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- Convenor:
-
Irena Hayter
(University of Leeds)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Irena Hayter
(University of Leeds)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.3
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
The panel explores literary representations of artificial life in Japan from the Meiji, interwar and post-war periods. We argue that artificial humans embody anxieties about technology, capitalism, race and gender at distinctive historical moments, but they can also illuminate our own present.
Long Abstract:
In response to the section theme of ‘multispecies’, this panel engages with representations of non-human agency and the porous ontological boundaries between life and technics. Our papers take issue with dominant discourses around Japanese cultures of technological practice: both with the simple developmentalist trajectories in which artificial humans are the latest in a long line of automata and simulations of life and with the insistence on an essential and timeless Japanese techno-animism derived from Shinto and Buddhism. Instead we explore artificial humans as ciphers of anxieties about technology, capitalism, race and gender that arose at distinctive historical conjunctures, but that can also be read trans-historically to illuminate our present moment. We see these literary and visual representations as creative engagements with European literary texts and films that circulated transnationally.
Michal Daliot-Bul focuses on the obscure political novel Senman muryō hoshi sekai ryokō, ichi mei, sekaizō (Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds or A Store House of Worlds, 1882) and its extreme materialist visions of a future world in which chemically produced humans would hold positions of power but can also be disassembled at any time into the chemical components from which they were produced. Daliot-Bul considers the novel’s dystopian vision in which capitalism and technology instrumentalize everything, including humans, against the centrality of science and technology in the Meiji project. Irena Hayter maps the web of significations that connected the fashion model, the mannequin doll and the robot in the literary and visual culture of the Japanese interwar years. Her analysis is situated in contemporary discourses of rationalization and the perceived becoming-commodity and becoming-machine of the human body. Jonathan Abel examines depictions of machinic autopoiesis in 1950s Japan, focusing on Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s novel Saigo no kyōwakoku (The Last Republic) and Abe Kōbō’s story ‘R62gō no hatsumei’ (The Invention of No.R62). Abel explores anxieties and fantasies about capital and social change on the cusp of the Cold War and their resonances to present-day popular discourses of singularity in which visions of technology out of control mask white-supremacist fears of replacement by uncanny others.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Irena Hayter (University of Leeds)
Paper short abstract:
Irena Hayter considers the images of the first Japanese fashion models as robots and of the mannequin dolls as sentient, within the context of rationalization of bodies and machines during the interwar years.
Paper long abstract:
Japan’s robot boom from the late 1920s, with its proliferation of cultural images of robots and artificial humans (jinzō ningen), overlapped with the furore over the first fashion models. ‘Mannequin girls’ were hired by department stores to pose still in show windows or on specially created displays. Like other women in new jobs related to new technologies or urban spectacle (telephone operators, elevator girls, ‘gasoline girls’, etc.), they were often described as soulless and machinic. Show window mannequins, on the other hand, also objects of media fascination, were sometimes depicted in terms reserved for humans, with language slipping between the sentient and the inorganic.
My paper traces these crossings of ontological boundaries and the traffic of meanings between live models, mannequin dolls and robots, along with the European literary and filmic intertexts that structured them – Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) and Alraune (dir. Henrik Galeen, 1928). I argue that the artificial woman is both a philosophical toy appropriate to an age of mechanical reproduction and a fantasy construct mediating anxieties about the becoming-machine and becoming-commodity of the human body. The artificial woman gave concrete form to relations of capital, labour and power, in a manner strikingly similar to that of our own historical moment.
Jonathan Abel (Penn State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the discourse around robots in 1950s Japan in order to place into context the hype around technological singularity and replacement theory today.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines depictions of machinic autopoiesis in 1950s Japan to shed new light on theories of technological singularity and racial replacement. Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s nine-part serialized novel The Last Republic (Saigo no kyōwakoku), first published in Chūō Kōron between April and December of 1952, featured a Malthusian world of gender equality, declining birth rate, population pinches, labour shortages, and a drug- and hormone-addled humanity dependent on robot agro-labour. Then in March 1953 as if in unspoken reaction to Ishikawa, Abe Kōbō published “The Invention of No. R62” (R62 gō no hatsumei) in Bungakkai, a concise short story that tells the simple tale of the creation of a new class of robot workers made from the bodies of human labourers, shedding allegorical light on the long history of global capitalization and corporatization. Published at the end of the Occupation era and the dawn of the Cold War, the fears, anxieties, and fantasies revealed in these fictional tales of economy and social change demonstrate just how much has changed and how much remains the same in some of the wildest prognostications about the social costs of technologization today. Their short novels destabilize the canonical vision of a robot dichotomy between robots that humans control remotely (Tetsujin 29) and autonomous humanoid robots (Tetsuwan Atomu) that is often read back onto the period in latter day accounts. Through the representations of robots making robots, we can see how singularity discourse today is related to the zero sum, white supremacist fear of replacement by uncanny others.
Michal Daliot-Bul (The University of Haifa)
Paper short abstract:
Michal Daliot-Bul analyses the innovativeness and political implications of the idea of chemically-produced people in a 1882 Japanese political novel, and then explores the ramification of this science fiction tale on the popular narrative on the acceptance of artificial life in Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The obscure Japanese pro-anarchism political novel Senman muryō hoshi sekai ryokō, ichi mei, sekaizō (Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds or A Store House of Worlds) was authored by the similarly obscure Nukina Shunichi, and self-published in 1882. In this novel, the protagonist travels to three different star-worlds where the local human civilizations are in different developmental stages, representing the past, near-future and far future of the earthly human civilization. The near-future star-world is a technology-driven, materialistically prosperous yet corrupt capitalist world. Among the many fabulous technological inventions in this world, there is a plan to systematically replace all naturally born humans with chemically-produced persons. The chemically-produced persons are the apex of technology, and a much-improved version of their naturally-born source of inspiration. And yet, notwithstanding their many merits and the plan to put them in the highest governmental positions, according to the grand scheme devised by chemists and the government, they will be no more than enslaved beings who could be disassembled at any time into the chemical components from which they were produced. As I will show, the point of the story is not to present an anthropocentric world view in which humans are afraid from replicas who will replace them―although this is also implied. Rather, the author uses the story to demonstrate how the combination of technology and capitalism reduces everything, including humans, to their use value. Contrary to the zeitgeist among Meiji elite, the author criticizes the adverse corrupting effect of science and technology in the civilizing process.