MDDM23: A Digestionary Process

[Dave Monroe]

"'The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be
remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously
outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his
Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result
could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechanickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it
matter,' Mr. Whitpot, having remov'd his Wig, is
irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, '-- who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste,
however compulsively accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

>From Jessica Riskin, "Duckshit and Damask," Eve Andree
Laramee: A Permutational Unfoldings, ed. Jennifer L.
Riddell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 45-51
...

"To Jonathan Swift's inquisitive Strephon, feces were
the antithesis of art.  Exploring his lady's dressing
room, he revealed mounting evidence of artifice
against nature, arriving at last at the furniture that
housed her chamber pot....  But Swift's tale does not
end here, for Strephon soon realizes he has uncovered
a universal truth....  The Enlightened Swift
recommends that his hero give up his ideals of wild
beauuty, and learn to enjoy the cultivated variety
....  Art is defined not only by its distance from,
but by its origin in shit.  Human ingenuity must be
understood by an incongruity with teh animal body that
generates it.
   "An incongruous, animal embodiment of artistic
ingenuity went on display in Paris in the winter of
1738-39, when the French mechanical deisgner Jacques
Vaucanson drew great crowds from all over Europe to
witness his mechanical Duck...." (pp. 45-6)

"... the Duck performed the 'Operations of Eating,
Drinking and Digestion,' eating bits of corn and
grain.  The grand finale was the excretion of this
input from out the other end.  Vaucanson said these
processes were 'copied from Nature.'  But he was vague
about the design, only saying the digestion was
carried out in a 'Chymical Elaboratory' in the Duck's
stomach.  This aroused suspicions.  In 1755 a critic
accused the Duck of being 'nothing more than a
coffee-grinder,' but in 1845 a repairer of its
mechanism found an even greater decit: the grain input
and the excrement ouput were totally unrelated, the
food went into a box at the base of the Duck's throat,
and the tail end was separately loaded.
   "What can one make of this hybrid animal, partly
fraudulent and partly genuine (other than the
digestion, the motion were meticulously imitative),
partly mechanical and partly (ostensibly) chemical,
partly transparent and partly ingeniously and
deceptively opaque?  It all comes back to Swift's
young Strephon: defecation, the defining example of
organic nature, represented the opposite of art, and
especially of mechanism.  In its partial fraudulence,
the Duck dramatized its author's assumption of the
limits of mechanization, even as it depicted the
traversing of these limits: Vaucanson assumed
digestion, which he took to be chemical and utterly
organic, to be out of bounds.  Others amde the same
assumption.  The Marquis de Condorcet would later
write in a eulogy of Vaucanson that if the digestive
part of the Duck was suspect, 'it was not M. de
Vaucanson's fault ... nature operated her functions in
a way other than those he could imitate." (pp. 46-7)

   "In designing his loom, as in his designing his
Duck, Vucanson assumed that automation was applicable
to a certain field of problems.  he made it his
project to identify the boundary between the
mechanizable and the non-mechanizable, and to reshape
industrial production around that oundary.  If
defecation represented the materil, organic far-side
of the limits of mechansm, there was also a spiritual,
psychic far-side.  I was occupied by intelligence and
'genius.'
   "In a triage operation that anticipated the
'job-analysis' of Taylorism, Vaucanson identified
those operations that should not require
intelligence...." (p. 48)

   "The distinction between intelligent and
unintelligent work was not Vaucanson's invention; it
was central to the social hierarchy of the old
Regime....  Vaucanson attached to this established
distinction a new significance: unintelligent work
became mechanizable work...." (p. 49)

   "This division of labor, which is at once economic
and intellectual, also informed the designs of early
calculating machines...." (p. 49)

"Carrying automation to its limit on one side of the
boundary would expand the horizons, on the other side,
of genius.  Here was a third phenomenon to join the
ranks of defecation and intelligence, out beyond
mechanism: creative genius." (p. 50)

Jonathan Swift, "The Lady's Dressing Room" (1730) ...

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/t-swift.htm

Jessica Riskin ...

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/riskin.html

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/riskinprofile1024.html

"the opposite of art," e.g. ...

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/Wim%20Delvoye/what%20is%20cloaca.htm

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49606,00.html

http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXIX7.htm

And thanks again, John ...

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