The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830.

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Allison Muri explores how the image of the human-machine became representational for enlightenment change throughout the long 18th century, and how a prototypical image of what has come to be known as the cyborg cemented identity and dealt with anxieties about permeability at the same time. Careful to place the human-machine in its proper historical context, she shows how earlier “human-machines can help us grasp the subjectivities of new ones.” Muri focuses on British natural philosophy and literature and emphasizes the fact that the Enlightenment “did not operate on a solely Cartesian framework, and involved the creation of other machines to mimic human thought and labour than the ... automata admired by Descartes.” Her major aim is to show how our current understanding of the cyborg is “part of the tradition of literature that began in the age of sensibility as a reaction to mechanical interpretations of human knowledge and understanding.”

In order to accomplish this aim, Muri explicates a number of textual and social dialectics. She explores the relationship between the mechanical body and the ideal of a moral, thinking being in her section on “Matter, Mechanism, and the Soul.” In “Body Politics,” she examines the cyborg “as an organism that is steered or governed by artificial feedback mechanisms” and argues that it should be seen more as a “human-machine-text moved by energy and controlled by a circuit of communications” than as a Cartesian automaton. In her section on “The Man-Machine,” Muri looks at the economic and social importance of the mechanical metaphor for human identity, and follows “the gradual transformation from control by an immaterial immortal soul to control by a material, machinelike bodily feedback system.” “The Woman-Machine” explores the construction of women’s bodies as passive mechanical sex objects, domestic mechanisms, or reproductive automatons in the 18th century. Finally, “Cyborg Conceptions” draws together important enlightenment developments as they manifest themselves in a metaphor and image that continues to be culturally relevant today.