The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art: Marionettes, Models, and Mannequins by Adam Geczy (review)

Readers of Geczy's book are in for a wild ride. The lavishly illustrated narrative moves in broad strokes from the commedia dell'arte to cyborgs, with gross-out plastic surgery disasters and live sex dolls in between. The book's premise is simple: where humans once found their humanity in separating themselves from the artificial, in our current technologically infused age, humans want more than anything to become as artificial as possible. Geczy puts it simply: "In the humanist age, Pinocchio wanted to become human; in the so-called post-humanist age, humans aspire to become Pinocchio" (2). His examples are anything but simple, however. Arguing that in and around the 1980s, the move from "dolls imitating humans, to humans wanting to be dolls" (10) became more pronounced, Geczy takes the reader on a grand tour of human use of puppets, dolls, and artificial selves from the Renaissance to the right now, showing how "we can no longer see the doll as external to ourselves" but, rather, "as different in degree, but not in kind" (10).

To make the case that the animated doll, once a source of horror and repulsion, has evolved into an attractive repository for posthuman dreams of the singularity, Geczy calls on a luscious array of wide-ranging scholarship and his obviously deep historical, philosophical, psychological, artistic, theatrical, and postmodern theoretical expertise. Starting with puppets, such as Punch and Judy, and marionettes and then on to the acting and costuming styles of commedia dell'arte clowns, Geczy engages these configurations of otherness as a foil for understanding the wide-ranging effects of Descartes's subjectivity-cleaving cogito, which Geczy claims created the rational conception of the body as machine. He then argues that the eighteenth-century fascination with the clockwork automaton made Descartes's metaphor of the body and the machine a reality. In this regard, the reader is treated to a tour of various automata, from early examples in the fifteenth century through to Vaucanson's duck, a 1741 mechanical bird that "drank, ate, paddled in the water and even ejected its waste" (38), which, due to exhaustive study of the animal's morphology, even walked like a duck. Due to their technological sophistication, even among hoaxes such as the mechanical chess-playing Turk (which housed a real human player under its pantaloons), the automata of the period seemed to replicate sentimental, intellectual, and artistic abilities previously understood as the "very qualities that were considered to make us human" (47). As a result of this destabilization, Geczy argues, the artificial body split into two symbolic poles: the "monstrous double" and the "modified body that improves on human … performance" (49).

Discussing these "dark doubles," Geczy takes the reader through a look at the doll in literature, via forays into the works of, among others, Baudelaire, Hoffmann, Offenbach, Heinrich von Kleist, Freud, Lacan, Le Corbusier, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Rilke, with a little Plato in between, to get at the question of why there was a "rather sudden volume of literature on dolls and automata from the late eighteenth century onward" (51). He uses this broad-ranging discussion to illustrate the new dual role of dolls and automata, e.g., symbolizing the "positive onward march of science and technology," while at the same time gesturing toward "foreboding over when that science goes askew" (52), a critique embodied, for instance, in the hubris-gone-wrong horrors of Frankenstein.

The following chapter engages in detailed analysis of the doll in art, discussing the grotesque and eccentric oddities of the work of Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman, to get at concerns about our ability to relate to the nonhuman. Geczy points to the emphasis on the doll at the opening of the twentieth century as a "growing consensus about the permeability between people and machines in the machine age" (70), a source of some fascination but mostly terror. Amplifying this theme...