Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 5a: Automata and the Proto-Industrial Ideology of the Enlightenment — History September 18, 2014
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Adam Smith, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Charles Coulomb, Charles Dufay, David Hume, Derek Price, Francois Quesnay, Gottfried Leibniz, Henry Maudslay, Isaac Newton, Jacques Vaucanson, Jeremy Bentham, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Marc Brunel, Max Horkheimer, Rene Descartes, Rupert Hall, Samuel Bentham, Samuel Clarke, Simon Schaffer, Theodor Adorno
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This post continues my look at Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Schaffer (Chicago University Press, 1999).
The division of labor in pin manufacturing. From the Encyclopédie.
Pt. 4 examined Schaffer’s characterization of an ideology associated with the Enlightenment, reflected in the era’s fascination with automata. This ideology revolved around the belief that physiology, labor, cognition, and social relations could be comprehended in mechanical terms, and governed according to philosophically derived managerial regimens. Pt. 4 also explored Schaffer’s situation of his arguments within a large, diverse, and venerable historiography of the mechanistic aspirations of the Enlightenment.
Pt. 5 turns to look at the historical events that Schaffer marshaled into his history of this ideology.
Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 4: Automata and the Proto-Industrial Ideology of the Enlightenment — Historiography August 13, 2014
Posted by Will Thomas in Ideology of Science, Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Adelheid Voskuhl, Alan Q. Morton, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Charles Coulomb, Dena Goodman, Ernst Cassirer, Frederick the Great, Immanuel Kant, James Graham, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Ehrard, Jean-Marie Apostolides, Joan Landes, John Cleland, John Desaguliers, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Karl Marx, Ken Alder, Leo Braudy, Lissa Roberts, Marquis de Sade, Michel Foucault, Norton Wise, Otto Mayr, Peter Dear, Reinhart Koselleck, Roger Chartier, Roland Barthes, Roy Porter, Simon Schaffer, Terry Castle, Thomas Markus, Walter Benjamin, William Sewell
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Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Schaffer (Chicago University Press, 1999)
“Enlightened Automata” is one of Schaffer’s few pieces that is especially forthright about the overarching scholarly project of which it is a part. It is certainly the centerpiece — and his clearest exposition — of his work on what he occasionally referred to as “machine philosophy,” a concept that interrelates several historical developments:
- The rising use of mechanisms in philosophical experiments, which have the virtue of preventing human fallibility and prejudice from influencing their outcomes.
- The use of mechanisms as explanatory metaphors in natural, moral, and political philosophy.
- The replication of natural phenomena and human behavior in mechanisms, i.e. automata.
- Industrialization, i.e., the replacement of craft processes with machinery, and the concomitant regulation and control of human action, especially manual labor, through managerial regimes.
Schaffer takes these four developments (but especially 2 and 4) to characterize the ideological ambitions of the Enlightenment. In “Enlightened Automata,” he leverages the history of the construction and display of automata (3), and commentary on such automata, as a means of probing these ambitions.
Ether Wave Propaganda 