Westworld is an American science fiction Western television series based on the 1973 film of the same name.  In introducing the new episodes, its official website remarks, “Follow the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin in this dark odyssey that begins in a world where every human appetite can be indulged.”  The new series, through the man-machine interaction and conflicts, explores ontological questions about the nature of our reality, free will and what makes us human.  Set in an American Old West themed park called Westworld in around 2058, the futuristic environment accommodates android hosts cybernetically programmed to satisfy human guests but not to harm them.  Android's autonomy is largely restricted. Humans are allowed to pay to indulge themselves into the sexual and violent fantasies in assaulting the androids indistinguishable from humans.

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The TV series exhibits contradictory concepts of human insatiable desires and dehumanizing effects of the man-machine relationship.  This is complicated by artificial intelligence and the  autonomous subjectivity imposed on machine, which is driven by a continual urge to transform them into the impossible and inhuman fantasy images.  In The Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard argues computerized techniques such as the artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy.  The subject, represented in history and memory and produced by humanist knowledge by grand narratives and metanarratives, is weakened and is unable to withstand the encroachments of contemporary capitalism and technology.  Humanity is at risk as a result because the capitalist system acts as “a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity” (63).  In other words, the only resistance to this form of the inhuman is another inhuman that is at work in human subjectivity – the dehumanizing product of a conflict between two inhumans (Malpas, 76).  

 

Works cited:

Lyotard, Jean-François. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge." Vol. 10. U of Minnesota Press, 1984.

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Malpas, Simon. "The postmodern." Psychology Press, 2005.

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HBO. "Westworld."  2020, www.hbo.com/westworld.

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Images:

McCarty, Stephen. "Aaron Paul in season three of Westworld." Found, 15 Mar 2020, www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3074593/westworld-back-season-three-singapore-among-new.