Artificial Reflections

1 ARTIFICIAL REFLECTIONS Mechanized Femininity from L’Eve Future to Lady Gaga by Janice Dees English Honors Thesis University of Florida Fall 2010 Dees 2 Introduction From Olympia to Hadaly, Maria to Helen O'Loy, Repliee to Aiko, Kusanagi to Lady Gaga, the most influential representations of mechanized humanity have been women. Although outnumbering their robotic peers, these gynoids and cyborgs remain mostly obscure and, unlike male robots, are endowed not with blocky bodies but explicit sexual signifiers which emphasize their physical and mental otherness. A global discussion about what a machine is, how it thinks, and what type of form it should have has been taking place for hundreds of years. The results have been the mechanization of femininity: an unofficial declaration through literature, film, and science that the female gender is synonymous with the artificial form. Two distinct discourses surround the trope of the mechanical woman, one perpetuated by the world of legitimate science and its cultural mythologies and the other spearheaded by feminist authors, anime, and pop stars. The first discourse paints an image of the mechanical woman as a silent, obedient, controllable, sexual slave meant to serve her male master. This artificial woman, unlike her human female peers, is ideal due to her ability to perfectly reflect her male user's ego and desires, thus allowing the user to transcend a tainted world for one in which he alone rules. The second discourse posits the mechanical woman as a post-gendered rebel who revels in permeability and the blurring of once-stable and absolute boundaries between man and woman, human and machine, innocence and sin, and other binaries. This cyborg first celebrated by theorist Donna Haraway questions past ideologies of classism, racism, and sexism which inform modern futuristic aesthetics and technological myths while declaring that "femininity is always mechanical and artificial--as is masculinity" (Halberstam 454). As Lerman, Mohun, and Oldenziel so keenly deduce, "gender ideologies play a central role in human interactions with technology, and technology...is crucial to the ways male and female identities are formed, gender structures defined, and gender ideologies constructed" (1). Dees 3 "Technology, like gender, is a construction situated firmly in cultural context" (1) as varied works of literature, film, music, and science from the eighteenth century to today attest. Together, these cultural artifacts tell a story of how technology, once endowed with human form and voice, was inscribed with gendered notions of sentience and artifice which posited women as mechanical beings, a story which continues to be reinterpreted and vocalized from an amazing number of sources. From René Descartes to Alan Turing, Thomas Edison to David Levy, and Donna Haraway to Janelle Monáe, the meaning of mechanized femininity and its implications have constantly changed, even as those who lay claim to objective, scientific authority have not. Dees 4 Chapter One: BEASTLY TRANSCENDENCE In a way, René Descartes is the father of what is now called artificial intelligence research. Eighteenth-century desist Descartes, famous declarer of "cogito ergo sum," devised a hypothesis which connected animals and machines and asserted that the animalian body is essentially composed of matter which operates through predictable, mechanical means. Human beings, however, were spared from this equation as Descartes cited mankind’s "rational soul" (Descartes qtd. in Wood 7) as the characteristic which separated human beings from the irrational artifice of instinct-driven animals. Physician Julien Offroy de La Mettrie took this hypothesis one step farther in his book L'Homme Machine (The Man Machine in English) which "stretched Descartes's beast-machine premise to include human beings as well" (Wood 7). La Mettrie's work argued that living beings' bodies operated without the means of a soul and thus linked humanity with a spiritual void. Distinctly misanthropic, the book chastised humans, animalistic "perpendicularly crawling machines" (La Mettrie qtd. in Wood 15), for their arrogant attempts to exalt themselves to the status of soul-owning demi-gods. La Mettrie flung his teachings in the face of eighteenth-century theologians who painted humans as the anointed children of God and he would pay the price for it, constantly living in exile and fear of repercussion. La Mattrie's connection between the mechanical void and the human body, however, would continue onward to thrive well past his lifetime, transforming to mechanize what was considered the most beastly representatives of humanity: women. Automatons and androids, mechanical humans, worked to exemplify La Mettrie's philosophy, but if automation, like instinct, was a figure devoid of logic, then what type of human would perfectly illustrate this irrational form? At first, this proved to be children. Automatons built by Pierre Jaquet-Droz in 1768, Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1783, Johan Dees 5 Nepomuk Mielzel in 1824, and many others featured human children as complicated clockwork without the misanthropy extolled by La Mettrie. The popular eighteenth century image of the child painted young humans as an innocent ideal, a "blank slate" and "purest being" (Wood ix- xx). These embodiments of "all the perfection of an unsullied being" were ironically simultaneously imperfect and thus fallible, not fully-formed adults (Wood 126) who could thus be molded into any desired form. In this light, the child was distinctly other, "not a person but a machine" (Wood 126), and thus the perfect form for early humanoid automatons. Children's connection to otherness was further solidified by famous automatons based on beasts like famous inventor Jacque Vaucanson's mechanical duck and its simulated digestive system of 1738 and Kempelen's gear-driven, chess-playing foreign Turk of 1770. These automated beasts and children which simulated life were the technological wonders of their time and were exhibited to the wealthy elite of Europe to much amazement and delight. One notorious scientific tall tale which emerged during the age of the automaton connected the human-machine child to the beast-machine hypothesis of self-declared sentience expert René Descartes, further solidifying the body of the other as synonymous with machinery. Descartes had an illegitimate daughter named Francine who died young, but one popular rumor suggested Francine had undergone a technological resurrection by the hands of her eighteenth- century philosopher father. While Descartes was aboard a ship headed to Sweden, the story goes, a pack of sailors wishing to see Descartes' mysterious daughter raided his room to find a crate containing a living mechanical girl, a moving doll. The gynoid so frightened the seamen that they threw it overboard lest the inhuman abomination curse their voyage. This story, this technological myth, would last long after Descartes' death, perhaps because it painted Descartes Dees 6 as a victor over death, as a man who has "defied mortality" (Wood 5) through the awesome power of science. This technological myth of godlike transcendence through mechanical humans would continue onward in the nineteenth century but would be remolded into a new image of the innocent, ideal automaton from the human child to the human woman. Nineteenth century writers, artists, and scientists would have been heavily influenced by the Cartesian rationale which "equated instinct with automation" but, within a scientific and popular culture which very vocally extolled the inherent "animality of women" (Forrest 20), they would exchange the mechanical child for what was deemed a more fitting example of the instinct-driven, artificial other: woman. Thus, La Mettrie's mechanical misanthropy was renewed and resurrected as misogyny when, "in the shift from the real to the imaginary and from the playful to the destructive, androids ceased to be male and became, more often than not, female" (Wood xix). This became especially tangible as artificial humanity took on a distinctly gendered, sexualized status in one erotic craze which swept bordellos in both Europe and America. In her 2002 book Edison's Eve, Gaby Wood chronicles the curious resurgence of the Pygmalion myth in the eighteenth century and the popular erotic plays of the sexual Pygmalionist culture of the nineteenth century. The Pygmalion myth tells the tale of Pygmalion, a sculptor, who falls in love with his beautiful female statue Galatea which, to his delight, is brought to life by a sympathetic Venus. Following the onslaught of eighteenth century automatons, the Pygmalion myth "underwent an extraordinary renaissance" as it was praised and rewritten by many respected and influential European writers such as Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire (Wood 16). This myth would take on a sexual overtone in the post-Industrial Revolution nineteenth-century Europe, however, as Pygmalionism moved from high-culture literature to Dees 7 lowbrow sexual practice. The original pygmalionism was defined by German sexologist Iwan Bloch as "the love for and sexual intercourse with statues and other representations of a human person" (qtd. in Wood 138), a form of pygmalionism closely related to "necrophilia" (138), but it would find a new embodiment in Pygmalionism, the erotic practice in which men gained sexual satisfaction from watching "naked living women...stand as 'statues' upon suitable pedestals and are watched by the Pygmalionist, whereupon they gradually come to life" (Wood

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