Cyperpunk, Politics, and other Undergrounds

excerpt from High Techné – Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman, by R.L. Rutsky

The term “bachelor machine” ( machine célibataire ) was coined by Marcel Duchamp in reference to his Great Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even. The Term was brought into broad usage by Michel Carrouges, who applied it not only to Duchamp, but to images from the work of Kafka, Jarry, Roussel, and others (Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires, Paris: Arcanes, 1954). The term has since been used by Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, de Certeau, and Arturo Schwarz, among others.

In all usages, however, what is figured in the bachelor machine is an autonomous technology that no longer answers to rational, instrumental standards. As Carrouges notes, “the bachelor machine has no reason for existing in itself, as a machine governed by the physical laws of mechanics or by the social laws of utility.” Thus, it appears to have its own secret laws, its own life, that can only be discovered or created by magical or alchemical means. Schwarz, in fact, suggests that “the bachelor machine’s birthplace” is “the bachelor-alchemist’s studio, or laboratory.” The alchemist’s solitary or bachelor status is narcissistic; his dreams of discovering the secrets of life – of an elixir of life or the philosopher’s stone – are merely metaphors for his own transmutation, his own ability to achieve an aurea apprehensio (literally, “golden knowledge”: i.e., “perfect knowledge”) or goodhood. As Schwarz points out,

“The material liberation of the philosopher’s gold from the common metal is above all a metaphor for psychological processes concerning the liberation of man from the contradictions in life. These contradictions stem from a dualistic conception to the universe which postulates the conflicting polarity of all natural phenomena… [This] implies, amongst other things, the abolition of the man-woman conflictual duality in the integrated personality of the reconstituted Gnostic Anthropos.”

It should be clear, however, that in the bachelor machine this “integration” or elision of difference is never achieved. In The Great Glass, the bride remains in a separate zone from the bachelors, stripped of any spirit of totality or life, a mere mechanical “skeleton”, as are the bachelors themselves. The base metal of the bachelor machine never attains the sublimated, golden form of the aura. The bachelor machine, in other words, is never a complete representation of life, but merely a technological life, an automaton whose life is the projection of its creator’s, the bachelor machinist’s, desire. The pleasure involved in this machine can therefore, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, “rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic.”

The “autonomy” of the bachelor machine, its life, is always mechanical rather than fully living. the bachelor machine always remains a supplement (remembering the sense in which Rousseau uses the term), a simulacrum that “merely” re-presents the full presence of life, a kind of technological “phantom” or fantasy. In this sense, the bachelor machine describes that simulacral technology of memory and representation that Freud referred to as the psychical mechanism or apparatus. As Carrouges notes, “Governed by the mental laws of subjectivity, the bachelor machine merely adopts certain mechanical forms in order to simulate certain mechanical effects”; it is, in other words, “the semblance of machinery, of the kind seen in dreams, at the theatre, at the cinema.”

The connection between the cinematic and the bachelor machine is, then, a matter of projection. What both presume to project – what they, like Bazin, dream of – is a magical, fully present, and completed representation. It is to this end that they frequently project an image of a mechanized woman or bride who, in Duchamp’s words, will serve as the “motor” of desire for the bachelor machine. Duchamp also makes clear that the status of this bride – and her pleasure – is imaginary: “the sexual life… of the desiring bride is purely imaginary.” This imaginary projection of a bride whose marriage is never to be consummated is precisely what allows the bachelor machine to function as a closed, indeed masturbatory, system.