Abstract
Standing two metres tall, with arms and legs splayed in the familiar Vitruvian posture, ‘Clear Man’ is a resin model of the human form which can be seen at the Science Museum in London. Embedded within his transparent body are over fifty different ‘devices’ ranging from the banal to the very edge of science fiction.2 Dentures and glass eyes have an ancient history, but the anterior cervical plate — a device which fuses the head and the neck bones — or the artificial larynx used to replace damaged or diseased vocal cords, hint at cyber-fictional fantasies as much as they represent the advances of medical technology. Prosthetic surgery — the replacement of damaged body parts by artificial features — has a long history. But ‘Clear Man’ shows us how prosthesis has now reached deep into the human interior. Of course, ‘Clear Man’ does not represent a mechanical or robotic figure: the organic body still predominates. Neither do the supplementary parts enhance the basic design specification of the human being. The individual fitted with a carbon fibre bone plate cannot run faster or further than someone who has not been so modified. Rather, damaged or worn-out organic features — hips, knee joints, blood vessels, heart valves — can now be made to function once more, at least after a fashion.
When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell, and his ‘hmh!’ is a battery. He sits in his state like a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus V.iv.15–201
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Notes
All references to the works of Shakespeare are to Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).
‘Clear Man’ is part of ‘The Challenge of Materials’ exhibition at the Science Museum in London. For a description, see: Charles Arthur, ‘Man of Many Parts’, Independent on Sunday (11 May 1997) pp. 44–5. Clear Man is, technologically speaking, male. Amongst his many addon or replacement parts is a penile prosthesis, an internal support helpful in maintaining an erection.
In referring to the ‘art’ of body modification, I have in mind, in particular, the French conceptual artist, Orlan. See Barbara Rose, ‘Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act’ Art in America 81 (1993), 85; Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 128–140.
Bryan S. Turner, ‘Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body’ in Mike Featherstone et al. (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1991), pp. 5–6. See also R. Brain, The Decorated Body (London: Hutchinson, 1979); T. Polhemus, Social Aspects of the Human Body (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978).
Susan Benson, ‘Bodies to Call our Own’ Times Literary Supplement 4922 (1 August 1997), p. 24. See also Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life (London: HarperCollins, 1993). On a possible history of ‘selfhood’ and the body see: Jonathan Sawday, ‘Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’ in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 29–48.
Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the late 1980s’ in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 191.
Brian Cotterell and Johan Kamminga, Mechanics of Pre-industrial Technology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 188–9. See also E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery — Historical Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books of Architecture translated by Maurice Hickey Morgan and A. A. Howard (1914 reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1960), pp. 303–9.
Cotterell and Kaminga, p. 192. See also Flavius Josephus, Bellum Judaicum translated by W. Whiston (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1960), V. p. 240.
Agostino Ramelli, The Various and Ingenious Machines (1588) ed. and trans. Martha Teach Gnudi and Eugene S. Ferguson (London and Baltimore: The Scolar Press/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 516.
Kenneth J. Knoespel, ‘Gazing on Technology: Theatrum Mechanorum and the Assimilation of Renaissance Machinery’ in Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (eds.), Literature and Technology Research in Technology Studies 5 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 99. On Renaissance machinery in general, see: Silvio A. Bedini, ‘The role of automata in the history of technology’ Technology and Culture 5 (1964), 24–42; Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966); Alex G. Keller, A Theatre of Machines (London: Chapman and Hall, 1964); Ladislao Reti, ‘Leonardo on Bearings and Gears’ Scientific American 224 (February 1971), pp. 100–10; Ladislao Reti, ‘Leonardo and Ramelli’ Technology and Culture 13 (1972), pp. 577–605; Charles Singer et al. (eds), A History of Technology, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954–8).
To the works of Ramelli, Besson, Agricola, and Zonca may be added the following ‘machine-books’ of the period: Georg Andreas Böckler, Theatrum machinarium novum (Nuremburg, 1661); Jean Errard, Le premier livre des instruments mathematiques mechaniques (Nancy, 1584); Guidobaldo del Monte, Mechanicorum liber (Pesaro, 1577); Niccolò Tartaglia, La nova scientia (Venice, 1537); Fausto Veranzio, Machinae novae (Florence, 1615); Heinrich Zeising, Theatri machinarum (Leipzig, 1613). Machine designs were also disseminated in treatises on subjects as disparate as architecture, music, fortification, ship-construction, and gardening.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), II. p. 556.
See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 133.
Too much load was placed on a single gear tooth in absorbing the ‘shock of halting and reversing the movement of a machine’; see Ramelli, Various and Ingenious Machines (commentary), p. 576.
Bert S. Hall, ‘The Didactic and the Elegant: some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustrations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’ in Brian S. Baigrie (ed), Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (Toronto and London: The University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 35.
See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) particularly chapter 4 ‘Divine Activity in a Mechanical Universe’, pp. 117–151.
Philipe de Mornay, A Worke concerning the Truenesse of the Christian Religion translated by Arthur Golding and Philip Sidney (London, 1617), p. 95. On the triumph of the ‘mechanic philosophy’, see E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanisation of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
Irma A. Richter (ed.), The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 88.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (ed.) Geoffrey Shepherd ed., (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 100–1.
Substitution of the term ‘soul’ (anima) for the term life (‘vita’) in this translation from a passage in the Codex Atlanticus (161r) was proposed by the authors of the section on Leonardo’s flying machine in the catalogue to the Leonardo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London (1989), where a beech wood model of the flying machine was exhibited. See Leonardo da Vinci (exhibition catalogue) (London: The South Bank Centre, 1989), p. 236. Such a substitution does not, however, make theological sense. In sixteenth-century terms, birds may be held to possess vitality, but only human beings possess ‘souls’.
Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings edited and translated by John Cottingham et al., 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), III. p. 366.
Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), pp. 75–8.
See Silvio A. Bedini, ‘The Mechanical Clock and the Scientific Revolution’ in Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr (eds), The Clockwork Universe German Clocks and Automata 1550–1650 (Washington, DC, and New York: Smithsonian Institution and Neale Watson Academic Publications Inc., 1980), p. 20.
It should be noted that some of the most complex hydraulic automata had a non-European origin. On this topic see Joseph Needham, Wang Ling, Derek de Solla Price, Heavenly Clockwork: The great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 179–99. Of equal importance were the many hydraulic automata to be found in the early thirteenthth century work of Al-Jazari; see Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices translated and annotated by Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht / Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1974).
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 328, 330.
Francis C. Haber, ‘The Clock as Intellectual Artifact’ in Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, p. 16.
Nicodemus Frischlin, Carmen de astonomico horologio Argentoratensi (1575) quoted (and translated) in Haber, ‘The Clock as Intellectual Artifact’ in Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, p. 18.
See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), I, pp. 314–15.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977).
Michael O’Connel ‘The Faerie Queene, Book V’ in A. C. Hamilton et al. (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 280.
Walter Charleton, Enquiries into Human Nature in VI Anatomic Praelections (London, 1680), sig. Br.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 9.
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Sawday, J. (1999). ‘Forms Such as Never Were in Nature’: the Renaissance Cyborg. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_10
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