Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 143
Machines for Ultimate Questions
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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