Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 10

Robotic History

book review of dustin a. abnet’s the american robot: a cultural history.

x-posted from us intellectual history book review.

Like Klaatu with his robot companion Gort in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still (remade with Keanu Reeves in 2008), Dustin A. Abnet has come to tell us about a history Americans only partly understand. In his study of “the idea of the robot in American culture,” Abnet notices that Americans have portrayed the machine in two almost opposite ways: sometimes, they treat the robot as a “mechanized human”; but just as often they have been interested in the “humanized robot” (3, 5). As a “mechanized human,” the robot has symbolized the degradation of workers within industrial systems of mass production (6). This is the context in which the term originated, in a 1920 Czech-language play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzálni Roboti, Rossim’s Universal Robots). The robot has also stood in for the passivity and lack of criticality arising in mass society in general. This was what sociologist C. Wright Mills meant when he unhappily described citizens turning into “cheerful robots” in the 1950s.[1] Either way, robot bad! However, Americans also have thought robots were good: as a novelty, a labor-saving device, or a helpmeet, the “humanized machine” has long dazzled and bewitched Americans with its uncanny qualities of simulated personhood. Just ask Siri or Alexa to confirm this.

Robots have cognition, they have intelligence, or so many techno-utopianists declare, but as a cultural historian Abnet is less interested in whether robots can actually think than in how robots have galvanized human thinking. The American Robot is ambitious in scope. It does not begin with the more familiar twentieth century stories of a clunky, science-fiction metal man shooting laser beams. Nor does it start with the fears of factory automation rampant since at least the 1950s. It does not even start with laboratory dreams of mechanical brains. Rather, it goes all the way back to the Early Republic. We join one “Senor Falconi” and his Native American automaton, which appeared in 1788 in Philadelphia. Abnet then explores robotic inventions and musings by many figures: Georges-Louis Leclrec, Comte de Buffon, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, Swiss clockmakers, Jacques de Vaucanson, René Descartes, John Locke, Methodists such as John Wesley, Thomas Jefferson, Cyrus McCormick, William Seward, Henry Thoreau, the “Steam Man,” the Automatic Toy Company, Frederick Taylor, Emma Goldman, Frank Baum’s Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, Ernest Hemingway, the Westinghouse Company, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Gene Autry, Vannevar Bush, Lewis Mumford, Charlie Chaplin, Harry S. Truman, Erich Fromm, Albert Einstein, Norbert Weiner, Isaac Asimov, Audrey Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the film Desk Set, Martin Luther King, Jr., Arthur Koestler, countercultural hippies, Philip K. Dick, Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, the rock bands Styx (“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto”) and Devo (“Q. Are we not men? A. We are Devo!”). That is just to name some of the people and material that The American Robot marches through on its way to the present era.

The scope of the book makes for a wide-ranging account, one that reminds us how the robot has lurked in many unlikely places. It has been, Abnet explains, “a multifaceted character that people use to deal with some of the most persistent tensions in their society, especially those between slavery and freedom, work and desire, authenticity and artificiality, peace and war, and self and other” (295). These tensions had to be “reconciled” repeatedly by the white, bourgeois men who dominated the robot imaginary (295, 17). For them, Abnet contends, the most impressive aspect of the robot had nothing to do with feats of technological invention and far more to do with what the robot could accomplish symbolically and ideologically to keep them on top. The robot was not a tool for social equality, Abnet believes; it was a mechanism for reinforcing hierarchy. It could not escape categories of identity and power; rather, it continuously wrapped its mechanical claws around issues of race, gender, and class. Or, maybe better said, in Abnet’s view, issues of race, gender, and class almost always powered the robot. They were the cultural batteries that repeatedly charged its place in the American imagination. These matters, for Abnet, form the national robot unconscious (actually, most of the time, the use of robots to reinforce hierarchy and power was not even subtle, as Abnet tells the story; it was pretty obvious and overt).

Alas, the way Abnet handles race, gender, and class in The American Robot can get somewhat too, well, robotic. Intent on squeezing disparate stories into one unified singularity of cultural historical analysis, he insists on fitting the robot into rather static modes of categorizing social organization and identity formation. Rather than look for what has surely been a more complex dynamic of contestation and change over robots and their many meanings, he settles on an underlying continuity. “The character of the robot,” he writes, “has predominantly been the creation of a small subset of Americans: middle- and upper-class white men” (8). It has “fused middle- to upper-class white men’s fantasies of taming the bodies of others to fantasies of taming the out-of-control machinery of modernity” (295-296). It has been “a slavery fantasy that has predominantly appealed to white, middle- to upper-class men as a means of dealing with their own lack of absolute control over themselves, others, and the processes associated with the development of industrial capitalism” (300). “The subset of people who have publicly envisioned, displayed, and discussed robots is strikingly small. With only a few exceptions before the late twentieth century, robots have been the expressions of men of power and privilege” (7).  These and many other sentences make it seem as if only this elite group of Americans has been able to exert control over the robot. It is not that this analysis is wrong, to be clear. They have! But the point takes on a rather automated quality in Abnet’s book. It bludgeons when one longs for interpretation that might be a bit more nimble.

In this sense, you do not really need to read The American Robot to know what it is going to say about robots. One need only execute what have become some of the more standardized programmatic commands of today’s routinized academic analysis. As with everything else, so too with the robot: bourgeoise white men have behaved monstrously. Yet Abnet makes a more subtle argument within this rather potted overarching historical narrative. To him, when elite white men have gazed into the robot’s blinking red eye, they, pace Nietzsche, have most often found it gazing back. The robot was not only a “metaphor for a person who lacks agency and authenticity,” it also presented “the possibility that everyone can satisfy even the most intimate of desires without having to deal with the competing wishes of others” (10). It became a means of narcissism, self-obsession, and self-aggrandizement. Robots allowed elite white men to diminish fellow humans by associating them with the robot as “other” rather than thinking of other humans as fellow beings. The robot was “crucial within American cultural history because separating human from machinelike persons has been one of the key ways of rationalizing efforts to restrict the rights, freedoms, and powers of others” (10, 7). In short, look for the robot in the American past and one finds not a futuristic hope for utopian science fictional transformation, but rather a social realism of continually reasserted subordination.

One sometimes wishes Abnet would delve more deeply into moments when robots served as feistier symbols of dissent, resistance, and rebelliousness. He mentions the African American cultural creation of the “robot dance” in the 1970s, for instance, but only with the faintest exploration of its sophisticated vernacular gestural commentary on the line between mechanical alienation and human virtuosity in an increasingly computerized economy (286-287). Similarly, Abnet alerts us to the potentially emancipatory feminist vision of the robot in Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” but moves on quickly to yet more examples of the oppressive use of the robot to guarantee racial, gendered, class hierarchy (291). For Abnet, the robot’s many manifestations—Barnumesque humbug automaton, corporate advertisement spectacle, cybernetic Cold War laboratory creation, paperback sci-fi fantasy—lead almost always back to an elite, white man assembling the mechanism’s cultural meaning and that alone. Not wrong, but not the whole story.

To skip the book for this reason, however, is to miss moments when Abnet discovers remarkable surprises. For instance, the religious dimensions he notices in the history of the robot remind us how stubbornly matters of the human soul surface in considerations of the non-human machine. Examining Enlightenment-era philosophy, Republican ideals of society and citizenship alongside shifting notions of salvation in early nineteenth-century Protestantism, Abnet points out that the precursor to the modern robot, the automaton, became a mechanism for exploring its precise opposite: the ideal of autonomy. It turned out that the when “Americans pondered whether the automaton was a gift of God or a demon that threatened to drag the country’s innocence to hell,” it was most of all a way to confront “the impact of material and intellectual transformations on the individual soul” itself (17). The automaton was but a way to measure the nature of human autonomy.

At the end of the book, the robot as a means of registering questions of human spirituality once again inspires Abnet to more nuanced investigation. In close readings of Janelle Monae’s appropriations of the robot in her science-fiction, Afrofuturist R&B as well as HBO’s revival of the 1970s Michael Crichton film Westworld, Abnet at last glimpses emancipatory possibilities for the robot. “Perhaps,” he writes on a more hopeful note, “the American robot has begun to rebel against those who have long imagined and controlled it” (300). When a machine imagined as an indigenous person spoke in HBO’s Westworld, Abnet explains, it reversed the use of Falconi’s automaton Indian centuries earlier. The robot became “an icon of resistance—not against the abstract concepts that seemed to restrict the freedom of the powerful, but against the powerful themselves” (301). By insisting upon “the material nature of human identity and reveling in the freedom it might provide,” Abnet believed that maybe, at last, the robot was becoming “a symbol not of control but of liberation” (300).

For Abnet, the robot’s symbolic power as a force for good arises, paradoxically, when we stop forcing robots to serve as symbols. Only when robots speak as themselves, for themselves—which is to say, when we stop wanting them to become human or stand in for humanity—can they perhaps deliver to us what it in fact means to be fully human. When reduced to their basic parts, robots thus expand their emancipatory potential. These machines start to provide the nuts and bolts for constructing a view of humans as themselves nothing more than flesh and bone. We are corporeal beings, they tell us, caught up within our own limits of this mortal coil. From there, however, maybe we can shift from fantasies of “mechanized humans” and “humanized robots” to a more egalitarian pursuit of beauty and justice for all. Released from the requirement that they automate our advancement, discharged from the task of mirroring human nature, robots might paradoxically help us make progress toward realizing a better sense of what it means to be human.

[1] C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175.

2024 March 26-May 31—Fannie Barrier Williams Historical Timelines Exhibit

now at drake memorial library, suny brockport, 26 march-31 may 2024.

The Fannie Barrier Williams Timelines created by students in Dr. Michael J. Kramer’s Public History seminar and Mitch Christensen’s Graphic Design course during the fall 2023 semester will be on display at Drake Memorial Library’s Lobby Gallery from March 28 to May 31, 2024. Come check them out!

More information about the Fannie Barrier Williams Project.

Museum

orhan pamuk on how the real museum transforms time into space.

In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects we love, but losing all sense of Time. Real museums are places where time is transformed into Space.

—Orhan Pamuk

2024 March 27—The Fannie Barrier Williams Project

presenting student work on the fannie barrier williams project @ the suny brockport diversity day conference, 27 march 2024, 4-4:45pm, seymour student union.

Please join Dr. Michael J. Kramer, Associate Professor of History, SUNY Brockport, and students from his Public History and The Fannie Barrier Williams Project courses for a conversation about our scholarly learning, public history work, and digital humanities inquiries on this important but understudied Brockport native. For more about the project, visit The Fannie Barrier Williams Project website. For the full SUNY Brockport Diversity Day Conference schedule, visit the conference website.

Spring 2024—SUNY Historians Network Webinar Pilot Series

the suny historylab will pilot a webinar series focused on connecting suny historical inquiry across campuses and to the citizens of New York State (& beyond).

The SUNY HistoryLab, with funding from an Innovative Instructional Technology Grant, offers a SUNY Historians Network Pilot Webinar Series focused on US history in the spring of 2024. All are welcome to attend by registering for the series.

The SUNY HistoryLab encourages scholarly exchange and connections across State University of New York campuses with the idea of encouraging further projects, courses, and outreach to the public of New York State and beyond by way of our work. Our pilot webinar series focuses on US history. In coming years, based on interest and participation across campuses, webinars will feature topics ranging from specialized research to teaching, public work, roundtables, and more.

Please register if you wish to attend an upcoming webinar. All are welcome to attend. The webinars will be recorded and available online after each convening.

Questions? Please contact SUNY HistoryLab Director Dr. Michael J. Kramer, Associate Professor of History, SUNY Brockport, mkramer@brockport.edu.

Nice Knowing You

hello, goodbye.

Messages From the Underground

subterranean signals.

Keep a Lid on It

underground power.

Sign of Change

We Go Cruising

“fast car” rides again.

The appearance of Tracy Chapman at the 2024 Grammy Awards ceremony broadcast, performing her 1988 hit “Fast Car” alongside country star Luke Combs, whose remake of the song went to the top of the country charts last year and made Chapman the first Black woman to write a number one country hit, elicited powerful emotions from many people, particularly those who remembered the original song and wanted to celebrate the resurfacing of the reclusive Chapman in the public eye again. “Fast Car” was originally understood to be a “folk” song or a “singer-songwriter” song, but with Combs adaptation of it, the country connections emerged in full. So too did many other levels of how genre in American popular music relates to questions of race, gender, sexuality, region, and class.

The celebrations, and some of the criticisms, of “Fast Car”‘s resurgence and transformations from Chapman to Combs must be understood in the aftermath of another country music charts controversy: the success of the more controversial, playful, ribald hip-hop song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X on the country charts in 2019. When that song succeeded on the country, hip-hop, and pop charts simultaneously, it spoke to the porous boundaries between genres that are supposed to signal neat, clean divisions in America by race (country is white; hip hop is Black), not to mention different kinds of sexuality and gender (Lil Nas X would eventually come out as gay and the song is, well, not just about horses; the performer also, of course, explores all kinds of queer modes in his performance style and presentation). So too, the song confounds regional associations (where is this old town road anyway? Is it an urban or rural place?). “Old Town Road” was removed from the country charts and radio play despite its success on social media and in country music dance clubs and on the radios of pickup trucks across the land.

“Fast Car” arrives from a different place. There are no horses in this song. What there is, fascinatingly, is another kind of interplay between musical genre with regard to race, gender, sexuality, region, age, and maybe most of all, class. Here, most of all, is a tune that pushes experiences from the margins of working-class aspiration to the center of the American story. Originally made popular by a queer Black female artist, its lyrics transposed easily to the identity of a straight, white, male artist. It speaks to both Black and white, female and male, queer and straight, young and old moments. it’s the class position that matters. The singer, whatever the identity, speaks of a hope to escape from poverty and precarity while at the same time registering a despair about being able to do so. Things will get better, but they probably won’t. While Lil Nas X is going to ride until he can’t ride no more, neither Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs are sure the motor will start at all at this point, nor that they can get anywhere even if it could ignite.

“Fast Car” brings us to a standstill. We poise in a liminal zone where American working-class identities, musical genres, racial identities, senses of self and community, dreams of partnership and loneliness, fantasies of mobility, and the realities of becoming trapped in the unrelenting social hierarchies of US economy come into view. From this place, maybe on the outskirts of town, by the onramp to the Interstate, you can see life sprawled out before you. The mansions on the hill beckon. The rows of houses slump humbly in the shadow of the shutdown factory. The strip mall stretches out blearily. It’s bleak, but there’s actually a lot of people here by the roadside.

We are in a place where many other musicians and their listeners have gathered. At this spot, the rules start to fall away when it comes to questions of sorting out who should be on what music industry chart, or what neighborhood they come from, or who should be riding shotgun in whose car, or what place anyone should be heading. The sounds of Hank Williams mingle with Robert Johnson’s slide guitar here at the crossroads. Frank Sinatra, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Simon and Garfunkel, Taylor Swift, and countless others sing about New York City here as they approach the big city lights. Maybe Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band gather by the parked cars, drinking forties on the hood. By the end of the night, the Boss sits alone with his girlfriend, much like Chapman or Combs do with their romantic partners in “Fast Car,” trying to figure out whether to split or stay, light out for the territories or return back to a humble job at the checkout counter.

Darkness at the edge of town. Couldn’t one say, in fact, that “Fast Car” is a kind of remake of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”? I don’t mean remake in a pejorative sense, but rather that these tunes are in a tradition of the working-class escape/no escape song. Indeed, both of these songs could be said to be remakes of yet another tune: “We Gotta Get Outta This Place,” written by the Brill Building team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. All of the songs in this mode take us to an unresolved moment between escape and no escape. There’s really no arrival or departure in them, just the moment at the door to the car.

There, you can interpret the songs going in both directions. For some, the point is that the car isn’t fast, we weren’t actually born to run, and we ain’t gonna get out of this place. The fast car is in fact a broken-down automobile prevented by the realities of class in America from going anywhere. Tramps like us, baby we were born to try to run but we are in fact doomed to get stuck. We gotta get outta this place if its the last thing we ever do, but actually we’re never going to get out of this place at all, and we know it. For others, the songs signal that brief moment of possibility that in fact is all the more powerful for its temporariness. And for a few, these songs could, maybe, just maybe, if others hear them loud enough, lead to some kind of liberation. Maybe one gets out by the skin of their teeth, but remember, workers of the world, that the next song Chapman had a hit with after “Fast Far” was “Talkin’ About a Revolution.” As cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote, “the impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock-and-roll is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.”

That’s what makes “Fast Car” and songs like it powerful. They present the moment when we don’t know which way things will go, when the door hinge might be shutting for the trip or shutting for the night. Yet, there’s an urge that shows up in popular culture to put the song back in its place. For some, it needs to be returned to sender, to the queer Black woman who wrote it. For others, it has to be freed from its origins, rendered a sonic Trump flag whipping in the wind on the back of a pickup truck. Country music, more than any other genre, has a way of raising the stakes of these affiliations and afflictions in the good old USA. I once heard even the cold-eyed economic historian Barbara Fields, who has repeatedly criticized the substitution of race politics for class analysis, surprisingly perform a bit of what she herself named as racecraft by saying that Black people would never want to listen to country music. I thought, what?!?!? Country music is so much in the African Diasporic tradition (not to mention beloved in Africa itself). It is only re-coded non-Black in America as a way to cover the fact up that the genre speaks to the polyglot nature of the US working-class (shoot, to the global working class): full of admixtures of races, genders, sexualities, regions.

On stage at the Grammys, if you watched close enough, Chapman and Combs undid the effort to straighten out country music’s many queernesses. They even did more than just perform the song together across lines of race. They also performed it across lines of gender and sexuality. They made the story permeable and full of permutations. They took its hypnotic riff back and forth over the borderline. There was Chapman, dressed more as the butch male performer while next to her, Combs started to look a bit more glitzy and glam, even a touch femme. Who was the man here and who was the woman? Who was the star and who was the starstruck? Who was leading and who was following? Who was in the driver’s seat of this fast car exactly? The need not to care slowly crept up on us. Stripped down to its essence, the song grew larger, as did the moment. A wonderful presentation of blurring and mixing offered itself up. One knew that it would not last. After all, the song tells is it won’t. But for a moment, all roads stretched out before us, an invitation across the nation, not so much to assert a resolution as to hang in the balance, like a pair of dice from the rearview mirror.