I. "Automatic, Fully Automatic"
She captivated my eyes and she changed my time
She is automatic……
- New Pants "She's Automatic"
Four years ago, in August, I used to live for a while in a house in an old neighborhood in Shanghai. The bathroom is only about two square meters in size. With the exception of a washbasin, a flush toilet next to it, and a shower cubicle with only room to turn around in place, there's no more than enough, let alone an automatic washing machine. In the summer, you need to change your clothes frequently, and it is annoying to wash your hands for two days. With the idea of giving it a try, I needed to rule out the inappropriate size of the "fully automatic washing machine", and entered a rather anachronistic word "semi-automatic washing machine" in the search bar. Surprisingly, the term seems to open the door to the end of the last century on the latest smartphones, and the "Power brand" washing machine that resounded in the middle of a prime-time TV show in my childhood still exists, and it is still producing "backward" products that meet my needs at this time.
In Suzhou in 1987, the father rode a tricycle with a washing machine and his daughter.
The actual object of arrival is only the size of a bucket, relying on mechanical rotation timing to create rotation, and then need to manually flatten the water pipe to discharge the sewage, and then manually replace the drainage liner, and then twist and rotate to dry... This reminds me of the old-fashioned washing machine at home when I was a child, the left laundry bucket and the drain bucket on the right, and after washing the clothes, you need to put the clothes from the left to the right. Because the machine vibrates too much when draining, the mother will always press the washing machine to reduce its noise when draining. The image of this machine was very shocking to me as a young man, like a grumpy little beast trying to overthrow the enslavement of instrumental reason, while humans suppressed it like a cowboy on a bull's back. Interestingly, the driving force for the development of the washing machine is precisely the great desire of human beings to get rid of labor, surpassing all the high-end inventions in the polls and steadily ranking first among the important inventions of mankind, and its development goal is therefore very clear: fully automatic.
According to the German ancient historian Helmut Schneider's History of Ancient Greco-Roman Technology, the word "automatos" appears as early as the eighteenth volume of the Iliad, a wheeled three-legged triped made by Hephaestus that automatically attended meetings of the gods. The earliest automaton recorded in ancient texts is a statue of dionysus the wet nurse of Dionysus, who participated in Ptolemy II's procession in Alexandria and was able to stand up on his own to pour milk and then sit down on his own. The use of "techne" in Homer originally meant deception of the powerful, and most of the Olympian gods who mastered the craft were not well-imaged, such as Dionysus and Vulcans. The wisdom of this weak man gradually gained legitimacy with the development of the labor force, it was neutralized into "technai", and the gods also turned from being the object of being captured and deceived by "technology" to becoming the teacher of teaching "skill", a kind of information transmission and inheritance.
In Work and Time, Hesiod teaches people who have mastered the art of labor to use tools in time guided by Atlas's seven daughters, which is a "semi-automatic" technique that, although the laws of time operate automatically, still require observation and intervention. But the word "automatic" becomes a hidden anomaly in this transformation, meaning that the way the device works has been predetermined and stored in itself. This anomaly is constantly reinforced in the development towards its "state of completeness", and the natural relationship between "work and time" is thus broken. In the era of exploitation in which "capital does not sleep", "observation and intervention" have also become "control and supervision" away from the labor technology itself, and the misery of the laborer is not that the "skill" cannot be obtained, but precisely that the whole set of lifestyles contained in the "skill" is deprived by the automation device. In Modern Times, Chaplin playfully expresses this misery on a "fully automated dining machine", on which the laborers who are tied up to "enjoy" fully automated "services" face this extraordinary extreme: they cannot be interrupted unless they start from scratch.
Stills from Modern Times.
In fact, "automatic" is like a process of unfolding a time boundary, and once you press the start button you are bound to this boundary. "The clothes in the washing machine haven't been washed yet" is probably one of the reasons why instant dating failures are most common in contemporary society. Similarly, forgetting to remove the clothes that have been dried in the laundry bucket and having to wash them again and still running the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past is one of the most common tragedies of contemporary home life. In order to neutralize the barrier of the "automatic magic boundary", one can only try to harmonize external time with it, such as effectively and consciously throwing oneself into the "space-time boundary" of another chore. "Automatic" is an important cause of the concept of "time management", and its essence is not when to work and when to rest, but how to organize as much time as possible into the "automatic world", where the gap between labor is eliminated as much as possible.
In fact, in the writing of the history of technology, the talk of "automatic" technology will naturally lead the topic to "timing technology" and finally converge on "precision instruments", that is, clocks and watches. Schneider's work is one example, and although this transition in chronology seems to be traceless, it fits a certain "technological trend" in the terminology of the French scholar Simondon. It is worth noting that the substance originally used for automatic timing was water, and the ancient Egyptian "water clock" achieved the purpose of "automatic" through the flow and buoyancy of water. In this original "automatic device", water showed two opposite abilities, that is, it fell and rose, and this is the core "automatic principle" of that technological era, that is, the technical mode of "leverage principle". If leverage is still a process for transmitting forces, then water as a single substance holds all the program information. Perhaps it is not that water is used in "automatic equipment", but that water itself is a "fully automatic" material prototype. Rather than using water, the washing machine is reading information about water, and rotation is the operation of the program itself. This operation shows the difference between "information" and "message", which appears in the pen of Wiener, the most important theorist of cybernetics. "Message" is a form of organization with "entropy" that communicates with the "cluster of states" of the external world, just like the laws of the gods but the timely flashing prescribes the routine of labor. "Information" is a kind of "reverse entropy", which is a cyclical and continuous purification of "news". Household appliances can actually be thought of as "anti-entropy" devices, but this is especially true for washing machines, which incorporate clothes contaminated with daily routines into this purified homology.
In 1858, the American Hamilton Smith invented the first washing machine, which was hand-cranked and improved by Bill Blacks in 1874. While it is sufficient to meet the need for alternative tools, the technological trends inherent in washing machines make hands-free a self-evident development. The first electric washing machine was born in Chicago in 1910, marking the beginning of the automation of housework, and the industrial automation of humans was only really launched in the 1940s. It is not an exaggeration to say that washing machines are the creation of modern industry, and the concept of order in an automated society is actually the mystery of the world read out of the substance of water by washing machines. If Heraclitus had known that the Earth and the atmosphere were a "fully automatic" system of water circulation, he would not have said that "one cannot step into the same river twice." Because on some rather Zen level, for people in a "fully automatic" water circulation system, water is everywhere, "stepping in" as an "intervention" is itself impossible, because people are already organized in it.
While the washing machine was in operation, the clothes that had been shaped by my body were swept up in the "automatic" pure "inverse entropy". Neat clothes are the embodiment of order, they are "automatically" organized and purified again and again, and then taken out to face the pollution of daily life that "increases in entropy", to the sudden mud splashed by the wheels and the sand raised by the gusts of wind. No piece of clothing can enter the same washing machine twice, because they are always thrown into two very different universes, repeatedly deprived of identity until they become garbage, which is the "washing machine" of the human situation in modern society. This is perhaps why almost all automata tend to avoid external observation in a closed form, like a mother firmly holding the lid of a drainage bucket. At least in those days, I never saw, nor did I want to see, what was happening inside the washing machine, but I still couldn't stop the overflow of the space-time order and specific cosmology inside the washing machine. As Nietzsche wrote in Human Nature, Too Human, "An age of happiness is completely impossible because people only want to yearn for it, but they don't want to have it." We can also say that the technological trend of washing machines is "automatic, fully automatic", yearning for and not wanting to have, which is the real situation of contemporary human beings.
Second, "Leibniz brand" automatic washing machine
She blocked out all the light and she needed me to kneel in front of me
But in fact, the history of washing machine development is a tortuous road that violates the linear progress of technology. Just 10 years after the birth of the first electric washing machine, in the 1930s the first drum washing machine was born, which was made by the airline. It was the first fully automatic washing machine in the true modern sense, where washing, rinsing and dewatering were all done in one bucket. However, the washing machine did not embark on the road of "fully automatic", and the semi-automatic washing machine mentioned in the opening chapter only appeared in Japan in the 1960s based on wave wheel technology. There are two directional understandings of wavewheel-based "semi-automation," but they are both related to "intervention." My mother's double-barrel semi-automatic washing machine to "surrender" is "semi-automatic" in the classic sense, which means a regression from "fully automatic" and has to require human "intervention" to complete the program operation. Although today's wave wheel washing machine has been "fully automated", its technical form of opening to "intervention" is still retained, which makes the "semi-automatic" technology trend have a comparative advantage. To this day, my father pauses the water injection program of the fully automatic wavewheel washing machine and allows the clothes to soak for a while to achieve his ideal cleaning effect. I would often lift the lid of a washing machine that had been activated and throw it in the clothes I had just discovered that needed to be washed. This "intervention" may even have the potential for improvement in accuracy, such as the precise angle at which you can lift the lid without interrupting the automatic program for a familiar wavewheel flip-up washing machine.
Although "fully automatic" is an eternal selling point of commercial technology, to this day in the home universe, "semi-automatic" is still the main state of human existence. Semi-automatic devices that can be stopped at any time, especially the twisting of microwave ovens and gas stoves, and their automation information contains a stop item, which is actually a potential demand of Wiener cybernetics, which is about correction and calibration. As the technical form of these "semi-automatic" devices shows, they tend to wrap the "automated" side in the dark, while placing the start-up and abort items in the light.
From my "semi-automatic" experience to the early spring of the same four years ago, my father, who had been taking the "semi-automatic stop-stop soaking method", continued to purchase a new apartment, and purchased a fully automatic drum washing machine with a high-priced first-class automatic drum washing machine on the market at that time, with an automatic drying function. Since then, the most common housekeeping scene in the apartment is that my mother and I crouched in front of the drum washing machine, looking at the clothes rolling inside, completely unsure of the step of the procedure. "When will it end?" "I don't know! "But it's been spinning for almost two hours, hasn't it?" "I just wanted to throw two pairs of underwear in, but I couldn't open the hatch. If the washing machine in the form of "semi-automatic" technology will also try to wrap its "automatic boundary", then the transparent hatch of the fully automatic drum washing machine is almost the "original lasciviousness" performance of what Žižek calls, which makes you face the overflow of the "fully automatic cosmology": the hands are indeed liberated by the "fully automatic", because it makes you helpless.
The understanding of the "fully automatic cosmology" needs to be traced back to two great thinkers, Leibniz and Newton. But it is not very consistent with their classification of the history of ideas, and while Newton is often seen as a pioneer in opening the door to modern science, it was Leibniz who was the potential supporter of "fully automatic" in his thinking. In fact, Wiener's cybernetics, in his own words, was a discussion of "the down-to-earth Leibniz problem," but it was far removed from Leibniz's. Leibniz is actually only concerned with the one-dimensional and endless delivery of "messages", such as the dancing little dancer in a music box that rotates after winding, and if we don't want to damage it, it is better not to intervene in this mechanical program until she stops herself. In this process, the "message" is a kind of thing that is sent out in the original place, and it does not matter whether the "message" is organized and refined, as in the father's "suspension of immersion method". It's like a fully automatic drum washing machine, its activities are predetermined harmonious. The flow of information about water is like the view of light in that era, the initial light source forms an arc of light around it, and then forms a secondary light source, so automatically propagating the light. All the perceptions of washing—soaking, shabu-shabu, shaking off, and drying," which people used to rely on exchanging these perceptions with the washing program—are hidden in fully automatically. Thus, Leibniz argues that the "list" that assembles the whole world is "windowless", that it does not have a hatch that can be "intervened" open, and outside the hatch is the "waiting for Godot" style of me and my mother.
Like the dislocation of "automation" and "semi-automation" in the history of washing machines, the revolutionary changes in modern physics also come from the debate between "automation" and "semi-automation" in the universe, which began in 1715. In a letter to the Princess of Wales, Leibniz criticized Newton's view that space was God's sense, which meant that God needed to perceive space from the outside, and the universe thus became a clock-like thing that required God to intervene, push and calibrate from time to time, which was clearly contrary to the idea of God's omnipotence. Clark and Leibniz, Newton's loyal students, debated, and the core of the debate was the subtle difference between the two words: "senses" and "sensory centers." Clark argues that Leibniz deliberately misinterpreted Newton's meaning of "sensory center" and that God was not "intervening" in the universe from the outside with "senses" because it implied an imperfect craftsman. The Newtonians actually saw God as a direct presence in the universe, that is, God created the universe and held Himself as the soul of the universe. The fundamental difference between Leibniz's and Newtonian views of the universe is that the former believes that God's omnipotence is embodied in his pre-arranged everything, including those that are fully automatically calibrated for error; the latter believes that God's omnipotence is embodied in the fact that he implants himself into the universe he has created and keeps it running.
According to the naming logic of the dialogue book "Leibniz is not a butter biscuit" published by the German Solomon father and daughter, we can imagine a "Leibniz brand" automatic washing machine, which is probably the washing universe in which today's automatic drum washing machine users are located. The "Leibniz" washing machine is the Garden of Eden of clothes, where the styles, colors and brands used for "communication" have disappeared, and the "meaning" of clothes is the automatic program itself that is included in it. Suppose you take a "save the clothes" stance when using a "Leibniz" washing machine, which would be quite pleasant. But if you still see clothing as an important vehicle for social activities, this completely pre-set self-contained universe will make you very worried. In the animated short film "Cosmic Laundromat" funded by the Blender Foundation, rows of fully automatic drum washing machines are depicted as the rebirth channels of living beings, and the reincarnated person has no control over his life form in the next life, which is the embodiment of the "Leibniz brand" washing machine.
Stills from "Cosmic Laundromat".
This is why the fully automatic drum washing machine that appeared in the 1930s did not unify the washing machine universe. People would rather retreat to the "semi-automatic universe" and maintain a relationship with the washing machine, and a possibility of leading to the "Newton" automatic washing machine universe was thus opened, which was reset in the cybernetic thought of the 20th century. In Wiener's cybernetic thought, "information" is no longer conceived as a kind of "totally centralized automatic," but rather something that is exchanged in messaging and reception. As Wiener said, physics at that time no longer pointed to an external universe that comprehensively answered all the problems, it became a list of answers to finite problems, and we were dealing with probability problems in a finite problem universe. In fact, today's "fully automatic" washing machine is not "fully automatic" in the strict sense, and the fuzzy control concept produced in the 70s is the theoretical basis of today's "fully automatic", and was applied to the field of home appliances on a large scale in the 90s. Cybernetics is more inclined to the technical setting of the "Newton" washing machine, but the difference is that it normalizes and blurs the control of "automatic", and it no longer emphasizes the completeness of "automatic".
Therefore, strictly speaking, the contemporary "washing machine cosmology" is not Leibnizian. Although everything seems to be pre-designed, just press the corresponding program button to start a program that cannot be exited halfway. However, these buttons are named after the type of clothing. For example, pressing "sweater" and "cotton products", what is the difference in the next operation of the washing machine? This becomes a "washing machine metaphysics" or even a "washing machine theology" problem. As Benjamin called the "Adamian" "naming language" phase, "naming" here is an "intellectual activity" that actually exchanges information with the archives on the clothing. Mixed-material clothing has a clear percentage of sensitive substances on the label, and some even refuse to machine wash and dry, this information is communicated from the "washing machine universe" under "fuzzy control", and some early clothes even made sacrifices for it. Perhaps the problem is not that we are really controlled by a "fully automatic universe," but that we ourselves have misconceptions about how the universe works. This is the value of discussing the history of science, where some currents have been blocked in the misalignment of linear progress. From Wiener's point of view, the human life experience itself is the sensory center calibrated by historical development.
Third, the "spectrum brand" drum washing machine
She kept spinning endless beats
She kept spinning on the empty stage
Too close and too far, too deep and too shallow, without a shadow, without a shadow, without end
——Chinese Football "Electric Girl"
But we cannot say that people's misconceptions about the "fully automatic universe" are completely self-illusions, at least there is a huge difference in the external form between the flip-up and the roller type, which is not unrelated to the former being closer to the "Newton card" and the latter being closer to the "Leibniz card". In fact, the inability of the drum washing machine to intervene in the middle is not entirely due to its "full automation", but to the inability of the vertical hatch to open without allowing the water to flow out. One of the advantages of this morphological design is that it greatly saves space and expands the possibility of placement to three dimensions. In small commercial apartments, the space reserved for the washing machine is usually the space for the drum washing machine by default. In large laundries, drum washing machines are the only choice, which has at least twice as much equipment space or at least a certain amount of volume than flip-top washing machines.
Drum washing machines are typical of the "machine reproduction era" appliances. If the flip-up washing machine, as the only high-tech product in the home, still has "housekeeping value" (when people choose the washing machine as the greatest invention, they look at it this way), then the drum washing machine has a typical "display value" form, which may be the natural trend of its hatch being transparent. In fact, "vertical" and "push-pull" are important forms of modern artifact landscaping, such as window refrigerators filled with various drinks in the outdoors of convenience stores in southern cities, often they are placed in rows, especially at night, the landscaping effect is not comparable to the lifting freezer that stores ice. People are often drawn to this landscape to buy drinks that they are not familiar with, but buying ice products is based on the taste cognition accumulated in the past. In other words, although in the "cosmology" of "automatic washing machines" people can pierce their own misconceptions, the "universe" of "fully automatic" is still the boundary that people face in reality.
While the double barrel semi-automatic washing machine in the 1960s blocked the seemingly uncontrollable "fully automatic" frenzy, the art world also adopted a trendy ironic posture towards "fully automatic", which is ready-made art and pop art. In fact, this artistic trend is not simply an irony of "commodity fetishism", but a basic position is to show that those seemingly "ready-made" and "automatic" industrial products are "semi-automatic" in the specific use of human beings. For example, in the modern painter's own narrative, most of the original artistic impulses come from a ready-made product such as "canned fuel", but they do not worship it, nor are they confused by its display value, but use it. Thus, an art philosopher like Thierry de Deaver wrote in Kant after Duchamp that the art of painting is a "readymades aided" in the contemporary era, and that the word "aided" means an auxiliary state of existence as part of the part to be integrated. In the concept "readymades aided" used by Duchamp, "aided" means "semi-automatic".
Stills from "Laundromat".
If we compare Andy Warhol's stacked boxes with cans with the fully automatic drum washing machines listed in the self-service washing machine shop, we will find that the difference may be that the daily boxes and cans lose their usefulness in this display that occupies three dimensions at the same time due to the way they are opened upwards. But drum washing machines do not, and even maximize the use or occupy time and space. In film and television works, the 24-hour laundromat that goes unattended at midnight is a classic place to show the alienation and intimacy of the characters. The 2016 Golden Horse Academy's short film "Laundromat" tells the story of the repeated suspicion and reconciliation of lovers on the first day of cohabitation in the laundromat, and the English title "Hustle Couple" implies that the entanglement of two people's clothes in the washing machine and the difficult isomorphism of intimate relationships in real life are like the preset and inextricable entanglement procedures of modern emotional relationships. We may be able to understand that "fuzzy control" is the true basis of social and technological progress, but in reality we still live in this "fully automatic" spillover.
From this point of view, the real replacement of the "Leibniz brand" washing machine is the "Einstein brand" washing machine. In relativity, the observer itself becomes a variable that can be stationary or motionable, which is why the concept of "odds" is not introduced in relativity because it does not have a fixed-position autonomous observer. The "fully automaticity" of "light" no longer needs to be interpreted by "propagation", it is just a public setting of "the speed of light". Although Einstein's universe, like the concepts of "intervention", "fuzzy control", and "sensory center", also tried to replace the real world with the world observed by the observer, the observer himself was incorporated into this public setting, thus becoming "relative". Correspondingly, in the early 20th century stream of consciousness boom, human subjectivity was seen as the "flow of life." Although this concept is undoubtedly liberating in the era when fully automatic washing machines have not yet become popular, in the era of "automation", it also makes it easy for people to be captured. Going back to the opening "Washing Machine Boundary" experience, when we open the fully automatic drum washing machine and look at the transparent rotating but dark circular hatch, we think of how Einstein predicted the existence of a black hole.
The washing machine is such a special modern device, it combines too many paradoxes: liberation and bondage, saving and consumption, bystanding and involvement, sensitivity and numbness... When my father decided to sell the apartment, we unanimously decided to abandon the expensive fully automatic drum washing machine because it belonged to the apartment itself more than to our home life. Parents still use the most basic version of the family's small flip-up wave wheel washing machine, which has only two buttons and can switch between some very vague concepts: fast, standard, soft, rinse, dry. My mother often forgot to put away the clothes that had been dried inside, my father still used the "stop soaking method", and I still longed for a place where a fully automatic drum washing machine was not necessarily needed, even though it was far away. In those moments when you are passively involved in certain social arenas, when people expect you to follow the established procedures and shake off the traces of experience on your body, I can't help but think of the scene with my mother in front of the high-end drum washing machine, which is a trapped "automated universe" revelation. Rilke writes in The Leopard: "Strong steps take soft steps / Steps rotate in this tiny circle / As if the dance of force surrounds a center / In the center a great will is dizzy." This is very similar to us in a "fully automatic" society:
It seems to have only a thousand fully automatic drum washing machines, and there is no universe behind a thousand hatches.
("It seems to have only a thousand iron railings, and after a thousand iron bars there is no universe.") ”）