When Does a Difference-Engine Become a Search for

Truth? Cybernetic Platonism in Alex Proyas I, Robot

(2004)

Sonny says that now that he has completed the mission for which he was created to kill Dr. Lanning
he does not know what to do with himself, and he is told that this is the human condition.
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In the first few minutes of I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004) we encounter Will Smith as Detective
Spooner interviewing the cyberneticist, Dr. Lanning, and as the camera moves behind him we
observe that the doctor is in fact a hologram projected from a metal disc lying beside his dead body.
His responses start to reflect the ambiguity of his position beyond the world in which he is still
trying to operate as a specter, when he says Im sorry. My responses are limited. You must ask the
right question. The beyond from which he speaks is the beyond of death, but the limited nature of
his responses also figures the ideological limits imposed on thought in the society he addresses.
Breaching these limits calls for an act of radical creativity or violence, and in fact Lannings strategy
partakes of both. It will emerge that he has committed suicide by building a robot capable of
transgressing the three laws that govern robot behavior and ensure they can never harm a human
being. The right question turns out to be Why would Lanning kill himself? The revelation that before
his death he had been imprisoned in his laboratory by his corporate masters, and that his suicide
took place at the hands of one of his own robots, will end up having a similar effect to Socrates
ambiguous suicide decreed by the city of Athens after he had refused the option of exile. It will do
what a much later Platonist, Matthew Arnold, saw as the task of the artist, the critic, and the
philosopher when he said we have not won our political battles . . . but . . . we have prepared
currents of feeling which sap our adversaries position when it seems gained, we have kept up our

own communications with the future.

Spooner and the hologram

of Lanning

Lanning knows that Spooner hates robots, having previously been involved in an accident where two
cars, one containing himself and the other a young girl, plunged into a river. A robot came to the
rescue and, making a quick calculation about everybodys chances of survival, decided to save
Spooner. Spooner feels guilty about having survived at the expense of somebodys little girl. Robots
seem to him to be only capable of an inhuman form of calculus that fails to take love into account,
but Spooners hatred at times attributes to them an unpredictability that, in robot terms, would
amount to being broken. It would also point to Lannings having achieved a kind of perfect mimesis
that would remove the boundary between human and robot. For Spooner, the automatism of robots
is a social evil that deprives human beings of jobs and makes logical decisions that seem morally
outrageous to him. The free will he also attributes to them and that would make them capable of
stealing property or plotting against the state looks like the opposite of automatism. Spooner himself
seems mad because he condemns robots on both counts, but in fact moral evil and automatism are
seen to be similar. Lannings calculation is that in the investigation of his suicide, Spooner will end
up discovering that he is right, some of them do have free will, but that he is wrong in seeing it as
malevolent. Lanning aims to teach him by indirect means that not only are robots capable of human
spontaneity but humans are capable of automatism when they refuse the challenge of their own
freedom.

We can see Lannings theory of creativity as the antitype of that of a poet like Lucretius for whom
freedom is just a blind swerving from ones course, a kind of error without connection to an
overarching good. Lucretius rediscovery during the Italian renaissance became an important factor
in the development of early modern science and political theory. His was an anti-platonic doctrine
that, in seeking to free people from superstition, explained everything as an effect of matter moving
matter around, and understood the Good in terms of the management of physical pleasure and pain.
Lucretius poem ends in melancholic visions of universal destruction, however, pointing to the fact
that he failed to cure his own horror of death, and to the fact that Epicurean culture has never
escaped the gravitational pull of the Platonic sun. In the nineteenth century, the laws of
thermodynamics introduced the idea of entropy into the Epicurean mindset and removed the faint
promise of resurrection entailed in the idea that the same universes could happen again and again.
However, in the twentieth century, Platonism still provided the metaphor with which the inventor of

cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, conceived of thermodynamic processes. He described two ways of

thinking about matter and energy, one of which he conceived in Augustinian terms as a monistic
system that would ultimately resolve itself into a uniform state of disorganization; the other he
imagined as a Manichean struggle between, on the one hand, lifeforms that resist entropy and, on
the other hand, an actively malevolent universe that reinvents itself to subvert their efforts.
The inner dimension of human experience at the heart of Augustinian theology has been reduced to
the Epicurean collision of atoms in Wieners theory, a fact that he worried about himself. We can
contrast him with a modern Platonist like Coleridge, who observed in his Biographia Literaria that
Matter has no inward. He meant that the more you pry into the inner mechanisms of the material
world, the more you lose yourself in its proliferating surfaces. For him, as for others in the Platonic
tradition, matter owes its being to substance rather than to conglomerations of atoms. Substance is
an Aristotelian word referring to an essence of the phenomenal world that we only find by looking
inside our minds. However, for a full understanding of what the word meant to Coleridge, we should
go not just to the founders of rationalism like Aristotle, Descartes, and Spinoza, but to the
neoplatonic Christianity of Meister Eckhart or the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, for whom
physics is a contemplative science. The knowledge of substance available to a neoplatonist confers a
kind of sovereignty that is quite different from the sovereignty of a liberal individual over his private
property. It is the sovereignty of the artist: when Spooner asks Sonny whether a robot can write a
symphony, Sonnys response is can you? Spooner may be a victim of his societys prejudices against
robots, thereby becoming a kind of robot himself, but in his stubborn belief in robots free will he
nevertheless displays the kind of sovereignty that allows one to take a stand, like Socrates or
Lanning, against an overwhelming consensus about the nature of reality.

Taking such a stand is made more difficult by the fact that Epicurean cultures always deploy a
travesty of substance to protect themselves from the real thing. Our use of the term substance to
describe material wealth encodes the way in which we allow money to replace virtue as that which
confers being on an individual, and afford a privilege to those who possess it that travesties the
happiness of the saint or the sage. We convince ourselves that freedom means freedom to choose
among meretricious consumer goods. That I, Robot is produced by such a society is evident in its
aggressive product placements that seek to alienate audiences from their substance in both senses
of the word, that is, to take their money and their integrity by convincing them that they will be

better people if they use a particular consumer product. However, the blurring of the distinction
between automaton and human when we see robots and people mingling in the shopping streets of
the city, means the film can be said to subvert the false-consciousness generated by corporate
interests that fund it. Furthermore, it connects the negative implications of this indistinction to the
broader history of the modern period, and to the decline of Platonism, by calling the
robopsychologist working for US Robotics in the film, Dr. Calvin.
In legitimizing the charging of interest on loans, and promoting democratic forms of government,
Calvinism was a forerunner of liberalism. In its antagonism to Thomist philosophy it was a
development of the nominalist revolution in late medieval theology, also known as the via moderna,
that expressed disbelief in metaphysical substances, and asserted Gods will to be more primordial
than his reason. It made this radically free God so transcendent that, in a way, he might as well not
exist, and at the same time suggested that the world he had created was ordained such that our
actions had no influence over our fate in the next life. Calvinism exalted the individual conscience as
a source of knowledge about the meaning of any text but diminished the role of the contemplative
life in distinguishing conscientious from self-deceiving interpretations. Asserting Gods absolute
freedom to designate people as elect or reprobate, and our powerlessness to alter our own status, it
created an ambiguous conceptual landscape filled with unstable binaries like good/evil,
puritan/libertine, freewill/determinism. The human/automaton ambiguity in this film can be seen as a
feature of this landscape.

Dr. Calvin and Sonny

I, Robots Dr. Calvin at first insists that robots are completely under the command of their makers
because the three laws form a perfect circle of logic. However, closer association with the
murderous robot, Sonny, shows her that it has an inner life: it dreams and keeps secrets. When she
examines it physically, she finds that in addition to the usual robot brain by which others of its model
are driven, Lanning has given it a positronic core that is capable of resisting the commands of its
first brain. This robot, like the film itself, has a divided will. The division of the human will is what
drives the dialectical engines of Platos Republic, and the Augustinian theory of there being two
intersecting cities of man and of God. The city is a metaphor for the soul, and the souls internal
division is manifest outwardly in political debate. When the sophist Thrasymachus insists in the
Republic that justice is whatever is good for the stronger, he is presented with the impasse between
this position and what he has to acknowledge as a competing truth: that justice is also whatever is
good for the weaker (Republic, 1.352a). This is an inversion of a binary opposition that
Thrasymachus doesnt have the dialectical skill to transcend. The society implied by his form of

materialism is an ancient Athenian equivalent of modern liberal democracy which has to divide its
powers horizontally so it is not vulnerable to being taken over by a tyrant, because its political
deliberations are not informed by an awareness of the importance of contemplative self-knowledge
in cognition.
In Platos depiction of Thrasymachus we observe that the conflict between justice as equality of
opportunity (whatever is good for the stronger) and justice as equality of outcome (whatever is good
for the weaker) is encapsulated in a single individual. This quarrel is essentially narcissistic, and
both sides are driven by the same will to power. This means that the Platonic division of the will is
not primarily a division between one kind of political opinion and another, but between the
horizontal plane on which todays right and left liberals fight with each other, and the vertical axis on
which we negotiate with the divine in the solitude of our own inner lives. For a Platonist, to desire
any kind of good there has to be a part of ones being that always already knows absolute goodness
in an unmediated way. Sophists and Epicureans mistake temporal goods for the Good they dimly
reflect, while dialectic involves becoming increasingly conscious of the Good as lesser forms of
goodness reveal themselves to be illusory. In Augustines Confessions, the transformational moment
occurs when, after much internal and external debate, Augustine hears a childs voice outside the
wall of his garden telling him to pick up and read. The passage he reads from St. Paul about leaving
aside the lusts of the body, speaks to his situation in a way that seems more than fortuitous. In that
moment eros turns to agape and his conflict vanishes. However, there remains an element of
mystery about why and how transcendence from one level of consciousness to another occurs when
it does, a mystery that persists in modern cybernetic thinking about artificial life, and in some
Marxist thought about what tips a society into revolution. In I, Robot, the mystery is invoked by
Lannings question: When does a difference-engine become a search for truth?

Like Plato, director Proyas transposes

Sonnys internal division and that of his
maker into the macrocosm. The street riots
that are a backdrop to their personal
journeys reflect the anticapitalist idealism
of the early twenty-first century. They
anticipate the way in which a Marxian
Platonist like iek understands
transformation in terms of game-changing
political events like OWS or the Arab
Spring, as well as the fact that the
contemplative dimension of Platonism is
largely missing from his analysis of such
protests. In its emphasis on
unpredictability, ieks understanding of truth in terms of the event is, nevertheless, more in the spirit
of contemplative Platonism than Karl Poppers liberal reading of Platonic truth as a cipher for
totalitarian ideology, which merely reflects Platonisms many institutional failures. Poppers view of
Platonism can be used to read the Artificial Intelligence named VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic
Intelligence) who controls the police robots and who, like Sonny, has a positronic brain. Unlike
Sonny she only has one brain, and it has arrived at a new understanding of the three laws whereby
humans can be killed for the greater good. She has learned how to invert a previously accepted
hierarchy, but not how to move qualitatively beyond it, making her form of free will more like the
swerve of atoms that lay at the basis of the Epicurean theory of freedom. Although VIKIs autocratic
reinterpretation of the three laws and Sonnys autopoetic transcendence of them look identical at

first, revolution and evolution become distinct from each other as we learn more about their
characters.
Lannings hologram tells Spooner that the three laws are perfect and warns that they lead to only
one logical conclusion: revolution. But whose revolution? That says Lanning is the right question. In
Specters of Marx, Derrida remarks that As soon as one identifies a revolution, it begins to imitate, it
enters into a death agony. If we apply this to I, Robot, we can reformulate its central question as
being: What do we imitate if we want to be good? Imitation has been key to the salvation it
envisages, but is it the imitation of the autopoetic free spirit who perceives, however dimly, the
Good; or of the fashion-victim who lusts after designer goods? Sonny says that now that he has
completed the mission for which he was created to kill Dr. Lanning he does not know what to do
with himself, and he is told that this is the human condition. Derridas polemic is largely aimed at
Francis Fukuyamas apologia for neoliberalism that controversially announced the end of history in
1989. Fukuyamas take on Plato conflated the Good with thymos or the desire for recognition the
virtue peculiar to the class of guardians in Platos republic and to modern liberal consumers
constructing identities for themselves. He worried at the end of that book about what would happen
when the ideological conflicts that get people out of bed in the morning had all been resolved in
favour of a liberal democratic utopia. This is the point at which the cybernetic dream of transcending
death and the political dream of transcending ideology converge by threatening us with the same
condition of boredom. Boredom is what drives the distracted multitude to buy goods and fuel the
engines of capitalism. For a neoplatonist, however, boredom can be a prelude to transcendence to a
new level of the contemplative spiral because the eros of the present level has been exhausted.

VIKIs rationalist tyranny

Spirals appear in several of Proyas films, and their symbolic potency derives from their being a
series of circles that instead of closing like the logical circle of the three laws that fail to prevent
VIKIs rationalist tyranny ascend to a higher level. Spooner, Sonny, and Calvin climb a spiral
staircase to reach the top of the corporate headquarters, where they discover that VIKI, and not the
corporate CEO, is the villain. Correcting her inversion of the human/robot binary, they then fall
through a well in the buildings center to access her CPU and inject it with nanobots that destroy her
(although Sonnys presence makes this inversion moot since robots and humans are no longer seen to
be that different). In Proyas previous film Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), a dystopian fable about a
world without sunlight or oceans that Gerard Loughlin has read as a version of Platos parable of the
cave, spirals are found scrawled on the bodies of dead prostitutes. They suggest ambiguously that

dialectic is equivalent to sexual tyranny or that sexual violence represents the failure of dialectic.
Proyas subsequent film Knowing (2009) depicts two children who are saved from the destruction of
the earth in a solar storm when they are beamed into a spherical spaceship by aliens whose auras
have the shape of angels wings. The children are taken to a virtual Eden dominated by the tree of
knowledge. The symbolism of spirals, of sunlight, of ascent, and the arborescent structure of the tree
are drawn from the neoplatonist flotsam of popular culture, but they are put together in a way that
makes these films intelligent critiques of the capitalist society that produced them.
Among these films by Proyas, I, Robot, the blockbuster of the three, is the most sanguine about the
future, and this is connected to its emphasis on the physicality of its heroes bodies. VIKI, the
villainous AI, is a tyrant because she doesnt have a body and is therefore incapable of human
empathy. Sonny does have a body, and leaves dents in the pavement when he leaps from a high
window, while the camera lingers on Spooners body as he stands in the shower (below), holding one
arm out of the water. We learn later on that this is a cybernetic arm that enables him to fight the
police robots who come after him, and that his own repressed cyborgism is part of why he initially
hates robots. In addition to its emphasis on solid bodies, the idealism of this film is undermined
much less clearly than that of his other films whose resolutions are fraught with the narcissism of
virtual reality, because its protagonists dont form a romantic couple at the end. Rather, Spooner,
Sonny, and Calvin look toward separate futures in which they have to discover or create their own
meanings. Like the Platonic philosopher king, and contrary to the common slander against Platonism
that its suspicion of concupiscence means it is antagonistic to the body, their bodies are all they
really possess as they embark on this project. The body is the principle of individuation and the
medium of the journey toward the Good.

The films emphasis on

solid bodies
In her conclusion to How We Became Posthuman, and after many dismissive references to Platonic
essentialism, Katherine Hayles acknowledges the continuities that exist across human societies
widely dispersed in time and space due to our possession of bodies that function in much the same

way. In this conclusion her interests intersect with those of St. Augustine, for whom the body was a
paramount interest, and who thought that in the resurrection we would have glorified bodies. He
didnt of course imagine that these bodies would be cybernetic or virtual, but was more concerned
that the indirection to which we fall prey as a result of our shallowest desires should transform into
the kind of indirection that characterizes the wisdom of the philosopher or the saint. Augustine was
not just an authoritarian patriarch, as liberal polemic would have it, but someone who valued
complexity and polysemy as distinct from the kind of anarchy that Wiener anticipated in his own
Augustinian scenario. Augustine celebrated Christian monotheism because it allowed the fluid
heterogeneity of creation to emerge from the god-encrusted Roman universe. In Proyas hands, the
Platonic traditions answer to postmodern nominalism is not a conservative rationalization of the
radical heterogeneity of the world, nor is it an obscurantist assertion of supernatural agency. It is
rather a suggestion that for radical heterogeneity to remain meaningful it has to exist on the vertical
axis of being where we cultivate our substance, as well as on the horizontal level where we construct
identities. It involves a belief that the phenomena of emergence that are seen at the levels of
personal and political development are both different and symbiotic, and that they should be
considered together without assimilating one to the other.
I, Robot does this by dramatizing the divided human will and the neoliberal context in which it
operates today. In doing so, it speaks at once to audiences most superficial and most profound
desires, resuming questions of free will and determinism that have been around at least since the
time of Sophocles. The kinds of answers suggested are ones that still subsist beyond the sphere of
mainstream intellectual legitimacy and that the film remains ambivalent about. It alludes to a
neoplatonic cosmology in which the disagreement between materialist representatives of the left
and right like Derrida and Fukuyama looks like a matter of the narcissism of small differences. It
generates its own kind of narcissism in its mobilization of the tropes of romantic love, but in its
restraint of this impulse it also suggests the possibility of getting in touch with the spiritual rather
than the material real, the latter being what iek sees on the other side of romance. These different
kinds of alterity the spiritual and the material can be conflated by interpreting them as that in which
the narcissist fears to see his reflection. They can be distinguished again by considering that ieks
real represents the shadow side of Fukuyamas argument the fear that the end of history is the end of
hope. A Platonic view suggests that the liberal democratic stability Fukuyama hopes for, including
the boredom inherent in it, might create conditions for a transformation in consciousness that would
alter the political landscape in ways we cant yet foresee. It keeps in mind that the Good that is
beyond being and the material contingencies that are too fleeting to attain full being are existentially
intermingled in all of us, and knows that Platonism is not antagonistic to the body, but to its
debasement as a mannequin on which to hang a partisan political identity as if it were fully
representative of the human soul.

Sonny draws his dream

Reconciling the tension between liberal reformers and Marxist revolutionaries by rediscovering the
inner life as a field of exploration may ultimately involve the loss of what we find most gratifying
about our current dispensation, that is, the narcissism of consumer culture and the ways it is bound
up with the kind of romantic feeling that places somebody or something on a pedestal, as well as the
melancholy that ensues when that ideal fails us. For Spooner this might involve renouncing the
sentimentality that makes him think his life is worth less than that of a young girl, and the
recognition for heroism that he seeks in wanting to sacrifice himself for her. Spooner and Calvins
failure to sleep together, and the fact that Sonny is an individual whose erotic life may not be at all
genital in nature, help to suggest a future society of people who relate to each other by means of a
semiotics that has only begun to evolve. Although his masculine name indicates his relationship to a
godlike creator whom he has killed, and so he has simultaneous Promethean, Oedipal, and
Christological valences, Sonnys overdetermination as a symbol combined with his lack of physical
features means that he is a mostly blank slate. He is not cut off from human history or from human
contingency, but is in dialectical conversation with them. He faced his own death when he came
within seconds of being decommissioned by Dr. Calvin as if he were just a malfunctioning machine,
and so he is human in the sense that he is a self-aware being who is contingent in nature, albeit one
whose body may afford him indefinite duration of life.
The tenor of the films ending is that the protagonists are now journeying at a new level of the spiral
in which the relations between individual and community are not mediated by the nuclear family and
its antagonism to the interests of the state. This is at once a more epicurean-nominalist-neoliberal
society, and a society with new possibilities for molecular complexity. Its ultimate suggestion,
however, is a severing of the liberal conflation of Platonism with patriarchal tyranny. The films chief
victims are a male scientist and a male corporate CEO, its tyrant is an abstract feminine AI without a
body, and the subaltern figure being given full humanity is a masculine robot with a superhuman
body but without a phallus. It would be easy to read it suspiciously, as a reactionary fable that
contains a misogynist ideology at the heart of its apologia for neoliberal economics. But the analysis
in this essay suggests that this would be an Epicurean misreading of its Platonic aspirations to a
world Plato didnt dare imagine, in which democracy is in fact possible because all human beings can
be monarchs who think for themselves rather than tyrants blown by the winds of fashion and
uninformed opinion. Such is the implicate order within Platos philosophy and Proyas speculative
fiction.
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Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots.