Machine-Being
Thomas Brinkmann’s 1998 minimal-techno track ‘Maschine’, recorded under the name Ester Brinkmann, includes a repeated voice sample that kicks in at 3.18. In German, the voice says: ‘Ich will eine Maschine sein. Arme zu greifen Beine zu gehn kein Schmerz kein Gedanke.’ ‘I want to be a machine. Arms to grab [,] legs to walk [,] no pain [,] no thought.’ The sample is the voice of Blixa Bargeld, lead vocalist of Einstürzende Neubauten, from their album Die Hamletmaschine, which is a score for Heiner Müller’s play of that name. In Brinkmann’s hands the sample repeats the techno trope of machinic acceleration and integration, from Kraftwerk through Detroit to Sheffield, in a semi-parodic fashion. What Nick Land had celebrated as ‘manically dehumanized machine-music’ is here slowed and repeated in a lulling techno rhythm.1 The sample holds up for critical inspection the exit from feeling and consciousness (‘no pain, no thought’) promised by machinic integration that is, I will argue, the fantasmatic underpinning of accelerationism.
In this chapter I want to explore these fantasmatic and libidinal elements of the promised integration of the human with the machine, which is so prevalent within accelerationism. To do so I will treat two exemplary and widely-spaced moments: the first is Victor Tausk’s psychoanalytic research on the ‘influencing machine’, published in 1919, shortly before his suicide by shooting and hanging in the same year. Freud remarked in a letter, with honesty verging on callousness, that ‘I confess I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future.’2 Tausk’s ‘machine’ would get an accelerationist retooling by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, shifted from the status of fantasy to the
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