In so doing, this session will build upon a growing body of scholarship dedicated to unpacking automata as a cultural and historical phenomenon. More particularly, the panel will extend discussions initiated by works such as Bruce Mazlish’s The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (Yale, 1993); Daniel Tiffany’s Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (California, 2000); Minsoo Kang’s Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard, 2011); Kara Reilly’s Automata and Memesis on the Stage of Theatre History ((Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Katherina Boehm’s edited collection Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu’s Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers, 2015).
This growing fund of critical literature speaks to the twenty-first century’s increasing preoccupation with the successors to automata – to our own era’s, at times anxious, obsessions with all things robotics, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence – as well as to the draw of emerging scholarly fields such as new materialism and animal studies. As such, through three papers (each of between fifteen and twenty minutes in duration), this session will produce and promote a plurality of discussions between our past, our present, and our future.
In ‘Automatic Writing’, Thomas Vranken initiates this conversation by exploring the role of automata in what is often taken to be the most uniquely human of fields, artistic production. Indeed, Vranken enriches contemporary discussions around the growing number of literature-writing, music-making, picture-creating ‘bots’, and their implications for our understanding of post-human creativity, by highlighting the ways in which these discussions themselves enjoy a much longer history than is typically acknowledged. From Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s 1770 invention ‘The Writer’ – a mechanical three-year-old boy capable of carefully transcribing playfully-existential questions such as ‘Je ne pense pas … ne serais-je donc point?’ (‘I do not think … do I therefore not exist?’) – to Henri Maillardet’s ‘Draughtsman-Writer’ of 1805, a number of humanoid art-making machines toured Britain and the Continent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, drawing sketches, writing poems, and more generally sparking debate about the meaning of creativity and these machines’ ontological status. Drawing on these debates – as well as on pieces of fiction (such as Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’ and the suffragist Clementina Black’s ‘The Troubles of an Automaton’) featuring automated artists, produced by humans in the decades that followed – Vranken argues that conceptions of creativity have been informed by technology and its creative potential for longer than we might like to think.
In ‘Animal, Human, Machine’, Fiona Coll further complicates traditional understandings of the human-automaton relationship by focusing on nineteenth-century responses to the automaton as scientific object. As a rhetorical launching pad, she begins with the debate which followed Thomas Huxley’s infamous 1874 lecture ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata’. Much of today’s understanding of Huxley’s lecture and the complex cultural history for which it serves as index takes the automaton as a mediating figure in a human-machine binary. Coll complicates this binary by demonstrating how – in a post-Darwinian paradigm – the work of the automaton can be more comprehensively understood as a triangulation of relationships between the human, the machine, and the animal. Through an examination of automaton references in fictional and nonfictional nineteenth-century writing, Coll argues that being human for the Victorians also involved being animal and being machine in a way that at times prefigures the twentieth- and twenty-first-century’s numerous visions of humanity’s supposedly post-human cyborgian future.
Finally, in ‘Debunking the Uncanny Valley’, Minsoo Kang brings the session to a close by broadening out the focus to examine larger questions relating to neurology and affect theory. In the last fifteen years, an ever greater number of academic fields, from robotics, to art criticism, to literary and theatre studies, have shown themselves receptive to the ideas of the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. First articulated in 1970, in an essay translated into English thirty-five years later, Mori’s increasingly-canonical theory of the ‘uncanny valley’ posits that, while we might respond to humanoid machines with growing levels of emotional sympathy as those machines come to resemble us more and more closely, at a certain point our levels of sympathy plunge rapidly. Deploying a series of recent neurological and psychological studies, as well as a longue-durée understanding of robots and their cultural history, Kang re-evaluates Mori’s ideas, offering critique where those ideas prove problematic and suggesting more fruitful ways in which to explore emotional reactions to automata.
Collectively, then, the panel promises to explore human responses to humanoid automata from a range of temporal and disciplinary perspectives, literary, scientific, cultural, and affective, in order to provoke a wide-ranging discussion about what it means to be human in an increasingly material world.