Sex Machines and Statistical Persons

Abstract

In this article I attempt to trace the genealogy of the body-technology relation in the 20th century as it emerges at two specific historical junctures: (i) The Taylorist/Fordist ergonomic society of the early part of the 20th century. To this end it outlines a double trajectory: firstly the shift in the epistemology of monstrosity from pre-enlightenment singularity to enlightenment replicability, and thus the possibility of containment and ‘technological monstrosity’ in the modern era; and secondly the emergence of Fordism as a social and scientific system which is premised on the body-as-machine but is underpinned by the fascination presented by the possibility of ‘machine pathology’, (ii) The emergence of the ‘statistical person’ in the late 20th century; a species of more or less psychopathological identity related to the predominance of information processing in contemporary urban epistemology. I argue that the late 20th century relation to technology, the cybernetic or statistical, is the inverse of that of the Fordist worker at the assembly line in the early part of the century, the era of the ‘sexualized machine’.