Episode 024: Lamia Balafrej
Dr. Lamia Balafrej of UCLA is an art historian specializing in the medieval Islamic period. Her work illuminates the connection between slavery and technology, which remains an important feature of the global economy today.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Dr. Lamia Balafrej, Assistant Professor of Arts of the Islamic World, at UCLA. Dr. Balafrej specializes in the arts of the medieval and early modern Islamic world, looking at what it says about labour and the material conditions of life. I came across her lecture on YouTube about medieval Islamic representations of slavery and automata – robots! – and I knew I had to have her on this show. I spoke to her remotely from Toronto, and she was at her home in Los Angeles. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Lamia, welcome to the podcast!
Lamia Balafrej: Hi, Cameron. Thank you for having me.
Cameron: It's such a delight to be able to see you, and it would be wonderful to be meeting face to face, but that's really not possible if I want to interview people who are far away. And particularly not possible at this time when so many people are in jurisdictions where there's a lockdown from the pandemic. So I'm glad that you've been able to set aside some time to talk with me. You have got a very interesting research topic here, and I'm really fascinated by it. Can you explain a little bit about how you got into this field?
Lamia: I became interested in art history because of my interest in a set of issues and questions that included, I think first and foremost, the question of visual literacy. I've always been fascinated by this idea, by the fact actually, that we live most of our lives on a daily basis without necessarily reading texts or even using words, but rather we use a kind of information that's encoded in, say, aspects of color, pattern, light, sound, and that's how our bodies negotiate reality and the world they live in. And then I've always been fascinating by the fact that we also live surrounded by, enmeshed with, objects and images. We can hardly do anything without using a piece of furniture or using a piece of equipment. So our dependence upon images and objects is something that art history takes very seriously. The other issue that I was also interested in, and brought me into the field of art history, was the relationship between past and present, and how the past continues to inhabit the present. The ways in which past and present intersect -- which is also at the core of this new topic that I have been investigating about the intersection of forms of labor and technology.
Cameron: There's so much going on in your explanation there. Because there's the attraction to the visual and to color and images. And then there's also the historical aspect of it. So tell me more about this focus on the past and the connections that you make to the present through your studies.
Lamia: So art history is a very broad field that has no temporal boundaries and no geographical boundaries and no cultural boundaries. We can study any area, any time period, as long as the focus is on visual and material cultures as well as notions of space, architecture, urban planning, and so on, and so forth. So there are subfields within art history that do study artists, contemporary artists, and their enmeshment with, say, the art market, the world of museums and galleries, and so on, and so forth. But there's also a lot of scholars like myself who study earlier periods in which those institutions had not yet defined objects as art. And scholars who also, like me, study areas that are outside of Europe and the Euro-American world. I study the Islamic world and a geographical area that covers a wide territory from Morocco to Central Asia. So in those territories and in those time periods, art was not yet the kind of artistic cultural production that we think of today. I don't study pictures that hang on a wall or objects that are exchanged as commodities on the art market. Rather, I study art in a much wider sense of any kind of production that involves objects, images, and spaces as they mediate various forms of exchange, as they embody various forms and patterns of labor. Does that answer your question?
Cameron: Well, you threw a little twist at the end there about your focus on labor. So before we get to that, you're talking about the role of images in a much more embedded context, right?
Lamia: Right.
Cameron: So when we think of, when we ... I mean, I grew up in English speaking Canada. When I think of art, the classical kind of representation in my mind is a painting hanging on a wall in a museum. And you're talking about art that is embedded in everyday uses, and in communication, in a much broader range of settings.
Lamia: Right, absolutely.
Cameron: So that allows you to study the use of images in texts, you know illustrations of texts. When you're looking at art history from the medieval Islamic period, are there other kind of objects that you also include besides illustrated texts?
Lamia: As you just mentioned, I've been studying manuscripts and illustrated manuscripts, but there are other objects that belong to the material and visual cultures of that period that I also incorporate in my work. For example, in this current project in which I study technology as well as labor, I also look at actual tools, instruments, mechanical devices. So those objects too, they're three-dimensional objects. They are utilitarian objects, but they can also be seen as cultural artifacts that an art historian can analyze using similar tools that we might use for analyzing a painting. That is to say, issues of scale, color, patterns, compositions, and all those aspects actually yield information on the cultural context in which those objects were used. So there is a lot of utilitarian objects, one might say, from a modern perspective, perhaps, that are also considered in fields that are outside the Euro-American canon of art history.
Cameron: You're looking at, for instance, tools which could be studied by a historian, or a technologist, or whatever. And you're trying to express something about that from the point of view of art. So you're adding something, adding a new perspective, to a discussion that's going on about these artifacts.
Lamia: Right, absolutely. As you said, there's many, many disciplines that have tackled the issues of technology, labor, the history of instruments, and I think that art history can contribute to those discourses and narratives by adding methodologies and perspectives such as visual analysis and material analysis that other scholars might not have been trained to use. And again, the point of all of this is to reach out to other disciplines. And I think we are at this moment in the history of academia where we have to do interdisciplinary work. We have to reach other disciplines. We can't just work in isolation and simply repeat the traditions that were embedded in our fields. We have to kind of open up and try to find ways in which one's work can intersect with and compliment the work that is being done by other disciplines on subjects that matter for everybody. Technology is a topic that is an all-encompassing topic that a lot of people encounter in various degrees and in various forms. And I think we can all learn from what each discipline has to say about that phenomenon.
Cameron: So you describe this attention to tools, and to artifacts, and the way that you as an art historian can contribute something to this conversation about these devices and about the use of images and so forth. That sounds a little bit different from the typical historian's approach, right?
Lamia: I think that my approach is different from a historian's approach. Although there is a lot of overlap, and I also want to add that historians have been working with visual and material cultures more and more. But I would say that for my period, for example, the medieval Islamic period, and for the topic that I study which is slavery and technology, I would say that my approach is different in that I look at images and objects not just as documents that yield a certain amount of information that will point to historical facts. But I look at objects and images as interpretations of the world. I look at them as media that convey certain narratives that construct certain visions of the world. So a tool for me is not simply a formal technical object that fulfills a certain function and that testifies to, say, a technological innovation. But rather for me, it testifies to certain desires. What does it mean to externalize that kind of labor through that tool? What can the tool tell us about ideas around materiality, labor? What is the tool itself producing in terms of experience and ideas? So in general, I would say that art historians look at images and objects not as illustrations, of external realities, but as documents that produce certain experiences, that embody and mediate ideas that offer interpretations of the world.
Cameron: You're talking about your focus on technology and labor. The kinds of things that you're looking at, then, are very much about this material existence in the world and the way that people grapple with the world, the way that people try to change the world, the way that the world impinges on themselves, and how they make sense of that. So is there something going on in this particular period, in medieval Islamic period, that draws you to that particular topic?
Lamia: First of all, I should define what the medieval Islamic period is.
Cameron: That would be very good!
Lamia: These terms are problematic and we could discuss whether or not they're adequate – the term medieval, for example, or the term Islamic. But I will just say this. That what I mean when I say the medieval Islamic period is a period that goes from the rise of Islam as a religion, and that happened at the end of the 6th century, in the early 7th century, all the way to the rise of the modern empires in the Middle East. For example, the Ottoman Empire or the Safavid Empire in the 14th century and 15th century. So it's a period that runs from the, say, the end of the 6th century to the late 14th century, and the geographical area that is covered here is constituted by the territories, the areas, that were ruled over by Muslim dynasties. And that doesn't mean that all the inhabitants of those areas were actually Muslim. And this leads me to why I think it's a very important period to study. First of all, because the medieval Islamic period is a very heterogeneous period. We think of the Middle East and North Africa, which are basically the regions that I study, we think of those regions today as predominantly Muslim, but in fact at that time they were heterogeneous in the sense that many ethnicities and many religions were there. They preexisted the emergence of Islam, and a lot of those ethnicities and religions continued to live on under the rule of Muslim dynasties. So it's a quite diverse and vibrant time to study. And then the second thing that's really interesting about this period is that it constitutes really the transition between the classical world and the early modern world, as well as modernity. And a lot of the texts, ideas, and cultures of the classical world actually were transmitted through the early modern world through movements of translation, and transmission, and dissemination that took place in the medieval Islamic world, thanks again to the diversity of that world. The fact that Muslim scholars worked with Christian scholars and Jewish scholars in translating, for example, Greek or Syriac sources into Arabic. So, it's a crucial period for understanding the link between the ancient world and the modern world. And it's also a fascinating area because it was a highly connected world. The medieval Islamic period was a kind of zone of exchange that allowed the transition from the classical world to the early modern world but also allowed the connection in a transregional manner between several zones of exchange that included the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa as well as the Red Sea, and beyond that the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean. So, the medieval Islamic world was really in between all of these areas and mediated trade and exchange between all of these geocultural zones of trade and exchange. So in a way, it was a link between Europe and Asia, if you will.
Cameron: My understanding of this period comes mainly from literature rather than studying history, right? So when you say the Silk Road, I get that from the kinds of books that I've read. And so my sense is that the very things that make the Middle East such a hotspot for geopolitical forces today have been in existence for centuries. And so you get this tremendous flow throughout this region of culture and trade, literature, art, technology, everything is ... There are no isolated pockets here. Everything is connected. But you're also adding to that this sense that you're studying it over a long time period, and this just flows from one time period to another. So it's ... It just seems like such an incredibly dynamic field that you're studying.
Lamia: Yes. Absolutely. And so you have to imagine that people in that area spoke many languages, have various cultural backgrounds, and all of that contributed to creating this kind of ... this movement of translation, of cultural translation, of transregional connection by which a lot of the medical, scientific, technological, artistic sources and innovations were disseminated in that region. That also explains, actually, the fact that this time period has also been somehow idealized. And that's a problem. Because it's a time period that's also known as the golden age of Islam. Which is a problematic term because it assumes that after that it was just a long period of decline. Right? So this idea of the golden age was actually formulated by Orientalist thinkers, and it was internalized by Islamic countries themselves and nationalistic discourses within them which, similarly to Orientalist discourses, also somehow idealized that period as the peak of Islamic civilization. So what I try to do in my work is acknowledge the fact that it was a highly interconnected world, and on the other hand that it was also a world that fostered a lot of the issues that we associate with modernity. So not just the so-called innovative, technological aspects of modernity that are problematic but also institutions such as slavery, for example. So I'm trying to revisit that period, acknowledging the creativity and the diversity of the period but also the fact that there is much to be challenged there in terms of the political systems of exploitation that emerged at the same time.
Cameron: It sounds to me like one of the keys to your approach is to try to disaggregate this kind of monolithic view of a medieval period, right? Either of the temporal period of the medieval era or the geographical idea of the Islamic world. And as soon as you start to recognize that the Islamic world is incredibly diverse depending on what area you're in, and even within a particular region there's all of these layers of other communities that are there that are not necessarily Islamic. So it's about pulling these things apart and teasing apart the nuances of all of these aspects of what you're looking at.
Lamia: Absolutely. And then really trying to foster a kind of crosscultural transregional and transhistorical approach that can emphasize continuities but also ruptures, and sort of foster an understanding of the Islamic world that's both inclusive and critical at the same time.
Cameron: Right. Well, let's launch into this one particular topic that you've looked at. I'll post these images on the website along with the recording of our interview so that people can see these. And I'll provide links to your works so that they can trace them down in the original setting. This is a set of images you've looked at that get at the slave experience in this time period and in this region. As soon as we start talking about slavery, of course, it's -- with current events in the United States -- it's impossible to talk about slavery without immediately being drawn to the institutions of slavery in the United States, which of course are founded in the British empire and other empires, other colonialist activities. This is a representation or a practice of slavery that seems to be a little bit outside of my understanding of slavery as an institution. So can you just give me a little bit of a background lesson here on what slavery means in this particular time and place?
Lamia: Thank you for the question. I think it is indeed very important to separate the Atlantic Slave Trade and earlier forms of slavery that came before the Atlantic Slave Trade. However, I would also say that it's important to consider the history of slavery in a global way and to consider the history of slavery as, again, a transhistorical phenomenon, a phenomenon that connected many different areas, and a phenomenon that's complex, multilayered, and recursive. So I think we can learn a lot about the Atlantic Slave Trade by looking at slavery before the early modern European empires. But there are many huge differences, and I can mention maybe three of those differences. Of course there is the issue of scale. Slavery before the Atlantic Slave Trade was not as massive in the Middle East and North Africa. It was actually a rather low volume enterprise, and slaves were more of a luxury commodity. The other very important distinction is labor. Slaves were not assigned the same kind of work, and before the model of the plantation, most slavery, for example in the period that I study, the medieval Islamic world, was either military or domestic. And the third very, very important point is that before modernity, slavery and race were two different things. And slavery in the premodern period and in my period, was not yet linked to the notion of race. So basically anyone could become a slave in the medieval Islamic world. The slave was ... Slavery and enslavement were threats for anyone who actually was a foreigner, who was not from the community. So for example, a captive at war could become a slave. And there was also trade, and the populations that were targeted for the slave trade did come in part from East Africa and Western Africa. So we're talking here about Black Africans. However, those territories were not the only sources for slavery. Slaves could also be brought from Eastern Europe. And in particular also from Anatolia and the Black Sea region. So, those are light skinned slaves. So anyone really could be a slave as long as they were not part of the community. So there are major, major differences. But there are also links and continuities between these different forms of slavery, and I think that among one of the threats that link all these forms of slavery is the phenomenon of objectifying a human body, of dehumanizing a human body, and at the same mechanizing labor. This kind of conjunction of technology and slavery is something that can be found in the classical world. For example, Aristotle in The Politics did say that humans needed instruments, and some of them would be animate, he meant the slave. And then in the medieval Islamic period, slaves were also conceptualized as instruments. And then we also find this kind of same parallel between the machine and the slave in modern times. So there are common threads, but of course there are also major, major differences that need to be considered.
Cameron: I can see why this period fascinates you. Because the linkages to our understanding of technology and of labor today and the link between oppression and economic activity is profound today and is obviously profound in the period that you're studying. You're looking at these images which then represent slaves in various capacities. One of the comments that you made in the lecture that I listened to online was that there's kind of like a standard view of slavery amongst academics as silencing. Slavery is about silencing people and excluding them. And you argue that it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Lamia: Thank you for this question. There is this assumption oftentimes that slavery has no archive. And that makes sense because documents that have survived often reflect dominant classes. If we think archeologically for example, a lot of palaces have survived from a very distant past. But little has survived about the life of lower social classes, and the same can be said about gender. History has been written from the perspective of male authors. So it's very hard to uncover the presence of women and to study women in a particular historical period. So the archive is always biased. And so one assumption is regarding slavery has been this idea that slavery equates to absence of archive, archival absence. Which is to a certain extent real. Because slavery is about erasure, and slavery as Patterson conceptualized it is about social death. But my argument-
Cameron: Sorry. Can you just explain that a little bit more? So, sorry, which Patterson are you talking about?
Lamia: Orlando Patterson and his notion of slavery as social death.
Cameron: Okay. I like to provide links to these things for my own reading but also for our listeners. And then you're talking about slavery as social debt?
Lamia: Social death.
Cameron: Death. Okay, sorry.
Lamia: Death.
Cameron: Okay. And so there's the kind of profound expression of slavery as silencing, right, as you disappear from society.
Lamia: Right, exactly. You disappear from society. You leave no trace because you're not allowed to.
Cameron: Right, yeah. And yet you find, in your work you're finding, traces of slavery.
Lamia: Right. So one has to adapt strategies in order to be able to write those histories that have been silenced. And one of the strategies that I have found in my work is to think of the dominant archive as being a kind of archive that is haunted by its own systems of oppression. In other words, I'm trying to find traces of slavery within documents that are usually considered to reflect only the canonical artistic and cultural productions of the medieval Islamic world. And my point is to say that since slavery was so pervasive, right, -- it was domestic so a lot of people had slaves in their households, slaves were very much part of the social landscape -- if slavery was the enabling condition of all this lifestyle, then slaves must be present somehow in the archives. So one has to scrutinize the dominant archive to look for traces, for ways of reading ghostly traces, perhaps, of slavery. So that's what I've been trying to do, and so I've looked at major texts that are usually thought of as very, very canonical, and I have found that even though those texts have not been studied by historians of slavery, they do mention slaves a lot. And slaves tend to be, of course, peripheral and marginal, but they are still there. They are present. So it's a dialectic of absence and presence, of slavery in the dominant archive, that I'm really interested in tracking down.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Can we talk about two particular texts that you sent me? One of them is al-Hariri's Maqamat, and what is the significance of this particular text for you?
Lamia: Maqamat of al-Hariri is a very important text, part of the canon of high art and literature. It's a text that contains 50 episodes, 50 stories, that take place in a variety of contexts around the Middle East in the medieval Islamic period. And the text is about eloquence or addition, belles lettres, and it features Arab characters who master language. Now, because these episodes take place in a variety of contexts, they also reflect social realities that we don't necessarily learn from using other kinds of sources. And in many stories, for example a story that would take place at somebody's house, a slave would appear holding a tray or bringing food, and that would be the only sentence in the text mentioning the presence of a slave. And yet, I think that those small notations and short sentences are very important because they do testify to the presence of slaves, not only the historical context but also in the dominant archive. And the text of Maqamat is important because it was very widespread. It was really part of the culture. Everyone read it. Everyone shared stories from it. And what's interesting for me as an art historian is that the text was also illustrated. So there were images made at that time to a company and illustrate parts of the story, and sometimes, I've recently found out, some of the slaves that are mentioned in the texts, again in very oblique ways, happen to be illustrated in images. So one would have the main scene taking place at the center of the image, and then on the margins we would have a standing character performing a domestic action, and that would in fact be a depiction of a slave. So it is really by kind of reading texts and images at the same time and looking for clues in the margins of the texts, reading between the lines, reading against the grain that one might be able to foreground the presence of these marginal characters.
Cameron: Did you have a sense of what kinds of episodes were selected to be illustrated? Did that affect your interpretation of the texts?
Lamia: That's a very good question. The texts were diffused in manuscripts that were copied, and some of them were illustrated. And so the rate of illustrations within a manuscript can vary greatly, depending on context. And in some instances, the manuscripts were actually pretty heavily illustrated so that we would have images illustrating almost every episode. And sometimes we would even have several images illustrating the same episode. And what's interesting about the question is that indeed images of slaves seem to emerge in a context in which slavery was quite widespread. For example, manuscripts that were copied and illustrated in Egypt and Syria in the 12th century and 13th century where there was a significant enslaved population, well in those manuscripts we tend to find a greater number of depictions of slaves.
Cameron: So it's at the point of reproduction of the texts that you're getting this decision of whether to illustrate a particular scene or passage.
Lamia: Right, absolutely.
Cameron: So this means that the illustrations are not necessarily, or maybe by definition, are not stemming from the same time period as the text itself. How-
Lamia: Absolutely.
Cameron: How late are the illustrations, and how early is the text?
Lamia: The text is a 12th century text, if I'm not mistaken.
Cameron: Okay.
Lamia: And after it was written, it was copied in manuscripts. There was no print culture at the time. So if one wanted a text of the Maqamat, one had to have a manuscript, a hand written copy, of the text. And so some of those texts were illustrated, and they were illustrated in different periods after that. Some periods were very close to the period during which the text was written, and some in much later periods including I think in 18th century Yemen, there is also an illustrated manuscript of the Maqamat that was made. But that's even more interesting because then we have access to interpretations of the text through images that reflect different readings across time of that text. So we can compare images illustrating the same texts but that were made in different periods, and so that would give us a sense of how the text was read and received in various periods.
Cameron: There are just layers upon layers here.
Lamia: Absolutely.
Cameron: Your work will never end.
Lamia: Yes.
Cameron: You'll never run out of things to do.
Lamia: That's pretty much what it is, yeah.
Cameron: Can you tell me about the particular images ... One I'm looking at, I don't know why this one appeals to me, but it's the one where this is ... which folio? ... 6094 folio 31. This is the one where the slave is actually a smaller figure than the other people in the picture. What's going on there?
Illustration from a copy of al-Maqamat of al-Hariri, dated 619/1222, Egypt or Syria. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arabe 6094, fol. 31.
Lamia: That's a very good observation.
Cameron: Well, you made it in your YouTube lecture! [laughs]
Lamia: Right.
Cameron: So I'm just drawing on what you've pointed out to me.
Lamia: But that's also what we were talking about earlier which was how do our historians approach images. So they're attentive to content. Indeed there is a slave. But they're also attentive to how that content is formally and visually presented. So aspects of composition. Where is the figure situated in the image? How does it relate to the other figures? Is it smaller than the other figures? What pose is it manifesting? What kind of task is it performing? All of those aspects construct our world view, in which in this case of course the slave is seen as a smaller figure, a marginal figure, a figure that does not participate in the main story. The slave is standing on the side while the story is unfolding at the center of the image. So all of those aspects give us insight into how slaves were perceived in that particular time period.
Cameron: So this particular scene is ... This is a judge?
Lamia: Right.
Cameron: Sitting on a chair that's fairly impressive. And you have three other people appearing before the judge. And the slave is holding something on a stick to brush flies away from the judge. Is that correct?
Lamia: Yes, absolutely. So we have a judge at the center, and this is a scene that illustrates a trial. And we have a total of three characters, three light skinned characters, that are wearing turbans and elaborate textiles. And all of those elements indicate their social status and their ethnicity. Meanwhile on the side in the margin, there is a smaller figure, dark skinned figure, holding a fly whisk. A figure that does not participate in the story. A figure that does not have access to speech. A figure that is simply reduced to an action, a very simple and repetitive action of moving the fly whisk. So for me, that tells us something about this perception of the slave or this desire for the slave to be a kind of predictable, silent, marginal instrument that is charged with the task of performing certain actions while the center of society can attend to intellectual debates. To actions that involved the mind, that involve the capacity to speak. So there is a dichotomy there taking place between the dark skinned marginal slave and then the central Arab light skinned character that we can also map out onto a larger division between body and mind, between periphery and center.
Cameron: Well there's also the aspect of emotion, I think, in this picture. Because the slave is depicted as this very static character who's just almost frozen in space. Which is very strange because he's the one person in this picture who should be moving. Right? Because he's actually got a job to do that involved physically moving something. But he is in a very rigid pose. And everybody else is involved in this emotive engagement with the subject of the trial. You've got one person who is leaning and imploring the judge. Another person who's crouching and the judge is leaning and tilting his head and I presume looking wise. So there's all of this emotional content in the depiction of these other figures that is missing from the depiction of the slave.
Lamia: That's a great point. So we see here the human is equated with a kind of motion that's emotional, that is intellectual, that has to do with the life of the mind. Whereas the body of the slave is also linked to motion, but more of a dehumanized and mechanized kind of motion. That's a very interesting point.
Cameron: The other document that you're looking at is al-Jazari's Hiyal, al-Jazari. And this is subtitled. It's got this lovely title. It almost sounds like an academic paper. A Compendium on the Theory and Practice of the Mechanical Arts. And you know, we were just talking about this slave who's involved in this very repetitive motion in the picture in the Maqamat. Now we're getting into these illustrations in the Hiyal that have to do actually with automated machines and robotic activities, mechanical devices. Where is this particular text coming from? Locate this text for me in kind of the whole body of literature that you're ... Is it really special that it's talking about automata? Or is that very common in many texts in this period, many manuscripts?
Lamia: This is a text that is quite well known among historians of technology and science. Because of it ... It testifies to and crystallizes this tradition of the mechanical arts that emerge in the Islamic world through the same movement of translation that I mentioned earlier. Through the translation, in particular, of Greek works by engineers such as Hero of Alexandria for example or Philo of Alexandria. So this is a tradition that belongs to the tradition of mechanical treatises that was quite common and widespread in the classical world. And so scholars, and craftsmen, and engineers in the medieval Islamic world picked up on that tradition, translated those texts into Arabic, and then compiled them into new versions. So what we have here is a text that draws on Greek sources on the mechanical arts, but also provides its own way of compiling that knowledge. So it is a very important text in that it is at the crossroads of different cultural takes on technology. And it is a text that focuses on a wide array of machines and technical objects, among which you mentioned automata, self-moving machines, that are often considered as the prefiguration of the robot. So I would say that there's a long tradition of writing about and dreaming about self-moving machines, and we can find self moving machines in literature, in poetry, in the Greek world, but also in Arabic literature and poetry as well as Persian literature and poetry of the time. So that's a motif, a literary motif, that's very much present there. But that's also treated in scientific literature such as this very serious Compendium of the Mechanical Arts that was written in the early 13th century in Anatolia by a craftsman and an engineer known as al-Jazari who had access to a variety of sources, earlier Arabic texts, earlier translations of Greek literature, and who as he said in this introduction was asked by his patron, the ruler of that region, to compile all the knowledge available on this issue of the mechanical arts. And a big chunk of the book as a result deals with self-moving machines.
Illustration from a copy of al-Jami‘ bayn al-‘ilm wa alamal
al-nafi’ fi sina‘at al-hiyal of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari,
dated 602/1206, Anatolia. Istanbul, TSMK, Ahmet III
3473, fol. 76.
Cameron: There's several that are illustrated in the picture that you provided to me. One's a clock mechanism. One is a wine serving mechanism, and another is a water pourer. So there's quite a variety of these things. But they're also ... The representation of the individual in these three different images is quite varied. In the one case with the clock mechanism, it's like the mechanism is there. The figure of the slave that's built into this drawing or kind of attached to this device in the drawing is this mechanized individual with a sword who cuts the wick of the flame at periodic intervals. One of the other illustrations, the mechanism is actually inside the figure that's depicted there. So there's all this different kinds of relationships between the device and the figure of the human being that's there. Can you tell me about what's going on there?
Lamia: So what's interesting about those devices as you just summarized is that many of them are shaped in the human form, and a lot of those human figures are actually depictions of slaves. So the wine serving device represents a slave pouring wine, serving wine, to the courtly audience of the time. And this is a very important point because most scholars have focused only on the mechanical parts of these devices. They have mainly paid attention to the internal, the inner workings, the mechanical details of the technology itself, but they haven't paid attention to the fact that those mechanisms were placed inside human figures that were supposed to represent slaves. So I believe that what we have there is an interesting conflation of the self-moving machine and the figure of the slave, which for me testifies to this idea that technology is haunted by slavery. Technology and in particular the idea of owning or controlling machines that could move on their own, machines that are intelligent enough that they can perform tasks that are usually tasks that a human believes only humans can perform -- this very desire which today would correspond to the desire of say the self-driving car -- I think it's very much the same desire that is at work in both the wine serving automaton of al-Jazari and this desire for the self-driving car. So this idea that that kind of labor can be externalized to a machine that would reproduce human characteristics and actually turn them into very predictable and repetitive patterns that can be activated by a masterful self, a masterful modern self, I believe that that's very much what those drawings and those paintings are embodying. That very desire of having machines that can anticipate and respond to a master's desire in a very predictable way. And so this conflation of the slave and the machine is telling us that perhaps what's behind this desire for the machine is linked to the institution of slavery and that perhaps the slave was a foreshadowing of the machine. That the slave was the originary figure of this desire for the perfect intelligent machine. And so for me, that's important because it speaks to the very complex relationship between technology and labor more generally.
Cameron: There's this desire, I think, for power and control that's embedded in this, right? With technology, we want stuff that's predictable and will always be executed the same way. And it's interesting that this representation of the wine serving mechanism -- in your lecture, you talked about the fact that this wine serving mechanism was built because the ruler or the noble person couldn't deal with a female slave that he had, and he wanted something that would basically just do what it was told. Right? So this whole idea of power over the labor of others and the desire to have predictable economic units of production is embedded in our relationship with technology but also the relationship between the owner and the worker in our society.
Lamia: Absolutely.
Cameron: We want people who will do what they're told and do it in a very economical and repetitive way. So there's these profound stories here.
Lamia: Right. Absolutely. And I really think it's not just metaphorical. The fact that the machine is shaped in the form of a slave. As you mentioned, and as the text says, is that the ruler explicitly wanted to replace the slave by the machine, and so the engineer came up with a machine that actually represents a slave. So the link between slavery and technology is metaphorical, but it is also really historical.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. It's material.
Lamia: And as you said, this discussion could be expanded to include the relationship between capital and labor and technology and the role that the machine played in the industrial age in the same way that these machines played in this treatise which is both in a double way and in a very ambivalent way: On the one hand, we have the discourse of the machine that can be labor saving. So we have this idea that the machine is going to perform, is a liberating force that is going to perform a kind of strenuous work that people would be relieved from thanks to the machine. So there's this idea of the machine as it's liberating and democratizing and labor saving device, but on the other hand the machine is also grounded in a desire to control bodies, to objectify bodies. And technology and the machine did not solve the problem of labor. In fact, they only displaced the problem of labor by actually making certain forms of labor invisible to the managerial forces that govern the world, the corporate world. So by replacing workers by machines, what happened is that it was not the end of oppression and labor exploitation. Machines were simply a way of reducing the power and the visibility of workers and that work that goes into making machines was simply externalized and outsourced and displaced in spaces very far away from where the technologies are actually used. I don't know if I'm making sense here, but...
Cameron: Well, you are when you start taking about the global system of production of the kinds of technologies that we “enjoy” today.
Lamia: Right.
Isometric rendition of candle clock by Donald Hill, 1974
Cameron: It's really illustrative to me that alongside this picture, this medieval picture of this clock mechanism, you have a reproduction from 1974 by Donald Hill in a book that looked at these kinds of devices. And his representation is very architectural and engineering-based, and completely dispenses with the fact that there was a figure attached to this. And to me, that just shouts that our understanding of technology today is that it is ... our assumption is that it's just this neutral thing that's value free. But you know, when you look at the way that an iPhone is built, the kinds of labor conditions for the construction of it, the kinds of environmental impacts that our technology has at its source as it's being built -- all of that is hidden in these artifacts that we use.
Lamia: Absolutely. The way modern technology works is by obfuscating forms of labor. We use objects that we don't really understand. We don't know much about the way they have been produced. There is a kind of enchantment that comes with the iPhone and the laptop, these magical devices that can do all this work for free. And it's the same kind of magic that was at work with this imaginary of the automaton, of the self-serving machine. And that sense of awe and magic is produced exactly by the fact that the labor that goes into making those machines and the essential link between having the work done by a machine and having the work done by a dehumanized, objectified human body, the technology works by opacifying, by hiding and by obfuscating those mechanisms. So there's always a tension there between on the one hand the kind of wonder-inducing aspect of technology and on the other hand the fact that technology works only because it hides systems of exploitation.
Cameron: You're looking at images that tell us more about the social conditions of the time than perhaps the artists and certainly the authors of the texts might have intended. So there's this role of art in revealing to us something that might have otherwise been hidden. There's another role of art in terms of it sometimes being an explicit critique. So if you think today of the kinds of forms of art that are very, very much an explicit critique of the social relations of the time: hip hop culture and the music of the Black community. What is your understanding of the role that you can play as an academic in helping to express the potential for critique in the stuff that you study? How do you connect what you're seeing in this medieval art to the conditions that you see around you today? You're working in LA. There's a particular form of oppression operating in the States right now that has been highlighted by Black people. You know, the police violence and the oppression of the Black community. As an academic, do you feel that you have a role in this, and how would you begin to conceptualize that and express that yourself?
Lamia: That's a very good question. I would start maybe by talking about this very particular project that I'm working on. So the relation of technology and slavery. I think it has very much been shaped by what I have observed, actually, while living in California. Where it's a state that is known for technological innovation, right, and so there is all this discourse around progress and innovation, and so on, and so forth. But one realizes after living here for a while that actually it is also a state that despite the discourse of technology being a liberating force, despite all of that, it's a state that is also highly segregated. Where police violence is systemic. And there is a lot of issues that pertain to racial violence. So how do we make sense of these two phenomena that are happening at the same time? And I think that that has very much informed my own thinking. So I'm hoping that my work can provide some sort of deeper history of that connection or of that dissonance between, on the one hand, scientific progress and, on the other hand, racial violence and sedimented racism. So there is that. There is this idea that I think my work can provide insight into a more interconnected transhistorical and transregional genealogies of the issues that we're facing today. And more generally about academia, there has been a lot of work done in many disciplines, and the protests that we see today are also the result of the work that has been done by scholars that are also activists and activists that are close to scholars. And so the ideas that we hear have been in the works in major, major scholarly productions. I'm thinking, for example, of the work of Angela Davis which is very much at the center of a lot of what we hear today. Now, I also think that academia ... I also think that there is one issue that needs to be taken into consideration which is the issue of time and temporality. And the temporal scale and rhythm of academic work. So the work that we do might not be helpful right away, right now in the current context, and yet I think it can work in a longer term as we build interdisciplinary connections, as we do more collaborative work, as we buttress our findings, and as we share them with a wider audience. I think are ways in which academic work can actually participate, maybe not as fast as we wish it would, but I think that it is there in the background in the long-term, the issue of time.
Cameron: Yeah, so you're talking about academic work taking place at a different speed, at a different rhythm than everyday life. What is added to the conversation? Why would anybody care about other time periods when the issues that we're facing today are so urgent and so crucial and need to be addressed now. There seems to be the danger of the academic world being disconnected from our lived experiences today.
Lamia: Right. That's a very good question. I think it might seem disconnected, but I think that in the longer term it is actually connected. And I think we need to work at multiple levels, and at different speeds and temporal scales. There is work that needs to be done now, and then there is deeper work that needs to be done to prevent the past from repeating itself. What we're witnessing and that's happening today in the US is very much specific to the US context, but it's also linked to forms of oppression that are global, that belong to the history of the world. And so I think that it's important not to isolate what's happening now or not to look at it as a limited or circumscribed movement, but to look at the connections between what's happening now, what happened in the past, what might happen in the future, and what's happening at the same time in other countries and places. And one aspect of the work that historians do by connecting various areas and various time periods, I think would allow other areas to understand that they too have to do the work that's taking place elsewhere. So what I'm trying to say here is that what academic work does is making connections that people might not have the time or the patience to do when they have to deal with urgent problems, but it's very important to have that space where one can take the time to make deeper connections to ... Anyway, I hope you get my point.
Cameron: Well, it's ... I understand your difficulty in trying to express yourself on this because it's something that I wrestle with all the time. You know, what is my role as an academic, and why should anybody care about the work that I do? I know that the events that are going on today have a profound impact on me, and they change the way that I do my work. They change the way that I think about the world. Regardless of what time period I might be studying, the events of today change my perspective on things. And I hope that something about the way that I do my work as an academic is contributed back to society in some way. Either through the students that I teach, through these podcasts, through the work that I do in the media. You know, trying to provide a different perspective on what's going on. And so I appreciate what you're saying about this, the capacity of the academic to be looking at a broader range of time and making connections between things. If only because I think it's so easy for people to despair at a time like we're in today whether it's from the pandemic or through racialized violence, police violence. It is a profoundly upsetting time. And to understand that there are connections to other regions of the world, connections to other time periods, can perhaps give people a little bit of a glimmer of light to go along with the analysis, and it's ... I'm working with journalists who are doing profound analysis of what's going on in society today. I don't pretend to try to compete with them. I'm simply adding a different note to the composition. So it's a tough thing to understand.
Lamia: Absolutely. It is tough, but I think it is essential. And as you said, that I found particularly interesting, is that we too as academics, we have to adjust to the present moment. So we're doing work that makes connections and work that will make sense hopefully at some point in the longer term. Especially as we do the work on ourselves to address to the realities in which we ... So there is this double dynamic of on the one hand working to make connections that span different time periods, and different areas, and different disciplines. But on the other hand, adjusting to the present and doing the work of challenging our own biases and the racism embedded in our disciplines. It has to go both ways. That scholars have to do what they have to do which is kind of very patient and very slow kind of thinking, but on the other hand they also have to acknowledge that their own disciplines are part of the problems that people are struggling with today.
Cameron: Yeah.
Lamia: Which makes, really, academic work fascinating.
Cameron: Yeah.
Lamia: In my opinion.
Cameron: We are part of the structure of power.
Lamia: Right.
Cameron: And maybe there are some ways in which we approach our work in terms of our attempts to think more critically about what we're doing, more reflexively, that offer something to those who are also trying to understand the world today.
Lamia: Right.
Cameron: So there is that need to be embedded not just in the time period that you're studying but also in the time period in which you are doing your work today in order to stay grounded as a human being.
Lamia: Right, absolutely.
Cameron: Lamia, thank you so much. You've been so generous with your time today.
Lamia: Thank you very much for having me. It's really great to have this opportunity to talk to a scholar from another discipline. It's very enriching. Thank you.
Cameron: Well, I'm glad that you feel that way. It's certainly been wonderful for me. So thank you very much.
Lamia: Thank you, Cameron.
Links
Faculty web page for Lamia Balafrej
The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting, by Lamia Balafrej
Slavery and Social Death, by Orlando Patterson
The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, by al-Jazari (trans. and illus. by D. Hill, 1974)
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producers: Cameron Graham, Bert Imai
Photos: Wellesley College, Lucy Jarman
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: June 19, 2020
Locations: Toronto and Los Angeles
