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Reviewed by:
  • The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West R. John Williams
  • Rachel McBride Lindsey
THE BUDDHA IN THE MACHINE: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West. By R. John Williams. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2014.

It is telling that some of our moments of greatest interpretive insight come out of moments of ostensible failure. Take, for example, the Chinese-American writer Lin Yutang’s brush with the Remington Typewriter Company in 1947. Having devoted decades of his life and invested all of his riches—and then some—in developing a Chinese typewriter, Lin and his daughter found themselves with an audience that could very well not only validate his life’s work but, in the process, usher China into the “rapidly technologizing global order” the typewriter signified and enabled (129). And then at the crucial moment, the darn thing wouldn’t work. Despite the typewriter’s failure to perform, R. John Williams probes Lin’s pursuit of the machine as a signature example of the discourse of “Asia-as-technê” running through American political and cultural entanglements with Asia from 1893 into the present.

Like much of the material that Williams orchestrates in this wide-ranging and deeply-textured study, Lin’s typewriter signifies a paradox, or so it would seem. The philosophically inclined novelist was convinced that the “cultural and aesthetic ‘handicraft’ of China … held the answers to the perils of the [Western] ‘mechanistic mind’” (133). And yet, he had spent decades of his life inventing, financing, and creating a Chinese typewriter, a tremendous technological and mechanical feat that signaled nothing short of the paragon of machine culture and quintessential instrument of modern statecraft. This seeming paradox is at the heart of Williams’s richly engaging, though at times plodding, interrogation of the discourse he terms “Asia-as-technê.” The ancient Greek concept of technê contributes the analytical spark Williams needs to get at the “organic world of art and technology” his book examines (46). But this is a technê with a distinctly Heideggerian bent. For Williams, the Asian technê that he traces through Sarah Wyman Whitman’s book designs, Jack London’s writing and photographs, Ezra Pound’s machine art, Lin Yutang’s typewriter, Robert Prisig’s motorcycle, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, and Wang Zi Won’s sculptures, among many other artists and authors, is itself an instrument that “reflects a general, therapeutic effort to explore alternatives to the overtechnologization … of Western modernity” (6). Asia-as-technê, he asserts, was and remains a “moral aspiration” that recognizes “a tradition of technological experience fundamentally untainted by the mechanical enframings of the Anglo-American disenchantment of nature” (6). In an unfolding cosmic pageantry of human redemption, “only the inherently aesthetic tradition of the East could rescue [America] from the inherently mechanical demons of the West” (12). If Asian aesthetics were at once “the antidote to and the perfection of machine culture,” exorcising the “mechanical demons” was the only hope for modern souls (1).

Apart from its distinct contribution to the transnational turn in American studies, The Buddha in the Machine introduces a sophisticated framework for analyzing ethnicity and technology. For instance, Williams asserts that the “discourse of Asia-as-technê could be adopted as a means of developing more positive and organic forms of modernity outside the racialized hierarchies of traditional Western technics” (131–132). At the same time, to the extent that literature and caricature critical, or more often, derisive of Asia and Asians were pervasive to American culture from at least the 1860s, a gesture to the tension between redemptive technê and malignant bias would be illuminating. The title [End Page 166] may also be somewhat misleading, as Buddhism appears at only a few points to receive benefit of Williams’s astute analysis, and then seemingly only to invoke an antimechanical worldview that people like Ernest Fenollosa and Wang Zi Won complicate through their crafts. But by the final page Williams persuades readers that American encounters with “the East” in the long shadow of the Columbian Exposition evince, alongside Lin’s typewriter, a “possibility of imagining therapeutic and alternative forms of modernity outside the Euro...

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