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Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, literature and technology often appear fundamentally at odds with one another. The supposedly transcendent works of the greatest writers to which we devote extended study and time can seem incomparable to the ever new electronic gadgets speeding up the world, enabling us to work and communicate more quickly and efficiently. Yet both terms in my title – “literature” and “technology” – only took on their current meanings less than two hundred years ago, and their parallel development reveals the continuing tensions between the two areas of study and practice. The career and writings of Jacob Bigelow, whose Elements of Technology (1829) is often cited as introducing the word “technology” into modern usage, begin to suggest the deep interconnections and divergent paths of literature and technology. Bigelow’s first publications were belletristic, consisting of a poem on commencing his career as a physician (“A Poem on Professional Life” [1811]) and a satiric “historical romance” attacking President Madison’s conduct of the War of 1812 (The War of the Gulls [1812]). Subsequently, most of his work focused either on medical matters, specifically arguing for the need to let nature run its course with many diseases, or on American botany. Comprising a series of lectures that Bigelow delivered as professor of material medica at Harvard, Elements of Technology epitomizes this eclecticism, as the lectures maintain the classic connection between the mechanical and fine arts, including chapters on “Sculpture” and “Designing and Painting” alongside those on “Arts of Locomotion” and “Elements of Machinery.” The useful and the fine arts thus both come under his rubric of “technology” – that is, “the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science, and which may be considered useful by promoting the benefit of society” (v).
By the time he delivered his Address on the Limits of Education at the still-new Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865, Bigelow seems to have accepted the rift between the fine and useful arts that his earlier volume largely avoided and that has become essential to modern conceptions of literature and technology. In particular, he suggests, in a version of what David Nye has called the American technological sublime, that technology has displaced art: “Poetry, art and fiction have sought for the beautiful and sublime in creations which are imaginary and often untrue … in the present age fact has overtaken fancy and passed beyond it,” as railroad trains, ocean steamships, and electric telegraphs fulfill “the appetite for wonder” (22). Where technology and professional specialization in general have advanced human happiness, technological developments in publishing have “inundate[d]” the world with more, often useless information, including the “perishable” fictions – which Bigelow equates with the “pseudo-sciences” – that now dominate “modern literature” (11–12). Elements of Technology hints at this distinction between the fine and mechanical arts in terms of historical progress. Classical Greece and Rome largely perfected the imitative arts, “those which required only boldness and beauty of design, or perseverance in execution”; but now new technologies have enabled modern humans to “extend the dominion of mankind over nature” (3–4). While technology is progressive and materially useful, art is natural and eternal. “A musical ear, an artistic eye and a poetic sense are not to be created in any man” (Address 26), but are merely useful in allowing man to “recreate himself” through “intercourse with congenial minds, and at times with the ideal world” (27).
Bigelow’s comments in these two works nicely incorporate some of the central themes and tensions running through accounts of technology and literature over the past two centuries. From one perspective, technology and literature are linked, parallel modes for the human remaking of the world, an idea captured in Martin Heidegger’s attention to the shared etymology of techné and poiésis. Yet literature, like all art, seems distinctly different from technology, for while literature, according to many accounts, speaks to either an innate human nature or an ideal realm of imagination, technology progressively transforms the physical world. As Bigelow’s comments on changes in print technology hint, however, technological changes transform literature itself and its production, circulation, and reading. It is only with those technological changes, in fact, that a modern notion of the literary as a special province emerges. At the same time, as Bigelow points out, “The arts of writing and printing, although comparatively simple in their processes, are superior to most other arts in the importance of their consequences” (Elements 5). Arguably, the inventions of written language 5,000 years ago and of the printing press more than 500 years ago constitute the most significant technological breakthroughs in human history.
Literature, from this perspective, becomes another product of industrialized technology. But because of its special relationship to technology as (in effect) technology par excellence, literature has the capacity to wrench open our understandings of technology in ways akin to Walter Benjamin’s account of film “burst[ing] this prison-world asunder” (236) by revealing “new structural formations of the subject” (237). Literature and technology linked together thus have the capacity to generate new forms of self-making, what Michel Foucault calls technologies of the self. In what follows, I use Bigelow as a point of departure for illustrating the dynamic relationship between technology and American literature. Focusing on the long nineteenth century, I draw on Heidegger, Benjamin, and Foucault to explore how conceptions of technology as dehumanizing, empowering, and/or revolutionizing the self take on varying degrees of prominence with the development of new technologies, their incorporation into industrialized capitalism, and the coterminous transformation of literary production. I conclude by suggesting how these modes for understanding technology shaped twentieth-century American literature and by reflecting on the current digital and electronic reconfiguration of our sense of technology and literature.
Emerson’s Question Concerning Technology
Published less than a decade after Bigelow’s Elements of Technology, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) has often been read as heralding a truly American literature based in the idea of the United States as, in Perry Miller’s phrase, “Nature’s nation.” In many ways, Emerson echoes Thomas Carlyle’s romantic critique of the era as the mechanical age. In “The American Scholar,” for example, he disparages the division of labor, worrying that humans have become indistinguishable from their tools: “Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things…. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship” (Essays 54). Yet despite his frequent questioning of material improvements, Emerson’s antebellum oeuvre engages to a surprising extent and in surprisingly positive ways with the new technologies of the era. Alongside a romantic distrust of technological improvement as addressing the merely physical, Emerson also echoes a republican faith in technology’s capacity to liberate the world and empower the self, while anticipating a modernist perspective oscillating between aesthetic withdrawal and the recognition of the deep interconnection between modern technology and art.
Nature begins by articulating the essential and eternal condition of the self, the relationship between “Me” and “Not Me” (8). Yet in the “Idealism” section, Emerson invokes the railroad – the machine that epitomized the mechanical age – to describe this relationship, declaring that traveling by train reveals “the difference between the observer and the spectacle, – between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt.” He continues by connecting this sublime pleasure with the work of the poet: “In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure…. He unfixes the land and the sea … tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought” (34–5). For Emerson, new technologies approximate the poet’s dominion over nature. Yet this sublime pleasure derives not from the mind’s dominance over nature alone but from both the ecstatic fusion of the self with nature and the revelation of the self’s detachment (the Me) from nature (the Not Me), a paradox best rendered in the famous transparent eyeball passage from the first section of Nature: “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (10). Even as the I becomes nothing but a vehicle for the universal being or a part of God, the repetition of “I” insistently reiterates the unceasing presence of that very I. By similarly disrupting our normal way of seeing, by unfixing the world, technologies like the railroad forcefully materialize this relationship.
We can turn to Martin Heidegger to help clarify this ambivalence toward technology as both rendering the self a machine and exemplifying the human imaginative capacity to reshape the world. Heidegger is often read as one of the most profound philosophical critics of technology, yet he argues that the possible redemption from technology derives from its essential and deep connection to art. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (Basic Writings), Heidegger denounces the fact that “we remain unfree and chained to technology” (287), but discounts descriptions of technology as merely instrumental. Instead, building on the connection in classical Greek between techné and poiésis as modes for revealing truth, he concludes that techné “is something poetic” (294), its essence lying not “in making and manipulating” but in “revealing” (295). Both poetry and technology reveal a new truth about the world, a new way of envisioning the human relationship to nature. But where poiésis reveals by “bringing-forth” (296), by uncovering the human relationship to the world through beauty, and by treating the world as other – the Not Me – modern technology treats the world, including humans, as a “standing-reserve” to be regulated and ordered.
Heidegger denominates the chief danger of modern technology as “enframing,” by which he means the predetermined engagement of the self with the world, for the world “no longer stands over against us as object” (298), but only as a resource waiting to be ordered and utilized (301–3). In poiésis, the human interacts with the world through a creative process of give and take; conversely, modern technology attempts simply to act on the world for its own ends. Yet the poetic encounter with the world has a logical and temporal priority to modern technology’s will to dominate. The world first presents itself as something to be determined by human consciousness (the poet’s ability to toss the world like a bauble) before humans attempt to use technology to render it merely instrumental to their own ends. This point leads to Heidegger’s contention that the essence of technology is not technological, that it lies not in making and manipulating but rather precedes technology and emerges directly from the human confrontation with the world. Heidegger then locates a “saving power” (314) in a realm “that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it,” the realm of art (317). This is because art, like technology, uncovers the relationship between the self and the world through the production of a truth; but without preordaining that truth’s use, it can act as a counter to modern technology’s instrumental determinism, revealing technology’s potential indeterminacy.
Even as he also distinguishes art and technology, Emerson similarly suggests that art and technology emerge from a common human impulse to shape the world: “I love the music of the water-wheel; I value the railway. … There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken” (“The Method of Nature” [1841], in Essays 115). Going further than Heidegger, Emerson upholds the revolutionary potential of technology, when properly framed, to foster the imagining and creation of a new, better reality. Thus, “Railroad iron” is “a magician’s rod”: “The habit of living in the presence of these inventions … combined with the moral sentiment” has created a new spirit that has “interrogated every institution, usage, and law” (“The Young American” [1844], in Essays 213–4). Technology unveils the fluidity of the world and humans’ potential to reshape it to their imaginative needs; it reveals, as Marx and Engels would say of capitalism, that “all that is solid melts into air.” For Emerson, in fact, the danger of technology lies in it becoming merely a tool of capitalism: “Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, – to mills, railways, and machinery, – the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey?” For Marx and Engels, those technological improvements are part of a historical march determined by class conflict; their significance lies in their granting humans greater productive power. Conversely, Emerson locates the power of technology in its correspondence with art. Thus, it is art – and the spirit underlying art and placing humankind into “harmony with nature” – that protects us against the dangers of technology, and that renders “the galvanic battery, the electric jar,” the “mills, railways, and machinery” “noble” and “divine” (“Art,” in Essays 439–40).
One reason Emerson, unlike Heidegger, still finds a great deal of potential within technologies themselves is that he was working at a time when the production of literature was not yet fully industrialized. As Michael Winship has noted, the technological improvements that would transform publishing – steam-powered rather than hand-cranked printing presses, stereotype rather than individually composed plates, and roll paper rather than sheets – while available by 1840, would not be widely utilized until later in the nineteenth century. This lack of full industrialization parallels the uneven development of industrialized technology in the larger economy and society and helps to explain why Emerson, as John Kasson has noted, at times echoed the dominant view that “hailed the union of technology and republicanism and celebrated their fulfillment in an ever more prosperous and progressive nation” (3).
For Emerson, republican technology comes to the fore in his antislavery writings. Slavery and technology often were interlinked in antebellum American thought. On the one hand, writers frequently cited technological wonders such as the telegraph as evidence of Anglo-Saxon superiority and of the ever-spreading dominion of the European mind over the natural world and the bodies of supposedly more natural people. Reversing the logic, abolitionists would contend, as Frederick Douglass did in his second autobiography, that slavery attempted to “reduce man to a mere machine” (Autobiographies 421). On the other hand, however, technology evidenced the progressive march of humanity, leading to greater freedom and power for all. Writing against the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851, Emerson insists that he “cannot accept the railroad and telegraph in exchange for reason and charity,” but then gestures to such technological wonders as proof of the certainty of emancipation: “Nothing is impracticable to this nation…. By new arts the earth is subdued, roaded, tunneled, telegraphed, gas-lighted; vast amounts of old labor disused; the sinews of man being relieved by the sinews of steam. We are on the brink of more wonders” (Antislavery Writings 56, 69). Emerson reserves praise for technology in and of itself, but applauds technology’s materialization of the human capacity to transform the world as evidence of the potential for a democratic United States.
By 1851, this progressive republican view of technology was already under assault by the grim realities of industrialization and the dimming prospects of new technologies like the telegraph radically transforming the world. Yet a similar utopian vision of technology’s democratizing potential frequently resurfaces up to the present day. To understand this view’s continuing saliency, we need to turn back to the formation of the American republic and its citizenry in technological terms, a formation best represented in the persona and works of Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin’s Technology of the Self
D.H. Lawrence famously cited Franklin’s technological self as the root of almost everything that was wrong with American culture, asserting that Franklin’s “automaton, of a pattern American” has led to “America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines … shut up fast in her own ‘productive’ machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages” (30–1). Franklin clearly sets himself up as a model through presenting his life story as a book, describing “the conducing means” that led to fame and felicity as “fit to be imitated” (1307). And he pursues his project for moral perfection from a technological framework, intending to publish his method as “ ‘The Art of Virtue,’ because it would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue” (1392). Art here, as in Elements of Technology, refers to all techniques for manipulating the material world. Franklin develops his account-book method of self-examination in order to overcome “natural inclination, custom, or company” (1384), just as he develops methods for cleaning streets or lighting cities or organizing libraries to overcome dirt, darkness, or a dearth of books, through a combination of reading, rational hypothesizing, and experimental testing. As with his stove – for which he rejects a patent because “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by an invention of ours” (1418) – he seeks to share his moral program through Poor Richard’s Almanac, which he conceived of as a “proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People” (1397). In these ways, Franklin parallels Benjamin Rush’s contemporaneous idea that the purpose of education in a republic is to render citizens “republican machines,” so that they can “perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state” (14–15). For Franklin and Rush, mechanical technologies become models for the shaping of the human self.
This image of the human as machine, as automaton, appears from the eighteenth century onward, usually with increasingly dark implications. But the technological context here suggests a less deterministic pattern than that which Lawrence projects. Michel Foucault’s work on technologies of the self helps elucidate this distinction. Foucault outlines four different types of “ ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason” – technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, and technologies of the self – “which permit individuals to effect their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (18). Unlike his work on technologies of power and sign systems, Foucault emphasizes at least a limited form of individual volition. Doing so, he traces the movement from classical Greek ideals “for social and personal conduct and for the art of life” (19) to a Christian asceticism, which “always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality” (35). He then demarcates “a decisive break” in the eighteenth century when “the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self” (49). This shift in the importance of giving an account of one’s self, of verbalizing if not writing the self into a new state, distinguishes Franklin’s Autobiography from his Puritan ancestors’ personal narratives and begins to suggest the connection between technologies of the self and technologies of production and sign systems.
While Poor Richard’s Almanac works as a vehicle of instruction to inculcate virtues essential to an ascetic Protestantism, it features some of Franklin’s most belletristic and humorous works, culminating in “The Way to Wealth,” where he satirizes the fact that most people will not fully heed his advice and instruction. This sense of human fallibility comes to the fore in his attempt at moral perfection, where he recounts his failures with false braggadocio, as in the speckled axe parable, and in his enumeration of his various errata over the course of his life. The errata importantly return us to the printing context and conceit of the Autobiography. Producing his own life as a book for others, he suggests they will have the ability to reproduce his life without those errors, or errata. Yet Franklin was writing at a time when printing presses were little more advanced than that which Gutenberg had used in the fifteenth century. In this context, Franklin’s printing metaphor hints that his readers will not reproduce his life exactly, as in a highly industrialized, mechanized system, but as new creations altogether. Stereotype plates that preserved the text for future printing lay decades in the future, and in conceiving of his life as a book fit to be imitated by others, to be republished in corrected form by others, Franklin gestures to the necessity of recomposing each sheet from the pile of type. This idea of flexible imitation appears in his own imitation of the Spectator, where in examining his recomposition of the essays he “sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language” (1320). Franklin’s use of the word “imitate” further indicates a more fluid mode. Where we might read “imitate” as denoting an attempt at exact replication (the second definition in the OED), the technological context of Franklin’s print metaphors hints that he has the older, first definition in mind, “to do or try to do after the manner of.” This potentially more flexible model relates to a more intricate articulation of art and technology, to an emphasis on art, like technology, involving the reformulation or reshaping of the self – either the writing or reading self, in the case of literature – and the world.
Writers such as Olaudah Equiano further reveal the simultaneously disciplinary and emancipatory potentials of such technological figurations. Where technology has often been posited as the domain of white men, either as evidence of their unique capacity to transform the world and its less capable people (then) or as a key instrument in their oppression of others (now), it has also long been celebrated for overcoming all natural limitations, including limitations ascribed to essentialized categories of race and gender. Equiano opens his Interesting Narrative by contrasting the Edenic Africa of his childhood with the European manufactured goods that figure as the snake in the garden, as Africans “were incited” to enslave one another “by those traders who brought the European goods” (25). Equiano is first mystified and terrified by the slave ship and nautical instruments such as the quadrant, and his technological ignorance ironically enables him to connect the new disciplinary powers he faces when, in Virginia, he encounters a slave woman encumbered by an iron muzzle, a portrait, and a ticking watch (44).
Up to this point, Equiano’s encounter with Europeans and their technology largely follows the account offered by European explorers and colonists such as Thomas Hariot. In his rendering of one of the key tropes of colonialist literature, Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) reports that the native Indians will have “cause both to feare and to love us” (50), largely due to technological differences: they are so amazed by the Englishmen’s mathematical instruments, guns, books, and clocks “that they thought they were rather the works of gods then of men” (57). But Hariot himself is somewhat discomfited when this amazement and worship are afforded the material Bible rather than its spiritual essence: “although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of any such vertue, as I thought they did conceive, but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke over all their bodie with it” (58). This apparent fetishization of the book, of the product of print technology, reappears in Equiano’s account of his “great curiosity to talk to the books” as the Europeans did (48). But Equiano learns to read and write as well as to become an adept sailor, mastering the very technologies – ocean-going vessels and nautical instruments such as the quadrant, as well as print – that had once been used to subjugate him. Through a technological process of demystification, he is able to utilize technologies that had once physically and emotionally enslaved him to achieve his freedom and to become one of the most important early advocates for abolition. Over the course of his Narrative, then, technology is transmuted from an instrument of slavery to an instrument of emancipation through the production of the self as a free subject.
Similar dynamics appear in early accounts of women’s relationships with manufacturing technologies. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton called for the development of industrial manufacturing in part because “women and Children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful by manufacturing establishments, than they would otherwise be” (131). Through the Civil War, factories in the United States relied to a significant extent on women’s labor, exploiting ideas about women’s innate tractability, their need for less pay, and their essential dependence on patriarchal authority. Yet works such as Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl (1814), often cited as the first American industrial novel, and The Lowell Offering, a magazine written and published by women factory workers from 1840 to 1845, extol the possibilities afforded women by industrial production.
These works overcome objections to women entering the economic realm by connecting their work and the new technologies they use to older domestic craft. Mary Burnam, Savage’s heroine, attempts “to describe the complicated machinery of the factory” in response to “her grandmother’s curiosity … [about] what facilitated so much the art of spinning, in which, in early life, it had been her ambition to excel” (14). Mary’s grandmother exemplifies a distinctly domestic technological spirit, as “no one was more pleased to examine and observe the effects of the machines and instruments, that were used in the country business to which she was accustomed; particularly if they were new inventions, or old ones improved” (15). Carrying on her grandmother’s interest in and use of new technologies for old tasks, Mary finds that factory work allows her time for self-improvement and expansion of her ability to help others. In particular, after one of the proprietors of the cotton factory denounces child labor (blaming the “thoughtless parents” who “deprive their offspring of the advantages of education” [37]), Mary establishes a Sunday school for the younger workers. The Factory Girl pictures the industrialization of cloth manufacturing as a continuation of the domestic sphere, as an expansion of the possibilities of feminine self-development and selfless service, an expansion implicitly linked to the newer publishing and reading possibilities enabled by similar manufacturing and technological changes in the print industry.
The Lowell Offering frequently echoed this sense of empowerment, linking it to technology’s potential to stimulate the mind: “all the powers of the mind are made active by our animating exercise,” for “Who can closely examine all the movements of the complicated, curious machinery, and not be led to the reflection, that the mind is boundless, and is destined to rise higher and still higher[?]” (63–4). As with The Factory Girl, the sketches and tales in The Lowell Offering envision the self-improvement enabled by factory life – through increased opportunities for moral and intellectual improvement – as the continuation of one’s family duties. Unlike The Factory Girl, some selections from The Lowell Offering begin to suggest that the workers themselves simply become part of the machinery of production. Contributors regularly narrate dialogues in which women complain about being “obliged to rise so early in the morning … dragged about by the ringing of a bell … [and] confined in a noisy room from morning till night” (160), “just as though we were so many living machines … [or] white slave[s]” (161). Other writers reflect on the need to imagine a world elsewhere “not of the crowded, clattering mill, nor of the noisy tenement which is her home, nor of the thronged and busy street which she may sometime tread, – but of the still and lovely scenes which, in by-gone hours, have sent their pure and elevating influence” (138).
These intertwining logics – equating factory work to slavery or becoming a machine, and positing nature as an escape or solace – underwrite Herman Melville’s account of a paper factory in “The Tartarus of Maids,” where the women “did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (328). Through its diptych other, “The Paradise of Bachelors,” Melville links the dehumanization and suffering of the female factory workers with the literary production and camaraderie of a masculine coterie. Literature and technology are decoupled, as factory work and the technological developments used there no longer open imaginative, political, or psychological possibilities but detach life from nature, foreclosing all possibilities of an authentic existence.
The Work of Art in the Age of Iron Mills and the Dynamo
As noted at the outset, Jacob Bigelow’s lecture at MIT helps to gauge the extent of this disconnection between art and technology as the nation moved into the latter half of the nineteenth century. While techno-utopian visions would become even more prominent in the decades to come, the utopian impulse of aesthetic production was increasingly distinguished from the realities of industrialized technology. Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) provides one of the best early examples of such thinking. Hugh Wolfe’s suicide near the end of the novella, his self-unmaking with a piece of “tin, not fit to cut korl with” (69), figures the obverse of Franklin’s self-making through technology. In the realm of the industrial factory, Wolfe, his talents, and his humanity are only so many natural resources to be used up and cast aside, like the korl (“the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run” [48]) from which he creates his sculptures. Despite this proto-realist (or naturalist) depiction of industrial life, the conclusion of the story moves between an aestheticism suggestive of modernism – via the korl figure’s ability to represent the unspeakable, to stand outside the realm of technological industrialization as a by-product of its processes – and the utopian possibility of recuperating the human potential obscured by industrial processes through “long years of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love” (73). Life in the Iron-Mills thus hints at three of the most predominant (and interrelated) tropes of viewing technology and literature over the last century and a half: the mechanization and denigration of human life itself; the utopian possibility or dystopian impossibility of escaping a technologized system; or, along the lines of Heidegger, the mutually constitutive yet antagonistic relationship between different kinds of human production.
The initial publication of Life in the Iron-Mills in The Atlantic Monthly is suggestive of how these different conceptions of technology corresponded with the changing production of literature itself. As noted earlier, the modern mechanical printing methods that defined publication throughout most of the twentieth century – stereotype printing using machine-powered presses and rolled paper – only became standard in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Atlantic Monthly was perhaps the most important of a number of magazines founded in the middle of the nineteenth century that would play an increasingly important role in delineating a more elite literary culture against the ever-expanding reaches of mass literature and, by the end of the century, mass cultural forms such as film. The Atlantic Monthly and similar publications as well as the novels and books they championed thus emerged from the expansion of print technologies and new forms of mechanical reproduction even as they attempted to define themselves against these very innovations. Davis’s conception of art, through the korl woman, as existing outside, yet within, an industrialized framework, and as allowing readers insight into “a secret … that has lain dumb” and that she “dare [not] make” any “clearer” (41), speaks to what would become the Atlantic’s declared position of carving out a niche for true literary art amidst the industrial production of culture.
At the same time, through the Quaker woman’s salvation of Deborah at the conclusion of the novella, Davis locates the solution to the horrors of industrialization outside of an industrial economy, literally displaced from the urban setting of the iron mills, in a realm where human relationships can be constituted on a basis of “Christ-love” rather than along class lines and economic contractualism. This displacement becomes central to much of the utopian fiction produced over the next century and a half, as would, to a surprising extent, its concomitant rejection of technological progress as the foundation for social change. In works such as Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3), which imagine a secret, enduring Ethiopian community as an alternative to the racial landscape of the United States, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), which describes a South American society devoid of men, the utopian communities either combine more primitive technologies with supernatural capacities (Of One Blood) or match the advances of western production while depending on new forms of biological reproduction (Herland). Even in temporally dislocated utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), where the technological innovations of the nineteenth century loom large in preparing the way for “a golden future” (65), the central transformations distinguishing the society of 2000 from that of 1887 have less to do with technological improvements, as essential as they are, than with restructuring “the organization of society” (68). Many of the “labor-saving inventions in all sorts of industry” appear as “the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions” (101–2) rather than as the causes of those rational conditions. In Bellamy’s account, the rationalization of society leads to the emancipation and empowering of human nature, a process we’ve already seen at work in Franklin. But with the full development of industrial capitalism and the expansion of technologies into every sector of human life – from reproduction and sexuality to forms of cultural representation and mental life – such rationalization often seemed less like an expansion of human nature than its denial.
Life in the Iron-Mills begins to suggest this notion of mechanized life – and its utopian and dystopian possibilities – in Kirby’s comment that he wishes the workers were “machines, – nothing more,” for “taste, reason” are nothing but “nerves to sting them to pain” (54). This conception of life as mechanical was central to what the literary historian Mark Seltzer calls “the naturalist machine” (25). More broadly, Seltzer contends, “the links between the body and the machine have focused the American cultural imagination since the later nineteenth century” (4) in three distinct ways: “the notion that machines replace bodies and persons,” “the notion that persons are already machines,” and “the notion that technologies make bodies and persons” (12–13). No work from the early part of the twentieth century so fully reveals the ambivalence surrounding these different conceptions as The Education of Henry Adams (1907). While the most famous chapter of the book, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” is often cited as a diatribe against the technological displacement of human life – the dissolution of a more natural, sacred, and artistic manner of living (the virgin) by dehumanized technological force (the dynamo) – Adams embraces a mechanized worldview alongside his distinct nostalgia. Adams equates the virgin – the religious, sexual power manifest in medieval cathedrals – with the dynamo, for “both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured” (1074). From the perspective of Adams’s dynamic theory of history, the universe becomes a “chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces”; society “becomes fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion” (983); and public education becomes “a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind” (792), for the mind itself is a “machine” (754). The mechanical organization of society and the individual’s mind at first seems to distinguish mind and society from nature, but Adams reveals them to be mirroring nature’s own mechanistic, if finally chaotic, forces. Adams, in this way, realizes Seltzer’s three tropes, as the dynamo replaces the virgin, but then the self is revealed to be only a machine itself, as the virgin similarly appears to be only the product of a greater chaos machine, Nature.
Occasionally read as the first modernist American work, Adams’s Education provides a bridge between the naturalist machine and a more distinctly modernist engagement with technology. In particular, through the contrast he sets up between the virgin and the dynamo and the way the dynamo desacralizes the virgin, rendering her (and art, sex, and religion) merely another force acting on humanity and the world, Adams hints at something like Walter Benjamin’s account of the technological denigration of aura, which is “never entirely separated from its ritual function” (224). For Benjamin, this dissolution of aura accompanies film’s ability both to shock its audiences and to foster a kind of distracted viewership, as art no longer absorbs the viewer through a mode of contemplation, but like the technologies of modern life itself pierces the normal sense of the self even as it becomes part of a quotidian, if chaotic, reality. Unlike Adams, the self-defined conservative Christian anarchist and detached historian, Benjamin distinguishes two political outcomes to the modern technologization of art: the fascistic aestheticization of politics, war, and destruction, and a communist politicization of aesthetics. His hope resides in the expansion and democratization of art, in everyone possibly becoming an author (232), penetrating, as the camera does, “deeply into [the] web” of reality, creating a picture of “multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (233–4).
Benjamin’s wary optimism about the democratic potentials of technologized art offers a Marxist and modernist update of Franklin’s technological republican self-making and Emerson’s romantic theorization of technology paralleling poetry and emancipation. While the kind of technological self-making Franklin exemplifies seems impossible for Adams, stuck as he describes himself as being in the eighteenth century, he foresees a new kind of American, “the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electrical power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined,” who “would need to think in contradictions” and “would know how to control unlimited power” (1174–5). In modernist works by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, and John Dos Passos, the alienated modernist artist represents the new American that Adams predicts will be able to draw on technology’s apocalyptic force as a model of aesthetic discipline and withdrawal from the technologized, mechanical world. For example, Williams defines a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words. … there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” (54); throughout his oeuvre, he was drawn to the precision, speed, and new perspectives enabled by modern technology, echoing Adams in Spring and All (1923) by arguing that “the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam” (207). At the same time, Williams, like Adams, recognized the destruction of newer technologies, describing, in Spring and All, how “[t]houghtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. … Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth,” before concluding with the line “Someone has written a poem” (180). The poem, as in Heidegger, is both aligned with and contrasted against technology, as the machine represents both technological society’s enslavement and a model for the poet “to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads” (235). Williams, like Adams and later American modernists, will not go as far as Benjamin’s call for a specific kind of politicization of aesthetics through technology. Yet he hopefully and suggestively gestures, as Emerson before him, to the politically liberatory potentials of the intersection of literature and technology.
Epilogue: The Digital Future
In the latter half of the twentieth century, in numerous dystopian and postmodern works, the emancipatory potential of technology seems to all but disappear as the lines between the technological and the natural no longer hold and the question of whether the machine controls humankind or individuals have any control over themselves and their machinery remains unanswered and unresolvable. In the last couple of decades, however, the emergence of new digital technologies has brought a resurgence of the kind of thinking we have seen represented by Franklin and Foucault, Emerson and Heidegger, and Adams and Benjamin. Utopian rhetoric surrounds the political and artistic potential of the Internet and the ever-expanding power of computers. Much attention in the public has focused on the transmutation of print literature into digital forms, whether in the form of academic databases, Google’s attempt to digitalize the world’s books, or new reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iPad. Undoubtedly reading itself and the content, themes, and forms of literature will change as more and more people gather news and information from computer screens or scan poems, stories, plays, and novels from electronic databases or via digital interfaces. More compelling, however, and potentially more transformative of literature are new electronic literary forms, works that mutate old print and oral genres by interfusing them with the aural and visual effects made possible by computer technologies.
As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, the emergence of electronic literature – and the possibilities for literature in a digital age – parallels the transformation of literature brought about by the printing press. Even an extended treatment of electronic literature can only begin to enumerate the different forms it is taking, and I can only gesture to a few ways these trends portend even greater transformations to literature than those fostered by the printing press. Perhaps best known are hypertext works, poems, memoirs, and novels that allow a kind of citation and layering through clickable links. More recent developments incorporate elements recalling video art forms, using flash technology as well as three-dimensional representations to enhance and destabilize the reading process, rendering texts more indeterminate by allowing for various different iterations of words, images, and sounds. Artists and writers have begun exploring the social-networking possibilities of the Internet to create communally created works, fictions whose different pieces are produced by writers from around the world, while others have incorporated new technologies such as global positioning systems to create literary forms that interact with the real world. Some interactive fictions begin to approach the qualities of gaming narratives, while other interactive forms simply allow users to manipulate how, when, and where different elements of texts (and often images) are combined.
Many of these experimental forms, as Jessica Pressman has argued, recall modernist aesthetics. But they also recapitulate many of the features of the narrative on literature and technology I have attempted to construct. While the overall tone of these works tends to be much darker, more cynical, and more ironic than Enlightenment or Romantic era accounts, many implicitly and explicitly celebrate the potential of new media literary forms to model a kind of dynamic postmodern self-construction. Celebrations of the democratizing potentials of the Internet more broadly and of Internet publishing and circulation of literary materials in particular often echo the techno-utopian logics of an earlier era, specifically the idea that new technologies will enable individuals to create themselves more freely and fully while simultaneously bringing together a more harmonious world community. The past two hundred years should make us wary of any such claims, yet the future of technological innovations, the uses they will be put to, and the literary forms they will transform and generate remain indeterminate. And thus, much recent work critically engages with new digital technologies in attempts at counteracting the economic and political ends for which they are typically deployed, seizing, in Benjaminian fashion, on their potential to fracture and trouble our normal sense of ourselves and our liberal capitalist worldview. The future of literature, as was true of its past, will largely be defined by its interaction with – its critique of, its dependence on, and its exploitation of – technology.
References and Further Reading
Adams, Henry. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (pp. 217–51). Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Bigelow, Jacob. An Address on the Limits of Education. Boston: E.P. Dutton, 1865.
Bigelow, Jacob. Elements of Technology. Boston: Hillard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1829.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron-Mills. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.
Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994.
Eisler, Benita, ed. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840–1845). New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self (pp. 16–49). Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Franklin, Benjamin. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1987.
Hamilton, Alexander. “Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791.” In The Reports of Alexander Hamilton (pp. 115–205). Ed. Jacob E. Cooke. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
Hariot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. London: n.p., 1900.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987.
Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Rush, Benjamin. Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806.
Savage, Sarah. The Factory Girl. Boston: Munroe, Francis & Parker, 1814.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. 2 vols. New York: New Directions, 1986–1988.
Winship, Michael. “Manufacturing and Book Production.” In A History of the Book in America. Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (pp. 40–69). Eds. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.