CNR 2013: Lectures: Louis Armand (AUS)
He is the author of Literate Technologies: Language, Cognition, Technicity (2006) and Event States: Discourse, Time, Mediality. Armand is the author of seven collections of poetry and five novels, most recently Breakfast at Midnight (2012) and Canicule (2013), both from Equus (London).
His work has been included in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Best Australian Poems and a screenplay, Clair Obscur, received honourable mention at the 2009 Alpe Adria Trieste International Film Festival. He edits VLAK magazine.
Abstract: Slaves of Reason? Perversion among the
Robots
"Perversion is in the unconscious of the neurotic as phantasy of
the Other" - Jacques Lacan
There is a memorable scene at the end of Ken Russell's 1975 film Lisztomania, in which Richard Wagner is transformed into a Nazi "golem" rampaging through the Jewish ghetto like some archaic monster-machine. In the film, the ghetto and the world at large is saved by a celestial spaceship (a utopian machine) piloted by an angelic Franz Liszt, who blasts this "golem" with pipe-organ laser guns. Russell's kitsch extravaganza is something like a last appeal to a humanism after the fact.
Between Capek's RUR and the Nazi State extermination machinery, humanism discredits itself along with all the rest of the enlightenment project. The robot or android henceforth represents not the acme but the ambivalence of human "perfectability." We have come full circle with the Frankenstein-effect and the anxiety arising from the machine-invention that learns to do without us.
By the time of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner any appeal to a
humanism appears entirely fantastical. What remains, however, is
the perennial question: Who is master, who is slave? Progress of
course implies a certain human obsolescence in the technological
equation - the problem is how to manage progress so as to transcend
obsolescence without succumbing to the Blade Runner moment, when we
all begin to suspect that we're in fact replicants, machines with a
nostalgia for our so-called creators. But after all, isn't this,
precisely this, the truth of the human condition?
Link:
Louis
Armand
[image source: Ken Russel, Louis Armand]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]
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Louis Armand directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague.
Slaves of Reason? Perversion among the
Robots
In Prague, during the Cafe Neu
Romance festival, Louis Armand will presents his lecture "Slaves of
Reason? Perversion among the Robots", Saturday 30 November at
Galerie NTK.
Galerie NTK
Technická 6
16080 Prague.