Can The Market Speak? by Campbell Jones

Author:Campbell Jones [Jones, Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-085-3
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2013-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Walter Benjamin tells a story about a chess machine in which it appears that a puppet smoking a hookah pipe plays, while in fact a chess master dwarf hides inside the machine pulling strings that move the puppet’s hands. The hands of the dwarf and indeed the dwarf’s very existence are hidden from view and so, dissimulating the location of agency, the puppet – or maybe the dwarf – is able to win every time.39

The machine in question was first created in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to entertain the Empress Maria Theresa. This chess machine was not, however, the most prized creation of von Kempelen, who also sought to create a machine that could produce the sounds of human speech. In the same year that he invented the chess machine he created a ‘speaking machine’ that could produce sounds recognisable as human speech. When he toured Europe displaying his creations, the chess machine was presented as the main act although audiences found the speaking machine much more disconcerting. It was at this time quite surprising to learn that speech could be produced as if out of thin air and in the absence of an animating agent. As Mladen Dolar writes, ‘the meaning was hard to decipher, given the poor quality of the reproduction, but the voice was what immediately seized everyone and inspired universal awe’. Dolar reports the surprise that was experienced by listeners to this speaking machine, which exceeded the surprise at seeing a puppet winning at chess.

No matter how much the thing was described for everybody to study, the machine nevertheless kept producing effects which can only be described with the Freudian word ‘uncanny’. There is an uncanniness in the gap which enables a machine, by purely mechanical means, to produce something so uniquely human as voice and speech. It is as if the effect could emancipate itself from its mechanical origin, and start functioning as a surplus – indeed, as the ghost in the machine; as if there were an effect without a proper cause, an effect surpassing explicable cause.40

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