Erewhon - Influence and Legacy

Influence and Legacy

Today scientists and philosophers seriously debate whether computers and robots could develop a kind of consciousness (artificial intelligence, AI), and organic interaction (artificial life) similar to or exceeding that of human beings. This is also a popular theme in science-fiction novels and movies; some raise the same question (Dune's "Butlerian Jihad", for example), while others explore what the relationship between human beings and machines with artificial intelligence would be, and even whether AI is desirable. However, it is important to note that Butler wrote of machines developing consciousness by natural selection, not artificially, although machine algorithms are approaching a level of autonomy which could be considered natural, now.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used ideas from Butler's book at various points in the development of his philosophy of difference. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze refers to what he calls "Ideas" as "erewhons." "Ideas are not concepts," he explains, but rather "a form of eternally positive differential multiplicity, distinguished from the identity of concepts." "Erewhon" refers to the "nomadic distributions" that pertain to simulacra, which "are not universals like the categories, nor are they the hic et nunc or now here, the diversity to which categories apply in representation." "Erewhon," in this reading, is "not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here."

In his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze draws on Butler's "The Book of the Machines" to "go beyond" the "usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism" as it relates to their concept of "desiring-machines":

For one thing, Butler is not content to say that machines extend the organism, but asserts that they are really limbs and organs lying on the body without organs of a society, which men will appropriate according to their power and their wealth, and whose poverty deprives them as if they were mutilated organisms. For another, he is not content to say that organisms are machines, but asserts that they contain such an abundance of parts that they must be compared to very different parts of distinct machines, each relating to the others, engendered in combination with the others. He shatters the vitalist argument by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine. —Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Œdipus

A reference to Erewhon and specifically "The Book of Machines" opens Miguel de Unamuno's short story, "Mecanópolis," which tells of a man who visits a city (called Mecanópolis) which is inhabited solely by machines.

George B. Dyson uses the heading of Butler's original article in Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (1998) ISBN 0-7382-0030-1.

In 1994, a group of ex-Yugoslavian writers in Amsterdam, who had established the Pen centre of Yugoslav Writers in Exile, published a single issue of a literary journal "Erewhon" (as referenced here).