The machine

The science of the living seems to be older than mechanics, because the organism appears to be natural and trans-historical, whereas the machine artificial and a recent achievement in human history. Yet this periodisation is misleading. Already in ancient Greece, the body was described through mechanical metaphors (Webster 2023). The modern term organism derives from the Greek term organon, meaning ‘tool’ of the body. These initial observations do not advocate for the primacy of a technological a priori over the experience of the world; rather, they acknowledge the historical a priori of social praxis over the abstractions of science. No scientific paradigm, especially a notion such as ‘intelligence’, should be received without assessing the mediation of cultural techniques and technical models in its genesis.

The machine has always been more than a material artefact: its technical materiality has generated philosophical paradigms, political mentalities and ideological worldviews, ultimately being rediscovered in its social genesis. Historians of science such as Franz Borkenau (1932) and Henryk Grossmann (1935) found a grounding for mechanical thinking in the economic sphere: they argued that the abstract diagrams of the division of labour and of the value form cast an epistemic influence on the abstract paradigms of modern sciences. The two authors, however, disagreed about the periodisation and context of this influence: Borkenau saw a direct influence of the abstraction of the division of labour on the abstractions of science, with Grossmann suggesting the key role of machines as mediators between labour and science. As feminist scholars (Merchant 1980; Federici 2004) have also highlighted, early modern Mechanical Philosophy and its mechanistic worldview developed in synchrony with a proto-mechanical discipline of the population, well before the machines of the industrial age established their own mechanical discipline. They argue that modern science (in particular, medicine) emerged to control women’s bodies and the social body in general, and not just to pursue a neutral scientific endeavour: in this way, at its inception, modern science mirrored and amplified an abstract mechanisation of the body and its social relations that was already in operation. The evidence of such mentality is today canonical. The vivid images of the treatise De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius (1543) exemplify the early analytical view of modern medicine, whilst the ‘iatromechanics’ of animal bodies, as found in De motu animalium by Giovanni Borelli (1680), can be seen as a visionary forerunner of the division of labour and the ‘biomechanics’ of workshops and manufactures. These analytical and mechanical models were visions of the social order, and got gradually absorbed by modern philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1651) and René Descartes (1664), although in different ways. Federici (2004: 140) noted that Descartes mechanised the body to subordinate it to individual will, whilst Hobbes mechanised it to subordinate it to state power. In both cases, however, the body was redefined in preparation for the capitalist work discipline.

The early modern view of the machine remains analytical rather than transformative. It defined the mechanism as a disposition of elements with a high degree of freedom: once activated by an external force, the mechanism does not change its overall configuration, and can go back to the initial state. The mechanism’s elements are: independent in their function, replaceable with equivalent elements, and organisable in a different configuration (Canguilhem 1952/2022). In modern mechanics, time does not affect the operations of the mechanism: it is indifferent to temporal becoming and perfectly reversible. In the nineteenth century, the science of thermodynamics intervened to restructure this atemporal dimension and inscribed energy decay and transformation in the mechanism (Rabinbach 1992). Indeed, the machines of the industrial age are productive: they consume energy and transform matter, they turn raw materials into commodities. Whereas the machine of early modernity (e.g. loom) is analytical and reversible, the machine of late modernity is transformative and irreversible (e.g. engine).

The social status of the machine was widely debated in the so-called Machinery Question in early nineteenth century England (Berg 1980). It should be noted that the political economy of the industrial age recognised the primacy of social abstraction over mechanical abstraction. Against the belief that industrial innovation proceeds through the top-down application of science, key economists of different political orientations such as Adam Smith (1776), Charles Babbage (1832) and Karl Marx (1867) all maintained that the design of machinery emerges from the analysis of the division of labour from below. According to them, the machine design comes to imitate the diagram of a previous division of labour that has been consolidated into a productive routine. This principle (that can be termed a labour theory of automation in opposition to the mainstream science theory of automation) remains crucial also to understand the rise of computation and AI: it is now recognised that when Babbage conceived the first prototype of the digital computer known as the Difference Engine, he adopted Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labour to implement the automation of mental labour (Braverman 1974; Daston 1994, 2018; Schaffer 1994; Pasquinelli 2023).

It was Marx (1867), in particular, who systematised a theory of the machine as a part of a larger social antagonism. In his view, technological development was driven not only by the division of labour but also by workers’ resistance (strikes and sabotage), and importantly by capitalists’ drives to reorganise labour and extract relative surplus-value more efficiently. In Marx, a labour theory was dialectically entangled with a standpoint theory and value theory of automation (Pasquinelli, forthcoming). Such a political reading of the industrial machine pushed against the depoliticising and reductionist attitude of the industrial science of the time, particularly thermodynamics. The scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1847) introduced the thermodynamic notion of Arbeitskraft to set on the same political continuum, without distinction, the energy performed by animals, workers and machines, suggesting a new metrics to measure and compare them (Rabinbach 1992; Pasquinelli 2022). Marx responded to such an equalisation with a political interpretation of Arbeitskraft that highlighted instead the labour–capital relation.