MDDM23: A Digetsionary Process

[monroe at mpm.edu]

"'The man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be remember'd only for having
trespassed so ingeniously outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided
his Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result could not be
distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechanickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it matter,' Mr. Whitpot,
having remov'd his wig, is irritably kneading it like a samll Loaf, '--who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste, however compulsively
accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

>From Jessica Riskin, "The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of
Artificial Life," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 2003): 599-633
...

   "An eighteenth-century mechanical duck that swallowed corn and grain and,
after a pregnant pause, relieved itself of an authentic-looking burden was
the improbable forebear of modern technologies designed to simulate animal
and intelligent processes.  Quaint as the Duck now seems, we remain in an
age that it inaugurated; its mixed carrer set in motion a dynamic that has
characterized the subsequent history of artificial life." (p. 599)

"... the design of automata became increasingly a matter, not just of
representation, but of simulation.
   "This new, simulative impulse embraced, not only the mechanisms
underlying living processes, but also the matter of life, its material
aspect....  By imitating the stuff of life, automaton makers were once again
aiming, not merely for verisimiltude, but for simulation: they hoped to make
the parts of their machines work as much as possible like the parts of
living things and thereby to test the limits of resemblance between
synthetic and natural life.  Eighteenth-century mechanicians also produced
devices that emitted various lifelike substances; not only did their
machines bleed and dficate, but, as we will see, they also breathed.
   "Vaucanson's Duck marked the turning point in these developments ....  It
produced the most organic of matters ...." (pp. 605-6)

   "Most impressively, the Duck ate bits of corn and grain and, after a
moment, excreted them in altered form ...  Vaucanson said these processes
were 'copied from Nature,' the food digested 'as in real Animals [...].  But
this,' he added, 'I shall ... shew ... [on] another Occasion' ....
Unfortunately his postponement of further explanations to 'another occasion'
aroused suspicions ....  the grain input and excrement output were entirely
unrelated ... the tail end of the Duck [was] loaded before each act with
fake excrement.  The Duck that pioneered physiological simulation was, at
its core, fraudulent." (pp. 608-9)

   "Historians writing on Vaucanson's and other eighteenth-century automata
have generally taken them as straightforward renditions of life in
machinery, and recent writers have continued to read the automata as
emblematic of an unbridled devotion to mechanism.  For example, Gaby Wood
....  It seems to me, on the contrary, that the automata expressed, not
mechanist conviction, but the tug-of-war between such conviction and its
antithesis.  By building a machine that played the flute and another that
shat, and placing them alongside each other, Vaucanson, rather than
demonstrating the equivalence of art and shit as the products of mechanical
processes, was testing the capacity of each, the artistic and the organic
product, to distinguish the creatues that produced them from machines.  In
other words, I find the most striking feature of Vaucanson's automata to
have been their simultaneous enactment of both the sameness and the
incomparability of life and machinery.
   "Vaucanson developed his experimental approach to designing automata,
neither in a context in which mechanist theories of bodily processes were
dominant, as in mid- to late seventeenth-century physiology, nor in one in
which such theories were largely discredited, as in early ninetheent-century
biology, but, instead, during an intervening moemnt of profound uncertainty
about the validity of philosophical mechanism.  This uncertainty accompanied
the rising materialism of eighteenth-century natural philosophy.  Even as
their insistence of the primacy of matter seemed to prepare the ground for
mecahnist explanations of nature, leading Enlightenment materilaists such as
Diedrot and Georges Buffon nonetheless disparaged such explanations,
invoking vital tendencies and properties of matter that, they argued, defied
mechnaist reduction....  Neither mechanist nor antimechanist conviction,
then, but rather a deep-seated ambivalence about mechanism and mechanist
explanation provided the context for the emergence of artificial life.  The
defecating Duck and its companions commanded such attention, at such a
moment, because they dramatized two contradictory claims at once: that
living creatures were essentially machines and that living creatures were
the antithesis of machines,  Its matseful incoherence allowed the Duck to
instigate a discussion that is continuing nearly three centuries later.
   "A simultaneous belief in both propositions--that animal life is
essentially mechanistic and that the essence of animal life is irrducible to
mechanism--has, from teh Duck's performances to this day, driven attempts to
understand life by reproduicing it in machinery....  Its contradictory
convictions derive from a combination that emerged in the early eighteenth
century and remains with us: first, a widely held materialist theory of
animal life and, second, the inability of this tehory to explain the core
phenomenon of animal life, consciousness.  Insofar as this combination
persists, and despite the technological transformations of the last two and
a half centuries, we live in the age of Vaucanson." (pp. 610-12)

"The contracdictory convictions--that one could understand life and
intelligence by reproducing them, on the one hand, and that life and
intelligence were defined precisely by the impossibility of reproducing
them, on the other--went into operation in the early part of the eighteenth
century....  The result was a continual redrawing of the boundary between
human and machine and redefinition of the essence of life and intelligence.
Insofar as we are still, in discussions of modern technologies from robotics
to cloning, redrawing the same boundary and reevaluating its implications
for the mature of life, work, and thought, we are continuing a project whose
rudiments were established two and a half centuries ago by the defecating
Duck that didn't." (p. 633)

http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n4.riskin.htm

Recalling, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&message=65200

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&message=65201

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&message=65295

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&message=65454

As well as ...

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to wtach out for will come
- you heard it here first - when the curves of research and devlopment in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge.
Oboy."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html