An Age of Ingenuity

On 11 February 1738, a new exhibit opened at the Hôtel de Longueville in Paris. In a magnificent room ornamented with mirrored panels and frescoes over the doors, a young mechanic from Grenoble named Jacques de Vaucanson entertained visitors with a life-size automaton he had constructed, which simulated a man playing the flute. Vaucanson's automaton was different from previous curiosities of its kind because the fourteen tunes it played did not come from a music box inside the machine, but were actually produced by the movements of the flute player's fingers in combination with the air generated by bellows in its chest. It was a huge success both with the public and the scientific establishment, garnering the approval of the Académie Royale des Sciences and the enthusiastic admiration of Diderot, who later included a long description of it in the entry on "Android" in the first volume of the Encyclopédie. In 1739, Vaucanson added two more automata to his exhibit: a pipe-and-drum player and what became his most famous invention—a duck that appeared to eat grain, swallowing and digesting it before expelling it as excrement from its rear. The three figures were later sold and taken on a tour of Europe, appearing first at the Haymarket Opera House in London in 1742, then later in Holland, Germany, and eventually Russia.

What was the fascination of these machines and those like them in the eighteenth century? Minsoo Kang offers two explanations in his ambitious and enjoyable book, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines—one anthropological and one historical. His first explanation, developed in a provocative opening chapter, is that human beings have always been fascinated by objects that challenge the binary categories with which they make sense of their world and order their societies. The automaton, Kang argues, "is the ultimate categorical anomaly"—an artificial, inanimate object that appears to be a living being made of flesh and blood, and a representation that also seems to have crossed over into the world of the represented: "its very nature is a series of contradictions, and its purpose is to flaunt its own insoluble paradox" (36). For Kang, the transgressive "liminality" of the automaton also explains the strikingly different range of feelings it generates in response, from laughter and amusement to fear and even horror. We are amused when our attention is drawn to an object that tries to transgress the ontological boundaries that organize our sense of reality, but makes such a poor fist of it that those boundaries end up being reaffirmed instead. When a machine gets closer to resembling a living being, however—to the point where it causes genuine uncertainty as to its status—the uncanny or "creepy" sensation it begins to produce is the result of the more serious threat it poses to our reality schemas. In a final twist, Kang argues that this feeling of uncanny horror may itself be tinged with ambivalence, since there is a part of us that "yearns to be free of the artificial and arbitrary strictures of our culturally imposed worldview" (42).

In the chapters that follow, Kang undertakes a sweeping intellectual and cultural history of the "automaton idea," tracing the concept of the self-moving machine from the ancients right up to contemporary robotics and Hollywood cinema. It is at the beginning of a pair of pivotal chapters on eighteenth-century automata that Kang offers his historical explanation of the appeal of Vaucanson's machines. He argues persuasively that the three figures enjoyed the special fame they did because they represented "the culmination and apotheosis of the intellectual golden age of automata" (111-12), which had begun in 1637 with the publication of Descartes's Discourse on Method and ended in 1748 with La Mettrie's Man a Machine—texts which, like countless others in between, adopted the self...