Tiffany, "The Natural Philosophy of Toys"

[Dave Monroe]

... yet more from Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric 
(Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), this time, Chapter 2, "The Natural 
Philosophy of Toys," pp. 34-62:

The automata in [E.T.A.] Hoffmann's stories are associated either with music 
or divination, qualities that recall the most ancient, and the most 
persistent, applications and mythical themes associated with mechanized 
figures.  The first comples, self-activating machines in antiquity were not 
tools but toys, and, more precisely, singing birds and other parerga 
(ornamental devices), including moving or talking statues employed at the 
sites of oracles.  Indeed, the mechanical singing bird has remained a 
popular and enduring motif.  In these correspondences bewteen song, 
divination, and the mechanized toy, we can discern the basic features of the 
automaton as a mythical figure .... (37)

With no constant means of indicating time to an observer, the ancient 
water-clock does not so much tell time as possess it, or embody it in its 
mechanical "movement" and technical configurtion.  Thus, the first clock, 
like the echnical singing birds and parerga built in conjunction with it, is 
essentilly a simulacrum of nature--thigh perhaps even more abstract in its 
topographical features than the mechanized puppet or bird. (42)

... the essential fascination must lie with the mechanism itself: absent the 
"signals" of the automaton, one simply observes the clockwork, wondering at 
its abstract yet material possesion of time.  (42)

The ambuguity of the parergon in these devices makes it impossible to 
isolate the mechanical singing bird or the puppet from the idea of a 
mathematical picture or a topographical "mapping" of time and nature.   
Further, insofar as the automaton is a kind of picture, it is a picture that 
is also a timepiece.  The relation of the automaton to time, which derives 
from its identity as a clock without hands or face, pertains not only to the 
incorporation of time, and to an image of the body in time, but also to 
implacable laws that exceed the body's mortal span. (42)

The key to the correlation between materialism and the automaton lies in the 
fact that ancient clocks, mechanical singing birds, and other automata were 
all regarded, as the titles of Philo's and Hero's treatises indicate, as 
pneumatica--instances of pneumatic technology.  Pneumatics is the branch of 
physics that deals with the mechanical prperties of air and other elastic 
fluids or gases (such as water).  (43)

... pneuma = spirit = air = wind?  And, again, for such a "mathematical 
picture or topographical 'mapping' of time and nature," see 
http://members.nbci.com/Surendranath/Shm/Shm01.html.

Somewhere in here Tiffany mentions that Rabelais seems to introduce the term 
"automation" to the French language in Gargantua and Pantagruel, but I can't 
find it ...
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