RoboCop Dissected: Man-Machine and Mind-Body in the Enlightenment

Koen Vermeir

Technology and Culture, Volume 49, Number 4, October 2008,

pp. 1036-1044 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0150

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v049/49.4.vermeir.html

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RoboCop Dissected: Man-Machine and

Mind-Body in the Enlightenment
Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg

KOEN VERMEIR

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 hor-
ror-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 fas-
cinating 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 Cy-
borg.2 Muri has set out to uncover the “prehistory” of the cyborg, a twenti-

Koen Vermeir is Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research—Flanders and a fel-
low at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has written
on the history of the magic lantern, artificial magic, and the theology of early modern
magnetic instruments. He is currently working on projects on early modern magnetic
and optical technologies and on the cultural history of the early modern imagination. He
thanks Lauren Kassell and Heidi Voskuhl for their comments on this essay.
©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/08/4904-0014/1036–44

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 Con-

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VERMEIRK|KAllison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg

eth-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, alter-
natively, rearticulates the ills allegedly created by technology and moder-
ESSAY
nity. “History,” she argues, “is necessary to combat the oversimplified and
frequently incendiary rhetorics of utopia and despair that have tended to REVIEWS
characterize theories of human identity in a technologized environment”
(p. 7). Second, Muri accuses postmodernists and cyborg theorists of mis-
appropriating 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 Enlighten-
ment mechanistic understandings of the mind, prefiguring theories of neu-
ral 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 cir-
culations 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 spir-
its 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 dis-
course. 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 steers-

trol in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp.
viii+308, $60).

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man, 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
OCTOBER
(antagonistic) characteristics of the female cyborg in popular culture: a
2008 “femme fatale” and the disembodied womb for reproduction. Muri de-
VOL. 49 scribes 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 con-
sciousness are not restructured as a result of the introduction of electronic
media, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, but that early modern analo-
gies 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 elec-
tronic 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 suc-
ceeded 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 cy-
borg,” points to problems that are present throughout the work. Muri rec-
ognizes 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 ap-
proach. What kind of history can this yield? The word “cyborg” implies a
complex set of meanings in twentieth-century culture which have no coun-
terpart in the Enlightenment. So what exactly is Muri looking for? She con-

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 En-
lightenment, 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 Univer-
sity, 2007).

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VERMEIRK|KAllison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg

siders 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 lin-
eage exists to be traced from an ancestor-machine to its offspring cyborgs;
ESSAY
what demands our attention, however, are the shared assumptions con-
cerning the perceived relationships of human to mechanism, material em- REVIEWS
bodiment to human spirit, and mind to matter” (p. 5). This is more inter-
esting, 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 dis-
cussions 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 develop-
ments in the sciences, technology, and philosophy, the mind-body problem
today can hardly be seen as identical with the problem confronted by Des-
cartes 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 simi-
larities, 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, chas-
ing 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.

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In addition, it is not just that the term “Enlightenment cyborg” is his-

torically 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
OCTOBER
will reappear in a new light when confronted with early-modern concerns
2008 about morality, religion, the immateriality of the soul, and the passivity of
VOL. 49
matter.
Even if we would grant that a history of “shared assumptions” is an in-
teresting and feasible project, is the man-machine the right focus for a his-
tory 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 artifi-
cial 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
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” 7 In Haraway’s view,
the cyborg subverts all the traditional modern dichotomies, such as hu-
man–machine, mind–body, organic–mechanical, public–private, natu-
ral–cultural, man–woman, life–death, reality–appearance, and truth–illu-
sion. It is a boundary creature that challenges all previously accepted
categories and takes pleasure in it. This explains why the cyborg is interest-

4. On the role of questions in the historiography of the sciences, see Nicholas Jar-
dine, 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 Ed-
win 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-Fem-
inism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1991), 149–81, quote on 149.

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VERMEIRK|KAllison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg

ing 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,
ESSAY
and maybe other boundaries as well, are transgressed.
It is tempting to see the Enlightenment man-machine as the focus of a REVIEWS
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 Ris-
kin 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 con-
joined the earthly with the heavenly. Body–mind, culture–nature, real-
ity–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 indi-
cate that Muri privileges the Enlightenment unwarrantedly. She denies
postmodernism the rhetoric of seeing the cyborg as a radically new phe-
nomenon, but she assumes that the Enlightenment witnessed some revolu-
tionary transitions, which is taken as (unjustified) ground to start her ori-

8. Jessica Riskin, Mind Out of Matter: The Animal-Machine from Descartes to Darwin
(forthcoming), chap 2.

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gin stories in the mid-seventeenth century. Most of her examples of En-

lightenment 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
OCTOBER
the animal part of humans) are nothing other than machines. This indi-
2008 cates that Muri should have taken her historical sensibilities farther and to
VOL. 49
earlier periods. Furthermore, she has failed to study the period between
1800 and 1950, which leaves us wondering what happened to this Enlight-
enment cyborg in the meantime. Finally, not only is The Enlightenment Cy-
borg 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 cen-
tered 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 dual-
ism 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

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 domin-
ions 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. Eliza-
beth S. Haldane and G. T. R. Ross (Cambridge, 1968), 1:118. Muri cites a similar passage
from the Meditations.

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VERMEIRK|KAllison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg

Furthermore, the idea of the soul as a pilot in a ship greatly precedes

Descartes. It was an important Averroist idea, commonly discussed and re-
jected 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.
ESSAY
Actually, the idea of a reciprocal action of body and mind was common-
place in most of Western history. Only the exact theoretical elaboration dif- REVIEWS
fered, 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 mech-
anism. 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. Al-
though 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 cur-
rent representation of “the cyborg or sentient machine” as a highly rational
being that lacks certain degrees of feeling reiterates early modern presenti-
ments (p. 33). It is precisely here, however, that there is a crucial and fasci-
nating 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 unno-
ticed 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

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 Sym-
pathy, trans. R. White (London, 1658), 89.

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after the development of the first calculating machines. Other directly rele-
vant material not discussed by Muri includes the animal soul in a broader
context, Enlightenment android automata, and the role of medical electric-
ity. 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 his-
OCTOBER
toriography of technology. It also serves as an example of the problems
2008 encountered when one tries to intertwine and make relevant early-modern
VOL. 49
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 his-
tory 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 under-
standing of the body as something compatible with a machine, at least in
certain respects. Third, Muri shows a keen interest in the English Enlight-
enment, which has led her to curious finds and amazing discussions of lit-
tle-known texts from an incredible variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
This is the most admirable aspect of the book, and she discusses some ver-
itable 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.

13. To give some examples, Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Con-
ceptions 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 Pan-
caldi, eds., Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity (Bologna, 2001);
Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 599–633, and “Eigh-
teenth-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.

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