>At 03:11 PM 12/8/00 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
>>CB: Now some people are fucking their cars and computers. It's sort
>>of the antithesis of ludditism.
>who on earth be fucking a computer or car?
>altho i do recall the HBO real sex series where people demonstrated
>their fetish for machinery once. metal, silver, chunky, hard edged
>steel shiny stuff got them off. big clanking machinery sounds.
The Greek myth of Pygmalion & Galatea
René Descartes (1596-1650), Francine, & the Body as an automaton
E. T. A. Hoffman, "The Sandman," 1817
Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_, 1831
Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, _L'Eve future_, 1886
E. E. Kellett, "The Lady Automaton," 1901
William James' "automatic sweetheart" in _The Meaning of Truth_, 1911 (at <http://paradigm.soci.brocku.ca/~lward/James/james_02_h.html>)
Marcel Duchamp, "Machines Celibataires/Bachelor Machines," _The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)_, 1915-1923 (see it at <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/Articles/Glass.html>)
Fritz Lang, _Metropolis_, 1927
Vladimir Nabokov, _Lolita_, 1955: "...my Lolita remarked: 'You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate -- dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions..."
Roger Vadim, _Barbarella_, 1968
Ridley Scott, _Blade Runner_, 1982
David Cronenberg, _Videodrome_, 1983
Shinya Tsukamoto, _Tetsuo_, 1988
David Cronenberg, _Crash_, 1996
David Cronenberg, _eXistenZ_, 1999
Alt.sex.fetish.robots FAQ, at <http://www.sexuality.org/l/fetish/robofaq.html>
Tom Polger, "Zombies," at <http://www.uniroma3.it/kant/field/zombies.htm>
Yoshie
Postscript: "Now, the concept of capital as a fetish reaches its height in interest-bearing capital, being a conception which attributes to the accumulated product of labour, and at that in the fixed form of money, the inherent secret power, as an automaton, of creating surplus-value in geometrical progression, so that the accumulated product of labour, as the Economist thinks, has long discounted all the wealth of the world for all time as belonging to it and rightfully coming to it. The product of past labour, the past labour itself, is here pregnant in itself with a portion of present or future living surplus-labour. We know, however, that in reality the preservation, and to that extent also the reproduction of the value of products of past labour is only the result of their contact with living labour; and secondly, that the domination of the products of past labour over living surplus-labour lasts only as long as the relations of capital, which rest on those particular social relations in which past labour independently and overwhelmingly dominates over living labour" (Karl Marx, _Capital_ Vol. 3, at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch24.htm>).