A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON97practical parallelisms with the epistemic rules of formation that informed
natural history illustration and the cabinet of curiosities can be identi-
fied in the work of resemblance, the ordering principle that shaped knowl-
edge in the Renaissance. And importantly, the ontological fluidity that
likened naturalia and artificialia in the cabinet of curiosities also played
a substantial role in the parallelisms between animals and machines in
Descartes’s thought. In Tr e a t i s e o f M a n (1629) Descartes described his
encounter with a fountain in the royal gardens of Saint-Germain-
en-Laye, which featured, among other machines, an automaton of the
goddess Diana, bathing.^84 When a person entered the garden, a me-
chanical trigger would cause the statue to move, seemingly of its own
will. Descartes’s description of his experience suggests excitement and
awe for machines’ ability to perform movement while nevertheless
lacking rational souls.^85 The ability to perform movement and the inca-
pacity to speak, which, in his eyes, both automata and animals shared,
thus provided an empirical foundation for the discursive formation of
Cartesian thought. As evidenced in a passage from Discourse on the
Method: “If any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and
imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we
should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were
not real men.”^86
As animals and mechanical objects were made to conf late through
an internal and external f lattening that took place over the Re-
naissance and the classical age, an irreconcilable distance between
animals and man also began to widen. Descartes’s statements will
thereafter proceed to normalize the use of animals and animal matter
upon which a number of discursive and nondiscursive practices of the
modern age, such as medicine, fashion, and intensive agriculture, will
develop.
DECONSTRUCTING NATURE IN DION’S
CABINETS OF CURIOSITIESThis chapter has positioned the practices of natural history illustration
and collecting in cabinets of curiosities as intrinsically panoptic in scope.