Chapter 8: Bodies on the Slab: Spaces in Between Machines

For the man stranded on the island with no hope of rescue, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719/2011) engages the machines available to him on a remote island; tables, weapons, and any instrument related to his survival. Indeed, this European man, steeped in the Truths of Enlightenment science, has only a parrot, goats, and other nonhuman animals to stand by his side for nearly two decades. A masterpiece of 18th-century literature that spans the spectrum from literary genius to a justification for racialization and colonization, Robinson Crusoe dares to think of the stranded European body amidst the “primitive” nature of the island, with only a “knife, a tobacco-pipe, and a little tobacco in a box” (Defoe, 1719/2011, p. 53). Indeed, even amongst a crushing reality of total isolation, his naked body must still be covered, reproducing the quintessential trope of Western European notions of civility: “I have not cloaths [sic] to cover me” despite being “a solitaire, one banished from humane society” (p. 72). Clothes, the sign of bourgeois rationality, also mark the limits between human and nonhuman, a clear demarcation found at the heart of this stowaway’s tale. Much like the distinctions this book has explored between the boundaries of machine and organic body, these borders construct a particular understanding of the world around us. This distinction not only portrays, and ultimately reproduces, the binary between “human” and “animal,” but also the power of social conventions steeped within a modernist and Enlightenment construction of the world.