Mechanical turks , mammet tr icks and messianic t ime

This essay considers the uncannily persistent figure of the Mechanical Turk, a spectre that haunts medieval theology, early modern theatre and modern philosophy alike. In all three cases, it functions as the mechanical, inhuman antitype of a futurity figured as meaningful and human. These attributes are materialized also in the Renaissance ‘mammet’ or mechanical puppet, an object whose name bears the trace of a supposedly lifeless and regressive Islam. Turning to Romeo and Juliet, the essay concludes with a consideration of how Shakespeare’s play deploys the mammet to counter-intuitive, untimely ends: by figuring Juliet as a mammet whose mechanical compulsions enable a messianic refusal of the old patronymic law, Romeo and Juliet explodes the temporal as much as ontological distinctions between human and machine, Christian and non-Christian, pre and post. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 80–87. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.10 Are we post-post-human yet? Whereas twentieth-century fantasies of the machine repeatedly imagined a dystopic post-human world in which machines usurp the attributes of humans, we are now witnessing – thanks to the Internet – a new scenario in which humans emulate machines to reveal the latter’s insufficiency. In 2005, Amazon.com launched a web service called ‘The Mechanical Turk’: although it replicates the seemingly mechanical tasks of search engines and data processors, the service flaunts its ability to connect clients to transnational workforces who can perform ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ beyond a computer’s power, such as identifying people in photographs. r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 80–87 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ Amazon.com’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ reworks one of the central figures in Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ To illustrate how historical materialism needs to borrow the energies of messianic thought in order to become truly revolutionary, Benjamin tells the story of another ‘Mechanical Turk’: It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight. (Benjamin, 1969, 253) In this scenario, ‘historical materialism’ is a Turkish puppet; this puppet can only ‘win’ – that is, overcome its opponents and produce a better future – if it is operated by something alien to it, a ‘theology’ that Benjamin will later identify in the ‘Theses’ with messianism. In other words, the Turkish puppet has no agency of its own. It is a seemingly magical contraption whose magical powers derive not from it, but from a tradition of religious thought conventionally opposed to it. This is an early version of Amazon.com’s post-post-human fantasy: the machine that usurps the agency of the chess-playing human is consolingly shown to be an illusion, a product of human legerdemain. In a brilliant reading of Benjamin’s Turkish chess-playing machine, Kathleen Biddick shows how the ‘Theses’ replays a traumatic scene of medieval typological thought – the cutting of the retrograde, mechanical Muslim from the future-oriented system of Christian typology (Biddick, 2008). This system presumes a Jewish past that refers to, and is perfected and canceled by, a meaningful Christian future. Judaism may be excised from the time of Christianity, but it still remains within the typological system as the antique signifier of the living word or logos of Christ. Islam, by contrast, is exiled from the typological system altogether by being made to stand outside of signification itself. As Biddick notes, medieval Christian theologians used the word mechanicum as a synonym for Muslim sorcery: they regarded Islam as a mechanical religion incapable of true life and of a meaningful future, and thus consigned it to a dead, unusable past. Benjamin’s Turkish chess-playing machine eerily replays this typological gambit. By itself, the Turkish machine cannot function in any meaningful way; it embodies a repetitious Muslim time 1 Biddick’s ‘When