Practice Abstract #2

1) summary
The first few pages of the Doane article focus on L'Eve future as the first visualization of a robot as the manifestation of the "ideal" woman. It relates the mention of Edison in the book to his connection to cinema and the way cinema in its first years was reacted to by the public. In L'Eve future the Edison character mentions, whether seriously or not, that he would defend men's love for their wives "who are so necessary to perpetuate the race (at least until a new order of things comes in)" and use soulless robot women as examples of "beautiful but deceptive" mistresses. Doane also reiterates the plot of Lang's Metropolis and interprets it as a representation of men's fear of women's reproductive power and of the female body.
Bridges' article critiques and debates about the goal of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der Sandman, saying that an automaton is "more real than real," and that Hoffmann expresses this sentiment through the almost voiceless Olimpia, who for weeks and years escapes detection because she in addition to her natural human appearance is "soft-spoken" and "normal" among her "peers." What brought her true nature to light, then, was her inability to "dance a little out of time," her lack of human flaws. Bridges concludes that Hoffmann was merely addressing many of the questions and mysteries present in culture in the early 19th century and that his characters paved the way for the developing fantasies of the possibilities of science.

2) key terms

• Taylorism - refers to the works of Frederick Taylor who published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 and whose philosophy included, "Develop a "science" for every job, including rules motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions."
• Venus Victorious - an aspect of the armed Aphrodite that Greeks inherited from the East, where the goddess Ishtar "remained a goddess of war, and Venus could bring victory to a Sulla or a Caesar." (wikipedia.org)
• dystopic - having to do with a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding (dictionary.com)
• womb envy - a theme in Lang's Metropolis which theorizes that women portrayed by men as demonic seductive machines are a manifestation of men's fear and ignorance regarding the female body and female reproductive power
• phallus dentatus - representative of men's fear of childbirth, reinforced by the terrifying image of the alien gnawing its way out of the movie character's belly
• ELIZA effect - prompts us to perceive real beings as "less real" than robots who simulate them
• preformationism - espouses the notion that offspring originated in a complete but pre-formed state in one parent

3) questions

• What is the true difference between a real woman and the android Hadaly after she has been "sparked" by a mother? Why is Hadaly's "not-quite-human" state more attractive in L'Eve future than a real woman?
• "Woman as mother" and "woman as mistress" don't quite mix. What do both of these phrases imply regarding a woman's relationship to a man, and why does the Edison character feel the need to "validate" the dichotomy of the two? Can it be possible for the two to reconcile ever in the same woman at the same time?
• Bridges writes, "the act of creating these human simulacra held strong assocations with alchemy and therefore with forbidden occult practices." How did the lingering presence of alchemy influence the attitudes of the discursive community of the time toward technology? Have those attitudes carried on in any way into the present?
• Given that Olimpia's nearly mute disposition in Der Sandman is successful at disguising her as human, what does Hoffmann imply about the accepted or desireable behaviors of human women at the time?

I found both articles very informative about various works, but now I'm eager to actually see Metropolis, Alien, and Blade Runner and to read the Hoffmann works. Really for a deeper understanding of either article the reader has to be familiar with the works discussed. For probably half of the Bridges article, I skimmed the summaries of Der Sandman, etc because summaries are BORING and take the interest out of the films and books themselves. So it was a little harder to grasp some of the rhetoric.