Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine

[Dave Monroe]

... this just in, from Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic,
Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific revolution
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), Chapter Three, "Monstrous Machines," pp.
53-96:

What happened to sacred monsters during the rise of the materialist
paradigm?  did they really undergo accelerated secularization and lose
their ancient association with divine forces, thus succumbing to teh
widespread extermination of supernatural beings that took place during
the century that gave rise to the Scientific Revolution? (53)

... an association with the sacred cannot always be characterized as a
religious one.  Angels and demons are supernatural and infranatural
beings, but they also serve as what we would call natural forces:
gravity and magnetism, for example, can be coherently described
according to the precepts of natural magic as interactions between
various kinds of spirits.  Furthermore, although some monsters are
figured as diabolical beings, not all demons are monstrous.  Nor do
"religious" thinkers necessarily perceive bodily deformation as a
metaphysically meaningful sign.  (53)

... there is at least one continuity in what constitutes monstrosity
throughout Western culture.  From the earliest written records to the
present day, a necessary condition for defining a sacred monster is that
which is inanimate yet moves of its own accord.  Or, in the terms I have
proposed: whenever spirit is called into or forcibly inhabits formed
matter, there is a danger of monstrosity arising.  (53-4)

But what makes an automaton monstrous is not the arrangement of its
parts (although the automaton is often form,ed to represnt a monster, a
highly significant convergence).  That is to say, the disposition of its
limbs is not what makes it rare and extraordinary; that is not what
makes it a monstrum.  Rather, it is the fact that matter formed by
artificial means and moving of its own volition would seem to be endowed
with spirit.  (54)

According to my cognitive schema, then, the sacred monster did not die
out; it transmuted and migrated into mechanical contrivances.  The
horror and  fear provoked by appearances in nature of monstrous births
moved over into the horror and fear provoked by our own artificial
creations, where these affects have remianed lodged to this day. (54)

... an association with sacred retribution is strong: for example, the
(well-founded) fears of ecological catastrophe that are projected onto
apocalyptic visions of teh earth taking revenge; Philip K. dick's
cybernetic nightmares, in which human and robotic consciousness
disturbingly mingle and lose their distinctiveness; and the intersection
of horror films with science fiction scenarios ... (55)

In the seventeenth century this fear was expressed in terms of licit
versus illicit magic: good magic operated by applying natural forces to
one another, whereas bad magic obtained infranatural or diabolical aid.
This distinction was never more crucial than in teh art of amking
monsters, both organically produced hybrids and mechanical simulacra.
(55)

My interest is clear: to show that monstrosity and technical virtuosity
tend to appear in the same discursive contexts ... Why do they appear
together so often? (55)

Perhaps the best way to approach this chapter is to understand it as an
extended meditation on a comment Augustine made in regard to egyptian
prcatices of creating false gods by calling demons into statues: "as if
there were any unhappier situation than that of a man under the
domination of his own inventions." (55)

... the Augustinian quote there is from the Penguin ed. of The City of
God, p. 332, if anyone needs to know.  The first endnote to this chapter
is interesting as well:

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has suggested in conversation that perception of
form in general, and especially perception of monstrous form, is
precisely what makes a monster not terrifying, since form allows the
possibility of "hetero-reference." (the term comes from Luhmann.)  Self
and other depend on the establishment of difference and distance.  Only
when something is formless does it adhere mysteriously to and within the
self, and this incapacity for heterogeneous reference is the most truly
horrifying phenomenon: the unlocatable and seemingly unregulatable
presence ....  Monsters, in this view, actually become a comforting
apparition: being able to identify them, define them, and perhaps even
dissect them, renders them harmless.  (226, n. 1)

... and note that ...

A monstrum (from monere, to warn or threaten) was by definition a
terrible prodigy, not for what it was in actuality--a piteously deformed
infant destined to die quickly either by natural causes or by ritual
scarifice--but for what it foretold.  A sign of coming calamity, the
monster was first and primarily a messenger from the other world.  So if
the barbarian was distinguished by making no sense, or nonsense, the
monster, on the contrary, was distinguished by making several senses: by
providing an oppositional corporeal limit to human definition; by
eroding the strong conceptual differentiation between man and beast, man
and demon, or man and god, pointing to pollution, transgression, a
breakdown in social order; and by bearing a sign of warning from teh
forces of the sacred.  (3)

... the sacred, the profane, religion, technology, the angelic, the
demonic, omens, monsters, automata, V., The Rocket, you name it ...