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Media Archaeology, Cultures of Automata, and Mechanized Cognition

My research overall investigates cultures of automata that surround the idea of mechanized cognition. Specifically, I focus on how Orientalist simulations of the machinic subject in Western techno-cultures mediated anxieties about early experimentations with intelligent machines.

By tracing examples ranging from pre-modern humanoid automata to contemporary socio-technical systems, my approach unites theory and methods from a) Media Studies, focusing on the archaeology of technical media and de- colonial critique, b) Cognitive Studies, concentrating on cultural techniques of cognitive labor, and c) Science and Technology Studies, exploring the interface between subjectivity and socio-technical systems. I primarily use media archaeology as a method to investigate the contact point between the cultural and the technical. In my exploration of contexts of automation as cultural historical themes, I integrate de-colonial critique as a way to counter the Western-centrism of history.

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I have also been active in bringing my research in contact with a practice-based methodology and creative work.

Recently, in collaboration with ZKM in 2015, I helped reconstruct one of the automata designed by the 13 century polymath Al-jazari, for an exhibit named

Allah’s Automata, an exhibition of devices from an historical period of ‘Arab

Islamic Renaissance.’ My essay, entitled Divine Clockwork: Reading al-Jazari in the

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Light of al-Ghazali’s Mechanistic Universe Argument, was also published in the art book called Allah’s Automata as part of the ZKM exhibition.

My interactive media reconstructions of medieval automata have been exhibited as part of the permanent collection in the Istanbul Museum of The History of Science and Technology in Islam, since 2008. I also contributed to the exhibit called “Arabs in the West” with my interactive reconstructions, at the Allard Pierson Museum in

Amsterdam in 2016, as part of the project Encounters with the Orient in Early

Modern European Scholarship.

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I have also furthered the scope of media archaeological studies by expanding its focus to be more specific, even in more political contexts, as ways to investigate alternative futures or pasts, by using speculative design that offers a critical, as well as a creative way of tackling issues in local situations. For example, one of the recent collaborations I was involved in with Jussi Parikka, as part of the Istanbul

Design Biennale, engages media archaeology with speculative design as a pedagogical methodology referring to the experiences of Middle-Eastern

Automata.

I can talk more about this project later, as part of my future research itinerary if there is an interest from the audience.

The exhibit component of this collaboration, called A Media Archaeology of

Ingenious Designs, looked at the automata and astrolabes developed within the

Arabic-Islamic culture of the 9th to 13th centuries as early precedents of today’s programmable machines. Automata, mechanical devices that perform a set of predetermined functions, raise questions about what the human is or isn’t. This exhibit was centered around two reconstructions of automata, the Elephant

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Clock and a Water Serving , from the 13th century engineer Ismail Al-

Jazarī’s manuscript called the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices.

My current book project called Epistemic Engines: Archaeology of ‘Oriental’

Automata is contracted at University Press, in the Recursions series. It is a media archaeology of automata that considers early modern instances of intelligent automata as conceptual prototypes of the Artificial Intelligence project.

I argue that, as mediums of mechanized cognition, these automata inhabit a three-way interface between the European self, the Oriental other and the machine, as the Orientalist forms of “othering” have been instrumental in the imaginary media of the mechanization of human cognition.

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Today, as a way to demonstrate one of those instances, I am going to present The

Chess Player, a chapter from my book in progress.

I will be speaking about how an 18th century player automaton creates an opportunity from which to engage with discussions about mechanized cognition in the context of automata culture during the Enlightenment.

I will use Chess Player Automaton to demonstrate how, throughout the development of the project of imagining mechanized cognition during the

Enlightenment, some of the underlying cultural assumptions were embodied by various human machine assemblages, were experimented with by these prototypes, and were culturally programmed into their material performance. I will also show how some of our current notions of Artificial Intelligence are conditioned by similar cultural assumptions that guided early modern experimentations with mechanized cognition.

In my analysis of the Chess Playing Automaton I explore the following questions:

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How does the Chess Playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental subject to illustrate the notion of mechanized cognition?

In what ways do these uses connect to Orientalist framing of a Muslim as machine-like subject as rooted in medieval Christian theology and literature?

I argue that these experimental products of the perennial myth of machine intelligence have mediated the Enlightenment project of a self-regulating subject.

They have simultaneously acted as performers of technological and cultural alterity, satiating the anxieties caused by the unfamiliar notion of mechanized cognition, by projecting them onto all-familiar ethnic and religious differences.

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Just to give you an overall context of how this chapter is related to the rest of the book, let me briefly tell you about the most recent reincarnation of the Chess

Player, called The Mechanical Turk. This project was also my initial entry point into this research.

At the beginning of the 21st century, an AI project reimagined the extended cognitive network in the form of a virtual labor market. Inspired by the 18th century chess player automaton, .com branded this crowdsourcing platform as the Mechanical Turk. Amazon.com’s initial motivation to build the

Amazon Mechanical Turk, or AMT, emerged after the failure of its artificial intelligence programs in the task of finding duplicate product pages on its retail website. After a series of futile attempts, the project engineers turned to humans to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system. Later, AMT made this cognitive labor platform available to private contractors in return for a commission. AMT’s digital workshop emulates artificial intelligence systems by replacing digital computing with globally sourced human brainpower.

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The virtual migrant workers of the system, power the so-called “artificial-artificial intelligence” engine of the Western software industry in a state of exception, devoid of legal rights. If the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor, then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. This configuration also embodies some of the conflicts whose seeds are placed during the early modern conceptualizations of the mechanization of industrial labor through division of cognitive labor. One of the most significant examples of this conceptualization was the chess-playing automaton that performed the insurmountable conflicts of the disciplining of the human mind for industrial production.

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Figure.1.1 In this engraving Joseph Racknitz showed how he thought the automaton operated.

Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton was constructed and presented

4 in 1770 at the court of the Empress of Austria and gave the impression that the pipe-smoking Turk mannequin, controlled by a sophisticated mechanism under the cabinet, could play serious chess against human opponents

However, the seemingly mechanical mind of the Turk was actually manipulated by

Kempelen’s chess master assistant, who was hidden beneath the pseudo- mechanism. The Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and the Americas and attracted many notable challengers and spectators, such as

Charles Babbage, , and .

Similar to its 21st century reincarnation, the 18th century Chess Player Automaton promised to deliver a truly mechanized intelligence, but it neither succeeded nor entirely failed in that mission. It was not exactly an automaton because the hands of the Oriental android were indeed controlled by a hidden human operator; but it still served its main function by providing a platform for an evaluation of the main question; “what would a mechanized cognition mean?”

The Chess Playing Automaton performed this question as a material discursive apparatus in which a HUMAN PASSED AS A MACHINE THAT WAS PASSING AS A

HUMAN.

My interest as a media scholar in intelligent automata has two motivations. I consider most Enlightenment automata as examples of imaginary media because they were either a) designed much too early, and have been materialized at some point in time, or b) they were mere conceptual prototypes of a much more sophisticated future technical media. Even though they were never materialized into finished products, they still functioned as experiments that influence the final product.

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Intelligent automata are also good to think with because they are apparatuses that inherently activate the question of the nature of the "real" operator as part of their epistemic function. Possible answers to this recurrent puzzle often provide explanations with further moral consequences, depending on the nature of the operator that is implicated. In that sense, intelligent automata are epistemic engines through which subjectification and desubjectification processes are modeled.

However, in most histories of automata, either the focus is solely put on the technical dimension while ignoring the cultural, OR, considered solely in relation to the European cultural context while overlooking examples from Islamicate cultures as an extension of colonialist desires to exclude non-western cultures from the

Western-centric histories of science and technology.

As a scholar with a Middle Eastern background my stake in this research is acknowledging the need to decolonize the repertoire of media history by de- linking these previously isolated two cultures of media. This is because I believe that broadening the media archaeological horizon must address more than the inclusion of the “Others” of media history while leaving intact the more infrastructured forms of ‘control of knowledge.’ Deep time histories of Middle East art and technology have to be mobilized as ways to participate in the debate about modernity as the historiographical condition of power that gradually cultivated as part of the Orientalist narratives.

So, how did the Chess playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental subject to illustrate the notion of mechanized intelligence?

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While working on his initial conceptions of the Chess Playing Automaton,

Wolfgang von Kempelen, a technocrat for the Austrian Habsburg Empire, was also witnessing the state apparatus in which he was embedded, going through wide- ranging bureaucratic reforms based on the calculability of standardized social relations. The Chess Player embodied a similar set of questions and became a conceptual prototype for mechanized reason.

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In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault considers 18th century automata as models for how the human body was thought to reflect the social order. Consequently, the mechanistic conception of the human body needs to be read in two registers; the anatomico-metaphysical register as constituted mainly through Cartesian mind/body duality; and, the technico-political register that reflected empirical methods deployed by the state to discipline the operations of the body through state institutions. In the context of these two registers, the 18th century humanoid automata functions as a model, on one hand for submission, on the other for empirical analysis.

Foucault has often been criticized for ignoring the racial others in his historiography. Notably, his concept of docility displaces Orientalist traces by solely focusing on the European subject in a selective genealogy. This absence becomes more critical in the analysis of an automaton that carries significations of Oriental

“other,” such as Kempelen’s chess-playing automaton.

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However, I believe that the trick of the chess-playing automaton involves more than just exchanging the enacted body of the European chess player with the represented body of the Turk, animated through its mechanical artifice. It also

7 includes initial assumptions that were set up in the audience by the automaton’s chess performance that were crucial in influencing the public debates on the mechanized cognition that provided the larger context for these performances.

These initial assumptions are closely tied to Orientalist undercurrents that were exploited by Enlightenment discourse in order to configure the docile subject on the image of the Turk.

The Orientalist assumptions that were active in Enlightenment automata were also effective in the cultural performance of Kempelen’s automaton. I will focus on the two main aspects of the affordance of the image of the Turk as a significant part of the main interface of the chess-playing automaton.8 The first critical aspect of the Turk’s performance is its liminal quality. This liminality created a buffer zone against the risk associated with the idea of the man-machine that most

Enlightenment humanoid automata performed. That potential risk was often associated with instigations of libertinism, atheism, and insurrection in public due to the heretical understanding of a body without a soul. Relegating this precarious role to an Oriental figure had, in fact, a long tradition with origins in medieval romance literature. The Oriental automata, through its association with liminal spaces and experiences in these literary accounts, conveyed surveillance, discipline, and enforcement of limits of morality.

The second aspect of the Turk’s performance is a particular form of docility that conveys the idea of the disciplined productive body, which played a salient role in the formation of the enlightened culture). The association of the Oriental with docility has its roots in medieval theology, where the Muslim subjects were considered as strict followers of religious code. Linking this association with the

8 discourse of Oriental automata, Christian theology configured a particular discourse of Muslim as automaton. Furthermore, docility prefigures the hidden chess player’s performance of the intellectual labor on behalf of the Oriental automaton. This dual performance of docility highlights the question of the intellectual labor in the context of the epistemic renovation in 18th-century

Europe. These two aspects of the Turk’s performance—docility and liminality—are crucial for grasping its function as a model of power for the idealization of a social order in the context of the large-scale processes of mechanization of labor in

Europe in the 18th century.

An important aspect of this mechanization is the division of mental labor, which entails a re-configuration of intellectual production in a multitude of domains, ranging from literary authorship to bureaucratic organizations.

1. Docile Automata

In Europe in the second half of the 18th century, automata performed as a

secure experimental apparatus for exploring impenetrable ontological

liminalities in a more systemic way and most of the time simulated life in order

to redefine it . Fueled by the mechanistic philosophy, humanoid automata

trans- formed not only the cultural attitude toward living creatures but also

machines, as they performed the idea that mechanisms were also living beings.

The mutual relationship between the animation of machinery and the

mechanization of life was explored through the experimental apparatus of

humanoid and animal automata and was popularized through the debates

instigated by their public exhibition in Europe.

Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton formulated the question of the

mechanized life with a unique emphasis: Can the mind exist without the body?

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To this question, it gave two answers simultaneously: yes and not yet. The

actual answer was not yet, as the automaton was indeed controlled by a human

operator. However, the deceptive yes response was still valuable as a

philosophical game10 for grappling with the ideas that were later made

technically possible and implemented systematically, such as self-regulating

mechanisms.

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In contrast to other automata of the 18th century, the Turk’s apparatus did not

act as mere clockwork; instead, it gave the impression of a self-regulating

system that could counter external actions within the symbolic logic of chess. As

historian of technology Otto Mayr (1970) suggests, in contrast to the idea of

clockwork universe, which was the political universe of autocratic feudalism, the

mechanical, political, and economic ideas of self-regulating systems influenced

the Enlightenment ideas of liberal subjects and democracy. This association is

partly constructed as a result of the rationalization of the socioeconomic life

through industrialization, where subjects self-regulate according to their

rational economic interests.

Consequently, an automatized chessboard represents the ideal Enlightenment universe, where the subjects and their possible actions are coded according to the regulations informed by the power structure of the society. Each subject is endowed with a relative power, and they cannot go beyond the roles for which they qualify. Particularly, when these intrinsic properties are abstracted into geometric functions and when combined with the functions of other subjects, they

10 have the potential to exhibit numerous but finite possibilities for a final outcome.

This is another reason for mechanized chess being a model for imagining a society whose coded subjects articulate a plurality of results. Thus, the chess-playing Turk embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanical docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe of the game of chess.

The chess-playing automaton performed its role as a model of power in multiple layers, the most significant of which was the demonstration of knowledge as a tool of power. This demonstration followed a particular tradition, namely, the nature as a divine theater as suggested by naturalist philosophy.

The hidden chess-player was the open secret of Kempelen’s shows.

Kempelen admitted that his automaton was just a so-called “happy deception.” As

Simon Schaffer notes, one of the roles of these automata was, quote, “to allow the selective entry by th[e] power to the inner workings of art and nature”, unquote.

In other words this open secret was also a conceited wink by the guardians of knowledge and power, reminding the general public of the guardians’ privileged status.

Kempelen studied the works on human physiology of prominent naturalists of his time. He also followed the tradition of public spectacle of experimental natural philosophy in his demonstration of the automata. His shows were meticulously designed to set up multiple assumptions in the audience about the inner workings of the automaton in order to initiate a collective investigation.

The element of mystery in Kempelen’s performance, functions within the system of representation of the natural philosophy, which perceived the whole of nature as a

“divine” theater. This system of representation could be easily exploited in order to

11 create a particular moral impression on its audience. Scottish philosopher Thomas

Reid expounds this moral effect as follows: Q “Upon the theatre of nature we see innumerable effects, which requires an agent endowed with active power; but the agent is behind the scene.” UQ

Kempelen’s Oriental automaton benefited from the assumptions within this theater as a significant representation of the techno-mythical idea of the mechanized mind. It was not just a machine; it also provided the language that made it possible to articulate that myth. As in every technical medium, it carried its own inscriptions of discursive formulations that defined its cultural system of significations. The Automaton Chess Player performed these inscribed notions through fundamental puzzles that have been relevant throughout the history of the artificial intelligence discourse, and which were tackled by notable scholars that began in the 17th century with Gottfried Leibniz and continued into the 19th and 20th century with Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Babbage, Norbert Wiener, and Alan

Turing.

What is missing in these accounts is that the chess-playing automaton was only able to perform its role through the peculiar coupling of the techno-mythical idea of automated mind, with the body of Europe’s “Other,” which harbored the so-called “heretical” attempts of materialist ideas under the turban of The Turk.

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Since the introduction of Byzantine and Muslim automata during the medieval period, and, up until early modernity, the European conception of the

Oriental automata functioned as a composite alterity by combining the unknown world of automata with the unknown world of the Oriental. Medieval Christian theology utilized this association for a symbolic disproof of Islam by assigning its subjects to the so-called “mindless” mechanical world of gears. In medieval ,

12 for example, monks used the term mechanicum in order to describe Muslim practices of sorcery. The Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, contrasted the

Muslim mechanicum, with the transformation of the Eucharist which was one of the inimitable signs of perpetual miraculous semiosis. This contrast was the basis of his rendering of Islam as bereft of miracle making.

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The humanoid automata were also referred to as “mammets” whose etymology is traced to Muhammed. The term was later used as a humorous expression to rebuke young women in English Renaissance drama as having marionette-like behavior.1 Kathleen Biddick, in her insightful work, considers this association as an integral part of a, quote, “theological foreclosure of semiosis”, unquote, to Muslims. The subjects of Islam, devoid of the magic of meaning- making, could only be the initial contents of the Christian politico-theological apparatus that has the privilege of creating the final, ideal, miraculous meaning in the embodiment of a European sovereign.

According to Lewis Mumford, by the 17th century, “[m]echanics became the new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah: the machine.” However, that messiah first had to engage in a relentless endeavor in purging the Muslim automaton from itself in order to embark on its long journey towards a full

1 Such as in the words of Lord Capulet, the father of Juliet, after she opposes marrying with Count against her father’s wish: And then to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, To answer 'I'll not wed; I cannot love, I am too young; I pray you, pardon me.–Romeo and Juliet Act 3 scene 5, lines 184-188, in Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Classic Books Company, 2001

13 machinic subject. In fact, this process was part of a long-term systematic epistemic violence.

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Edward Said, a scholar of literary critique, has explored one of the most elaborate intellectual projects in Western history of epistemic violence. Said describes Orientalism as, quote, “a style of thought based upon an epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.”, unquote. Orientalism is an ideological product of the European material culture, constructing the Orient as a mode of discourse. Especially after the end of the eighteenth century this discourse became a “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” by primarily functioning as a geopolitical awareness as well as allocating this awareness into a “whole series of interests” including aesthetic, academic, economic and sociological domains. Said explains that one of the crucial means of this domination was to render the Oriental subject impossible to be “a free subject of thought or action.”

Orientalism historically coincides with the European colonial expansion period that takes place between 1815 and 1914. Similarly, Foucault locates the epistemic violence through the re-definition of sanity within the emerging institutions of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. From this crucial overlap, post-colonial scholar Gayatri

Spivak has deduced the existence of a “two-handed engine,” the epistemic renovation that redefines historical narrative both in Europe and in colonies.

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Therefore, Oriental automata represent a crucial link in this two-handed engine: On one hand the automaton performs the docility for the Western subject in the image of the Oriental. On the other, it casts the Oriental subject outside of

14 the norms of being human by subjecting them to the world of the machines.

However, these techno-political assumptions that were active in the Oriental automata’s performance also carried a transformative power through their act of simulation.

Performing the idea of the self-regulating system through the symbolic universe of the chess game was partly enabled by the cultural alterity enacted by the image of the Turk. Until the 19th century, in Europe, the term “Turk” was used interchangeably with “Muslim,” referring to the subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

On the other hand, in the European imagination, chess, as the proto-war simulator, was introduced and mastered by the Orientals and epitomized their military power. Therefore, the simulation of the simulator in the example of the chess- playing automaton had a double significance in the articulation of the ideas of the self-regulating system and autonomous mind. First, the material manifestation of a mechanized cognition by means of self-regulating machinery brings the mind down to the same universe as the body that is the so-called “profane” nature of the physical world. Consequently, this materiality rendered the mind manipulatable towards the imperialist wishes of the sovereign. Within the history of imperialist projects designed to subdue nature, this moment signifies a crucial recognition that nature is now nothing but a series of clockworks that has also subsumed human mind within its mechanics.

However, the simulation of the mechanized cognition via the performance of the Oriental alterity was also related to the unsettling evocations of the autonomous mind for the 18th century European subject. The most crucial change that caused these uncanny evocations was the middle class, emerging in major urban centers, as a result of industrialization. This emerging middle class was differentiated from the masses of manual labor by means of their involvement in

15 the prolific print culture. This differentiation was further highlighted with the moral authority ascribed to the recognition of a so-called higher-order, refined intellect as distinct from that of the lower-order, mechanical intellect.

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In this milieu, the idea of the mechanization of cognition created a crisis in this distinction and undermined the moral authority associated with the intellectual labor. The immense industrial expansion of the print culture in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, was also meant as a deterioration of the traditional authority associated with the literary “authorship.”

Indeed, the mechanized writing styles performed by the highly professionalized authors of these texts mirrored the mechanized production of textual material.

This fact was clearly visible in the production of the pamphlets that depict demonstrations of android automata that perform mechanized writing, such as

The Writer built by Jacques Droz.

These mass-produced texts were mostly reproduced from one prototype and reflected an intellectual indifference to the topic at hand by their professionalized authors. Their textual craftsmanship on the mechanized writing of The Writer automaton resembled the subject of their works.

The decline of the moral authority of literary authorship as a result of the mechanization of intellectual labor is also related to the docility correlated with work that was previously associated with the machinic subject of manual labor. The degree of the perceived docility of an intellectual worker was directly correlated with that worker’s position in the intellectual hierarchy. The chess-playing Turk, for example, was useful to perform this intellectual hierarchical order because it included various levels of expertise distributed across its participant operators.

During Kempelen’s performance, the intelligent automaton was subjected to the

16 mastery of its impresario, the state engineer who belonged to the class of managerial analysts, who stood clearly above others in the cognitive hierarchy. As

Simon Schaffer explains, this was the era when “the science of calculation became the supreme legislative discipline, just as the calculating engines provided both legislative and executive coordination.” Kempelen, as a leading figure of the bureaucratic revolution of the Habsburg State, clearly embodied this supreme legislative role.

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But still, this was not the highest position in the intellectual hierarchy. As a managerial engineer of bureaucratic processes, Kempelen had to rely on mathematicians for laying out the principles for solving some of these puzzles. One of the most significant examples of the Turk’s performance that used varied levels of intellectual participation was called the ’s Tour. That problem is based on the premise that a knight would visit all the squares (black and white) of the board, starting from any square on the board, and completing its move by landing on each square only once. The Knight’s Tour was inherently a mathematical puzzle that was solved by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1758 when chess started to be in fashion in European courts. Euler’s problem was an example of a

Hamiltonian path problem. Today, it is widely known in graph theory as a special case of a traveling salesman problem that appears in a multitude of contemporary computer science applications, ranging from semantic networks to genetic algorithms. The demonstration of this puzzle highlights the role of another actor in Kempelen’s chess playing automaton, the mathematician who represents a higher cognitive status whose contribution was considered as a quintessential rational skill. The distribution of roles in the Turk’s performances involved a clear

17 division of mental labor, which would later become a significant subject matter in the development of mechanical calculators.

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These models made visible the impending techno-political reconfigurations, and secured docility for the intellectual labor within self-regulating social order. In other words, the development of technical means for intelligent automata was an imbricated element of the public contestation for its political ends. The division of mental labor was one of the most crucial aspects of the techno-political register, due to its direct effect on the developments of the technologies of rationalism.

While the Turk was demonstrating the potential of the idea of an intelligent automaton during its tours across Europe, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations expounded an economic theory for the impending Industrial Revolution by attributing a significant role to the division of labor. Smith observed that the division of labor not only enables higher levels of automation but also eventually renders human labor obsolete at an increasing rate.

Following Adam Smith’s analysis in The Wealth of Nations, a British mathematician Charles Babbage thought that the principle of division labor when applied to mental labor would serve for his eventual goal of transferring the functions of the human cognitive functions to the operations of a machine.

Before this project, Babbage had seen one of the performances of the chess- playing Turk in in 1819, and about a year after he went to see the automaton again at St. James Street and challenged it to a game. Babbage lost the game in an hour. He later considered the thought of building a chess-playing machine and exhibiting it for a stable income source, in order to fund his other ambitious projects, such as the Difference Engine, but he never realized this idea.

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In 1825, a new owner, Johann Nopemuk Maelzel, the Viennese engineer, inventor, and impresario of automata, brought the chess-playing Turk to several

Northern and Southern American cities. Not long after, however, a major challenge to the chess-playing automaton’s coveted secret of modus operandi took place.

Based on a thorough comparison between Babbage’s calculating machine and The

Turk’s performance, the young editor of a based periodical, named Edgar

Alan Poe argued that the chess-playing automaton could not operate without the manipulation of a human agent. In his essay, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” Poe concluded that, quote, “(t)here is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr.

Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a ‘pure machine’ we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind”, unquote.

Poe’s later analytical literary works embodied a particular kind of predicament that concerned his intellectual labor. The very possibility of a chess automaton as a “pure machine” must have posed an uncanny prospect to Poe as an intellectual worker, for its implications about the value of his intellectual labor.

In one of his later speculative narratives, Poe depicted von Kempelen as an alchemist who transforms lead into gold, resulting in a reduced value of gold and an increase in the price of lead in international markets. This could be read as an allusion to the expected reduction of the intellectual labor as an outcome of the mechanization of cognition. Poe later reflected this anxiety in a systemic way, through his tales of ratiocination, a series of detective stories, including the infamous Purloined Letters, which became a literary genre of its own.

Poe’s rejection of the possibility of a “pure machine” enabled him to imagine that the solution to this puzzle included a very particular type of human

19 machine assemblage, which was also a direct challenge to the idea of an autonomous subject. Poe’s essay is particularly significant as a reflection on a prominent theme in the American psyche, especially with the evocation of terror and anxiety caused by the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in relation to the mechanization of the mind. This transformation was a function of both mimesis and the sublime through the formation of a particular relationship between self and alterity that enabled transcending the conventional limits of the individualized human subject.

In American Orientalism, the excess and magic produced by the wondrous objects of these shows also reflected the consumption fantasies of the emerging

American middle class as a result of the colonial expansion of American trade activities. The chess-playing automaton, as an imaginary media, exploited this consumer fantasy for its transformative effect based on the anxiety caused by the emergence of a new form of embodiment and subjectivity.

It is within this Orientalist consumer fantasy world that the figure of the

Turk, by functioning as the mimetic surrogate for the alterity of the machine, enabled that transformative effect. The Turk essentially transferred the tension of mechanization of cognition by allowing its enactment to be mediated by a rationalized and tamed alterity that eventually humanized the uncanny premise of automated cognition. This mediation is the key to understanding how the self- regulating liberal subject relieved its anxiety of the mechanization of cognition by means of the assurance of the cultural difference it had already established through the fantasies and desires projected onto the Oriental.

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CONCLUSION

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Archaeologies of technical media, whether they are imagined, planned, behaviorally prototyped, or commodified, present immense possibilities for an integrated analysis of technical media, material cultures, and the senses.

Consequently, my study of the chess-playing automaton as an archetypal imaginary media of the mechanization of cognition focuses not only various instances of its materialization but also its epistemic formulations and cultural techniques that produce their own subjects. Throughout this project, I demonstrate that, by enacting ideas of automated cognition in their most precarious stages, the chess player embodied in its materialization a perpetual effort to collectively imagine an alternative way of being human for the Western subject. The interaction between the technological alterity of the myth of the mechanized cognition and the cultural alterity of the Oriental has been a critical factor in this effort. The Chess player mediated this process by perpetually translating one type of difference into another, from technical to cultural and reverse.

END

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My research agenda, for the next five years, focuses on two complementary projects in various stages of development; Postcolonial Archaeology of Affective

Computing and Middle Eastern Futurism. On one side, I look at how western techno-cultures rely on colonial imaginations for their conceptualizations of media technologies from Affective Computing to AI. Equivalently, I am also interested in how Middle Eastern cultures, in conversation with these techno-imaginaries, engage with alternative futurities as an inherently de-colonial response. My recent

21 collaboration on Speculative Design and the Middle Eastern Futurism that was part of the Istanbul Design Biennial is a product of this dual research focus.

Using speculative design, issues of local cultural politics of Ottoman pasts, of alternative geographies of past Islamic inventions, of contested territories of political representation that imagine other futures, meshes into a form of media archaeology as practice-based methodology in a workshop setting. To mobilize the middle-eastern media imaginaries as an alternative historical lineage, the project aimed to use a speculative design method as a collective thinking through doing, for countering the Western-centric media history narrative.

In our speculative design workshop, we explored these various forms of futurities with the help of a “what if” question. What if the legacy of science and technology in the Islamic world would have been able to gather such momentum that the advanced technological age would have been branded by this alternative technological heritage? Specifically, in the workshop we wanted to extend the exhibit experience into a sort of collective imagination exercise by playing with its objects and using them as our reference points.

Here is an example…

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