Romanticism with the Machine Romanticism with the Machine (1): From Frankenstein’s Monster to Hippie Computing

Science, Technology, and Wonder in the Early Nineteenth Century

In France, Britain, Germany, Denmark, and other places in early nineteenth-century Europe, science was shaped not only by Enlightenment rationalism but also by Romanticism. In The Age of Wonder (2008), Richard Holmes indicates several elements that support this claim, such as the neo-Faustian figure of the scientific genius “thirsting and reckless of knowledge” and the idea of the “Eureka moment”: invention or discovery not prepared by rational analysis but due to instant inspiration and intuition, perhaps a moment of “singular, almost mystical vision” (Holmes 2008, xvii), such as those moments of revelation and vision expressed in the Romantic-Gothic paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (e.g., An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768; figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Joseph Wright of Derby, *An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump: A Philosopher Is Demonstrating the Formation of a Vacuum by Withdrawing Air from a Flask Containing a White Cockatoo*, ca. 1780 (mezzotint). (Image courtesy: Wellcome Library, London, no. 575780i, http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0076258.html. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

The Romantic attitude was combined with the notion of “an infinite, mysterious Nature, waiting to be discovered or seduced into revealing all her secrets” (xviii). This revealing of Nature, however, was not a passive reception but an active practice in which technology in the form of instruments played a crucial role (in Wright’s painting, the air pump). Instruments such as the voltaic battery, the electrical generator, the scalpel, the air pump, and the balloon were what Holmes calls instruments of discovery and seduction (viii): technologies used not to study a mechanistic universe but a mysterious, fluid, dynamic, and organic—that is, Romantic—Nature. Romantic wonder reached for the remotest places on the earth and beyond, but also for the deepest abysses of the soul. Science was an adventure. Ballooning, exploring, and soul hunting were “part of the great journey” (xx). In his book, Holmes shows how in Britain, France, and other places in Europe, scientists searched for Paradise (as Joseph Banks did in Tahiti); invented new instruments to explore the universe,¹ hunt comets, and reflect on the sky’s ghosts (“The light did travel after the body was gone” [Holmes 2008, 210]); dreamed of flying but also built the technology to fly and create wonder and experiences of the sublime (the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon, for instance); embarked on hazardous exhibitions in the hope “to penetrate the obscurity of the internal face of Africa” (211), as Joseph Banks described the missions of Mungo Park, the lone wanderer with a passionate desire to discover the mysteries and the unknown in the heart of Africa (all this fascinated Joseph Conrad, who would later write the Gothic-Romantic 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness); did chemistry with a love of the sublime and the thought that there may be beings “near us, surrounding us, which we do not perceive” (294) (Sir Humphry Davy); or did experiments with voltaic batteries and dead bodies in an attempt to animate dead matter (Giovanni Aldini, Johann Wilhelm Ritter). Romantics such as Schelling conceived of the natural world as a whole of “invisible powers and energies” (Holmes 2008, 315), and scientists tried to understand and reveal these powers. Animal bodies and even human bodies were part of Gothic-Romantic experiments: Can we revive a body after someone is dead by using electricity? Can we (re-)create life?

As I already mentioned in the previous chapter, such experiments and questions inspired Mary Shelley. Could dead bodies be reanimated? What is life? What is this invisible animating power? Is it perhaps like electricity, that mysterious force? In her fiction, she “would take up where Aldini had been forced to leave off” (Holmes 2008, 327) and entertain the idea that electricity could be used not only to reanimate dead human beings but also to create one from dead matter. Her imagination was surprisingly practical. Holmes writes: “She would invent a laboratory in which limbs, organs, assorted body parts were not separated and removed and thrown away, but assembled and sewn together and ‘reanimated’ by a ‘powerful machine,’ presumably a voltaic battery” (327). In other words, in her novel, science and science fiction met. Her Gothic-Romantic fantasies were not mere fantasies, but were very much related to the science of her day. In this sense, Victor Frankenstein existed: he represented the typical Romantic and Gothic scientist of the time. Poets such as Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and of course Mary Shelley herself were fascinated by this kind of science because it was so close to their Romanticism—their Romanticism was “scientific” and the science was “romantic.” The Romantic scientists even shared the religious ideas of the poets. For some, this took the form of Judeo-Christian monotheism and creationism (science must reveal the wonders of God’s creation/design); for others it was a kind of mysticism without a creator. Holmes convincingly argues that scientists and poets were united in an “Age of Wonder.”

Furthermore, as Holmes’s narrative shows, technology played a crucial role in this romance. Technology was not seen in opposition to Romanticism, but was—literally—its instrument. Without the instruments, Romanticism might have remained “dreamy.” But it became practical, so practical that it also helped to lay the basis for the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. In The Romantic Machine (2012), John Tresch has argued that in post-Napoleonic France, there was what he calls “mechanical romanticism.” To understand what this is, we have to begin with an insight that is entirely in line with what many philosophers of technology think: “The kinds of machines we use are bound up with the ways we think about nature and the ways we know it” (xi). Indeed, as Heidegger also argued, technologies are not mere instruments; they also shape our way of thinking. And this includes our thinking about nature. How does this work? Tresch argues that the dominant image of modern science is based on “classical machines” such as balances, levers, and clocks, which imply that nature is stable and fixed, and “suggest a view of knowledge as detached, impersonal, and emotionless objectivity.” He contrasts this with an alternative image of science and theory of knowing: a Romantic one that was based on new kinds of machines such as steam engines, batteries, electrical instruments, better presses, and photography. These “romantic machines” went together with a different understanding of nature and indeed a different kind of knowing, a different epistemology:

Unlike “classical machines,” they [romantic machines] were understood as flexible, active, and inextricably woven into circuits of both living and animate elements. These new devices accompanied a new understanding of nature, as growing, complexly interdependent, and modifiable, and of knowledge, as an active, transformative intervention in which human thoughts, feelings, and intentions—in short, human consciousness—played an inevitable role in establishing truth. (Tresch 2012, xi)

Tresch then shows that this mechanical romanticism was prominent in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s in France, where, again, not only poets were enchanted “by the very scientific machines that have been held responsible for the disenchantment of the world” (xv), but also the scientists themselves. The new technologies were not mere instruments; they were tools of transformation: a transformation of society, of nature, and of the self. They were not detrimental to Romanticism, but part of its revolution and its magic. In this kind of thinking—mechanical romanticism—romanticism and mechanism were not seen as mutually exclusive but as going hand in hand. Tresch argues that to think of machines as having no feelings, no soul, no freedom, is to sustain an opposition that “has obscured important features of the intellectual and political landscape of modernity” (3). Instead he shows how in the first half of the nineteenth century, machines became associated with all that is usually associated with romanticism: self-expression, renewal of nature, metamorphosis, attention to the aesthetic and the emotional (3). The image of the clockwork machine was replaced by new innovations such as the steam engine, which could act as “fluid mediators between mind and world, and as the ligaments of society; they appeared as transformative, even sublime devices” (5). The “romantic machine” emerged as something that could fuse humans and their tools, which “drew forth invisible powers, converted them, and put them to use,” and which

involved the active participation of the observer and articulated a spontaneous, living, and constantly developing nature; it produced aesthetic effects and emotional states. From a certain angle, the romantic machine might still be seen as the embodiment of instrumental rationality, as an agent of the deadening and alienating routines of modern life. Yet from other angles … it was imbued with the aesthetics and the effects of the organic, the vital, and even the transcendent. (Tresch 2012, 12)

Here Tresch comes close to describing more recent “romantic machines” (if still machines at all), which I discuss in the next chapter: smart devices, robots, and hybrids such as the cyborg. But let me first say more about the nineteenth-century romantic machines and the related mechanical romanticism in order to better understand this extraordinary hybrid of Romanticism and technology.

Like Holmes, Tresch focuses on case studies, commenting on devices such as “electrical apparatus, geophysical instruments, daguerreotypes, musical instruments, stage sets, printing technologies, calendars, and the mother of them all, the steam engine” (287). For instance, he shows how André-Marie Ampère’s experiments with electricity and magnetism were informed by a discovery made by the Danish natural philosopher Hans Christian Oersted (in Danish: Ørsted), like Ritter a follower of Schelling (29): Schelling and Oersted conceived of electricity as a bridge between matter and mind (32), and Ampère was part of a context in which there was interest in spiritualism (Maine de Biran), animal magnetism, and mesmerism (37). Important here is again the alternative epistemology implied in this romantic science, which goes beyond the rationalism-romanticism dichotomy as it is usually understood. For Ampère, knowledge was not detached or intuitive, but the result of human intervention (57), indeed “an active, embodied encounter between mind and matter” (58). Similarly, Alexander von Humboldt, situated “in the midst of the tempest that was German romanticism” (63), suggested that science required a mix of humans and instruments. In von Humboldt’s view, tools not only became extensions of human faculties (81); they also merged with the human: “tool and human became a single unit: the instrument was humanized, and the human incorporated the machine” (80). Thus, instead of the detached and passive observation of nature, we have a kind of “cyborg” process here in which humans and instruments merge in order to “make” new knowledge, in which hybrids are born.² A different epistemological approach took form, which helped to shape a tradition in the history of science that was more craft centered, and hence more centered on the instruments and technologies of science:

According to this tradition, the actions and experience of knowers, along with their tools, were celebrated as the necessary conditions of knowledge. In place of disembodiment and transparency, this craft-centred view emphasized the body of the artisan and the transformations that labor and instruments brought forth. (Tresch 2012, 101)

Moreover, Tresch argues that new machines such as steam engines were meant to contribute to a “utopia of communication, circulation, and production” (111), and new apparatus could also create new sensations and phenomena. Instead of mere observation of the phenomena of nature, romantic technologies created new, artificial phenomena. These phénomenotechniques (Gaston Bachelard) were meant to produce effects. Science and technology became closely linked to the realm of imagination, magic, and superstition (125). New “ghosts” were created, and new machines that appeared lifelike. The high tech of the time created new illusions, hallucinations, and “uncanny visual and auditory metamorphoses” (127). Drugs and séances were also used. There was a Gothic interest in monsters, which Tresch relates to “uncertainty over the increased presence of new technologies in everyday life” (153).

Tresch’s work also supports the point made in chapter 2 that Romanticism as a historical phenomenon was not necessarily antisocial or conservative, opposed to social change. We may consider William Morris again, but in the context of France, Tresch rightly points to Karl Marx, who lived in Paris in the 1840s and whose writings of that period exhibit the (mechanical) Romantic idea of a species being that creatively transforms its environments and realizes its essence through material engagement. More generally, the romantic technologies of these times were seen as being connected to social relations. Consider again Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism: technology makes it possible that social relationships are perceived in different ways (as relationships between people, between objects). Apparently these magic machines could change our perception: they could change the living to the dead. And these machines could do things with invisible powers. In France, as in Britain and elsewhere, machines were “granted an uncanny power to animate the inanimate, to emancipate and spiritualize ‘vibrant matter’” (Tresch 2012, 16). Finally, there is an interest in social change. Tresch pays special attention to the Saint-Simonians. Saint-Simonianism was a political and social movement inspired by Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. The movement recognized that science and technology has a profound impact on society and aimed to shape that society by reorganizing it. The Saint-Simonians saw machines as mediators between the spirit and the world (192) and imagined society as an “organic machine” (210).

Even Auguste Comte’s positivism, which is usually not categorized as romantic but as embodying its very opposite, turns out to be more romantic than expected. It is based on an organicist and relational epistemology, oriented toward social change; has clear romantic-religious aspects; and argues for limits to human control over the earth. To start with his epistemology: Comte stressed interactions between an organism and its environment and thought that our relation to the environment is the basis of knowledge: every phenomenon supposes a spectator; it implies a relation between object and subject (Tresch 2012, 272). This reminds us of what I have called Romantic epistemology. Second, Comte embraced religion to preserve the cohesion of society (284). He proposed the Religion of Humanity (273) and coined the word altruism: we should live for others. Although this kind of religion is perhaps not entirely romantic in itself, the very idea that we need religion and some form of enchantment for social purposes is in line with romanticism. Third, if Comte thought that the notion of an animate, conscious nature was a good way to popularize science, it was because he took fetishism seriously (276). His nature was not one that needs to be preserved as wilderness or used as passive material (282). It was a nature in which we can and must intervene. We are directed toward the world (281). But Comte thought that we should impose limits on humans’ control over the earth (282); he proposed a “Biocracy,” that is, an alliance between humanity and other creatures and the earth (282). These ideas are at least compatible with romanticism.

Like Holmes, Tresch shows again that binary oppositions such as rationalism/romanticism, empiricism/romanticism, and Enlightenment/Romanticism represent a distortion of a much more complex and hybrid historical reality of ideas and technologies that relate and entangle in various ways. “Mechanical romanticism” and “romantic machines” are concepts that try to do justice to that hybrid reality. Moreover, Romanticism clearly was more than a mere aesthetic movement; it can be interpreted as having a truly transformative ambition, including for society and modern culture in general. For Tresch, then, this kind of romanticism is not merely of historical interest. He sees it as a way of trying to think “alternative modernities” today:

Rethinking technology meant rethinking the basis of the social bond and order of the universe and, potentially, living very different lives … alternative modernities in which scientists, engineers, poets, painters, composers, philosophers, and politicians cast the powerful new technologies of the early industrial age as the basis for social arrangements that differed. … They proposed paths beyond the stalemate between hopeless romanticism and soulless mechanism, making technology and science into instruments of inspiration and even salvation, in which experiments with external nature and internal subjectivity offered practical sources of hope. These modes of thinking through the proper division of goods, spaces, and actions offer critique as well as serious alternatives to the fragmentation, destruction, and alienation found on the paths actually taken by modern society in the past 150 years. (Tresch 2012, 26)

In the next chapter, I show how these ideas help to open up a space in which we can discuss contemporary technologies and society in a novel way. What are our contemporary “romantic machines,” if there are any, and what might be the contemporary equivalent of “mechanical romanticism”? What does romanticism mean in the information age, and could a discussion of romantic technologies help us to not only reinterpret but—heeding the motto of Marx and his fellow Romantics—perhaps also change the world? I show how our times also have “wondrous new devices” (to use Tresch’s vocabulary): machines that may be “merging with and extending the capacities of humans—now understood as a species whose perceptions actions, and technical interventions transformed its milieu and itself” (287). I show that not only in the nineteenth century were “science and technology … seen as the bearers of emotion, aesthetics, and individual needs” (308), but that this also happens today. I also suggest that romantic epistemology is still helpful to make sense of our relation to technology: the view that knowledge is the result of active and material engagement with the world and the view that there are and should be limits to human control and intervention are still relevant. Moreover, today it is also important to (re)think society in the light of new technological developments. One way to do that is to discuss the monsters of our time and their relation to society. But there are many more ways of trying to “forge a unity by means of art, science, and technology between human consciousness and the nature from which it emerged” (289) and to merge materiality and spirituality. An important lesson from this section is the active role that technology plays, together with humans, in creating scientific knowledge. And as Tresch suggests, Romanticism prefigures more recent thinking about technology and media such as McLuhan’s romantic organicism. Recognizing the more dynamic, relational, and environmental picture Romanticism offers may help us to better understand what is going on, and change things. With new technologies, we might be able to create new kinds of understandings and new kinds of con-fusions. And of course there will also be new kinds of illusions and attempts to reinforce the status quo. Romantic wonder may be used to distract from social issues. But, importantly, the scholarship of Holmes and Tresch shows that this is not necessarily so and that there is also a positive and transformative side to Romanticism. Technology can be a means for social change and for “overcoming divisions between people, metaphysical domains, and fields of knowledge” (Holmes 2008, 308).

To conclude, even if one is less sympathetic to romanticism than Tresch, it is clear that a rich tradition here alerts us to the possibility of a “romanticism and technology” or “romanticism with technology” next to “romanticism against technology”—the latter dichotomy, which, ironically and as I pointed out previously, itself originates in romantic thinking. Therefore, it is worth developing the main point of this section further: technology and romanticism are not necessarily incompatible, and it is at least possible to merge them, as some historical strands of romanticism have done, even if such a merging remains somewhat uneasy:

When romanticism is dismissed as a naïve and nostalgic flight from “reality,” as narcissistic brooding, or as a precursor to totalitarianism, a vital tradition and a central source for imagining the future is lost. … In the emblematic city of Paris, in the early stages of industrial modernity, the diverse strands of romanticism were compatible with an embrace—an ambivalent, cautious embrace—of science and technology. (Tresch 2012, 310–311)

Romanticism’s ambiguous attitudes toward social transformation are also still relevant to understanding technology, as is the social history of the nineteenth century in general. For instance, the infamous Luddites were not against technology as such. When in early nineteenth-century England they protested against spinning frames and other textile machines, they protested the replacement of highly skilled laborers (like themselves) with less skilled, low-wage laborers. It was mainly a social movement that acted against automation technology not because they were against machines as such, but because they opposed their social consequences, in particular lower wages and the threat to employment. But they also opposed the production of inferior goods, which threatened the reputation of their trades (Binfield 2008). The employment issue, for instance, is still relevant today, as automation threatens to replace even jobs that were previously thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. And are the big cities of today’s world not also places where romanticism and technology can be found in a cautious embrace?

I will say more about contemporary times in the next chapter. First, we have to better understand the romantic roots of contemporary technology, in particular electronic ICTs: our computers and other electronic devices, robotics, artificial intelligence, and similar apparatus. For this purpose, let us take a closer look at romanticism and technology in the twentieth century. The next sections are concerned with romantic science in the early twentieth century (Freud), science fiction in the twentieth century, and the history of computing and ICT in the context of the romantic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which shows remarkable parallels with nineteenth-century Romanticism. These sections thus complete the historical chapters of this book and prepare us for its major task: the interpretation of contemporary ICTs and their relation to romanticism.

Early Twentieth-Century Romantic Science: Freud on the Unconscious and Uncanny

We find an interesting combination of science and romanticism in the work of Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud was a scientist: he was a neurologist, did research at the Vienna General Hospital, and taught neuropathology at the university. The psychoanalysis he created was intended and developed as a clinical method. He had a practice and wanted to treat patients and if not cure, then at least relieve their symptoms. After trying hypnosis, which helped patients to retrieve memories of traumatic incidents, he encouraged patients to talk about whatever occurred to them (a method known as free association)³ and analyzed the dreams of patients to reveal unconscious thoughts and what he called “repression”: the “force” and process that prevented past memories from becoming conscious (but this is not always successful; there are the famous slips). This led him to develop theories that are difficult to categorize and fully understand without recourse to the terms romantic science and romantic epistemology: theories about the unconsciousness, hypnosis, dreams, sexuality, death, and the uncanny; theories about how things that are hidden struggle for appearance. Since it is not my main purpose here to study Freud but rather to understand romantic science, I focus on two concepts relevant to romanticism: the unconscious and the uncanny.

The unconscious is a term coined by the early Romantic philosopher Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Before Hegel, Schelling already tells a history of self-consciousness, in which the “I” articulates itself in material products. But the origin is something “unconscious”—a realm to which understanding does not have access. Reality is always the product of the conscious and the unconscious. Nature begins unconscious. Schelling writes: “The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit” (12). This unconscious origin cannot be represented by philosophy. Art can show it.⁴

In Freud the unconscious becomes a part of the mind: the mind is divided in a conscious part and an unconscious part. A lot takes place in the unconscious mind, below the surface, hidden.⁵ It is a part of the mind that is not directly accessible, though one can try to tap it by using methods such as free association and dream analysis. This view is clearly in line with the Romantic and Gothic interest in what remains hidden, in the depths and darkness of the mind. It also reminds us of romantic science, which did not see an opposition between science and romanticism and instead taught and practiced an epistemology in which the unknown and unconscious is central. In nineteenth-century romantic science, science and knowledge is all about what may or may not reveal itself, what hides and may show itself, what we may try to describe but will always remain mysterious. In Freud’s work, the exploration of the unconscious is not considered to be pseudoscience or something that needs to be done next or outside of science. Instead, his quest to trap the unconscious and to feel its resistance to rational thought is part of his romantic science and clinical practice. For Freud and his nineteenth-century precursors, truth is always partly hidden. There are always darker corners and cellars, situated not outside truth but part of it.⁶

Freud’s proximity to the Romantic-Gothic tradition, and especially his connection to Romantic-Gothic thinking about science and technology, becomes especially clear in his concept of the uncanny. The uncanny (in German: das Unheimliche, the opposite of what is familiar, unhomely) was already touched on in philosophy by Schelling and Nietzsche, and in psychology by Ernst Jentsch, who in his 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s use of uncanny effects in his stories: the reader is left in uncertainty whether something is a human being or an automaton (see the next section). In his essay The Uncanny (1919), Freud critically elaborates on Jentsch and also draws on Hoffmann.

Freud says about the uncanny that it “belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” (123). Like earlier Romantics, he complains that aesthetics generally is interested only in feelings for the beautiful and the positive; instead he wants to say more about repulsion and distress. His thesis is that “the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (124). What once was familiar becomes uncanny and frightening. But how does this work?

Freud first turns to several languages to explore meanings of the uncanny. In his own language, German, he starts with the meaning of its opposite, heimlich, which means “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely” (126). The word heimlich also means secret, concealed, and hidden (129). It has to do with the “mysterious” (129). Uncanny (unheimlich), then, means unhomely. It is related to unease and to the feeling of horror, even the “ghostly” (131). Freud quotes Schelling’s definition: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open” (132). The words heimlich and unheimlich are thus intimately and uncannily connected. We started off in the home and we end up in a gothic scene in which there are sleepwalkers, ghosts, and corners that all seem “eerie and frightening” (134).

Then Freud, with the help of Jentsch, brings in technology: the automaton of Hoffmann’s stories. For the reader of the stories, there is “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate” (Jentsch quoted in Freud 1919, 135) In this romantic epistemology, the uncanny becomes connected with unclarity and uncertainty. Is it living or not? Is it a human or not? Freud writes that readers of Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1816) are left “wondering whether a particular figure is a real person or an automaton, and … in such a way that his attention is not focused directly on the uncertainty” (135). Instead, readers feel an emotion: uncanniness. The doll/automaton (Olimpia) becomes uncanny due to uncertainty about its status. Surely Freud also relates the uncanny in Hoffmann’s tale to other meanings and emotions (childhood fears of the sandman and fear of losing one’s eyes), which he discusses in order to develop his psychoanalytic approach and which he argues has nothing to do with uncertainty (Freud relates it to the castration complex). But whatever the merit of that interpretation, in Freud’s essay romantic uncertainty and mystery are certainly part of the meaning of the uncanny.

Freud gets closer to the Romantic-Gothic sphere again when he introduces the figure of the doppelgänger, also very romantic-gothic. It first appeared in Jean Paul’s Romantic novel Siebenkäs, published at the end of the eighteenth century, in which a person fakes his own death and the double of a living person is introduced as a paranormal, mysterious, perhaps evil phenomenon. The double belongs to “the night side of nature,” to use the title of Catherine Crowe’s nineteenth-century novel (1848), which is about ghosts and ghost seers and, indeed, doppelgängers: people see their own double or the double of another person (e.g., the spirit of a dead person). Again there is uncertainty here: Is the double real, or not? Is the person dead, or not? Is my double me, or not? What or who is “me” anyway? As Freud says, “A person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own” (142). In Freud’s hands, the doppelgänger becomes part of the history of the ego. But the Romantic-Gothic elements remain clear: it is also “the uncanny harbinger of death” (142).

Freud continues to discuss a situation that brings us “the lure of superstition” (145) and then turns to “unequivocal cases of the uncanny” (145), which are at the same time unequivocal examples of his Romantic-Gothic interest: the horror of the uncanny host in a Romantic poem by Schiller, a dead wish that is fulfilled, fear of the “evil eye,” and “the attribution of magical powers (mana) to alien powers and things” (146–147). Freud is quick to explain away the latter as a phase (the animistic phase) in the development of “primitive peoples,” which still leaves behind traces (147). But the very idea that there are “remnants of animistic mental activity” waiting to “express themselves” (147) is in line with Romantic-scientific thinking. In his psychoanalytic thinking and practice, Freud attends to the “frightening element” that “has been repressed and now returns” (147). His concept of the uncanny, but also repression, is thus directly related to Romantic-Gothic epistemology. There is something waiting for us—something hidden, something secret that should not be uncovered. The secret is at the same time unknown and known, uncanny and familiar. The uncanny and its relation to repression is defined in deeply Romantic-Gothic ways. In Freud’s own words, “The link with repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as ‘something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open’” (148).

Thus, Freud’s thinking in this essay is not only Romantic-Gothic because of its theme (the dead, ghosts, and so on), but also because of his approach. First, as Freud says, the uncanny is usually “represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, sprits, and ghosts”: the uncanny house is “a haunted house,” which Freud thinks is perhaps the most potent example of the uncanny (148) and is clearly Gothic. This is all about “the gruesome” (148). It is about mystery and magic, about “secret powers” and “the realm of animism,” about uncanny events and uncanny persons with hidden powers such as Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust (149). It also concerns those other great Romantic themes: madness, demons, and “secret forces” (150). It is about strange, uncanny phenomena such as “a severed head, a hand detached from the arm,” and “feet that dance by themselves.” And of course it also touched on what Freud calls “the crown of the uncanny”: “the idea of being buried alive, only apparently dead” (150). Second, Freud’s psychoanalytic science is Romantic-Gothic. The “primitive” fear of death, indeed realizing the very truth about death, is covered by only “a thin veneer” and can show itself any time. It is usually repressed, but it can manifest itself any time: “The primitive fear of dead is still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself if given any encouragement” (149). Similarly, even if “so-called educated people have officially ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits” (149), this is repression; people might have all kinds of dreams and experiences. Thus, in this Romantic-Gothic epistemology, truth and knowledge are like ghosts that might appear at times unknown to us—like the undead, which may seize us, indeed like death itself, which may visit us uncalled and unplanned.

In Freud’s hands, science, therapy, and philosophy become a haunted house in which secret forces reign. It is also a house where “the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred” (150). Of course Freud explains and treats. He wants to solve puzzles. He wants to help people. But the world that is revealed and constructed by means of his Romantic-Gothic science is one that mixes “psychical reality” with “material reality,” one in which people “see something undefinable gliding over the stairs” and in which “the wooden monsters come to life in the dark.” The truth is like the uncanny: it “has been repressed and then re-appears” (152). Psychoanalysis is a technique of revealing what has been hidden, but at the same time it leaves the mystery and the darkness intact—or rather, in a sense it constructs and creates a space for mystery and darkness. It creates a truth that is at the same time homely and unhomely; it brings into being the uncanny truth. It is simultaneously a Romantic science and a Gothic narration.

Later in the twentieth century, more was said about the uncanny. For example, in Jacques Lacan, the uncanny—in a very romantic-gothic fashion—leads the way to the hidden, “the real.” But the concept of the “uncanny” is not confined to philosophy and literature; it has influenced contemporary thinking in robotics as well. Consider the concept of the “uncanny valley.” In 1970 robotics professor Masahiro Mori argued that as robots appear more human, observers will respond in a more positive way to them, but when the appearance is very human-like, a point will be reached when observers will feel uncanniness and this will make human-robot interaction difficult, if not impossible. There is thus a valley between objects that are not (yet) uncanny, such as puppets and real humans beings—a valley where all kinds of uncanny entities live, such as corpses, zombies, and certain humanlike robots (Mori 1970). Fear of death is certainly part of Mori’s discussion. At times, Mori becomes very gothic, although he immediately continues with an attempt to explain scientifically the function of the uncanny feelings:

A healthy person is at the top of the second peak. And when we die, we fall into the trough of the uncanny valley. Our body becomes cold, our color changes, and movement ceases. Therefore, our impression of death can be explained by the movement from the second peak to the uncanny valley. … We might be happy this line is into the still valley of a corpse and not that of the living dead! I think this explains the mystery of the uncanny valley: Why do we humans have such a feeling of strangeness? Is this necessary? I have not yet considered it deeply, but it may be important to our self-preservation. (Mori 1970; the translation is in MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006, 312)

More recently, the uncanny valley issue has been discussed by robotics researchers. For instance, MacDorman and Ishiguro (2006) argue that creating very humanlike devices is necessary to elicit social behavior, although “subtle flaws in appearance and movement can be more apparent and eerie in very humanlike robots,” an “uncanny phenomenon” (abstract). They write, “The uncanny android still seems to be a reminder of death” (337). They also mention the Romantic doppelgänger figure: if androids are copies of actual people, those may “elicit a fear of being replaced, on the job, in a relationship, and so on” (313).

Freud, however, would perhaps be less worried about “uncanny” robots in science-fiction. He did not think that in fairy tales, it is always “highly uncanny when inanimate objects—pictures or dolls—come to life” (153). Think, for example, about the seemingly dead Snow White who opens her eyes again (153), which would be rather uncanny in real life but according to Freud is not uncanny in fairy tales. He suggests that we should “distinguish between the uncanny one knows from experience and the uncanny one only fancies or reads about” (154). Repressing the Romantic side of his approach, he thus reinforces a philistine reality/fantasy dualism (and a psychical reality/material reality dualism). That said, he recommends that we study the uncanny in fiction, which he says is “much richer than what we know from experience,” even if it does not pass “the reality test” (155). He writes:

Many things that would be uncanny if they occurred in real life are not uncanny in literature, and that in literature there are many opportunities to achieve uncanny effects that are absent in real life. (Freud 1919, 155–156)

Fairy tales, Freud writes, openly accept animistic beliefs and, for instance, show “secret powers” and “the animation of the inanimate” (156), but they are not uncanny because we know that they are not possible in real life. Writers such as Dante and Shakespeare may use their tricks to invent worlds with “supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead,” but according to Freud, in “fictional reality” (156) these “souls, spirits and ghosts” are not uncanny. They may even be comic.

This topic brings us to twentieth-century science-fiction and its roots in nineteenth-century mechanical romanticism.

Twentieth-Century Science Fiction: Mechanical and Other Romanticisms for the Masses

A lot of twentieth-century literature and film draws directly on Romantic and Gothic themes and novels. For instance, there were Frankenstein films as early as 1910, 1915, and 1921, and there have been many later series and adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel. Similarly, there have been many Dracula films since the 1930s. And of course, horror films draw directly on Gothic. But there is also romantic science fiction that does not directly refer to Romanticism and Gothic themes and figures yet displays key romantic and gothic features insofar as it has an interest in the wondrous, the mysterious, the eerie, the extraordinary. Moreover, this romanticism does not always, and necessarily, go at the expense of technology. On the contrary, technology is not only feared; there is also fascination with technology.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and others had already engaged in what used to be called “scientific romance.” For instance, in his Voyages Extraordinaires, published between 1863 and 1905, Verne wrote about the wonders of the earth, the stars, and the oceans. Science became an adventure, a wondrous romantic exploration. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), for instance, starts with an “apparition,” indeed a “supernatural apparition,” an “unexplained and inexplicable occurrence”: an “enormous thing” has been spotted, a “monster” (5–6). The protagonists then search for this mysterious object or sea monster, which turns out to be an electrically powered submarine. With the Nautilus, they encounter “unknown species” and visit places of natural beauty such as “the coral kingdom” and seas and oceans. But there is also technology in the story—for instance, the transatlantic telegraph cable, which is used to discuss the monster (15) and appears later in the novel when the cable is spotted and its history is recounted in detail (361–362). It is described as an “electric cable” but also as a “long serpent” that “rested calmly, sheltered from the movements of the sea, at a pressure suitable for the transmission of the electric spark” (362). In these descriptions, technology and romanticism go hand in hand. Another indication of the combination romanticism/technology is that the novel both begins and ends in mystery, as the submarine gets in to the “Maelstrom” off the Norwegian coast: “Maelstrom! Maelstrom! The Maelstrom! Could a more frightening word sound in our ears in a more desperate situation?” (379). There is a “a whirlpool from which no ship has ever been able to escape” with “monstrous waves” rushing in from everywhere. And the novel continues in true Romantic-Gothic spirit:

We were in a state of terror! Terror to the highest degree! Our blood was no longer circulating. Our nervous systems were deadened. We were covered with cold sweat, as if on a death-bed. What a noise around our frail boat! What moanings echoed from miles around! … The Nautilus was fighting like a human being. Its steel muscles were cracking. (Verne 1870, 379)

Yet the novel is an expression of mechanical romanticism not only because of its combination of a sense of wonder and technology—and indeed its combination of terror, nature, and technology: it also has a political-romantic message. Captain Nemo is an underdog and helps rebels. He is a romantic rebel himself, who seeks freedom in the ocean with the help of technology and who is opposed to oppression, for instance, in British colonial India. At the same time, the captain’s identity is not clear; there is still a lot of mystery left.

Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, in which people of a learned society are launched to the moon by means of a gigantic gun, is also relevant to show the connection between technology and romanticism. The novel did more than inspire what is commonly regarded as the first science-fiction film (Le Voyage dans la Lune—A trip to the moon, 1902), which is highly romantic in many ways (the moon and the universe are enchanted spaces full of ancient gods, magic plants, aliens, and the man in the moon); it is also an example of Romantic science and indirectly inspired twentieth-century space travel. There is science and (then) high tech in the novel. For instance, the scientists measure the temperature in the shadow of the moon, and the novel features aluminum, a new and still relatively unknown material. And even if Verne’s cannonball method does not work, he inspired pioneers in rocket science and space travel. Verne inspired Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who at the beginning of the twentieth century wrote scientific articles about how to explore outer space with rockets (especially his “Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices,” 1903) and is regarded as the Russian father of rocket science (McCurdy 2011, 16–18). Verne also inspired important rocket science pioneers Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth: their interest in rockets and space travel was also “motivated by works of imagination” (McCurdy 2011, 19). Oberth read Verne’s book in his youth in Transylvania, and after publishing his ideas on rocket propulsion, he gave scientific advice for Fritz Lang’s film Frau im Mond (By rocket to the moon, 1929). Later in the twentieth century, Wernher von Braun, a German rocket scientist who designed the V-2 rockets for the Nazis and would become a central figure in the postwar U.S. space program, also became interested in rockets through works of imagination. When asked about such stories he even explicitly says he had “a romantic urge”:

It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one’s life to! Not just to stare through a telescope at the moon and the planets but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe! (Von Braun quoted in McCurdy 2011, 25)

This romantic urge contributed to the postwar success stories in space travel, which captured people’s romantic imagination. Sometimes that imagination was once again influenced by Verne. Neil Armstrong mentioned Verne’s book when returning from the moon.⁷ Later, space travel would become a metaphor for exploration of the Internet, displaying a similar romantic urge (see the next chapter).

Thus, in Verne’s work, there was an extraordinary mixture of romantic wonder and state-of-the-art science and technology, and there was a cultural exchange between fiction and science and technology. Early science fiction such as Verne’s was influenced by nineteenth-century Romantic science, with its “mesmerism, mechanics, electricity, natural history, spiritualism, laboratory science, and animal experimentation” (Willis 2006, 3). In Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines (2006), Martin Willis attends to the mesmerism that played a role in stories by Hoffmann—“a leading figure of Romanticism” (30)—and to the monsters and machines in Shelley, Verne, and H. G. Wells. Nineteenth-century romantic science might have been “chaotic and unregulated” and allied with magic, alchemy, and the occult (10). But it is interesting that there was a close relationship between science, literary, language, and the educated public (8); the entanglement between technology and romanticism was not restricted to that period and should be taken more seriously than Willis suggested. Earlier in this chapter, I noted that we can interpret this meeting of science and romanticism as constituting a “mechanical romanticism” and a “Romantic science.” This Romantic science influenced late nineteenth-century writers of science fiction and, through that fiction, twentieth-century science and technology.

I mentioned Hoffmann’s stories when I interpreted Freud as a romantic scientist; now I say more about these stories, in particular the way in which they mix (gothic) romanticism and technology. I start with “Automata” (1814), a story that opens with a typical romantic science scene in which people stare in amazement at “a glittering gold ring” and cry out. “Wonderful,” Most inexplicable!” and “Curious.” They try to see “whether the pendulum swings of a suspended ring can be controlled by the concentrated human will” (Hoffmann 1814, 71) and talk about a “spiritual principle.” Hoffmann writes: “From here there is only a very short step to ghosts and supernatural stories” (72). There is a girl whose “cheeks and lips wear a deathly pallor” and who seems to have “some morbid bodily condition,” evoking “spectral awe,” “eerie feeling,” and “strangeness” (73). Appearances of “the White Lady” are recounted, including “a hollow voice of the deepest terror” (74) and “a face of horror” (76) at the sight of “the spectre” (75). But, interestingly, the wonder and mystery in the story also extend to technology. In a section announced as dealing with “the mystical” (78), Hoffmann writes about people who marvel at the “Talking Turk,” an automaton “dressed in a rich and tasteful Turkish costume” (79) exhibited and visited by people who see in it “the appearance of life” and “the agency of a sentient being” (79). The automaton has an expressive face and can turn “his” eyes and head toward the visitors. Puzzled by the “mysterious nature of this exhibition” (80), the visitors perceive it as quasi-human. They are

all eager to listen to the oracular utterances which were whispered to them by the motionless lips of this wonderful quasi-human figure. The manner of the construction and arrangement of this automaton distinguished it very much from ordinary mechanical figures. It was, in fact, a very remarkable automaton. (Hoffmann 1814, 78)

The presence of the automaton leads to fascination but also fear: it is said to be “unnatural and gruesome”; it may “haunt” us with “his” (!) “rolling eyes, his turning head, and his waving arm, like some necromantic goblin” (81). “People were discussing … the mysterious and unexplained human influence which seemed to endow the figure with life” (80–81). In other words, we witness a gothic-romantic phenomenon.

Hoffmann’s Turk is a fiction, but it is also more than a fiction; it refers to automata in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in particular “the Turk,” a chess-playing automaton. Hoffmann’s story rationalizes the Turk: the protagonist is certain that there is a human being in there. But at the same time, the mystery and the wonder remain. Willis writes that Hoffmann’s automata are “mechanical figures vitalized by apparently supernatural means”; they take “a position on the boundary between mechanical excellence and magical animation” (Willis 2006, 30). This boundary position leads to uncertainty about the automaton’s status. As Jentsch argued, the automaton is uncanny, since the reader is left in uncertainty whether it is human or nonhuman. The uncanny and the mystery are not dissolved.

This also applies to those who make and display automata, who have an aura of mystery and magic. The story tells us that the person who uses “the medium of the Turk, has powers at his command which compel our most secret thoughts with magic might” (Hoffmann 1814, 83). The person who displays the Turk, “Professor X,” is specialized in “natural philosophy and chemistry” and is described as “a mysterious man” (90). As Willis (2006) puts it, Professor X has “mesmeric” influence (48–49). There is also “something most unpleasant about the Professor’s voice” (Hoffmann 1814, 93), and he creates “machine music” that strikes a listener as “unnatural” and “terrible,” even “monstrous and abominable” (95). The story even considers the possibility of constructing “automata which would dance,” perhaps even dance with human beings, “so that we should have a living man putting his arms about a lifeless partner of wood, and whirling round and round with her, or rather it. Could you look at such a sight, for an instant, without horror?” (95). Again there is confusion between life and death and a crossing of the life/death, human/nonhuman boundary.⁸

I suggest that contemporary robots (real and science fiction) may also have this effect. It may be that as Weizenbaum argued in his 1966 article on the computer program ELIZA, the magic of machines “crumbles away” once you explain its inner workings, once it is “unmasked” (36). But first there are magic and romance. First there are machines that “behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer” (36).

Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” (1816), which Freud (1919) interpreted in his famous essay on the uncanny, also connects romantic-gothic wonder and mystery to technology, and touches on boundary questions as well. The Sandman is a figure that tramples and knocks upstairs with “slow heavy steps” and scares the children (Hoffmann 1816, 184). It is a “fearful apparition” (185). But there is also Olimpia. Said to be the daughter of Professor Spalanzani, “a queer fish,” she is beautiful and sits at a table with open eyes but with “a strangely fixed look about her eyes” as if she “had no power of vision” and was “sleeping with her eyes open” (194). Olimpia plays the piano and sings. When Nathanael wants to dance with her and grasps her hand, he feels that the hand is “cold as ice” (206), yet the hands seem to warm up and she dances in a perfect rhythmical way. When later he declares his love, Olimpia only sighs: “Ah! Ah!” He kisses her, but “ice-colds lips met his burning ones” (207). But then her lips appear warm again. In other words, she appears alive. Others say she is stupid and call her a “wooden doll” (207). His friend Siegmund says that she is “soulless” and that her eyes are “utterly devoid of life” (208). And he adds, “We felt quite afraid of this Olimpia, and did not like to have anything to do with her; she seemed to us to be only acting like a living creature, and as if there was some secret at the bottom of it all” (208). Yet Nathanael is still in love with Olimpia and forgets about Clara (a real human being) “whom he had once loved” (208). In the end, it turns out that Olimpia is an automaton, “an inanimate puppet” with a “clockwork” inside (210), a “wooden doll” made by the “skillful mechanician and fabricator of automata, Spalanzani” (211). Nathanael awakens from what felt like a nightmare, but he becomes and remains mad. (He tries to kill Clara.) Thus, again we have an exploration of how we (may) perceive automata, of what may happen when something dead appears alive, when its status is unclear. Hoffmann gives us the science-fiction figure of the automaton that is so perfected that it becomes difficult to draw the line between dead and alive, automaton and human being. This vagueness and the wonder and horror it evokes are typically romantic and gothic. But it is a wonder and a horror directly related to technology and its (perceived) possibilities. This romantic fiction is not antitechnology, but instead mixes technology and romanticism-Gothic.

Thus, like Romantic science, this science fiction does not at all oppose science and technology, but instead produces a hybrid of rationalism and magic, science and mystery. Similarly, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is well connected to the science of his day, especially to public interest in science, which included fascination with machines and natural history, but also to the ambition of Romantic science to combine science, technology, and nature. Like the Romantic scientists of the early nineteenth century, Verne was interested in the interaction between technology and nature. As Willis puts it:

Verne does not simply reiterate the quotidian belief that the organic and inorganic are utterly opposed to each other and that the work of the technologist and the researches of the natural historian are incompatible. Rather, the novel investigates the common ground of these disparate scientific fields by constructing a narrative that places them in situations where they are able to interact. (Willis 2006, 138)

Technology and nature meet in this science-fiction. The wondrous and the adventurous are able to encompass both worlds and partly merge them.

Later science-fiction literature and film continue these confusions and, indeed, this fusion of romanticism and technology. Although there are a lot of imaginative fictional beings in these films, in contrast to fantasy, which is also romantic but generally does not embrace technology and science, the attempt is made to merge the extraordinary and mysterious with science and technology. In the twentieth century, the setting is often space. After the earth had lost much of its mystery, the romantic-gothic imagination moved to space and extraterrestrial life in order to retrieve the lost wonder and horror. New extraordinary travels take place in space. But its worlds and narratives are inspired by science and technology, even if some authors focus more on technology than others. Its aliens, mutants, androids, and humanoid robots are also hybrids and cross boundaries: they are often simultaneously technological and natural, machine-like and human-like.

Examples of twentieth-century science fiction literature include the robot stories by Isaac Asimov, which are still read by philosophers and roboticists; Arthur C. Clarke’s contribution to the screenplay of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey; Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961); the work of Philip K. Dick, which inspired films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, and includes the famous novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); and William Gibson’s darker cyberpunk (see below). Here romanticism and gothic meet futurist technologies. Often this literature explores the boundaries between humans and machines, as in Hoffmann, and the stories involve various degrees of hybridity between humans and robots, between the biological and the machine. For instance, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) features androids made of biological materials that look like humans but are machines and lack empathy. And the figure of the cyborg represents an attempt to imagine and think human-machine hybridity. Interesting science-fiction subgenres also include steampunk and dieselpunk. The former is inspired by nineteenth-century industrial machines and features anachronistic technology, fictional machines that writers like H. G. Wells or Verne (might) have imagined. Dieselpunk is fascinated by the machines of the twentieth-century world wars. In both cases, we meet new forms of the mechanical romanticism that already thrived in the nineteenth century. And in cyberpunk, we again meet romanticism, but one that is darker and linked to contemporary technologies, cybertechnologies: computers and information technology. Here the setting is often dystopic. There is anarchy, with power in the hands of large corporations. There are stories about hackers, artificial intelligence, and robots.

For instance, before the Internet, Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer (1984) tells the story of a hacker, a “cowboy” with a damaged central nervous system who is hired by a mysterious employer and is “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (6). People are “wired” (278) or not. As Nicol (2009) observes, the “labyrinthine” plot follows the conventions of the romance, “a genre which specializes in the marvelous and the fantastic, and typically features questing heroes” and is “full of twists and turns and peopled by characters who are not who they seem” (169). There is romantic mystery and romantic interest in different kinds of states of consciousness, but this romanticism is always mixed with technology. There is also a clear romantic-gothic side to the novel. As Botting (1999) puts it in his chapter on virtual romanticism, Neuromancer “relates a quest romance involving the penetration of a Gothic stronghold and the mystery of its labyrinth and the subversion of the power of a cloned and cryogenically frozen industrial dynasty. … It is a near future … where memories are revived as ghostly holographic images, simulations indistinguishable from the lost origin” (110). In other words, it is a Gothic romance (112). Indeed, in general, it is quite a dark novel in which death is omnipresent and the self of the protagonist is rather mysterious as it moves about between different realities and between dream (nightmare?) and reality. The matrix is “Nowhere. Everywhere” (Gibson 1984, 310). It is not clear what is simulation and what is real. It is also not clear where the borders of the self are, or the border between real people and artificial intelligences, as with the confusion about the Wintermute “entity” (138). In industry there are “the machine, the system, the parent organism,” and there are “invisible” influences (236) and, as Botting (1999) puts it, “shadowy powers” (111). But there are also gothic details such as the protagonist who sleeps in cheap “coffins” (Gibson 1984, 7), environments that are often “dark” (198), and a “howling waste of snow” and “stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds” (242). Spatial disorientation is seen as a “horror” (242). Implants leave “an inverted pool of blood” (265). Wintermute is “spinning his death” (309). The matrix also enables people to exist after their death. They become a kind of digital ghost. Botting (1999) writes that the matrix’s data banks consist of “the living dead,” which then combine to form a new being (111). Neuromancer is a gothic feast of technology and flesh, matrix and meat.

The twentieth-century media in which science-fiction flourished best were film and TV. Science-fiction was and is part of popular culture. We meet a female robot (Metropolis, 1927); a crew of humans and aliens on a peacekeeping mission in the universe (Star Trek series, first in 1966); a monstrous and deadly alien from an unknown planet (Alien, 1979; see also Aliens, 1986); replicants, which are supposed to work in extraterrestrial mines but travel to earth and are hunted (Blade Runner, 1982); a struggle between good and evil (Star Wars films, for instance, Return of the Jedi, 1983); a human-looking cyborg who assassinates, a supercomputer, and more generally a battle between humans and machines (The Terminator, 1984); time travel (Back to the Future trilogy, first in 1985); a society based on DNA profiling (Gattaca, 1997); and a hacker in a computer-simulated reality and humans who are used as energy sources for machines (The Matrix, 1999). Entering the twenty-first century, we encounter a hacker hunted by a female cyborg cop (Ghost in the Shell 2.0, 2008), a cute waste-collecting robot that saves humanity (Wall-E, 2008), an “extractor” who can enter the dreams of people (Inception, 2010), a lonely man who develops a relationship with a female operating system (Her, 2013), a poltergeist that turns out to be an unknown intelligence and a crew that travels through a wormhole (Interstellar, 2014), and a mysterious experiment and a female artificial intelligence (Ex Machina, 2015)—a kind of “techno-femme fatale” (Ess forthcoming) that attracts and threatens the (male) protagonists. Again there is fear of, and fascination with, technology. There are many romantic and gothic elements in these films—we encounter all the figures and tropes of the romantic-gothic warehouse—but technology is always present. The reenchantment that romantic science-fiction seeks to accomplish takes place not against technology but with technology.

There are also many religious and magic elements in science-fiction that are firmly inside the technological and scientific world, not outside it. Consider the Force in the Star Wars films: a ubiquitous power that connects everything and everyone and brings life. It has a light side and a dark side. Small particles are linked to the mystery of life and death. Using the Force, one can move objects, feel the presence of someone, steer the thoughts of someone else, heal, enhance defense (by means of an aura), calm animals, and kill or destroy. Some users of the Force can even exist as ghosts after their death. There are monastic orders. The Star Wars religion(s) have been compared to Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and others.⁹ And in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? there is a religion, Mercerism, that uses Empathy Boxes to link users to a collective consciousness in which they can share the pain and suffering of a person called Wilbur Mercer.

Science fiction is romantic not only in the sense that it presents us with new faces of the extraordinary and the mysterious; it also has a social and political side. For instance, in the film Metropolis, there is a gap between thinkers who live in luxury and workers who work in the mine; there is an uprising in the mines. In the film Gattaca, people’s social position is determined by their DNA; the protagonist tries to overcome this. The crew in Star Trek is meant to do peacekeeping. Neuromancer features a large, powerful corporation; crime and drugs; and an international political context (Russia in the cold war period). The romantic hero (here antihero) is in an underdog position, fighting for his freedom. More generally, science fiction offers romantic utopia and dystopia. Like utopia, dystopia can also provide a way to look critically at contemporary society. Neuromancer’s dystopia can be read as a criticism of the 1980s neoliberal world and indeed of today’s world, with its “neocons and neoliberals who want to treat everything from schools to hospitals as businesses” (Cory Doctorow quoted in the Guardian, 2014).¹⁰

Contemporary electronic games sometimes have science-fiction aspects and often display similar romantic features. They bring back the extraordinary and the magic, but often they are not merely escapist or engaged in mere fantasy: they also comment on technology and explore alternative worlds with rather than against technology. Thus, there is an emphasis on imagination, an interest in the exotic, mysterious, monstrous, and supernatural. We meet our monsters, zombies, and ghosts. There are also heroic figures and new worlds to discover and new and syncretic myths. But in many games, this is not opposed to technology. Consider, for instance, the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) World of Warcraft. The game mainly belongs to the fantasy genre. It is set in a fantasy universe; there are orcs, trolls, dwarves, gnomes, centaurs, and elves; there are also dragons and all kinds of horror monsters and dungeons; and the narratives are typical fantasy ones. There are also medieval-style objects (e.g., swords) and forms of social organization such as guilds. But (later) these elements of fantasy are combined with steampunk and science fiction: there are also steam-powered automata, zeppelins, spaceships, portals, futuristic guns and swords, and alien worlds and space travel. The gnomes and goblins have technological (steampunk) societies, and there are dwarves that use steam-powered machinery, even if they are powered by magical means. Fantasy and science fiction thus combine to form a game that is romantic-with-technology, like many other products of our romantic culture. (I return to the topic of romanticism in games in the next chapter.)

To conclude, while there is of course also technophobia in science fiction, generally it represents and expresses both fear and fascination with technology, and often it is also much more than that. At its best, it explores and tries to reimagine the human-technology relation, including the human–machine relation and sometimes the idea of fusing humans and machines. With its mysteries, monsters, and ghosts, it is romantic, but it is a kind of romanticism that includes engagement with technology. Like mechanical romanticism, later science-fiction practices its own romanticism, adapted to the new technologies of the information age. Its “informational romanticism” tries to deal with the same problem nineteenth-century mechanical romantics tried to cope with: What happens to our world and our societies, what happens to the human and to human consciousness, what happens to human relations, when these new technologies enter? How can and should we respond to this new technological world and culture? The answer given by these romantics is not that the technologies are merely terrifying, sublime, ghostly, or monstrous, or that they enable us to escape from the real world. The answer is more ambiguous and includes the idea that perhaps the machines can help us to reenchant the world rather than deprive us of the magic and mystery we lost through half-secularized religion and unimaginative Enlightenment thinking.

Is this also true for contemporary technologies in the information society, as some science-fiction suggests? Could computers, robots, and AI be part of the romantic universe? Or will they always get the role of the machine taking over the world, the role of the bad Terminator? Are they doomed to embody the antiromantic? I have already suggested that perhaps there is a kind of informational romanticism today, analogue to the mechanical romanticism of nineteenth-century literature and early twentieth-century science fiction. Romanticism has a present and a future, and it is a technological one. As films at the beginning of the twenty-first century suggest, machines have become a lot less frightening today. They have become friendly, attractive, sexy, and very human-like (consider, for instance, Wall-E, Her, and Ex Machina). As I will argue in the next chapter, they have become more romantic, even more romantic than they already were. The next section helps to explain why and how this happened.

Hippie Computing: Romanticism as One of the Parents of Contemporary ICTs

In order to understand how romantic contemporary technology has become, we need to look into the history of computing and ICT, including the rise of personal computing in the context of the romantic counterculture of the 1960 and 1970s. As Fred Turner (2006) has argued, in the second half of the twentieth century, the cultural meaning of ICT shifted “drastically” (2). Whereas in the early 1960s, computers were seen as calculating machines, operated only by and for experts, and even as dehumanizing, they had become human-friendly machines everyone can use by the 1990s. To explain how this happened, we need to understand the romance between computer technology and romanticism, and especially how technological developments interacted and fused with the romanticism of the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The history of computing is of course one of technological change: from large calculating machines that needed an entire room to be hosted in the cold war era to increasingly smaller computers that could perform and assist with an increasing range of tasks that seemed much more “human”: word processing (writing), for instance, but also later sending messages and websites that publish (communication). Today we have smartphones: small computers that are more “human” and “friendly” than ever before. Turner suggests that this shift in meaning and use was made possible by the various ways in which the technological development fused with romantic countercultural visions such as “empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion” (2). Let me explain this link with counterculture.

In chapter 2 I noted how romantic the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s was. Sometimes this romanticism implied what could be interpreted as an antitechnology stance, or at least opposition to modern technology. Some people left the city to live on farms and use traditional technologies. Some philosophers on the left (the so-called New Left) were explicitly critical of technology. For instance, influenced by Marx and Freud, Herbert Marcuse, who himself influenced many people in the counterculture and became a symbol of the New Left, wrote about alienation and criticized consumerism. He also wrote about the loss of eros. In One-Dimensional Man ([1964] 2007), one of the most famous books of the 1960s, he criticized technological rationality: by transforming nature, we become dependent on an objective order of things. This has consequences not only for nature; it also shapes society as “scientific-technological rationality and manipulation are welded together into new forms of social control” (149). Through the quantification of nature, science was separated from ethics, logos from eros. Social reality is rationalized and quantified, made calculable. There is “submission to the technical apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of labor” (162). Technology thus leads to domination and makes possible a “rationally totalitarian society” (162). The “logos of technics” leads to “the instrumentalization of man” (163):

Only in the medium of technology, man and nature become fungible objects of organization. The universal effectiveness and productivity of the apparatus under which they are subsumed veil the particular interests that organize the apparatus. In other words, technology has become the great vehicle of reification—reification in its most mature and effective form. The social position of the individual and his relation to others appear not only to be determined by objective qualities and laws, but these qualities and laws seem to lose their mysterious and uncontrollable character; they appear as calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality. The world tends to become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the administrators. (172)

Here technology is seen as destroying the mysterious and uncontrollable character of social reality, taking away people’s freedom by making possible instrumentalization and control. Allied with scientific-mathematical quantification and objectification of the world, it turns society into a large, bureaucratic machine. We again meet Weber’s iron cage.

However, there was also a pro-technology side in the countercultural movement. Turner convincingly shows how in the Bay Area around San Francisco and in what later would be called Silicon Valley, there was an extraordinary fertile meeting of technological development and romantic counterculture. At first sight, people who went to live in communes and wanted to transform their consciousness and reach a more authentic self seem to have little to do with technology. But this picture is misleading. There were all kinds of bridges between counterculture and high tech. On the one hand, the cybernetics that emerged out of the military-industrial complex might be seen as unromantic. But at the same time, it also suggested a nonhierarchical, more democratic model of politics: Norbert Wiener and others “offered metaphors for the democratic creation of order from below” (Turner 2006, 24) that inspired people. Engineers also became used to interdisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, McLuhan offered an inspiring vision of how technology could be a tool for social transformation (52). Perhaps the new technologies would make possible a single “global village,” a world in which we are all linked by means of technology.

The New Communalists and later the hippies were exploring all kinds of ways they could transform their consciousness and, for some, how they could transform society. Next to art, rock music, LSD, the culture of Native Americans, magic, and Eastern religions—rather classic romantic tools—some also became interested in new technologies. For instance, the Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine and network organized by Stewart Brand, was a “publication in which the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and communal social theory of the back-to-the-land movement”: technologies were seen here as tools to develop consciousness and to reach “ecstatic communion.” The conditions were created “under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation” (73). The exploration of the mind and of collective possibilities—in a typically romantic way, taking place outside mainstream religion and often without mediation by priests—was not at all opposed to technology but even inspired by it. For example, when NASA’s cameras showed earth as seen from space, this propelled the idea of one whole earth, the world seen as “a single whole” (83). And the romantic tradition of cowboys and Indians at the frontier was translated into do-it-yourself: people repaired and reconfigured technological devices such as cars and camping gear. Independent of government and industry, they took things into their own hands. When later the new computers came out, they were marketed as devices that were antibureaucratic and helped one achieve freedom (103), even revolution. (Consider, for instance, the 1984 television commercial for the Apple Macintosh personal computer.)¹¹ The computer became “a tool for the establishment of a better social world” (117). Thus, personal computers can be seen as a romantic reaction against earlier computers and the unromantic world of modern bureaucracy and control they initially belonged to. As Streeter puts it in his study on romanticism and the Internet:

Sensing the folly of these plans to use computers to control human complexity, and to frame it in a predictable grid, increasing numbers of individuals began to interpret the act of computing as a form of expression, exploration, or art, to see themselves as artists, rebel, or both, and to find communities with similar experiences that would reinforce that interpretation. People need to express themselves, it was said, people want and need spontaneity, creativity, or dragon-slaying heroism. … This is why we need small computers … personal computers. (Streeter 2011, 2)

Computing thus became a romantic tool rather than its opposite. Computers were no longer number crunching “mathematical tools” (Streeter 2011, 29) instruments for calculation. They became part of a new romanticism that reimagined them as involving and supporting imagination and creativity. There was a process of “radical reclassification of computers, taking them out of the old box of mathematical impersonality and putting them in a new one that associates them precisely with individual uniqueness, distinctiveness, unpredictability, and expression—with all those things we have long associated with the romantic persona” (63). Computers became part of a romantic counterculture and helped to constitute it: “key romantic tropes—the strategic use of colloquial language, a studied informality, appeals to self-transformation instead of need-satisfaction, tales of sensitive rebel heroes, and a full-throated departure from instrumental rationality—became associated with alternative uses of computing” (14). Computers were now used to rebel against “a dangerous dehumanizing dream of centralized military control of people and complexity via computerized control systems” (19). They also seemed far removed from the machinery of the industrial age: instead of monstrous machines, microcomputers “produced no roar or smoke” but rather produced wonder (88).

Later, in the 1990s, computing would also become a tool to live at the electronic frontier and find freedom in cyberspace, even mystical union (see the next chapter). Before that happened, however, hippie romanticism was also working at the heart of ICT innovation. Not only the use of the first personal computers but also their invention and development were closely linked to the countercultural context and activities. In the 1970s, members of the Bay Area hobbyist computer community were not classic engineers linked to large industrial or governmental institutions, but do-it-yourself rebels and hackers influenced by the counterculture that surrounded them or—in the case of Steve Jobs—of which they were part. In their garages and clubs, they were bringing together, on the one hand, art, mysticism, and rebellion and, on the other hand, technological innovation and business. Sharing hippie aims, they “merely” used a different technology. Instead of drugs and rock ’n’ roll (or next to drugs and rock ’n’ roll, for some), they used computers as a romantic liberation engine. In the 1980s and 1990s, this romanticism was jeopardized when ICT became hijacked by large corporations and neoliberal politics, but first it was a vital force (or so the narrative goes). In any case, it radically changed people’s view of computing technology and its relation to social change: “The machines that had once stood for all the social forces that threatened to end their lives and perhaps even destroy the world … promised to fulfill their youthful dreams of an egalitarian utopia” (Turner 2006, 249). Thus, like the nineteenth-century mechanical romantics and people like William Morris, these people combined their romanticism with technology in a way that changed technology and society forever.

Of course, this narrative, or myth, can be criticized. One could offer evidence against it by pointing to many countercultural people who did not take this pro-technology route. Or one could point out, as Turner does, that the result of the technology was often anything but romantic (see also the next chapters): instead of expanded consciousness and self-transformation, the technology would also be used in very unromantic ways. Turner writes that

coupling one’s life to technologies of consciousness … may require individuals to deny their own bodies, the rhythms of the life cycle, and, to the extent that their jobs require them to collaborate with faraway colleagues, even the rhythms of day and night. It may in fact result in every bit as thorough an integration of the individual into the economic machine as the one threatened by the military-industrial-academic bureaucracy forty years earlier. Furthermore, it may cut individual works off from participating in local communities that might otherwise mitigate these effects. (Turner 2006, 258)

Insofar as this happened, Marx’s vampires are back. Working day and night, life is sucked out of our bodies. We feed the machines. When the new computing became “information technology,” it was and is used as an instrument of control by governments and corporations. Perhaps the very concept of “information” is dangerous, as it tends to turn everything into what Heidegger (1977) used to call a “standing-reserve”: things that can be used for modern manipulation and control. As Streeter puts it in his comments on computing in the context of 1980s capitalism:

The word information suggests that meaning can be treated as a thing and thus as manageable. … From the point of the power structure of capitalism, information had the extraordinary advantage of being something you could imagine as thinglike and therefore as a property, as something capable of being bought and sold. And this had a broad appeal to a struggling corporate leadership. (Streeter 2011, 76)

One may also criticize the hippie ideals themselves and thereby point to problems with this kind of romanticism and perhaps with romanticism in general. For example, the preoccupation with personal salvation may make one turn away from others and the public world, and the McLuhanian vision of one world and the “fantasy of unimpeded information flow” may blind us to social-material reality. Infrastructure and labor become invisible when the technology is romanticized. (See also Turner 2006, 260–261. I return to some of these criticisms later in this book.)

That said, it is difficult not to be struck by the interesting ways in which romanticism met technology at these times, and indeed by its extraordinary successes in technological and economic terms, but also in terms of change to our culture. In order to further understand this twentieth-century liaison between romanticism and technology, consider Steve Jobs. Based on Isaacson’s biography (2011), it is easy to interpret Jobs’s thinking, activities, and indeed technological devices as a kind of “technological romanticism.” Combining art, creativity, and imagination with technology (xxi), he was the example of a hippie with a business plan, a romantic who embraced technology. Let us start with the hippie side of Jobs. Isaacson quotes the musician Bono:

“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that it is great for imagining a world not yet in existence. (Isaacson 2011, 53)

Isaacson shows that Jobs was a hippie, especially, but not exclusively, in his younger years: he was interested in spiritual experience and Eastern religion, smoked marijuana in high school, wrote poetry, and played guitar. In the early 1970s, he went to a college that was known for its hippie culture (Reed), where people had an interest not only in political activism but also personal development and spirituality. Jobs was a “bohemian” who went often barefoot at Reed (37). He practiced Zen Buddhism, mediated, participated in love festivals at the Hare Krishna temple, became a vegetarian, was interested in intuition and consciousness. As a true romantic, he says about this period, “I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis” (32). And as a typical romantic, he says about his experience and his time:

I came of age at a magical time. … Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD. … Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could. (Jobs quoted in Isaacson 2011, 37–38)

Jobs shows here that he is an heir to nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its interest in different kinds of knowledge and in whatever may be on the “other” side of things, and with its ambitions to do great things and be part of history—indeed, quite literally, “making” history. Jobs is very explicit here about his purpose: the background narrative is that of a Fall in which things—artifacts—have become remote from human consciousness. Now it is time for technology that reconnects with the human, for technologies of consciousness, technologies that transform consciousness. In other words, the aim is a reenchantment: one that does not give consciousness to technology (as some others attempt to do) but instead gives technology back to consciousness. Magic is also a key term here: Jobs knows “how to get the magic back” (291), was passionate about algorithms “that enabled such magic as allowing computer-generated raindrops to refract sunbeams or blades of grass to wave in the wind” (393), wants buildings that combine innovation and magic (397), has “magic” powers to make possible Apple’s comeback (443), and so on. Jobs believed in “the power of the will to bend reality” (40). It is said that he acted as a kind of magician. Furthermore, Jobs travels to India as part of “his own spiritual journey” (41). From Eastern religions, he takes the idea that we should develop our intuition: he believes in “the power of intuition and experiential wisdom” and thinks that if we managed to calm down our “restless” mind, we could “see so much more than you could see before” (44–45). This was not only Jobs’s personality; like all of us, he was firmly connected to the social-cultural context in which he lived. Isaacson describes Jobs’s contexts as follows:

In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s various cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution. … There was a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks. … There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD. … There was the hippie movement … and the rebellious political activists. … Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation. … This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. (Isaacson 2011, 51–52)

Indeed, for people like Jobs, romanticism was not enough; technology was an essential part of the mix. Jobs’s romanticism was also a technological romanticism. When he was young, his father transferred his love of technology and his love of craftsmanship to his son (5). Later he became interested in computers. He became a fan of the Whole Earth Catalog, went to the Homebrew Computer Club (also a place where the “ fusion between the counterculture and technology” happened [54]), and worked with Steve Wozniak, who is usually portrayed as a very technical kind of person but with a romantic side: he shared with Jobs an interest in the new music and said he had a “vision” about personal computers: “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head” (55).

More generally, many people working on the Mac “were poets and musicians on the side:” (568). Thus, Jobs was part of a larger whole and history. This from Isaacson:

Initially the technologies and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. … But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote. (Isaacson 2011, 52)

The result of this mix of romanticism and technology was visible (and still is visible) in Apple products, which aim at combining art and technology. Computers were not only reimagined as romantic tools for exploration and surprise; as Streeter writes, the Apple II was supposed to offer surprises, whereas IBM’s System 6 was supposed to prevent them (Streeter 2011, 66). There was thus “a romantic framing of computer use” as “playful, expressive, even rebellious” (68). Computers were also redesigned as romantic tools. In other words, the technology itself was transformed; it became more romantic. As Isaacson puts it, Jobs positioned himself “at the intersection of the arts and technology,” which means that “in all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing friendly graphical user interfaces” (37). Intuition was important: in the use of products and even in the store (340). Apple products would not remind people of Big Brother; technology would now be about you. It would be beautiful and have “sex appeal” (122). Jobs created romantic technology for romantic people. They wanted revolution; he gave them technology and presented it as revolution. The launch of the Macintosh in 1984 “featured a rebellious woman outrunning the Orwellian thought police and throwing a sledgehammer into a screen” (149). Computers were no longer “instruments that could be used by Orwellian governments and giant corporations” but “potential tools for personal empowerment” (149).

Jobs became a romantic hero and Apple “a cool, rebellious, and heroic company” (149). As a romantic through and through, Jobs wanted to be that hero, wanted to be part of the counterculture. He wanted to be a hacker and a pirate—also a typical romantic figure. Isaacson compares Jobs with Bill Gates, thereby making a typically romantic opposition: “Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined, and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly” (158). With Pixar, he was interested in combining art and technology, and he wanted design that seduces. Apple is said to thrive at “the intersection of artistry and technology” because he infused his sensibilities and imagination in it (522). As a romantic figure, he also had his gothic side: he is said to have “passions,” “demons,” and even “devilry” (516–517). He is experienced as a mystery. And of course there is the figure of the romantic genius, which is combined with the figure of the magician to create a powerful, attractive romantic character: Jobs is called a “genius” who had “imaginative leaps” that were “instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was … a magician genius” (522). But all this was combined with technology; it happened at the intersection of “the humanities and science,” a “magical” place where both artists and engineers could “express themselves” (523).

Of course this narrative is itself a myth, indeed a romance. It also includes, for instance, the myth of the garage, where innovation started and is where ICT innovation is now supposed to start. Perhaps Jobs was not so rebellious as he portrayed himself. Maybe he was more of a businessman than an artist or a hacker. And one may wonder how much artistry there was in the daily life of Apple employees—or in the daily life of Jobs, for that matter. But as romantics, we love myth and romance. As Streeter (2011) puts it, “The story of personal computers being manufactured and programmed by youth in their garages … had an added romantic appeal” (89). We are, like Isaacson, in the business of creating and sustaining these myths. We are happy to buy into the dream of changing the world rather than occupying ourselves with philistine number crunching. We admire hackers as romantic heroes. We are happy to learn about their risky adventures, visions, and passions. And more important for the purpose of this book, these myths forcefully show and construct not a romanticism against technology but a romanticism with technology—even, and perhaps especially, the most recent high tech.

4 Romanticism with the Machine (1): From Frankenstein’s Monster to Hippie Computing