Bachelor Machines: Part One

I feel it necessary to impart a little of my background research in order to fully explain my piece ‘Trophy Wife Trophy’.
The theme of ‘bachelor machines’ became increasingly important to me during my MA studies, and I embraced the ‘scenario’ as a useful narrative device within the jewellery installations which I was creating at the time. As part of the design process, I find it useful to have reasons for the form and aesthetics of a piece - it is the narratives I create and work with which stipulate these reasons (more on that some other time).

Below is an extract from the second chapter of my dissertation ‘Imaginary Machines - Functions, Narratives and Possibilities of the Mechanical’, 2004.

Literary and Bachelor Machines 

Although machines had already entered mainstream literature, it was not until surrealists took hold of the subject early on in the twentieth century that the perspective really changed. The machine became much more than just a straightforward metaphor; the surrealists’ fundamental pessimism(1) explains their attitude to a world in which machines increasingly claimed to provide the solution for a myriad of problems, despite the mechanised slaughter of the First World War. The artistic responses are therefore not whimsical but blackly humorous - “Breton and his friends always venerated (humour) as the chief god in their pantheon to which they made continual sacrifices”(2); surrealist artworks provide a strangely dark commentary of a subculture that despised and undermined popular culture, methodology and politics at any opportunity, and indeed as a reason for their existence. Many of the works to be discussed were approached in different ways, yet all comment on the role of the machine in society.

“These so-called ‘type-objects’ [hats, pipes, etc.] were held to be perfectly adapted to their function as the result of a long evolution, and while none is a machine in the usual sense, they embody in their forms an ideal state of efficiency and utility which could be said to render them machine-like. This principle of economy is reflected pictorially in compositions which have the clarity and precision of an engineer’s blueprint, where the neat orchestration of elements reads as an analogue for mechanical perfection.”(3)

Marcel Duchamp had a very complex relationship with ‘the machine’. For him, the machine was an intricate mechanism used “as an increasingly distinct and rigid counter against the vastness of unchannelled association.”(4) The complexity and obsession that Duchamp gave his machines increased over time; from ‘The Coffee Mill’ (1911) to the embodiment of an elaborate system in ‘The Bride Stripped bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’ (1915-23) (fig. 4) which transformed the machine into a construct, scenario, death-device, a set of variables always yielding the same result. This was the birth of the ‘Bachelor machine’. That Duchamp spent so long working on ‘The Large Glass’ - 1915 to 1923 is a testament to its complexity; there are many texts and drawings that relate to this work, the machine went through many stages of development in terms of both medium and mechanical expression, but comparable ideologies can be drawn from his previous and later work. The artwork constitutes of a double panel of glass mounted in a steel frame. Two dimensional in form, the lower half adheres to some degree of perspective, whilst the upper half does not; mixed media, including lead foil and varnish, have been used to create the images.

“Governed primarily by the mental laws of subjectivity, the bachelor machine merely adopts certain mechanical forms in order to stimulate certain mechanical effects.”(5) These mechanical forms consist of two equal units, the ‘Bride’ (female) and the ‘bachelor(s)’ (male); and whilst each unit can have a varying number of components, the mechanism, or function of the apparatus is governed largely by the interaction between the male and female parts (fig.5). This is most clearly visible in ‘The Large Glass’ where the ‘Bride’ is located in the top half of the assemblage and the ‘bachelor apparatus’ is in solitary confinement at the bottom(6). The machine operates somewhere between the realms of mechanics and sexual tension, its ultimate function being death; this will be shown in the following examples where the machine is often embodied as a complex execution device.

Fig. 5-  Key to the parts of 'The Bride Stripped Bare...'

Although similarities have been noted between several pieces of otherwise unrelated work, chronologically Duchamp’s  ‘bachelor machine’ is not the first, but it is the definitive one and creates its own narrative within its rigid frame, following its own logic. The subsequently identified literary machines are important in their own way - the way in which the machines drive the narrative is crucial for all of them in some way.

Literary machines pose different problems to those created by physical machines, because they rely purely on description (unless the author has illustrated the machine(7)). Language becomes the medium of communicating the idea, and is confined within its own set of criteria. Fiction is open to any structural gimmicks that the author desires, and perhaps surrealism more so. Many of the surrealists employed such uses of language and imagery, but the work can also be analysed in a straightforward manner that adheres to academic standards. “Plot structures represent an armoury of relational models by which what would otherwise be nothing but chains of mechanical causes and effects can be translated into moral terms.”(8) This is crucial for our understanding and the relevance of the issues being addressed within a story, as within fiction it is often wider cultural significance and its implications that are more important than the actual events being described, as this is the framework of our understanding. 

Franz Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1919) is structured in such a way that the narrative takes 
the reader through the process of his machine whilst at the same time questioning the role of capital punishment within society. Describing the demise of this complex device (figs. 6 &7) and its operator, the foreign explorer as a narrative device provides cues for questions and leads the narrative to its horrific conclusion. 

Michel Carrouges draws comparisons between the forms of the torture machine in ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘The Large Glass’: “The same over-all structure, including two superimposed elements, the same operating principle, the same modes of operation for equivalent parts, the same kind of hieroglyphic inscriptions at the top, same kind of final effect- dazzling of the splash (‘Large Glass’), ecstasy after vomiting (Penal Colony). In a word, under the manifest reality of the mechanical unit, the machine in the ‘Penal Colony’ is connected to the underlying reality of a sexual unit with two elements (female and male). Despite some utterly divergent outward aspects, the bachelor machine in the ‘Penal Colony’ and that of ‘The Bride’ are structurally extremely close. This is all the more symptomatic for the fact that Duchamp and Kafka knew absolutely nothing about each others' works.”(9) Similar, although perhaps more general comparisons can also be made with the execution device in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) which predates the other two examples by more than seventy years.

The processes of the machine in ‘In the Penal Colony’ are extensively described, unlike those involved in Duchamp’s bachelor machine. Kafka’s device intricately tattoos the sentence of the condemned man onto his rotating body, the effluvia is washed away by jets of water, in a process that lasts for twelve hours (and includes a meal) before the expired convict is tossed into his grave. The executioner, doubting the validity of his convictions against the visitor’s questions, takes the place of the condemned man in the machine, committing suicide and inadvertently destroying the machine. The painstaking detail with which the executions are staged is the ‘pataphysical element within the story, for although execution machines are used within society, there is no logical reason for the process to be performed in this way - indicative of Kafka’s trademark irrational bureaucracy.

‘Pataphysical machines can be said to be concerned with the exceptions of function, since they all have very specific functions associated to them, very few of which have credible or ‘useful’ applications in the real world: “’Pataphysics relates each thing and each event not to any generality (a mere plastering over of exceptions) but to the singularity that makes it an exception. Thus the science of ‘Pataphysics attempts no cures, envisages no progress, distrusts all claims of ‘improvement’ in the state of things, and remains innocent of any message.”(10) Thus each bachelor machine exists in its own isolated pocket of reality, dependent on its own specific conditions for the functions it performs, and the manner in which it performs them. “The conscious mind searches for practical functions in objects, the subconscious or superconscious mind is concerned with objects for a wider significance or meaning.”(11) These surrealist examples, which are not concerned with practical functions, implicate such wider significances by way of their impractical functions.

There is very often a person involved within the processes of the ‘bachelor machine’ other than the operator. This can be confusing, especially as the sexual elements of the machine are gendered; does the subject (very often male) become the ‘bachelor’ by default? There does not seem to be a definitive answer - all roles are interchangeable and it is equally as probable that the bride may be a female character within the narrative that has no physical interaction with the machine, yet plays a significant enough role in the sequence of events that lead to the use of the machine that she can said to be the ‘Bride’, for example Ellen in ‘The Supermale’.

Alfred Jarry (the inventor of ‘Pataphysics) wrote ‘Le Surmâle’ in 1902. The story, set in 1920, culminates in the death, by machine, of the main character, the ‘supermale’. After excessive sexual exploits with Ellen Elson, to break all historical records for virility, Ellen’s father declares that the couple must marry - but there is a problem: “Since this man had become a mechanism, the equilibrium of the world required that another mechanism should manufacture - a soul.”(12) He has, within the realms of the story been pronounced a machine himself; therefore a machine is devised to give him a soul.
“And thus it was that Arthur Gough, the engineer who could build anything, was called upon to create the most unusual machine of modern times, a machine not designed to produce a physical effect, but to act on forces hitherto considered out of reach: the machine-to-inspire-love”(13) (fig. 8).  

It is clear from Jarry’s work that he renounced the order of nineteenth century science, not so much a parody as a differing concept of reality (this much can be seen from his lifestyle) that incorporated such ideas as ‘perpetual motion food’. The understanding of the ‘soul’ is antithesis to machines - even within modern literature on the subject, the crux of the narrative is very often that whilst a machine may be capable of artificial intelligence, it can never have a soul, the one essential element that will make it more ‘human’. Therefore a machine designed to manufacture a soul is the antithesis of mechanical (or electrical) function - if humans cannot make souls, how can machines be conceived to do so. And as one might imagine, it has seemingly no other effect within the story than to kill the supermale in a spectacular fashion; the machine, although derived from an electric chair, is little more than a plot device, a high voltage climax for a strange tale. 

The relevance of bachelor machines as social metaphors goes deeper than would necessarily have been imagined, for such a specific “scenario”. The similarities within the texts are too many to be coincidental.  And whilst bachelor machines have been a mainstay within surrealism, it is evident that this construct is a concept that has universal echoes backwards and forwards within culture and society.  “Whether or not the machines in question happen to be materially feasible makes no difference to their essential nature. They are first and foremost mental machines, the imaginary working of which suffices to produce a real movement of the mind. They belong therefore to a trend that is diametrically opposed to that of anticipation.”(14)

There is no need for these machines within reality; they are, in some respects functionless, often the narrative that they communicate becomes their only function, and yet they all relate the moral attitude that machines are instruments of death - the male subject will remain a bachelor for ever. The construct of characters/events/devices used in these literary machines underlines some basic human paranoias - (pro)creation and power. The exploration of the narrative world of machines through the literary medium underlines an important stage in cultural consciousness concerning machines - a reflection on the levels of experience machines can impart, from frivolous technology to that which can create a soul, and all the while never forgetting that the knowledge we hold can destroy us.

©Anastasia Young 2004

NOTES

¹ Nadeau, Maurice - The History of Surrealism (Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1973.), p. 242.
² op.cit., p. 242.
³ Lomas, David - The Haunted Self : Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000.), p. 28.
⁴ D’Harnoncourt,  A & McShine, K - Marcel Duchamp (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973.), p. 70.
⁵ Carrouges, Michel - What is a Bachelor machine? Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 21.
⁶ op.cit., p. 22.
⁷ Other illustrations can only be an interpretation of what the author intended, but several are included here in order to give the reader a clearer idea of some of the forms being discussed.
⁸ White, Hayden ‘The Narrativization of Real Events’ from Mitchell, W.J.T. (Ed.) - On Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981.), p. 253.
⁹ Carrouges, Michel - What is a Bachelor machine? Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 26.
¹⁰ from Roger Shattuck, Superliminal Note, Evergreen Review, May - June 1960, volume 4 number 13,  Lavelle, B. (20/4/2002), ‘Pataphysics/Imaginary Solutions, (WWW)http:i-ii.org/pataphysics/ (11/3/03).
¹¹  Jones, Tim - Anti-logic and the Arts, 1896 - 1971 (Royal College of Art Masters Thesis, 1972), p.119.
¹² Jarry, Alfred - The Supermale (originally published as ‘Le Surmâle’, 1902), (Exact Change, Cambridge, MA, 1999.), p. 136.
¹³ op. cit., p. 135.
¹⁴ Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 44.


IMAGE CREDITS

Fig. 4 - ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’ (1915 -23), Marcel Duchamp.

D’Harnoncourt, A & McShine, K - Marcel Duchamp (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973.), p. 65.

Fig. 5 - Diagram based on Duchamp’s etching ‘The Large Glass Completed’.

D’Harnoncourt, A & McShine, K - Marcel Duchamp (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973.), p. 64.

Fig. 6 - The Execution Device from ‘In the Penal Colony’.

Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 25.

Fig. 7 - The Execution Device from ‘In the Penal Colony’.

Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 233.

Fig. 8 - The ‘Machine-to-inspire-love’ from ‘The Supermale’.

Le Bot, Marc - Le Macchine celibi:The Bachelor Machines, (Venezia Alfieri, 1975.), p. 232.