Desiring Machines and Impressions of Africa: Roussel and the Notational Logic of Subjective Mechanics
At the surreal edge of early 20th-century invention lies Impressions d’Afrique, Raymond Roussel’s theatrical hallucination of mechanical marvels, linguistic automata, and ritualized absurdities. It is not merely a play or novel, but a structural machine in itself—one powered less by plot than by processes of invention. Within its eccentric tableaux, Roussel presented machines that operated without function, rituals without precedent, and contraptions whose logic bypassed utility altogether. These artificial systems, unconcerned with realism, foreshadowed a lineage of conceptual machinery that would be retooled by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia—figures who took Roussel’s perverse mechanization and rendered it into a language of erotic engineering and poetic obstruction.
Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique presents a world governed not by mechanical efficiency but by mental interference. His machines are metaphysical jokes, often producing aesthetic or linguistic results rather than physical outcomes. It is precisely this tension—between the machinic and the subjective—that so deeply influenced Duchamp’s own diagrams of desire, most notably in his Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Here, the bachelor machine is an erotically frustrated system—a parody of Newtonian logic in which fluids stall, pistons hesitate, and desire misfires across layers of transparent glass. The machine, like Roussel’s inventions, is designed to not work—at least not according to the traditional laws of motion or cause-and-effect. Picabia, too, followed suit, his drawings populated with mechanical forms that were more symbolic than operational, drawn from crankshaft schematics and sexual innuendo rather than engineering blueprints.
Where Roussel gave us machines that symbolized inner thought and circular logics, Duchamp and Picabia imagined a new class of mechanism altogether: the bachelor machine—a machine not for production but for interpretation, not for utility but for symbolism, governed not by thermodynamics but by erotic failure. The machine becomes a vessel for inner contradiction, a ritualistic object capable of enacting desire, delay, and conceptual comedy.
It is in this precise tradition that my notational systems evolve—not as devices for translating composerly intent into performance, but as score-machines, configured to resist linear instruction while inviting interpretive friction. My approach is not one of symbolic legibility but of architectural complexity. Visual notational elements are placed within, under, next to, and inside each other—not as mere superimposition, but as a designed refusal of standard compatibility. Like Roussel’s inventions, my notational forms are compatible with their own material logics, but not necessarily with the performer’s expectations. They invite an ontology of notation that is self-sufficient—self-imagining, even—where the signs refer not to sound, but to their internal relations, interdependencies, and disobedient syntax.
The performer, in this scheme, is not a reader of instructions, but a decipherer of tensions. The score-machine, like the bachelor machine, is eroticized—not in the sexual sense, but in its pursuit of affect, resistance, and entanglement. It draws attention to itself as a structure, not simply a path. If Roussel could invent a phonographic plant that grows wax cylinders or a machine that translates color into sound into gesture, then I too aim to place glyphs and forms in paradoxical constellations—notations that resist being performed as they insist on being seen.
Thus, these scores become a mode of material abstraction, animated not by a drive to be played but by a drive to be solved, misread, and misremembered. In this light, the influence of Roussel is not merely aesthetic, but mechanical and conceptual. His legacy passes through Duchamp’s transparent partitions, Picabia’s eroticized cogs, and lands here—in the flickering tension of a page where notation has ceased to instruct and instead begins to dream.
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