Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (review)

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines argues effectively that the automaton is both a central idea and a conceptual tool in the Western imagination. It makes a significant contribution to the field through its broad-spectrum approach to automata not just as performing objects or technological curiosities, but as key material objects for the study of intellectual history. Rather than viewing automata through one central theoretical framework, Minsoo Kang examines how the idea of the automaton functioned differently in specific historical periods. He notes the degree to which "explanations that work for a specific historical and cultural context are often stretched to other eras, resulting in distortions" (p. 25). To avoid such distortions, Kang explains the necessity of examining "how the levels of amusement, fascination, unease, and horror at the object fluctuated in accordance to the beliefs, concerns, and needs of each period" (p. 54). His careful focus on how the significance of the automaton changed from one context to another is matched by his thorough understanding of key theoretical conversations about the intellectual and cultural meaning of the automaton.

In chapter 1, "The Power of the Automaton, "Kang creates a compelling conceptual framework by building on Claude Lévi-Strauss's insight that individuals make sense of the world through safe binary categories. Such a comfortable worldview is disrupted by the ambiguous automaton, which Kang argues is both a liminal object and "the ultimate categorical anomaly. Its very nature is a series of contradictions, and its purpose is to flaunt its own insoluble paradox" (p. 36). Unlike the stabilizing funeral effigy, which Carlo Ginzburg suggests defines the boundary between the living and the dead, the automaton "is the diametric opposite of the effigy, or its dark twin. While the latter stabilizes the dangerous situation by standing in for the corpse that is going through the journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead, shielding people from its frighteningly ambiguous nature, the automaton deliberately disturbs by pointing to its liminality, playing havoc with people's notion of what is alive and what is dead, what can move and what must remain still" (p. 37). Kang's application of Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime to Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" is insightful. Kang writes that "Burke notes the oddity of the fact that things that pose a danger to our self-preservation cause terror, yet when those same things are presented to us with the possibility of actual harm removed we derive a peculiar pleasure out of it that is a species of the sublime" (p. 41). Kang explains that if what disturbs us to the highest degree is secured within a safe environment, it gives us "a cathartic thrill."

Building on this complex conceptual framework, chapter 2 offers a thorough examination of key automata from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with special attention to ongoing debates about magic—demonic or divine, natural or mathematical—involving luminaries such as Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Francis Bacon, and Tommaso Campanella. Chapter 3 traces the development of the mechanical philosophy and transition away from natural magic through a close analysis of René Descartes' writings, with particular attention to the royal pleasure gardens at Saint-Germain that played so significant a role in his thinking. Kang writes that Descartes' examination of the hydraulic garden statues reveals that "their mundane machinery is indicative of the general process of disenchantment of the world that was taking place in the period. His philosophical exposure of the body-machine leads directly to Vaucanson's physical exposure of the flute-player to prove that nothing more than pure mechanics was going on in it" (pp. 120-21). Critical insights like this pepper the book and make for highly compelling reading.

Other chapters include an examination of humans as automata in the second half of the eighteenth century and in Enlightenment literature, particularly in the writings of Jean...