| LOUIS ARMAND TEXTUAL MACHINES: JOYCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE AVANT-GARDE In Joyce, it is the identity of writing which is the victim of an excess of the book (au trop de livre) or of literature (Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard). AVANT-GARDE MACHINES Machine metaphors abound in literature from the earliest times, but have proliferated in European literature since the time of the industrial revolution. Most importantly, however, machine technology has also had a direct and decisive impact not only upon modes of literary production but upon the literary temperament itself. Writers such as Jonathan Swift and William Blake early on responded to the new �mechanistic� view of the universe propounded by Isaac Newton and the Marquis de Laplace, developing a poetic sensibility that was incisive in its ability to critique as well as assimilate the new science and the philosophies born out of it. Blake�s metaphor of an infernal printing house in his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell stood not only for a poetic idea, but also for a poetic practice. Blake literally engraved his poems by means of a caustic technique that seemed to fuse the energy of his writing, his revolutionary politics, and the spirit of technological transformation. In a seemingly direct outgrowth of the Blakean, Romantic idea, modern science and the resultant proliferation of applied technologies projected the image of a world in which the old concept of reality as matter was being replaced by the concept of reality as energy. At the same time artists sought to express this �new� reality in their work�a movement of avant-gardism which reached its peak in the twentieth-century on the eve of the two World Wars and, according to some, achieved its last flowering during the Vietnam conflict. But while this movement is often comprised of disparate and seemingly unrelated, even contradictory, attempts at arriving at new means of expression, it is nonetheless possible to establish a general tendency in the arts which can be described as �technological��from Cubism and Italian Futurism, to the constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, the neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian and Th�o van Doesburg, the architectural functionalism of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, the minimalism of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Samuel Beckett, and the seriality of John Cage, Andy Warhol, Fluxus and the Oulipo. As art critic John Baur has argued: The machine is as old as the wheel, the wings of Icarus or the Trojan horse. But it is only in our century that it has transcended its utilitarian functions and acquired a variety of meanings, aesthetic and philosophical, which are only distantly related to its practical uses. Developing a theme which dates from the Renaissance and beyond, Filippo Marinetti, in the first �Futurist Manifesto� of 1909, spoke of the �metalisation of the human body.� Marinetti�s technological optimism was based upon the prosthetic functions of modern, mechanised industry and warfare, and proposed a radical machine aesthetic to replace the former antiquarianism of nineteenth-century Italy with functional, technological forms. Similarly, Jacob Epstein�s 1914 Vorticist sculpture �Rock Drill� envisioned a mechanthropomorphic figure with genitalia formed from an enormous drill-bit. In 1916 Hugo Ball performed sound poetry at Z�rich�s Cabaret Voltaire, dressed in a Cubist �spacesuit� designed by Marcel Janco. In 1921, the German Dadaist Raoul Hausmann produced a bust of an industrialised head (complete with metallic type, a spring-loaded mechanism, a gauge, a ruler and measuring tape) which he ironically entitled The Sprit of Our Time. More recently, performance-artists like Stelarc have explored the human-machine interface in more radical ways, attending not only to the prosthetic function of machine technologies, but to the signifying function of the (computerised) virtual environment in which the body itself operates, as a �data� environment. At a time when mechanisation has become more often equated with information, technology and language (broadly speaking) have come to be recognised as virtually synonymous. Blake�s poetic genius, the embodiment of creative energy, has become something of an emblematic figure, however sublimated it may seem, of a techno-poetic epoch in which virtual light-speed data processing has reconfigured the concept of the Romantic sublime not as the �mechanisation of spirit,� but through a technological sublimity of endless proliferation which in turn mirrors signifying proliferation: the dispersal of self in a �data stream� which is also the �riverrun� of language. As though in some curious anticipation of this moment of transition, from the Romantic to the technological �sublime,� it was Ada Byron, the mathematician daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who pioneered many of the basic techniques of modern computer programming. In 1833 Byron, otherwise Countess Lovelace, met Charles Babbage with whom she co-operated on the design for an �Analytic Engine� (or difference engine). This innocuous counterpart to the Frankensteinian monstrum of Mary Shelley was in fact a mechanical device capable (at least in theory) of �weaving algebraic patterns� in the form of Bernoulli polynomials and the pertaining �Bernoulli sequence�: B'r=r!Br(O) (r=0,1,2,3,�), a string of terms based upon an integral of statistical probability and actual outcomes (and named for the late seventeenth-century Swiss mathematician Jacques Bernoulli). To this end Byron, working with a machine code comprised of binary sequences, developed methods of �branching� and �looping� which remain today standard techniques in programming. In 1842, Byron suggested that the Analytic Engine �might act upon other things besides number.� But unlike Shelley�s infant terrible, Byron�s prodigy was kept at a strict distance from ideas of artificial intelligence and autopoiesis: The Analytic Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. This strange encounter between the mechanical and aesthetic was itself an outgrowth of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment project, and although its transformation in the twentieth-century takes it well beyond its initial manifestations, it nevertheless preserves a trace of a �primitive� modernity. There is something of the novelty of a prehistoric child�s toy which persists even in Vladimir Tatlin�s utilitarian manifesto �New Way of Life� (1918-19), with its exhortations towards pure functionalism, or in Fernand L�ger�s 1920 painting The Mechanic, or Nikolai Tarbukin�s 1923 From the Easel to the Machine, or in L�szl� Moholy-Nagy�s 1923 kinetic sculpture Light-Space Modulator with its echoes of Denis Diderot�s 1751 �stocking machine� and Swift�s 1726 prototypical random text generator (�for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations�). But while the advent of modern science may have brought to an end the tradition of the Renaissance man (artist, philosopher, scientist, soldier, explorer, politician, and so on), it also gave rise to a new tradition�that of the �avant-garde,� a tradition of critical experimentation within separate, if mutually effected and sometimes mutually antagonistic, disciplines. The result of this change has not only been noticeable in the growth of �specialisation� within individual disciplines, but also in the tendency to focus more and more upon the basic assumptions of each of these disciplines, and upon the means or media in which each discipline pursues its particular activities. The physical sciences have become far more critical of classical discourses on the nature of matter, space and time, and have increasingly focused upon the normativity and ideology of its self-determining models, and the way these models often pre-empt or pre-determine the outcomes of experimental observation. In literature and philosophy there has been a similar focus upon the affective nature of theoretical discourse, and upon the ways in which conventions of representation function in determining the nature of critical and analytical paradigms and so on. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, writers and philosophers alike began to consider how language, or poetics, might not only describe (let alone account for) the modern �technological condition,� but that language could in fact be seen as contributing to that condition and even as being technological itself�not simply as a metaphor, but as a determinant. Paul Val�ry, in �La conqu�te de l�ubiquit�,� argued that this was a necessary and inevitable development, and that it remains implicit to the very idea of �modernity�: Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in as ancient a craft as the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bring about an amazing change in our very notion of art. It was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, however, who offered perhaps the most succinct statement about the relationship between poetics and technology. In his 1953 essay �The Question Concerning Technology,� Heidegger argues that �techn? belongs to bringing forth, to poi?sis; it is something poetic,� thereby suggesting the very rootedness of technology in language, and vice versa. While Swift had satirised mechanisation as the arbitrary and �soulless� relationship of matter to meaning, modern writers began to think of a different type of mechanics�one which described, in fact, the very conditions of meaning. As the na�ve ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries slipped further into the past, the tendency to perceive mechanisation either in utopian or nihilistic terms diminished. Perhaps the first significant signs of this came with the critical writings of Walter Benjamin, whose influential essay �The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction� was framed by a materialist view of contemporary urban culture and by the way in which human experience had adapted to the new social conditions brought about as a result of European colonialism, global trade, mass manufacture, and the First World War. For Benjamin, the apotheosis of mechanical reproduction was film: �For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking through the lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.� It is not surprising, then, that Arnold Hauser, in his monumental and largely overlooked Social History of Art, seeks to identify machinic elements in the work of James Joyce, in particular Ulysses, with the technology of film. According to Hauser, in Joyce�s text: The Bergsonian concept of time undergoes a new interpretation, an intensification and a deflection. The accent is now on the simultaneity of the contents of consciousness, the immanence of the past in the present, the constant flowing together of the different periods of time, the amorphous fluidity of inner experience, the boundlessness of the stream of time by which the soul is borne along, the relativity of space and time, that is to say, the impossibility of differentiation and defining the media in which the mind moves. In this new conception of time almost all the strands of the texture which form the stuff of modern art converge: the abandonment of plot, the elimination of the hero, the relinquishing of psychology, the �automatic method of writing� and, above all, the montage technique and the intermingling of temporal and spatial forms of the film. Contrary to the opinion of Sergei Eisenstein, who insisted upon the filmic limitations of Joyce�s writing, Hauser argues that Joyce�s use of montage achieves a level of aesthetic autonomy comparable to that of film, suggesting, as Marshall McLuhan had earlier done, that Joyce�s text represented a convergence of media that translate the �real world� (the �stable fixity of realist writing�) into the �reel world� (FW 064.25-6). In Hauser�s view, however, the �forms of juxtaposition and simultaneity into which the non-simultaneous and the incompatible were pressed, have often been merely the expression of a desire to bring unity and coherence, certainly in a paradoxical way, into a world suspended between two incongruous epochs.� This negative hermeneutic tendency in the face of modern technology is a recurrent theme in recent criticism of the various neo-avant-gardes (versus the �counter-discursive and anti-institutional function� of the historical avant-garde which Peter B�rger describes), and itself marks a reactionary development in the reception of Joyce�s work within the academy. For Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, this has had to do with Joyce�s concern, precisely, with the �unpresentable� and the normativity of concepts like �unity� and �coherence,� thus dispensing with the traditional academic pieties. According to Lyotard: Joyce allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his writing itself, in the signifier. The whole range of available narrative and even stylistic operations is put into play without concern for the unity of the whole. [�] The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given; rather they appear as academic forms, as rituals originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward. It is not surprising, either, that references to Joyce appear at a crucial moment in Lyotard�s �report� on knowledge, The Postmodern Condition, in the final section of that book entitled �What is Postmodernism?� Joyce, as an exemplary figure for Lyotard, can also be viewed as exemplary of a certain type of historical avant-gardism. Echoing B�rger, Lyotard states that: A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that the work and text have the character of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realisation (mise en �uvre) always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo). For Lyotard it is precisely this �unpresentable,� the normative object of an institutional exclusion, which defines a fundamental aspect of the postmodern. This, in large part, repeats the assertions of B�rger�s Theory of the Avant-Garde, suggesting that historical avant-gardism and the postmodern are largely co-terminous with what J�rgen Habermas refers to as the project of �modernity.� �The postmodern,� Lyotard argues, �would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.� In this way, �a work can only become modern if it is first post modern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.� ERGONOMIC MACHINES The orientation of the modernist project may generally be said to belong to a series of technological moments, inaugurated by the industrial revolution and sustained by the Enlightenment and the subsequent shifts in social consciousness regarding ideas as fundamental as those of rationality, space and time, and of the more tangible consequences of mechanised production: the political and industrial transformation of landscapes and societies, the evolution of mass warfare, economics, trade and transport, the development of new urban and commercial architecture, sanitation, communications, energy and so on. The use of new construction materials like glass and steel gave rise to new conceptions of building and a new architectural aesthetics based upon functionality. The result was previously inconceivable structures like Joseph Paxton�s monumental Crystal Palace, as well as to more �functional� architecture, like London�s Victoria and St Pancras Stations, New York�s Brooklyn Bridge, and seemingly impossible buildings like the Eiffel Tower and the Galerie des Machines . Signalling a trend that came to transform the concept of architecture, the Galerie des Machines was designed by a team comprising only one architect, Charles-Louis Ferdinand Dutert, but three engineers, led by Victor Contamin. The building itself, comprising enormous steel arches whose supports seemed hardly to be fixed to the ground at all, the Galerie des Machines bore greater resemblance to an enormous engine room than to a traditional building, and was referred to at the time as a �disconcerting industrial cathedral.� Measuring 422 metres in length, 114 in width, and 47 in height, the Galerie enclosed a total of 15 acres of exhibition space, and its most extensive exhibit was fittingly devoted to Thomas Edison�s 493 inventions. Public buildings such as the Galerie posed a challenge to artists at the turn of the century, whose priority it became to find a vocabulary capable of creatively engaging with a world of radically new forms. Artists like Robert Delauney, and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, were amongst the first to grapple with these problems. Likewise the Italian Futurists Filippo Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, and the Russian Constructivists, Suprematists and Rayonists. But as art critic Robert Hughes has noted, among all the symbols of the new technological sensibility, none was more ubiquitous than the Eiffel Tower. Unlike the Galerie des Machines which (as with Paxton�s Crystal Palace) was designed as an exhibition space, the Eiffel Tower served as a very different kind of space. Its elevation of 300 metres at the time of completion made it the tallest man-made structure in the world and directed the viewer�s attention towards yet another, future frontier of discovery and exploration. Its vertical design symbolised the technological aspirations of the time, but also a new conception of functional space which no longer needed to be tied to the earth, to horizontality, and thus to a materialist conception which had determined the formal expression of technological production for millennia. To the contrary, the Eiffel Tower�s sheer verticality suggested the limitless possibilities of human aspiration, and in may ways symbolised a type of historico-dialectical overcoming of the legacy of Babel. As the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in his poem �Zone,� in Alcools: At last you are tired of this old word. O shepherd Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity Here, even the automobiles seem to be ancient Only religion has remained brand new, religion Has remained as simple as the aerodrome hangers [�] It�s God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday It�s Christ who climbs in the sky better than any aviator He holds the world�s altitude record Pupil Christ of the eye Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows what he�s about, And the century, become a bird, climbs skywards like Jesus. In the 1890s �the most spectacular thing about the Eiffel Tower,� Hughes tells us, �was not the view of the Tower from the ground. It was seeing the ground from the Tower.� While the photographer Nadar had taken pictures of Paris from a hot air balloon in 1856, the most elevated view of Paris available to most Parisians before the opening of Eiffel�s monument, had been the gargoyle gallery of the Notre Dame cathedral. When the tower opened to the public in 1899 thousands rode in the elevators to take in the panoramic, aerial view, in which the �once invisible roofs and now clear labyrinths of alleys and streets� became suddenly available to the eyes of these new observers, and Paris became, as Hughes says, �a map of itself, a new type of landscape [...] based on frontality and pattern, rather than on perspective recession and depth.� Along with the experience of locomotive travel, telecommunications and mass media, this revolutionary architecture of the sky had a major impact upon the way in which ordinary people, as well as artists and philosophers, perceived the world. Not only the objects in the world, but the very manner in which the world was experienced, seemed to undergo radical changes. Commenting on the impact of such changes upon modernist art in general, Arnold Hauser points to a new conception of space and time, �whose basic element is simultaneity and whose nature consists in the spatialising of the temporal element.� For writers like Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, this conception was literal (simultan�isme being a term both claimed in application to their own work and to modern life generally), and from Cubism to Surrealism the phenomenon of simultaneity permeated the arts. Echoing the words of Paul Val�ry, the Cubist painter Fernand L�ger wrote in 1914: �If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has made this necessary.� But this consequentialist argument is not entirely valid. At least since Arthur Rimbaud�s exhortation to be absolument moderne, the avant-garde had pursued a project no less radical than that of industry itself in exploring new possibilities of cultural production. However, the most significant transition in the approach of the avant-garde was signalled by the onset of the First World War and the subsequent shift from the early need to represent a technologically transfigured, outward reality, towards an awareness of the transfiguration of individual experience: the machine within. Consequently, technology changed from being a mere spectacle or utility, to defining a basic experience of reality, both collective and private. The distinction between the prosthetic function of the machine and a somehow organic function began to be blurred. The Swiss architect Charles-�douard Jeaneret (otherwise known as Le Corbusier), described dwelling spaces as �machines pour habiter.� The new �International Style� that grew out of Le Corbusier�s ideas focused upon efficiency: the efficiency of the working body translated into the mechanised efficiency of pre-fabricated housing. �Je ferai des maisons,� Le Corbusier had exclaimed, �comme on fait des voitures!� Le Corbusier�s interest in structural harmony led him to devise the �Modulor,� a measuring principle which combines harmonious mathematical relationships with the proportions of the human body. Judicious use of the Modulor scale would enable an architect to �harmonise� every element in a building with the whole�a type of apparent architectonics that resembles Joyce�s own interest in the relationship of the body to architecture�a theme that is both neo-Platonic (the body as dwelling place of the soul) and Heideggerean (language as dwelling place of man). The �modular,� as a metonym for the scale and dimensions of the human body�s functional topology, has come to resemble a type of �interface� which extends, rather than encloses, the functional body. The modular environment is no longer the mere simulation of a habitat, closed off from a technological exterior, rather it projects the body through a technological matrix, in what might be described as a moment of signifying substitution. As theorists from Julia Kristeva to Paul Virilio have variously noted, this �interface� is also a text. And in this sense, just as a new empirical tendency seems to arise as the counter-formulation of a technological metaphysics, it may be possible to identify something like an �ergonomics��a theory of work (ergon) which is the work of signification itself, between a �total� discursive environment and the �insistent atopics of the parergon.� As Jean-Michel Rabat� has pointed out with regard to the technology of the �book,� Finnegans Wake: �The metaphor of the machine describes not only the book�s theoretical functioning, but also the labour which has constructed it.� Or as Joyce himself puts it: �ergons irruminate the quantum urge� (FW 167.07). MACHINE AESTHETICS When the first mass produced personal computers had begun to come off the production line in the 1970s, this hyper-mechanical reinvention of literacy appeared to signal a new and seemingly �ultimate� stage in a process that had begun even before the industrial revolution, with William Caxton and the printing press of Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth-century. But this metamorphosis was not simply one of mechanisation, rather it was the outcome of an entire poetics which, as Roland Barthes argues, had achieved its first succinctly �modernist� formulation with the French poet St�phane Mallarm� towards the end of the nineteenth-century, but had grown out of a tradition reaching back through the Symbolists to the late-Romantic poets, and through them to the Renaissance and the Classical world. At the same time contemporary developments in applied technology were rendering such a formulation inevitable. By the time of Joyce�s linguistic experiments in Finnegans Wake, the machinic or rather technological refigurement of the �organic� conception of language had already been accomplished. What remained for Joyce was to radicalise this �refigurement� in terms of an essential condition of language itself. In Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication, Donald Theall similarly points to Joyce�s writing, and above all Finnegans Wake, as emblematic of a techno-poetic transformation. For Theall, Joyce�s work not only encapsulates the sense of a new �era� of technology, culture and communication, but in fact mediates our understanding of this era and of its consequences for contemporary culture. In this way Finnegans Wake can be regarded as a type of matrix. As Geoffrey Bennington has similarly noted in regards to the work of Jacques Derrida: �It is not at all by chance that Derrida talks of Joyce�s book in terms of supercomputers, nor that his thought should communicate in an essential way with certain discourses on so-called artificial intelligence.� Theall makes an analogous point: Finnegans Wake signalizes a whole new relationship with language, with audience, and with the everyday world. Joyce anticipated the age of the microcomputer and the micro�s easy relationship with telecommunications, while also dramatizing certain developments which were and would be taking place in poetry and the arts as a result of the dramatic socio-economic, cultural and technological changes which had started in the mid-nineteenth century. During roughly the second half of the nineteenth-century technological changes rapidly and dramatically accumulated. Telegraphy, the telephone, photography, the typewriter, the rotary press and electro-magnetic power were all developed. In 1844 Samuel Morse successfully ran a telegraph wire from Baltimore to Washington, while in 1870 a telegraph cable was laid between England and France. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell developed telephony, while in 1878 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and in 1879 the incandescent lamp with a carbon filament. In 1880 Edison installed the first electric railway and in 1881 the first electric power plant. The advent of serviceable electricity alone signalled an aesthetic transformation which would render the vitalistic distinctions between the organic and the inert increasingly tenuous. Similarly the recording and animation of images, and the implied potential for simulated experience of all kinds, radically altered the perception of spatial and temporal limits, the boundary between human and machine, body and prosthesis, and indeed the very nature of reality itself. The Baudelairean semblable found a new incarnation in Joris-Karl Huysmans�s L�-bas, Louis Boussenard�s Le Secret de Monsieur Synth�se and the cult of simulationism. The classical opposition of physis and techn? was further eroded in 1883 when the first synthetic fibre was produced, heralding a future age of modern alchemy in which the great chain of being might be rent at last. Casting off the remnants of mystery and mysticism, science yielded up the previously impossible to the expansive banality of an emerging consumer culture. It performed the deceivingly uncomplicated task of rendering the miraculous as something entirely ordinary, and as it did so became increasingly pervasive and at the same time increasingly inconspicuous. Amongst the miracles of technology which immediately entered into an everyday language of the �contemporary� was photography. In 1885 coated photographic paper transformed the mechanical reproduction of images into a straightforward and commonplace procedure. By 1887 Eadweard Muybridge had published his photographic study of motion, entitled Animal Locomotion, revealing what later critics like Rosalind Krauss have come to refer to as the �optical unconscious.� The omniscience of the camera�s eye seemed to transform the medieval notion of the omniscience of god as the final outcome of Renaissance humanism. But unlike humanism, the mechanical eye defined a �technological unconscious,� and the Cartesian solipsism, like its deistic counterpart, was shown to be merely another form of deus ex machina. For critics like Benjamin, photography abolished the mystical aura of the Romantic cult of �personality,� and redefined presence as the autonomous relation of light and movement, described by the aperture and lens of a camera. This notion changed the idea of seeing itself, from the subjective, or psychological, to the material. Moreover, it tied visuality (as the dominant paradigm of Western knowledge) to all other fields of mechanisation. While machines accelerated the capacity for movement and locomotion, photography provided the analytical means of seeming to capture movement itself in stasis: the first visual medium of the present. It was the animation of the static image, however, which completed the transformation of mystical aura into material attribute. In 1894 the cinematograph and the gramophone disc were successively manufactured, thus transferring to both image and sound something like a technological anima. Within a century the advent of digitalisation would further radicalise this break, reducing the visual (and verbal) medium to bits of coded �information.� When Wilhelm R�ntgen discovered x-rays in 1895 and Guglielmo Marconi invented radio telegraphy, technology similarly revealed a capacity to extend verbal and visual media beyond the apparent limits of visibility and audibility, exposing to view the internal organisation of the body and reducing speech to the frequency and amplitude of waves propagated invisibly through unbounded space. By the turn of the twentieth-century the Lumi�re brothers had begun exploring projected moving pictures (a technique patented by Auguste Lumi�re in 1895). Before the end of 1903 Marie Curie had discovered radium, Marconi had completed the first transatlantic radio broadcast, and the Wright Brothers had developed powered flight. In 1905 Albert Einstein articulated the theory of relativity and the law of mass-energy equivalence, while Henry Ford initiated a new phase in the history of mass mechanisation by developing the assembly line for the production of model-T automobiles. As Robert Hughes has put it: �one need not be a scientist to sense the magnitude of such changes. They amounted to the greatest alteration of man�s view of the universe since Isaac Newton.� Or, as the French writer Charles P�guy remarked in 1913: �the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.� By the first decade of the twentieth-century the fact of this change and its impact upon all aspects of Western life was undeniable. In painting and literature these changes were also evident, no longer as points of Luddite resistance or as spectres of doom, but as the basic condition of the aesthetic apprehension of the world at large. Yet while mechanisation and industrial transformation are phenomena that have preoccupied much of the European artistic community since the end of the sixteenth-century, it remained the advent of electricity which continued to have the most radical impact upon a shared experience of a social reality. From Marinetti�s Futurist manifesto to the ironic assemblages of Marcel Duchamp (La mari�e mise � nu par ses c�libataires, m�me), electro-mechanical devices became emblematic of a basic condition of existence, and hence of aesthetic production. Marinetti�s emphatic prose conveys the radical nature of this impact: We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that bestride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that snort the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels stamp upon the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers clamour in the wind like banners and seem to roar like an enthusiastic crowd. Joyce himself was fascinated by the seemingly unlimited linguistic possibilities emerging from and alongside these new technologies. For Joyce, machines, machinery and engineering comprised both the material of the world around him and his �instruments of composition.� Throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake there appear terms and metaphors borrowed from all branches of the pure and applied sciences, as well as from contemporary European and North American popular culture. In 1909 Joyce himself was involved in establishing the first cinematograph in Dublin, named the Volta, and by 1922, when Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake, mechanisation, electricity and electrification were already central aspects of everyday life. In 1925, the year before Joyce began Finnegans Wake, John Logie Baird invented television, the apotheosis of consumer mass culture. And by 1936, Charlie Chaplin�s Modern Times had chronicled the post-institutionalisation of Fordism and the cult of mechanical reproduction, in a serio-comic rendering of Aldous Huxley�s 1932 Brave New World. At the same time Chaplin�s film signalled a transformation of cinema and mass visual media from technological spectacle into technological autocritique. As Theall has pointed out, the broad implications of these changes became the focus of a whole generation of writers, but above all of Joyce. By the eve of the Second World War, just as it had on the eve of the First, a new avant-garde poetics had begun to emerge, signalled by the publication of Finnegans Wake on May 4, 1939. Less than thirty years later, in 1963, the Wake�s incisive, indeed formative, influence upon contemporary techno-culture, was appreciably signalled when Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed the term �quark� (FW 383.01) from Joyce�s text to designate the fundamental constituent of the nucleon�an appropriate tribute to Joyce�s own �atomistic� approach to language. The technological nature of Finnegans Wake could in itself be ascribed to a particular synthesis of ideas current amongst the European literary and scientific �avant-gardes� at the time Joyce was writing. This synthesis, in effect, was of several dominant oppositional tendencies, from idealism and materialism, to functionalism and expressionism, to lyrical and geometrical abstraction, and so on. Figures such as Paul C�zanne and Adolf Loos, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud and Werner Heisenberg, can all be seen as pioneers of this broadly synthetic approach to language, aesthetics, and the social and physical sciences. But at the time Joyce was composing Finnegans Wake, this approach had come to be most fully embodied in the institution that was known as the Bauhaus. Intended as �a consultation centre for industry and the trades� by its first director, architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus (originally located in Weimar, but later, and more famously, at Dessau) exemplified the tensions that existed in European intellectual and artistic circles between the concepts of �applied� and �pure� art. Among its activities the Bauhaus published the writings of artists like Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich, and Gropius attempted to establish, after 1925, a basis for all design in the broad synthesis of the theories of de Stijl and Constructivism. Artists and architects such as Th�o van Doesburg, Johannes Itten, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at one time or another bore direct or indirect influence upon the international emergence of the Bauhaus style, in which an expressionist metaphysics was gradually sublimated within a more austerely rational one, dominated by ideas originating in architecture and industrial design. For Moholy-Nagy, �technology� could thus be defined as �the invention, construction and maintenance of the machine.� Or, as van Doesburg insisted: Since it is true that culture in its widest sense means independence of Nature, then we must not wonder that the machine stands in the forefront of our cultural will-to-style [�]. Consequently, the spiritual and practical needs of out time are realised in constructive sensibility. The new possibilities of the machine have created an aesthetic expressive of our time, that I once called the Machine Aesthetic. But this aesthetic, which can only with difficulty be thought according to the opposition between nature and artifice, physis and techn?, the sensible and the intelligible, and so on, poses a challenge to the very conception of the machine. For van Doesburg this may be explained in terms of �constructive sensibility� and �will-to-style.� At the same time, the notion that culture stands for an independence from, or of, nature can also be thought in terms of an exacerbation of physical processes, beyond the purely mechanistic to the technological as such. As Theall notes, Joyce�s own use of the term techn? works against any such oppositional tendency, emphasising a �machinic� aspect inherent in nature, not as a prosthesis, as Aristotle suggests, �to produce what nature does not produce,� but as the basis of production itself. Yet if Joyce viewed nature as �machinic,� that is not to say that nature is �technologised,� or that it is subject to technology, nor that technics is �organicised,� which would simply introduce a reversible mimetic element, orientated, once more, by the exteriorisation of one of its terms. According to Theall: Joyce associates art as techn? with the artist as a constructor and, recognizing the classical affinity of the arts and the proto-technology of the crafts, he carries his conception of the artist as engineer forward into the post-Enlightenment eras of mechanization and electrification. But a post-technological assembler is of necessity a comic, satiric parodist. While Joyce is intrigued by tools and machines of by electricity and photochemistry, his satiric critique is directed towards the spirit of technology and the fetishization of organization. But while Joyce�s �critique� of the �spirit of technology� may appear to work counter to the principles of what Theall terms �the fetishization of organization,� this is realised as a particular type of �satire,� as an excessive, inflationary solicitation of technology. That is to say, of a hyper-mediated �organization� in the form of an architectonics whose exacerbated consonantia would render a totalisation of structure impossible. It is not surprising, then, that the architectural preoccupation of the Bauhaus has particular analogies in the work of Joyce. There are numerous architectural themes that appear throughout Finnegans Wake, but it is the particularly technological aspect of this �architectonic� approach which is of relevance to Joyce�s project as a writer. According to Gropius�s 1919 �Manifesto of the Bauhaus�: �The ultimate aim of all creative activity is building.� In one way or another this is true, but it might also be expressed in terms of bringing-forth, of poi?sis. In 1923, Gropius made clear the link between this sense of building and contemporary developments in machine technology, underlining the artist�s duty to assimilate industrial means and materials in the creation of new works. For Gropius, this process of assimilation became the overriding concern. �The Bauhaus,� he insisted, �believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.� And this too can be taken to describe the impetus of Joyce�s project in Finnegans Wake�of �coming to terms� with technology. � Louis Armand, 2001 |