Androids in the Enlightenment

Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self

Adelheid Voskuhl

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226034164, 9780226034027
• eBook ISBN: 9780226034331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these "Enlightenment automata" have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized.

 

In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines. 

ONE

Introduction: Androids, Enlightenment, and the Human-Machine Boundary

Android automata, robots, and mechanical humans have been central to our understanding of the relationship between humans and machines. They are designed to look and move as human beings do and perform motions and techniques such as walking, writing, or music-making. For a spectator, it is often difficult to determine whether an android object is human or machine. Because androids so effectively destabilize our sense of the boundary between humans and machines and, by extension, our sense of our own constitution, they and their histories evoke a broad range of concerns, most significantly, perhaps, those related to the promises and perils of the modern industrial age.

Specifically, those android automata that were made during the Enlightenment have played an influential role in our understanding of modern industrial society and the human-machine boundary in it, either directly or through texts. Enlightenment automata were spectacular and innovative self-moving objects and, in regard to mechanical complexity, the most sophisticated of their kind compared to not only earlier but also later periods. They have attracted people’s attention continuously from the time they were made to the present and have served throughout all stages of industrialization during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries as eloquent metaphors for the social and economic changes, and novel human-machine encounters, brought about by the steam engine, the factory, and the electronic computer. The Enlightenment period as such is also widely recognized as a milestone in the making and theorizing of modern society. For this reason as well, Enlightenment automata are often taken to be forerunners and figureheads of the modern, industrial machine age, an age in which the economic, social, cultural, and aesthetic constitution of humans changed fundamentally and supposedly became “mechanized.”¹

In this book I discuss two android automata that were made in the Enlightenment. They both represent women playing a keyboard-type instrument (see figs. 1 and 2).² One is a harpsichord player that was built by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, father and son, who were clock-makers from the small town La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Neuchâtel mountains in the western part of Switzerland. They presented this remarkable, life-size automaton to the public in 1774. The seated figure is about four feet high and shows a young woman of about age fifteen in front of a small organ. She plays her instrument like a human by pushing keys on the keyboard with her fingers. The other automaton is a dulcimer player that was made by the cabinetmaker David Roentgen in collaboration with the clock-maker Peter Kinzing. David Roentgen, together with his father, ran a sizable furniture manufacture (a preindustrial type of factory) in the small principality of Neuwied in the Holy Roman Empire, about seventy miles south of Cologne on the Rhine. He offered this elegant, delicate automaton as a gift to Marie-Antoinette in 1785. The dulcimer player is smaller than the Jaquet-Droz family’s harpsichord player: she is one foot and nine inches tall, is arranged on top of a table, and strikes the strings of her dulcimer with two hammers. She purportedly represents Marie-Antoinette herself, who was thirty years old when the automaton was made. The musical instrument is large in relation to the automaton’s body: it is about two feet long by one foot wide, and the arrangement as a whole—consisting of musician, dulcimer, and table—is about four feet wide, two feet deep, and four feet high. Both women automata, despite differences in design, therefore play music at the same height: the eye level of a seated spectator. They produce similarly captivating scenarios of music-making with different aesthetic means. The harpsichord player shows a musical performance in real-life dimensions with realistic motions of arms, hands, and fingers, while the dulcimer player’s appeal resides in her miniature effect and the contrast in size between the instrument and the music-playing figure.³

FIGURE 1 The harpsichord player (called La musicienne). Made by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1772–1774. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel (Switzerland); photograph S. Iori.

FIGURE 2 The dulcimer player (called La joueuse de tympanon). Made by David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing, Neuwied, 1785. © Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, Paris/photo P. Faligot: Inv. 7501.

The two mechanical androids are a subset of a group of about ten that were made between 1730 and 1810, and they are exemplary of their genre: they realistically carry out sophisticated motions, they are appealing and charming in their performance, and their clockwork mechanisms are hidden entirely in their bodies.⁴ The two also distinguish themselves from the others in important ways: they are the only women among the ten, the only musicians to play keyboard-type instruments, and the two (among pairs made by different artisans) with the greatest resemblance to each other. Being such an exemplary and distinguished pair within the larger set of Enlightenment automata, they allow us to draw several conclusions about mechanical arts, industrialism, and the human-machine boundary in the period on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.

The other eight android automata that we know of from the eighteenth century display a variety of figures and activities. They were made by clock-makers, cabinetmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans who had the means, skills, and incentives to do so.⁵ The French mechanic Jacques de Vaucanson presented three automata—a flute player, a galoubet player, and a duck—to the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1738. He set the standard for mechanical androids for the following decades and continues to this day to be the best known and most-often-cited eighteenth-century automaton-maker. In 1760 Friedrich von Knaus, a mechanic employed at the imperial court in Vienna, built a writing machine for the mechanical cabinet of the Holy Roman Emperor Franz Stephan. It was the first mechanical device to implement the process of writing. Father and son Jaquet-Droz introduced in 1774 three android automata often considered to be the most spectacular and appealing of the entire period: a writer, a draftsman, and the harpsichord player. In 1785 Roentgen and Kinzing presented the dulcimer player to Marie-Antoinette as a gift. Finally, in 1810, the instrument-maker family Johann Gottfried Kaufmann from Dresden built a trumpeter. It was reported to play tunes and fanfares in two voices and is today famed for inspiring E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous tale “The Sandman.” I provide details about each of these automata on pages 29–36.⁶

I focus on the dulcimer player and the harpsichord player because they replicate in a more comprehensive and far-reaching way than the others, through their distinctive mechanical design, an entire setting of eighteenth-century cultural and political activity. They make manifest Enlightenment ideas about music-making that were at the core of efforts to constitute new types of selfhood in a new type of society. The automata teach us about both technical and cultural conditions that were central to the beginnings of modern society in the eighteenth century. In a novel way, they make processes of creating cultural and technical modernities visible, by cutting across material, intellectual, and political cultures that are often discussed separately.

The German and Swiss artisans built the two women automata so that they move not only their arms, hands, and fingers to play music; they also move their heads, eyes, and torsos in rhythm with the music they play: two-voice dance pieces that were standard at contemporary courts. Separate mechanisms independently drive the automata’s motions of their heads, eyes, and, in the case of the harpsichord player, her torso to breathe and make a gracious bow at the end of each performance. These body motions were “extra” features, as it were, in addition to the music-making. The harpsichord player’s mechanism for moving her head and eyes and for breathing, for example, can run for one and a half hours. The musician thus begins these movements long before she starts playing her instrument. Miniaturizing this type of mechanism to fit into the automaton was one of the Jaquet-Droz family’s most innovative feats, and it indicates their strong intent to make the automaton perform subtle and graceful body motions in addition to playing music.

The automata’s bodily motions correspond to eighteenth-century performance techniques, as musicians at the time were expected to move their bodies while playing music to communicate affects and sentiments to the audience—affects and sentiments that they were meant to generate in themselves first, according to the program set forth by the musical piece. Cultivating sentiments was not only a feature of making and listening to music at the time; it was also part of a larger social movement in the European Enlightenment and was practiced in the reading and writing of literature, in the sciences and natural philosophy, in letter-writing and friendship, and in travel culture. Sentiments were taken as means to form new types of social interaction and used as the basis for a new, more equal and just social order: civil society. Civil society, made up of rational, sensible, and equal citizens, was meant to replace the traditional estate and court societies and be held together and sustained by, among other things, cultivated and shared sentiments.⁷

The artisan automaton makers thus manifested mechanically in their androids body practices that cultivated sociability, sentiments, and practices of subject- and society-formation.⁸ The culture of sentimentality was not only a social and political affair, prescribing participation in other people’s feelings and generating emancipated forms of social conduct such as in an audience or a reading club. It was also a practice of self-reflexivity in which feeling subjects were supposed to find and experience themselves, in a manner discussed in the era’s cultural, political, and pedagogical literature.⁹ The specific musical literature of the time made the same point about the relationship between musician and listeners in a musical performance. Music-playing women automata that communicate sentiments thus raise issues that touch simultaneously on mechanics, artisans, subject-formation, and social order.

The two automata replicate mechanically a comprehensive scenario of cultural and political activity of their time. The image of piano-playing women was a widespread stereotype: it embodied contested cultural and political gender issues and was the subject of pointed caricatures.¹⁰ In my study, accordingly, I investigate the automata not only as symbols of industrial modernity, as they have been used widely, but also, and primarily, as products of their own period, the early, preindustrial phases of modern society. Doing so, I bring the eighteenth century into a sustained dialogue with industrial modernity. Although the eighteenth century is rightfully considered to be a milestone in the making of the modern age, it still retained distinctly “early” modern features that set it apart from the industrial age. On the European continent, in particular, the eighteenth century was a period of largely pre- and protoindustrial production and was characterized by a social order that was culturally, politically, and legally organized as estates in a court society. Furthermore, the bourgeois classes were still in a very early phase of consolidating and emancipating, efforts that they based on sentimental practices among other things. Despite my two women automata’s later association with industrial modernity, they and the textual commentary they occasioned are products of these emerging “early” modern practices: protoindustrial mechanical arts, novel techniques of bourgeois sociability in a courtly estate society, sentimental music-making, and novel types of literary production.

However, androids from the eighteenth century have sparked interest continuously since their creation, especially because the two hundred or so years between their making and the present span the entire history of industrialization in Europe and North America. Their continuous use as illustrations for the varied experiences in an industrializing world has kept the automaton motif alive to this day and has maintained and perpetuated its credibility as an allegory for relationships between humans and machines. The automata that were made in the eighteenth century underwent a long and complex journey, literally and figuratively, between the Enlightenment and the end of the Cold War. The very idea of the “Enlightenment automaton” has been used in a wide range of ways and is not an unambiguous historical or conceptual category. Our current understanding of the Enlightenment automaton is preceded by a long and contested history of ideas about how android automata do, or do not, epitomize humans in the industrial age.¹¹

My study raises the questions of how eighteenth-century automata became such successful symbols of a later and in many ways very different type of modernity and how their roots in their own time help us understand better this later industrial modernity for which we so readily make them a symbol. I uncover how protoindustrial conditions were already forming in the eighteenth century, as others have before me, but my case also prompts me to ask how objects rooted in a preindustrial court society became so successfully associated with industrial periods. We use eighteenth-century androids as emblems of human-machine problems that are situated firmly in the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century and the major wars (including the Cold War) of the twentieth. I ask what this fact teaches us about our understanding of, on one hand, the relationship between humans and machines in the industrial age and, on the other, the objects that we choose to represent this relationship and make it comprehensible to ourselves.

The Book’s Structure

I treat the range of themes that converge in the construction and interpretation of my two women automata by integrating the social and economic histories of artisan industries in western Switzerland and the Rhineland with cultural histories of sentimental body techniques and literary production on automata from 1740 to 1815. This effort occupies chapters 2 through 5. In chapter 6 I discuss these findings in the context of the two-hundred-year history following my automata’s construction. During this period Enlightenment automata were engaged, cited, and rendered symbols successively of each of the later stages of industrialization. The two women automata thus introduce us, on the one hand, to a multifaceted world in the eighteenth century that featured the design and construction of mechanical androids, music-making, nascent bourgeois self-awareness, and literary exploration of the human-machine boundary. On the other, they help us understand how objects that seem to successfully symbolize relationships between humans and machines travel equally successfully through later periods and get used in those later contexts as metaphors of later and later industrial modernities, often with an assumption that their symbolic connotations remain unchanged through different periods of human-machine relations.

My two women automata were made in artisan environments in the 1770s and 1780s that combined in unique and productive ways traditional and modern elements of craft and trade that were flourishing in protoindustrial early modern Europe. In regard to the history of economics and of technology, this was an exceptional period, on the cusp of the industrial revolution, that saw the last blossoming of the artisan and court worlds on the European continent. The body...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Androids, Enlightenment, and the Human-Machine Boundary
• 2. The Harpsichord-Playing Android; or, Clock-Making in Switzerland
• 3. The Dulcimer-Playing Android; or, Furniture-Making in the Rhineland
• 4. The Design of the Mechanics; or, Sentiments Replicated in Clockwork
• 5. Poetic Engagement with Piano-Playing Women Automata
• 6. The “Enlightenment Automaton” in the Modern industrial Age
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index