ABSTRACT
The more subtle ways in which the term 'machine' has come to be understood with reference to the body are more difficult to capture and less intuitively obvious and this chapter provides a framework for considering how they operate. It proposes that how people see and understand the world around them is calibrated to the human form, and medical and scientific inquiry has historically cultivated a mode of looking that is heavily dependent upon technology and seeks to neutralise people inherited mode of bodily perception. As the body is increasingly investigated and represented in a way that depicts it as a mechanistic system, and, furthermore, other, fabricated, technological systems are seen to operate in ways that are fundamentally the same, so popular understandings of people's own bodies bifurcate into a non-conscious, uninterrogated manner of making sense of bodies in everyday interactions and an intellectualised, common-sense understanding of bodies as simply mechanistic objects in the world.
