Copying Machines This page intentionally left blank Copying Machines taking notes for the automaton Catherine Liu university of minnesota press minneapolis london Chapter 3 originally appeared as “From Faux Pas to Faut Pas, or On the Way to The Princess of Clèves,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17, no. 1 (spring 1998): 123–44; copyright 1998, The University of Tulsa. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Chapter 5 will be published in Dramas of Culture: Between Philosophy and Literature, ed. John Burt Foster (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming), and appears here courtesy of Northwestern University Press. Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liu, Catherine. Copying machines : taking notes for the automaton / Catherine Liu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3502-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3503-X (pb : alk. paper) 1. Robotics—History. 2. Automation—History. I. Title. TJ211 .L49 2000 629.8'92'09—dc21 00-008066 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 111009080706050403020100 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Doing It Like a Machine 1 2 “What’s the Difference?” 21 3 The Princess of Clèves Makes a Faux Pas 49 4 Getting Ahead with Machines? The Cases of Jacques Vaucanson and Thérèse des Hayes 76 5 Don Juan Breaks All His Promises but Manages to Keep One Appointment (with History) 106 6 De Man on Rousseau: The Reading Machine 127 7 Friends: Dangerous Liaisons 155 Notes 183 Index 219 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am grateful to the following organizations for their generosity and sup- port. At the University of Minnesota, I would like to thank the Graduate School, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, the McKnight Land-Grant Professor- ship, and McKnight Travel Grants. Grants from the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones and the French department of the City University of New York also funded various phases of early research and development. I would like to thank Crystal Eitle for her attention to the manuscript and William Murphy for his support and assiduity. The other individuals to whom I am indebted are too numerous to name. I would like to thank all those who had a hand in making this book possible. I dedicate this book to them. vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction I am my own creation. —Madame de Merteuil, Dangerous Liaisons I am one thing, my writings are another matter. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo THIS WORK IS A SUSTAINED EXAMINATION of the automaton as early mod- ern machine, and curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, who slaves away at the assembly line of being, sustaining the most precious fan- tasies of our humanity, while entertaining us with nightmares of the treachery of others. In Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the Turkish attire of the automaton is slightly faded and dusty, giving it an air of obsolescence, quaintness, and disrepute.1 On the one hand, the chess-playing automaton is considered an allegory for a relation- ship with the “magical” operations of ideology; on the other hand, it offers us an invitation to a historical perspective, and an elaboration of the ideo- logical and identificatory impulse in our understanding of history and lit- erature. “It was a false automaton which by itself caused more talk than all the others put together, and also acquired a European reputation. This was Baron von Kempelen’s Chess-Player.”2 The von Kempelen automaton chess-player was indeed attired in a vaguely Oriental way, and after being presented at the Viennese court around 1783, circulated through Europe in less-than-illustrious circles. From the very beginning, there was a suspicion that it was what historians of the automaton Alfred Chapuis and Edmund Droz call “false,”but it provided Walter Benjamin with a complex figure of the struggle between historicism and historical materialism. The historical ix Introduction materialist resists identification, but in so doing she must struggle on two fronts, in the strategic game of chess with an external, visible opponent, and with the “contraption” or game of mirrors that must be operated in order to conceal the complexity of her theoretical investments. Between impatient anticipation of redemption and belatedness in relationship to loss, the automaton of historical materialism is crystallized as an image that is not determined by being but, rather, emerges as a flash of insight that disrupts the very temporality of the event. The “now” of academia in which I came to intellectual maturity is dis- tinguished by a generalized sense of having overcome the recent past. This is the intellectual event to which I can bear witness: there has been a sense that the theoretical investments of the past few decades had been dissolved. This sense is based on a progressive, additive notion of history in which the present always seems so much smarter than the past. A Benjaminian critique of such an attitude of complacency is founded on an analysis of the historical event in terms of rupture, revolution, and redemption. Criticism itself is only possible if it can think through and leave room for radical dis- continuities between past and present, history and materialism.3 Benjamin reminds us never to take for granted the leap of cunning that allows the theorist of historical materialism to conspire with images of the past in order to redeem the present. Benjaminian recognition must be differenti- ated from historical identification. The identificatory impulse in any read- ing of history or literature is more than simply narcissistic; it is first and foremost political. In a purely specular relationship with historical material, we always see ourselves in the victors.4 In the work that follows I will focus on the specificity of the metaphor of automaton and the machines as mechanical double of the human being in ancien régime France, because it was there and then that the singularity of the curious and useless machines makes history. The automaton is a preindustrial, nonproductive machine that still has a relationship to the machines of the Ancients. It inspires both automation and mass produc- tion, but it ends up as one of the Industrial Revolution’s mechanical vic- tims. Its obsolescence is guaranteed by the virtual impossibility of its mass reproduction. The suspicion of the machine, as it is manifested in critical, literary, and philosophical works that we will examine, is not something that can be easily undone, nor should it be. The Enlightenment promul- gated two machines: one represented an image of soullessness; the other was sublimated into the very structure of its own ambitions of encyclope- dic and instrumentalizing systematicity. Julien Offray de La Mettrie mobi- x Introduction lizes an ironic concept of the machine as a limited model for the human being, but he rejected the mechanistic reason as a model for thought when he offers in its place the trope of irony and doubled meanings as the most advanced form of thinking.5 Benjamin’s automaton of historical materialism is a predecessor to what I call in the first chapter the “theory robot,”a figure criticized by jour- nalists and humanists alike as nothing more than an ambitious nihilist. The marionette/automaton/machine is an image solicited by many of the authors to describe ideology itself, but in Paul de Man’s work the machine functions as only one part of the system of allegory and irony that is a con- dition of every attempt at figuration and representation. De Man’s materi- alism is something that I would like to take seriously, in both positive and negative ways. Although his work allows for a sustained critique of simple identificatory impulses in reading, the limitations that it places on itself with regard to psychoanalysis create a detachment that invites transferen- tial aberrations on the part of his readers and students in terms of his asceti- cism, his teaching, and literary theory in general. Only a psychoanalytic intervention can take into account the way in which his work and person have produced such great loves and hatreds in the recent history of literary theory. This psychoanalytic method abjures a simplifying analogical rela- tionship between models of subjectivity and models of either readership or spectatorship, and is concerned primarily with the disruptive effects of projective mechanisms. If detachment can be fascinating, the stupidity of the automaton is also hypnotizing, literally mesmerizing in its idiotic repetition of anthropomor- phizing movement. What this hypnosis produces is a nonthinking repudia- tion or total acceptance. The automaton allegorizes the problem of think- ing confronted by nonthinking: this encounter takes place, however, in a flash of misrecognition. Thinking thinks that it sees its Other in the passive, glassy gaze of the automaton, but it only sees itself, unable to think outside of specular models. The prevalence and virulence of ideological and self- reproducing systems of judgment produce an indifference that functions as both resistance and repetition. This ambivalent formulation has in the name of progress suppressed critical thinking inside and outside our insti- tutions of higher learning. The figure of the automaton mediates the repre- sentation of a catachrestic imperative: how has the Enlightenment repre- sented the machine as its infernal Other, while at the same time adopting a principle of mechanical reason to justify the giddy optimism of its expan- sionist project? Only historical materialism can answer this question.