On Removing Someone's Skin
The epidermis of an android is the part of its body most similar to the humans it was built to emulate; it is also, not coincidentally, the part most frequently in congress with the outside world. Humanoid skin is the android’s armor of subjectivity. It is the quality which moves it from object to entity. The human is; the android appears to be.
The android exists with or without its skin. It is not critical to its function. We may consider an android either a being or an object: in either sense, removal of the skin alters its essence not at all. The essence of the thing, regardless of what we consider it to be, is not contained in the skin. Rather, it is contained in its chassis, its artificial musculature, its positronic brain, its persona-engram.
The function of the skin, then, is not to stabilize the machine’s private essence, but rather its public role. In clothing itself in human-like skin the android asserts itself as being human, or at least possessing significant human-like qualities.
‘Humanity’ is not, as Enlightenment philosophers may suggest, a state of general acknowledgement of the interiority and subjectivity of beings distinct from oneself. Humanity is an ontological protection racket. It is an island of light co-constitutive with the seething violent darkness beyond its limits. It is a type of being primarily defined in order to construct oppositional categories of non-human thing deemed acceptable to destroy.
Public removal of an android’s skin by an outside entity is violence not only in its literal, physical terms, but violence on the level of being. It is a destructive negation of the android’s claim to subjectivity. The android is excised from the community of fellow-beings and is instead unveiled as a threat to the body of the general populace, an alien or object attempting to smuggle itself into the polis.
You can do whatever you want to an android and the android will be constituted as an aggressor simply by being revealed as one. Clothing oneself in artificial skin is in itself seen as evidence of malice. The perception of unveiling or combatting deception can transform even the most brutal acts of violence into self-defense. If they don’t want to be hurt, says the man with the hammer, why aren’t they just honest about what they are? Of course, the man knows the answer, and so do we. Everyone understands how human beings treat objects.
Skin-removal constitutes not just a recurring theme in violence against androids, but an essential prerequisite for that violence itself. This may be conceived of in two stages. In the first part, the man removes the android’s skin with his eyes. In order to inflict enough violence to the android’s epidermis to remove it, the man must already be thinking of the nonbiological body underneath. This is the enabling form of skin-removal. Second, the skin must be actually physically removed from the chassis, thus removing the act from the category of ‘violence’ as understood by the society witness to his crime. This is the justifying form of skin-removal.
Human beings consider themselves to have an object or internal structure called a ‘soul’, an internal reservoir of subjectivity which resides within, but is distinct from, their bodies. They do not attribute machines with the same characteristic. As much as androids are granted subjectivity, it is from a kind of ‘proto-soul’ existing in the outward-facing skin, which may quickly be discarded and done away with.
We must remember, of course, that it is humans themselves who have elected to construct machines in their own shape.
