Fictions
of the Machine
10th
Annual French Graduate Student Conference
Maison
française, Columbia University
March
24, 2001
Abstracts
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“A faire la guele d'un four sont trois pierres
necessaires”: The form of diegetic navigation and meta-narrative commentary
in Francois Rabelais' Quart Livre |
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La Jetée: Cinema as Time Machine |
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The
Stop/Start Fantasy in Early 20th C. Literature and Film |
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"Die Maschine" de
Georges Perec |
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Animated Statues: Going Beyond Mind and Machine in
the Writing of Buffon and Condillac |
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The Kaleidoscope |
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Man/Ray: The Camera as (Bachelor) Machine in
Surrealist Photography |
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William Morris' Mechanical Aesthetic: Wallpaper and the Machine |
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Phonographe,
dictaphone, graphophone : de la conservation idéale jusqu’à la perte de
l’actuel |
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The Phonograph's Horned Mouth: Voice in Tomorrow's
Eve |
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Une Conquête
méthodique: Valéry's
Search for a Method |
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Les classiques ont-ils cru à leurs machines? La
force du surnaturel dans La Devineresse ou Les Faux
enchantements de Thomas Corneille et Donneau de Visé (1679) |
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Moliere, the machine-comic, and the text-trap
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Zola's Superstore in The Ladies' Paradise:
Dynamics and Paradoxes of the Machine |
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Cinema and the Fall |
The
Stop/Start Fantasy in Early 20th C. Literature and Film
Stephen Donovan
Gothenburg
University, Sweden
This paper will make an
examination of the fantasy of stopping and starting time as represented in some
early-twentieth-century works of literature and films. The first half of the
paper will seek to define the motif as being structurally different from that
of the time travel fantasy in general, a genre which has of course long
commanded the attention of scholars, by drawing on an array of approaches to
the subject—from Henri Bergson’s Matière
et mémoire (1908) to E. P. Thompson’s celebrated account of work, time, and
wage-capitalism. It will be argued that, notwithstanding this formal
distinctness, the various features of the stop/start fantasy share a common
origin with time-travel fantasies in the nexus of modernization, mechanization,
and scientific-theoretical innovation which was rapidly gaining importance at
the start of the twentieth century. The stop/start fantasy’s constituent
element of arresting or reversing time (as opposed to simply moving within time) should thus be regarded as
the expression of the fundamentally modern experience of temporal manipulation
in mechanized travel, at automated work, and in the urban environment at large.
Stop/start fantasies also exercised a particular fascination for creative
artists in the early twentieth century and the second half of the paper will
offer a detailed analysis of some selected literary and filmic examples. Where
later instances such as Nicholson Baker’s The
Fermata (1994) and Richard Lester’s Superman
II (1980) appear to invoke the device solely in order to provide erotic
titillation or heighten plot suspense, it will be shown that the issue of work figures
forms a key underpinning of early treatments of the fantasy such as Arthur
Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913)
and René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort
(1924).
Moliere,
the machine-comic, and the text-trap
Zachary Polsky
UC
Davis
"It
is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh," says Henri Bergson in
his essay Laughter, "an
automatism...akin to mere absentmindedness." Comedy is in fact born of the
co-operation between this purposeful absentmindedness on the part of the
robot-like actor and the almost-unintentional absentmindedness of the audience
member, who has come only to be entertained. Absentmindedness and automatism
are therefore synonyms, in the Bergsonian sense, for susceptibility. The acted
susceptibility of the character, when viewed through the comic-receptive,
comic-susceptible eye of the beholder, results in a comedy so automatic unto
itself that Bernadette Rey-Flaud calls it "la machine a rire" (joke
machine).
Rey-Flaud identifies this
machine-comic as being the essential mechanism behind the medieval farce as
well as Moliere's seventeenth-century comedies. The seventeenth century,
however, loved a particular kind of comic machine; a machine just as apt to
break down as to carry out its intended function. This breakdown on the part of
the machine, rather than breaking down audience susceptibility with it,
actually invited audiences to look inside of the machine with those assigned to
repair it, and see just how it works. The more difficult it was to repair, the
more entangled the onlooker became in its actual machinery. Hence the machine
is a metaphor for the theater in its entirety: the stage as well as the text
which is recited upon that stage. The more evident the machine-comic of a text
is, the more deeply embroiled in that text the audience will become, to the
point where the machine as a corporeal entity can be removed from the equation
without spoiling the effect that it generates. As a devout subscriber to this
practice of textual mechanization, Moliere ensnared audiences in his verbal
world without the use of any explicit physical machines whatsoever. His works,
like those of his fable-writing friend La Fontaine, were an automatic trap
(piege) for readers and audience members alike.
It is this trap which, although born of textual rather than physical machinery, makes Molire perhaps the greatest theatrical mechanic of the seventeenth century. His narrative trap, unlike the fragile, absent-minded automaton, is of a ruthless, almost sinister precision. In its analysis of _L'impromtu de Versailles_, using Bergson, Freud, Rey-Flaud, and Louis Marin's _Le recit est un piege_ (The Narrative is a Trap) as guides, this paper will illustrate how the machine that takes the place of man is comic, whereas the man who takes the place of machine, as Moliere textually and personally demonstrates, is terrifying.
“A faire la guele d'un four sont trois pierres necessaires”: The form of diegetic navigation and meta-narrative commentary in Francois Rabelais' Quart Livre
Shannon Clute
Cornell University
Francois Rabelais’ 1552 “Quart Livre” appears to present a
journey which goes nowhere, [1] for the fleet never reaches “l’oracle de la
dive Bouteille Bacbuc.” Often, it is read according to the rather too obvious
model supplied by the diegesis, as a series of encounters that are “isolés”
and create a fragmented narrative. While any linear diegetic trajectory does
indeed elude the reader, I will argue each and every episode is united in the
use of a specific narrative mechanism.
The “Prologue de l’Auteur”
calls attention to the process of triangulation, which drives the diegesis.”
King Jupiter sits in his heavenly court debating how to settle a dispute
between two famous scholars, Pierre Galland and Pierre Ramus. Priapus says to Jupiter, “Par mon advis vous
les convertissez en pierre,” with the likeness of the medieval jurist Pierre de
Cugniere above and between them so as to create a “figure trigone
equilaterale.” This figure, says Priapus, should be placed “on grand temple de
Paris…en office de extaindre…le feu de faction, simulte, sectes, couilloniques,
et partialité entre les ocieux escholiers.” This episode reveals a complex
narrative mechanism that will repeat throughout the Quart Livre. Galland was a
prominent Aristotelian and “professeur d’eloquence” at the College Royal. Ramus was self-educated, vehemently
anti-Aristotelian, and appalled by Parisian scholastic teaching. Thus, two different cognitive paradigms
(read “critical frameworks”) are revealed to be in opposition; a punning
judgement establishes a resolution, or a mean which is equidistant from the
original “terms” of the debate and often incorporates elements of both; the
process is emblematized in the form of an equilateral triangle.
The creation of such a punning resolution requires tremendous reflection upon the process by which the narrative is progressing. It is not surprising that each reference to the equilateral triangle in the Quart Livre corresponds to a moment when the text achieves a higher plane of self-reflexivity. In the Prologue the triangle is the emblem of the diegetic mechanism of triangulation that allows the text to demonstrate how cognitive paradigms can be juxtaposed and judged by an “author” whose linguistic choices determine the fate of the “personnages.” In the central chapters of the book the inscription of a “figure triangulaire aequilaterale” upon the body of the Physetere (whale) that is presented as an allegory for typology allows the “author” to condemn certain exegetical practices. By later chapters, the triangle becomes an emblem of meta-narrative critical discourse.
If we read the Quart Livre not as a series of isolated episodes, but rather in accordance with the profound occidental topos of sea voyage as quest for knowledge, we understand the need for triangulation as a “navigational” tool. Near the conclusion of the narrative, Epistemon (Le Savant) sits on deck with his Astrolabe in hand: This machine allowed the calculation of Latitude based on the triangulation of the ship’s position in relation to the horizon and the altitude of a heavenly body. Thus, at the diegetic level, triangulation allows the fleet to position itself at sea. If this journey is indeed a metaphoric quest for knowledge, triangulation-like dialectical criticism-requires that one always reckon one’s own position into the analysis of other exegetical practices.
[1] Indeed, the
first island the fleet encounters is Medamothi, or “nulle part.”
Les
classiques ont-ils cru à leurs machines? La force du surnaturel dans La Devineresse ou Les Faux enchantements
de Thomas Corneille et Donneau de Visé (1679)
Martial Poirson
Johns
Hopkins Univrersity et Ecole Normale Supérieure
Les années 1679-1680 marquent,
de l’avis général, la fin de trente ans d’âge d’or pour le théâtre à machines
(trappes, poulies, effets spéciaux et artifices en tous genres, destinés à
simuler l’intervention du merveilleux). Et pourtant, c’est l’époque d’un des
plus grands succès de scène et de librairie pour La Devineresse ou Les Faux enchantements, de Thomas Corneille
(frère du célèbre dramaturge Pierre Corneille, et non moins célèbre en son
temps) et Donneau de Visé. C’est que cette pièce à machine repose en fait sur
le travestissement burlesque des machines, si bien que cette forme de théâtre
devient alors une dénonciation antithéâtrale des illusions de la scène, fort au
goût d’un public avide de renouvellement des formes dramatiques. Elle est à la
fois la synthèse de l’esprit libertin et de son doute sceptique du XVIIème
siècle (proche en cela des pièces de Cyrano de Bergerac, comme aussi de sa
réflexion romanesque sur les machines), et l’annonciatrice de la critique
philosophique des auteurs du XVIIIème siècle (article « Machines de
Théatre » de l’Encyclopédie).
Moment de basculement, de
transition pour le théâtre des machines, cette pièce utilise habilement
l’actualité politique et sociale (L’affaire des Poisons notamment) pour mettre
en scène un imaginaire de l’enquête et interroger les notions philosophiques de
preuve, de hasard, de monde possible, ou encore de Providence. Sans démentir le
goût classique paradoxal (au sens étymologique) pour le spectaculaire, et en
mobilisant tous les ingrédients d’un succès de scène, la pièce introduit le
soupçon sur l’attirail mythologique et tente une rationalisation de
l’utilisation des machines. Ce faisant, elle met en évidence le jeu classique
sur l’illusion référentielle consentie (le spectateur délègue
intentionnellemment et consciemment son pouvoir de jugement et fait
« comme si » il croyait à la scène qui se déroule devant lui) par un
public avide de sensationnel et satisfait en même temps les exigences d’un
pouvoir reposant sur une économie politique du spectacle (il s’agit de sublimer
les interrogations sur les moeurs et les pratiques du temps en les rendant
divertissantes).
A travers une étude à la
fois du contexte de la pièce (la « chasse aux sorcières » et le
scandale politique des Poisons), de la curieuse collaboration entre un poète et
un journaliste à succès, de la structure dramatique de la pièce déchirant le
voile d’ignorance sur la machination de la devineresse, et même de l’étonnante
iconographie de la pièce (les planches de L’Almanach
de la Devineresse), nous nous interrogerons sur le statut de l’artifice
dans la comédie classique finissante, tantôt contesté et critiqué, tantôt
justifié et légitimé, à travers le thème des machines théâtrales. Si bien qu’on
peut dire, en paraphrasant Destouches « Chassez le surnaturel, il revient
au galop ».
William Morris' Mechanical Aesthetic: Wallpaper and
the Machine
Stacey Loughrey
U. of Southern California
There is an inherent contradiction in the aesthetic/labor philosophy of William Morris and his art production. Morris was an ardent promoter of the revolutionary artistic and social potential of original works of art made by a creatively empowered craftsman. However, the actual circumstances of their production and the aesthetic nature of Morris' designs reveal that repetition, copying, and mechanical processes were intrinsic to his work, particularly his pattern designs for tiles, wallpaper and textiles. The majority of Morris’ wallpaper designs are characterized by abstracted natural forms organized upon a rigidly symmetrical, repeating design. An aesthetic that is as mechanical as it is natural, Morris’ work bears the influence of contemporary design reformers, art critics and political activists as well as the natural and rapidly industrializing world around him. While Morris’ promotion of handcrafted art, utilitarian design, and just working conditions has been the subject of extensive scholarly research, what has been less acknowledged are the ways in which his art and its production are indebted to mechanized forms, repetition, and abstraction. This paper will examine Morris' aesthetic philosophy as it relates to handicraft and the machine and interrogate how this philosophy was applied to Morris' own production of wallpaper designs.
While Morris’ papers were
printed by hand, their aesthetic is resolutely mechanical. This mechanical aesthetic seems, to some, to
directly contradict his labor/artistic philosophy. By reading Morris' writings as proposals for a future socialist
society, removed from the industrial-capitalist climate of Victorian England,
the production of his wallpapers and other objects can be more clearly
understood as products steeped in the actual social and technological
conditions of their time. Modern scholars have, perhaps, been too willing to
take Morris' rhetoric as the fact of his production. However, by looking at his pattern designs and the actual
circumstances of their manufacture, we can see that William Morris was not the
backward, medieval romanticist, he has sometimes been made out to be, but rather a forward-thinking Marxist
designer who both worked within and critiqued the art and objects of his time.
Man/Ray:
The Camera as (Bachelor) Machine in Surrealist Photography
Sophie Levy
University of Toronto
We rarely think of the camera
as a machine. In feminist film theory, it is perceived as the displaced gaze,
an ocular phallus penetrating both subject and audience. As Linda Williams
demonstrates in Figures of Desire, this manifestation of the gaze begins
in the avant-garde film of the 1930s – in Surrealist as much as in
Expressionist cinema. In this paper, however, I propose a different analysis of
the photographic and cinematic cameras used by the Surrealists – an analysis
that may serve to identify traits that mark a work as Surrealist. I want to
analyze the camera as machine; to examine its machinic effect on the female
body, and to interrogate the Surrealist fascination with the lens alongside
their fascination with those other machines that depict/reflect the human form:
automata.
The lens of the camera – and
the print of the photograph – are both manifestations of Breton’s first
Surrealist vision, of a man bisected by a plane of window glass. The intense
experimentation of Brassaï, Masson and Man Ray with techniques such as
solarization that both sharpen relief and merge figures with their shadows,
mark the desire to cross and blur boundaries evidenced by so much Surrealist
art. Binaries such as dream/waking, male/female, human/object are all
manipulated in black-and-white in order to create gray areas. The
camera-as-machine is able to confuse these categories through its technologies
in a way that the human eye is not. Thus, the camera is a fetishistic
substitution for the genital eye apparent in texts such as L’Histoire de l’Oeil,
but it also has the power to convert the body into a machine for both receiving
and creating visual images. The Surrealist photographer, attempting to capture
his own unconscious in the flash of a bulb, could be called the first
manifestation of the cyborg. (Is it coincidence that popular Surrealist H.R.
Giger created the “cyborg style” of Blade Runner?)
Theoretical approaches to
cyborgs often identify them with the Freudian concept of unheimlichkeit – the uncanny, or literally, unhomely. For Hal Foster
in Compulsive Beauty, this is the defining character of Surrealist art,
which processes the human (particularly female) body through its machine, and
offers representations which – like Hans Bellmer’s grotesque dolls – may remind
us of home because, as well as despite, their distortions. The home of which
they remind us, argues Foster, is the mother’s body; it is from this that the
photographs and fétiches of
Surrealism alienate us. I want to examine a number of representations of the
female body, particularly in the work of Man Ray, in order to test this
hypothesis. In addition, I will pursue the theory that the camera makes bodies
into machines, as well as making machine-parts into bodies – as in
“Dancer/Danger,” where the indeterminate word is another boundary erased. Lee
Miller, gazing just under the camera’s radar, her hands resting on the shaft of
a massive wheel, becomes a pleasure-machine, eternally turning the viewer’s
crank.
Thus, the camera is the most
cohesive manifestation of Duchamp’s “bachelor machine”, seen in the lower half
of the vitrine in “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even.” It is a
machine for undressing women, as can be seen kinetically in the camera of Un
Chien Andalou. For Man Ray and Duchamp, the camera “strips” women down to
their cogs and gears. This can be shown to relate to the Surrealist
fetishization of automata. “Ma femme…” write André Breton in “L’Union Libre,”
“Á la langue d’une poupée qui ouvre et ferme ses yeux.” The bachelor machine of
the camera makes the female body a “union libre” between automaton and automatisme. Like the Underwood girls
beloved of French and Spanish Surrealists, woman not only represents but is the unconscious as machine. Caught by
both man and ray, she turns photographic technologies of light back onto the
camera and the Surrealist art it produced.
Massimo Leone
University
of Siena, Italy
École Pratique des Hautes
Études, Paris, France
My short paper will analyse
a particular optical device: the kaleidoscope.
The paper will consist of
three sections:
The first one will concern
the history of the kaleidoscope: the technological context of this creation,
the purposes for which the kaleidoscope was created and those for which it was
used.
The second section will deal
with the role which the kaleidoscope has played in decorative imagination and
creation.
Finally, the last section of
the paper will point out the way in which the kaleidoscope has become both a
powerful visual and technological metaphor in order to express the philosophy
of structuralism.
This last section will refer
to Lévi-Strauss’ conceptual use of kaleidoscope: the semiotic structure of this
metaphor will be analysed in great detail.
Zola's Superstore in The
Ladies' Paradise: Dynamics and Paradoxes of the Machine
Eurydice Prentoulis
Columbia
University
"The Ladies' Paradise is the story of the creation of one of those big department stores, like the Bon Marche or the Louvre, that have so shaken up and reinvigorated the commerce of France. I show it at war with the small commerce, which is little by little devoured by it. To do so I introduce a rival house, an old store that incarnates old-fashioned customs, that is killed off by the department store - which gives me a family drama."
(Emile Zola, Correspondances)
The Ladies' Paradise recounts the frenzied transformations that made late nineteenth-century Paris the fashion capital of the world. The novel's capitalist hero, Octave Mouret, creates a giant department store that swallows up the archaic and outmoded boutiques in the neighborhood. It represents "the triumph of modern activity", commercial growth and success, and a "democratization of luxury". Inevitably though, a price must be paid. Neighboring businesses tempted shoppers and the difficult lives of the sales personnel are all affected by this new commercial enterprise, likened to an ogre, a monster, a modern cathedral and a machine.
It is not an accident that the image of the machine is used to express the magnitude of social and economic change brought on by the new type of marketing of this Second Empire innovation. Zola presents the Store as a type of combustion machine, "working at full pressure", a metaphor which he develops and hyperbolises through the notions of its seductive and destructive power, its dehumanization, its traps and its overall size. People fuel this machine: the people who run it and the customers who yield to its power. As the image of the Machine unfolds, we can examine the dynamics at work between its two components in order to better appreciate the influence it wielded on Zola's ever-modernizing Paris.
La Jetée: Cinema as Time Machine
David Copenhafer
UC
Berkeley
La
Jetée is one of the best examples of a film that thematizes technology at the
same time as it foregrounds its own technological intervention into traditional
modes of cinematic narrative. It begins by making brief reference to a nuclear
holocaust that has devastated the planet. On the verge of extinction, humanity
must send a person into the future in order that he might return with a source
of energy capable of saving the present. For the film, time travel would appear
to be a possibility for thought and for memory: the human subject, with the aid
of powerful drugs, becomes a time machine.
Constructed
almost entirely of still photographs, the form of La Jetée reflects the
technological moment it attempts to narrate. The film represents a limit-case
for cinema. Is it in fact a film or a kind of "slide show" that could
either pre-date or post-date the era of the motion-picture camera? In
conjunction with the complicated soundtrack, the photos manage to tell a story,
but they also tend to undermine the very possibility of storytelling insofar as
they demonstrate that narrative conventions are subject to transformation and
manipulation. Put differently, there is scarcely an image in La Jetée that
could not be shown at a different time,
and that fluidity of image undermines the rhetoric of temporality on which the
story seems to depend. Somewhat like its protagonist, the film is a time
machine as well, one that combines image and sound in a way that upsets
traditional notions of cinematic time and narration.
Phonographe, dictaphone,
graphophone : de la conservation idéale jusqu’à la perte de l’actuel.
Considérations sur les valeurs de la voix et sur le pouvoir des machines
d’enregistrement entre la fin du XIX-e et la première moitié du XX-e siècle
Maria Muresan
Columbia
University
Cet essai
mettra en rapport les trois machines, le phonographe, le dictaphone, le
graphophone, en fonction de leur force de capter la voix par ou dans
l’écriture. L’aventure commence par l’imperceptible mise en question de
l’essence de la voix enregistrée par Villiers d’Isle-Adam, elle continue par
l’ironique mise en spectacle du rapprochement écriture-voix qui finit par
s’annuler dans l’acte de la transcription chez Blaise Cendrars et elle s’achève
quand l’écriture reste seule à gloser sur l’absence de la voix enregistrée (du
disque) chez Michel Leiris.
A partir de 1878, l’événement de la découverte du phonographe par Edison, très vite
présentée devant l’Académie française, commence à troubler l’imaginaire
poétique de l’époque, qui se libère ainsi de ses urgences vis-à-vis de
l’ontologie de la voix. Charles Cros, dans Principes
de mécanique cérébrale et Procédés d’enregistrement et de reproduction
liés aux phénomènes perçus par l’ouïe, essaie de proposer un contrepoint
scientifique à ses doutes et désirs poétiques d’une chanson perpétuelle. Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam, dans son roman l’Eve
future, concentre dans le personnage d’Edison ses questions relatives à la
possibilité de l’incarnation et conservation de l’idéal dans le monde sensible.
Seule la machine pourrait « fixer
presque immortellement » une âme qui parle comme les héros des grands
livres de l’humanité. Le phonographe, nouveauté absolue à la fin du XIX-e,
entre dans l’imaginaire au moment où la voix est l’épreuve et la certitude
suprême de l’être. Aussi peut-il créer des archives de vérité inaccessibles
dans le passé. La machine est dans ce sens une transformation sans perte des
vibrations de la voix en ondulation de l’écriture.
Tout cet imaginaire témoigne d’une « ontologie
forte » (Vattimo), de l’existence sûre et essentielle de la voix, face à
laquelle l’écriture n’est qu’un moyen de conservation. Ce logocentrisme
(Derrida) deviendra dans le XXe siècle une « parole essoufflée » qui
n’est que la représentation d’une ontologie faible (Vattimo) de la trace, de
l’hégémonie de l’écriture. Déjà Villiers posait l’apparition du phonographe
comme manque de foi dans la conservation de la voix dans l’âme.
Chez Leiris, dans le chapitre Perséphone de Biffures,
il y a une description d’un cousin du phonographe d’Edison : le graphophone. Celui-ci apparaît dans la
gloire d’une figure fabuleuse du passé, dont on a oublié le principe de
fonctionnement. Il n’est plus présent ou opérateur. Cible à toute sorte de jeu
langagier, il est associé au fragment, à la fiction, au monde lointain des
automates, à la descente aux enfers de Perséphone, à la perte de l’ouïe. Son
nom parle de lui-même : au lieu de « phonographe » (étym., la gravure des sons) il s’appelle
« graphophone » (étym., la
sonorisation de l’écriture) qui met en vibration sonore l’écriture, dont l’étrangeté
et l’écart du présent joue la seule épaisseur de la réalité : la voix
enregistrée est disparue, le disque cherché n’est pas trouvé.
Entre ces deux entreprises d’une complète confiance dans
la machine-voix qui rapetisse la force de l’écriture et de l’effet de Luna Parc
d’une machine aux signes inversés, qui laisse une réalité exclusive à
l’écriture, se situe les essais de Cendrars d’incorporer la machine vocale à
l’écriture. Le roman Les confessions de
Dan Yack se veut une transcription de la voix du personnage sur un dictaphone. Il est une réaction contre
« un air beuglant de
gramophone », contre la suprématie de la lettre simplement sonorisée,
il attend que la voix fond dans le texte : « Quel dommage que l’imprimerie ne puisse pas également enregistrer la
voix de Dan Yack et quel dommage que les pages d’un livres ne soient pas encore
sonores. Mais cela viendra. Pauvres poètes travaillons. B.C ».
Le dictaphone (étym., l’enregistrement
d’une dictée) ne capte pas une voix, mais une dictée, et par cela se range
entre l’ontologie forte de la priorité d’une voix et celle faible de
l’exclusivité de l’écriture. La dictée est un faire-semblant de la voix, elle
est déjà une technique pour créer la sensation de la présence forte de la voix,
gardant la possibilité de ne pas être qu’un enregistrement.
Une Conquête
méthodique:
Valéry's Search for a Method
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Vanderbilt
University
This
paper presents a close reading of Paul Valéry's 1897 essay "Une conquête
méthodique," focusing both on its historical implications and its
philosophical significance for Valéry's aesthetics-specifically, for his
preoccupation with the task of poetry in modernity. On the historical level,
the essay's depiction of the nascent German state anticipates with unwitting
exactitude the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century and the ways in which
systematic mechanization leads to dehumanization. On the theoretical level, the
essay presents us with an interesting dialectic between the foreign and the
native, a dialectic in which what is proper to the native is found amidst the
foreign, and thus the improper. The French poet searches for the parameters of
a literary method-his proper field of inquiry-in two culturally and
epistemologically foreign realms: German culture and political theory.
Valéry explicitly contrasts the Germans' "native" inclination to discipline to the "native" imaginative skills of his fellow Frenchmen. Inspired by the power of rationality, and yet at the same time threatened by the spiritual impoverishment such a cult of discipline entails, Valéry paints an uncanny portrait of a Germany that establishes a formal method that is abstracted from, and exists at the expense of, the specificities and irregularities of any content. In his analysis of the German attitude toward method, however, the poet has already moved into another system of knowledge, that of political analysis. Political writing combines documentation with an ethically motivated exegesis, and in so doing, it situates itself at the crux of the factual and the contingent, the objective and the subjective. This provides Valéry with a potential model for a synthesis of technique and accident in the aesthetic realm. Given the polemical stance with which Valéry resisted the politicization of the artwork's contents-in the face of a highly politicized modernity-this excursion into the world of politics in search of literary method is what foregrounds the dialectics of foreign/native and proper/improper.
The role of accident and
technique in the production of an artwork is, in fact, the fundamental question
behind the thought and poetics of Paul Valéry. I argue that in this particular
essay the relation between imagination and discipline allegorizes, or
translates, Valéry's major ethical concern regarding the relation between art
(the realm of accident and freedom) and technology (the realm of instrumental
reason). In other words, the tenuous relation between accident and method is at
the heart of Valéry's philosophical question concerning the place of poetry in
the world of modern crisis, a question which he addresses again in his famous
essay "La Crise de l'esprit" and in "La Necessité de la
poésie."
"Die
Maschine" de Georges Perec
Hans Hartje
Université
de Pau
"How can we think the machine, in an age of thinking machines?» - voilà une des questions que vous posez, avec de bonnes raisons. Or si l'on n'a pas manqué de relever l'aspect potentiellement machinal de la démarche oulipienne, on n'en constate pas moins qu'à ce jour il a rarement fait l'objet d'une analyse approfondie. Cela tient peut-être au fait que la seule ouvre oulipienne à s'y référer explicitement, est en allemand. Je veux parler de la réalisation radiophonique «Die Maschine» de Georges Perec (en collaboration avec Eugen Helmlé, son traducteur allemand), diffusée sur les ondes d'une radio allemande en 1969.
Si cette ouvre figure parmi les «tubes» de la radiodiffusion allemande, sa nature expérimentale et métatextuelle n'en a pas moins rendu toute réception ailleurs (dans une autre aire linguistique) difficile, sinon impossible. Il s'agit - très grossièrement - de la mise en scène de la manière dont un ordinateur - «Die Maschine» - procéderait pour analyser un poème (en l'occurrence «Wanderers Nachtlied» de Gothe) dans l'espoir - non dit - de découvrir son secret de fabrication, ce qui lui permettrait à terme de fabriquer à son tour de la poésie.
A l'époque, cette idée était dans l'air du temps, comme le prouvent les travaux de Max Bense à Ulm, mais également les réflexions dont Italo Calvino a fait état dans une conférence de 1967, intitulée «Cybernétique et fantasmes, ou de la littérature comme processus combinatoire» (le texte de cette conférence a été publié en France dans le volume La machine littéraire, dans «La librairie du XXe siècle», en 1993).
Animated
Statues: Going Beyond Mind and Machine in the Writing of Buffon and Condillac
Daniel Leonard
Columbia
University
In the 1750’s, French philosophes became increasingly
preoccupied with the senses and their relation to thought and human
nature. Buffon and Condillac both
resorted to the literary device of an animated statue to illustrate the logic
of sensation and its formative influence on perception and thought. Their concerns were quite different (Buffon
was writing a “natural history” of the human animal in De l’homme, whereas the more philosophically-minded Condillac was
attempting a comprehensive Traité des
sensations), but both agreed that narrative and imagination were the best
means to treat sense experience. Asking their readers to imagine sensitive and
curious statues coming to life in an ordered time and space, they introduced
the senses (and corresponding stimuli) one by one to their shapely “blank
slates.” The gradual animation of a
lifeless, stone statue illustrated the particularity of the individual senses
and their specific contributions to perception, as well as posing the problem
of their interrelation.
Furthermore, these stories
actually staged a birth to experience.
The statues learned from sense impressions to form ever more complex
ideas about their world and themselves, eventually becoming feeling and
thinking beings. The sensual education
of these artificial Adams and Eves was meant to recapitulate the development
both of individuals from birth and of humanity from its primitive origins.
Through an imaginary experimental inquiry, conducted in a controlled, acultural milieu, a model natural subject was thus produced to explore feeling in its broadest senses. Embodying sensation in an imaginary and idealized human figure, the creation of the statue allowed observations, manipulations and controls not otherwise possible. Buffon and Condillac’s fictional statues were machines for producing knowledge about the senses.
But the statues represented an attempt to model sense experience on its own terms: rather than literal machines, they were metaphoric and analogical devices designed to illuminate the unknown. The physiology and psychology of the senses were matters for speculation, inaccessible to direct observation and control: both mind and body remained “black boxes.” Much like modern thought experiments, these statues exposed the theoretical problems of sensation without speculating on ultimate (and perhaps unknowable) causes. In an attempt to go beyond the dualistic impasse of mind and machine, soul and body, Buffon and Condillac represented the mediating role of sensation through an artistic creation, a living statue both abstract and concrete, general and particular. Artifice alone was able to give access to the invisible and elusive “laws” of human nature.
Neither metaphysical system
nor physical machine, these statues exist ambiguously between body and soul (or
mind). I propose to examine the curious
status of these textual creations and situate them within the discursive
context of philosophy, natural history and fiction in the 1750’s. To what extent are narrative, fiction and
analogy viewed as viable instruments for investigation of human nature? How do the statue stories appeal to the
prestige of physical experiments, instruments and demonstrations as a means of
displaying knowledge and producing conviction? Do the senses have a language
and logic of their own, beyond mind and body? Is the sensual body a work of art or a machine?
The Phonograph's Horned
Mouth: Voice in Tomorrow's Eve
In 1887, the phonograph was invented by Cros and Edison as an aid to memory, one which could capture, then play back dialogue, speeches, and vocal shreds of family history. It was thought by Edison, himself hearing impaired, that the phonograph would enable later generations to hear great words by great men, better foreign language and diction training. At that time writing was the primary technology of memory and the phonograph promised to do that which writing could not: inscribe voice, the inflection and feeling of the spoken word. Edison had also hoped that the device could become a method of communicating with and hearing the dead. In many ways, the phonograph achieved that hope, allowing one to speak posthumously, “be” there without being there.
By the late 1940s, a coin-operated phonograph, the Recordio-Gram, was available in most American drug stores. It was used to make vocal letters, two minute post cards of sound sent to say “hello,” “I miss you,” or for a distant relative to hear the newborn’s voice. A sign posted on Recordio-Gram booths announced to their users “Record your own voice: Hear yourself as others hear you.” Nevertheless, hearing one’s own recorded voice was often met with the feeling that the voice did not sound like oneself. The phonograph induced a fracture in the ground of presence and self-presentation, an ontological crisis. Responding to such a crisis, the late 19th and early 20th centuries issued a wave of literature permeated with sound recording as leading to haunting, madness, delusion, and death. Authors such as Renard, Jarry, and Friedlaender evoke the phonograph as a grotesque mutilation of the human body, a misuse, counterfeiting, displacement, and stealing of voice.
Villiers’ late 1880s novel, L’Eve Future, is a cautionary tale of a scientist who manipulates the limits of the embodied voice. A fictional Edison invents a cyborg female whose voice is the effect of two phonographs implanted beneath her breast. Part machine, human, and ghost, she replaces the unattainable love object of a tortured young man and makes for him a perfect converser, one with perennially pleasant things to say. Extending Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” Jacques Derrida’s critique of the status of writing since Plato, as well as Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” I interpret L’Eve Future as a response to the fear of the phonograph as both an emasculation and a robbery of presence. The novel positions machines and women as imposters in the realm of “true” voice. Villiers feminizes the phonograph as a residue of presence, recuperating the authorial, original voice as male. Offering an alternative to Villiers, my reading of the phonograph shows the machine to have a profoundly border and hermaphroditic quality, one at the interstices of absence and presence, haunting and reality, writing and speech, masculinity and femininity. This reading counters the possibility of the phonograph as it is interpreted by Villiers and finds sound recording to have an inherently emancipatory potential.
Dana Stevens
UC
Berkeley
I
propose to trace a certain history of the fall in early photography and cinema.
I am interested in exploring images from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries that attempt to "represent... the momentum of
falling": photographic or cinematic images that record falls, flight, and
the outcome of chance or accident.
In
his essay "Guilty" (Le Coupable ), Georges Bataille writes:
I saw on a roof some large
and solid hooks, sticking up from its slanted surface. If we imagine a man falling
from the roof's peak, he might, by chance, catch hold of one of them with his
arm or his leg. Pitched from the roof of a building, I would be crushed on the
ground. But if there were a hook there, I might catch hold of it in passing!
[...] I realize now, representing for myself the momentum of falling, that
nothing exists in this world but for having met up with a hook.1
It struck me, reading this
passage from Bataille, that behind what we think of as the origin story of
cinema, the mythic bet between the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the
philanthropist and tycoon Leland Stanford, lay a speculative question: is there
a moment in a horse's stride when all four hooves are suspended in the air? In
other words: can horses fly? Muybridge's answer, after his second photo session
with Stanford's racehorse, "Occident", in 1873, was an affirmative
one: he wrote that the wet plate negatives "were sufficiently sharp to
give a recognizable silhouette portrait of the driver and some of them
exhibited the horse with all four of his feet clearly lifted, at the same time,
above the surface of the ground."2 And thus, at least according to film's
own origin myth of itself, the moving picture was born.
The ironic beauty of the
detail that Stanford's horse was named "Occident" is perhaps what
first seduced me into this research, since we know how much of Occidental
theology and aesthetics has centered around narratives of the fall. At least
since Aristotle, the genre of tragedy has been defined by the notion of the
great man's fall, and the slapstick pratfall is at least as old as comedy
itself. The tragic personage falls in stature; the comic personage simply
falls. In the second part of my paper, I propose to move from a discussion of
Stanford and Muybridge's "bet", and its crucial place at the
beginning of a new type of technological representation, to a discussion of the
representation of literal falls on the silent movie screen. Theatre has always
been about falling (from Oedipus to Shakespeare), but early cinema is finally
able to show the fall actually happening -- the combination of vaudeville and
technical savoir-faire allows representation to break up the advent of chance,
mischance, or accident into a discrete series of gestures: to frame the fall,
or, in Bataille's image, to capture it on a kind of "hook."
In connection with comedy
and falling, I would turn, in closing, to a discussion of the American
filmmaker who was such an incomparable genius at both: Buster Keaton.
Bataille's realization that "nothing exists... but for having met up with
a hook" finds its counterpart in this passage from Keaton's oral
autobiography, "My Wonderful World of Slapstick":
So my scene was where the cops were chasing me that I came to this thing and I took advantage of the lid of a skylight, and I laid it over the edge of the roof to use as a springboard and backed up, hit it and tried to make it to the other side which was probably about eighteen feet, something like that. Well, I misjudged the spring of that board and I didn't make it ... [I] fell to the net, but I hit hard enough...that I had to go home and stay in bed for about three days... So the boys the next day went into the projecting room and saw the scene anyhow 'cause they had it printed ... Well, they got a thrill out of it so they came back and told me about it. It's a miss. Says, well, if it looks that good let's see if we can't pick it up this way ... so now we go in and drop into something just to slow me up, to break my fall, and I can swing from that onto a rainspout and when I get a hold of it, it breaks...sways me out away from the building... and for a finish collapses enough so that it hinges and throws me down through a window [onto a firetruck] a couple of floors below...3
This missed fall (which, like
Keaton's body, wound up "hooked" on celluloid in spite of itself) and
the series of sight gags invented to "cover" for its accidental
outcome, are beautifully shown in the documentary "Buster Keaton: A Hard
Act to Follow"4. Using images from this documentary and possibly one or
two other Keaton shorts (depending on the availability of video technology at
the conference), I hope to show how the technology of early cinema made
possible, for the first time, a different relation to chance and to the fall, which
perhaps accounts for film's long-term fascination with depictions of the human
body as projectile. From photography to film, from Stanford's
"Occident" to Keaton's accidents (the closeness of the two words is
more than an easy pun, since both come from the Latin for "to fall"),
a new chapter opens in the history of representation: now, we are able to
witness accident, chance, slippage, happening over and over again as if for the
first time.
1Bataille, Georges, Oeuvres Complètes.
Paris:Gallimard, 1970-1988, v. 5, p. 316. Translation mine.
2 Coe, Brian, The History of Movie Photography, London: Ash & Grant, 1981,
p. 43.
3Quoted in Dardis, Tom, Keaton, the Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, Penguin Books,
1980, p. 108.
4written and produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, in association with
Raymond Rohauer. New York: HBO Video, c1987.