Notes on Machines

The origin of the word machine is the Greek mekhané, which means “contrivance” or some “artificial means” of accomplishing a given end. The Greeks spoke a lot about “irrigation machines” and “oil-pressing machines,” which makes some sense, given the historical importance of olive production in that region. The term mekhané could also cover less practical matters, such as the “arts of Zeus” (mekhanaís Dios in the Greek) and a theater crane that could produce the illusion of flight. In general, one might say that the Greek term mekhané referred to any artifice, gimmick, or tool designed to help achieve some end, especially when nature has presented obstacles. Perseus using the reflection in his shield to cut off the Gorgon’s head is a good example of mekhané. In the Odyssey, in fact, Homer describes Odysseus as a “master of tricks” or polymekhanos.

In Latin, the term machina expands the semantic range of mekhané a bit to comprehend whole systems and networks, like what one finds in book five (vv.95-96) of Lucretius’s De rerum natura: “though held in place for many years, one day it will all come apart, that great mass and machine of the world” (una dies dabit exitio, multosque per annos sustentata ruet moles et machina mundi). Here Lucretius, borrowing from Presocratic atom theory, sees all matter—from whole planets down to our briefest thoughts—as an assemblage, a “machine” of atomic parts (atomos meaning “indivisible” in Greek). As Lucretius points out (somewhat ominously) this “machine of the world” has managed to hold together for many years, but it will inevitably come apart one day and revert to its original state of flow. The known universe for Lucretius is but an assemblage of atoms, a temporary pause in flow, and nothing more. It’s worth mentioning, even if in passing, that the word in Greek for the form that these assemblages take—understood as a temporary interruption of flow—is ruthmós, or rhythm. Rhythm then is the form that these machines take; machines that emerge from flow and work principally to divert subsequent flow. Following this logic, a dam or a water mill would thus be a kind of iconic example of Greco-Latin machine. Greek thinkers after Plato would conceive of rhythm quite differently, and the Romans would follow suit (referring to it as numerus); but the Latin idea of machina does come tantalizingly close to the earlier Greek concept.

The term máquina seems to have made its way into Iberian Romance vernaculars early in the sixteenth century. In Portuguese, it was a learned term commonly used to refer to the cosmos, as in “a máquina do universo” and Luís de Camões’s famous “máquina do mundo” in canto 10 of his epic, Os Lusíadas. It could also speak to an ordered assemblage, as in the “máquina de ministros” (assemblage of ministers) that João de Lucena found working in the Chinese court in 1600. There were also the various “máquinas de guerra” then in development that similarly relied on the assembling of various components into a lethal whole.  As a kind of shorthand, we could say that Portuguese usage appears to have been predominately learned and largely, though not entirely, in agreement with Lucretius.  

In Spanish, one finds similar treatment, with “máquina del mundo” and “máquina del universo” being perhaps the most common forms one finds in textual sources from the early modern period. The striking exception here, albeit a later one, is Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, in which the term máquina appears no fewer than 21 times, and in nearly all cases referring to different types of assemblages: stories, enchantments, architecture, and elaborate deceptions. These are all pretty much Cervantes’s stock in trade, and so we might justifiably refer to him as, more than anything, an accomplished machinist or, like Odysseus, a polymekhanos. In all these cases, disparate parts have been brought together (by God or humans) to form a constellation or system that redirects energy to achieve a certain end. Machines here are either the cosmos itself (created by God) or, on a smaller scale, artificial mediating means (created by humans). 

A few years ago, my friend Marília Librandi pointed out to me (and others in attendance at a Stanford Center for Latin American Studies event) that the fishing net is an excellent example of a machine. In a very basic sense, it is an artificial (i.e., human-made) assemblage designed to catch fish: a “máquina de pesca.” The question, however, is what the fishing net is an assemblage of. Of string? Of weights? In the preface to his final collection of short stories, published in 1967, Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa offers a definition. A net, he says, is “uma porção de buracos, amarrados com barbante” (‘a bunch of holes held together by string,’ 21). Going one step further, he adds: “cujo paradoxo traz-nos o ponto-de-vista do peixe” (‘a paradox that provides us with the point of view of the fish,’ 21). A fish, after all, only sees the holes (not the string) and so is caught. We’re thus left with a sort of riddle: the fishing net, a very simple, even primitive machine, as an assemblage of holes, an ordering or conditioning of openness and flow that allows us to catch fish. A “machine of holes” in the early modern sense. If this seems counter-intuitive, then try to answer the following question: If you tear a hole in a net, does it now have more holes in it or fewer?

There are other examples of this principle at work. Let us take the human heart. As we learned in high school biology class, the right side of the heart receives de-oxygenated blood from the body. It then pumps this blood to the lungs, where the latter picks up a fresh supply of oxygen. Oxygenated blood then returns to the left side of the heart and is pumped back to the body. We often refer to the heart as a pump, and this certainly works. But like the fishing net, the heart can also be defined as a collection of holes (four for mammals, three times as many for cockroaches) held together by cardiac tissue. As Lucretius might put it, the heart is yet another temporary assemblage of atoms that exists to redirect flow in some way (in this case, the flow of blood).

What happens when we look at other machines as systems of holes? As apertures and nodes in networks of outward-looking redirection? And what if, more broadly, our world is made up entirely of machines? The university as a machine, culture as a machine, nature as a machine, and even my innermost self as a machine driven to make connections with other machines. Aristotle describes us as “social animals” by nature (ho anthropos phusei politikon zôon), and an expanded understanding of “machine” might help us to explain why this is so.

At the macro-level, we know that the universe itself is a vast, string-like network of gravity-rich dark matter to which planets and stars cling, but it is also organized around vast holes of dark energy—like a net or a spider web. As the NASA website explains it: “Roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest—everything on earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter—adds up to less than 5% of the universe.” Unlike the fish, all we see is the string, or to be more precise, tiny drops of water on the string. The machine of the world, it turns out, is a net—a machine of holes, and by examining just the string (as in actor-network theory), we get at only the smallest fraction of what is there. The approach I’m suggesting is perhaps somewhat metaphysical, but then in literary studies, with all its talk of magic and paradox, this isn’t necessarily a problem.

Readers of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are likely aware of where I’m going with all this talk of machines, so it’s time to say a few words about what “machine” means in their 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The main target of their criticism is Freudian psychoanalysis, which they consider overly committed to Oedipal structures of heteronormativity, the nuclear family, and the suppression of human desire in the service of capitalist notions of productivity. In the traditional scheme of things, we’re taught that desire is based on lack and that we—enduring and discrete—inevitably always want what we don’t have. This has become something like common-sense over the past twenty years, especially insofar as California’s Silicon Valley has become an engine of both insatiable desire and seemingly endless economic growth. Even as I say all this, I admit that it’s difficult for me to think outside of this fundamental supply-and-demand approach to desire. I’ve been taught since birth that desire is dependent on an object, one that I don’t already possess. So how can I understand desire to be anything but a pull toward a constantly receding horizon that I can point to but never actually grasp? The iPhone 12, the iPhone 13, the iPhone 14, and so on to infinity. Or Christopher Columbus in the Americas.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the conventional notion of desire that I’ve just described is essentially a Eurocentric folk theory (like the sovereign self) and a perverse one at that. As they argue, something very similar to the Lucretian concept of machina can serve as a powerful model for non-Oedipal desire, a conceptual mekhané that frees us from the established (at least since Freud) economy of distance, lack, and suppression. As they see it:

It functions everywhere, at times without break, at times discontinuously. It breathes, it heats, it eats. […] What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines, and not metaphorically: machines within machines, with their couplings, their connections. An organ-machine is connected to a source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. […] In this way, we are all bricoleurs: each with our little machines. An organ-machine for an energy-machine: constant flows and interruptions.

Here talk of flows and interruptions leads us back to Lucretius and the atomists. It also leads to a fundamentally different sense of the self and the place of creativity and improvisation in human activity and experience. It puts us on new footing. We don’t desire what we lack in some economy or network of commodities (where we ourselves serve as commodities among others); rather, we desire as a function of the endless creative flexing and resting of machines coupling with and conditioning other machines. We can design a machine, but can we ever predict what it will do when coupled with other machines?  In this way, we are all connected, as eddies and swirls move and redirect water without ever being separate from the sea itself. We are so many clenching hearts, literally swimming in oceans of dark blood. Holes through which flow dark and light energy that we bend, condition, and redirect in myriad ways.