Artificial Love by Paul Shepheard, MIT Press, 拢27.95/$42, ISBN 0262692856 Reviewed by Simon Ings
WHERE does architecture leave off and landscape begin? Do our artefacts set us apart from nature, or are they simply the way we sign our presence? In what sense are our machines not alive?
Only a madman, a science fiction writer or an architect would attempt to fashion a book out of such questions. The madman lists the radio stations being picked up by his teeth, bemoans the New World Order, and bores everyone. By chapter three, the science fiction writer has already turned her protagonists into gods, so their questions, however valid, hardly seem to matter. The architect agonises more or less pretentiously for 200 pages, mixing fable, memoir and homespun philosophy, sells the result to MIT Press, and hopes, if he鈥檚 lucky, to shift half-a-dozen copies.
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Paul Shepheard is an architect. In Artificial Love, he argues that architecture 鈥� under which label he includes machines and sculpture 鈥� is a component of the natural world. The argument has been made before. But where George Dyson, following a similar line in Darwin Among the Machines, studied the artefacts, Shepheard prefers to study the people around him: how they respond to the environment, and how their responses change with age. Shepheard鈥檚 material springs from his own life, from the banter of his students, and from the air: where memoir leaves off and fiction begins hardly seems to matter.
The test of any particular intellectual discipline, is whether it can tackle questions no other discipline can handle. The novelist Milan Kundera has argued that the novel, too, exists to explore questions that only the novel can explore. Unexpectedly, Shepheard鈥檚 rather pedantic book, streaked through with veins of gobsmacking self-satisfaction, turns out, at last, to be a novel. That Shepheard may not know this can only add to the reader鈥檚 sense of intrigue: what exactly is Artificial Love?
It鈥檚 hard to say. Somewhere between Don DeLillo鈥檚 waste-strewn opus Underworld and the humane puzzle-making of Kundera, a new kind of novel is stirring: one which addresses a new, cybernetic, post-industrial sort of everyday life.