Androids in the Enlightenment

[Dave Monroe]

Androids in the Enlightenment
MECHANICS, ARTISANS, AND CULTURES OF THE SELF
ADELHEID VOSKUHL


The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable
mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built
between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other
artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands.
Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing,
or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted
continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the
present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era
during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized.

In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two
such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not
only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic
a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were
expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then
communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl
argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation,
that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the
sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of
anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology.
She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory
production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves
and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo15357383.html
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