Llullaby

This is one of five essays that extend, to the current moment of digital infrastructure transformation, musings on synthetic intellect generation put forth by Jorge Luis Borges in one of his lesser-known essays from 1937. «Ramon Llull’s Thinking Machine» showcases an instrument for analytical enhancement, devised in the 13th century, to settle theological conflicts between the three monotheistic world religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Borges observes that delegating intellectual agency to automated routines fails to fortify reason per se — but succeeds in other respects, namely in quickening concept proliferation and lateral associations. Borges treats Llull’s «thinking machine» as an object lesson that conveys a core historiographical insight concerning the prosthetics of mind in general: New idea-generating technologies entail unintended cogito-cultural ramifications. This essay sees itself as an addendum to Borges' commentary. With reactionary politics once again on the rise, it recalls two thinking machines of a more recent vintage along with their respective cultural reverberations — the Chess Player (a late 18th century automaton), for one, and the Portable Bettmann Archive (a mid-20th century image search tool), for another. The commercial picture library Otto Bettmann founded in 1936, the year before the Borges essay appeared, articulated a critique of totalizing thought like the critique that Borges extracted from Llull. By the 1960s, Bettmann’s pictorial logic had entered mainstream US-advertising culture from whence its distinctive visual grammar continued to spread. To this day, the Bettmann/Borges vision of combinatorics informs the functional layout of the graphical user interface. This idiom of search and retrieval, first consolidated in the 1930s, has come to permeate online signposting and intuitive wayfinding. A few sample plates from the Bettmann Portable Archive conclude this essay-update of Borges' remarks on Llull’s thinking machine. They are tendered as an invitation to follow a visual argument for the broader claims here advanced.