Lastra, Sound Technology ...

[Dave Monroe]

... well, checking in after a few days away again, can't help but notice
references to Vaucanson.  Just reading James Lastra, Sound Technology
and the American Cinema, which touches upon all yr favorite
automata--Vaucanson's Duck, von Kempelen's Chess Player as well as his
speaking machines, Mayer's Euphonia--as well as (esp. relevant, to V.)
fictional counterparts like Villier de L'Isle Adam's Hadaly in L'Eve
Future (the U of Illinois P trans., Tomorrow's Eve, is out of print, but
it's currently available nonetheless as The Future Eve in Zone Books'
The Decadent Reader ... and do note what, er, "V[ee]" is backwards ...
also, "V.," "vee-period," "Five-Spot") and E.A. Poe's "Maelzel's Chess
Player," though he seems to have skipped E.T.A. Hoffmann's Olympia from
"The Sandman" (on which, of course, see S. Freud on "The Uncanny," in
that long line of estrangements from the Russian futurists, Russian
formalists, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, Godard, et al.), not to mention yr
Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, prosthetics,  et
al.  And that's just the first chapter  ... anyway, from James Lastra,
Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,
Modernity (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), on early phonography ...

By preserving the purely contingent, these phonographic systems
effectively reversed the rational hierarchy between the essential and
inessential, between  substance and accident. (46)

In fact, these prosthetic senses soon served as models for the general
attitude of the investigator himself [and I think the gendering here is
appropriate ...].  While devices like the phonautographe, the manometric
flame [cf. the "sensitive flame" at a seance], or any one of Marey's
many graphical inscriptors outdid the human senses in sensitivity and
storage capacity, they also suggested attitudes that could be emulated
by human observers.... without regard to prior notions of intrinsic
importance.... in the sciences such perceptual "passivity," modeled on
the photograpf, emerged in teh nineteenth centuray as the very paradigm
for experimental objectivity.  It even became fairly common to desribe
human perception in mechanical terms, or as aspiring to the unbiased
receptivity of a mechanical instrument.  one typical instance argues
that physicists must overcome the prejudice of the "musical" ear, and
learn to give all aspects of a sound equal prominence or attention.
(47)

[And cf. that trajectory of modernist music noted here, Schoenberg,
Webern, Berg, Cage, Stockhausen, Coleman, even the allegedly
cybernetics-inspried feedback of Pete Townshend, et al. ...]

In the world of scientific experiment, particularly in the study of
movement and vibration, such a reversal was necessary.... This increased
sensitivity responded to the fact that, for physiologists [and note from
whence terms like "sign" and "symptom" came ...], what had previously
seemed "background" phenomena--complexities and oddities of
movement--had suddenly assumed the foreground of their reserches.  In
fact, as Marey repeatedly pointed out, it was precisely our expectations
about what should be in the foreground that blinded us from the
actualities of physiological complexity.  (46-7)

... "passive" mechanical devicers effectively challenged or reversed
established cultural and intellectual norms and hierarchies.  In the
course of this shift, previously "rational" and "objective" categories
like "musical/nonmusical," "meaningful/nonmeaningful" or
"essential/contingent" came to appear simply prejudicial.  In essence,
the very devices that initially had been modeled on human perceptual
faculties had themselves come to embody a nw paradigm of ideal and
decidedly inhuman sensory activity.  ,In contrast to centuries of
thought to the contrary, the new sensory attitude was passionately
devoted to a counter-intellectual, counter-hierarchical sensitivity to
the fugitive, teh ephemeral, "the background." (48)

The strategic "passivity" of inscriptional devices, which refused to
ignore those stimuli that contradicted expected results and which
tirelessly and indiscriminately recorded all contingencies regardless of
whether they corresponded to more general "types," effectively destroyed
the reigning hierarchies of scientific observation, and, even more so,
representation. (48)

... which I think bears not only on those Pynchonian texts and the
reading thereof, but on the readERs thereof, as well, esp. in re: that
"rational," "objective" "category," "meaningful/nonmenaningful."
Critiqued, put into play, required, implicating text, author AND reader,
all at once.  Also reminds me, yeah, that robot vs. human Maria thing in
Metropolis, I've been troubled by that as well, though, yes, good
observation, very infernal scene indeed there, a la that opening to
Gravity's Rainbow, much interested in such instances of "polysemy" or
whatever.  Ditto the Sphere/Monk/Coleman thing, yep, both of 'em, and
then some, perhaps--that ivory/plastic thing is particularly
interesting, ditto "something else"--though I think Hollander is on to
something there, again, my only real disagreements with his researches
have been their tendency to close off other possibilities, but I don't
recall Monk coming up much at all before he pointed the connections
out.  But the great appeal to me of those Pynchonian texts, along with
their extraordinary learnedness, extraordinary humor, is the way they
manage to keep those "several levels" in play.  Which is what happens
with religion, mythology, science and technology therein as well, no?

Further, on automata, and, esp. the gendering thereof, do do DO see the
following:

Frank, Felicia Miller.  The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the
Artificial
    in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1995.

Michelson, Annette.  “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile

    and the Philosophical Toy,” October 29 (Summer 1984): 3-21

Lathers, Marie.  The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'Eve future.
    Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996

Well, have some catching up to do, so ...