Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770–1930 ed. by Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (review)

As its title promises, this collection explores “compelling constellations of minds, bodies and machines” (6). Providing a fresh look at the long nineteenth century through the lens of posthuman and new media studies, its approach is both timely and robustly interdisciplinary, stressing relays between literature, history, science, and technology. Its thematic range is equally expansive, treating topics as diverse as eighteenth-century automata, gothic fiction, Victorian energy physics, and modernist theories of poetic invention and aphasia. Yet, as volume editors Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser note, all of the essays share a common emphasis on metaphor and the charged discursive play that attends mechanical and materialist models of mind, body, art, language, and, indeed, humanness itself. In his mid-Victorian writings, George Henry Lewes famously warns against mistaking scientific metaphor for fact (a topic discussed by contributor Marie Banfield). Minds, Bodies, Machines directly addresses the risks and attractions of such literal and figurative reading, in essays that probe the complex historical “relations of propinquity between us and things” (4).

Contributions to the volume hail from a 2007 conference hosted by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and they are preceded by a similarly themed 2008 special issue of the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Taken together, the essays reassess the scope and scale of the period, tracing its confluence with Enlightenment-era mechanistic philosophy, with modernism and technological modernity, and beyond. The volume is framed by a substantial introduction and conclusion, which theorize a more posthuman nineteenth century in the context of recent cultural history and critical theory (and supplemented by an extensive bibliography). Coleman and Fraser draw insightful historical comparisons both to early modern medical technologies and to artifacts from our current “digital and cybernetic revolution” (17), including prosthetically amplified athletes and the Visible Human Project, whose once-living, cross-sectioned human bodies “now enjoy a posthumous existence as digitized information” (209). While posthumanist theorists such as Cary Wolfe loom large in this account, its other presiding figure is undoubtedly René Descartes, whose vision of disembodied reason and mind-body dualism is a perennially live topic for contributors.

Minds, Bodies, Machines offers readers a nuanced view of biological and technological life—a welcome change from narratives of literary and intellectual history that, following S. T. Coleridge, have typically favored organic models over mechanical, beginning with the rejection of earlier mechanistic cosmology. The collection is, of course, not alone in this emphasis. It joins a number of revisionist literary and historical studies that complicate assumptions about Victorian and Romantic-era vitalism, mechanism, energy, and information, including recent monographs by Bruce Clarke, Barri Gold, Richard Menke, Laura Otis, Ted Underwood, and myself. Like these studies, Minds, Bodies, Machines highlights the dynamic and multifarious forms of mechanism that evolved in the nineteenth century, especially in realms of vision and observation, writing and communication, medicine and (proto)psychology, physics and physical science, and literary and cultural discourse.

The volume’s nine essays are distinguished by careful, detailed historicism and analysis, and make for stimulating—if sometimes challenging—reading. The links between contributions are occasionally loose; the title triad should be construed inclusively but by no means prescriptively. (For instance, the machine largely drops out from discussion in Iain McCalman’s engaging piece on Alfred Russell Wallace and the spiritual evolution of mind.) Nonetheless, the majority of the essays explore the relation between mind and body and the highly contested forms of metaphor and discourse that this relation inspired: bodies as machines, minds as machines, and machines, in turn, as bodies, intelligences, or networks. This play of mechanical referentiality is the explicit topic of articles by Steven Connor, Katherine Inglis, and Banfield. Connor treats the machine as an explanatory figure for madness in nineteenth-century accounts of schizophrenia and delusion by James Tilly Matthews, Friedrich Krauß, and John Perceval. These patients imagine a “machinery of...