I've been engaging with the idea of empiricism a lot recently. It seems like everywhere I look, I see systems that propose to work like machines, like clockwork, like mechanisms for the delivery of understanding. It's a guiding principle of how we think about study, of course, and also for how we tend to think about social institutions, at least these days: can it deliver measurable results? In what way are individuals' efforts like data points or like individual gears? How can we map it, write it out equation-style?
And then, of course, there are the predominant theories of personality and thought: people's minds and bodies are like computers, like information systems. Data goes in, and people come out. There is, by and large, nothing new in this thought: that is, perhaps the most fundamental metaphor of our current age is "people are like machines."
And yet, the metaphor of person-as-machine is a metaphor I return to again and again with a certain amount of confusion or dischord. And, after reading a couple of articles in the (totally great) most recent issue of the New Yorker on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which is, by the way, stunningly beautiful) and the Antikythera Mechanism I've suddenly realized something. It turns out that a lot of my literary work (my dissertation, first book, second book, whatever it is) could be seen as an attempt to chart the history (and thus the use) of this metaphor, at least from the early modern period on.
That's not how I usually put it, when I describe what I like to talk about. I normally say that I like to talk about life in things that are dead (or imaginatively dead): idols, books, corpses. I talk about the need to perceive these things -- that n logical terms cannot move or act -- as living, acting things. (Although the "life" of a book is a different sort of life than any logically living being has.)
I like to talk about the potential for plays to excite, and the fear of that potential; about the belief that pictures can work miracles and the need for new systems of bureaucracy to undermine that belief; about the fear the bureaucracies are themselves gigantic, carnivorous animals with a life that no individual can control; about the way that economies and societies themselves get figured as animals – or as human beings.
But all that, in many ways, gets right back to the idea of people as machines. What it all addresses, on some level, is that old, old, fascination and problem of the automaton.
The Antikythera article mentions the Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria, who is supposed to have made fantastically complex automata out of brass and powered by steam. Galatea is another type of automaton, animated by mysterious natural forces (is it lust? Is it godly freakishness? Is it some sort of magnetism inhering in genius?). Renaissance plays became, towards the seventeenth century, increasingly fascinated with devices – either mechanisms in the public theaters for elaborate staging tricks like flying chariots or carnivorous thrones or the even more elaborate state properties and sets of the court masques. Automata themselves became a feature of eighteenth and nineteenth century entertainments – and, as such, form part of the ground for Freud's theories of the uncanny. With the growth of increasingly self-operated factories and machines, we see fiction about robots, then androids, then collective networked intelligences.
All of it is new, focused on the newness (the metaphor of the machine is in some sense about newness, or about rebirth) and yet none of it is new. It all asks the same question, over and over again, the question inherent in Genesis 1.2 -- "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" – and 1.27 ("So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." What does it mean to be nothing and yet something? What does it mean to be in the image of -- but not the same as -- God? To put it less religiously, the fundamental question is: what makes us...well...us?
And that is a question that we have over and over again addressed through the linkage of man and machine -- the living assemblage of parts and the assemblage of parts that (seems to) live. In some sense, this is the underlying metaphor of much of current literary studies as well: one of the metaphors that governs cultural studies is the metaphor of "articulation." The word implies both the putting of thoughts into speech and the way parts of a machine or a joint are articulated, linked together. One of the projects of cultural studies is simply to link, and to figure out what workings happen by way of that linkage. (The presumption is that the linkage is already there, culturally, since everything is already linked by being part of culture.) Even traditional literary studies to some extent pursues the metaphor – it assumes, for instance, that elements of form operate like machines to create meaning, or that particular texts work, like gears, with social movements or other texts or their authors' biographies.
It all reminds me of when I first fell in love with Commander Data from Star Trek. People who do readings of Data tend to like to posit him as a figure for emotionless, alienated young men. Like Data, the theory goes, socially hopeless pubescent nerdboys are not like normal human beings. They think only in numbers and in science, so they like an android character who does the same thing.
This explanation always struck me – a thoroughgoing lover of Commander Data who is anything but number-prone – as ridiculous. The tremendous thing about Data as a character is that he is anything but a collection of data. The constant, underlying irony of his emotionlessness is that he in fact understand and takes in human experience in a much more primary, more experiential, and more heart-felt way than any of the non-android characters. Star Trek is and has always been about technology made human, rather than the other way around. The point of Data is that he shows you that even if people are machines, that just means machines are like people – that machine-understanding is another, maybe even deeper, way of feeling. I loved Data precisely because he failed to be a perfect machine.
And in the end, that's I think why I go in the direction I do with my projects – because the most interesting thing about the metaphor of people-as-machines is that it consistently fails. It doesn't matter whether it logically fails. Logic doesn’t need metaphors. It fails emotionally, or it fails emotion. Whether we "are" machines or not, we do not feel like machines, and we do not even feel about machines as if they were machines. And that, to me, is wonderful.
And then, of course, there are the predominant theories of personality and thought: people's minds and bodies are like computers, like information systems. Data goes in, and people come out. There is, by and large, nothing new in this thought: that is, perhaps the most fundamental metaphor of our current age is "people are like machines."
And yet, the metaphor of person-as-machine is a metaphor I return to again and again with a certain amount of confusion or dischord. And, after reading a couple of articles in the (totally great) most recent issue of the New Yorker on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which is, by the way, stunningly beautiful) and the Antikythera Mechanism I've suddenly realized something. It turns out that a lot of my literary work (my dissertation, first book, second book, whatever it is) could be seen as an attempt to chart the history (and thus the use) of this metaphor, at least from the early modern period on.
That's not how I usually put it, when I describe what I like to talk about. I normally say that I like to talk about life in things that are dead (or imaginatively dead): idols, books, corpses. I talk about the need to perceive these things -- that n logical terms cannot move or act -- as living, acting things. (Although the "life" of a book is a different sort of life than any logically living being has.)
I like to talk about the potential for plays to excite, and the fear of that potential; about the belief that pictures can work miracles and the need for new systems of bureaucracy to undermine that belief; about the fear the bureaucracies are themselves gigantic, carnivorous animals with a life that no individual can control; about the way that economies and societies themselves get figured as animals – or as human beings.
But all that, in many ways, gets right back to the idea of people as machines. What it all addresses, on some level, is that old, old, fascination and problem of the automaton.
The Antikythera article mentions the Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria, who is supposed to have made fantastically complex automata out of brass and powered by steam. Galatea is another type of automaton, animated by mysterious natural forces (is it lust? Is it godly freakishness? Is it some sort of magnetism inhering in genius?). Renaissance plays became, towards the seventeenth century, increasingly fascinated with devices – either mechanisms in the public theaters for elaborate staging tricks like flying chariots or carnivorous thrones or the even more elaborate state properties and sets of the court masques. Automata themselves became a feature of eighteenth and nineteenth century entertainments – and, as such, form part of the ground for Freud's theories of the uncanny. With the growth of increasingly self-operated factories and machines, we see fiction about robots, then androids, then collective networked intelligences.
All of it is new, focused on the newness (the metaphor of the machine is in some sense about newness, or about rebirth) and yet none of it is new. It all asks the same question, over and over again, the question inherent in Genesis 1.2 -- "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" – and 1.27 ("So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." What does it mean to be nothing and yet something? What does it mean to be in the image of -- but not the same as -- God? To put it less religiously, the fundamental question is: what makes us...well...us?
And that is a question that we have over and over again addressed through the linkage of man and machine -- the living assemblage of parts and the assemblage of parts that (seems to) live. In some sense, this is the underlying metaphor of much of current literary studies as well: one of the metaphors that governs cultural studies is the metaphor of "articulation." The word implies both the putting of thoughts into speech and the way parts of a machine or a joint are articulated, linked together. One of the projects of cultural studies is simply to link, and to figure out what workings happen by way of that linkage. (The presumption is that the linkage is already there, culturally, since everything is already linked by being part of culture.) Even traditional literary studies to some extent pursues the metaphor – it assumes, for instance, that elements of form operate like machines to create meaning, or that particular texts work, like gears, with social movements or other texts or their authors' biographies.
It all reminds me of when I first fell in love with Commander Data from Star Trek. People who do readings of Data tend to like to posit him as a figure for emotionless, alienated young men. Like Data, the theory goes, socially hopeless pubescent nerdboys are not like normal human beings. They think only in numbers and in science, so they like an android character who does the same thing.
This explanation always struck me – a thoroughgoing lover of Commander Data who is anything but number-prone – as ridiculous. The tremendous thing about Data as a character is that he is anything but a collection of data. The constant, underlying irony of his emotionlessness is that he in fact understand and takes in human experience in a much more primary, more experiential, and more heart-felt way than any of the non-android characters. Star Trek is and has always been about technology made human, rather than the other way around. The point of Data is that he shows you that even if people are machines, that just means machines are like people – that machine-understanding is another, maybe even deeper, way of feeling. I loved Data precisely because he failed to be a perfect machine.
And in the end, that's I think why I go in the direction I do with my projects – because the most interesting thing about the metaphor of people-as-machines is that it consistently fails. It doesn't matter whether it logically fails. Logic doesn’t need metaphors. It fails emotionally, or it fails emotion. Whether we "are" machines or not, we do not feel like machines, and we do not even feel about machines as if they were machines. And that, to me, is wonderful.
Labels: idolatry, nerd power, representation, spirit of the age, theatre
Empiricism, robots, and Star Trek -- Ginny, you are one of my favorite people!
Oh, you're so right. A cog-and-wheel universe is very tempting, but very incomplete! You feel that emotionally -- so do I -- but even on my side of campus it fails when rigorously applied to ANYTHING. Since the mid-19th century there have been growing rust marks on the Newtonian/Ptolemean view of a clockwork universe: entropy, uncertainty, chaos, information theory. People keep trying to patch up the rusty bits with hidden variables and God particles, but they always fail.
Cool example: the 3-body problem. Given three bodies under the influence of each other's gravitation only, try to solve their orbits using Newtonian (i.e. simple) theory. It cannot be done. Three objects, each of which we understand, under the influence of a force which we understand. But we can't solve it. We can get close, but not exactly there. I think it's conceptually related to the links you mention -- the way you understand the bits and parts and ideas that should connect them, but there's often something intangible, or at least fascinating and totally complex, that comes from the combination.
If you ever write a history of automata in literature, I will eat it up!!!
Hi Ginny,
I linked to your blog through Jessica Smith's... Wow, you're an entertaining writer. I am still finishing my final paper (oops) so won't make this lengthy... but there is an article you *must* read on the subject of automata and the (re) animation of lifeless things. It's a musicology article centered on two of Ravel's works, but the article would be accessible to you whether you know Ravel's works in question (though I highly recommend you check them out.) The author is Carolyn Abbate, and it's the last chapter in her book _In Search of Opera_, called "Outside the Tomb." A few years ago, a precursor article appeared called "Outside Ravel's Tomb," that you could get off JSTOR. Journal of the American Musicological Society > Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 465-530
If you read it let me know what you think. I'm interested in Ravel and just wrote a paper that dealt with some of these issues, but in conjunction with R's interest in childhood/"the childlike."