Frankenstein in the automatic factory (original) (raw)

Written in the wake of the Luddite protests, Frankenstein has long been recognised as a fable of the social impacts of technological modernity. Here I examine the career of a real-life Victor Frankenstein, the Scottish physician Andrew Ure. On 4 November 1818, Ure performed a series of galvanic experiments at Glasgow University on the body of Matthew Clydesdale, hanged for murder an hour earlier. According to Ure’s lurid account in the 1819 Quarterly Journal of Science, the dead man resumed breathing, opened his eyes and appeared to gesture towards the terrified spectators. Ure subsequently became, along with Charles Babbage, one of the principal theorists of the industrial revolution. Whereas Babbage was concerned with the technical aspects of automation, Ure was preoccupied with the machine’s capacity to discipline the labouring body. Ure’s definition of ‘AUTOMATIC’ in his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines underlines his theorisation of the link between body and machine: AUTOMATIC: A term used to designate such economic arts as are carried on by self-acting machinery. The word is employed by the physiologist to express involuntary motions. As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, I wish to examine Frankenstein’s relationship with the first, and its reconceptualization of the living body as matter that can be animated by forces such as electricity, and can thus be heightened, sustained, managed and disciplined – in a word, engineered – in the service of capitalist production.