The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine 1660–1830 by Allison Muri (review)

81 will find myself returning to, learning more each time, since it touches on many important issues that Restoration scholars cannot ignore. Tim Harris Brown University ALLISON MURI. The Enlightenment Cyborg : A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine 1660– 1830. Toronto: Toronto, 2007. Pp. viii ⫹ 308. $60. Teeming issues consuming all of us surround the slow, but sure systemic changes wrought in our time by the increasing meld of technology with the human organism. We are all at risk. The cyborg image is Ms. Muri’s vehicle for this profound ontological review of who we imagine we are in the great scheme of things; she proceeds by enlisting the philosophies, sciences, medicines, humanities, and literatures of the best minds from the seventeenth century until now. The cyborg is defined as the living organism modified by technology or as the human machine. The singular groundbreaking contribution of Ms. Muri’s interdisciplinary study is to integrate , for perhaps the first time, these major systemic changes with their ignored Enlightenment past and worrisome indeterminate future. Fearlessly, the book spread-eagles cybernetic research from Fanny Hill and Terminator to Cartesian dualism and the genome project. While Ms. Muri recognizes that cybernetics is firmly rooted in posteverything , the contemporary idea of the cyborg is unforgivably missing the historical context of the literary figure and anatomical model of seventeenthand eighteenth-century corollary understandings . For example, her new approach creatively links the cyborg with the metaphorical relation of the body and the book. Through thorough analysis of such missing linkages, she competently redresses this historical imbalance . Consequently, Ms. Muri’s brilliance is her encyclopedic ability to make a connection between early Enlightenment scientific theory and its social and political thought on the cyborg and late twentieth-century feminism, socialism, and conservatism that use the cyborg as a politicized trope. This rare and compelling tie-in between Enlightenment and postmodern worlds on cyborg art and scientific theory is an interdisciplinary triumph. At the same time, the study sends up a woeful signal that widely quoted eminent contemporary authorities lack intimate familiarity with, context for, and communication between literary and intellectual historians and all other interdisciplinary resonances throughout Enlightenment studies. In contrast, Ms. Muri’s overview treatment of two systemic changes now in flux, in particular , command attention: the connections of woman-machine and science-humanities : the two final chapters, respectively . In the first instance, the transfer of gender power, like the gradual universal loss of the male hormone and global warming, is happening, but its impact , as this study demonstrates, is far more glacial and more elemental. Since the 1960s, the rising feminist movement (and concomitant eighteenth-century studies) has been impoverished by the uniform failure of presentists and futurists of both sexes to see the titanic , millennial systemic gender change in global power, and its complementary historical framework of monumen- 82 tal, sweeping, and irreversible change. These slow gender shifts cry out for centennial and millennial historical contexts like this study. Ms. Muri devotes pages 167–225 to her chapter on the present and past of ‘‘The Woman-Machine: Techno-lust and Techno-reproduction.’’ One chapter subhead reads ‘‘Why Do Cyborgs Need Boobs?’’ and is symptomatic of both the strengths and weaknesses of this ambitious book in dealing with a subject of such contemporary magnitude despite sparse previous historical examination. Massive current popular fiction and film on cyborg encourages use of the slang vernacular and, more critically, makes the chapter overall top-heavy with the present. The magnitude of both popular and contemporary scholarly interest places two necessary, but heavy, weights on every chapter from the introductory one to the conclusion. It is the price the author and the reader pay to reach Ms. Muri’s insights. Nevertheless, the en passant pithy commentary and the well balanced conclusions make this seminal book a valuable contribution to both studies on the Enlightenment and systemic change. In concluding the woman-machine chapter , for example, Ms. Muri summarizes ‘‘provocative similarities between the eighteenth-century auto-female mechanism and the female cyborg today.’’ ‘‘In the case of Fanny Hill, her sexual desires are still guided by mechanical response and still in need of male direction , government, and ideally...