S h o r t Es s ay

O f d ra m a t o l o g y : A c t i o n i n t h e for m o f t o o l s a n d m a c h i n e s (Wiener, Plato, Aristotle, Latour, S h a ke s p e a r e , B a c o n )

H e n r y S . Tu r n e r
Department of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Abstract This article examines Norbert Wieners notions about self-reproducing

machines in his work on cybernetic systems; it then compares Wieners arguments to classical discussions of tools and instruments, with particular reference to Plato and Aristotle. The article argues that all three writers provide a way of thinking about the category of action in posthuman terms: they offer examples of a mode of artificial, performative action that has been dissociated from subjects and persons and that flourishes in technology, in theater, and in the philosophy of science. The article closes by briefly considering how this model of posthuman action might help us understand two areas in early modern writing: the drama of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Francis Bacon. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 199207. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.25

My contribution to this special issue of postmedieval on the posthuman has been drawn from a speculative project that concerns philosophies of action, both classical and contemporary, especially as these emerge in four primary areas: accounts of action as the substance of ethics and of ethical deliberation; accounts of public or collective action in a political sphere; accounts of mechanical or artificial action; and accounts of signifying action, especially in
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drama the last category being the broadest and in different ways a determining category for all the others. For the purposes of clarifying the terrain and drawing into relief of the key problems involved, I will be turning to three very different examples in order to demonstrate both the endurance and the complexity of the cluster of problems (I hesitate to call it a tradition) that a notion of dramatology might illuminate for us. The first example is the mathematician Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, in particular his notion of an operative image as the core of a technological system. The second example is Socrates, arguably the first theorist of the posthuman and an illuminating point of comparison to consider alongside Wieners somewhat obscure but fertile ideas. The third is Shakespeare, seasoned with a little Bacon. As some readers will know, Wieners notion of the operative image appears in the middle of his book God and Golem, Inc. (1964), a discussion of the problems that arise when cybernetics, or the science of control and communication in the human, animal and machine, confronts religion. These problems include the very definition of life itself, especially forms of life that cut across the divide between organic and inorganic entities, and whether any argument about the human capacity to invent artificial substances is a kind of heresy. Within these broad concerns, Wiener identifies three specific issues: learning machines, or artificial intelligence; self-reproducing machines; and the relationships between machines and people. It is the second problem self-reproducing machines that leads Wiener to propose the phrase operative image. The use of the term appears first in the phrase machines are very well able to make other machines in their own image (Wiener, 1964, 13), a slightly ironic usage that is deliberately meant to evoke and displace religious phrasing, and specifically the notion of God as creator of man. To my ear, Wieners use of the term image at this point in his argument retains too much of its ironic overtone to be helpful. But having introduced the phrasing, Wiener seems stuck with the metaphor, and he goes on to develop it in two key passages: What is the image of a machine? Can this image, as embodied in one machine, bring a machine of a general sort, not yet committed to a particular specific identity, to reproduce the original machine, either absolutely or under some change that may be construed as a variation? Can the new and varied machine itself act as an archetype, even as to its own departures from its own archetypal pattern? (Weiner, 1964, 29) In order to discuss intelligently the problem of a machine constructing another after its own image, we must make the notion of image more precise. Here we must be aware that there are images and images. Pygmalion made the statue of Galatea in the image of his ideal beloved, but after the gods brought it to life, it became an image of his beloved in
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a much more real sense. It was no longer merely a pictorial image but an operative image. (Weiner, 1964, 3031; emphasis in original) Wiener goes on to give two immediate examples of an operative image: a reproducing lathe used to fabricate a model for a gunstock, and an electric circuit re-imaged and printed by a printing press using metallic inks. These he calls operative images, again in distinction from pictorial images: These operative images, which perform the function of their original, may or may not bear a pictorial likeness to it. Whether they do or not, they may replace the original in its action, and this is a much deeper similarity. It is from the standpoint of operative similarity that we shall study the possible reproduction of machines. (Weiner, 1964, 31) Wiener then gives a more technical example drawn from electrical engineering, which he had also considered in his earlier work on cybernetics: the output of a transducer whose input signal is so low that the signal the transducer produces is effectively a model, or image, of its own operation. Through a combination of such devices, Wiener argues, we may produce a machine whose outputs approximate any input and any modification whatsoever, thus generating the operative image not of a particular machine but of any machine in general. Moreover, he suggests, this machine can transmit those outputs to another machine which can then use those outputs as its own inputs, enabling the first machine to produce an image of itself. Even for those readers (like myself) who dont have the expertise to follow Wieners highly technical exposition, the outline of what he is proposing is clear enough. In the first place, he has a restricted and technical notion of machine in mind, one based on the notion of information and system: For us, Wiener writes, a machine is a device for converting incoming messages into outgoing messages. A message, from this point of view, is a sequence of quantities that represent signals in the message (Weiner, 1964, 32). The problem of selfreproducing machines and of learning machines are related through these notions of information and system, and the most radical form of machine learning would result in self-reproduction: if a machine can learn by modifying an informational message and re-transmitting it, and if this message is the information necessary to produce another machine of the same type, the machine will reproduce itself. So what, then, is an operative image? Like all images, it is a kind of representation, and what it represents is a certain structure of information; Wieners phrase combines the analog with the digital and the icon with a concept of code. The Galatea example in the passage cited earlier suggests, furthermore, that the operative image can be understood as the thing imaged and not merely as the image that does the imaging: operative is here being used
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1 All citation of Platos Cratylus are from the Loeb Classical Library edition (1939), edited by H.N. Fowler, by section number.

by Wiener in an intransitive rather than transitive manner, as it were, as a term to qualify the secondary reproduction and not the original. The oldest form of the operative image is, in one sense, the Platonic idea, and its newest appearance, as Wiener points out, is the double helix and the genetic code. It has also been the Divine Word, and the circuit board, and the virus, lodged in the entrails of the biological organism and the software of the computer. It would not be much of a stretch to see the theater as a kind of operative image, and especially the mimetic character generated by the actor, as I have discussed elsewhere (Turner, 2007, 2009). Since my space is brief, however, I would like to devote the rest of my discussion to exploring the notion of image and imitation that underlies Wieners arguments about the operative image, an idea that can be understood more clearly if we compare it to classical thought about language and tools. There are many places in Plato to look for something like an operative image, but one of the most interesting is his discussion of the origin of language in the Cratylus. For Socrates, the relation between language and the world is a mimetic or imaging relation: if we trace our words for things and concepts back far enough, Socrates argues, we will reach an originary set of names that cannot be said to derive from any others and that stand in a primary mimetic relationship to the entities that they designate. One model for this primary language is picture-making; to name something is to apply letters and syllables to things, Socrates argues, just as painters, when they wish to produce an imitation, sometimes use only red y and sometimes mix many colours (424c425b).1 Socrates also compares naming to theatrical mimesis in a famous passage: If we had no voice or tongue y should we not try y to make signs with our hands and head and person generally? y If we wished to designate that which is above and is light, we should, I fancy, raise our hand towards heaven in imitation of the nature of the thing in question; but if the things to be designated were below or heavy, we should extend our hands towards the ground; and if we wished to mention a galloping horse or any other animal, we should, of course, make our bodily attitudes as much like theirs as possible y . For the expression of anything, I fancy, would be accomplished by bodily imitation of that which was to be expressed. (422e423b) But for Socrates the relationship between language and the world is more than mimetic or imagistic: it is also what we could call technological. Socrates makes this point elaborately in order to explain the action of naming in language: the name is applied to designate things according to art (techne) and only by him who has the skill (techne), and the use of it is an action much the way the use of a shuttle by a weaver is an action, or the way burning or cutting

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or hole-boring are actions. The word for action that Socrates uses throughout is praxis, the same word used throughout classical philosophy for human action and human activity in an ethical sense, as well as in a dramatic sense, most famously of course in Aristotles Poetics (which, unexpectedly, offers its own posthuman philosophy of action, but one that would require a separate essay to elucidate). Here the term praxis simply means actions undertaken in order to modify an object. For instance, Socrates argues, y if we undertake to cut anything, ought we to cut it as we wish, and with whatever instrument we wish, or shall we, if we are willing to cut each thing in accordance with the nature of cutting and being cut, and with the natural instrument, succeed in cutting it, and do it rightly, whereas if we try to do it contrary to nature we shall fail and accomplish nothing? (387a387b) Every action has a natural instrument or proper method, just as weaving and boring require a shuttle and a borer, and so a name also, then, is a kind of instrument (388a) it is an organon, or tool. If when we weave, we separate the mingled threads of warp and woof, then the name, like the shuttle, is an instrument of teaching and of separating reality (388b388c). Under the cover of a dialog about the origin of language, we have found a philosophy of action, in both a theatrical and a technological sense, and for want of a better word I will call this philosophy-of-language-as-technical-acting a dramatology. This dramatology seems to me to resemble Wieners notion of the operative image in more ways than we might expect. Wieners image is operative, after all, because it has a function that it performs: Wiener uses these two terms to further define his concept, both of them species of action. Indeed, Wiener describes the process as a machine that by its own operation, transfer[s] its pattern of action to a machine that is capable of assuming any pattern of action (Wiener, 1964, 44). The theory of the operative image is a theory of action as function, or of purpose-oriented action, or of technological action, or of artificial action. It is also a reproduced action (rather than reproductive action), and in this sense I will call it (broadly speaking) a mimetic action, a sense reinforced by the fact that the action of the operative image is also a performative action, which for Wiener is a synonym for function but which, after Austin and Derrida and Butler, will probably have us pricking up our ears. Wiener seems to be articulating a performative philosophy of machines, or the machine as an instance of the performative, in the strong philosophical sense; in this view, the machine becomes a concrete instantiation of the force of the performative, the performative made into substance, but this substance is not simply matter; it is code, or information. And it is an action without beginning and without end, an ongoing process of self-reproduction as selftranslation an act of transmission or of communication that is also an
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embodiment or a change in substance according to a set of automatic (or routinized, or prescribed) rules. Wieners philosophical difference from classical thought about tools is perhaps most clearly visible in his notion of a general machine, and this shift from singularity to generality is probably as good a way as any to mark a distinction between tool and machine: the tool is always oriented toward the singular and particular, even if it allows for some translation and adaptation; the machine is always oriented toward the general, even if it finally always finds a particular use. To propose a theory of a general machine would thus mark a significant departure from classical thought, since for Plato and Aristotle the tool is never general: it is always particular and highly-defined. To have an absolute and real tool, as Socrates describes it in the Cratylus (389b), is to match specific actions to specific substances, and any true tool has only one function. There are several ways to understand these arguments, and one way is to say that the one-to-one correspondence between action and substance that the tool embodies is not a natural essentializing relation, as we might be tempted to understand it, but rather a performative one: a new tool emerges instantly in the moment when we modify an existing tool for a different purpose or use it in a different way. In the moment of convergence between use and object in the swing of the tool, if you like a new tool is born, and this performative relation between action and substance is nothing less than the act of making, or the act of poiesis. Even if it looks the same a hammer used not to pound but to pry, for instance in Socratess view we would now no longer be using a hammer, since the tool depends by definition on a specific, one-toone correspondence, and a tool that pries is different from a tool that pounds. Again, there is no reason we have to understand this specific difference as an essential or natural relation somehow inherent in the tool, as Socrates does; in fact, the entire analogy with language suggests that the relation between tool and object, as mediated by action, remains an undecidable one. Readers familiar with the Cratylus will remember that the problem of language that motivates the dialog is precisely the problem of whether the correspondence between names and things is one of nature or convention, and that this question finally remains unsettled. The turn to analogies with imitation, miming and technical action in the middle of the dialog can, I think, be understood as Socratess attempt to circumvent the dichotomy between the natural and the conventional by way of the performative, which we could understand as convention reified and reiterated so as to appear natural. Such would be a Latourian reading of the Cratylus, in any case, since Latours account of technology in terms of translation and inscription can also, it seems to me, be understood as a performative account of technology, as Latour himself suggests in several places (Latour, 1996; Latour, 2005, esp. 46). This reading would seem to make Wieners theory of the general machine an impossibility; there are always machines with specific functions and applications, specific operations, specific
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conjunctions; the machine is really always a tool, and the operative image always a kind of name. With Latour in mind, it is also worth pointing out that the other famous locus classicus for a discussion of tools is Aristotles Politics, which also presumes a relationship of singular correspondence between tools and uses. Aristotle modifies the debate in several important ways, above all in the distinction between tools for making and tools for action (the latter characterized further as the action of use), and in his subsequent extension of the tool to include all forms of property, including slaves, who are living tools in the action of maintaining life (Aristotle, 1944, 1253b41254a6). The conjunction between political theory and a philosophy of tools and technology in the Politics shouldnt surprise us, since Wiener himself takes the term cybernetics from the Greek word for governor. Here we touch on another aspect of Wieners operative image that is particularly relevant to our special issue, since it implies a philosophy of action, of ethics, and of politics that carries us beyond the human and certainly beyond the subject, that fatigued philosophical category that we really should allow to rest. As Ive tried to suggest both here and elsewhere, we find this philosophy of posthuman action announced already in classical thought, in Socratess discussion of becoming-animal through mimesis and in Aristotles discussion of slaves and machines and prostheses of all types all acting in ways that sit uncomfortably with the philosophies of action or agency that we are familiar with if we restrict them to the frame of the human subject. We find it in a peculiar, non-modern way in the occult philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the mimetic, rather than chemical or biological, philosophies of life that the work of Ficino and Agrippa and Della Porta and Shakespeare describe and in a more familiar way in the work of Francis Bacon, who formulates an entire philosophy of technology in terms of action. On the one hand, Bacon re-imagines the Platonic and Aristotelian form as a law of action for which Nature is a kind of grand Subject (Bacon, 1960, 53), and yet on the other hand Bacons work announces a multitude of actions that we can only describe as posthuman or machinic in Wieners sense, actions that hover in a kind of middle mode between subject and object, joining a nearly infinite series of singular bodies through equally singular forces and generating as their trace or precipitate a nearly infinite series of new names: attraction, repulsion, attenuation, conspissation, dilatation, astriction, dissipation, maturation, and the like (Bacon, 1960, 63). The central question for a Baconian ethics, as for a Wienerian ethics, would thus be: what happens when a classical philosophy of action-as-ethics encounters a modern mechanical philosophy of posthuman action-as-pure-force? There is a long tradition of debate over the political and ethical implications of cybernetic systems, but it seems to me that this discussion only becomes interesting in the moment that it takes account of this radical, as in root, conjunction between politics, ethics, and technology:
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that there literally is no collective of any kind that is not an assemblage of people and tools, some of which are living and some of which are not, and that any notion of ethics and politics worth the name will be of the posthuman variety, toward which Wieners own work points us. In order to draw these no doubt all-too-speculative comments to a conclusion, Id like to offer a brief map of how a notion of dramatology might proceed, by sketching some of its presuppositions as well as what it might allow us to dislodge and to displace. In dramatology we find first of all the presupposition that actions signify, like a kind of language; that actions mean, that they are expressive, and this is true of normal everyday actions as well as of performative actions in theatrical contexts where the significance of action is layered, doubled or saturated through the process of mimesis. But an important test for dramatology will at the same time be to separate the way we think about the significance or meaning of action from the models of signification that language offers, so that we speak of varieties and types of action in drama or in science (for instance) without subordinating these to a linguistic model, which is also to say the model of writing. In this sense, dramatology will intersect with theories of performance, and for critics of early modern drama (to take an example from my own field), I imagine that it might produce a new poetics of the stage direction: I think of Alan Dessens wonderful work on early modern stage directions, and of work by Bruce Smith on the spatial significance of prepositions in stage directions, and of some very astute readings of stage directions in The Taming of the Shrew that Leah Marcus has conducted. There is a kind of paradox concealed in stage directions, since they would seem on the surface to be the most mimetic element of any play text, and yet they turn out to be the least mimetic element, since they are directed to a reader and simulate in linguistic or micro-narrative form a set of actions that they cannot rigorously capture. As a mimetic effect, the stage direction turns out to be a very blunt instrument, and I have become only more aware of the degree to which stage directions restrict and narrow the possible significance of actions on stage by framing them in a particular way. On the whole I think that modern editors would do well to resist adding them as much as possible. Among the most important significations of these actions is, of course, the signification of the concept of the subject, of subjectivity in general as the origin and telos of all action, or as Othello puts it early in the play that bears his name, my outward action doth demonstrate/The native act and figure of my heart (1997; 1.1.6162). For those who remain interested in the sciences of subjectivity in ethics, the first philosophy of significant action, or in psychology (desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit, Troilus declares in Troilus and Cressida [1997; 3.2.83]) dramatology will offer new resources. And if we remember that in classical thought all discussion of ethics and psychology as philosophies of action eventually culminate in a theory of politics
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as is evident from the passages I have already considered then dramatology as a philosophy of action will inevitably lead us, too, toward a political philosophy, or a philosophy of collective action, and to a notion of politics that extends beyond the human.

About t he Auth o r
Henry S. Turner is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 15801620 (Oxford, 2006) and Shakespeares Double Helix (Continuum, 2008); he is the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002) and coeditor of the book series Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate).

Refer e n c e s
Aristotle. 1944. Politics. In The Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle XXI, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bacon, F. 1960. The New Organon, and Related Writings, ed. F.H. Anderson. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Latour, B. 1996. Aramis, or The Love of Technology, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1939. Cratylus. In The Loeb Classical Library: Plato IV, trans. H.N. Fowler, 7191. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shakespeare, W. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Turner, H.S. 2007. Shakespeares Double Helix. London: Continuum. Turner, H.S. 2009. Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare. South Central Review 26(1/2): 197217. Wiener, N. 1964. God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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