In the previous chapters I have employed the phrase “the end of the machine.” But what, exactly, does end mean? I have used the term in at least two senses, meanings that can be clarified by looking briefly at Heidegger’s discussion of ending and death in Being and Time (1927). In section 48, Heidegger distinguishes between, on the one hand, ending as stopping and disappearance, and on the other hand, ending as ripening and fulfillment (227). Whereas the former meaning is about termination, the latter concerns end as a telos, a purpose. It is about completion and fulfillment. Now whatever this distinction means for thinking about death and human existence, it can help us to clarify the discussion about the end-of-the-machine vision I constructed in the previous chapters.
We can distinguish between two senses of end here. First, the thesis is that increasingly technologies stop being machines (descriptive claim) and should stop being machines (normative claim). Contemporary information technologies are no longer very material instruments, or so it seems. And as technologies become romanticized, their mechanical workings and character disappear. In its normative version, the technoromantic vision is that we should work toward the end of the machine in the sense of its termination. The romantic cyborg is the termination of the machine: the technology stops being a machine as it merges with the human. Second, at the same time, this figure of the romantic cyborg can also be seen as the end of the machine in the sense of a telos. The romantic cyborg is the completion, fulfillment of the technoromantic project: the striving to reach the romantic goal of going beyond the machine. Both meanings have been at play in the romantic attitude toward technology. Some romantics wanted to stop the machine. But others also wanted to reach the goal of marrying humans and machines, a project that seems to find its (partial?) completion in contemporary technologies, which are not only no longer experienced and used as “machines” (end as termination) and seem to complete and fulfill the technoromantic project (end as telos). But are these ends reached? Or do they remain machines and rather fulfill the telos of the machine?
Indeed, my construction of the end-of-the-machine vision was not the end of the discussion (pun intended). The previous chapter offered a further critical analysis of the relation between romanticism and contemporary technologies. It turned out that the end-of-the-machine vision and recent romantic technologies and technoromantic practices are highly problematic in various ways. Some issues concern problems with romanticism itself; long-standing objections to romanticism could also be applied to contemporary technoromanticism. Both romanticism and many of these objections, however, rest on dualist assumptions with dichotomies such as reality/illusion and authenticity/unauthenticity—a dualism that some strands of romanticism, at least, wanted to overcome. Furthermore, there was another problem with the end-of-the-machine vision: it seems that romanticism has turned into its opposite (what I have called the dialectic of Romanticism), and that there has not been a good synthesis of Enlightenment and Romanticism (yet) insofar as “the machine” is merely hidden but still there. Using the reflection on end offered above, it could be argued that there is neither a completion of the technoromantic project (end as telos) nor a termination of the machine (end as termination). Perhaps the development of technology is even working toward a different telos, one that is the opposite of what technoromanticism wanted to achieve: the completion of the “machine” project instead of the merger of humans and machines or the marriage of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Moreover, to the extent that the technoromantic project has succeeded, there are dangers that seem to come with it, including the danger of totalitarianism (see my interpretation of Marcuse). Seen in this light, the end-of-the-machine vision is problematic, and the postmodern cyborg rhetoric may be too optimistic and hide forms of domination and exploitation. Heeding Pirsig’s (1974) insight, perhaps romanticism is often merely a nice-looking layer on top of the machine. And even if we are heading toward the technoromantic telos, this is not necessarily something we should welcome since it may also lead to exploitation and totalitarianism.
Therefore, to the extent that this is what our new romantic technologies are and do, we need to go beyond both kinds of modern thinking: beyond the Enlightenment tradition and beyond romanticism. But what resources do we have to do this? To employ the arsenal of critical theory to call for resistance to romanticism and, indeed, the exploitation and dehumanization that is done in its name, is not helpful for this purpose, since that thinking remains within the Enlightenment-Romanticism binary and other modern binaries. It helps to be critical of romanticism, but its recipes risk turning into a caricature of the Enlightenment the Romantics rightly opposed, potentially leading to a Brave New World of total rationality and transparency. To mitigate this danger, one could try to find a synthesis of Enlightenment and Romanticism, but this is again a very romantic aim. In other words, when going this route or even participating in this discussion, we remain within the modern dialectic and therefore within the romantic order, within the romantic way of thinking. How can we really move beyond modern thinking and, hence, modern thinking about technology? How can we bring about a real end of the machine that is no longer romantic? This chapter is about how to think beyond the machine, beyond romanticism, and beyond modernity—thereby taking the risk that this thinking reverts back to romanticism and to modern thinking in general. But I am willing to accept that risk because the journey is worthwhile in itself.
Can we move beyond the machine? Are there “nonmachines”? Maybe it helps to first reconceptualize what we are already doing by using a less modern approach. I first explore the route suggested by Pirsig and some contemporary phenomenology (e.g., Dreyfus and Borgmann). This is also the route I proposed in response to what I take to be a romantic environmental philosophy (Coeckelbergh 2015a) and what I already suggested in my book on moral status (Coeckelbergh 2012a): perhaps the notion of skilled engagement can help us to move beyond modern thinking and practice. I also develop Coyne’s suggested narrative turn mentioned in the previous chapter. Maybe thinking about technologies as narrative technologies (Coeckelbergh and Weijers 2015, 2016; see also Kaplan 2006) also helps bring together humans and technology, culture and tools, in a way that goes beyond the machine concept. Both approaches will enable me to replace the Enlightenment-Romanticism opposition with another opposition: one between distance and engagement. Both Enlightenment and Romanticism turn out to lead to too distant modes of praxis and experience. A less modern approach, by contrast, one that is focused on the notions of skilled engagement and narrativity, may help to bridge the distance. I will argue that focusing on praxis and narrative helps us to think outside the human–machine opposition. The machine and even the cyborg—which, after all, is still defined in machine terms—start disappearing from view.
Then I discuss how we can go beyond modern thinking about technology by critically responding to the romantic disenchantment myth. As Lewin already suggested (see the previous chapter), it may not be sufficient to confine the discussion to the realm of the secular—if that realm exists at all. If we really want to be critical of modern ways of thinking, including romantic ways of thinking about technology, then it seems that we need to ask ultimate questions about the nature of reality and about religion and spirituality in the broadest sense of the terms. Drawing on Latour and Szerszynski, I explore the thought that we have never been (totally) disenchanted, secularized, and modernized in the first place. This means that maybe we can learn something from “religious” concepts. But we should not confine our analysis and discussion to Christian or even monotheistic religion; we should also explore different ways of seeing the world, for example, so-called “pagan” ways of interpreting, experiencing, and indeed practicing. Influenced by cultural anthropology, we may then reinterpret what I have called “romantic technologies and practices in a different way. Perhaps they are not so much romantic but rather magic, tribal, and so on. Perhaps our contemporary technologies and technological practices are far less modern than we think. If this is so, then in philosophy of technology we need to find and construct concepts that reflect these nonmodern aspects of our relation to technology.
Finally, I will argue that these different paths to less modern thinking are not without danger in the sense that they easily lead back to romanticism. Romantics already tried to build machines that were no longer machines, and contemporary roboticists seem to do the same (the idea of animating dead matter). And romantics have always shared an interest in different, nonmodern forms of religion and spirituality. Furthermore, when we search for nonmodern forms of life, we may become nostalgic about a time when—so we may assume—there was less distance and more engagement, when there were better myths and other narratives and myths, when there was more magic and enchantment, and when indeed there were better rituals, practices, and technologies (e.g., more simple tools used by a craftsman). It seems that to the extent that this kind of thinking holds sway, a new arcadia is in the making, a new romantic utopia. Furthermore, it is also all too easy to approach the problem in a modern way when it comes to drawing conclusions from the argument: we might want to “decide” to change direction and “design” new technologies and a new society that are less modern. But, as I will argue following Heidegger and in line with previous work (Coeckelbergh 2012b), this technological kind of thinking does not lead us away from modernity but parachutes us right back into it. To really move beyond modern thinking, we have to try to move beyond the desire to control and master, and hence beyond not only modern thinking but also beyond the (version of) Aristotelian humanism Babbitt endorsed: beyond the binary (self-)mastery/incontinence, and beyond the binary Apollo/Dionysus. We should neither attempt a return to an “original” world nor try to make an entirely “new” beginning, “end,” or radical transformation. As mortal human beings, our place is between birth and death; this is the space of experience, practice, narrative, and indeed technology.
This chapter will make the following journey:
There is still a lot of optimistic Enlightenment thinking about technology, and this thinking remains firmly within machine thinking. For instance, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) have argued that we are witnessing “the second machine age,” an important new stage on the road of progress. Of course this comes with some challenges, but in principle, these can be mastered. Technological development is primarily thought of in terms of machines: new kinds of machines, perhaps (“digital” ones), but machines nevertheless. Similarly, the critical discussion of the Enlightenment vision, which involves a dialectic between Enlightenment and Romanticism, remains a “machine” discussion. Will machines enslave us? Can we achieve authenticity in the digital age, or do the machines turn us into “they”? Is transparency by means of the new media and technologies/machines primarily good, or is it dangerous? What is the moral standing of the new machines?1 These are still machine questions that involve thinking in terms of machines.
Yet the end-of-the-machine vision constructed in the previous chapters also remains within machine thinking. The cyborg idea to fuse humans and machines, not only culturally but also materially, is still very much operating within machine thinking. It projects the end of the machine in the sense of termination and telos, but by doing so, it remains within the gravitational field of the machine. Antimachine thinking is still machine thinking, and the vision that it is the telos of machines to fuse with humans (and vice versa) is also still fueled by machine thinking—albeit of a romantic kind.
Could we conceptualize technologies that are no longer machines in any sense—not romantic machines and not romantic cyborgs? Could we terminate the machine as a technology and as a concept? Could we move from a more or less romantic “postmachine” such as the smartphone (which does not appear as a machine but still is a machine and links us up to a larger system or machine) to a “nonmachine”? What would this mean? Does such a term make sense at all? Can we move beyond machine thinking? What is nonmachine thinking? How would it go beyond the appearance/reality binary, assumed here in what I say about the postmachine? This is certainly an exercise worth doing, but it easily gets too abstract. Let us first see if we can reinterpret existing technological practices in ways that somehow escape modern “machine” thinking—and indeed (techno)romanticism.
One way to get beyond modern thinking is to remove the focus from being on either the “machine” or the “human” to human beings engaged in technological practices and to human beings related to their environment and to others. At the end of the previous chapter, I suggested that there are less dualistic ways of thinking about the human-technology relation, and the same is true for the human-environment relation. Sometimes our relation to our environment and others is more engaged than at other times. Skilled engagement, in particular, seems to lead to a more immersed, less distant relation. Such an understanding of “technology” or “the human” (but neither term is the main focus here) goes beyond romantic epistemology insofar as that epistemology involved a detached, distant relation.
Let me further explain this by drawing on Pirsig’s approach to romanticism in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), which I already briefly touched upon in the previous chapter but deserves more attention. Pirsig starts from the opposition between classicism and romanticism:
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. … The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. … The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws. (Pirsig 1974, 85)
For the romantic, then, technology appears as dull and ugly (here, what counts is the eye of the observer, the subjective), whereas the scientist sees only the underlying form (this is a so-called objective view; the observer is missing). Pirsig’s book moves beyond these two “irreconcilable” positions (98) insofar as it suggests that craftsmanship, skilled engagement with the world, is a better way of understanding and coping with the world. Instead of choosing the romantic rejection of technology, Pirsig seems to recommend a third position, which is close to the postromantic end-of-the-machine vision that tries to achieve a synthesis between Enlightenment and Romanticism, but perhaps also goes beyond that modern dialectic altogether.
In contrast to the detachment of the Enlightenment thinker and the romantic (or at least a certain type of romantic, the reverie type—I have shown that some of them had a different view), the craftsman is immersed and absorbed in the work: “his motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony,” Pirsig writes, rather romantically (209). Form and beauty merge. The craft itself creates beauty in the things; it is no longer necessary to make things beautiful afterward, to overlay them with “a veneer of ‘style’ to make it acceptable” (375). According to Pirsig, “classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic pettiness” (375–376). In contrast to the smartphones and other romantic devices we use today (at least, this is my interpretation), we need a “real unification of art and technology” (377). This unification happens in and through the crafting, in and through the work practice, not in romantic reverie, scientific abstraction, or “afterward” when the veneer is applied on top of an ugly piece of technology. Instead, “a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context” (379). Pirsig explains that in the involvement of the craftsman in his work, “the idea of a duality of self and object doesn’t dominate one’s consciousness” (381). Thus, what some romantics longed for in the nineteenth century (and indeed at the time of the counterculture, which is Pirsig’s time) and what I also sympathize with, the goal of overcoming dualism, is reached here neither by “subjective” intoxication and reverie nor by “objective,” abstract scientific theory and disinterested philosophy. It is reached in and through practical worldly involvement, in which object and subject merge. Such an intense involvement in and engagement with the world is a fulfilling experience. As work in psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) also shows, in concentrating on some kinds of work, we can forget our selves and experience so-called flow: especially in high-challenge, high-skill situations, we can experience a state of consciousness in which there is total involvement and no self.
Thus, again we meet the romantic dream of a fusion, a merger of object and subject, human and machine. But here it is not only a dream; with its focus on craftsmanship and praxis, it becomes involved and material. It is engaged. Although some romantics already went in that direction, this route may help us to find an “outside” of the modern Enlightenment-romantic dialectic. The orientation toward craftsmanship certainly helps us to go beyond machine thinking. Because craftsmanship practices involve an active relation to technology and the environment, there is no human versus machine experience, but practical engagement: with technology, with the environment, and with others.
In philosophy of technology, other thinkers have recommended skilled engagement as a way out of the modern problem of meaning and as a better way of “doing technology.” For example, Borgmann (1984) has argued that our “devices” require too little skilled engagement: they are easy to use and give us comfort, but because of that, we miss the opportunity to develop our skills by engaging in “focal practices,” which gather people and enable us to engage with the world in an intense way (Borgmann 1984), challenging us rather than having us pampered by modern technology as if we are young children. And Dreyfus is known for his work on the phenomenology of skill, which conveys a similar normative message: skilled engagement is the remedy for modern alienation. Dreyfus and Kelly (2011), for instance, recommend craftsmanship as a more care-full way to cope, and a better way to give meaning to the world—or, better, perceive meaning in the world—than prevalent modern ways of relating to the world. Against modern alienation, they see craftsmanship as a way of discerning meaning that is already there (209).
However, while this “skilled engagement” route seems promising when it comes to starting to go beyond machine thinking, it is unclear how Pirsig’s project to merge form and beauty differs from the romanticism of, say, William Morris. Romanticism always had a practical, skill side to it. Moreover, overcoming dualism was also a goal of nineteenth-century romantics. Thus, there is at least always the danger that skilled engagement leads back to romanticism. Moreover, this view is also romantic insofar as it invites nostalgia and seeks reenchantment and loss of self. For instance, All Things Shining can all too easily be interpreted as a romantic work (Coeckelbergh 2015a). Dreyfus and Kelly’s (2011) project is, after all, to reenchant the world. They offer a polytheistic vision of a universe with “a whole pantheon of gods” in it (185) and describe moments when “the sacred shines” (194) and when there is “the whooshing up of a shining Achilles in the midst of battle” (201). Dionysus is back. With this imagery, they stand of course in a long romantic tradition—especially a German tradition of going back to (their construction of) ancient Greek culture. Thus, the notion of craftsmanship, even if it can do valuable work in moving us somewhat beyond modern thinking about humans and technology, can also easily revert back to romanticism—and therefore to modern thinking. Where can we find the nonmodern if not in the premodern past, when the gods had not left us yet and when the craftsman was doing his romantic work of fusing subject and object as he engaged with natural objects and gathered together with others? And did the romantics not crave for a loss of self? I return to this problem at the end of the chapter.
In spite of these “dangers,” however, the notion of skilled engagement and craftsmanship shows that it is possible to move toward an epistemology that is at least less romantic and modern (unless, of course, one defines romanticism in a richer way that benefits from the possibilities of what I called romantic epistemology). These discussions about skilled engagement show that there are ways of experiencing, knowing, and relating to the world that are less detached and alienated than those of the philistine rationalist or the romantic dreamer. More important for the purpose of this book, the discussions about skilled engagement also show that one can think about technology in a way that is not about machines or not even about artifacts as such, and still keep some distance from romanticism.
Moreover, my reading of these works on skilled engagement also enables us to criticize our current shiny devices (think smartphones and tablets), which are overlaid with romantic beauty and enchantment but are actually products of detached science and alienating, exploitative production. If we consider the use of contemporary technology, clearly we have not yet achieved the end of the machine: neither in the sense of a (modern) successful synthesis between Enlightenment and romanticism (the end of the machine as a romantic or postromantic telos) nor in the deeper (nonmodern) sense we seek in this chapter (the end of the machine as the termination of modern machine thinking and machine practice).
Another concept that may do some work for moving to a different understanding of technology is narrativity. As Reijers and I have argued recently (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2015, 2016) when elaborating a suggestion by Kaplan (2006), we can use Ricoeur’s narrative theory (Ricoeur 1980, 1983, 1985) to shed new light on technology. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics focuses on the way people interpret language and their lifeworld. According to Ricoeur (1983), social existence is embedded in a cultural context shaped by narratives (54). Narratives help us to understand what we do and what happens to us, and they are not merely individual: we draw on collective narratives. This idea can be applied to technologies in at least two ways. On the one hand, technologies are the object of our interpretations and narratives. We can have narratives about technology. This book, for instance, is also about such technological narratives. It is about how we do and should interpret contemporary technologies and how romanticism functions as a collective narrative that interprets technologies in some ways rather than others, affords some meanings rather than others. Technoromanticism is such a narrative. The end-of-the-machine vision is another narrative, a working narrative, so to speak, that I constructed in this book for the purpose of discussing the relation between romanticism and contemporary technologies (ICTs), and which I then critically discussed. Yet as I also suggested previously and in line with contemporary philosophy of technology, technologies and their concrete materialities play a much more active role: they also shape our culture. Concepts such as “romantic technologies” and “romantic machines” indicate this much closer entanglement of human and technology, culture and materiality. This book is not an exercise in cultural studies, if this means that it is about culture separated from technology; rather, it is mainly about understanding and thinking through technologies, which shape our culture. We can then try to conceptualize this more active role of technologies in relation to narratives, for instance, by using Ricoeur’s concepts of configuration and plot. Technologies are not only the object of narratives but also “cowrite” them. They can configure our understanding of the world and reorganize and shape the narratives we tell about ourselves. Technology thus mediates our experience and practices in a way that is similar to a text. Technologies cocreate plots: they (re-)organize characters and events into a meaningful whole (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2015, 2016). There is a chronological order, and there is the order of the text as a whole, to which the parts relate and in which they are organized. For example, a car co-configures events such as “starting the engine” and “adjusting the mirrors” in a meaningful whole that includes human and nonhuman characters. The narrative of driving is thus “cowritten” and con-figured by humans and technology. For instance, as Lewis Mumford already showed, clocks dissociate time from human events (see also Carr 2010, 211). And contemporary technologies such as block chain technologies and video games reconfigure plots and characters in a way that leads to new narratives, coauthored by humans and technology (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2015, 2016).
For our discussion about romanticism and technology, this approach shows that using the language and theory of narrativity enables us to go beyond seeing either technology or the human as the main actors. By highlighting their narrative function, we can liberate technologies from their classicist, Enlightenment, and Romantic corsets; they are no longer (mere) machines at all. They are no longer mere artifacts or materialities. They are also like texts or like authors of texts. They are also somewhat like humans. Moreover, humans are no longer seen as the only narrators, and texts are no longer seen as merely cultural: as humans and technologies coauthor a narrative and as texts are made by means of writing technologies and can also have a material form, the divide between humans and technologies and between culture and matter is at least partly bridged. This approach thus gives us a less modern way of understanding humans and technology, even if it may not entirely end modern thinking about technology.
Note, however, that this view is different from the postmodern claim that everything is text. In the postmodern imaginary, there are only signs, which no longer refer to anything outside themselves. There is only language, but materiality is gone—or is banned to “the real” which is beyond (re-)cognition. By contrast, the claim here is that there is a dynamic entanglement between language (here: narrative) and material technologies, between culture and technologies, in which narratives are firmly connected with real (human and material) characters and real events.
Ricoeur (1983) also showed that narratives may abstract from “first-order entities” and construct second- and third-order entities (181). Today’s narratives, for instance, are often no longer about humans and specific technologies, but, about abstract entities such as “markets” or “crisis,” or indeed about “machines” or “technology.” This insight can be related to the arguments about alienation and disengagement discussed earlier in this section: surely our relation to the world may be more or less distant, more or less engaged, and in modernity, narratives tend to become more abstract. For instance, in the nineteenth century, both Enlightenment and Romanticism constructed rather abstract entities in their narratives about Science with a capital S and History with a capital H, in which characters such as “laws,” metaphysical “I’s,” the “world-soul,” and “nations” play a role. In this sense, turning to narratives cannot guarantee that there is less distance. But even narratives about such more abstract characters are never merely cultural but always already material and technological. The narrative of our personal lives as well as the narrative of “Humanity” are coauthored by humans and technology. Thus, technology is more narrative than previously supposed, but narratives are also more technological than previously assumed.
This importance of the material and technological dimension and influence of narratives probably means that if we want to take distance from the romantic imagination, it is not enough to construct a different narrative and to “reimagine” and “conceptualize” a different approach. If the way we see the world also depends on the technologies, which cowrite the narratives we create about ourselves, then we also have to change the technologies. Like some of the nineteenth-century romantics, we may not only write books but also experiment and invent. We may have to experiment and tinker our way out of Enlightenment-Romantic thinking; conceptual work is probably not sufficient. I return to this in my conclusion. Let me first try another reimagining and reconceptualization.
The Romantics, in their efforts to reenchant the world, assume that the world has been disenchanted. Romantics basically accept Weber’s narrative of disenchantment (see chapter 3). But there is also an alternative view: the world was never disenchanted in the first place. Perhaps modernity itself is a myth, albeit a very powerful one that has shaped and continues to shape our (technological) practices.
In the previous chapter I mentioned Popper’s suggestion that the world may not have been completely disenchanted. But there are also much more radical versions of this view. Latour (1993) has argued that we have never been modern. Moderns strictly distinguish between nature and societies, humans and nonhumans, and so on, but our premodern ancestors never made these distinctions and neither do we live in a world purified of hybrids. We are still nonmodern to the extent that we have hybrids, mixes of politics, science, technology, and nature. Consider black holes in physics or climate change: these phenomena and problems have human and nonhuman dimensions; it is not possible to completely disentangle the two. Instead of trying to purify such phenomena, Latour suggests, we better adapt our concepts to that nonmodern reality. For thinking about romanticism and technology, this means that if we see and construct phenomena such as black holes in romantic terms, then this is only possible since they were never really purely “scientific” and entirely “modern” phenomena in the first place. They were already hybrids before we did our modern construction work. The object-subject border was already crossed in scientific practice, even if scientists may play lip-service to objectivist ideas. In the way that anthropologists study “cultures,” the West is also “a culture,” which can and needs to be studied by anthropologists (Latour 1993, 97). With Latour “anthropology comes home from the tropics” (100) and shows that science itself is not what the Romantics thought it was. As a practice, it is not at all detached, objective, cold, and it is as much cultural as it is technological:
Science does not produce itself scientifically any more than technology produces itself technologically or economy economically. Scientists in the lab, Boyle’s descendants, know this perfectly well, but as soon as they set out to reflect on what they do, they pronounce the words that sociologists and epistemologists, Hobbes’s descendants, put in their mouths. (Latour 1993, 116)
Thus, Latour shows that we are far less modern than we think; it turns out that “cold,” “objective” science was an invention of the Enlightenment thinkers—or better: of the Romantics. Latour explicitly writes about “the antimoderns,” who have taken “what the moderns say about themselves at face value” (123):
The tragedy becomes more painful still when the antimoderns, taking what the moderns say about themselves at face value, want to save something from what looks to them like a shipwreck. The antimoderns firmly believe that the West has rationalized and disenchanted the world, that it has truly peopled the social with cold and rational monsters which saturate all of space, that it has definitely transformed the premodern cosmos into a mechanical interaction of pure matters. … Except for the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same convictions. (Latour 1993, 123)
Hence the “antimoderns,” Latour continues, try to save what can be saved: “souls, minds, emotions, interpersonal relations, the symbolic dimension, human warmth, local specificities, hermeneutics, the margins and the peripheries” (123). However, he argues, there is nothing to save. Our networks are full of souls. Science was never pure and rational. And technology was never a matter of machines that try to dominate humans:
Protecting human beings from the domination of machines and technocrats is a laudable enterprise, but if the machines are full of human beings who find their salvation there, such a protection is merely absurd. … It is admirable to demonstrate that the strength of the spirit transcends the laws of mechanical nature, but this programme is idiotic if matter is not at all material and machines are not at all mechanical. (Latour 1993, 124)
In other words, the romantic cyborg project of merging humans and machines was misguided, since we already had hybrids of humans and machines. The machines were always already human.
Szerszynski (2005) also questions the dominant modern story about disenchantment. He argues that both the champions and critics of modernity (including, for instance, defenders of secularization and the hippie counterculture) accept the same disenchantment story. The alternative view he proposes sees history in terms of orderings of the sacred. Romanticism, then, is part of “the modern sacred”: it “offers a form of this-worldly salvation: through rediscovering our natural, authentic selves, and thus our interconnectedness with everything else, we can overcome our alienation from others and from the natural world” (22).
Let me further unpack this view. Influenced by the anthropologist Ingold (2000), Szerszynski (2005) suggests that premodern cultures experienced the world as already meaningful and as emerging from daily social-technological activity. In modernity, technology became divorced from this dynamic social fabric; the craftworker and the engineer act “from outside” (Szerszynski 2005, 56), like the creator. Nature becomes, as Heidegger (1977) put it, a “standing-reserve.” Nature is seen in opposition to technology. Environmentalism, for instance, assumes this dichotomy as it draws on Enlightenment thinking and on Romanticism; it is therefore entirely modern. A narrative of the Fall is invoked: the ills at present are the result of a fall from “a primal state of harmony with nature” (Szerszynski 2005, 146). There are proposals about reenchantment. Against this way of thinking, Szerszynski argues that nature is already enchanted (123). If we seek an alternative to domination of nature by modern technology, the challenge is “which enchantment” we want rather than reenchantment (124). Our modern view of nature and technology is part of a particular ordering of the sacred, which has its roots in the separation between a god-creator and world/nature made by the ancient Hebrews (168) and has since then evolved into the modern view that nature is “a secular wasteland, devoid of sacral meaning” (171). Our modern view—including the Enlightenment-Romanticism dialectic—is thus part of a history of the sacred. If we want to achieve a right relation to nature and to technology, therefore, we have to “engage at the level of the sacred meanings—both benign and malign—that inform our current relationships with them” (172). New meanings of the sacred may emerge.
Such an engagement includes studying “primal cultures” (177). It also means that “evaluating specific technical effects and consequences will not be enough”; they need to be “‘read’ in a far richer way” (178). One way to do this is to use different, nonmodern and nontechnological concepts to understand technologies. What happens if we look at technology not through the lens of modernity—including Enlightenment versus Romanticism—but through nonmodern concepts, concepts anthropologists used to reserve for “exotic” tribes but have then been applied to Western culture?
Ingold, who has studied hunter-gatherer societies, argued in his influential book The Perception of the Environment (2000), that we should focus on organisms engaging with their environment, indeed on skilled engagement. He observes “patterns of skilled activity” that “give rise to the real-world artifactual and organic forms that we encounter, rather than serving—as the standard view would claim—to transcribe preexisting form onto raw material” (345). His language changes the focus on technology as being about “things” or “artifacts” to what human beings do as they skillfully engage with the world. In The Life of Lines (2015), Ingold has further developed his conceptual apparatus: life is woven from knots rather than built from blocks. And as we are knotting our way through the world, we are always in an “atmosphere”: a meteorological concept that relates to the sky and the weather but also to mood, sound, and color. Using concepts such as growth, skilled activity, knotting, and atmosphere, Ingold thus brings together the world formerly known as “objective” with the world previously known as “subjective”; by using these metaphors, he goes beyond the object-subjective binary.
Another, perhaps more straightforward (but maybe also more problematic) way of approaching this problem is not to develop new concepts but to use the terms anthropologists employed to describe primitive cultures. We used to think that there was magic in other cultures, whereas we lived in a disenchanted world. But what if we applied concepts such as “magic” to our technological culture, thus bringing anthropology home from the tropics? In previous work, I have already argued that this opens up interesting avenues for thinking about technology (Coeckelbergh 2010, 2013, 2015b). If a culture can be described as a technoreligious form of life with a spiritual-material history (Coeckelbergh 2015b), then we can make sense of our culture by using concepts from our religions for thinking through technology. Consider, for instance, the transhumanist quest for immortality and the idea of Singularity, which involve ways of thinking that have parallels with Judeo-Christian thinking. But we can also use concepts we usually reserve for so-called “pagan” cultures. Animism, for instance, does not understand the world in terms of aspiritual objects but as “suffused with spirit” and as part of the social: plants and animals but also human-made objects possess spirit. Technological objects are no exception; they are not seen as separate from the social and spiritual domain. People from these “other” cultures experience technological objects as part of their social-spiritual lifeworld. But such experiences also happen in “the West,” and, in line with Latour, we might even suggest that it is the first or spontaneous way we perceive and experience things: as children, but also perhaps as adults before we put on our modern glasses. If this is true, then animism is not something of the distant past or of distant “other” cultures, but is still shaping how we experience technology. Then also in this sense we are a lot less modern than we think.
Similarly, magic also still seems to play a role in our use and experience of science and technology. And we do not need romanticism to see this; an interest in different, nonmodern cultures and in religions and spirituality suffices. Yet the insight that magic still plays a role in our contemporary technological culture can also be found in some of the technoromanticism literature sensitive to nonmodern forms of life. In Media, Modernity, Technology (2007), Morley has argued that there are “many overlaps and continuities between the Occident and the Orient, the traditional (irrational) past and the logics of the modern, and between the realm of magic and that of technology” (3). Like Szerszynski, he questions the disenchantment story. Influenced by Kwame Anthony Appiah and John Gray, he argues that Weber’s opposition between tradition and modernity is too simplistic (256–257) and that religion is still important today. Like many other commentators at the beginning of the twenty-first century he observes a revival of religion and shows that atheism is a negative version of Western monotheism: they belong to the same tradition (159). Similarly, the “primitive” world of magic and ritual is “derived, by opposition, from the West’s own self-conception” (188); it is a mirror image and belongs to the same myth of Western modernity.
What does this mean for understanding technology? In contrast to the previous chapters, which articulated the romantic dimension of technology, here the argument is not so much that the new technology is magic and therefore romantic, but rather that magic and enchantment have always been a part of human culture and that this is not different today. Technologies always had a magic function, and contemporary technologies are no exception. If modernity has never really begun, then we can observe ritual, enchantment, and magic in technological society. These practices and phenomena are then interpreted not so much as signs of technoromanticism but rather as nonmodern practices and phenomena that are age old (and which technoromantics, but also others, may then draw our attention to).
Hence concepts such as “icon,” “totem,” and “fetish” can be used to describe a “techno-anthropology” of technologies such as the Internet and the cell phone. For example, Morley uses modern and nonmodern concepts. He argues that what Williams (1974) called “mobile privatisation” also happens in the age of Internet and cell phones. Williams described a suburban world where life became privatized—people retreat to their homes—but at the same time people connected to the wider world through radio and television broadcasting: news from “outside” was needed (20–21). With the invention of printing, leisure became individualized (Morley 2007, 211). The refrigerator made the home a site of leisure, creating a “home-based lifestyle” (261). New media further supported this individualization of leisure and the home-based lifestyle: we can now stay at home and use our computers, smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets to entertain ourselves. But at the same time, the new media also connect users to the wider world. Of course today the communication is more interactive (in Williams, by contrast, the communication is more one-way; consider especially TV), and through the technology of the cell phone, we can take our “home” with us wherever we go. But the psychic dimension of the technology is similar: the technology allows people to stay “safe within the realm of their familiar ontological security and to travel (imaginatively or virtually) to ‘places that previous generations could never imagine visiting’” (Morley 2007, 199). The phone becomes the familiar and the comfortable, which we get attached to and to which we like to return; it becomes home. Technology is thus constitutive of what “home” is (214) and has the wondrous property of balancing “instant technological access to the world outside with inviolable personal safety and quietude,” thus keeping intact the image of familial stability (215). Like the car, the phone and the iPod create “my own little bubble” (219), “a psychic cocoon for its user” (221), which is at the same time connected to the rest of the world. The result is “a complex hybrid of the high-tech and the traditional” (215).
But Morley also describes technologies in a way that directly links them to nonmodern forms of life. We enter a world where electronic objects “‘leak’ their dreams and thoughts into the places and objects around them” (Morley 2007, 254), where, after the television already became a “totemic item” (278), other material, technological objects such as “mobile phones, portable MP3 players, iPods and laptop computers” become the “totems of today’s ‘technotribes’” (297). It is a world in which electronic devices are involved in rituals to restore “connexity” (305) and function as talismans to provide “psychic reassurance” (305). Email, for instance, is a “daily ritual of confirmation of one’s participation in and belonging to a wider, technologically mediated community” (324); if email is down, this ritual is disrupted and the result is no less than “an assault on our ontological security itself” (325).
A similar observation could be made about smartphones and social media (not discussed by Morley), which, even more than email, provide us with new rituals and are supposed to give users psychic reassurance and ontological security, and give us the feeling of connectivity and of belonging to a wider community. For instance, when people check Facebook, share information about themselves, and “like” posts from others, these activities take on a ritualistic aspect. They “need” to be done again and again (every day, every hour, or even more frequently) to reassure users that they are connected to others and the wider community. Moreover, perhaps there is also what Morley calls “idolatry of information”: in the information age, information becomes “sacred” (325). Technical processes cast “a spell” over us and transcend our understanding. We live in a mix of science and magic, technology, and tradition (326).
Note again, however, that if we aim to go beyond romanticism, there is a certain danger in these descriptions and this approach: revealing links to magic and tradition easily sounds as if we want to reenchant our Western world, making it more exotic and interesting, and perhaps even return to premodern times and technologies. Even if an author explicitly rejects romanticism, by the very act of revealing all this magic and enchantment, she or he might not only radically question but also significantly contribute to the romantic project. This danger is also present in this book: by presenting contemporary technology in a romantic light, I am in danger of contributing to the project of reenchantment and supporting romanticism—even if I did not intend to do so.
A similar danger is present in discussions about alternative, less modern ways of conceptualizing our relation to nature. In this context, it is interesting to mention so-called ecopsychology, which also claims that “the Old way of being in nature … has never left us. Its patterns and needs are with us still” (Kahn and Hasbach 2012, 1). In their seminal book on ecopsychology, Peter Kahn and Patricia Hasbach argue that our species always had a form of kinship with the “greater-than-human world,” our “totemic self,” and that this has allowed us to flourish; therefore, they argue, we better embrace it (2). Partly this response may be framed as romantic. For instance, it is said that the origins of ecopsychology go back to the countercultural movement in the 1960s and that wilderness experiences can trigger the sense that the world is “enchanted, alive, whole, and meaningful” (5). But whether or not ecopsychology is romantic, the claim is that there are nonmodern patterns and ways of interacting with nature that are age old and tend to be forgotten when we engage with nature by using contemporary technologies or when we theorize the environment by using a modern framework. For instance, when we use GPS, we risk losing opportunities for paying attention and connecting to animal life and the natural world (8; see also Coeckelbergh 2015a). But we can retrieve the old ways of perceiving and experiencing nature, for instance, when we “look up at the night sky and feel grandeur, awe, and humility”—in other words, when we have a “totemic feeling” (Kahn and Hasbach 2012, 12). Ecopsychologists seek a reconciliation with that more-than-human world. They identify meaningful and nearly lost nonmodern interaction patterns between humans and nature such as foraging (57) and hope to overcome modern dualist thinking that “divorces the human mind from nature” (83). Going beyond the boundaries of standard, modern science and its mechanical understanding of nature, they look—very romantically—for a more poetic form of dwelling (96) and for more of an “integrative praxis” that reintegrates “psyche, nature, and society” (101). The point is not to become nontechnological—we are technological, “tool-wielding” beings (187)—but to transform our relation to nature and render our environments living and “awe-inspiring” (198). Rediscovering an ancient “way of knowing and being” (309) and expressing “our totemic selves,” which are “somewhat buried” (310), ecopsychologists do not want us to go back to the past or reject technology, but rather stop degrading nature and reshape our relation to nature and use technology in such a way that our “deep psychic connection with the natural world” (310) is restored. Moreover, they also want to “help rewild humans”: by bringing forward “the primal energies” (316), they aim at “rediscovering and honoring the wildness within” (315).
As in the other explorations of nonmodern ways of experiencing and practicing, there is no aspiration to transcendence here. Instead, immanent meaning and good are found in a world that does not need enchantment because it is a human-natural and material-spiritual world. Nonmodern understanding and praxis are both earthly and heavenly, between heaven and earth, or indeed none of these, since we may assume that to a truly nonmodern and non-Western person (does such a person exist?), neither term makes sense.
Again, when one looks at the actual descriptions and aims, ecopsychology sounds rather romantic. It seems that ecopsychologists are still starting from the problem of disenchantment and then embark on a romantic project attempting to reenchant nature and romance the ancient ways of relating to nature. There has been a Fall, and we need to make everything whole again, reintegrate, heal. This way of thinking remains problematic—at least to the extent that romanticism is problematic (see the previous chapter). For instance, in practice, it may become too “aesthetic” and self-absorbed in feelings for “nature,” failing to relate practically to and engage with the natural environment. (See also Coeckelbergh 2015a for a criticism of romantic environmentalism.)
Yet going beyond romanticism is not easy, and it would already be very helpful if we would acknowledge the influence of romanticism and its “dangers,” and if we would be and remain critical toward it. Perhaps this is the biggest danger today with regard to romanticism: the term is used as a tool to condemn anything that smells of self-indulgence, nostalgia, and escapism, but there is too little acknowledgment of, and reflection on, (1) romanticism as a rich and influential cultural and philosophical tradition and (2) the romantic roots of contemporary thinking, that is, the romantic roots of our own thinking. Without this, much contemporary thinking about technology remains too dogmatic, too little (self-)critical.
With regard to thinking about the relation between romanticism and technology, therefore, adopting a less modern, more nonmodern approach does not imply that one needs to deny any connection between romanticism and technology whatsoever. As the previous chapters and sections have shown, there certainly is such a connection: sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. For instance, the “home” function of the cell phone and smartphone can also be described as romantic; today we have romantic phones. And ecopsychology’s attempts at reconciliation and its poetics of rewilding are certainly romantic. It is important to acknowledge this romantic dimension if we want to keep a critical distance from it.
However, if we take on board the lessons from Latour and others, we should not see romanticism as the primary source of meaning and interpretation; the more basic, fundamental current that runs through cultures is a nonmodern one. Romanticism itself, then, is to be interpreted as an expression of what has always been there: magic, enchantment, the sacred, and so on. Romanticism can be fully understood only by putting it within the context of modernity and the Enlightenment. But what it articulates, reveals, and uncovers is less “other” than it seems; “before” the romantic reaction, magic was already mixed with science, and there was already a hybrid between tradition and modernity. Romanticism highlighted what has always been there and practiced what has always been done.
For philosophy of technology, this means that it should not take the secularization narrative for granted but engage with the many magical, spiritual, sacred, and religious meanings that are attached to technology, including nonmodern ones, in order to better understand technological practices and technological culture. Lewin (2011) has argued that currently, philosophy of technology is hampered by a secular attitude (2). I think this is true if and insofar as this attitude prevents scholars from seeing the many relations between religion and technology. Moreover, unfortunately “religion” is frequently associated with one particular religion or “one particular ordering of the sacred” (to borrow Szerszynski’s term), for instance, a Christian one. This also hinders serious attention to questions in this field.
Of course, Christian traditional frameworks remain important in Western culture, and hence also in its technological culture. Consider again transhumanism, for instance. Many people in this field are antireligious and see themselves as secular. They classify themselves in the “Enlightenment” box, especially the atheist version of it. But the longing for transcendence and the hope for immortality, in particular, clearly display what Paul Tillich (1951) and others call “an ultimate concern.” This kind of thinking seems closely linked to an all-too-familiar ordering of the sacred—the Christian one—which has a similar concern.
The relation between technology and religion is a complex one, and I cannot do justice to this topic within the space of this chapter. But it has become clear that there is a way of trying to think outside the modern box—that is, that there is an outside of the Enlightenment-Romanticism dialectic—and that following that path is impossible without questioning the modern disenchantment/secularization narrative.
Note that this approach, which pays attention to cultures and religions, does not necessarily imply that we should not try to understand particular technologies. On the contrary, it is necessary and important to study the modern and nonmodern aspects of the technologies of our daily lives and of our age: how we use these technologies, what meanings emerge from this use, and what narratives are connected to them (and partly constituted by them). However, it is good to keep in mind—heading romantic epistemology—that the meaning of these technologies may not be immediately transparent to us, not immediately visible. (See also Lewin 2011, 110.) Next to more detailed studies about the use of technologies, therefore, we also need a broader approach to think through the relation between technologies and the larger frames and transformations in our culture. Even then we may not be aware of all the conditioning of our thinking, but as philosophers, we have a duty to try to articulate our assumptions and explore where they come from. Yet it is important to recognize that this will always have limitations: not everything may be (easily made) visible, and even if we have an intuition or feeling about something, we might not be able to represent it. This is a matter of the limitation of language in general, but it can also be due to a limitation of a particular language, a particular vocabulary, or a particular discourse. Influenced by Heidegger, we could say that our thinking necessarily remains within (a) language. In my conclusion, I say more about this.
In this chapter I have offered two kinds of responses to (techno)romanticism, which attempted to go beyond romanticism and its modern thinking/language, including machine thinking. One focused on the concepts of skilled engagement and narrative, which somewhat helped to think beyond the technology-human binary and therefore the technology-romanticism binary; the other attempted to uncover nonmodern meanings and saw these as more fundamental than the modern-romantic ones. Yet it became clear that these responses may not be able to fully escape romanticism, that a revival of craftsmanship and the uncovering of the nonmodern may take on romantic faces. Moreover, even if successful, the very notions of the overcoming of the machine and the end-of-machine thinking may be described in all-too-romantic terms. It turns out to be very difficult to escape thinking within the romantic order, which has set up rationalist and empiricist Enlightenment modernity against the magic and enchantment of romanticism and religion. If there is a powerful spell at all, it turns out to be a modern-romantic one rather than a premodern “exotic” one.
Yet some affinity with romanticism is not necessarily a problem. It is probably wise to recognize that there might be a connection between romanticism and one’s own thinking rather than rejecting romanticism outright. Only if we recognize our romantic heritage can we take a critical stance toward it and obtain some success in exploring how to go beyond it. This is why I spent so much time in this book studying romanticism and the myriad connections between romanticism and technology. However, romanticism is and remains problematic, even, and perhaps especially, when it is so much mixed up with our technological practices and our thinking about technology. There is a sense in which the romantics have succeeded in changing the world—not so much through poetry and other writing, as they intended, but, surprisingly, through (other) technologies.
Romantic technologies have changed our world forever, and they continue to do this in the early twenty-first century. If philosophers set themselves the task of responding to their contemporary world and its problems, they have no choice but to respond to romanticism. This is also applicable to philosophers of technology, who have to respond to material-cultural entanglements of romanticism and technology if they want to understand and evaluate contemporary technology. And if they seek to contribute to changing that world at all (which neoromantics also want to do), they have to intervene in the “making” of these material-cultural entanglements. This making happens in research and innovation processes, but also, and perhaps especially, in the everyday experience of those who use and live with technology: the technological experience all of us have as twenty-first-century romantics. Making a new world—it can hardly get more romantic now—necessarily includes making new technologies, including new things that are not machines: “nonmachines.”
However, as my language in this chapter shows again, it is difficult to avoid romantic meanings. Partly this is a problem of language. Therefore, a philosophy of technology that aims to be doing critical rather than dogmatic philosophy should deal not only with things but also with language. Our language is romantic, and it is difficult to escape that language. Language remains the master; we are not master of language. Heidegger argued in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971) against the common view that language is expression and a human activity (190). Breaking the spell of this idea, he says that “language speaks” (194, 207). We respond to language (207). Furthermore, he argued that naming is not to “deck out the imaginable familiar objects and events … with words of a language” as we hand out titles; naming “does not apply terms, but it calls into the word. The naming calls” (196). Naming makes things present as things: “It invites things in, so that they may bear upon men as things” (197). In this book I have invited romantic machines and cyborgs into the picture, in the hope that they may bear on philosophy of technology. By using a different language, I have also explored how we might talk about technology in nonromantic and nonmodern ways.
Of course, Heideggerian language is not romanticism free. The idea of a “guest” and an “invitation” reminds us of romantic epistemology. Interpreting the poem “A Winter Evening” by Georg Trakl (1915) and using the metaphor of invitation, Heidegger uses romantic tools to say that we are not the master of language and uses a romantic epistemology. Consider also what Lewin (2011) says about Heidegger: “For Heidegger things may come into language and may show themselves or they may not” (170). Language indeed speaks (213), and in the case of Heidegger, it is a romantic language that speaks, bringing along a romantic epistemology. More generally, Heidegger’s focus on language and poetry as instruments for change is also shared with romantics, who were mainly writers.
Given these limitations, maybe part of what needs to be done to overcome romanticism is what I suggested earlier in this chapter: maybe we have to start not only from language to change things but also from technology—or rather, develop and tinker with different technologies to invite a different way of doing things. Maybe we should not only be writers and readers. Hope may lie in transformations of our praxis, and not only writing praxis: new technological practices, new ways of doing—and then, perhaps, language will follow or at least will change together with the material practice. Maybe we should not only try to think and write in a nonmodern way but also try to bring the nonmachine into being.
It is difficult to say what this means and how this can be done. Craftsmanship might be one route. At the beginning of this chapter and in my work on environmental skill (Coeckelbergh 2011, 2015a) I have explored a nonmodern, less romantic view by drawing on the notion of skill: perhaps skilled engagement with nature and with materials can afford a less alienated and less romantic form of life, which discovers meanings that are already there in the world (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, 209), and which cares for things rather than treating them as a resource (217). This does not necessarily mean that all forms of engagement or all craft technologies and craft practices are good, but at least if there is a closer connection between these technologies and our experience and practice, we may be able to tell what technology is good and what is not good, and we may participate in experimenting with better ones. Then we no longer need “responsible innovation” since there is no gap between the context of innovation and the context of society in the first place. Then technology is not something remote and external to which we can respond in various ways, for example, in a romantic way, but something that is experienced and practiced as something that is part of what we do and experience ourselves, something that is part of our own lifeworld. This differs from the mere consumption of technologies or treating technologies as idols (see McLuhan again); in other words, it differs from modes of doing and thinking that alienate us from our technologies. Instead, we are involved in technology, and technology is recognized as human. If McLuhan is right, perhaps a more involved way of doing things is already happening, also with regard to contemporary information technologies. More people participate in the creation of software, and more people tinker with hardware. More people participate in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. But it is unclear if, for most of us, this amounts to real craftsmanship and skilled engagement, or a perverted form of it: technologies for oppression and exploitation disguised as a romantic workshop—albeit a high-tech one.
That said, craftsmanship remains an attractive ideal. Consider again Pirsig (1974), who suggested a route beyond romanticism: a unification of art and technology, which can come about only when we leave behind both disinterested objectivity and romantic style and become involved in the work, reaching a “harmony” with it (380). This suggests that instead of the romantic technologies of, say, Steve Jobs, technologies that do not achieve a real unification of art and technology since the art is overlaid on an otherwise closed technological device created by disinterested science and engineering, craftsmanship may provide us with truly artful technologies and technological art, perhaps technologies that are not machines.
This focus on technological praxis and craftsmanship does not mean that a change of language should not be pursued. Keeping in mind the section on nonmodern religious and spiritual meanings, for instance, we might look at various religions’ vocabularies for inspiration. If we look beyond the illusion of secularization, we might find old words that help us to change. Perhaps we have to learn to talk about things we usually hesitate to talk because of our modern education: the soul or spirit, for instance. And maybe contemporary artists and indeed contemporary romantics and goths—not only the ancients or the “primitive” people and those who study them—can help us to find a new vocabulary.
Again, this route can easily lead back again to romanticism. Like Dreyfus and Kelly (2011), we might end up with the project of trying to reenchant the world by bringing back the gods and the “shining” things—in their case, the Greek polytheistic universe with its “whole pantheon of gods” (185). They try to recover attention to moments when “the sacred shines” (194) and see “a shining Achilles” in a sport event (201). This need not be our project. Yet if we do not want a return to the premodern world, what do we want? We cannot want something new” since such a hope for the new is very modern and romantic—as is the hope that the ancients or primal peoples have the answer.
It turns out that there is no simple solution—if this would be desirable at all. Indeed, the very idea of a solution is problematic. From a Heideggerian point of view, we could say that this kind of thinking is a modern-technological thinking that seeks a technological fix rather than practical engagement, “solutionism” (Morozov 2013) rather than first trying to remain open to different understandings of technology and of the human. Unfortunately, we do not always see how modern technological thinking enframes us. As Heidegger has argued, the enframing itself withdraws from view. But what is the alternative to looking for a solution? According to Heidegger, what remains is waiting. There may be a revealing and an opening. Of course this is again romantic vocabulary and romantic epistemology. But the idea that human willpower, decision, and mastery do not necessarily help, but can even be in the way, is interesting in itself. Lewin, interpreting Heidegger, writes:
What is given to be known does not come within the purview of the human will and so cannot be actively sought. … That something is given at all implies that what is cannot ultimately be circumscribed by the subjective will. The attitude of technological enframing expresses the will of technology as the extension of the subjectivist will. (Lewin 2011, 54)
Lewin thus suggests that truth, knowledge, and wisdom—also about technology—may come to us. Truth is not available, as if it were a commodity available in a supermarket: we cannot determine “how things show up for” us (Lewin 2011, 228); instead, “truth must be graciously received” (188). This view is, of course, again in accordance with romantic epistemology. The same is true for the idea that the good is also not “available”:
The good itself has an ontological ground that is ultimately mysterious and uncircumscribed, rather than being something we can simply express on the basis of our knowledge and experience; it is not necessarily equivalent to availability. … We must allow for the possibility that the good goes well beyond our imagination. (Lewin 2011, 227)
The good may show up or not, may visit us or not. We are back in the romantic villa, the gothic castle, or the ancient hunting grounds of what we, as romantics, imagine nonmodern meaning to be. And when it shows up, we better be prepared for it.
This epistemology and phenomenology also seems applicable to the problem of the nonmachine. It seems that such a change needs to “happen” as much as that it needs to be “done” by us. Birth is a good metaphor here. Of course things need to be done. We may conceive of new technologies and prepare ourselves and society for them. But at the same time, we also need to wait. We need to await the birth of the nonmachine, if such a birth will happen at all. At the right time, perhaps we can accompany and assist the birth of the nonmachine. And then we can do the game of name giving. But we lack full control over what is going to happen, and we have to accept that.
Of course we might try to invent nonmachines. But perhaps at present these technologies (and maybe we would no longer call them technologies) cannot be invented as long as we assume the problematic modern concepts of innovation and design, and perhaps this culture cannot be articulated yet unless it would take the form of utopia, which is again romantic and fraught with dangers. We cannot yet see that future, cannot yet bring it into being and thinking—if it can ever come into being at all. We may be stuck with machines and machine thinking for long a time; the machine age is not over yet. Our task, therefore, is to (1) become aware of, and better try to understand, the conditions of our contemporary thinking, including romantic language and culture, in order to be able to take a critical stance toward it and (2) explore, experiment with, and become more sensitive to whatever might turn into a material poetics that makes, blends, reworks, and regrows philosophy, art, and technology in a nonromantic and nonmodern way. To call for a new beginning is a very modern thing to do. To try to be open to, attune to, adapt to, and engage with whatever may be already growing sounds less grand, less exciting, and certainly less modern and less romantic. But it might save us a lot of trouble.
Until changes comes, then, we have to try to live with our romantic machines. And we have to try to live with ourselves. As moderns, we are romantic cyborgs too.