DESIRING MACHINES

More and more the cinematic apparatus has become estranged from the observer, not merely hidden in the projection booth but in the electronic circuits of the VCR or computer (to which the mouse gives only partial access for we are powerless to grasp the inner workings of the machine.

However in our parallel universe of philosophical toys, the body is intimately connected to the apparatus, whether twirling the Thaumatrope or turning the handle of the Nic Talkie. Jonathan Crary would have us believe that this process is dehumanizing as the factory assembly line, "A crucial feature of those optical devices of the 1830’s and 1840’s is the undisguised nature of their operational structure and the form of subjection they entail. (1)I suggest that this tactility which is an essential element of all philosophical toys, is quite the opposite, that the repeated rhythmic movement is a sensual if not downright sexual gesture.
These apparatuses join with us to produce what Linda Williams has called "a carnal density of vision" (2). This carnal density conjuring up the image of some man at the turn of the century cranking the Mutoscope, eyes glued to the peep hole where images of a naked girl, causes him to jerk off or "crank himself" with the other hand. A new desiring machine is born, half human, half cog wheels and naughty pictures. Why not? All I say is that women should not be excluded from this much fun. Indeed women have the added pleasure of doing something even more socially unacceptable. There have been moments when watching home pornographic films from an earlier era, when the women became for me not object of desire but mirror image, virtual alter egos in sexual fantasy.
Perhaps the most vivid explication of the philosophical toy as desiring machine comes in the form of an instruction manual or rather instruction box ,"The Green Box". It contains Duchamp’s blueprints for a hypothetical cinema as thought machine, welding together the human body, the apparatus and the media itself into a whole that gloriously incorporates its own unrealisability.

"The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even". The dream-logic conclusion of the man who peered too long into the pornographic Mutoscope is a cartoon, "…graphic translation of the blossoming into stripping by the bachelors (expressing the throbbing jerk of the minute hand on electric clocks)." Duchamp refers to the moment of orgasm as a "cinematic blossoming".

"The motor with quite feeble cylinders is a superficial organ of the Bride; it is activated by the love gasoline, a secretion of the Bride’s sexual glands and by the electric sparks of the stripping. To show that the Bride does not refuse this stripping by the bachelors, even as she accepts it, since she furnishes the love gasoline and goes so far as to help towards complete nudity by developing in a sparking fashion her intense desire for orgasm." (3)

For a discussion of the body itself as desiring machine that projects mental images with out the aid of any mechanical contraptions see: HYPNOGOGIC CINEMA and
(1) Crary, Jonathan Techniques of the Observer Cambridge: MIT 1990, p.132.

(2) Williams, Linda Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the "Carnal Density of Vision in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video ed. Patrice Petro. Indiana University Press. 1995

(3) Duchamp, Marcel The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even. A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box translated by George Heard Hamilton . Edition Hansjörg Mayer 1960