Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

WHENCE COMES OUR LOVE OF MACHINES?

What is a machine? What distinguishes a machine from a tool or a simple instrument—for example, a knife, a hammer, an ax, or a pencil? Tools are technical objects that can be seen as extending or continuing a bodily action. They augment its efficiency. To push, hit, tear, pierce, crush, grasp, or throw: tools and simple instruments allow us to do better what, to some extent, we can already do without them. They enhance our performance, make the action easier, more precise, they push back the limits of what we can do. What is done with difficulty and imperfectly with our bare hands, teeth, or nails can be done better and more easily using a tool, or with the help of a stone, a leaf, a stick, or of any natural object that momentarily becomes a tool. We can throw farther using a thruster, or a sling, draw better using a pen or brush. A knife, an adze, or an ax cuts deeper, tears thicker material than we can with our teeth or hands; a hammer hits harder, allowing us to crush hard stones. In all these cases, when using the tool the bodily action originally involved is, so to speak, developed in the same direction. Tools prolong the bodily intention of [End Page 99] the action. They aim at the same goal. When we rake, for example, we more or less repeat the same gesture while using the tool as if we were doing it with our own hands and the instrument itself imitates the shape of a hand with open fingers. In consequence, tools generally are more or less transparent, so to speak. Their purpose is often immediately visible from the very form. However, a tool by itself cannot do anything. Without a hand that guides it, the tool remains an inert object.

Machines, even very simple ones, constitute a different type of technical object. We usually define a machine as a more or less complex human-made device or contrivance that transforms energy into work. Proper to a machine is, first, that it is made, fabricated, while a rock, some bark, or a fallen branch that is found can serve as a tool. A machine, second, is also more or less complex, made up of various interacting parts. A hunter's snare, for example, is such a machine, an assemblage of various elements that interact to transform energy into work. The snare distracts an animal's movement from its original objective, to accomplish a different task. Unlike a tool that continues the movement in its intention, here it is the very efforts of the animal to escape that tighten the noose or net imprisoning it. This operation, which captures a motion and enrolls it for an intention that was not originally its own, is the case for all simple machines that depend on human or animal power. To raise a weight you lower the lever; to shoot away an arrow you pull the string toward you.¹ The circular motion of early millstones came from the transformation of the alternating action of pulling and pushing in a straight line. The intention that animates the body's movement is not that which guides the machine. Thus, the machine functions as an intermediary between a gesture and its objective, converting the action into energy while enlisting the original objective to a different task. That is why there is something magical to every machine, why all are in some way "autonomous." Not only is it the case that thanks to them we can do what we could not do before, but by diverting our action from its intention, transforming it into energy, they to some extent do what they do "by themselves."

In consequence, every machine is in a sense a potential automaton. Unlike a tool, the machine seems to acts by itself. It adds to the realization of a task its own contribution that is different from and exterior to the skill and action of the craftsman. Furthermore, the fact that it is necessarily invented, that it does not...