Love of Machines. Antynomies of Machine in Polish Modernism
Also for Polish modernism the machine comes to be a synecdoche of modernity as a
whole. In contrast to the fetishistic approach to machines that characterized Italian futurism and
to the economic utilitarian attitude of Russian futurism, which saw machines as an instrument
of proletarian emancipation, in 1923 the leader and chief theoretician of Polish futurism, Bruno
Jasieński, introduced (in Polish Futurism: a balance) the vision of the machine as a prosthesis, a
continuation of the human body. This essay starts from Jasieński’s proposition and, by means of
an aware anachronism, makes use of the 20th century categories of cyborgs to try to describe
and interpret an extensive passage of the unique novel of a forgotten Polish writer from the
period between the two World wars, Jerzy Sosnkowski. The novel in question is called A Car,
You and Me (Love of Machines) and was published in 1925. Chapter VIII of the novel describes
the main character’s dystopian dream about machines taking control over the world dooming
the human race to extinction. Among 20th century cyborg categories, the ones that appear to be
especially useful are those that cross the confines between human and machine and between human
and animal. In this case we are dealing with machines described as huge animals. Although
the machines theriomorphous shape seems to bypass man, they retain certain key features in
common with us, such as sexual desire. Besides the cyborgs, another category (usually applied to
man-machine resemblance) proved effective in trying to analyze Sosnkowski’s animal machines,
an aesthetic and psychoanalytical one, that of the Uncanny. Although the dystopian character of
the dream is due to the fact that machines have no feelings, hence their effectiveness and superiority
over men, Sosnkowski seems to have had a foreboding of another possibility: an intelligent
machine (in the novel represented by the main character’s car), which empathetically understands
and realizes what the man is thinking and feeling. This intuition, which predicts current research
into contemporary robotics, makes this text worth remembering.
