Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination by Minsoo Kang (review)

Reviewed by: Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination by Minsoo Kang Alex Wetmore (bio) Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination by Minsoo Kang Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. xii+376pp. US $39.95; £29.95; €36. ISBN 978-0-674-04935-2. This wide-ranging, often engaging account of the automaton’s place in European culture from the classical era to the early twentieth century treats this ancestor of the modern robot primarily as an imaginative construct or “conceptual object” rather than as a technological artifact. [End Page 626] The book’s gaze oscillates between actual automata, such as Jacques Vaucanson’s defecating duck or Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess-playing “Turk,” and representations of humanoid and lifelike machines in literature, art, and philosophy. Minsoo Kang’s history of this intriguing figure has much to recommend it, including an impressive storehouse of facts, myths, anecdotes, and textual references pertaining to automata from diverse fields of inquiry and cultural origins, all of which have been gathered in the service of a clearly presented and generally persuasive narrative of the object’s long evolution. Sublime Dreams alternates not only between considering real and imagined machines, but also between a synchronic and a diachronic approach to its subject matter—between mapping out schematically a theory of the “perennial” fascination with the automaton and considering the figure’s historical transformations. The opening chapter is devoted to the former and engages with an array of thinkers—Freud, Ginzburg, Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Burke, Mary Douglas—in order to argue that the automaton’s perpetual power to both enthrall and disturb stems from its status as “the ultimate categorical anomaly” (36). Like Haraway’s mythical cyborg, the automaton disrupts divisions between living/dead, animate/inanimate, and artificial/natural, but Kang provocatively adds that it also disrupts the divisions between representation and reality since “what normal representative images only threaten to do, namely come alive, the automaton seems to actually realize” (36). This discussion of the evocative capacity of lifelike machines roots itself in aspects of mental perception that the book implies are instinctual and perhaps biologically grounded (29), giving Kang’s theory a transhistorical flavour that I found problematic, despite concerted efforts within the text to address these concerns (see especially 53–54). As the study moves forward, the emphasis shifts from what unifies depictions of the automaton to how these depictions have changed over time. Individual chapters proceed chronologically, discussing classical precursors such as Hero of Alexandria’s designs and Daedalus’s animated statues; medieval and Renaissance texts that surround humanoid machines with a magical, exotic aura; the “golden age of automata” in the Enlightenment; the uncanny dolls and devices of the Romantic period; re-evaluations of machine-human relations after the Industrial Revolution; troublingly sexual, surreal fantasies of technology and power in the early twentieth century; and, finally, cultural representations of revolution, mass destruction, and automatized workers after the First World War. Most significantly, three middle chapters—“The Man-Machine in the World-Machine, 1637–1748,” “From the Man-Machine to the Automaton-Man, 1748–1793” and “The Uncanny Automaton, 1789–1833” —trace an interconnected series of developments around eighteenth-century [End Page 627] Western Europe. In the wake of the scientific revolution, the automaton loses its previous magical aura, but does so only to become “the central emblem of the entire mechanistic worldview that was dominant in the period” (112). This “golden age” witnesses an “automaton craze” (104) set off by Vaucanson’s celebrated creations, and in the same era the figure of the clockwork-driven human becomes a touchstone in philosophical, scientific, medical, and political works that describe “the world, the state, and the body” in mechanistic terms (9). In the late Enlightenment, the popularity of spectacles of automata only expands with new curiosities created by Jaquet-Droz, Kempelen, James Cox, and John Joseph Merlin, but Kang argues that the cultural capital of the figure dips at this time as the hegemonies of rationalism and mechanistic philosophy are challenged by vitalism and the sentimental turn. The automaton begins to take on now-familiar associations with incomplete, flawed, or enslaved subjectivity, with individuals...

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