Complete catalog from Le Macchine Celibi / The Bachelor Machines (1975), curated by Harald Szeemann & Jean Clair, with critical vocabulary.
Updated
4/11/2026
Reading Time
22 min
This catalog pairs the machine inventory from the 1975 Szeemann exhibition with the critical vocabulary of bachelor-machine studies. Machines are organised by author or era; definitions run from Carrouges' original 1954 framing through Deleuze & Guattari, van Weelden, Spyrou, and Galloway. Short glosses live in the vocabulary tables; full-paragraph definitions are gathered in Expanded Definitions at the bottom.
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Large Glass / Grand Verre | Duchamp, 1915-1923 | The ur-bachelor machine; two-tier structure with Bride above, Bachelors below |
| The Nine Malic Moulds | Duchamp | "Cemetery of uniforms and liveries" — priest, department store delivery boy, gendarme, cuirassier, policeman, undertaker, flunkey, busboy, stationmaster |
| The Chocolate Grinder | Duchamp | Stands for "masturbation"; grinds its own chocolate |
| The Chariot/Glider | Duchamp | "Slow life / Vicious circle / Onanism / Buffer of life / Celibate life" |
| The Sieves/Parasols | Duchamp | Filter the illuminating gas |
| The Water Mill | Duchamp | Part of the bachelor apparatus |
| The Stoppages (étalon) | Duchamp | "Standard stoppage" — three meter-lengths dropped from height |
Locus Solus & Impressions d'Afrique.
| Machine | Description |
|---|---|
| La hie / The Paving Beetle | "Demoiselle à reitre en dents" — mosaic of teeth representing a mercenary |
| Faustine's Large Diamond Aquarium | Contains Danton's head, the dancer Faustine, a Siamese cat; electrical/musical machine |
| Fogar's Photographic Plant | In somnambulism, operates the control-lever of a spotlight; "molecular movement in the fibres of the luminous plant" |
| The Montalescots' Mechanical Manikins | Helot (slave on whalebone corset rails) and Kant (bust with electric bulbs in skull) |
| Djizmé's Lightning-Conductor Bed | Woman integrated as "fuse" to lightning conductor; first time a woman takes the condemned man's place |
| The Painting Machine | "Clinamen" — ejaculates colors onto walls; "puffs at its ease on the steep canvas" |
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Supermale's Race | Le Surmâle | 10,000-mile race; train vs. 5-seater bicycle; "Perpetual Motion Food" |
| The Magneto in Love | Le Surmâle | "Magneto-electric machine suitable for inspiring love"; machine falls in love with the supermale |
| The Electric Chair | Le Surmâle | Supermale strapped in with platinum crown, electrodes, ear-flaps; predates Kafka's Penal Colony by 10 years |
| Père Ubu's Debraining Machine | Ubu Roi | Kept in cellar; threatens to remove brain through heel |
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Penal Colony Machine | In der Strafkolonie | Harrow inscribes sentence on condemned man's body; bed descends into pit |
| The Pendulum/Pit | (via Poe comparison) | "A capital punishment executed by an automatic machine" |
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Umbrella and Sewing Machine | Chants de Maldoror | "Beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table" |
| The Vendôme Column | Chants de Maldoror | Maldoror swings Mervyn like a pendulum; Paris becomes the dissecting-table |
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Maître Zacharius | Novel | Clock/time machines |
| La Stilla's Portrait | Le Château des Carpathes | Full-length portrait + mirrors + electricity + phonograph = "infernal machine" |
| Machine | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hadaly / Eve Future | L'Ève future | The android; descendant of Fogar, Neddou, of Bioy Casares' Invention of Morel |
| Machine | Author/Source |
|---|---|
| Isabella von Ägypten | Achim von Arnim |
| The Invention of Morel | Bioy Casares |
| Barbarella's Robot Aiktor | Jean-Claude Forest |
| The Infernal Machine (Baron de Gortz) | Jules Verne |
| Hamlet the Difference Machine | Stephen Barker (2012) |
| Machine | Date/Source |
|---|---|
| The Locomotive / Iron Horse | 19th c.; named after gods (Aeolus, Apollo, Bacchus, Neptune, Vulcan) then Walter Scott heroes |
| The Rock Drill | Jacob Epstein, 1913/14 |
| Steam-Hammers | From 1840; "like thunderbolts" |
| Singer Sewing Machine | ca. 1855 |
| The Iron Shoemaker | Leeds GB, 1876 |
| Velocycle-Shower | GB, 1897 |
| The Ideal Life-Saving Device | François Barathon, Paris, 1895 |
| The Shakers' Mowing Machine | ca. 1866 |
| The Electric Chair | 1890 |
| Machine | Artist |
|---|---|
| Cyclograveur | Jean Tinguely, 1960 |
| Little machines for inoffensive fecundation | Max Ernst, 1919-20 |
| Madonna | Edvard Munch, 1885/1902 |
| Rose Sélavy | Duchamp/Man Ray, 1921 |
| L'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse | Man Ray, 1920/1972 |
| Confessing Machine | Boris Vian, ca. 1949 |
| Père UBU postcard | Collège de 'Pataphysique |
| Civilisation | Frank Kupka, ca. 1901 |
| Machine | Description |
|---|---|
| Frankenstein's Monster | Mary Shelley; "man, the new Prometheus" |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker; "reversing the closed circuit exploiting the male" |
| Metropolis | Fritz Lang; "the machine struck a pose" |
| The Psychic Apparatus | Freud; der Schauplatz der Träume (dream stage) |
| Pallas Athena (Parthenon) | "First Bachelor Machine" — born from Zeus's head |
| The Spartan Warrior Society | Plato; "perfect realisation of the Bachelor Machine" |
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Celibacy/Celibate | The essential condition of the machine; denial of woman and renunciation of procreation |
| The Closed Circuit | Self-contained system; "they love their self-created closed circuit" |
| Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries | The nine malic moulds as social types frozen in their roles |
| Sexual Unit / Mechanical Unit | The two components of every bachelor machine |
| Perpetuum Mobile | Perpetual motion; the bachelor machine as "normal energy transformation machine" |
| Stoppage (étalon) | Standard/stoppage; "variable form assumed by a piece of thread one metre long" |
| Malthusianism | "The bachelor machine is the erotic form of malthusianism, or the malthusian form of eroticism" |
| Parthenogenesis | Virgin birth; "was bound up with the existence of the gods" |
| Deification of Man | Bachelor Machine as "withdrawal from relationships involving service or other forms of dependence" |
| Todesarten | "Ways of dying"; Ingeborg Bachmann's term |
| Grenzübertritt | "Frontier passage"; what is imprisoned in language becomes |
| Der Schauplatz der Träume | "Dream stage"; the bachelor machine as theoretic fiction |
| Modus loquendi | "Saying machine"; a machine for speech/writing |
| The Simplexes | Levels of abstraction (per Korzybski); "each level of simplex is a 'level of abstraction'" |
| Body Without Organs | (Deleuze/Guattari); "a de-activated BM, flanked by diverse functional extensions" |
| Anti-Oedipus | The colors under which the BM was developed |
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Sensism / Sensist | Duchamp's philosophy; "radical attention to the senses" not conceptualism |
| Aesthetic Relativity | Art as "node in a network of relations" with no hierarchical dominance |
| Literal Nominalism | Focus on particular things, not abstract concepts |
| Transcendental Laziness | Refusal to be productive; studio as "no man's land between art and society" |
| Art in a Raw State | "Infinite continuum of art in a raw state" |
| Art-Mode | Enhanced attention, suppressed reflex judgements |
| The Possible | What a readymade becomes pataphysically |
| Infra-Mince | "Difference in volume between a clean shirt and one worn once" |
| Radical Democracy of Criticism | "Every spectator becomes a critic" |
| Interzone | Duchamp's studio as humble space between art and society |
| Virtualized | What happens to measurement in Three Standard Stoppages |
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Projective Geometry | Desargues' system; parallels Duchamp's "arbor type" vocabulary for the Bride |
| The Fourth Dimension | The Large Glass operates in 4D; the Bride casts a 3D "shadow" into our world |
| Arbor Type | Duchamp's term for the Bride's branching form, from Desargues' geometry vocabulary |
| Capillary Tubes | Curved forms from Three Standard Stoppages; pathways for the illuminating gas |
| Topological Transformation | Shapes stretch and bend while retaining relationships; visible in "Tu m'" |
The vocabulary tables above give one-line glosses for scanning. The sections below give full-paragraph definitions, plus additional critical vocabulary from Spyrou and Galloway that doesn't fit the one-line format.
Bachelor Machine (Macchina Celibe): The term was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 for the lower portion of The Large Glass: the realm of the bachelors containing the chocolate grinder, the cemetery for uniforms and liveries (the nine malic molds), and the témoins oculistes. The Large Glass consists of two distinct realms: the bride above and the bachelors below, both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension. In 1954, Michel Carrouges found structural similarity between Duchamp's Large Glass and Kafka's Penal Colony apparatus (Bed below, Designer above, Harrow moving between). Both operate as closed circuits with the action of one zone upon another; in both, a message from the upper zone is inscribed upon the lower one. The myth of the bachelor machine is a new technological version of the mirror of Narcissus, in which is played out the interferences of machinism, terror, eroticism, and religion or anti-religion. The myth is a double articulation of difference: sexual difference and machinic difference. For Deleuze and Guattari, the bachelor machine forms a new alliance between desiring machines and the body without organs to give birth to a new humanity.
Celibacy / Celibate: The essential condition of the machine. The denial of woman and even more of procreation as a basic condition for a break with cosmic law. What becomes evident from the Bachelor Machines is the denial of woman and renunciation of procreation. The bachelor machine does not exclude eroticism, but procreation. This is the erotic form of malthusianism, or the malthusian form of eroticism.
Sexual Unit: One of the two components of every bachelor machine. By definition it includes two elements: male and female. These two elements are to be taken as sharply defined and discernible categories. The sexual unit constitutes the original and determinant structure for the identification of bachelor machines. The dualism of the sexes is at the root of all the forms and significations.
Mechanical Unit: The other component of every bachelor machine, likewise made up of two mechanical elements which correspond respectively to the two male and female elements of the sexual unit. However complex they may be, the mechanical representations contained in the mechanical unit are thus automatically divided into one of the two sexual elements.
The Closed Circuit: Both love their self-created closed circuit. Value judgements are certainly out of place in the face of those hot and cold amateur obsessions and others who, by restricting them, were forced to live this circuit simply. The closed circuit with its change of energy at any given time corresponds to a change in the state of aggregation. The bachelor machine is a machine only symbolically; optically it is only the lower part of the Bachelors, members of a social hierarchy, which is interspersed with machine parts.
Perpetuum Mobile: Perpetual motion. The creation of the Perpetuum mobile, of the voyeur. The bachelor machine as normal energy transformation machine. There is a current consumption of the new machine, a pleasure that may be described as autoerotic, or rather as automatic, where the marriage of a new alliance takes place, a fresh birth, dazzling ecstasy, as though the eroticism of machinery had released other unlimited powers.
Dissecting Table: The function specific to the bachelor machine. In Lautréamont's celebrated formula: He is beautiful like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. Among these three seemingly heteroclite objects one recognizes the umbrella as a male symbol, the sewing machine as a feminine one. That leaves the third object: the dissecting table. Instead of the love bed, signifying union and life, the dissection table expresses the bachelor machine's specific function, which is solitude and death.
Two-Tier Structure: The Large Glass operates on two levels. The upper panel is reserved for those images that concern the Bride, whilst the lower panel is especially allocated to the bachelor images. The two sexual elements, female and male, are thus directly projected into the division of the two zones of mechanical figuration in the Large Glass.
Milky Way / Via Lattea: On the upper panel, where the Bride is situated, one sees a long sinuous and horizontal form hanging right at the top of the Large Glass. This is the milky way and it is flesh-coloured (in other words, the skin, or mortal remains, of the Bride), whilst the angular part which descends vertically on the left is the Bride's skeleton. The stripping bare of the legend corresponds, therefore, to a stripping bare on the Large Glass.
Inscription / Torture: The machine in the Penal Colony automatically carries out capital punishments while inscribing the sentence on the condemned man's skin. The function of death is exercised here by a mechanical aggregate set in motion by a military one, in a repressive odious but consistent system. In both machines there is an upper zone with an inscription which passes on a message to a lower zone through a mechanical drawing device.
Malic Moulds: Duchamp realized this very well, for his machine célibataire contains nine bachelors who may be regarded as fractions of the masculine element. One can find many an example of bachelor machines in which several different cooperative characters represent the male element against a single female.
Body Without Organs: A de-activated bachelor machine, flanked by diverse functional extensions. Deleuze and Guattari in L'Anti-Oedipe (1972): O which designates the full body without organs. And they form relative falls or rises according to their complex relationship and the proportion of attraction/repulsion that enters into their cause. In short, the opposition of forces of attraction and repulsion gives rise to an open series of intensive, and all positive, elements which never express the final balance of a system, but an unlimited number of metastable stationary states through which a subject passes.
Anti-Oedipus: The colors under which the bachelor machine was developed. The schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in the pure state, at an almost unbearable point: bachelor misery and glory experienced at the highest point, like a shrieking suspended between life and death, an intense passing feeling, pure and crude states of intensity stripped of their shape and form. Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from two preceding forces: repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of these two forces.
Machinic Dispositif: Foucault's concept of dispositif applied to the analysis of literary machines. An analytical tool describing heterogeneous ensembles consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions. The dispositif itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. When applied to bachelor machines, it reveals how the machinic structure organizes meaning through the interplay of its components and their relations. The concept helps decode how machines in literature function as meaning-making systems beyond their mechanical properties.
The Inexchangeable: Baudrillard's concept for understanding the terminal phase of machine evolution. When machines reach a point of total simulation and hyperreality, they become inexchangeable because there is no outside reference point against which to measure their value or meaning. The machine implodes into pure self-reference. In bachelor-machine analysis, this concept explains how the closed-circuit nature of these machines leads to a breakdown of traditional exchange relationships between male and female, organic and mechanical, life and death.
Structural Homology: Carrouges' methodological discovery that different bachelor machines across literature share structural similarities despite their surface differences. The homology between Duchamp's Large Glass and Kafka's Penal Colony apparatus reveals a common deep structure: two-tier organization, inscription of message from upper to lower zone, closed-circuit operation. This structural approach allows diverse works to be analyzed as variations on a single mythic pattern.
Seven Theses on Countercinema: Peter Wollen's framework opposing classical Hollywood values (left) with Godard's countercinema techniques (right):
What is fascinating about countercinema is not simply the identification of alternate formal strategies but "the active employment and gleeful exploration of those strategies." Classical film certainly borrows from countercinema here and there, but "it is a question of commitment to certain techniques, not simply dipping into them from time to time."
Industry-Sanctioned Hacking: Brody Condon's term for how the gaming industry, unlike the music or film industries, actually promotes hacking, patching, and modding by consumers. In 1994 ID Software released the source code for Doom one year after commercial release, allowing players to create custom levels and mods. This makes the relationship between countergaming and the gaming industry fundamentally different from countercinema's relationship to Hollywood.
Countergaming: The video-game equivalent of countercinema. Mainstream games thrive on repetition, rewinding and backtracking, story-on-a-rail episodic structures, digressions into minigames, and other nonlinear techniques. Games greatly complicate the concept of diegesis: the nondiegetic in gaming is often on equal footing with the diegetic, whereas in classical narrative cinema the nondiegetic is rarely foregrounded. Games constantly rupture between different codes and different channels, transitioning fluidly from the (mostly) nondiegetic HUD to diegetic weapons, or from configuration menus to normal gameplay. Adapting Peter Wollen's theses on Godard, Galloway identifies formal differences between conventional gaming and countergaming: (1) transparency versus foregrounding, (2) gameplay versus aestheticism, (3) representational modeling versus visual artifacts, (4) natural physics versus invented physics, (5) interactivity versus noncorrespondence. However, Galloway argues that countergaming as practiced (by artists like Jodi, Brody Condon, Anne-Marie Schleiner) remains "essentially progressive in visual form but reactionary in actional form." It serves to hinder gameplay, not advance it. It eclipses the game as a game and rewrites it as a sort of primitive animation lacking any of the virtues of game design. This is why Jodi's work is apolitical while Godard's was hyperpolitical: Jodi aims to create better abstraction, not to create better (or different) gameplay. We need an avant-garde of video gaming not just in visual form but also in actional form. We need radical gameplay, not just radical graphics.
Radical Action: Galloway's sixth and most important principle: gamic action versus radical action. "By radical action, I mean a critique of gameplay itself. Visual imagery is not what makes video games special. Any game mod focusing primarily on tweaking the visual components of a game is missing the point." Artists should create new grammars of action, not simply new grammars of visuality. They should create alternative algorithms, reinventing the architectural flow of play and the game's position in the world, not just its maps and characters. Countergaming remains "an unrealized project" because it has yet to produce radical action.
Control Allegory: Video games are allegories for life under protocological networks of continuous informatic control. Unlike cinema, which hides informatic control and requires demystification to reveal it, games flaunt control. "To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system." This horizontal "scanning" replaces the vertical "depth model" of traditional allegorical interpretation. The player does not interpret the game; the player plays the algorithm.
Gamic Allegory / Other Act: Following the definition of literary allegory as "other-speak," gamic allegory is "other-act." The interpretation of gamic acts should be thought of as the creation of a secondary discourse narrating a series of other acts. A century ago, Maurice Blondel suggested the word "allergy" following his theory of "coaction" or "another's action." The interpretation of gamic acts is the process of understanding what it means to do something and mean something else. It is a science of the "as if."
Enacted Metaphor: The customary definition of allegory as "extended metaphor" should, for games, be changed to "enacted metaphor." In fact, for their active duality, zeugma or syllepsis are even more evocative figures of speech. When one plays Civilization, there is one action taking place, but there is more than one significant action taking place. This is the parallelism necessitated by allegory. The first half of the parallelism is the actual playing of the game, but the other is the playing of informatics.
Theory of Pretending: For video games, one needs a theory of pretending, but only in the most positive sense of the term: a theory of actions that have multiple meanings. Bateson: "The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite." So the role of control allegory is, methodologically but not structurally, to see the nip and process neither the nip nor the bite, but instead what the bite denotes. The playful video game may metacommunicate "this is play," but it can never avoid also being informatic control.
Polyvalent Doing: The game critic should be concerned not only with the interpretation of linguistic signs, as in literary studies or film theory, but also with the interpretation of polyvalent doing. This is interpreting material action instead of keeping to the relatively safe haven of textual analysis. The critical terrain has shrunk from a two-way relationship involving the text and the reader as critic to a singular moment involving the gamer (the doer) in the act of gameplay. The game as text is now wholly subsumed within the category of the gamer, for he or she creates the gamic text by doing.
Playing the Algorithm: The essential gamic act. "To interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel 'allegorithm')." Games like Civilization require the player to internalize the logic of the program: "You must learn to predict the consequences of each move, and anticipate the computer's response. Eventually, your decisions become intuitive, as smooth and rapid-fire as the computer's own machinations." The player becomes intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm.
The Unrealized Project: Galloway's prophecy (2006): "An independent gaming movement has yet to flourish, something that comes as no surprise, since it took decades for one to appear in the cinema. But when it does, there will appear a whole language of play, radical and new, that will transform the countergaming movement, just as Godard did to the cinema, or Deleuze did to philosophy, or Duchamp did to the art object." The realization of countergaming as gaming. A political and cultural avant-garde achieved through play itself.
Thirty-Year Rule: Galloway's observation about the lag time between a medium's invention and its cultural maturity. Film took roughly thirty years from its birth in the 1890s to the classical form of the 1930s. The Internet developed hidden through the 1970s and 1980s before erupting in the mid-1990s. Video games, born as primitive pastimes in the 1960s, were predicted (in 2006) to enter their golden age in the following decade. This suggests games have now (2020s) reached maturity equivalent to cinema's 1930s-40s golden age, though they still resided until recently "in a distinctly lowbrow corner of contemporary society."
Critical Play: Mary Flanagan's framework treating play as both artistic practice and critical methodology. Critical play positions games not as mere entertainment but as tools for interrogating technology, cultural assumptions, and interactive possibilities. The 20th century's "rich tradition of strange games, its fascination with chess, and absurd, playful performances were instrumental in how we see art today." Critical games emerge from "social groups, indie gamers, activists, and youth asking questions with the medium of their time." Examples include Unmanned, Mainichi, Every Day the Same Dream, Waco Resurrection, PainStation, and other works that use gameplay to create critical engagement rather than passive consumption.
Malthusianism: The bachelor machine is the erotic form of malthusianism, or the malthusian form of eroticism. Named after Thomas Malthus who argued for population control. The bachelor machine represents the renunciation of procreation while maintaining erotic function. A form of sexuality divorced from reproduction.
Deification of Man: Bachelor Machine as withdrawal from relationships involving service or other forms of dependence. The myth of the Bachelor Machines has taken us into the era of Freud, the era of machines, of the discovery of the fourth dimension, of atheism, and of the militant bachelordom of both sexes and its renunciation of procreation.
Autoerotic Machine: The machine is essentially the symbol of autoeroticism. The image of pleasure is greater the more the machine seems a do-it-yourself one. The machine metaphor may pass from the symbolical to the real plane, as is shown in the case of Strindberg and of President Schreber.
Paranoid Machine / Miraculating Machine: We borrow the name bachelor machine to designate that machine which succeeds the paranoiac machine and miracle-working machine, forming a new alliance between desiring machines and the organless body for the birth of a new mankind or of a glorious organism. One is tempted at least to say that the subject is produced like a remnant, beside the desiring machines, or that the subject itself is blurred into this third producing machine and into its residual reconciliation: a conjunctive synthesis of consumption in the amazed form of a So it was that!
Schizophrenic Machine: Under the name of bachelor machines Michel Carrouges has singled out a certain number of fantastic machines that he has come across in literature. The examples he quotes are very varied, and do not seem at first sight to fall under any single heading: Duchamp's the Bride stripped bare, Kafka's In a Penal Colony, Raymond Roussel's machines, and those of Jarry's Supermale, certain machines described by Edgar Allan Poe, Villiers' L'Eve future, etc.
Modus Loquendi / Modus Scribendi: The contestation of the Father is the result of a passage from a modus loquendi to a modus scribendi. The numerous wonders exhibited by the bachelor machine, though in various ways comparable to the phenomena experienced by mystics, far from marking our liberation from Time, mark our domination by it.