For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, ‘of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods’; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” (Aristotle, Politics, Book 1).
Seeing the Museum of automata & magic in Marrais in 2018 after the big exhibition on Lissitzky in Pompidou gave me a very different perspective on modernist machines, such as the Lenin podium or Lissitzky’s robots. The various attempts to capture the mechanical and futurist promises of the early 20th century world with its automation and social utopias suddenly looked like posh versions of these wondrous contraptions in the business circus. I found the unexpected origins of Modernism and our technological civilization in the circuses and faires with these techno-vulgar amusements for the masses. They looked like the return of the wondrous, paradoxical, monstrous and often transgressive objects from the Middle Age cabinets of curiosities close to Cornelis Drebbel 17th century living instruments. For Drebbel they were never promises of the industrial revolution or some new Atlantis, but philosophical models of how the universe is “alive”, transforming and metabolizing different forces that the skillful artisan can then use in his magic.
The Museum of automata & magic in Marrais shows the history of the robots as such attempts to simulate metabolism rather than cognition, a pure artisanship of “make belief” and magic tricks with prototypes that blur the difference between reality and wildest dreams and nightmares. Instead of insisting on how the frog’s eye constitutes what it sees and other cybernetic obsessions with control, they show a parallel history that is about the defecating Vacaunson’s duck and other processes in nature as a perpetual carnival and circus full of transgressions and paradox.
From Diderot, La Mettrie and Baron D’Holbach man-machine concepts to Friz Kahn’s marvelous illustrations of humans as industrial machines, we see the same grotesque metabolism of the universe confronting our fragile sense of importance. The automata are neither slaves nor masters, but Mad Hatters and March Hares in some strange ongoing party triggering all kinds of uncanny connections with the indifferent universe. They perform the metabolism and different processes that make the universe alive. Automata are probes into the different definitions of being alive, toying with the difference of being and process, purpose and indifference. The discussion on one of the early uses of “automaton” in Aristotle should be the starting point of any reflection of automation, robots and technology in society. Aristotle uses the word automaton to criticize the Atomist concept of chance as that which resists the final causes and Telos (meaning purpose – what it was designed to be). In this sense, Aristotle’s automaton or chance are also the first definition of “hacking”. It is the freedom to repurpose or not case about the final causes and reason for something to exist. Automata teach us to enjoy the chance as contingency and spontaneity, similar to the one that Aristotle criticizes in the case of atomism: “the cosmos of the atomists is the result of spontaneity in that it serves ends for which it was not designed”. To server ends for which something was not designed is a nice definition of hacking, leisurely and hedonistic making that these early automata show. The problem with such chance driven design of automata in an indifferent universe is that they question our meaning and purpose in the universe. They become symptoms of our humanity that is reaching the end of history.
In his lectures on Hegel published in 1959, Alexandre Kojève, French philosopher and one of the architects of the EU, a nephew of Wassily Kandinsky, and Russian spy, describes modern humans as “healthy” automata. Without historical battles to fight, humans become metabolic machines and something akin to playful animals, producing sounds that Kojève describes as the “language of bees” In a letter to a friend, the conservative philosopher Strauss. Kojève writes that being “no longer human” means becoming either a beast or, better, an automaton, or god:
In the final state there naturally are no more ‘human beings’ in our sense of an historical human being. The ‘healthy’ automata are ‘satisfied’ […], and the ‘sick’ ones get locked up. As for those who are not satisfied with their ‘purposeless’ activity […] they are the philosophers (who can attain wisdom if they ‘contemplate’ enough). By doing so they become ‘gods.’ [The philosopher] becomes an administrator, a cog in the ‘machine’ fashioned by automata for automata.”