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Peter Gaffney
Dissertation Abstract
Demiurgic Machines
The Mechanics of the Dada Text
In “Demiurgic Machines: The Mechanics of the Dada Text,” I explore the
genealogy of modernity as a set of aesthetic and cultural practices heavily invested in the
metaphorical system of the machine. Beginning with an overview of machine art during
the early part of the 20th century, I proceed to analyze an intercontinental Dada
movement that emerged in the period 1912–1922. Linking this movement to the writers
and texts that inspired it (Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry, but also Max Stirner,
Freud, and the Marquis de Sade), I consider how machines provide a working model for
theories of production, suggesting a “demiurgic” reorganization of human thought and
agency at the level of representation. What is unique about Dada is a strange
amalgamation of word and image that suggests a radically new kind of representation:
one that replaces the discourse of authenticity with a process of inscription that
continuously reinvents the parameters for science, language and the work of art. The new
subjectivity, I conclude, is characterized by hybridity, automatism, multiplicity and a
troubling ambiguity between the self and its technological other.
One example of this shift in artistic production can be found in the works of
Raymond Roussel, a (reluctant) figure of the avant-garde and a key figure for New York
Dada. In his poem Mon Ame, Roussel describes his soul as une étrange usine, identifying
an inexhaustible potential for literary production in the alienated form of Man's
technological other. Roussel's invention of le procédé anticipates Surrealist techniques of
écriture automatique, as well as Freud's schematic for the ego as the enclosing 'surface'
of an autonomous agency in the form of the unconscious. It is best known, however, as
the primary inspiration behind Duchamp's machine art. It was through Roussel (and JeanPierre Brisset before him) that Duchamp arrived at his formula for the Large Glass (La
Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), a production of images based entirely on a
three-way correspondence between optics, kinetics, and the mechanics of language. By
“reading” the Glass through Duchamp's notes (collected and published as La Boîte verte),
we find a continuation of the artist's earlier experiments with movement on the pictorial
surface, this time as a series of phantasmic events activated by the involuntary play of
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signifiers on the surface of language. Throughout Demiurgic Machines, I read the Dada
text as an attempt to situate artistic production on this surface, outside the boundaries of
human subjectivity, yet closely related to the interplay of words and images that
constitutes the thinking subject.
Other topics include: Brisset and les fous littéraires; Breton and automatism;
intersubjective relations in Surrealism and de Sade; Dadaism and the technology of
cinema; scientific discourse in Duchamp’s Boîte verte; Jarry’s cyborg, and other dreams
of a mechanomorphic body; and Deleuze's conception of an impersonal and nonindividual transcendental field, exemplified by the “agency” of machines.
Chapter 1: The Demiurge of New York Dada
Here, I present the field of the dissertation: New York Dada, and other artists involved in this
movement during the years 1912-1922 (principal years of Picabia’s and Duchamp’s machine
art). I try to show how the sudden interest in machines and blueprints intersects with notions
of the demiurge, mythological figure with the power to create—or destroy—the divine order
of the universe. I also develop a criticism of Pierre Arnauld, who describes Picabia as an
artist who has lost faith in the demiurgic powers of the artist (“comment ne pas voir que, dans
le passage de l'âme orphique et de la subjectivité créatrice à l'âme-machine du monde
moderne, une perte rédhibitoire s'est produite, que cette âme réifiée, sclérosée en mécanique
répétitive, n'est plus que le fantôme de l'âme infiniment déliée de l'artiste démiurge...”)1. My
argument involves a close reading of Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction,
analyzing the political implications of his expression “the decay of the aura.”
Chapter 2: Blueprints For a Dada Machine
In this chapter, I develop the argument that New York Dada’s machine art involved a
production on the order of symbols and schemata, rather than an interest in the material
conditions of real human (and machinic) productive forces. By looking at the transition in
Duchamp and Picabia from their association with the Puteaux Cubists to their earliest
experiments in machine art, I demonstate how these artists discovered the medium of the
blueprint—a bridge between the world and its “mental and metaphysical expression,” to use
Picabia’s expression. It is the blueprint, I argue, and not machines properly speaking, that
inspired these artists, and gave them a key to understanding the demiurge, not as a craftsman
of the physical universe, but as a figure of multilplicity at the center of scientific order.
Chapter 3: Duchamp’s Mechanics of Surface
In a close reading of Duchamp’s work during the period 1912-1923, together with related
works and notes, I develop the argument that the Large Glass is itself a kind of blueprint. Yet
it is one where the artist has found and inscribed certain mechanisms for a demiurge
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constantly in motion, constantly reinventing the order of the cosmos. After discussing
Deleuze’s interpretation of Hume, I relate Duchamp’s notion of “a reality which would be
possible” to other inventions of possible worlds, including Descartes’ treatise The World, and
Jarryian Pataphysics (“the science of exceptions and imaginary solutions”).
Chapter 4: How the Machine Speaks (!)
In this chapter, I explore the mechanisms by which language produces—and reproduces—
itself on un champ transcendantal impersonnel et pré-individuel (Deleuze), and the way Dada
depicts these mechanisms through its literary and artistic creations. I also try to understand
the precarious position in which the subject finds itself when faced with a production not of
symbols, but of real material things: an idea of generation that links Lacan's analysis of Judge
Schreber to Guattari's notion of an inconscient machinique, via Picabia's Fille née sans mère.
In conclusion, I compare Villiers' automaton (L'Ève future)—particularly in its demonstration
of an intersubjective mechanism for desire and language—to similar themes in Dada art.
Chapter 5: Machinic Vision and the Cinematic Eye
In the fifth and final chapter, I bring my findings to bear on the techniques of photography
and cinema, with the questions: Is photography a way of seeing? Is the moving image a kind
of consciousness? If Dada discovered an impersonal and non-individual transcendental field
via the mechanics of surface, how did the pioneers of cinematography understand their
production of images on the silver screen? Beginning with a discussion of a 'cinematic
development' in the Large Glass, together with Benjamin's notion that Dada art was a
precursor to cinema, I explore such early filmmakers as Germaine Dulac (La Roue, Disque
927, Thèmes et variations), René Clair (Entr'Acte), Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or, Chien andalou), and
Duchamp himself (Anémic cinéma), as well as Paul Virilio's theories on cinema in relation to
the technology of war (War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception).
1
Arnauld Pierre, Francis Picabia: La Peinture sans aura. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. p.126.