Motor Eyes.

[John Bailey]

>
>One may not rule out that the use of the Cartesian metaphor of man being a 
>clock was
>quite useful at the time (17th century).  A man stated bluntly for the 
>first time
>since centuries not that man was a clock but rather that man could think 
>and act
>independently, just as a clock was ticking (for some time and) without 
>human help.
>As every metaphore it was far from perfect.
>
>The silly metaphores used today when man is being compared to a  machine, a 
>computer
>and the like have a thing in common: they reduce one man to one thing and 
>then they
>draw conclusions about all men, about mankind.  They implicitly leave out 
>all
>interactions between people.  The syllogism does not work -it even is not a
>syllogism.
>
>Back from Trafalmadore,
>Michel.
>


And, not surprisingly, it was shortly thereafter that "The Golden Age of 
Automata" came into being, in France and thereabouts.

We can also level a quivering finger at Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who, 
following Descartes, tried to expand the Metaphor of Man the Machine in his 
saggy-bottomed tract of the same title, though I prefer to translate it as 
"Machine Man!" (exclamation mark added), which difuses some of the heavy 
handed seriousness of its polemic...He later wrote a companion piece, Man 
the Plant, not a guidebook to nuclear power management, but a diatribe on 
"our" place as vegetable matter.

La Mettrie's work was very popular, and is still reprinted today. It's also 
a prime example of the way new vogues in technology (ie. automata) bleed 
into far more important issues, such as the very way we conceive of our 
subjectivity. When we get to SHOCK and SHROUD, we will be duly informed of 
one of the more insidious ways this very process has occurred: in the 18th 
Century, man conceived of himself as a clockwork machine...later, as new 
"discoveries" asserted themselves, we became bundles of heat, conduits of 
energy, what next? Look around, folks. Since V. was published, we've been 
meat computers, quantum flesh mutations, what've you got?

Technology and spirituality are not two important themes in Pynchon, they're 
one.

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