During the first season, we are witnessing the implantation of Hubots (a contraction of humans and robots) in society. A brilliant scientist, weeping for having lost his wife, decides to revive it in the form of a machine with the appearance of the person loved. His discovery drives him to create new ones, new ones, more and more. Admittedly, these Hubots have something mechanical in their attitude, and especially in their eyes. They never sleep and have to recharge their batteries regularly, but they can tell stories in the evening to a child without getting bored, make love to you without debonding or being raped and say thank you. They obey without complaining, are inexhaustible, and covetable to thank you …
At the beginning of the series, they stumble on witticisms, family equivocals, and can not make use of denial, but their program is growing and some, more sophisticated than others, come to learn the subtleties of language. They can understand the different meanings of speech and pretend. So much so that one might think that desire appears, and especially that of child. Sometimes even bugs in program changes, when the memory does not completely disappear, manage to make us believe in a “subjective” division in the hubot.
The boundaries between robots and humans are fading, so much so that they fall in love with these individuals, desire them, defend their rights or, conversely, fear them, fight them, want to exterminate them. The last scene of the second season is striking. A hubot, defended by a human lawyer, asks to have her rights recognized by a child she adopted with her husband, 100% human, who died of a heart attack. She does not want to get money, but to be recognized as the wife of this man and the mother of this child. The advocate’s argument unfolds around the definition of the human being: what is a human being? His main argument — the error being human, the error of the hubot program humanizes it — will fly and shake the court.
The signifier, 100% human
This series anticipates the dream of the cognitive sciences: to create a machine in the image of the human, as much in its form as in its brain. To tie the imaginary to the symbolic. We know the belief of cognitivism in an absolute Other, which holds a knowledge where all signifiers exist and would be at hand, where sense and reference would be inadequacy. And if these do not coincide, it would even be possible to learn all the subtleties of the language, because the machine, holding all the signifiers, could realize all the combinations. The symbolic order is universal. One of the individual, one of the imaginary form, becomes the absolute One, one of the unique. “The signifier accomplishes an eternalization of the subject in its uniqueness,” says the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. This is what the lawyer of Real Humans defends: tearing the hubot out of his series and elevating it to the dignity of the signifier, as unique. “The unique is what the signifier converts from being in spite of all the transformations of the living to make an absolute One”
It is the symbolic that names and that assigns a place, a status, a recognition. The hubot can, therefore, claim rights in the system meaning the law, it can be recognized as a victim of any discrimination, its place can evolve according to the program that constitutes it and the performances that characterize it. Nothing is impossible in the realm of the symbolic.
The living body, 100% human
But the power of the symbolic bumps into the reality of life. This is the success of the series. Something escapes this attempt at generalized symbolization. The body of the hubot is not that of the human. Something is elided for the hubot suffered by the human being. His skin can be hot, he can be attacked by a virus, he can decay, break up, he can even have leaks, misfires, he can inspire love, desire … but he is in no way himself affected. Because it is not a living body: “we do not know what it is to be alive if not only this, that a body is enjoyed”
This living body is at the same time what escapes knowledge and who is affected by it. For the living body of the human being is a body parasitized by language. This parasite, this mark of language in the body, the exile of knowledge that it should have to adapt to the demands of life:
“Knowledge is in the Other. It is a knowledge that is supported by the signifier and that owes nothing to the knowledge of the living. The language enters the body and thereby produces a pleasure that exceeds the needs of the living. It cuts the body and each part is likely to be subtracted from the functional unit of the body to eotise and thus become autonomous.”
The ear made to hear and give the signs of danger becomes pure object of enjoyment in its dimension of voice. Theodore, the character of the movie Her, is crushed by severe depression, he creates a new computer operating system to which he assigns a voice. The intelligence of this system extracts in the body of Theodore an erogenous zone which frees itself from the vital needs of the body to become a libidinal object. He falls in love with it, his desire is awakened. This voice is not that of a machine, it is that of a living body, that of Scarlett Johansson, American actress supports many male fantasies. Because for an object to become an object of enjoyment, it needs a living body: “the living body […] is the condition of fruition”.
The speaking body, 100% human
On the one hand, we have the enjoyment that the signifier produces when it strikes the body when it enters the body. The signifier becomes corporealized. The body enjoys in its partition. The living, therefore, is caught only by little bits, because it is a body cut out by language. The human being enjoys his body by edges that the drive lives. Cannon fodder, flesh sex, fragmented body in the explosion, beheaded in the execution, body cut under the scalpel of the cosmetic surgery or under that of the forensic doctor, the fragmented body takes a new value. This small end can conceal a knowledge with its DNA, become an object of exchange in the trade of organs, become object of sacrifice, spoils of war or more-of-come. “There is always in the body, because of this engagement in the signifying dialectic, something separate, something sacrificed, something inert, which is the pound of flesh”.
And that one pays for the satisfaction of desire.
On the other hand, we have the enjoyment of the signifier as the satisfaction that the human gets from language. The loss of enjoyment made by the signifier when he enters the body is recovered in this orgasm of the language: to produce meaning, but also to undo it to enjoy the nonsense, the equivocation or the double meaning, this that Lacan will call to enjoy his unconscious.
Being 100% human is ultimately born of the inevitable encounter between a living body and language, whether we like it or not.
