Androids Near the Pyramid
Fittingly, Daniel Joseph Martinez’s brilliant exhibit, Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant (2006) opened near the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Martinez’s work features an artificial humanoid—one that looks exactly like Martinez does, serving as a double (what the ancient Egyptians would call a ka). This android lies on the floor in loose-fitting white clothing. For an instant, it is static, as if totally dead, a reclining statue. Then, sudden as a seizure, the creature starts to convulse. It appears to be trying to rise from the floor, but it cannot. It is stuck in this ground-bound posture, imprisoned. Still, even though it is entrapped in one place, even though it desperately struggles against its invisible chains, this animatron is, in some sense, free. It is free because its parts are radically out of control, chaotically flailing as if unshackled.

This is the strange duplicity of Martinez’s artificial human. On the one hand, as a blindly repetitious mechanism, it is determined, and thus a departure from what we like to call human freedom. On the other hand, as a wildly turbulent creation, it is intensely free, and therefore a model of the emancipation to which human beings aspire. In an interview, Martinez himself illuminates this doubleness. While his mirroring contraption is obviously a machine, and so devoid of conscious choice, it is also a simulacrum of “the human body short-circuited” and in this way an instance of times when “the body is taken over by something that causes it to catapult itself into a genuinely radical space, outside of our norms and comprehensions.”1 Martinez’s doppelgänger exemplifies imprisonment and liberation, thwarting of human yearning and fulfillment of human potential.

I say that this exhibit appropriately opened in Cairo because this city rests very close to a pyramid that once, thousands of years ago, very likely housed statues thought to come to life, imitations of human beings designed to do chores for the animated mummy. Indeed, the culture famous for preparing its corpses to come back to life developed a fascinating theory of humanoids. Ancient Egyptian pyramids were arrayed with numerous human statues. Through proper magical incantations, the awakened mummy could summon these statues to clean his abode, to bring him food—to minister to any of his needs. Such statue thaumaturgy was often repeated in ancient Egyptian temples. These temples featured statues crafted to draw the presence of a god. To create statues meant to channel the divine was to connect decaying, dumb matter with eternally wise spirits. Even though the statues were probably made to talk by a priest hiding in a secret vault, the ancient Egyptians believed these stone humanoids to be oracles and healers. Whether the sacred power came through the statue itself or through a human medium, the potency was there, humming through the mouth. To this orifice, men and women addressed questions concerning innocence or guilt, sickness or health.2

These divinely animated statues, like Martinez’s animatron, suggest the enduring paradox of artificial humanoids. The creations are on the surface obvious automatons, automatic contraptions merely mimicking will or consciousness. As such, they appear to challenge human notions of the distinction between organic and inorganic; they seem to be biological when they really are not. In this way, these humanoids push against human security, suggesting the humans might really be machines and the machines could possibly be humans. Artificial humans in this sense are threats to human freedom. But on a deeper level, these mechanical creatures are something else again: they are potentially improvements on decaying biological matter. From this perspective, they encourage humans to transcend their physiologies; they offer a way of being indifferent to time and demise. In this manner, these artifices reveal human potential, intimating that humans in their current states are limited by their organic natures. Mechanical humanoids in this context are not threats but models to which to aspire.3

Martinez’s animatrons—not only in Call Me Ishmael but also in at least two other powerful exhibits—meld these potent antagonisms, these two seemingly contradictory antinomies: fate and freedom, imprisonment and liberation. Doing so, these works get to the deep and disturbing core of the psychology behind the construction of androids, a vexed cognitive state in which the mind always finds itself in a keen double bind. To illuminate this bind before turning to Martinez’s androids in earnest, we would do well first to pause on puppets and monsters, those uncanny marionettes that always elicit fear and desire and those horrific creatures that perpetually blur allegedly distinct categories, such as human and machine.

The Puppet Theater
In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer of a rather melancholy turn, published an essay on the great tragedy depicted in Biblical myth: the fall of man. This essay, called, rather surprisingly, “The Marionette Theater,” proposes that the primary result of the fall is self-consciousness. Before Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they knew only unity—unity with their garden environment, with each other, with their God. These harmonies fostered the most pleasing concord of all, unity with self, the feeling that thinking and acting are one, that awareness and spontaneity are not disjointed. However, after Adam and Eve ate from the tree, they immediately suffered fracture, a break with environment, each other, and God. These divisions caused them to sense a division within themselves, to become self-conscious, to see themselves not only through their own eyes but also through the eyes of others. Whereas before they were perfectly at home with their bodies, after the fall they became aware of how others might view their nakedness. They covered themselves with fig leaves, hiding their shame. For the first time, they were split between two perspectives—between their own idea of their identities and their notions of how others might view these same identities. They were split between freedom and censorship, feeling and rectitude.4

With this idea of the fall in mind, von Kleist—a man who felt the pain of life so intensely that he committed suicide in 1811—presents in his essay a dancer, Mr. C., who claims, rather startlingly, that humans pining for a return to the garden have much to learn from puppets. Mr. C. states that puppets dance with perfect grace because they lack affectation, that terrible split between doing something and wondering what others are thinking of what you’re doing. At one with themselves, beyond the rift between acting and thinking—untroubled, in other words, by self-consciousness—puppets always retain a perfect center of gravity. They move as Adam and Eve moved before they ate of the forbidden fruit. This marionette elegance, says Mr. C., reminds us not of humans—awkward and clumsy—but of gods, beings forever agile and comely. Indeed, von Kleist’s Mr. C. believes that puppets and gods are little different from one another. Puppets enjoy perfect innocence because they lack all self consciousness; gods delight in untroubled bliss because they are conscious of everything. Neither puppet nor god is vexed by the fracture that bedevils human beings, that break between effortless being and partial knowing that gnaws, between lithe anatomy and the mind’s turbulence.5

Von Kleist—when he killed himself he also killed his lover—sheds new light on the nature of artificial humans and on the agony of organic sinews. Not violations of divine law, not blasphemous efforts to become as gods, virtual humans beings—puppets but also other humanoids such as androids, automata, robots, and cyborgs—are in fact fulfillments of human potential, symbols of perfection to which breathing lungs and beating hearts and self-conscious minds can only aspire. Indeed, these kinds of machines, smooth in their movements and devoid of doubt, actually highlight what humans are doomed chronically to suffer: gestures that are jerky and disconsolate skepticisms. Humanoid machines are double. They are holy paragons, calling us to prelapsarian dignity; they are difficult memorandums, recalling our distance from grace.

The Frankenstein Factor
In 1815 Mary Shelley’s daughter Clara, born prematurely, died. No wonder Shelley, a year later, featured in her novel Frankenstein a character bent on overcoming death. The book’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, mourns deeply the loss of his mother. He grows to hate bodily annihilation. He decides to take revenge on this necessary organic process by concocting an artificial creature that will know no death. We all remember the story. Victor—ironically, given his loathing of decay—spends hours in graveyards digging up various corpses. From the parts of these ghoulish anatomies he pieces together a giant man, as hideous and monstrous as one might imagine. Using a secret process likely involving electricity, Victor brings this thing to life. Horrified by what he has made, Victor flees the scene. He abandons his perverse progeny.6

But Shelley, desperately mourning her dead baby, knew that lost children, even overgrown and monstrous ones, always return to hound those bereft of them. In her novel, the creature comes back to haunt his distant creator. Left to fend for himself, this creature eventually learns language and morality, love and longing. These human traits, however, do not allow the creature to gain entry into mainstream society. His grotesque appearance terrifies other people. They shun him. Embittered by his exile, the creature turns to crime, specifically, to murder. Eventually, through mere chance, he discovers Victor’s whereabouts. He asks his creator to fashion for him a female companion, a being as ugly as he. When Victor vehemently refuses, the creature begins systematically to murder almost everyone close to his creator. Meanwhile, Victor tenaciously seeks revenge. The creature, though, is too strong and cunning for the mere man. Exhausted and defeated, Victor finally dies in the vast ices of the Arctic. Soon after, the creature, remorseful, kills himself. He burns himself to death in flames of his own making.

This tale, completed around the time Shelley had a second child (and only a few years after von Kleist finished his piece on puppets), shows us something else again about artificial humans. While von Kleist’s essay suggests that mechanistic humanoids might be a fulfillment of a person’s spiritual potential, Shelley’s novel intimates another vision of the machine: the idea that the humanoid might be a violation of natural order. Shelley’s Victor hates organic process, the vibrant interplay between life and death. He wishes to remove one of these essential antinomies: death. Doing so, he hopes that he will enjoy only life. However, he soon realizes the opposite—to extricate one essential part of the organic process, be it life or death, results in a wasteland, an Arctic plane, lifeless and cold. Trying to make only life, Victor ends by fashioning death alone. To alter the natural order with machines is to change the world for the worse, to bring about a flatland, dead as smooth ice, or, worse, metal that never even rusts.

A Tale of Two Machines
These two perspectives—that of von Kleist and that of Shelley—produce a continuum of humanoid machines, a span illustrating the extremes of artifice. At one end, the human-like mechanism is a realization of spiritual potential, an elegant ideal to which awkward humans aspire. At the other end, the artificial human is a violation of natural order, a perverse power that apocalyptically annihilates all things living. Obviously, most all humanoid machines somehow combine both extremes. Putting together realization and violation, the high and the horrible, the majority of these artificial humans are properly sacred. This word derives from sacer, which means both holy and accursed. This is the significance of the puppet, the android, the robot, the automaton, the cyborg: each of these seemingly living contraptions manifests what we most love and most loathe.

Humanoid machines, then, are not mere issues of cold scientific curiosity or indifferent technological tinkering. They are markers for the deepest mysteries of human yearning and repulsion—the desire for transcendence of the decaying body, the fear that this very same decaying anatomy will one day disappear. The artificial human is in this way a revelation of what I can only call the soul—that enduring psychological essence that has organized human behavior for centuries. From almost the beginning of civilization, human beings—consciously or not—have concocted human-like mechanisms to symbolize their gods and their demons, their thirsts and their terrors. These humanoid contraptions, in other words, are religious phenomena. They are mechanical meditations on the mysterium tremendum, the crushing riddle of being. To study the living machine is to brood over the ungraspable absolute, the numinous.

Sacred Androids
The preceding is an appropriate intellectual context for thinking about the most powerful and memorable representation of artificial humans in recent cinema. This representation is featured in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982).7 The film is based on Philip K. Dick’s novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a profound meditation on the spiritual possibilities of humanoid machines. In the book, a band of extremely sophisticated androids—Nexus 6 Replicants—rebel against their human makers. Designed to function for only six years and on the verge of their imminent demise, these Replicants crave more life. In the course of their quest, they exhibit more vitality, emotion, and intelligence than their comatose human creators. They in fact call into question the abiding distinction between human and machine. On the one hand, their careers suggest that alleged machines can really be more human than those biological creatures that make them. On the other hand, their brief life spans intimate that ostensible humans are actually not as organic as they appear to be—that humans are in fact machines. This blurring of categories shows this: the concepts “human” and “machine” are not tied to the organic or the inorganic. Regardless of physical constitution—regardless of whether one is made of arteries or circuits—one can, based solely on behavior, be a human or a machine. If one is full-hearted, capable of profound feelings and capacious thoughts, then one is human. If one is heartless—that is, consigned to tepid emotions and narrow cognitions—then one is a machine.

In his film, Scott develops this dilapidated distinction between human and machine. In his depiction of the character of Roy Batty, the leader of the Replicant rebels, he encapsulates the horrific yet exhilarating duplicity of humanoid machines. In imbuing Roy with “human” characteristics—with consciousness, emotion, and wit—he suggests that there is no enduring disjunction between organs and cogs. But at the same time, in attaching to Roy “mechanistic” elements—indifference to pain, unselfconscious grace of motion, and transcendence of gravity—Scott gestures toward this notion: machines can be more than human, superhuman, angelic. So, the humanoid machine is in one way a violation of human notions of logic and order—it is organic and inorganic at once; it is a challenge to our staid notions of biology. Yet, in another way the machine is a realization of human potential, for it is not troubled by the limitations of physiology and it is not constrained by the constrictions of time and space. In embodying these two poles at once, Roy Batty, memorably played by Rutger Hauer, combines the two archetypes of the android: the von Kleist structure of transcendence (humanoid machines are superior to humans); the Shelley blueprint of limitation (artificial humans violate essential laws).

Not surprisingly, Blade Runner has spawned numerous and profound cinematic meditations on the relationship between human and machine. For instance, it is the presiding genius over such sophisticated films as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), The Matrix (1999), and A.I. (2001). But Ridley Scott’s film has also inspired some of the most striking art of the new millennium, the strange animatrons of Daniel Joseph Martinez. In a scene near the end of the film, Deckard, a bounty hunter of renegade Replicants, shoots Pris, Roy’s beloved. Before Pris loses her ability to think and move—before she, in essence, “dies”—her entire mechanical anatomy short circuits. This break-down in her machinery causes her to fall into a sort of epileptic fit, as though she’s suddenly possessed by forces utterly beyond her control. As Martinez claims in an interview, this “violent convulsion” signals “a machine . . . gone out of control.” The contraption can “no longer control its extremities much less its own thoughts, so it goes berserk. It’s chaos come alive.”8 For Martinez, this moment signals the deep mystery of androids, their irreducible duplicity. The machine is of course a model of determinism, a symbol of what it would be like if humans lost their ability to will things one way or another. But the machine also might signal our “discomfort with the body” and thus our desire to “evolve, mutate toward some other state of existence”—a state in which we are free of biology and possessed by something wildly emancipated.9

To Make a Blind Man Murder for the Things He’s Seen (Happiness Is Overrated)
A mechanical man sits in an utterly white room. His knees rest on the floor. He leans back on his heels. His hair is longish, shoulder-length. It is combed back off his forehead. He sports a small beard under his lower lip. His eyes are blankly melancholy, almost comatose. He wears blue working clothes, seemingly the Dickie brand, and blue and white Puma tennis shoes. He uncannily resembles his maker, Daniel Joseph Martinez. He bends his elbows, with each forearm held to the side of his torso and parallel to the floor. In each hand, held between index finger and thumb, is a razor blade. Suddenly, the mechanism awakens from its virtually somnambulistic state. Slowly, almost ritualistically, he raises his right arm and slices down toward his left wrist. A red gash is exposed on this wrist. After making this slashing motion, the machine returns its right arm to its original position. The android then raises its left hand and slashes toward its right arm. Again, a reddish wound appears, this time on the left wrist. As the machine makes these movements, the hissing of pistons can be heard. Drowning this mechanical sound, though, is a profound belly laugh seemingly emerging from the animatron’s mouth. The creature then returns to its moribund state. It just sits alone in a totally pallid dwelling. But it soon repeats its suicide and its laughter, only once more to return to its static position. It does this endlessly, apparently caught in a horrifically repetitious loop.

We can quickly see how this machine, like the one in Call Me Ishmael, is sacred, a melding of monstrous determinism and miraculous transcendence. One the one hand, the animatron is severely limited—it cannot successfully complete the ritualized suicide that it seeks. Like a bug on its back, it strains against the strictures of space and time. It wants more than anything to escape these rules, to free life into death. But it is unable to annihilate itself. Such a failure takes away the last inkling of human freedom. As the mid-twentieth-century existentialists argued, suicide is the last and most powerful expression of human freedom—no matter how constrained one is, one can always decide to end his life. Martinez’s android, however, does not enjoy this liberation. It is fated to suffer the same botched effort at suicide over and over again. But, on the other hand, there is the laughter. This desperate guffaw shows that the animatron is, in some strange sense, aware of the futility of its actions. This ostensible awareness allows the machine, as it were, to stand outside of itself and watch itself undergo the endless round of unsuccessfulness. It’s as if the humanoid machine is both participating in the event and not participating in the same occurrence, both suffering the scene and witnessing the happening. The disembodied eye, unmoored, as it were, from space and time, can only laugh at the absurdity of the body, its almost comic efforts to overcome against the limitations in which it finds itself. Such transcendent guffawing illustrates the transcendence of self-consciousness, an ecstatic stance always outside of the source that generated it. While the body, no better than a machine, enacts the same dull round, the mind watches the body repeat itself. This same mind, though, is also capable of watching itself watch and then of watching itself watching itself watch, and so on, ad infinitum This is the “n + 1” of self consciousness, its perpetual ability to be both in and beyond.

Fittingly, Martinez points to this very duplicity between imprisonment and emancipation in an interview. Speaking of To Make a Blind Man Murder—a show that opened in Los Angeles in 2002—he intimates that the work is about the “compression” of the “necessity of [a body’s] own death” and the attempt of this body “to become self-aware.” Such a compression, Martinez continues, reveals the body’s innate nature—it is, at its base, truly violent. To be sure, in the piece, Martinez exhibits a disturbing upsurge of suicidal violence and also an awareness of that very violence. This melding of act and thought is designed, Martinez goes on, to shock viewers into an immediate knowledge of the fact that they live in a “post-violent” dream world, a world of alienating lies.10 Only by being recalled to the real violence within their bodies can they become aware of truths they have forgotten. When such awareness comes, then bodies, Martinez concludes, might become vehicles for “transmutation,” “emergent” technologies that go “against all logic and laws that currently govern us.”11 Such a rebellion would be ironically grounded on a freedom reached through determinism, a transcendence of violence through violence.

Irony, indeed, is the primary mode here. What is irony but one’s ability simultaneously to participate in an event and distance oneself from the same event? Martinez’s animatron in To Make a Blind Man Murder embodies this duplicity. In ritualistically attempting suicide over and over again, the machine exhibits its extreme limitations and suggests that human bodies suffer from the same sorts of limitation. The artwork intimates that machine and body alike are determined by repetitive feedback loops utterly beyond the control of any kind of purposeful consciousness. But this doesn’t mean that one can achieve freedom here. In breaking into a deep laugh each time it brings down the blades, the animatron points to a perspective distant from the immediate act, a detached stance that looks on the event from afar and finds its absurd, worthy only of laughter. This signification of the android indicates that human beings can likewise achieve this liberated distance by way of their self-consciousness, their ability to witness the experiences that their bodies undergo. Even though the body is entrapped, fated to be what it is, awareness of this same body is liberated, free to be what it decides to be. This is the duplicity of all irony: something is one thing and its opposite at the same time. Such an oppositional situation leads to simultaneous existence and erasure. To study Martinez’s android is to encounter a self-consuming artifact. In this scenario, one experiences something but is ultimately left with nothing. This nothing is simultaneously nihilism—life is a meaningless round of violent acts—and idealism—life is a constant transcendence of violence to the laughter of eternity.  Irony in this arena—the arena of the melancholy android—is sacred, a blurring of what we most loathe (the void) and what we most love (the plenitude).

This is only one of the sacred ironies of Martinez’s provocative work, To Make a Blind Man Murder. Another is this: even though the electronic body of the piece is seemingly trapped in the same feedback loop, one could argue that this same body is possessed by forces beyond its control and thus empowered by the same creative energies that convulsed the android in Call Me Ishmael. In this perspective, the machine would have a transcendental function. It would beckon to a potentially ubiquitous potency outside of its parameters. It would be overtaken, in other words, by something like a demon or an angel or a god, something driving it to engage in a disturbing yet sacred ritual, a ritual designed to help the body escape its limitations into the mystery of death. One can similarly reverse the interpretation of the animatron’s laughter. Although the guffaw seems to enjoy an ironic distance from the body’s travails, one could submit that the laughter is controlled by an electronic circuit and thus utterly determined. In this context, the laughter would not be transcendental at all but rather limited by a determining power. In fact, this same laughter would suggest that even the appearance of self-consciousness is in reality but one more aspect of fate, an apparent mode of going beyond that is really merely epiphenomenon of a purely material process. The laughter, then, would be a site of failure—failure to go beyond the entrapped body. Taken together, these two readings—the body as transcendent, self-consciousness as determined—cancel out the earlier interpretations—the body is determined, self-consciousness is transcendent. In doing so, these significations of the android yet again point to transcendental irony, an irony grounded on a self-annihilation that frees one into either a meaningless equation or an infinite abyss.

Yet another irony inheres in To Make a Blind Man Murder. This irony resides in the work’s title. The line, “To Make a Blind Man Murder for the Things He’s Seen” comes from a rap song called “Keep Me Lifted,” written by Michael Franti in 1997. The song was performed by the group Spearhead on the album, Chocolate City.12 The line comes in the midst of the rapper complaining about the ills of contemporary society. The situation is so bad, the song suggests, that it will make an unseeing man actually sense the tragedies of the contemporary world and respond to these tragedies with outraged violence. Such violence might be a vehicle of positive change. However, as Martinez himself has made clear, the title also refers to the career of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. In the words of Martinez, Mishima was a writer devoted to “political change” and “aesthetic exploration.”  When the author, at the age of forty-five, felt that he had nothing more to say, he “committed ritual suicide.”13 In this context, the blind man is Mishima, a man blinded by his rage against futility and willing to murder himself because of this rage. This wrenching together of popular culture (a rap song) and a scene from elite literature (an esteemed literary man performing seppuku, ritualized self annihilation) is, to say the least, jarring. The two modes cancel one another out, with the “high” culture challenging the “low” culture, and the “low” countering the “high.&rdquo This self-consumption is reinforced by the contradiction in the title: a blind man seeing. Obviously, on the one hand, this contradiction is a paradox, a reconcilable opposition: a blind man can “see” things that sighted persons cannot because he is attuned to unseen forces beyond the purview of mere sight. In this context, we think, of course, of the blind poet Homer or the blind literary character Tiresias. However, on the other hand, this contradiction features two concepts forever at odds: sight and blindness. From this perspective, a blind man is simply someone who cannot see anything and thus would murder indiscriminately, unjustly, absurdly. This additional self-cancellation in the title is supported by another erasure in the subtitle. This second part of the title is clearly an ironic undercutting of the enduring slogan of the Walt Disney Corporation: “The Happiest Place on Earth.”14 Happiness, Martinez’s work suggests, should not be the primary goal of life.  Not only is it given praise that it doesn’t deserve (it is an attenuated, superficial state); it also fosters blindness to the world’s suffering (it blithely embraces an unjust status quo). However, the animatron also intimates that happiness is not overrated—at least happiness of a certain kind. In laughing uproariously at its absurd predicament, the android suggests that a kind of joy can issue from the self-conscious gaze—the exuberance of liberation, the giddiness of transcendence.

(I should here note that Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant is also rich in sacred irony. Obviously, as I have already mentioned, the work cancels itself, for it points to the idea that bodies are both thoroughly determined, caught in the same vicious round, and utterly liberated, possessed by creative chaos. This is—as we now know—the irony inherent in any experience of the sacred. Undergoing such an experience, one is both horrified at the accursed state of bodies—they are fated by forces beyond their control—and overjoyed at the body’s holiness—its ability to push beyond itself to virtually infinite vistas. But Martinez’s 2006 work is ironic in two other ways as well. First of all, it, as with To Make a Blind Man Murder, reverses and thus undercuts the very ironic tension that seems to organize it. If from one perspective the piece points to a sacred tension between a shackled machine and an emancipated body, the exhibit from another angle of vision intimates this: it is precisely the imprisoned mechanism that is free and exactly the quivering body that is fated. The reclining circuitry is motionless and garbed in the same color of white that surrounds it. As such, even though it is chained, it signifies a pure potentiality, an indifferent limbo out of which anything might emerge. It is the whiteness that is everything (the ground of all colors) and nothing (no color at all). In this way, the enchained figure reminds us of the mythological undifferentiated chaos—itself both everything and nothing—from which the cosmos emerged. If the reclining figure from this angle betokens creative chaos, then the jolted body from this view signals predictable order. The spasmodic body is an actualization of the pale potential. In this way, the seized circuitry is severely limited, for it is a definite form and only a definite form. It is fixed on an unalterable course. It is doomed to be what it is and only what it is. A third irony agitates Martinez’s jostling android, this time in the context of the title. The work’s title, Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened World Radiates Disaster Triumphant, is based on the famous openings of two powerful volumes. The main title comes, obviously, from the first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); and the second is from the opening of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s book The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).15 Melville’s novel of course meditates on the idea that an albino whale is both a plenitude of all meaning (whiteness, again, is all hues) and a void of no meaning at all (once more, whiteness is blankness). It also contemplates the idea that the outcast from mainstream society—both the Ishmael of the Bible and the protagonist of the novel—is both an exile wandering over cruel and uncharted spaces (the desert or the sea) and a noble founder of a powerful spiritual vision (the Islamic religion or the metaphysics of whaling). Both of these situations are palpably ironic: the whale is revelation and veiling; the exile is lost yet prescient. Irony also runs through Adorno and Horkheimer’s text. This philosophical treatise explores the idea that a totally rational world, a totally “enlightened world,” would be a cold totalitarian condition, in which everything, no matter how mysterious or alive, would be reduced to a predictable quantity, a bloodless number. Such a situation would obviously allow disaster to triumph—the earth would descend into a vast waste. Of course this statement is clearly ironic: enlightenment, normally generous knowledge, turns out to be crudely violent ignorance. Supporting this irony is Martinez’s own earlier work, To Make a Blind Man Murder, in which he points to the idea that blindness is a kind of deep seeing and that, conversely, regular sight is a sort of blindness. In both cases—in the case of the 2006 work and also the case of the 2002 exhibit—illumination is blindness, and blindness is enlightenment. Once more, we are faced with a self-cancellation that leaves us in the abyss, itself a realm of meaninglessness and meaning, the nothing that is nihilism and the nothing of possibility.) Martinez’s most recent exhibit opened in Mexico City in 2007. The show is called Have You Seen My Clark Nova, or I Want To Vomit In Your Mouth and Hope You Gag on Your Insipid Lies (Dancing Is Still the Only Way To Start a Revolution). This work is yet another rich illustration of Martinez’s sacred technology, of his holy irony. It features a four-foot high animatron of Fidel Castro emerging from a box every few minutes and dancing as Anthony Quinn’s Zorba the Greek did at the end of the great film. Reducing an oppressive dictator to a diminutive dancer, invoking William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, (in which Clark Nova appears as a character), and glancing toward Disney cartoons (in which miniature characters gleefully dance), Martinez in this work is once more cleverly and ironically mixing the high and the low, the serious and the comic.16 Doing so, he is also blurring the accursed, the violence of a tyrant, and the holy, the transformative possibilities of Dionysian dance. The work, like Martinez’s other two works featuring androids, is a rich and brilliant meditation on the relationship between fate and freedom, oppression and liberation, mechanism and consciousness.

Indeed, this Mexico City work, like those set in Egypt and Los Angeles, establishes Martinez as our age’s hieratic maker, a benevolent priest of circuitry bringing, as the ancient Egyptian priests did before him, the dead back to life. Whether he is concocting doppelgangers forcing us to brood over the nature of bodies or fashioning satirical mechanisms that undercut the brutal pomposity of dictators, Martinez is struggling to remove the bandages from our moribund eyes, to make us once more see, and to see anew, the horrific and the beatific powers of the machines that are our bodies. Witnessing these potencies, we are transformed, shocked beyond our tragic cogs.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The recipient of several important awards, including a National Humanities Center yearlong fellowship, he is the author of five books on the relationship between literature and psychology.

Endnotes
1. Quoted in Gilbert Vicario, “Enlightenment Is Mythic Fear Turned Radical (becoming more human than human,” The Illustrated Guidebook to The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, by Daniel Joseph Martinez, United States Pavilion, 10th International Cairo Biennale 2006 (Houston:  The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006), 8.  This quotation originally came from Lauri Firstenberg, “Mutation Is the Most Radical Ideology: Lauri Firstenberg Talks to Daniel Joseph Martinez,” Art Papers 30: 1 (January-February 2006): 38-41.
2.Ioan P. Couliano, Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston: Shambhala, 1991), 61.
3. This basic argument is developed fully in Eric G. Wilson, The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).  
4. Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre,” Selected Writings: Heinrich von Kleist, ed. and trans. David Constantine (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 413-416.
5. von Kleist, 413-416.
6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin, 1985), 52-53.
7. Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, perfs. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, Sean Young (Blade Runner Partnership, Ladd Company, 1982).
8. Moukhtar Kocache, “Call Me Ishmael: An Interview Between Daniel Joseph Martinez and Moukhtar Kocache,” The Illustrated Guidebook to The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, by Daniel Joseph Martinez, United States Pavilion, 10th International Cairo Biennale 2006 (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006), 17.
9. Kocache, 19.
10. Kocache, 18.
11. Kocache, 19.
12. Vicario, 12.
13. Farah El Alfy, “An Epileptic Robot Inspired By Nietzsche Rocks Cairo’s 10th International Biennale: An Interview With Daniel Joseph Martinez,” Daily News: Egypt, December 15, 2006, http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx? ArticleID=4477.
14. Vicario, 12.
15. Vicario notes this connect, 9. The sentence comes from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 16.
16. I gleaned this basic information pertaining to Martinez’s most recent android work from the program to the exhibition at EDS galeria in Mexico City.  The program can be found at http://boletin.arteven.com/h/07_eds_galeria_3.htm.