About a Film in Progress
Welcome to Erewhon
With Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, published in P-E-R-F-O-R-M-A-N-C-E, 2023
Erewhon is a city imagined by Samuel Butler in a story of the same name published in 1872. What makes Erewhon special is that its inhabitants know about machines, but don't use any of them. In fact, they destroyed their machines centuries ago. Samuel Butler learns why during this imaginary visit to the town. This is the chapter of the "Book of Machines". The Erewhonians are convinced that machines have a life of their own, a life in an extended sense. Obviously, machines are not like animals. Nor does it have human consciousness. This is the mistake we usually make in reducing life to the forms we know: plant, animal, human, consciousness. This error prevents us from recognizing the autonomy, the life proper to machines. We look for animal life in machines, or for human-like consciousness, but we don't find it, and we conclude that machines are just like other things. Whereas machines only manifest another form of life. The "Book of Machines", which Butler discovers in the Erewhon library, imagines, far back in the evolution of life, just as animal life is beginning to emerge, a plant ...
