The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life

by David F. Channell and Channell

In 1738, Jacques Vaucanson unveiled his masterpiece before the court of Louis XV: a gilded copper duck that ate, drank, quacked, flapped its wings, splashed about, and, most astonishing of all, digested its food and excreted the remains. The imitation of life by technology fascinated Vaucanson's contemporaries. Today our technology is more powerful, but our fascination is tempered with apprehension. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195060407
• ISBN13: 9780195060409
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Philosophically important and packed with fascinating historical information

In its opening chapters this book examines in detail the historical trajectory of two competing world views in Western thought, which Dr. Channell identifies as the mechanistic and the vitalistic. It then describes a convergence of the two paradigms in the age of modern biological and computer science into what Channell terms the "bionic" worldview, wherein artificial and natural values have developed to the point where they can no longer be easily distinguished. Channell identifies the "vital machine" as the "root metaphor" for this emerging world view, and I'm not sure I fully understood this--the plant as a metaphor for a vitalistic universe is rich in implication yet intuitively simple, as is the mechanistic metaphor of the clock, but what exactly is a "vital machine"? I suppose the entire book is an exercise in answering precisely this question, and the point is that organisms and machines are not so different as we once imagined, but I still don't get how the vital machine, an abstract and synthetic concept, can function as a metaphor per se. Perhaps I just failed to fully understand the concept of a "root metaphor." In any event, despite the absence of a "catchy" bionic metaphor (along the lines of Donna Haraway's famous cyborg, say), this is a sober, lucid and important study and a good read.