Making Words - Poets Machine – Commentary in the name of a machine
Sotirios Bahtsetzis, art theorist, curator
“Sarah, Sarah with what does the world begin? - With speech? - With vision?”
(Jacques Derrida)
(Jacques Derrida)
In the text “What is a dispositif?”, Gilles Deleuze attempts a personal reading of this concept in the same manner with which it develops in the work of another great philosopher of this era, one to whom Deleuze dedicated one of his monographs. According to Deleuze’s interpretation of Michel Foucault’s work, the nearly untranslatable term dispositif becomes a focal point of expression for present philosophical envisagement. According to Foucault, the dispositif (which can be rendered in English as a system or deployment) consists of the interaction between a heterogeneous set of “discourses, institutions, laws and regulations”, which through a specific historical figuration, produces forms of authority and knowledge.[1] To be more precise, the “deployment” includes all the technologies that support this production and formation of authority and knowledge. The other term used often and along with dispositif is apparatus, which is perhaps more appropriate at revealing the “technological” substance of these processes. In this case of course, one needs to comprehend the term technology on a greater scale, not just as applying scientific knowledge to create objects that would benefit us, but –as Martin Heidegger did when he used the neologism “Ge-stell” to describe the technological method of organizing and regulating life– as a fundamental anthropologic component of the modern world.
Architecture is an example of these personal and social technologies. According to Deleuze, when conceived as technologies, architecture like painting and every other system of visual representation function as “machines which make us see and speak”[2] and somehow comprise a type of visual machines and mechanisms which produce verbal enouncements and discourse. (For example, the “prison-mechanism” is a “visual machine used to see without being seen”.) Reversing Deleuze’s dictum, we could say that every visual machine, like architecture and painting, function like Foucaultist machine-prisons, but also that, according to Foucault, prison is not necessarily a negative concept but more likely a necessary state of human subjectivism. Similarly to the importance of a shell for a snail’s survival, the human subject at the end of anthropocentric thinking –or as an anime director would say, “A Ghost in the Shell”, needs these repulsive, perhaps, and often paranoid prison-machines of surveillance, restraint and conservation. And art has provided many such examples like the machine in Kafka’s correctional colony, Morel’s invention in Casares’ homonymous short story, Roussel’s machines in “Locus Solus” and Jarry’s “Supermale”, Duchamp’s glass paintings, Burroughs’ devices in his book “The Electronic Revolution” and numerous architectural fantasies –a constant progression of Piranesi’s “carceri d’ invenzione”–, the machine is always the vessel of this painful process of subjectivism. Accordingly, the term dispositif becomes revealingly explicit in regards to this aspect of interpretation since its etymology refers to the term disposition, to the mental state, to a physical disposition.
Deleuze therefore ponders that since Foucault in his work demonstrated the historical conditions through which the various models (the dispositif-technologies) where introduced, such as general hospitals in the 17th century, clinics in the 18th, prisons in the 19th, the concept of subjectivity in ancient Greece and later in Christianity, all that is left for us to do is to inquire about today’s modern ways of subjectivism in continuance to these models.[3] Deleuze’s question is of course a rhetorical one, since he has already proposed one such modern dispositif of subjectivism; cinematography. Recollecting Heidegger’s prophetic realization that “the fundamental incident of modern times is the conquest of the world as an image”, we only need to look around us and to realize that the modern Foucaultist prison-machine is every image found on the internet and television, in every influential printed material, every film that becomes a model of reality and in every advertisement and logo. As Tom Holert characteristically notes while referring to the American television show “The West Wing”, “the television dispositif can be seen as a technology of government which controls life’s tempo, directs our attention, regulates our state of mind, creates jobs and fuels productivity”.[4] We watch television and we realize that the political and visual authorities have disharmoniously intersected on both a symbolic and operational level. It’s not as much about the power of the image itself, but what Camiel van Winkel calls a “regime of visibility”: “Life through visual means is dominated by a constant pressure to replenish the absent imagery, to make an image out of every non-visual practice and procedure… Images are present everywhere, but as a social force they are less powerful than the imperative of visualization.”[5] Foucault left a wise consignation through his study of the history of sexuality, that is, the history of dispositif sex by saying that we shouldn’t always concede to the directives of this modern god. But what about the directives of the image which strive to overlap the directives of sex as a dispositif of subjectivism? The most suitable aphorism for modern man could be “I am seen, therefore I am”. I exhibit myself to another’s view so as to create my image and to gain power over his time and life. We are therefore living in a new medieval era, in an intermediary stage of human evolution in which, as Foucault firmly states, “man seems to be just an image of a face in the sand, being washed away by the waves”. In this case though, the waves are tied to the media. They are the electronic images on our screens which continuously fade and recompose. So much for the image. What about speech and language? Will they be rescued from the regime of imagery? Perhaps the most distorted idea today would be for someone to create a showcase filled with water, containing the preserved head of Danton which would faintly stir with every touch as described in Roussel’s prophetic world. Today, those heads should belong to the producers of true language, perhaps the heads of poets, placed in showcases filled with water and traveling on a wooden ark from country to country, to places where numerous modern images like this exist –perhaps to major art exhibitions– striving with their narrations, voices and speech to clash with the power of images. There is no guarantee that this unequal struggle will be victorious in the end. Nonetheless, let’s imagine such a “machine of poets”. What kind of function can a machine like that perform? Is it initially a machine which belongs to poets as one of their traits (a poets’ machine), a machine which creates poets (a poet’s machine), a machine which operates on poets or is it a machine of poetry for an audience observing its operation? This is a somewhat tricky question since any machine, regardless of its simplicity, cannot function without its operator. As a machine, a bicycle is comprised of levers, gears, numerous metal parts and the rider himself. In their philosophical “engineering”, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that, “the operator is part of the machine not only during its operation, but also after it”. The paradox in our speculation is that although we can rather easily define the mechanical part of what we called a “machine of poets”, it is impossible for us to do the same with its living part. Strangely, our poets and their traits appear as faces on sand being washed away by the waves. It is speech itself, the voices of the poets’ narrations which distorts their recorded images on the screens of the “Poets Machine” and, thus, poetry can exist as a phonemic fabrication only during the moment of articulation even in a language which is unintelligible to us – I remember hearing Greek, Russian, Serbian, English, French and Italian while in Venice. This linguistic Babel refers to the presence of the narrating voice since no translation can reproduce the initial meaning of the words. Either way, as Derrida writes, “God is not talking to us anymore, he has stopped: the words are our burden now”.[6]
Could it be that this improvised “machine of poets” is presented to us as a “machine”, with the ancient Greek meaning of the word, as a machination? The machination is the improvised low technology of the “Poets Machine” constructed using a method which refers to a bricolage, that is, by using simple tools that were not intended to be used in such a way (a jar with water, a video camera). The images it creates are fundamentally insufficient and disrupt our conventional relationship with images by attacking the contemporary “regime of imagery” and the directive that we should replenish every aspect of human existence with that imagery.
Moreover, the “Poets Machine” reminds us that every live utterance refers to the statutory absence of primal writing, reminding us that every form of poetic speech –as the fundamental expression of this live utterance– is impromptu, balancing between the explicit and implicit, between the absolute and non-language. Regarding the level of language itself, Derrida introduces the aspect of the bricolage and the distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur (a handyman, jack-of-all-trades), saying that “every utterance is generally a bricoleur{…} The engineer who Lévi-Strauss contra poses to the bricoleur would have to create the language in its totality, both syntax and vocabulary. Under this perspective, the engineer is a myth: a subject being the absolute descendant of its speech, creating it whole, being the verb’s father, the verb itself {…} bricolage is a form of fictionalization, we can claim that the engineer is a myth created by the bricoleur.”[7] If we presume that such a linguistic instrument truly exists, then it would be proportionate to every ecumenical, equating, totalitarian and machining speech, and thus it would be a functionalizing alteration. Accordingly, every real machine, like a “machine of poets” is a product of bricolage contradicting conventional systems, compositions and technologies which create and operate such forms of speech.
Notes:
[1] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 194-195.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2007, p. 344.
[3] Ibid. p. 352.
[4] Tom Holert, Regimewechsel. Visual Studies, Politik, Kritik, Bildtheorien. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.), Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 343.
[5] Camiel Van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, p. 15.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 73.
[7] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 443.
Architecture is an example of these personal and social technologies. According to Deleuze, when conceived as technologies, architecture like painting and every other system of visual representation function as “machines which make us see and speak”[2] and somehow comprise a type of visual machines and mechanisms which produce verbal enouncements and discourse. (For example, the “prison-mechanism” is a “visual machine used to see without being seen”.) Reversing Deleuze’s dictum, we could say that every visual machine, like architecture and painting, function like Foucaultist machine-prisons, but also that, according to Foucault, prison is not necessarily a negative concept but more likely a necessary state of human subjectivism. Similarly to the importance of a shell for a snail’s survival, the human subject at the end of anthropocentric thinking –or as an anime director would say, “A Ghost in the Shell”, needs these repulsive, perhaps, and often paranoid prison-machines of surveillance, restraint and conservation. And art has provided many such examples like the machine in Kafka’s correctional colony, Morel’s invention in Casares’ homonymous short story, Roussel’s machines in “Locus Solus” and Jarry’s “Supermale”, Duchamp’s glass paintings, Burroughs’ devices in his book “The Electronic Revolution” and numerous architectural fantasies –a constant progression of Piranesi’s “carceri d’ invenzione”–, the machine is always the vessel of this painful process of subjectivism. Accordingly, the term dispositif becomes revealingly explicit in regards to this aspect of interpretation since its etymology refers to the term disposition, to the mental state, to a physical disposition.
Deleuze therefore ponders that since Foucault in his work demonstrated the historical conditions through which the various models (the dispositif-technologies) where introduced, such as general hospitals in the 17th century, clinics in the 18th, prisons in the 19th, the concept of subjectivity in ancient Greece and later in Christianity, all that is left for us to do is to inquire about today’s modern ways of subjectivism in continuance to these models.[3] Deleuze’s question is of course a rhetorical one, since he has already proposed one such modern dispositif of subjectivism; cinematography. Recollecting Heidegger’s prophetic realization that “the fundamental incident of modern times is the conquest of the world as an image”, we only need to look around us and to realize that the modern Foucaultist prison-machine is every image found on the internet and television, in every influential printed material, every film that becomes a model of reality and in every advertisement and logo. As Tom Holert characteristically notes while referring to the American television show “The West Wing”, “the television dispositif can be seen as a technology of government which controls life’s tempo, directs our attention, regulates our state of mind, creates jobs and fuels productivity”.[4] We watch television and we realize that the political and visual authorities have disharmoniously intersected on both a symbolic and operational level. It’s not as much about the power of the image itself, but what Camiel van Winkel calls a “regime of visibility”: “Life through visual means is dominated by a constant pressure to replenish the absent imagery, to make an image out of every non-visual practice and procedure… Images are present everywhere, but as a social force they are less powerful than the imperative of visualization.”[5] Foucault left a wise consignation through his study of the history of sexuality, that is, the history of dispositif sex by saying that we shouldn’t always concede to the directives of this modern god. But what about the directives of the image which strive to overlap the directives of sex as a dispositif of subjectivism? The most suitable aphorism for modern man could be “I am seen, therefore I am”. I exhibit myself to another’s view so as to create my image and to gain power over his time and life. We are therefore living in a new medieval era, in an intermediary stage of human evolution in which, as Foucault firmly states, “man seems to be just an image of a face in the sand, being washed away by the waves”. In this case though, the waves are tied to the media. They are the electronic images on our screens which continuously fade and recompose. So much for the image. What about speech and language? Will they be rescued from the regime of imagery? Perhaps the most distorted idea today would be for someone to create a showcase filled with water, containing the preserved head of Danton which would faintly stir with every touch as described in Roussel’s prophetic world. Today, those heads should belong to the producers of true language, perhaps the heads of poets, placed in showcases filled with water and traveling on a wooden ark from country to country, to places where numerous modern images like this exist –perhaps to major art exhibitions– striving with their narrations, voices and speech to clash with the power of images. There is no guarantee that this unequal struggle will be victorious in the end. Nonetheless, let’s imagine such a “machine of poets”. What kind of function can a machine like that perform? Is it initially a machine which belongs to poets as one of their traits (a poets’ machine), a machine which creates poets (a poet’s machine), a machine which operates on poets or is it a machine of poetry for an audience observing its operation? This is a somewhat tricky question since any machine, regardless of its simplicity, cannot function without its operator. As a machine, a bicycle is comprised of levers, gears, numerous metal parts and the rider himself. In their philosophical “engineering”, Deleuze and Guattari indicate that, “the operator is part of the machine not only during its operation, but also after it”. The paradox in our speculation is that although we can rather easily define the mechanical part of what we called a “machine of poets”, it is impossible for us to do the same with its living part. Strangely, our poets and their traits appear as faces on sand being washed away by the waves. It is speech itself, the voices of the poets’ narrations which distorts their recorded images on the screens of the “Poets Machine” and, thus, poetry can exist as a phonemic fabrication only during the moment of articulation even in a language which is unintelligible to us – I remember hearing Greek, Russian, Serbian, English, French and Italian while in Venice. This linguistic Babel refers to the presence of the narrating voice since no translation can reproduce the initial meaning of the words. Either way, as Derrida writes, “God is not talking to us anymore, he has stopped: the words are our burden now”.[6]
Could it be that this improvised “machine of poets” is presented to us as a “machine”, with the ancient Greek meaning of the word, as a machination? The machination is the improvised low technology of the “Poets Machine” constructed using a method which refers to a bricolage, that is, by using simple tools that were not intended to be used in such a way (a jar with water, a video camera). The images it creates are fundamentally insufficient and disrupt our conventional relationship with images by attacking the contemporary “regime of imagery” and the directive that we should replenish every aspect of human existence with that imagery.
Moreover, the “Poets Machine” reminds us that every live utterance refers to the statutory absence of primal writing, reminding us that every form of poetic speech –as the fundamental expression of this live utterance– is impromptu, balancing between the explicit and implicit, between the absolute and non-language. Regarding the level of language itself, Derrida introduces the aspect of the bricolage and the distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur (a handyman, jack-of-all-trades), saying that “every utterance is generally a bricoleur{…} The engineer who Lévi-Strauss contra poses to the bricoleur would have to create the language in its totality, both syntax and vocabulary. Under this perspective, the engineer is a myth: a subject being the absolute descendant of its speech, creating it whole, being the verb’s father, the verb itself {…} bricolage is a form of fictionalization, we can claim that the engineer is a myth created by the bricoleur.”[7] If we presume that such a linguistic instrument truly exists, then it would be proportionate to every ecumenical, equating, totalitarian and machining speech, and thus it would be a functionalizing alteration. Accordingly, every real machine, like a “machine of poets” is a product of bricolage contradicting conventional systems, compositions and technologies which create and operate such forms of speech.
Notes:
[1] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 194-195.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2007, p. 344.
[3] Ibid. p. 352.
[4] Tom Holert, Regimewechsel. Visual Studies, Politik, Kritik, Bildtheorien. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.), Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 343.
[5] Camiel Van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, p. 15.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 73.
[7] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Κ. Papagiorgis, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, p. 443.