The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, and Mechanized Bodies in Victorian Culture
type: CreativeWork
description: While recent scholarship focuses on the fluidity or dissolution of the boundary between body and machine, "The Body Machinic" historicizes the emergence of the categories of "human" and "mechanical" labor. Beginning with nineteenth-century debates about the mechanized labor process, these categories became defined in opposition to each other, providing the ideological foundation for a dichotomy that continues to structure thinking about our relation to technology. These perspectives are polarized into technophobic fears of dehumanization and machines "taking over," or technological determinist celebrations of new technologies as improvements to human life, offering the tempting promise of maximizing human efficiency. "The Body Machinic" argues that both sides to this dichotomy function to mask the ways the apparent body-machine relation is always the product of human social relations that become embedded in the technologies of the labor process. Chapter 1 identifies the emergence of this dichotomy in the 1830s "Factory Question" debates: while critics of the factory system described workers as tools appended to monstrous, living machines, apologists claimed large-scale industrial machinery relieved human toil by replicating the laboring body in structure and function. Chapters 2 examines factory workers' autobiographies which record their experiences of being treated like machine parts, disposed of when broken by gruesome factory accidents. Chapter 3 analyzes Trollope's Michael Armstrong and Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, in which merely occupying the space of the factory initiates workers' transformations into a dangerously politicized yet mindless "community of automata." Chapter 4 analyzes Babbage's mathematical theory, his Difference Engine, and Dickens's representation of Babbage in Little Dorrit to argue that representations of mechanization were crucial to debates about the category of mental labor, which we continue to define as productive of intellectual property…
abstract: While recent scholarship focuses on the fluidity or dissolution of the boundary between body and machine, "The Body Machinic" historicizes the emergence of the categories of "human" and "mechanical" labor. Beginning with nineteenth-century debates about the mechanized labor process, these categories became defined in opposition to each other, providing the ideological foundation for a dichotomy that continues to structure thinking about our relation to technology. These perspectives are polarized into technophobic fears of dehumanization and machines "taking over," or technological determinist celebrations of new technologies as improvements to human life, offering the tempting promise of maximizing human efficiency. "The Body Machinic" argues that both sides to this dichotomy function to mask the ways the apparent body-machine relation is always the product of human social relations that become embedded in the technologies of the labor process. Chapter 1 identifies the emergence of this dichotomy in the 1830s "Factory Question" debates: while critics of the factory system described workers as tools appended to monstrous, living machines, apologists claimed large-scale industrial machinery relieved human toil by replicating the laboring body in structure and function. Chapters 2 examines factory workers' autobiographies which record their experiences of being treated like machine parts, disposed of when broken by gruesome factory accidents. Chapter 3 analyzes Trollope's Michael Armstrong and Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, in which merely occupying the space of the factory initiates workers' transformations into a dangerously politicized yet mindless "community of automata." Chapter 4 analyzes Babbage's mathematical theory, his Difference Engine, and Dickens's representation of Babbage in Little Dorrit to argue that representations of mechanization were crucial to debates about the category of mental labor, which we continue to define as productive of intellectual property…
author: Kuskey, Jessica
keywords: Bodies, British literature, Labor, Marxist, Technology, Victorian, English Language and Literature
date published: 2012-12-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:54:37Z
provider: Syracuse University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Syracuse University