The Lives of Mechanical Servants

Abstract

The history of two different ways of conceptualising the relationship between man and machines is traced. On the one hand, the machine-as-slave, going back to Aristotle, describes the relation as a purely instrumental one, denying the machine any agency of its own and reducing it to a part or extension of the human subject. On the other hand, the machine-as-servant stresses a horizontal relation instead of a hierarchical subordination, and it distributes agency more evenly between the different actants. Those, in turn, lose their distinctiveness: with the discovery of the category of communication in Butler's Erewhon, man as well as machines become capable of exchanging information, and with the concept of the ‘margin of indetermination’ introduced by Simondon, machines acquire degrees of freedom hitherto reserved for humans. The role of traps in the history of technology is explored.