The Bill of Flights / The Oddiesy

Bill Oddie is writing his autobiography. The bird world waits with baited beaks…However the downside is the fact that he won’t be making a much anticipated contribution to the next issue of Fancy That. Meanwhile in place of Bill; Jacques de Vaucanson. The Canard Digerateur (Digesting Duck)   ”Most impressively, the Duck ate bits of corn and grain and, after a moment, excreted them in an altered form (fig. 6). Vaucanson said these processes were “copied from Nature,” the food digested “as in real Animals, by Dissolution. . . . But this,” he added, “I shall…shew…[on] another Occasion” (“L,” p. 21). By claiming that his Duck digested by dissolution, Vaucanson entered a debate among physiologists over whether digestion was a chemical or a mechanical process. Unfortunately his postponement of further explanations to “another occasion” aroused suspicions. Already in 1755 a critic accused the Duck of being “nothing more than a coffee-grinder” (JV, p. 479). Then in 1783, a close observer of the Duck’s swallowing mechanism uncovered an even greater deceit: the food did not continue down the neck and into the stomach but rather stayed at the base of the mouth tube. Reasoning that digesting the food by dissolution would take longer than the brief pause the Duck took between swallowing and expulsion, this observer concluded that the grain input and excrement output were entirely unrelated and that the tail end of the Duck must be loaded before each act with fake excrement.¹⁸ The Duck that pioneered physiological simulation was, at its core, fraudulent. On the other hand, this central fraud was surrounded by plenty of genuine imitation. Vaucanson was intent on making his Duck strictly simulative, except where it was not. Each wing contained over four hundred articulated pieces, imitating every bump on every bone of a natural wing. All the Duck’s movements (except the one just mentioned) were modeled upon exhaustive studies of natural ducks.” (http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v29/v29n4.riskin.html)   Perhaps this exposé is not as heartbreaking as it first seems. Maybe their beauty lies is the guarded disclosure of some but not all of their mystery. Perhaps we feel we know better than to believe that automata could think and remember and act independentlybut maybe we might take “unsettling delight…in knowing full well that [we are] being deceived.”                          Afterall,    ”nobody dreams of absolutes, like unbeatable automatic chess players, any more”  Dream on.  

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