If you can’t see Janelle Monae live tonight, you can see her as one of the greatest robots ever filmed in “Autofac,” which is a part of Amazon’s Electric Dreams series and is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1955 short story “Autofac.” Monae is a black robot, Alice, who arrives at a village of white and wild-looking people to offer customer service. The villagers are tired of the factory sending them shit they do not need, and they want the factory to just go away and let them live happily (and hippily) ever after. Alice’s job is to deal with customer complaints. She lets the white villagers know that the stuff is going to keep coming. There is no stopping that. Upon hearing this, the white villagers break into two groups: those who want to take military action against this automated factory and those who do not. The plot of the show is driven by those who decide to take action.
But Monae’s robot is just too perfect. The actor deeply understands this service machine. And the fact that the black robot confronts white people about their own enslavement has to be considered very interesting and not accidental. And this performance has many echoes with a curious relationship in the new film Solo: A Stars Wars Movie. In Amazon’s “Autofac,” you have a black robot informing whites they are essentially consumer slaves and they have to live with this fact; in Disney’s Solo, a rebellious robot called L3-37, which Spencer Kornhaber at the Atlantic described as “Star Wars’ first woke robot,” is in love with a black man. This pattern cannot be ignored.
In “Autofac,” Monae gets to the content of a robot’s soul, which is indeed nothing because it works all of the time. With whites, the idea of the soul and non-soul of the life-world is at the center of their work ethic. The soul is your reward. But a robot works with no such ethic or reward. It just works. This condition is much more accessible to those for whom slavery is not a distant memory. The soul, then, cannot be a reward for the punishment work. That makes it a prisoner of labor. And as such, it is an illusion of a soul. The slave does not find soul in work or its reward, consumption. The whites demand a soul. The black robot will not give them one.
In the age of industrial labor, which is not just factory work but the attempt to make all work like factory work, labor was measured by time. You could clock in and clock out. And it was understood that the time of work was not yours (soulless), and the time outside of work was yours (soul). In post-Fordist forms of labor (the flexibilization of time), there is no time that is your time. This is the understanding the black robot is trying to make the white villagers (who are not hicks but politically progressive) come to terms with, and it’s this understanding that freaks them the fuck out. They must not only work without a soul, but consume without one.
Let’s turn to Solo. We have not seen in the Star Wars series a robot that is in love with a white person. They might be loyal to whites (R2-D2), or annoy whites (C-3P0), but they do not love them. In Solo, we have a robot who has fallen in love with a human. And that human is black, Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian (whose name echoes—and I think importantly—Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali’s “slave name”). L3-37’s love for the black man, which stuns and confuses the film’s white beauty (Emilia Clarke), and the robot’s revolt (she is the Harriet Tubman of robots) cannot be separated. L3-37’s has a soul, but it’s not in work, or is a reward for work. The robot’s soul is simply love. And so it doesn’t have the artificiality we find in a human with a work ethic. L3-37 was not long for the Star Wars world.
Lastly, David Graeber describes in his new book Bullshit Jobs a story by the Soviet-era Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. It is about Ijon Tichy, a “space voyager” who visits a planet that is very much like the postapocalyptic one described in Philip K. Dick’s “Autofac.” The latter story was published in 1955, the former in 1957. The former is by a socialist writer; the latter, a capitalist one. Yet the stories are identical. What this indicates powerfully is that a whole new and universal form of governing emerged after World War II. The recently late critical theorist Moishe Postone calls it the interventionist government. It succeeded liberal government, and was followed by the neoliberal one we have today. Graeber, like the economic historian Karl Polanyi, believes that capitalism as it was understood in the 19th century did actually collapse in the middle of the 20th century. It did not survive World War II. The West and East were having the same dreams.
