The Body as Machine in Antiquity: Towards an Early History of Iatromechanics (Nicosia, 1 December 2017) (original) (raw)
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This essay introduces the theme of the ‘embodied object’. The concept describes artefacts which assume, interact with, substitute for and/or become parts or extensions of human bodies. In doing so, it puts recent work in cognitive archaeology, material culture studies and Actor-Network-Theory into conversation with a longer tradition of phenomenological approaches to art history. To demonstrate how Graeco-Roman artefacts might be understood as ‘embodied’, the authors focus on a fifth-century BCE bronze water-jar with a handle shaped as a female figure. When considered in its original religious context and as a handled container, the vessel’s vitality, agency, and close relationship to the bodies of its users and beholders are made more manifest. Drawing on the essays in this special issue of Art History, the introduction explains how the concept of the ‘embodied object’ applies to classical antiquity in particular, where one can trace the philosophical roots for conceiving of inert things as possessing or interacting with bodies. At the same time, it argues that a concern with questions of embodiment pertains to art- historical research across all cultures and periods.
“Singing the Body Mechanical: The mechanization of life in the seventeenth century”
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. "
The beauty that lies within: Anatomy, mechanics and thauma in Hellenistic medicine
forthcoming in: Maria Gerolemou and George Kazantzidis (eds.) Medicine and Mechanics in Classical Antiquity Towards an Early History of Iatromechanics, CUP (under review)
The great anatomical discoveries of Herophilus and Erasistratus are counted among the most distinctive features of Hellenistic medicine. These discoveries go hand in hand with an increasing assimilation, attested during this period, between parts of the human body and mechanical devices. While this mechanical model has been thoroughly discussed in scholarship, the emphasis has been usually placed on the interaction between the fields of medicine and mechanics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and the ways in which this interaction helped doctors to understand the function and the properties of the human body better. In this chapter I will deal with a different, though closely related, question: I will set out to examine the extent to which the discovery of little 'machines' and 'sub-machines' operating within the body is also significant on an aesthetic level. Aristotle, as we shall see, claims that the interior of the human body looks messy and disgusting; still, as soon as a bodily organ is found to serve a specific purpose (assigned to it by Nature), it immediately claims a place in the realm of the beautiful. By focusing on the case of Erasistratus, I will argue that Hellenistic medicine nourishes a different aesthetic model: in this case, the expression of wonder for the artful design of the human body is not that much a matter of teleology but is more tightly linked to, and becomes consolidated on the basis of figural analogies and similarities with products of human ingenuity and craft. But this ingenuity involves also a considerable degree of deception-one that becomes manifest in a mēchanē's inherent capacity to instill feelings of bafflement and confusion. Unlike Aristotle who proposes that the body should be fully comprehended before we proceed to marvel at it properly, the machine-body analogy thus re-instates a more elusive kind of wonder in which informed admiration and a simultaneous sense of bewilderment blend inextricably.
Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.