Peak Prostheticity: Westworld’s Player Piano and Imperialist Organologies

From the opening credits the piano player is a prominent recurring character in Westworld. To the extent that it is at home in the American Old West saloon setting, it threatens to become as invisible and inaudible as the furniture in this fantasy world. It simultaneously functions as a key to understanding—and supreme exemplar of—the posthuman technological forms of life whose very existence precipitate the ethico-political dilemmas driving the series. The appearances of the player piano call for a reconfiguration of the field of organology, which has typically been concerned with musical instruments played by human bodies. Taking my cue from Peter Szendy’s Phantom Limbs, I invert this to ask how, through the interaction of performance, music itself makes organs and bodies, even producing a proliferation of phantom organs undercutting any clear distinction between human and nonhuman. I track the appearances of the piano player and of piano playing across the series, on and off screen, and offer analyses of critical scenes that rewrite organology by focusing on the instrument’s capacity to fashion fingers, bodies, memories, and entire worlds. Westworld’s sonorous rescripting of organology moreover transforms the very medium of television, illuminating how peak TV fabricates new kinds of listening ears.