Aegis 2021
---tMasochism and Sinthomosexuality: 34
Caleb and Ava’s Relationship in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina By Miranda Hilt There is a machine, a text machine, an implacable determination and total arbitrariness…which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any narration (23). -Paul de Man, quoted in EdelmanIntroduction Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina offers a fascinating and provocative take on technology, relationality, and what it means to be human. The film’s protagonist, Caleb, is a 26-year-old programmer at a search engine company Blue Book. He wins a contest and is invited to the CEO Nathan’s estate to perform a modified version of a Turing test to Ava, a feminine humanoid robot with advanced artificial intelligence. Caleb becomes emotionally connected to Ava and is willing to do whatever it takes to protect her, including betraying his employer. While Ava appears to share this emotional bond with Caleb, her motivations remain obscure. The master signifiers of “human” and “machine” both seem to fail to adequately account for the complex entity that is Ava, as she resists the symbolization that Nathan wants so deeply to assign to her. Caleb and Ava’s relationship is a major element of the plot that ultimately determines both character’s fate. Garland
invites a psychoanalytic reading of Caleb and Ava’s relationship in which Caleb represents the feminine masochist with an impulse toward the death drive, and Ava represents the sinthomosexual, an embodiment of the Real. “Being of Language” and Relationality After meeting Ava, Caleb admits to Nathan that he is unsure of exactly how to perform the Turing test that Nathan has proposed. The problem, as Nathan succinctly puts it, is how to discern simulation versus actual. Ava knows that she is a machine and notes as much during her first session with Caleb. She is not a carbon-based life form, but her mind and body are essentially that of a human. What Garland is shows us here is much like what Slavoj Žižek describes as the gap between the symbolic and the Real. Žižek characterizes humans as “being of language,” suggesting that we ascribe master signifiers (S2) to nonsensical signifiers (S1) due to the societal demand that the Other solidify or render intelligible the subject’s place in the social order.i There exists between S1 and S2 a crucial gap called the signifying chain, in which the subject is confronted with language. Despite the efforts of S2 to cement a social identity and symbolic meaning to the subject, S2 is never fully successful. There always exists a degree of S1 that remains nonsensical, arbitrary, and enigmatic. Ava questions Caleb on his relationship status and if he is attracted to her, which prompts Caleb to ask Nathan why
