The Classical Age of Automata

[Dave Monroe]

>From Jean-Claude Beaune, "The Classical Age of
Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth
to the Nineteenth Century," Fragments for a History of
the Human Body: Vol. 1, ed. Michel Feher et al.
(trans. Ian Patterson, New York: Zone, 1989), pp.
431-80 ...

"An automaton is a machine that contains its own
principle of motion.  This Cartesian definition was
advanced by Rabelais when, in Gargantua (1.24), he
introduced the word 'automate' into the French
language: 'and contrived a thousand little automatory
engines, that is to say, moving of themselves.'" (p.
431)

"The Mechanical Myth.... automata tend to be regarded
as timeless.  Ever since man has been capable of
creating artifacts (which, in a sense, is the point at
which he becomes fully human), he  has dreamt of
'autonomous' machines that could either imitate his
own actions ... or cold reproduce the course of teh
world as they function.  Before it became a
high-performance machine, teh automaton was primarily
a techno-mythological idea, or, more precisely, the
mythic distillation of technical processes and
machines and, by extension, of tools or instruments. 
But this is still basically the same idea .... 
Finally, bringing the classification full circle, the
living machine meets its mirror image, live matter
...." (p. 433-4)

"The Classic Automaton.  If we turn to the 'classic
automaton,' as it existed between the Renaissance and
the latter part of the nineteenth century--when the
industrial norm really established its hold over
people--we find something apparently quite unassuming.
 Nonetheless, this automaton not only retains within
it the myths of origin, which it preserves as a latent
life, but it also clearly anticipates the utopias of
the future.  There are several general characteristics
we can apply to this group.
   "First, this automaton is a mechanistic being, and
in this connection the Cartesian definition takes on
its fullest sense: it acts by figure and motion, it is
motion itself, the prime problem of physics,
concentrated into exemplary machines....  Its
mechanical skeleton is a living 'encyclopedia' of the
different mechanical pieces and of the machine parts
available at the time.
   "Second, the automaton is basically a mechanical
individual.  It is often possible to discern some
temptation towards group activity, of course, but not
yet to such an extent as to affect its insularity.  
Th combinations of instruments it presents are still
visible, and its 'chracter' still has an identity of
it own.  Moreover, this mechanical or technological
individuality realtes to the broder concept of the
individual as it develops in philosophy from the
Cartesian cogito to the 'responsible man' of the
Enlightenment.
   "Third, the automaton has cloe links with living
creatures in all its different manifestations, but
especially in realtion to the medicine and physiology
of the period.  It dissects the living and imitates
them ufficienty well to generate a gartifying illusion
about its own ature; it proposes experimental
protocols that link up with theold topics ofthe body,
animals and man (compare La Mettrie) as machines.  It
crops up wherever the awareness of man's physical
functions becomes a pretext for investigating them and
providing surgical prostheses ....
   "Fourth, as well as being a scientific individual,
the automaton is also an aesthetic or more precisley,
a ludic object.  It simultaneously demonstrates and
conceals the cunning artifice that makes it the
supreme toy, and it also shares in the mathematical
formalization of play.  When dissection is complete,
outward appearance reigns supreme and the automaton
can make play of the ambiguities of the inside and
outside of the body....  Whether as entertainment for
the graet or as an illusion for the masses, it plays
at denying its own trickery for the pleasure and pride
of the spectators.  As they watch, they amire
themselves for being 'philosophical' enough to suspend
willingly their disbelief in what they know is the
object's real nature; yet they also pretend to forget
this suspension in order to share the great mysteries
of teh world with it.  There are some sumptuous
pretexts for artifice, especially in the eighteenth
century.
   "Finally, at this period in history, as the world
is somehwere being mapped and catalogued, the
automaton represents a kind of primal mythology ....  
The automaton achieves this through a grasp of time in
which tehre is still some memory of the great era of
monumental timepieces and Jacks of the clock.  The
automaton, as clock of the universe, is no longer
happy making symbolic figures appear and strike the
hour; rather, it keeps as its own mysterious secret
the rudiments of a history of man and nature which
emerges in the shadow of the science of space.  The
question of primum mobile persists in the problem of
the origin and medium of forces....  This relationship
between the automaton and time is probably the ost
important part of its originality; it is what
separates teh automaton from teh machinethat it, in
fact is, though it can never fully accept it." (pp.
435-7)

   "Sharing in the trickery of the automaton i merely
another way to define ourselves as human, that is, as
both being and nothingness, presence and absence: the
automaton is, in a way, our mirror ... or our evil
eye." (p. 437; ellipses in text)

"Automatic Impressions" (pp. 437-65), e.g. ...

"The cock from the astronomical clock in Strasbourg"
(p. 439)

Descartes's Treatise of Man (pp. 444-5)

http://lrc.csun.edu/~battias/454/descartes/main.html

Diderot and D'Alembert, Encyclopedie (pp. 450-3)

Vaucanson's Duck (p. 456)

"Vaucanson: Engineer of Genius" (p. 457)

"Weaving and the Beginnings of Industrial Automatism"
(pp. 462-3)

P. Navile, Vers l'automatisme social? (pp. 466-7)

Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Les rouages de
l'automate, preface to Prasteau, Les automates (pp.
474-5)

"The Automaton and Death.  Th automaton is both
individual and totality, the extreme of artifice and
an image of recreated, revitalized nature.  During the
period we have been examining it is the most singular
and yet the most univrsal of beings.  That is, it has
a quality which embodies its power of mythical
suggstiveness as much as its inexorable utopias: a
quality of maintining a special relationship with
death--which is itself the most singular and
contingent moment of our lives, yet also the most
universal, the one know we cannot escape.... 
Universal and unique like death, both the oneand the
other: in tis ambuiguous finality lies the form of teh
automaton's own paradox, an the key to the general
paradox of technology." (p. 479)

"The Death Drive.  The Renaissance Engineer ... is the
firt who can properly be said to have conceived and
constructed automata worthy of the name.  Buitthat
complex and multifaceted indiviual ... wa first and
foremost a man of war.  The machines he prepared for
his prince were machines of killing; mobility, speed
and camouflage belong with the arts of war that lie
concentrated within the sequence of automata ....  It
is rather as the nineteenth century draws to acloe
that repetition finds a medical representation in the
world of Charcot, Regis and Dubourdieu which is
comparable to Zola's night: the vagabond is defined as
an 'ambulant automaton,' social rejects, prostitutes
and celibates as 'degenrate dromomaniacs.'  Freud, who
for a time was a pupil of Charcot, never forgot these
shadowy figures.  Although his whole conception of the
unconscious was an attempt to replace these walking
corpses with a symbolic force, they return with the
'death drive,' that ambiguous but disturbing diagnosis
of our culture." (p. 479)

"The Theater of Shadows.  The moving figures were, of
course, created as part of positive experiments: th
human body, opened by Vesalius, finds a model in
Cartesian mechanism and its extensions which medicine
uses, sometimes to its advantage.  When we come to
Boerhaave, Borellia nd particularly La Mattrie, the
automaton rediscovers man and nature and slips between
the two concepts as a reciprocal approach.  Vaucanson
creates a flute-player, a Provencal pipe-player an teh
duck, which earn him plentiful applause; the digetsive
mechanism in partiualr is copied schematically but
efectively.  And he doesn't stop tehre, but sets up
factories to anticipate the industrial automatism to
come, the first real application of which will be to
textile manufacture.  In this rich, transitional
period death and life are intertwined, as in tragedy:
but Sophocles and Shakespeare are no longer pulling
the strings, which have been taken over by
engineer-inventors, scientists and automaticians .... 
The gullotine awaits its hour, as do massacres on a
new and different scale.  Today, man is seeking ...
toteam up with a machine that, as de Sade shows, may
embody more than a whiff of death.  Yet people
stilltake time out to dream of possessing perpetual
motion, or of man flying, in Da Vinci's sense.  Shadow
and light.  Automatism, in all its varied modes, is a
demonstration that death is only the other side of
life."

Cf. ...

"Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is
transformation....  And everything science has taught
me--and continues to teach me--strengthens my belief
in the continuity of our spiritual existence after
death."

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/von-braun.html

Anyway, pardon my einscription of Beaune's sexist
language and/or Patterson's sexist translation ("man,"
"men," "his") ...


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