ABSTRACT
When Richard Waller described Hooke’s body, he used two images: it was a fast, lightweight machine and a misfunctioning organic system. The arguments were related by Hooke’s own account of his selftransforming bodily practices: ‘he first grew awry, by frequent practicing, turning with a Turn-Lath, and the like incurvating Exercises’.1 By disrupting the correct relationship between subject and object, user and tool, the lathe worked the worker’s body into both a machine and its product. This machining of the body into a new state, fusing the organic and the mechanical, was only the first instance of a lifetime of self-reflexive moves in natural philosophical practice. Whether living at low pressure in a vacuum chamber or dosing up on coffee and opium, Hooke’s own body was a major site of postRestoration experimentation.
