Man-‐Machine Brian Baker I. Re/Tour/Kraft/Werk 1. L’homme machine The track begins: the breath, the breath, the lungs, the heart, the legs, the legs, the gear, the chain, cycling, recycling, the rhythm of the body, the body on the bicycle. Kraftwerk’s Tour De France (1983) was originally released as a single in the year of the 90th anniversary of the Tour; and re-‐ recorded in 2003, to be a assembled as part of Tour De France Soundtracks, an album that missed its July 2003 release date which was to coincide with the tour’s centenary. In the 1970s, Kraftwerk’s albums had been predominantly organised around mobility and Communications Technologies, from Autobahn (1974) to Radio-‐Activity (175) to Trans Europe Express (1977). ‘Kraftwerk’, writes David Toop in ocean of sound, ‘the original power station, the conductors, operatives, the sound fetishists [...] Kraftwerk: sexual, pure concentration, edible. Constraint with humour. Camp. Boys in uniform. Expression through proportion. Emotion through detachment. Inspiration through work’ (201-‐2). Toop diagnoses a ‘benign futurism’ at work in Kraftwerk’s ‘deadpan celebration of technological utopia, a deadly efficient parody and confirmation of Germanic efficiency’ (203). What is also crucial to the vision of these tracks is communication, connection, a European as well as German sensibility. Though Ian MacDonald speaks of Kraftwerk’s ‘mechanised dehumanisation’ (in ‘The Robots’), Toop’s sense of the sensuality of Kraftwerk’s machine-‐music is particularly apt for ‘tour De France’. Before the ticket of the drum machine, the sprockets and gears of the bicycle, we hear the all too human breath; combined, rider and bicycle are a sensuous man-‐machine. Kraftwerk’s last album of the 1970s was The Man-‐Machine (1978), an allusion to Julien de la Mettrie’s 1748 text L’homme machine. la Mettrie, a physician, is one of a group of French materialist thinkers of the Enlightenment, and la Mettrie’s materialism is to do with the human body. In this, la Mettrie draws upon, and extends, Descartes’ arguments to do with the machine-‐like qualities of animal bodies – constituted by material mechanisms and devoid of ‘mind’ and consciousness – and thereby the analogical relation of the human body to animal physiology, in which physical processes such as the heartbeat, digestion, respiration (the breath, the lungs), walking (dare we say riding a bicycle?) are all produced mechanically, without ‘mind’. When someone falls, argues Descartes, ‘and
sticks out their hands so as to protect their head, it is not a reason that instructs them to do this; it is simply that the site of the impending fall reaches the brain and sends the animal spirits into the nerves in the manner necessary to produce this movement even without any mental volition, just as it would be produced in a machine’. That it is the fall that is Descartes’ example is instructive: it is the diagnostic but limit case of the body as machine, at the point at which it fails as a machine (it is clumsy, imperfect, fallen). la Mettrie’s materialism, influenced by his medical investigations, proposes the human body as a machine; in fact, L’homme machine is often translated ‘man a machine’. la Mettrie suggests that ‘the body is nothing but a clock’: ‘every fibre in it, right down to the smallest, oscillates, and this natural oscillation is like that of a clock – it sometimes winds down’ (26). la Mettrie, rather than relying on metaphysics – soul, mind, spirit – to differentiate human and animal, suggests instead that it is the complexity of organisation of l’homme machine that is the crucial difference: ‘ “the soul” is an empty term’ he writes (22). In Samuel Beckett: a critical guide (1960), Hugh Kenner diagnoses a problem in Descartes’ conception of the machinic nature of the human and animal body, in that ‘a machine can do almost anything better [than a man]; “clock composed only of wheels and waits can number the hours and measure time more exactly than we would all our skill”’ (120). Kenner continues: The body, if we consider it without prejudice in the light of the 17th century connoisseurship of the simple machines, is distinguished from any machine, however complex, by being clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible; the extreme of analytic ingenuity will resolve no one of its functions, except inexactly, in to lever, wedge, wheel, pulley, screw, inclined plane, or some combination of these. (121) The body, then, is resistant to reason, to the very discourses of enlightenment which attempts to figure it as a machine. In and of itself, it may not be recuperable to a machinic state. Kenner argues that, in Beckett, it is the bicycle that completes the ‘Cartesian Centaur’, ‘the body worthy of human reason’ (121). The bicycle becomes a supplement, a technical prosthesis, that in fact completes the Cartesian machine, l’homme machine. ‘The intelligence guides, the mobile wonder obeys,’ writes Kenner, anticipating the rhythms of Kraftwerk; ‘body and mind the each one nobly about its business, without interference or interaction’ (121). For Kenner, there is no reduction to ‘man a machine’; instead, the bicycle, the ‘Cartesian Centaur’, is ‘body and mind in close harmony’ (124). 2. Le Surmâle The bicycle appears in Modernist fictions recurrently, and not only in terms of the liberation of social relations (and the phenomenon of the new woman) highlighted by Stephen Kern in The Culture Of
Time And Space 1880-‐1918 (1983). Hugh Kenner investigates the recurrent use of the bicycle in several of Beckett’s texts, from the ‘Fingal’ story in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) to Mercier and Camier’s bike (1946), to the bicycle Molloy uses/ combines with (1955). Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) contains ruminations on human subjects hybridising with their machines: people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish it’s their personalities mixed up with the personalities of the bicycle as a result of the interchanging of atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly aha for people and half bicycles. (85). In the work of Marcel Duchamp in particular, whose Bicycle Wheel (1913) is an iconic dada object, the bicycle was a particularly significant technology, not least, perhaps, because of its then-‐novelty and its seemingly revolutionary (vélorutionary) potential in terms of physical and social mobility. It is in the work of Alfred Jarry, however, that the Modernist bicycle comes into its own. Jarry was so attached to his bicycle that he rode around his small apartment on one. He is best known for his character Pére Ubu, the obscene and corpulent figure Jarry uses to satirise greed, corruption and conventional morality; but also, more notoriously, in ‘The Passion Considered As An Uphill Bicycle Race’, Jarry imagines Christ is a Tour De France rider ascending the mountain, in which the bicycle becomes an object upon which Jarry’s peculiar mix of satire, science, fantasy and proto-‐dada can be articulated. In Le Surmâle (1903), the protagonist Marcueil embarks on a quest to find the limits of heroic masculinity, the first in a 10,000 mile race between a train and a 5-‐man bicycle; the second in a Sadean sexual marathon in which the Supermale orgasms 82 times. The narrative of the 10,000 mile race is given as a report, published in ‘the New York Herald’, by one Ted Oxborrow, one of the members of the team; ‘as for the question of whether or not André Marcueil the past and the race [...] we leave to be judged from this chapter’, the text enigmatically states (50). The race, promoted by the inventor of ‘perpetual motion food’, William Elson, was intended to prove that, with this fuel, ‘the human mechanism was superior to the machine over long distances’ (50). In attempting to prove ‘the limitless nurse of human strength’, the racers are conjoined into a multiple centaur: Lying horizontally on the five-‐man bicycle – standard 1920 racing model, no handlebars, 15 millimetre tyres, development 57.43 metres – our faces lower than our saddles, sheltered behind masks from wind and dust. Our ten legs joined on each side by aluminium rods, we started off. (51)
When one of the riders dies, the multiple force of the other men resurrects him mechanically: ‘Jacobs’ death-‐sprint was a sprint the like of which the living cannot conceive’ (58-‐9). As implied by the French materialist conception of the body as a machine, there is nothing to distinguish dead from living matter: in ‘teaching the dead to live’ (59), the racers insist that all matter is in motion. Disturbingly, the armoured, mechanical, masked 5-‐man team conjures up images of the armoured phalanx diagnosed by Klaus Theweleit in his extraordinary text Male Fantasies (1987), as central to the imagination and self conception of proto-‐fascist German militiamen, the Freikorps, in the immediate post-‐WWI period. Theweleit suggests that these men, who dream of an armoured body and the ‘ritual of the mass parade’, defend against ‘the hostile principle of femaleness’ (1:403) and the ‘red flood’ of Communism in a technologised, militarised and multiple masculine body. Technology as supplement here creates l’homme machine as a fascist subject, externalising anxiety as the will to annihilate the other. As Scott Bukatman writes, ‘under fascism the body or most explicitly becomes part of a machine [...] an obfuscating ideology unifies body and psyche – the subject as weapon, the subject as machine’ (303). While Marcueil’s Sadean sexual ritual at the end of Le Surmâle is not predicated on the destruction of the female, the sexual act as machinic act excludes love and desire during the 82 orgasms. It is only afterwards, when he erroneously believes that he has killed his lover (fucked her to death) that he declares: ‘“I adore her”’ (131). This woman, Ellen Elson, is William Elson’s daughter; although she declares that ‘“I love him”’ (134), Elson cannot believe this is reciprocated, and devises ‘the-‐ machine-‐to-‐inspire-‐love’ to combat the Supermale: ‘since this man had become a mechanism, the equilibrium of the world required that another mechanism should manufacture – a soul’ (136). Inserted into the machine’s circuits, Marcueil’s bodily strength (and sexual potency) is such that ‘THE MACHINE [...] FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MAN’ (139); trapped inside the machine’s iron embrace, glass tears dripping molten down the Supermale’s cheeks, the image of the man-‐machine is parodied or travestied (as in ‘The Passion’) and sexualised, but orgasm becomes suffering, torture, an ordeal. Another mechanical Christ, Marcueil attempts to break free of the machine, but cannot: André Marcueil’s body, stark naked, and gilded in spots with a reddish gold, remained wrapped around the bars – or the bars remainder wrapped around it. There the Supermale died, twisted into the ironwork. (141) This excessive, parodic crucifixion re-‐write l’homme machine, from the ‘Cartesian Centaur’ to the ruined, tortured, mechanised masculine subject.
3. Le Tour, la Tour The Eiffel tower was erected in time for the 1889 Paris exposition, which opened on May 5, ‘100 years to the day after the fateful meeting of the Estates General in Versailles that marks the beginning of the Revolution’ (Higonnet 357). The Champ de Mars had been the site of numerous exhibitions and fairs going back to 1798, but the expositions mondiales were the expression of a particulate industrial modernity associated with the city. As Higonnet suggests, ‘from 1855 to 1889 the terms “Paris”, “modernity”, and “exposition” became synonymous in the minds of all who saw themselves as the ends of the enlightenment’ (358). Although many despised the Tower – one catholic paper calling it ‘a hideous, horrible, phallic skeleton’ (Higonnet 358) – it quickly became inscribed into the culture of spectacle that had developed in Paris during the 19th century, the Paris of the arcades, the flâneur, of Baudelaire, famously analysed by Walter Benjamin. Anna Friedberg, in Window Shopping (1993), argues that: Even though the Eiffel tower ruptured the Paris skies with a wrought iron spire, it offered its visitors a spectacular new vista of urban space. The elevator ascension of the tower was one of the exposition’s main attractions; the gaze was mobilised to a new vantage. The aerial view of Paris from the Tour d’Eiffel was previously available only to balloonists. From this lofty passerelle, all of Paris unfolded like a grand magasin. (83) The Eiffel Tower inserts itself so directly into the popular culture of spectacle – panoramas, wax museums, phantasmagoria – that, as Vanessa R Schwartz notes in Spectacular Realities (1998), the Musée Grevin, in 1889, featured a panoramic tableau of the tower under construction (145): a scene which multiply reflects and reproduces the technologies of spectacle. Several of Roland Barthes’ essays in the French language collection Mythologies (1957) went untranslated when published in the English collection of the same name (1972). Instead, they were published, with other, later essays, in the book The Eiffel Tower (1979). One of the uncollected Mythologies essays was ‘Le Tour de France comme épopée’, or, ‘The Tour De France as Epic’, in which Barthes constructs an ‘onomastics’ of the Tour upon the names of great riders: ‘these names keep recurring; they form certain fixed points in the greater risk of the ordeal, whose task is to fasten episodic, tumultuous duration to the stable essence of the great characters’ (79). This fixing is reflected in the way back to the individual place names or stages (étapes) are forged into the national narrative of the Tour, whether clockwise (Alps then Pyrenées) or counter-‐clock (Pyrenées then Alps). Comparing the French and English versions of this essay, I was intrigued to note that when translating a passage about ‘the epic necessity of ordeal’ (81) – ‘the gradients are wicked,
reduced to difficult or deadly percentages, and the relays [...] are above all physical characters (80) – Robert Howard uses a perplexing word to translate étape, which is usually rendered as ‘stage’. Howard uses ‘relay’. For those who know the Tour, ‘relay’ is discomfiting: it suggests the passing on of a baton, a succession of riders, not one whose ordeal is mapped across three weeks of stages. So why use ‘relay’? I think it is because Howard wanted to emphasize the circularity of the Tour, the Tour as circuit with each depart and arrive as relay stations; the Tour as a circle, cycles performing a tour (turn) around France, re-‐turning to Paris, the National Capital. In the essay ‘The Eiffel Tower’, Barthes seems to pun on the word ‘tour’, which has a double signification in French. As a masculine noun, le Tour, it signifies the circuit, a lap, a turn; as a feminine noun, la Tour, it signifies a tower. Tour/tour, de France, d’Eiffel. Barthes writes of the Tour d’Eiffel: The Tower is not the usual spectacle; to enter the Tower, to sustain it, to run around its courses, is [...] to accede to a view and to explore the interior of an object (though an openwork one), to transform the touristic rite into an adventure of sight and of intelligence. [...] The Tower looks at Paris. To visit the Tower is to get oneself up on the balcony in order to perceive, to comprehend, and Serena a certain essence of Paris. (Selected Writings 241) Barthes, then, insists, as Friedberg and Schwartz do much later, upon the place of the Eiffel tower in a regime of spectacle: it offers Paris as a kind of panorama. At the same time, the static and elevated nature of the view, its verticality (‘to scale it’), is accompanied by mobility on the horizontal axis: the tourist ‘runs around its courses’, the movement implying a tour around the city, the circle of physical space encompassed by that gaze. Barthes argues: ‘the Tower is the only blind point of total optical system of which it is the centre and Paris the circumference’ (237). 4. The ethical bicycle In his 1946 film Jour de Fête – itself a ‘double’ film, shot at the same time with black and white and colour stock in separate cameras – Jacques Tati stars as Francois, the role village postman whose life is disrupted by the arrival of the fair in the village. Francois becomes the butt of the carnival men’s jugs and ribbing as, drawn into the saturnalia, he is encouraged to emulate the hyper-‐mobile technologies of the US postal service. After watching a film extolling the benefits of train, helicopter and aeroplane to delivering the post, Francois embarks on a postal round a l’Americaine, in which speed is the essence. This ends in disaster as, after racing some coureurs (and losing his bicycle along the way), he plunges heroically into a river after missing the turn. Francois erroneously attempts to inscribe the bicycle into a new circuit of modernity. In this film, as in the later Mon
Oncle (1958), Tati’s articulation of a critique of the postwar modernization of France ranges the bicycle against other technologies of mobility, in particular the automobile. As Kristin Ross notes in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1996), ‘Mon Oncle depends on spatial devices to stage its conflict: the juxtaposition of two, non integrated universes, [the] quartier, almost a village within the city of Paris’ with the ‘modern’ spaces of new apartment blocks and suburban villas (51). In Jour de Fête, this articulation of space is organised through the centrality of the village square, an index of a ‘Deep France’ corresponding to community, seasonal cycles, and a suspicion of modernity. When Francois circuits around the square, at speed, it is a folly, a delusive tour, that must return him ultimately to who, and where, he is. Janet Menzies, in an article in Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett’s bicycles’, notes that the bicycle often appears as a ‘moral, upright and endearing’ technology in cultural representation, one which has long been associated with social progress and a communal ethic (partly because, as often noted, the bicycle can only travel forwards). As suggested in relation to Tati’s Jour de Fête and Mon Oncle, the bicycle is now figured as a peculiar kind of machine, a beneficent one, much unlike a car or jet plane. Cycling seems once again to be booming in popularity, and may yet achieve 1890s levels of participation. But its contradistinction to other technologies of mobility means that a conception of the 21st century l’homme machine must be revised. The bicycle, see the added to the human body, no longer creates simply the ‘Cartesian Centaur’, perfect in Unison; it improves (helps perfect) the human body (as a machine, in terms of health, fitness and expenditure of energy) even when the rider is not riding: (s)he is healthier, better, in ethical (and carbon footprint) surplus. L’homme machine is now the human/machine, a kind of happy cyborg, posited against the ‘machine/machine’ the dominates, pollutes and divides. The bicycle-‐cyborg is the contemporary super-‐human. II. Ring Cycle 1. Buses, Trains and Bicycles I realised, driving home down the M6 the other day, that I have never driven a car in my home town. I learned to drive where I live now, in North Wales, and have driven extensively in Wales and across North-‐West England, but nowhere else. My sense of the local space of Essex is determined not by auto-‐mobility but by buses, trains and bicycles. As a teenager, I had a BMX bike, with 20-‐inch wheels and a single gear. This meant my mental mapping of space, my following of routes from A to B, was not determined by which was the quickest, the shortest, or the most scenic: but by which was the flattest. Bike riding articulated my sense of terrain differently, and turned the relief map of Essex into a flat plane.
London, May 1898: -‐ Bastable pedalled harder on his new Rover to get past the coal cart on Kensington High Street. He was aware that he would be late for his appointment at the Museum. ‘There’s a feeling exactly like one has upon a switchback – a helpless headlong motion. I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.’ The lines were etched on his memory. He would ask the great man whether he was a bicyclist, too. Traversing an internal time and space, Bastable failed to see the large pothole ahead and plunged over the handlebars. Sitting in the gutter, seeing stars, he felt his collarbone. Not broken, anyway, this time. 2. The five-‐ring circus On the large roundabout at Victoria House Corner on the A13, some 200 yards from where I lived as a teenager (not to confused with Victoria Circus in Southend, where the buses terminated), there now stands a large sculpture of a man on a bicycle. (‘It cost £200,000’, said my Dad.) The ‘legacy’ of the Games, for Hadleigh as an ‘Olympic’ town, is difficult to diagnose, other than in this monument to the Cartesian centaur forged from grey metal. Promises of regeneration, the smiling future denizens of the town printed onto chip-‐board hoardings that hid a long-‐boarded up pub in the centre of the town, have now faded along with the photographs. The fire station in Hadleigh, true, is an Arts Centre, but this is no Turner Contemporary or De La Warr pavilion restoration, New Labour wheezes to provide some kind of ‘pump-‐priming’ for (sub-‐)urban ‘regeneration’; this town, stretched along the A13, shabbier than I remember, is neither engaged with the promised future nor with the sea, which is over the horizon, always just a couple of miles away.
Paris, September 2008: What a damp squib, Bastable thought, as he folded up this morning’s Le Monde. They turn it on and it leaks like a broken-‐down washing machine. At his pavement table at the café Charlot, Bastable watched the morning bustle along the rue de Bretagne, these happy Parisians completely oblivious to what was going on just some few hundred kilometres from here. He sipped his tepid coffee and picked at the croissant, before checking on yesterday’s football scores. So much for the end of the world, he said to himself. That’s the last time I place any faith in scientists. 3. Ambulocentrism Writing on place is ambulocentric. That is, it privileges walking as a means by which to engage with the specificities of place; or, in the sense of psychogeography, by means of dérive to recuperate the occluded histories and specificities of the local that are under erasure by late capital’s time-‐space compression and circuits of spectacular consumption. From Sinclair to McFarlane to Jules Pretty, walking slows the subject down enough to see space, to perform an act of witness (to see with one’s own eyes), or perhaps to act in space rather than passing through it. (Sinclair’s attitude to the bicycle
and particularly to urban cyclists is revealed in his acid response to the ‘Boris bike’ in an LRB article of a couple of years ago.) The time of walking is therefore the space of the local.
Zurich, April 1943: -‐ Herr Doktor Hofmann, eyes goggling, gingerly swung his leg over the cross-‐bar and sat upon the saddle. His assistant looked across nervously, astride his own bicycle. Later, Hofmann wrote: ‘On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly.’1 4. Sally Army Fields The radius of my bike-‐riding as a lad, my own space of the local, usually encompassed the boundaries of Hadleigh, with occasional trips beyond to Leigh or Westcliff or Thundersley to see friends. (I rarely rode to Southend itself, as these trips were usually to borrow books from the library or to buy vinyl lps, neither suited to a long ride home.) Marking the Eastern border, between Hadleigh and Southend borough, were the Salvation Army fields, across which you could look from the A13 (Billy Bragg’s ‘trunk road to the sea’) and see the Thames estuary. These were the fields of the Salvation Army Farm Colony instituted by General William Booth, to give the destitute men of Whitechapel an experience of uplifting labour, fresh air, and physical and moral hygiene. Graduates from the farm were sent to manage in further-‐flung colonies. (Jonathan Meades’ recent documentary about Essex, which took several opportunities to excoriate utopian experiments in the county from the Bata factory to Crittall’s, began with Hadleigh Farm Colony.) In 2012, the natural amphitheatre of the Farm was used as the site of the Olympic Mountain Biking event.
The Marquis of Granby, Esher, August 1895: "There's no hurry, sir, none whatever. I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on the accursed machine, than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view, get hot, juicy, red,-‐-‐like a grilled chop. Here I am, sir. Come from Guildford in something under the hour. WHY, sir? [...] Because I'm a damned fool, sir. Because I've reservoirs and reservoirs of muscular energy, and one or other of them is always leaking. It's a most interesting road, birds and trees, I've no doubt, and wayside flowers, and there's nothing I should enjoy more than watching them. But I can't. Get me on that machine, and I have to go.’2 5. The Tour The time of the British seaside was, of course, organised by railway timetables, but now is subject to the ‘day trip’, arrival and departure by car. The time of the local (of psychogeography, of place) is the 1 2
Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-‐‑Hill, 1980). HG Wells, The Wheels of Chance (1898), ch.VII.
span of the walk. The bicycle, suspended between the acceleration of modernity – the bicycle is the first ‘crash’ technology – and the deceleration of local recuperation, is the time of the ‘ride’ or, more grandly, the ‘tour’. Hoopdriver, the cycling protagonist of HG Wells’s 1898 novel The Wheels of Chance, is haunted both by anxieties about social status (he is, like Wells, a draper’s assistant) and the fantasy mobility promised by the coming community of the bicycle (he aspires to be taken for a Gentleman or ‘Dook’). In his ‘Cycling Tour along the Southern Coast’, Hoopdriver pedals through interstitial country: There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him, pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows, where shining rivers wound their lazy way, villages with square-‐towered, flint churches, and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns, clean, white, country towns, long downhill stretches, where one might ride at one's ease (overlooking a jolt or so), and far away, at the end of it all,-‐-‐the sea. (Ch.VII) The sea is the destination, the ‘end of it all’; or perhaps not, as the ‘tour’ returns to the beginning, a circle or loop in time and space; or perhaps the sea is the spectre that haunts the journey, an end that is always just over the horizon.
London, August 2012: Bastable sat in the library of the Wellcome Institute, glad to get away from the five-‐ring circus being orchestrated down in Stratford by the PM. Some scholar, clearly a devotee of science fiction, had annotated every page of the book with imaginary footnotes referring to Hofmann’s career as President of the European Union, and as inventor of the first time machine. You didn’t need an alternate-‐worlds hypothesis to find the latter plausible, thought Bastable. In fact, he had his own time machine in his document case. He reached in, tore a square from the blotter, and placed it carefully on his tongue. He wondered where he would find himself next. III. Orpheus/ Transmitting (The Time Machine) The International Necronautical Society, founded in 1999 by the author/critic Tom McCarthy, with Simon Critchley acting as chief philosopher, is patterned on avant-‐garde artistic groups of the modernist period, and has regularly issued manifestos, reports, and other documents, some of which are collected in The Mattering of Matter. Part parody, part critical vehicle, part invention, the INS provides the critical and theoretical counterpart to McCarthy’s fiction. His Booker-‐shortlisted 2010 novel C can be read as a fictional meditation of the ideas and investigations produced under the aegis of the International Necronautical Society: a modernity suffused with transmissions, communications technologies, codes, and cryptography.
In his critical work, McCarthy turns to an emblematic film in articulating his ideas about the displacement of authorial status in a world of transmissions, the world deeply implicated in death: Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. Orphée is a text that McCarthy in returns to recurrently, from the INS’s ‘Calling All Agents’ to his own digital/kindle-‐only text, Transmission and the Individual Remix. For McCarthy, Orphée’s presentation and revision of the myth offers a crucial exposure of modernity’s technological (and aesthetic) modes of transmission. In Orphée, the poet fears losing his powers, and he is being overtaken by his rival Cégèste. Unknown to him, Death has fallen in love with Orpheus, and arranges for Cégèste’s death to create a kind of trap: the young poet ‘broadcasts’ from the other side of the mirror (the realm of death), which Orpheus listens to on the car radio of Death’s limousine (which has been parked in Orpheus’s garage). The phrases that Cégèste broadcasts echo the BBC/SOE radio broadcasts of coded messages to agents operating in occupied France: ‘the bird sings with its fingers. Two times. I repeat. The bird sings with its fingers’. McCarthy calls these ‘exquisite finds ... miracle fragments, miniature celebrations of silence and playback, illumination, mourning, and avian transmission, of cards, wisdom and loss’ (Mattering of Matter 165). This ‘aesthetic of repetition’ – ‘je repète’ -‐ is also a poetics of transmission, where ‘the author shall author of the fragments is not the originator but rather the repeater whose composing consists first and foremost of listening’ (165). Not only does McCarthy displace an originary integrated subjectivity in his work, then, he also theorises his literary or artistic creation through mediumship. Orpheus is re-‐imagined as a listener or receiver of broadcasts, the lyre a kind of electronic Aeolian harp which ‘sings’ to the aetheric broadcasts that surround us. This revision of artistic creation as dictation or ‘receiving’ has antecedents, most notably in Rilke’s own revision of the myth in his Sonnets to Orpheus, which, in Don Paterson's words, reflects [Rilke’s] mind [which], at times, resembles nothing as much as that of a giant articulate in fact. He described the experience of writing the sonnets as ‘enigmatic dictations’, and indeed work-‐in at that speed, he could not have felt otherwise. [...] Rilke [might be called] a prophet of sorts, if what you mean by prophet is someone so sensitive that they become not only the lightning rod for all the crackle in static of the culture, but also a satellite-‐dish, a ‘receiver’ (to use a Rilkean favourite) things a less precisely attuned and calibrated sensibility would never be aware of. (61-‐2) That the poet takes ‘dictation’ can also be found in the Vancouver lectures of the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer, in the work of William Burroughs (not solely in be cut up method, but also in an image in his last novel The Western Lands (1987), where the writer, his creativity waning, sees a spectral book hovering above his typewriter, which he copies out), and in the music of Kraftwerk (in particular the album Radio-‐activity (1975)), which McCarthy refers to in Transmission and the Individual Remix, where the electronic tracks repeat the modern world's broadcasting of electronic sounds.
The concept of broadcasting from a numinous ‘other’ space is recurrent in all the works cited above; little wonder that McCarthy connects Orphée with the phenomenon of EVP, electronic voice phenomena, uncanny transmissions from ‘elsewhere’ which had become part of the suite of paranormal/occult investigations that characterise contemporary manifestations of the phantasmagoria. EVP is most associated with the figure of Konstantin Raudive, a psychologist who, on hearing the ‘voices’ captured by one Friedrich Jurgenson, when taping birdsong, conducted a series of ‘experiments’ in taping ‘silent’ rooms and de-‐coding the ambient sound into polyglot ‘voices’. Joe Banks, in his Rorschach Audio project, presents EVP as a kind of deficient decoding, the construction of pattern from random sound that approximates the meaning-‐making subjects project with Rorschach ink blots, revealing not the ‘voices of the dead’ but simply a human psychological apparatus of forging pattern from randomness. While I certainly sympathise with Banks’s view, his work misses McCarthy’s diagnostic analysis of EVP as a response to the ocean of transmissions that surround human life, in visual, sound and electro-‐magnetic spectra. What interests me about Raudive – something rubbished by William Burroughs in his essay ‘It Belongs To The Cucumbers’ – is his insistence that these voices are those of the dead. (For those minded to restore a psychological reading, like Banks, it’s worth noting that Raudive hears most often the voice of his mother in these ‘transmissions’; she had died a short time before his experiments began.) EVP, like Orphée, is an emblematic narrative in which that which is largely in-‐ visible – that we are surrounded by, produced from the circuit of codes and broadcasts – is made visible or, more properly, aurally perceptible to us. EVP and Orphée present modernity to us both coded and en clair, as myths of transmission. The centrality of death to EVP draws us back to a core concern for the International Necronautical Society and, of course, for Simon Critchley too. The INS’s founding manifesto insists ‘that death is a kind of space, that we intend to map, enter, colonise, and, eventually, inhabit’ (53), and while it sets out the INS’s proposal to ‘bring death out into the world [...] To tap into its frequencies’ (53), it is insistent in figuring death not only as a mode of transmission or travel (‘our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably toward death’ (53)) but as a material space is crucial. Point 4 of the manifesto proposes that Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. (53) How might we imagine such a craft? The first might be, simply, a radio transmitter, reversing the circuit of transmission so that human beings no longer receive broadcasts from the dead, but broadcast into (and thereby inhabit) the space of death. And other might be, of course, returning to
the myth of Orpheus, Charon’s skiff, taking the necronaut cross the Styx and into the underworld, to the figural ‘space of the dead’. In Orphée, death travels by car, and has threatening of motorcycle outriders (who run down Eurydice); but Orpheus and the angel Heurtebise, once they pass through the mirror into death’s realm, must first traverse a corridor on foot. (In of this wonderful scene, which uses back projection to unsettling and brilliant effect, Cocteau insists, of course, that it is the cinematic apparatus that is the craft by which to voyage to the space of death.) But here are another couple of suggestions for Necronautical craft: Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. A glittering metallic framework [like a] clock, and very delicate be made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. (Ch.2) [It has a saddle, and is operated by levers.] Or here is another: The machine consists of an ebony frame, or similar to the steel frame of a bicycle. The ebony members are assembled with soldered copper mountings. [...] The circular frames and the semi circular forks of the gyrostats are made of nickel. [...] When of the machine is at rest, two of the circular frames of the gyrostats are tangential to the ground. [...] The machine swings freely in azimuth on the extremity of the horizontal gyrostatic axis. (118) Both of these are, of course, Time Machines: the first is by HG Wells, the second by Alfred Jarry. Both have clear affinities to the bicycle. As they are chrono-‐cycles, used in The Time Machine to travel into the future. Here, then, I’d like to propose complementary myth to that of Orpheus and broadcasting in relation to the Necronautical project, one that is also central to modernity: the chrono-‐mobility of the time machine as a form of transmission. When the Traveller sends his model off into the future, the sceptical homosocial audience he has gathered for the experiment to propose that as the machine has not moved in space, but only in time, they should still be able to see it. The Psychologist, at the Traveller’s prompting, explains that ‘if we cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, if any more than we can see the spoke of a wheel spinning’ (ch.2). The model travels too fast for human apperceptive apparatus to register it: if it remains ‘below the threshold’ of visible perception, as the traveller puts it. The time machine itself enters into some kind of (luminiferous) aetheric other space, outside of ‘time’; it is transmitted into the future, sent out like radio and television signals from the earth. When the Traveller returns from the future, he describes the experience of time travelling in highly suggestive ways: the circuit of perception is reversed, the world becomes ‘hazy’ and attenuated, ‘misty and vague’, the sky characterised by ‘greyness’. Physically, the sensations of time travelling
are vertiginous: ‘I seemed to reel; I felt the nightmare sensation of falling’ (ch.3). The experience is ‘excessively unpleasant. If there is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback – of a helpless headlong motion’; vertigo, greyness, falling, a space/bubble created outside of time itself, a medium through which the machine and the traveller can be transmitted. To leave time and space is to enter the numinous; or, the space from which Raudive’s or Orphée’s transmissions emanate: a space of death. When the traveller perceives the world pulsating the diurnal cycle like the ‘beating of a black wing’, it appears an ill omen, a presentiment, like the anticipation of catastrophe – of an ‘imminent smash’ – that accompanies time travel. To travel into the future is to characterise the future as catastrophic, fatal. At the same time, however, the Traveller avoids going back into the past. (I have often wondered about this, as suspect the Wells was aware that sending the Traveller back in time produced unlooked-‐for difficulties in terms of paradox. In the future, if the text can assume agency for the traveller even if the model of time is necessarily deterministic.) To travel back into the past is to travel into a time, where those, now dead, were living; a world populated by dead people. The Traveller avoids this journey to an Orphean underworld (the realm of death) by journeying into the future; but this is a trip into the realm of the ‘as-‐yet-‐unborn’, the not-‐alive/ not-‐dead. The Eloi and Morlock who populate the future are a third [ontological] term which, like transmissions from the dead, compromise the difference between life and death. If the ‘trip’ is not quite into the space and death, rather space of not-‐life, then it still has Orphean echoes: it is a penetration of the mysteries, it is accompanied by visions (the ‘Further Vision’ of the ends of the Earth, its ‘heat death’), and to return from this space is made without the ‘loved one’ (Weena), abandoned to death/ fate. Why is the time machine a bicycle? As Stephen Kern noted in The Culture Of Time And Space 1880-‐ 1918 (1983), the availability of the bicycle in the last years of the 19th century had multiple effects on the experience and articulation of time and space: ‘a French critic attributed to the excitement of cycling to the sheer pleasure of movement, enhanced by a sense of mastery over the environment’ (111); enhanced physical mobility was accompanied by changes in social relations: ‘the bicycle also bridged social space’ (216). Of the bicycle, then, is a machine of disruptive mobility, reorganising or re-‐scripting the world he traverses. Wells himself wrote a novel based on cycling, published in 1896 (the year after The Time Machine), called The Wheels Of Chance; little wonder that the Everyman library paired this novel with The Time Machine in the 1920s for a particularly suggestive doubled edition.
Crucial to the early representations of the bicycle, as noted by Kern and crucial to The Time Machine, is speed. The cycling man-‐machine affords not only greater mobility, but the ‘time-‐space compression’ that accompanies accelerated cultures of mobility and spectacle developing throughout the 19th century. For, while the bicycle has maintained a rather benign presence in late modernity (signifying not only freedom, but social and ecological responsibility), for Wells, the chrono-‐cycle’s ‘headlong motion’ is haunted by the anticipation of the ‘smash’. An accelerated mobility is one where the ‘crash’ becomes a technological possibility; and The Time Machine suggest that the first popular ‘crash’ technology is not the automobile, but the bicycle. The crash, in the INS document ‘Declaration on the Notion of the “Future”’, is located in the rhetorical gesture Marinetti makes towards careering technology in the Futurist manifesto. The path he suggests that ‘the future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or rather, an account of one’ (267). As McCarthy notes, in the Futurist manifesto, when Marinetti and his friends pile into 3 ‘roaring’ cars and (as ‘centaurs’, 3) hurtle through the night, the cause of the crash – where Marinetti’s car end up in the ditch – is the approach of two cyclists. McCarthy reads this moment as emblematic of late modernity’s catastrophic circuits, and of the capacity for the avant-‐garde to instantaneously derail itself: ‘the roaring surge towards the future is arrested no sooner than it begins’ (268). In an article on Duchamp and Beckett’s bicycles, Jake Kennedy reads this scene differently; where McCarthy effaces the bicycles, Kennedy suggests instead that the scene demonstrates ‘the tragic-‐comic intermingling of technology with technology’ (1), reading of crash not as a moment of (instantaneously derailed) triumphal escape from the past, but as one that insists upon the continued presence of the bicycle. Stubbornly, the cyclists remain. I would extend this to suggest that the bicycle is an inescapable remainder of the ‘crash’ imperatives of late modernity that extend beyond (prior to/ after) the hyper-‐mobile present and its speeded up, endlessly receding horizons, an unacknowledged spectre of the historicity of the ‘crash’. The automobile crash replays the bicycle ‘smash’, rather than signifying a rupture in time/space. That the bicycle is the prior crash technology is evidenced in The Time Machine. When of the traveller’s nerves are upset by the thought that ‘I could never stop’ for fear of re-‐entering material reality in the same space as something else, he rashly pulls on the lever (brake) and ‘incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air’ (ch.3). As all Tour de France riders know, the most likely form of crash when a bike’s progress is halted is over the handlebars, the body continuing in motion although the machine is at rest. This is the journey the traveller makes into the world of 802,701: over the handlebars.
What we have here, of course, is slapstick. The man-‐machine chrono-‐cycle, the Centaur, falls from machinic perfection to graceless comedy in one vault. The time machine swerves from the space of death into a Bergsonian laughter: ‘the attitudes, as gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’, Bergson suggests (section IV). Automatism is not uncanny, or simply so: it is comic. The Centaur’s fall is the pratfall, the descent into materiality from the ‘hazy, misty’ numinous realm outside time. As the films of Jacques Tati suggest, in particular Jour de Fete (1946), the bicycle-‐Centaur, the man-‐machine as imperfect and ‘headlong’ hybrid, offers a return to after and the materiality that is comic rather than tragic. In writing on Beckett in Very Little...Almost Nothing (1997), Simon Critchley’s lines can serve as a gloss to Jour de Fete’s pratfalls: ‘laughter returns us the limited condition of our finitude, the shabby and degenerating state of upper and lower bodily strata, and it is here that the comic allows the windows to fly open on to our tragic condition’ (159). Critchley goes on to suggest that The sardonic laughter that resounds within the ribs of the reader or spectator of Beckett’s work is a site of uncolonizable resistance to the alleged total administration of society, a node of non-‐identity [that] lights up the comic feebleness of our embodiment. (159) The connection between the pratfall, slapstick, the comic insistence upon the ‘feebleness of our embodiment’, and the journey into the space of death, the ‘death trip’ of the INS (and of the time traveller) comes together in a moment of the bicycle ‘smash’, the rider’s vault into materiality over the handlebars. As the traveller face-‐plants into the turf of the year 802,701, the future of hazy Spires and ‘progress’ that he had perceived from the saddle of the chrono-‐cycle disappears. In a sense, in the moment of pratfall the future collapses back on to the present, and the traveller comes to find the divided world that he eventually understands not as a development of our own (the narratives of progress cancelled), but as an analogy of our own, evolution collapsed on to class struggle. In his often brilliant book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, McCarthy suggests that Hergé’s Tintin adventures are themselves full of codes, signs to be read or decoded, transmissions, multiple receptions. He also suggests that the ‘secret’ of Tintin is a radical nothingness, ‘pure negative’ (161), the ‘zero degree of character, of history, of life itself’ (161). The ‘secret’ of The Time Machine is ‘meat’: the meat that the Morlocks used to survive (the Eloi as cattle), and the ‘meat’ that the Traveller demands of his friends upon his return, the secret affinity between Traveller and Morlock that he seeks always to occlude, to disavow. But the secret of ‘meat’, the irresistible materiality of the Traveller cannot escape, is insufficiently hidden, poorly encrypted. The code of ‘meat’ masks a deeper secret, the secret and hidden in plain sight, like the model that the conjuror-‐traveller makes
disappear at the beginning of the novel (making the audience fear that it is all illusion, prestidigitation): a machine that allows (how?) the traveller to traverse time as space, the machine that pitches headlong, that transmits the traveller from home to the terminal beach, and returns him from the heat death to the hearth. (How?) The secret hiding within the pages of The Time Machine is simple, and is revealed when the Traveller, having told his tale, says: ‘“Take it as a lie – or a prophecy”’ (ch.16). The time machine is in fact a bicycle, time is space, and the journey to the space of death, to the realm of the dead or not-‐ dead/ not-‐alive, is simply a pratfall over the handlebars, laughing. Bibliography Banks, Joe, ‘Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11: 2001, 77-‐83 Barthes, Roland, ‘Le Tour de France comme épopée’, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 110-‐120 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Fontana/Collins, 1983), 236-‐250 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Tour de France as Epic’, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Robert Howard (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), 79-‐90. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (1972), trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1993). Beckett, Samuel, ‘Fingal’, More Pricks Than Pricks (1934) (London: Faber, 2010), 15-‐28 Beckett, Samuel, Mercier and Camier (1970) (London: Faber, 2010) Bergson, Henri, On Laughter (1900) (Project Gutenberg) Bukatman, Scott, Terminal Identity: the Virtual subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993) Burroughs, William S., ‘It Belongs to the Cucumbers’, The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (London: John Calder, 1985), 53-‐60 Critchley, Simon, Very Little...Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997) Friedberg, Anna, Window Shopping: Cinema and the postmodern (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993)
Higonnet, Patrice, Paris: the Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 2002) Hofmann, Albert, LSD: My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-‐Hill, 1980) Jarry, Alfred, ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 114-‐121 -‐-‐-‐, ‘The Passion Considered As An Uphill Bicycle Race’, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 122-‐124 -‐-‐-‐, The Supermale (1903), trans Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1999) Kennedy, Jake, ‘Modernist (Im)mobilities: Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and the Avant-‐Garde Bike’, Toutfait.com: the Marcel Duchamp Online Journal, 2005. http://www.toutfait.com/online_journal_details.php?postid=4331. Accessed 5 October 2013 Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (NY: Grove, 1961). http://archive.org/stream/samuelbeckett031321mbp/samuelbeckett031321mbp_djvu.txt. Accessed 5 October 2013 Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-‐1918 (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1983) La Mettrie, Julien de, L’homme machine (1748) http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/mettmanm.pdf Macdonald, Ian, ‘Pulse of the Machine’, The People’s Music (London: Pimlico, 2003), 148-‐152 Marinetti, FT, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, Alex Danchev (ed) (London: Penguin, 2011), 1-‐8 McCarthy, Tom, ‘Calling All Agents’, The Mattering of Matter: Documents for the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 162-‐205 -‐-‐-‐, ‘Declaration on the Notion of the “Future”’, The Mattering of Matter: Documents for the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 266-‐276 McCarthy, Tom, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006) McCarthy, Tom, Transmission and Individual Remix (Jonathan Cape/ Digital Vintage, 2012) Menzies, Janet, ‘Beckett’s Bicycles’, Journal of Beckett Studies 6 (Autumn 1980). http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num06/Num6Menzies.htm. Accessed 5 October 2013 O’Brien, Flann, The Third Policeman (1967) (London: HarperPerennial, 2007)
Raudive, Konstantin, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With The Dead, trans Nadia Fowler (New York: Taplinger, 1971) Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Re-‐ordering of French Culture (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1996) Schwartz, Vanessa R., spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-‐de-‐siècle Paris (Berkeley and os Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) Theweleit, Klaus , Male Fantasies vol.I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. trans. S. Conway, E. Carter, C. Turner (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). Toop, David, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995) Wells, H.G., The Time Machine (1895) (London: Heinemann, 1911) Wells, H.G., The Wheels of Chance (1898) (London: Everyman, 1984) Filmography Cocteau, Jean (dir), Orphée (1950) Tati, Jacques (dir), Jour de Fête (1946) Tati, Jacques (dir), Mon Oncle (1958) Discography Kraftwerk, Autobahn (1975) Kraftwerk, Radio-‐activity (1975) Kraftwerk, Trans-‐Europe Express (1977) Kraftwerk, The Man-‐Machine (1978) Kraftwerk, Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)