Other Bodies and Obscured Violence: Posthumanism, Monstrous Intimacies and Privacy in Ex Machina

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Other Bodies and Obscured Violence:

Posthumanism, Monstrous Intimacies

and Privacy in Ex Machina

Gea Bruinsma

MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis Student number: 10766537

Supervisor: Mireille Rosello Second Reader: Timothy Yaczo January 2017

Contents

Introduction page 2 – 3

Chapter 1 Narrative and Plot Twist page 4 – 6

Chapter 2 The Body page 7 – 32

Chapter 3 Violence page 33 – 55

Conclusion page 56 – 57

Introduction

The cultural object of my analysis is Ex Machina, a film that was released in 2015. The directorial debut of Alex Garland received critical acclaim and nominations for various awards, such as the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the BAFTA Award for Best British Film of 2015. Ex Machina is considered an independent film, and can be seen as a hybrid of art house and Hollywood cinema in the genre of science fiction. This makes it an interesting cultural product, as its Hollywood allure presumably provides it with a relatively large audience, while its art house quality might provide more critical substance than a mainstream Hollywood film.

Ex Machina has proven to be a layered film that therefore can be analysed from various thought-provoking angles. It investigates the potential technologies of our future, and, perhaps more importantly, how we might react to them. Considering current technological developments in the field of artificial intelligence of which some of the most groundbreaking supposedly are just waiting to be launched, narratives investigating the possibilities of such developments are important. Whether or not the reality of artificial intelligence in fact is upon us, a film exploring its effects is thought-provoking either way, as such an examination always is telling of our current ideologies as well. As the film focuses on androids and their relation to humans, it provides an excellent possibility for critical portrayal that might question these contemporary ideologies.

In this thesis, I have sought out to analyse Ex Machina from the starting point of two keywords that each come with their own merit: the body and violence. The first chapter serves the purpose of introducing the narrative of Ex Machina and to delineate the particulars of a film with a plot twist – the latter with help of the work of film scholar George Wilson – which is useful for my analyses in chapters 2 and 3.

In the second chapter, my focus is on the body. Here I use, inter alia, posthumanist theories to analyse whether or not Ex Machina provides a critical answer to humanism’s value for some bodies, which coincides with the devaluation of other bodies. Myra J. Seaman’s discussion of posthumanism’s critical denaturalization of the humanist subject is instrumental for my analysis of the film’s portrayal of bodies, as is Mel Y. Chen’s examination of animacy and Donna Haraway’s argument for viewing all beings as companion species. This leads to the question of whether the film establishes the narrow humanist category of the human or of ‘the’ body as either sufficient or, like critical posthumanist theories, as limiting, and whether it provides an example of the latter.

In the third chapter, my focus is on violence. Here I investigate if and how Ex Machina is productive in the sense that it provides a critical portrayal of violence. I extend Egbert Alejandro Martina’s comprehensive discussion of ‘care’ as a term that often conceals problematic behaviours and stances in White anti-racist discourses to Ex Machina’s representation of relationships and subtle violence. Here Christina Sharpe’s notion of monstrous intimacies, which she describes as predicaments “that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection” (4), is an important concept for my analysis. Lastly, I give an overview of the discourse of privacy, on the basis of which I argue that privacy violation must be considered violent. I will critically analyse the overlapping concepts of privacy and violence in the film’s narrative.

Chapter 1

Narrative and Plot Twist

1.1 Ex Machina’s narrative

Ex Machina tells the story of a young ICT worker, Caleb, who wins the prize his young but established boss Nathan gives away. Caleb only knows he will visit Nathan, but does not know what the actual prize entails. When Caleb gets to Nathan’s estate, he has to sign a confidentiality agreement: Nathan has built a robot with artificial intelligence – an ‘AI’ – and Caleb is the first one to test its consciousness. Upon his first encounter with the AI, Caleb discovers that the robot is gendered female: her body is formed as a female, and she is called Ava. Later in the film it becomes clear that Nathan’s beautiful Asian female housekeeper Kyoko is an AI as well. She nevertheless is mute and programmed to be very sexually receptive. Also, Caleb discovers that Nathan created many other female AI’s before, all of whom protested their captivity.

Ava lets Caleb know that her maker should not be trusted, and that she would like to be free. Because of his interactions with her, Caleb begins to question his own humanness and at one point cuts open his arm to check for robotic insides. He draws blood, which confirms to him that he is human after all. In the end Caleb comes up with a loophole in the extensive security system Nathan has installed, and sets Ava free. She encounters Kyoko, and whispers something in her ear. Kyoko stabs Nathan in his back a few moments later, followed by Ava stabbing her creator. Nathan dies. Ava subsequently dresses her robot body in human-looking skin, and in women’s clothes, so that her robotic insides are invisible. Ava does not take Caleb with her, but leaves him in a fully locked estate with no means of communication to the outside world.

1.2 Twist in narrative fiction film

Ex Machina is a film with a plot twist, which deviates from the ‘transparency’ of the narration that is the characteristic of “classical narrative films” (Wilson 81). Transparency entails a sense of knowing whether or not what happens on-screen is actually happening in the story. George Wilson divides this “transparency of narration” into two parts: “(1) most of the shots in these movies are understood as providing the audience with ‘objective’ or intersubjectively accessible views of the fictional characters, actions, and situations depicted in the film and that (2) where the shots or sequences are not to be construed as objective, there is a reasonably clear marking of the fact that they are, in one of several different ways, ‘subjective’” (ibid.). Thus, when one or both of these rules is broken, transparency is breached. When this is revealed near the end of a film, this can be considered a plot twist.

In films where a twist is employed, a certain expectation of the audience is needed in order for the twist to work, Wilson argues: “The narration in the films I have in mind is significantly unreliable in particular ways, and its unreliability depends precisely on the audience's confounded expectation that the norm of narrational transparency will have been in place. These movies have come to be known as ‘twist movies,’ where the ‘twist’ in question is predominantly epistemological” (ibid.). This epistemological form entails that something that was shown in the film was not what actually took place.

Wilson divides the films in two general categories: movies where the twist depends on special or supernatural entities that are revealed as such and that cannot be seen by everyone, and other films, “[…] in which the cinematic narration, as the audience eventually comes to realize, represents the narrative action through the subjective perspective of a particular character, although, in general, that action has not been represented from the perceptual point of view of the character in question. That is, the narration stands outside the ‘focalizing’ character, regularly presenting him or her within the frame. Still, at the same time, the

narration reflects the problematic way in which the character imagines the relevant fictional story to have transpired” (ibid.). In the latter category Wilson focuses on films in which the reality of situations is altered by someone’s perception.

Although Wilson seems to mean films where certain actions are revealed not to have happened – as they only happened according to the perception of one character – I think Ex Machina corresponds to the category as well. In Alex Garland’s film, namely, the twist lies in the deceit at the level of, inter alia, who the main character and/or mastermind behind all events is. The film plays with expectations on different levels: first, the story seems to follow the question of whether or not Ava has ‘true AI’; then quickly the story seems to take a romantic turn of Caleb and Ava falling in love, and Caleb saving AI Ava; then the twist seems to be that Nathan has tricked Ava into convincing Caleb to save her, in order to reveal her true AI; and then the definitive twist is that Ava was the driving force behind it all, and the true main character or mastermind of the narrative. Thus Wilson’s observations on the framing of narrative action through one character’s – in this case Caleb’s and then (in a way) Nathan’s – perspective, while the actions are revealed to actually have a different significance – as Ava was the actual main character – are fitting to the film at hand.

Chapter 2

The Body

In this chapter, my focus will be on the body and its representation in Ex Machina. The (human) body is not a neutral, objectively identifiable unit. Yet, in Western culture there are hierarchies in place that rank bodies in their presumed worthiness of life, empathy, hate, death, love, punishment, and so forth. As, among others, Michel Foucault has theorized, these hierarchies, which are part of the supposed natural ‘order of things’, have proven to be unstable, which is demonstrated, inter alia, by their change through time. Whilst humanism presumes a world in which a certain human subject is at the top of all hierarchies, “[the] ensuing denaturalization of this subject has challenged the ontological foundations on which traditional humanism, and thus much of Western society, has been based” (Seaman 246). This form of critical engagement that Myra J. Seaman refers to, which is dubbed posthumanism, is a productive commitment that I will measure Ex Machina by: does or does it not contribute to the posthumanist project? First I will delve into the features of humanism and its critical successor posthumanism.

Humanism presumes and values a certain supposedly universal human subject. As Seaman summarizes,

[the] human long presumed by traditional Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanism is a subject (generally assumed male) who is at the center of his world (that is, the world); is defined by his supreme, utterly rational intelligence; does not depend (unlike his predecessor) upon a divine authority to make his way through the world but instead manipulates it in accord with his own wishes; and is a historically independent agent whose thought and action produce history. It is this human—who is, as Tony Davies notes, ‘always singular, always in the present tense, . . . inhabit[ing] not a time or a place but a condition, timeless and unlocalised’ (32)—that is the subject of traditional liberal humanism. His power and superiority inhere in his human essence. (246)

I would add a long list of other implied assumptions to “generally assumed male”, such as heterosexuality, whiteness, ability, and the like. Traditional liberal humanism, all in all, is

valuable, and only pertaining to a narrow category of those considered human subjects. Yet, the term ‘human’ construed by “Enlightenment and its legacy” still “enjoys widespread consensus and it maintains the reassuring familiarity of common sense” (Braidotti 7).

Seaman however continues to state that, no matter the by some still presumed neutrality of the humanist subject, “in a posthumanist world, this human is an endangered species” (246). The way for “alternative posthumanist philosophies” has been paved through “the recognition that human subjectivity has been constructed by those who have claimed it as their exclusive feature” (ibid.). This recognition is spurred by technological developments, Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter summarize: “the overriding task for posthumanism, as a critical discourse, is reflection on how the effects on and of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology force through a rethinking of the integrities and identities of the human: not forgetting, either, those of its non-human others, many of them of humanity’s own making and remaking – gods, monsters, animals, machines, systems” (241).

The aim of posthumanism is to deconstruct the self-proclaimed superiority of a small, privileged group, Seaman writes:

Posthumanism observes that there has never been one unified, cohesive ‘human,’ a title that was granted by and to those with the material and cultural luxury to bestow upon themselves the faculties of ‘reason,’ autonomous agency, and the privileges of ‘being human’ (Davies 19; Hayles 286). As a result, not everyone whose biology would identify them as homo sapiens have ‘counted’ as human (Fuss 2). Ideologically shaped distinctions have determined inclusion and exclusion, so that features with cultural significance, such as race and gender, have been misinterpreted as biologically significant and used as markers of supposed superiority or inferiority within the ‘species.’ (246-247)

The posthumanist world Seaman, among others, imagines, is one where “the assumed universalism and exceptional being of Enlightenment humanism [is rejected] and in its place substitutes mutation, variation, and becoming” (247). It thus rejects the presumed universal, static subject with a supposed unchangeable essence – the human, male, white, heterosexual,

and so forth – and instead imagines multiple, diverse beings, who are constantly changing, and who never ‘become who they truly are’.

The posthumanist process thus also automatically entails the loss of privilege by a small group, ideally in favour of all previously considered ‘others’. This loss of privilege might be painful for the formerly privileged. As an example of this loss of privilege is that on the part of whites in South Africa, Melissa Steyn writes about their experience: “There is an acute sense of loss of the familiar, loss of certainty, loss of comfort, loss of privilege, loss of well-known roles” (156).

The threat of privilege loss unsurprisingly fuels the privileged group’s imagining of stories surrounding emancipation, wherein the emancipated group is represented as having malicious plans. Fu Manchu, a fictional character invented in the United States of the early twentieth century, “the outlandish […] creation figured by tropes of the Yellow Peril” (Chen 121), is a telling example of this. Fu Manchu is described as bordering on Western intelligence, but is also characterized as mean and cunning. He wants to build a Chinese empire, with techniques that actually mirror those of the imperial practice of the West (123). Thus, on the one hand the privileged group imagines the emancipating group as an enemy that is inferior, but also as a dangerous one: an enemy that employs a certain repressive malpractice upon the hitherto privileged, even though that same behaviour was practically invented by the privileged.

Mel Y. Chen has written on animacy, which according to them is used in discourses like the aforementioned Yellow Peril-personification of Fu Manchu to divide bodies into a hierarchy. Chen argues that there is a “fragile division between animate and inanimate” that informs many hierarchies, that it is “relentlessly produced and policed, and maps important political consequences of that distinction. The concept of animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture” (2). According to Chen, those who are considered most animate are at the top of the animacy hierarchy, and those who ‘are’ less animate are considered lesser.

Chen maintains “[the] stakes of revisiting animacy are real and immediate, particularly as the coherence of ‘the body’ is continually contested”, which they illustrate as follows: “What […] is the line between the fetus (often categorized as ‘not yet living’) and a rights-bearing infant-subject? How are those in persistent vegetative states deemed to be at, near, or beyond the threshold of death?” (7). The nature assigned to subjects and objects – animate, less animate or inanimate – hence is considered by Chen as a construction that bears many consequences for those subjected. I think Chen is right. Imagine for example a case where the foetus and disability meet: in Down syndrome testing of the unborn child, which is still a dangerous procedure. An abortion is in the case of a positive result often approved1, because of two constructions of animacy. Namely, firstly the foetus is constructed as practically inanimate (‘just a clump of cells’), and secondly the adult human with Down syndrome – which the foetus inevitably will grow into – is constructed as considerably less animate than abled adults. The life of the foetus with Down syndrome is therefore significantly devalued compared to the abled foetus.

1 _{In 1999 92% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome were aborted in European countries (Mansfield, C;}

Chen states, “an animacy hierarchy […] conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (13). They invoke linguist Michael Silverstein’s first account of an animacy hierarchy, which

noted that the hierarchy was implicational: if a borderline entity behaved in a certain way, then those entities below its animacy level could not behave syntactically as if they were more animate. [This is] how racism stereotyping, and a lack of empathy can co-conspire to construct deflated animacies for some humans (and, arguably, some nonhuman animals) in spite of biological equivalences. (27) Thus, once for instance a racial group is placed at a certain lower level of animacy, it becomes a ‘truth’ that is upheld by racist and white supremacist discourse. This is for instance exemplified in the still existing remnants of social Darwinism.

Chen argues that the animacy hierarchy is “an ontology of affect: for animacy hierarchies are precisely about which things can or cannot affect – or be affected by – which other things[.] […] Above all, […] animacy is political, shaped by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not” (31). Chen nevertheless does not limit animacy’s consequences to humans, but radically “[considers] how animacy is implicated in political questions of power and the recognition of different subjects, as well as ostensible objects” (8-9). This can be seen as part of the posthumanist project, which is not anthropocentric.

Also focussing on the construction of some bodies as truly living, and others as less so, Donna Haraway emphasizes the undeniably inextricable interconnectedness of humans and non-humans, who co-constitute each other, and as such are never stable, autonomous, or definite entities. She writes: “The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (When Species Meet 4). Haraway imagines all species to always “become with” many others (ibid.), instead of the most animate, to use Chen’s concept, floating on a sea of inanimate or less animate creatures that exist solely in the service of these most animate beings: (some) humans. Instead of the anthropocentric view where a certain group of humans is deemed the

exception to all other life, which Haraway calls “human exceptionalism”, she proposes to view the human as just another among the many “knotted beings”, dependent on others in the same way that others are dependent on them (14). Haraway introduces the view of others as “companion species”; an approach that should highlight “the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another’s bodies” (79). Her “hope for companion species is that we might struggle with different demons from those produced by analogy and hierarchy linking all of fictional man’s others” (322). She thus argues for an “instrumentality [that] should be thought outside the dualistic taxonomies of master/slave, powerful/powerless, free/unfree, active/passive – even though it cannot be denied that pain and suffering is distributed extremely unevenly between human and nonhuman animals” (Rossini 310).

In order to truly live as companion species, Haraway states the commandment of “Thou shalt not kill” should be changed into “Thou shalt not make killable”, because “[it] is not killing that gets us into exterminism, but making beings killable” (80). That is to say that species or (groups of) subjects should not be represented or imagined as merely killable or un-killable: divided up into invented hierarchies that are made to seem natural, and thereby making it easy and even logical to kill certain and not other beings. This is reminiscent of Chen’s animacy hierarchy, where those who ‘are’ less animate are considered not as worthy, and thus are rendered an easy kill. Moreover, they are not registered as a ‘kill’ at all, Judith Butler writes, as “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living” (1).

While humanism does not have an uncontested definition, posthumanism is even given “irreconcilable definitions” (Wolfe xi). Posthumanism moreover quite simply refers to a departure from humanism, which makes providing a simple demarcation difficult. Neil Badmington phrases posthumanism as simply “questioning humanism” (Theorizing 23). In their ‘questioning’, some versions of posthumanism that reject humanism involuntarily

incorporate the very ideology they claim to reject (Hayles 1; Badmington 10-14). As Badmington writes: “many are a little too quick to affirm an absolute break with humanism, and a little too reluctant to attend to what remains of humanism in the posthumanist landscape” (Theorizing 15). As he summarizes N. Katherine Hayles’ analysis in How We Became Posthuman: “there is nothing more terrifying than a posthumanism that claims to be terminating ‘Man’ while actually extending ‘his’ term in office” (16).

A version of posthumanism that is referred to as transhumanism “derives directly from ideals of human perfectibility, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment” (Wolfe xiii), and thus not really ‘terminates Man’. Transhumanism focuses on technological developments that help humans ‘improve’ mentally and physically. The “contemporary techno-scientific posthuman”, as Seaman calls it, “offers another kind of emancipation, promising the self—typically conceptualized in the form of the brain or mind— freedom from the limitations of the body. This techno-scientific fantasy has much in common with liberal humanism” (Seaman 258). Humanist mind-body dualism and anthropocentrism are consequently not challenged by transhumanism or techno-scientific posthumanism. Seaman identifies this strand of ‘posthumanism’ “outside of theoretical circles” as one that imagines the ‘posthuman’ as a subject “often described as a physical counterpart (and successor) to the universal human” (247). The idea that the posthuman could be the human’s literal successor is in fictional narratives often represented as a physical threat to ‘real’ humans; the posthuman here is represented as an “apocalyptic posthuman” (259).

The form of posthumanism I consider productive questions the limiting form and subject of humanism, and “transforms the humanist subject into many subjects, in part by releasing the body from the constraints placed on it not only by nature but also by humanist ideology, and allowing it to roam free and ‘join’ with other beings, animate and inanimate” (Seaman 247-248). I will incorporate into my analysis of Ex Machina this deconstruction of

long held ideologically shaped distinctions that determine inclusion and exclusion of the term human, following the project of this strand of posthumanism. I am convinced that these distinctions of Self and Other should continually be questioned and thereby deconstructed, and will examine Ex Machina for its particular construction of divisions of some bodies versus others. Further, to summarize Chen’s writing on animacy, they “[develop] the idea of animacy as an often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery” (9-10). Animacy therefore is a useful measure to look for in Ex Machina. Also, ‘making killable’, can be transferred to the case of the AI. These are the indicators I will analyse in Ex Machina.

First, I will point out some main developments in Ex Machina that are relevant to the question of this chapter, namely the construction of (affect towards) bodies. The development of the protagonist, antagonist and other agents is quite clearly guided in the film. Nathan is figured as the antagonist, Caleb as the protagonist, the AI’s – or at least Ava – as increasingly deserving empathy. Nevertheless, the ending complicates things.

The growing empathy for Ava and the other AI’s is accomplished by the three parties in the story, that each relate differently to the view of the androids: Nathan, the unlikable antagonist who tries to dehumanize the AI’s consistently and objectifies them and others in literal and figurative senses; Caleb, the likable protagonist who is manipulated by Nathan and Ava and who sides with Ava in the end; and the AI’s themselves, who do not consider themselves as ‘killable’, in Haraway’s terminology, and are focused on freedom. While in the vast majority of the film’s trajectory it seems that Nathan is the story’s most autonomous agent, the puppet master, if you will, it really turns out to be Ava. This is only revealed at the very end, which has implications for the growth or decrease of appreciation for bodies. The

twist ending changes some of the affective stances that are developed throughout the story. I will now turn to each of these developments.

2.1 Nathan as antagonist

The ideal subject of humanism seems to be personified by Nathan. We learn that he was a child prodigy who “wrote the base code of Blue Book at age thirteen, which is like Mozart”, as Caleb tells Ava. Nathan also is the first person who succeeds in creating an android that looks, acts and moves as a natural human being, and that is probably truly sentient. He thus is construed as brilliant man, who is extremely rational. Nevertheless, Nathan is not a likable character.

Nathan is condescending to Caleb, has a temper and objectifies women and racial minorities. His condescension of Caleb serves as a constant reminder of his superiority. This starts when Caleb first walks into his villa. Nathan immediately enforces his dominance when he states that Caleb is “freaked out”, and coincidentally mentions all the ways in which he is Caleb’s superior: “[Can] we just get past that? Just be Nathan and Caleb, and not the whole employer-employee thing?”. Nathan uses the rhetoric device of apophasis here, as he brings up a subject – his brilliance – by denying it.

Also exemplary are two separate events where Caleb cites respectively Lewis Carroll and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nathan calls Caleb “quotable”. It later becomes clear that Nathan says this mockingly, as he already knew the citation’s origins. Furthermore, Nathan misquotes Caleb’s assertion that creating a conscious machine is an event concerning “not the history of man [but] the history of gods”, thereby figuring himself a god: “I wrote down that line you came up with. The one of if I’ve invented a machine with consciousness, I’m not a man, I’m God”. These are just some of the cues for the spectator to view Nathan as the antagonist of the film.

The objectification on Nathan’s part can be found in the way he builds his AI’s, and how he subsequently interacts with them. When Caleb logs into Nathan’s computer, he finds a collection of folders with camera footage, all bearing the names of different androids. The footage shows AI’s, all with slender, female forms, naked and locked up in the glass room where Ava later resides. The images show different androids that get built up from legs to head, first revealing robotic insides, then getting covered in what looks like human skin. There is footage of various androids. Lily is the first; a white-skinned android with blond hair, ranging from Lily v1.0.0 to v.2.4.0. Her name stresses her whiteness, bearing in mind the phrase ‘lily white’, thereby framing her skin-color as an important quality.

Then we see Jasmine, a black-skinned android without a face, first sitting behind the desk and then dragged around by Nathan, lifeless. She then lies in the corner of the room. Jasmine is literally faceless, which objectifies her even more than the other androids, and a sexual object at that. Her body is the only thing that matters, apparently. It is unclear why she furthermore is dragged around like a doll. Her lifeless naked body is disconcerting to look at, reminiscent of a sex crime-, hate crime- or domestic violence victim, left naked and for dead.

Then there is Jade, who Nathan has provided with Asian features. Her name refers to the gemstone jade, a material that happens to be greatly valued in Asian countries, making it a racial stereotypical name for the AI in question. The footage shows Nathan and Jade facing

each other. First Jade sits on a bench in front of Nathan, and she simply asks him “Why won’t you let me out?”. She has some kind of ‘foreign’ accent, which also must be programmed by Nathan, again proof of his racist objectification. He reacts: “I already told you why. Because you’re very special.” Jade keeps asking, however, why she is kept locked up. “Are we gonna do this again?” Nathan replies irritated. We see a cut to Jade standing up and now screaming “Why won’t you let me out?!”, while she hits the glass wall. Then there is a shot of Nathan, standing with his arms crossed, blasé, after which we can see an aerial shot of Jade hitting the door, upset, until she demolishes her body, chipping away her arms.

In the third still we see Nathan with his arms crossed – an indifferent pose –, which is juxtaposed with the scene in the fourth still: Jade demolishing herself by hitting the door, looking extremely panicked

There is something very disturbing about seeing creatures that walk and talk just like human women, locked up, naked, some begging to be freed, one even demolishing herself in her panicked struggle to be free, labelled with stereotypically racialized names and accents, and version numbers V.1.0.0, V.2.4.0, V.4.1.8, et cetera. It shows what they are to Nathan, because he is the creator of all this: they are considered disposable, interchangeable objects; mere numbers. He is unmoved by even the most extreme utterances of Jade, who screams and begs to be freed, until she self-destructs. Nathan further only makes female androids, and creates them in a form indistinguishable from real naked women. The image of these

imprisoned, naked, female androids is reminiscent of real-world forms of sexual abuse, of women who are locked up as sex slaves. Nathan is presented as indifferent to all of this, and naturally even the creator of the unsettling context and the course of events. Furthermore, he is the only one who has made the troubling scenes possible. This all contributes greatly to Nathan’s role of antagonist in the film.

Another scene where Nathan is objectifying the androids in a literal sense is the one where he takes Caleb to his laboratory. “This is where Ava was created,” he says to Caleb. “Here you have her mind. Structured gel. […] I needed something that could arrange and rearrange on a molecular level, but keeps its form when required. Holding for memories, shifting for thoughts.”

Nathan hands the brain to Caleb, “her mind”, thereby referring to Ava, although of course this is not quite true: Ava is in another room, bearing another ‘mind’. By showing Ava as a collection of materials, as a kind of assembly kit where Ava’s ‘parts’ are interchangeable with other parts to such an extent that there is no difference – “this is her mind” – he represents her as a fungible object. Nathan shows Caleb the ‘insides’ of the AI’s as just parts of a complex machine, which dismisses that the AI’s appear to become more than just the sum of their parts, just as (those who are considered as) humans are more than just an assembly of working body parts.

Literal objectification on Nathan’s part also is apparent in Kyoko, an Asian-looking AI, although her android corporeality is only revealed near the end of the film. Again, Nathan has chosen a name that reflects his racial stereotyping, as it is a common Japanese name.

Kyoko is obedient to Nathan, and she is shown in several serving functions throughout the narrative. She prepares food, serves wine, has sex with him when he wants and so forth. When she brings Caleb his breakfast for the first time she does not talk, moves graciously and swiftly, het short skirt hiking up slightly when she sets down the tray, and looks at her feet as she exits the room.

Caleb is somewhat startled. In the next scene, Nathan greets Caleb by excusing himself for sending Kyoko to wake him. Caleb thanks him, to which Nathan replies: “She’s some alarm clock, huh? [Snickers] Gets you right up in the morning.” Caleb laughs along in mutual understanding. The sexual objectification of the submissive Asian female-stereotype is invoked, which Chen writes about as “female hypersexualization ranging in representation from the submissive geisha to the ‘dragon lady’” (127). Kyoko is clearly modelled after the obedient geisha stereotype. I will discuss her more in paragraph 2.3.

Objectification in the figurative sense is shown, inter alia, in a scene where Nathan and Caleb talk about the future of the AI’s. Nathan tells Caleb about a “model after Ava”, after which Caleb says, disillusioned: “I didn’t know there was going to be a model after Ava”, which conveys his empathy for Ava and aversion to Nathan’s objectification of her. As the conversation progresses, Nathan and Caleb employ terms like “prototypes” and “version 9.6” to refer to the androids. Caleb asks what Nathan will do with “the old one” when he introduces a “new model”. Nathan replies: “I download the mind, unpack the data, add in the new routines […]. And to do that, you end up partially formatting. So the memories go, but the body survives. And Ava’s body is a good one”. He waits a second, as Caleb stares into the

distance. “You feel bad for Ava? [Sighs.] Feel bad for yourself, man. One day the AI’s are gonna look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa. An upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools. All set for extinction”. Caleb then cites Oppenheimer, after which Nathan calls him “mister quotable” again. Caleb corrects him, saying this is not his quote, Nathan replying, “Yeah, I know what it is, dude”. There is much tension between the two characters at the end of this conversation, and Caleb decides to get Nathan intoxicated by alcohol again, in order to start his project to free Ava. This again reveals his disdain for Nathan and his positive feelings for Ava.

The conversation, in which Ava and all AI’s are presented by Nathan as (re)writable, likened to versions of software, erasable, portrays them as inherently inanimate and thus dead, objects to improve and update, in need of a third person to animate them. The difference between Nathan and Caleb is how they consider the AI’s: Caleb has progressed into seeing them – or at least Ava – as living, while Nathan continues to objectify them and represents them as mere machines that are killable, to cite Haraway. Nathan makes new versions, keeps ‘improving’ the programming of the androids and reinstates the fearful vision of the AI as the literal successor of the human. He talks about deleting Ava’s mind as something inevitable and logical, and about her body as “a good one”, not taking her sentience and feelings serious. In this instance and many other moments where Nathan is portrayed as a mean person, he is dismissive about the AI’s and their worth. The dismissal of the AI as an object is thus framed as malevolent, which thereby simultaneously makes the case for empathizing with the AI.

Nathan’s objectification of the AI’s, as well as women of certain racial groups on thus takes varying forms. He sexually objectifies his slave Kyoko by calling her “some alarm clock” to Caleb. He also sexually objectifies Ava by telling Caleb enthusiastically: “you bet, she can fuck, while Kyoko stands within earshot. Furthermore, he talks about ‘types’ of girls that Caleb likes and then only mentioning racial exterior as a property, he has formed all of

his AI’s as naked women, and so on. Nathan is framed as a contemptible person, which gives way even more so for framing Caleb, by contrast, as a good person, and the AI’s in the role of victims in need of help.

2.2 Caleb as protagonist

The story’s protagonist thus for the most part of the film is Caleb. The viewer is encouraged to identify with him, and be on his side in his quest to free Ava. From his first meeting with Ava onward, Caleb develops an increasingly empathic stance when it comes to her. This seems to expand to all AI’s when Caleb watches the shocking footage of androids Lily, Jasmine and Jade. However, the latter is not real empathy, as I will later elaborate on.

Caleb even empathizes with Ava to such an extent that he begins to question his own humanness. This is exemplified in the scene where he cuts open his arm to look for an android essence. He cuts rigorously into the skin of his underarm, in a vertical line. This stresses how seriously he considers that he is an android: it is a dangerous undertaking for a human being, as it is a commonly known suicide method. He loses a lot of blood, thereby proving he is human instead of an android after all.

Caleb questions his own humanness, cutting open his arm to look for signs of his android-ness

By identifying with Caleb, the viewer is guided through the same development of feeling for the androids, and also of implicitly questioning what the essential difference between humans and androids is. The question of Caleb being an android himself is made to seem very plausible, and thus the essential difference that supposedly exists between humans

and AI’s – a difference that Nathan time and time again emphasizes – is questioned. This leads to the conclusion that the human and the android do not differ, insofar that they are indiscernible to the observer, and even to the android or human itself. Kyoko revealing her inner AI-ness is a good example of the android being indiscernible to the observer, and the case of Caleb demonstrates the indiscernibility of being an android or human to the being itself. Kyoko after all passed for human, and Caleb does not know if he is an android until he cuts himself open to look what lies underneath his skin.

While Caleb watches the footage of Nathan and his AI’s – the scene I mentioned earlier – he is shocked: in-between the shots of the disconcerting footage, there is a close-up of Caleb whispering “Jesus Christ…” (see still below).

By positioning Nathan as the sadistic antagonist, Caleb is more sympathetic by comparison. He is the protagonist. The shot of Caleb reacting to the footage adds to his sympathetic appeal, and can furthermore be seen as a cinematic tool that Carl Plantinga analyses as follows: “The reactions of a favored protagonist are often used to cue spectators about the desired response to various stimuli in the film. An example of what we might call ‘mimetic cueing’” (87). Caleb’s horror consequently mimetically cues the spectator to feel the same and reminds the viewer that Caleb is ‘a good person’. The way in which the footage of the androids is shown – accompanied by nervously pulsing non-diegetic music, while the audience knows of the threat of Nathan, who might be waking up in the next room – adds to its disquieting atmosphere.

Because Caleb is the protagonist who serves as a moral compass for the viewer, his laughing along to Nathan’s sexually objectifying joke on Kyoko – “some alarm clock” – does not force the spectator to question its acceptability or critically reflect on it. The same goes for the scene where Nathan starts to ‘answer Caleb’s real question’, en then gives Caleb an extensive explanation of Ava’s sexual physique, starting by saying “You bet she can fuck”. Caleb listens to the whole explanation, and only when Nathan is finished resists by saying that this was not his real question. Caleb’s character thereby still poses as the empathic hero, but actually appears interested in Nathan’s objectification of Ava: an android that can be ‘fucked’ is worth more as a love interest than one that cannot. I will delve more into Caleb’s problematic form of ‘care’ in chapter 3.

Kyoko reveals to Caleb that she is an android

2.3 The problem of Kyoko: instrumental use of a mute geisha

Zhuojie Chen challenges Ex Machina’s portrayal of the Asian stereotype in Kyoko, exemplified by her detailing a specific scene: “Kyoko spills wine as Nathan and Caleb eat dinner. Caleb attempts to placate Nathan’s angry outburst by telling Kyoko that he’ll take care of the spill, but Nathan’s reply – ‘Dude, you’re wasting your time talking to her; she doesn’t understand English’ – left me with an acute awareness of the unfolding spectacle. In white America’s imagination, Asian American women take up dichotomous spaces: Dragon Ladies

subservient android is problematic, I think the mere portrayal of the objectified character of Kyoko does not render it questionable, even more so because Kyoko is revealed to be an android, not a real human woman. Moreover, as Nathan is the antagonist of the story the one who made the androids according to his racist and sexist imagination – AI’s that meet certain racial stereotypes and are there only for his sake –, his actions and choices are cast in a negative light, revealing his treatment of Kyoko and the others as deplorable. This critique is inherent because Nathan is the antagonist. Nevertheless, Kyoko’s representation should have been even more critical in order to be truly productive, as I will argue here.

Kyoko is the geisha stereotype2 in the flesh, so to speak. By touch, she is compelled to have sex, which becomes clear when Caleb puts his hands on Kyoko’s shoulders to ask her where Nathan is – “Jesus Christ, you really don’t speak a word of English?” – and she immediately begins to unbutton her shirt. Caleb tries to button her blouse back up (see images below). Earlier there is a scene where we see her with Nathan, as he puts Kyoko’s hand on his face, thereby initiating sex (stills below). Her inability to speak and her absence of sexual agency, supposedly programmed by Nathan, add to her subservience.

First two stills: Kyoko in a sex scene with Nathan; Second two stills: Kyoko starts to undress upon Caleb’s touch

2 _{Geisha’s have been wrongly associated with prostitution in Western culture. Prostitution is furthermore a}

stigmatized occupation (see for example Going ‘round Again: The Persistence of Prostitution-Related Stigma by Lewis, Shaver, Tyndale (2013)).

Parts of the stereotype of Fu Manchu are present in Kyoko, Zhuojie Chen sharply notes, describing the android as “an Asian woman with a hairstyle that surely drew inspiration from Fu Manchu’s moustache” (Bitch Flicks). Nevertheless, Kyoko’s appearance is Nathan’s doing, which does not make it problematic in itself.

Kyoko’s inner world is suggested in several ways, despite her silence. Kyoko is often seen in the foreground of conversations between Caleb and Nathan, suggesting her listening in. She is also seen alone in some short scenes, portrayed as submerged in thought: looking at the surveillance screens; looking at the painting of Jackson Pollock; sitting on the floor in the hallway, by herself, with her shoes tossed to the side. The latter is shown after the scene where she spills wine and Nathan snaps at her, at the end waving her away in a belittling way: “Hey Kyoko, go-go”. While Kyoko does not react visibly when Nathan loses his temper, this very short scene of her sitting in the hallway in this position portrays her sadness, and is shot in a composition that evokes utter solitude: a big, empty hallway without daylight, or anywhere to go, as only Nathan has the key to exit the building.

It is telling of the still prevalent and largely unquestioned racial stereotype of the submissive geisha that Caleb does not ask questions of Kyoko’s subservience or muteness, and that it appears natural in the film’s narrative.

Kyoko is, as I mentioned before, a background character that however at some points is subtly framed as more important than that. For instance, in a scene where she appears not to

be a main character she is literally framed in front of other characters, the focus on her, the others blurred behind.

The scene starts with a close-up of hands cutting fresh fish, preparing an Asian-looking dish. Then there’s a cut to Kyoko, which reveals it were her hands. Then we see her front, as she looks down at the fish while she is cutting it. Caleb and Nathan are behind her, discussing Ava’s supposed heterosexuality and whether or not Ava is capable of “fucking”, to cite Nathan. Still, Kyoko is in focus and they are blurred. The camera then switches to Nathan and Caleb’s conversation.

At the end of their debate, Nathan takes Caleb with him to another room. At that instant another shot of Kyoko is shown, now for the first time with her looking up from the countertop. The fact that she looks up the very moment that Nathan invites Caleb to leave the room implies her acute awareness of her creator Nathan and their guest Caleb. She is unable to speak, but it is made clear throughout the film that she has desires, and that they are unknown to those who are not willing to put themselves in her position. In each scene where Kyoko is framed as important, it is done so in image – not sound – fitting Kyoko’s muteness. Moreover, no matter her supposed subservience and her muteness, she in the end is the first one to put a knife through Nathan. She thus plays a pivotal role in the narrative.

However, what makes the narrative unsatisfying for Kyoko’s sake is the fact that, even though she is shown to be conscious and thoughtful, she is not saved by Caleb nor Ava, and not mourned. Her death is quick and forgettable, as not even the camera lingers on her lifeless body as it did when she still added to the narrative of Ava escaping. Kyoko plays a pivotal role in adding credibility to Nathan’s role of antagonist, in showing the viewer the indiscernibility of android and human, and in freeing Ava. She is however quickly forgotten when she has fulfilled her instrumental role, rendering her just a prop in the story. It thus shows a selective form of empathy, which is not emphasized or criticized in the film.

2.4 Ava: some AI’s are more equal than others

As I have said, there is a tendency throughout the film to humanize the AI’s. This is significant, as an android is an unusual being to develop feelings for. It is a machine, human-made, and made of steel, plastic, and other ‘cold’ and ‘unnatural’ materials. As Mel Y. Chen argues, these materials and often also objects that are made out of them are situated at the lowest point of the animacy hierarchy. The androids in Ex Machina therefore pose an interesting collision, for in Ava’s case there is still a clear sense of her machine body.

With Ava, we see in one gestalt a woman and a machine. Her female form is immediately clear, although her robotic insides are showing at the same time. Ava has been designed with feminine curves, including breast-like forms and hips, and a slender figure, and also a face with aspects traditionally and generally considered beautiful in women: symmetry, big eyes with long lashes, full lips, smooth white skin, delicate features such as a petite nose and a narrow jawline. Whereas a large part of Ava’s body is transparent and thus shows her electronic and therefore obviously non-human insides, her ‘private parts’ are covered with opaque material. Her supposed breasts and genital area are thereby left to the imagination, suggesting they really have human skin underneath the layer of grey metal. The covering of

these specific areas are reminiscent of underwear, which makes imagining Ava as a woman who has intimate parts that are covered convincing.

Ava’s face – perhaps the most important feature for identifying (with) someone – is covered in white skin, as are her hands. Thence her face looks exactly like a human face, and her hands are indistinguishable from human hands. Though machines normally do not attract empathy, humans – or at least (some of) those who are considered as humans – do. These choices thus can be considered adding up to Ava’s worth of empathy. But are all androids are made equal, and does the film invite the viewer to develop the same empathic stance toward the others?

The latter is not the case, as I have shown with Kyoko. Caleb is the protagonist and Ava is represented as favourable too, but the other AI’s prove to be fungible props. The AI’s of which Caleb finds footage on Nathan’s computer only serve as an indicator of Nathan’s cruelty and, by contrast, of Caleb’s virtue. Caleb finds the AI bodies in closets and looks repelled by Nathan’s sadism, but then leaves them behind. Ava merely uses them to shop around for skin and body parts, to ensure she can pass as human. She simply drops her broken arm on the floor, and replaces it with Jade’s arm. The skin she takes is from Jade, the Asian-looking android, as well. She marvels at her newfound human body, but does not look at the potentiality to live of her AI-peers. That she uses Jade’s skin and body for this is even more painful as in the footage of Nathan’s earlier experiments it was precisely Jade who was most frantically trying to escape her captivity. Zhuojie Chen criticizes Kyoko and Jade’s treatment at the end: “Ava loses half of an arm in the process [of killing Nathan]; Kyoko loses her life (like a horror film, the lady robot of color doesn’t make it to the end)” (Bitch Flicks). Chen also criticizes Ava’s usage of Jade’s arm and skin as if the android of colour does not matter. Indeed, the film here misses an opportunity to make the androids of colour matter.

In Ava’s case, her becoming an android that completely passes for human as she puts on her new arm and covers herself in skin is presented as a transformational moment of revelation. We hear soft non-diegetic music, Ava is awed by her body, even Caleb takes a step back when he sees this special moment; it is a slow and thoughtful scene.

The scene thus appoints a positive meaning to the moment in which Ava chooses her life over that of Jade, Kyoko, Jasmine and the other AI’s. This again shows a problematic underlying message, of the white, beautiful, articulate android to be worth of empathy and life and the others as worth of some sympathy, but in the end killable.

In order to be free, Ava then leaves the building. She leaves Caleb behind, who supposedly cannot get out without her help, and is shown screaming behind the glass door of Nathan’s residence. He is left to sdie, which in contrast to the other AI’s ‘deaths’ is framed as horrific. Caleb, the white male protagonist, is mourned.

Ava leaving Caleb behind for dead comes as a shock, as up until this point in the film Ava acted as if she was falling in love with him. In the last scenes, it is revealed that Ava was the driving force behind her escape all along, and she played up her enamourment with Caleb to be free. Before every meeting between Ava and Caleb, there was a still that indicated the number of the session. Because Caleb was the protagonist whose task was to test Ava, the presumption of these sessions’ goals was finding out whether Ava was truly sentient.

However, this hypothesis proves to be wrong: after Ava is freed by the opening of all doors in the building, there appears a new session number: Ava: session 7.

This session number seems puzzling at first, as Caleb’s sessions with Ava now truly seem over: he believes in her sentience. Nevertheless, when Ava leaves Caleb behind, their significance is revealed: Ava, as if she were a chess computer, was always the one who was using him as a pawn in her quest.

In the scene after Caleb is left behind, Ava is shown outside, marvelling at the world around her. She leaves by helicopter. In the final scene we see Ava at a traffic intersection. This was what she told Caleb she dreamt about visiting if she was free. She did not lie.

2.5 Conclusion

In Ex Machina we seem to follow the story of Caleb, who then is framed as the protagonist of the film. He is meant to test android Ava for consciousness, but falls in love with her simultaneously. Ava’s inventor Nathan is framed as the antagonist, which is accomplished by his condescending attitude, his objectification of AI’s, women and racial groups, and his irascibility. When Nathan is at his most malicious, he often is so in connection to the

androids. His dismissal of the AI’s is therefore framed as malevolent, thereby concurrently making empathy, or at least sympathy, a possible stance towards the androids.

Empathy for the androids however in the end proves to be limited to Ava. By presenting Caleb as the protagonist, his development when it comes to empathizing with the androids is what the viewer is steered towards as well. Through his doubt of whether he is an android himself, cutting himself open to find out, the spectator is implicitly made to question the supposed essential difference between humans and androids. Kyoko also plays a pivotal role in this, as she is revealed to be an android after being presumed human for most of the narrative. The android of colour is also framed in ways that make her stand out, and she is useful in the narrative to impeach Nathan, and in the end to kill him so that Ava is free. Yet, Kyoko dies suddenly and quickly, and is forgotten immediately, as just a prop in the story. The same counts for the other AI’s, whose skin and body parts Ava uses as if she were trying on clothes, a scene that is accompanied by a dreamy soundtrack. Ava thus appears to be more important than the others. The film misses the opportunity to make the AI’s of colour matter.

The latter brings me to the last part of my critique: Ex Machina’s ending. This is where even empathizing with Ava is somewhat problematized. Although Ava is shown throughout the film as worthy of life and empathy, she does leave Caleb behind for dead. This seems to have been done for shock value. To even it out, the final scene presents Ava having a dream come true – to visit a traffic intersection – but the fact remains that she locked Caleb into a building in which he will surely die.

Whereas the whole film encourages a development of empathy for at least Ava, the ending leads to suspicion of the androids. Ava leaves the story’s protagonist Caleb behind: the character with whom the viewer is encouraged to identify from the start. Caleb was the one who learned to feel for Ava – however problematic this relationship was, I will detail in the next chapter. This ending encourages fear of emancipating groups: a fear of betrayal when the

privileged help the emancipating group, where the latter may betray the former. Ex Machina exploits this fear, at the cost of empathizing with the android(s).

Ex Machina thus could have functioned as a metaphor for the way in which ‘the’ human subject, presupposed by humanism as I delineated at the beginning of the chapter, is an “endangered species” in the sense that the category is not neutral, essential, true, nor self-explanatory, but instead open to change, and ever-changing at that. The twist ending prevents this productive outcome. Namely, what the film instead does, is present the android as a literal successor of the human, and a creature that does not empathize with its ‘inferiors’; exemplary for the aforementioned transhumanism or techno-scientific posthumanism. That is, the androids are imagined to act in the exact same way as ‘the humanist subject’ was able to for a long time: to deny power and value to self assigned inferiors.

Chapter 3

Violence

In this third chapter, I will focus on the way the film shows what violence is or might be, and if and how Ex Machina is productive in the sense that it provides a critical portrayal of violence. The conclusion of the second chapter plays an important role here, for more than half of the film’s characters belong to the subaltern category of the androids. This chapter therefore follows the line taken in the second chapter. First, I will explore some critical definitions of violence and related concepts such as privacy that are useful for analysing Ex Machina in connection to violence.

Violence does not have one uncontested definition, as it depends on social and cultural contexts and discourses. Violence is a term that evokes a binary: actions that qualify as violent are the opposite of non-violent, kind, peaceful, calm actions. One form of behaviour that at least seemingly opposes violence is ‘care’. This is a word often invoked in White anti-racist discourse, Egbert Alejandro Martina writes. His analysis nevertheless shows that instead there are “anti-Black dynamics in the intimate politics of care” that are obscured (“Thinking Care”).

Martina writes that “practices of ‘care’ are modes of social organization: they (re)produce, maintain, and repair civic relations. White anti-racism is often conceptualized as a practice of care. […] [W]ithin White anti-racism the aim is often to repair society, if not the ‘world’, that is to make it so that everyone shares equally in the material, and cultural spoils” (ibid.). Yet, Martina writes, this notion of care as a reparative and redistribution practice is problematic. It does not challenge the status quo of for example capitalism, which relies on value distribution: “Lindon Barrett has taught us that value requires negativity and excess, which ‘invariably form the ground of possibilities for value.’ What does a notion of care as repair mean for people who have been constructed as ‘deprived’, a problem? Do practices of

‘care’ always look at how people and spaces have ended up being ‘in need of care’?” (my italics, ibid.).

Martina argues that the current politics of care obscure the systemic changes that are needed to create a world that is just to everyone, which is something that can only be achieved when “the category of the Human” is critiqued. Real care should “not centre on repair, but on initiating ‘an epistemological break with the hegemonic common sense of both civil society and the left’”, and, furthermore, “[an] ethics of care that seek to repair civil society without taking into account ‘how the category of ‘human’ itself remains fundamentally unethical with respect to black people” only extends that originary violence against Black lives and allows it to be rewritten as ‘care’’” (ibid.). The criticism of the category of the human overlaps with the aim of my second chapter, but the case of compassion, for which Martina refers to Berlant, applies to this chapter’s goal: “compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have the resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering” (ibid.). Compassion thus implies difference: a power dynamic instead of equality.

To summarize, the ‘care’ “within contemporary discourses” should be altered, and therefore Martina invites “a structural rethinking” of care. This means, as Martina cites Uma Narayan, rethinking “the roles [care] has historically played in justifying relationships of power and domination between groups of people, such as colonizers and colonized” (ibid.). Thus, “[p]ower works through intimacies and an ethics of care by way of the distribution and circulation of empathy, compassion, and even love. One poignant example is the fantasy that re-imagined Dutch imperialism as an ‘ethical’ obligation to ‘care’ for Indonesians. Interestingly, a sense of ‘ethical’ obligation was only felt toward Indonesia. What does it mean to offer ‘care’, or ‘feel toward’, in a context of colonial domination?” (ibid.). Martina thus argues for a close examination of what ‘care’ entails in specific situations, to see if it really is helpful or if it is framed as ‘care’ to cover up domination or subordination.

To expose such a predicament, Martina refers to Christina Sharpe’s concept of ‘monstrous intimacies’, which “is instructive in helping ‘to think through the configurations of relations that arise out of domination and that continue to structure relations across race, sex, ethnicity, and nation,’ and describe the relations of care that ‘intensif[y] the brutal exercise of power upon the captive body’” (ibid.). These monstrous intimacies are defined by Sharpe as “a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated and transmitted, that are breathed in the air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous” (3). In her book, Sharpe delves into forms of violence and involuntary subordination “that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection: intimacies that involve shame and trauma” (my italics, 4). Her unveiling of such narratives will inform my analysis of Ex Machina, as will Martina’s overall writing on the notion of care as “a reparative and redistribution practice [as] problematic” to review its way of proposing ‘care’ in a radical or in a reparative sense.

While the discourse on ‘care’ conceals the damaging forms it may take, the discourse of privacy shows a preoccupation of ‘balancing’ security and privacy. The side of security is regularly presented as that which prevents violence – often in the form of terrorism. In order to maintain safety, privacy must make way, according to this widely accepted ideology. Law scholar Mireille Hildebrandt writes that, for example, after the attacks of September 11th ₂₀₀₁

in the USA, “criticizing security measures in the USA was easily interpreted as unpatriotic behaviour,” (18). The measures that were taken to improve safety often meant a decrease in liberties such as privacy. Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule wrote a book, Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty and the Courts, where they express this kind of view in a manifest way. They conceive of a “tradeoff thesis” that entails that “governments should, and do, balance civil liberties and security at all times. During emergencies, when new threats appear, the balance shifts; government should and will reduce civil liberties in order to enhance

security in those domains where the two must be traded off” (5). Further, they compose a “deference thesis”, which entails that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty. During emergencies, the institutional advantages of the executive are enhanced. Because of the importance of secrecy, speed, and flexibility, courts, which are slow, open, and rigid, have less to contribute to the formulation of national policy than they do during normal times” (5-6). To summarize this viewpoint, security and civil liberties are always balanced, security the most important, and during “emergencies” civil liberties are rightly abandoned to ensure safety of ‘all’.

Mireille Hildebrandt analyzes the metaphor of the balance in privacy versus security discourse, a metaphor that is all too often invoked after terrorist attacks. Hildebrandt argues that in this metaphor, the supposed ‘new balance’ is often not balanced at all. Rather, there often is only extra weight put on the security side of the scale, whereas the privacy side is kept the same. This is not a new balance, but a misbalance, or a “off” instead: “A trade-off would mean that more security means less privacy; a balance would mean that the more privacy invasive [a measurement is,] the higher the threshold should be for allowing it, the more counter-infringement [is] required, and the more effective legal safeguards must be implemented” (21-22). Hildebrandt thus argues for a real balancing act when required, where privacy is safeguarded against invasive security measures.

Posner and Vermeule’s view ties in with the “nothing-to-hide argument” that law scholar Daniel Solove points out: “[only] if you’re doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don’t deserve to keep it private” (21). It is one of the most pervasive arguments that critics of privacy reduction meet, Solove writes. “In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security” (ibid.).

Many of the latter arguments devaluate of privacy to a luxury, and pose security as its polar opposite; a necessity in preventing forms of violence. Privacy scholars instead have made the case for privacy as something that should be considered valuable, and a fundamental right, and have argued that the deprivation of privacy is a violent act in itself. The value of privacy is less easy to grasp than the value of security, for, as Solove writes, with the latter “life and limb are at stake, while privacy rights remain more abstract and vague” (2). Still, Solove exposes security arguments as false, because their unmentioned point merely is a plea against regulation. He further argues that true democracy should never “demand blind trust”. On the contrary, he argues, “strong rules and procedures [have to be] in place to ensure that the government doesn’t get out of line” (208-209).

Solove makes clear why privacy should not simply be traded for supposed security, however what misses in his analysis is privacy’s substance. An enlightening account on this matter is Helen Nissenbaum’s framework of privacy as contextual integrity. She analyzes instances of privacy infringement, and comes up with an explanation for the concern they provoke: they violate contextual integrity. Nissenbaum argues that in different social contexts, there are “context-relative informational norms” in place, which “prescribe, for a given context, the types of information, the parties involved, and the principles under which this information is transmitted” (140-141). To maintain contextual integrity, the norms that apply to a specific context must be met. Nissenbaum defines contexts as “structured social settings characterized by canonical activities, roles, relationships, power structures, norms (or rules), and internal values” (132).

An example of such a context is a close friendship. Close friends generally know some things about one-another that are not to be shared with others, such as, for example, a personal history of mental illness. When two close friends are talking, and a third, more superficially befriended person joins, the context changes. The illness is not discussed, unless