In “Demiurgic Machines: The Mechanics of the Dada Text,” I explore the genealogy of modernity as a set of aesthetic and cultural practices heavily invested in the metaphorical system of the machine. Beginning with an overview of machine art during the early part of the 20th century, I proceed to analyze an intercontinental Dada movement that emerged in the period 1912–1922. Linking this movement to the writers and texts that inspired it (Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry, but also Max Stirner, Freud, and the Marquis de Sade), I consider how machines provide a working model for theories of production, suggesting a “demiurgic” reorganization of human thought and agency at the level of representation. What is unique about Dada is a strange amalgamation of word and image that suggests a radically new kind of representation: one that replaces the discourse of authenticity with a process of inscription that continuously reinvents the parameters for science, language and the work of art. The new subjectivity, I conclude, is characterized by hybridity, automatism, multiplicity and a troubling ambiguity between the self and its technological other.

One example of this shift in artistic production can be found in the works of Raymond Roussel, a (reluctant) figure of the avant-garde and a key figure for New York Dada. In his poem Mon Ame, Roussel describes his soul as une étrange usine, identifying an inexhaustible potential for literary production in the alienated form of Man's technological other. Roussel's invention of le procédé anticipates Surrealist techniques of écriture automatique, as well as Freud's schematic for the ego as the enclosing 'surface' of an autonomous agency in the form of the unconscious. It is best known, however, as the primary inspiration behind Duchamp's machine art. It was through Roussel (and Jean-Pierre Brisset before him) that Duchamp arrived at his formula for the Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), a production of images based entirely on a three-way correspondence between optics, kinetics, and the mechanics of language. By 'reading' the Glass through Duchamp's notes (collected and published as La Boîte verte), we find a continuation of the artist's earlier experiments with movement on the pictorial surface, this time as a series of phantasmic events activated by the involuntary play of signifiers on the surface of language. Throughout Demiurgic Machines, I read the Dada text as an attempt to situate artistic production on this surface, outside the boundaries of human subjectivity, yet closely related to the interplay of words and images that constitutes the thinking subject.

Other topics include: Brisset and les fous littéraires; Breton and automatism; intersubjective relations in Surrealism and de Sade; Dadaism and the technology of cinema; scientific discourse in Duchamp’s Boîte verte; Jarry’s cyborg, and other dreams of a mechanomorphic body; and Deleuze's conception of an impersonal and non-individual transcendental field, exemplified by the 'agency' of machines.

CHAPTER 1: THE DEMIURGE OF NEW YORK DADA

CHAPTER 2: BLUEPRINTS FOR A DADA MACHINE

CHAPTER 3: DUCHAMP'S MECHANICS OF SURFACE

CHAPTER 4: HOW THE MACHINE SPEAKS (!)

CHAPTER 5: MACHINIC VISION AND THE CINEMATIC EYE

In his 1946 interview with James Johnson Sweeney, Duchamp names four writers for his ideal library: Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Lautréamont and Mallarmé. He admired Roussel and Brisset in particular, he says, for their 'delirium of the imagination.' Yet it is a delirium, as Duchamp himself acknowledges, that has much to do with the mechanics—or as Breton says, the mathematics—of language, and derives from the various deformations to which language is susceptible. In this essay, I concentrate on a certain genealogy of the Dada text that begins with Brisset's treatises on the origins of 'La Parole' and finds its ideal expression in the imaginary worlds of Roussel, before emerging at last in a machine art that reveals a profound involvement with literatrure and a poetic dislocation of the image.

Dada has been described as an attack on the bourgeois institution of art (Peter Burger, Walter Benjamin), particularly as this term designates longstanding artistic conventions based on the contemplation of a unique and authentic work of art. Does Dada machine art from the period 1912-1922 signify the end of an era, or simply the end of the aura? What are the implications of an art that deliberately accelerates what is already, in Benjamin's conception, the inevitable 'decay of the aura,' adopting various techniques of mechanical reproduction, as well as an aesthetic inspired by electric circuitry, blueprints, factories and machines? Some scholars describe Dada's romance with the machine as a loss of faith in the orphic soul (Pierre Arnauld); yet Dadaists themselves call it a purgative (Duchamp), or describe it in Nietzschean terms as the eternal present of a technological era. 'Monsieurs les artistes,' writes Picabia, 'foutez-nous donc la paix, vous êtes une bande de curés qui veulent encore nous faire coire à Dieu.' Is Dada machine art a purgative or a purgatory for the modern subject, and what does this tell us about the new terms of engagement for the human and its technological other?

In the works of Descartes, automata are portrayed as incomplete or distorted reflections of man: beings which may imitate human form and function to an uncanny degree, but operate purely on the principle of physical laws. As such, the machine serves a double purpose: first, by comparison, to provide a rationalistic model for the human body, one that is marked by the art and insight of a human creator; second, in contradistinction to arguments advanced for the metaphysical nature of the rational subject, to demonstrate an agency that is characteristically physical, no matter how convincingly it may imitate the behavior of an intelligent being acting freely under the guidance of reason. In key passages (Discourse on the Method, Treatise on Man, The Passions of the Soul, and Description of the Human Body), Descartes visualizes the driving forces of human behavior through the lens of early modern technology. Proceeding to map one onto the other, the philosopher brings man and machine into close proximity, flirting with the notion that there is no difference, before dismissing the materialist hypothesis in favor of principles that help to maintain a clearer distinction. In other words, it is only by traversing the ethos of the machine that Descartes is able to lay the groundwork for the modern subject. This has lasting consequences for conceptions of technology, not only as counterpart to the modern subject, but as a destabilizing force at the very heart of human subjectivity. Using specific references to these passages by Descartes, and to the technologies that inspired them, I will explore the intersection of man and machine in the 17th century. What are the consequences of the Cartesian metaphor? What does it tell us about subjectivity and its relationship to both vitalist and mechanistic conceptions of the natural world? What does technology have to do with Classical Age conceptions of the moral law? What advances in early modern technology prompted these conceptions, and how did they affect the philosophical inquiries of Descartes and his contemporaries?

I am currently editing a collection of essays on the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and science. Expected date of publication is spring 2008.