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SLIDE 1
Media Archaeology, Cultures of Automata, and Mechanized Cognition
My research overall investigates cultures of automata that surround the idea of
mechanized cognition. Specifically, I focus on how Orientalist simulations of the
machinic subject in Western techno-cultures mediated anxieties about early
experimentations with intelligent machines.
By tracing examples ranging from pre-modern humanoid automata to
contemporary socio-technical systems, my approach unites theory and methods
from a) Media Studies, focusing on the archaeology of technical media and de-
colonial critique, b) Cognitive Studies, concentrating on cultural techniques of
cognitive labor, and c) Science and Technology Studies, exploring the interface
between subjectivity and socio-technical systems. I primarily use media archaeology
as a method to investigate the contact point between the cultural and the
technical. In my exploration of contexts of automation as cultural historical
themes, I integrate de-colonial critique as a way to counter the Western-centrism
of Artificial Intelligence history.
SLIDE 2
I have also been active in bringing my research in contact with a practice-based
methodology and creative work.
Recently, in collaboration with ZKM in 2015, I helped reconstruct one of the
automata designed by the 13 century polymath Al-jazari, for an exhibit named
Allah’s Automata, an exhibition of devices from an historical period of ‘Arab
Islamic Renaissance.’ My essay, entitled Divine Clockwork: Reading al-Jazari in the
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Light of al-Ghazali’s Mechanistic Universe Argument, was also published in the art
book called Allah’s Automata as part of the ZKM exhibition.
My interactive media reconstructions of medieval automata have been exhibited as
part of the permanent collection in the Istanbul Museum of The History of Science
and Technology in Islam, since 2008. I also contributed to the exhibit called “Arabs
in the West” with my interactive reconstructions, at the Allard Pierson Museum in
Amsterdam in 2016, as part of the project Encounters with the Orient in Early
Modern European Scholarship.
SLIDE 3
I have also furthered the scope of media archaeological studies by expanding its
focus to be more specific, even in more political contexts, as ways to investigate
alternative futures or pasts, by using speculative design that offers a critical, as well
as a creative way of tackling issues in local situations. For example, one of the
recent collaborations I was involved in with Jussi Parikka, as part of the Istanbul
Design Biennale, engages media archaeology with speculative design as a
pedagogical methodology referring to the experiences of Middle-Eastern
Automata.
I can talk more about this project later, as part of my future research itinerary if
there is an interest from the audience.
The exhibit component of this collaboration, called A Media Archaeology of
Ingenious Designs, looked at the automata and astrolabes developed within the
Arabic-Islamic culture of the 9th to 13th centuries as early precedents of today’s
programmable machines. Automata, mechanical devices that perform a set of
predetermined functions, raise questions about what the human is or isn’t. This
exhibit was centered around two reconstructions of automata, the Elephant
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Clock and a Water Serving Automaton, from the 13th century engineer Ismail Al-
Jazarī’s manuscript called the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices.
My current book project called Epistemic Engines: Archaeology of ‘Oriental’
Automata is contracted at Amsterdam University Press, in the Recursions series. It is
a media archaeology of automata that considers early modern instances of
intelligent automata as conceptual prototypes of the Artificial Intelligence project.
I argue that, as mediums of mechanized cognition, these automata inhabit a
three-way interface between the European self, the Oriental other and the
machine, as the Orientalist forms of “othering” have been instrumental in the
imaginary media of the mechanization of human cognition.
SLIDE 4
Today, as a way to demonstrate one of those instances, I am going to present The
Chess Player, a chapter from my book in progress.
I will be speaking about how an 18th century chess player automaton creates an
opportunity from which to engage with discussions about mechanized cognition in
the context of automata culture during the Enlightenment.
I will use Chess Player Automaton to demonstrate how, throughout the
development of the project of imagining mechanized cognition during the
Enlightenment, some of the underlying cultural assumptions were embodied by
various human machine assemblages, were experimented with by these
prototypes, and were culturally programmed into their material performance. I will
also show how some of our current notions of Artificial Intelligence are
conditioned by similar cultural assumptions that guided early modern
experimentations with mechanized cognition.
In my analysis of the Chess Playing Automaton I explore the following questions:
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How does the Chess Playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental
subject to illustrate the notion of mechanized cognition?
In what ways do these uses connect to Orientalist framing of a Muslim as
machine-like subject as rooted in medieval Christian theology and literature?
I argue that these experimental products of the perennial myth of machine
intelligence have mediated the Enlightenment project of a self-regulating subject.
They have simultaneously acted as performers of technological and cultural
alterity, satiating the anxieties caused by the unfamiliar notion of mechanized
cognition, by projecting them onto all-familiar ethnic and religious differences.
SLIDE 5
Just to give you an overall context of how this chapter is related to the rest of the
book, let me briefly tell you about the most recent reincarnation of the Chess
Player, called The Mechanical Turk. This project was also my initial entry point into
this research.
At the beginning of the 21st century, an AI project reimagined the extended
cognitive network in the form of a virtual labor market. Inspired by the 18th
century chess player automaton, Amazon.com branded this crowdsourcing
platform as the Mechanical Turk. Amazon.com’s initial motivation to build the
Amazon Mechanical Turk, or AMT, emerged after the failure of its artificial
intelligence programs in the task of finding duplicate product pages on its retail
website. After a series of futile attempts, the project engineers turned to humans
to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system. Later, AMT
made this cognitive labor platform available to private contractors in return for a
commission. AMT’s digital workshop emulates artificial intelligence systems by
replacing digital computing with globally sourced human brainpower.
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The virtual migrant workers of the system, power the so-called “artificial-artificial
intelligence” engine of the Western software industry in a state of exception,
devoid of legal rights. If the digital network is the assembly line of cognitive labor,
then the Mechanical Turk is its model apparatus. This configuration also embodies
some of the conflicts whose seeds are placed during the early modern
conceptualizations of the mechanization of industrial labor through division of
cognitive labor. One of the most significant examples of this conceptualization was
the chess-playing automaton that performed the insurmountable conflicts of the
disciplining of the human mind for industrial production.
SLIDE 5
Figure.1.1 In this engraving Joseph Racknitz showed how he thought the
automaton operated.
Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton was constructed and presented
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in 1770 at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and gave the
impression that the pipe-smoking Turk mannequin, controlled by a sophisticated
mechanism under the cabinet, could play serious chess against human opponents
However, the seemingly mechanical mind of the Turk was actually manipulated by
Kempelen’s chess master assistant, who was hidden beneath the pseudo-
mechanism. The Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and
the Americas and attracted many notable challengers and spectators, such as
Charles Babbage, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Similar to its 21st century reincarnation, the 18th century Chess Player Automaton
promised to deliver a truly mechanized intelligence, but it neither succeeded nor
entirely failed in that mission. It was not exactly an automaton because the hands
of the Oriental android were indeed controlled by a hidden human operator; but it
still served its main function by providing a platform for an evaluation of the main
question; “what would a mechanized cognition mean?”
The Chess Playing Automaton performed this question as a material discursive
apparatus in which a HUMAN PASSED AS A MACHINE THAT WAS PASSING AS A
HUMAN.
My interest as a media scholar in intelligent automata has two motivations. I
consider most Enlightenment automata as examples of imaginary media because
they were either a) designed much too early, and have been materialized at some
point in time, or b) they were mere conceptual prototypes of a much more
sophisticated future technical media. Even though they were never materialized
into finished products, they still functioned as experiments that influence the final
product.
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Intelligent automata are also good to think with because they are apparatuses that
inherently activate the question of the nature of the "real" operator as part of
their epistemic function. Possible answers to this recurrent puzzle often provide
explanations with further moral consequences, depending on the nature of the
operator that is implicated. In that sense, intelligent automata are epistemic
engines through which subjectification and desubjectification processes are
modeled.
However, in most histories of automata, either the focus is solely put on the
technical dimension while ignoring the cultural, OR, considered solely in relation to
the European cultural context while overlooking examples from Islamicate cultures
as an extension of colonialist desires to exclude non-western cultures from the
Western-centric histories of science and technology.
As a scholar with a Middle Eastern background my stake in this research is
acknowledging the need to decolonize the repertoire of media history by de-
linking these previously isolated two cultures of media. This is because I believe
that broadening the media archaeological horizon must address more than the
inclusion of the “Others” of media history while leaving intact the more
infrastructured forms of ‘control of knowledge.’ Deep time histories of Middle East
art and technology have to be mobilized as ways to participate in the debate
about modernity as the historiographical condition of power that gradually
cultivated as part of the Orientalist narratives.
So, how did the Chess playing Automaton use the image of the Oriental subject to
illustrate the notion of mechanized intelligence?
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While working on his initial conceptions of the Chess Playing Automaton,
Wolfgang von Kempelen, a technocrat for the Austrian Habsburg Empire, was also
witnessing the state apparatus in which he was embedded, going through wide-
ranging bureaucratic reforms based on the calculability of standardized social
relations. The Chess Player embodied a similar set of questions and became a
conceptual prototype for mechanized reason.
SLIDE 7
In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault considers 18th century
automata as models for how the human body was thought to reflect the social
order. Consequently, the mechanistic conception of the human body needs to be
read in two registers; the anatomico-metaphysical register as constituted mainly
through Cartesian mind/body duality; and, the technico-political register that
reflected empirical methods deployed by the state to discipline the operations of
the body through state institutions. In the context of these two registers, the 18th
century humanoid automata functions as a model, on one hand for submission, on
the other for empirical analysis.
Foucault has often been criticized for ignoring the racial others in his
historiography. Notably, his concept of docility displaces Orientalist traces by solely
focusing on the European subject in a selective genealogy. This absence becomes
more critical in the analysis of an automaton that carries significations of Oriental
“other,” such as Kempelen’s chess-playing automaton.
SLIDE 8
However, I believe that the trick of the chess-playing automaton involves more
than just exchanging the enacted body of the European chess player with the
represented body of the Turk, animated through its mechanical artifice. It also
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includes initial assumptions that were set up in the audience by the automaton’s
chess performance that were crucial in influencing the public debates on the
mechanized cognition that provided the larger context for these performances.
These initial assumptions are closely tied to Orientalist undercurrents that were
exploited by Enlightenment discourse in order to configure the docile subject on
the image of the Turk.
The Orientalist assumptions that were active in Enlightenment automata were also
effective in the cultural performance of Kempelen’s automaton. I will focus on the
two main aspects of the affordance of the image of the Turk as a significant part
of the main interface of the chess-playing automaton.8 The first critical aspect of
the Turk’s performance is its liminal quality. This liminality created a buffer zone
against the risk associated with the idea of the man-machine that most
Enlightenment humanoid automata performed. That potential risk was often
associated with instigations of libertinism, atheism, and insurrection in public due
to the heretical understanding of a body without a soul. Relegating this precarious
role to an Oriental figure had, in fact, a long tradition with origins in medieval
romance literature. The Oriental automata, through its association with liminal
spaces and experiences in these literary accounts, conveyed surveillance, discipline,
and enforcement of limits of morality.
The second aspect of the Turk’s performance is a particular form of docility that
conveys the idea of the disciplined productive body, which played a salient role in
the formation of the enlightened culture). The association of the Oriental with
docility has its roots in medieval theology, where the Muslim subjects were
considered as strict followers of religious code. Linking this association with the
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discourse of Oriental automata, Christian theology configured a particular
discourse of Muslim as automaton. Furthermore, docility prefigures the hidden
chess player’s performance of the intellectual labor on behalf of the Oriental
automaton. This dual performance of docility highlights the question of the
intellectual labor in the context of the epistemic renovation in 18th-century
Europe. These two aspects of the Turk’s performance—docility and liminality—are
crucial for grasping its function as a model of power for the idealization of a social
order in the context of the large-scale processes of mechanization of labor in
Europe in the 18th century.
An important aspect of this mechanization is the division of mental labor,
which entails a re-configuration of intellectual production in a multitude of
domains, ranging from literary authorship to bureaucratic organizations.
1. Docile Automata
In Europe in the second half of the 18th century, automata performed as a
secure experimental apparatus for exploring impenetrable ontological
liminalities in a more systemic way and most of the time simulated life in order
to redefine it . Fueled by the mechanistic philosophy, humanoid automata
trans- formed not only the cultural attitude toward living creatures but also
machines, as they performed the idea that mechanisms were also living beings.
The mutual relationship between the animation of machinery and the
mechanization of life was explored through the experimental apparatus of
humanoid and animal automata and was popularized through the debates
instigated by their public exhibition in Europe.
Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton formulated the question of the
mechanized life with a unique emphasis: Can the mind exist without the body?
10
To this question, it gave two answers simultaneously: yes and not yet. The
actual answer was not yet, as the automaton was indeed controlled by a human
operator. However, the deceptive yes response was still valuable as a
philosophical game10 for grappling with the ideas that were later made
technically possible and implemented systematically, such as self-regulating
mechanisms.
SLIDE 9
In contrast to other automata of the 18th century, the Turk’s apparatus did not
act as mere clockwork; instead, it gave the impression of a self-regulating
system that could counter external actions within the symbolic logic of chess. As
historian of technology Otto Mayr (1970) suggests, in contrast to the idea of
clockwork universe, which was the political universe of autocratic feudalism, the
mechanical, political, and economic ideas of self-regulating systems influenced
the Enlightenment ideas of liberal subjects and democracy. This association is
partly constructed as a result of the rationalization of the socioeconomic life
through industrialization, where subjects self-regulate according to their
rational economic interests.
Consequently, an automatized chessboard represents the ideal Enlightenment
universe, where the subjects and their possible actions are coded according to the
regulations informed by the power structure of the society. Each subject is
endowed with a relative power, and they cannot go beyond the roles for which
they qualify. Particularly, when these intrinsic properties are abstracted into
geometric functions and when combined with the functions of other subjects, they
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have the potential to exhibit numerous but finite possibilities for a final outcome.
This is another reason for mechanized chess being a model for imagining a society
whose coded subjects articulate a plurality of results. Thus, the chess-playing Turk
embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanical
docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe of the
game of chess.
The chess-playing automaton performed its role as a model of power in
multiple layers, the most significant of which was the demonstration of knowledge
as a tool of power. This demonstration followed a particular tradition, namely, the
nature as a divine theater as suggested by naturalist philosophy.
The hidden chess-player was the open secret of Kempelen’s shows.
Kempelen admitted that his automaton was just a so-called “happy deception.” As
Simon Schaffer notes, one of the roles of these automata was, quote, “to allow the
selective entry by th[e] power to the inner workings of art and nature”, unquote.
In other words this open secret was also a conceited wink by the guardians of
knowledge and power, reminding the general public of the guardians’ privileged
status.
Kempelen studied the works on human physiology of prominent naturalists
of his time. He also followed the tradition of public spectacle of experimental
natural philosophy in his demonstration of the automata. His shows were
meticulously designed to set up multiple assumptions in the audience about the
inner workings of the automaton in order to initiate a collective investigation.
The element of mystery in Kempelen’s performance, functions within the system of
representation of the natural philosophy, which perceived the whole of nature as a
“divine” theater. This system of representation could be easily exploited in order to
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create a particular moral impression on its audience. Scottish philosopher Thomas
Reid expounds this moral effect as follows: Q “Upon the theatre of nature we see
innumerable effects, which requires an agent endowed with active power; but the
agent is behind the scene.” UQ
Kempelen’s Oriental automaton benefited from the assumptions within this
theater as a significant representation of the techno-mythical idea of the
mechanized mind. It was not just a machine; it also provided the language that
made it possible to articulate that myth. As in every technical medium, it carried its
own inscriptions of discursive formulations that defined its cultural system of
significations. The Automaton Chess Player performed these inscribed notions
through fundamental puzzles that have been relevant throughout the history of
the artificial intelligence discourse, and which were tackled by notable scholars
that began in the 17th century with Gottfried Leibniz and continued into the 19th
and 20th century with Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Babbage, Norbert Wiener, and Alan
Turing.
What is missing in these accounts is that the chess-playing automaton was
only able to perform its role through the peculiar coupling of the techno-mythical
idea of automated mind, with the body of Europe’s “Other,” which harbored the
so-called “heretical” attempts of materialist ideas under the turban of The Turk.
SLIDE 10
Since the introduction of Byzantine and Muslim automata during the
medieval period, and, up until early modernity, the European conception of the
Oriental automata functioned as a composite alterity by combining the unknown
world of automata with the unknown world of the Oriental. Medieval Christian
theology utilized this association for a symbolic disproof of Islam by assigning its
subjects to the so-called “mindless” mechanical world of gears. In medieval France,
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for example, monks used the term mechanicum in order to describe Muslim
practices of sorcery. The Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, contrasted the
Muslim mechanicum, with the transformation of the Eucharist which was one of
the inimitable signs of perpetual miraculous semiosis. This contrast was the basis of
his rendering of Islam as bereft of miracle making.
SLIDE 11
The humanoid automata were also referred to as “mammets” whose
etymology is traced to Muhammed. The term was later used as a humorous
expression to rebuke young women in English Renaissance drama as having
marionette-like behavior.1 Kathleen Biddick, in her insightful work, considers this
association as an integral part of a, quote, “theological foreclosure of semiosis”,
unquote, to Muslims. The subjects of Islam, devoid of the magic of meaning-
making, could only be the initial contents of the Christian politico-theological
apparatus that has the privilege of creating the final, ideal, miraculous meaning in
the embodiment of a European sovereign.
According to Lewis Mumford, by the 17th century, “[m]echanics became the
new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah: the machine.” However,
that messiah first had to engage in a relentless endeavor in purging the Muslim
automaton from itself in order to embark on its long journey towards a full
1 Such as in the words of Lord Capulet, the father of Juliet, after she opposes marrying with Count Paris
against her father’s wish:
And then to have a wretched puling fool,
A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender,
To answer 'I'll not wed; I cannot love,
I am too young; I pray you, pardon me.–Romeo and Juliet Act 3 scene 5, lines 184-188, in Shakespeare,
William. Romeo and Juliet. Classic Books Company, 2001
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machinic subject. In fact, this process was part of a long-term systematic epistemic
violence.
SLIDE 12
Edward Said, a scholar of literary critique, has explored one of the most
elaborate intellectual projects in Western history of epistemic violence. Said
describes Orientalism as, quote, “a style of thought based upon an epistemological
distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.”, unquote. Orientalism is
an ideological product of the European material culture, constructing the Orient as
a mode of discourse. Especially after the end of the eighteenth century this
discourse became a “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having
authority over the Orient” by primarily functioning as a geopolitical awareness as
well as allocating this awareness into a “whole series of interests” including
aesthetic, academic, economic and sociological domains. Said explains that one of
the crucial means of this domination was to render the Oriental subject impossible
to be “a free subject of thought or action.”
Orientalism historically coincides with the European colonial expansion
period that takes place between 1815 and 1914. Similarly, Foucault locates the
epistemic violence through the re-definition of sanity within the emerging
institutions of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning
of the nineteenth century. From this crucial overlap, post-colonial scholar Gayatri
Spivak has deduced the existence of a “two-handed engine,” the epistemic
renovation that redefines historical narrative both in Europe and in colonies.
SLIDE 13
Therefore, Oriental automata represent a crucial link in this two-handed
engine: On one hand the automaton performs the docility for the Western subject
in the image of the Oriental. On the other, it casts the Oriental subject outside of
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the norms of being human by subjecting them to the world of the machines.
However, these techno-political assumptions that were active in the Oriental
automata’s performance also carried a transformative power through their act of
simulation.
Performing the idea of the self-regulating system through the symbolic
universe of the chess game was partly enabled by the cultural alterity enacted by
the image of the Turk. Until the 19th century, in Europe, the term “Turk” was used
interchangeably with “Muslim,” referring to the subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
On the other hand, in the European imagination, chess, as the proto-war simulator,
was introduced and mastered by the Orientals and epitomized their military
power. Therefore, the simulation of the simulator in the example of the chess-
playing automaton had a double significance in the articulation of the ideas of the
self-regulating system and autonomous mind. First, the material manifestation of
a mechanized cognition by means of self-regulating machinery brings the mind
down to the same universe as the body that is the so-called “profane” nature of
the physical world. Consequently, this materiality rendered the mind
manipulatable towards the imperialist wishes of the sovereign. Within the history
of imperialist projects designed to subdue nature, this moment signifies a crucial
recognition that nature is now nothing but a series of clockworks that has also
subsumed human mind within its mechanics.
However, the simulation of the mechanized cognition via the performance
of the Oriental alterity was also related to the unsettling evocations of the
autonomous mind for the 18th century European subject. The most crucial change
that caused these uncanny evocations was the middle class, emerging in major
urban centers, as a result of industrialization. This emerging middle class was
differentiated from the masses of manual labor by means of their involvement in
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the prolific print culture. This differentiation was further highlighted with the
moral authority ascribed to the recognition of a so-called higher-order, refined
intellect as distinct from that of the lower-order, mechanical intellect.
SLIDE 14
In this milieu, the idea of the mechanization of cognition created a crisis in
this distinction and undermined the moral authority associated with the
intellectual labor. The immense industrial expansion of the print culture in the late
seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, was also meant as a
deterioration of the traditional authority associated with the literary “authorship.”
Indeed, the mechanized writing styles performed by the highly professionalized
authors of these texts mirrored the mechanized production of textual material.
This fact was clearly visible in the production of the pamphlets that depict
demonstrations of android automata that perform mechanized writing, such as
The Writer built by Jacques Droz.
These mass-produced texts were mostly reproduced from one prototype and
reflected an intellectual indifference to the topic at hand by their professionalized
authors. Their textual craftsmanship on the mechanized writing of The Writer
automaton resembled the subject of their works.
The decline of the moral authority of literary authorship as a result of the
mechanization of intellectual labor is also related to the docility correlated with
work that was previously associated with the machinic subject of manual labor. The
degree of the perceived docility of an intellectual worker was directly correlated
with that worker’s position in the intellectual hierarchy. The chess-playing Turk, for
example, was useful to perform this intellectual hierarchical order because it
included various levels of expertise distributed across its participant operators.
During Kempelen’s performance, the intelligent automaton was subjected to the
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mastery of its impresario, the state engineer who belonged to the class of
managerial analysts, who stood clearly above others in the cognitive hierarchy. As
Simon Schaffer explains, this was the era when “the science of calculation became
the supreme legislative discipline, just as the calculating engines provided both
legislative and executive coordination.” Kempelen, as a leading figure of the
bureaucratic revolution of the Habsburg State, clearly embodied this supreme
legislative role.
SLIDE 15
But still, this was not the highest position in the intellectual hierarchy. As a
managerial engineer of bureaucratic processes, Kempelen had to rely on
mathematicians for laying out the principles for solving some of these puzzles. One
of the most significant examples of the Turk’s performance that used varied levels
of intellectual participation was called the Knight’s Tour. That problem is based on
the premise that a knight would visit all the squares (black and white) of the
board, starting from any square on the board, and completing its move by landing
on each square only once. The Knight’s Tour was inherently a mathematical puzzle
that was solved by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1758 when chess started
to be in fashion in European courts. Euler’s problem was an example of a
Hamiltonian path problem. Today, it is widely known in graph theory as a special
case of a traveling salesman problem that appears in a multitude of contemporary
computer science applications, ranging from semantic networks to genetic
algorithms. The demonstration of this puzzle highlights the role of another actor
in Kempelen’s chess playing automaton, the mathematician who represents a
higher cognitive status whose contribution was considered as a quintessential
rational skill. The distribution of roles in the Turk’s performances involved a clear
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division of mental labor, which would later become a significant subject matter in
the development of mechanical calculators.
SLIDE 16
These models made visible the impending techno-political reconfigurations,
and secured docility for the intellectual labor within self-regulating social order. In
other words, the development of technical means for intelligent automata was an
imbricated element of the public contestation for its political ends. The division of
mental labor was one of the most crucial aspects of the techno-political register,
due to its direct effect on the developments of the technologies of rationalism.
While the Turk was demonstrating the potential of the idea of an intelligent
automaton during its tours across Europe, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations
expounded an economic theory for the impending Industrial Revolution by
attributing a significant role to the division of labor. Smith observed that the
division of labor not only enables higher levels of automation but also eventually
renders human labor obsolete at an increasing rate.
Following Adam Smith’s analysis in The Wealth of Nations, a British
mathematician Charles Babbage thought that the principle of division labor when
applied to mental labor would serve for his eventual goal of transferring the
functions of the human cognitive functions to the operations of a machine.
Before this project, Babbage had seen one of the performances of the chess-
playing Turk in London in 1819, and about a year after he went to see the
automaton again at St. James Street and challenged it to a game. Babbage lost the
game in an hour. He later considered the thought of building a chess-playing
machine and exhibiting it for a stable income source, in order to fund his other
ambitious projects, such as the Difference Engine, but he never realized this idea.
SLIDE 17
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In 1825, a new owner, Johann Nopemuk Maelzel, the Viennese engineer,
inventor, and impresario of automata, brought the chess-playing Turk to several
Northern and Southern American cities. Not long after, however, a major challenge
to the chess-playing automaton’s coveted secret of modus operandi took place.
Based on a thorough comparison between Babbage’s calculating machine and The
Turk’s performance, the young editor of a Virginia based periodical, named Edgar
Alan Poe argued that the chess-playing automaton could not operate without the
manipulation of a human agent. In his essay, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” Poe
concluded that, quote, “(t)here is then no analogy whatever between the
operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr.
Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a ‘pure machine’ we must be
prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the
inventions of mankind”, unquote.
Poe’s later analytical literary works embodied a particular kind of
predicament that concerned his intellectual labor. The very possibility of a chess
automaton as a “pure machine” must have posed an uncanny prospect to Poe as
an intellectual worker, for its implications about the value of his intellectual labor.
In one of his later speculative narratives, Poe depicted von Kempelen as an
alchemist who transforms lead into gold, resulting in a reduced value of gold and
an increase in the price of lead in international markets. This could be read as an
allusion to the expected reduction of the intellectual labor as an outcome of the
mechanization of cognition. Poe later reflected this anxiety in a systemic way,
through his tales of ratiocination, a series of detective stories, including the
infamous Purloined Letters, which became a literary genre of its own.
Poe’s rejection of the possibility of a “pure machine” enabled him to
imagine that the solution to this puzzle included a very particular type of human
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machine assemblage, which was also a direct challenge to the idea of an
autonomous subject. Poe’s essay is particularly significant as a reflection on a
prominent theme in the American psyche, especially with the evocation of terror
and anxiety caused by the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in relation to
the mechanization of the mind. This transformation was a function of both
mimesis and the sublime through the formation of a particular relationship
between self and alterity that enabled transcending the conventional limits of the
individualized human subject.
In American Orientalism, the excess and magic produced by the wondrous
objects of these shows also reflected the consumption fantasies of the emerging
American middle class as a result of the colonial expansion of American trade
activities. The chess-playing automaton, as an imaginary media, exploited this
consumer fantasy for its transformative effect based on the anxiety caused by the
emergence of a new form of embodiment and subjectivity.
It is within this Orientalist consumer fantasy world that the figure of the
Turk, by functioning as the mimetic surrogate for the alterity of the machine,
enabled that transformative effect. The Turk essentially transferred the tension of
mechanization of cognition by allowing its enactment to be mediated by a
rationalized and tamed alterity that eventually humanized the uncanny premise of
automated cognition. This mediation is the key to understanding how the self-
regulating liberal subject relieved its anxiety of the mechanization of cognition by
means of the assurance of the cultural difference it had already established
through the fantasies and desires projected onto the Oriental.
SLIDE 18
CONCLUSION
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Archaeologies of technical media, whether they are imagined, planned,
behaviorally prototyped, or commodified, present immense possibilities for an
integrated analysis of technical media, material cultures, and the senses.
Consequently, my study of the chess-playing automaton as an archetypal imaginary
media of the mechanization of cognition focuses not only various instances of its
materialization but also its epistemic formulations and cultural techniques that
produce their own subjects. Throughout this project, I demonstrate that, by
enacting ideas of automated cognition in their most precarious stages, the chess
player embodied in its materialization a perpetual effort to collectively imagine an
alternative way of being human for the Western subject. The interaction between
the technological alterity of the myth of the mechanized cognition and the cultural
alterity of the Oriental has been a critical factor in this effort. The Chess player
mediated this process by perpetually translating one type of difference into
another, from technical to cultural and reverse.
END
SLIDE 19
My research agenda, for the next five years, focuses on two complementary
projects in various stages of development; Postcolonial Archaeology of Affective
Computing and Middle Eastern Futurism. On one side, I look at how western
techno-cultures rely on colonial imaginations for their conceptualizations of media
technologies from Affective Computing to AI. Equivalently, I am also interested in
how Middle Eastern cultures, in conversation with these techno-imaginaries,
engage with alternative futurities as an inherently de-colonial response. My recent
22
collaboration on Speculative Design and the Middle Eastern Futurism that was part
of the Istanbul Design Biennial is a product of this dual research focus.
Using speculative design, issues of local cultural politics of Ottoman pasts, of
alternative geographies of past Islamic inventions, of contested territories of
political representation that imagine other futures, meshes into a form of media
archaeology as practice-based methodology in a workshop setting. To mobilize the
middle-eastern media imaginaries as an alternative historical lineage, the project
aimed to use a speculative design method as a collective thinking through doing,
for countering the Western-centric media history narrative.
In our speculative design workshop, we explored these various forms of futurities
with the help of a “what if” question. What if the legacy of science and technology
in the Islamic world would have been able to gather such momentum that the
advanced technological age would have been branded by this alternative
technological heritage? Specifically, in the workshop we wanted to extend the
exhibit experience into a sort of collective imagination exercise by playing with its
objects and using them as our reference points.
Here is an example…
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