Ornamentalism and the (In)Human Future

Dolls: Our Archaeology of Asiatic Ornamentality

Nineteenth-century Orientalism, particularly centered around the image of Asiatic femininity, persists in contemporary American culture, influencing desires and animosities across various domains. This influence isn't solely due to ongoing racism but also stems from an aesthetic, ornamentalist practice that shapes our perceptions of what lies beyond the human. There's a close connection between technology and Asiatic tropes, especially in popular culture.

Asia-as-Technê

R. John Williams, in his book The Buddha in the Machine, discusses the ongoing presence of Orientalism in technology and corporate culture as “Asia-as-technê.” He defines it as a compelling fantasy where Eastern aesthetics serve both as an antidote to and a perfection of machine cultures. Williams traces the significance of Asian aesthetics in the Western technological imagination, noting how Martin Heidegger's concept of technê was influenced by his engagement with Orientalism. He also points out how corporate America utilizes Eastern mysticism to engage fully in the capitalist dynamic, resulting in what he terms “Corporate Zen.” According to Williams, in the 21st century, Asia-as-technê is used to bridge the gap between humans and machines, leading to the East not merely transcending but becoming the machine itself.

Pensive Mechanical Bodhisattva/Kwanon_Z

Wang Zi Won’s piece, Pensive Mechanical Bodhisattva/Kwanon_Z, offers a commentary on contemporary American Orientalism by presenting a striking aesthetic vision of biological and spiritual mechanical systems.

The Yellow Woman

The figure of the yellow woman anticipates the transposition of biological and spiritual mechanical systems well before modern technology and corporate culture. Encounters with Eastern otherness, such as the semihuman fleshliness of Chinese porcelain and the sensuousness of Japanese lacquer, promote prototypes of animated objectness.

The production of artificial life through the enchanted materialism of Asiatic femininity creates a predicament and a romance with synthetic personhood, which has haunted the Western conceptualization of personhood since the imperial age and early contact with the Eastern Other. Ornamentalism provides an understanding of Western technological determinism. By combining organic flesh with art and manufacturing, the ornamental yellow woman anticipates a specific aspect of Asia-as-technê. The Asiatic woman serves as a threatening replicant in artificial life fictions, embodying the crisis of the inhuman within the human.

Synthetic Asiatic femininity offers a mobile vocabulary and a model through which machine culture followers realize the indebtedness of the organic to the inorganic and the primacy of the prosthetic. Science fiction often retreats from its ambitions by reverting to human sentimentality. The figure of the yellow woman as ornamentalist technology allows us to reconsider assumptions about humanness and personhood. The yellow woman is a site where the logic of embodiment is worked through, not an atavistic figure to be abandoned but the form of aspiration for modern technological science.

The Ghost in the Ghost

Freud highlighted the unsettling effect of encountering a machine that comes to life, echoing a long-standing anxiety about the limits of the human since the beginning of the machine age. Architectural theorist Spyros Papapetros argues that contemporary animated culture evolved from the vivified terrain of the preceding fin de siècle, representing the return of repressed empathy for objects. Asiatic femininity offers another vivified terrain in the archaeology of object empathy. The machine age has origins in racialized encounters from the Age of Exploration, with the explosion of material culture in the 19th century rooted in the discovery of the East. Confronting empty-but-embodied objects forces us to encounter our own thingness.

Ghost in the Shell

Rupert Sanders’s film Ghost in the Shell (2017) provides an opportunity to reflect on the ornamentality of our (in)corporeal fantasies in a digital age. Levi R. Bryant distinguishes between corporeal and incorporeal machines:

• Corporeal machine: Made of matter, occupies a discrete time and place, exists for a duration (e.g., subatomic particles, rocks, human bodies).

• Incorporeal machines: Defined by iterability, potential eternity, and the capacity to manifest in various spatial and temporal locations while retaining identity.

However, the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal machines can be misleading, especially with bodies treated as both finite matter and infinitely iterable. Based on the 1995 anime of the same name by Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the Shell focuses on Asia-as-techê and techê-as-Asiatic-femininity. It extends the apprehension about animating the inanimate, raising questions about what makes a human human, the relationship between consciousness and the soul, and the implications of artificial intelligence.

The film deploys femininity and racial otherness as gratuitous and exotic titillation. Reviews have noted the voyeuristic pleasures of Scarlett Johansson's character, Major Motoko Kusanagi, and the casting of Johansson as Kusanagi is seen as commercial whitewashing. However, films like Ghost in the Shell should raise questions about the relationship between surface and embodiment for raced and gendered subjects, rather than affirm racial identities.

Asiatic Femininity

Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve presence, with Asiatic femininity being prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman encompasses a dream about the inorganic and is the original cyborg.

It is easy to mourn the loss of humanity or celebrate posthumanism. The yellow woman reminds us that the human was involved with the inhuman before the threat of the modern machine. Racial logic haunts Ghost in the Shell on the surfaces of the film. The Major’s epidermis is a combination of resilience and transparency, a collation of fragmented nudes, and bareness that is also armor. The prosthesis is plastic, gel, skin, and race.

Synecdoche

The Major’s epidermal schema can be compared to Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (1991–present), where sample paint chips turn out to be monochrome paintings based on skin tones of models. The piece insists on the simultaneity of poly- and monochrome, individuality and collectivity, anonymity and biography, seriality and randomness, abstraction and the figural. Viewers are asked to consider how the human (racial) epidermal schema draws from abstract concepts of color.

The Major’s skin is synthetic and organic, exemplifying technology but also carrying the history of human labor. The Chinese coolie and the Oriental woman are global inhuman humans from Western imperial history. The Major is the union of both: a body of labor and numb endurance, but also a beauty that bears the lines of its own wreckage.

Corporeality is divisible, and biology is plastic and manipulable. There is a sedimentation of meaning within Asiatic femininity as a slippage between racialized organicity and synthetic inorganicity. The Major's skin instantiates a history of Asiatic femininity, with the modern surface consolidating the racialized skin it replaces. The Major is the daughter of an American industrial giant in an economically colonized Japan.

The suppression of the original anime character’s Japanese name punches up the reveal that the Major’s white body hosts Kusanagi’s Japanese brain. The android has an ornamental relation to the human and is always already the yellow woman. The shadow of the yellow woman lends the robot-and-AI its human poignancy. The film tells a cautionary tale about people being turned into things, but Orientalism in the West is also a history of personification. The nonperson embodies a genealogy about the coming together of life and what is not life, conditioning the modern understanding of humanness.

The Major is the great hope, a singularity that is serial. When the Major looks into the face of a geisha robot assassin, it disavows the complex interpenetrations of race, gender, and machine. Asiatic femininity is a critical agent in the fiction and fantasy of prosthetic personhood. The Major is like the robot: Asiatic, other, alien. This otherness is the alibi for her humanity. Racial and gender differences chart dehumanization but provide the means for humanizing synthetic inventions. The yellow woman is the ghost within the ghost.

The Shell Game

American cyborgism is about personhood in the telos of Western technology. It is a modern story of passing that does not pivot on binary tensions. The master-slave relation in American history is not black and white. Given this, where is blackness in the fiction of the cyborg? Why is the telos of Asiatic objecthood the cyborg, while the telos of black objecthood is the monster?

Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is a film about stolen black bodies, revealing insights into the phantoms of American sociality. The black laboring body is used as a prosthesis of white desire. It gives us a set of nesting dolls, a shell game: an organic black body sheltering a white phantom within which is the black psyche interred in the “sunken place” of its oedipal trauma. There is no underground haven for the black man, even in his mind. The black man's unconscious can be conscripted into the white man’s family drama.

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok describe the human psyche as a shell game, with the ego as a protective layer marked by what it shelters. Traumatic memory gets buried without a legal burial place, creating a crypt in the ego. In Get Out, Missy Armitage uses hypnosis to call forth Chris Washington’s phantom, trapping him in his own crypt. Interlocking phantoms structure relations between subjects in a racialized landscape.

The psychological crisis in Get Out is about Chris’s psyche’s vulnerability to external phantoms. The film uses a vocabulary shared by psychoanalysis and confidence tricks, indicating the violence of the “love and theft” that haunt American history. The protagonist is passing, not only in the film’s traumatic form of passing but also in the minor accommodations he performs in a postracial society. Chris repeatedly fails to read the signs to get out the moment he enters the Armitage estate, wanting to get over racially awkward moments. For the raced subject, the imperative to move on comes from a survival instinct. Surrounded by phantoms, Chris has been sidestepping the sunken places of white American culture. Chris is ensnared by the injunction to assimilate, what Kenji Yoshino calls covering.

Abraham and Torok distinguish between incorporation and introjection. Incorporation signals a harmful encryption of traumatic loss, creating a phantom. Introjection designates a process of acquisition and assimilation, a life-affirming form of assimilation. The well-adjusted racialized subject appears so by disavowing signs that he should be otherwise. The raced subject demonstrates that introjection is shadowed by the violence of assimilation and incorporation. In an unfriendly world, introjection is a horror, a double bind.

High-Tech Fable: Ghost in the Shell vs. Get Out

In contrast to Ghost in the Shell, the persons created in Get Out are akin to Frankenstein’s monster. The yellow woman and the black man are bodies subject to colonization, but the terms of theft differ. One fate is to become a machine, the other to become a monstrosity. It’s the difference between the enfleshment of the black body and the syntheticness of the yellow body. The black body is emphatically corporeal, while the yellow female body is desirable for its affinity and material compatibility with the unreal.

Get Out peels back layers of white psychic investment in black flesh, while Ghost in the Shell alerts us to what yellow female bodies promise: an escape into the dream of artificial ontology. The Major is always already surface, thing, robot, and shell. The black body is cut into, while the yellow body is uploaded. The yellow woman is automechanical, whereas the black man undergoes violent manual manipulation. American racialization almost always involves triangulation, even as it appears black and white. The legal history of desegregating the nation involved Asians, just as the specter of Asianness arose during Brown v. Board of Education as a rationale for segregation.

The China Doll never exceeded the naturalization of her aestheticized thingness. There are dolls to play with and dolls to live in. For the yellow child, the racial choice is impossible. Is it better to disappear into whiteness or claim a place in a system that excludes you? In Get Out, Mr. Tanaka exemplifies the position of the Asian in the American racial economy: outside of yet noticeably intrusive. What is unthinkable for Asian masculinity is possible for Asian femininity.

Ex Machina

Ghost in the Shell suggests that the yellow woman is a ghost within the ghost of the white woman, with Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2014) spelling this out. In contrast to the film’s sleek appearance, Ex Machina is violent on racial and gender levels, concentrated around yellow femininity. Caleb Smith wins a week at the estate of Nathan Bateman, the CEO of a tech company. Caleb learns that he is to determine the capabilities of Ava, a beautiful android.

Ava is sexy despite not looking human. Jane Bennett argues that we are drawn to vitality, human or not. The sexiness of the thing that Ava promises is compromised by gender and race. Vitality derives from miscegenation. Ava is “Version 9.6.0,” destined to have her higher functions stripped to become a fembot, with this adventure degenerating into a horror tale of misogyny and racism. Many of those other versions are still present in Nathan’s research facility. Almost all the versions built by Nathan looked like women of color, especially Asiatic women. (Ava was fashioned after Caleb’s porn profile, not Nathan’s.) Nathan’s “yellow fever” is underscored by Kyoko, his porcelain-skinned, silent maid, who turns out to be another android.

Kyoko is an Orientalist trope, marking the limits of Nathan’s erotic imagination. A black female android body, “Jasmine v 4.3.0,” is shown discarded. The black body is indigestible to the machine aesthetics at work in Nathan’s imagination, while the film’s representation of Asiatic femininity offers the form and animating matter for Nathan’s project of inhuman life. The yellow woman is a priori a living doll.

How did we go from encrusted Asiatic femininity to spare lines? Japan connotes relaxed organicity and simplicity, while China connotes decadent extravagance. Japanese simplicity and Chinese ornamental encrustment function as two sides of the same coin in the service of Euro-American modernist aesthetics. The slim, machinelike Asiatic female body is ornament. The yellow woman unites aesthetic vocabulary for the modernist imagination: sleek and ornamental.

Li Xiaofeng’s Beijing Memory No. 5 (2009) and Karl Simon Gustafsson’s Ava concept art share a line of descent. Seemingly encrusted, Beijing Memory No. 5 has revealed itself as a mechanical assemblage meditating on the pliable nature of race, gender, and temporality. The translucent product of Western technology (Ava) proves to embody phantasmic Asiatic roots.

Ava and Kyoko are mirror images, sharing a creator-father and the same skin. The name Kyoko means “mirror,” with the film reinforcing the idea that the women are reflections of each other.

sartorial veiling and unveiling

Near the end of the film, Ava opens his wardrobes to reveal a series of life-size, fully lifelike nude female androids hanging there. Ava appears to be searching and then stops in front of a model that is another Asiatic sister: Jade (“v 5.4.0”). In a video recording, we see Jade locked in a room, begging her creator for release until her arms break off. Ava takes an arm from Jade to replace her own shattered limb and starts removing sections of Jade’s skin to put them on herself.

There could this be a more explicit dramatization of the sartorial uses of yellow skin? This scene troubles assumptions about racial identity, embodiment, augmentation, intersubjectivity, property, and selfhood. Yellowness and whiteness are decorations, and the skin in question is materially identical for all the AI androids. Is this theft or collaboration, dispossession or ownership? What if this was a mirror scene without the split? What would it mean to have a subject who looks into a mirror and sees itself?

When we watch Ava apply pieces of artificial skin to her armature, we end up with organic absorption. Garland’s dramatization may have hoped to give viewers a teasing sense of lesbian erotics, but the scene also illustrates the radical possibility of ornamentalism: That animated personhood can be achieved through synthetic attachments and applications.

Ava’s capacity to absorb yellow skin says less about white or human appropriation than about the animation of things. This dramatizes Mel Y. Chen’s concept of “animacy.” It also suggests that the biopolitical realizations of animacy in contemporary American culture are enmeshed with productions of race and aesthetics. Here, we are witnessing a form of racializing objectification that yields a different kind of subject. Given the choice, Ava chooses the yellow doll.

We cannot talk about self-making with our assumptions about what a self/race/identity are. This scene is phantasmically intrasubjective. To read this sequence as only an instance of invidious cross-racial identification is to miss the crisis of personhood that ornamentalist transmutation generates. Here, we have a thing covering itself up with other things to acquire humanity. This ending seems to celebrate a delicate and transitory freedom in which Ava is neither human nor machine.

Ava does not escape with Caleb, the young programmer who is in love with her and helps her rebel against Nathan. Instead she leaves him locked up in a hermetically sealed room in the compound, effectively entombing him, leaving him for dead. Given the opportunity to become “a real girl” with a real human partner who is, by the way, conveniently an engineer and advanced programmer, Ava closes the door on that option. She looks human but does not make the human choice. Her rejection of the normative heterosexual narrative and the protection of human kinship suggests that in this version of Pinocchio, the animated doll wants to stay that way. At the same time, the conclusion does not celebrate the triumph of the machine, since Ava chooses to remain within her corporeal casing. She emerges, isolated and empty-handed, into the larger world as a human who does not make human choices.

In the end, we see her standing in a busy traffic intersection, in North America, while people walk indifferently about her. There is no sense of how long Ava will last. She is not Eve on the threshold of a brave new world, but instead an alternative being whose only promise can be the here and now.

Caleb tells Ava the story of Mary in the black and white room. A fable intended to show the difference between a computer and the human mind that in fact blurs the difference. The terms of Ava’s escape and its newfound freedom are ambiguous: original and scripted, full of possibilities and impossible.

Freedom here might be described as a form of capability: the ability to sustain the moment, to experience and to not be second-hand. Could this fantasy of living on as a thing, undetected by humans, serve as a fable for the social subject who is an object? Given Get Out, not to assimilate, but to exist, somehow? Ernst Bloch tells us that fairy tales were originally “radical theory,” political narratives about freedom and happiness. In Ex Machina, the outcome is not exactly friendly, but Ava may be offering her own brand of radical theory: the proposition that existing, however isolated and provisional, may be the only mode of survival in the enchantment of objecthood.