Romanticism and technology are usually assumed to be incompatible. Romanticism is associated with feeling, imagination, and nostalgia. It is seen as backward looking and conservative. It is also seen as religious. It is supposed to be dreamy and otherworldly. It is about subjects, spirits, and ghosts. It is about magic. Technology, by contrast, is associated with objectivity, rationality, and an orientation toward the future. It is seen as nonreligious or even antireligious. It is seen as practical and realistic, quite the opposite of dreamy. It is concerned with this world—if the concept of another world is taken to make sense at all. Technology is about objects, materiality, and machines.
Interestingly, this assumption is found not only among those who warn against the dangers of modern technology but also among those who embrace contemporary technology and seek to change the world by means of new technology. This chapter shows how the assumption about the incompatibility of romanticism and technology, a deeply modern-romantic one and one that I criticize in the next chapters, is also present in philosophy of technology: in the writings of critics of modern technology such as Weber and Heidegger, but also in the contemporary, more empirically oriented philosophy of technology, which has turned away from the pessimism and romanticism of these critics but has uncritically borrowed the same dichotomy. At the same time, this chapter also shows that Weber and Heidegger had much more nuanced views about technology than may be assumed, views that do not divorce technology from romantic aspirations and religion, for example, but incorporate these in their histories and understandings of modern society and culture. Furthermore, I will argue that Walter Benjamin’s criticism of modern art expressed the technology-romanticism opposition but can easily be criticized as being unappreciative of the magic and aura of new media such as film. The chapter then questions the antiromantic stance in contemporary philosophy of technology and further explores the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology in an American context by commenting on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and the twentieth-century film Koyaanisqatsi. It turns out that there are more machines and cyborgs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century romantic thinking about technology than expected.
Classic thinking about technology tends to be very critical of, if not opposed to, modern technology and society. In the German philosophical tradition, this criticism is directly rooted in romanticism. Today we inherit the opposition between science/technology/disenchantment and romanticism/religion/enchantment from Max Weber, who in turn borrowed it from the Romantic philosopher Schiller—or so it has been suggested by Jaspers and many other authors after him. It is plausible that, as Angus (1983) has argued, Weber appropriated Schiller’s contrast between the unity of ancient Greek life and modern fragmentation, a problem that Romantic art and aesthetics sought to overcome. In his Letter VI, published in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Schiller indeed wrote that whereas in ancient Greece there was simplicity and not yet a split between “the senses and the mind” (38), understanding became divided in modernity, and today “the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart might have warmed itself” (39); the “wholeness in our nature” is destroyed (45). And in his poem “The Gods of Greece” (1901), he contrasted a lost happy world of gods, mysterious rites, shrines, spirit, nymphs, love, and heroes with a modern world in which only traces of that lost world are left; only the shadow of the godhead remains (72–76). This so-called flight of the gods is of course a classic Romantic theme: the gods have left us (see also the next section on Heidegger, who was inspired by another Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin). But Weber did not literally quote Schiller. Schiller wrote about a nature without gods, a de-divinized nature (Entgötterung). In Weber, Schiller’s world without gods becomes a world without magic, without enchantment (Entzauberung). The spell of the older, enchanted world is gone. Let us look in more detail at Weber’s claims about disenchantment and its relation to science and technology.
In “Science as a Vocation” (1919), Weber does not argue that science and religion are necessarily opposed. On the contrary, he attends the reader to the fact that Protestant and Puritan scientists wanted “to show the path to God” and that in early modern times, one hoped “to come upon the traces of what He planned for the world.” But then he argues that “today,” in modern times, no one believes this. We no longer see meaning in the universe. Today science is no longer seen as a way to God but is “irreligious” (142). He contrasts this science with the craving for religious experience and the interest in “the spheres of the irrational,” which he calls “romantic irrationalism” (143). He also contrasts serious science with “the naïve optimism in which science—that is, the technique of mastering life which rests upon science—has been celebrated as the way to happiness” (143). Thus, on the one hand, there is rational science; on the other hand, there is religious-romantic craving and naive optimism: all kinds of beliefs that he thinks have no place in rational science. Science, according to Weber, cannot give an answer to our questions about the meaning of life and our questions about what we shall do and how we shall live.
Yet this does not mean, according to Weber, that science is entirely value free or meaning free. It makes presuppositions. For instance, modern medicine presupposes that it has the task of maintaining life and diminishing suffering. It then gives us “a practical technology which is highly developed scientifically” to “master life technically” (144). But science and technology themselves, Weber argues, do not answer the question of whether it makes sense to do so. Weber thus separates means (technology, science) and end (e.g., eliminate suffering), a typical instrumentalist position on technology that contemporary philosophy of technology criticizes: technologies are never mere means but also shape our ends. What concerns me here, however, is the repeated and well-known claim Weber made that modern science and religion, and therefore also technology and romanticism, are incompatible. As I noted, he thinks they are not incompatible in principle—in earlier times they were—but in modern times, there is a problem, which he famously conceptualizes as “disenchantment”: in our times there are “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, … the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155).
Weber thinks that, ironically, this disenchantment is the result of religion, or at least one kind of religion: Protestantism, and in particular Puritanism, which has encouraged secular vocations. This secularization was then combined with scientific and technical rationalization and control—also the unintended consequence of Puritan ethics, which emphasizes self-control and asceticism. The result is industrial capitalism, rational calculation, and bureaucratic administration. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber speaks of what is often translated as an iron cage—or, more accurately, housing, shell, or perhaps a heavy and fixed exoskeleton (the metaphor is supposed to contrast with cloak, which is “light” and removable). And here we meet technology: human beings become cogs in the machine. Weber writes that the modern economic order
is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determines the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism. … Perhaps it will so determine until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber 1905, 123)
For the Puritans, the care for external goods and the worldliness of everyday life was meant to be only a means, but now it becomes heavier: it becomes a fate, a calling that is no longer up to choice. The machine plays a role in the increasing rationalization and depersonalization of life. The housing or exoskeleton, like the cloak, protects, but at the same time, it also becomes a kind of cage since it can no longer be thrown off. Technology, in this view, is a key part of the increasing disenchantment, rationalization, and dehumanization of life. Gone is the “spontaneous enjoyment of life” (18), which was, after all, “the end of this asceticism” (73).
Romanticism, then, appears here as the opposite of disenchantment, the opposite of asceticism, the opposite of the machine, and the opposite of the religions that have secularized the Western world, have taken away possibilities for spontaneous enjoyment, and have contributed to our becoming cogs in the machine. Technology, in the form of the machine, is part of a capitalism that has caged us in our everyday lives and has delivered us to impersonal bureaucracy and mechanical industrial production.
This way of looking at modernity is itself very romantic. I do not mean that Weber regretted the loss of magic—maybe he did, maybe not—but I want to make a more fundamental point: Romanticism has given us the conceptual tools to create a gap between science and religion, between technology and spontaneity, between machines and humanity. And this is precisely what Weber does in his texts. In this sense, Weber is highly romantic. At the same time, by connecting religious history with secularization and industrialization (magic and technology may not go well together, but Protestant religion and technology do), Weber hints at a far more ambiguous conception of the relation between religion and technology, and specifically between romanticism and technology. To use a romantic-gothic metaphor, there are more unexplored rooms and corridors in the Romantic castle. This deserves further exploration. However, let me first give an example of another famous romantic criticism of modern technology.
Martin Heidegger’s later writings are quite hermetic, unless one reads him as a romantic thinker. This is so not only because he takes up the Romantic theme of the flight of the gods, especially through the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and seems to be nostalgic about the ancient past (in the German tradition, often the ancient Greek past). Heidegger also expresses what we could call a “romantic epistemology.” In this section I interpret Heidegger’s view of technology in the light of Romanticism and discuss his view of (modern) technology.
Heidegger’s world is a Romantic one: the modern world that has been abandoned by the ancient gods. But here, Hölderlin, not Schiller, is the source of inspiration. The poet Hölderlin was an important figure in German Romanticism and a seminarian with Hegel and Schelling in Tübingen. He was a supporter of the French Revolution but also an admirer of ancient Greek culture, with a keen interest—long before Nietzsche—in the Dionysian mysteries and of course in the Greek gods. Heidegger knew these poems and commented on them, and they play a crucial role in his later work. When Heidegger thinks about art, he thinks, as do other Romantic thinkers, mainly about poetry. But Hölderlin’s influence goes beyond that: it also touches his epistemology and his view of technology.
In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977), Heidegger sets out to define the essence of technology. He argues against its instrumental definition. Technology is not merely a means to an end (4); it is also more than that—a particular way of thinking and perceiving. In Heidegger’s Romantic, nearly Gothic epistemology, this becomes a particular way in which “something concealed comes into unconcealment,” a particular way of “revealing” (das Entbergen) (11). Technology thus has a phenomenological-hermeneutical function. It makes us see the world in a different way, or rather, it makes the world appear in a specific way. Heidegger writes, “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” (12). This means that technology reveals the world in a specific way (as opposed to other ways of revealing such as poetry), and—interpreted in a way that is closer to contemporary phenomenology of technology—implies that different kinds of technologies may reveal the world in a different way. Heidegger distinguishes between “the techniques of the handcraftsman” and “modern machine-powered technology” (13), which he calls “the disturbing thing” and (later) “the danger.” Modern technology is also a revealing (14) but a different one. To explain this, Heidegger gives examples from the domain of energy. For example, modern technology such as a hydroelectric power plant “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored,” whereas the sails of the windmill “are left entirely to the wind’s blowing” (14). In other words, modern technology challenges nature and the land, it forces it to give its “resources.” Nature is turned into stock. The modern ways of revealing are “unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about” (16). But Heidegger points out that there are different ways of revealing, such as the revealing accomplished by Hölderlin’s hymn about the Rhine. Whereas modern technology orders about everything it can get hold of and turns everything into a “standing-reserve” (17), the poet and the craftsman have different ways of revealing.
However, Heidegger suggests that we cannot simply choose between modes of revealing: “man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any time the real shows itself or withdraws” (18). The thinker responds only to “what addressed itself to him” (18). In this sense modern technology is “not merely human doing” (19). What Heidegger calls the “Enframing” of modern technology “holds sway” (20) and shows itself to us in and through technology. There is a “destining” (24). Heidegger thus uses and assumes a Romantic epistemology in which things show themselves and hide again, are revealed and then again concealed. This is true for technology and for the gods. The mystery conceals itself, but sometimes truth comes to light, goes into the open, shows itself (25). And, Heidegger writes in true Gothic fashion, there is a danger. Again the danger may be concealed or unconcealed. Modern technology is the danger. But the problem with modern technology “does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology” (28) but has to do with the particular way of revealing that modern technology renders possible. By revealing everything as standing reserve, it closes us off from “a more original revealing” (28), one that poets such as Hölderlin were sensitive to. It is a revealing that does not “challenge forth,” does not try to master technology (32), which would keep us locked up in the technological way of thinking. It is a revealing that does not result from our will to master, but a revealing that “comes to pass” (33). There is a mystery, an extreme danger, and we are not in control. Only a higher power can save us. In the meantime, Heidegger suggests, we can look to the ancient Greek ways of bringing forth (techne) and read the (Romantic) poets. And we must question. But as a true Romantic, Heidegger ends his essay with the thought that “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes” (35). In contrast to rationalist philosophical argument, his romantic questioning leads to more, not less, mystery.
Heidegger’s Romantic-Gothic epistemology (and thus not merely his romanticism in the form of nostalgia for Greek art and culture) becomes even more apparent in his essay “The Turning” (in Heidegger 1977). Here, in an environment that could be a Gothic castle, we find truth in an “entrapping” (36) and “the danger” remains “veiled and disguised” (37). A destining is “waiting” (37), not yet concealed. Like the gods of ancient times, truth may show itself or not, the danger may present itself or not, Being may suddenly show up or not. When the danger goes, this also happens suddenly. Heidegger uses the metaphor of lightning: “The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. … This sudden self-lightning is the lightning-flash. … Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in” (44). Like gods, ghosts, and other supernatural entities, truth, Being, “the danger,” the saving, may suddenly appear or disappear, for instance, in a lighting flash. But Heidegger stresses that even when there is a flashing glance, it “simultaneously keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin as the unlighted” (45). Thus, darkness always remains. And we are never in control; we also do not only see, yet at the same time we are seen: we are “struck … by the flashing of Being” and we “are caught sight of” (47).
In his earlier work, Heidegger had come remarkably close to what we may call the romantic-gothic phenomenology of the fear and risk. In Being and Time (1927) he sets out to “determine phenomenally what is fearsome in its fearsome character” (132). He claims that “what is feared has the character of being threatening,” which he then analyzes in terms of harmfulness that is approaching and that may get us or not:
As something threatening, what is harmful is not yet near enough to be dealt with, but it is coming near. As it approaches, harmfulness radiates and thus has the character of threatening. … [W]hat is harmful is threatening, it can get us, and yet perhaps not. … This means that what is harmful, approaching near, bears the revealed possibility of not happening and passing us by. This does not lessen or extinguish fearing, but enhances it. (Heidegger 1927, 132)
Like the nineteenth-century Romantics and Goths, Heidegger also speaks of the “horror” and the “terror”: when “it” (what threatens) is unfamiliar, fear becomes horror, and when it is suddenly there, fear becomes alarm and terror (133). Dasein as being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s technical terms for what we can here translate as human existence) is said to be “fearful” (133–134). Thus, here we have already the epistemological and psychological environment of the Romantic-Gothic castle, in which danger may suddenly present itself (or not), in which things are radiating danger, in which the danger awaits us. The fear, the horror, and the terror presuppose concealment and the possibility of unconcealment, the possibility of a lighting flash that shows us the danger, perhaps also the truth.
To conclude, like other modern and Romantic thinkers Heidegger opposes “techno-logical, calculating representation” to different, ancient ways of thinking, perceiving, and making. But his Romanticism should not be reduced to his nostalgia concerning ancient Greece and the Romantic poets, who, Heidegger suggests, still understood the ancients. In this later writings Heidegger also uncovers, unconceals a different, romantic epistemology (and therefore also a romantic theology). As a romantic epistemologist, his main point is that we cannot command the truth and cannot order in “the highest mystery of Being” (49). Truth, the divine, and so on may come to pass, show themselves. This is not up to us. He writes: “Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men. … Whether or not God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being” (49). As shown, he same romantic epistemology is already at work in his phenomenology of fear and risk in Being and Time (1927): what threatens us may get us—or it may pass by. It may be unfamiliar, and it may suddenly appear.
Moreover, while it is true that in both Heidegger and Weber, there is a tension between technology and romanticism, both also have a more nuanced view than is usually supposed by contemporary philosophers of technology. Weber clearly makes links between religious history and the history of modern society and the machine, and in Heidegger, modern technology is much more than instrumentality or merely the opposite of everything romantics desire. Technology is itself a way of revealing and is part of a history of Being that we cannot and should not try to master. Both thinkers incorporate technology in their romantic narratives. Technology is the antiromantic, but at the same time it is also part of the romance of modernity, including modern thinking.
A criticism of modern technology and media that expresses a clearer technology-romanticism opposition can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, although there is also some ambiguity. Generally Benjamin rejected early Romanticism. Yet his thinking also shows “a fundamental affinity” to it (Gasché 2002, 52). For instance, he is known to have been attracted to mysticism and to Novalis’s attempt to go beyond the subject-object dichotomy, and he also appreciated the progressive elements in early Romanticism (Allert 2004, 274). In his doctoral dissertation on the topic, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” successfully defended in 1919, he is sometimes sympathetic, but also hostile, to Romanticism: he accused the Romantics of “obscurity, of failing to clearly differentiate between their concepts, of having become embroiled in unresolvable contradictions” (Gasché 2002, 52). So how romantic is Benjamin? And to focus on what interests us here, What would be his view on the relation between romanticism and technology? In this section, I focus on Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). I argue that it is very romantic with its focus on authenticity, aura, cult, and spirituality, but that in this text, technology does not always stand in opposition to romanticism.
Benjamin claims that there is a loss of authenticity and “aura” because of the mechanical reproduction of art—for example, in film production. The object is detached from “the domain of tradition” (215), whereas the historical object still had an aura. With “aura,” Benjamin refers to the “cult value” of the work of art, which can be understood in terms of its uniqueness and “unapproachability” (236). He writes: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (216). There is distance: the cult image always remains distant. Its beauty is transcendent. Moreover, art objects have “ritual power” (237): “We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind” (217). This “ritualistic basis” (217) of the work of art meant that it was distant and usually hidden: “The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did not expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits” (218). Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priests in the cella;1 certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round.
Yet this view of the work of art changes in modernity. Today we no longer talk about its cult value; we now use the concept of authenticity instead (237). The cult value of the work of art is secularized. Its aura is destroyed (217). It is no longer an “ominous idol” and no longer a cult object. Today there is a loss of the spiritual. Benjamin quotes Hegel saying that the “spirit” of a painting “speaks to man through its beauty,” but today we are “beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine” (238). Film has lost the aura. The last technology that had an aura was early photography: “For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty” (219). Film, however, is no longer an “instrument of magic” (219) and lacks ritual value. Benjamin wanted “a dream more poetical and more real at the same time!” (221), but for him, the poetry is gone when the film audience takes the camera’s point of view (22) and when actors become shadows on the screen: their bodies lose their “corporeality” as they are “deprived of reality, life” and become “a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence” (223). For Benjamin, a person’s aura is “tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it” (223). In film there are only effects, no real acting, which would require the presence of the “whole living person” (223). Benjamin also makes an interesting comparison between a surgeon and a magician: whereas the surgeon “penetrates into the patient’s body,” the magician keeps a distance by “laying on the hands” rather than cutting into the patient’s body. For Benjamin, the camera(man) penetrates deeply into reality with his “mechanical equipment” (227). There is no longer distance and time for contemplation. Film changes the image all the time. Thoughts are replaced by movie images since there is constant change (231). Quality is replaced by quantity. Concentration is replaced by distraction (232–233). The public is “absent-minded” (234).
In this epilogue, Benjamin seems to be closer to the romantic interest in the sublime and the gothic interest in the grotesque and death: he romances war when he connects beauty to technological warfare. Mentioning “gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks,” he says that war is beautiful:
War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. … Poets and artists of Futurism! (Benjamin 1936, 235)
Yet Benjamin also sees the horror of war and the alienation it produces. He argues that society is not mature enough to “incorporate” technology; the discrepancy between the “tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production” leads to imperialism and horrible war, which abolishes the aura. In the end, there is only self-alienation: we experience our own destruction “as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (235). Thus, on the one hand, Benjamin’s description of war seems to suggest that war has romantic-aesthetic value and can even give “aesthetic pleasure”; on the other hand, he thinks that warfare abolishes the aura and that the aesthetic pleasure is due to self-alienation.
Benjamin’s narrative shows that even for well-known twentieth-century critics of modern technology, not all technology is necessarily opposed to romanticism. According to Benjamin, the technology of war has romantic features—there is a Futurist aesthetics of war—and early photography was still romantic. However, his view can easily be criticized for being too nostalgic: it is not clear why his romanticism does not cross over to film. In the twentieth century, film had more than enough magic in it to attract large crowds of romantic viewers. Benjamin does not see the wonder in the eyes of the film spectators. He does not see the film’s ghosts and spirits “flickering an instant on the screen.” And indeed he does not see how he turns his criticism of film into an aesthetics of the dead, focused on the contrast between the (un)dead actor on the screen versus the living person. More generally, we must question his secularization narrative. Modernity has not been (fully) secularized. Even, and perhaps especially, contemporary technologies and media are great enchantment machines. Conservative romantics will always respond that the new technology (today, digital technologies and media) has lost the aura. However, as I argue next, romanticism should not be confused with such nostalgia, melancholy, or conservatism. In the next chapters I further support the view that contemporary technology and romanticism are entangled by responding to the recent technoromanticism literature and by offering my own analysis and interpretation of contemporary technology and media in terms of romanticism. Today there are new forms of magic and new rituals.
Contemporary philosophy of technology is often surprisingly silent about romanticism. When romanticism is mentioned at all, it is assumed to be something that needs to be rejected immediately, without further analysis, and it is reduced to nostalgia and preference of older technologies, as in Don Ihde’s (1993, 106–107) and Peter-Paul Verbeek’s (2005, 68) responses to Heidegger’s view of modern technology, Smits’s association of romanticism with shallowness and “a simpleminded repudiation of technology” (Smits in Achterhuis 1999, 149), or Turkle’s (1996) view, which describes the resistance to seeing computers in human terms as “romantic” (24–25). In other words, romanticism is equated with a nostalgic and conservative, if not reactionary, response to new technologies. This use of the term romanticism is common and understandable, but does little justice to its many meanings; as I have already suggested, romanticism is much richer as a tradition of thinking, and as I also show in the next chapters, its relation to technology is far more ambiguous.
An exception is Carl Mitcham, who in his epilogue to his seminal work Thinking through Technology (1994), recognizes and takes seriously romanticism as one way of “being-with technology” (289–299). He takes it seriously since he sees Romanticism not only as a reaction to and criticism of modern scientific rationality, a view of nature as “one of process and change” (295), and a defense of the imagination in order to overcome the limitations of reason (this is nothing new). He also sees it as a questioning of technology, even the first questioning of modern technology:
What is seldom appreciated is the extent to which romanticism can also be interpreted as a questioning—in fact, the first self-conscious questioning—of modern technology. (Mitcham 1994, 290)
Mitcham thereby assigns to Romanticism a place, even a crucial place, in the history of philosophy of technology. He then refers to Wordsworth, Rousseau, Blake, Dickens, and others in order to show the “uneasiness” about technology displayed by romanticism. For instance, he says that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “presents a love-hate relationship with technology” (294). Earlier in the book, he also mentions Rousseau’s Discourse on the Science and Arts (see chapter 2), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other romantic responses to technology. He also refers to Heidegger’s idea that modern science and technology “does not know itself”; it does not know its own limits (54). Mitcham thus not only assigns an important place to Romanticism in the history of philosophy of technology; he also explicitly recognizes some of the ambiguity of romanticism’s relation to technology; this is rather exceptional in contemporary philosophy of technology, which usually assumes a one-sided view of the matter.
However, with what nineteenth-century Romantics would call a “philistine” gesture, he then rejects romanticism because of its presumed lack of “practical efficacy” and failure “to take hold as a truly viable way of life” (299). Partly this response can be understood as the view of someone who largely embraces what Mitcham himself calls an “engineering” philosophy of technology (19) as opposed to a “humanities” philosophy of technology. Mitcham suggests that the Romantic reaction to modern technology is part of a “humanities” philosophy of technology, which “too often seems to be a philosophy of antitechnology and to close itself off in romantic subjectivity from technological aspects of the human”; seen from an “engineering” philosophy of technology point of view, this kind of philosophy is rejected for being “too speculative or based on too narrow if not unempirical foundations” (65).
As indicated previously, many philosophers of technology today seem to share this view or, rather, assume it. Usually contemporary philosophy of technology, eager to shed the presumed pessimism of earlier technology critics, defines itself—sometimes explicitly but more often inexplicitly—as antiromantic. Insofar as it wants to be a forward-looking, empirically oriented philosophy of technology and a philosophy of artifacts and things, and turns away from the old, backward-looking thinking of Weber, Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Karl Jaspers, and others, contemporary philosophy of technology is indeed antiromantic. Insofar as it embraces an “engineering philosophy of technology” (19), its language and thinking come closer to the language and thinking of technology, closer to its artifacts, things, machines, and systems. Latour, Wiebe Bijker, and many others leave the study room of the humanities professor and enter the lab of the scientists and the workshop of the engineer. Their focus is, in the first instance at least, on things, not humans. The orientation is pro-technology rather than antitechnology, optimistic instead of pessimistic—at least this is the accusation addressed by the “old,” romantic philosophers of technology.
This view of romanticism implies that romanticism and technology are seen as necessarily opposed. Whether romanticism is reduced to nostalgia (or used as a kind of insult) or used as a kind of negative background against which one defines one’s approach, romanticism in both cases is assumed to be incompatible with an appreciation of contemporary technology. Yet it is precisely in this antiromantic moment that contemporary philosophy of technology remains highly romantic, since the oppositions it presupposes are inherited from the very romantic tradition it rejects. In its antiromanticism, it remains within the order of romantic thinking. But it is a one-sided romanticism: it eclipses meanings of technology (and indeed of romanticism) that do not oppose technology to romanticism. It is silent about the many ways technology and romanticism have flirted with one another.
Similar observations could be made about (more) analytic philosophy of technology and about contemporary critical theory of technology, for instance, Marxian analysis of contemporary ICTs and the Habermasian discourse about responsible innovation. These thinkers usually understand themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment: they believe in clarity as opposed to romantic darkness and shadows, rationality as opposed to emotion, analysis as opposed to narrative, evidence as opposed to intuition, down to earth and practical rather than dreamy, contributing to making things work versus being on the sideline, dealing with stakeholders, power, interests, political economy versus utopian thinking, and so on. These oppositions may not be originally part of the Romantic tradition and may not offer a fair representation of romanticism, but the point is that they are part of the romantic discourse and order of thinking, which includes antiromanticism and sees technology and romanticism as incompatible.
If today’s thinking about technology such as Heidegger’s is branded romantic and opposed to contemporary philosophy of technology, which aims to take seriously technology as technology, then this view is not mistaken when it comes to calling Heidegger and others romantic,” although there are much less superficial reasons for this than mere nostalgia; clearly antiromanticism often results in an impoverished, distorted, or caricatured view of romanticism (and vice versa, of course). What is more problematic for the purpose of understanding technology, however, is the assumption of an unbridgeable gap between romanticism and technology, since this closes off a space for thinking about romanticism and technology, let alone that it leaves room for apprehending what I later in this book call romantic technologies.
Note, finally, that even if contemporary philosophy of technology may, explicitly or not, understand itself as antiromantic, it nevertheless contains quasi-romantic elements. Consider, for instance, its sympathies to the idea that designing and using artifacts can and should be used to shape one’s subjectivity and one’s life (this might be presupposing the romantic idea that living is an art and that we should all become artists) and that design (art) can and should change society—an idea inherited from twentieth-century countercultural romanticism, now often mixed with consumerism. I will return to more contemporary technology in the next chapters when I discuss links between information and communication technologies and romanticism. But I first further explore the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology in an American context by commenting on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964).
The romantic is often connected to pastoralism. In his influential book, The Machine in Garden (1964), Leo Marx discusses the idea that technology disrupts pastoral life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.2 The pastoral American dream was to begin a new life on a perceived “virgin continent” (see, for instance, the name Virginia), to retreat to “an oasis of harmony and joy,” which led to “various utopian schemes” (3). Marx argues that this pastoralism “remains a significant force in American life” (4). But, he asks, what does it mean in the context of twentieth-century urban, industrial society? He points to the flight from the city, localism, and “the wilderness cult” (5). He is interested in the psychology of this. He mentions Freud’s explanation of this nostalgia (frustration and repression) and this wish to return to nature. But central in this narrative is the appearance of new technology. One of the images he evokes is the whistle of the steam locomotive in Thoreau’s Walden (1854, a classic romantic book), which disrupts nature (15). He also discusses many other literary works to illustrate this tension between pastoralism and technology (e.g., Hawthorne and Melville). Technology is perceived as a dangerous intrusion: “the noise arouses a sense of dislocation, conflict, and anxiety” (16). There is what we may call a typically romantic-religious pattern: first there is harmony (paradise, arcadia), then there is disruption of the harmony (the Fall), and finally (an attempt to) restoration of the harmony. The locomotive is the symbol of alienation—not only the alienation of the figure in the narrative but also the alienation of all Americans in the industrial age:
The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power. It appears in the woods, suddenly shattering the harmony of the green hollow. … The noise of the train … is a cause of alienation in the root sense of the word: it makes inaudible the pleasing sounds to which he [Thoreau] had been attending, and so it estranges him: from the immediate source of meaning and value. … In truth, the “little event” is a miniature of a great—in many ways the greatest—even in our history. (Marx 1964, 27)
The railroad turns out to be both an emblem of progress and a road that can lead to hell (27). Technology becomes threatening. In particular, it threatens the image of America as a garden rather than (or at least next to) “a hideous wilderness” (43).
In his literary criticism, however, Marx also shows and explores how pastoralism and technology often went together. The machine expressed hopes for peace, equality, freedom, and happiness (192) and thus was part of the rhetoric of progress (193), but not necessarily in a way that contradicted the pastoral ideal in its American version. Some see the possibility of harmony between technology and nature, especially if nature is seen as something that needs to be brought in line with the will of humans as the lords of creation. Marx points to what he calls “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” (195). The railroads were said to have “exalted power and grandeur” and thereby “elevate the mind that seriously dwells on them” (195). People wondered at “the strange and unusual spectacle” (195). According to Marx, people felt the powers of their mind: they could now be masters of nature, which was seen as “progressively making less and less resistance to his dominion” (196). To look at machines was to see “the sublime progress of the race” (197). They are sublime, even if “the underlying assumptions remain those of the Enlightenment” (198).
Machines were thus not only viewed as threatening; they could also glorify human powers (and thereby divine power), in particular the power over nature. Their workings may have been based on Enlightenment science, but their appearance was responded to in romantic terms, for instance, sublime or magic. Marx, when commenting on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, sees affinities between magic and modern science: “Both presuppose our ability and our need to master the non-human through activity of mind” (55). Again there is not an opposition between pastoralism and technology. There is, rather, a glorification of nature and wilderness (the island, paradise) but also mastery of nature: “Shakespeare is able to depict a highly civilized man testing his powers in a green and desolate land” (68). Marx thus turns The Tempest into the narrative about America and “a prologue to American literature” (72). The raw, virgin nature becomes a “setting for technological progress” (203). It becomes, in Heidegger’s words, a “standing-reserve” for humans to use and master. For the “Americans,” the technology was also a symbol of their new nation, something the new Republic could do better than “the Old World” (205).
Technology was also seen as part of a divine plan. To show that “Americans had little difficulty in reconciling their passion for machine power with the immensely popular Jeffersonian ideal of rural peace, simplicity, and contentment” (208), Marx shows how in the rhetoric of the technological, sublime machine power becomes aligned with “the spirit of the Republic” and “the progressive forces of history” (214):
Everything, it says, is working out according to a divine plan. Now the disturbing images of change, the screaming monster and the defacer of landscape, seem embarrassingly squeamish, effeminate, and trivial. The noise and smoke, the discomfort and visual ugliness, even the loss of peace and repose—these things, the rich voice proclaims, are of little consequences to true Americans. (Marx 1964, 214)
The machine is now assimilated and at home in the landscape. This was made possible, Marx shows, by the American pastoral ideal itself, which had already “provided a clear sanction for the conquest of the wilderness, for improving upon raw nature and for economic and technological development—up to a point”—the point when there would be a threat to the “happy balance of art and nature” (226). But this point was never identified. And so progress could continue and can continue, under the blessing of romanticism.
Marx also points out that even Emerson—who can be seen as a romantic—was perfectly able “to join enthusiasm for technological progress with a ‘romantic’ love of nature and contempt for cities” (232). On the one hand, he recommends withdrawal from society, but at the same time he is impressed by the new technologies and their power (233). In a lecture, he welcomes machine power as an instrument of national unity and sees railroad iron as “a magician’s rod” that has the power “to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water” (234). Marx writes: “There are to be no satanic mills in America, no dark, begrimed cities, nothing like the squalid, inhuman world depicted by Blake, Dickens, and Carlyle” (234–35). Instead, the New World is a garden. In such a garden, there is no place for cities, but technology is not (necessarily) a problem. It even “extends the efficacy of the Understanding” (236). He even argues that the new technology is not necessarily antipoetic: “There is nothing inherently ugly about factories and railroads; what is ugly is the dislocation and detachment from ‘the Whole’” (241). They merely need to get their proper place. The poet can reattach things to nature and the Whole (241). What technology “is” depends on our perception of it. Poets can show the possibility of harmony (242). And this, Marx argues, is what Thoreau did in Walden, an “experiment in transcendental pastoralism” (242).
Walden may easily be taken to be an antitechnology book: “men have become the tools of their tools.” But Marx shows that Thoreau’s position was more complex: instead of expressing “simple-minded Luddite hostility toward the new inventions” (247), Thoreau attacked the idea that society should be ordered according to a machine and that people become machines: “The laboring man becomes a machine in the sense that his life becomes more closely geared to an impersonal and seemingly autonomous system” (248). The locomotive in Walden is sometimes a “hawk” but also a “partridge,” blending into the landscape (251–252). It is very different from the pond, of course, but Thoreau is also “elated by the presence of this wonderful invention” (252). There is hope and promise. His view is a blend of “Jeffersonian and romantic attitudes toward nature” (256) and cannot be described as a return to nature or as expressing a desire to go back to the past. Everything transforms itself. In Thoreau’s idealism, inherited from Emerson, this happens through the imagination, through the power of the human mind (264). Like nineteenth-century romantics, Thoreau wrote in an attempt to reimagine and rewrite the world.
Marx also argues that the mechanical arts and the fine arts became linked. Inventions are seen as the “poetry” of science” (200). To invent a new machine required “genius.” This comes close to the “mechanical romanticism” of nineteenth-century European romantic science and technology. (See chapter 4.) Marx also refers to earlier eighteenth-century writings (William Coxe) in which there was no contradiction yet between the machine and nature: nature was seen as a celestial machine. But, Marx argues, this idea “is difficult to grasp because of our own feeling, learned from the romantics, that ‘organic’ nature is the opposite of things ‘mechanical’” (162). While this misrepresents the spectrum of romanticism(s), Marx points again to ways in which machines and nature may be reconciled. For instance, he shows that Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand,” did not deny the advantages of machine production and did not want to return to an earlier society (174), but rather defended a return to a “balance” in the human situation instead of the determination of human behavior by external, invisible, abstract forces alien to human impulses (176).
Whether we wish to endorse the American pastoral romanticism of the machine that Leo Marx described, it clearly is also a version of romanticism, one that is not totally opposed to the machine but has an ambiguous relation to it: the machine is something that disrupts the pastoral idyll, but it is also a sublime sign of the mastery over nature and to invent a new machine requires romantic-scientific genius. This may be seen as a “contradiction,” but romantics can live with contradictions. As Black (2002) remarks, the early romantics of the nineteenth century “preferred a sense of contradiction” (108), and they promised “a way of making life whole within, rather than despite, the necessary contradictions in modern society” (109). Escape from civilization is only one type of romanticism, and even this kind of romanticism is defined in relation to the modern world.
There are also darker, more gothic pictures of the human relationship with nature and technology in American literature. Marx also discusses Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a classic in American Romanticism. The novel further supports my point that the romantic relation to technology is more ambiguous than usually assumed.
The start of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is undoubtedly gothic-romantic. The narrator, Ishmael, wants to see the sea in order to escape the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, the coffins and the funerals (1), the “dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb” (9). He joins Captain Ahab, who seeks revenge on a large white whale called Moby-Dick that took his leg (he has a prosthesis—thus uses technology in a way that is very much connected with his body, perhaps he could be called a “cyborg”: a combination of human and machine) and sets out on a monomanic quest to kill the whale. But instead he and his crew meet death and destruction; in the final fight with the whale, Ahab is drawn into the sea. The novel displays a typical romantic-gothic epistemology: there is an encounter or not, the whale may (re)appear or not, the danger draws nearer. When the whale is coming for them, it strikes “terror” in them (616). Death is present everywhere. The crew talk about a coffin (579–581). The whale is monstrous (as is the captain in his monomania). Nature appears as sublime and threatening, and humans depend on technology to cope with it. Chapter titles are the names of parts of the boat (e.g., “the cabin”) and artifacts such as “the log and the line” and “the life-buoy.” The crew constantly deals with nature through technology. Leo Marx (1964) writes, “In a whaling world, Ishmael discovers, man’s primary relation to nature is technological” (295). But here the green romantic garden becomes a dark wet gothic churchyard: there is a corpse that receives a “ghostly baptism,” they sail on the tomb of the dead (Melville 1851, 595), there is a floating coffin, and the ship and the whale become hearses (632). The whale is also a vault, as is suggested by one of the quotes at the beginning of the book. The self is mysterious and no longer under control. Ahab says:
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (Melville 1851, 599–600)
Similarly, nature is out of control; it becomes clear that full mastery through technology is no longer possible. The narrator praises the technologies and skills of the hunters to navigate and calculate where the whale is, making a comparison with timing and locating a train, “the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway” (613). But the whale wins. Ahab does not listen to Starbuck’s warning: “Never, never wilt thou capture him. … Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? … Oh, oh,-Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!” (620). Caught in the line, he is shot out of the boat (633). There is a vortex; the ship sinks. A coffin rises and serves as a life buoy for the narrator-messenger, who is rescued (635).
Technology thus turns out to be two-sided. On the one hand, it is part of “life”; humans use it in their struggle with nature. It can even be part of the human body, like Ahab’s prosthesis. On the other hand, if used in order to gain full mastery of nature, it leads to death and destruction. Whether Leo Marx (1964) is right to call the romantic attitude toward nature “narcissistic” (291), it becomes clear again that the romantic attitude toward technology is not necessarily entirely negative; there is a lot more ambiguity in these writings than one may suppose.
This interpretation is in line with Klaus Benesch’s reading of American Romantic writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, which is highly relevant to the cyborg theme in this book. Benesch (2002) also shows that, like today, in these times there was not only anxiety and fear, but also admiration and fascination with technology. In the writings of authors who tried to cope with fast-changing modern life, there was fear of what Benesch calls “the technological other” (33), but also fascination with, for instance, the free proliferation of information (60); the mechanical reproduction offered by print technology, which promises nothing less than immortality to the writer (36–37); or the hope that the sublime landscape would have “the power to redeem, to ‘wash out’ the negative consequences associated with the onslaught of technology” (48). Of course there were idealizations of nature, but the Romantic discourse at the time also had a keen interest in machines and in the cyborg: that “hybrid figure that comprised the human as well as the machine” (4). I already commented in these terms on Ahab’s prosthesis. Benesch argues that the cyborg imagery—for instance, in the form of “ representations of the body encroached on by technology” (4)—developed into “a powerful metaphor of technological culture” (43). The cyborg stands for the symbolic encounter between humans and machines, and was used by these writers to both repudiate and continue what Benesch calls “mechanical philosophy” (54). Writers projected their fears and fascination onto the screen of the cyborg, which enabled them to “cut across the realms of the human and the technological” (54). Moreover, the American Romantics were also interested in automata. They would have known the so-called Chess Turk, for instance, which was also exhibited in the United States, or the Chess-Player, which both stand in the tradition of “wonderful automata”: they were believed to be more than a machine (110). And already then there was discussion about machine intelligence and how it compares to human intelligence. To conclude, it would be misleading to say that American Romanticism, like Romanticism in Europe, was interested only in nature and was entirely antitechnological. Instead, there was also fascination by the wonders and new possibilities of machines, and there were cyborg fantasies, which sometimes took on a gothic character—for instance, in Melville’s references to artificial implants and replacement parts (155). There was a taste for nature and the landscape, for old myth and fables, but also an interest in “the intimate communion of art, body, and machines” (172). The horrors of war may have cooled down the fascination with technology but did not eradicate it. Benesch concludes that there was a fear of losing control, of technology taking over, but he also observes: “The coupling of the human and the machine remained an alluring topic for nineteenth-century American authors” (178).3
If we turn to the twentieth century, we get a similar picture. Of course, there are other, more one-sidedly antitechnological forms of romanticism in the American literary-cultural context. Leo Marx mentions Rachel Carson’s famous Silent Spring (1962) in which the “machine-in-the-garden trope,” as Marx puts it in his afterword (Marx 1964, 381), plays an important role. First, there is a harmonious life, which then is abruptly disturbed by an alien, technological force (380–381). In this typically romantic narrative, the ambiguity is gone: the machine can no longer be redeemed. There is no hope for balance. But there are more ambiguous works in twentieth-century American culture that address the same theme, for example, the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance (1982), which supports my argument about the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology.
Koyaanisqatsi has an unusual format. The cult film is a poem of images and sounds, without narration. It uses slow-motion and time-lapse shots of natural landscapes, skies, technologies, cities, traffic patterns, and assembly lines. Like the literary works discussed by Leo Marx, it makes us think of the relationship of humans, nature, and technology. On the one hand, it may share some of the romanticism of Silent Spring, and there is a kind of “original statue of nature.” The film shows natural landscapes and skies that seem pristine and untouched. This original state of nature is not that of the first white American settlers, who started to master the new land that they constructed as virgin and untouched. The role of “authentic” people (or messengers) is given to the Hopi, a Native American tribe that strives toward peace and respect for all things and views its land as sacred. Then modern technology enters that world. The Hopi prophecies are about disaster, and the film lists people such as Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, who are usually read as being against modern technology. The title Koyaanisqatsi refers to the Hopi word for “life out of balance” or “disintegrating life.” In this sense, the film is antitechnology. But the director, Godfrey Reggio, leaves room for more interpretations. He says that the film is about technology becoming ubiquitous: “We live technology” (Reggio in Carson 2002). But he does not explicitly say that modern technology is bad; is up to us to interpret and evaluate, which leaves room for a romantic interpretation of technology: the film also shows the sublimity of the technological world or, rather, the virgin landscape transformed by human, sublime technology. We see Horseshoe Canyon (Utah) and other natural beauty, but also a large mining truck, the launch of a Saturn V rocket, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, and a Boeing 747 on a runway at Lost Angeles International Airport. Apparently technology can be sublime and romantic.
The nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century works about the environment and technology discussed in this chapter raise questions regarding the meaning of modern technology. Contrary to their European relatives (consider Weber and Heidegger, but also Ellul and other critics of technology), these nineteenth-century American writers are generally more optimistic about the possibility of finding a good balance between humans, nature, and technology, although there are exceptions (see again Moby-Dick). Twentieth-century works tend to be less optimistic. Yet while their views differ, all of these American romantic comments on technology are generally more ambiguous about technology than may be supposed. Instead of pushing them toward a one-sided rejection of modern technology, their romanticism leads them to recognize the sublime and wondrous nature of technology. And even Melville’s darker picture acknowledges the existential necessity of technology: the problem is not technology but our modern unrestrained will to mastery. We depend on the line, and this is part of life. We need technology. We live technology. The question is what kind of life we want to live. The line (and the whale) leads to death only if we keep on “pushing” and “jamming,” to use Melville’s words.
Romanticism is usually seen as opposed to technology, especially modern technology. This chapter has shown that nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of technology in Europe and the United States display a lot more ambiguity concerning technology and has suggested that romanticism and technology are not necessarily opposed. This implies that if philosophers of technology care to better understand the relation between romanticism and technology, they can learn a lot from these critics. In particular, it became clear that although the relation is full of tension, there is also the possibility of intimacy and liaison. In the next chapters we will see that some of these liaisons have not only offered some interesting and often neglected technology-friendly versions of romanticism but have also helped to create contemporary high-tech culture. To understand how this was possible, however, we first return to the wondrous and sometimes dark romanticism of the nineteenth century.