The body made machine: On the history and applications of a metaphor

ANDRÉS VACCARI

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Grecia

Conferencia; The Flesh Made Text: Bodies, Theories, Cultures in the Post-Millennial Era; 2003

School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

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.