La freccia e il cerchio
anno 1, numero 1, 2010
pp. 32-37

Maurizio Ferraris, Ernesto Paolozzi
You are the Automaton!

I. Lies about the automaton

FERRARIS

“The spirit strengthens, the letter kills”. I’m convinced that even whoever, by remote hypothesis, ignores this quote from the Gospels, would give the spirit a clear advantage over the word. It is a hierarchy that is imposed even without explicit cultural mediation: the spirit is good, the letter is bad, the spirit is life, the letter is death, the word is alive, the letter no and obviously the automaton is bad and the soul is good. It is a common cliché that unites everyone who knows absolutely nothing about letters and philosophy (a pair that deals with the opposition between letter and spirit, as well as between automaton and soul), as well as poets and philosophers. There is a passage from Baudelaire in My naked heart which reads: “Well organised conspiracy, to exterminate the Jewish race. The Jews, librarians and witnesses of the liberation”. The passage is frighteningly anti-Semitic. Benjamin, quoting it and commenting, minimises it, while Pichois, Baudelaire’s editor wrote in the Pléiade: “This passage is difficult to interpret, however any form of anti-Semitism can be excluded”, which personally seems to be a monumental denial. He would then add that it was the Jews fault for having to do with letters: after all, was it not Christ who took it out on the scribes and Pharisees? Now – and this is the point of our conversation – he could have quite easily, and logically, taken it out on the automatons: the spirit is the good part, as is the soul; the letter is the bad part, as is the automaton. The same mechanism is in the Fedro by Plato, when he condemns writing due to it being a form of external soul, brought to the outside and therefore becoming a technical soul, automaton. Nevertheless, when it comes to dealing with defining the true discussion, Plato says that it is what is written in the soul, and the soul, in turn, compared to a book. It is as if he is saying that the soul is good and the automaton is bad, then going on to discover two things. The first is that the soul is good because the automaton is bad (the soul has no other positivity other than that which comes from the comparison with the automaton, just as that of the Lega Nord is reduced to not being from the south). Secondly, that the soul is like an automaton, only that it is a good automaton, while the automaton is a bad automaton. We started with the soul and the automaton, and now we’re faced with a chapter from Moral Genealogy. I would like to say in these distinctions, that it seems to be purely either functional or technical, there is a hidden axiology as well as moral. The same that forces us to favour organic foods and spontaneous behaviour. Therefore, the soul and the automaton are not a couple which can not be thought of separately, but the term bad, the automaton, is, more than a concept, a suspect or insult: “the others are automatons”.

PAOLOZZI

Even I, naturally, have thought about the platonic soul as well as the complications of the Aristotelian soul, which another thing, in certain aspects is a gigantic automaton that ends up ruling the whole world. There is also the worry of modern philosophy, from Descartes up to Kant, in the attempt, on the one hand, to discard the soul as a metaphysical idea, but then to not know what a soul actually is, whether metaphysical or schematic. We therefore avoid the common cliché of the soul being good and the automaton bad and negative. However, we should take into account that in the history of culture, there is also the idea that the automaton could be the opposite, winning over the soul. Let’s think about psychoanalysis: the soul as conceptualised by Freud, has a pure mechanical function…Notwithstanding the overabused reference, I can’t not quote The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with its good and bad soul, the second created by the first through a series of scientific experiments which become more and more irreversible: the mechanical soul, the automaton, the bad, therefore ends up prevailing while the beautiful soul remains fixed to good. The real message, apart from that of opposition, is that in reality the soul doesn’t actually exist, when faced with an automaton. In substance, a soul is also always an automaton just as an automaton is a soul, we are in a relationship of undistinguishable dialectic reciprocity. The tale dramatises the punishment of the abstractness, not of the automaton, because Stevenson understood one thing: if you abstractly try to separate good from bad, with even the best of intentions, so that good triumphs, you will fail, because in reality we are no more automatons than we are souls, if for soul we intend freedom in relation to mechanicalness.

FERRARIS

There, let’s imagine that someone comes and says: “How do you
know you have a soul? Come on, prove it. How do you know? How do you know? Why do you think you have a soul?” he continues to ask another question, “Why do you think you are free?”. We have no proof: for all we know, we could be made of springs and wound up like an alarm clock, automatic like a spitroast, only a little more complex. Someone would reply: “No, it seems to me as if it has spontaneous movements”. However, these spontaneous movements could be the mere effect of internal mechanisms – according to the old argument in which the deeper things within us, they are simply the things that they taught us at elementary school – result of perceptions that have been mechanically learnt and that – encrusted and aged – we imagine form our intimacy. As I said before, the couple soul/automaton is not ontological – on one side there is the soul while on the other there is the automaton – rather axiological: there is a good thing, which is the soul; and a bad thing, which is the automaton. Automatism is therefore considered a justification. “I did it without even thinking”: I believe that everyone has justified themselves at least once like this. “I was following orders”: another typical justification, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone to either be faced with or use. If we think about how much of our lives is carried out automatically, we realise the continual repetitions with the spiritual sphere. In the 1600s, it was said that a preacher could talk for an hour without even speaking: I can guarantee that a professor can too. There’s a difference between you and an automaton, in the moment in which you are doing a lesson, or maybe even recording this interview, that should be the quintessence of spontaneity but, if what I am saying is worth anything (and I firmly believe it is) is through every kind of mechanism and stereotype. We should now play the part of the thinkers, but we are largely following the script, books we have either written or read. Careful! I’m not saying that it is bad. It’s necessary, in the light of what I was trying to say before. And if you were to say: “Stop acting, be spontaneous” would it be a tragedy or comedy, it certainly wouldn’t be absolute spontaneity, but merely something that apparently appears more spontaneous, in reality more artificial. Given that you succeed. We can’t but not identify the sincerity of actors and call centre operators. Actors are happy automatons, because they are carrying out something that has already been scripted, which they can add something of their own to without actually ever leaving the text. While, call centre operators are unhappy automatons who can’t interpret anything, they have to merely repeat. You call, at first there are the automatic instructions, if you require this push one, if you require that push two, push three etc. Then, if it’s not included in the list, the operator intervenes, who is an anonymous figure (in the literal sense due to the fact that they don’t have a name, even though the first thing they usually say is – “I’m Sara, how can I help you?”: however noone really knows whether Sara is Sara, and if you don’t know the surname, what can you do with a name?), they often don’t know the answer and are therefore forced to repeat the same thing. You start off talking to an automaton and then talk to another automaton. Grim technology to blame? In part, yes, due to the fact that without mobile phones there wouldn’t be call centres. However, the automaton is a perennial temptation as well as constant presence, for example in rites. The priest who pronounces the formula blesses the host, on the one hand, part of the rite of transfiguration, while on the other acting with the same automatism of the call centre operator.

PAOLOZZI

Reproposing the same gests, similar formulae, is in the very nature of rites.

FERRARIS

I can clearly see an automaton, with wound up springs or even more sophisticated, celebrating mass. I suspect that the sacrament would be valid (for example, communion would be valid), just as long as the words were appropriate.

PAOLOZZI

In this case, the gown therefore, make the priest.

FERRARIS

Yes, just as long as the words offered are appropriate (meaning, those prescribed), the sacrament would be valid. Miracles don’t occur notwithstanding automatism, but rather thanks to automatism. The highest artistic, spiritual and institutional functions can be perfectly carried out by automatism. Is there any difference between an orchestra conductor and a priest who celebrates mass, or even Obama who makes his inaugural speech to the American Congress? The conductor and priest have a script that was explicitly written. And even Obama, probably, had his written by a speechwriter. And this should be all three, the highest point, the concentration, the apparition of the spirit on the cosmic-historical scene.

PAOLOZZI

I think we can close this first part of our discussion with Pascal. He believed, even religion, even better faith, the spiritual act par excellence, appears to be the least mechanical, is often acquired through habit, as if an automatic act.

FERRARIS

“Pray, pray, faith will follow”. And he invented a calculator: there is method, and reasoning, in all this, and there is a deep correspondence between the exhortation to prayer as fundamental to faith and the invention of a machine that helps thought.
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