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WEEK NINE
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RESPONSE, WEEK 9 Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. Weibel, Peter. "The World as Interface" Comments / Questions Weibel divides the evolution of the mechanized image into eight stages: 1) Photography 2) telegraph 3) film 4) CRT/Television 5) Magnetic recording of visual signals (video) 6) Transistors, integrated circuits, chips: machine-controlled interactive visual worlds. 7) Telematic culture 8) brain-chips: Simulation of the brain itself. The Mechanical Eye (I) Weibel writes that the "eye triumphs only with the help of machines," yet is not the eye itself a sort of mechanism? In Erewhon's "Book of the Machines," Samuel Butler makes this interesting argument: What is a man's eye but a machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through? A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for some time after the man is dead. It is not the eye that cannot see, but the restless one that cannot see through it. (Butler 205) Endo- and Exo-physical Beings Weibel also writes that media worlds present the "first instance where communication between internal and external observer, between endo- and exo-world becomes possible." I think this is a hopeful way to look at new technology (gaming, for example). Where does such a statement leave the body? (I.e. the part of the being that is still endo-crinated (forgive the bad pun) in the physical (as opposed to the gaming) world). The Book of the Machines': An Early S/F Myth of Disembodiment Due, Ironically, To Bodily Extension In chapter 25 of Erewhon, "The Book of the Machines-- Concluded," Butler's description of technology is surprisingly similar to both Wiener's description of information feedback and Hayles' analysis of bodily extension. A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture. 'Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm has become artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint. The handle of the spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus; the shaft is the additional bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new form of the hand which enables its possessor to disturb the earth in a way to which his original hand was unequal. (223) Yet whereas Hayles tends to affirm the artificial extension of the body that technology can afford, Butler's anxiety about disembodiment becomes quickly clear. He writes: The one serious danger…was that the machines would so equalise men's powers, and so lessen the severity of competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He feared that the removal…might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action. DARWIN, EREWHON, AND DUNE In 1863 Samuel Butler wrote an essay entitled "Darwin Among the Machines," a work that has been appropriated to discuss the negative potential of Artificial Intelligence. "The machines," Butler states, are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bowed down as slaves to tend them; more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
In 1872 Butler revised these arguments and reworked them into Erewhon. Almost one hundred years later, Frank Herbert published Dune (1965), the first in a series of six books devoted to the exploration of a desert planet in the far-flung future. Besides providing a commentary on Mid-Eastern and Western relations, speculations about the future role of women, and metaphors for oil and OPEC in the forms of spice and CHOAM, Herbert's Dune reiterates the fears and tensions expressed in Butler's "Darwin Among the Machines." The series takes place after the so-called Butlerian Jihad, a crusade against computers, thinking machines, and robots…Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.' (Dune 505) Such a commandment makes for an old-fashioned--if not antiquated--society, complete with aristocratic rule and rigid gender roles. Such a commandment also reflects a tension regarding technical progression--a tension, as it turns out, that is rooted in Victorian anxiety regarding Darwinism and technology. Another expression of this tension would come three years later, in 1968, with Kubrick's HAL-9000 in 2001. Yet, whereas Kubrick's tension plays out in a face-to-interface confrontation between human being and thinking machine, and one that occurs as a part of human evolution, Herbert's tension proves more reactionary. Destruction of thinking machines the form of the Butlerian jihad does not occur within the linear narrative of the text, but as an appendix, a paragraph of back-story to explain the lack of the technical. "Pulling the plug" of thinking machines does not lead humanity to the Stargate's triumphant threshold. Herbert's novel reject new technology and anchors us in the past, even as the story pretends to be about the future.
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