Kraftwerk: The Robots (1977)

I recall reading an English translation of Descartes's Meditations some time ago, in which the very important term automate is rendered not as 'automaton' but as 'robot'. In other words, Descartes finds himself worrying in the second Meditation whether those beings moving around out there in the street, beneath their hats and cloaks, are not beings at all, but 'robots'. Now, why is this such an inexcusable anachronism? Certainly, the ancient preoccupation with creating artificial humans has something in common with 20th-century robotics. But whereas the aspiration in ancient and early modern chemistry, hydraulico-pneumatics, and related fields was to create a machine that simulates freedom, the idea of a robot, since the first appearance of the term in 1920, has been associated with the absence of freedom. That is, automata are machines that realize freedom artificially (the Greek automatos is generally translated as 'spontaneous'), while robots are machines that simulate some of the motions of the human body, but with freedom conveniently subtracted. 

Robots are always workers, and they are a product of the same historical moment that saw the aesthetic glorification of industrial labor in, e.g., the Futurist movement, as well concern over the danger of humans becoming mere cogs as expressed in, e.g., Chaplin's Modern Times. Apparently, when Karel Čapek decided on the term 'robota' for his 1920 play, RUR, he had initially considered the Latin-rooted laborus. But in deciding on the Slavic root for 'work', willingly or not Čapek anchored the robot for all time in a particular historical moment with a particular cluster of associated images, many from Soviet iconography, but many also from fascist Futurism, with which Maiakovskii et al., as is well known, had surprisingly close ties. The pull of Soviet futurism is so strong that 57 years later, in what is perhaps the beginning of the second wave of profound artistic engagement with the robot, Kraftwerk inserts a Russian phrase into what is otherwise, for reasons I'll get to, meant to be a working-out of distinctively German preoccupations: Я твой слуга, я твой работник [I am your servant, I am your worker]. That's the essence of the robot: not spontaneity, but a narrowly circumscribed range of actions, all of which are geared towards production (whether for greedy capitalist bosses or for 'the people').

Now, what I want to say is that this video is not at all techno-futurist, but is rather neo-Futurist. That is, it is not, as is generally supposed about Kraftwerk (and as would be the case about even Kraftwerk just a few years later with their fun and frivolous output of the early 1980s, so closely linked to the birth of breakdancing, and scarcely different in spirit from the most ridiculous monuments of that era, such as Midnight Star's 'Freakazoid'), it is not, I say, a crude but promising beginning for the later history of techno music. One is getting it entirely wrong if one's reaction is: well, not bad for 1977.

Look at the microphones and the haircuts and the shirts and ties. These all represent something we are familiar with from German cultural output of that era, something you might call the 'seventies thirties guy', that is, the guy who is clearly in the 1970s, in reality, but who is understood to represent someone in the 1930s, perhaps his own grandfather. In fact, in spite of the 1970s technology on display, here Kraftwerk more compellingly channels the early 20th century than any other film image from the same era that I can think of (and certainly more compellingly than the characters in the Nazi films of Fassbinder or Visconti). Why though are they channeling the early 20th century? Much of the best German art that issues out of the intense efflorescence of creativity between roughly 1968 and 1982 (only to come to a screeching halt after that) is driven by a concern to work through the legacy of some of the most ensorcelling visions of the future that were entertained in the immediate pre-war period. None of the visions conjured in that period is quite so disconcerting as the figure of the robot, which took the ancient dream of artificial freedom represented by the automaton, and turned it into a quest to artificially remove freedom from beings that naturally have it, that is, to turn them into workers. In this respect, the real history of robotics is not about turning machines into humans, but rather humans into machines. This history informs 'The Robots', consciously or not, and thus sets it very much apart from the subsequent history of techno music, in relation to which it supposedly stands as a distinguished ancestor.

Comments

[Maximus]

Kraftwerk themselves explained that they were trying to recapture the spirit of a European avant-garde that was interrupted by Nazism and Stalinism:

"The living culture of Central Europe was cut in the '30s, and all the intellectuals went to the U.S. or to France, or they were eliminated. We take back that culture of the '30s at the point where it was left, and this on a spiritual level..."

http://artificeeternity.com/voltage/index.php?m=200510#post-707

[esteban]

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