Uncanny

Last updated
Repliee Q2 is a lifelike robot developed at Osaka University, often named as an example of the uncanny valley due to its similarity to humans, even replicating functions like blinking, breathing and speaking. Repliee Q2.jpg
Repliee Q2 is a lifelike robot developed at Osaka University, often named as an example of the uncanny valley due to its similarity to humans, even replicating functions like blinking, breathing and speaking.

The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious. [1] This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar entity is encountered in a frightening, eerie, or taboo context. [2] [3]

Contents

Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny, later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche", which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. [4] For Freud, the uncanny is located in the strangeness of the ordinary. [3] Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. [5] The concept has since been taken up by a variety of thinkers and theorists like roboticist Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley [6] and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. [7]

Etymology

Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken : "knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception." The uncanny is thus "an idea beyond one's ken", [8] something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions.

Freud noted the German unheimlich as the antonym of heimlich, or the "homely". [4] A more literal rendering of the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny would therefore be "unhomeliness".

History

German idealism

Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1837, postulating that the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny. [9]

In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.

Ernst Jentsch

Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." [4] He expands upon its use in fiction:

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. [4]

Jentsch identifies German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" ("Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.

Sigmund Freud

The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche" or, "The Uncanny", which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud considers the "unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story ("The Sandman"):

I cannot think – and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me – that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. [4]

Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", to be the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale. He focuses on how the anxiety of their loss, is not unlike male castration anxiety. He continues, explaining how this anxiety may lead a male audience, robbed of their masculinity, feeling the uncanny. Their masculinity being robbed, provides Freud the foundation to illustrate a central contributor to male fear.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion. [10] He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double".

Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination – especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds us of our own Id , our forbidden and thus repressed impulses – especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one of infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought. [3] Such uncanny elements are perceived as being threatening by our super-ego ridden with oedipal guilt because it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, being the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

[...]

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind [forming a central theme in "The Sandman"], is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration – the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. [...] All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their 'castration complex' from the analysis of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life. [4]

After Freud, Jacques Lacan, in his 1962–1963 seminar "L'angoisse" ("Anxiety"), used the Unheimlich "via regia" to enter into the territory of Angst. [11] Lacan showed how the same image that seduces the subject, trapping him in the narcissistic impasse, may suddenly, by a contingency, show that it is dependent on something, some hidden object, and so the subject may grasp at the same time that he is not autonomous (5 December 1962).

Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny. The uncanny valley is the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional response. Mori Uncanny Valley.svg
Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny. The uncanny valley is the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional response.

This concept is closely related to Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, where one reacts adversely to something forcefully cast out of the symbolic order. Abjection can be uncanny in that the observer can recognize something within the abject, possibly of what it was before it was 'cast out', yet be repulsed by what it is that caused it to be cast out to begin with. Kristeva lays special emphasis on the uncanny return of the past abject with relation to the 'uncanny stranger'. [12]

Sadeq Rahimi has noted a common relationship between the uncanny and direct or metaphorical visual references, which he explains in terms of basic processes of ego development, specifically as developed by Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. [13] Rahimi presents a wide range of evidence from various contexts to demonstrate how uncanny experiences are typically associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. He also presents historical evidence showing strong presence of ocular and specular themes and associations in the literary and psychological tradition out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' emerged. According to Rahimi, instances of the uncanny like doppelgängers, ghosts, déjà vu , alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms, twins, living dolls, etc. share two important features: that they are closely tied with visual tropes, and that they are variations on the theme of doubling of the ego. [14]

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's essay on human reactions to humanlike entities, Bukimi no Tani Genshō (Valley of Eeriness Phenomenon), describes the gap between familiar living people and their also familiar inanimate representations, such as dolls, puppets, mannequins, prosthetic hands, and android robots. The entities in the valley are between these two poles of common phenomena. Mori has stated that he made the observation independently of Jentsch and Freud, [15] though a link was forged by Reichardt and translators who rendered bukimi as uncanny. [16] [17] [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Lacan</span> French psychoanalyst and writer (1901–1981)

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.

In psychoanalytic theory the “id, the ego and the superego” are three different, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus as Sigmund Freud summarized and defined it in his structural model of the psyche. He developed these three terms to describe the basic structure and various phenomena of mental life as they were encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.

Defamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently. According to the Russian formalists who coined the term, it is the central concept of art and poetry. The concept has influenced 20th-century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, science fiction, and philosophy; additionally, it is used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming.

Masahiro Mori is a Japanese roboticist noted for his pioneering work in the fields of robotics and automation, his research achievements in humans' emotional responses to non-human entities, as well as for his views on religion. The ASIMO robot was designed by one of Masahiro's students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sublimation (psychology)</span> Psychological defense mechanism

In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

<i>Powers of Horror</i> 1980 book by Julia Kristeva

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection is a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.

In psychology, intellectualization (intellectualisation) is a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling. It involves emotionally removing one's self from a stressful event. Intellectualization may accompany, but is different from, rationalization, the pseudo-rational justification of irrational acts.

In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire, the "a" being the small other ("autre"), a projection or reflection of the ego made to symbolise otherness, like a specular image, as opposed to the big Other which represents otherness itself. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire, as it is the force that induces desire towards any particular object. Lacan always insisted that the term should remain untranslated, "thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign" (Écrits).

In psychoanalytic theory, aphanisis is the disappearance of sexual desire. The etymology of the term refers to it as the absence of brilliance in the astronomical sense such as the fading or the disappearance of a star. The term was later applied to the disappearance of the subject.

Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and health care, and philosophy.

In continental philosophy, the Real refers to the demarcation of reality that is correlated with subjectivity and intentionality. In Lacanianism, it is an "impossible" category because of its opposition to expression and inconceivability. The Real Order is a topological ring (lalangue) and ex-sists as an infinite homonym.

[T]he real in itself is meaningless: it has no truth for human existence. In Lacan's terms, it is speech that "introduces the dimension of truth into the real."

"The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" is an essay by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later published in Lacan's 1966 book Écrits.

Barbara Creed is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oedipus complex</span> Idea in psychoanalysis

In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex refers to a son's sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, first formed during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. A daughter's attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine Oedipus complex. The general concept was considered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), although the term itself was introduced in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

Penis envy is a stage in Sigmund Freud's theory of female psychosexual development, in which young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in a series of transitions toward a mature female sexuality. In Freudian theory, the penis envy stage begins the transition from attachment to the mother to competition with the mother for the attention and affection of the father. The young boy's realization that women do not have a penis is thought to result in castration anxiety.

Didier Anzieu was a distinguished French psychoanalyst.

Poststructural feminism is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities.

Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the human mind is structured by the world of language, known as the Symbolic. They stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate among Lacanians.

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Royle, p. 1.
  2. ↑ Royle, p. vii.
  3. 1 2 3 D. Bate, Photography and Surrealism (2004) pp. 39–40.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Freud, Sigmund (1919). "Das Unheimliche". Archived from the original on July 14, 2011.
  5. ↑ Lacan, Jacques (2005). O Seminário, livro 10: A Angústia. Jorge Zahar Editor.
  6. ↑ Mori, M. (2012). "The Uncanny Valley". IEEE Robotics and Automation. 19 (2). Translated by MacDorman, K. F.; Kageki, Norri: 98–100. doi:10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811.
  7. ↑ Kristeva, Julia (2018-07-31). ""Approaching Abjection," from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection". Classic Readings on Monster Theory: 91–100. doi:10.1017/9781942401209.008. ISBN   9781942401209.
  8. ↑ "Definition of ken". Dictionary.com .
  9. ↑ A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1993) p. 26
  10. ↑ N. Royle, The Uncanny (2003) p. 90
  11. ↑ A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1994) p. 224
  12. ↑ S. Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva (2012) pp. 189–92
  13. ↑ "Lacan: The Mirror Stage". www.english.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2019-10-02.
  14. ↑ Rahimi, S. (June 2013). "The ego, the ocular, and the uncanny: Why are metaphors of vision central in accounts of the uncanny?". The International Journal of Psychoanalysis . 94 (3). Wiley-Blackwell: 453–476. doi:10.1111/j.1745-8315.2012.00660.x. PMID   23781831. S2CID   10856256.
  15. ↑ Jochum, E.; Goldberg, K.: Cultivating the uncanny: The Telegarden and other oddities. In: Herath, D.; Kroos, C.; Stelarc (Hrsg.): Robots and art: Exploring an unlikely symbiosis. S. 149–175. Singapore 2015
  16. ↑ MacDorman, K. F. (2019). Masahiro Mori und das unheimliche Tal: Eine Retrospektive. In K. D. Haensch, L. Nelke, & M. Planitzer (Eds.), Uncanny interfaces (pp. 220–234). Hamburg, Germany: Textem. ISBN   978-3864852176 doi : 10.5281/zenodo.3226274
  17. ↑ Mori, M. (2019). Das unheimliche Tal (K. F. MacDorman & V. Schwind, trans.). In K. D. Haensch, L. Nelke, & M. Planitzer (Eds.), Uncanny interfaces (pp. 212–219). Hamburg, Germany: Textem. ISBN   978-3864852176 doi : 10.5281/zenodo.3226987
  18. ↑ Reichardt, J. (1978). Human reactions to imitation humans, or Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley. In Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction. New York: Penguin.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.