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Pamela Fox

Jennifer Dobbs

CORE 112

April 11, 2005

The Training and Discipline of David towards the Production of a Knowable Soul

As the first of his kind, David begins the film AI with an empty “soul,”

but by the end, subtle control tactics combined with severe disciplinary

measures, like those discussed in Foucault’s “Discipline & Punish,” produces a

clearly defined soul. The post-modern sense of the soul, as Foucault describes,

is a “body of knowledge” about an individual that comes to be known through

observation of that individual (295). Since that observation itself is part of the

control tactics used in producing the soul, the process of soul production is

already cyclic in nature. In fact, claiming David’s soul begins empty at the

beginning may be impossible, by definition, because a soul once observed

adds to itself; but it is nearly empty. Through his confinement to the human

community and subsequent subjection to their training controls and

disciplinary measures, David’s soul becomes increasingly knowable until it is

as defined as a human’s soul in the end.

Once adopted into Monica’s family, David is disciplined, mostly at

Henry’s order, after several well-intentioned actions accidentally resulted in

bodily harm, once to Monica and once to Martin. In Foucault’s description of

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the carceral system, particularly with reference to Mettray, discipline is

exercised in response to any slight deviance from the norm. “The best way of

avoiding very serious offences is to punish the most minor offences very

severely” (294). The post-modern sense of rule-breaking doesn’t break down

into binary sense of “right” vs. “wrong,” but instead spreads into a continuous

spectrum from perfect compliance to complete deviance with the norms or

laws. When thought of from that perspective, the individual needs to be

punished at every point along the spectrum that is away from “perfect

compliance.” Punishing them significantly before they reach the opposite

extreme ensures that they will never reach that extreme. This spectrum

becomes even more important in David’s case because of his uncontrolled

physical strength. Usually when a child holds tight onto their sibling, though it

may cause slight pressure, it does not suffocate them, but when David holds

onto Martin begging for protection, his grip exceeds typical human strength

and he ends up putting Martin’s life in danger. “Think about this. If he was

created to love, then it’s reasonable to assume he knows how to hate. And if

pushed to those extremes, what is he really capable of?” posits Henry, after

David’s previous hair-cutting incident. Though Henry realizes that David isn’t

bad-intentioned, he sees the violent possibilities inherent in David’s spectrum

of deviance, and wants to prevent him from ever getting to a bad-intentioned

violent state and harming Henry’s family more.

When Henry threatens to send David back to the factory, Monica still

believes in David’s good intentions and wants to save him from destruction.
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She drops him off in the forest, urging him to run far away. Though she

believes this is the best for him, and will save him from himself, she is

effectively causing the original motivations that inspired David’s outbursts to

be destined for amplification. His isolation in the woods is analogous to cell

confinement for the subjects at Mettray; both are separations from the

community that foster a greater desire to return to the community. Foucault

quotes Ducpetiaux as describing the punishment: “ ‘Isolation is the best

means of acting on the moral nature of children; it is there above all that the

voice of religion, even if it has never spoken to their hearts, recovers all its

emotional power” (294). David’s “religion” is his love for his mother, his desire

to be with her. Becoming separated from her just makes David need her more.

Since punishment, in the post-modern sense, is designed to keep its subjects

firmly inside the carceral system, isolation makes sense as a punishment. If

somebody tries to leave the system, they are then isolated from the

communal part of the system, and this leaves them thinking only about how

desperately they want to be back in the system for the duration of the

isolation. As much as Monica wants David to be able to leave the carceral

system, it can never happen. Nobody can ever leave the system; David can

never rid himself of the desire to be in it.

But it’s not all David’s fault that he developed such a fervent desire to

be in the real world. He was made with only the standard mecha desire—to

serve humans. After imprinting, his desire becomes more specific: to serve

Monica, to show Monica that he loved her. The escalation from those duties to
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his desire to be loved by Monica in return, and thus be real to her, and thus

find the Blue Fairy, is a sequence fueled by the community controls. Though

discipline can be considered a control, here discipline and control are

contrastive by the extent to which they reveal their soul-defining abilities.

Both discipline and control mold the soul, but control is subtle about it.

Behavior control is equitable to Foucault’s concept of “training”; the result of

the interactions of subjects with the individuals around them. In an

institutional version of the carceral system, there are specific supervisors with

the responsibility of training. But in a real world model, potentially anyone is a

trainer, because once any individual has been introduced into the system,

they both learn and pass on the training subconsciously to the younger

members. The most influential training that David experienced was learning

that Monica would love him more if he was real, and then that the way to

become real was by finding the Blue Fairy. Martin’s bullies David constantly,

and like most grade-school bullies, leaves a lasting mark on David’s

impressionable soul. He constantly points out how not-real David is, and how

Monica doesn’t love David, and even though he knows Monica would never

have the same unconditional love for David as she does for Martin, he

repeatedly gives him ideas for making Mommy love him, like when he makes

Monica read “Pinocchio” to them, and when he encourages David to clip her

hair. This grade-school taunting strategy works very effectively: inevitably, the

bullied victim will want to be what the bully makes fun of him for not being.

Though Professor Hobby created David’s initial framework, Martin added the
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most to his soul. “Mommy, if… I become a real boy can I come home?” begs

David, in the woods. Here, David’s soul nears its final state; basically, he

wants to be Martin.

After creation, Professor Hobby did continue actively administering one

type of control to David: observation. “Training was accompanied by

permanent observation; a body of knowledge was being constantly built up

from the everyday behavior of the inmates; it was organized as an instrument

of perpetual assessment,” describes Foucault of Mettray (294). As discussed

earlier, observational controls are what allow the system’s “guards” to know

the souls of their subjects, and support the distribution of power relations. The

ones on top that watch the ones below come to know their souls so well that

they are able to control them more (and thus know them more, and the cycle

continues.) David doesn’t realize he has anyone to report to until Hobby

reveals they’d been watching him, and they now understood him. “And that's

what Dr. Know needed to know to get you to come home to us,” explains

Hobby, revealing that they’d been observing David then. By that time, they

knew his soul well enough to know what would bring him to them. David was

the “first of a kind,” as Hobby tells him, and thus the beginning of an entirely

new population of unknown souls. Before they could learn how to control a

community of Davids, they had to observe one and build up their knowledge

base about him until they acquired enough knowledge to predict the soul of

each David. “Do you have any idea what a success story you've become?”

Hobby excitedly tells David, implying that discovering the contents of his soul
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will allow them to release the next generation, confident they’ll behave with

similar motivations. “Provided it is technically supervised, submissive subjects

are produced and a dependable body of knowledge built up about them,”

writes Foucault (295). Now that they are equipped with the knowledge of

David’s soul, they’ll be able to manipulate his copies more easily and further

establish power relations. Though David frequently insisted that he was “one

of a kind,” his encounter with Hobby and the other David mecha forced him to

understand the implications—he was not one of a kind, he was just a subject—

so he quickly ran away to the Blue Fairy to avoid accepting that. The future

generation of David mechas, with more known souls, would probably be made

more submissive in order to maintain better adherence to the system and

more structured power relations.

In the end, the scientists realize what the system has made of David’s

soul—a constant quest for Monica’s love. Though Monica and Henry assumed

that by disciplining David they were teaching him that he couldn’t be and

shouldn’t aspire to be loved, they were actually driving him further into their

world. Each time he was disciplined, seeing himself lose some of Monica’s love

made him want it more and become more fearful of losing it altogether, and

he still believed it’d be possible to keep her love, because he was still a

(mecha) part of their family unit. If he wasn’t, it wouldn’t make sense for them

to punish him, when, as discussed, punishment is used primarily for keeping

subjects within a system—not kicking them out. Combined with Martin’s

behavioral training, David’s soul is doomed to pursue the impossible: find the
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Blue Fairy and become real. Once the idea is implanted in his soul, it is what

drives him for the remainder of his life.

The fact that humans, and mechas like David, will pursue the impossible

probably explains how easily malleable we are. Once a subject is intent on

pursuing an impossible dream, a trainer can direct this passion into any

activity by pretending this activity will bring them closer to their dream, and

the trainer never has to worry they will reach their dream. Just as the Blue

Fairy statue captivated David’s gaze for millennia, the trainer could keep a

subject enslaved to their impossible dream for a lifetime.

Works Cited

Artificial Intelligence: AI. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Haley Joel Osmont,

Frances

O’Connor, and Jake Thomas. 2001. DVD. DreamWorks Home

Entertainment, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan

Sheridan. New York:

Vintage, 1977.