Counter-machine
“Welcome to the machine!” When Pink Floyd sang this line 50 years ago, the theoretical understanding of machines was in the process of changing fundamentally: away from a primarily technological conceptualisation towards a critical, society-related perspective. While machines had traditionally been understood as technical implementations of a specific operating sequence – “single-task automata”, as one might say – now the idea of a more comprehensive machine structure came into focus: “assemblages”, to use a term coined by “desiring-machine” theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who set the tone at the time. Subjective components played just as important a role in this as institutional, social, technological, etc. ones. In other words, an entire field or “assemblage” of machine parts coupled together and yet repelling each other at times, never interlocking smoothly. “Welcome to the machine” should really mean: welcome to an overall social machinery that may seem abstract at times but actually operates with concrete individual modules. This machinery might have overwhelmed us a long time ago but it still continued to “code” the currents of subjective desire (as Deleuze/Guattari called it).
50 years later, the present can tell us a thing or two about such coding – and it does so, too. For example, in Jefta van Dinther’s production Remachine, based on the experimental arrangement of a comparatively simple mechanical machine, a horizontally rotating grey disc, and five dancers/singers positioned on/towards it. Mind you, the digital present and the associated “datafication” of everything and everyone are present in a symbolic sense rather than in reality. Thus, nearly every explicit reference to our permanent handling of data, which we are inevitably exposed to like a residual organism put on a machine drip, is almost entirely omitted. (The obvious exception is a ballet executed by the ensemble consisting of manual swiping gestures, impressively demonstrating the tactile nature of today’s data manipulation.) And yet the basic constellation of the continually rotating – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – universal wheel and the protagonists on it, striving for physical well-being, point to the aforementioned coding principle: everything that is subjective, indeed, everything that is both individually and collectively physical, is increasingly taken over by an immense overall mechanism, or rather, an “assemblage” of interlocking substructures, that leaves little room for the illusion of autonomous self-determination.
“I am restless, […] I am heavy like a stone”, the polyphonic swelling chorus of the five dancers sings right at the beginning, thus establishing a dialectical component that runs through the entire production – the guiding metaphor of individual life in the information age, as it were: restlessness, an inability to find peace, a state of constant agitation and drivenness – all the things that digital mediality has worked into both the social and the subjective body with unrelenting, seductive vehemence; and at the same time a growing sense of heaviness, of permanent failure or inadequacy in the face of ever faster algorithmic demands in both social media and work contexts. On the basis of this dualism, the collective body of the dancers – itself a kind of finely tuned machine structure made up of individual bodies that remain distinguishable – discloses a fundamental moment of today’s dynamics of subjectivation: being dragged along, at least insofar as the centrifugal force can be defied, and at the same time a helpless, albeit graceful, mounting of resistance that refuses to be cast into the mould of the passive victim. As a result, the group formations, deformations and reformations that continually arise from individual body modulations reveal a “counter-machine structure” that remains committed to the idea of immanence. The singing in the final section, like all the music, is based on superb adaptations of three pieces by Anna von Hausswolff, beguiling us with lines like “Unexpected out of nowhere / Was the truth told for me”. But the “truth” invoked here is beyond any human-machine dualism. Human and mechanical are no longer opposites in that sense, and Remachine underlines this with a stage-production verve, as human and machine bodies (and minds) have long since formed a symbiotic relationship with each other. While it isn’t advisable (or at best results in additional contortions) to stand in the way of the course of things, it isn’t practicable either to regard the mechanical (or the digital) as completely decoupled from us, as matter externally descending upon us, as it were. The mutual entanglements, regardless of which machine generation or phase of humanity one refers to, have always gone deeper than the clear-cut division into (1) cold mechanics on the one hand and (2) warm-hearted, doomed humanity on the other, which, as a result, doesn’t do them justice.
And so, towards the end of Remachine, in ritualistic repetition, echoing in many voices, we hear “Will we fall? Will we fall? Will we fall?” over and over again. Meanwhile, the protagonists, hanging on elastic ropes in a precarious balance, have at least temporarily secured themselves amid the mechanical centrifugal force. More can hardly be expected from a counter-machine structure, as things stand. Welcome to the machine.
Christian Höller is a member of the editorial staff and co-editor of the magazine springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst (springerin.at). Author and (co-)editor of many publications, most recently Ricarda Denzer – ganz ohr / all ears. Audio Trouble, Para-Listening, and Sounding Research, Berlin 2024.