Wednesday, December 21, 2005
(11:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Animal and Angel
Agamben's premise in The Open may be inadequate. I came to this realization through my reading of the early Christian literature, where a kind of theological anthropology is played out in the tension among animals, humans, and angels. In the modern world, the parallel structure is given away in the term Agamben uses to discuss the production of the human out of the distinction between human and animal: the "anthropological machine."Arguably, the replacement for angels today would be robots. I use the term robots primarily to highlight the parallel -- the robots that come to mind when one says robots really do not exist yet, and even though the church fathers believed angels were real, they had never seen one. More mundanely, one might say that the replacement for angels is the computer in general. For instance, think of the Turing test -- couldn't that be construed as a sort of negative test for finding what is distinctively human? The analogy of the computer with human cognition became popular, as far as I can tell, even before computers were widespread -- certainly before the advent of the PC. Although admittedly Agamben is primarily working with early modern to early 20th century sources, which might render the computer thing less obvious, even at that time there was some real anxiety at the thought of a literal "anthropological machine" if this post is to be believed.
This whole thing might make a decent dissertation -- but I claim the right of first refusal, you plagiarizing bastards.
