
8. Several critics relate Frankenstein to the Uncanny: see Hogle, Coeckelbergh 107-113, and Spadoni 93-120. For Frankenstein and the Uncanny Valley, see Morton (especially 152-57). For Freudian readings, see Rieder.
9. Some theorists would not agree with “most effectively.” Karl Spracklen, for example, approaches the Internet differently, saying that it is “just another leisure space where social networking and performativity operate” (98). His view of social networking is ultimately more critical than Cover’s: it can “[turn] … into a parade of narcissism” or even “threaten people with psychological trauma” (102; see also Spracklen 98-102).
10. Greg Singh offers a fascinating eco-Jungian reading of the same Black Mirror episode, in which he examines the selfhood created by the black mirrors of electronic devices in standby mode, result of the “always-on” culture. According to him, “in the Jungian … topology, this ‘sense of self’ is not an authentic, true sense of self. It is an overidentification with the projected persona” (126; emphasis in original). He also reaches the conclusion that “the boundaries between reality and virtuality … no longer seem to matter” (128). But this Jungian theoretical framework does not suggest an integration of the online and the offline in relation to identities (124-30; see also Cover 32-50). To Singh, the “psychosocial pressures to perform an online presence” are a harmful phenomenon that “Black Mirror deftly dramatizes” (130).
11. This concept is more than twenty years old in surveillance studies. David Lyon, for instance, discusses a similar idea in The Electronic Eye (1994), based on Mark Poster’s work (see Lyon 71 and 83-101). Haggerty and Ericson were the first to conceptualize it using Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the assemblage, a “multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items function together” (qtd. in Haggerty and Ericson 608).
12. I am using the 1818 edition (see Works Cited), and for simplicity’s sake, the author’s name is omitted in all subsequent references to the primary text.
13. As many feminist readings of the novel have pointed out, this is a very problematic metaphor of “nature as the passive female” (Mellor 111), “possessable [and] the willing receptacle of male desire” (Mellor 115). Though this paper does not focus on gender per se, the results of influential feminist and queer interpretations of the novel always inform any subsequent readings; hence, I also follow the critical habit of referring to Frankenstein’s creature with the gender-neutral pronoun.
14. Elaine L. Graham also notes that “monstrosity is a result not of some inherent transgression against divine proscription, but a consequence of obsessive, alienated pursuit of certainty and controlling power” (77).
15. This strategy can be seen in the context of Coeckelbergh’s fascinating discussion of how contemporary debates about transparency and digital selves can be fruitfully examined with the help of the “Enlightenment-Romanticism dialectic” (250) while always being wary of falling back into reductive “dualistic thinking” (240). Coeckelbergh examines self-knowledge in relation to transparency, showing that both ends of the spectrum (total transparency versus total opacity of the self) build on simplified notions of the dialectic (240-52). He suggests escaping the dialectic altogether and charts the possibilities and difficulties of going beyond Romanticism (253-81), a discussion that resonates closely with contemporary issues in post-humanism.
16. Markman Ellis also takes his cue from the importance of secrecy in the text when he argues that Victor’s endeavor is “alchemical” in nature because it does not conform to standards of repeatability and publicity that were already prerequisites of science in Shelley’s time.
17. The irony is that Victor himself is a volatile subject, with his “changeable … feelings” (39), compulsive self-reflection, and extreme mood swings.
18. For a more in-depth discussion of the role of oscillation and liminality in sf, see Klapcsik 7-31.
19. Another interesting mirroring here is that A-Ash is depicted as having an acceptable interior and an unacceptable exterior, just the opposite of the creature’s situation.
20. Sean McQueen argues in a biopolitical reading of Frankenstein that this is also a challenge to the “Frankenstein barrier,” a term coined by George Slusser to describe the way “the future possibilities of sf creation and the story in general fold back upon one another through the denial of futurity” (120); as Hollinger notes, an argument familiar from Frederic Jameson’s contention that sf cannot depict truly different futures (198). However, as McQueen argues, a “rethinking” of the barrier from a biopolitical perspective recognizes that “Slusser’s formula is human-centered—it is, after all, the Frankenstein, rather than the Frankenstein barrier” (130; emphasis in original).
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