WHO IS THE MASTER?
Automata as philosophical models of the posthuman turn
Amsterdam, June 19, 2016 R.J. Schweiger, 5992370
MA THESIS Art History
University of Amsterdam Supervisor: dr. S.Y. Berrebi
Index
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: The Posthuman Turn 8
Pluralization of perspectives 9
Chapter 2: Allah’s Automata 13
Automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance 14
GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution: Allah’s Automata 21
Thoughts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance 24
Automata as philosophical models 34
Concluding remarks 39
Chapter 3: Enlightened Automata 40
The Automaton in Europe 43
Mechanical Turk and Die Automate 47
And after… 55 Concluding remarks 62 Conclusion 63 Epilogue 66 Bibliography 68 Images 74
Introduction
The word αὐτόματον (automaton, plural automata) – “acting of one’s own will” – was first used by Homer, who described golden doors that opened automatically and tripods with golden wheels so “that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and return to his house: a wonder to look at.”1 Automata were very present in Greek mythology and the Hellenistic world, where they were “intended as tools, toys, religious idols, or prototypes for demonstrating basic scientific principles, although never intended to equal nature: according to the [Ancient] Greek culture artifacts could never become as real as natural objects.”2 In the Middle Ages the manufacturing tradition of automata continued in the Greek world and China, but also, in a more advanced form on the Arabian Peninsula, in North Africa, Asia Minor, and southwestern Europe during the ‘Arab-Islamic Renaissance’, which lasted approximately from 800 to 1200 AD.3 Islamic ideas around automata found their way to the Europe of the Renaissance.4 European engineers were occupied with automata in the centuries that followed, but not until the eighteenth century did the automaton became a big center of attention.5 Since then, the self-operating machines that are “designed to follow automatically a predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions”6 have become more and more prominent in science and technology, but also in art.
During Rotterdam Art Week in February 2016, Atelier Van Lieshout opened AVL-Mundo, a 3.500 square meters creative breeding place in the Merwe-Vierhaven of Rotterdam. 1 Homer. Odyssey. Trans. Shewring. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1980, 87. & Homer. Iliad. Trans. Lattimore. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951, 371.
2 Guijarro, Victor, Leonor Gonzalez. “Human Automata.” The cultural dimension of technology, November 15, 2015. Accessed April 20, 2016.
https://ladimensionculturaldelatecnologia.wordpress.com/
3 Ayteş, Ayhan. “Divine Water Clock: Reading al-Jazari in the Light of al-Ghazali’s Mechanistic Universe Argument.” In Allah’s Automata: Artifacts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200), 100-105. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2015, 105.
4 Banu Musa. The book of ingenious devices (Kitāb al-ḥiyal). Trans. Hill. Heidelberg: Springer, 1979, 23
5 Kang, Minsoo. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011, 9.
The public got a preview of ALV-Mundo’s Artist-in-Residency program, and in the sculpture garden and exhibition spaces Atelier Van Lieshout presented a selection of kinetic sculptures. Two of these sculptures formed the installation The Mechanical Turks (image 1). The ‘talking heads’, one with male and the other with female features, stood opposite each other in a dark room and were involved in something that sounded like a conversation. As they spoke, their heads, lips, and tongues were moving and every other second they blinked their eyes to keep them hydrated. “I am the master,” said the male head as he turned towards the visitors. “I am the master. I am the master. I am the master.” Every repetition of his statement allowed for more questioning: Is he the master? Who else is claiming to be the master? And if he is the master, of what then?
The Mechanical Turks by Atelier van Lieshout are automata. The words of the automata, and especially the phrase “I am the master,” incite encounters with posthuman ethics and theory of new materialism through authors like Graham Harman, Rosi Braidotti, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. Indeed, they question the human/nonhuman relationship and reject the human claim on knowing and often also owning the other: the claim to human mastery. “Posthumanism demands a rethinking of the humanist grounds for ethical decision making, particularly around the question of whose lives merit consideration and by whom.”7 Atelier Van Lieshout’s automaton triggers this rethinking by drawing attention to itself without the need for justification from something/someone else. He is the master.
Questions around the claim to human mastery, which are very present in posthuman ethics and theory of new materialism, aren’t new. Automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance raised similar questions during that time, and the same happened in Europe around 1800. It is these parallels with contemporary thought that is the focus of my research, which asks:
7 Harley, Alexis. “Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory.” Life Writing 10:3 (2013): 358.
How does the tradition of automata in the Arab-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200), and in Enlightened Europe, relate to the current questioning of the anthropocentric order and the claim to human mastery in posthuman ethics, and theory of new materialism?
This thesis treats a selection of contemporary thinkers who challenge the anthropocentric order, which refers to the cultural, scientific apparatuses that justify humans as masters and center point of the planet. I examine the tradition of automata through the perspective of posthuman ethics and new materialist theory, and vice versa; the examination of posthuman ethics and new materialist theory through the perspective of the tradition of automata. This will demonstrate how during the Arab-Islamic Renaissance, and in Enlightened Europe similar thoughts emerged as templates for dealing with increasing complexity and incomprehension, brought about by scientific and technological developments.
Although Western ‘modernity’, and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe are often associated with the current state of science and technology, and current thoughts around posthumanism and new materialism,8 other ancestors in the form of Islamic inventors and thinkers have received little attention. Few authors have pointed out that Islamic philosophy seems to provide fruitful formats of thinking about these issues. In Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks shows parallels between new media art and classical Islamic art. For Marks, both a computer algorithm and the words of the Qur’an are “an interface to the infinite.” She illustrates how early Islamic philosophy already questioned the boundaries between the human and the non-human and even demonstrates ontological explorations of non-organic life in algorithm and carpets in
8 Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. MacCormack, Patricia. Posthuman
Islamic thought.9 With his theory on the interaction of objects, Graham Harman also build on Medieval Islamic philosophy. In his elaboration of the “occasionalist model of causation,” Harman stresses that the European roots of this theory go back to Islamic thought of early Medieval Iraq.10 A more thorough exploration of Islamic thought and automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance in their scientific and cultural context proves more parallels to the current questioning of the anthropocentric order and the claim to human mastery in posthuman ethics, and theory of new materialism, than has ever done before.
Before entering into the tradition of automata and relating them to the current questioning of the anthropocentric order and the claim to human mastery, the first chapter will provide a short introduction to OOO, posthuman ethics, and theory of new materialism. The following chapters on the tradition of automata will take the Arab-Islamic Renaissance as point of departure, since it was in this period that the first automata were invented and build, which, unlike the Greek automata, were intended to equal nature. Because of these humanoid and biological automata Islamic thinkers started to ask questions about human mastery.11 The exhibition Allah’s Automata at ZKM Karlsruhe, which ran from October 31 – February 28, 2016) will function as a case study to explore this heritage.
The third chapter treats the renewed interest in automata in Europe during the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in the form of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automaton chess player, The Mechanical Turk (1770) (image 2), the first machine to compete with humans, beating most of its human contestants. Although von Kempelen had created a hoax, the idea of the possibility of a self-acting machine was further developed in the nineteenth century and eventually executed in the twentieth century.
9 Marks, Laura U. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. London: The MIT Press, 2010.
10 Graham Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A New Theory of Causation” Cosmos and
History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 6:1, 2010, p. 5.
11 Rosheim, Mark E. Robot Evolution: The Development of Anthrobotics. New York: Wiley-IEEE, 1994, 36.
Now contemporary automata are blurring the boundaries between human and non-human agency, and this time it isn’t a trick.
Chapter 1: The Posthuman Turn
In this chapter I provide a short overview of the main ideas of posthuman ethics and theory of new materialism, and how it challenges the anthropocentric order and human mastery. As formulated by different thinkers the concept of the human – a product of the tradition of the European Enlightenment – can no longer be maintained because of technological and scientific developments and global economic concerns. With the help of post-colonial theory, feminist thought, race theory, gender theory, disability studies, and embodied cognition theory, which drew attention to different human phenomenologies, these developments have caused the de-centering of the human as the measure of all things and the denial of the privilege of a human perspective, which should lead to explorations of how other entities encounter the world.12
Pluralization of perspectives
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humanism, which formed the cornerstone of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, faced critique from different angles (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx). Since the late 1990s new kinds of critique of humanism emerged, which have become known under different names – Object oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism, new materialism, and posthumanism. Although they have different starting points and focus, they all question the human/nonhuman relationship, reject the human claim to superiority, and challenge the anthropocentric order, which refers to the cultural, scientific apparatuses that justify humans as masters and center point of the planet. In the rest of this chapter I will refer to a ‘posthuman turn’, which includes the aims of all different schools of thought mentioned above.
Rosi Braidotti, one of the most prominent theorists of new materialism, sees the posthuman turn as the “de-centering of ‘Man’ the former measure of all things.”13 According to Braidotti, the debates in mainstream culture treat the posthuman turn as human enhancement through “new age visions of trans-humanism and techno-transcendence”, thanks to prosthetic technologies in our bodies. However, this is still about confirming humans as masters of the planet and the rightful center point through which to understand reality. Levi Bryant has a very clear and similar conception of the posthuman turn. For Bryant, “a position is posthumanist when it no longer privileges human ways of encountering and evaluating the world, instead attempting to explore how other entities encounter the world.”14
His piece entitled “Thoughts on Posthumanism”, is particularly helpful because it shows the common denominator of different theories on the posthuman turn. It addresses seemingly obvious questions, yet this makes it particularly useful for an introduction into this body of thought. The first misunderstanding that he wants to put aside is that posthumanism is often critiqued in that it is humans that think it, yet this is not problematic, he argues posthumanism is no denial or rejection of the human viewpoint on the world, but rather a “pluralization of perspectives.” Bryant continues: “While posthumanism does not get rid of the human as one way of encountering the world, it does, following a great deal of research in post-colonial theory, feminist thought, race theory, gender theory, disability studies, and embodied cognition theory, complicate our ability to speak univocally and universally about something called the human.”15
Moving beyond humanism with the negation of the separation of the human from the nonhuman (the posthuman turn), it is necessary to take a step back to the fields of research
13 Dolphijn, Rick, Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012, 14. & Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, 2.
14 Bryant, Levi. “Thoughts on Posthumanism.” Lavral Subjects, November 10, 2012. Accessed March 30, 2016. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/thoughts-on-posthumanism/
mentioned by Bryant. Consensus of what it means to be human seems to be the first difficulty, since in the tradition of the Enlightenment and its widespread legacy not even all biological humans are human according to the criteria of “[t]he Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on.”16 Although by far not all humans fit these conceptions of ‘being human’, the term is still used as a given. However, critical theories mentioned above brought about the realization that ‘human experience’ consists of “a variety of different phenomenologies […] depending on the embodied experience of sexed beings, our disabilities, our cultural experiences, the technologies to which our bodies are coupled, class, etc.”17
Although this fair criticism is still humanist in that it only deals with a human perspective, it has laid a good foundation for the posthuman turn expanding different human phenomenologies in phenomenologies of automata, animals, plants, algorithms, shells, rocks, et cetera, that also have their “ways of apprehending the world.” For Bryant, the aspect of pluralization of perspectives gets overlooked too often when treating the posthuman turn. He stresses that this new tradition of thought is “as much a theory of perspectives as a radicalization of phenomenology, as it is a theory of entities.” Bryant: There is a phenomenology for, not of, every type of entity that exists.” Bryant refers to the American philosopher Graham Harman, whose work on metaphysics led to the development of OOO, to support his argument: Harman claims that “the difference between a Kantian subject and any other object is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. With this claim, Harman stresses, “just as Kantian subjects structure the world in a particular way such that they never encounter things-as-they-are-in-themselves, the same is true for all other entities as they relate to the world.”18
16 Cary Wolve in Braidotti (2013): 1.
17 Bryant (2012b).
According to Harman, the autonomous existence of objects should be taken more seriously. This can be established by using his elaboration of Heidegger’s ‘tool-analysis’. For Harman, “[t]he key is that it [tool-analysis] shows us that descriptions of the object as solid material and descriptions of it as functionally useful are derivative.”19 Entities can’t be described as “their sheer existence as pieces of wood or metal or atoms,” because “[t]hings are so intimately related to their purpose.”20 With his approach, Harman points to the deficiencies of phenomenology, which is still mainly about human experience because of the forced submission of objects to humans. Establishing a metaphysics for all objects will challenge the anthropocentric order and claims to human mastery.
Braidotti argues that “[w]hile conservative, religious social forces today often labour to re-inscribe the human within a paradigm of natural law, the concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns” She continues that we have reached “the posthuman condition”, which “introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.” According to Braidotti nature (the given) and culture (the constructed) can no longer be considered as opposites. This opposition is “currently being replaced by a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction”, which, “stresses instead the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter.”21 In other words, the boundaries between nature and culture are no longer tenable because of the current state of science and technology.
The boundaries between nature and culture are also a major topic in the work of Timothy Morton, who claims that the term nature has never been tenable. In his ecological critique in Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010), Morton
19 Harman, Graham. “Object-oriented Philosophy.” Ereignis, October 15, 2001. Accessed April 20, 2016. http://www.beyng.com/OOP.html
20 Ibid.
stresses that in order to face the current ecological crisis the distinction between nature (the given) and civilization (the constructed) has to be divested. According to Morton “[e]cological writing keeps insisting that we are "embedded" in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society.”22
Rather than treating ‘nature’ as a means and as something that exists outside of society’s walls, an awareness of interconnectedness should be established. Morton coins the concept ‘mesh’, which refers to the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, consisting of “infinite connections and infinitesimal differences.”23 The mesh has no central point of view, has no definite ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of objects, and permits no distance between entities. Everything is interdependent, but at the same time “[t]hinking interdependence involves thinking difference.”24 This is where Morton introduces the term ‘strange stranger’, as entities that can’t be fully understood or defined, nor will they ever encounter or be encountered as (as Bryant agues) “things-as-they-are-in-themselves.”
This short overview on thoughts of posthuman ethics and theory of new materialism serves as an introduction to ideas that seep into the whole thesis, and function as a frame of reference for the provided theory in the following chapters. The ideas of authors mentioned in this chapter – Braidotti, Bryant, Harman, and Morton – have challenged the anthropocentric order and the claim to human mastery. All things encounter the world in their own way; they have their own phenomenology. This pluralization of perspectives is based on unbridgeable difference between interconnected entities, or strange strangers, in the mesh.
22 Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 4–5.
23 Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, 30.
Chapter 2: Allah’s Automata
Since the 2000s the ‘posthuman’ has been omnipresent in contemporary art and exhibitions. The exhibition Exo-Evolution (November – February 2016) at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe was one of these exhibitions. Exo-Evolution featured a second smaller exhibition inside its framework: Allah’s Automata, which showed the role of automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance in the history of natural sciences as an archeology of media and art. The curators made a serious attempt to bring Allah’s Automata to the present by placing it inside an exhibition of contemporary art, which reflected on the posthuman. However, in this chapter I argue that the ideas of the curators of Allah’s Automata and Exo-Evolution, and the contributors to the exhibition catalogues didn’t go far enough in their conception of the posthuman. They are still stuck to the idea of human mastery and the Western conception of the history of technology as a linear narrative of innovation and progress, and connected the exhibition to a too narrow view on the posthuman turn.
I pick up where the curators of Allah’s Automata fell short. With a proper examination of the rich tradition of science and technology of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance, and especially of automata, in their contemporary historical and philosophical context I show how Allah’s Automata is much more in line with theories of the posthuman turn. Just like Harman shortly pointed out in his article on the occasionalist model of causation,25 I demonstrate that the posthuman turn has its roots in Islamic philosophy. Scientific and technological developments (which at the same time are at the basis of twenty-first-century science and technology) forced Islamic thinkers to redefine the relationship between human beings and other entities. Automata functioned as philosophical models in this practice, and still prove their maintainability as such today.
Automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance
The first thoughts around humanoid and biological automata were expressed in the Kitab Al-Ahjar (The Book of Stones) by polymath Abu Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān (721-815): it was completed in the middle of the eight century. Hayyān studied chemistry (alchemy), pharmacy, philosophy, astronomy, and medicine, and worked as a court alchemist for the Abbasids dynasty.26 The Book of Stones, which was part of an oeuvre of more than 500 books, was written in esoteric code, only readable by those enrolled in his school of alchemy.27 In this book, Hayyān included alchemist recipes for the constructing of artificial snakes, scorpions and humans that would be subject to their creator’s control.
Since 750 the Abbasid caliphs ruled over an empire that covered the Middle East, and a big part of North Africa and Central Asia. The Abbasid dynasty was a fervent stimulator of the study of philosophy and hard science. The founder of Baghdad, the second caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur (714-775), in particular played an important role in scientific developments with his direction of numerous foreign translations from Hindu, Persian, and Greek manuscripts into Arabic, for which he established a royal library in Baghdad. This center of sciences, in which all funds were made available to the scholars, formed the basis of the Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom.28
The following centuries the House of Wisdom proved to be an extremely fertile breeding ground of uninterrupted and organized research, and produced many skilled scientists. Three of these scientists, the brothers Muhammed, Ahmad, and al-Hasan bin Musa ibn Shakir, composed the Kitab al-Hiyal, literally “The Book of Tricks”, which has become famous under the name The Book of Ingenious Devices, in 850. The book was commissioned by the caliph and was part of a bigger project that summoned the brothers, whom have 26 Amr, Samir S, Abdelghani Tbakhi. “Arab and Muslim Physicians and Scholars.” Annals of Saudi
Medicine (January 2007): 53-54.
27 Some say he didn’t write them all himself, also students. See: Ibid.
28 Lyons, Jonathan. House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. London: Bloomsbury, 2009, 62-63.
become known as the Banu Musa (“Sons of Mozes”), to collect all Hellenistic texts that were preserved by scholars or in monasteries in Byzantium. To safeguard the knowledge the manuscripts had to be translated into Arabic. With their The Book of Ingenious Devices Banu Musa build on the works of Greek engineers like Hero of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium.29 The book features about a hundred illustrated devices and describes how they are made and being used. Next to the ingenious mechanical devices (ḥiyal), including a number of automata that were mentioned in the Greek texts, the Banu Musa invented a number of automata themselves and added them to the book.
The English engineer and historian of science and technology Donald Hill (1922-1994), who had worked in the oil business in Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar, developed an interest in the Arabic language, and the Arab-Islamic scientific and technological heritage. In the 1970’s Hill studied different manuscripts of Banu Musa’s The Book of Ingenious Devices and al-Jazari’s (1136-1206) Kitab fí ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) from 1205. He translated both books to English and, where needed, added technical descriptions or drawings to clarify the construction and functioning of the devices. In the introduction Hill pays some attention to the historical context of the books and provides an overview of other sources, both Western as Arab-Islamic, in which the Banu Musa or al-Jazari are mentioned. Judging from the many references in medieval Arabic sources, Banu Musa’s work must have enjoyed a great reputation. In these same sources the book is mainly attributed to the brother Ahmad, who was the engineer of the family. According to Hill, who translated The Book of Ingenious Devices to English in 1979, Ahmad especially paid careful attention to the description of his own inventions.
In his introduction on the historical context of The Book of Ingenious Devices, Hill argues that the machines he had designed not only emanate from the translated Greek texts
29Bunch, Bryan. The History of Science and Technology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books, 2004, 107.
but also from a centuries old and unbroken tradition of automata in Syria. Therefore, it would be “an over-simplifications to postulate a Greek written tradition as the sole inspiration of the Banu Musa.”30 Since their interest was mainly based on pneumatics and aerostatics (propulsions made by compressing and releasing water and air), “the only things that move in The Book of Ingenious Devices are fluids, and the components such as conical valves and tipping-tanks that are essentially part of the flow systems.”31 The Banu Musa had become most famous because of their fountains, in which the figures of animals and humans are static. Although their automata weren’t human-like, their work was part of a tradition, of which, more than three hundred years later, al-Jazari would become the most important representative.
Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari was born in 1136 in Al-Jazira (present-day Anatolia, Turkey) between the upper reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates. For twenty-five years he served as chief engineer at the court of the Artuqids dynasty that reigned over southern Turkey, northern Syria, and northern Iraq in the eleventh and twelfth century. Just like the Abbasid dynasty, safeguarding science and technology was considered of high importance, for it was king Nasir al-Din Mahmud ibn Muhammad that told Al-Jazari: “you have made peerless devices, and through strength have brought them forth as works; so do not lose what you have wearied yourself with and have plainly constructed. I wish you to compose for me a book which assembles what you have created separately, and brings together a selection of individual items and pictures.”32
In The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, which he completed at the end of his life, al-Jazari describes fifty devices in six chapters. He wrote the book with the clear intention to allow other engineers to reconstruct his automata. Especially this aspect 30 Banu Musa (1979): 17-19.
31 Ibid., 22.
32 Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari. The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitāb fī ma
gives an invaluable amount of information and insights in the methods of engineers of the Islamic world. The automata are divided into the categories 1) clocks, 2) vessels and figures suitable for drinking sessions, 3) pitchers, basins and other things (for handwashing and phlebotomy), 4) fountains and perpetual flutes, and 5) machines for raising water. Al-Jazari’s work in the form of a clear manual might be the result of the conflict between the teaching of Islam and an the production of automata: “this branch of science […] has always been related in the Muslim mind with the occult sciences and magic, as the word itself, whose root means stratagem or ruse, shows.”33 By accompanying his automata with the most detailed descriptions of its functioning, it was hard to keep up the esoteric and occult aura around the devices.
In his introduction to the section of fountains, al-Jazari refers to Banu Musa. He says “I did not follow the system of Banu Musa, may God have mercy upon them, who in earlier times distinguished themselves in the matters covered by these subjects.”34 According to Hill, who also provided the first English translation of The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, al-Jazari’s approach was different from Banu Musa in that it, unlike the brothers, was “concerned with the application of hydraulic power to activate the biological and cosmographical automata on monumental clocks, and […] hydraulic machines.”35 Figures of humans and animals didn’t simply function as static decorations, but were brought to life in al-Jazari’s automata.
One of his most notable creations is the Elephant water-clock (image 3), in which several of al-Jazari’s own inventions were incorporated. The mechanism consists of a weight-powered water clock inside the elephant actuating humanoid automata, a bird, and a snake, every thirty minutes.36 According to Salim al-Hassani, writer of 1001 Inventions: Muslim
33 Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Ayteş (2015): 100.
34 Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1974): 157.
35 Banu Musa (1979): 22.
Heritage in Our World, al-Jazari hadn’t only created a clock, but also an artwork. The waterworks that referred to Archimedes’ principles are placed inside an elephant, which refers to India, there are Chinese dragons, Muslim humanoid automata wearing a turban, a Persian carpet symbolizing the Iranian civilization, and a phoenix at the top referring to Egyptian civilization.37 Al-Hassani concludes from this that “he [al-Jazari] is effectively recognizing the contributions of other countries and civilizations.”38
The most advanced and most refined automaton by al-Jazari is the astronomical Castle water-clock (image 4). In addition to indicating time, it displayed day and night, the seasons and, the orbit of the sun, the moon and the zodiac. Behind the twelve doors at the top of the gateway, of which one per hour opened automatically, stood twelve human figures, each representing a different hour. At the bottom of the arch stood an assembly of five human-like automata musicians that played every hour. There was even a possibility to reprogram the machine by adding or removing a certain amount of water so that it could correctly indicate day and night, since sunset and sunrise differed as the days got longer in summer and shorter in winter.39 Because of this ingenious possibility to reprogram the device, the Castle water-clock can be considered the world’s first programmable computer.40 Al-Jazari’s invention fits the definition of computer programming, which is described as “a process that leads from an original formulation of a computer problem [every day has a different duration], to executable computer programs [adding or removing water].” 41 Just like the programming of the Castle water-clock, “it involves activities such as analysis, developing understanding, 37 Balci, Kerim. “A book on Muslim contributions to science provides solution to identity crisis.”
Today’s Zaman, June 14, 2009. Accessed April 21, 2016.
http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/1001-inventions-book-continues-its-way-media-two-recent-reviews
38 Lecture by professor Salim Al-Hassani. National Geographic Live! See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=879kqbx9rqc
39 Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1974): 17-41.
40 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGXL5OKGqs for complete working of the Castle
water-clock.
41 “Computer Programming.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 12, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming
generating algorithms, verification of requirements of algorithms including their correctness and resources consumption, and implementation of algorithms in a target programming language.”42
As has become clear, the medieval gap of a thousand years, between the Greek and Romans civilizations and the European Renaissance, in the history of science and technology can be filled with Arab-Islamic scientific and technological heritage. Especially during the Arab-Islamic Renaissance between 800 and 1200, safeguarding and creating knowledge was considered of great importance up to kings and caliphs, who considered this intellectual ambition a matter of official state policy.43 Most knowledge created in the Hellenistic period would have been lost forever, had it not been for the Arabic translations. Unlike Greek automata that were never intended to equal nature, Islamic scholars first fantasized about constructing artificial humans and animals in esoteric code, and then used static sculptures of different life forms as ornaments to their fountains, to eventually activate biological automata by means of hydraulic power by al-Jazari.
Hill’s translations of Banu Musa and al-Jazari have made a significant contribution to the history of science and technology, and are up until today the most important English sources of the scientific and technological heritage of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance. However, Hill also included his perspective on this heritage in the introductions of these texts and sometimes even adjusted and complemented the elaborate descriptions of automata when he thought something was missing or wrong. It is important to realize that Hill’s perspective is a Western perspective that places the Arab-Islamic scientific and technological heritage in a linear narrative of innovation and progress. This sometimes resulted in pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle: some automata, constructed to perform untoward behavior, created a friction
42 Ibid.
between Hill’s conception of the automaton as means of increasing control.44 An examination of the philosophical context of these automata shows that automata were more than mere instruments of a striving for control.
GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution: Allah’s Automata
ZKM Karlsruhe launched a new art platform called GLOBALE in June 2015. GLOBALE, which ran for three hundred days until mid-April 2016, dealt with globalization and digitalization, and their effects on culture.45 The exhibitions and events that were part of GLOBALE, reflected on the present. As the organizers shared on their website: “For a long time, art, philosophy and religion were considered two dominating but rival systems of world explanation. But in the modern era, natural science, technology and politics have been added as reference systems. They don’t just interpret the world. They have also created a new tool culture, with which they change the world.”46
GLOBALE presented Exo-Evolution, which ran from November 2015 until February 2016. The exhibition explored the “scientification of art” and the artistic application of new technologies, and provided possible ways of building a future and reflecting on the past. Participating artists proposed a “new reality formed by 3-D printers and robots, cyborgs and chimeras, molecules and gene pools; by wearable technologies and medical miracles; by synthetic beings, bionic suits and silicon retinas, artificial tissue and biotechnical repairing methods; by findings from aerospace research, molecular biology, neurology, genetics, and quantum computing.”47 The term ‘exo-evolution’ originates from ‘exo-Darwinism’, a term 44 Nadarajan, Gunalan. “Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices (1206).” Muslim Heritage, August 2007. Accessed March 28, 2016.
http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/islamic-automation-al-jazari’s-book-knowledge-ingenious-mechanical-devices
45 “GLOBALE: Background.” ZKM Karlsruhe. Accessed April 1, 2016. http://zkm.de/en/globale/background
46 Ibid.
47 Weibel, Peter. “Evolution.” In The New Art Event in the Digital Age GLOBALE:
invented by Michel Serres: “But what is true of purely physical functions – with regard for example, to hammer, wheel etc. – is also true for intellectual functions (fonctions intellectuelles), and indeed you can clearly see that memory has become materialized: in writing, in printing, in computer science. The body actually loses – it loses these objects, which become conveyors of an evolution that we call technical evolution, scientific evolution etc.” Serres calls this exo-Darwinism.48
In exo-Darwinism, technological and scientific developments have extended the human limits of perception and the world. A part of Exo-Evolution was dedicated to undervalued knowledge that forms the basis of today’s science and technology, and their artistic applications exhibited at ZKM. The small exhibition Allah’s Automata, curated by Siegfried Zielinski, which was part of the bigger exhibition GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution, showed how between the eight and the thirteenth century, the first Renaissance took place on the Arabian Peninsula, in North Africa, in Asia Minor, and southwestern Europe. With the exhibition on the tradition of automata of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance, Zielinski stressed the importance of these automata in “the history of the natural sciences, particularly with regard to an archeology of media and the arts.”49
Zielinski described the exhibition Allah’s Automata as “a brief excursion through the Golden Age of Arab-Islamic cultures.”50 The exhibition revolved around automated mechanical devices of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance and functioned as a testimony to the marginally recognized importance of Islamic automation in the history of science and technology. The highlight was four medieval manuscripts, including al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices and Banu Musa’s The Book of Ingenious 48 Michel Serres in Ibid., 7.
49 Zielinski, Siegfried. “Allah’s Automata. Artifacts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200).” In
The New Art Event in the Digital Age GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2015, 74. 50 Zielinski, Siegfried. “Allah’s Automata. Where Ancient Oriental Learning Intersects with Early Modern Europe. A Media-Archeological Miniature by Way of Introduction.” In Allah’s Automata:
Devices, which were exhibited next to a reproduction of al-Jazari’s Elephant water-clock, a reproduction of Banu Musa’s mechanical flute player (which was the first programmable universal musical instrument using a pinned barrel), animations and drawings of other automata, and publications that appeared on this theme.
Next to the Arab-Islamic scientific and technological heritage, the exhibition also emphasized, as Ayhan Ayteş mentions in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, “the contact zone between technical and cultural aspects of Islamic Automata,” which are usually studied separately.51 In his article “Allah’s Automata. Where Ancient Oriental Learning Intersects with Early Modern Europe. A Media-Archeological Miniature by Way of Introduction”, Zielinski too draws attention to this contact zone. Zielinski: “The 800-year-old elephant clock by al-Jazari, […] can be interpreted as the role model for an early Islamic notion of the GLOBALE, the current event at ZKM | Karlsruhe, which provides a platform for Allah’s Automata.”52 With his clock al-Jazari similarly dealt with globalization (the references to knowledge inherited from different cultures, as described by al-Hassani) and digitalization (programmable mechanics in al-Jazari’s case), and their effects on culture and religion.
Allah’s Automata presented in the framework of Exo-Evolution solely focused on human “natural and apparatus-aided perception”53 and connected knowledge of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance to a posthumanism that Braidotti describes as “robotics, prosthetic technologies, neuroscience and bio-genetic capital to fuzzier new age visions of trans-humanism and techno-transcendence.”54 Although this is not the kind of posthumanism that is treated in this thesis, Allah’s Automata and the accompanying publication are a valuable source in the exploration of Islamic automation and philosophy.
51 Ayteş (2015): 100.
52 Zielinski (2015b): 14.
53 Weibel (2015): 8.
Echoing Braidotti I want to shift the focus of the curators on the position of the human subject to the theory on the posthuman turn discussed in chapter one, which I believe especially suits Allah’s Automata. The two catalogue contributions on the connection between Islamic thought and Islamic technology by Ayteş and Zielinski will be discussed more thoroughly and supplemented by notions on subordination and submission to the Islamic automata expressed by Gunalan Nadarajan, in his article “Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206)”. The Islamic thinkers that come to light in these publications will be subject to further scrutiny after which their thoughts are measured against current thoughts around the posthuman turn.
Thoughts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance
“Oh God, pray for, keep safe and bless our Lord Muhammad, the seal of the Apostles, his family and his Companion. Praise be to God, creator of His work in the heavens, consignor of the secrets of His wisdom to the earths, which He made as a proof of His dominion, and as a certain sign of His omnipotence. I praise him for the instruction he has given and I seek more of His increasing gifts and these are the manifestations of His wisdom, praise appropriate to some part of His beneficence and His abundant generosity. The grace of God be upon our Lord Muhammad, the noblest type of humankind and upon his followers, beneficence be upon them.”55
This is the opening to al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, which just like the Qur’an, and other almost all texts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance, starts with praising Allah. As al-Jazari describes in the third sentence, his automata are
manifestations of the wisdom of Allah, who expresses himself through him. In his article, Zielinksi examines multiple automata, including the two famous clocks by al-Jazari. As Zielinski notes, “[h]e designed and described them as if they were mechanical objectifications of the cosmic spirit and thus they are truly Allah’s automata.”56 With reference to these clocks, Zielinski shows how al-Jazari’s work and inventions can’t be seen separately of its important cultural and religious connotations, which makes it different of Western technological history solely focused on a linear narrative of innovation and progress.
Ayteş’ article makes a similar point when he quotes Seyyed Hossein Nasr about Islamic automata: “They did not make practical use of all they knew in this domain, feeling instinctively the danger of the development of a technology which makes use of metals and fire, both elements alien to the natural environment, and which therefore ultimately results in the loss of that equilibrium vis-à-vis nature which is so central to the Islamic perspective and whose destruction is such a danger for modern man.”57 Apart from Ayteş and Zielinksi, Nasr is one of the few examples that take the connection between technical and cultural aspects of Islamic automation into account. Rather than only focusing on “the utilitarian and technical aspects of these automata, Nasr’s take on Islamic medieval automata is based on a general understanding of Islamic perspective towards technology and is skeptical of the narrative of progress through science and technology.”58
Besides their religious significance, many of al-Jazari’s devices, however, had profane uses that competed with divine omnipotence. Some devices were actually really useful. Zielinski notes that “the larger mechanical devices were intended to intervene in the given natural environment and to change drastically for the benefit of its inhabitants, to transform extremely arid tracts of land into fields of thriving vegetation […] Hoists, pumps, wheelworks, and other mechanisms actually represented instances of animation in the most 56 Zielinski (2015b): 19.
57 Nasr in Ayteş (2015): 100.
direct sense of the word – ensoulment in the sense of bringing inanimate material to life.”59 The utilization of automata, which challenged the relationship between “the divine will and the natural occurrences,” was a hot topic in the philosophical debate of the eleventh, twelfth (already before al-Jazari’s famous inventions) and early-thirteenth centuries.60
Ayteş argues that this debate required “scholars who engaged with the question to utilize discursive devices that equally matched the complexity of their reasoning.”61 One of these scholars was the philosopher Abu Hamid ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111), who formulated a mechanical universe argument on the basis of automata (water clocks). Al-Gazali’s “water clock parable, anticipating Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) by two hundred years, compared the universe to a water clock and God to a clockmaker.”62 His water clock parable combined the arguments of both theological scholars and ideas of rational philosophers, which were diametrically opposed in the debate that was formed around the utilization of automata.
In his reading of al-Jazari’s water clocks in the light of al-Ghazali’s mechanistic universe argument, Ayteş sketches a broader intellectual context in which al-Jazari lived and worked. The Ashʿarite theological school in Baghdad had the largest share in the intellectual debate of that time, and stood opposite the ideas of rational thinkers like Abu Ali al-Hoessein Ibn Abdoellah Ibn Sina (Ibn Sina, or Avicenna (Latin)) (980-1037). The Ashʿarite conception of time used Democritus’ elaboration of Greek atomism in the late fifth century BCE, which argued that all physical objects consisted of indivisible bodies – atoms in an infinitive void in which these atoms come into contact.63
59 Zielinski (2015b): 19.
60 Ayteş (2015): 101
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 “Atomism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy. August 23, 2005. Accessed April 24, 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/atomism-ancient/
Democritus’ atomism involved a wide range of theological questions for Ashʿarite theologians, since it denied divine intervention or design and regarded “every composite of atoms as produced purely by material interactions of bodies, and accounting for the perceived properties of macroscopic bodies as produced by these same atomic interactions.”64 As Ayteş argues, atomism as a concept “instigated the reconsideration of the ontological difference between animate and inanimate objects,” which “would eventually posit a material continuity between all existent beings.”65 Ashʿarite theologians solved these questions by attributing the infinite time (void) to God, and human experience as a single instant within this void. They argued that God creates everything from nothing in every moment; “however, humans experience this universal discontinuity as continuity by relying on the consistency of among all of Gods creations.”66
In this continuous recreation in atomic time, “there are no intermediate causes that transfer the divine wisdom to the “sub-lunar world,” and reality only consists of the minimum indivisible particles […], which only exist for an instant until the next instant when the whole universe is recreated with a new set of atoms.”67 The human illusion of a coherent path of movement “had rendered autonomy in human actions entirely irrelevant because of its refutation of natural causality.”68 Thus, according the Ashʿarite theological school, scientists and inventors like Banu Musa and al-Jazari were no intermediates between God and the sub-lunar world; they and their creations were simply a continuously experienced discontinuity of a single instant in the infinite time of God.
In the deterministic framework of Avicenna, on the other hand, there was “no place for chance or probability in nature” – as was the case in the occasionalist views of the Ashʿarite
64 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/atomism-ancient/
65 Ayteş (2015): 101
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
theological school69 – “and everything emanates from God by a chain of necessary effects.”70 There is, however, something like “free will” within Gods laws of pre-established harmony.71 Avicenna coins the terms ‘will’, ‘voluntary’, and ‘choice’, which he doesn’t explain as “an act based on knowledge and unobstructed choice,” but as things that are beyond human’s control.72 Avicenna’s idea of gharīza, something best translated as ‘instinct’, moves both humans as animals and makes Avicenna’s free will deterministic.73
While the animal’s ‘will’ is driven by a bodily instinct – which is called “sensual will”, the human is also moved by the “intellect’s instinct” or “intellectual will.” According to Avicenna, the human intellect “is moved by a higher intellect, the active intellect, an angelic or divine intellect that is outside of man and beyond man’s control. Thus, when man’s will is moved by his intellect, it is essentially moved by the (outside) active intellect, and when the will is moved by bodily faculties, needs, or instincts, it is moved by forces beyond his control also.”74 So, although there is something like free will, it is either moved by the outside intellect of God or by the instinct inside a body created by God.
According to Ayteş, Al-Ghazali, with his mechanistic universe argument, “treats Ashʿarite occasionalism and Avicenna’s order of the causes as two alternative descriptions of the same phenomenon.” A more hybrid model incorporating “natural and metaphysical causal chains” could resolve the theological questions around natural causality. Al-Ghazali explained this model by making use of the conceptual mechanism of a water clock.75 The basic 69 Occasionalism is a philosophy that deals with causation in which everything is allways directly caused by God. According to the Ashʿarite theological school “the world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God.” See: Anaya, Brigido. “On God, Transcendence vs Immanence.” Kone, Krusos,
Kronos, January 7, 2012. Accessed May 15, 2016.
https://konekrusoskronos.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/on-god-transcendence-vs-immanence/
70 Ayteş (2015): 102.
71 Lahood, Gabriel. “Avicenna’s Deterministic Theory of Action and its Implication for a Theory of Justice.” The International Journal of Bahamian Studies, 12 (2003): 16.
72 Ibid., 17.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., 18.
mechanism of a water clock consists of three elements: “a perforated cylinder filled with water, an empty tank that floats on the surface of the water, and the chiming bole.” The perforations at the bottom of the cylinder determine how fast the water runs out. At the same time this water discharge and the speed of it puts everything else into motion at a proportional speed. When the water drops the empty container drops with it, releasing a ball into the chiming bole.76
Just like the water clock is ‘programmed’ by the amount of punctures at the bottom of the cylinder, which sets everything into motion at a certain speed, all events in the universe move according to a programmed mechanism, or as al-Ghazali calls it a “known numerical plan.” Robert Charles Stade explains: “The cause moving the celestial bodies, the stars, the sun, and the moon, to a known extent is like that puncture, which was the reason for the escape of the water in a known amount. The movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars leads to the occurrence of certain events on the Earth just as the movement of the water led to the occurrence of those movements causing the fall of the ball, which is known to have marked the end of the hour.”77
God has the power to intervene in this causal model at any moment, which denies the model’s seemingly deterministic character and “the necessary connection between cause and its effect.” Al-Ghazali: “The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us […], it is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist, and it is not a necessity of the nonexistence of the one that the other should not exist.”78 Therefore it is impossible to know for sure what caused a certain effect because God could have always intervened in the process. This model of “conditioned causality helps al-Ghazali affirm the possibility of
76 Ibid.
77 Robert Charles Stade in Ibid.
obtaining knowledge about natural events while still maintaining the omnipotent role of God.”79 Ayteş adds that al-Ghazali’s model of conditioned causality does allow humans to “become responsible for their individual actions, as they are obliged to choose their actions even though those actions are compulsory.”80
Following the argument of science historian Derek de Solla Price, who believes mechanistic philosophy leads to mechanisms, it is no coincidence that the unfolding tradition of automata by polymaths like al-Jazari during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries happened at a time that al-Ghazali’s ontology was the main theological doctrine of Islam. Ayteş: “Aside from its problematically progressivist view, Price’s point on the affinity between the mechanistic philosophy and high technology is a key insight.”81 Ayteş continues: “Reading al-Jazari’s water clocks on a parallel conjuncture promises a possible path for understanding his works within a more comprehensive sphere that bridges theory and practice, as part of a tradition that considers these clockworks as philosophical models.”82 Combining water clocks with animal and humanoid automata, as al-Jazari did with his famous Elephant water-clock and Castle water-clock, forms the next philosophical challenge, which “would be to identify the underlying symbolic structure that these automata embody because they act as the bridge between the mechanism and the cosmology that they depict.”83
Just like Ayteş and Zielinski, media historian Gunalan Nadarajan also addressed the disconnectedness of cultural and technical aspects of Islamic science and technology. His article presents al-Jazari’s work as exemplary of Islamic automation “where the notions of control that have informed the conventional history of automation and robotics are substituted by subordination and submission to the rhythms of the machines.” In his reading of automation as “a manner of submission rather than the means of control that it has come to 79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 204.
82 Ibid.
represent in our times,” Nadarajan provides examples of what he calls “untoward automation”, which deliberately programmed automata to conduct untoward behavior. 84
Nadarajan stresses that that the Islamic notion of science and technology during the Arab-Islamic Renaissance differs greatly from the current Western notion, of which Donald Hill was a representative. The Arabic word ‘ilm, translated to English as ‘knowledge’, is a good example of this difference, as it “included a wide range of fields as astronomy, mechanics, theology, philosophy, logic and metaphysics.” Nadarajan continues:
“This practice of not differentiating between seemingly separate fields is best understood in the context of the Islamic view of the interconnectedness of all things that exist and wherein the quest for knowledge is a contemplation on and discovery of this essential unity of things. It is this essential unity and coherence of all things in the world, referred to in Islamic philosophy as tawhid [oneness], which makes it almost impossible to articulate and maintain the distinctions between the sciences and other areas of inquiry and experience.”85
Nadarajan’s thoughts on submission are based in Avicenna’s idea that “there is a natural hierarchy of knowledge from the physics of matter to the metaphysics of cosmological speculation, yet all knowledge terminates in the Divine. All phenomena are creations of Allah, his theophanies [visible manifestations of divinity], and nature as a vast unity to be studied by believers as the visible sign of the Godhead [divine nature or essence].”86 Avicenna’s idea of the ‘visible sign’ corresponds to the Islamic term of a’yat (sign), which is mentioned frequently in the Qur’an as messages “for people who are conscious of Him.” Discovering and studying these messages or visible signs will lead to a better understanding 84 Nadarajan (2007).
85 Ibid.
and appreciation of Allah’s greatness. 87 Nadarajan argues that “in thus deciphering the peculiar ways in which each thing manifests itself and exists in this world, one is arriving at the understanding of its specific islam (manner of submission), i.e., of how that thing submits to the will of God.”88
The Islamic conception of technology is part of the notion of ‘ilm or knowledge, which blurs boundaries between disciplines of hard science and Humanities. When combining the idea of ‘ilm and Avicenna’s study of visible signs, technology can also be considered a a’yat. Nadarajan suggests that “technological objects are signs that have been made to manifest as such by human design.”89 According to this view the “design itself is a sign of the submission of the person who ‘makes’ the technological object as much as the object’s functional operations reflect its own manner of submission.”90 Just like the human scientist, who is a creation of Allah, his invention too is created by Allah, through him. Human creativity can thus be described as “referring to and making manifest God’s creative work rather than ‘showing off’ one’s own ability to create.”91 Therefore, studying the way in which technological objects manifest themselves as a a’yat contributes to the understanding of the object’s islam.
Next to Avicenna’s ontology, Nadarajan claims to have found evidence for the idea of automation as a manner of submission rather than as a manner of control, by a specific reading of al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Although Hill interpreted al-Jazari’s work as utilitarian and a mere manifestation of the strive after control, he did observe that in some descriptions of the mechanisms “the techniques devised for the given purposes were often more sophisticated than were strictly necessary.”92
87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Hill in Ibid.
According to Nadarajan the reasons for this ‘untoward automation’ embodied in “these elaborate mechanisms that Islamic engineers devised for their machines were informed by religious world-views within which their works were conceptualized and made.”93
When the Islamic subordinate human creator made an automaton, it was about making manifest God’s creative will and not about “how effectively and efficiently one could control the natural forces of air and water but as conduits of allowing these forces to play out their capricious movements that were pleasurable because they were conceived as expressions of God’s will.”94 The expression Insha’Allah (if Allah wills) often used in these mechanical treatises, and especially by Banu Musa, also supports this idea. Although this expression is now frequently used, “this notion of including the divine will in mechanical treatises is peculiar to Islamic scholars of the medieval period and thus needs to be understood within the context of how religion mediates scientific and technological aspirations.”95
Untoward automation – “where predictable movement is substituted by programming for untoward behavior” – as seen in the al-Jazari’s book, was more about creating an aesthetic experience, than about creating an effective and efficient mechanism. The animal and humanoid automata added to al-Jazari’s devices must also have contributed to this aesthetic experience, since the mechanics didn’t need a biological appearance to do their work. Hill’s inability to “appreciate the aesthetic appeal of the untoward automation” shows how he (and with him many others) approached Islamic automation within the Western technological linear narrative of innovation and progress and didn’t take into account the philosophical, religious, and cultural context in which these devices came to being.
Nadarajan concludes that “the task of what has been referred to here as Islamic automation reflected in al-Jazari’s works was not to achieve effective control over an automata but to present through these automated processes, a vicarious expression of divine 93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
will and the peculiar manners of submission inherent to those forces that provide the motive power for these devices.” Reading al-Jazari from the perspective of untoward automation might be “especially significant in developing new ways of working with robotic arts that are not informed by, and therefore celebrate the departure from the instrumental logic of conventional robotic programming.”96
Automata as philosophical models
Different Islamic philosophers of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200) with different viewpoints agree on the shortcomings of human perception and impossibility of human control. The occasionalist views of the Ashʿarite theological school in Baghdad “had rendered autonomy in human actions entirely irrelevant because of its refutation of natural causality.”97 In Avicenna’s determinism the human intellect “is moved by a higher intellect, the active intellect, an angelic or divine intellect that is outside of man and beyond man’s control.”98 The at first glance deterministic character of Al-Ghazali’s mechanical universe argument, which made use of the conceptual mechanism of a water clock, is made undone because God can always intervene in the process. In this conditioned causality, a human being can never fully understand what caused a certain effect, and therefore will never achieve total control over objects. The fact that their reasoning is based upon the notion of divine omnipotence doesn’t make it less interesting and is no excuse for leaving it out of the debate.
Their thinking of ‘human control’ shows similarities with the posthuman turn, which, as described in the previous chapter, also challenges the anthropocentric order and the claim to human mastery. The Arabic concept of ‘ilm, for example, doesn’t differentiate between separate fields of knowledge and “is best understood in the context of the Islamic view of
96 Ibid.
97 Ayteş (2015): 102.
interconnectedness of all things that exist (including human beings) and wherein the quest for knowledge is a contemplation on and discovery of this essential unity of all things that exist.”99 This view is reminiscent of Morton’s conception of the ‘mesh’.
Morton imagines everything as part of this mesh, which he describes as “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.”100 In The Ecological thought he describes the title of his book as “a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral.”101 This mesh of interconnection between all things on earth doesn’t have a center or edge from where the rest can be regarded, and thus has as many perspectives as there are entities within the mesh. This thinking “affects all aspects of life, culture, and society. Aside from art and science, we must build the ecological thought from what we find in philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, religion, cultural studies, and critical theory.”102 Morton’s argument is similar to Nadarajan’s, who argues that Islamic philosophical term tawhid or ‘oneness’ “makes it impossible to articulate and maintain the distinctions between the sciences and other areas of inquiry and experience.”103
Beings (human and non-human, animate and inanimate) can be studied, but for Morton, “the more we know, the less certain and more ambiguous things become.” Scientific discoveries have “torn a giant hole in the fabric of our understanding,” because a complete understanding of phenomena is impossible and every discovery leads to more complicated questions.104 Al-Ghazali’s model of conditioned causality suggests something similar: obtaining knowledge about objects and phenomena is possible, but a complete understanding of these events is impossible since God could have always intervened in the process.
99 Nadarajan (2007): 4. 100 Morton (2010): 28. 101 Ibid., 7. 102 Ibid., 11. 103 Nadarajan (2007): 4. 104 Morton (2010): 14.
Avicenna’s study of a’yat or visible signs – as messages that can be found in all entities – even includes technological objects (like an automaton). Although these objects are ‘man-made’, they all have their specific manner of islam (submission). Because everything manifests itself according to its own specific islam, all entities are placed on one level in their pursuit. Following this argumentation, the separation between nature (the given) and culture (the constructed) can no longer be separated, just like Braidotti argues that this boundary is no longer tenable because of the current (as in twenty-first-century) state of science and technology. Acknowledging that every a’yat has its own way to manifest itself and exists in this world comes close to Bryant’s idea of the purification of perspectives: that there is “a phenomenology for, not of, every type of entity that exists.”105 To find out an entity’s specific manner of submission or islam, you first have to find out how it acts and apprehends the world around itself.
The concept of manifesting a’yat comes close to Harman’s idea of a “real object”, which are objects that don’t need any form of experience to exist.106 With the idea of a real object Harman saves “the independence of real objects and the ineffability of their interiority from any (human) “precense” of manipulation or (scientific mechanicism of) causal power,” as Roland Faber argues in his article ‘Touch: A Philosophic Meditation’.107 For Faber, Harman’s idea of an “inaccessible essence” of an object, “dissociated from its essential qualities and any claimed attributive unity, is based on […] a theological presupposition.”108 Faber links this presupposition to Ashʿarite substantialism, which talks about the for human beings inaccessible essence of all things (only God has access to this essence). 109
105 Bryant (2012b).
106 The opposite is a “sensual object”: they exist only in experience. See Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. London: Zero Books, 2011.
107 Faber, Roland. “Touch: A Philosophic Meditation.” About the Allure of Things: Process and
Object in Contemporary Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury 2014, p. 59. Harman and Bryant are also
contributors to this book
108 Ibid.
