disembody (the theory)
The term "bachelor machine" emerged in 1952, when Michel Carrouges used the phrase to describe "the Duchamp effect" — the construction of readymade sculpture which "makes it absolutely unmistakable, even to us, that the world of things to which it belongs is that of the "part-object." It has not come to us from off the shelf, of supermarket, or department store, or bookshop. There is no question but that it has migrated off the body: so many detachable organs, so many areas of intensity, the effects of so many proper names ... Rodin, Maillol, Duchamp, Brancusi, and closer to us, Morris, Andre, Hesse" (Krauss 54).
Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (pictured right) best exemplifies Carrouges' concept of the "bachelor machine." The piece incorporates perpetual motion, complex interconnections, and self-replication. These elements recur in other "bachelor machines" and allow theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to appropriate these works of art to advance their own agendas. In their work Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari use the "bachelor machine" to represent "the total interconnectedness of the machines and the absolute deterritorialization of the world onto which they cling: an undifferentiated socius, the body without organs, the subject without a center" (Krauss 55). E. E. Cummings discusses a similar type of dislocation in his collection of essays entitled Six Nonlectures:
Even supposing that (from time to time) walls exist around you, those walls are no longer walls; they are merest pseudosolidities, perpetually penetrated by the perfectly predatory collective organs of sight and sound. Any apparent somewhere which you may inhabit is always at the mercy of a ruthless and omnivorous everywhere ... You haven't the least or feeblest conception of being here, and now, and alone, and yourself. Why (you ask) should anyone want to be here, when (by simply pressing a button) anyone can be in fifty places at once? How could anyone want to be now, when anyone can go whening all over creation at the twist of a knob? (Six 23)
This sense of displacement, of being adrift amidst a maelstrom of technological possibilities, echoes the anxieties and fears caused by the cyborg, in particular the cyborg's ability to cross and shift boundaries. "Haraway's cyborg especially addresses the boundary crossings that result from the implosion of 'nature' and 'culture' derived from a new system of domination that she calls 'technoscience' " (Melzer 23). By design, the cyborg is neither one thing nor another: neither human nor machine, neither natural nor artificial, neither autonomous nor autonomat. Indeed, the cyborg's very existence depends upon and
derives from three major boundary dissolutions that threaten dualisms (Western thought's primary system of social organizing): human versus animal, organisms versus machines, and physical versus non-physical (challenged, for example, by invisible technologies such as wireless technology). It is important to understand the cyborg figure metaphorically: its "technological" manifestation in science fiction is its origin, not its only form or signification. The cyborg symbolizes a state of consciousness and has manifested as a metaphor within science fiction literature. It is a deeply troubling figure, whose ironic nature grows from the contradictions of exploitation and agencey that the particular historical moment produces. The cyborg's origin is thus rooted both in real material and technological relations and in (science) fiction. The realms of imagination/representation and material relations are closely dependent and reproduce each other (Melzer 23-24).
Cyborgs, like the "bachelor machines" constructed during the early avant-garde movement, possess the capacity for perfect, precise, and predictable replication. They perform the task they have been programmed to perform, without question or hesitation. They are deliberate, methodical constructions designed to eliminate the need for the messier and more capricious forms of human production. The first "bachelor machines" were "not machines of speed and power, but rather machines of reproduction and simulation: writing-machines, imaging-machines, duplicating-machines" (3). These early artistic devices displaced their predecessors: "such alternative machines proliferate in postmodernist art; indeed, the displacement of the speed-and-energy model is one of the distinguishing marks of postmodernism" (McHale 3). Representations of the cyborg in literature, film, and popular culture also allude to this type of displacement, routinely portraying the cyborg as the ideal substitute for the less technologically advanced human model.
But the cyborg actually occupies a much more tenuous position. Without its human side, a cyborg becomes merely a robot. It loses the privileges that come with its dual nature and must rely entirely on an external force (be it human or electric) to function. It remains forever vulnerable to the whims of its human ancestors, especially "when a system reaches its limits, its own saturation point" and "a reversal begins to take place," when "something happens to the imagination" and the world becomes a place where "it is the real which has become our true utopia" ("Simulacra and SF" 309). I wanted to explore this fragile aspect of the cyborg's nature. I wanted to make my own version of a cyborg by combining the delicate rhythms of formal poetry with the precise mechanications of computer programming. In short, I wanted to create my own "bachelor machine" and use it to produce and replicate an infinite number of cybernetic poems.
In his article "Poetry as Prosthesis," Brian McHale argues that "all poetry, indeed all language use whatsoever, appears to be what Donna Haraway terms a cyborg phenomenon — a human being coupled to a machine — or what David Wills characterizes as a prothesis. Mechanical composition fucntions in this context as a scale model and a heuristic device, figuring in miniature the larger language-machine and rendering that language-machine visible" (2). I adapted McHale's theory to fit the goals of my project and built another language-based machine which could deconstruct the poetry-machine and use those disparate parts to create a hybrid — half poetry and half program, half meter and half algorithim, half embodied human and half disembodied code. My version of the "bachelor machine" has only one purpose: to create the "cyborg-sonnet." To achieve this goal, my machine must perform a rapid series of calculations which allow it to break even the most broken and experimental sonnet forms into smaller parts.
"To partialize the world in the realm of the natural body allows the real to be 'overcome by some other thing' " (Harter 35). In this way "unities that have been lost may be further fractured until the fractures begin to constitute new unitites" and "the playful images of descriptive resurrection are exchanged for a kind of "literal" vision. It is also [through this] process ... [that] bodies (as bodies per se) and objects (as objects) are radically, often irretrievably blurred" (Harter 35). This sort of transformative, irretrievable blur is exactly the effect I hope to create with my "cyborg-sonnet."