Body, machine, and sound:  Genealogies and Contemporary Experimentations in the Work of Luca Pagan

The human body, since its earliest scientific explorations, has been opened, investigated, and observed as a complex mechanism. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the idea took root that the body could be conceived as a machine: a system regulated by energetic impulses and interconnected nerve centers. In the Traité de l’homme (1644), Descartes compared man to an animated statue, a “machine of earth” modeled by God, drawing a clear distinction between body and soul: the former as extended substance, the latter as thinking substance. In an era dominated by measure and regularity, the body progressively lost its spiritual dimension and came to be interpreted as a set of gears: the heart as a hydraulic pump, muscles as springs and levers, bones as metallic frames, the nervous system as electrical wiring, the skin as a metallic covering.

This conception found radical application with the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine and mechanical looms transformed labor, also redefining the meaning of the body. The proletariat—initially understood in ancient Rome as a class useful only for procreation—became the mass of workers subordinated to factory and capital. Engels described with clarity the condition of nineteenth-century English workers: deprived of rights, confined to living conditions akin to slavery. Marx elaborated the notion of alienation: the worker forced to sell himself and his humanity in order to survive, reduced to pure labor-power. Man, like the machine, became a commodity, subject to the laws of market and production.
The factory imposed itself as a place of discipline, a social panopticon in which bodies were surveilled, segmented, and made functional. Over time, however, the relationship of subordination shifted from the physical machine to technologies of surveillance and control, up to our own day, in which video surveillance, algorithmic systems, and digital devices exercise an invisible, constant, and capillary form of monitoring. As Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, modern power no longer requires visible force: it operates through subtle, internalized techniques that shape behavior and life itself.

This is where the concept of biopolitics is located, introduced by Foucault in the 1970s: power that regulates the biological life of the population. From the embryonic principle of Habeas Corpus in the Magna Carta to the excesses of Nazism—which translated biopolitics into absolute biopower, deciding who should live and who should die—the relationship between body and power has profoundly marked modernity.
In the 1980s Donna Haraway, with her Cyborg Manifesto, proposed a radical and alternative vision: the body no longer as a passive object of control, but as a hybrid entity, capable of allying with the machine to surpass the limits imposed by traditional biopolitics. The cyborg became a political and cultural symbol: a hybrid of flesh and technology, a liminal figure capable of resisting hierarchies and dualisms. It is no coincidence that the cyberpunk culture of William Gibson and the cinematic imagination of authors such as Cronenberg and Tsukamoto gave shape to universes in which bodies merged with machines, creating disturbing and grotesque landscapes but also new possibilities for autonomy.