Beasts, machines and porous bodies: The mechanization of life in the seventeenth century

ANDRÉS VACCARI

Macquarie University, Sydney

Congreso; Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves; 2003

Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

I will offer a historical exploration of machine analogies as applied to the conceptualization and control of human bodies, focusing particularly on the body as a discursive object of science. My aim is to outline strong historical continuities that form the backbone of the prehistory of the cyborg, robotics and work-place management. During the seventeenth century, in the formative period of modern science, technology offered the rational study of nature not only new tools for measuring and observation, but also a source of analogies and metaphysical inspiration. Certain perceived features of machines (e.g., their physical structure, their internal processes) became the metaphorical basis for a new mechanical model of the world. The machine image neatly encapsulated a new ontology of matter, centered on the interaction of inert mechanisms acting according to laws of motion, force and figure (i.e., the spatial structure of the constituent elements of the universe). The machine was also an object of interest for the emerging class of merchant capitalists in early modern Europe. Descartes is the first philosopher to argue persuasively that the body is a machine, but the notion is also suggested by the ancient atomists. In particular, some strong continuities exist between the representation of machines in technological treatises and the representation of the human body in the works of Vesalius and Descartes. Later this tradition re-emerges with peculiar strength during the late industrial revolution, where the taming and control of bodies became an industrial prerogative. So, there has been a fruitful conceptual interaction between bodies and machines, organisms and technology. In medicine and physiology, the machine image has been central in the conceptualization of organic life as the concerted interaction of mechanical processes subject to physical laws. The nineteenth century sees the rise of models of industrial and managerial application, such as human-machine interaction, and the numerous successors of “efficiency engineering”. These reach a most sophisticated expression in the twentieth century, with the development of cybernetics and bionics, both of which depart from very close machine-organism analogies, and problematise the difference between organism and machine. Engineering systems can be made compatible with human characteristics and limitations only when the behavior of both man and machine can be described in comparable terms. The mechanistic paradigm has profoundly affected the attitudes and methods of the physical and life sciences, and has nowadays become a “dead metaphor” of wide-ranging reach.