MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES

GRAND NARRATIVES/MODEST PROPOSALS

Robert Hooke's Prosthetic Gods

MARCH 5 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

Tasked with the fabrication of instruments in his capacity as curator of experiments for the Royal Society, Robert Hooke was insatiable in his quest for prosthetically-acquired superpowers able to extend the body's capacities beyond its organic bounds. Focusing on Hooke's dazzling compendium of observations of the microscopic world, the 1665 Micrographia, this talk addresses the way the instrumental enhancement of the senses, by blurring the threshold between person and thing, transformed Hooke's understanding of the human. My interest lies in the way technology reconfigures what might be called Hooke's anthropology: his understanding of humanity as a historical object. How do Hooke's devices — these prosthetic "helps" for the inadequate senses — contribute to the broader history of what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler terms "the invention of the human": both the technical invention of the human and the human inventing the technical? In what ways do things (tools, prosthetics) tinker with the distinction of human from animal? In Hooke's account, the grand master narrative of human progress and technological prowess is inextricably bound up with the eye's dependence upon instruments that rescale its capacities to register the claims of the microscopic world.