18th-century humanoid automata functions as a model, on the one hand, for submission and use and, on the other, for empirical analysis.
Foucault has often been criticized for ignoring the racial others in his historiography.6 Notably, his concept of docility displacesOrientalist traces by solely focusing on the European subject in a selective genealogy. This absence becomes more critical in the analysis of an automaton that carries significations of Oriental "other,"such as Kempelen's chess-playing automaton. However, I believe that the trick of the chess-playing automaton involves more than just exchanging the enacted body of the European chess player with the represented body of the Turk, animated through its mechanical artifice. It also includes initial assumptions that were set up in the audience by the automaton's chess performance that were crucial in influencing the public debates on the mechanized reason that provided the larger context for these performances. These initial assumptions are closely tied to Orientalist undercurrents that were exploited by Enlightenment discourse in order to configure the docile subject on the image of the Turk.7
The Orientalist assumptions that were active in Enlightenment automata were also effective in the cultural performance of Kempelen's automaton. I will focus on the two main aspects of the affordance of the image of the Turk as a significant part of themain interface of the chess-playing automaton.8The first critical aspect of the Turk's performance is its liminal quality. This liminality created a buffer zone against the risk associated with the idea of the man-machine that most Enlightenment humanoid automata performed. That potential risk was often associated withinstigations of libertinism, atheism, and insurrectionin public due to the heretical understanding of a body without a soul (Vartanian 1960). Relegating this precarious role to an Oriental figure had, in fact, a long tradition with origins in medieval romance literature (Truitt 2004). The Oriental automata, through its association with liminal spaces and experiencesin these literary accounts, conveyed surveillance, discipline, and enforcement of limits of morality.
The second aspect of the Turk's performance is a particular form of docility that conveys the idea of the disciplined productive body, which played a salient role in the formation of the enlightened culture (Schaffer 1999). The association of the Oriental with docility has its roots in medieval theology, where the Muslim subjects were considered as strict followersof religious code. Linking this association with the discourse of Oriental automata, Christian theology configured a particular discourse of Muslim as automaton (Biddick2011). Furthermore, docility prefigures the hidden chess player's performance of the intellectual labor on behalf of theOriental automaton. This dual performance of docility highlights the question of the intellectual laborin the context of the epistemic renovation in 18th-century Europe (Foucault 1977). These two aspects of the Turk's performance—docility and liminality—are crucial for graspingits function as a model of power for the idealization of a social order in the context of the large-scale processes of mechanization of labor in Europe in the 18th century.
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