While theories of the “uncanny valley” are debatable (see Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley” (.pdf)), the quest for human-like androids and automatons continue to compel their designers. At Carnegie-Mellon University’s anthropomorphism.org, I found an interesting early study of robot head design that shows how these designers sometimes make choices about when to make robots anthropomorphic (human-like), and when to avoid such resemblance.

In “All Robots Are Not Created Equal,” by Carl F. DiSalvo (et. al, 2002), analyzes the human perception of the humanoid robot head in alarming detail, from the length between the top of the head and the browline, to the diameter of the eyeball, to the distance between pupils. The researchers want to know: how human should a robot head be, and is this contingent upon the context in which they are employed? Their study suggests that eyes, mouth, ears and nose — in that order — seem to be the most important traits for us to perceive the “humanness” in a machine. But the most interesting conclusion they draw, in my view, is that the more servile and industrial the robot, the less we want to perceive its resemblance to us. Thus, not all robots are created equal: “consumer” robots often are purposely more “robotic-looking” (mechanical) in design, since they often perform servitude and routine functions that would crush the spirit of any real human, while others — especially “fictional” — robots are often the most human-like of all, reflecting our projected fantasies for them as “characters.” Desalvo and crew propose that the following elements of robot design would create the ideal “human-like” robot:

1. wide head, wide eyes
2. features that dominate the face
3. complexity and detail in the eyes
4. four or more features
5. skin
6. humanistic form language

To what degree is our notion of the “double” located on the head, the face and its various features? Freud’s classic itinerary of uncanny traits include doll’s eyes and language, and I would suggest that the more the traits listed above appear in a doppelganger, the more uncanny that double might be. The role of the uncanny valley is at work here, and while it not directly addressed in DiSalvo’s article, it’s worth considering the degree to which the factor of increasing “likeness” in robot head design follows the x-axis of the classic uncanny valley:

Mori's 'Uncanny Valley' Schematic

It is useful to consider not only the “uncanny” in this chart, but the way that that assumptions about use value and instrumentality lie behind its structure. There is a politics of self/othering at work in this schema that is rarely discussed. One of the fundamental principles of the Uncanny as it is classically understood in aesthetics is that, symbolically, the “double” is a harbinger of death for the subject that perceives it. This is a complicated notion, but on one level what this means is that when the self perceives itself as disembodied and located in another entity — through its mirror image — we unconsciously recognize how “replaceable” we are and this is felt as uncanny. We do not only respond, typically, with fear: we also feel compelled to separate the Self from the Other as a form of protection against the threat that the Other presents. A power relationship transpires: the psyche construes a hierarchical separation that institutes the Self in a higher subject position than the Other, in order to retain its sense of mastery over identity. The Other is subjugated into a lower position. While it is “harmless” in fiction, this is also a dream that reproduces the politics of everyday life.

There is a generalized fear of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence “replacing” mankind; we see it everywhere in science fiction, but it is also a very real threat to the labor force. Robot design participates in a self/othering dynamic that domesticates these anxieties. Could the uncanny valley be a symptom of class conflict as much as some organic reaction formation? I think so.

On a lighter note, test these theories against the Life magazine photogallery, “Robots We Fear, Robots We Like”

Just found this neat Prezi presentation on “Uncanny Digital Literacies” by Sian Bayne, from the ESRC seminar series on Literacy in the Digital University (University of Edinburgh, 16 Oct 2009).

I like the free-floating zoomieness of Bayne’s presentation, but with an ‘absent’ presenter, it is a little difficult to make the ideas and images cohere.

I found a draft of one of Bayne’s articles (in .pdf format) that might shed light on this presentation — “Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds” (University of Strathclyde, 2008) — in which she explores how teaching via SecondLife and other virtual spaces can tap into a ‘pedagogy of uncertainty…as a way of working productively with the ‘strangeness’ and ‘uncanniness’ of contemporary academic – and digital – ways of being. The full article is definitely worth a read.

I think the quotation from Ronald Barnett’s book, A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education, 2007) is key. If I’m reading the presentation correctly, it suggests that the primary linkage between the ‘uncanny’ and pedagogy (a philosophy of teaching) is the use of new knowledge and new methods (e.g. digital technology in the classroom) to generate a defamiliarization of the habitual ways of thinking: “The student is perforce required to venture into new place, strange places, anxiety-provoking places. This is part of the point of higher education.”

DEFINITELY. This argument shares much with the thinking I’ve explored on my teaching website, Pedablogue, and particularly with an essay I wrote last year on “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Learning Theory”, published in The Jnl of Tranformative Works & Cultures last September. In that article, I discuss how horror fiction can provide an “activating event” that challenges a students assumptions…this is a little different than Bayne’s assertion that digital media taps into “intellectual uncertainty” to generate inquiry, but we sound a similar call to teachers to defamiliarize and challenge student habits, so that they might learn something new.

Of course, Freud’s theory of the uncanny is not entirely about “intellectual uncertainty”…indeed, one of his stated purposes in writing his article to begin with was to peer behind this idea — first launched in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (.pdf)) — to explore how unconscious desire underpins an experience of the uncanny. And teaching “unconscious desire” can be a bit too slippery and mucky for the classroom. Teachers cannot be psychotherapists. Instead, teachers are in a position to raise consciousness: to help students understand how “certainty” is sometimes a ruse, and — with care — unveiling how desires that we think of as natural might actually be socially constructed, after all. And this, after all, is the impulse behind not only most teaching in the liberal arts, but most scholarship: to lift the veil.

News note: Monkeys, according to a recent study, behave similar to humans in the face of the Uncanny Valley.

From the New Scientist: “These primates don’t participate in human culture, which suggests the uncanny valley has a biological basis,” says Karl MacDorman of Indiana University in Indianapolis. Wired magazine suggests that this means “the uncanny valley has evolutionary origins deep in the primate psyche.”

So monkeys are like humans, almost. Hmm…it all seems so…uncannily similar.

Unconscious Drives - Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society

“Dreamland” is an amazing concept for an amusement park attraction based on literal interpretations of Freud’s theories.

I’m learning about this from Zoe Beloff’s exhibition at Coney Island museum (running till July 2010): The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-72. I’m ordering the book that covers the history of this fascinating group, and I can’t wait to spend time with it. For now, I just want to share coverage of the exhibit in an article, “The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.” from The New York Times, which generously includes a slide show of images from the exhibit.

Albert Grass led the Amateur Psychoanalytic group, who proposed to restore and renovate ther “Dreamland” park area as “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.” Grass’ sketches of the rides and attractions of the id are compelling works of art in themselves, such as the autonomous bumper cars that function as “unconscious drives — 25 cents!” (image at the top of this post is from good coverage of the exhibit at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog…which also features an interview with Beloff). The textual notes (“In the unconscious nothing dies…They (the drives) are zombies!”) are at once an accurate description of Freudian thought and an unsettling literalization of anxiety and desire.

As the museum’s press release for the exhibit explains, Grass’s sketches and plans included “a working architectural model consisting of a series of pavilions (The Unconscious, Dream Works, Consciousness, The Censor), linked by a miniature locomotive (The Train of Thought)…integrat[ing the Group's]intellectual interests into its surroundings, in ways both serious and amusing.”

Grass, The Dome of the Unconscious: "Terror - In Consciousness We Experience Immediately The World Around Us"

How uncanny it would be to literally ride the unconscious and traipse along the pathways of the Dream Works. And I can only guess the horror of “The Censor” pavilion. By making the “figurative” elements of psychoanalytic theory “real,” the park attraction would have constituted an amazing fantasy adventure, but one that would resist the suspension of disbelief in that it would always already be a sort of projection of a conscious rationality in its very design. I suppose, there is a degree to which this is less an instance of the uncanny “confusion” between a symbol and what it symbolizes, and more a projection of the omnipotence of Freudian thought. Or, conversely, an artistic comment on Freudian thought as, itself, fantasy.

One of the unique concepts I broach in The Popular Uncanny is the notion of doublement — a term I employ to refer to the uncanny regress that occurs when a textual double (such as a remake or other adaptation) foregrounds the capacity for media to reproduce or “double” itself. In a recent entry on The Watchmen over at the Graphic Engine blog, new media critic Bob Rehak captures the uncanny spirit of this concept, and what is at stake in reproduction, remarkably well:

…here’s where the real uncanniness resides. We’re often hoodwinked into thinking that the visual (indeed, existential) crisis of our times is the rapidly closing gap between profilmic truth and what’s been simulated with computer graphics. But CG is merely the latest offspring of a vast heritage of manipulation, a tradition of trickery indistinguishable from cinema itself. Watchmen is uncanny not because of its visual effects, but because it comes precariously close to convincing us that we are seeing Moore’s and Gibbons’s graphic novel preserved intact, when, after all, it is only a copy — and a lossy one at that. In flashes, the film fools us into forgetting that another version exists; but then the knowledge of an original, an other, comes crashing back in to sour the experience. It is not reality and its digital double whose narrowing difference freaks us out, but the aesthetic convergence between two media, threatening to collapse into each other through the use of ever more elaborate production tools and knowing appeals to fannish competencies. At stake: the very grounds of authenticity — the epistemic rules by which we recognize our originals. — Bob Rehak, “Watchmen: Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” (3.9.09)

Brilliant. Moreover, this is not only the case with Computer Graphic enhanced cinema or graphic novels adapted to screen like the very popular Watchmen; I would argue that all remakes raise these very same stakes, because they engage in a tension with their “originals” that threatens to destabilize boundaries, which is felt by us as uncanny. In the introduction to my book, I make the case that Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho — which is nearly identical to Hitchcock’s — is perhaps the purest form of this destabilization, by virtue of being so nearly identical that the differences between the two are psychologically overdetermined by the spectator, rendering the text “uncannily” similar-yet-different.

Rob Horning’s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for instant art without work found in such manufactured-but-ultimately-empty products for purchase like Paint-by-Numbers kits and Guitar Hero. These are simulacra that pre-package the artistic process, transforming it into a consumer item, slowly depreciating the cultural value of art in the process.

Horning’s essay is important, I think, especially in the way he ties all of this in to the economy. His article is not so much a snubbing of folk art or a call for a return to the great divide between high art and lowbrow, as it is a lament about the erasure of meaningful production altogether under capitalism. He’s captured what is so pathetic about games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band — whose karaoke appeal (as I discovered over the holidays personally) is really quite fun, but whose faux instruments are irrationally consumerist and whose existence would seem unfathomable a decade ago. As Horning points out: for the same price of the kit needed for Rock Band, you can buy real musical equipment! Instead of creating art what happens is that players are trained to play along, buying more and more accessories (available in an infinite shopping mall that opens up via online access, with its downloadable songs and pricey plastic “instruments” and much, much more). While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players’ attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players’ mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you’re doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights — we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production.

Horning argues that such an activity deifies consumption and that this sort of artistic paradigm transforms how we relate to artwork. We see it as a collectible, rather than an experience. The “aura” of the artist dissipates, replaced by the commodity fetish. We begin to value quantity over quality, in order to display and advertise our pop culture status, rather than genuinely appreciating what it is we’re collecting, or attempting to create anything of use or cultural value on our own. In the case of paint-by-numbers art, we have no time to develop the skills required to refine our talents; we have no desire to work for pleasure. In the process, the arts become a deskilled industry — just like the handcraft of furniture making is replaced by push-button factory labor — and we subsequently become bored and alienated by the arts, driven only to fill the void with more and more stuff as we throw away one thing (or momentarily give tribute to it in the collection) and move on to the next one. The result is ultimately ennui and a quest to stave it off with more consumer goods that ultimately leave us dissatisfied all over again.

In games like Rock Band and Guitar hero, we don’t create the music: the music creates us, and we recognize this in the uncanny avatars that refract back to us, screaming and pounding the skins on our TV screens.

A cheeky November 2008 webisode on TrendHunterTv.com reveals just how strange American’s fascination with such things has become in “Faux Rockstar”:

A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

Adbusters # 78 asks “What if design stood up for itself? What if instead of bowing immediately to our demands, design gently pushed back?”  In the “Psychodesign” slideshow (by Sarah Nardi), products like Panasonic Design Company’s experimental ”Gel Remote” (above) are framed as a political use of the uncanny, animating the inanimate icons of everyday life in order to challenge and subvert the objects that enable our sense of mastery and dominance over the environment:

Inert and lifeless, design is animated only through human use. It exists only by virtue of its functionality, possessing no reality independent of its purpose in our world. Would we think of it differently if it were alive?

What products designs like these are asking us to do is empathize with objects, which in my opinion (following Susan Verducci) can be a progressive and moral outcome of an imaginative representation of the uncanny in the arts. 

But the “gel remote” got me thinking about the sensation of touch.  The gel remote — and other forms of haptic technology/art/design — are inanimate objects that “touch back”  when we touch them.  So much of the theoretical work on the uncanny has been about the visual realm and other forms of representation; haptic technology and art is a new media form that projects a sort of tactile sensation of the uncanny, which in some ways is like a “return of the gaze” in the plane of the visual. 

A little web research reveals the artistic history behind the remote and other objects of this ilk.  It stems from Kenya Hara’s attempt to assemble a group of Japanese artists to design an object from everyday life that animated tactile perception.  Japan Society cites him on the concept:

“The concept of ‘haptic,’…leads to the idea that we not only design form by creating a shape or an object, we also design how it feels. A human being is a bundle of delicate senses. Science doesn’t only help the evolution of materials and media, it also helps us understand the senses, where there may be hidden a whole new, undiscovered territory. . . ‘Haptic’ means another design attempt to expand the world atlas of senses.”

The Lighthouse art museum of Glasgow hosted this “haptic art” exhibition earlier this year, showing the Gel Remote along with a few other designs that I’d place in this category of the tactile uncanny, like Naoto Fukasawa’s “Juice Skin”:

These examples of the repackaging of nature (a la Next Nature) are at once novel and attractive.  A review by The Scotsman of the Haptic exhibition celebrates the mission in our audio-visual centered world to reawaken the senses of touch, but laments that samples of these art objects were rubbed smooth by passers-by. 

We are both attracted to and repulsed by such objects. 

A good starting point for explaining the feelings aroused by actually touching — rather than seeing — this sort of object might be this example from Jentsch’s essay on the Uncanny, which describes the “intellectual uncertainty” one has when one can’t tell what causes a “perceived movement”:

One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake…. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movement lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.

The terror he describes is triggered by sitting on an object that shows itself to actually be a subject.  More than just the striking surprise of a statue that suddenly lights up with life, there is a moment of abjection on top of the terror caught up in touching what one assumed was “dead” material that surprisingly touches back with a “life” all its own.  This sensation of touch literally “pushes our buttons” perhaps more forcefully than any other form of the uncanny.  Haptic art/tech does not merely reawaken the sense of touch; it triggers a reflexive response that inherently asks us to rethink our assumptions about the environment.

Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled “Thinking After Dark.” With a focus on such topics as “figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre” and a featured guest in Barry K. Grant as a keynote speaker, this conference sounds quite promising.

“Thinking After Dark” will be held in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) from the 23rd-25th of April 2009 under the supervision of the Ludicine research group from the University of Montreal. The deadline for proposal submissions is Jan 15, 2009. I don’t know if I game enough to attend, but my curiosity is strong.

Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) offers up a nice Powerpoint “slideshare” from his courses, which gives a succinct overview of Freud’s work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media.

I particularly liked this slide below (#10), because it serves up the way that oppositional binaries structure the theory, especially in terms of the role of “secrets” in the private and the public (un-private?) spheres.

Binaries of the Uncanny

There’s a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey’s impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show,  30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post a considerationabout this very self-conscious — and hilarious — program, which directly referred to “uncanny valley” theory last season, helping bring the issue to light in the popular imagination.

Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” theory is gaining notoriety in popular culture already, generally. Mori argued that as non-human entities (monsters, robots, androids, etc.) evolve to appear and move more and more like actual human beings, the more repulsive we find them. The “valley” refers to the negative emotional response we feel in response to an encounter with these entities, as represented in this chart (c/o Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato at the journal, Android Science):

Conversations about the “uncanny valley” have been taking place in numerous communities recently, from researchers in android science to digital animators to performance artists. Artists and designers have been chatting, for example, about the differences between the success of Pixar’s Incredibles or Wall-E and the failure of shows like The Polar Express, suggesting that the latter comes too close to the valley while the former avoids it altogether. (Ward Jenkins elaborates in depth). Gamers especially are getting into the concept; fans of PS3’s upcoming game, Heavy Rain are talking about its uncanny realism, and fans of the Wii are talking about how the design of the games on that platform avoid the valley altogether. But these conversations and experiments have been on the margins of media culture for the most part… until a popular television sitcom this year employed the theory in an overt and hilarious way.

On April 24, 2008, the NBC television comedy 30 Rock aired its 13th episode of its second season, called “Succession.” The theory is actually debated overtly during the show when the two most radically off-kilter characters, variety show headliner Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and staff writer Frank (Judah Friedlander), become obsessed with designing “Grand Theft Pornography” — the “world’s greatest pornographic video game” — and this ludicrous plot arc unfolds with wacky and surprising results as the characters become more and more obsessed with perfecting their game.

On Television Without Pity, Michael Neal summarizes the way the theory of the Uncanny Valley is delivered in the show, which employs a parody of the above chart:

Frank is attempting to explain to Tracy why his porn video game idea won’t work. It’s because of something called “the uncanny valley.” As artificial representations of humans become more and more realistic they reach a point where they stop being endearing and become creepy. Frank whips out a chart to prove his theory exists and when Tracy asks him to break it down in Star Wars he does just that: On one side of the scale are R2D2 and C3P0. “Nice,” remarks Tracy. On the other side is a real human like Han Solo. “He acts like he doesn’t care but he does,” again says Tracy stating the obvious to usual comedic perfection. But the lowest point on the scale is “a CGI storm trooper or Tom Hanks in Polar Express.” Paying careful attention I notice that only slightly above that low point is “wax figure of Nicole Kidman.”

(Neal also posts Tracy Jordan’s hilarious “notes” for the video project on his blog at slapclap.com).

What’s funny about this to me is that the theory is employed in such a serious fashion about a ludicrous and juvenile gamer fantasy. Highbrow and lowbrow elements are thereby swapped in a topsy-turvy fashion, transgressing unspoken cultural boundaries and thereby revealing them. The least intellectual characters on the show — empowered by their silly quest for porno perfection — suddenly become studious and drop their slacker routines to engage in more serious work than they ever have on the show before. Naturally, all of this juvenalia “works” so well because it ostensibly shows fans a “new” side of the characters, suggesting that they’ve really just been slacker heroes all along: given incentive, they could be geniuses who create masterpieces…it’s just that the world they live in rarely gives them “incentive” enough on their own terms.

Is 30 Rock mocking Uncanny Valley theory as a geek fetishism, or is something more at play here than just mockery that theories of the uncanny might explain? I’m not entirely sure, but when I consider the progam in terms of uncanny “doubling,” I find its clever allusions to popular culture at work here very interesting. As serious and studious as Tracy and Frank become in their creative act, there worldviews are entirely delimited by references to other forms of popular culture (Star Wars, Polar Express, etc.). One could read these “slacker heroes” as engaged in active “play”, poaching from culture high and low, manipulating its tropes to their own creative ends, breaking out of their passive role as consumers of media. They are, like dedicated fans, “scholars” of their genre, capable of theorizing and applying scholarship to their productive work. But the problem here is that they already ARE media tropes in and of themselves. Thus, everything can only be understood self-reflexively. The comedy becomes a parody not simply of intellectualism, or of game fandom, but also of itself.

Tracy: “My genius has come alive, like toys when your back is turned. I see potential for erotica in everything around me. This cup. This table. Even you Kenneth.”

Kenneth: “Well, I am wearing a cuffed trouser today.”

Kenneth’s deadpan response to Tracy’s crazy mixture of references to the uncanny is apt because it suggests that, just like any given object in the room (cup, table), a character is ultimately always a non-human object, operating as a “stand in” for real human relations that nevertheless is alive and seemingly autonomous…just like Tracy’s “genius” which “comes alive”.

The show constantly turns inward, nods at — and more often mocks — itself, before deflecting back out to the culture at large. And this episode’s treatment of the uncanny raises the status of the show as a work of popular culture itself to the foreground. The metafiction of the whole “uncanny valley” plot arc ruptures the seamless fantasy of the already metafictional sitcom, because 30 Rock is already a show about the making of a show: in the narrative proper, Tracy and Frank are an actor and a writer on a fictional TV show called “TGS” — which is already a sort of “doppelganger” in its own right, since the familiar actors from “SNL” (Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan — and Alec Baldwin, who has appeared on SNL so often he might as well have been a cast member) are playing actors/writers on the fictional set of a fictional variety show very much like SNL, which is run on the same network as SNL, and produced by the same producer as SNL. This chain of intertextuality is difficult to follow because of the parallels that it incessantly solicits, the constant cloning of cultural semes, the textual reproduction of other texts at a rate of near-panic. All of these levels of plot and intertextual references bounce off each other in an echo chamber of meaning that is not unlike a “hall of mirrors” narrative about popular narrative itself.

Thus, when “Succession” depicts these characters creating yet another fictional plot (for the game) inside of an already many-chambered plot, it becomes a metacommentary that threatens to reveal how flat their characterization really is, how constructed the storyline is from the thin tissue of other texts, and therefore shatter our suspension of disbelief. This may very well be why the creation of the video game storyline becomes like a parody of the film Amadeus Amadeus when it mocks Jordan’s lowbrow quest for a “masterpiece.” Often the show will spin plotlines more reminiscent of SNL sketches than they are of genuine charcacter conflicts, since the introduction of yet another “text-in-production” threatens to topple the metafictional coherency of the show. There are moments so hyperreal that the writers are driven to seek an intertextual touchstone elsewhere in pop culture, suggesting that the characters in THOSE shows are the flat ones, that THESE characters know better and are just acting. But it can never quite evade the control of the media. These media characters — who are media consumers themselves — are also, uncannily, autonomously, themselves creations of the consumerist media. Thus, while the “porno video game masterpiece” quest narrative is perhaps the most ludicrous and unbelievable of all the plotlines of 30 Rock, it somehow transcends mere mockery and opens a doorway into intellectual uncertainty that probably hasn’t been as successfully tried since Seinfeld boldly told the imaginary story of it’s own show as a show about “nothing.”

This is the genius of the structure of 30 Rock (and perhaps why it survives while similar shows such as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip die off) — as an ongoing metafictional series, it can refer to other texts — even those from cultural theory and android science — indefinitely, while at the same time parodying itself. This is not merely self-depricating humor; the show works so well because it is itself a reflection of another text, a “looking glass world” of SNL’s variety show format — while remaining just different enough from that show to avoid any “valley” of repulsion that audiences familiar with Saturday Night Live might feel. It successfully avoids the status of Saturday Night Living Dead by being more than SNL’s other.