The American Robot: A Cultural History by Dustin A. Abnet (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• The American Robot: A Cultural History by Dustin A. Abnet
• Ben Russell (bio)

The American Robot: A Cultural History By Dustin A. Abnet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 376.

This wide-ranging and thought-provoking book is about the idea of the robot in American history. The robot is presented not as a technical creation but as "a multifaceted character that people use to deal with some of the most persistent tensions in their society" (p. 295). Taking the robot as a central interpretative lens, the book identifies "a persistent ideological determination" to connect and conflate machines and humans, "sometimes the self, but more frequently others" (p. 295). The book argues this ideology has been created by American elites—primarily a small subset of American middle- and upper-class men—who, while "unwilling [End Page 712] to acknowledge that they themselves might be machines, have been willing to accept that others might or should be" (p. 7). In consequence, humans have been turned into machines and machines into humans, with all the quandaries pertaining to race, gender, and social status that such a transformation entails.

The author acknowledges the extant literature, sharing with it an approach taking the robot as a mirror for humans to reflect upon themselves with—see, for example, Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock (2016). The book quickly defines a dual focus, on America and on presenting a narrative right up to 2019. This stands well alongside works that have been written with a European focus and those that are often necessarily historical case studies—take Adelheid Voskuhl's Androids in the Enlightenment (2013) for the former, for example, and E. R. Truitt's Medieval Robots (2015) for the latter. That said, note that European museums have adopted the book's long historical view in robots exhibits as standard (Technisches Museum, Vienna, 2013; Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, 2014; Science Museum, London, 2017; and MUDEC, Milan, 2020)—and that there is a caveat to how the book adopts this approach in the following discussion.

The book is split into three parts. "God and Demon, 1790–1910" addresses the rise of automaton figures such as Signor Falconi's Indian (1788) or Zadoc Drederick's Steam Man (1868), within the context of American society's nineteenth-century industrial transformation. The second, "Masters and Slaves, 1910–1945," sees Karel Capek's newly coined word "robot" applied in an America being transformed into the world's preeminent power. The third, "Playfellow and Protector, 1945–2019," addresses the robot's rise as a creation of popular culture within an America that had huge prosperity but was grappling with the dilemmas of the Cold War. Each section is prefaced with a short case study introducing the key themes to be discussed. This careful structuring is repeated for each individual chapter, providing clear framing for the detailed source material and discussion contained therein.

The book speaks to the three characteristics that make robots such intriguing subjects. First, they are liminal, existing at contested points on numerous spectrums between paired extremes: at the top level as identified by the author, intimate/distant, god/demon, master/slave, playfellow/protector. The body text identifies, or brings to mind, a wide range of other such pairings. Secondly, robots are situated: they exist not just in the laboratory but in the unpredictable and infinitely variable human world, and in many different media types, from films and plays to comics and cartoons. The book takes this rich media as its feedstock throughout, outlined and interrogated in detail. Finally, robots are embodied: they take different physical forms, which influence how the robot interacts with and shapes the human environment in which it resides.

The overall argument pertaining to robots' liminality and situatedness is well made. The nature of robots' embodiment could have been explored a [End Page 713] little more. The book's source material includes robots in considerable numbers and taking many different physical forms, from chess-playing automata and electromechanical men to industrial robots by Unimation, and even Cyrus McCormick's reaper. The absence of robots as embodied software, or electronic devices, was quite surprising. Maybe these technologies are not as...