From Divine Machines to Sex Machines

On James Brown, Live in Rome, 1971

1.

As I have observed in this space before, there are surprisingly few mechanical metaphors in the thousands of pages of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Yet the few there are come at crucial moments. One appears in connection with the famous anamnesis-inducing cake. The narrator relates that when he brings to his lips “a spoonful of tea where I had left a piece of the madeleine to soften”, he does so machinalement. Another occurs in his description of the petit traintrain that makes up Tante Léonie’s daily routine. In this connection the author draws on Saint-Simon (1675-1755), comparing the auntie’s secret little world to the daily “mechanics” of life that that great memoirist and courtier had observed at Versailles under Louis XIV.

To say that the daily ceremonies and meals and consultations and petitions before the king have a “mechanics” of their own is, in the 18th-century sense, to draw at once on multiple historical connotations of the notion in question. The most ancient is the “machine” out of which God sometimes emerges, in classical theater, to save the otherwise hopeless characters towards the end of a drama: the machina as the assemblage of pulleys and ropes and so on that help maintain the sublime illusion of the reality of what transpires on stage. The royal court is plainly a sort of stage too, and its daily motions must be tightly coordinated in part in order to maintain an illusion of royal sublimity. But Saint-Simon also lived through the era of “mechanism” as a movement within natural philosophy, and in his lifetime there appeared books such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme-machine (1747), which went beyond the much more cautious proposal of the previous century, associated above all with the name of René Descartes, that animals are bêtes-machines, and extended this same mechanical analogy (for in the end that is all it is) to our own kind, not just to the motions and passions of our bodies, but even to the most exalted and “highest” faculties of our minds.

Already in the 17th century many of Descartes’s immediate successors were unsatisfied with the reductive simplicity of Descartes’s mechanical model of animals, even if they were generally sympathetic to the idea that in some way or other the mechanical model was the most promising one for making future breakthroughs in the study of animal physiology. G. W. Leibniz, for example, thought animals are machines, but very weird ones. Towards the end of his career he was in the habit of calling them “divine machines”; I myself once wrote a book explaining, among other things, why he used this term. At an earlier phase of his career Leibniz had been in the habit of saying that animals are “hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnical machines of quasi-perpetual motion”. That is, these are machines that you cannot fully account for in terms of the simple “tractoric” (to speak with the German Jesuit Kaspar Schott) principles of pulleys, levers, springs, and so on. You also need to introduce principles borrowed from experimental study of the power of compressed air, or water pressure, or the sort of explosiunculae or “little explosions” you see, for example, in gunpowder.

The “quasi-perpetual” part of this early characterization of animals, in turn, comes from Leibniz’s reflection on the nature of biological reproduction. Even if each individual animal perishes sooner or later, enough of these individuals manage to generate others of their kind to keep the species going in perpetuity. Even if there are strictly speaking no perpetual-motion machines in the physical universe, sexual reproduction, he thinks, justifies the claim that animals get pretty close to that impossible limit. What kind of machines may be said, then, in a certain sense, to live forever? Sex machines.

The next few centuries would witness a great deal of tension, and many ingenious efforts to resolve this tension, between vital phenomena, not least biological generation, on the one hand, and on the other the principles of mechanics that science now generally hoped to extend as far as possible to explain as many natural phenomena as possible. I’ll skip over the greater part of this history —after all, my purpose here is to write about James Brown, and at this point you surely still have no clue as to how I’m going to manage the inevitable audacious segue—, in order to move ahead to the mid-20th century, when science indeed had largely succeeded in showing that, pace Immanuel Kant, there could in fact be “a Newton [or at least several Newtons] for the blade of grass”. That is, by around the 1950s we came to see that we could in fact understand vegetal growth and other such phenomena no less exhaustively than, say, the orbit of a planet or the arc of a projectile.

But unlike the preceding centuries, by the time Watson and Crick reveal the structure of the double helix of the DNA molecule, there is considerable anxiety in the surrounding culture about the prospects for a peaceful coexistence between humans and (other kinds of) machines. That is, at the moment the mechanical analogy of animal and even human existence seems finally to be translating itself into a literal account of what we are, the built environment and the totality of social reality are simultaneously becoming increasingly mechanized. The “mechanics” of the French court under Louis XIV could easily have been experienced as a sort of elegant choreography, just like the royal ballets that same sovereign also sponsored and performed in: the mechanics of the court as an expression of power and an assertion of will. But when Charlie Chaplin gets overwhelmed and chewed up by the Fordist assembly line he’s supposed to be working on in Modern Times (1936), or when the same thing happens to the hapless Lucy Ricardo a few decades later as she and Ethel go to work in a chocolate factory, what we see is the opposite of human sovereignty. We see human beings getting plowed under —comically enough, at least for the moment—, by the machines that were supposed to be helping us to live better. What Modern Times and I Love Lucy are really showing us, if I may be blunt, is that the natural evolution of machines is towards human bondage and death (see Hitler, if you must, on the inspiration he drew from Henry Ford’s assembly lines for his own most diabolical project).

But then something remarkable happens in the 1960s: the sex machine makes a comeback, and asserts, against death, which is to say against the reality of the 20th century, its defiant intention, as one of its great human vehicles puts it, to “stay on the scene”. I want to try to draw out, in what follows, the historical significance of this gesture.