Of Writing Machines and Scholar-Gipsies

Abstract

THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY recently mounted an exhibition entitled the Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Proceeding in a roughly chronological manner, the exhibition provided an overview of some of the many ways which the melding of human and machine has been imagined in both the fine arts and popular culture, from the nineteenth century to the present. The visitor to the Gallery was greeted at the outset by a cherubic mechanical boy, dressed in a red satin waistcoat and matching hat that one imagines would have looked very fashionable in 1810, when it was made. The automaton stood at a small writing desk, a stylus poised over a blank sheet of paper. The story goes that when it was donated to the Franklin Institute in 1928, the machine was little more than a box of loose parts, having been recently destroyed in a fire. Automatons from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century were designed to reproduce some distinctly human action, such as playing chess, or dancing a jig, but in its present condition there was no way to predict what this one was meant to do. Over the next months, the complex arrangement of wheels and gears was painstakingly reassembled. Finally, it was wound up and let go. To the amazement of those present, the machine bent over its piece of paper and composed a poem in French, before concluding with the phrase, Ecrit par Maillardet (Grenville 14). Visitors today seemed no less surprised by Maillardet's automaton, the exhibit drawing, at least on the day I was in attendance, a great deal more attention than the cubist paintings of Leger and Picasso, or the video installations showing sequences from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. We expect a computer to play chess, or a metallic policeman to wield a rapid-fire rifle, but writing is somehow different. It suggests the presence not of a program but of a person, one whose actions are the free and spontaneous expressions of some deep reserve of selfhood, an inwardness or depth of being which is capable of reflecting on itself as a self. The very appearance of writing, as Plato suggests in the Phaedrus, is always marked by the trace or outline of a living presence, the unique individual who is both the source and origin of the enunciative act. No wonder, then, the interest of the crowds in Maillardet's automaton, and its precocious claim to authorship. There is a certain audacity to the act of signing its poem, and not only because L'Automaton Maillardet is less a proper name than it is a kind of brand or corporate logo. What we recognize in this performance is not so much the machine's failure to be human, as something of our own, the automaton's efforts to establish itself as the origin of expression mirroring our own need to assure ourselves that it is we that write words and not words that write us. The small flourish of the pen as the automaton signs its name seems strangely familiar. To someone who is interested in the relationship of technology to the study of literature, what was most surprising about this representation of the writing machine was its evident delight in its subject matter. Evoking little of the fear or dread that one typically associates with the uncanny, Maillardet's automaton stands in marked contrast to the dominant tone of much of the contemporary debate concerning the effects of technology on the practices of reading and writing. In his study of the decline of book culture, The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts places the blame for the current state of literacy on the computer, and the highly mediated forms of social interaction that result from networked communications. Following a line of argumentation first developed by Marshall McLuhan, Birkerts claims that the sequential nature of print, in which the reader must gather meaning in a cumulative manner as she proceeds from the left to the right margin and from the top to the bottom of the page, has given way to the instantaneity of the electric circuit. …