Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 143

Machines for Ultimate Questions 139 as models of artificial beings in a rather similar sense as smart machines and virtual agents are used by science-fiction authors today. In these writers of one and a half or two centuries ago, however, we also encounter a strong orientation towards existential problems, incited by technological achievements. It appears that art profits directly from the artificial, the synthetic, from whatever is conveyed to the largest extent possible by man, and from imagination whose inspiration is technology. The modelling of future things and alternative, even transgressive forms of life in the sense of science fiction sharpens the atmosphere created in a literary work to an ecstatic point at which the issues of the most consequential existential alternatives are crystallised more poignantly than in everyday natural situations. Let us make here only a fleeting reference to Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Hoffmann’s Sandman. In Shelley’s text, we encounter Frankenstein’s synthetic product, a monster whose tragic destiny raises a number of very deep and nowadays particularly relevant dilemmas associated with the physics and metaphysics of the person and with the fate of mankind facing the challenge of modern sciences and technologies. Frankenstein’s m onster is one of the most tragic characters in world literature; not only was he denied a name by his creator, but also—and this is crucial—a future. Out of fear that he may represent the threat to the future of mankind by a race of future people, let us simply say proto-cyborgs, he was also denied a bride and thus the possibility of reproduction. Tragically, nameless and unhappy, he vanishes together with his deviant creator from the face of the planet. Frankenstein is also a text which, at a very early stage, envisages a shift from the traditional orientation of science, bound to analytics and description of the laws of nature, towards a science which itself has become creative, promethean, and—in a certain sense— also artistic; it directs itself to the production of the models of life as such. This is the shift, which in recent years was the concern of the theory of artificial life, conceived as an investigation into alternative forms of life in non-organic, symbolic environments. What is at issue here is life-as-it-could-be, as opposed to the familiar forms of life (life-as-we-know-it). Also extremely relevant, even in the context of cybernetics and cyber anthropology, is Hoffmann’s Sandman. For the main character, Nathanael, falls in love with Olympia who is a synthetic being-automaton, built according to the logic of clock mechanism and with regard to the already mentioned Vaucansanian artistry of automata. Olympia is an unbelievably lovely being, who/which, however, is only capable of sighing “uh, uh”, and, at best, of articulating the reply “Goodnight, my dearest.’’Although Nathanael is educated, well-read and sensitive, he does not find this particular muteness of his beloved disturbing. He does not find it a matter of dispute; on the contrary, he even acquiesces and turns against words, against the customary, discursive communication. “What are words? Mere words! The glance