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...anything regular. La Mettrie writes toward the beginning of his treatise, "Man is a machine constructed in such a way that it is impossible first of all to have a clear idea of it and consequently to define it." (2) If we would like to know exactly how the human mechanism operates, La Mettrie intimates, we are forced to look outside of treatises, and in so doing to "ignore the history of all the futile opinions of philosophers." (3) From La Mettrie's point of view, man-a-machine could just as well be man-a-mushroom (4)--"an image and not ... an explanatory principle." (5) In other words, he is nothing but a trope. Unlike Condillac, whose statue-man takes shape incrementally within a diachronic textual order, built up from the outside in, La Mettrie gives machine-man neither point of origin nor internal organization per se. Instead, he offers him up to us as pure figure. At the origins of modernity as a regime of bodily control there appears to lie a peculiarly constraining formalism.
Scholars of machine-man, whether critical of or sympathetic to what they see as La Mettrie's larger project, have not yet fully accounted for the extraordinary tropiness of their object of study. Nor has it become clear what the relationship might be, in La Mettrie's writing, between this materialist figure of relative constraint (or, in Foucauldian terms, docility) and the rhetorical techniques of extreme liberty that characterize the Lamettrian oeuvre. (6) What could it mean, in the context of a seemingly dogmatic Enlightenment materialism, for a theory of physiological determinism to be founded in a trope? (7) More specifically, what does the figural status of machine-man suggest about the relationship between the automaton as an important crystallization of a radically embodied subject and materialist philosophy as intimately involved in forms of literary practice and, indeed, literary style? How can we conjugate La Mettrie's easy deployment of figure with the critical tendency to read into machine-man an enduring construction of the human subject as thoroughly constrained by its own substance? (8) For what, as readers, is machine-man meant to prepare us?
I will suggest here that, in order to understand what is at stake for La Mettrie in the particular materialization of the human subject that he develops, we must take La Mettrie's tropological science seriously as such. For La Mettrie, the mechanical body of machine-man concordantly functions as the tropic body par excellence: a style or mode of being fully realizable only through an investment in literary practice and, not coincidentally, literary pleasures. (9) Ultimately, I am proposing that, once we see machine-man as fundamentally and formally tropic in constitution, we must turn to the domain of literature to see how his substance comes into being--to realize, in effect, how he works. If we do this, we will discover the literary text as the site where Lamettrian machinic constraint dissolves reiteratively into a series of contingent pleasures, producing a subject that is at once textual, substantial, and autonomous. For La Mettrie, literature is both the space of an enactment of matter--since, as he explains, we first come to recognize the nature of our own physical substance through an encounter with tropes--and the arena where compulsion provokes dissolution, where the hard body of machine-man becomes the porous body of the voluptuous philosopher. In order to begin to understand all aspects of our experience as fully materializable, La Mettrie suggests, we must begin by thinking figurally.
1. ATOMISM AND FIGURAL BODIES: MACHINE-MAN WORKS THROUGH LUCRETIUS
La Mettrie's attention to the connections between matter and figure makes sense in the context of what seems to have been his consistent, sympathetic engagement with Epicurean materialism. Standing at the juncture of physiological determinism and a radical secularism, situated between trope and substance, the constrained body of machine-man resembles, in certain respects, the Epicurean atom. This does not mean that La Mettrie adheres to an Epicurean theory of the material soul (for he does not), but that the matter of which he sees machine-man (and, indeed, the universe) as being made partakes of the absolute uniformity, the perfect motility, and the figural "irreality" characteristic of atomic substance. "The human body is a machine which winds itself up," La Mettrie explains, "a living picture of perpetual motion." (10) Within this uniformly constituted "machine," there can be no fundamental variation in the basic stuff of which it is composed: "Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that there is in the whole universe only one diversely modified substance," he writes. (11) Insofar as this corporeal machine is emphatically not animated by anything outside of itself, it must be internally regulated by a principle intrinsic to it. It thus remains a "hard" body, retaining a certain material consistency even when dissected into smaller and smaller pieces. "Each tiny fibre or part of organised bodies moves according to its own principle whose action does not depend, like voluntary movements, on the nerves," La Mettrie contends. (12)
Similarly, the atom of Epicurus is mobile, tough, and very, very solid; by its very nature, it cannot be cut up or divided into pieces. As Lucretius explains, "[Atoms] are not compounds formed by the coalescence of their parts, but bodies of absolute and everlasting solidity. To these nature allows no loss or diminution, but guards them as seeds for things." (13) The resistant indivisibility of the atom--impenetrable by any other substance and wholly self-identical--grounds Epicureanism as a philosophy of supremely hard, albeit resolutely invisible, atomic bodies. The impermeability of the atom in turn works to generate a philosophy of rigorous exteriority, where the excavation of the "insides" of things yields not the metaphysical secret of their motility but the discovery of layers of sameness: for Epicurus as for Lucretius as for La Mettrie, matter resembles itself all the way down.
These hard bodies are the fundamental building blocks of all existence (the Lucretian semina rerum). They are indeed "naturally" constrained in their movements--in the sense that all atoms, left undisturbed, follow a downward course--but they are intrinsically and unpredictably mobile as well--thanks to the arbitrary yet regular intervention of the clinamen. The extreme constraint exemplified by the vertically falling atoms thereby throws the slightest deviation that they make from their prescribed paths into sharp relief, and ultimately gives rise to a material world defined not as the perfect instantiation of regularity, but as the perceptible embodiment of invisible and persistent processes of recombination and dissolution. As they bounce around the "void," atoms are constantly coming together in diverse and often "irregular" (or simply unsustainable) ways. While there are specific laws governing these combinations--Lucretius cautions that "it must not be supposed that atoms of every sort can be linked in every variety of combination" the universe tends toward a state of flux that renders every form but that of the atom itself impermanent. (14) Yet, rather than grounding a concept of matter as merely a chaotic and destructive force, the doctrine of constant atomic flux ultimately serves as the basis for a theory of perception (and ideation) as beholden to the endless motion of things in the world. Atomic movement makes thought possible since, in a completely material universe, the very capacity to form ideas can only be attributable to transformations in substance. The hard "seed" of the atom engenders an environment in which every body larger than the atom itself is only perceptible by virtue of the fact that it has always already begun to dissolve--to throw off, or "discharge," its own atoms. Lucretius explains:
But since I have taught of what manner are the beginnings of all things, and how, differing in their diverse forms, of their own...
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Empiricism, cognitive science, and the novel., September 22, 2007
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