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The Myth of the Perfect Woman: Cinema as Machine Célibataire
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 26, Number 4, Winter 1986
- pp. 26-37
- 10.1353/esp.1986.0010
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The Myth of the Perfect Woman: Cinema as Machine Célibataire Inez Hedges I N A COMPELLING OVERVIEW of French philosophy of the last 50 years or so, Vincent Descombes suggests, after Michel Serres, that the dominant nineteenth-century cognitive frame was that of the steam engine; according to this view, the Freudian primary process, and the Marxian theory of the accumulation of capital, are seen to be “ trans lations” of one and the same informing mental set, which also gives rise to the appropriate artistic expression in fiction, philosophy, and paint ing: Zola, Bergson, and Turner.1He might well have included cinema, as a desiring machine that produces social effects, and which was also called into being by the nineteenth century. Cinema is of particular relevance here as a “ translation” of what Michel Foucault would call the episteme of the period, since, as André Bazin has pointed out, the scientific condi tions for the creation of cinema and photography existed long before anyone actually bothered (or needed) to invent them.2 The steam engine metaphor is a metaphor of thermodynamics, and the inclusion of Freud and Marx is explained by the fact that both posit the buildup of pressure (either the repressed unconscious or the sup pressed proletariat) which then sets certain compensatory events in motion. This machine metaphor in turn can be used to explain the economy of desire expressed by the virtual outpouring of “ machines célibataires” in the art and fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth cen turies, among which, as I will show, cinema holds an important place. Any machine must, of course, have moving parts, force and counter force. In addition, a machine is self-contained, even though it may act on the environment. The “ machine célibataire,” as its name suggests, is sexualized. Typically, it is composed of “ male” and “ female” parts, whose interaction constitutes its force. Its status as “ bachelor machine” is 1. Vincent Descombes, Le Même et ¡’autre (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), pp. 109-10. Descombes quotes from both La Traduction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974) and La Distribution (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977) by Michel Serres. 2. André Bazin, “ Le Mythe du cinéma total,” in Q u’est-ce que te cinéma? (Paris: Edi tions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 21-26. 26 W in t e r 1986 H ed g es linked to a metaphor of reproduction, since the activity of the machine is without use, producing no practical effect (offspring) as might be the case in a “ marriage” of the parts. Though the formulation of the term comes from Duchamp’s notes on his famous work “ La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” of 1915-23, Michel Carrouges has extended the term to an entire set of artistic and literary practices beginning with the end of the nineteenth century (the period more or less contem poraneous with the birth of cinema) and extending through dada, sur realism, and the work of Raymond Roussel.3 There are many reasons for arguing that the “ machine célibataire” functions with the force of an epistemic paradigm for an entire system of intersubjective relations that stretch from post-romantic ideology into our present cybernetic age (and perhaps even beyond it). I think that a strong case can be made for the idea that the structure of desire embodied and encouraged by film spectatorship is one that is furthered by a system of values discernible elsewhere in some literary works, in Freudian and Lacanian psychology, and in the current inquiry into Artificial Intelli gence which, so far at least, has tended to reinforce existing cognitive typologies rather than exploring the problem of originality (and hence the possibility for change). What I hope to unravel are the assumptions that underlie the construction of “ Woman” in a specific aspect of cinematic discourse, and to show that this construction was inevitable, given the available models in literature and psychoanalysis. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out in L ’Anti-Œdipe, “ les machines désirantes ne sont pas dans notre tête, dans notre imagination, elles sont dans les machines sociales et techniques elles-mêmes.”4...