Page 258 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Perceptions of Self 241

human senses of it. Specifically, there is an obvious appeal to a relinquishing
of the viewer’s self because she or he experiences no option but to play along.
It was Freud who coined the term "ego" for the consciously motivated aspects
ofhumanselfhoodthatinvolve will, rationality, values, sociality, etc., anditdoes
tend to be the notion of "ego-self" that we mean by "self" in common parlance.
There is another approach to selfhood that may apply closely to human-IA
dynamics, which is to remove the notion of self from the Freudian tradition that
fixates on intrapsychic phenomena, and locate it equally or even predominantly
within social relations. In her analysis of human willingness to abandon self in
relationships of domination and submission to authority, feminist theorist and
psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin rejects the primacy of the oedipal quest for a
lost original unity in the self, and focuses instead on dynamics between self and
other that begin in infancy and continue to evolve in adulthood. For Benjamin,
domination and submission are signs of failure in the mutuality of recognition
within primary relationships that is necessary for a fully realized sense of self.
She says, "The need of the self for the other is paradoxical, because the self is
trying to establish himself as an absolute, an independent entity, yet he must
recognize the other as like himself in order to be recognized by him. He must
be able to find himself in the other" [5, p. 32]. Our receptiveness or resistance to
the authoritarianism of technologies might also be shaped by these deep-seated
developmental processes involving our closest relations.
Freud’s corollary idea about those aspects of the human psyche that lie out-
side ego could be described as a kind of excess of self that is outside rational
understanding. In my personal absorption of the Freudian schema, there is a
"good" excess of self that is fundamentally creative – instinctual, emotional,
libidinal, etc. (the "bad" excess of self is a distortion into loss of will or submis-
sion to values that have no creative dimension). In George Bataille’s writings
on the erotic, selfhood or individuation is a trauma of discontinuity with the
universe, a splitting from a once unified state that the self is always seeking
to repair, an idea closely related to Freud’s death instinct. Bataille calls the
super-abundance of energy that typifies individuation a plethora, which is al-
ways poised for crisis: the cell splitting, or the organism sexually climaxing.
The crisis only momentarily resolves the violence of excess energy: ego-self
equals ongoing violence and crisis [3, pp. 94-108]. This portrait of too much
self I think is closely linked with the Cartesian mind-body split. It is an alternate
way of describing a deeply felt ineffectuality in separating the rational mind
from the affective domain to reconcile desires, needs and the rest of the human
range of experience.
The expansion of the human sensorium that is invoked in multi-sensory art
works do exceed the constraints of ego boundaries by appealing directly to af-
fect through senses other than the visual. Consideration of emotion is also one
of the more enticing and challenging aspects of modeling social intelligence in