Spencer Roberts-University of Huddersfield
Beckett Machine: 'Something Mechanical Encrusted Upon the Living'

Stream-Repetition and Embodiment

Beckett Machine [1] is an electronic artwork that endlessly performs the text of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.[2] The stage is comprised of a small Liquid Crystal Display and a series of Light Emitting Diodes. The text of the play passes mechanically across the surface of the screen. Its exposition is interrupted by standardised pauses for punctuation and for the designated periods of silence that are indicated in the text.

Five Light Emitting Diodes hang beneath the display. They each flash periodically, giving voice to an associated character. Despite this representational specificity, the style of each character’s exposition is generic - they flash rhythmically and repeatedly with the movement of the text. An additional LED, in closer proximity to the screen, signifies, with the same rhythmic insistence, the occurrence of stage directions, whilst a further two serve to indicate which of the acts is currently being performed.

The resulting enactment (or series of looped re-enactments) is intended to be both engaging and meta-theatrical. Whilst in one sense there is an endless repetition of the text, in another there is an endless exposition of its structure. Beckett’s directions are expressed alongside the words and actions of his creations, and a mechanical strobing light serves as a common system of representation. In this fashion the Beckett Machine connects with three of the playwright’s own preoccupations: reflexivity, the shape of the play and the corresponding rhythm of its exposition.

In this paper I would like to explore shape, rhythm and reflexivity with respect to the Beckett Machine, and to frame this specifically in relation to notions of repetition, embodiment, transcendence and routine. There are a number of ways in which the Beckett Machine could be said to either embody or to be embodied by the text of the play. That is to say, there are resonances between its constitutive materials, its formal structure and the content of the play itself. With this in mind, and in attempt to both elucidate and justify this form of staging, I will discuss the peculiarly logico-mechanical orchestration of the text.

The quotation in the title of this paper comes from Henri Bergson’s writing on laughter.[3]

The phrase is presented both as the central image of the text, and as a kind of comic formula. Bergson conceived of laughter as a specifically human form of social corrective. He believed that we laugh in the face of organic, vital activity that has become affected or infected by the characteristics of mechanism. He suggested that we laugh spontaneously and involuntarily as a means of reprimanding or shaming a person who has adopted the qualities of a thing.

The Bergsonian analysis of comedy suggests that it is the mechanisation of the vital that lies at the root of comic form. Bergson identifies a number of scenarios in which the suppleness of the specifically human, seems to fall prey to mechanical force, and he suggests that in light of this, our laughter connects with a peculiarly material, or bodily emphasis. He states that this loss of vitality can manifest itself in a number of ways. It can be seen in the simplest forms of slapstick and physical comedy, in patterns of overly officious and unadaptive behaviour, and it can also be located at a peculiar point of intersection between comic and tragic form. For Bergson, comedy and tragedy overlap in that the tragic figure is unable to see that they are manipulated by a set of destructive forces, which they have themselves set in motion.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze develops this account of tragedy. [4]

For Deleuze, the tragic figure has lost the ability to represent the internal forces that are producing or reproducing their behaviour. These forces are  both in and of the tragic figure, yet they remain hidden as a result of this representational blindness. For Deleuze, this blindness, or self-deception, is constitutive of the tragic figure. That is the tragic figure is embroiled in a paradox of knowing: they must, at one and the same time both know (behaviourly) and not know (representationally) the forces that condition their plight.

Both Deleuze’s and Bergson’s analyses is of particular pertinence to Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, a play which is presented as a tragicomedy in two acts.  Beckett’s characters clown, stutter, reiterate, and oscillate - seeming to be embroiled in a deterministic patterning of which they are only dimly aware. There is, in the staging that is orchestrated by the Beckett Machine, an extreme example of blind mechanistic activity. Each performance constitutes an overt expression of its own, repetitive cycle, and yet the machine is unable to represent this patterning subjectively. The Beckett machine serves as a paradigmatic example of representational blindness. Being in one sense a physical object, and in another a software process, the Beckett Machine occupies a peculiarly ambiguous space. It is on the one hand a manifestation of a rule set with a formally deductive, idealised logical basis, and on the other, by virtue of its physical embodiment, an aspect of a purely contingent, material, system. This blurring of the necessary and the contingent results in a strange form of logico-machinic hybrid.

A digital computer can be seen as a kind of compromise. It is an attempt to physically realise the idealised form of mechanism characteristic of a formal logical system. That is, it is an attempt to make manifest a pristine abstracted realm of atemporal, deterministic and necessary relations. This deal, however, becomes frustrated and limited in the face of contingency; it becomes another example of transcendence that is encrusted with mechanism. Without a source of power a machine will run down; as a register of time, it will age and decay.

Bergson’s notion of a mechanical encrustation presents a powerful image that can be employed to describe two polarised positions.  It has a clear application to a number of anti-mechanistic themes that can be located throughout the last century of European philosophical thought, but it also seems an apt expression of another anti-mechanistic strain that can be observed in classical conceptions of deductive logic. Although there are tensions between classical and contemporary orientations, there seems to be a shared conception of the mechanical as a sullied or sullying force.

In the second half of the 20th century, particularly in the thought of Deleuze, the hostility shifts focus slightly. Machinic metaphors, are to a degree, positively embraced in the form of replicators. Criticism is now specifically directed towards closed forms of mechanism that inhibit or place sanctions upon the fundamentally open potential of the virtual. Here, the reproductive capabilities and the dynamism of mechanism are celebrated, but the picture of mechanism as a closed principle of production is seen as an offence to a principle of openness or difference.

In this way, the image of the static-mechanical object structure is replaced with a picture of the fluidity and dynamism of the field. One strand of continuity that runs throughout each of these developments can be found in the thought of Bergson himself. His position in Time and Free Will [5] has an affinity with the earlier period of qualitative subjectivity, whilst his thinking in Creative Evolution[6] provides the notion of differential process that serves as a basis for Deleuze’ position.  Despite the shift in focus, there appears in each case to be a commitment to Beckett’s pronouncement, through Vladimir, that ‘habit is a great deadener’. [7]

In relation to the classical tradition, we can trace a different kind of hostility towards the mechanical. Here, the mechanical is conceived as a kind of fall. There has been a tendency for logicians to venerate the atemporal deductive necessity of logical relations - as though describing the functioning of a transcendent and frictionless machine.

“We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.” – Ludwig Wittgesnstein, 1922 [8]

As a consequence, the comparative contingency and fragility of any physical mechanism – the presence of friction in the world – is interpreted negatively as a kind of lack. There is an obvious affinity here with the Platonic conception of the world as an imperfect copy of a transcendent ideal.

Both the contemporary European and classical traditions share in a conception of mechanism as a form of impurity. In the first instance, this mechanistic impurity constrains or inhibits the novelty of a fundamentally open and creative process; whilst in the second the contingencies of mechanistic process are presented as a sullying of a rationalistic ideal. The Beckett Machine alludes to each of these attitudes in its attempts to create a broadly paradoxical, performative arena.

The aim with the Beckett Machine was to create a sculptural artefact – a stage that was engaged with the near ethereal idea of logical form or process, but which was nevertheless a clearly physical structure.  I wanted to create a device which was in an important sense mechanical, but which, had an absence of visibly moving parts. Ultimately, this was an attempt to establish a setting that embodied a  structural or functional absurdity, and which, in virtue of this, could allude to the content of the play itself. In this sense the Beckett Machine should resonate with a richer affective conception of paradox, which is more in tune with the thinking of Beckett himself.

Although founded upon a strict conception of the repetitive, and a logical notion of tautology – the Beckett machine is a platform for engaging with the affective qualities of paradox. The affective aspects of paradox manifest themselves through a felt sense of the absurd. The Beckett Machine is intended to present, represent and complicate its source material primarily through the manner of its staging. By an extreme tightening of the plays repetitive structure, an open- ended extension to the play’s duration, and a consequent increase in its sense of monotony, the Beckett Machine elicits a play of affect in the face of repetition.

Described in purely algorithmic terms, the Beckett Machine operates unceasingly as a closed, centered, solipsistic loop. Ironically, and in stark opposition to the characters in the play, there is a sense in which, given its formal, looping, programmatic quality, the Beckett Machine wants to wait; wants to repeat. In exact opposition to Vladimir and Estragon, it is precisely the Beckett Machine’s infinite potential to wait – or  to be engaged in a process of waiting - thatis ultimately frustrated by its own, contingent, material circumstance. There is a sense in which it sits in eternal opposition to Beckett’s characters, providing the deterministic process metaphysic that serves as the background to their plight.

The notion of mechanism conceived as a kind of impurity points to an interesting affinity between our recognition of the paradoxical and a certain conception of transcendence. There seems to be a transcendent principle at work in both the classical and contemporary responses to mechanism that I have addressed thus far. Whilst traversing a recursive mechanism, we are in some sense able to recognise that it is closed and repetitive. That is to say, we do not traverse a paradox blindly; we can experience paradox, recognise its reflexivity and in the face of its monotony we can attempt a radical break.

Contemporary information theorists and cognitive scientists [9] have suggested that the oscillations of paradoxical thinking might be treated as a form of closed and infinite cognitive loop. From this perspective, the paradox becomes a meme that can be spontaneously generated by, and transmitted through, language.

These viral linguistic conceptions provide an attractive picture of the transmission of paradox but the functionalist models of the information processing approach seem captivated by an overly deductive picture of mind. They seem to neglect the way in which a paradox feels and the ways in which we recognise and respond creatively to paradoxical form. We are told anecdotally that there is a dizzying, nausea, and vertigo in the face of paradox but we are not told why this should be?  Similarly we are told of the ‘halting problem’ that occurs when computers, having been given paradoxical instructions, enter a state of infinite oscillation – dancing like Beckett’s Lucky, as if caught in a net – but our own ability to avoid this situation, is given far less attention.

Bergson’s oeuvre is in many ways representative of his own recognition, engagement and subsequent break with a paradoxical form. Much of his subsequent thinking stemmed from his early struggles with Zeno’s paradoxes of motion [10].

His critique of spatialised models of time was derived from his engagement with Zeno’s notion that the infinite divisibility of movement led to the impossibility of motion through a logical reduction to the absurd.  Zeno had suggested that it was impossible for a faster moving object (Achillies) to overtake a slower moving object (a tortoise) as the distance between the two was at all times infinitely divisible. Thus by the time Achilles had reached the point where the tortoise had begun, the slower creature would have moved on some additional distance, however infinitely small. This process of half measures could be repeated ad infinitum, and as such Zeno had reasoned that it should be impossible for Achillies to traverse the distance in question. In the more extreme versions of Zeno’s paradoxes, any movement at all is presented a logical impossibility. Zeno reasoned that in order to cover a specific distance, it is first necessary to cover half of that distance – and this fractional division continues ad infinitum. For Zeno, this seemed to culminate in an inability to start. 

Zeno’s incessant sectioning of space provides us with a familiar, vertiginous feeling. The attempt to conceive of infinity of points between any two particular Cartesian coordinates serves as an appropriate catalyst for paradoxical reverie. It is important for my purposes here to notice that our sense of dizziness and our felt sense of the absurd are in some way a response to the problem.

Bergson’s own radical intellectual break ultimately resulted in his rejection of the analytical conception of temporality that was extrapolated from the spatial Catertesian grid. His positioning of movement and change as the brute conditions of a fundamentally temporal reality served to orient much of his subsequent philosophical thinking. Existence became a struggle between the deadening forces of matter and the creative, open potential of the virtual.

The Beckett Machine is itself a recursive, habit-laden performance. There is an affinity between such a machinic performance and Beckett’s mime plays. Steven Connor has gone so far as to liken the script of Quad to a piece of computer software. [11]

Appropriately, Quad can be seen as a careful, precise and choreographed study in monotony. Beckett described it as ‘a piece for four players, light, and percussion.’   During  a performance  of  Quad, four  hooded figures silently walk a precise triangular pattern traversing an imaginary square. They come and go according to a geometric structure and at no point make contact or speak to one another.

Though there are obvious overlaps of form with respect to Quad and the Beckett Machine, there are also important differences that can be located with respect to its physical staging. Quad is presented as a study in deterministic movement – as a study in physicality. In contrast to this, the Beckett machine is a study in paradox, absurdity and affect. It borrows the deterministic structure, borrows the notion of a rule set but replaces the primacy of embodied movement with a partial orchestration of subjectivity through changes in affect.

The Beckett machine is a deterministic mime which attempts to shift the focus of the audience from effect to affect. That is to say it prioritises qualitative, subjective change over and above changes that are purely material or spatial.

A digital medium presents interesting possibilities in relation to the concepts of performance, speech and text. There has been a tendency for Beckett studies to focus upon issues of materiality or physicality with respect to performance. That is to say it is often the fleshing of the word that is foregrounded. The Beckett Machine is an attempt to focus upon the temporal and affective aspects of a performance. It retains the textual or readerly aspects of the play but imposes a deterministic temporal structure onto the written form of presentation. Thus its activity sits somewhere between performance and traditional writing. Only a small fragment of the text is ever displayed on screen – and given that this fragment is itself forever passing – a form of reading is established which, oriented by both memory and expectation, points ever towards the future.

The Beckett Machine is a kind of performative abstraction (in the subtractive sense of the term). That is to say, much of the subtle interplay between speech and action that is characteristic of Beckett’s approach is subtracted from the performance. The gesture and personal characteristics of the physical perfomers give way to a generic percussive, textual system. Any performative nuance is transferred from the performer to the imaginative faculties of the individual reader. The text is therefore subject to our own failures of memory, convenient abstractions and fanciful constructions.

The Beckett machine performs its text much as Martha O’Nan’s Lucky might first have delivered his speech. Unlike Lucky, however, there is no room for the later onset degradation or slippage. The Beckett Machine has a timeless ability to perfectly reproduce its text.

An altogether more extreme example of absolute recall occurs in the Borges story, ‘Funes the Memorious’. [12] Funes, having been thrown from a horse, develops an absolutely unbounded, veridical form of memory. Through the perfect acuity of his recall, nothing is distorted and no detail of his life can escape. To Funes every particular takes on the quality of the unique; he has lost the concept of the general; he has lost the ability to abstract to a genus. With Funes, Borges aim is to show that there is an affinity between slippage, generalisation and analytic thought. That is to say, our embellishments, distortions, negotiations and forgettings are in some way constitutive of our concept of thought – which is to say that they are constitutive of our power to abstract. For Borges, to describe something as a repetition - to describe it as one of a series, is to actively forget some aspect of difference between the thing in question and other examples of its type.

Slippage and distortion in the face of a rule works as a playful force in  Beckett’s writing.  It is perhaps for this reason that Steven Connor refers to Waiting for Godot as having a ‘deja vu’ structure.[13] It is clear that the two acts have a structural affinity and yet it is also clear that they not in any simple sense repetitions. This seems a necessary condition if Beckett’s characters are to have the scope to be irritated – to be affected – in the face of over familiarity. It is a vague sense of constant recollection that sustains their torment. Language, with Beckett, is always on the move.

It is worth stating at this point that our ordinary employment of the vocabulary of sameness, identity and repetition itself has a degree of looseness - and a flexibility with respect to degrees of precision. When speaking of things being the same, we do not ordinarily mean ‘absolutely identical’. It is only from a formally logical standpoint, with idealised notions of identity that we encounter a truly reflexive paradox.

In closing I would like to suggest that the cultural fascination with the concept of return is in no way hostile to a notion of difference. If the staging and restaging of events are considered as temporal interventions – as in some sense staged assertions of a Proustian involuntary memory - then we might conceive of them as small pockets of repetition being employed in the service of differentiation. That is to say, we should not consider repetitive practice as something that hinders actualisation. Repetition may, as in the case of Bergson’s breaks with paradox, serve as a positive, novel, and actualising force.

Throughout Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops an account of repetition that emphasises difference and marginalises identity. The present on this account is conceived as an encounter between the past and the future. Repetition, he argues, is constituted by variation and there is a notion that there must at all times be violent breaks with established forms of thought. Laughter, as analysed by Bergson is perhaps the first indication of a space for such a break, and as such, it might be seen as a summoning of Deleuze’ ‘something in the world that forces us to think.’ [14]

1. Spencer Roberts, The Beckett Machine, 2006.  http://www.anthropo.org.uk/godot/

2. Samuel Beckett,  Waiting  for Godot,  Faber and Faber, 1965.

3. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, London, Macmillan, 1911

4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference  and Repetition,  Continuum, 2004.

5. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1910.

6. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, London, Macmillan,  1911.

7. Samuel Beckett,  Waiting  for Godot, Faber and Faber, 1965.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,    Kegan, Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1922.

9. Justin Leiber, Paradoxes, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1993.

10. Zeno’s paradoxes recur in much of Bergson’s work. They are first referenced in Time and Free Will but can be found throughout  the rest of his oeuvre.

11. Steven Connor, Repetition, Theory  and Text , The Davies Group Publishers, 2007.

12. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, New York: New Directions Books, 1967.

13. Steven Connor, Repetition, Theory and Text , The Davies Group Publishers, 2007

14. Gilles Deleuze,, Difference  and Repetition,  Continuum, 2004