INVESTIGADORES
VACCARI AndrÉs
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
The body made machine: On the history and applications of a metaphor
Autor/es:
ANDRÉS VACCARI
Lugar:
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Grecia
Reunión:
Conferencia; The Flesh Made Text: Bodies, Theories, Cultures in the Post-Millennial Era; 2003
Institución organizadora:
School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Resumen:
The merging of machines and organisms into integrated systems flowed out of the notion that the universe could be better explained as machine-like, as a kind of clockwork contraption. I will locate this shift in the seventeenth century; more precisely with Descartes, who transported the mechanization of the heavens into the heart of life. This deceptively simple idea (that living bodies are, literally, machines) is now everywhere. Modern offices and factory floors, automated surgery rooms, engineering and design practices, scientific models in biology: they all owe something to Descartes idea. There is no cybernetics without the nineteenth century factory floor, and no capitalist revolution without mechanical models of the body.