RoboCop Dissected: Man-Machine and Mind-Body in the Enlightenment
Legend has it that Descartes had made an automaton, a beautiful female android, which he named “Francine” after his deceased daughter.1 Descartes and the automaton were inseparable, and he took her with him on all his journeys. During a storm at sea, Descartes was nowhere to be found, and the ship’s crewmen discovered a large wooden box in his cabin. They were horror-struck when they opened it and saw a young woman inside, seemingly dead, but alive as well. Convinced of witchcraft and of having found the ill omen that hampered the voyage, the captain threw Francine overboard. This story first appeared in the eighteenth century and gained wide currency. It indicates that Descartes became an iconic figure, representing the watershed between a magical world in which living automata were frightening and fascinating and a mechanized world in which humans became machines. It also shows that the Enlightenment was fascinated by the question of what it is to be human, especially since old certainties had been overthrown and the boundaries between the natural and artificial, life and the lifeless, body and mind, animals and humans, were being contested and renegotiated.
This theme lies at the center of Allison Muri’s The Enlightenment Cyborg.2 Muri has set out to uncover the “prehistory” of the cyborg, a twentieth-century hybrid between man and machine, a prehistory she locates in the Enlightenment trope of the human-machine. She has two basic aims. First, she inveighs against the exaggerated rhetoric of postmodern theorists, who claim that the age of the cyborg heralds a “new humanity” or the “posthuman,” and against recent claims that the cyborg overcomes or, alternatively, rearticulates the ills allegedly created by technology and modernity. “History,” she argues, “is necessary to combat the oversimplified and frequently incendiary rhetorics of utopia and despair that have tended to characterize theories of human identity in a technologized environment” (p. 7). Second, Muri accuses postmodernists and cyborg theorists of misappropriating the Enlightenment. She stresses its complexity and proposes to provide a more adequate history of the cyborg figure.
Muri locates the history of the cyborg as man-machine in the early modern mechanistic view of the body as an engine, as well as in Enlightenment mechanistic understandings of the mind, prefiguring theories of neural networks and the electrochemical mind-machine interface. Then and now, in man-machine and cyborg, the role of the soul is contested—affirmed by some and dispensed with by others. In chapter 4, the heart of the book, Muri sketches the history of the nervous system in terms of circulations and communications, and she examines the transformation from control by an immortal soul to a machine-like bodily feedback system. She calls the physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis (1621–75) the originator of the cyborg tradition, because—Muri claims—Willis took a materialistic approach toward the soul, which was in essence the nervous system consisting of an active and energetic communications network, and because he treated the body as a feedback engine. Muri describes it as “a case study in mechanical consciousness” (p. 118), in which the animal spirits are seen as messengers, akin to current-day information technology. From Willis’s theories, she sketches the development of a new image of man-machine as “sensible machine” in physicians such as George Cheyne and Samuel Auguste Tissot, and writers like Laurence Sterne. Then she goes on to describe Diderot’s view of the nervous system as a sensitive network and Erasmus Darwin’s identification of the nervous fluid with electricity. In this way we arrive at the idea that the matter of the mind is continuous with electromechanical systems, a precondition for the cyborgian idea that the mind can actually be connected to a machine, and that the human spirit might be downloaded and transmitted in an information network.
Elsewhere in her book, Muri focuses on different aspects of cyborg discourse. In chapter 3, she analyzes the body politic of the man-machine in order to uncover the historical roots of the acclaimed political and moral consequences of cyborgs. What governs the human machine? Is it a steersman, such as a disembodied soul, or can the human machine govern itself by means of material feedback systems? Similarly, can the political body organize itself, or does it need a divinely installed authority? In chapter 5, Muri searches for an Enlightenment woman-machine as a precursor to the female cyborg, but she claims that she cannot find much evidence for this.3 She therefore takes an indirect route and presents the history of two main (antagonistic) characteristics of the female cyborg in popular culture: a “femme fatale” and the disembodied womb for reproduction. Muri describes the Enlightenment literature of morality, physiology, midwifery, and pornography in order to show us that the womb was compared to the brain, that female vanity was sometimes perceived as “artificial,” sexuality as mechanical, and a woman as mechanically guided by her clitoris. In her concluding chapter 6, Muri briefly shows that human identity and consciousness are not restructured as a result of the introduction of electronic media, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, but that early modern analogies of the page as body and of the text as thoughtful reflection now have to be rethought in the face of new technological developments. The electronic revolution causes no changes in humanity, Muri argues, but rather in the discipline of the humanities.
I agree with Muri about the desirability of bringing some historical sensibility into cyborg and media theory, and in this objective she has succeeded very well. The historical project developed in The Enlightenment Cyborg is interesting and challenging. Whether Muri’s historical objectives are met is open to more questioning, however, and it is on this aspect that I will now focus by playing devil’s advocate. I will discuss problems with her book at three distinct levels: historiography, general historical claims, and particular historical points. At each level, I will challenge some of the choices she makes and the conclusions she draws.
The catchy title of the book itself, introducing an “Enlightenment cyborg,” points to problems that are present throughout the work. Muri recognizes at the very outset that “there is no such thing as the Enlightenment cyborg” and that her project “could seem anachronistic to say the least” (p. 3). After that, however, she happily ignores the problems raised by her approach. What kind of history can this yield? The word “cyborg” implies a complex set of meanings in twentieth-century culture which have no counterpart in the Enlightenment. So what exactly is Muri looking for? She considers her object of study the man-machine, but any identification of the man-machine with a cyborg will be tenuous, and analyzing perceived “shared” characteristics is bound to result in vague analogies at best, often bordering on the meaningless or the trivial. Granted, Muri’s point is more subtle than I have just presented it: “Of course,” she writes, “no broken lineage exists to be traced from an ancestor-machine to its offspring cyborgs; what demands our attention, however, are the shared assumptions concerning the perceived relationships of human to mechanism, material embodiment to human spirit, and mind to matter” (p. 5). This is more interesting, but it demands a difficult balancing exercise to write such a history, and problems thus remain.
Attempting to write the history of these “shared assumptions” comes close to attempting to write the history of Western intellectual culture. Muri, of course, wants to be more concrete, and her book is rife with discussions about cyborgs and links to their alleged counterparts in the past. So we are back with our former problem of identifying a sensible subject of study that is relevant for our conception of the cyborg today. Furthermore, when closely scrutinized, many of our assumptions will look very different from prevailing assumptions 350 years ago. After innumerable developments in the sciences, technology, and philosophy, the mind-body problem today can hardly be seen as identical with the problem confronted by Descartes or Willis. Only on the most abstract level might we talk about shared assumptions. But Muri is not so much into abstract metaphysical subtleties. Instead, she is interested in historical detail. Yet in tracing long-term similarities, she tends to forget that local contexts are crucial for understanding historical detail, and that the similarities she finds are superficial. A general problem with Muri’s book is that the reader finds it difficult to extract a clear argument from her dense descriptions and enumerative discussions of early modern works, which are juxtaposed with few hints at the parallels and differences. The book keeps branching out in different directions, chasing diverse cyborg images.
Looking for precursors and origins often results in a Whiggish and much too diachronic view, one which is prone to missing the synchronic multiplicity of objects, contexts, and meanings. For instance, even if one could trace a continuous historical line between technologies, e.g., from the magic lantern to the movie projector, one would miss noting that such an instrument is actually not stabilized: variants were developed, hybrid and alternative technologies that may have flourished and then disappeared after a while. Finally, I would suggest that looking for differences is often much more interesting than finding vague and already obvious similarities, because one is compelled to look closely in order to make them as precise as possible. The resistance of the unexpected that we can find in closely studying history can bring to light the differences in our presuppositions, and this can compel us to refine our current categories of thought.
In addition, it is not just that the term “Enlightenment cyborg” is historically vacuous, for to read a current set of problems into the past can also result in anachronistic history, even if “similar” questions were posed at the time. To identify our questions with theirs is to neglect the contexts in which these questions were posed—and as a result, to lose the specificity and particularity of history.4 Many of the passages discussed in Muri’s book will reappear in a new light when confronted with early modern concerns about morality, religion, the immateriality of the soul, and the passivity of matter.
Even if we would grant that a history of “shared assumptions” is an interesting and feasible project, is the man-machine the right focus for a history of the cyborg? Inspired by cybernetic theory, Muri interprets the cyborg as a “steered organism” (p. 19) and focuses for her history on two crucial characteristics: a mechanistic assumption and the metaphor of steering or governing the body.5 This definition is controversial, however. First, it does not correspond to the popular view of the cyborg as a mixture between organism and machine. Second, it does not come close to the first use of the term in a NASA report about humans modified for surviving in space without spacesuits (there is explicit reference to incorporating artificial organs, drugs, and/or hypothermia in the human organism).6 Third, Muri does not apply her definition consistently. On the one hand, she often takes the human body, guided by a soul or by its own material processes, as representative. On the other hand, she seems to be talking more about what most would call “robots” steered by cybernetic mechanisms.
Donna Haraway offered what is now the most prominent definition of the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creatureof social realityas well as acreature of fiction.”7 In Haraway’sview, the cyborg subverts all the traditional modern dichotomies, such as human–machine, mind–body, organic–mechanical, public–private, natural–cultural, man–woman, life–death, reality–appearance, and truth–illusion. It is a boundary creature that challenges all previously accepted categories and takes pleasure in it. This explains why the cyborg is interesting and should be treated as distinct from a robot. Anthropological studies have shown that hybrid objects and the crossing of boundaries create angst and unheimlichkeit—these hybrids are liminal objects—and therefore haunt the cultural imagination. Although Haraway denies that the cyborg has a history, we could still conceive of writing an alternative history of such creatures in which the boundaries between life and the mechanical, and maybe other boundaries as well, are transgressed.
It is tempting to see the Enlightenment man-machine as the focus of a prehistory of the cyborg. But this contradicts the commonplace image of the cyborg as a hybrid of man, animal, and machine. First, Cartesian philosophy saw man as if he were a machine and never considered a real intermingling of the organic and the mechanical. Organic material consisted of much more subtle “machinery” than manmade machines. This was an insurmountable difference in degree resulting in incompatible “kinds” of machines. Second, it is true that the organic was treated on the same ontological footing as the mechanical. Yet it is precisely the mixture of what we perceive as different and irreconcilable kinds of being (organism and machine) that makes the image of the cyborg so fascinating for us. Treating everything as a machine makes the essential hybridity of the cyborg disappear.
Given that the Enlightenment human-machine is at odds with the common image of the cyborg in many ways, we could just as well construct a very different origin story. It is well known that Descartes’ account of the animal-machine was inspired by an older tradition of automata-making, sometimes known as thaumaturgy or artificial magic. This tradition has its roots in the ancient texts of Heron of Alexandria and Vitruvius, and in the medieval texts of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. These “magical” texts claim several inventions, such as talking heads, moving statues, and other automata, which seemed imbued with life and are imbedded in a magical tradition of marvels, monsters, simulation, and imagination. As Jessica Riskin argues, these machines did not so much assert the mechanical nature of animals or humans as they represented, in a paradoxical way, life at its very liveliest.8 The magical imagination could produce illusory hybrids of man and animal, and the magus himself was a half-human half-god who conjoined the earthly with the heavenly. Body–mind, culture–nature, reality–illusion, and natural–artificial are all marked boundaries he easily crossed, and—like Haraway’s cyborg feminist—he enjoyed it.
This example of an alternative history of the cyborg also serves to indicate that Muri privileges the Enlightenment unwarrantedly. She denies postmodernism the rhetoric of seeing the cyborg as a radically new phenomenon, but she assumes that the Enlightenment witnessed some revolutionary transitions, which is taken as (unjustified) ground to start her origin stories in the mid-seventeenth century. Most of her examples of Enlightenment revolutionary transitions can be contested: the transition from spiritualized to materialist æther theories, for example, or from the theory of the female as an inverted male to the view of women as mechanisms for reproduction.9 Not even the idea of the animal-machine is original to the Enlightenment. As early as 1554, Gómez Pereira had held that animals (and the animal part of humans) are nothing other than machines. This indicates that Muri should have taken her historical sensibilities farther and to earlier periods. Furthermore, she has failed to study the period between 1800 and 1950, which leaves us wondering what happened to this Enlightenment cyborg in the meantime. Finally, not only is The Enlightenment Cyborg too narrowly focused on the Enlightenment, it is also disturbingly Anglocentric, ignoring almost everything outside this set temporal and geographical framework.
But let us take seriously Muri’s characterization of the cyborg as a steered organism, together with her focus on feedback mechanisms and bodily circulations. She gives a fascinating overview of Enlightenment physiological theories and how they were used metaphorically to think about politics. She seeks to do away with simplistic history that is often centered on naive interpretations of Descartes or other major philosophers. Unfortunately, she misreads Descartes, ascribing to him the view of the human soul as a pilot in a ship (followed by a quote which explicitly denies this), and she almost exclusively makes reference to his metaphysical dualism while ignoring his other texts.10 To the contrary, Descartes writes:
I showed, too, that it is not sufficient that it [the soul] should be lodged in the human body like a pilot in his ship, unless perhaps for the moving of its members, but that it is necessary that it should also be joined and united more closely to the body in order to have sensations and appetites similar to our own, and thus to form a true man.11
Furthermore, the idea of the soul as a pilot in a ship greatly precedes Descartes. It was an important Averroist idea, commonly discussed and rejected in medieval and in early modern scholastic literature. In general, Muri ignores the rich and complex history of mind-body interactions and organism-mechanism relations before the seventeenth century and seems to believe that the general strand of premodern thought was occultist. Actually, the idea of a reciprocal action of body and mind was commonplace in most of Western history. Only the exact theoretical elaboration differed, was difficult, and was contested.
In place of Descartes, Muri puts forward Willis as a revolutionary figure because of his neurophysiological theories of animal spirits as messengers, which can be interpreted as the description of some kind of feedback mechanism. But it is unclear to me why Willis deserves so much attention and why other contemporary physicians, such as Francis Glisson, Johannes Baptista van Helmont, and Hermann Boerhaave, are not even mentioned. Furthermore, Muri unduly emphasizes Willis as an innovator for those aspects of his thought that were almost common knowledge at the time. Although Willis’s energetic theories of animal spirits are indeed striking, many physicians had similar views and compared animal spirits to light or æther. Furthermore, animal spirits were widely acknowledged to constitute some kind of communications network. Kenelm Digby, for instance, wrote before Willis that they served as “centinells, to bring their discoveries to their General, viz. to the imagination, who is as it were the Mistresse of the whole family.”12 Muri also misrepresents Willis as an innovative materialist. Spirits and imagination were seen as material in dominant medical traditions long before Willis, and in crucial passages she ignores that Willis was orthodox in positing an immaterial rational soul next to a material animal soul.
Not only does Muri represent common ideas as revolutionary, she also glosses over truly important changes. She states, for instance, that our current representation of “the cyborg or sentient machine” as a highly rational being that lacks certain degrees of feeling reiterates early modern presentiments (p. 33). It is precisely here, however, that there is a crucial and fascinating historical change happening—a change from a mechanical body and a transcendent reason, not reducible to mechanism, to more current ideas of mechanical reason and artificial intelligence—which is left unnoticed and unexplained. Such changes are crucial for the topic of the book, since android automata such as the organ player of Pierre Jaquet-Droz and the chess player of Wolfgang von Kempelen were built in the middle of the eighteenth century to show the possibility of a sensitive machine and to question the idea of mechanical reason, which was slowly being conceived after the development of the first calculating machines. Other directly relevant material not discussed by Muri includes the animal soul in a broader context, Enlightenment android automata, and the role of medical electricity. References to standard secondary works are also lacking at times.13
I have been particularly critical in this review because Muri’s approach highlights long-standing problems that still beset certain strands in the historiography of technology. It also serves as an example of the problems encountered when one tries to intertwine and make relevant early modern history for discussions of contemporary theory. In this last paragraph, however, I want to counterbalance my critique by pointing out that Muri’s book does have many virtues. First, I can only praise an author willing to bring a historical sensibility to current “theory” and media studies. Such an author can refine the arguments of “theorists” and help them to reconsider their presuppositions. Second, when considering the history of body-machine interactions, it is a brilliant strategy to take the body-as-machine seriously and to look at mechanistic metaphors and assumptions in the history of physiology. It is true that we should not concentrate solely on automata and other technological artifacts. In order to conceptualize a real interface between animal and machine, it is necessary to come to an understanding of the body as something compatible with a machine, at least in certain respects. Third, Muri shows a keen interest in the English Enlightenment, which has led her to curious finds and amazing discussions of little-known texts from an incredible variety of disciplines and backgrounds. This is the most admirable aspect of the book, and she discusses some veritable historical jewels—but I will leave these for everyone to discover by themselves. To conclude, I would say that this book itself is a “cyborg”: a hybrid between history and theory, at once fascinating and unsettling.
1. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), 1–2; Leonora Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York, 1968), 203.
2. Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. viii+308, $60).
3. Surprisingly, Muri does not discuss obvious examples such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s female organ player or the legend of Descartes’ Francine. For female androids in the Enlightenment, see Adelheid Voskuhl, “Motions and Passions: Music-playing Women Automata and Cultural Commentary in Late 18th-Century Germany,” in Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago, 2007), and Voskuhl, “The Mechanics of Sentiment: On the Construction and Interpretation of Music-playing Women Automata in 18th-Century Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2007).
4. On the role of questions in the historiography of the sciences, see Nicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences (Oxford, 2000).
5. This is not consistently carried through in her discussion of the woman-machine, where Muri focuses on different characteristics, as discussed above.
6. See Robert W. Driscoll, “Engineering Man for Space: The Cyborg Study,” NASA Biotechnology and Human Research Final Report NASA-512 (15 May 1963), and Edwin G. Johnsen and William R. Corliss, Teleoperators and Human Augmentation: An AEC-NASA Technology Survey (SP-5047) (Washington, D.C., 1967), both reprinted in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa, and Steven Mentor (New York, 1995), 75–92.
7. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1991), 149–81, quote on 149.
8. Jessica Riskin, Mind Out of Matter: The Animal-Machine from Descartes to Darwin (forthcoming), chap 2.
9. Material as well as spiritual theories of substances like æther, such as pneuma or spirit, had been around for a long time. Furthermore, Thomas Lacquer’s account of the “inverted male” has recently been challenged by Katharine Park in an as-yet-unpublished paper, “Itineraries of the ‘One-Sex Body’: A History of an Idea.”
10. In his treatise on the passions and in his letters to Princess Elisabeth, Descartes explains that “the mind, the body and the union between them belong to distinct dominions of knowledge. In metaphysics, intellect can only clearly think a dualism between body and mind, but it is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of the things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.” See René Descartes, Philosophical Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1981), 141.
11. René Descartes, Discourse, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. T. R. Ross (Cambridge, 1968), 1:118. Muri cites a similar passage from the Meditations.
12. Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France; Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, trans. R. White (London, 1658), 89.
13. To give some examples, Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), and Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Rosenfield (n. 1 above); Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds., Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity (Bologna, 2001); Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 599–633, and “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” Representations 83 (2003): 97–125. Promising material (recent or forthcoming) that will reshape this field of research are Riskin, Genesis Redux (n. 3 above); Riskin, Mind Out of Matter; and Voskuhl, “The Mechanics of Sentiment” (n. 3 above). Also, recent contributions of importance to cybernetics, such as those of Andrew Pickering, go unmentioned in Muri’s work.
©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.
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