The Enlightenment Cyborg

[Dave Monroe]

The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in
the Human Machine, 1660-1830
By Allison Muri
University of Toronto Press
240 Pages
Cloth
ISBN 9780802088505
Published Jan 2007
$64.00


For many cultural theorists, the concept of the cyborg - an organism
controlled by mechanic processes - is firmly rooted in the
post-modern, post-industrial, post-Enlightenment, post-nature,
post-gender, or post-human culture of the late twentieth century.
Allison Muri argues, however, that there is a long and rich tradition
of art and philosophy that explores the equivalence of human and
machine, and that the cybernetic organism as both a literary figure
and an anatomical model has, in fact, existed since the Enlightenment.

In The Enlightenment Cyborg, Muri presents cultural evidence - in
literary, philosophical, scientific, and medical texts - for the
existence of mechanically steered, or 'cyber' humans in the works
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. Muri illustrates how
Enlightenment exploration of the notion of the 'man-machine' was
inextricably tied to ideas of reproduction, government, individual
autonomy, and the soul, demonstrating an early connection between
scientific theory and social and political thought. She argues that
late twentieth-century social and political movements, such as
socialism, feminism, and even conservatism, are thus not unique in
their use of the cyborg as a politicized trope.

The Enlightenment Cyborg establishes a dialogue between
eighteenth-century studies and cyborg art and theory, and makes a
significant and original contribution to both of these fields of
inquiry

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See, e.g., ...

History, Continuity, and Discontinuity: Cyborgs and the Eighteenth Century

http://ecti.english.illinois.edu/reviews/49/mitchell-muri.html