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THE EARLY MODERN MACHINE: DIVINE, SENTIMENTAL, ROMANTIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2014

JESSICA RISKIN
JESSICA RISKIN*
Affiliation:
History Department, Stanford University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

It is easy, especially for a generation of students who entered kindergarten in the age of Google, to think that machines, before the advent of electronic computers (and smart phones and iPads), were heavy, clunky, stupid things—big, industrial, hissing with steam and clanking their gears. Or if they weren't heavy and hissing, at least they were rigid and rote: a clock inexorably ticking its way around the dial, an automaton executing brittle motions in stiff sequence.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 443 - 451
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Nouveaux essais, in Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, Carl Immanuel, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875–90) (hereafter PS), 5: book 2, chap. 20, 153Google Scholar.

2 I discuss this passage, and Leibniz's view of machines, both living and artificial, more fully in Riskin, Jessica, “The Restless Clock,” in Findlen, Paula, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, 84–101, and in a forthcoming book by the same title.

3 See also Garber, Daniel, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” in Okruhlik, K. and Brown, J. R., eds., The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz (Dordrecht, 1985), 27–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, “Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason” (1714), in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. Ariew, Roger and Garber, Daniel (Indianapolis, 1989) (hereafter PE), 206–13, 207Google Scholar. See also Leibniz, Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances et autres textes, 1690–1703, ed. Frémont, Christiane (Paris, 1994), 70–71Google Scholar: “A natural machine still remains a machine in its least parts”; and Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, in PS, 5: book 3, chap. 6, section 39.

5 Leibniz to Lady Damaris Masham, 30 June 1704, in PS, 3: 356.

6 On Leibniz's distinctive form of mechanism as applied to the phenomena of life see also Duchesneau, François, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris, 1998), chap. 10Google Scholar; and , Duchesneau, “Leibniz's Model for Organizing Organic Phenomena,” in Perspectives on Science, 11/4 (2003), 378–409, 398CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Duchesneau argues that Leibniz's theory of organisms grew out of his understanding of dynamics, a “science of power and action,” which he developed in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

7 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “On Nature Itself, Or, on the Inherent Force and Actions of Created Things, Toward Confirming and Illustrating Their Dynamics” (1698), in PE, 155–67, 156. See also Leibniz, “Against Barbaric Physics: Toward a Philosophy of What There Actually Is and against the Revival of the Qualities of the Scholastics and Chimerical Intelligences” (1710–16?), in PE, 312–20, 319: “everything happens mechanically in nature, but that the principles of mechanism are metaphysical.”

8 See also Garber, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics.”

9 Journal des sçavans (Paris, 1665–1792), 1680, 12.

10 Chapuis, Alfred and Gélis, Edouard, Le monde des automates, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928), 2: 270–78Google Scholar; Chapuis, Alfred and Droz, Edmond, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study, trans. Alec Reid (Geneva, 1958), 280–81Google Scholar; and Jaquet-Droz, Pierre, Les oeuvres des Jaquet-Droz: Montres, pendules et automates (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1971)Google Scholar. On the Jaquet-Droz family see also Perregaux, Charles and Perrot, François-Louis, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot (Neuchâtel, 1916)Google Scholar; Chapuis, and , Droz, The Jaquet-Droz Mechanical Puppets (Neuchâtel, 1956)Google Scholar; and Carrera, Roland, Loiseau, Dominique, and Roux, Olivier, Androïdes: Les automates des Jaquet-Droz (Lausanne, 1979)Google Scholar.

11 See Perregaux and Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz, 31–4. On the Musicienne's performance see also Altick, Richard Daniel, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar; Schaffer, Simon, “Enlightened Automata,” in Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 126–64, 138Google Scholar; and Chapuis and Droz, Automata, 280–82. I have discussed the Jaquet-Droz automata in Riskin, Jessica, “The Defecating Duck,” Critical Inquiry, 20/4 (Summer 2003), 599–633Google Scholar; and in , Riskin, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” in Representations, 83 (Summer 2003), 97–125Google Scholar.

12 de Bachaumont, Louis Petit, Mémoires secrets pour server à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis MDCCLXII jusqu’à nos jours, 36 vols. (London, 1777–89), 7: 323Google Scholar; Chapuis and Gélis, Le monde des automates, 2:192; and Metzner, Paul, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley, 1998), 171Google Scholar.

13 Perregaux and Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz, 110–11.

14 Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1992), 92Google Scholar.

15 I develop these points fully in The Restless Clock, forthcoming, and in two forthcoming articles, “How the Mouse Lost Its Tail” and “Lamarck's (More) Dangerous Idea.”