Machine-v-Man: It All Comes Down to Desire

“[N]umbers and figures become (in spite of romanticism) the key to all creatures” (Kittler 118). This implies that man is no more than a machine, which is a common comment among media analysts. But is there a flaw in this bold assertion? It is true that people do tend to think in more logical, algorithmic ways than before new media, but is that the extent of their being? Some relevant pieces of fiction help us to contemplate the validity of the aforementioned statement.

The first is an Andrew Niccol film entitled Simone. The premise is about a struggling director who realizes his need for a good, yet docile leading actress who will bring him fame without completely stealing the spotlight from him or making his life miserable with outrageous demands in the process. Unable to find this ideal, he, in the true Pygmalion fashion, decides to create the perfect woman on his computer, naming her Simulation One, abbreviated Simone. She stars in his films, and the public quickly comes to love Simone. Although the director is at first delighted with the fame it brings him, he becomes overwhelmed by the increasingly intense pressure to show this nonexistent star of his. Simone symbolizes how the “total connection of all media…erases the notion of the medium itself” (Kittler 102); but as the movie shows, we sense the artificiality upon closer inspection. Though outwardly perfect, Simone lacked the realism to maintain the admiration of her audience. One cannot identify with a lifeless machine in the same way one can with a person. There is an innate quality missing.

The second example is the selection we read of Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In this reading, humans are not equated with numbers per se, but they are treated as machines in various ways. Upon entering the school of languages, Gulliver is presented with a professor’s latest project: “shorten[ing] discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles; because, in reality, all things imaginable are but nouns” (169), and there is a more dramatic project underway, which suggested the total abolishment of words for the betterment of health, whereby people would communicate by carrying around with them every object they might need to convey a message to others (169). Such development, although the former may be potentially more efficient than current communication, are both highly unlikely. Bolter writes, “It is not possible or desirable that the prose writer should become a mathematician or that human language should be reduced to a system of logical symbols” (19). The key word here is “desirable.” It is a covert, but nonetheless very real aspect of capitalism that there should always be a lower working class, who is in some way suppressed by the upper class, so that the upper class can enjoy the benefits of their labor without ever having to participate in it. In the world of new technology, the machine (symbolized in the above quote by “mathematician”) may replace the working class, doing the laborious work of dry calculation, permitting humans to explore the richness of their language and curiosity. Although it may be practical to limit language, it is not necessary or “desirable,” especially for those upper echelons of society who have never really had to be concerned about practicality. To combat the idea that new media is making man into a machine, we can argue that one distinguishing characteristic will always be man’s desire.*

I have discussed the idea that man is made of numbers, in other words, that he is a machine. The movie Simone portrays a dystopian projection of such an idea, while Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, suggests the “pragmatic” simplification of human language, sarcastically presenting the real message that everything is more than “but nouns,” far more than facts and objects. The machine is an object, not a person, and thus a person cannot become a machine; they possess the defining human characteristic of desire.

*A side note is that the working class is most susceptible to the mechanization because they are subject to the demands of the market out of financial necessity, as evidenced with the introduction of the assembly line. However, it is unlikely that even their desire could be completely eradicated.