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megapolisomancy's review against another edition
4.0
Originally Kang's dissertation, this work is a rigorously historicized examination of the role of automatons throughout western history as a kind of liminal entity that allowed people to work through their concerns regarding a number of binary distinctions: natural/artificial, living/dead, animate/inanimate, mechanist/vitalist, and so forth. The book is organized chronologically, working from the classical/medieval/renaissance fixation on self-moving machines as agents of demonic or benign natural magic, through the scientific revolution's stripping away of magic in favor of the automaton as the ultra-rational symbol of the machine-man in the machine-state in the machine-universe. This progression then gets inverted in the late Enlightenment/Romantic period, when the waning of the Age of Reason leads to the use of the automaton as a shambling and uncanny creature... which is then reversed again in the industrial era's triumphalist presentations of transcendence through human-machine hybridization. Finally, after the horrors of the first mechanized/modern World War, darker visions of modernity's technological violence/control/dehumanization came to predominate.
Sadly, that's where Kang's narrative draws to a close, although I really wish he had kept going to the modern day (not that I can really fault him for this, he was clear from the outset what his timeline was for this project, I just personally would have liked more attention paid to this era).
Kang is an intellectual historian, so this book is on the dry side, but the variety and breadth of subjects that he manages to cover through the lens of the liminal idea of the automaton is truly impressive.
Sadly, that's where Kang's narrative draws to a close, although I really wish he had kept going to the modern day (not that I can really fault him for this, he was clear from the outset what his timeline was for this project, I just personally would have liked more attention paid to this era).
Kang is an intellectual historian, so this book is on the dry side, but the variety and breadth of subjects that he manages to cover through the lens of the liminal idea of the automaton is truly impressive.
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