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Prosthetic Personhood in <em>R.U.R.</em>

2020; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5621/sciefictstud.47.1.0153

2327-6207

Swanstrom,

Art, Technology, and Culture

153 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Prosthetic Personhood in R.U.R. Most SFS readers will be aware that Czech playwright Karel Èapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920) provides a defining template for all subsequent robot stories, not only through its depictions of artificial persons but also through the very neologism “robot” itself, which stems from the Czech word for “worker” and “slave.” The term is appropriate, for the play offers a scathing critique of assembly-line production and sheds light on the dehumanizing conditions of the people forced to work in this way. This, at least, is a predominant way R.U.R. has been analyzed in existing scholarship, which is to say as a satirical take on the emergence of the modern factory, with its attendant attributes of efficiency, time management, and modular labor. This reading makes excellent sense, and the play confirms it unambiguously in an early scene, when the Director of R.U.R. notes that the process of building robots is “just like making a car.” I would like to return to this same moment, however, to tease out a different but complementary perspective, namely, that the production of the robots—and their parts—in R.U.R. resonates with the swift advances in prosthetics that occurred in the wake of World War I. In both readings, the human body is valued primarily for the specific labor it is capable of performing and often becomes indistinguishable from it. With this hypothesis in place, a closer examination of this early scene will be instructive. The play begins with Domin, the “Director General” of R.U.R, who dictates to his robot secretary a business letter confirming an order of “15,000 robots.” He is interrupted by Helena Glory, an ambassador from a human rights organization, who has come to investigate whether or not Rossum’s robots are at risk. Domin finds the suggestion ludicrous and aggressively insists that the robots are not at all human. When Helena refuses to believe this, Domin proposes that they take Sulla, his secretary, to “the dissecting room” and “open her up” so Helena can have a better look. The assembly of robots is a piecemeal process, he explains, with various machines devoted to the production of their individual components: I’ll show you the mixers ... [for] mixing the dough. Each one of them can mix the material for a thousand robots at a time. Then there are the vats of liver and brain and so on. The bone factory. Then I’ll show you the spinning-mill ... where we make the nerve fibres and the veins. And the intestine mill, where kilometers of tubing run through at a time. Then there’s the assembly room where all these things are put together, it’s just like making a car really. Each worker contributes just his own part of the production which automatically goes on to the next worker, then to the third and on and on.... After that they go to the drying room and into storage where the newly made robots work. Although the earliest known prosthetics date back to antiquity, in the form of a false toe found on an Egyptian mummy and a fake leg on a buried Roman soldier (Coughlan), the manufacture of prosthetic limbs became a modern science after “the unparalleled destruction of the First World War combined with improved emergency medical care.” Consequently, “thousands of 154 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) servicemen surviv[ed] their devastating injuries and subsequent amputations. The situation demanded both increased production of artificial limbs and improvements in prosthetic device technology” (“Prosthetic Devices”). In an article from 1956, “Economic Aspects of the Artificial Limb Industry,”•McCarthy Hanger, Jr. details the swift advances made in this area: Some of the more outstanding of the mechanical devices invented by members of the industry in the last 50 years are: many different designs of artificial hooks, which are designed to fulfill particular needs such as those of the farmer, mechanic, or office worker, as well as the needs of daily living; ball bearing joints of several different designs for amputations below the knee or at the knee...