R.U.R
Karel Capek’s R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is an 85-page play which reads like a veritable
fountainhead for many of the themes and concerns of cyberpunk. In particular,
R.U.R. meditates on what the continued production of advanced technology might
mean for humanity at large. In the effort to continuosly “better” human life,
the technological arc of R.U.R. eventually arrives at the robot- a production
of the human as thing not person. Devoid of emotion, personality and thus
agency, the robot is introduced to the reader of R.U.R. as an object of
technological preversion; man altered to the point of being labor alone, not
love or creative intellect. It is humanity without the spark
ROBOT- derived from- Czech word ‘robota’, means – forced labor
dehumanization of man through technology.
R.U.R. in its
Era: Historical and Cultural Contexts
R.U.R. had its
origins in decidedly tumultuous times. Written in 1920 and first performed in
1921, the play’s nightmare vision of massed armies of faceless hordes
threatening to wipe out human civilization was undoubtedly influenced by two
world-changing recent events. In 1917, Russia rose up in revolt, overthrowing
the Czar and overturning the social order, sending shivers through aristocrats
across the world and inaugurating a nearly century-long global conflict between
capitalism and communism. Closer to home for Karel Čapek and of greater impact,
World War One (1914-1918), which he escaped by being declared medically unfit
for military service, devastated his entire generation. The war introduced such
deadly innovations as the first mass use of trench warfare, the machine gun,
tanks, air combat, bombs, and poison gas, resulting in mechanized slaughter
unprecedented in its horror and sheer numbing statistics. Modern machinery
could now kill on a scale and with an efficiency never seen before. As Ivan
Klima writes in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of R.U.R.,
“the cruel, senseless carnage of war shattered the world of certainties: the
commonly shared illusion that by means of unprecedented technical progress,
civilization was moving toward a better, easier life.”
The industrial age that had begun in the previous century had indeed made great
leaps forward and was progressing with the same sense of unstoppable momentum
that marks the technological advances of our own time. Railways, steamships,
and telegraph lines connected the world and its economies as never before, and
the mass manufacture of automobiles enabled by Henry Ford’s assembly line
offered Čapek the inspiration for Rossum’s robot factory, where humanoid
machines are turned out en masse in the same manner. The machine was glorified
and celebrated in popular culture and modern art in movements such as Futurism,
Vorticism, and the sleek lines of Art Deco in design and architecture (and
let’s not forget that the first moving picture created by the Lumière brothers
to cause a mass sensation depicted a train entering a station). Yet for every
innovation there was a World War or a Titanic (lost in 1912) to remind the
world that the new technology was not always friendly or infallible.
In western culture and society, meanwhile, unrest and reorderings were not
confined to Russia. Another of the side effects of industrialization was the
rise of a middle class that was starting to become aware of its power and to
demand democracy and rights. The trade union movement began to burgeon, and the
women of many western countries increasingly mobilized to demand the vote. It
is hard not to see in Helena Glory, the naïve Humanity League activist of Act
One of R.U.R., a perhaps less-than-generous portrait of the
militant suffragette (maybe not coincidentally, women gained the right to vote
in what is now the Czech Republic in 1920, as Kapek was writing the play), even
as her rhetoric also recalls that of the Abolition movement of the 19th century
(for the first audiences of R.U.R., slavery was a not altogether
distant memory).
At the confluence of social upheavals and science was the Eugenics movement,
which reached its apex in the early decades of the twentieth century. Seeking
to apply Darwin’s theories to human beings, eugenicists sought to perfect human
beings by way of selective breeding and sterilization of undesirables
(“inferior” races, mental “defectives,” etc.). Eugenics was a respected and
much debated scientific movement at the time of R.U.R.’s
composition, attracting as adherents even such widely admired thinkers as H.G.
Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and John Maynard Keynes. Eugenics would have
offered Čapek a model for the type of human physiological engineering he would
depict in the play, one that prefigures our modern equivalent, genetic
engineering. Hitler’s dreams of a conquering Aryan race spelled the death knell
for the movement some years after Čapek, who had been proclaimed
Czechoslovakia’s “public enemy number two” by the Nazis, died in 1938, escaping
the fate of his brother Josef, who died in a Nazi concentration camp.
Helena, the Natural Human
Helena, a particularly sentimental human, is the
play’s object of attention. Helena’s humanity is manifest in her pronounced
emotions is continously contrasted with the robots to emphasize the gap between what appears to be human (as the robots
look like people) and what it is to be human. Helena is
preoccupied with liberating the robots, but is rebuffed by their lack of
receptivity. Frankly, it seems that Capek is being cynical about revolution in
his characterization of Helena, as she represents a romantic revolutionary
whose ideals cannot penetrate practice (embodied by the laborious existence of
the robots).
As a woman, Helena also operates as a sort
of ideal, a feminine ideal to be exact, that works as a sort of symbol for nature (mother
nature) in the text. Disgusted by which she percieves as an injustice to the
natural order of things, Helena sees the robots as human rather than other. The male humans, by
contrast, see the robots as commodities (the play is a pretty satirical
treatment of capitalism, but not explicitly communistic in its indictment of
labor for labor’s sake).
Domin(ance) - Male Power
Eventually, Helena’s attempt to liberate the
robots is subjugated by her semi-forced marriage to Domin, the boss of the factory. As
an individual, Domin is as his name suggests, domin-ating. He continually lords himself above Helena,
often by treating her as
an object of a chivalry, who must be honored and venerated like a piece
of art unable to be involved with the actual world. He is also introduced to us
at the beginning of the play as a personality who channels (and thus controls)
knowledge. He alone has
access to the secret manuscript of “Old Russom” which contains the
secret of producting robots.
Producing Artificial Life
The production of robots is another example of perverting nature.
Rather than existing as a mechanical objects (automaton) Capek’s robots are
biotechnological, literally objects of flesh and blood, but factory produced
flesh and blood. Like Herr Virek in Mona Lisa Overdrive, this biology is vat
based, a chemical process that begets a humanity which is engineered not born.
Several times in the text, the humans re-iterate the fact that robots are not
born, they are produced.
Eventually, the production of robots is
subverted to enable their liberation. Helena, who is still interested in the liberating
of robots despite (or perhaps because 0f) her marriage to Domin, pressures the scientists to
begin giving the robots a soul. This is where everything starts to go
wrong, as the addition of a soul finally makes the robots “aware” of their
situation, and their rights to agency not slavery.
The Problem with Souls
Interestingly, the adoption of a soul first
manifests itself in the robots ability to feel pain, which was an early concern
about the robots, who occassionally killed themselves because they didn’t know
what they were doing to themselves. So Capek is suggesting that pain (which is
a cybernetic feedback system of humanitiy) is a possible origin of its soul. Or
rather, the ability to feel in the literal sense eventually begets the ability
to feel metaphorically.
As one scene near the end of the play goes:
Second Robot: We were machines, sir, but from horror and
suffering, we’ve become…
Alquist: What?
Second Robot: We’ve become being with souls.
Fourth Robot: Something is struggling within us. There are
moments when something gets into us. Thoughts come to us that are not are own.
(Penguin Edition, 75)
“Thoughts… that are not are own” are not
necessarily a soul, but they do seem to be some kindling of extra-agency which
could be read as a development of a human element. One of the things that this
dialog asks, and it is question repeated throughout the text, is who can you
produce a thing like a human (visually,
productively, mentally, physically) that is not a human. Capek’s text suggests
that eventually that made in the image of the human becomes human. In fact, the
play ends with a invocation of Genesis, as the last living human calls to
love-struck robots “Adam and Eve” and recites “God created man in his own
image” clearly invoking the idea that a spark was transmitted by humanity to
robotics by the transmission of the image of humanity to the robots. Man is a
god, but as Nietschze would have it, god is dead.
Post-Humanity
The rise of the robots obliterates humanity.
It is snuffed to a last man, who dreams of his species alone. This vision of
the technology of humanity overrunning it is a theme prevalent in science
fiction, and surely passed on to the Matrix where humanity is enslaved by its own
product, who reverses the dynamic of the relationship and makes man the
commodity. Gibson also channels this post-humanity to a more subtle degree in
his presentation of technology as a space for post-corporeal humanity. The
Tessier-Ashpools and Count Zero both wish to inhabit a private technological
cosmos where they are no longer, particularly human.
The end of humanity is presented as a missed
opportunity for capitalism. The last surviving humans realize that they can
survive the robot apocalypse if they trade the Russom Manuscript (containing
the secret of robot production) to the robots. This trade is a complicated
move, as it means robots will multipy and take over the earth entirely, where
destroying the manuscript means the end of the robots eventually (a final blow
from the hand of the maker to the product). Just when you this is the major
debate of the play however, you learn that Helena has already destroyed the
manuscript. She saw it as an unnatural knowledge, and as nature incarnate
destroys the document to right the wrongs of humanity. But at a terrible cost,
as it seals the fate of all humans.
Man as Robot, Robot as Man
One man, Alquist, is left by the robots
because “He is a robot. He works with his hands like a Robot” (70). So in fact,
he turns out to be the least helpful human to leave alive as he cannot reveal
the secret of robot production, which the robots so desperately require.
At the end of the play, it appears that
robotics like humanity is destined for total death. But a glimmer of hope
emerges, as two robots, one of whom is called Helena, and the other Primus,
seemed to manifest human qualities in their behavior towards one another. In
brief, they are in love, which prompts Alquist to see a future of redemption
for robots and humanity as a hybrid form of the two has emerged and promises a
certain fertility. These two robot-humans also represent an reversal of Alquist
himself, as they are the robotic becoming human (where he was described as the
human who is robotic) and their duality (manifested by a need for one another)
overcomes Alquist’s incapicitating loneliness. The future of Capek’s R.U.R. is
thus a return to “nature” where love replaces labor, and the robot as dualistic
unit replaces the robot as an individual agent of labor. Hybridity of man
(manifested as a dynamic) and a machine (a physical ideal) is the realization
of a future.
Where the
Robots Came From: Historical Notes on Karel Capek’s R.U.R.
The intellectual history of
Theatre UNB’s upcoming production is truly fascinating. Here are some thoughts
on the historical and cultural background to the play.
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