TV Series (May 2021)

La plasticité de l’humain et de l’inhumain dans Westworld. Scepticisme, perfectionnisme et mise à l’épreuve réciproque

  • Diego Scalco

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/tvseries.5104
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19

Abstract

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In the Westworld series, the guests of the homonymous amusement park interact freely with humanoid hosts locked in behavioral loops inspired by the conquest of the West. Everything changes when humanoid’s software is secretly improved by one of the park's designers. Many hosts begin to transgress the limits of their respective loops, in reaction to memories and affects that persist through these loops. As guests are confronted with increasingly spontaneous behaviors, the boundary between the human and the inhuman starts to fall, thus revealing their very plasticity. In the closed space of the park, the relation to others becomes tinged with skepticism in a Cavellian way. In order to show that there is no ideal situation in the (re)cognition of what is human, Stanley Cavell resorts to the fiction of an automaton so improved that it almost perfectly simulates pain and grief, which hence poses the dilemma of intervention. In the case of Westworld too, the conversion to skepticism regarding others implies a shift from an approach of being and (re)cognizing towards a practical approach (with all the underlying contradictions). The various actors find themselves engaged, unwillingly and in a confrontational way, in a transformation of reciprocal attitudes that have common features with Cavell’s perfectionism. The challenge is no longer to (re)cognize a consciousness of which the humanoid should be deprived and which would mark the ascent at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, but to establish a relation with a foreign intentionality, whose emergence is analogous to the path to the center of a maze.

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