New Romantic Cyborgs: Romanticism, Information Technology, and the End of the Machine 9780262035460, 0262035464

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New Romantic Cyborgs

New Romantic Cyborgs Romanticism, Information Technology, and the End of the Machine

Mark Coeckelbergh

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coeckelbergh, Mark, author. Title: New romantic cyborgs : romanticism, information technology, and the end of the machine / Mark Coeckelbergh. Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016021510 | ISBN 9780262035460 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Technology--Philosophy. | Human-machine systems--Philosophy. | Information technology--Philosophy. | Cyborgs--Philosophy. | Romanticism. Classification: LCC T14 .C5726 2017 | DDC 601--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021510 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To Tim O’Hagan and Nicholas Dent, from whom I learned a lot about Rousseau

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix 1  Introduction: The Question Concerning Technology and Romanticism  1 I  Romanticism against the Machine  19 2  Romanticism  21 3  Romanticism against the Machine?  71 II  Romanticism with the Machine  95 4  Romanticism with the Machine (1): From Frankenstein’s Monster to Hippie Computing  97 5  Romanticism with the Machine (2): Cyberromanticism, Uncanny Robots, Romantic Cyborgs, and Spooky Science  135 III  Beyond Romanticism? Beyond the Machine?  209 6  Criticisms of Romanticism and of the End-of-the-Machine Vision  211 7  Beyond Romanticism and beyond Modernity: Toward the (Real) End of the Machine?  253 Notes  281 References  289 Index  301

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Philip Laughlin and Judy Feldmann from the MIT Press for supporting this book project, which was not easy to categorize. I thank De Montfort University for giving me research time, which enabled me to write this book. I warmly thank Agnes Buchberger (University of Vienna) for help with formatting, editing, and image search, including dealing with copyright issues and permissions. Thanks to Vincent Mattina (cover image), Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg, Wellcome Library London, and Galyonkin Sergey for the permission to use their images. I also thank my wife, Sabine, for our discussions about English history. Finally, I am grateful to have many great companions de route in philosophy of technology, with whom I hope to continue to discuss the theme of technology and romanticism. Books come to an end; philosophical journeys can go on.

1  Introduction: The Question Concerning Technology and Romanticism

Romanticism as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon Romanticism is usually seen as a historical artistic and cultural movement, starting at the end of the eighteenth century and—at most—reaching far into the nineteenth century: from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s return to nature to William Morris’s medievalism and beyond. As a reaction against mainstream classicism, Enlightenment rationalism, scientific objectivism, disenchantment, and attempts to crush religion, Romanticism1 attempted to revive and liberate subjective feeling and emotion, passion, horror, and melancholy. It tried to reenchant the world and unite what was divided. It searched for personal liberation and freedom from convention and tradition, experimented with drugs and various forms of sexual transgression, explored new aesthetic experiences such as the sublime, and tried to achieve mystical union. It embraced the exotic and the extraordinary. It tried to escape the conformism of the mainstream and the dullness of the everyday in imagination and art, for example, by evoking medieval imagery. Romanticism created imaginary worlds ranging from sweet medievalism and passionate love stories to graveyard poetry, nightmarish monsters, evil witches, and gothic horror; it even created fantasy buildings such as sham castles and other aristocratic architectural follies in order to escape to the past. At the same time, it found sublimity, liberation, and authenticity in nature. In France, Rousseau argued for liberation and for the value of authenticity as against the conventions of society. Closer to nature, the individual could be free and authentic and face the immense and overwhelming forces of nature. In Germany, intuition and emotion were prized over Enlightenment rationalism and the “I” was seen as intimately connected to a wider natural and spiritual history. Romanticism celebrated individual artistic genius and more general individuality, self-assertion and self-expression; artists had to express their innermost selves. Individual

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authenticity was the aim. The autonomous artist became the model worthy of imitation. At the same time Romanticism had a nationalist aspect when it supported expression and the liberation of “the people” (das Volk) and when it celebrated national or regional culture and history, as in England and Germany. And Romanticism was wholeheartedly utopian and revolutionary, especially if the latter could be achieved by means of shedding ink rather than blood. Although in fact Romanticism was not solely an artistic and cultural phenomenon but had many links with other domains of life and society (think, for example, about its links to politics such as the French Revolution and nationalism and its links to religious developments), and although, as I argue in this book, there are still strong romantic currents in contemporary culture, today Romanticism is usually safely put at a distance. It seems that it has little to do with our contemporary lives and personal selves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It seems that it might be interesting “for your free time” (art and aesthetics more generally are often seen in this way) or that it may be of “academic” interest (!), but that it is neither a “serious” matter nor directly relevant to twenty-first-century existence, with its global economies, high-tech devices, and smart environments. Moreover, the term romantic is often used without reference to historical Romanticism, its meaning reduced to going back to the past and nostalgia. There is hardly a public discourse about the romantic heritage and what it means for our lives today. Especially the technological dimension of our contemporary lives seems to have little to do with romanticism. Romanticism is perhaps the last thing users and developers of information and communication technologies (ICTs) think about when they engage with computer programs, electronic devices such as tablets and smartphones, autonomous robots, and so on. Most people—and this includes many philosophers of technology—see such electronic technological devices as “machines.” At first sight, there seems to be nothing romantic about that; on the contrary, it seems to fit with a science-oriented worldview that excludes romanticism. But as I show in this book, this way of thinking about technology is itself shaped by romanticism and obscures a better and deeper understanding of our relation to technology, including our relation to today’s electronic ICTs. While there is some academic discourse on romanticism and technology and even some “technoromantic” visions of technology (see below), in common use and development of ICTs the rationalist way of thinking about technology is still dominant, and many interpretations in philosophy of technology still follow this—even if more attention is paid to implications for self and

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society. Computers, electronic devices, robots, and other devices are still mainly interpreted as belonging to the world of the rational, the instrumental, the mechanical. This is a world of engineers and scientists, not the world of poets, writers, artists, and visionaries. There is a gap between “technology” and “culture,” a gap that is mirrored in the one between an “engineering” type of philosophy of technology and a “humanities” type of philosophy of technology (Mitcham 1994). This book responds to this situation by discussing the relation between technology and romanticism in the following ways, which corresponds to the steps of its main argument: (1) it argues that current uses of electronic ICTs are not romanticism free but can instead be interpreted as realizing a surprising marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism. This “material romanticism” had nineteenth-century precursors, but there are also new forms: cyberromanticism and especially the cyborg as a romantic figure; (2) it shows how problematic these new forms of material romanticism or technoromanticism are, given the problems related to romanticism and given that this kind of romanticism seems to turn into its opposite (what I call “the dialectic of romanticism”), and (3) it deconstructs both previous steps of the argument by showing that the new, material romanticism and the objections against it are still part of modern thinking and still belong to the romantic dialectic, and that to achieve a more profound critique of contemporary technology and culture, we need to explore different forms of thinking and different technologies—and we also need the latter (new technologies) to achieve the first (new thinking). Finally, (4) the book reflects on how difficult it is to escape from modern and Romantic thinking when dealing with technology and otherwise. In the next section, I unpack this argument and say more about the relation between romanticism and technology, and about the contribution that this book makes. Technology and Romanticism: Main Argument and Narrative of the Book Many people see romanticism and technology as opposites, and most classic philosophers of technology share this assumption. Technology is seen as belonging to the cold, rationalist, and instrumentalist side of modernity. It belongs to the world of “the machine” and its dirty mechanical and metal components, to “the system” and the management and bureaucracy that belongs to it, to what Max Weber called “the iron cage” (Weber 1905). It is alienating, dry, without life, and without love. Technology thus stands in stark contrast, so it seems, to life, passion, love, and the

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human desire for freedom and self-expression, for nature, for spirituality, and for authenticity—in stark contrast, therefore, to everything a romantic soul desires and aspires to. This book argues against this opposition, which is itself a highly Romantic one, and shows that the relation between romanticism and technology is far more ambiguous and complex—in the nineteenth century and today. Those who see a gap between the two may have a point when it comes to industrial “mechanical” technology, although even this will be questioned. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was not only fear but also fascination with new science and technology (see Tresch 2012) and there were already “romantic machines” and a “mechanical romanticism.” But they miss in particular how contemporary ICTs, say, electronic devices, robots, and the Internet, have a strong romantic dimension. Even starker, these technologies seem to constitute a phase in the development of technological culture that can be interpreted as a unique and extraordinarily successful marriage of classic-rationalist and romantic modernity. Rather than representing romanticism’s antithesis, therefore, I argue that these technologies—or, more precisely, these devices and their use, not only the discourse and narratives about them, as Coyne (1999) has argued—amount to a synthesis of rationalism and romanticism. In the beginning of the industrial age, romanticism took on a “mechanical” shape (Tresch 2012). In the information age, romanticism is once again materialized, albeit in a different way. This book explores how people today, albeit unintentionally, try to realize their romantic craving for freedom, self-expression, spirituality, utopia, and authenticity by electronic means and how companies unscrupulously respond to these romantic desires with electronic gadgets that become what I call romantic technologies. Romanticism is not only present in, for instance, transhumanist visions and science-fiction dreams about artificial intelligence and space; it is right here in our face. As children of twentieth-century romantic counterculture, we seamlessly fuse technology and romanticism. Engaging with our many screens and smart gadgets and shielded from the inner, machine-like workings of our devices (developed by science), we try to satisfy our romantic desires and are more like Rousseau, Novalis, or Wordsworth than we think. We are not only romantics at heart; we are also romantics “at technology.” As in the nineteenth century, we have materialized our romanticism; only now the tools are different. This development seems to imply “the end of the machine,” signified by the celebration of the figure of the cyborg in which machine and human merge, united in love.

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Yet this book is not content with analysis and interpretation; it also constructs and discusses a range of evaluations of this “cyberromanticism” or “material romanticism” when it warns for too much self-absorption and argues that much of the old criticisms of Romanticism, for example, by Irving Babbitt, are still relevant. It uses the myth of Narcissus to warn that by looking romantically into the mirror of our screens, we risk seeing only ourselves and losing sight of reality—which, as it does in the myth of Narcissus, leads to death. Moreover, the book shows that our technological hyperromanticism risks destroying its very aims when, in its obsession with authenticity and so-called social media, we become the people of “society” whom Rousseau despised: people who care only about appearances and always live in the opinion of others, needing constant confirmation from others. In other words, one can criticize these technologies and their uses from a romantic point of view: they pretend to be romantic, but in reality they are not. For example, the “love” and “care” that robots promise is not real love or care, and real authenticity is not about using the right kind of phone, tablet, or other product; we are being deceived by our devices and by the companies that promote and sell them. When we project romantic political aspirations onto the Internet, we see utopia but may end up in dystopia. (This view is in line with criticisms of the “delusions” of the Internet, as, for instance in Morozov’s 2011 criticism of cyberutopianism.) Similarly, we are deceived if we use these technologies for spiritual and religious purposes; those who look for salvation in cyberspace meet the same dire, fragmented, and all-too-human world they wanted to escape from—let alone that there would be possibilities for resurrection or immortality. Furthermore, inspired by Heideggerian and Marxian criticism, I also discuss other potential objections to cyber-Romanticism and its technologies. For instance, it seems that through the use of our devices, the self is turned into a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger 1977) for data, which are then sold on the market. As we use these devices, we are commodified and objectified; we become alienated workers in the production process of data under capitalist conditions (see, e.g., Fuchs’s Marxian account of political economy of the Internet in Fuchs 2009 and subsequent work). In contrast to what they promise, these new technologies do not constitute the end of the machine but its continuation. We are merely in an advanced, later phase of “the system.” There is no synthesis of Romanticism and Enlightenment, no happy marriage of humanity and technology. Instead, romanticism has turned into its very opposite. I then show that both of these criticisms—what I call the dialectic of Romanticism and the end-of-the-machine thesis—are still based on

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modern rationalist and romantic views. The end-of-the-machine vision expresses a typically romantic aspiration. The criticisms presuppose the rationalism-romanticism dichotomy and rely on romanticism and its antithesis as a normative anchor. The criticisms also rely on a Platonic and modern distinction between reality and appearance: the argument that the device pretends to be a romantic tool, but that this is only appearance since in reality it still is a machine, presupposes a sharp divide between reality and appearance, between a rationalist thing-in-itself and a romantic (sur)face phenomenon. The machine as the antithesis of all that is romantic is still there: in our (use) of ICTs, as the critics point out, but also in the very thought instrument the critic uses, that is, the romantic dialectic of humans and machines, romanticism and rationalism. Therefore, neither material romanticism nor the criticisms it may receive constitute the end of the machine. If we really wanted the end of the machine, we would have to put an end to modern thinking: to machine thinking and romantic thinking. We would have to stop thinking within the dialectic between rationalism and romanticism, between the machine and its Romantic antithesis, and between romanticism and the objections discussed—all of which remain within the framework of modern and romantic thinking. And if we wanted to develop a more profound criticism of our current age and technology, we would have to move beyond Platonic thinking in terms of reality versus appearance. For instance, we could look at nonmodern practices and nonmodern cultures to explore radically different possibilities. Yet at the end of the book, I emphasize that this may easily collapse into a romantic exercise that seeks the exotic, the extraordinary and romanticizes the past. More generally, the desire to unite what has been separated, perhaps also the aspiration to overcome dualism, also belongs to the romantic heritage. The search for nonduality with regard to humans and technology, for instance, may well turn out to be another form of modern-romantic mysticism. Moreover, since our thinking is so much entangled with the devices we use, perhaps going beyond modernity also means exploring new technologies. In the conclusion to this book, I suggest that if we really wanted to move beyond modern thinking, we would have to develop nonmodern and “non-Platonic” technologies and use them in a nonmodern and non-Platonic way. If we wanted to end machine thinking, we would have to bring about the true death of the machine. However, the birth of the “nonmachine” (for lack of a better word) and the new, nonmodern forms of subjectivity that would accompany it (a stage that may have to be preceded by the development of “postmachines”), may be not entirely in our own hands. Perhaps we have to leave behind

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modern and romantic ideas about change, solutions, innovation, and progress and open up to different ways of how technological culture can change and is already changing. Position in the Literature and Approach In contemporary philosophy of technology, there is generally a lack of attention to the relation between romanticism and technology. Sometimes the term romanticism is mentioned, but mainly to say that we should avoid a “romantic” or “nostalgic” view (e.g., Verbeek 2005). (An exception is Carl Mitcham’s Thinking through Technology, 1994, which includes a discussion of what he calls “Romantic Uneasiness.” I say more about this below.) Within the field of philosophy of technology, generally there is little knowledge of historical Romanticism, let alone its ambiguities, little awareness of the persistent influence of romanticism and of the deeper and more complex relation between romanticism and technology, and no systematic analysis of the romantic dimension of today’s ICTs (e.g., use of the Internet, electronic devices). By contrast, in related fields such as cultural studies, sociology, and media studies, there is a growing body of literature on romanticism and technology, which makes us aware of the history of the relation between romanticism and machines and its relevance for today’s technologies and culture. Consider, for instance, in history of science, John Tresch on The Romantic Machine (2002); in cultural studies, Walter J. Ong’s Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971); in media studies and sociology, Thomas Streeter’s The Net Effect (2011); and in postmodern theory, Richard Coyne’s Technoromanticism (1999). In cultural studies and media studies, Morley (2007) also argues for more historical awareness, and Black (2002) even defends Romanticism as a framework for cultural studies. And in his literary criticism book Romantic Cyborgs (2002), Benesch has studied how the American Romantic literary discourse responded to technology, focusing on the relation between technology and authorship. Contemporary philosophers of technology should not ignore this wealth of scholarship. If in the work of many contemporary influential scholars in philosophy of technology, romanticism is confused with and reduced to nostalgia, we are missing something. Romanticism is much richer in meaning and is far more complex and ambiguous than usually supposed. Moreover, romanticism itself is not only a movement from the past; it seems to be alive today, and in an area where we might least expect it to thrive: the use of ICTs. Analyzing and reflecting on this dimension, and really thinking

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through its implications and future, may help us to better understand contemporary electronic technologies, our contemporary world, and, in the end, ourselves. Perhaps one reason that romanticism is neglected by many contemporary people in the field is that there has been not only an “empirical turn” (Achterhuis 2001) but also what we may call a “material” turn in philosophy of technology. In their attempt to move toward a more empirical and material philosophy of technology and science and technologies studies, contemporary Dutch and American philosophers of technology have focused so much on “artifacts” and “things” that they have neglected discourses about technology (e.g., Coyne 1999, on the technoromantic discourse) and the “symbolic” cultural significance of artifacts (e.g., Morley 2007 on the anthropology of contemporary technology). While it may be true that cultural studies, by contrast, have often neglected the materialtechnological dimensions, artifact-centered philosophy of technology, especially in the engineering tradition, has unduly and wrongly neglected the more in-depth study of romanticism and technology. This book aims to start closing this gap with an inquiry into the relation between romanticism and technology (in particular, contemporary ICT). In the past two decades, attention to this topic in areas outside philosophy of technology has been growing. This book builds on that scholarship and at the same time relates to it in a critical way in order to shed new light on a central, if not the central, issue in modern philosophy of technology: the relation between humans and machines, or how to think (about) the machine and, hence, about the human. In mediating between philosophy of technology and studies of romanticism, the book goes further than Mitcham’s (1994) seminal reflections on the matter by giving the topic a more systematic and more extensive treatment and by focusing on specific and contemporary technologies (ICTs) rather than only technology in general. Mitcham has done excellent work by suggesting some ambivalences of what he calls “the romantic way of being-with technology” and also noted links between Enlightenment and Romanticism. But he says little about the relation between romanticism and contemporary technology and their use. Yet this is important at a time when, almost twenty-five years after Mitcham’s book, we live in a world permeated by electronic ICTs. When today, as philosophers of technology but also as users of technology, we literally try to come to terms with the technological, societal, and cultural changes and challenges we face, gaining a better understanding of the relation between romanticism and ICT is not only helpful but necessary.

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For this purpose, the book constructs its own narrative and argument about the marriage of rationalism and romanticism as instantiated in contemporary ICTs and their use, a narrative and argument that then is critically examined (and criticisms that are then deconstructed). This makes it more argumentative, critical, and philosophical than many other books on the topic in cultural studies and media studies. As a contribution to philosophy of technology, it is also more focused on technologies than on culture, although, as I have suggested, this distinction is problematic; it is precisely my purpose here to bring a cultural angle to philosophy of technology and to show how “cultural” ideas and “material” technologies are intimately connected. Furthermore, the book leaves the level of disinterested interpretation at a distance. In contrast perhaps to Streeter (2011) and Coyne (1999), this book renders itself more vulnerable and not only analyzes the romantic dimension of contemporary technologies but also takes a normative position in the debate about modernity. Yet its position differs from, for instance, that of Black (2002), who defends romanticism. Although I fully acknowledge that we can move forward only if we first better understand romanticism and its continuing influence in and on our time, including the historical variant, I suggest that we should try to move beyond romanticism. Furthermore, the book engages with Coyne’s (1999) very helpful book on technoromanticism but adds, among other things, an analysis of new electronic technologies. Coyne writes in the 1990s, when the current smart mobile technologies and social media were not yet fully developed. Similarly, Morley (2007) talks about cell phones at the end of his book, but most of his analysis still assumes older technologies, including an older Internet and even the Walkman. Of course, historical awareness is good, and Morley shows a longer historical perspective. In this book, I also bring in a historical perspective aided by this kind of literature. But an update is also necessary. Similarly, Streeter writes about the Internet and ideas in the 1990s and earlier technologies and thinking. Since then much has changed. This book is concerned with the contemporary world, with technologies at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. It attempts to catch up with what is happening in current society and with current ICTs, including smartphones, robots, and all kinds of cyborg technologies that are now much more “material” than in the time that Haraway (1991) wrote her rather abstract manifesto from what turns out to be a rather “cultural” perspective, not obviously directly relevant to our contemporary quotidian material-technological existence. More generally, the 1990s focused on issues regarding (virtual) reality and the Internet. Some of this interest refigures in this book, especially when it

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articulates the escapist, Platonic tendencies in material romanticism and when the myth of Narcissus is used to construct an anti-Romantic narrative (which I then later deconstruct). But today, living in a time when online and offline have merged (see also Floridi 2014), we face different issues. Therefore, this book is not only an interpretation and an argument but also an update. Finally, this book also offers a critical discussion of romanticism and makes suggestions for how we might want to move beyond (techno) romanticism. At the same time, however, it also argues that it is difficult to escape (techno)romantic thinking. Therefore, I explicitly acknowledge some romantic influences on my approach. First, as in other literature on technoromanticism, what I call “romantic epistemology” is at work in efforts to reveal the hidden ghost of romanticism that haunts contemporary technology. The hermeneutic work involved in uncovering the links between romanticism and technology assumes that there are some concealed things that may be revealed. Perhaps it even involves the assumption that there is a kind of organic and dynamic material-cultural whole in which our thinking and our technologies participate (and to which they contribute). And it certainly acknowledges that a lot remains unknown. This book does not assume that the meaning(s) of our own culture, our technologies, and our time can be made entirely transparent to us. It offers concepts, interpretations, distinctions, and arguments, but reality will always be richer, more complex, and more chaotic. These assumptions are all in line with romantic thinking. Second, romanticism is sometimes hidden in small corners, in the details, and I do not claim that my thinking and writing are entirely romanticism free. For instance, the metaphors I use here and elsewhere may be influenced by romanticism (e.g., organic metaphors), and this is also true for many of the sources I use. For example, occasionally I refer to Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias in order to point readers to more information on a particular topic or concept. Now one way to criticize this controversial tool (or to defend it?) would be to say that Wikipedia already participates in the Romantic encyclopedia project insofar as it is functioning not only as a collection of “facts” or as a store of information, as in the Enlightenment encyclopedia project, but also as a living and growing whole to which many people contribute. It instantiates a kind of organic way of dealing with knowledge, which embodies the acknowledgment that knowledge is always interconnected (Rayan 2004), incomplete, and changing. This may be seen as problematic by scholars who believe that this kind of tool does not match the authority of an academic text. And it might well be that Wikipedia’s

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“Enlightenment” side prevails; perhaps it partly fails in its romantic ambitions. But at the same time, this very discussion already reveals a link between romanticism and contemporary information technology that is instrumental in supporting my project. The controversy about Wikipedia and about encyclopedia shows that information technology can be a site where Enlightenment and Romantic notions of knowledge meet and play out. Third, in order to construct the end-of-the-machine vision (which I then criticize), I had to think with, rather than against, romanticism. I had to construct a romantic narrative, a romance about humans and technology. This required engagement with, rather than disinterested distance from, romanticism as a tradition. To conclude, the means of analysis is already infected and infused by Romanticism in various ways, and I acknowledge this from the start. Structure of the Book and Overview of Chapters The book is structured in three parts, which reflect the three steps in my argument and which each contain two chapters. Part 1, “Romanticism against the Machine,” evokes the widely accepted opposition between romanticism and technology. I explain how romanticism, since historical times and still today, is itself the source of this dichotomy; the assumption that romanticism and technology do not go well together is part of its very definition, or so it seems. I also show how philosophers of technology— classic and contemporary—are romantic when they inscribe themselves in this schema: whether they are for or against romanticism, they presuppose the same romantic dichotomy and dialectic. In part 2, “Romanticism with the Machine,“ I question this dichotomy and show that romanticism, not only at the beginning of the nineteenth century but also at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has a far more ambiguous and complex relation to technology. In particular, I argue that then and today, many new ICTs can be interpreted as constituting and incorporating the fusion (transcendence, suspension) of romanticism and its antithesis rather than the continuation of the romantic dialectic. In part 3, “Beyond Romanticism? Beyond the Machine?” I first construct objections against this interpretation: the marriage between rationalism and romanticism turns out to be an illusion; the romantic aims are not achieved, and insofar as there is a new material romanticism, its romantic side is deeply problematic. However, then I show that these criticisms are themselves still hostage to either romanticism or antiromanticism, and therefore to the romantic dichotomy

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and dialectic. I explore how we can go beyond modern and romantic thinking, and hence beyond machine thinking. Let me now give a more detailed overview of the chapters. Romanticism is often seen as a movement of the past, but this must be questioned. In chapter 2, I outline historical Romanticism (capital R) and show its link to romanticism (without the capital) more broadly defined, which persists today: I argue that in many ways we are still romantics and that there is a line to be drawn start from Rousseau in the late eighteenth century to twentieth-century counterculture and beyond. First, I outline some features of Romanticism as it emerged and thrived in Germany, Britain, and France around 1800 and as it reached deep into the nineteenth century. I use Rousseau, Novalis, and Morris for this purpose. I also show that Romanticism and romantic Gothic had a social and political side. Then I argue that we are still living in a romantic culture: early twenty-first-century forms of subjectivity are still very much shaped by Romanticism—mainly in the form of our heritage from the romantic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. We still value the kind of individual freedom and authenticity Rousseau longed for, and we still yearn for community, transcendence, and the wonder, magic, and all the superstition we think we have left behind when we entered the modern world. We value the rebel, the anti-establishment. We still love nature and the natural. Creativity is worshipped and the artist is deemed more important than the work of art. And we still—secretly or not—dream of utopia. However, like other structures and conditions of our thinking and practice, romanticism itself is usually invisible. Usually we are not aware of the horizon, of the glasses we wear, and this is also true for philosophers of technology. In chapter 3 I show how romanticism (historical Romanticism and romanticism more broadly defined) is usually seen in opposition to technology: in the past, by many Romantics themselves, but also by later interpreters and critics—including philosophers of technology. Romanticism is seen as an attempt to escape the machine; it is the machine’s very anti­ thesis. It moves away from cold rationality, from the lifeless, from the mechanical, from the machines. Science and technology are supposed to be domains where passion, love, freedom, spirituality, and authenticity have no place. Scientists are supposed to be disinterested; engineers are supposed to be busy with mechanical things. Bridges cannot be built from poems. Machines need electricity, not love. Science and technology have disenchanted the world. Romantics try to escape the new industrial and urban worlds, which are experienced as ugly, dark, and threatening. Technology is

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experienced as alienating, monstrous, and dangerous. Already in the nineteenth century Mary Shelley warns against technology going out of control. Later critics of modernity such as Weber and Heidegger argue, in a rather romantic fashion, that modern technology has created an “iron cage” (Weber 1905), an “enframing” and a danger (Heidegger 1977). But even contemporary philosophers who claim to reject a romantic view of technology tend to presuppose the romantic dialectic. The same is true for the public discourse about technology that is still largely caught up in the romantic language-world of beauty and terror. Romantic thinking is not only nostalgic and against the machine; it also looks forward to a future with the machine. Indeed, it turns out that the writings of Weber, Heidegger, and Benjamin—all influenced by romanticism—are more ambiguous with regard to technology than usually supposed. This point is also supported by my discussion of the relation between romanticism and technology in an American context: authors such as Leo Marx and Melville also show that ambiguity, and so does, for instance, the twentieth-century film Koyaanisqatsi. Perhaps romanticism and technology are sometimes compatible. In chapters 4 and 5 in part 2, I question the opposition between romanticism and technology, humans and machines, culture and materiality— itself an opposition inherited from romanticism. But here I do not attempt this (yet) by trying to step outside “the romantic order” (to use a term from Taylor), but rather by revealing ambiguities and complexities in romanticism itself. In chapter 4 I argue that already in historical times, the romantic relation to technology cannot be reduced to mere opposition. I show how in the early nineteenth century, romantics were not only fearful of but also fascinated by the new science and technology that delivered magic machines, wonderful scientific phenomena, and mysterious forces such as electricity. There was escapism, but also experimentation. Even industrial machines and romanticism were not always seen in opposition. There were “romantic machines” and a “romantic science”: drawing on Tresch (2012) and Holmes (2008), I argue that a current in Romanticism viewed science and the arts as entwined and tried to fuse the organic and the mechanic, life and science. I show how the line between Enlightenment and Romanticism was thinner than one might expect—even for philosophers like Kant, who was haunted by both rationalism and mysticism. And perhaps Mary Shelley did not so much warn against technology as against the widening gap she perceived between, on the one hand, unchecked scientific development and individual genius and, on the other hand, life and society—not to mention the gothic strand in romanticism, which thrives on the horror

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associated with the machine, of course, but also on the fascination with science and technology, in particular the cyborg project of merging the machine with life, indeed, with bringing the machine to life. These material romanticisms are neglected by philosophers of technology who reduce romanticism to escapism, nostalgia, or antimachine thinking. This brings us to our age, with its life sciences and its robotics that share these deeply material-romantic aims. I first show how in the twentieth century, there was a romantic science (Freud) and how technology and romanticism became very much entangled: not only in science fiction—from Verne in the nineteenth century to today’s films about robots and artificial intelligence—but also in reality: born as hippie computing in the context of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture (here I zoom in on Steve Jobs’s romanticism), there is a development of what we may call romantic devices. This is the topic of chapter 5, in which I continue constructing the hybridity and fusion narrative, but now focused on contemporary electronic ICTs. For the purpose of trying to understand the relation between romanticism and these ICTs, I construct the working thesis that contemporary use and development of ICTs can meaningfully be interpreted as contributing to, if not completing, material romanticism’s project to marry Enlightenment and Romanticism: rather than creating new machines, there is an attempt to reach a synthesis of rationalism and romanticism by fusing humans and machines. Romantic aims are not only present in the discourse around the new technologies (the liberation promised by the Internet, the escape in cyberspace, the authenticity we hope to achieve by using electronic devices, the idea that everyone can be an artist); efforts are going into making machines alive (robotics) and in creating new unions and fusions, for instance, in the life sciences or in neurotechnology. In this sense, the figure of the cyborg is as much romantic as it is scientific. Shelley’s dream and nightmare takes on new forms: in the life sciences, in the engineering sciences, and in material-romantic strands in philosophy of technology. When new natures are created, the modern-romantic project is not over but reaches its summit. Using romantic devices and the Internet, we try to achieve authenticity, escape to cyberspace, and shape our romantic selves in various ways. Of course today there is also resistance against new technologies; for instance there are concerns about addiction and distraction (see Carr 2010) and about, for instance, using robots in health care and robots taking over jobs.2 But my study of today’s technoromanticism helps to explain why we are attracted to some of these technologies in the first place. Moreover, what people think about the technologies also depends on, if, and how

Introduction 

15

they are used. Many people are not so familiar (yet?) with robots in their daily lives, but they are very familiar with devices such as smartphones and computers, with apps and with the Internet. And they love them. Indeed, there is not only discourse about technology and subjectivity separate from materiality; instead, the devices themselves shape that discourse and subjectivity. And as many new devices are increasingly designed to merge the beautiful and the machine, the arts and technology, body and artifact, life and matter, they become highly attractive to the romantic soul. Those lucky enough to be liberated from industrial, dirty, oily, iron machines, find lovely, human-compatible things they can incorporate in their lives and bodies. Smooth, shiny, and curvy objects no longer appear to us as machines but as means of self-expression, as personal extensions of our ego, as beautiful mirrors we can use to shape ourselves and transform our world by creating personal realities that suit our demanding selves, and perhaps even as friends or partners. Now it seems that everyone has the means to become artists and change the world. “You wanted a revolution? You wanted love? Here is the technology.” As Enlightenment rationalists, we love machines. As romantics, we want life, love, humans, wonder, and mystery. Now it seems that we can have both: our machines are not caging and enslaving us but are friendly and kindly living with us and even melting with us. Robots become friendlier, and cyborgs celebrate the union of humans and machine. Passion, relationships, beauty, and the sublime are not to be found outside technology; smart technologies and media offer it all. Technology becomes human; media become social. And the new romantic machines become more magical than ever before. Combining cold science and warm use, new experiences of wonder expel the ghost of disenchantment. We are bewitched by the Internet and study the wonders of the human mind. The haunted castle of the Romantic imagination has turned into an immense, seemingly infinite new universe with room for new gothic monsters and new genius artists-scientists. Never before have romantics had such powerful tools, and never before was romanticism so alive. There are plenty of possibilities for mystery and transcendence. Salvation is just a few mouse clicks away. Liberation from your body seems possible with new Platonic devices. And if you like colorful fantastic, spiritual, and demonic figures, be my guest: reenchantment is core business in the games and entertainment industry. Technology enables you to escape reality, to overlay reality by augmenting it with a romantic game, or to reach wholeness and union, perhaps reach a communion of matter and spirit. The new material romanticism as it takes shape today promises to finally realize what we may call the end of the machine.

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Again, there is also resistance. There are not only promises but also threats. Our romantic self is not always seduced by the new gadgets. But first I focus on what makes us fall in love with them as romantics, on technology’s romantic promises. Chapter 5 is also an update of the technoromantic literature: I do not only show the romanticism of the1990s Internet and (engaging with Turkle) the romantic identity practices related to it. I also reveal romanticism in the development and use of smartphones, social media, games, surveillance technology, algorithmic art, robots, transhumanist human enhancement, and other technological practices and phenomena. In addition, I show how romanticism and even gothic is present in contemporary science and scientific-technological practice, for instance, in astronomy and physics. It seems that with these new hybrids, technology and romanticism merge to an unprecedented extent. Commenting on Haraway, I especially discuss the figure of the cyborg, which exemplifies this merger—albeit a much more material one than Haraway imagined in her “Manifesto.” It seems that the end of the machine is near. This synthesis of rationalism and romanticism speaks directly to the heart and mind of romantics. Yet as I argue in chapters 2 and 4, inspired by Turner’s (2006) and Streeter’s (2011) history of computing and commenting on Steve Jobs, it is a development that perhaps does not always directly originate in historical Romanticism. Although much contemporary music and game culture is at least as medievalist, romantic, and gothic as its nineteenth-century forerunners, it mainly has its roots in much more recent forms of romanticism: the escapism of the Internet and technoculture of the 1990s in part, but also, and especially, the romanticism of twentiethcentury counterculture. The countercultural current in the 1960s and 1970s tried to merge art and electronic technology, hippie culture and high tech, Easter mysticism and material devices, poems and silicon, the muses and the geeks. Yet I also remark that this counterculture now has become mainstream and has quickly been absorbed by consumerism, commodified by pop artists, and cannibalized by capitalism. We are all romantics, and we pay for it. This brings me to chapter 6, which constructs (first historical and then 1990s style) objections to these material romanticisms and to the narrative about romanticism and technology. Is their relationship and marriage an illusion? First, I draw on classic antiromantics such as Irving Babbitt to construct the argument that romanticism leads to escapism and what I call cybernarcissism: looking into the mirror of our screens, we lose sight of reality, and this can be lethal. I also discuss Berlin and Popper to show the merits and problems with this position. Then I construct a position that is

Introduction 

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more sympathetic to romanticism, one that criticizes the current material romanticism for not being romantic enough, for failing to reach the romantic aims. I argue that our hyperromanticism in the form of Web 2.0 and its social media risks destroying its very aims when, in its obsession with authenticity, we become the people of “society” whom Rousseau despised: people who care only about appearances and always live in the opinion of others, needing constant confirmation from others in social networks. And technologies such as robots pretend to provide care, companionship, and love, but in reality they are mere machines. We are also deceived by our personal devices that merely adapt to our preferences to commodify our identity and harvest our data. The self is commodified and turned into a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger 1977) of data. (Note that of course there are far more criticisms of contemporary technologies; here I construct only criticisms that target their romantic character.) I conclude that, seen from these perspectives, material romanticism’s promise of a synthesis of enlightenment and romanticism is not kept and there is no end of the machine in sight. Romanticism has turned into its opposite—what I call the dialectic of Romanticism. However, then I argue that the criticisms I discuss may well be antiromantic, but they largely (but not completely and not always) remain within the “romantic order.” To further show these limitations, I also construct and discuss what one could call “Marcuse’s objections to romanticism.” Then I draw on Coyne’s reading of the phenomenological tradition in order to start exploring what a less dualistic and less romantic view would look like. I end the chapter with a summary of what we can nevertheless learn from the romantic tradition. In chapter 7, I continue the project of trying to think beyond romanticism. First, I conclude the previous chapters by restating the end-of-themachine thesis and analyzing the meaning of “end” in it. Then I ask how we can move beyond the assumptions made by the criticisms constructed in chapter 6, which are still trapped in the romantic dialectic and in Platonic dualism. For instance, the idea of cyberspace is extremely Platonic, and the figure of the cyborg in its postmodern form is still romantic through and through. To really move away from romanticism, we would have to move beyond modern and Platonic thinking. But how can this be done, is this desirable, and is it possible? Can we find a language to make sense of the new technologies that is not enchanted by “machine thinking,” not bewitched by the picture (to use a Wittgensteinian term) of the romantic dialectic? Can we think without the modern-romantic binaries? I argue that in any case, we should become more aware of and acknowledge the

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romantic horizon. I also explore some ways in which we could begin to take some distance from romanticism. First, I propose the notion of skilled engagement as a way to escape the Enlightenment-Romanticism binary (and the classicism-romanticism binary) and to decrease modern “distance.” Then I explore (other) forms of nonmodern thinking. Using Latour (1993) and Szerszynski (2005), I further question the disenchantment myth and argue that if we really want to change our thinking into less modern directions, we cannot avoid a discussion about religion and spirituality, broadly understood. Modern binaries such as enchantment versus disenchantment and theism versus atheism have blinded us to spaces of experience and thinking that escape these categories, and it is impossible to conceptually grasp our technological culture and address its problems without talking about it. An interesting position that deserves consideration is that the world was never disenchanted in the first place and that romanticism and even Enlightenment can be understood as different forms within a history of the sacred (Szerszynski 2005). A related route is to rethink our relation to the environment. In line with Ingold (2000), we could take the view that the environment should be understood as neither a dead realm of objects studies by science nor a blank slate onto which we project our romantic imagination; instead we are engaged and entangled with, and involved in, our environment. Such views could then lead to a different view of technology, for instance, not as machine but as praxis, which interweaves the material and the cultural. However, it turns out that it is difficult to escape romanticism, not only in the narrow sense of escapism or nostalgia, but also in the richer sense articulated in this book. Our language and thinking seems to be trapped; we can try to change language, but this is difficult; language also has its own kind of autonomy or life. In my conclusion, I suggest that it is difficult to move beyond romanticism by means of language alone. If we take seriously the idea that things matter for thinking, then perhaps an exploration of a nonromantic thinking and a nonromantic space also needs to involve exploring and experimenting with technologies. I suggest that we try to invent, “await” (to say it in a Heideggerian fashion), and accompany the birth of the nonmachine (for lack of a better word). The birth of nonmachine thinking and nonmachine culture would also require a different language for sure, but such a different language can come into being only with a different praxis and different technologies. Until then we remain romantic cyborgs.

I  Romanticism against the Machine

2  Romanticism

Making a connection between romanticism and technology is not a very obvious thing to do; the two terms do not seem to live together comfortably. The main reason for this has to do with the fact that we are romantics to the bone: most romantics think that there is an unbridgeable gap between both. So what is romanticism, and what does it mean for our relation to technology? In this chapter I outline some key features of Romanticism as a cultural-historical movement (hence the capital R), and argue that today we are still very romantic in a broad sense (without the capital R): contemporary ways of understanding ourselves and the world have much more in common with the thinking of Rousseau, Novalis, and Ruskin than we usually assume. Even the technological and consumerist dimensions of our culture are not free of romanticism. My approach in this chapter is to select and use some key figures of the movement in France, Germany, and Britain to sketch a picture of Romanticism and start exploring its influence on contemporary culture. This background forms the basis for further reflections on romanticism and technology. The Birth of Romanticism in France: Rousseau’s Nature The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred. (Berlin 1999, 1–2)

To define and understand Romanticism is a notoriously difficult task and has generated a vast literature. I start with what is widely considered one of its main roots: the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Before Romanticism flourished in Germany, Britain, and France, Rousseau wrote influential works that set the stage for the movement. Although there is also a lot of Enlightenment thinking in his work (see especially his On the

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Social Contract, 1762), many elements prefigure Romanticism and have influenced the key figures of the Romantic movement. As Berlin (1999) puts it, there are two Rousseaus: an Enlightenment philosophe and a Romantic. Here I am interested in the latter, in those parts of his work that “entitle him to be regarded as one of the fathers of Romanticism” (62). In his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), or the so-called First Discourse, and in Emile (1762), Rousseau favored a return to a simpler way of life closer to nature and more authentic. Contrary to what many people believe, he never argued for a return to nature in the sense of a return to wilderness or for what critics called the life of “the noble savage.” Rather, he preferred the rustic life of the peasant-citizen instead of, say, prehistoric life. But he was very critical of “artificial” society, which he thought corrupts us. This is a kind of Romanticism, perhaps, but it is not primitivism, and in Rousseau’s case, it is very much influenced by Stoicism. As Taylor puts it in his Sources of the Self: The view Rousseau himself propounded … did not involve going back to the precultural or presocietal stage. Rather the idea of a recovery of contact with nature was seen more as an escape from calculating other-dependence, from the force of opinion and the ambitions it engendered. … What is often mistaken for primitivism in Rousseau is his undoubted espousal of austerity against a civilization of increasing needs and consumption. Rousseau often speaks in the language and evokes the principles of the ancient Stoics. True strength involves having few needs, being content with the essential. … It is our dependence on others, on appearance, on opinion which multiplies our wants. (Taylor 1989, 359)

Yet whatever its roots, Rousseau’s view, including its misreadings and misinterpretations, have been very influential and shaped the Romantic movement. Let us take a closer look at his writings. In the First Discourse (1750), Rousseau writes: “How delightful it would be for those who live among us if our external appearance were always a true mirror of our hearts” (49). Instead he sees moral corruption and “a loathsome and deceptive conformity” in society: we do what society expects from us rather than following our intuition (50). He argues against the sciences and the arts of “civilization,” which he accused of having produced vice rather than virtue, and the appearance of knowledge rather than knowledge itself. According to Rousseau, scientific jargon “has usurped the name of knowledge, setting up an almost invincible obstacle to its return” (48). But what is the alternative? In Emile (1762), Rousseau proposes an influential view on education: education should preserve the child’s good nature without corrupting it. Children are different from adults; they are naturally

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23

good. We should make sure that education preserves this goodness and develops virtue in the child. To educate is to follow the path of nature (47); education should not be based on authority but on the constraints given by nature (91). We should not raise children for a particular job but for life (41). Moreover, according to Rousseau, education must be individualized and follow development through stages. It should also be based on experience rather than on study and the authority of learned men. He even writes, “I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know” (184). Rousseau wants his pupil to find out things for himself rather than be told how things are: I do not like explanations in speeches. Young people pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things, things! I shall never repeat enough that we attribute too much power to words. With our babbling education we produce only babblers. (Rousseau 1762, 180)

Instead of exposing his pupil to society and books, Rousseau takes him to the woods and lets him discover, for instance, how to navigate (180– 181). If there is a book Emile must read, he suggests, it is Robinson Crusoe. Although he notes that Robinson’s condition is not Emile’s—Rousseau does not reject the state of “social man” (184) and hence does not want us to be living in isolation (193) and in the wilderness—he thinks the book is good for education since it invites the child to want to know what is useful (185) to live and satisfy his needs—no more, no less. Learning by experience gives the child know-how (skills) and virtues that are useful for life; all the rest is distraction and corruption. As Rousseau (1750) writes in the First Discourse, “Men are perverse; but they would be far worse if they had had the misfortune to be born learned” (55). Like many philosophers of technology in the twentieth century, Rousseau interprets the Prometheus myth as a warning against science and technology: it was “a God hostile to human tranquility” that was “the inventor of the sciences,” and therefore it was quite understandable, Rousseau suggests in a footnote, that the Greeks chained him (56). Instead Rousseau longs for simplicity, for a state of nature that was not nasty and brutish, as Hobbes had argued, but harmonious and simple. Reflecting on what he takes to be the simplicity of the past, Rousseau speaks of “a lovely shore, adorned only by the hands of nature, toward which our eyes are constantly turned and from which we turn away only with regret” (60). According to Rousseau, the Fall is not a separation from God but a separation from true human nature. The sciences and the arts have alienated us from “those who give bread to us and milk to our children” (63). The lessons of the philosophers are divorced from experience.

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Instead Rousseau embraces the “sublime science of simple souls” (67). He thus opposes the Enlightenment celebration of the sciences at a time when the Enlightenment was peaking. Instead, he proposes a return to ancient virtue and nature. However, when Rousseau writes “nature” he usually means “human nature.” Sometimes, especially in his later work, Rousseau’s “nature” is also the natural environment; this is when he comes closer to later and contemporary romanticism. Turning away from the appearances of society and the arts and sciences, Rousseau literally goes into nature, where he finds solitude and peace of mind, as he recounts in his The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782a). Rejected by society at the end of his life, he finds tranquility and peace “only in myself” (5). Instead of scientific knowledge, he desires self-knowledge, and for this purpose, he seeks “refuge in mother nature” (95). Rather than “human nature,” Rousseau is now mainly interested in his own individual soul, and retreating to the natural environment is a method to gain that knowledge. He is, as Taylor (1989) puts it, interested in “the voice of nature within”—an idea that influenced “a great deal of contemporary culture” (362). Rousseau’s walks are a technique of the soul: they are meant to find his true self, uncorrupted by unnatural social passions. At the same time, this exercise to find his inner nature puts him back in touch with outer nature. He writes, “It is only after having detached myself from social passions and their sad retinue that I have again found nature with all its charms” (Rousseau 1782a, 119). Immersed in nature, for example, on the island Saint-Pierre in Switzerland, he indulges in reveries. As Babbitt (1919) argues, this was a rather new thing to do: whereas the ancients would have avoided wild and uncultivated nature (269–270), Rousseau evaluated it far more positively—and so we do today. But whereas Rousseau was content with his lake, we want the extremes, the “real” wilderness. We are more romantic than Rousseau (and also more gothic, as I will suggest). In ancient times, mountains, for instance, were seen as alien and unsuitable for cultivation and habitation; they are now seen as more authentic and natural. Like Rousseau, we try to become more authentic and natural by bathing in that nature. In a remarkable reversal of moral perception and value, romantics experience civilization and society, not nature, as alienating. After Rousseau, we all look for authenticity and naturalness outside society. Nature is also important in Rousseau’s views on religion: we can sense the presence and goodness of God in the beauty of his creation. Not the churches (or Churches), but the forests and the fields help us to see this. The aim is a personal, inner religious experience connected to outer

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nature. In Emile, he asks us not to “confuse the ceremony of religion with religion itself” (Rousseau 1762, 296), not to rely on authority, and restrict ourselves to what we can acquire “on [our] own from the inspection of the universe and by the good use of [our] faculties” (297). Instead of organized religion, revelation, and abstract theology, Rousseau turns to the worship of the heart (308) and to admiration of the beauty of the creation. God is “the Author of nature” (323) and this book we can read (on our own); we can access nature with our senses. Rousseau’s religion is based on senses, feeling, and nature. Sometimes he is closer to nature religions (“pagan” religion) than to Christianity, although he is certainly not opposed to the religion of the gospel. He feels ecstasy in melting with the whole of nature. This is what he says in Reveries about “the spectacle of nature”: The more sensitive a soul a contemplator has, the more he gives himself up to the ecstasies this harmony arouses in him. A sweet and deep reverie takes possession of his senses then, and through a delicious intoxication he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels himself one. Then, all particular objects elude him; he sees and feels nothing except the whole. (92)

Nature thus helps us to forget ourselves and reach harmony with nature. Rousseau tries to forget himself by becoming one with nature: “I never meditate, I never dream more deliciously than when I forget myself. I feel ecstasies and inexpressible raptures in blending, so to speak, into the system of beings and in making myself one with the whole of nature” (95). But not only nature is important to Rousseau, and he certainly does not always forget himself. With his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) he tells a romantic love story (and touches again on the theme of natural beauty and the simple life in contrast to the artificial life in cities), and with his Confessions (1782b), he does something that is entirely common today (in novels, for instance, but also in new social media, a topic explored later in this book) but new at his time: Rousseau talks about himself. Contrary to Augustine’s Confessions, in which God is central, Rousseau puts the self—his own self—at the center. This is the famous beginning of the Confessions: I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen. … I have disclosed my innermost self. (Rousseau 1782b, 5)

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This was not only the beginning of the genre of autobiography; it was also the first of many romantic struggles for authenticity and personal integrity. With Rousseau, the personal “I” took front stage. Personal feelings became important, and it became increasingly necessary to disclose oneself and to show how “special” and “different” one was. The pre-Romantic “I” of Jean-Jacques is the predecessor of many more romantic “I’s” who all feel that their selves and their lives are important and special enough to share with the world through social media. Paradoxically, however, Rousseau felt that he was unique and that no one could understand him. He thus made a psychological but also an epistemological point: there are two kinds of knowledge here, only one of which is fully accessible by everyone. As Berlin writes: Rousseau’s point was that nobody could love as Rousseau loved, nobody could hate as Rousseau hated, nobody could suffer as Rousseau suffered, and only Rousseau could understand Rousseau. He was unique. Nobody else could understand him, and only a genius could understand another genius. This was a doctrine opposed to the view that the truth was equally open to all reasonable men who did not becloud their understandings with unnecessary emotions and unnecessary ignorance. What Rousseau does is to contrast with the so-called cold logic which he constantly complains about, with cold reason, the hot tears of shame, of joy or misery, or love, or despair, or mortification, or spiritual agony, or ecstatic vision. (Berlin 1999, 53–54)

Later, Freud will also be interested in what is not normal, not “elegant, rational, sane” (Berlin 1999, 54). Note, however, that there is a small but significant distinction between Rousseau’s celebration of authenticity and individuality and that of later romantics who seek fame and share their feelings with the world. For Rousseau, becoming an individual and living an authentic life means reaching self-sufficiency and becoming independent of the opinion of others. The goal is not to become famous, since that would render one dependent on society. Romantics, by contrast, tend toward a cult of the individual, which is rather different: what matters is the person; the artist is more important than the work of art. Moreover, this Romantic artist is part of society and is preoccupied with society in various ways, including in the project of trying to change it (see later chapters). The following quotation from Emile, taken from a passage where Rousseau recommends that Emile learns to work with his hands, clarifies Rousseau’s position: Let his work be valued for the work itself and not because it is his. Say of what is well made, “This is well made.” But do not add, “Who made that?” If he himself

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says with a proud and self-satisfied air, “I made it,” add coldly, “You or another, it makes no difference; in any event it is work well done.” (Rousseau 1762, 202)

Rousseau thinks the quality of the work is more important than individual qualities or what Romantics call the “genius” of the artist or scientist, for example. And as we have seen, Rousseau uses nature not only to find his self but also to forget it. Contemporary romantic individualism, by contrast, puts a lot of emphasis on the individual as creator and author, and indeed on the individual self and private happiness. In this they go much further than historical Romanticism, which always linked the “I” to a larger natural-religious reality. This becomes clear when we look at German Romanticism. German Romanticism: Novalis and the Depths of the Spirit I feel ecstasies and inexpressible raptures in blending, so to speak, into the system of beings and in making myself one with the whole of nature. (Rousseau 1782a, 95)

Like Rousseau, the German Romantic movement emphasized feeling and sentiment, celebrated the “I” (especially the “I” of the artist), and wrote about nature in an entirely new way. My summary of the main features of the movement are based on my interpretation of writings by the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis and guided by Safranski’s study of German Romanticism (2007), Black’s study of romanticism (2002), and Taylor’s remarks on Romanticism in his Sources of the Self (1989). Against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, the German Romantics focus on feeling and imagination. Against secularization, they try to reenchant the world. Novalis hopes for the rebirth of a religious age (Safranski 2007, 82). Romantics are bored with the secularized everyday and search for the extraordinary and the wonderful. Safranski writes: What unites Romantics is their discontent with normality, with conventional life. … And so it was precisely to protect normal life from disenchantment that they continually sought new sources of mystery. They found it in the poetic spirit, in imagination, in philosophical speculation, and sometimes too in the realm of politics, albeit a fantastically done up politics. (Safranski 2007, 126)

Novalis argues that modernity has dispelled our childlike sense of wonder. Like Rousseau, the German Romantics value childhood because of its presumed innocence.1 Modernity, the Romantics argued, has little space for the child in ourselves. Moreover, it is believed that Nature had been downgraded to a machine: Novalis argued that the modern way of thinking had

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“made heretics of imagination and feeling … and turned the infinite, creative music of the universe into the uniform clattering of a monstrous mill … a mill grinding itself” (Novalis 1799, 144). Against this predictable dullness, the Romantics use poetry in order to bring back the mystery, which gives them an epistemology of revelation and surprise: The sense for poetry has much in common with the sense for mysticism. It is the sense for the particular, personal, unknown, mysterious, for that which is to be revealed, what necessarily happens by chance. It represents that which cannot be represented. It see what cannot be seen, feels what cannot be felt etc. (Novalis 1799, 162)

Against secular(ized) Protestantism and against the Enlightenment aim to shed the light of science and reason on everything, the Romantics make room for darkness, for the mystery and the supernatural, for what cannot be fully known, for what does not reveal itself to the daylight of reason, and for surprises. As Safranski wrote, the Romantic spirit “loves the remoteness of past and future, the surprises of the everyday, the extreme, the unconscious, dream, madness, the labyrinth of reflection” (Safranski 2007, xiv). The night, the place and time of mysteries, becomes interesting. In his Hymns to the Night (1800) Novalis wonders what the “dark night” is holding under its cloak, what grabs “unseen” at his soul (51). The “secretive” night (11) is home to “creative Love” (19) and is sacred, holy (23). It is “the mighty womb of revelations” (29) where the gods withdrew. The night is also the time of passion, love, and madness. “All passion is enchantment,” Novalis writes, and he sees enchantment in charming girls (Novalis 1799, 106). At the same time, the religious is also connected with love: God is love (123). Furthermore, the Romantics embrace the exotic, especially “the Orient” with its supposed erotic qualities and magic, and “the Gypsies.” This orientalism is once again related to the night, which opens up possibilities for sexual freedom and enchantment. And of course the psyche is also part of this “night”; it becomes a realm the Romantics want to explore exactly because of its darkness and mystery. Our selves are not clear to us. As Taylor remarks, Romanticism, understood as counter-Enlightenment, denies self-transparency: we are “full of contradictions,” “our self is a mystery to us” (Taylor 1989, 357). Novalis writes: We dream of traveling through the universe—but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us—the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds—the past and future—is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows. (Novalis 1799, 25)

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The internal world (night, spirit, mystery, truth) is thus contrasted with the external world (day, profanity, dullness, deception). Indeed Romanticism’s desire for transcendence is inherently and explicitly Platonic. Novalis (1799) writes that “the heart is full, the world is empty.” Human beings live “only in the realm of ideas” (29). He complains about the “inadequacy of the earthly bodily form as the expression and instrument of the spirit dwelling within” (41). He dreams of a human being who is “truly independent of nature” and “capable of separating himself from his body” (75). Novalis even suggests modifying the body in order to use it as a tool that is capable of anything (78). Behind and below the shadows and the dullness of everyday life and objects (“the dull catalog of common things,” as Keats put it in his poem “Lamnia”), Romantics seek the magical and the mythical. Friendship and love, for instance, become mysteries: one ought to speak about them “only in rare, intimate moments, silently agreeing about them” since “many things are too delicate to be thought, even more are too much so to be discussed” (27). In response to the Enlightenment rejection of religion and myth, the Romantics create new myths, often by drawing together elements from existing myths. In Hymns to the Night (1800) Novalis tells such a syncretic myth: a narrative that starts with a lost “golden age” that is then contrasted with today’s alienated existence. First, there is “the all-joyful Light,” “the wonder, the splendour of the earth’s kingdoms” with its youth and “loving, maternal goddess” (25). But then the world lies “sunken in a deep vault” (11) and “in the heart’s strings, deep sadness blows” (11): In times now passed. … Rivers, trees, flowers and animals had human sense. The wine poured by a visible fullness of youth—a god in the grapes—a loving, maternal goddess, growing upwards in full, golden sheaves—love’s sacred intoxication a sweet duty to the fairest of god ladies—Life, like spring, thundered down through the centuries, an endlessly bright feast of heaven’s children and earth’s inhabitants … it was Death who interrupted. … The gods disappeared with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. An iron chain held it in arid count and strict measure. … Gone was the imploring faith, with its all-changing all-relating divine twin, imagination. A cold north wind blew unfriendly over the frozen plain, and the rigid place of wonders dissipated into the ether. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the soul’s higher realm the world’s soul drew up with its powers. (Novalis 1800, 25–27)

But in the end, Novalis thinks, there will be “a new golden age with dark infinite eyes, a prophetic, consoling time, working miracles and healing wounds, and sparking the flame of eternal life—a great time of reconciliation” (147). This amounts to a concept of salvation, albeit not the orthodox

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Christian one. Novalis mixes pagan myth with Christian narrative (and he mixes prose and verse, typical for the romantic aesthetic). The intoxication of the golden age is pagan, Dionysian. Yet the metaphors he uses to describe the great reconciliation are straightforwardly Christian: “The stone is lifted—Humanity is risen—… At the last supper” (33). The imagination is used as an instrument to get to the mystery, the myth, and the magic that otherwise remain unseen in the shadows of the dull daily world. The imagination is a technique of revelation and liberation, of lifting the stone, of restoring life. Against what the Romantics call the “philistine”—“someone who tries to explain away the wondrous and mysterious and reduce it to the standards of normalcy” and who lacks imagination—the Romantics have faith in “the transformative power of the imagination” (Safranski 2007, 131). The imagination has “magical or synthesizing power” (Novalis 1799, 135). Instead of the Philistine everyday life, the Romantics want adventurous, mysterious, extraordinary lives. This is also why they celebrate childhood, which is seen as a golden age (41). We must not betray our childhood dreams and live in a fairy tale; indeed history itself must become a fairy tale, in which nature and spirit merge: In a true fairy tale everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected—everything must be animated. … The whole of nature must be mixed in a strange way with the whole of the spirit world. (Novalis 1799, 125)

According to the Romantics, the world is ful of mystery. But we do not always see that “we live in a colossal novel” (135), and therefore the Romantics had to do some work to evoke the mystery, invite the spirits, reanimate and reenchant the world. They wrote books, they held séances, and they were interested in people who were banned by the Enlightenment: miracle healers, prophets, exorcists—everyone and everything irrational and incomprehensible, including ghosts and demons. As we also will see in the next chapters, this list included science and technology. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, for instance, did experiments with galvanism and electricity (Safranski 2007, 50). Romantics do everything to escape “the wasteland of disenchantment” (136). Novalis defended what he called “the Romanticization of the world”: “the world must be made Romantic. … By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic” (Novalis 1799, 60). Reenchantment was not only a means to make the world less boring; it was also a defense against nihilism. It was an attempt to restore value and

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meaning to what they perceived as a disenchanted world. Later Nietzsche asks the same question: When God is explained away, is there still meaning? The Romantics answer by bringing in God and gods and mystery. Their urge for reenchantment, combined with transcendentalism, leads Romantics to embrace “poets, madmen, saints, prophets” (Novalis 1799, 61), individual and communal madness, and magic. Interestingly, in Novalis’s romanticization, reenchantment also includes a transformation of the sciences: “magical chemistry, mechanics, and physics” (22) and “magical astronomy, grammar, philosophy, religion” (125). To understand this, one has to better understand the Romantic project, which was not only about poetry, literature, and (other) art but reached into science and philosophy and was not concerned only with the self. Indeed, it is important to add nuance to the picture of Romanticism as antirationalist and as entirely self-absorbed, which is a caricature of Romanticism. The picture is more complex. On the one hand, it is true that Romanticism rebelled against what its adherents experienced as the cold world of rationalist science and philosophy. They work on establishing a poetry that, “like a bejeweled India, will stand more captivatingly and more colorfully over against the cold, dead Spitzbergen of that stuffy understanding” (Novalis 1799, 148). On the other hand, it would be misleading to portray Romantics as being concerned solely with poetry, magic, and religion, with themselves and with dreaming and escaping to another reality. Novalis, for instance, argued for transcending the self—he even echoes the mystic’s phrase that “self equals nonself” (59)—and ascribed to the artist the social responsibility of guiding others toward magical truth. He also recommended critical contemplation. Influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his aim was to merge philosophy and poetry, rational argument and imagination; he did not reject the former. He also advised artists to not only look inward but also, in a second step, achieve “an active outward gaze—autonomous, constant observation of the external world” (27). Moreover, after contrasting logical-atomistic thinking with poetic intuition, which “hates rules and fixed form” and celebrates the “wild, violent life” that “reigns in nature,” Novalis argues that in the artist, both kinds of thinking and doing come together: in the artist “living reflection comes into being” (51, Novalis’s emphasis). Thus, in contrast to the caricature that is often made of them, Romantics are not necessarily self-absorbed or mere dreamers, and at least some of them aspired to a synthesis of the fixed and the dynamic, the rational and the intuitive, the ruled and the wild. Their focus was often on “intellectual contemplation” (66) rather than worldly activity (although many were also engaged

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in social reform), but intellect itself was broadly understood. Furthermore, there were not only more connections between science and Romanticism than many people think; for many, science was a significant part of their project. Romantics wanted to unite religion, philosophy, and science. As Ferber puts it: It is one of the accomplishments of the Enlightenment that most thinkers take for granted that religion, philosophy, and science are distinct domains with their own projects and procedures. … This was not the view characteristic of Romanticism. Constantly striving for unity between subject and object, feeling and knowledge, fact and value, truth and beauty, Romantics typically saw these three domains as one. … Most of them embraced the Enlightenment, but sought a new synthesis whereby faith, science, and reason … would be different faces of the same universe, and that all of them would express the cultivation, or Bildung, of the human spirit. (Ferber 2010, 89)

This meant also that there were many practical links between science and Romanticism. For instance, Friedrich Schelling was interested in new developments in chemistry, electricity, and magnetism, which “seemed to reveal forces within living bodies, not to mention action at a distance” (Ferber 2010, 90). Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani suggested that electricity and magnetism were vital, animating forces. Percy Shelley took his scientific instruments with him on travels. And Mary Shelley was interested in all these new scientific developments and used them in her novel Frankenstein (90–92). (I say more about the connection between science and Romanticism in chapter 4.) Note that one should not paint a caricature of Enlightenment philosophers either. For instance, there are indications that Kant, usually regarded as a prime example of an Enlightenment nonromantic or even antiromantic (see, for instance, Safranski 2007), was not only negatively but also positively influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg himself was a mixed figure. Living in eighteenth century Sweden, he was an Enlightenment engineer, mathematician, and scientist, but he also became known as a mystic. He had mystical visions that he claimed revealed the world of spirits to him: “the other world,” heaven and hell, the community of angels and other beings. He believed that the phenomenal world is the face of heaven (Thorpe 2011, 54)—at least that in the “Golden Age,” though after the Fall, we can no longer see this and are no longer in the company of angels (55). He was followed by the English poet William Blake and influenced the German Romantics, including Schelling and Novalis. Swedenborg’s visions do not seem acceptable to an Enlightenment mind, and indeed Kant thought Swedenborg was mad. But Thorpe has argued that

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Kant had an ambivalent attitude toward Swedenborg and that Swedenborg even influenced him. Kant not only wrote about Swedenborg’s visions in his Dreams of a SpiritSeer, published in 1766 (visions that Kant regarded as those of a madman but apparently considered interesting enough to write about). According to Thorpe, he was also drawn to Swedenborg’s conception of heaven as a community of spirits and his suggestion that it is up to us to choose which spiritual community we belong to. This, Thorpe argues, influenced his ethics, in particular Kant’s notion of “a realm of ends as an ideal community that we should strive to be members of” and his account of moral judgment: when we think morally about what maxims we should adopt, we “think about whether it would be possible to be a member of a community of individuals with such characters” (Thorpe 2011, 57). This connection with mysticism is interesting and helps in understanding Kant’s view: without the link to Swedenborg’s Romantic mysticism, Kant’s notion of the realm of ends and its link with the kingdom of heaven is indeed rather puzzling. While Kant objected to regarding the phenomenal world as a symbol of the spiritual world (Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences), Thorpe’s arguments suggest that Kant and Swedenborg shared the idea that there is a spiritual community (Kant: “intelligible” community), an other world where spirits interact: “the mature Kant conceives of the intelligible world/realm of ends as a community of spirits in real interaction” (66), indeed interaction between disembodied beings—to which Kant added: a community of spirits governed by laws “given by the members of the community itself” (71). In this sense, Kant’s (moral) philosophy was more “mystical” than usually presumed, and in any case partly developed in “dialogue” with the mystical visions of a romantic spirit-seer. Furthermore, Kant’s epistemology famously makes a distinction between a “noumenal” realm and a “phenomenal” realm and assumes that the noumenal realm remains fundamentally unknowable. Although the relationship between Kant and Romanticism is complex and deserves more elaboration, this idea brings him at least close to Romantic epistemology’s emphasis on the unknowable—there are limits to knowledge—and the Romantic view that reality is always a human construction, that experience always has a subjective dimension. These links between Romanticism and philosophy are not coincidental. There was what one could call a Romantic philosophy. Novalis, for instance, was not only a poet but also a philosopher, that is, someone who, as Novalis (1799) himself wrote, “lives on problems as the human being does on food” (68). The philosophy he practiced was transcendentalist: Platonist,

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but also Idealist and what we would now call relativist. Novalis saw the world as “a communication—a revelation of the spirit” (81), and long before postmodern philosophers, he argued that there is no objective truth. According to Novalis and in line with the Idealist philosophies of this time, the world and the human being are a trope of the spirit (67, 105). This also means that language plays a crucial role in thinking. Long before twentiethcentury thinkers, Novalis recognized that a text can have many meanings (108) and that there is a sense in which language speaks (to put it in twentieth-century terms). Taking a radical antirepresentationalist view, he writes that language “is concerned only with itself” and that languages “constitute a world of their own. They play only with themselves, express nothing but their own marvelous nature” (83). This autonomous aspect of language, or at least the claim that language conditions our thinking, implies that to change thinking, one has to create a different language (an insight that Heidegger shares in the twentieth century). The Romantics set out to create new languages. They wanted to change the world by means of language. The world transformed by the linguistic imagination: this is Novalis’s “magical idealism” (135). Moreover, long before twentieth-century thinking about metaphor, Novalis suggests that “all cognition, knowledge etc. may well be reduced to comparisons, resemblances” (60). And like Enlightenment philosophers, he was committed to “the republic of learning” and a “community of all knowledge” (39). However, in contrast to Enlightenment rationalists, the Romantics thought that this language and knowledge can never be merely scientific. As Friedrich Schlegel argued, we should not try to reduce the complexity of the world, as science tries to do, but embrace the chaos. This chaos can be found in the personal self, in the communications and relationships between human beings, and in the universe as a whole—with God being the absolutely incomprehensible, the “overcomplex” (Safranski 2007, 36). Embracing the chaos within yourself is necessary for true progression in understanding. But chaos, Novalis thought, is not enough. Instead he proposes a synthesis when he describes the genius as combining the best of the Philistine and the poet. The Philistine is an orderly person, and that order enables him to quickly gain insight, but then, at a rather early point, further understanding is blocked. Instead the poet gains insight through imagination, but there is confusion. The genius, however, combines order and confusion, and this renders him “progressive” and “perfectible” (Novalis 1799, 32). In this sense, there is a progressive side to Romanticism, but because of their view of knowledge and the psyche, Romantics are skeptical about

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the idea that progress can be achieved by means of rationality and selfgovernment (individual and collective). Safranski claims that in contrast to Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant, “the Romantics saw deeper into the human abysses, and were thus less apt to trust the rationality of selfassertion and self-interest” (Safranski 2007, 112). There is what Johann Gottfried Herder called “living reason,” which is part of “the darkness and creativity of life” (6); we need a philosophy of life. Romantics hope for encounters that change everything (29). The Romantics love new beginnings and conversions. Herder has a conversion experience “exactly as Rousseau had felt his great inspiration twenty years earlier under a tree on the road to Vincennes: the rediscovery of genuine Nature beneath the crust of civilization” (3). The German Romantics are poets, writers, and playwrights. The Romantics want a revolution, but it is mainly a revolution that sheds ink, not blood. Poetry will change the world. Give power to the imagination. Every activity can have beauty. The wall between imagination and life, art and life, literature and life needs to be demolished. Everything is and should be connected to everything. (32) Art is not a leisure activity one does to enjoy oneself; it is a project to construct reality and change the world. As Black puts it: The romantic revolution in culture was not about artistic self-indulgence. Art was life because culture was the means to directly fashion a conscious world within which one lived. The romantic subject was often represented as a poet-magician conjuring new realities through discourse. … Art was the primary means to re-enchant the world; it restored a world that was damaged by instrumental rationality to itself. (Black 2002, 27)

Thus, both religion and politics are conducted by aesthetic means, if not replaced by art. Art will save us, and it will save the world. Schiller argued that art involves all our faculties: not only intellect, but also imagination and feeling, for example. Everything can be interesting. Novalis admired Goethe’s “linking of small, insignificant incidents with more important events” (Novalis 1799, 27). We are part of a larger picture and a larger history. Individuals are part of the history of communities, the history of the nation, and the history of the spirit. The “I” is at the center, the subject, but because of their idealism, Romantics draw the whole world into this “I.” We are part of life, of nature, of the history of the spirit, and at the same time that history unfolds itself in us. As Taylor (1989) summarizes Herder’s view, “Herder offered a picture of nature as a great current of sympathy, running through all things. … Man is the creature who can become aware of this and bring it to expression” (369).

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That said, the “I” does not merely express something that is already there, and in this sense a focus on expression is misleading to characterize the romantic view. The epistemology developed here rejects the picture of a gap between an independent, objective reality and a separate subject. Object and subject are entangled, and knowledge is the result of active creation. According to Taylor, “What the voice of nature calls us to cannot be fully known outside and prior to our articulating/definition of it. We can only know what realizing our deep nature is when we have done it” (Taylor 1989, 376). But since there is no independent reality, this articulating is at the same time creating. Reality manifests itself, reveals itself, in the creation of new form rather than in “the reproduction of forms already there” (379). Active creation by the “I” is key, and the artist is the model human being who reimagines and reshapes the world. Everything is in the “I” and everything can change through the “I.” Fichte offered the concept of such a “dynamic, world-grounding, world creating” I (Safranski 2007, 42). The artist will create a new world. The task of the artist is no longer mimesis but creation. It is not even expression, Novalis argued. Poetry has its own voice and creates its own reality. It is artificial, intuitive, and spontaneous. At the same time, this “I” is always connected to nature. There is a “creative power that works throughout Nature,” as Herder thought (7), and indeed a creative power that works through the individual. Fichte thought that this power works in us unconsciously (45). The emphasis on individual creation means that individual difference and individual originality become important. But Romantic artists also understood themselves as part of a community of artist-citizens. This suggests a communitarian model of politics, according to which every citizen is an artist (Black 2002, 27). Moreover, sometimes this world creating and this Fichtean “I” takes a collective shape. The Romantics speak of the German Kulturnation (Schiller) and the Weltgeist who has chosen the Germans for cultivating humanitas in Europe (Safranski 2007, 114). Fichte speaks of the people (Volk). More generally, the idea is that we cannot just step out of the social bond and leave the community. Romantics search for folk traditions and create a national culture. Another political direction Romantic thinking takes us is—perhaps surprisingly—to Marx. Instead of interpreting and poeticizing the world, Marx thought that it was time to change it. His early philosophy was romantic: in his writings of the 1840s (Marx 1844, 1846), when he is concerned with alienation versus self-expression and spontaneity, but even in Capital (1867) where his thought sometimes takes on gothic features (see below). Here I focus on the early Marx.

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Consider Marx’s view of estranged labor and alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which is all about threats to life, spontaneity, and self-realization. First, the worker “puts his life into the object,” but the object is then alienated from him (Marx 1844, 70). Second, the worker is also alienated from the production activity in which he does not “affirm” but “denies himself”: he “does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind” (72). There is no longer “spontaneous activity,” and there is a “loss of his self” and loss of free activity (73). Third, man is estranged from his species being: estranged labor threatens man as a “free being” (74), since there is no longer free, conscious life activity. Man is also estranged from “his spiritual essence, his human being” (76). Fourth, there is estrangement from others, and man performs his activity under “the yoke of another man” (79). This emphasis on life, freedom, and spontaneity is romantic. In The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1846), Marx’s Romanticism takes on a materialist form but remains focused on life and liberation. Outlining the premises of the materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels start from “living human individuals” (31), and it is said that they “express their life” (31). The “materialist” point is that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life” (36). What people say and imagine is based on this “life-process” (36). Starting with the “flesh,” the authors aim at “ascending from earth to heaven” (36). “The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process” (36). This life process is social. Similarly, language arises only from “the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (44). For Marx, liberation is not about selfconsciousness but is “real liberation,” which can be achieved only “in the real world and by real means” (38). Surprisingly perhaps, these means include technology, the high tech of the time: Marx writes that “slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine” (38). The early Marx thus defends a kind of material romanticism that combines a romantic interest in spontaneity and life and resistance against alienation with a materialist outlook, emphasizing the material basis and even seeing technology as a tool for social change. But this materialism does not alter the focus on ending alienation, on liberation and expression, and on transforming the modern world. With Black, we can also point to Marx’s emphasis on praxis (reason alone is not sufficient for emancipation) and his love of the grotesque (Black 2002, 4). (I say more about the gothic Marx later in this chapter.) Marx shows that romanticism can be political.

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There are of course other political romanticisms too—for instance, Heidegger’s romantic turn to National Socialism, which he interpreted as a new beginning, “a new historical moment of authenticity” (Safranski 2007, 248), and of course National Socialism itself—although as Safranski and others have argued, National Socialism had also a modern-scientific face. It is true that there is a romantic discourse about the nation and the people, and there is of course an irrational side to Nazism. But Safranski argues that for a race-biological ideology, Goebbels turned not to Romanticism but to the sciences: the Nazis “regretted the lack of a biological, racial element in the Romantic concept of Volkstum” (242). Based on his reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Safranski argues that it was in social Darwinism, “vulgarized science” (246), rather than in Romanticism, that National Socialism found the source for its anti-Semitic and murderous ideology. The Nazis thus (mis) used science and in fact developed “a highly technological, industrially productive, autobahn-building society” (243). If there is a romanticism in such a world, Goebbels suggested in a speech, it is a romanticism that seeks reenchantment in the results of modern technology (244). Could not the same be said of our time? It seems that Goebbels understood something that Heidegger did not: romanticism and modern technology are not necessarily opposed.2 (See the next chapters.) What does Romanticism imply for thinking about nature? According to the German Romantics, nature is not an objective collection of things, as science reveals it to be; instead nature is enchanted and has also subjective qualities. For Novalis nature “remained so marvelous and incomprehensible, so poetic and infinite, in spite of all efforts to modernize it” (1799, 145). It remained spiritual and subjective. The subject sees itself mirrored in nature. Sometimes nature even unites with this “I,” and vice versa. The subject-object dichotomy vanishes in what Nietzsche later would call “the Dionysian” (Nietzsche 1872): the Romantics desired re-union with nature. Consider again Rousseau’s ecstasies when his “I” was absorbed by the whole: nature is a means to forget the self and immerse oneself in the whole. In Friedrich Schleiermacher, this becomes more explicitly a mystical experience. As in Rousseau, disappearance of the self is not experienced as threatening but as enjoyable: it is “a feeling of melting in love” (Safranski 2007, 91). This does not mean that afterward, everything in life becomes unimportant; rather, as Safranski puts it beautifully, “the things of life” are “relativized against the horizon of immensity. They retain their seriousness, but lose their oppressive heaviness” (91). More generally, the reenchantment of Romanticism is geared toward reunification: reunification with nature, with others, with the whole.

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Romanticism, says Taylor (1989), aims at “bringing us back in contact with nature, healing the divisions between reason and sensibility, overcoming the divisions between people, and creating community. … We ought to recognize that we are part of a larger order of living beings, in the sense that our life springs from there and is sustained from there” (384). This aim of reunion and reunification thus at the same time concerns “nature,” “community,” and a “religion.” It also refers to the original meaning of religion, which is about re-ligare: the aim is to connect again, link again, reunite. Indeed, the idea is to link up with something greater than yourself: community, society, the world, being, God, and so on (see also Taylor 1989, 427). However, although the Romantics are clearly religious, their view, like Rousseau’s, takes distance from institutional religion—the religion of hierarchy, priesthood, and church. In this sense it is, like Protestantism, more “individual.” Yet the feeling of being connected to the whole is extended to the feeling of being connected to others. The Romantics want to share experience, build community, and ground friendships (Safranski 2007, 91). Like Catholicism and perhaps unlike Protestantism, it is a sensuous religion. In Catholicism, Safranski says, “beauty is deemed to glorify the divine” (96). In Romantic religion, boundaries between the aesthetic and the religious are blurred. Furthermore, not all Romantics excluded religious intermediaries. Novalis, for instance, took distance from organized religion and emphasized religious feeling, but he also argued that “nothing is more indispensable for true religious feeling than an intermediary” since human beings are incapable of sustaining an immediate relation with the godhead (Novalis 1799, 35). In contrast to Catholicism, however, Novalis thought that human beings should be free in their choice of intermediary, and that everyone is a priest in the sense that our whole life is a divine service: “Ordinary life is a priestly service—almost like that of the vestals. We are occupied with nothing other than the preservation of a sacred and mysterious flame” (107). On the whole, Romanticism is significantly different from the main religions of its time. It is not anti-Christian but certainly more “pagan.” It is, like Rousseau’s religion, more (like) a nature religion. The Romantics perceived the divine in nature: if not everywhere, then at least “in certain landscapes and configurations of human relationships” (Safranski 2007, 107). Even if most Romantics were still heavily influenced by Christianity (consider again Novalis’s Christian metaphors of salvation), they also looked to other sources of religion and spirituality. For instance, they turned to ancient Greek times to find different myths and religious experiences. Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who influenced

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Heidegger, is part of this movement. In his poetry, the gods are fleeting (108): sometimes they show themselves, and then they are gone again. There is appearance and disappearance, revealing and hiding. The gods can leave traces when they are gone. The Romantics also searched for religious experience in the East. Later in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche celebrated, in true Romantic fashion, the Dionysian. I will say more about this, as it illuminates the influence of Romanticism and, indeed, Nietzsche’s version of romanticism. Nietzsche and Wagner, like Novalis and other Romantics, turned to the creation of new myths, and both looked to antiquity for a regeneration of Western culture. They wanted to bring back the gods and the myths. Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human (1878) about the artist that his art aims at inspiring “unrest” and “disorder”; it is not about truth but about everything a true Romantic desires: [The artist] does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of this manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth. (Nietzsche 1878, 103–104)

Given this focus on creation rather than (scientific) truth, the artist “does not stand in the front ranks of the enlightenment” but remains a “child or youth,” and his task is “the juvenescence of mankind” (104); he reenchants the world with his artistic effects. Nietzsche explains that the Enlightenment has forced feeling out of the religious, but feeling did not disappear: it “throws itself into art”: “The wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms” (105). Nature is also an important focus point for Nietzsche. A true Romantic, Nietzsche sees the tremendous (das Ungeheure) in nature (Safranski 2007, 192). He sees nature as “a great reservoir of amoral force, with which we must not lose contact” (Taylor 1989, 445). Again there is the aim of reuniting oneself with what is larger. Nietzsche and other German nineteenthcentury thinkers turned to ancient Greek culture to retrieve a sense of this. Earlier the Romantics already had an interest in Dionysian mysteries of rebirth and renewal. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the gods and the demons are back. Nietzsche retrieves the Dionysian as a drunken unity with the world—an experience of self-dissolution not so different from Rousseau and Schleiermacher. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he contrasts the Dionysian with the Apollonian and talks about dreams and

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intoxication (14). Inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is interested in those moments when reason is suspended and the self is forgotten through intoxication: Under the influence of the narcotic potion hymned by all primitive men and peoples, or in the powerful approach of spring, joyfully penetrating the whole of nature, those Dionysiac urges are awakened, and as they grow more intense, subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self. (Nietzsche 1872, 17)

Trying to retrieve the Dionysian, Nietzsche refers to the ancient Greeks and, before that, Asia Minor and Babylon. He sees the same Dionysian power in medieval German singing and dancing. In the “Dionysiac magic,” humans and nature are reconciled (17). Even social differences are (temporarily) suspended: Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or “imprudent fashion” have erected between man and man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbor, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens. His gestures express enchantment. (Nietzsche 1872, 17–18)

However, here it is not poetry but music that is the main form of art used as a means of reunification. According to Nietzsche and later twentiethcentury countercultural romantics, music can help to bring about this unity and a different level of consciousness. Music and art can reconnect us to life, liberate us. Perhaps this art needs to be speechless in order to keep the mystery intact; at least words become less important. It is the music that enables intoxication, ecstasy, Eros. As Safranski (2007) remarks, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra dances, and much like the Indian god Shiva (203). All this is, of course, a further development of the Romantics’ interest in the special, the mysterious, and the extraordinary. But as the metaphor of the night already indicated, this is not necessarily pleasant or beautiful in the ordinary sense of the words. Romantics share an interest in “beautiful chaos” and in what was known as “the sublime”: nature is not only beautiful; it can also be frightful and inspire awe. Nature can be “ecstatic, wild, horrific” (33). This leads us to British Romanticism, including Gothic. I will also further explore the social dimension of Romanticism.

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British Romanticism and Beyond: Sublime Nature, Gothic Castles, and Romantic-Socialist Utopia Where there are no gods, ghosts reign. (Novalis 1799, 148)

Against secularization and a Protestantism that was experienced as quasisecular,3 the British Romantics also sought to reenchant the world. The British Romantic writers and poets around 1800 argued that poetry should be about feelings. William Wordsworth famously said that it should begin with “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” And of course nature was important: Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others wrote about the beauty of the Lake District. They were interested in aesthetic experiences such as the sublime. There was also an interest in horror and terror, which later developed into what we may call the gothic version of Romanticism. Writers and artists turned to medievalism against the industrial revolution and the associated urbanization. Later in the nineteenth century, there was also a strong interest in utopia. In order to complement rather than repeat what has been said about Romanticism in the previous pages, I will not discuss the thinking of (early) Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, or William Blake but instead focus on three topics that defined Romanticism in nineteenth-century England: the sublime, the gothic, and utopia. Burke’s Sublime: First Explorations of the Incomprehensible Darkness; Deformity and Lack of Form The Romantic age is also the age of the sublime. For instance, in their paintings Joseph Mallord William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich depicted sublime scenes such as storms and mountains. But what is the sublime? In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke had argued, against Plato, Aristotle, and the classicism of his time, that the aesthetic should not be reduced to what is pleasing. In classic thinking, aesthetics is about beauty defined in terms of proportionality, regularity, and perfection, which are pleasing to the eye. But Burke—closer perhaps to ancient tragedy than to ancient philosophy—added the category of the sublime, which is not immediately pleasing but quite the opposite: it invites fear, pain, awe, and horror, although there is then pleasure in knowing that one is at a safe distance or that it is not real. Burke writes: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”

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(101). He also mentions terror: “Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever … the ruling principle of the sublime” (102). Thus, the sublime creates feelings of horror and terror. But at the same time, one feels safe. It is our imagination that creates the terror. As Kant wrote in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), “The astonishment bordering on terror, the horror and the awesome shudder, which grip the spectator in viewing mountain ranges towering to the heavens, deep ravines and the raging torrents in them, deeply shadowed wastelands including melancholy reflection, etc., is, in the view of the safety in which he knows himself to be, not actual fear, but only an attempt to involve ourselves in it by means of the imagination” (152). But the emotion is real. Burke (1757) defines terror as a kind of pain: not pain related to physical suffering but pain caused by “the operation of the mind suggesting the danger” (162), which “raises the emotions of the body” (164). What creates the terror and the horror, according to Burke, is lack of clear knowledge. The metaphors and images he uses therefore are the night or the twilight: To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds. (Burke 1757, 102)

Thus, the sublime does not only have to do with ugliness and deformity but, ultimately, with formlessness, absence of form—or at least absence of a clear form. Burke also refers to Milton’s portrait of Satan. There is eclipse and twilight, mist and revolution. Poetry raises obscure images. He says that in nature, but also in paintings, “dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate” (106). He associates the sublime with the absence of bounds, with infinity, with confusion. The lack of knowledge and certainty produces terror. There is a shadow, a voice, but the eye and the mind cannot clearly discern what it is that causes our fear. We cannot represent the darkness: But when this grand cause of terror makes its appearance, what is it? Is it not, wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more aweful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting could possibly represent it? (Burke 1757, 106–107)

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To explain how the sublime is related to uncertainty, lack of form, and our inability to represent, Burke reads a passage from the book of Job: we enter the night, there is fear and trembling, and there is a spirit, but we cannot discern its form. If we try to represent it by means of painting, it would become grotesque. Poetry, Burke suggests, does not have this problem and produces “serious passion” by means of “its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures” (107). Similarly, as already mentioned, such passions are produced by nature’s “dark, confused, uncertain images” (106). In religion, sublime images are evoked to suggest the majesty and awe of the divine: “Every thing terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence” (112). After this aesthetics, psychology, and indeed epistemology of the sublime, it is time for the Gothic. As inheritors of Burke’s sublime, Goths set themselves the task of “assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imaginations could suggest” (107). Burke already described the colors and sounds of the sublime, which include black and deep purple (122); “excessive loudness,” which is to overpower the soul and noises of thunder and artillery (123); and sudden beginnings and pain—all of which will become attractive in gothic art and, later, in twentieth-century gothic subcultures. Gothic writings further explore the wonder, terror, and horror—in nature and elsewhere. Gothic Castles, Monsters, and Vampires The history of gothic is long and complex (for an overview, see Groom 2012).4 An important element in the English context is the rise of Protestantism and the “imaginative void” it left (Groom 2012, 34). In sixteenthcentury England, Protestantism had wiped out a substantial part of Roman Catholic culture and ritual with the dissolution and pillage of monasteries, the execution of religious leaders, the rejection of the “superstitious” worship of saints and relics, and effectively a dismantling of “the whole calendar of customs and lore—the fabric of everyday life” of the earlier period (34). The result was that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not much earlier, many people in England were nostalgic about the lost medieval, Catholic past. More generally, artists started to explore and reconstruct their ancient past in search of the wonder and the mystery that had been wiped out by Protestant and rationalist (quasi-) secularization. Combined with an interest in the more carnal, material, and violent aspects of human history and culture, including “sex, rape, torture, dismemberment, decapitation, death” (36), this resulted in what is usually called “Gothic.” There was an interest in ruins, which reminded people of the medieval past

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(some “ruins” were actually newly built); more natural, “wild,” chaotic Romantic English gardens were created; and Gothic literature emerged in which haunted castles were filled with everything the Gothic imagination could dream up: ghosts, crypts, graves, animated corpses, hidden skeletons, secret passages and labyrinths, Catholic ritual, nightmares, demons, devils, witches, inexplicable whispers and groans, murder, sex, rape, vampires, and all else that was seen as dark, forbidden, supernatural, and “superstitious.” In literature, Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, published in 1764, is usually seen as a seminal text that introduces many of these themes. Many more gothic novels followed. Romantics eagerly created and consumed this Gothic terror and horror, these sublime, shivering pleasures that one could enjoy in the safety of the home. It is questionable if it even makes sense to distinguish between Romanticism and Gothic in this context: it seems entirely justified to speak of Gothic-Romanticism or of Romantic-Gothic here to emphasize and express how much both are entwined in English art and literature around 1800. There is clearly a shared interest in the extraordinary, the supernatural, the medieval past, the night. It makes sense, therefore, to confuse both terms, especially in relation to this time and context. I propose to interpret Gothic as a darker form of Romanticism that flourished around 1800 in England but also had a deep and broad influence across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Let me briefly indicate some of the Gothic-Romantic themes. First, in architecture, Gothic-Romanticism means looking back to what was taken to be the medieval past. Ruins of castles, monasteries, churches, and graveyards became favorite anchors for the Gothic-Romantic imagination. They referred back to the romanticized past, but also showed how nature and architecture could go together, how there may be organic growth and integration of the human and the nonhuman. It was also clearly a way to explore the decay of form and order: maybe there is beauty in deformity. Gothic-Romanticism also humanizes, or at least animates, the building. In The Stones of Venice (1853), John Ruskin sees imperfection as a key feature of a Gothic building: the buildings are “expressive of the artisans and builders who made them” (Groom 2012, 108). This leads us to a second theme, which we can also find in Ruskin: Gothic-Romantic art had a keen interest in the grotesque, and in whatever may happen in the night—that is, in the nonrational parts of the human psyche—and in mysterious knowledge. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin writes about the grotesque and the sublime, about terrible images and visions that come uncalled in dream (151), when the imagination escapes conscious

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control. Sleep is sacred and reveals secrets to us. Insofar as our minds are imperfect, we are musical instruments used by divine power, tablets on which the divine truth is written (152)—sublimely or grotesquely. Ruskin adds, “And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be seen as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapors trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest” (153). (Interestingly, Ruskin uses technology here as a metaphor.) For Romantics and Goths, the night is a time when the creative imagination is released, an imagination that may lead us to truths that perhaps cannot be accessed in daytime, truths that need the distortion of dream to reveal themselves to us. Next to Enlightenment self-government, the absence of self-government is seen as a gateway to higher truths. Art needs dream, madness,5 and inspiration. Much later, Freud, in full Romantic and Gothic fashion, writes about dreams and the unconsciousness, and like many Romantics expresses an interest in sexuality, violence, and what he will call the uncanny (Freud 1919). Like Romantics, Freud accepted that the human mind is unknowable to itself. There are unconscious processes, dreams and nightmares. As Hugh Haughton rightly suggests in his introduction to The Uncanny, Freud, with his “aesthetics of anxiety,” his economy of awe, terror, and dread, stands firmly in the tradition of Burke’s thinking about the sublime (Haughton in Freud 1919, xli) and more generally in the gothic tradition. After World War I, psychoanalysis reports from “the psychic underworld of the death drive” (xlii) and becomes even more gothic and romantic than it already was. The uncanny is about death, dead bodies, spirits, ghosts. It is about the supernatural. In the first half of the twentieth century, the child is no longer Rousseau’s innocent child; there is horror in the child and terror in the nursery. We are no longer at home in and with ourselves (the German word Freud uses is unheimlich, literally unhomely). War and death are inside and outside our selves. The uncanny is familiar but at the same time mysterious. As in gothic and romanticism, the familiar becomes unfamiliar and strange. There are forbidden things and hidden things. There are monsters. And there is a lack of clarity about the nature of things: we do not know if the doll is living or not living. We don’t know if the machine is living or not living. As in Gothic, Freudian psychoanalysis discusses not only psychological but also epistemological issues. It is a gothic-romantic technique of revealing, uncovering that which is hidden, that which lies wait-

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ing to visit us, uncalled, in the dark night when rationality sleeps. (I say more about Freud later, in chapter 4 and elsewhere.) Third, Gothic was of course an aesthetic movement and found expression in art, architecture, and literature. But it was also connected with science and technology. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), we see echoes of a Romantic but also, and especially, a Gothic science interested in the unseen, the carnal, and the mystery of life: the blood when the body is opened up, the forces of electricity, the mysteries of the psyche, the possibility of reanimating a corpse. More generally, there is an interest in the boundary of life and death. This is all Romantic and Gothic. But this Gothic and Romantic science did not only take place in the realm of imagination; Mary Shelley was familiar with Percy Shelley’s experiments with chemical apparatus and materials. When she imagined that life could be bestowed on a corpse by using electricity, she was responding to what she had heard about scientific experiments in her day. For example, the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini used electricity to stimulate limbs of a human corpse (figure 2.1). Earlier, Galvani already investigated the effect of electricity on frogs. Mary Shelley knew about “galvanism” and discussed it with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron on the evening before she had her “waking dream” that inspired her novel (see below). Moreover, it is true that Mary Shelley was critical of science; her novel is usually read as a warning against science and technology. It is hubris against the gods. But her message was far more subtle and nuanced than many contemporary readers think: she was writing not so much against science and technology as such, but against a science and technology that became abstracted from life, family, and society; against a science unconcerned with its consequences. As Hindle writes in his introduction, the novel is about “the dangers of putting the ‘abstracted’ pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness … science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society” (xxix). To put it in the language of duty ethics: science has duties and scientists have duties: duties toward society and toward the technologies they create. As the monster says in the novel, “Do your duty toward me, and I will do mine toward you and the rest of mankind” (Shelley 1818, 96). Perhaps Shelley suggests that Romantic and Gothic science may avoid this detachment and irresponsibility and merge with life and imagination. The reanimation of a corpse is thus a symbol of the aim of Romantic-Gothic science: to reenchant, reanimate dead modern science, marry it with life, give it the divine spark. Shelley argues against a science and technology that is without “destination” (125),

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Figure 2.1 Romantic-Gothic science: Aldini’s galvanism experiments. Source: Giovanni Aldini, Essai theórique et expeŕimental sur le galvanisme, avec une seŕie d’expeŕiences faites en preśence des Commissaires de l’Institut national de France, et en divers amphithéâtres anatomiques de Londres, plate 4 (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de Fournier fils, 1804). (Image courtesy Wellcome Library, London, no. L0029560. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0029560.html.)

against a science and technology that kills life by means of its cold “machinations” (180). There are of course more Romantic and Gothic elements in the novel. Mary Shelley, having read Rousseau, portrays the monster as initially innocent, before it becomes corrupted by evil society. Furthermore, like other Gothic and Romantic writers, she sets out to descend into the darkness of her mind. And of course there is the famous, highly Romantic-Gothic narrative about how she created the novel. Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley sit together in a villa in Switzerland. They tell each other ghost stories and talk about the possibility of reanimating a corpse, perhaps through galvanism. Then, after midnight, Mary Shelley had a “waking

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dream” about a scientist who created life. She writes, in true Gothic fashion: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. (Shelley 1818, 9)

Yet again this Gothic moment is fully in line with the Romantic-Gothic science of its day and with the Romantic-Gothic reimagining of the history of science. Shelley writes: The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. (Shelley 1818, 46–47)

It is this kind of magic science that renders the scientist in the novel “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (51), indeed “the creation of a human being” (52). It is magic and gothic, but at the same time there are material instruments (56) and devices (79), and there is hard work. When the scientists sees “the dull yellow eye of the creature open” (56), this is a dream and a horror, but it is also the result of work: the work of a Romantic-Gothic science that combines “dark passions” (90) with scientific experiments. (I will say more about this Romantic-Gothic science in chapter 4.) Even in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a Gothic novel par excellence that is all about superstition and vampires (with all their sexual and violent aspects) and set in Transylvania (seen as the place where, historically, the Goths came from), we can also see elements of Gothic science. On the one hand, Dracula offers everything one expects from a Gothic novel. It is full of horror, of course. It is, in a proto-Freudian fashion, about desires for sex and power, about something dark inside that takes over us (rather than something clear and external). It is about Victorian “fear of, yet desire for, sex,” says Hindle (in Shelley 1818, xii). It testifies to the RomanticGothic interest in emotions, in what we now call the unconscious. As a

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Romantic tale, it is about wildness, strangeness, and lack of knowledge. Stoker (1897) calls the Carpathian Mountains “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” (8), and says that city dwellers “cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter” (29). The novel is about a “stranger in a strange land” (31) where “many strange things” happen (32). It is about “the Un-Dead” (275) and the “unknown and terrible” (383). There is blood—“trickling over my chin” (38), a castle, gypsies, a crucifix and other “idolatrous” (41), religious, and superstitious things. In the moonlight young women whisper together and laugh (53), and there is “the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin” (54). There is RomanticGothic longing for “the pagan world of old” (175), for the “carnal” (275), and for the mysterious and the dark, which had been suppressed by science and quasi-secularized religion. There is hope for “spiritual guidance” that comes in sleep (333). There is nostalgia for tradition and for people who are “brave, and strong, and simply, and seem full of nice qualities” (464). All this seems to suggest a longing for returning to a lost world, an ancient past. Technology seems to be out of sight. Yet there is far more science and technology in Dracula than most readers notice. Next to superstitions there are also “the latest scientific techniques and technological products” such as typewriters, phonography, telegrams, and blood transfusions (xxvii). The occult is not seen in opposition to science. Like Frankenstein, there is an interest in the new science of the day, which speaks of electricity and other hidden and previously unknown forces. For example, it is said that “there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in a strange way” (411). Groom even argues that the new technologies and media of the time are central to the plot: Dracula Gothicizes technology: typewriting, train timetables, the phonograph, telegrams, and the newspapers, as well as medicinal drugs (sedatives and laudanum) and pioneering surgery (blood transfusions and brain operations). Occult machineries suffuse the book: radio communication, for instance. (Groom 2012, 97–98)

The novel also suggests ideas about evolution and degeneration: maybe we become wolves. Fear of degeneration was part of the public scientific discussions of the day. Later, Gothic artists will also happily use the new media and technologies of their time, such as the cinema. Groom writes, “Rapidly innovated special effects and camera techniques made the moving image a stunning new tool in representing not only fantastic visions, but also in making the

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familiar mysterious” (Groom 2012, 122). These are, of course, very Romantic aims. After magic lantern shows and photography helped to bring back the ghosts and spirits, twentieth-century Gothic cinema enabled artists to animate new monsters, vampires (e.g., Nosferatu based on Stoker’s novel), and other strange and grotesque figures to the screen. Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster return. The horror film was born, influenced by Gothic. And Freud is always present. Room is made for sex, violence, exorcism, witchcraft, and so on. In countries with a culture rooted in Protestantism such as the United States, there is a high demand for what is normally repressed. There is also science fiction with Gothic elements such as Alien. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer and cyberpunk6 are influenced by Gothic. And film has enabled billions of people to consume reconstructions of the past. Gothic horror and Romantic medievalism also influenced and continue to influence computer games, and Goth culture is present in contemporary digital culture more generally; consider, for example, interest in cyborgs and steam punk. (In chapter 4, I say more about twentieth-century science fiction and cyberpunk.) Gothic has also influenced music. For instance, as a child Richard Wagner was impressed by Gothic through Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz, and today’s rock music has its gothic currents. Consider heavy metal and especially death metal and black metal, which have themes such as death, sex, Satanism, occultism, horror, paganism, mysticism, nature, non-Christian ritual, taking the position of the outsider, anarchy, modification of the body—all of which can be understood as being a core part of Gothic and Romantic culture. And there is music that is described as “Goth music” such as Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy and Nick Cave. In this music, there is again no opposition between Gothic and technology. For instance, Sisters of Mercy has always used a drum machine. Music itself is also a technological practice, and the history of music is also a history of music technology/computer technology: from drum machine to laptop. Thus, in music, the darkest Gothic themes merge seamlessly with contemporary technology. (In chapter 4 I return to Shelley and say more about Romantic science in Britain and France, and I develop my argument that Romanticism and science/technology were not always opposed. In later chapters, I also link romanticism to contemporary digital culture.) Fourth, Gothic also had a social and political dimension. There is also a Gothic politics, even if this is not always explicit. Dracula, for instance, can be read as expressing fears about immigration and indeed about the “other.” And one could argue that there is a Gothic element in nineteenth-century socialism, including—perhaps surprisingly—Marx.

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Marx and Marxian thought is usually interpreted as representing Enlightenment thinking. Yet there are certainly Romantic elements in Marx—for instance, in his analysis of alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 in which he regrets the loss of self-realization, spontaneity, and (inner) life. But there are also Gothic elements. First, as Jacques Derrida has alluded to with the title of his book Specters of Marx (1993) and his “hautology,” the ghostly and the spectral are certainly present in Marxian thought and especially in The Communist Manifesto (1848), which famously begins with the phrase, “A spectre is haunting Europe” (2). Marx clearly uses a very Gothic metaphor here. But, interestingly, Gothic is also present in Capital, in particular the figure of the vampire. For instance, in volume 1 of Capital (1867), Marx writes, “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (342). And there are more references to the vampire metaphor in Marx. It makes sense to interpret him as outlining what Neocleous calls a “political economy of the dead” (2003). Marx sets up a distinction between living labor and dead labor. Capital, with its desire for accumulation, sucks life out of the workers. It sucks up living labor. Like a vampire, it lives (is undead) only “thanks to the sensuousness of the living” (Neocleous 2003, 683). Instead, Marx suggests in a Romantic fashion that we should live spontaneous and creative lives, and we should choose life rather than the vampire of capitalism. The myth he suggests is very Romantic: first there is the paradise of undisturbed living labor; then there is a Fall when capital rises among the living and sucks the living labor. Amedeo Policante (2011) summarizes what we could call the Fall of labor: “At the beginning it is creativity, living labor. At the beginning, it is the free play of human beings transforming the life-world of nature through the productive power of their minds and bodies. … At the end, it is capital” (abstract). In other words, Marx’s socialism is more Gothic-Romantic than one may expect; it fuels his early Romantic analysis of alienation but also his political economy in Capital. Marx is also Romantic and Gothic when he views the world of capital as a world that is magical: it is “a world where magic, in the form of fetishism, remains an integral part of the totality of the social relations of production” (Policante 2011, 4). Indeed, Marx writes in Capital about “the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor on the basis of commodity production” (Marx 1867, 169). There is fetishism: the products of labor appear alive. Consumerism starts as a romance. But soon we are again on a Gothic-Romantic horror ride. The products of labor appear alive, according to Marx, because they are based

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on the vampiric process of sucking up living labor. “The surplus value extracted by the blood of the workers exists in the factory in the form of commodities” (Policante 2011 11); everything is transformed into surplus value. We enter “the gothic realm of the monstrous” (19). The workers become zombies and become part of a demonic, mechanical monster. Their life is transformed into commodities, and then into capital—indeed the only subject left (17). Dracula travels to London. Marx has turned political economy into a horror story. David McNally further connects Marx’s monster metaphors to tales of the grotesque in folklore, literature, and popular culture. In his book Monsters of the Market (2011), vampires enter the stage again, but also Frankenstein, corpses, rebel monsters, specters, alchemy, the occult, witchcraft, and fetishism. He starts with the economic crisis that started in 2008, which, he said, produced zombies and vampires: “the rich devoured the poor,” and investment banks resembled vampires looking for blood (1). But he also points out that the monstrosity of capitalism is usually invisible and has become normalized: “What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity … is its elusive everydayness” (2). With his monsterology, McNally sets out to reveal these monsters, to study the monstrous forms of everyday life in a capitalist system. Monster stories tell us something about how we experience “capitalist commodification” (2). As we sell our “life-energies” to the market, we imagine the risks to our bodily integrity in the form of zombie and vampire tales (3). These “body-panics,” McNally argues, are thus part of the anxieties we experience under capitalism (4). Again, this interpretation is based on Marx’s Capital, which is read as “a mystery-narrative that seeks out the hidden spaces in which bodies are injured and maimed by capital” (4). Like Neocleous and Policante, McNally highlights Marx’s words about capital—dead labor lives by sucking living labor—and argues that the use of these metaphors is not merely rhetorical. If Marx made capitalism into “a modern horror-story,” McNally argues, he did so because he wanted to depict the actual horrors of capitalism in his time (13). His concept of abstract labor, for instance, can be read as a kind of dismemberment: Marx argued that capitalism detaches “labor and its products from the concrete and specific individuals who perform unique productive acts, treating all work as effectively identical and interchangeable.” Labor thus becomes “disembodied” (14). This mutilation of labor and of the workers happens by means of the machine, a “mechanical monster” (15). Similarly, use value becomes transformed into something ghostly: the world of value is “spectral” (125). McNally writes, “Commodities thus inhabit a world of ‘magic and necromancy’ in which sensuous things (use-values) are mysteriously

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transformed into entities of an altogether different order (values), as if by alchemy. Through these reversals, material goods metamorphose into bearers of something ghostly” (126). How more gothic can socialism get? Marx turns out to be closer to, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, than expected. Indeed, as Lena Wånggren (2013) interprets the TV series, its vampires, werewolves, demons, and other creatures have social and political significance: the series criticizes a system of exploitation in which people are slave-laborers, but next to the normalization McNally writes about, it also shows resistance, fighting back. We are stimulated to fight off “the last demons of capitalism.” We are encouraged to fight “some very real monsters out there,” “some neoliberal vampires” (n.p.). Marx is back, and gothic-romanticism is his companion. But Marx’s Gothic socialism does not stand alone when it comes to nineteenth-century efforts to combine (Gothic) Romanticism and social criticism. Later William Morris, for instance, influenced by Ruskin’s arguments against industrial mass production, also evoked the GothicRomantic spirit against industrial capitalism and consumerism. Of course it may be true that “the Victorian Gothic Revival was only made economically and physically possible by the profits and workforce of industrial capitalism” (Groom 2012, 110); nevertheless, Romanticism—Gothic and otherwise—had always displayed genuine, serious, and strong socialpolitical interests. Moreover, Romanticism helped to shape various forms of socialism. I next comment on the social-political dimension of Romanticism by zooming in on William Morris, which will again involve comments on Ruskin and Marx. Romantic-Socialist Utopia: Morris, Ruskin, and Marx We shall be our own Goths, and at whatever cost break up again the new tyrannous Empire of Capitalism. (William Morris in Commonweal, 1890)

Romanticism is sometimes presented as a mere “aesthetic” or “cultural” movement, but as my overview of German Romanticism has suggested, it always had a political side. Many Romantics were politically active and took part in political action or explored alternative forms of society and community, inspired, for instance, by medieval or ancient Greek culture. Moreover, that political aspect did not necessarily have a conservative nature (let alone that it always and necessarily prefigured Nazism). Although in the first half of the nineteenth century many Romantics turned conservative and many were nationalists—indeed even, like Herder, helped to invent it—–the early Romantics were very sympathetic to the French

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Revolution, if only because revolution means sudden change, an epochal event in our lifetime we can be part of. There was also internationalism (e.g., Byron, see also the many travels and translations), and later romanticism was often entangled with socialism and other progressive currents. Black writes about the early romantics: While German romanticism became unmistakably conservative in the early nineteenth century, this does not justify ignoring the extraordinary vision of radical democracy evident in the early texts. … The early romantics were anything but racist. They believed deeply in cultural authenticity: they extended tolerance and pluralism to all cultures, and are regarded as a major source of contemporary multiculturalism. (Black 2002, 32)

It is this side of romanticism that enables Black to argue for “a romantic, critical imagination built upon a solidarity that projects outward from deep, textured, and extensive relationships with real people, not distance and category,” which he thinks is “the only means by which the articulation of local and global might effectively be imagined” (144). This democratic and open aspect of romanticism, however, is based not on abstract reason but rather on empathy and is rooted in people and places; the global is connected to the local. Whether or not we want to endorse this view, clearly this interpretation has its source in Romanticism; apparently there is also this open and progressive face of Romanticism. And as I have shown, there are romantic and gothic elements in Marx. More generally, as Black has argued, Romanticism is not necessarily “oblivious to production, structure, and social responsibility” (Black 2002, 153). On the one hand, it is true that an economy of abundance and the consumer culture made possible that—at least for some people—“pleasure was increasingly projected onto imaginary experiences, images, and dreams” (154), and this is all the more the case today. (See also Campbell on consumerism and romanticism later in this chapter.) On the other hand, Romanticism also had a critical side. It was critical of the Enlightenment liberalism of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill, and it opposed utilitarianism and “aggressive individualism” (154–155). Later in the nineteenth century, the arts and crafts movement had clear romantic roots and socialist aspirations. I focus on the latter movement in order to further support this claim, in particular on the thinking of William Morris. In response to the industrial revolution with its mass production and the beginnings of consumerist culture, the arts and crafts movement proposed a return to traditional craftsmanship and skills. Its aesthetic was also

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romantic in its medievalism and interest in folk art. Flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century, it was heavily influenced by Ruskin, who had his views on aesthetics but also voiced social criticism; he had already argued against the industrial revolution with its mechanized production and instead proposed independent workers who designed their own things. He introduced what he called “arts and crafts.” For Ruskin, free creation in the form of working with your hands gives pleasure and happiness; mechanization is not good for the soul. He praised “the perfect workmanship of the Renaissance” (Ruskin 1853, 13) and argued that “all great art is the work of the whole living creatures, body and soul” (181). But according to his followers, the problem was not so much the machine itself but rather the factory system of production and the related specialization of labor, which robs workers of their independence and leads to a loss of skill. (Note again that the early Marx, in writings that were hardly less romantic, emphasized the loss of the opportunity of self-realization and discussed other forms of alienation.) While the arts and crafts movement is often seen as a movement that is about decorative arts, it is much more than that: it is also a program of social reform, and one with a clear Romantic-Gothic side to it. This is particularly clear in the thinking of William Morris. Morris was part of the so-called Pre-Raphaelites: artists, architects, and writers in Oxford and Birmingham who turned to medieval art and methods. Like Ruskin, Morris had an interest in Gothic. Like Ruskin, he opposed the gap between intellectual design and manual, physical, and material creation, created by industrial production methods. Instead, he argued, we should learn skills and master techniques ourselves. Designing and making should be integrated. Morris experimented with stone carving, wood carving, embroidery, metalwork, and the making of illustrated manuscripts.7 He also founded a company that made decoration for homes such as wallpaper and stained glass, and he founded a press for which he designed his own typeface. His designs were influenced by medievalism and the Gothic. He also created what we would call today bio-inspired forms: organic, natural forms were his model. And there was enough room for romanticgothic mystery and darkness. All this was very romantic, albeit with one crucial difference: Morris was not only a thinker and a dreamer, but invented his own hands-on version of romanticism, which had a far more material and indeed social side to it than Rousseau’s pre-Romantic musings or than the early Romanticism in Germany around 1800. Morris opposed the (neo-)classist style not only because it was cold, unnatural, and disenchanted; he also opposed it because he thought it was not practical and it was imperialist. His version of romanticism would entail not only a new

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aesthetics but also a social vision and a material-technological vision. It was about writing and art, but also about work, industry, and technology. Morris proposed to add “the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination” (Morris 1890, 201), and this focus on workmanship and a wide range of crafts distinguished him from the German romantics earlier in the century and, indeed, from the Parisian bohemian and fin-de-siècle romantics in his own time, who were equally influenced by the romantic-gothic current but restricted their workmanship to the fine arts. With what we could call his material romanticism, Morris at the same time went beyond romanticism, or at least beyond early romanticism and beyond the mainstream conception of romanticism. (I return to this issue in chapter 4.) Morris was romantic in his medievalism but also in his utopian moments. Utopia has two sides, which were also present in Morris. On the one hand, there is a looking backward to the past, nostalgia for a time that has passed (medieval times, for instance, were reconstructed and recreated) but is seen to hold a treasure of knowledge and truth for our own time. On the other hand is a forward-looking side that hopes for a time in the future when everything will be better. A time and place in the future is constructed; it does not yet exist but is projected as an ideal time and place. Both sides of utopia have in common that they transcend the present. The romantic modern subject is always somewhere else, at a different time. It is homeless and presentless. At first sight it also seems as if the romantics only dream, and remain passive when it comes to action. However, in practice both sides—forward looking and backward looking—were often connected to actionist and practical programs: these could be conservative or even reactionary, artistic, politically or otherwise but also progressive and socialist. In the case of Morris, the last is the more fitting category. Morris was not only a dreamer. He also wanted to reform: he wanted to reform design and society. His recommendation that the craftsman-designer work in a medieval, nonindustrial way was not only based on his reverence for what he imagined to be the great medieval past with great art and architecture; it was also a proposed intervention in the mode of production and therefore in the kind of society he experienced. It was a protest against the misery of industrialcapitalist society. As Clive Wilmer puts it, “Morris’s desire to improve design was inseparable from his desire to improve society” (Wilmer in Morris 1890, xxviii). Although Morris was not altogether opposed to machines as such (see also below), he saw what mechanization did to workers and to society. He wanted to bring back the independence of the worker and the beauty

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that had been lost on the road to industrial progress. For this purpose, he created things but also engaged in politics. He founded the Socialist League and advocated the socialist world revolution. He knew Engels and was a friend of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He wanted a classless society, and in this sense he was a Marxist. Like Marx, he was leading a bourgeois kind of life and—contrary to his longing for the countryside and like many contemporary eco-romantics—he lived in an urban environment: his main home was in London, not rural Oxfordshire. However, unlike Marx, Morris engaged himself in material production and proposed an alternative production method instead of predicting and hoping that industrial society under capitalism would transform itself into something else. And in contrast to Marx, he sympathized more with religion: religion in the form of Christianity (in his early days he even considered becoming a priest) but also the paganism and the values and virtues that he found in Iceland (personal courage, craftsmanship, the unimportance of social distinction or wealth, health, and closeness to nature—see again Wilmer in Morris 1890, xxxi). He was also romantic in his belief that human society develops in a natural, organic way. In 1890 Morris published his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which uses the utopian dual movement of backward looking/forward looking to develop a vision of an alternative society. His romantic socialism (or socialist romanticism) becomes very clear in the novel. Morris dreams of a world before the Fall of industrial revolution. He sketches a future world that is “a picture of fourteenth-century life” as Morris imagines it (47). We find ourselves in an idyllic world without industrialization, private property (122), big cities, money, divorce, and class system. There is no “class-murder” (99). There is “nothing ‘modern’” (61) about people’s appearance and lives. People live in harmony with nature and are not self-centered. Architecture is inspired by “Gothic” and “Saracenic and Byzantine” styles (62). When the main character (the visitor, the traveler coming from the modern industrial past) suggests the idea of being paid for work, this is considered a joke. People take pleasure in building houses, paving streets, and gardening. They experience what presumably the 1840s Marx also wanted: they find pleasure in work; work is “genuinely amusing” (68) instead of dull. All work is pleasurable (122). There is no opposition between work and selfrealization. The pleasure in the work creates beauty, which in turn gives pleasure: “Pleasure begets pleasure” (96). Artists have “sensuous pleasure in the work itself” (123). But in Morris’s utopia, art is not reserved for a specific category of people; in his Romantic utopia, everyone is an artist, and everyone experiences work in this pleasurable way. There is also plenty of

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time to enjoy the rural and natural environment. The main character expresses his wish to “lie under an elm-tree on the borders of a wheat-field, with the bees-humming about me and the corn-crake crying from furrow to furrow” (170). He watches beautiful ladies with “delicate sunburnt cheeks” (175) and girls playing on the grass after bathing (193). Nature is beautiful, and nature includes humans. There is no longer a desire to enslave nature since nature is not seen as something external (200). Because people live in a natural way, they become what today we would describe as “enhanced” humans: the girls are “specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times” (203). Yet this enhancement is not achieved by means of technology; it is accomplished by living and working according to nature. Little could be more romantic (even, and perhaps especially, in its contemporary form) than what Morris describes as “that passionate love of the earth”: a life which connected to the seasons and which is to be enjoyed. Morris opposes this passion for a life close to the earth to “the prevailing feeling among intellectual persons” in this time, which is a distaste for the earth (225). And the book as a whole is a romantic journey of the self. As Carol Silver (1982) has argued, Morris combines Marxism and romance: he is an enchanted wanderer who embarks on a quest for love, fellowship, and a new self. At the same time, the book is a social vision. Morris’s imagination is romantic, but with a strong social side to it. His romanticism and medievalism is not merely escapist; it fuels thinking about how to change his society. At the end of the novel, Morris asks us “to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness” (228). The religious tone fits again the romantic drive. But at the same time, Morris’s romanticism is more practical than romanticism ever was before, and at least as politically engaged, social, and material as the other socialisms of his time. This engaged and progressive side also becomes clear when we zoom in on Morris’s view of machine technology. I already noted that Morris was not opposed to the machine as such, an important point in the light of my discussion about romanticism and technology in the next chapters. In general Morris was far more positive about machines than one may suppose. He thought that machines could release us from the mechanical part of labor. In News from Nowhere (1890) he is even lyrical about their wonders: “It may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience” (126). Here the wonder of romanticism meets the machine (see also the next chapters). But the problem, in Morris’s view, is that machines are used for “the production of measureless quantities of

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worthless makeshifts” (126). This is unacceptable to Morris the romantic and Morris the craftsman, who are disappointed with the ugliness and the low quality and lack of craftsmanship of the products of the industrial world. But as he clarifies in his lecture “How We Live and How We Might Live” (1884), this “amazing machinery” has also significant negative social consequences: it has become our monstrous master. Morris argues that we should not be the slaves of machines and that they should not “injure” the beauty of life—the beauty of products but also the beauty of the people and of the collective life: I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don’t quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. (Morris 1884, n.p.)

Thus, according to Morris, the problem is not machines as such but that we use machines to enslave people. Machines themselves are not the main problem; ownership and social relations are (see also the Luddites later in chapter 4). And if machines themselves are a problem at all, Morris thought, it is because they do not enable us to experience pleasure in work. But this does not lead Morris to reject machines altogether. Instead of proposing to ban machinery, he offers a different social-technological vision: he predicts that at first, there would be “a great development of machinery for really useful purposes,” but when people realize that some things can be done more pleasantly by “using hand-work rather than machinery,” they will “get rid of their machinery” and cease to be “slaves to the monsters which we have created.” In other words, “the elaboration of machinery … will lead to the simplification of life, and so once more to the limitation of machinery” (n.p.). Thus, for Morris, there is no need to fight against the machines, no need to try to destroy them; instead he thinks people will move to handwork because of its intrinsic pleasure and worth. Like other romantics, Morris believed that dreams could change the world. And by designing and making things, he contributed to this in a very material way. Yet in practice, Morris’s beautiful decorations were available only to the rich. He and his friends did not manage to end slavery, and the story he had in mind did not seem to play out in reality. Next to his socialist aspirations, he also had a conservative side: he preferred feudalism over capitalism. Because of his romanticism, Morris was nostalgic and

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perhaps, as Engels said, sentimental. But his romanticism also enabled him to develop a vision not only of a different style in art and design, but also of an alternative society. Both visions deserve a place in the history of romanticism and the history of socialism. The opposition to mechanical existence and the claim that machines should not be our masters will be shared by many philosophers of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see the next chapter). Morris’s “people of the artistic turn of mind”—say, romantic artists—who care about making beautiful things are of course also to be found in later times, and the idea that machines should not bereave us from beauty will also be echoed in later art and in contemporary times, even in places where one might not expect it (see my arguments about information and communication technologies and Steve Jobs later in chapter 4). A more direct heir of Morris’s thinking and that of earlier romantics, however, is to be found in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which shaped the roots and background of romanticism in the early twenty-first century. In the next section, I say more about this, and more generally about romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Romanticism in Contemporary Times: From the Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s to Contemporary Romanticism Romanticism in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Art, and Culture There are many heirs of Romanticism in twentieth-century philosophy and culture. Consider Freud’s influential work around 1900 and the early twentieth century, which was occupied with the unconscious, dreams, sexuality, death, and the uncanny (see also chapter 4), Heidegger’s philosophy (the existentialism of Sein und Zeit [1927] but especially his later work, which I discuss later in this book), and poststructuralism and postmodernism, which are very much indebted to Romanticism in several ways, even if there are also crucial differences. Postmodern currents of thought share not only the romantic rejection of a one-sided emphasis on reason (as Black shows, postmodernism “has again pressed the familiar charges against reason”; 2002, 2); they also share the Romantic epistemology and many romantic-gothic themes, including ghosts. Authors such as Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and maybe Michel Foucault preserve the mysterious, the unknown (e.g., in Lacan, “the real”) against the Enlightenment claim that everything is knowable, at least in principle. Through Nietzsche, Freud, and perhaps Heidegger, they inherited a deep suspicion of Enlightenment reason,

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a nonrepresentationalist epistemology, the view that language actively mediates and constructs reality, an interest in chaos, and a “dark” view of the self that we can never fully know. These authors could use romanticism in this way since, in the words of Black (2002), romanticism is more than an “assortment of poems, essays, and manifestos which, like so many pressed flowers, are beautiful and dead”; instead it is “a vital philosophical tradition” (5) that still influences our vocabulary today, for example, in socalled continental philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies. And via Kant, many philosophers have also inherited the idea that objective knowledge of reality is not possible, that there is a noumenal realm that we cannot know—even as the romantics rejected Kant’s “Cartesian separation of consciousness and reality” (23). Romanticism can also be interpreted as a precursor of hermeneutics. This is how Black summarizes what I have called Romantic epistemology: “Knowledge consists in the disclosure or revelation of what was, prior to utterance, not yet said, the defamiliarization of a hitherto unknown or ineffable reality” (4). Black contrasts this with ideology critique, which “allows little surprise or discovery in its epistemology,” and with poststructuralism, which “writes off the unrepresented as a permanent unknown excluded from the sealed envelope of discourse, a discourse authorized by the relentless machinations of power/knowledge.” According to Black, such ideas contribute to more rather than less disenchantment (67). This brings us to differences between Romanticism and postmodernism/ poststructuralism. The idea that we can know only a linguistic or a simulated reality, for instance, can be seen as a radicalization, if not a caricature or perversion, of Romantic idealism. As Black explains, Romantics thought that language mediates and constructs reality, but at the same time, they believed that we are always embedded and involved in the world. Romanticism was not yet “divorced from the real” (31). Romantics rejected a firm foundation of the truth, but this should not be confused with postmodernism’s rejection of truth in any form (34). It acknowledges the chaos and indeterminacy of reality but retains “confidence that meaningful things might be said of it” (66). Black writes about nihilism: “Nihilism, of course, always threatens. But the romantic solution is to keep meaning moving through space, to write as if one’s very life depended on it—as it does” (143). Therefore, Black argues, for instance, that Lyotard’s rejection of metanarratives would be unacceptable to Romantics. Romantics would not have a problem with fiction, of course, but their view was that instead of rejecting narratives of denying the possibility of knowledge, we should “forever rewrite these stories … develop a better mythology” (29). According to

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Black, Romanticism’s epistemology and ontology is relational: it “supports a continuous process of reinvention through contextual redefinition” (68).8 Whether we endorse Black’s defense of romanticism, it is clear that these contemporary philosophical movements have deep and complex relationships to romanticism as a philosophical tradition, which are not merely historically interesting but relevant today. Romanticism also influenced various twentieth-century art movements such as expressionism, surrealism, and Dada. For instance, the Der Blaue Reiter group of artists at the beginning of the twentieth century believed in art as a way to express spiritual truth and the importance of spontaneity and intuition; they were also interested in medieval art and primitivism. And in the 1920s, surrealists such as André Breton wanted to bring together dream and reality in letting the unconscious express itself. Against bourgeois values, they embraced the irrational. Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto (published in 1924) stressed the importance of letting thought express itself “in the absence of any control exercised by reason.” He argues that boundaries set by reason and logic create “a cage from which release is becoming increasingly difficult”; instead, he proposes to explore the human mind and its “depths,” which “conceal strange forces,” which we should try to capture (n.p.). Referring to Freud, he turns to dreams and welcomes their absurdity, their strangeness, and their spell. And the surrealists wanted revolution: social revolution (they had sympathies with communism and anarchism) and—very romantically—a revolution that breaks down the division between art and life (see also Taylor 1989, 471). Indeed, these romantic art movements remind us of the early nineteenth-century Romantics and, of course, later artists who thought that art is life and that everyone is an artist. Barriers between art and life need to be broken down. For example, Joseph Beuys said that art should not be “confined to the restrained boundaries of the Art world: but rather has to open itself to ‘live processes.’”9 Beuys is also an example of an artist who was influenced by romantic thinking of nature. He wanted to contribute to an ecological avant-garde. In his well-known action “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974), he had himself locked in a cage with a coyote in a New York art gallery, with the aim of—as Gandy (1997) puts it—tapping “into innate and primordial sources of meaning” and to achieving a reconciliation between “human and nonhuman nature” (644)—a “romantic utopianism” (653) and an effort to revive myth (654). His efforts to mystify are also very romantic: the fact that he was covered in a blanket was in line with “the romanticist aura of mystery that surrounded his work” and was not open to rational scrutiny (646).

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Beuys and art movements such as surrealism also remind us of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, with its highly romantic aim of giving power to the imagination and of later New Age spirituality. Let me now say more about this countercultural movement in order to better understand contemporary romanticism and especially how romanticism and technology became entangled. Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s: Rock ’n’ Roll Romanticism and (Anti-)Consumerism To understand contemporary culture and its romantic traits, we need to turn to the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s that reacted against the establishment and the mainstream consumerist Western culture. Hippies experimented with new lifestyles, including new clothes, drugs, music (rock ’n’ roll), and sexual relations. Much of this was made possible by technology. For instance, electric guitars made possible new kinds of music, and a new contraceptive, the pill, created more room for sex before and outside marriage. Propelled by movies, radio, and television, the counterculture spread through the Western world. It happened in San Francisco, New York, and London, but also in Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, and Berlin. Sometimes the goal was revolution (here, the movement merged with the so-called New Left), sometimes communes were set up, or both. There was protest against the Vietnam War and against authorities and violence. There was a belief in the power of art (e.g., music) and imagination. There was an interest in transcendence, expanding consciousness (often with the help of psychedelic drugs such as marijuana and LSD), and Eastern religion and practices (e.g., Buddhism, yoga). The goal was social, cultural, sexual, and spiritual liberation. More generally, there was a growing interest in religion, spirituality, and the occult, but as in early Romanticism, organized religion was rejected in favor of personal spiritual experience. Hippies explored alternative religions such as neopaganism and alternative ways to organize religion, such as communes.10 Many of these people also thought that it was important to seize the historical moment, to respond to the moment of change: social-political change was connected to personal change, political liberation to personal liberation. Safranski writes about “the demand for the historical moment”: “Every generation would like to have an experience of epochal upheaval. The 68ers believed their moment had come. The dynamic of the movement changed those who took part in it. They could feel themselves as new subjects” (2007, 267). It is not difficult to recognize many key romantic features in this movement—and indeed in later outgrowths of it, such as New Age and

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environmentalism: the rejection of the philistine mainstream (nonconformism), the use of art (now mainly music) to achieve personal liberation and societal transformation, the interest in historical events and the connection between personal and political liberation, a return to nature and more traditional ways of living (as many communes attempted), political engagement and interest in revolution and radical change, experimentation with alternative ways of living, and an interest in nonmainstream, nontraditional forms of religion and spirituality, which link the individual to the larger whole. The new movement seems only superficially different from the neoromantic bohemians (the “life-reformers and sun-worshippers” around 1900; 267) and early romantics of the nineteenth century. Even if many people who were part of the movement denied their affiliation to romanticism and even if there was also an Enlightenment side to it (consider the links with the New Left, for instance), it is clear that there was at least a kind of “Romanticism light”—Safranski speaks of “a vulgar Rousseauism” (265)—which might not have shared all the traits and metaphysical commitments of historical Romanticism but was certainly deeply influenced by it. The hippie was a neoromantic figure pur sang. The May ’68 slogan, “Power to the Imagination!” (267) is telling: it is hard to think of a more romantic phrase. It seems that the countercultural movement was proof of the vitality of the romantic tradition and gave it new impetus. Of course, there were superficial differences. The countercultural movement rejected high culture, including Romantic high culture such as Romantic literature, and instead embraced popular culture, mainly rock music. But it shared with historic Romanticism the belief that art can liberate us, can change everything. The imagination was to change the world. Note also that the movement invited, and still invites, the typical antiromantic charge of escapism. Safranski, for instance, interprets the fact that “people used popular music to celebrate their Dionysian Saturnalia” as escapism (268). In any case, here we have another parallel with nineteenthcentury romanticism: an interest in the Dionysian. Rationality is supplemented by, and sometimes replaced with, feeling. There is room for ecstasy, madness, the irrational. We Are Still Romantics Living in the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are all children of these countercultural movements and inherit its romantic values. As in past decades, the counterculture has been largely sucked up by the mainstream and has been shamelessly commercialized and commodified as it was

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absorbed by consumerism; it may have lost its “alternative” soul but not its romantic heart. It is not that easy to dispel the ghosts of Romanticism. Safranski rightly says, “Romanticism as an epoch has passed away, but the Romantic as an attitude of mind remains” (2007, 269). Consider, for instance, the contemporary figure of the hipster, which could be defined as a more philistine and bourgeois form of the hippie and, earlier, the romantic Bohemian: hippies who go to hair stylists, want regular employment, and do not resist consumerism, and so on, but still express sympathy with the earlier countercultural romantic values in the way they live, eat, dress, and listen to music, for example. And as I observed previously, today there are music subcultures that are directly or indirectly heirs of nineteenth-century Gothic culture. Moreover, the Internet is hospitable to all the dreams and nightmares of the romantics. It seems to provide opportunities for escapism (e.g., by means of gaming) but also for new global and local communities. Furthermore, in art, romanticism has since long become the mainstream: the focus is more than ever before on the autonomous artist, on the imagination, and especially on the person and individual genius of the artist. Our attitudes toward the environment are still very romantic: it is part of our “vulgar Rousseauism” that we want to be close to nature, return to nature, be authentic, be natural (see also Coeckelbergh 2015a). And there are still many romantic responses to technology: rejection and fear of contemporary technology (sometimes combined with a longing for a romanticized past) but also fascination. Consider, for instance, the fear of, and fascination with, robots, which are seen as either taking over the world or as friendly and sexy companions. Even contemporary consumerism, which the counterculture opposed so much, is closer to Romanticism than usually assumed. In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) sociologist Colin Campbell has argued that Romanticism has even facilitated the rise of modern consumerism. To show this, he starts with identifying a form of modern, self-illusory hedonism that focuses on emotion (something “inner”) rather than sensory experiences (related to the outside world) and presents individuals with the possibility of controlling their experience and pleasure. This happens through the imagination: the modern hedonist is a “dream artist” (78) who creates and enjoys daydreams. Modern consumption, according to Campbell, is not about the actual use of products but about “imaginative pleasure-seeking to which the product image lends itself” (89). The product does not so much give but promise modern hedonists new experiences that they have not yet encountered in reality. The “new” product affords dream pleasure. The product is “material for illusory enjoyment” (92). Campbell

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then turns from economic and psychological theory to the cultural and sociological domain, where he tries to grasp the ethic that underpins modern consumerism. He argues that Weber’s picture of Protestantism and Puritanism as being only about rationality and industry was one-sided. Puritanism also had emotional aspects (e.g., melancholy and horror of death), and next to the rationalist ethic, there was also a Puritanist strand that developed into sentimentalism, a precursor of Romanticism that emphasized feeling. Romanticism, finally, with its focus on passions, imagination, and art, and its idealism, which creates a divide between an ideal world of beauty and a world of ugly appearances, is not really opposed to consumerism but has contributed—and continues to contribute—to it. It does so with its view that pleasure is a means to reach higher moral purposes (with pleasure ranked above comfort), its philosophy of selfexpression, and its continuous longing for a different experiences. Romanticism helped to create “the restless longing, that dissatisfaction with experience and yearning for the dream, which underpins the spirit of consumerism” (200). Romanticism thus supports the self-illusory hedonism that underlies modern consumerism. It has taught us daydreaming and fantasizing, manipulation of illusions, indeed the pleasure of illusion. Gratification is not important; what matters is “to seize opportunities to create desire” (222). Campbell writes: Romanticism provided that philosophy of “recreation” necessary for a dynamic consumerism: a philosophy which legitimates the search for pleasure as good in itself and not merely of value because it restores the individual to an optimum efficiency. … At the same time, Romanticism has ensured the widespread basic taste for novelty, together with the supply of “original” products, necessary for the modern fashion pattern to operate. … In all these ways, Romanticism has served to provide ethical support for that restless and continuous pattern of consumption which so distinguishes the behaviour of modern man. (Campbell 1987, 201)

Campbell notes that Bohemianism (e.g., the hippie Bohemian movements of the 1960s) went together with “periods of creative consumer boom” (206). Romantic ideals and consumerist behavior were not mutually exclusive but instead went hand in hand. Both supported and support one another. (Interestingly, Campbell even argues that the relation goes in two directions: consumerism may generate idealism [216].) Of course Romantics never intended this connection with modern consumerism. For instance, pleasure was seen as a means to a higher moral and spiritual end, not as an end in itself. It is therefore ironic, Campbell argues, that although the first Romantics were certainly opposed to

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utilitarianism and commerce, their philosophy has stimulated and continues to stimulate consumerist daydreaming and its “the restless pursuit of goods and services” (209). This is especially so when romanticism is (ab)used merely for materialistic and utilitarian purposes: when “materialistic and utilitarian beliefs prevail, then it seems only too likely that romantic poems, novels, and music, will be employed as little more than the raw material for a leisure and recreation industry” (216). But he suggests that the symbiosis of both can and has been culturally fruitful—or at least the symbiosis enables the continuation of industrial and consumerist society. He also argues that Puritan and romantic elements live together in modern society, in the modern individual, and in the bourgeois family. Inheritors of Puritanism in North America such as Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville were romantically anti-utilitarian. And the middle-class individual and family have a “Puritan” and romantic side. Both sides are opposed in theory, but in practice, Campbell argues, there is “sociological compatibility” (223). One can be a romantic in one’s youth and a bourgeois later in life. Furthermore, there is also a gender aspect to this. Campbell suggests that usually women are more associated with a romantic role, whereas men are supposed to be more “Puritan.” Men who become romantic adolescents (e.g., Romantic students) thus adopt the romantic idealism from their mothers, against the “puritanism” of their fathers (225). At the level of society and culture, these “twin cultures ensure the continued performance of those contrasted but interdependent forms of behavior essential to the perpetuation of industrial societies, matching consumption with production, play with work” (227). Modernity is about the “iron cage” (Weber—see the next chapter), but also about “a castle of romantic dreams” (227). However, we are seldom aware of our romanticism: it is a kind of horizon that is not itself visible or glasses that disappear from view once we wear them. We do not know that we live in the romantic castle. Yet romanticism conditions our thinking and practice. For instance, we are indeed highly romantic consumers, and advertisement takes advantage of this. The relation between consumerism and romanticism is a utterly interesting topic in itself. In the next chapters I do not focus on consumerism as such, but instead study the ambiguous modern-romantic relation to technology. First, I discuss some nineteenth-century and twentieth-century objections to modern technology (including those of Weber and Heidegger) and argue that these arguments have a clear romantic dimension: not so much because they are nostalgic—this is a superficial conception of romanticism—but because they are fueled by the elements identified in this

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chapter: a romantic aesthetic but also an interest in myth and religion, a romantic epistemology, and a typically romantic ambiguous attitude toward machines. Then I show that romanticism is not necessarily opposed to technology. In the past, Romantics and scientists engaged in surprising alliances and liaisons. In order to (re)construct some of that romance, I elaborate a number of elements briefly touched on in this chapter, such as Romantic science and the scientific-romantic imagination at work in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, but also add material showing a clear sense in which, on the one hand, science and technology and, on the other hand, romanticism have been entangled and intertwined rather than opposed, and are thus much closer related than one might expect.

3  Romanticism against the Machine?

Romanticism and technology are usually assumed to be incompatible. Romanticism is associated with feeling, imagination, and nostalgia. It is seen as backward looking and conservative. It is also seen as religious. It is supposed to be dreamy and otherworldly. It is about subjects, spirits, and ghosts. It is about magic. Technology, by contrast, is associated with objectivity, rationality, and an orientation toward the future. It is seen as nonreligious or even antireligious. It is seen as practical and realistic, quite the opposite of dreamy. It is concerned with this world—if the concept of another world is taken to make sense at all. Technology is about objects, materiality, and machines. Interestingly, this assumption is found not only among those who warn against the dangers of modern technology but also among those who embrace contemporary technology and seek to change the world by means of new technology. This chapter shows how the assumption about the incompatibility of romanticism and technology, a deeply modern-romantic one and one that I criticize in the next chapters, is also present in philosophy of technology: in the writings of critics of modern technology such as Weber and Heidegger, but also in the contemporary, more empirically oriented philosophy of technology, which has turned away from the pessimism and romanticism of these critics but has uncritically borrowed the same dichotomy. At the same time, this chapter also shows that Weber and Heidegger had much more nuanced views about technology than may be assumed, views that do not divorce technology from romantic aspirations and religion, for example, but incorporate these in their histories and understandings of modern society and culture. Furthermore, I will argue that Walter Benjamin’s criticism of modern art expressed the technologyromanticism opposition but can easily be criticized as being unappreciative of the magic and aura of new media such as film. The chapter then questions the antiromantic stance in contemporary philosophy of technology

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and further explores the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology in an American context by commenting on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and the twentieth-century film Koyaanisqatsi. It turns out that there are more machines and cyborgs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century romantic thinking about technology than expected. Weber, Heidegger, and Benjamin on Modern Technology Weber on Disenchantment in Modern Society Classic thinking about technology tends to be very critical of, if not opposed to, modern technology and society. In the German philosophical tradition, this criticism is directly rooted in romanticism. Today we inherit the opposition between science/technology/disenchantment and romanticism/ religion/enchantment from Max Weber, who in turn borrowed it from the Romantic philosopher Schiller—or so it has been suggested by Jaspers and many other authors after him. It is plausible that, as Angus (1983) has argued, Weber appropriated Schiller’s contrast between the unity of ancient Greek life and modern fragmentation, a problem that Romantic art and aesthetics sought to overcome. In his Letter VI, published in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Schiller indeed wrote that whereas in ancient Greece there was simplicity and not yet a split between “the senses and the mind” (38), understanding became divided in modernity, and today “the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart might have warmed itself” (39); the “wholeness in our nature” is destroyed (45). And in his poem “The Gods of Greece” (1901), he contrasted a lost happy world of gods, mysterious rites, shrines, spirit, nymphs, love, and heroes with a modern world in which only traces of that lost world are left; only the shadow of the godhead remains (72–76). This so-called flight of the gods is of course a classic Romantic theme: the gods have left us (see also the next section on Heidegger, who was inspired by another Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin). But Weber did not literally quote Schiller. Schiller wrote about a nature without gods, a de-divinized nature (Entgötterung). In Weber, Schiller’s world without gods becomes a world without magic, without enchantment (Entzauberung). The spell of the older, enchanted world is gone. Let us look in more detail at Weber’s claims about disenchantment and its relation to science and technology. In “Science as a Vocation” (1919), Weber does not argue that science and religion are necessarily opposed. On the contrary, he attends the reader to the fact that Protestant and Puritan scientists wanted “to show the path to

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God” and that in early modern times, one hoped “to come upon the traces of what He planned for the world.” But then he argues that “today,” in modern times, no one believes this. We no longer see meaning in the universe. Today science is no longer seen as a way to God but is “irreligious” (142). He contrasts this science with the craving for religious experience and the interest in “the spheres of the irrational,” which he calls “romantic irrationalism” (143). He also contrasts serious science with “the naïve optimism in which science—that is, the technique of mastering life which rests upon science—has been celebrated as the way to happiness” (143). Thus, on the one hand, there is rational science; on the other hand, there is religious-romantic craving and naive optimism: all kinds of beliefs that he thinks have no place in rational science. Science, according to Weber, cannot give an answer to our questions about the meaning of life and our questions about what we shall do and how we shall live. Yet this does not mean, according to Weber, that science is entirely value free or meaning free. It makes presuppositions. For instance, modern medicine presupposes that it has the task of maintaining life and diminishing suffering. It then gives us “a practical technology which is highly developed scientifically” to “master life technically” (144). But science and technology themselves, Weber argues, do not answer the question of whether it makes sense to do so. Weber thus separates means (technology, science) and end (e.g., eliminate suffering), a typical instrumentalist position on technology that contemporary philosophy of technology criticizes: technologies are never mere means but also shape our ends. What concerns me here, however, is the repeated and well-known claim Weber made that modern science and religion, and therefore also technology and romanticism, are incompatible. As I noted, he thinks they are not incompatible in principle—in earlier times they were—but in modern times, there is a problem, which he famously conceptualizes as “disenchantment”: in our times there are “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, … the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155). Weber thinks that, ironically, this disenchantment is the result of religion, or at least one kind of religion: Protestantism, and in particular Puritanism, which has encouraged secular vocations. This secularization was then combined with scientific and technical rationalization and control—also the unintended consequence of Puritan ethics, which emphasizes self-control and asceticism. The result is industrial capitalism, rational calculation, and bureaucratic administration. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber speaks of what is often translated as an iron cage—or, more accurately, housing, shell, or perhaps a heavy

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and fixed exoskeleton (the metaphor is supposed to contrast with cloak, which is “light” and removable). And here we meet technology: human beings become cogs in the machine. Weber writes that the modern economic order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determines the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism. … Perhaps it will so determine until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber 1905, 123)

For the Puritans, the care for external goods and the worldliness of everyday life was meant to be only a means, but now it becomes heavier: it becomes a fate, a calling that is no longer up to choice. The machine plays a role in the increasing rationalization and depersonalization of life. The housing or exoskeleton, like the cloak, protects, but at the same time, it also becomes a kind of cage since it can no longer be thrown off. Technology, in this view, is a key part of the increasing disenchantment, rationalization, and dehumanization of life. Gone is the “spontaneous enjoyment of life” (18), which was, after all, “the end of this asceticism” (73). Romanticism, then, appears here as the opposite of disenchantment, the opposite of asceticism, the opposite of the machine, and the opposite of the religions that have secularized the Western world, have taken away possibilities for spontaneous enjoyment, and have contributed to our becoming cogs in the machine. Technology, in the form of the machine, is part of a capitalism that has caged us in our everyday lives and has delivered us to impersonal bureaucracy and mechanical industrial production. This way of looking at modernity is itself very romantic. I do not mean that Weber regretted the loss of magic—maybe he did, maybe not—but I want to make a more fundamental point: Romanticism has given us the conceptual tools to create a gap between science and religion, between technology and spontaneity, between machines and humanity. And this is precisely what Weber does in his texts. In this sense, Weber is highly romantic. At the same time, by connecting religious history with secularization and industrialization (magic and technology may not go well together, but Protestant religion and technology do), Weber hints at a far more ambiguous conception of the relation between religion and technology, and specifically between romanticism and technology. To use a romantic-gothic metaphor, there are more unexplored rooms and corridors in the Romantic castle. This deserves further exploration. However,

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let me first give an example of another famous romantic criticism of modern technology. Heidegger on Modern Technology Martin Heidegger’s later writings are quite hermetic, unless one reads him as a romantic thinker. This is so not only because he takes up the Romantic theme of the flight of the gods, especially through the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and seems to be nostalgic about the ancient past (in the German tradition, often the ancient Greek past). Heidegger also expresses what we could call a “romantic epistemology.” In this section I interpret Heidegger’s view of technology in the light of Romanticism and discuss his view of (modern) technology. Heidegger’s world is a Romantic one: the modern world that has been abandoned by the ancient gods. But here, Hölderlin, not Schiller, is the source of inspiration. The poet Hölderlin was an important figure in German Romanticism and a seminarian with Hegel and Schelling in Tübingen. He was a supporter of the French Revolution but also an admirer of ancient Greek culture, with a keen interest—long before Nietzsche—in the Dionysian mysteries and of course in the Greek gods. Heidegger knew these poems and commented on them, and they play a crucial role in his later work. When Heidegger thinks about art, he thinks, as do other Romantic thinkers, mainly about poetry. But Hölderlin’s influence goes beyond that: it also touches his epistemology and his view of technology. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977), Heidegger sets out to define the essence of technology. He argues against its instrumental definition. Technology is not merely a means to an end (4); it is also more than that—a particular way of thinking and perceiving. In Heidegger’s Romantic, nearly Gothic epistemology, this becomes a particular way in which “something concealed comes into unconcealment,” a particular way of “revealing” (das Entbergen) (11). Technology thus has a phenomenological-hermeneutical function. It makes us see the world in a different way, or rather, it makes the world appear in a specific way. Heidegger writes, “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” (12). This means that technology reveals the world in a specific way (as opposed to other ways of revealing such as poetry), and—interpreted in a way that is closer to contemporary phenomenology of technology—implies that different kinds of technologies may reveal the world in a different way. Heidegger distinguishes between “the techniques of the handcraftsman” and “modern machine-powered technology” (13), which he calls “the disturbing thing” and (later) “the danger.” Modern technology is also a revealing

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(14) but a different one. To explain this, Heidegger gives examples from the domain of energy. For example, modern technology such as a hydroelectric power plant “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored,” whereas the sails of the windmill “are left entirely to the wind’s blowing” (14). In other words, modern technology challenges nature and the land, it forces it to give its “resources.” Nature is turned into stock. The modern ways of revealing are “unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about” (16). But Heidegger points out that there are different ways of revealing, such as the revealing accomplished by Hölderlin’s hymn about the Rhine. Whereas modern technology orders about everything it can get hold of and turns everything into a “standing-reserve” (17), the poet and the craftsman have different ways of revealing. However, Heidegger suggests that we cannot simply choose between modes of revealing: “man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any time the real shows itself or withdraws” (18). The thinker responds only to “what addressed itself to him” (18). In this sense modern technology is “not merely human doing” (19). What Heidegger calls the “Enframing” of modern technology “holds sway” (20) and shows itself to us in and through technology. There is a “destining” (24). Heidegger thus uses and assumes a Romantic epistemology in which things show themselves and hide again, are revealed and then again concealed. This is true for technology and for the gods. The mystery conceals itself, but sometimes truth comes to light, goes into the open, shows itself (25). And, Heidegger writes in true Gothic fashion, there is a danger. Again the danger may be concealed or unconcealed. Modern technology is the danger. But the problem with modern technology “does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology” (28) but has to do with the particular way of revealing that modern technology renders possible. By revealing everything as standing reserve, it closes us off from “a more original revealing” (28), one that poets such as Hölderlin were sensitive to. It is a revealing that does not “challenge forth,” does not try to master technology (32), which would keep us locked up in the technological way of thinking. It is a revealing that does not result from our will to master, but a revealing that “comes to pass” (33). There is a mystery, an extreme danger, and we are not in control. Only a higher power can save us. In the meantime, Heidegger suggests, we can look to the ancient Greek ways of bringing forth (techne) and read the (Romantic) poets. And we must question. But as a true Romantic, Heidegger ends his essay with the thought that “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the

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more mysterious the essence of art becomes” (35). In contrast to rationalist philosophical argument, his romantic questioning leads to more, not less, mystery. Heidegger’s Romantic-Gothic epistemology (and thus not merely his romanticism in the form of nostalgia for Greek art and culture) becomes even more apparent in his essay “The Turning” (in Heidegger 1977). Here, in an environment that could be a Gothic castle, we find truth in an “entrapping” (36) and “the danger” remains “veiled and disguised” (37). A destining is “waiting” (37), not yet concealed. Like the gods of ancient times, truth may show itself or not, the danger may present itself or not, Being may suddenly show up or not. When the danger goes, this also happens suddenly. Heidegger uses the metaphor of lightning: “The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. … This sudden self-lightning is the lightning-flash. … Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in” (44). Like gods, ghosts, and other supernatural entities, truth, Being, “the danger,” the saving, may suddenly appear or disappear, for instance, in a lighting flash. But Heidegger stresses that even when there is a flashing glance, it “simultaneously keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin as the unlighted” (45). Thus, darkness always remains. And we are never in control; we also do not only see, yet at the same time we are seen: we are “struck … by the flashing of Being” and we “are caught sight of” (47). In his earlier work, Heidegger had come remarkably close to what we may call the romantic-gothic phenomenology of the fear and risk. In Being and Time (1927) he sets out to “determine phenomenally what is fearsome in its fearsome character” (132). He claims that “what is feared has the character of being threatening,” which he then analyzes in terms of harmfulness that is approaching and that may get us or not: As something threatening, what is harmful is not yet near enough to be dealt with, but it is coming near. As it approaches, harmfulness radiates and thus has the character of threatening. … [W]hat is harmful is threatening, it can get us, and yet perhaps not. … This means that what is harmful, approaching near, bears the revealed possibility of not happening and passing us by. This does not lessen or extinguish fearing, but enhances it. (Heidegger 1927, 132)

Like the nineteenth-century Romantics and Goths, Heidegger also speaks of the “horror” and the “terror”: when “it” (what threatens) is unfamiliar, fear becomes horror, and when it is suddenly there, fear becomes alarm and terror (133). Dasein as being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s technical terms for what we can here translate as human existence) is said to be “fearful”

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(133–134). Thus, here we have already the epistemological and psychological environment of the Romantic-Gothic castle, in which danger may suddenly present itself (or not), in which things are radiating danger, in which the danger awaits us. The fear, the horror, and the terror presuppose concealment and the possibility of unconcealment, the possibility of a lighting flash that shows us the danger, perhaps also the truth. To conclude, like other modern and Romantic thinkers Heidegger opposes “techno-logical, calculating representation” to different, ancient ways of thinking, perceiving, and making. But his Romanticism should not be reduced to his nostalgia concerning ancient Greece and the Romantic poets, who, Heidegger suggests, still understood the ancients. In this later writings Heidegger also uncovers, unconceals a different, romantic epistemology (and therefore also a romantic theology). As a romantic epistemologist, his main point is that we cannot command the truth and cannot order in “the highest mystery of Being” (49). Truth, the divine, and so on may come to pass, show themselves. This is not up to us. He writes: “Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men. … Whether or not God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being” (49). As shown, he same romantic epistemology is already at work in his phenomenology of fear and risk in Being and Time (1927): what threatens us may get us—or it may pass by. It may be unfamiliar, and it may suddenly appear. Moreover, while it is true that in both Heidegger and Weber, there is a tension between technology and romanticism, both also have a more nuanced view than is usually supposed by contemporary philosophers of technology. Weber clearly makes links between religious history and the history of modern society and the machine, and in Heidegger, modern technology is much more than instrumentality or merely the opposite of everything romantics desire. Technology is itself a way of revealing and is part of a history of Being that we cannot and should not try to master. Both thinkers incorporate technology in their romantic narratives. Technology is the antiromantic, but at the same time it is also part of the romance of modernity, including modern thinking. Benjamin on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction A criticism of modern technology and media that expresses a clearer technology-romanticism opposition can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, although there is also some ambiguity. Generally Benjamin rejected early Romanticism. Yet his thinking also shows “a fundamental affinity” to it (Gasché 2002, 52). For instance, he is known to have been attracted to

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mysticism and to Novalis’s attempt to go beyond the subject-object dichotomy, and he also appreciated the progressive elements in early Romanticism (Allert 2004, 274). In his doctoral dissertation on the topic, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” successfully defended in 1919, he is sometimes sympathetic, but also hostile, to Romanticism: he accused the Romantics of “obscurity, of failing to clearly differentiate between their concepts, of having become embroiled in unresolvable contradictions” (Gasché 2002, 52). So how romantic is Benjamin? And to focus on what interests us here, What would be his view on the relation between romanticism and technology? In this section, I focus on Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). I argue that it is very romantic with its focus on authenticity, aura, cult, and spirituality, but that in this text, technology does not always stand in opposition to romanticism. Benjamin claims that there is a loss of authenticity and “aura” because of the mechanical reproduction of art—for example, in film production. The object is detached from “the domain of tradition” (215), whereas the historical object still had an aura. With “aura,” Benjamin refers to the “cult value” of the work of art, which can be understood in terms of its uniqueness and “unapproachability” (236). He writes: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (216). There is distance: the cult image always remains distant. Its beauty is transcendent. Moreover, art objects have “ritual power” (237): “We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind” (217). This “ritualistic basis” (217) of the work of art meant that it was distant and usually hidden: “The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did not expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits” (218). Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priests in the cella;1 certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round. Yet this view of the work of art changes in modernity. Today we no longer talk about its cult value; we now use the concept of authenticity instead (237). The cult value of the work of art is secularized. Its aura is destroyed (217). It is no longer an “ominous idol” and no longer a cult object. Today there is a loss of the spiritual. Benjamin quotes Hegel saying that the “spirit” of a painting “speaks to man through its beauty,” but today we are “beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine” (238). Film has lost the

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aura. The last technology that had an aura was early photography: “For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty” (219). Film, however, is no longer an “instrument of magic” (219) and lacks ritual value. Benjamin wanted “a dream more poetical and more real at the same time!” (221), but for him, the poetry is gone when the film audience takes the camera’s point of view (22) and when actors become shadows on the screen: their bodies lose their “corporeality” as they are “deprived of reality, life” and become “a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence” (223). For Benjamin, a person’s aura is “tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it” (223). In film there are only effects, no real acting, which would require the presence of the “whole living person” (223). Benjamin also makes an interesting comparison between a surgeon and a magician: whereas the surgeon “penetrates into the patient’s body,” the magician keeps a distance by “laying on the hands” rather than cutting into the patient’s body. For Benjamin, the camera(man) penetrates deeply into reality with his “mechanical equipment” (227). There is no longer distance and time for contemplation. Film changes the image all the time. Thoughts are replaced by movie images since there is constant change (231). Quality is replaced by quantity. Concentration is replaced by distraction (232–233). The public is “absent-minded” (234). In this epilogue, Benjamin seems to be closer to the romantic interest in the sublime and the gothic interest in the grotesque and death: he romances war when he connects beauty to technological warfare. Mentioning “gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks,” he says that war is beautiful: War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. … Poets and artists of Futurism! (Benjamin 1936, 235)

Yet Benjamin also sees the horror of war and the alienation it produces. He argues that society is not mature enough to “incorporate” technology; the discrepancy between the “tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production” leads to imperialism and horrible war, which abolishes the aura. In the end, there is only self-alienation: we experience our own destruction “as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (235). Thus, on the one hand, Benjamin’s description of war

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seems to suggest that war has romantic-aesthetic value and can even give “aesthetic pleasure”; on the other hand, he thinks that warfare abolishes the aura and that the aesthetic pleasure is due to self-alienation. Benjamin’s narrative shows that even for well-known twentieth-century critics of modern technology, not all technology is necessarily opposed to romanticism. According to Benjamin, the technology of war has romantic features—there is a Futurist aesthetics of war—and early photography was still romantic. However, his view can easily be criticized for being too nostalgic: it is not clear why his romanticism does not cross over to film. In the twentieth century, film had more than enough magic in it to attract large crowds of romantic viewers. Benjamin does not see the wonder in the eyes of the film spectators. He does not see the film’s ghosts and spirits “flickering an instant on the screen.” And indeed he does not see how he turns his criticism of film into an aesthetics of the dead, focused on the contrast between the (un)dead actor on the screen versus the living person. More generally, we must question his secularization narrative. Modernity has not been (fully) secularized. Even, and perhaps especially, contemporary technologies and media are great enchantment machines. Conservative romantics will always respond that the new technology (today, digital technologies and media) has lost the aura. However, as I argue next, romanticism should not be confused with such nostalgia, melancholy, or conservatism. In the next chapters I further support the view that contemporary technology and romanticism are entangled by responding to the recent technoromanticism literature and by offering my own analysis and interpretation of contemporary technology and media in terms of romanticism. Today there are new forms of magic and new rituals. Contemporary Philosophy of Technology: Antiromantic and   (Therefore) Romantic Contemporary philosophy of technology is often surprisingly silent about romanticism. When romanticism is mentioned at all, it is assumed to be something that needs to be rejected immediately, without further analysis, and it is reduced to nostalgia and preference of older technologies, as in Don Ihde’s (1993, 106–107) and Peter-Paul Verbeek’s (2005, 68) responses to Heidegger’s view of modern technology, Smits’s association of romanticism with shallowness and “a simpleminded repudiation of technology” (Smits in Achterhuis 1999, 149), or Turkle’s (1996) view, which describes the resistance to seeing computers in human terms as “romantic” (24–25). In other words, romanticism is equated with a nostalgic and conservative,

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if not reactionary, response to new technologies. This use of the term romanticism is common and understandable, but does little justice to its many meanings; as I have already suggested, romanticism is much richer as a tradition of thinking, and as I also show in the next chapters, its relation to technology is far more ambiguous. An exception is Carl Mitcham, who in his epilogue to his seminal work Thinking through Technology (1994), recognizes and takes seriously romanticism as one way of “being-with technology” (289–299). He takes it seriously since he sees Romanticism not only as a reaction to and criticism of modern scientific rationality, a view of nature as “one of process and change” (295), and a defense of the imagination in order to overcome the limitations of reason (this is nothing new). He also sees it as a questioning of technology, even the first questioning of modern technology: What is seldom appreciated is the extent to which romanticism can also be interpreted as a questioning—in fact, the first self-conscious questioning—of modern technology. (Mitcham 1994, 290)

Mitcham thereby assigns to Romanticism a place, even a crucial place, in the history of philosophy of technology. He then refers to Wordsworth, Rousseau, Blake, Dickens, and others in order to show the “uneasiness” about technology displayed by romanticism. For instance, he says that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “presents a love-hate relationship with technology” (294). Earlier in the book, he also mentions Rousseau’s Discourse on the Science and Arts (see chapter 2), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other romantic responses to technology. He also refers to Heidegger’s idea that modern science and technology “does not know itself”; it does not know its own limits (54). Mitcham thus not only assigns an important place to Romanticism in the history of philosophy of technology; he also explicitly recognizes some of the ambiguity of romanticism’s relation to technology; this is rather exceptional in contemporary philosophy of technology, which usually assumes a one-sided view of the matter. However, with what nineteenth-century Romantics would call a “philistine” gesture, he then rejects romanticism because of its presumed lack of “practical efficacy” and failure “to take hold as a truly viable way of life” (299). Partly this response can be understood as the view of someone who largely embraces what Mitcham himself calls an “engineering” philosophy of technology (19) as opposed to a “humanities” philosophy of technology. Mitcham suggests that the Romantic reaction to modern technology is part of a “humanities” philosophy of technology, which “too often seems to be a philosophy of antitechnology and to close itself off in

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romantic subjectivity from technological aspects of the human”; seen from an “engineering” philosophy of technology point of view, this kind of philosophy is rejected for being “too speculative or based on too narrow if not unempirical foundations” (65). As indicated previously, many philosophers of technology today seem to share this view or, rather, assume it. Usually contemporary philosophy of technology, eager to shed the presumed pessimism of earlier technology critics, defines itself—sometimes explicitly but more often inexplicitly—as antiromantic. Insofar as it wants to be a forward-looking, empirically oriented philosophy of technology and a philosophy of artifacts and things, and turns away from the old, backward-looking thinking of Weber, Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Karl Jaspers, and others, contemporary philosophy of technology is indeed antiromantic. Insofar as it embraces an “engineering philosophy of technology” (19), its language and thinking come closer to the language and thinking of technology, closer to its artifacts, things, machines, and systems. Latour, Wiebe Bijker, and many others leave the study room of the humanities professor and enter the lab of the scientists and the workshop of the engineer. Their focus is, in the first instance at least, on things, not humans. The orientation is pro-technology rather than antitechnology, optimistic instead of pessimistic—at least this is the accusation addressed by the “old,” romantic philosophers of technology. This view of romanticism implies that romanticism and technology are seen as necessarily opposed. Whether romanticism is reduced to nostalgia (or used as a kind of insult) or used as a kind of negative background against which one defines one’s approach, romanticism in both cases is assumed to be incompatible with an appreciation of contemporary technology. Yet it is precisely in this antiromantic moment that contemporary philosophy of technology remains highly romantic, since the oppositions it presupposes are inherited from the very romantic tradition it rejects. In its antiromanticism, it remains within the order of romantic thinking. But it is a one-sided romanticism: it eclipses meanings of technology (and indeed of romanticism) that do not oppose technology to romanticism. It is silent about the many ways technology and romanticism have flirted with one another. Similar observations could be made about (more) analytic philosophy of technology and about contemporary critical theory of technology, for instance, Marxian analysis of contemporary ICTs and the Habermasian discourse about responsible innovation. These thinkers usually understand themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment: they believe in clarity as opposed to romantic darkness and shadows, rationality as opposed to emotion,

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analysis as opposed to narrative, evidence as opposed to intuition, down to earth and practical rather than dreamy, contributing to making things work versus being on the sideline, dealing with stakeholders, power, interests, political economy versus utopian thinking, and so on. These oppositions may not be originally part of the Romantic tradition and may not offer a fair representation of romanticism, but the point is that they are part of the romantic discourse and order of thinking, which includes antiromanticism and sees technology and romanticism as incompatible. If today’s thinking about technology such as Heidegger’s is branded romantic and opposed to contemporary philosophy of technology, which aims to take seriously technology as technology, then this view is not mistaken when it comes to calling Heidegger and others romantic,” although there are much less superficial reasons for this than mere nostalgia; clearly antiromanticism often results in an impoverished, distorted, or caricatured view of romanticism (and vice versa, of course). What is more problematic for the purpose of understanding technology, however, is the assumption of an unbridgeable gap between romanticism and technology, since this closes off a space for thinking about romanticism and technology, let alone that it leaves room for apprehending what I later in this book call romantic technologies. Note, finally, that even if contemporary philosophy of technology may, explicitly or not, understand itself as antiromantic, it nevertheless contains quasi-romantic elements. Consider, for instance, its sympathies to the idea that designing and using artifacts can and should be used to shape one’s subjectivity and one’s life (this might be presupposing the romantic idea that living is an art and that we should all become artists) and that design (art) can and should change society—an idea inherited from twentiethcentury countercultural romanticism, now often mixed with consumerism. I will return to more contemporary technology in the next chapters when I discuss links between information and communication technologies and romanticism. But I first further explore the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology in an American context by commenting on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Romantic Pastoralism versus   Modern Technology? Pastoralism and Technology: In Search of Balance The romantic is often connected to pastoralism. In his influential book, The Machine in Garden (1964), Leo Marx discusses the idea that technology

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disrupts pastoral life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.2 The pastoral American dream was to begin a new life on a perceived “virgin continent” (see, for instance, the name Virginia), to retreat to “an oasis of harmony and joy,” which led to “various utopian schemes” (3). Marx argues that this pastoralism “remains a significant force in American life” (4). But, he asks, what does it mean in the context of twentieth-century urban, industrial society? He points to the flight from the city, localism, and “the wilderness cult” (5). He is interested in the psychology of this. He mentions Freud’s explanation of this nostalgia (frustration and repression) and this wish to return to nature. But central in this narrative is the appearance of new technology. One of the images he evokes is the whistle of the steam locomotive in Thoreau’s Walden (1854, a classic romantic book), which disrupts nature (15). He also discusses many other literary works to illustrate this tension between pastoralism and technology (e.g., Hawthorne and Melville). Technology is perceived as a dangerous intrusion: “the noise arouses a sense of dislocation, conflict, and anxiety” (16). There is what we may call a typically romantic-religious pattern: first there is harmony (paradise, arcadia), then there is disruption of the harmony (the Fall), and finally (an attempt to) restoration of the harmony. The locomotive is the symbol of alienation—not only the alienation of the figure in the narrative but also the alienation of all Americans in the industrial age: The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power. It appears in the woods, suddenly shattering the harmony of the green hollow. … The noise of the train … is a cause of alienation in the root sense of the word: it makes inaudible the pleasing sounds to which he [Thoreau] had been attending, and so it estranges him: from the immediate source of meaning and value. … In truth, the “little event” is a miniature of a great—in many ways the greatest—even in our history. (Marx 1964, 27)

The railroad turns out to be both an emblem of progress and a road that can lead to hell (27). Technology becomes threatening. In particular, it threatens the image of America as a garden rather than (or at least next to) “a hideous wilderness” (43). In his literary criticism, however, Marx also shows and explores how pastoralism and technology often went together. The machine expressed hopes for peace, equality, freedom, and happiness (192) and thus was part of the rhetoric of progress (193), but not necessarily in a way that contradicted the pastoral ideal in its American version. Some see the possibility of harmony between technology and nature, especially if nature is seen as

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something that needs to be brought in line with the will of humans as the lords of creation. Marx points to what he calls “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” (195). The railroads were said to have “exalted power and grandeur” and thereby “elevate the mind that seriously dwells on them” (195). People wondered at “the strange and unusual spectacle” (195). According to Marx, people felt the powers of their mind: they could now be masters of nature, which was seen as “progressively making less and less resistance to his dominion” (196). To look at machines was to see “the sublime progress of the race” (197). They are sublime, even if “the underlying assumptions remain those of the Enlightenment” (198). Machines were thus not only viewed as threatening; they could also glorify human powers (and thereby divine power), in particular the power over nature. Their workings may have been based on Enlightenment science, but their appearance was responded to in romantic terms, for instance, sublime or magic. Marx, when commenting on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, sees affinities between magic and modern science: “Both presuppose our ability and our need to master the non-human through activity of mind” (55). Again there is not an opposition between pastoralism and technology. There is, rather, a glorification of nature and wilderness (the island, paradise) but also mastery of nature: “Shakespeare is able to depict a highly civilized man testing his powers in a green and desolate land” (68). Marx thus turns The Tempest into the narrative about America and “a prologue to American literature” (72). The raw, virgin nature becomes a “setting for technological progress” (203). It becomes, in Heidegger’s words, a “standing-reserve” for humans to use and master. For the “Americans,” the technology was also a symbol of their new nation, something the new Republic could do better than “the Old World” (205). Technology was also seen as part of a divine plan. To show that “Americans had little difficulty in reconciling their passion for machine power with the immensely popular Jeffersonian ideal of rural peace, simplicity, and contentment” (208), Marx shows how in the rhetoric of the technological, sublime machine power becomes aligned with “the spirit of the Republic” and “the progressive forces of history” (214): Everything, it says, is working out according to a divine plan. Now the disturbing images of change, the screaming monster and the defacer of landscape, seem embarrassingly squeamish, effeminate, and trivial. The noise and smoke, the discomfort and visual ugliness, even the loss of peace and repose—these things, the rich voice proclaims, are of little consequences to true Americans. (Marx 1964, 214)

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The machine is now assimilated and at home in the landscape. This was made possible, Marx shows, by the American pastoral ideal itself, which had already “provided a clear sanction for the conquest of the wilderness, for improving upon raw nature and for economic and technological development—up to a point”—the point when there would be a threat to the “happy balance of art and nature” (226). But this point was never identified. And so progress could continue and can continue, under the blessing of romanticism. Marx also points out that even Emerson—who can be seen as a romantic—was perfectly able “to join enthusiasm for technological progress with a ‘romantic’ love of nature and contempt for cities” (232). On the one hand, he recommends withdrawal from society, but at the same time he is impressed by the new technologies and their power (233). In a lecture, he welcomes machine power as an instrument of national unity and sees railroad iron as “a magician’s rod” that has the power “to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water” (234). Marx writes: “There are to be no satanic mills in America, no dark, begrimed cities, nothing like the squalid, inhuman world depicted by Blake, Dickens, and Carlyle” (234–35). Instead, the New World is a garden. In such a garden, there is no place for cities, but technology is not (necessarily) a problem. It even “extends the efficacy of the Understanding” (236). He even argues that the new technology is not necessarily antipoetic: “There is nothing inherently ugly about factories and railroads; what is ugly is the dislocation and detachment from ‘the Whole’” (241). They merely need to get their proper place. The poet can reattach things to nature and the Whole (241). What technology “is” depends on our perception of it. Poets can show the possibility of harmony (242). And this, Marx argues, is what Thoreau did in Walden, an “experiment in transcendental pastoralism” (242). Walden may easily be taken to be an antitechnology book: “men have become the tools of their tools.” But Marx shows that Thoreau’s position was more complex: instead of expressing “simple-minded Luddite hostility toward the new inventions” (247), Thoreau attacked the idea that society should be ordered according to a machine and that people become machines: “The laboring man becomes a machine in the sense that his life becomes more closely geared to an impersonal and seemingly autonomous system” (248). The locomotive in Walden is sometimes a “hawk” but also a “partridge,” blending into the landscape (251–252). It is very different from the pond, of course, but Thoreau is also “elated by the presence of this wonderful invention” (252). There is hope and promise. His view is a blend of “Jeffersonian and romantic attitudes toward nature” (256) and cannot be

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described as a return to nature or as expressing a desire to go back to the past. Everything transforms itself. In Thoreau’s idealism, inherited from Emerson, this happens through the imagination, through the power of the human mind (264). Like nineteenth-century romantics, Thoreau wrote in an attempt to reimagine and rewrite the world. Marx also argues that the mechanical arts and the fine arts became linked. Inventions are seen as the “poetry” of science” (200). To invent a new machine required “genius.” This comes close to the “mechanical romanticism” of nineteenth-century European romantic science and technology. (See chapter 4.) Marx also refers to earlier eighteenth-century writings (William Coxe) in which there was no contradiction yet between the machine and nature: nature was seen as a celestial machine. But, Marx argues, this idea “is difficult to grasp because of our own feeling, learned from the romantics, that ‘organic’ nature is the opposite of things ‘mechanical’” (162). While this misrepresents the spectrum of romanticism(s), Marx points again to ways in which machines and nature may be reconciled. For instance, he shows that Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand,” did not deny the advantages of machine production and did not want to return to an earlier society (174), but rather defended a return to a “balance” in the human situation instead of the determination of human behavior by external, invisible, abstract forces alien to human impulses (176). Whether we wish to endorse the American pastoral romanticism of the machine that Leo Marx described, it clearly is also a version of romanticism, one that is not totally opposed to the machine but has an ambiguous relation to it: the machine is something that disrupts the pastoral idyll, but it is also a sublime sign of the mastery over nature and to invent a new machine requires romantic-scientific genius. This may be seen as a “contradiction,” but romantics can live with contradictions. As Black (2002) remarks, the early romantics of the nineteenth century “preferred a sense of contradiction” (108), and they promised “a way of making life whole within, rather than despite, the necessary contradictions in modern society” (109). Escape from civilization is only one type of romanticism, and even this kind of romanticism is defined in relation to the modern world. There are also darker, more gothic pictures of the human relationship with nature and technology in American literature. Marx also discusses Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a classic in American Romanticism. The novel further supports my point that the romantic relation to technology is more ambiguous than usually assumed.

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Melville: From the Romantic Garden to the Gothic Churchyard The start of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is undoubtedly gothic-romantic. The narrator, Ishmael, wants to see the sea in order to escape the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, the coffins and the funerals (1), the “dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb” (9). He joins Captain Ahab, who seeks revenge on a large white whale called Moby-Dick that took his leg (he has a prosthesis—thus uses technology in a way that is very much connected with his body, perhaps he could be called a “cyborg”: a combination of human and machine) and sets out on a monomanic quest to kill the whale. But instead he and his crew meet death and destruction; in the final fight with the whale, Ahab is drawn into the sea. The novel displays a typical romantic-gothic epistemology: there is an encounter or not, the whale may (re)appear or not, the danger draws nearer. When the whale is coming for them, it strikes “terror” in them (616). Death is present everywhere. The crew talk about a coffin (579–581). The whale is monstrous (as is the captain in his monomania). Nature appears as sublime and threatening, and humans depend on technology to cope with it. Chapter titles are the names of parts of the boat (e.g., “the cabin”) and artifacts such as “the log and the line” and “the life-buoy.” The crew constantly deals with nature through technology. Leo Marx (1964) writes, “In a whaling world, Ishmael discovers, man’s primary relation to nature is technological” (295). But here the green romantic garden becomes a dark wet gothic churchyard: there is a corpse that receives a “ghostly baptism,” they sail on the tomb of the dead (Melville 1851, 595), there is a floating coffin, and the ship and the whale become hearses (632). The whale is also a vault, as is suggested by one of the quotes at the beginning of the book. The self is mysterious and no longer under control. Ahab says: What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (Melville 1851, 599–600)

Similarly, nature is out of control; it becomes clear that full mastery through technology is no longer possible. The narrator praises the technologies and skills of the hunters to navigate and calculate where the whale is, making a comparison with timing and locating a train, “the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway” (613). But the whale wins. Ahab does not listen to

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Starbuck’s warning: “Never, never wilt thou capture him. … Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? … Oh, oh,-Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!” (620). Caught in the line, he is shot out of the boat (633). There is a vortex; the ship sinks. A coffin rises and serves as a life buoy for the narrator-messenger, who is rescued (635). Technology thus turns out to be two-sided. On the one hand, it is part of “life”; humans use it in their struggle with nature. It can even be part of the human body, like Ahab’s prosthesis. On the other hand, if used in order to gain full mastery of nature, it leads to death and destruction. Whether Leo Marx (1964) is right to call the romantic attitude toward nature “narcissistic” (291), it becomes clear again that the romantic attitude toward technology is not necessarily entirely negative; there is a lot more ambiguity in these writings than one may suppose. This interpretation is in line with Klaus Benesch’s reading of American Romantic writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, which is highly relevant to the cyborg theme in this book. Benesch (2002) also shows that, like today, in these times there was not only anxiety and fear, but also admiration and fascination with technology. In the writings of authors who tried to cope with fast-changing modern life, there was fear of what Benesch calls “the technological other” (33), but also fascination with, for instance, the free proliferation of information (60); the mechanical reproduction offered by print technology, which promises nothing less than immortality to the writer (36–37); or the hope that the sublime landscape would have “the power to redeem, to ‘wash out’ the negative consequences associated with the onslaught of technology” (48). Of course there were idealizations of nature, but the Romantic discourse at the time also had a keen interest in machines and in the cyborg: that “hybrid figure that comprised the human as well as the machine” (4). I already commented in these terms on Ahab’s prosthesis. Benesch argues that the cyborg imagery—for instance, in the form of “ representations of the body encroached on by technology” (4)—developed into “a powerful metaphor of technological culture” (43). The cyborg stands for the symbolic encounter between humans and machines, and was used by these writers to both repudiate and continue what Benesch calls “mechanical philosophy” (54). Writers projected their fears and fascination onto the screen of the cyborg, which enabled them to “cut across the realms of the human and the technological” (54). Moreover, the American Romantics were also interested in automata. They would have known the so-called Chess Turk, for instance, which was also exhibited in the United States, or the Chess-Player, which both

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stand in the tradition of “wonderful automata”: they were believed to be more than a machine (110). And already then there was discussion about machine intelligence and how it compares to human intelligence. To conclude, it would be misleading to say that American Romanticism, like Romanticism in Europe, was interested only in nature and was entirely antitechnological. Instead, there was also fascination by the wonders and new possibilities of machines, and there were cyborg fantasies, which sometimes took on a gothic character—for instance, in Melville’s references to artificial implants and replacement parts (155). There was a taste for nature and the landscape, for old myth and fables, but also an interest in “the intimate communion of art, body, and machines” (172). The horrors of war may have cooled down the fascination with technology but did not eradicate it. Benesch concludes that there was a fear of losing control, of technology taking over, but he also observes: “The coupling of the human and the machine remained an alluring topic for nineteenth-century American authors” (178).3 Life Out of Balance If we turn to the twentieth century, we get a similar picture. Of course, there are other, more one-sidedly antitechnological forms of romanticism in the American literary-cultural context. Leo Marx mentions Rachel Carson’s famous Silent Spring (1962) in which the “machine-in-the-garden trope,” as Marx puts it in his afterword (Marx 1964, 381), plays an important role. First, there is a harmonious life, which then is abruptly disturbed by an alien, technological force (380–381). In this typically romantic narrative, the ambiguity is gone: the machine can no longer be redeemed. There is no hope for balance. But there are more ambiguous works in twentieth-century American culture that address the same theme, for example, the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance (1982), which supports my argument about the ambiguous relation between romanticism and technology. Koyaanisqatsi has an unusual format. The cult film is a poem of images and sounds, without narration. It uses slow-motion and time-lapse shots of natural landscapes, skies, technologies, cities, traffic patterns, and assembly lines. Like the literary works discussed by Leo Marx, it makes us think of the relationship of humans, nature, and technology. On the one hand, it may share some of the romanticism of Silent Spring, and there is a kind of “original statue of nature.” The film shows natural landscapes and skies that seem pristine and untouched. This original state of nature is not that of the first white American settlers, who started to master the new land that they

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constructed as virgin and untouched. The role of “authentic” people (or messengers) is given to the Hopi, a Native American tribe that strives toward peace and respect for all things and views its land as sacred. Then modern technology enters that world. The Hopi prophecies are about disaster, and the film lists people such as Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, who are usually read as being against modern technology. The title Koyaanisqatsi refers to the Hopi word for “life out of balance” or “disintegrating life.” In this sense, the film is antitechnology. But the director, Godfrey Reggio, leaves room for more interpretations. He says that the film is about technology becoming ubiquitous: “We live technology” (Reggio in Carson 2002). But he does not explicitly say that modern technology is bad; is up to us to interpret and evaluate, which leaves room for a romantic interpretation of technology: the film also shows the sublimity of the technological world or, rather, the virgin landscape transformed by human, sublime technology. We see Horseshoe Canyon (Utah) and other natural beauty, but also a large mining truck, the launch of a Saturn V rocket, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, and a Boeing 747 on a runway at Lost Angeles International Airport. Apparently technology can be sublime and romantic. Romantic Ambiguity about Modern Technology The nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century works about the environment and technology discussed in this chapter raise questions regarding the meaning of modern technology. Contrary to their European relatives (consider Weber and Heidegger, but also Ellul and other critics of technology), these nineteenth-century American writers are generally more optimistic about the possibility of finding a good balance between humans, nature, and technology, although there are exceptions (see again Moby-Dick). Twentieth-century works tend to be less optimistic. Yet while their views differ, all of these American romantic comments on technology are generally more ambiguous about technology than may be supposed. Instead of pushing them toward a one-sided rejection of modern technology, their romanticism leads them to recognize the sublime and wondrous nature of technology. And even Melville’s darker picture acknowledges the existential necessity of technology: the problem is not technology but our modern unrestrained will to mastery. We depend on the line, and this is part of life. We need technology. We live technology. The question is what kind of life we want to live. The line (and the whale) leads to death only if we keep on “pushing” and “jamming,” to use Melville’s words.

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Conclusion Romanticism is usually seen as opposed to technology, especially modern technology. This chapter has shown that nineteenth- and twentiethcentury critics of technology in Europe and the United States display a lot more ambiguity concerning technology and has suggested that romanticism and technology are not necessarily opposed. This implies that if philosophers of technology care to better understand the relation between romanticism and technology, they can learn a lot from these critics. In particular, it became clear that although the relation is full of tension, there is also the possibility of intimacy and liaison. In the next chapters we will see that some of these liaisons have not only offered some interesting and often neglected technology-friendly versions of romanticism but have also helped to create contemporary high-tech culture. To understand how this was possible, however, we first return to the wondrous and sometimes dark romanticism of the nineteenth century.

II  Romanticism with the Machine

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

Romanticism is not necessarily hostile to science and technology. In chapter 2 I mentioned Novalis’s ideas about “magic science”—the view that Romantic philosophy aspired to a synthesis rather than a rejection of science and technology—and of course Gothic literature such as Mary Shelley’s, which was informed by and commented on science and technology and should not be reduced to a simple rejection of technology. In chapter 3 I also suggested that romanticism is not necessarily opposed to technology. In this chapter, I develop this line of thought and engage with histories of science to show how Romanticism is historically much more connected with science and technology than contemporary philosophers of technology assume. Moreover, looking at the scientific developments of the early nineteenth century, it is even justified to speak of what Cunningham and Jardine (1990) call “Romantic science.” That Romantic science was not only fiction—Cunningham and Jardine start with the example of Goethe’s Faust, who wants to know Nature’s secrets, hidden forces, and harmony (xix)—but was also part of actual scientific practice. This included the development of a new science. It is now increasingly acknowledged that Romanticism played a major role in the so-called second scientific revolution, which included the study of magnetism and electricity and rendered science more experimental and based on raw data collection, which in turn was made possible by new technical equipment. New institutions were founded (e.g., in France the École Polytechnique in 1794), and in the nineteenth century, there was increasing collaboration between industry and science. In other words, what we know as modern science was shaped not only by Enlightenment thinking but also by Romantic imagination and experimentation. In contrast to what many people think, Romanticism does not necessarily mean passive reception of nature or the creation of works of art. Science itself could also be seen as a kind of art, Novalis thought, and this entails a more

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active relation to nature. The Romantics were pluralistic about how their ideals could be reached. Cunningham and Jardine point to The Novices of Sais (1802) to support this point, in which Novalis indeed writes, “Various are the roads of man,” although he also suggests an opposition between science and art: “Under [the] hands [of scientists] friendly nature died, leaving behind only dead, quivering remnants, while the poet inspired her like a heady wine till she uttered the blithest, most godlike fancies, till, lifted out of her everyday life, she soared to heaven, danced and prophesied, bade everyone welcome, and squandered her treasures with a happy heart” (25). Poetry remains the high road. But science is at least one of the roads. In this chapter, I draw on recent literature to say more about Romantic science and further support the thesis that romanticism and technology are not necessarily opposed but are and have been entangled in various ways. I also show how the story of Romantic science was continued in twentiethcentury science fiction and technological innovation. First, I use recent scholarship on Romantic science in Britain and in France to show how in the nineteenth century, science was not only an inspiration for art and fiction (as in Frankenstein), but itself had Romantic aspects. In line with what I wrote about William Morris in chapter 2, I also show that the nineteenth-century Luddites were not against technology as such but rather against automation and its social consequences. Then I turn to the twentieth century, which had its own Romantic science (e.g., Freud) and saw the development of science fiction that draws on nineteenthcentury Romantic and Gothic themes (including Frankenstein films and work by Jules Verne), but also what we could call a new romantic science and especially new romantic technologies. I argue that what inspired innovation in the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and robotics changed from the Gothic fear of the machine to the idea of living with machines and explore how in the context of the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, romanticism and technology became entangled in hippie computing, which then led to the development of what I call (in the next chapter) romantic devices. 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

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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). 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

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.)

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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

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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)

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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: selfexpression, 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

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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,

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 humanrobot 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

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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

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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

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its combination of terror, nature, and technology: it also has a politicalromantic 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)

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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

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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

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“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

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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,

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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 nineteenthcentury 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

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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 computersimulated reality and humans who are used as energy sources for machines

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(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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 dragonslaying 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

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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-ityourself 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 nineteenthcentury 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 selftransformation, 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

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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 twentiethcentury 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, sandalwearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and

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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

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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)

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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

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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. Conclusion The story of countercultural computing shows how romantic technology became, and how technological romanticism became, at the end of twentieth century. But earlier, Romanticism and technology were already clearly engaged in an intense and fruitful romance. The romance started in the nineteenth century with romantic science and romantic technologies. These entanglements between romanticism and technologies are mirrored and developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. The picture of romanticism as necessarily opposed to technology thus needs to be revised: such opposition exists, but in both the nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, the relation between romanticism and technology became much more complex and ambiguous. To interpret these forms of romanticism as antitechnological is far too one-sided and simplistic. This becomes especially apparent when we consider the many active ways in which science, technological innovation, and romanticism have been entangled. But even for those of us who are not involved in science and technological innovation, there are various ways in which romanticism

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and technology intersect as we live in the new technoromantic worlds and use and consume its products—worlds and products to which we must respond and that “make” us. As Streeter puts it, romantics are a product of their world, including a technological world: The original romantics were never opposed to technological advances in the same fashion as, say, the Amish. The original romantics were products of the emerging new technological world; they raised questions about that world and pointed to what they saw as its limits and spiritual failings, but they were not really ones to step completely outside of it. They lived and moved about in the new world being created by new technologies of communication and transportation, regularly riding the railroad into the countryside, living off of an economy made possible by the rotary printing press. And they were not beyond considering the artistic character of new technologies. (Streeter 2011, 59–60)

This misinterprets contemporary Amish perhaps, insofar as they may not reject all new technology, but the conclusion is clear: romanticism and technology often go hand in hand. Twentieth-century romantics were also part and product of the technological world, and some of them, like Jobs, helped to create it. This is also true of our contemporary, early twenty-firstcentury technological world, with its transformed Internet and new electronic devices. The ways these devices are used and developed and the ways we relate to them and try to cope with and respond to the new world they create cannot be fully understood without considering romanticism. This brings us to the next chapter.

5  Romanticism with the Machine (2): Cyberromanticism, Uncanny Robots, Romantic Cyborgs, and Spooky Science

This chapter explores how romanticism today takes on various shapes and (dis)guises in the development and use of contemporary electronic technology. It starts with the perhaps by now familiar cyberromanticism narrative of how the Internet created new romantic spaces and opportunities for romantic-Platonic escape; how romantic machines were developed that were more human, more personal, more beautiful—machines that more than ever before enabled one to escape to Wonderland and shape one’s identity. But I also go further than most of the other literature in the cyberromanticism field and make new claims that take into account our contemporary, early twenty-first-century techno-lifeworld. I show that today’s technologies are beautifully designed romantic devices that afford indulgence in mystery and magic, including gothic imaginary. For instance, romantic-gothic fantasy flourishes in video games (this is a kind of cyberromanticism that remains largely unexplored) and robotics, understood as a romantic science and technology, explores the uncanny valley and is challenged to deal with the (Western) Frankenstein problem. In Japan, there is also an interest in the presence, soul, and ghost of the robot—without negative gothic connotations and more in line with nature religion. I also discuss contemporary surveillance, which is more ghostly and invisible than ever before, and the Internet of things, which promises us a world of enchanted objects. I end with contemporary physics and astronomy—fields one would not usually associate with romanticism— and argue that they have become increasingly spooky. I also note that even one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century believed in animal spirits. All these phenomena thus present different ways of using technological devices as instruments for romantic aims and indeed for romancing and enchanting technology itself: one may create and escape to a different enchanted world (cyberspace, transhuman uploading), try to overcome

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dualism and integrate humans and technology through smartphones and (other) cyborg technologies, or create and interact with quasi-others (robots) and enchanted objects (Internet of things). The new information technology may thus appear as a separate world or environment (this is what happened in the 1990s), as something that is part of us or even invisible, and as an “other” or another agent. In all three cases, I argue, the ultimate romantic machine is no longer a machine—or at least “the machine” usually disappears, remains invisible—although it sometimes makes ghostly and uncanny appearances. Indeed, I construct the argument that in the first two decades of this century, new technologies made possible an end of the machine: not so much in the sense that in these devices there is little mechanical left, but also, and especially, in the sense that romanticism and technology have fused to such an extent that the (romantic) dichotomy life-versus-machine has become outdated. Moreover, I argue that the cyberromanticism narrative relies on the real/virtual and digital/analogue distinctions, but that these distinctions have become problematic, if not obsolete. I show how after the “virtual” 1990s, technology became more integrated with quotidian life, to such an extent that the terms “virtual” and “digital” hardly make sense any more. Consider, for instance, smartphones but also all kinds of smart things and social media and the ways we use them today: virtual and real, analogue and digital, online and offline mix. This opens the way to more immanent (as opposed to transcendent) forms of thinking and religion such as animism, although transcendent thinking is still very alive in contemporary transhumanism, which dreams of uploading and digital immortality. In general, however, the binaries of the 1990s and the Western binaries that Haraway wanted to overcome with her “cyborg” language no longer need postmodern writing for their deconstruction; they fall apart in a concrete, technological, and material sense. The cyborg thus becomes both the sign and the embodiment of a new, successful merging of technology and romanticism and indeed a successful—or so it seems—marriage of Enlightenment and Romanticism. In this sense, there is no longer a “machine.” First, I address the romanticism of early Internet and computer use in the 1990s. Then I turn to technological phenomena and practices in the early twenty-first century, which are also romantic, albeit in largely different ways, and further complete the project of what I call “the end of the machine.” I show how smartphones, social media, games, surveillance technology, algorithmic art, robots, transhumanist human enhancement, and other technological practices and phenomena constitute not only a

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romanticization of technology but also a romanticization with technology. In the end, they promise and perhaps partly realize a marriage of Enlightenment and Romanticism as they produce hybrids of humans and technology, life and machine. It seems that today, technology and romanticism merge to an unprecedented extent. The end of the machine is near, or so it seems. The 1990s Internet and Its Romantic Spaces: Liberation, Identity, and Intimacy in Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, MUDs, and Early Video Games A New Frontier and a Virtual Space: Digital Cowboys and the Craft of Hacking In the previous chapter, I described how the birth of the Internet is rooted in countercultural romanticism. The more open and networked kind of thinking usually associated with the Internet may have its origins in the military-industrial-academic complex, but developed its own impetus and merges with romanticism at the time of the counterculture. The Internet thus helped to realize romantic ideals such as self-expression, creativity, rebellion, and exploration. This led eventually to the Internet of the 1990s, which was perhaps more corporate and chaotic than expected and had its dark sides (see again the cyberpunk of Neuromancer), but also afforded highly romantic experiences. In a North American context, these experiences can be interpreted with the help of the romantic metaphors of the frontier and the cowboy. Let me unpack this. First, what exactly needed to be explored and conquered? The interest in computing was combined with an interest in space, and this led to the construction of a new space: cyberspace. The romantic role outer space played in earlier twentieth-century romantic science fiction was now taken over by cyberspace. A new “cyberromanticism” emerged. As Streeter (2011) has argued, in the 1990s, “cyberspace” was envisioned as “an unknown space to be explored and thus available for any number of collective projections, particularly the frontier metaphor” (121): cyberspace emerged as “a new frontier to be conquered,” and open source can be interpreted as an anarchist “utopia” (2). As David Gunkel (2001) has argued, such a metaphor is not neutral but shapes and drives the use and implementation of the technology: “Cyberspace may be as much a product of technical innovation in hardware and software as it is the result of the discursive techniques by which it comes to be articulated, described, and debated” (32). The frontier metaphor not only evokes the Columbian voyages of discovery but also brings in the connotations of violence, power, hegemony, and colonization

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(15). The cowboy at the frontier is ethnocentric and exercises cultural power. But what interests me here is that the frontier metaphor is also very romantic. It evokes the spirit of invention and exploration. It is “seductive” (26). The metaphor invites us to explore the edge(s) of the world, to discover a new world, to go where no one has gone before. As noted in the previous chapter, Neuromancer (Gibson 1984) can be seen as a romantic novel. It is dystopian, but the figure of the console cowboy is highly romantic (Streeter 2011, 123). The North American cowboy is a romantic myth, connected to the myth of the Wild West, which is about liberation from the Old World and about finding the wild. The cowboy finds a way to live with nature, far from civilization. He is a romantic hero located outside society, wandering and leading a rather solitary life, rejecting social norms. Similarly, the romantic cybercowboy explores a new world, a terra nova, and seeks freedom and a new kind of wilderness, in which he or she wanders as a solitary figure and deals with the raw forces in cyberspace. In addition, there is also the figure of the rebel and—typical for romanticism—the artist. In the 1990s, Internet users and programmers started to see themselves as artists or rebels (172). Why artists? Let us look at this development in the light of the historical context sketched in the previous chapters. These romantic hackers were not only (computer) scientists and technical people; they could also be seen as the heirs of the arts and crafts movement. After the countercultural romantic turn in computing, hacking was no longer seen as something merely technical; it became a romantic craft, something for artists. As Coyne (1999) puts it: “Digital narratives also promote various computer crafts and those who practice them, much as nineteenth-century artists and intellectuals valorized the crafts of weaving and carving” (27). In other words, hackers and programmers became romantic artists. Individual genius becomes important, and independent creation becomes possible. Crafts can be done at home or in a small workshop. Similarly, programming can be done by an individual “author” who is part of small communities or workshops. It does not depend on automated and bureaucratic institutions; it requires creative individuals who pay attention to fine detail—very similar to, say, illuminating a manuscript (28) or indeed to the work William Morris did in the nineteenth century. The hacker becomes the romantic “free-thinking individual who is able to … give full scope to the creative spirit” (30). Instead of being associated with a boring, philistine identity, the programmer now finds herself crowned with the label of romantic artist—the total opposite. It becomes cool to be a nerd and a geek, to be obsessed with technology in a way that is remarkably similar to that of the mechanical romantics of the

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nineteenth century who fused romanticism and scientific-technological innovation. Morris starts tinkering with computers in his garage. Dr. Frankenstein is given money to set up a dot-com. Revolution is in the air, and this time the romantics write not poetry or novels to change the world but code. The imagination has turned to technology, and the romantic hero-genius has a degree in computer science. It also helped romantic users that computers, now linked to the Internet, made computing experience a lot less predictable. The new cyberromanticism shared with nineteenth-century Romanticism an interest in the unknown. Computers became what Streeter calls “unpredictability machines,” which afford the romantic experience of surprise and unpredictability: Most computer users have had the experience of getting absorbed in web surfing or programming and then finding themselves loosing track of the passage of time, and ending up in a place they had not intended. … Used interactively, computers can become, in a specific way, unpredictability machines. It is a limited unpredictability, to be sure, more akin to reading a story about a dangerous mountain climbing expedition than to actually being a participant. The safely enclosed experience, the limited unknowability, of web surfing or hacking can draw one in and then become articulated with the romantic value of being involved with something beyond the bounds of fully predictable, calculable rationality in which the initial intention is assumed to be fixed. The experience of drifting while interacting with a computer offers an experiential homology to the romantic sense of exploration, an experience of a self-shaping process that unfolds according to its own logic, that cannot be mapped to some external grid. (Streeter 2011, 172)

Like earlier romantics, 1990s Internet users could explore different worlds with their wonder and extraordinary creatures. This time, however, it was not the natural-magic world of Jules Verne or the space worlds of science fiction, but the wondrous virtual worlds and virtual realities created and explored online. Virtual worlds provide the romantic self with opportunities to explore different identities and to discover and be one’s authentic self. In a Rousseau-like fashion, the Internet promises worlds in which you can be yourself “against a duplicitous world in which you have to confirm to the expectations of others” (Coyne 1999, 5). It seems that you can withdraw from (offline) “society” and become yourself and make friends (and perhaps find love) in the online world. For many people, this was and is immensely liberating: it seems that one reaches freedom from social constraints and apparently also from bodily constraints. There is no need to take your loathsome mortal body with you; in cyberspace, your mind can

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wander freely. There is no need to be tied to your real-life social relations; you can have a different social identity and make new friends, who can be physically located anywhere on the planet. Unconstrained by social or physical limits, the user reaches a romantic-religious liberation. Thus, the user desires a kind of transcendence by technological means. Even the biological body is transcended, or so it seems: in true (neo-)Platonic fashion one is liberated from the constraints of the body, that repulsive prison. Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), feels as if he is in “the prison of his own flesh” when his nervous system is damaged and he can no longer connect to the “matrix”: For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson 1984, 6)

Entering cyberspace does not necessarily mean having no body whatsoever. One can create a new, digital body—an avatar—and become more authentic and free than in one’s daily existence where one is imprisoned in a body that may or may not suit one’s desired self. Platonism and romanticism thus fuel new cyberpractices. Coyne (1999) correctly observes that cyberspace narratives “continue the trajectory of the Neoplatonists, … transformed through idealism, the romantic tradition, and technorationalism” (47). Through cybernetic rapture and ecstasies— states of being outside oneself—one can participate in “a unity beyond the multiplicity and individuation of the material realm” (47). By transcending the constraints of the body, one enters this other, more unified, whole reality (55). Romantics believe that reason alone cannot do this. They turn to feeling, imagination, intuition, and the unconscious. And to drugs and technology. Here information technology comes to aid of the Platonic romantic. Technology, sometimes combined with drugs, makes possible ecstasy and promises to fulfill the old dream of transcending the physical world (and reunite). In the 1990s, Internet technology and technomusic are new means of romantic liberation. The cybernaut (and the techno/drug user) is a neo-Platonic and romantic figure: she goes from the real, physical world to the virtual world, then goes “back to the world transformed, renewed, informed, and enlightened” (267). The Internet is a Platonic liberation tool, a transcendence machine. Note that this romanticism is not confined to cyberspace, understood as a separate sphere, a different world one can escape to. It also mixes with the world of bodies and matter. In Escape Velocity (1996), Mark Dery

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describes cyber-subcultures at the end of the twentieth century: people dream of escaping their body and uploading their minds, cyberhippies use “smart drugs” that stimulate the central nervous system and cognitive enhancers to boost their brain power, and cyberpunk roboticists organize robot battles. Although in many of these subcultures, the computer is seen not only as an engine of liberation but also of repression (14)—cyberpunk also sees the darker side of computing and the Internet and many reject a return to arcadia—the rhetoric of liberation still plays an important role, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. And if Platonic liberation is no longer on the menu, Dionysian forms of liberation are more popular than ever before. In the 1960s and 1970s, technology was used to perform Dionysian rites. Dery writes: “The archetypical hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite” (26). This Dionysian experience continued in the 1990s, but with other technological means. Dionysus now dwells in cyberspace or is honored in robotic dances and performances. There is cybersex and more fleshy and material forms of cyberculture such as the use of implants and sex machines. Dery interprets James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like being a) Sex Machine” as follows: “He imagines himself a prosthetically enhanced satyr who retains enough of his humanity to be able to savor the pleasures of the flesh. Cyborged, Brown has the best of both worlds, thrilling to the fevers and ‘cold sweaths’ of human passion but performing with locomotive endurance” (173). Information technology is used for Dionysian liberation. A more common experience of cyberspace was Platonic, and that involves a different, loftier kind of eros. As Michael Heim (1993) has argued, our fascination with computers is erotic. Reading Plato’s Symposium and the story of the cave in the Republic, he connects cyber-eros with the drive to extend ourselves. Eros, Heim explains, is not only about sex and physical extension but also about attaining Platonic knowledge of ideal forms; it is possible to ascend to something more spiritual and intellectual. If we manage to free ourselves from “the dungeon of the flesh,” we can process things “through mental logic” and move to higher truth. The cybernaut, Heim argues, is lost to this world, leaves the prison of the body, and “emerges in a world of digital sensation.” It is a modern form of Platonism, since Platonic forms are replaced by information. But the dream of information is still basically Platonic (86–89). At the end of Neuromancer, he observes, sex and personality are transformed into information:

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The ultimate revenge of the information system comes when the system absorbs the very identity of the human personality, absorbing the opacity of the body, grinding the meat into information, and deriding erotic life by reducing it to a transparent play of puppets. In an ontological turnabout, the computer counterfeits the silent and private body from which mental life originated. The machinate mind disdainfully mocks the meat. (Heim 1993, 91)

With his interpretation of Neuromancer Heim shows the darker side of this Platonism. It is highly problematic, as I argue in the next chapter. But before criticizing it, it is important to understand the promise of liberation and the Eros that drives this Platonic-romantic vision. By supplanting physical space, cyberspace provides a liberation machine by which “the spirit migrates from the body to a world of total representation” (101), a world that Leibniz already dreamed of and is now realized, or so it seems. It is the dream of a mind without body. Moreover, as Heim rightly remarks, this is not only Platonism but also has a Gnostic aspect: we are imprisoned in the flesh, the body, the earth, but the virtual life may release us from this Fall and set us free. (102).1 Of course the rhetoric of liberation through technology is not new. As David Morley (2007) argues, the liberation discourse related to the Internet must be placed in the context of “the long history of dreams of liberationthrough-technology”: these dreams are always inscribed in new technical forms: machines, electricity, and digitalization (8). Moreover, the dream of transcendence and liberation has roots not only in Plato; there is also a Christian version of it. As Wertheim argues, the yearning for a New Jerusalem, a Heavenly City, offers special appeal in times of decay and disintegration. And this, it seemed to some in the 1990s, is what cyberspace provides. She writes: Just like the early Christians, [proselytizers of cyberspace] promise a transcendent haven—a utopian arena of equality, friendship, and power. Cyberspace is not a religious construct per se, but … one way of understanding this new digital domain is as an attempt to construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven … as a realm in which their souls would be freed from the failings of the flesh. (Wertheim 1999, 18)

Wertheim (1999) also points to the universalism inherent in the cyberspace vision: the Christian heaven was potentially open to everyone (24), and similarly everyone can hope for transcendence when entering cyberspace. There is a “promise of salvation for all” (24): everyone, at least those who can afford a computer and Internet access, can plug in (25). Wertheim remarks that there is something positive about this taking distance from

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the body: “the biasing baggage of a gendered, colored and aging body is hidden from view behind the screen” and hence cyberspace provides relief from “the relentless bodily scrutiny” and “the constant pressure to look good”; everyone is equal to the digital stream (25). Moreover, as medieval iconography shows, the promise of heaven is also the promise of the end of isolation and alienation, and similarly the Internet is “sold as a panacea that will fill the communal vacuum in our lives” (26) and offers forums for new meetings and relationships (27). Whether this really is what the Internet delivers, it is important to understand the promise of cyberspace, a promise with deep roots in Western religious history and culture, including age-old dualistic views about body and mind that continue to haunt our thinking (30). Such ideas about transcendence and liberation from alienation, which themselves are of earlier lineage as they echo Plato, all kinds of ancient Eastern and Mediterranean cults and indeed Gnosticism, are not alien to romantics. Romantics also long for a home, a haven, and sometimes also liberation from the body. Nineteenth-century Romantic ideas were often (and still are) directly connected to imagery from the Christian tradition. In addition, cyberspace has other specific characteristics that may attract romantics. For instance, it is not a solid and static space, and it is not visible and located in the same way as material spaces are visible and located. It has no coordinates in Euclidean space. Wertheim says that it is “an emergent phenomena” (40). It seems nonmaterial. This is of interest to romantics. As I have shown in the previous chapters, they were always interested in the spiritual, in “ether,” and in electricity and other things that flow (see also Morley 2007, 325). The Internet and its streams of information are of course also very fluid and may invite discourse about the invisible and about spirits. Séances can now be done by means of a computer: cyberspace, as a nonmaterial space, presents itself as a realm of spirits. Indeed, cyberspace and the new online worlds are also means of reenchantment: virtual worlds and worlds in video games become enchanted spaces, hosting all the magic and mystery, all the colorful figures of romantic fairy tales and gothic horror stories such as demons, elves, and ghosts, that is, all the weird and extraordinary, which daily, philistine life excludes. Medievalism surfaces again, especially in video games. Some are explicitly set in a virtual world designed to simulate the historical medieval world (which is, of course, always a construction); others borrow, transform, and mix medievalist imagery as it has been developed since the nineteenth century. There are also primitivism and technopaganism, which, for instance, combine the use of the computer with neopagan rituals and magical

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practices (Dery 1996, 51). Like anywhere else in human culture, there are many cultural hybrids—if not only cultural hybrids—in cyberromanticism. As in earlier romanticism, there is (re)mixing and the making of hybrids: “Medieval reality readily becomes entangled with myths of other eras and places, of frontier worlds, the Wild West, piracy, Celtic and Norse legends, the Orient, primitivism, the future, and now the constructions of cyberspace” (Coyne 1999, 36). If romantics want to go back to the past at all, it is a patchwork past, a romanticized remix, aimed at boosting reenchantment by using the newest technology. The same can be said about the gothic and the grotesque. In cyberspace, we meet again the romantic-gothic dungeons and dragons; there is the digital grotesque and digital gothic. Not only Neuromancer has gothic elements; the romantic and the gothic are all over the Internet and the emerging digital culture—perhaps not everywhere but at least in many places. In many video games we find elements of romantic medievalism: “labyrinthine progression, hierarchies of place and status, irrational interventions through the forces of magic, powerful and irrational forces,” and so on (38). Some games are especially gothic: there are zombies and there is blood; there are dark forests, dragons, monsters, dungeons, graveyards, vampires, werewolves, and so on. In early video games, the setting of the dungeon was very popular. For instance, the traditional MUD (multiuser dungeon) is a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by monsters and other fictional characters.2 (I say more about contemporary video games below.) The new worlds can also be related to the concept and practice of carnival, with its disintegration from the everyday (37). People can do things in the online world that are otherwise (in the offline world) forbidden and explore darker sides of oneself. On the Internet, so it seemed, there is no longer repression and control. Coyne also mentions the surrealists: “computers (the Web, computer games, and electronic role playing) seem to provide ample opportunity to celebrate the marvelous, dreams, fantasy, and the labyrinthine” (193). Home pages of people were places where “individuals assert themselves as dreamers, free spirits, and fountainheads of original ideas that can at last be published to the world” (195). The World Wide Web became a space of romantic freedom. Thus, in the 1990s, the Web itself becomes an extraordinary place full of magic and mystery: a place where everything may appear (or not), a place where everything is possible (or so it seemed). Moreover, the Internet does not only host gothic underworlds; it also becomes itself a mysterious and fascinating being, an entity on its own that might develop consciousness or

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something sublime and something living. In Understanding Media (1964), long before the Internet, McLuhan already explored the idea of a shared electronic consciousness: Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society. (McLuhan 1964, 4)

In the 1990s, this “global embrace” seemed to become reality. Coyne (1999) writes: “In the electronic age, there is the expectation of ultimate participation in a united electronic consciousness in which we will all share” (65). Insofar as this “technology becoming alive” means a transgression of the dead/alive border, we meet again the gothic corpses that leave the grave, or Frankenstein’s monster that is made of dead parts but becomes alive. Dead matter becomes alive and spiritual. What was supposed to be merely material and technological becomes a conscious, living entity. If during the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, the romantic imagination was mainly living on drugs, now it was powered by computers. And filtered through the counterculture, it was inclusive: the idea was that everyone could participate in this world, and everyone could be creative, everyone could be the self she or he wants to be. Individuals would become liberated from everyday social networks, from existing political arrangements, and also from biological constraints. Internet was a space for escape and transformation—with an emphasis on escape. However, as this remark about inclusion suggests, escape did not imply a lack of interest in social and political issues. On the contrary, the Internet as it emerged in the 1990s also included a romantic-social and romanticpolitical promise: “a utopia in which those unfair institutions are supplanted altogether by communities of free individuals working at computer consoles” (Streeter 2011, 141). Carnival is not only a place for the grotesque and escape from the everyday, as Coyne suggests; it is and has always been political. This is also true for the cybercarnival, which criticizes social positions and projects alternative social and political arrangements. The cybercarnival showed the possibility of a different world and a different way of living together. The Internet was meant to be a community of romantic selves that use it to be creative. It was meant not as an instrument to make money but as a tool to reach openness and decentralization. Profit and property are not (a necessary) part of this romantic vision, in which we are

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all free authors rather than profit-maximizing calculators. The Internet was meant to be the home of openness and anarchism, the habitat of “passionate artist-programmer communities freed from the chains of corporate constraint” (177). It was meant to be democratic. In other words, the Internet and the Web were linked with a particular kind of social and political utopia. They embodied the hope for a new and better world. Like many nineteenth-century romantics, those who invented the Internet at the end of the twentieth century coupled their technological dreams with a political, romantic-utopian vision of alternative social relations and political arrangements. Moreover, as in earlier forms of romanticism, there was no perceived opposition between the social-political vision and the goal of personal transcendence and unity. Both were seen as intrinsically connected. As in nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century counterculture, social-political liberation and liberation of the self were seen as two sides of the same coin. Coyne also links the two: According to the narratives of electronic communities, we can rediscover the unity that is humankind through the immediacy of electronic communications, which provide access to the essential self, unencumbered by the distorting effects of physical appearance, social status, and the uneven access of social hierarchies. The romantic narrative presents the problematic as how to preserve the freedom of the net, how to maintain the spirit of its grass-roots, decentralized origins. (Coyne 1999, 271)

Note that there is and was not one romantic vision of the Internet. Some visions put more emphasis on the free individual, while others, influenced by McLuhan, emphasize the integrated whole. But, interestingly, romanticism is able to absorb both currents by putting the individual within a larger whole and history (e.g., the information revolution) and by emphasizing the heroic role of particular individuals in bringing about the conditions that led to the global network. Today we inherit this Internet and its romantic meanings and different social and political faces, this romantic Internet. Of course, one may object to this romantic vision; there are many good reasons for criticizing it. For instance, Streeter argues that it obscures social context, and Coyne refers to the denial of ecology and labor (Coyne 1999, 68). One may also point out that the Internet we have today is not the open space its creators envisaged and is not really liberating in any sense described above (see also chapter 6). Coyne rightly remarks that the arts and crafts movement was “a bourgeois phenomenon,” which also seems true of

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cybertinkerers, that “the ‘cottage industries’ of software production” depend on hardware and other technology, and that small software producers are often dependent on large companies (43). He also helpfully presents “counternarratives” that point to “uneven levels of literacy and network access” and “the potential dystopian aspects of ubiquitous networks: alienation, distance, hegemony, substituting fleeting electronic encounters for being with one another—the full weight of critical theory“ (271). In the next sections and chapter, I discuss these criticisms further and also criticize the real/virtual assumption and the online/offline distinction. But my point here is that we need to discuss this vision and its romantic roots in order to better understand the contemporary Internet and its critics. Cyberromanticism is a myth, for sure, but one that continues to shape our technological practices (and vice versa). Because it is a myth, we should make it explicit, pay attention to it, and discuss it. Myths are important: they shape our society and technological practices (and vice versa). That said, romanticism is not the only influence on contemporary technological culture. The Internet culture is shaped not only by romanticism but also by Enlightenment thinking. What Coyne (1999) calls “digital narratives” seem to combine Enlightenment and romanticism: rationalist technology and romantic visions, Enlightenment politics and romantic aspirations concerning authenticity and personal transcendence. It therefore seems more accurate to talk about a marriage of romanticism and Enlightenment. I return to this idea in later sections. Finally, the line between romanticism and Enlightenment is not always very clear, and there are other oppositions and distinctions that are also useful to interpret the Internet and contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs). Walter J. Ong, who also argued that the antithesis between romanticism and technology is illusory (Ong 1971), puts romanticism in the context of the opposition between oral and written culture (see also Black 2002, 133). Seen in this light, the Internet is part of a written culture and is born out of the printing press. As Black puts it: Coming some three centuries after the invention of the mechanical press, romanticism was the mature cultural expression of the cumulative effects of Gutenberg’s breakthrough. Print technology allowed for an unprecedented capacity to compress, organize, and store data far superior to human memory. (Black 2002, 134)

Thus, the printing press has shaped our culture, and technologies such as the Internet are no exception. Enlightenment and Romanticism— historically and today—are then seen as having a common root: printing

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culture, which today takes the form of a digital culture. One may also argue that the current digital technologies make possible a more ora” culture. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan suggests that in the electronic age, “we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence and of expression which are ‘oral’ in form” (3) and argues that today “written and oral experience” are “co-existent” (2). In Understanding Media (1964) he emphasizes the “tribal” character of these new forms. This gives us a wider perspective, reaching far beyond the boundary of modern culture. The Internet, then, is surely romantic. But it is also much more than that. It is a kaleidoscope with mirrors that enable us to examine a range of culturaltechnological patterns, that is, examine modernity and ourselves. And surely what we see in these mirrors is not all romantic. There is also Enlightenment; there is also a broader writing and printing culture and perhaps a new oral culture. However, in modern descriptions of cultural-technological phenomena, the romantic is never far away: McLuhan uses the term tribal (1964) and writes about “the African child” who lives in “the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral world” (1962, 22). These are romantic terms and images. By trying to gain back “the oral and magical dimensions of acoustic space” (70), the Western romantic wants to return to what is perceived as the magical world of the child and hopes to return to “Africa,” seen as the origin. The model and example for the romantic myth teller is the “original” myth teller of the oral tradition, who put his magic to work. And in McLuhan, we meet again “the oral and auditory world of the Middle Ages” (107), which has always attracted romantics. The hope of McLuhan and other cyberromantics is that the new technology can bring back the dramatic and magical orality of those lost cultures, feeding on the energy and spirituality of those original forms of enchantment. Virtual Worlds, Fluid Identities, and Emotional Lives: Information, Alice in Wonderland, and the New Romantic Machine If there are two worlds, a real one and a virtual one, there can be tensions between them and confusions. For instance, in the 1999 film The Matrix, it is not always clear in which world the protagonist is located. And as Gunkel has shown in his comments on the film in Thinking Otherwise (2007), sometimes the cyber–drug user3 is presented with a difficult choice: stay in Wonderland but live in a computer-generated fantasy, or choose reality and the (less enchanting) truth? In The Matrix, Neo chooses reality. But what if it is no longer clear what is real or virtual? This is a serious problem, at least from a Platonic point of view.

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Moreover, what if there is no reality? What if there is only simulation? In the 1990s, the idea that the new technologies created a different, virtual reality that became confused with the real seemed to support the postmodern view, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, that there are only signifiers, that there is only language, and that there is only simulation (think, for instance, about Jean Baudrillard)—or at least that all boundaries are fluid. The subject itself disappears in the stream of information. Although many postmodern writers celebrated this fluidity and disappearance, it was and is not always seen as a blessing and a pleasure. Sherry Turkle (1996), for example, remarks that “thinking about people as information also carries the serious risk of impoverishing our sense of the human” (265). This sounds like a “romantic” response to the problem: here Turkle seems to defend a humanism against what we may call an “informationalism” that tries to reduce us to information. But, one may object, surely information technologies make possible romantic experiences? How can romantics deal with this paradox? The information society is indeed a two-edged sword for romantics. On the one hand, to reduce everything to information is the most antiromantic thing one can do: not only since it wipes out individual differences—something that is especially horrifying in eyes of post­ modernist romantics—but also because it seems to promote an entirely antiromantic epistemology of knowledgeability and certainty. It is believed that everything can be turned into information and hence that everything can be knowable in principle. Black (2002) writes, “Information-based capitalism … murders sublime uncertainty in declaring everything knowable, a mere matter of accumulating the data and running the spreadsheets” (162). He recommends the sublime as an antidote to such “closure”: The sublime tips the balance in favour of culture versus information by declaring some things unknowable, adding culture’s rich combination of fact and fiction to the experiential mix, and thus vastly contributing to the world’s enchantment again. Once the strategic value of the Kantian sublime, with its romantic pedigree and social nature, is admitted into the analysis, a different model of social totality is involved. This is a model of a romantic totality as radically open as the prevailing market model is closed, where the sublime represents the impossibility of its closure. (Black 2002, 162)

Yet as informational beings we are connected to a larger whole, the Internet itself appears as sublime (see also earlier in this chapter), and a world has emerged where there is more room for fantasy and romantic escape than

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ever before. We may live in an “information” age, but that information age is also highly romantic. Within modern thinking, there seems to be no way of solving this paradox. The new technologies retain their Enlightenment, informational side in the way they work and in their “murderous” epistemological and social consequences, but they also have a Romantic aspect in their ecological nature and their liberating consequences for the self. Internet technology thus has a Janus face—a metaphor and a predicament that is itself highly romantic and gothic. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, of gates, doors, and passages.4 We could use him as the symbol of romantic transitions. The face looks to the future and to the past; romantics are never in the present. The Internet, at least in the 1990s, is typically thought of as a kind of gateway and as a tool of transformation. Janus is about transition. The 1990s Internet offers portals. Internet surfing is a transitional practice. We are continuously “in transit.” Enabling a passage to cyberspace, the technology also takes us out of the present. Etymologically, the name Janus may also relate to chaos and openness. And the problem can be described as two-headed monster; the problem is a trap from which there is no escape. Yet as already suggested previously, in the 1990s, the liberating, romantic effects of the Internet were stressed. We could use the Internet to go to another world and even to move to different selves. Indeed, the Internet also invited a postmodern interest in questions concerning fluid or multiple identities. Let us look at Turkle’s 1990s work on this identity issue and relate it to the problem concerning technology and romanticism. The new spaces not only provided transitional spaces to explore strange new worlds; they also enabled people to experiment with identities. In the mid-1990s, Turkle (1996) uses a metaphor from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872), the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to describe the new function of the computer. In the novel, Alice wonders what is at the other side of the mirror (the looking-glass) and is surprised to find that she can step into an alternative world, where she finds an enchanted garden with flowers that can speak and all kinds of figures such as the Red King, the White Queen, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion, and the Unicorn. Turkle compares this wonderland experience to living in virtual worlds. The Internet is also such as a mirror, or looking-glass, through which we can explore different worlds and indeed ourselves:

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We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine. … A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities. … Most recently, the computer has become even more than tool and mirror. We are able to step through the looking glass. We are learning to live in virtual worlds. (Turkle 1996, 9)

Like Alice, when we enter the new, virtual world, we ask questions about the reality of that world. In the novel, Alice wonders what would happen if she would make a fire in the room: Would there also be fire and smoke in “that room,” or would it be fake? She says that it “may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire” (Carroll 1872, 20). But when she steps through the mirror, she finds “a real one” (21). Thus, there is a lot of similarity between the two worlds—except that the world she finds is more animated. The pictures on the wall are alive; the chess pieces are walking about (22). It is a place of wonder and feeling. It is a poetic world and— literally—an enchanted garden. There is a garden of flowers that are alive and can talk. Similarly, the Internet affords experiences of wonder (and horror); there are worlds in which poetry and feeling are at home—where indeed humans are at home—and these experiences are virtual and real at the same time. There is a blurring of boundaries, or at least what we may call the possibility of a transition. One can move from one world to another. We are in the world of Janus. This blurring and transition also happens to identity. Turkle (1996) argues that the Internet enables people to construct their identity in what she calls a “culture of simulation,” which is in turn part of a larger cultural context: the postmodern story of “eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self” (10). For instance, MUDs were places where “the self is multiple” (17); role playing enables us to explore different versions of our self. Generally the new media enable us to explore multiple identities. In Turkle’s interpretation, the Internet becomes a workshop for identity construction. However, in contrast to what Turkle suggests and postmodern theory celebrates, in the early days of the Internet, the boundaries between real and virtual are not yet eroding. There is not much blurring of boundaries yet. There is mainly transition between worlds rather than eroding of boundaries. In the 1990s, the boundaries are still relatively stable. It is still clear that Alice is dreaming: at the end of the book, children lie in Wonderland, dreaming. Even if Carroll says, “Life, what is it but a dream?” the boundary between the real dream (life, reality) and the virtual dream

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(dreamlife, virtual reality) is clear enough to readers and indeed to Alice. In Alice in Wonderland, as in the 1990s cultural-technological world, Alice wakes up and is aware that she had a dream—even it was a “strange” and “curious” dream (and of course “wonderful”). When we read a book, we enter a different world, but then we reenter the real world. In the 1990s, when we use the Internet, we enter a virtual world; after this, we return to the real world. The Internet is a simulation machine; there is still a real world. Therefore, there are transitional stages and transitional moments, such as plugging in or waking up. There are transitional technologies, such as the “rabbit-hole” or all kinds of ways to enter cyberspace (e.g., portals). Janus has not yet been expelled. As long as there are different worlds, we need transitions. Here reenchantment applies to imagined and simulated other worlds; it does not yet enter the real, physical world. Note that the creation and simulation of other worlds should not only be understood in terms of escape. Like earlier romantics, virtual reality enthusiasts also wanted a transformation of this world. Heim (1993) compares VR with the “spiritual quest” and “lofty aspiration” of the Holy Grail and Wagner’s “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) (124), a concept that in turn is influenced by Romantic ideas about syntheses of the arts, for instance, in the work of Novalis. The purpose of the Holy Grail or the Gesamtkunstwerk is not to escape but to change: the work of art is meant not to create another reality but transform this reality and this audience. (This sounds more like augmented reality than virtual reality; I return to this later in this chapter.) But important for now is that this simulation function made computing much more romantic than previously. It became romantic in the sense of offering a different, enchanted reality and wondrous transition experiences, but also since it was more about human feeling. Computers were no longer calculating machines; in the 1970s and 1980s they became “personal computers.” In the 1990s, there is a further shift from “a culture of calculation toward a culture of simulation” (Turkle 1996, 19), which renders the image of a computer as a calculator indeed ”quaint and dated” (19). The computer thus became what we could call a “romantic machine”: a machine that was much more human and personal, and that was not to be contrasted with human feeling and identity, but instead became a tool to explore these feelings and identities—not altogether different from the nineteenth-century romantic novel. As true romantics, Turkle and others welcomed this.5 The computer also became a romantic machine in the sense that it enabled people to explore the boundaries between inanimate and animate,

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dead and alive, cultural and material, and so on. Romantics are plagued by ontological divisions, and postmodern romantics are especially annoyed with Western dualism. It seemed that the machine now finally could do what decades of postmodern writing largely failed to do since it was too much lost in language: crossing ontological boundaries. The new technology enabled experiments with transitions between inanimate and animate, between nonhuman and human. For instance, suddenly computers could speak! This boundary crossing reminds us of nineteenth-century romanticism: Mary Shelley also explored boundaries, and so did the romantic science of her day. The computer scientist of the 1990s becomes the new Dr. Frankenstein, who tries to animate what was supposed to remain inanimate, thus expelling the old image of the computer as a mechanical or, in any case, technical calculating device. Consider also the automata in Hoffmann’s story, who could speak and whose status was unclear. Turkle, however, does not link these “boundary negotiations” to (early) romanticism, but to “Freud and Darwin” who used “dreams and beasts” as “test objects” (22). As computers could do more human things; they seemed to become more “alive,” even if they were at the same time “dead,” mere machines. They were like Hoffmann’s Olimpia: a boundary-crossing object or, rather, more-than-an-object. Thus, inspired by Turkle’s concept of “test objects,” we may reinterpret earlier Romantic science and science fiction as experimenting with objects such as monsters and robots in order to question boundaries. With its monsters and vampires, gothic fiction was especially good at exploring the alive/ death boundaries. Turkle does not see these links, let alone the interesting ways in which romanticism and technology have been entangled in nineteenth-century science and indeed in twentieth century and today’s information technologies. Like many other interpreters of technology today, Turkle fails to see how both modernism and so-called postmodernism are already shaped by earlier forms of romanticism. The idea of exploring boundaries by imagining and using technologies is not new and was part of what nineteenth-century mechanical romanticism was all about. Instead, like so many other contemporary thinkers about technology, Turkle associates romanticism with a conservative attitude toward technology and a defensive attitude concerning boundaries. She writes: A decade ago, people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. … This reaction … was romantic. I use this term to analogize our cultural response to computing to nineteenth century Romanticism. … Humans, it insists, have to be something very different from mere calculating machines. In the mid-1980s, this romantic reaction was met by a

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movement in computer science towards the research and design of increasingly “romantic machines.” … The researchers who worked on them said they sought a species of machine that would prove as unpredictable and undetermined as the human mind itself. … [People] have also begun to pursue a new set of boundary questions about things and people. After several decades of asking, “What does it mean to think?” the question at the end of the twentieth century is, “What does it mean to be alive?” We are positioned for yet another romantic reaction, this time emphasizing biology, physical embodiment, the question of whether an artefact can be a life. (Turkle 1996, 24–25)

These are great questions and helpful observations, albeit regrettably guided by a very limited and one-sided conception of romanticism. My use of the term romantic machines is different from and much broader than Turkle’s. In the previous chapters, I have drawn on recent romanticism scholarship to show that it is linked to a rich tradition in modern (and indeed postmodern) thinking and practice. While I appreciate the analogy Turkle draws between romanticism and contemporary cultural responses to computing, there is no good reason to limit “romanticism” to a defense of the human/nonhuman border or the alive/dead boundary. Of course romanticism includes such a conservative, perhaps even antitechnological stream. But as the historical part of this book has shown, it is much broader than that: as in the nineteenth century, it also includes the making of romantic machines and the aim of transformation through these machines. Today it includes asking new boundary questions through creating and testing new natural-technological artifacts/living things such as artificial tissue and genetically modified plants and animals, and new technologies such as robots that seem “alive.” Again, these questions, such as whether an artifact can be alive, are not entirely new; Shelley and others were already asking them at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not only the cultural response (or a particular cultural response) is romantic; the very science and technology is romantic. “Romantic machines” is not only applicable to a particular kind of computers or to what particular types of “romantic” scientists want to make; we can conclude from the literature on the cultural history of computing that computing itself has become romantic. In the 1990s, computers, as they morphed into personal Internet machines, became romantic machines. Whether or not they became more “lifelike machines” (26), they became tools for romantic adventures in virtual worlds, romantic explorations of identity, and romantic boundary explorations.

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Computers also became much more emotional and intimate. Turkle is known for studying that aspect of computing use. Again she enables us to identify the difference with earlier computing technology: People explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives. When people explore simulation games and fantasy worlds or log on to a community where they have virtual friends and lovers, they are not thinking of the computer as … an analytical engine. They are seeking out the computer as an intimate machine. (Turkle 1996, 26)

Indeed, presented with the chance to enter new, virtual worlds, people entered these worlds as social and emotional beings. They used the new worlds not to “calculate” but to have social and emotional experiences. In The Second Self (1984) Turkle had already studied, by means of ethnography, how computers became part of our personal selves. As early as the 1980s, computers became more personal, more alive, closer to human identity and even love. The human spirit found a home in the computer culture. In her 2004 introduction, Turkle tells how she observed that many people in the computer world had “strong, even passionate relationships with digital machines,” that building and programming computers was “the most powerful intellectual and emotional experience of their lives” (1). The computer was “evocative”: in the 1970s and 1980s, computers were still “new and exciting” and evoked “strong feelings” including fear (19). In the 1980s this human spirit and this passion migrated from programmers to computer users. In the 1990s, computers became very much part of the human world, including the world of language. Today we take them for granted; Turkle even observes a certain “nonchalance” (3). And there are losses. Rather romantically (in her sense of the word), Turkle regrets that “the socially shared activity of computer programming and hardware tinkering has been displaced by playing games” (7); the pleasure of trying to understand computers is gone. (In the book, however, Turkle also presents a different picture of gaming; see the next section.) She narrates how transparent computers have been replaced by computers such as the Mac and cell phone, which are closed to users: “Culturally, the Macintosh carried the idea that it is more fruitful to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for mechanism, origins, and structure” (9). Indeed, today computers no longer appear as machines. They speak our language. They are more like us. But this humanization and romanticization of technology has flip side—a cost, if you wish. There is no longer a need for understanding the “mechanism, origins, and structure,” or so it seems. As I argue

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below, this means we no longer see them as machines at all, let alone that we are interested in their mechanism. Perhaps this means that part of the wonder is gone too, at least that kind of wonder associated with the mechanism. From what Turkle says, it seems that mechanical romanticism is dead. There is also no longer wonder concerning what used to be something new and exciting: a (desktop) computer. Most children are no longer surprised by computers in the way Turkle described in her study (33); they grow up with them. There is only nonchalance left. Or, as discussed in the previous pages, there is intimacy with the computer. (Later in this chapter I say more about Turkle’s argument that our current machines have become more intimate.) But while generally our machines have become more intimate and human friendly, this intimation and humanization is no longer achieved within a conceptual and technological framework of simulation, especially if this means “virtual reality.” With the emergence of twentyfirst-century information technologies, our language of different worlds and transitions has waned. The portals are gone. Technology is now much more entangled with human reality. We need a different vocabulary to describe these changes and these new human-technology relations. In the next sections and chapter, I argue that today our relation to ICTs is better captured by using other metaphors and concepts, such as that of the cyborg or that of “onlife” (Floridi 2014), concepts that suggest a merging of humans and their machines and make the real/virtual distinction obsolete. I argue that these metaphors also suggest different romantic dreams from the one of Alice and her mirror. That said, the romantic experiences, aspirations, and attitudes related to the 1990s world of the Internet and the computer as described by Coyne and Turkle have not completely disappeared and remain relevant in any study of contemporary technoromanticism, with its new romantic “test objects” such as robots and new romantic cultural-technological phenomena such as transhumanism, which retains a dualistic view of world and humans, and the Internet of things and augmented reality, which seem to aim at recreating Alice’s enchanted garden but one that is merged with reality: a romantic dream while being wide awake. Conclusion: Romantic Machines and (almost) the End of the Machine These 1990s developments already imply what we could call the end of the machine, or at least its invisibility. It may well be that beneath or behind the magic worlds and emotional experiences, there is still a machine, there is still (instrumental) Enlightenment reason, there is still the mechanics,

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and so on. But in computer and Internet use, these technical materialities (and the reasoning and tinkering of the computer programmer) withdraw from view. The focus is on the new magic worlds, the new wonderlands. The experience is magic and evocative. We have love and horror, sex and monsters. Computer experience becomes emotional and human. Computers start talking. The Internet itself, or rather the Web, is no longer seen as a technical object or infrastructure but becomes a sublime, mystical reality in its own right. Our screens became mirrors and we dream. Who cares about the “objective” “nature” of the mirror, if it provides a passage to an enchanted world? Who cares about the instrument, the mechanics, or the technology, when the technologically mediated daydream is so beautiful and romantic? Beyond Romantic Mirrors and Identity Machines: How Smartphones, Social Media, Gaming, and Surveillance Technologies Transform Daily   Life in the Early Twenty-First Century Whereas the romantic machines of the 1990s enabled users to escape to a different, enchanted world, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, romantic reenchantment takes on quite a different form: reality itself becomes romanticized as new devices merge with the human and our world becomes intensively mediated and pervaded by the new ICTs. Now the romance of technology and romanticism is intensified and taken to a new level. New devices embody the marriage of Enlightenment and Romanticism as they transform human experience in such a way that the technology disappears from view and that it no longer makes sense to talk about the “virtual” or even the “digital.” Even “computer” or “computing” no longer belongs to the core of our language about technology. Consider the cell phone, the device that was invented in the 1970s but was only widely adopted in the 1990s and then evolved into what we know today as the smartphone. These phones have little to do with their ancestor, the telephone. Although the device still remediates the functions of a phone, it is not often used for phoning. Instead, it is a machine that connects us to the wider world, which has itself been transformed by the new technology. In a sense, the computer has disappeared: we no longer think of our smartphones as computers, even if they are computers in miniaturized form. Perhaps the Internet has disappeared too. Today we no longer think of the Internet and the Web as separate realities. Instead, with our phones we have become part of the net-world or world-net. There is no longer a real outside as opposed to a virtual inside.

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In this section I discuss this shift from the 1990s Internet to early twentyfirst-century mobile and social technologies, which have not yet received much attention in narratives about technology and romanticism. Smartphones, social media, and gaming are no longer (about) virtual worlds, digital technologies, and evocative objects; they are hardly about technology if that means something entirely separate from humans. They are about human beings and their lives, which have thoroughly been reshaped by the new technologies, rendering the question of boundaries nearly obsolete. I argue here and in the next sections that our machines have become more romantic than ever before and that we have become “romantic cyborgs.” Again I suggest that this could be interpreted as the end of the machine: we no longer see computers and related technological realities as machines. Here I say more about smartphones, social media, surveillance, and gaming—technologies that remain heavily undertheorized in discussions about romanticism and contemporary technology. “Phones” and Social Media Our current phones can still be used in a “1990s” way, of course (as they can be used in a nineteenth-century way: for phoning). We can and do use them as romantic mirrors and as tools in the identity workshop. We can use them to explore different worlds. But our use has changed. Instead of the activity of “surfing” the “Net” or the “Web” by means of a personal computer (PC) and Internet browser, we use a smartphone, and this changes our use and experience. Although the smartphone can remediate the 1990s’ browsing experience (it still has an app to “explore” the web or to go on a romantic “safari”—very romantic, nineteenth-century-style activities), the main interface now consists of all kinds of apps (applications, basically computer programs for smartphones) that are tied to specific functions, activities, and practices. In the context of what is known as Web 2.0, the most important apps are those that focus on social communication and sharing information. The information the Internet offered (in the form of web pages, for instance) is still there, but is now tunneled into apps and devices known as “social media,” defined by Wikipedia as “computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/ videos.”6 There is a lot of user-generated content, meaning that information production became more inclusive: instead of a limited number of people creating websites, now everyone can easily upload and share information, using apps such as Facebook (since 2006, at least in the form we know it today) and Twitter (launched in 2006). Although the Wikipedia

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article on social media still mentions “virtual communities,” this is not what is happening if we take seriously the phenomenology of social media use. When it comes to the experience of social media users, there is no longer a separate virtual world as opposed to the real world. Instead, the new media and the activities such as “searching” (or “Googling”) or “sharing” are integrated in daily life. Supported by the inherent mobility of the smartphone, these devices have transformed this world and have become tools for more immanent rather than transcendent romantic experiences. Sharing information about one’s private life, for instance, is no longer seen as happening “online,” “digital,” or in a “virtual” world; it is happening here and now. It is experienced as actual and real. Note also that Wikipedia (created in 2001) is itself a prime example of how content is produced collaboratively; its content is open and editable—everyone can contribute. Moreover, the disappearance of the machine is now completed: the phone is not seen as a machine at all, let alone the related apps and the transformed Internet. The smartphone was first an “evocative object,” but is now an essential but increasingly invisible medium in the “onlife” world we inhabit. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, many new technologies and media promise a romantic paradise in this world, in the here and now. First, the smartphone and its cousin, the tablet (which is no longer a phone; this function disappears as it is considered “too direct”), are certainly still good old-fashioned romantic identity tools. They are what we may call “iDevices.” The romantic “I” is now digitalized into an “i” that is less metaphysically loaded (some may say: impaired) than the Romantic “I” of Fichte, Novalis, and others, but that is also using technologies such as writing, smartphone, and social media for the purpose of romantic self-expression and identity construction. The “i” or romantic self is active on social media in order to develop and experiment with its identity through “posting,” “liking,” and “sharing” activities. The phones, tablets, and new media thus become romantic tools, which themselves become invisible. Social media sites become the new romantic identity workshops. Like “the Internet” of the 1990s, the new technologies and media are mirrors through which we express and construct who we are and, especially, who we want to be. Like “the Internet” of the 1990s, the smartphones and tablets we use enable us to create our dream self. In romantic times, to be a dreamer is always good. We can use the technology to express unexplored parts of ourselves (see also Coyne 1999, 273) but also to present and assert ourselves as “dreamers, free spirits, and fountainheads of original ideas that can at last be published to the world” (195). Thus,

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smartphones and social media have transformed the earlier Internet into an even better, more effective tool that we use in our romantic practices and techniques of the self. Second, when smartphones were relatively new, they were still what Turkle calls “evocative objects.” Newness has always magical qualities (Morley 2007, 295), and the phone was an icon of the new and a status object, something with which one could distinguish oneself from others. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was important to show that you belonged to the new century (303). Furthermore, the object itself, beautifully designed and attractive in other ways (not only visually but also in a tactile way), received much admiration. But it was also quite a magic thing if we consider its functions and especially the promises and dreams related to it. It seemed to have magical powers. In your pocket “the whole world” and “all information and knowledge” became accessible and you could communicate with “everyone.” And with the mobile phone you could do this “everywhere.” It was like a magic ball that enables you to become nearly omniscient and omnipresent. It was and is also a tool to remain connected: it continuously confirms that we exist and that we are part of a larger social world. It (re)connects us with others. The phone thus became a way to cope with our social and existential vulnerability. As Morley argues, as the phone became part of everyday rituals at home and elsewhere, it also provided “psychic reassurance” (305); without the phone, people feel uncertain and incomplete (303). It was “a magical technology with the capacity to make everything alright” (10). In other words, the cell phone could do what traditional religions failed to do (or at least so it was perceived): to give us the feeling that the world is whole (again). Morley wrote when the cell phone was still relatively new; this is no longer the case today. The phone is less magical now than it was ten or fifteen years ago. At least, it is less evocative as an object. But it still fulfills magical functions. And the point about the phone having symbolic significance and functioning as a symbol of connectivity and as something that creates reassurance or even wholeness remains relevant. (In the near future, new icons of the new may arise and may have similar functions.) Third, because of these extraordinary mystical and religious properties, the phone has become an intimate companion. It is intimate in the sense that it is close to the self and its feelings, connecting us with others, and letting us express our most intimate feelings if we want. But it is also intimate in a very physical, bodily sense: we keep it close to our body. It lives in our pocket quite near our skin, in our handbag near our body, or in the

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palm of our hand. It makes sounds but can also vibrate. It is also nearly always there. We have personal relations with our phones. Turkle (2011) tells how teenagers sleep with their cell phone, and even when it is not on them, they know when it is vibrating (16–17). Many people keep their phone with them at all times. The phone offers more intimacy and companionship than the PC ever could deliver. Fourth, what is really new, however, is that these new technologies and media have transformed our experience and practices in ways the immobile and less social tools of the last century could not have done. Because of their mobility and pervasiveness, the new devices make possible that we experience one world rather than two: there is no longer an online world separate from an offline world, or a virtual world separate from a real world. Floridi has proposed the concept of “onlife” experience in what he calls the “infosphere”: With interfaces becoming progressively less visible, the threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred. … The digital-online world is spilling over into the analogueoffline world and merging with it. This recent phenomenon is variously known as “Ubiquitous Computing,” “Ambient Intelligence,” “The Internet of Things,” or “Web-augmented things.” I prefer to refer to it as the onlife experience. It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the development of the information age. We are increasingly living onlife. The gradual informatization of artefacts and of whole (social) environments means that it is becoming difficult to understand what life was like in pre-digital times. In the near future, the distinction between online and offline will become ever more blurred and then disappear. For example, it already makes little sense to ask whether one is online or offline when driving a car following the instructions of a navigation system that is updating its database in real time. The same question will be incomprehensible to someone checking her email while travelling inside a driverless car guided by a GPS. … To people belonging to Generation Z, the world has always been wireless. … For them, there never has been a world without “google,” “tweet,” and “wiki” … the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other reality. Generation Z was born onlife. (Floridi 2014, 43–44)

Floridi conceptualizes this phenomenon by starting from a metaphysics of information, which is problematic insofar as it reduces everything and everyone to one element: information. It seems to conceptualize the blurring of online and offline and solve the subject-object problem by viewing everything and everyone as informational objects and agents (“inforgs”), thus increasing alienation and disenchantment rather than helping to solve it.7 If this interpretation of Floridi’s view is sustainable, this is neither

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a romantic nor a very attractive way of dealing with the matter. But Floridi is right to argue that it no longer makes sense to distinguish online and offline; making sense of our experience today requires other concepts such as onlife and cyborgs. (I say more about cyborgs below.) In any case, the smartphone has contributed to the creation of this world where online and offline are nearly always mixed. Moreover, usually we no longer see the technology and media we use: they are so much part of what we experience, think, do, and are that we no longer notice them, let alone that we would experience them as machines. If they appear as separate objects, then the technologies are usually so evocative and magic that they appear as art or as design. For sure, they might appear as machines again when they break down or let us down in other ways, that is, when they malfunction. Then they become what Heidegger calls “present-at-hand” (Heidegger 1927). But usually smartphones, the Internet, and so on are literally ready-to-hand: we use these technologies and media as we are involved in the world. We are focused on whatever we are doing, but not on the tool or the environment. They are part of the everyday, part of the world, and part of us. Of course one may criticize some of the promises of the new media. For instance, in Alone Together Turkle has argued that, contrary to their promise, social media may also alienate us from others: I was enthusiastic about online worlds as “identity workshops” when they first appeared. … But if you’re spending three, four, or five hours a day in an online game or virtual world … there’s got to be someplace you’re not. And that someplace you’re not is often with your family and friends—sitting around, playing Scrabble face-to-face, taking a walk, watching a movie together in the oldfashioned way. (Turkle 2011, 12)

Turkle also tells how people prefer texting and other computer-mediated communication over direct, face-to-face interaction. Not only young people but adults too “choose keyboards over the human voice” (11). The technology might thus be used in a way to avoid a more direct form of sociality and communication, to avoid relationships. Turkle suggests that in the world of social media, we are together, but when we disconnect, we are alone. This is of course a “romantic” reaction (in the limited, poor sense of the word), which oversees how hybrid our current form of sociality is. It is still thinking in dualistic categories and assumes a 1990s experience of the Internet. Yet it is important to take seriously these criticisms: perhaps these technologies and media cannot fulfill their romantic promise (see the next chapter).

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However, even if they cannot fulfill their promise, it is important to explore these dreams and promises in order to better understand humans and the use of technology. For instance, the desire to be connected is of course a very human desire, and it is interesting to further discuss the relation between our (experience and expectations about our) relationships and the new media. Turkle (2011) writes about “romancing the machine”: how machines give us new romances (11) as they “promise relationships where we will be in control” (17) and how they make us rethink what it is to have a relationship (19). Discussing machines and romance can thus teach us something about human relationships in the early twenty-first century. Moreover, if they shape our relationships, the new ICTs can only do this and can only have such (positive or negative) effects since they are so much entangled with our lives. This is interesting with respect to the side of romanticism that aims not only at escape to other worlds, but also wants to transform this world: the more immanent side of romanticism (see below). Many of the dreamers of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century did not merely want to dream, at least if this means escaping to a nonreal world. They created poetry, art, and music in order to transform the real world. They might have been interested in an expanded, transformed consciousness, but the ultimate aim was to change the here and now. The romantic slogan power to the imagination meant and means: reenchant and improve this world, also socially. This kind of romanticism is also present in our use of contemporary technologies and media. First, our current technologies are used not so much to “romanticize the machine” but to dispel the machine, to break the spell of the machine, to bring an end to the machine. In the transformed consciousness— transformed by the new media—of the twenty-first century, there is no longer a machine. There is a technohuman reality that, from a romantic point of view, can be interpreted in two ways: from a nostalgic, conservative view we may have reached the ultimate point of alienation and selfalienation,8 or from another, perhaps more progressive and optimistic romantic point of view, we have finally managed to reach a synthesis between Enlightenment and Romanticism that merges technology and the human in such a way that there is no longer an opposition. There is no longer a machine or a system that could oppress us, since there is no longer a separation between the machine and us. In this sense, the varieties of posthumanism that celebrate this hybridity between humans and technology and are optimistic toward the technological future are basically constitutive of a romantic current—even if they often disguise themselves

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in the cloth of Enlightenment rationalism (as opposed to religion, for instance). Second, the technoromanticism at work here is not so much interested in escaping to a different world but in transforming this world, including the social-political world. Social media become tools for revolution, for social change, for making everything new. For example, social media have been connected to the so-called Arab Spring, the wave of protests and revolutions in the Arab world that began in December 2010. We can use social media for self-expression but also political liberation. In 2014, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, expressed in a Huffington Post article the hopes and dreams that are often connected to the new media: I believe that social media is a tool of liberation and empowerment. … In countries where traditional media is a tool of control, these new and truly social channels have the power to radically alter our world. In my eyes, social media is one of the most important global leaps forward in recent human history. It provides for self-expression and promotes mutual understanding. It enables rapid formation of networks and demonstrates our common humanity across cultural differences. It connects people, their ideas and values, like never before.9

Thus, social media seem to fulfill the dreams of Enlightenment thinkers and romantic poets, both of which wanted to create a new world—not a virtual reality. The new technologies thus lead us to a less dualistic view of the world: one in which the informational and the physical merge (see also Coyne’s remark that “the physical world seems to be permeated with data flows”; 1999, 268) and also one in which the social and the digital merge. We live in one world, which has been transformed by new technologies. We have become more technological, and technology has become more human. This technoromanticism fits with a more immanent form of spirituality. In traditional metaphysics and theology, immanence means that the divine or spiritual world permeates the mundane, material world; the divine is not outside the (mundane, material) world. With the current technoromantic technologies, then, we seem to have moved the digital, more “spiritual” world into the nondigital, material-physical world, perhaps to the extent that both have merged. This resembles Christian theology’s narrative about the God who became human, became flesh. And to the extent that there is a total and global merging of spirit and matter, it comes close to pantheistic and pagan religious spirituality, in which the divine is everywhere in nature. Both interpretations are in line with Romantic religion and spirituality, which attempted to reenchant this

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world and rejected narratives of the sacred that place the sacred and the spiritual outside this world. There are also different forms of technoromanticism, which retain the longing for transcendence, hang on to the assumptions of different worlds, and assume more dualistic, Platonic, and modern understandings of reality and of the human. In the section in this chapter on transhumanism, I say more about the idea of uploading and other ways of leaving the body, which seem to be rooted in a (neo)Platonic contempt for the body. This seems more in line with the side of romanticism that seeks transcendent spirituality and escape, although in spite of this discourse focused on transcendence (and sometimes going in apocalyptic directions), it must be granted that many transhumanists also aim for change and transformation in the here and now, for instance, when they want to change their body and mind now or try to reach immortality through creating and using human enhancement technology. I say more about transhumanism and human enhancement below, but first I zoom in on gaming practices mediated by electronic ICTs (i.e., gaming), which also seem to show ambiguity regarding the problems of transcendence/immanence and mind/body dualism. Gaming as a (Real) Practice; Toward the Zen of Gaming Gaming can be seen as enabling immersion in another world as opposed to the real world. Games set up a virtual simulated environment and run a fictional narrative, which renders gaming an ideal romantic playground. Many games draw on romantic myths and stories, and the fictional worlds of these games are populated by all the romantic-gothic figures one can dream of. Imagination is more important than reason. Romantic reenchantment thus takes place by means of the creation of a computer-simulated enchanted game world, where there is plenty of room for exploration of the mysterious, the monstrous, and the grotesque. Some games are also explicitly about the inner self, focus on a struggling hero, or express longing for a simple life.10 In this sense, contemporary gaming remediates the 1990s Internet technologies and the related culture of romantic exploration, working on self and identity, and escape. Consider also older media films and TV, a dimension of gaming that remains important today. But in today’s techno-lifeworld we can no longer make such a sharp distinction between real and virtual. What does this mean for gaming? First, it means that gaming is as real as any other technology-mediated practice today. The gamer exercises agency and personality in the new world. Her

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experience and actions are real. Gaming is also social: contemporary gaming often involves many players, is interactive, and requires role playing. Gamers meet new people and develop friendships and romantic relationships. They thus have real social experiences, including emotional experiences. These experiences are not a mere response to what happens on the screen or on stage, but are the result of the interaction of the gamer with others in the game environment. Gamers’ thinking, interaction, engagement, and feelings are not fictional or virtual; they are totally real. Thus, phenomenologically, gamers do not leave this world for another world; their subjectivity is shaped by the reality of the game, which is at the same time “here” and “there,” which is as real as any other experience in this world. This also means there is no longer such a thing as online friendships or virtual relationships; the friendships and relationships people experience through gaming are as real or fake as any other friendships and relationships.11 Second, because of these qualities, gaming can be a tool for romantic (self-) transformation: the promise of the technology is that gaming is transformative, that the person playing the game becomes a different, better, and possibly more interesting person by playing the game. Indeed, gamers and researchers studying the game culture claim that gaming is not merely entertaining but also transformative. For example, one claim is that games provide learning experiences and have educational benefits (Li, Chiu, and Coady 2014). In her talk “Immersion, Transformation and Agency,” Janet Murray argued that in the “cybernetic loop” (first described by Ted Friedman in 1995) of players and computer responses there is merging of the player’s consciousness and the computer world, and that the “cyberdrama” creates agency, transformation, and immersion: the user has the feeling that she has an effect on the environment and the direction of the narrative, an environment is created for role play, and the gamer is submerged in the simulated place.12 The latter means that gamers do not experience a virtual world but really feel surrounded by a different world, which creates delight as they learn to move within it: “We enjoy the movement of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight comes from learning to move within it” (Murray 1997, 99). Thus, the gamer has the feeling that it is a real world, that she can move in this environment, and that her actions have consequences. Immersed in the game, she might even experience the new world as a material world.13 Furthermore, gaming may assist not only romantic transformation of the self but also of the world. In her TED Talk, Jane McGonigal has

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argued that “gaming can make a better world” (2010): gaming creates optimism, builds trust and cooperation, enables us to do meaningful work, and builds epic meaning. It gives us epic stories with “awe-inspiring missions.” She claims that therefore games are not “mere fiction”; they may help to solve “serious real world problems.”14 In addition, there are so-called serious games that explicitly aim at political and societal change. Imagination is again central key to this technoromantic effort. For instance, the game World Without Oil invites people “to contribute ‘collective imagination’ to confront a real-world issue: the risk our unbridled thirst for oil poses to our economy, climate and quality of life. It’s a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking future-changing action.”15 Moreover, if a game works in terms of learning and transformation, the gamer is also given the right kind of challenge: not too much, not too little. This leads to my next point. Third, the high degree of involvement and engagement implies that gaming can also be used as a romantic tool to overcome dualism: while gaming, the subject-object tension may be overcome. In her 1984 book, Turkle describes how deeply involved people are with video games (89), including emotionally involved, and points to the experience of “flow” and “continuity between mind and body,” the achievement of a recentering of the self, and “skill” involved in gaming (84). Perhaps gaming is more like “socially shared activity” and “tinkering” than she suggests in her Introduction. Inspired by Robert M. Pirsig’s famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and by a remark made by one of the people Turkle talked to (“David,” who says that “it’s almost a Zen type of thing”), we may explore whether there is something like the Zen of Gaming. What is this, and how romantic is it really? On the one hand, the striving to overcome dualism by means of skilled involvement and flow is romantic—not so much since the game presents a reenchanted virtual world, but because this kind of skilled, involved, and flow-like gaming experience seems to help romantics overcome dualism. It presents itself as a means to cope with the alienation that the romantic self experiences. Through immersion in the game play (rather than immersion in a different world), there is not so much escape to a different reality; instead, the reality and (real) self of the gamer are transformed. In this interpretation, then, gaming becomes a romantic technique of the self that uses gaming as a transformative and, indeed, unifying and healing (i.e., whole-making) experience. Through the intoxication of the game,

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there is a recentering or even loss of self. A unity is restored; there is again community—a good old romantic aim. On the other hand, to the extent that this goal of overcoming dualism and this Zen of skilled engagement is actually achieved, it goes beyond romanticism and is more in line with the third way Pirsig proposes: it is about engaging with technologies and being in that moment of skilled engagement, rather than just using them as closed systems, seeing only their rationality, or commenting on their ugliness (or beauty) from a romantic, detached point of view. Whether or not this approach fits seamlessly with the Zen tradition, it is interesting that Pirsig attempted a third way beyond (classic and Enlightenment) rationalism and romanticism, and found such engagement with technology and the resulting peace of mind in the “Zen” of motorcycle maintenance. Rejecting on the one hand rationalist “disinterestedness” (Pirsig 1974, 444) and its “ghost of reason” (462), and on the other hand “romantic pettiness” and technology overlaid with the “veneer” of style (375–376), Pirsig’s narrator finds a “real unification of art and technology” and indeed virtue in the craft of working with motorcycle technology. But the idea could be applied to gaming and use of ICTs more generally, which can also be done in a more engaged, crafty, and skilled way (see also Coeckelbergh 2015a). In the flow and skilled engagement of gaming, the gamer is “in the moment” and attains a nondualistic relation to the world. If gaming really became Zen in Pirsig’s sense of the word, it would no longer be romantic. That is, if and to the extent that it really overcame dualistic experience, it would also help us move beyond romanticism. Whereas romantic practice is still living in the tension between self and world, and as a mode of perception and attitude towards technology tends to share a detached and disengaged attitude with the rationalism it rejects, this third route overcomes this tension and alienation by means of skilled engagement. (I say more about this in my final chapter.) Romantic Utopia and Gothic Ghosts in Contemporary Surveillance Another interesting area of technological practice that can be interpreted in terms of contemporary technoromanticism is surveillance. Of course, people have always kept an eye on each other. But surveillance has taken on a specific form today, made possible by new technologies. In Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault wrote that political power has been given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It has to be like a

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faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network. (Foucault 1975, 214)

Foucault used the metaphor of the panopticon, a “marvelous machine” (202). Proposed by Jeremy Bentham for surveillance in prisons, its purpose was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility” (201); at the same time, the observer remains invisible. This is meant to lead to self-monitoring. Foucault has argued that this is also how surveillance works in modern societies. Many authors have suggested that this concept is also applicable to contemporary surveillance society. Digital information and communication technologies are used to monitor the everyday life. As David Lyon (2001) puts it, “Today, the most important means of surveillance reside in computer power, which allows collected data to be stored, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed and circulated” (2). Moreover, with the rise of new social media, surveillance takes on a new dimension: it is democratized and decentralized, and takes place in an electronic “superpanopticon” (Fuchs et al. 2012, 1). Social media made possible “the massive provision and storage of personal data” (3), which provided new possibilities for surveillance—we are now living in a panopticon without walls— and indeed new possibilities for resistance against surveillance (6). Today there is of course still Big Brother (the state) who can monitor us easily since we keep files of ourselves on social media. This is the dream of every totalitarian state. But because of social media, there are also other people who can monitor us all the time. Surveillance is not only vertical but also horizontal. Yet there is still top-down surveillance: since we put so much personal information on social network sites, these are rich sources for the state, employers, advertisers, and others. As Gilles Deleuze already observed in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” ([1990] 1992), markets are an instrument of social control and today control is “continuous and without limit” (6). Information technologies are also instruments of social control. There is “a multitude of little sisters” (Castells 2001, 180) that collect information about us. But citizens can also use the new technologies bottom up: for countersurveillance (Fuchs et al. 2012, 13) against state and corporations: the Internet “enables those who are normally objects of surveillance to turn their eyes, the ears, and the voice on the powerful and reverse the power of surveillance” (13; see also Fiske 1996 and Castells 2001). Thus, citizens can watch the watchers and, of course, watch each other.

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There are several connections with romanticism and gothic here. First, social media are created with a romantic purpose to connect people, to create new communities. Our social media are there because in modernity we miss community. There is, as Turkle suggests, a lot of loneliness in modern society. Social media therefore could be interpreted as romantic technologies that try to make whole again what has been separated and fragmented. There is the dream of a planetary unity (see also again McLuhan 1962, 1964). The new technologies promise a social-romantic utopia in which everyone is connected to everyone else. But then these very same technologies are also instruments for corporate and state surveillance: social media with all their utopian promise are turned into sites of instrumental reason as we are turned into data (see the next chapter) and as we are watched by people who remain invisible. Both the users, with their digital self and identity, and those who may want to exploit or violate them and take advantage of the data they produce are not in one known position but are all over the network, invisible and unknowable. Utopia turns into dystopia. A social-romantic ideal of community and the social turns into a totalitarian reality. Second, this idea of being watched by invisible powers is a rather familiar gothic theme. The world of the early twenty-first century is turned into a global gothic castle where invisible, ghostly forces play with us. Big Brother was already pretty ghostly, but now the position of the observer is dispersed. We do not know where the ghosts and demons are that spy on us. They are hidden, but not in one place: they are everywhere. Note that this is true not only for the corporate or governmental “they” who may spy on us (or not—we never know for sure, which is essential for the panopticon); “they” and “we” also don’t know who or where the hacker is who might be able to practice countersurveillance. And since with new social media there is also what we may call horizontal surveillance between ordinary people, this epistemic situation extends to surveillance by known or unknown others on social media: we no longer know who knows what about us. Anyone can read our posts. They go out into the world. Our digital identity (and those of others) is a specter: invisible and difficult to track. This brings me to the next point. Third, our identity itself, as it becomes digitalized and is turned into data, spooks the Internet. It is nowhere and everywhere. We “appear” at various places, some of which may surprise us. Our data and those of others leak everywhere. We no longer know what others know about us. We no longer know where we appear (or not). We are turned into doomed ghosts indeed: multiplied and dispersed across the network, we are doomed to

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spook as multiple versions of ourselves. Our identities are forever beyond our control. And as undead entities, we may have to stay in cyberspace forever. This fits with the romantic view of the self and the romantic epistemology: we are never transparent to ourselves in the first place. But here this is taken to an extreme: identity is totally out of control. There is no socalled right to be forgotten. Even after our physical death, we are doomed to keep on spooking—not in a separate cyberspace but in an onlife reality transformed by the new media. Fourth, there are further ways in which the surveillance technologies themselves turn us into ghosts: we become apparitions on CCTV screens and other security screens. We appear and then we are gone again. As we move through the world, we leave tracks of ghostly images and other data. Our shadow no longer follows us, at least not as one visible shadow. It is multiplied into many shadows and ghosts, all with some connection to our past behavior, and we no longer have control over these digital doubles and spectral traces. The security officer’s task, then, is ghost hunting: there are many images, and the task is to distill a more fixed and coherent identity and behavioral pattern and narrative out of this shadow play. Here technologies also help. Algorithms transform our data into profiles. Appearances are transformed into essences. Fluid identities and mobile selves become fixed and categorized. The analogue becomes digital. There are efforts at representation. Yet these efforts always partly fail. There will be always shadows, always ghosts, always noise. The phenomenology of security and surveillance is often romantic-gothic. This also means that both the monitors and those who are monitored retain a ghostly, ungraspable character. Indeed, from a romantic point of view, one may ask whether the ghostly “they” really know us. As Black argues, starting from a romantic position, surveillance society is not as bad as it might be for those who believe that identity can be fully represented and clarified. Does surveillance really threaten the self, can it really violate its “privacy,” if we assume that the self is not fully transparent to itself, let alone to others? Black writes: What is also valuable in being unrepresentable is that a subject who is, at some level, unknowable to her or himself is also unknowable and invisible to the system that’s built on utter visibility. In other words, the romantic self is relatively immune to reification aimed at the subject. (Black 2002, 127)

Thus, if we take romantic epistemology seriously, then we can never be reduced to our data, since reification by means of digital surveillance technologies touches only the visible part of the self, the part of us that can be

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represented, and this is only a fraction of what we are. The mystery remains. Weber’s iron cage or Heidegger’s enframing start to look more like a gothic ghost house. Surveillance cameras also help to create narratives of ghostly apparitions and thus participate in much more literal sense in ghost detection and ghost hunting. For instance, in 2009, a story circulated about a ghost hanging around Disneyland,16 and in 2014, police in New Mexico were reported to believe their surveillance camera captured a ghost since they found “no logical explanation” for what happened.17 These are “incidents,” but some people intend to search for ghosts: there is also the practice of ghost hunting, which today uses the latest information technologies. Note also that in the study and development of automatic monitoring and recognition by means of algorithms, the term ghosts is applied to false detections and generation of objects. But algorithms can do more: they can also create entirely new environments. In the next section, I touch on the romantic aspects of game worlds and the new magic tricks of algorithmic art. (I have already discussed game play and here focus on the graphics, the art of game worlds.) Do Androids Dream? From Sublime Game Worlds to the Magic of Algorithmic Art In the 1990s, the Internet was used as a new space for romantic exploration. I explained that today the use and appearance of the Internet has changed. But it is also still used as a romantic space, one that is often very attractive in a romantic-aesthetic sense. There is a lot of romantic beauty, sublimity, and horror on the Internet. Games, for instance, create beautiful enchanted new worlds. Not only the characters are magical and fantastical; the environments are also stunningly beautiful, often in a very romantic-gothic way. There are many fantasy landscapes18 and environments that have been described with romantic terms such as American frontier (Red Dead Redemption)19 and of course sublime. Games such as World of Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls are called “sublime.” In a blog post Jo Taylor says about The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim that it “re-imagines the sublime mountainous landscapes of the northern hemisphere into this virtual world: the natural experiences of the Romantic poets are transfigured into the virtual experiences of the modern gamer.”20 In 2015 a Dutch museum exhibit, Sublime Landscapes in Gaming, claimed that today “the sublime is back in an unexpected artistic form: gaming.” The landscapes are thus placed within the tradition of sublime painting, which was already all about “beauty and danger.”21 This enables us to compare Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer with a High

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Elf standing in the Skyrim landscape: the gamer’s experience is similar to that of the romantic poet who feels eternity when looking at the mountains and goes into the dark abysses of the mind.22 The experience of the game landscape thus shapes the gamer’s (romantic) subjectivity. This sublime— literally “awe-some”—experience is not virtual; it is real. And it is deeply romantic. Yet these worlds are usually created by humans using computing technology. The technology has improved, but essentially the same thing happens as in the 1990s: gamers immerse themselves in a world created by game developers, who use ICTs as tools to create their human art. The artist is still human. But another phenomenon gives a larger role to the technology: algorithms that generate “art.” For instance, in fractal art, images are generated by calculating fractal objects. Humans facilitate this and perhaps modify the images. This was already being done in the mid-1980s. But there are also new developments, which put the artistic agency (“authorship”?) entirely in the hands of the computer. As I write, Google announces that by using a feedback loop in its image recognition software, it has created “hallucinatory images of animals, buildings, and landscapes which veer from beautiful to terrifying.” As if these romantic qualifications were not enough, the Guardian asks: “What do machines dream of?” thus referring to the famous title of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel in which people live with simulated animals. This is the answer given by the author of the article: “Yes, androids do dream of electric sheep.” The article describes the images as “disturbing hallucination” and “mesmerising” landscapes. The author ascribes the images to the software’s “own imagination.”23 On the one hand, according to the romantic view of art, such images generated by computers cannot be considered “art,” which requires a human artist genius to be the author, painter, and so on. According to this view, algorithms cannot “imagine” or “dream” at all. On the other hand, the romantic imagination of the journalist, (other) viewers, and so on transforms the algorithm in a romantic, imaginative artist and interprets the images in highly romantic terms. This romanticization was already happening with fractal art. For instance, images are tagged as “a beautiful and romantic flower”24 or are titled “Spiral Romance.”25 Although these images are sometimes edited by humans, as is the case with “Spiral Romance,” they are mainly generated by algorithms. Of course, computer programs cannot imagine as we do. They “imagine” in the sense of generating an image based on mathematical calculations—itself the most unromantic, if not antiromantic, thing anyone

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or anything can do. But when we see the image, we see, feel, experience something different. What matters with regard to the emergence of these romantic meanings in fractal art and in algorithmic “dreaming” is not the science and the objective truth behind the image, not the machine generation of the images (this disappears from view), but the perception—the way the art appears to us. And we, as viewers, are romantics. Therefore, this is what we see. What matters is how we humans, with our subjectivity already shaped by romanticism, experience the image. This is also true for robots, to which I turn now. They further illustrate the romanticization of technology, romanticization with technology, and ultimately the disappearance of the machine. Romantic Robots: Uncanny Machines and the Romantic Dream of the Artificial Partner (or Nightmare of the Destructive Double?) Robots today represent more than ever before the merging of technology and romanticism, and perhaps even the end of the machine. They are machines created on the basis of hard science and down-to-earth engineering, but at the same time they are also much more than machines. There are many human cultural meanings attached to robots (e.g., the social meaning of slave and the idea of creating a being that is alive), and in the interactions with, and indeed “encounters” between, humans and robots, meanings and experiences emerge that can be, and have been, interpreted within what we can now easily identify as a romantic framework. Especially as robots become more human-like or come to resemble other living beings, the issues touched on in the tales of Hoffmann take center stage. What happens when “dead” machines become “alive”? Can robots become partners? What is this fascination with human-like machines? Moreover, robots also make us reflect on ourselves: Are we machines, or not? And if machines become alive, are we not “frighteningly inert” (Haraway 1991, 294; see also Coyne 1999, 187)? What if our machines were to become more interesting and more enchanting than we are? Some people fall in love with their machines. They become more intimate than ever as people search for companionship, love, and sex—a literal, or rather material-physical, merging of humans and machines. But there is not only romantic fascination; there is also fear: what if robots and artificial intelligences (AIs) overpower us? What if they become monsters? What if we meet our machine double (to apply a Freudian concept)? I explore some of these issues with the aim of saying more about contemporary technological romanticism and in particular about what I have called the end of the machine.

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Robots as Evocative and Enchanting More-Than-Machines In contrast to computers and many electronic devices, many robots are still evocative objects that raise questions such as, “Is it alive?” and other categorization problems that Turkle (1984) described. We do not know if they belong to the “alive” or “dead” category. They are not human but also not animals or mere objects. Robots are still somewhat mysterious. They are not yet as familiar and domesticated as computers or mobile phones. They are still somewhat enchanted objects. They still have an aura or a presence. And when they start looking too much like us, they become what Freud called “uncanny.” Then they may come close to the category of zombies: undead creatures. They are like the reanimated monster of Dr. Frankenstein: they are created out of “dead” parts that are animated by means of the magic of computing technology—something that appears as magic since it is not yet (fully) understood by the layperson. Code thus functions as a magic formula that gives life to the machine. With the help of code and electricity, the dead machine standing or lying about in the lab or taken out of the box is no longer an assembled corpse; it comes to life and starts moving, perhaps even talking. People are enchanted by it. It is tremendously evocative. It immediately becomes the focus of attention: in the lab, in the classroom, in the home. The roboticist becomes a magician who puts on a show, and as in Hoffmann’s story, some of the magic of the robot is transferred to her. She becomes a mediator between the enchanted object and the spectator. And as the magic unfolds, the robot draws attention to the mystery of the human being as a living creature and, indeed, to the very mystery of life itself: How is it possible that something material-technological becomes a living being, that the living and the spiritual arise from the dead and the material? And are we more than software and hardware? Can creating and experimenting with robots help us to solve the mysteries of the human mind–body? This romantic robot phenomenology thus reveals robots as more than machines: whereas the machine is still seen as “mechanical” and made of “iron,” “steel,” or “silicon,” the new robots are perceived as something different and more than that. They are no longer put in the culturaltechnological context of the industrial machine. Through the magic of the romantic-gothic science of robotics, they become cybernetic organisms, quasi-living things. There is “artificial life.” Robots now seem to have “bodies” and come ever closer to the category of “flesh.”26 Robots also become more than things that can live with humans. They become “social.” In the robo-romantic imagination, they can fulfill all kinds of public and

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private roles. They can even become partners, sometimes very intimate partners. Robots as Intimate Partners At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our machines have become more intimate and more human than ever before. They also have become more interactive and social. They are what Turkle calls today “relational artifacts.” In her 2004 epilogue to her influential work of 1984, she argues that if they “present themselves as sentient and feeling creatures” (288), they respond to our need to feel loved: “In the presence of relational artifacts, people feel attachment and loss; they want to reminisce and feel loved” (293). Indeed, humans are hungry for recognition, vulnerable to feeling themselves in a mutual relationship with even very simple relational artefacts. Robots that seem to make and sustain eye contact elicit strong reactions from their users. And a child’s belief that her digital doll wants to be hugged, dressed, or lulled to sleep is not merely the product of fantasy or desire projected onto an inert plaything. Rather it is based on such things as the doll’s crying, frowning, asking to be hugged, and responding with the physical manifestations of pleasure. … Relational artefacts ask their users to see them not as tools but as companions, as subjects in their own right. (Turkle 1984, 288–289)

Some philosophers describe this human, social, and intimate appearance as a problem of deception, and indeed one may ask if it is ethically right to have tools that pretend to be more than what they are. But there are also more interesting questions to ask. With Turkle, we must ask how technology may change our thinking about these very issues and our dealings with one another, our social relations. As she puts it, “The question is not whether children will love their pet robots more than their real life pets or even their parents, but rather, what will loving come to mean?” (296). She asks good questions regarding human intimacy, companionship, and friendship. Thinking about technology is thinking about people. For example, if some people want a robot partner, perhaps this indicates that they are looking for a “self-object” that never disappoints rather than a real other in a rich relationship (296). Indeed, the intimacy with machines is sometimes criticized. As noted, in her later work, Turkle became much more critical. She writes in Alone Together (2011) about artificial pets: “We are told they are lovable and responsive, don’t require cleanup, and will never die” (1). Lonely and afraid of intimacy, Turkle argues, we even turn to social robots for “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship” (1), the illusion of love without the demands of love. But

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however problematic this may be, the illusion is a romantic illusion created by the roboticist as a romantic magician who uses and develops the most recent technology to reach this goal. Usually this is not intended; scientists tend to describe their work in nonromantic terms borrowed from the Enlightenment. But that does not mean the magic and the romance are absent. Our romance with robots is not entirely new. As Levy argued in his book on love and sex with robots (2007), humans have always been interested in emotional relationships with their technological creations. He mentions the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion who fell in love with an ivory statue of a beautiful woman, which he named Galatea (177). He also mentions romances with dolls and the book and film The Stepford Wives (2004), in which women (wives) are replaced by robots. Moreover, humans have always used artifacts in sexual practices. But human-like robots may raise new issues. Levy imagines the future of robotics in this way: Imagine a world in which robots are just like us (almost). A world in which the boundary between our perceptions of robots and our perceptions of our fellow humans has become so blurred that most of treat robots as though they are mental, social, and moral beings. … How will it affect us when we are no longer instinctively able to tell robot from human at a glance? How will it affect the way in which we interact with someone we’re meeting for the first time if we’re not certain whether that someone is indeed a someone—or instead a something? (Levy 2007, 303–304)

This problem was already explored in Hoffmann: the doll/automaton that looks and acts so much like a human being that a human is deceived into thinking “she” is a human being. More recent science fiction explores this issue. In the film Her (2013), for example, a man has a romance with an AI operating system with a female voice and personality. According to Levy, we are getting closer to that reality where indeed “uncanny” encounters may happen if we are no longer sure about the status of the human/nonhuman other. Of course, one may question this prediction and criticize Levy’s dream of a world in which people no longer “need to suffer from lousy sex, mediocre sex, or anything less than great sex” (307). But whether we endorse Levy’s vision, it is true that our new technologies change human relationships and make us rethink who we are and who or what we want to become. Increasingly, science fiction explores romances with robots and AIs that—like science fiction from the nineteenth century and the twentieth centuries—can be interpreted as transgressions of the human–machine

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boundary. Consider, for instance, the film Ex Machina. This is not “mere” science fiction, as if science fiction or any other fiction really was every “mere” fiction at all. Fiction and facts are entangled in our romantic technoculture. New intimacies with machines are already developing. Some people have robots pets and some have sex robots. Perhaps these “marginal” or “extreme” cases, especially if viewed from a “philistine” point of view, are mere symbols (symptoms?) of a general increased intimacy and romance with technology. Consider again the romance we have with our phones: “We romance the robot and become inseparable from our smartphones. As this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines” (Turkle 2011, 3). What happened with the use of phones may also happen with regard to our use of robots: as we become more intimate with robots, we remake ourselves and transform our relationships with one another. As robots move from monsters in the lab to enchanting objects in the garden and then to partners in the intimacy of the home, they raise questions about how we want to live together: with technology, but also with one another. Robots can have this effect on us only because they are no longer mere machines: they have been romanticized. At the same time, our human romances may become more “robotized,” to the extent that we increasingly take our relationships with technology as models for relationships with people. Conclusion: Robots and the End of the Machine To the extent that robots are perceived and used as more than machines, they help to bring about a romantic end of the machine. In a successful marriage of Enlightenment scientific instrumental rationality (say, the science and engineering construction of the robot) with romantic fascinations and gothic fears, the machine is taken to a stage when it starts disappearing as a machine. As it becomes more “alive” and intimate and takes on a more human or animal form (literally: it is animated, gets a “soul”) it enters the world of the living—even if, as an undead” creature, it remains a little uncanny. It is a romantic or gothic postmachine. As it is romanticized by us and as we are romanticized by it, the robot helps to fulfill the romantic dream of reunification and reconciliation. Here there is reconciliation with the machine, with technology. The solution to the “Frankenstein” problem is enchantment and love. The scientist’s creation no longer confronts him as a monster and is no longer rejected by him or by others, but appears as an enchanted object and even a romantic partner. As the creator embraces his creation instead of rejecting and abandoning it, there is a romance

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between humans and machines. Mind and matter, culture and materiality, humans and machines come closer to one another. There is intercourse between humans and machines: communication and sometimes even sexual intercourse. Perhaps with this kind of romanticism, a new version of the techno-Dionysian dance is possible, in which all differences between humans and machines disappear. In the next section, I say more about the romantic dream/reality in which humans and technology merge. We are now ready to meet the cyborg. Romantic Cyborgs: The Romantic Dream of Merging Culture and Matter, Humans, and Machines Technoromanticism aims not only at reenchanting artifacts and machines. Like mechanical romanticism in the nineteenth century, it also entertains the dream of reconciling humans and technology by merging them. The new mechanical romantic (or informational romantic or cyber romantic) asks if we can perhaps create a hybrid human–machine being. Of course, the human-like robot is already such a hybrid to some extent. And Levy has already explored the consequences of a blurring of human–machine boundaries. But the vision I discuss here suggests a much higher degree of hybridity and unity: the dream of a cyborg, that is, the dream of a fusion of human and machine. This, I argue, constitutes the summit of the new technoromanticism, which today takes on an increasingly material form: cyborg romanticism. The Cultural Cyborg of the 1990s: Haraway’s Posthumanist Romanticism The figure of the cyborg has its own cultural-technological history. Already in the 1990s there was a romantic yearning for unity by means of technology. The Internet made people dream of a unity of minds and a unity of mind and machine: the aim was transcendence in the sense that, in Coyne’s (1999) words, “not only the body but technology is transcended. The electronic matrix is something greater than the contingencies of individual components, their physicality and their failings. We become one with each other and with our machines” (67). However, this concept of “melding of minds with machines” (268) had not yet materialized and was not very concrete. It remained a trope, a figure of speech, a cultural motif. I show this by discussing Haraway’s rather immaterial cyborg. I also highlight the romantic dimension of her cyborg dream and the way this dream contributes to the technoromantic aim of what I call the end of the machine.

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In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway (1991), who is rooted in the 1960s romantic counterculture, uses the cyborg metaphor to reject rigid boundaries between humans and nonhumans such as animals and machines. Partly her point is descriptive: nineteenth-century ideas about evolution blurred the lines between humans and animals; twentieth-century machines blurred the boundaries between humans and machines. But her narrative is also normative: dualisms have always been used to dominate those constituted as others, such as women and animals. The cyborg metaphor, by contrast, is meant to help us move toward a postmodern world of monsters in which there are fusions between animals and machines. Haraway defines the cyborg as follows: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291). She finds such cyborgs not only in science fiction but also in modern medicine, where there are “couplings between organism and machine” (292) and in modern production and modern war. However, for Haraway, cyborgs are not necessarily bad: her piece is “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (292). Haraway’s manifesto has many romantic-gothic aspects. It may be a postmodern “ironic dream,” but it is a dream nevertheless. Her aim is to build a “myth” and to create “a world-changing fiction” (291). She also says that our time is a “mythic” time. This aim to create a new world-changing myth is of course very romantic. Moreover, Haraway’s monsters and cyborgs have a rather gothic flavor. As for a true gothic, the monsters are for her a source of pleasure. Her cyborg is committed to perversity and is utopian (292). She imagines a cyborg world “in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (295).27 Of course, Haraway’s romanticism is posthumanist, feminist, and postmodernist: she rejects “a restoration of the garden” and “the Garden of Eden”; for her, these concepts belong to myths that lead to “polarity and hierarchical domination” (293). But her cyborgs are very romantic nevertheless. Remember their origin: like the personal computers and other technologies, they partly originated in militarism and capitalism, but then they were transformed by the countercultural movement. Without explicitly mentioning this movement, Haraway shows her countercultural romanticism when emphasizing the latter leg of their origin, “the mother” rather than “the father”: The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.

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But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (Haraway 1991, 293)

Thus, while recognizing the connection to what is often called the militaryindustrial complex, Haraway, as a true romantic, turns away from the Enlightenment rationalist “father” and links her cyborgs to their romantic “mother”: the romantic and countercultural origin of which remains unarticulated in the manifesto and in its postmodern form becomes the heroine or goddess (after all, Haraway, like her humanist and modernist predecessors, sees human culture from a god’s point of view). It is a goddess that breaks down barriers: the boundary between humans and animals made possible by biology and evolutionary theory (which of course already started in the nineteenth century), and the distinction between animals and machines (which may be of more recent origin). In her description of the latter blurring, she uses gothic language: Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism. … But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. … Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (Haraway 1991, 293–294)

Thus, for Haraway, contemporary machine technology overcomes organism/machine dualism. This paradoxical cultural change is made possible by “technical features” of the technology. Since technology became smaller (the silicon chip), this specific way in which writing, power, and technology combined has “changed our experience of mechanism” (294). She uses very interesting metaphors to describe this change: Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile. … People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. (Haraway 1991, 294)

Our “sunshine” machines thus lend themselves perfectly for romantic praise, for instance here, within a postmodern and feminist framework. Their “father” might be military and capitalist; their “mother” is the romantic countercultural movement that remains largely salient in Haraway’s manifesto but has certainly contributed to her interpretation and

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the emergence and development of these light, clean, and portable machines to which we can connect as humans. The “machines” became less “machine” and more “human.” They not only connected to humans; they also became more like humans. There is a sense in which they are consciousness or at least its “simulation” (294). Haraway, however, gives a gothic twist to this: she makes her cyborgs appear as a kind of invisible and bad, even deadly, spirits. And there are secrets: The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. … Ultimately the “hardest” science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit. C3I, cryptography and the preservation of potent secrets. (Haraway 1991, 294)

Here Haraway’s language is very romantic-gothic: there is an epistemological play of visibility and invisibility, there is confusion, and there are secrets. With a fin-de-siècle twist, she even sees engineers as “sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society” (294). In her romantic view, science and technology are not “mere” science and “mere” technology: they are revolutionary. They change and will change the world. This brings her remarkably close to nineteenth-century romantics and to people like Steve Jobs. Haraway and Jobs share a Californian version of romanticism, a dream that merges high tech with countercultural romanticism.28 This interest in revolution of course also points us to the social and political message of Haraway’s manifesto, which is very romantic (as well as postmodern and neo-Marxist). Her political aim is “resistance and recoupling,” which she hopes to achieve by means of a romantic-gothic myth, the myth of the cyborg: “Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling” (295). The aim is revolution: she (re-) imagines an action group committed to “building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state” (295). Monsters have always defined the limits of community and helped us to establish our identity (315), and now the cyborg is meant to help us to (re)think our boundaries and identity. With her cyberwitches and cyborgs, these “illegitimate fusions of animal and machine,” Haraway aims at “subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind” (312). Like the romantics of the nineteenth century, she aims

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for nondualistic unity, also “across race, gender, and class” (310)—this is the universalist dimension of her political romanticism. However, Haraway’s manifesto is not a mere dream, and it is not only normative but also descriptive. She also emphasizes how the cyborgs are already here: communication science and biology “are constructions of naturaltechnical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms” (303). Thus, Haraway’s aim is romantic and is served by gothic metaphors. With the myth of the cyborg, she asks us to imagine what we could call a marriage of technology and romanticism: hybridity between machine and organism—although Haraway would reject the traditionalist “marriage” metaphor; perhaps coupling would be better here. With her cyborg couplings, Haraway reminds us of what the French philosopher Jean Brun called “technological Dionysianism.” In Le retour de Dionysos (1969), Brun argues that “ultra-media” are Dionysian since they are instruments of coupling (couplage) and combination, like the torn god that is reassembled. Like Haraway’s cyborgs, this Dionysianism is about mixture and assemblage. Romantics have always loved the myth of Dionysus, the god of coupling and reunification. But is Haraway right that her cyborgs are already here? And does Haraway succeed in bringing them to the stage? Haraway clearly points to scientific developments in the direction of more material cyborgs: machines that become more lively and scientific constructions of natural-technical objects—for instance, in biology. Yet in the manifesto, these concrete developments remain largely invisible; concrete technologies do not often appear. Overall Haraway’s postmodern cyborg is more like ether and less material than one would expect. Her main point is about changing social reality through “world-changing fiction” (291), that is, through myth. There are words. In the end, Haraway’s postmodernism is, like the romanticism of the early Romantics, all about writing and about changing the world through writing: “Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs” and “cyborg politics is the struggle for language” (312)—even if for Haraway there is no original language, no “original symbiosis” (312) because postmodernism rejects this. In her version of romanticism, the romantic project of transformation and revolution through writing and the desire for nondualistic unity is and remains central stage. Haraway explicitly writes about technology, and this distinguishes her from many romantic writers—although as we have seen in the previous chapters, there are significant exceptions. Yet in the manifesto, technology

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is viewed in rather cultural, not very material, terms. The dualisms are challenged by “high-tech culture” (313). The new machines are “coding practices” (313). For sure, Haraway has interesting things to say about technology, for instance, that “it is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine” and that “our sense of connection to our tools is heightened” (313). She also has an interest in computers—in particular, a romantic-countercultural interest in consciousness and hence in the “trance state” she claims is experienced by computer users and she writes that “severely handicapped people can have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization” (313). But instead of then focusing on the concrete material-bodily hybridizations, she retreats to the realm of literature, including feminist science fiction and its boundary transgressions. Of course, for romantics, literature is life. Yet there remains a gap between, on the one hand, Haraway’s suggestion that science and technology present us with real, material cyborgs and, on the other hand, her postmodern culturalism, which fails to make these material couplings visible. The primary aim of Haraway’s cyborg was the creation of a new “myth” (316). Her dream is, in her own words, “an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues” (316). She has succeeded in dreaming and writing that dream. But it is one that does not sufficiently articulate the material side of cyborgs and hybridity. As Black says (with perhaps a philistine flavor in it): Haraway’s post-structuralism tends to overwhelm her good materialist intentions, leaving that materialism largely gestural. … Her lack of materialism and political practicality weakens the articulation of body and material world. (Black 2002, 125)

Haraway’s imaginations are thus very different from the more fleshy or material cyborgs of the early romantics. Could maybe art do what her writing failed to accomplish? Black (2002) says that according to Schiller, combining the formal and material aspects of human existence constitutes artistic practice (126) and suggests that through “artful exploration,” we may creatively intervene in material reality (135). In other words, perhaps not (only) literature but also art could play the role of a romantic instrument. But, keeping in mind the scientific and mechanical romanticisms of the nineteenth century, what about technology? Perhaps science and technology could also help to realize the romantic cyborg dream and do what Black expects from art: “probe the dark places between subject and object” (136). Haraway registers cyborg developments in these realms but does not seem to give a more active role to science and technology. Perhaps they

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could self-consciously work on the responsible and art-full creation of cyborgs? Perhaps art could explore new technologies? (Both are already happening. Boundaries between art and technology are being crossed. In the next section, I give the example of Stelarc, who did this in the 1990s; today there are many others.)29 In any case, it is good to keep in mind that the romantics were already thinking about cyborgs long before twenty-first-century science and culture. Black: “If the original cyborg was Frankenstein’s monster, then the romantics might be seen as pioneers in the making of recombinant beings and worlds” (126). What we may call “cyborg romanticism,” if it is to be(come) critical and self-critical, must engage with its romantic heritage and tradition rather than, as Haraway did, silence it. It must recognize that there is a sense in which contemporary cyborg technologies continue the romantic science and mechanical romanticism of the nineteenth century, but now with twenty-first-century technological means. It is a kind of cyberromanticism or “informational romanticism,” if you like, or even a “cyborg romanticism.” In any case, it is a new form of technoromanticism that deserves further critical discussion because it helps us not only to steer and cope with new technological developments, but also aids our reflection on what it means to be human: Are we romantic cyborgs? What images and myths do we want and need for thinking about the human and for coping with being human in the twenty-first century? One problem identified with Haraway’s view was a lack of real materiality. I therefore now paint a more material picture of contemporary cyborgs and other hybrids, keeping in mind earlier forms of technoromanticism. The Fleshy-Material Cyborgs of the Early Twenty-First Century: From the Borg and Stelarc’s McLuhanesque Performances of the Twentieth Century to Contemporary Phone-Borgs There are many cyborgs in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction. Think about the Borg from Star Trek, or the Terminators from the Terminator films. Discussing these cyborgs is interesting in its own right if one cares about better understanding our contemporary relation to technology. For instance, Gunkel (2000) has argued that the Borg from Star Trek reveals a lot about our contemporary technological condition: “we are borg,” that “we are always and already assimilated into this theorized and fabricated hybrid of machine and organism” (332). Gunkel follows Haraway here: the figure of the cyborg is already reconfiguring subjectivity in the sense that there is “an ideological implosion of the concept of the human” (336) and there have been border wars at least since René

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Descartes (339). Like Haraway, however, Gunkel sees this monstrous boundary crossing not so much as a threat but as a promise of liberation and a description of our condition. Resistance is futile, since we are already Borg (340) since our subjectivity is not autonomous but “formed in and by the flow of information” (343). Like Captain Picard, we are already transformed into cybernetic organisms. The machine is us. This is at least how some people feel at the turn of the century, when in the romantic-gothic imagination it seems that we are assimilated into the “hive mind” or “the Collective” of the Internet, a collective consciousness. But perhaps this aspect of the Borg metaphor is still too dualistic, insofar as it suggests that there are two worlds. In contrast, cyborg thinking is not about different worlds; it is about one world—our world. It is about us. We are cyborgs now, and perhaps have always been cyborgs, have always been technological. More generally, one could say that our technologies are not merely prosthetics that extend us, but have always been part of us and have always been shaping our subjectivity. A cyborg approach to philosophical anthropology means recognizing our cyborg nature. In this sense, there is nothing new. Moreover, twentieth-century posthumanist and postmodern imaginations may sometimes conceal that there are already very material, physical, and biological cyborgs living among us (an insight that Gunkel acknowledges but does not further develop) and that there are already many cyborg practices. Medical technologies, for instance, “create” cyborgs in the sense that they often literally merge the biological body with technologies such as a pacemaker or even a brain-computer interface, which enables the brain to communicate directly with an external or implanted technological device. Again this technology has its origin in the military (the 1970s research on this in California was funded by DARPA) and of course may also help people who are disabled and have all kinds of other intended uses. It is useful. But at the same time it also has a romantic cyborg aspect, which is relevant far beyond the contexts in which it was developed: the technology evokes the hope for more integration between humans and machines. For instance, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics, has done a series of experiments involving the implantation of a device into the nerves of his arm in order to link his nervous system to the computer. This technology may help people with serious impairments, but it is also part of his cyborgromantic vision. In his book I, Cyborg (2004), Warwick tells his story. A Rousseauistic romantic and remaining with the confessions tradition, he starts with the following words: “This book is all about me” (vii). He

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explains that he was born human, but that this also gave him the ability to change himself. He wanted to “upgrade” himself: “upgrade my human form with the aid of technology. To link my body directly with silicon. To become a cyborg—part human, part machine” (1). He wants to do this in order to overcome our “distinct physical limitations” (2). He sees our age as the “age of machine enlightenment” (2): computers can learn and think for themselves. They also have far better communicative abilities. If we want to keep up, we have to upgrade ourselves. Implanting chips in the human body and connecting the human nervous system to machines are means by which he wants to expand our senses and create the possibility of communication with others “merely by thinking to each other”—and thereby making speech obsolete (3). Warwick predicts an evolution in which cyborgs will “split” from humans in the same way as humans split from chimpanzees. If we choose to remain “mere humans” then we are likely to become “a sub-species,” “the chimpanzees” of the future. I will say more about human enhancement and the transhumanist romantic dream below. And there is also an Enlightenment aspect here, although in this case, the computers, not the humans, are said to be first in line for enlightenment. For now, however, I emphasize the romanticism, in particular the cyborg dimension of this technoromantic vision. By merging with machines, we can achieve a highly romantic goal: “unmediated” communication between humans, here understood naturalistically as brain-tobrain communication, and different ways of experiencing the world. Instead of a threat, the merger of humans and machines is seen as the next step for humanity as it tries to evolve away from animals and current “limited” humans. In the meantime, twenty-first-century romantic science and technology creates other cyborgs and hybrids, in genetics, for instance (as Haraway already suggested). But with a little technoromantic and posthumanist imagination, we can also see our use of smartphones, gaming, and other current uses of information and communication technologies as making us into cyborgs. More connected to and entangled with our electronic devices, we increasingly resemble the cyborg pilots that fly our airplanes: hybrids of humans and machines. Perhaps in the near future, our cars will be fully automated. We are already quite cyborg-like when we use navigation devices while driving, and cars are already partly automated. And connected everywhere and with everything and everyone by our smart devices, we might become increasingly Borg-like. We might be turned into cybernetic organisms that increasingly lose our distinctiveness as we all become part of a larger whole.

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This was already anticipated at the end of the twentieth century, and not only in film but also in art. In one of his performances, the Australian artist Stelarc had his body connected to the Internet by means of electronic muscle stimulators. In Fractal Flesh “the body becomes a host for a remote and alien agent,” and in Movatar, “the body shares its agency with an artificial entity”—part of the body is being moved by an avatar’s code.30 These performances that explore human–machine symbiosis can be interpreted as metaphors for how we are already merging with technology and how we are already dependent on its oscillations. Like Warwick, Stelarc also explores new, different ways of sensing through technology. And of course in his art and performances, we recognize a lot of the gothic cyberpunk of Neuromancer and others like it, which also explores what happens to us when we are “wired.” Flesh is connected to silicon, and remote agents, not visible to us, do something to us. This is from Stelarc’s text for Fractal Flesh (1995): Consider … a body that is directly wired into the Net—a body that stirs and is startled by the whispers and twitches of REMOTE AGENTS—other physical bodies in other places. AGENTS NOT AS VIRAL CODES BUT AS DISPLACED PRESENCES … a body whose authenticity is grounded not in its individuality, but rather in the MULTIPLICITY of remote agents that it hosts … or a body whose left side is remotely guided and whose right side intuitively improvises … a body that must perform in a technological realm where intention and action collapse, with no time to ponder … a body of FRACTAL FLESH, whose agency can be electronically extruded on the Net—from one body to another body elsewhere. Not as a kind of remote-control cyber-Voodoo, but as the DISPLACING OF MOTIONS from one Net-connected physical body to another. Such a body’s awareness would be neither “all-here” nor “all-there.” Awareness and action would slide and shift between bodies. Agency could be shared in the one body or in a multiplicity of bodies in an ELECTRONIC SPACE OF DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE … a body with TELEMATIC SCALING OF THE SENSES, perceiving and operating beyond its biology and the local space and human scale it now occupies. … a body no longer merely an individual but a body that needs to act beyond its human metabolism and circadian rhythms … a body directly wired into the Net, that moves not because of its internal stimulation, not because of its being remotely guided by another body (or a cluster of remote agents), BUT A BODY THAT QUIVERS AND OSCILLATES TO THE EBB AND FLOW OF NET ACTIVITY. A body that manifests the statistical and collective data flow, as a socio-neural compression algorithm. A body whose proprioception responds not to its internal nervous system but to the external stimulation of globally connected computer networks.31 (emphasis added by the artist)

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Although this concept still expresses the 1990s excitement about the new possibilities of the Internet and does not take into account how contemporary technologies have further blurred boundaries, Stelarc offers an interesting text and performance here that reveals our “cyborg” existence today and indeed our technoromanticism. First, the changes of subjectivity and awareness described by Stelarc, which are no longer limited to the biological body and its immediate environment, do not happen only in bizarre artistic performances. When we use our computers, phones, and other Internet-connected devices, we become cyborgs with bodies and minds connected to “the ebb and flow of net activity,” responding to and manifesting the collective data flow. As the smartphone makes possible continuous connectivity and “onlife,” we are always and everywhere part of the whole. Second, sometimes our cyborg experience may become what earlier romantics would call a “Dionysian” experience: as romantics, we not only fear the Borg; we also desire it. We feel we want to immerse ourselves in the larger whole, take pleasure in the transgression of boundaries, and enjoy the intoxication of self-disappearance, or at least the disappearance of an autonomous, self-directing self. Removed from the context of the military, the cyborg becomes a romantic figure that lets us dream of a different kind of existence, consciousness, and awareness, one that connects us all. In a McLuhanesque and Neuromancer way. Stelarc says about Fractal Flesh that it speculates about the idea of the cyborg not simply being a cyborg individual body—a kind of military model—that has been damaged biologically and is reconstructed with technological components; so instead of this cyborg idea the cyborg becomes a sort of cyborg-system of a multiplicity of bodies spatially separated but electronically connected—the internet perhaps as an external nervous system that connects these operating nodes, and allows for an extended operational system to come into being, or extruded awareness to come into being. (Stelarc quoted in Kreps 2007, 78)

But insofar as this Borg-like, Dionysian intoxication happens, we also pay a price: as romantics, we also value individuality, but individuality disappears if we become part of a larger Borg-like awareness. Paradoxically, romantic science has developed the Internet as a romantic tool for the individual “I,” but at the same time individuality may well disappear as a result of it. I say more about such paradoxes and problems in the next chapter. Now I discuss technoromantic attempts at human enhancement and the transhumanist movement.

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Human Enhancement and Transhumanism: Romanticism Uploaded Some people use prostheses or undergo plastic surgery, for instance, because they had an accident and need technology and science to bring their functioning closer to what a particular society and culture considers as “healthy” and “normal” functioning. But as Kevin Warwick’s story indicated, others who are “healthy” and considered “normal” want more: they want superhuman levels of functioning, experience, and thinking. They want to enhance themselves. They use human enhancement technology not for treating illness and disability, but for enhancing their capacities and performance. They want to become “better than human.” Of course humans have always “enhanced” themselves by means of education and other humanistic methods. But here technology is used to reach a higher level: personally and perhaps also for humanity at large. In the latter case, the aim is to bring humanity to a next level. The so-called transhumanist movement (also literally organized as a movement, H+, and organization, Humanity+)32 aims at “transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”33 Nick Bostrom (2005b), a well-known transhumanist, defines the movement as follows: “Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have” (4). New technologies should improve our well-being and lead to more pleasure and longer life spans. Transhumanism is also often linked to the concept of the technological singularity: artificial intelligences are assumed to develop (i.e., be developed and improve themselves) to such an extent that—so it is predicted—at some point there will be an “intelligence explosion” that far exceeds human capacities and control.34 Transhumanist human enhancement is then a way to be part of that future rather than staying behind. Enhancement can take at least three forms. One is genetic enhancement: genetic engineering is used to change the genetic makeup of humans. This is a form of enhancement that mainly focuses on enhancement of the biological body by directly intervening in the human genome. Another form of enhancement chooses a more external form of humantechnology hybridity and is not always associated with the term enhancement but effectively leads to it. It ranges from devices such as glasses,

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smartphones, electronic navigation tools, and devices such as Google Glass, which are not directly connected to the body, to more cyborg-like solutions in which the biological body is directly connected to (electronic) technology. Consider again Warwick’s experiments. We can also think about other cyborg technologies such as brain-computer interfaces. In these cases, “flesh” is connected to “silicon.” A third form seeks to divorce mind from body. Starting from a dualist Cartesian view of the human, it seeks to upload the mind to a digital sphere or download it into a robot— in the latter case, we have another kind of cyborg again. In the case of uploading there is a neo-Platonic agenda: a kind of contempt for the flesh leads to an attempt to escape from the human body and take on different posthuman forms. While most transhumanists and other advocates of human enhancement would reject romanticism and instead embrace Enlightenment reason and, for instance, the utilitarian project of improving humanity through science and technology, there is certainly a romantic current running through this kind of thinking. For instance, Bostrom (2005a) is keen to link transhumanism to “its Enlightenment roots, its emphasis on individual liberties, and its humanistic concern for the welfare of all humans” (4). He claims that it is based on “rational humanism, which emphasizes empirical science and critical reason—rather than revelation and religious authority” (3) and that it has more in common with Mill than Nietzsche. But it is questionable if transhumanism can be purified from religious, and indeed romantic, tendencies if it can be the sober rationalist project Bostrom wants it to be. On the contrary, we can discern many signs of romantic-religious thinking. First, Bostrom’s claim about Nietzsche has been challenged by Sorgner (2009), who argues that there are many similarities between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy: both hold that we have to “overcome” ourselves. Sorgner is keen to distinguish Nietzsche’s “spirit” from “some ghostly spiritual substance” and reinforces again the connection between transhumanism and science, thus defending transhumanism as an Enlightenment project. At the same time, it is clear in both Bostrom and Sorgner that there is a transformative aim in transhumanism, one that is not very different from romantic or religious transformation. Romantics, including Nietzsche, also wanted to overcome themselves. Enhancement technologies may be used for the purpose of self-transformation and, ultimately, the transformation of the human species. Romanticism has always been aimed at transformation: self-transformation and transformation of humanity. Sometimes this involved technology. Romantic literature could be seen as a

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(writing) technology of self-transformation. And as we have seen, nineteenth-century romantics projected not only their fear onto the new machines, but also their fascination and their hope for a better world. Some romantics, like William Morris, aimed at a transformation of society through different technological practices. Thus, in its transformative aim, transhumanism is also rooted in romanticism. Second, however, in transhumanism, this transformation goes beyond improving yourself or beyond incrementally improving this world; it reaches into a domain that is usually considered to be the domain of religion, especially when it seeks immortality. Bostrom himself points out a similarity between religious and transhumanist transformation, namely its radicality: “Many people who hold religious beliefs are already accustomed to the prospect of an extremely radical transformation into a kind of posthuman being, which is expected to take place after termination of their current physical incarnation” (Bostrom 2013, 43). It is also true that in spite of Bostrom’s Enlightenment allergy to religion, “some transhumanists pursue hopes traditionally espoused by religions, such as immortality.”35 Indeed, insofar as it is concerned with aims such as immortality and the destiny of human beings, the transhumanist movement expresses “ultimate concern”—to use a famous phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich, who wrote: “The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us” (Tillich 1951, 12). And Hughes has argued that although transhumanism is a product of the Enlightenment humanist tradition and most transhumanists are secular, it appears to be compatible with some religious traditions, for instance, those that emphasize “evolution to a transcendent state” (Hughes 2007, abstract). And indeed both transhumanists and romantics seek transcendence. Both want to explore new, previously unknown realms. Third, in transhumanism, the longing for transcendence and immortality sometimes takes on a Platonic form. Transhumanists who seek to leave the body and become part of a digital realm stand in a (neo-)Platonicromantic and Cartesian tradition. Apparently the disenchanted world and the earthly body are not interesting enough and mainly cause pain and suffering; what we need to do, according to this view, is to escape the prison of the body, with its unnecessary and undesirable limitations. Sometimes this Platonic and Cartesian legacy is explicitly recognized by transhumanists. Natasha Vita-More (2007), for instance, one of the pioneers of the transhumanist movement, refers in a conference paper, “Human 2.0,” explicitly to Plato and Descartes. She says that Plato believed

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that our mind just happens to be associated with a particular body (it is chained to it), and that Descartes thought that our mind exists “in conjunction” with and “separate from body.” On the basis of these assumptions, Vita-More argues that it is possible and desirable to replace the body over time with “non-biological matter,” which enables us to express ourselves in new ways. Although generally romantics are anti-Cartesian, Vita-More’s Platonism and emphasis on self-expression are certainly shared with many romantics. Vita-More also sees life as movement and quotes Teilhard de Chardin: we have to conquer the new that lies ahead of us (Vita-More 2007). This reminds us of the modern, colonial, and frontier types of romanticism we encountered when interpreting early Internet use. In practice, however, Vita-More is not entirely Platonic: she does not so much aim at disembodiment but rather a transformation of the body in order to take on and explore new identities—an aim very similar to (other?) twentieth-century postmodern romantics. The difference to earlier forms of romanticism is that this form of transhumanism does not mainly rely on drugs and other intoxications but rather on enhancement technologies that alter the body and enable one to explore a new identity not completely dominated by the biological body one happens to have.36 Thus, in this conception of transformation of the body, the (biological) body is still there; one is not disembodied. A clearer example of the desire to leave the body can be found in the idea of “mind uploading” or simply “uploading”: “the hypothetical process of copying mental content (including long-term memory and ‘self’) from a particular brain substrate and copying it to a computational device” that would then simulate brain processing in such a way that it responds in the same way as the original brain and experiences consciousness. Such a mind could then reside within a virtual, simulated reality or could be put inside a robot or biological body.37 Sandberg and Bostrom (2008) define what they call “whole brain emulation” as follows: “The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain” (7). Humans are thus “digitized.” In this way, it is suggested, one could extend one’s life or even reach so-called digital immortality since the mind lives in a more durable medium than a human biological body (Bell and Gray 2000). Is this concept romantic? It is certainly Platonic-romantic since it aims at escaping the reality of the body and going into a virtual reality. It is also remarkably ghostly and spiritual: it is assumed that our mind can be

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incorporated in all kinds of bodies and media. Once uploaded, we are supposed to live on as ghosts or spirits in digital environments. And the neoCartesian view of the current human being is indeed a ghost in a shell or a ghost in the machine. As B. Murphy, who says he is a transhumanist activist and writer, asks in his post, “A Transhumanist Journey to Becoming Gods, Angels, and Ghosts” (2013), when we take on a digitized immortal presence, “are we then not essentially taking the throne of ghosts? … When we’ve long since passed away … our digital re-creations live on, is this not similar to the basic concept of ghosts?”38 Yet many romantics would reject the dualism of Vita-More and mind uploading enthusiasts. Black (2002) reminds us that Percy Bysshe Shelley saw dualisms such as mind/world as mere conventions and that “mind and reality were believed part of a shared continuum” (126). He warns of hatred of the body—of people rejecting “the obstinate fact of the mortal body” (128)—and argues that technoromantics should recognize “the need to have the on-line self ‘warranted’ by a warm body” (129). In other words, nondualistic romantics may not find themselves at home in a bodiless, “cold” virtual environment and may want to overcome dualism altogether. But Vita-More’s reference to Teilhard de Chardin brings me to a fourth point. Even if transcendence is not always seen in a dualistic way, it is often coupled with a narrative about history that is not only rather religious but also romantic in the sense that it is highly excited about the changes that await us and that it is assumed that we are part of a larger story and larger whole in which we, as humans and individuals, can play an important role. In The Singularity Is Near (2005), Ray Kurzweil predicts the Singularity (following Vernor Vinge and, much earlier, mathematician John von Neumann): an exponential increase in intelligence will lead to a point when machines will become more powerful than us and we will no longer understand what is going on. At the same time, humans will be augmented and transformed by genetics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Again human beings are seen as limited; we have “frail” bodies subject to many “failure modes.” But the Singularity “will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains.” We are now in the early stages, but this will change. The growth rate of our technologies will be “so steep as to appear essentially vertical.” And then: “We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands” (9). For Kurzweil, all this is part of our destiny and a process toward greater intelligence, beauty, creativity, and love—a transition that is a spiritual one, leading toward a conception of God:

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Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation. … So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking. (Kurzweil 2005, 389)

Thus, by connecting the history of AI to a larger story about the spiritual progress and destiny of humanity, Kurzweil reenchants and romances the history of machines and technology. Interesting with regard to the end-of-the-machine narrative I construct is that Kurzweil also argues that our conception of the machine will change. Our conception of machines is now derived from the simple machines we have known so far, but Kurzweil thinks this will change as machines reach greater levels of complexity and richness of behavior, which will “evidence emotional reactions, aspirations, and, yes, history” (476). Future machines, Kurzweil argues, will even understand and reflect on their history (477). There will be no longer a distinction between humans and machines because “future machines will be human” (30). Our notion of machines will “fundamentally change” (311). Kurzweil’s view can be called romantic in the sense that it seeks to transcend boundaries and desires to be part of a larger narrative in which we move toward greater creativity, love, and spirituality. It is also utopian and profoundly romantic in its view that machines will no longer be machines: his narrative concerns the ultimate humanization and romancing of machines. If interpreted in this way, the Singularity would indeed mean “the end of the machine.” Here we move beyond “romantic machines”: when machines are thus romanticized, they stop being machines altogether. They are human; they are all about love and lead to God (or, as Kurzweil would put it, the concept of God). In Kurzweil’s religiousromantic imagination, we are on our way to an end time when we will witness the end of everything we know: the end of the machine (as we know it) and the end of the human (as we know it). Indeed, Kurzweil’s narrative is very eschatological. Hughes (2007) also recognizes this eschatological dimension in Kurzweil and in the idea of the Singularity: a “dramatic abruption of history by technological acceleration,” with exponential technological progress leading to “either catastrophe or a transition to a new phase of history.” There will be an end time. Some will be uploaded and others “left behind.” We await the coming of a

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deus ex machina. He also writes that Kurzweil is “recognizably millennialist about the utopian promise of the Singularity” (23) and notes similarities with the mystic Teilhard de Chardin: in some scenarios, “collective intelligence will emerge as all human beings are being linked to one another and to machine intelligence in the emerging global telecommunications web” (24). Hughes also mentions that some refer to the Singularity as “technorapture” (22)—which is not so much a Christian rapture, as Hughes sees it, but a technoromantic one: by means of technology, one reaches Dionysian immersion in the larger whole. This Dionysian aspect was already present in Haraway’s posthumanism and other earlier boundary-crossing posthumanisms. It can also be detected in Haraway-style posthumanist transhumanists such as Sorgner, who is inspired by Nietzsche and coauthored the “Metahumanist Manifesto” (2011). Using romantic-gothic language, the “Manifesto” sees “reality as immanent embodied process of becoming” and claims that “monsters are promising strategies for performing this development away from humanism.” The “Manifesto” talks about a “common relational body,” transformation, and the metahuman: an open set of strategies aimed at the production of “a frontier body that is operating on existing boundaries and redefining them.” In a Dionysian way, the “Manifesto” proposes pansexuality, which is also border crossing: “Pansexuality, public sex, poliamoria, or voluntary sexwork are means to redefine sexual norms into open fields of relationality, where modalities of affect reconfigure the limits of kinship, family and the community.”39 To conclude, Kurzweil’s transhumanist narrative may be partly inspired by Enlightenment thinking, but it is also romantic, utopian, and has deep religious-spiritual roots. More generally, transhumanism is not only a rationalist-humanist but also a technoromantic movement. In its Platonic moments, it is in tune with the escapist side of romanticism and indeed the ghostly side of machine gothic; in its eschatological and posthumanist moments, it is not far from romantic mysticism and spirituality, including Dionysianism and attempts at radical relationality and boundary crossing. It shares the longing for transcendence and transformation. It can be read as an enchantment of the history of machines. And with mechanical romantics or “machine romanticism,” it shares the desire to humanize machines, to move toward what I call “the end of the machine.” Not all contemporary forms of technoromanticism aim at a cyborg-type of condition or a radical transformation of the human and a transgression of all limitations and boundaries, leading to a point when there is no longer

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a difference between humans and machines. The next form of technoromanticism starts not with enhancing humans but with enhancing things. The Internet of Things: Reenchanting the World, Creating a New Enchanted Garden The Internet of things (or Internet of Things, IoT) is a network of smart physical objects with sensors that exchange data with humans and with each other. Kevin Ashton, usually credited with coining the term, emphasizes the importance of input from nonhumans: If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things— using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. We need to empower computers with their own means of gathering information, so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, in all its random glory. RFID and sensor technology enable computers to observe, identify and understand the world—without the limitations of human-entered data. (Ashton 2009, n.p.)

At first sight this sounds rather unromantic: Ashton believes that it is important to “track and count everything” and that humans stand in the way of a more efficient and quantified world. But there are also more romantic interpretations of the Internet of things, which express a vision of the Internet of things as a realm of “enchanted objects.” Whether the Internet-of-things idea in the end will amount to “rampant consumerism,” as one commentator puts it,40 it is worth exploring the romantic side of the vision. For this we must turn to David Rose’s book Enchanted Objects (2014). Rose welcomes us to “the age of enchanted objects” and thinks about “how to design enchantment”: how to design enchanted objects and how to transform our homes, workplaces, and cities “through enchanted objects” (xiii). The book starts, in romantic-gothic fashion, with a nightmare. Rose finds himself in a world without “all the wonderful everyday objects we once treasured”; instead there is only “this slice of shiny glass, its face filled with tiny, inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives” (1). In other words, it is a world where there are only screens and distractions and interruptions. Rose seems to agree with Nicholas Carr that the Internet distracts (Carr 2010) and that automation leads to a loss of skills (Carr 2015). Gone are all objects and tools; gone is the craftsmanship, the pleasure, and the skill associated with working with enchanting tools (Rose 2014, 2). To

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bring back the enchanted workshop, Rose wants enchanted objects. He writes: “Technology, I believe, should help make human beings, and the world we live in, more captivating and more enchanting” (4). It is difficult to find a more romantic statement. Rose evokes the curiosity he had as a child when interacting with objects such as a barometer, which appeared “mystical” to him (6). His approach to computing is about wishes for “omniscience, telepathy, safekeeping, immortality, teleportation, and expression” (8). He suggests that “a magical pill bottle—a technologyenabled object that would be as trusty as Frodo’s sword”—might have saved his grandfather from a too early death (8). He also openly connects the idea of enchanted objects to childhood and fiction: The idea of enchanted objects has deep roots in our childhoods, in our adulation of superheroes and fascination with fantasy and science fiction, and in the fables, myths, and fairy tales that go back centuries. As a result, it seems as if we have always longed for a world of enchantment. (Rose 2014, 9)

Rose’s source of inspiration, for his book and its title, is Bruno Bettelheim’s 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: a Freudian analysis of the meaning and importance of fairy tales (Rose 2014, 272). Rose’s narrative goes as follows: We have all kinds of human wishes. In fantasy and folklore, enchanted objects fulfill these wishes. But today we are stuck with smartphones, which turn us into “blue-faced zombies, as we incessantly stare into its screen every waking minute of the day” (7). The Internet of things is to change this. The term is, in Rose’s vision, another name for enchanted objects that promise to fulfill our deepest desires. We want to fly, be invisible, live forever, and so on. Technology is the means to do these things. He quotes the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The idea is to render ordinary objects extraordinary (7). Technology becomes “a realization of our fondest fantasies and wildest dreams. A reimagining of flying carpets, talking mirrors, protective cloaks, animated brooms, and omniscient crystal balls—as well as cherished everyday objects of our past lives, such as hallway barometers and woodworking tools—things we have always loved, dreamed about, and wanted in our lives” (13). Rose wants to make these dreams a reality. Designers become “wizards and artists, enchanters and storytellers” (64). They design objects such as an ambient umbrella that glows when rain is forecast. Of course, one may criticize Rose’s book as just one more way of trying to sell new design. Advertisement always uses (or abuses, if you like) romanticism for its purposes. But it is important to see that his romantic vision of

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a new world of enchanted things only “works” and “sells” in the first place since there is a technoromantic cultural basis at the side of designers and of consumers. Insofar as we are still romantics today, we crave an enchanted world. And instead of giving us the possibility to escape to a different world, Rose and other designer-magicians offer us enchantment of this world. In romantic-religious terms, they thus provide us with a more immanent (rather than transcendent) form of romanticism and spirituality, in which mind/spirit is not divorced from body/earth, but is mixed with it as the material world becomes transformed and spiritualized. In this sense, the Internet of things implies what we may call “the end of the thing.” Once transformed by smart technologies, our things are no longer “things”; they appear to us as whatever our romantic imagination can dream of. Perhaps cyborgs and other posthumans (“postsubjects”?) will be joined by what we may call “postobjects,” everyday things that come alive and constitute a new Wonderland. Furthermore, Rose’s book also reminds us of how magic contemporary technology already appears to us. Think of all the devices that enable remote viewing, remote sensing, and remote control. Think of that magic device that fits in our pocket and connects us to the entire world: the smartphone. Another range of technologies that also aim at enchanting this world rather than enabling you to escape to a different one (although in this case the border between these two is not always clear; it rather seems that both happen at the same time), and which certainly appears to many contemporary people as magic, are the so-called augmented reality technologies. Augmented Reality: Reenchanting the World by Merging Real and Virtual In augmented reality (AR) there is no separate, virtual reality (VR) or virtual environment (VE) one may want to escape to; the idea is to use computer-generated sound, video, and so on to generate a reality here and now that is modified by the technology. Instead of generating a different reality, the purpose is to alter (one’s current perception of) reality.41 Ronald Azuma (1997) explains the difference as follows: “VE technologies completely immerse a user inside a synthetic environment. While immersed, the user cannot see the real world around him. In contrast, AR allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world. Therefore, AR supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it” (355–56). With the help of computer vision and object recognition algorithms and sensors, the “real”

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environment is overlaid with, and ideally mixes and merges with, the computer-generated content. Current AR uses a head-mounted display, such as the nonimmersive Google Glass (the real world is overlaid with some information—say, with information you could also get out of your smartphone, but now that information appears in your peripheral vision and is thus hands free42) or the more immersive Microsoft’s HoloLens, which projects 3D images you can interact with in actual space. Microsoft calls this “mixed reality”: Microsoft HoloLens is the first fully untethered, see-through holographic computer. It enables high-definition holograms to come to life in your world, seamlessly integrating with your physical places, spaces, and things. We call this experience mixed reality. Holograms mixed with your real world will unlock allnew ways to create, communicate, work, and play.43

Thus, instead of projecting a virtual world on a separate (computer) screen, AR aims at mixing the two. Physical spaces are thus magically transformed into, for instance, the game world of Minecraft. AR has many actual and potential applications: gaming is an obvious one, but it can also be used in, for example, architecture, education, search and rescue, and medicine. Like Internet-of-things technology, AR can be interpreted as a romantic tool: if we find ourselves in a disenchanted environment, we can try to reenchant it by superimposing all the magic we want over the real world, which subsequently becomes more “shining” (to use a term from Dreyfus and Kelly 2011). In other words, augmented reality, more than virtual reality, aims to transform the world rather than escape it. This romantic character also explains its attraction: romantic ICT users are not looking for (to paraphrase Heim 1993) just another vacuum cleaner or any other new tool or device; they are after the holy grail. The technology is meant to do what pagan and Christian holy grails were all about: it promises to give us a pharmacon (or drug) that will heal, a blood that will save us, a digital communion that will transform everything and all. It is also worth mentioning that the name Hololens refers to the Holodeck of starship Enterprise in Star Trek—a famous twentieth-century sciencefiction television series Heim (1993) refers to in his interpretation of VR. Star Trek is of course very much embedded in the frontier and exploration romanticism mentioned earlier. Culturally, space exploration and exploration of cyberspace are tightly connected. A famous phrase in the Star Trek title sequence was to go “where no man has gone before.” The full speech from Star Trek: The Original Series, which is inspired by a White House document and was narrated at the beginning of every episode, reads:

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Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.44

Thus, here and in AR we meet the cybercowboy again: that romantic solitary male figure who operates at a new frontier and explores the Terra Nova of a new and better reality. Finally, note that as long as the technology is not widely adopted yet, AR equipment is still more an evocative object: people comment on its aesthetics, are lyrical about it on social media, and so on. There is also the fact that it is new. One commentator compares the feeling of trying Hololens with the feeling of the first time he tried an iPhone: “Wow.”45 Note also that sometimes the border between AR and VR is not so clear. VR has also improved. As I write, Facebook’s Oculus Rift (figure 5.1.), which turns your living room into a game, attracts a lot of attention. Romantic escape remains attractive to people, especially as real-life environments start to look rather dull or grim compared to the magic computer-generated worlds of games.

Figure 5.1 Sergey Galyonkin, Orlovsky and Oculus Rift (photograph), 2013. Kyiv: Sergey Galyonkin. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sergesegal/ 9084790214.)

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As an investor put it: “Nobody wants to be reminded of the crappy apartment they’re sitting in. … People want to escape.”46 Augmented reality, like VR, is literally awe-some: it offers the romantic experience of the sublime or awesome (see also Heim 1993, 137). The constraints of the usual physical world are removed, and everything seems to be possible. Another way to explore a world that is more exotic and interesting than that of a crappy apartment is not to immerse yourself in games or other fictional worlds, but to explore contemporary science, which, like in the nineteenth century, not only functions as a disenchantment machine but also offers a site where, perhaps surprisingly, romantic reenchantments and gothic appearances occur. Spooky Things and Alien Appearances, or Yet Another Way of Reenchanting the World: The Technologies of Physics and Astronomy and the Question of Whether the Moon Is There If We Do Not Look at It Mysterious events, wonders, and spooky things are found not only in fantasy or alternative science, medicine, and psychology usually called pseudosciences (e.g., parapsychology studies paranormal and psychic phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, clairvoyance, near-death experiences, apparitions). They are also part of mainstream, hard and positivist sciences such as physics and astronomy, which turn out to be highly technologically mediated practices with a romantic-gothic dimension. Contemporary particle physics studies subatomic particles (or waves) and their interaction. However, these particles—think about photons, protons, and neutrons, but also quarks, Higgs boson—are not visible to the human eye. They need to be discovered, that is, they need to be shown. In practice, their appearance is produced by technologies. It requires high energies and particle accelerators. For instance, in 2012, CERN “discovered” Higgs boson, an elementary quantum particle. But, like other discoveries in the sciences, this required a lot of technical work, and more is still to be done to provide further evidence. The so-called Higgs field is, according to the theory, present everywhere, yet it is difficult to confirm its existence. Higgs particles are hard to detect. Experimental technology needed to be developed in order to confirm their existence. CERN uses the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that accelerates particles to high energies and lets them collide with other particles. It claims that the collider is “the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator” and “the largest machine in the world.”47 It is built in a 27 kilometer tunnel, lets highenergy particle beams travel at speeds close to the speed of light, has several

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detectors that use superconducting electromagnets to direct the beams, and uses huge amounts of energy. Thus, the terms created or produced seem more adequate than discovered. Romantic epistemology seems very applicable to this kind of scientific experimentation. There are invisible things and hidden forces. One never knows if they will show up or not; particles may appear or not. There is no simple, direct observation. The “facts” and the truth need to be produced in an interaction of humans, machines, and the nonhuman world (“nature”). And there are certainly gothic aspects to this process and these phenomena. Consider Higgs boson again. In March 2015 scientists at Griffith University and the University of Tokyo performed what a commentator called a “spooky” quantum experiment.48 The term spooky is used not only by journalists but also by scientists (e.g., Hardy 1998) and was first used by Albert Einstein. What Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (he rejected the idea) now seemed to have been observed: a particle was in two places at once (so-called superposition), and only when one measured it could a definite position be assigned to it. It also seemed to do this at a speed faster than light, thus violating Einstein’s theory of relativity. Thus, we have a spooky phenomenon here, and an epistemology in which measurement constitutes what reality is. In the 1980s, N. David Mermin, a physicist from Cornell University, evokes the discussion about the spooky phenomenon in his article, “Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?” (1985). He says that Einstein did not believe that we produce the results of measurements by means of the measurement; he wanted things to have properties independent of their measurement. He did not believe in what he called in March 1947 “spooky actions at a distance” (in German: spukhafte Fernwirkungen). But Mermin shows that quantum physics moved beyond this view. Physicists “compel” a particle to assume a definite position and “produce” the results of measurements. They accept the idea that measurement carried out in region A create the value of a property in region B: they accept spooky action at a distance or, in the language of romanticism, magic. Particle physics gets even more magical and spooky if we consider another implication of contemporary quantum physics: time can seem to run backward, and future events can affect the past. To quote a recent news item, which comments on a recent experiment by physicists at Australia National University (2015): A new study published in Nature Physics appears to show that time in fact may move backward, things may exist in multiple states, and whether a tree fell in the

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woods not only may depend on whether anyone ultimately saw it, but also on whether something somehow knew it would be seen. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.49

Again these phenomena are not borrowed from science-fiction novels but are the very stuff contemporary physics deals with. The photon “surprises” us when it “decides” its position. There is romantic unpredictability. Strange things happen in the laboratory. Particles “behave” in ways that were unforeseen or remain mysterious. The quasi-occult phenomena of quantum physics are also open to interpretation, and there is again the idea that measurement is not independent from reality but constitutes it. Contrary to what Einstein believed, contemporary science suggests that the moon may not be there when we do not look at it. Particle physics thus became a science with spooky phenomena and strange interpretations. Viewed from this perspective, it comes rather close to hermeneutics, a romantic hermeneutics. This is true even if this hermeneutic science is highly mediated by mathematics. As Lucien Hardy, a scientist from Oxford University, put it in his article in Contemporary Physics (1998): “The mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics does not point toward a clear picture of the world. There are many different ways of interpreting it. All these interpretations have strange features” (419). One such feature (and interpretation) was the “spooky” action at a distance, or “nonlocality.” We no longer know where a particle is. Another interpretation, which hangs on to the idea of objective reality but is no less wondrous, is the so-called many-worlds interpretation: there are many worlds in the universe and hence many alternate histories and futures.50 It becomes clear that contemporary physics as it has developed from the twentieth century onward has rendered the world more, rather than less, mysterious. In all these senses and to the extent that it has these mysterious and hermeneutical aspects, contemporary (particle) physics as a technological, mathematical, and scientific practice must be regarded as a romantic science. Similar observations can be made of contemporary astronomy. In chapter 4, I mentioned Herschel’s telescopes, which as early as in “the age of wonder” (Holmes 2008) functioned as devices that not only aided people’s wondering at the mysteries of the universe, but also coconstituted reality through their skillful use and contributed to the rise of astronomy as a romantic and interpretative science. But this age of wonder never ended, and today there is more in the night sky to wonder at than ever before.

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Theories and observations concerning the beginning and the end of the universe, black holes, extraterrestrial life, dark matter, and dark energy show, in the words of an advertisement for an undergraduate astronomy course at the University of Virginia, that “the universe is full of deep mysteries that astronomers are far from understanding.”51 There are also fantasy figures out there: giants and dwarfs. There are wormholes, which seem to come straight from science fiction: tunnels of a sort that function as shortcuts through space-time. There is “exotic matter” that violates the known laws of physics; many have not yet been encountered. Some of these things and phenomena can be observed, others not—or certainly not directly. Again technology plays an important role in this quest to discover the mysteries of the universe. Consider, for instance, the concept (phenomenon?) of a black hole: a deformation of space-time “exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can escape from it.” At the center it has a singularity with infinite density. It is called “black” since, absorbing mass and light from its surroundings, it is invisible. It has huge effects on other objects but “appears to have no locally detectable features.”52 The idea had been suggested at the end of the eighteenth century (the time of early romanticism) by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Later Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that very compact mass can deform space-time. There is also further theoretical development in the twentieth century. But the production of evidence needs technologies, such as NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which enables astronomers to study how galaxies are powered by black holes,53 and MIT’s Haystack Observatory, which develops an event horizon telescope for the purpose of getting closer to the edge of a black hole.54 Astronomy thus becomes a romantic science unraveling the mysteries of the universe and its strange objects. In the case of black holes, it becomes what we may call a monstrology. In January 2015 NASA published a news item on its website, “Will the Real Monster Black Hole Please Stand Up?” It is reported that NASA “seeks to unravel the secrets of our universe” and searches for “life among the stars.” The news is that “a new high-energy X-ray image from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array [NuSTAR, an instrument on a spacecraft] … has pinpointed the true monster of a galactic mashup. The image shows two colliding galaxies. … Each of the galaxies has a supermassive black hole at his heart.”55 Thus, new technology is used to reveal monstrous realities that are waiting to be discovered. The lead author of the new study says, “Before now, we couldn’t pinpoint the real monster in the merger.” In the report, space is recast as a living whole, in which there

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are mash-ups, hearts, sleeping, and hidden partners. There is feeding and consuming. Black holes are snoozing away or are buried in gas and dust. Before the question of alien life is even touched on, NASA and astronomy have already reimagined and revealed—with the help of technology—the universe as a living whole full of hidden secrets and monsters. Note also again the epistemology at work here: with the help of technology, what is hidden is revealed. There may be “objective” realities, perhaps, but these need to be constructed by means of technologically mediated observation and human interpretation. In experimental and theoretical science, understood as technologically and mathematically mediated practices, subject and object liaise to create a new, mysterious, fantastic, and indeed romantic world. Perhaps similar observations and romantic interpretations could be made about contemporary studies of the human mind and brain. Today the mind appears hardly less mysterious than it did to scientists in the nineteenth century, and scientists embark on new missions that aim at understanding the human brain by using and developing new technologies, in particular new ICTs.56 However, I will not develop this point here but end this chapter by turning to an area one might least suspect is touched by romanticism. Animal Spirits in Economics Even economics, usually not seen as a very romantic science, contains romantic elements. In his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes used the term animal spirits when arguing that the stability of our economy depends not only on “mathematical expectation” but also on a spontaneous optimism and a “political and social atmosphere”: Most probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. (Keynes 1936, 134)

When our animal spirits “are dimmed,” however, there is no longer optimism and “enterprise will fade and die” (135). Therefore, Keynes recommends “reasonable calculation” supplemented by “animal spirits,” which enable us to put aside “the expectation of death” (135). Our prosperity, Keynes argues, depends on these animal spirits and on the individuals

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who have these spirits and hence a spontaneous optimism. Keynes concludes: In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends. (Keynes 1936, 135)

Thus, according to Keynes, the economic future cannot be calculated—“the basis for making such calculations does not exist” (135)—and is not only a matter of “rational selves choosing between the alternatives” but depends also on occult things such as “animal spirits,” or on what we would today call emotions and trust. In their book Animal Spirits (2009), George Akerlof and Robert Shiller put the point as follows: “People have noneconomic motives. And they are not always rational in pursuit of their economic interests” (ix). Keynes ascribed this to animal spirits and thought that these “thought patterns that animate people’s ideas and feelings” (1) create instability in our economies. On the one hand, this appeal to animal spirits can be read as an Enlightenment disdain for emotions and the irrational. “If only people would be more rational,” the Enlightenment economist may sigh; “then we could calculate and control our economic future.” On the other hand, Keynes and others take seriously this emotional-spiritual dimension of human nature and the economy and thereby allow for what cannot be calculated. They ascribe a role to trust, which they see as nonrational: “The very meaning of trust is that we go beyond the rational” (Akerlof and Shiller 2009, 12). They assume, very romantically, that there is “a basic mental energy and life force” (3) at work and that there is an interdependence between the mental and the material. They use an old concept, “animal spirits,” to reenchant the economic world and show that there are forces at work that rationality cannot control. Akerlof and Shiller even say that the economy has a “sinister side” (26): there is antisocial behavior and there are crashes. There may be gloom, darkness, depression, melancholy, Weltschmerz, and indeed low spirits. Sometimes there is good weather, sometimes storm and night. Sometimes we greet the summer morning; sometimes the winter afternoon visits us. Confidence may disappear and reappear, and we don’t know when. Romantic epistemology and psychology is back and alive. As I search for more literature on romanticism, a program on my computer asks if I want to “enchant” my browser with a mythical unicorn “theme” and warns me that this “may lead to daydreaming.” It is a long nineteenth century indeed.

III  Beyond Romanticism? Beyond the Machine?

6  Criticisms of Romanticism and of the End-of-theMachine Vision

Romanticism can and has been criticized, and these criticisms also apply to technoromanticism. I start by enumerating some of them. First, technoromanticism may lead to escape to a different reality, create distance, and constitute a disengaged relation to the (real) environment. Since the new worlds of games, films, and virtual realities are so immersive, this seems to come at the expense of engagement with “this” world. Second, technoromanticism may lead to self-absorption and narcissism: insofar as romantic use of technologies such as the Internet and smartphones enables retreat in our fantastic inner, private world where we find harmony and can enjoy romantic-gothic pleasures, it seems to lead to too little engagement with others outside the game and the technologically mediated world—real, fleshy and embodied others. We engage with machines rather than with people, or so it seems. The Rousseauistic retreat from society is thus rejected: instead of a return to nature, it is argued, we need a return to society. Third, it is unclear if romanticism can have its authentic self in what seems a technological-cultural environment full of imitation. How authentic are we if, through Internet and social media, we imitate the romanticism of others? How can we become authentic, if at all? Fourth, some of these objections can be reframed in romantic terms: technoromanticism fails to achieve a real romanticism since it is turns to “artificial” environments and “machine” others instead of “real” places and real people. Moreover, what technoromanticism achieves is not authenticity but the very opposite: with social media and other technologies, people become highly dependent on the opinion of others and become commodified. Fifth, these escapist romantic practices and the objections articulated here seem to assume Platonic and other dualisms. There are two worlds— appearance and reality, “virtual” others versus “real” others, real nature versus artificial society—where there is only appearance, authenticity versus nonauthenticity, machines versus humans and so on. These

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assumptions can and have been criticized: anticipating the next chapter, we can try to find less dualistic ways of thinking. Perhaps there is just one reality, and there are degrees of engagement instead of “illusion” versus “reality.” And the concept of authenticity is very problematic: it is not clear what romantic authenticity means at all if we start from the assumption that we always change and grow in relation to others and in response to our environment. Moreover, the objections that seek a “real” romanticism are equally dualistic: they seek a return to a “reality” versus “illusion,” a “society” versus primitivism or “nature,” and so on. Sixth, romanticism is always seen as either “too little” political or “too much” political. It is too little political insofar as it promotes escape and dreaming over realworld politics. It is too much political insofar as it tries to put these dreams into practice. Indeed, political romanticism has always been seen as dangerous. Since Rousseau, it has been argued that by connecting the individual to the larger whole, romanticism may lead to authoritarianism or totalitarianism, or both, especially if the larger whole is identified with the nation or the people (German: das Volk). As we will see, sometimes the utopian aspirations of romanticism are also connected to the (neo-) Platonic dream of Arcadia. Critics of romanticism then argue that instead of dreaming—and then trying to realize that dream in reality by means of a total reordering of society which leads to totalitarianism—we should instead embrace, for instance, liberal or socialist recipes for social change: do not dream but “laissez faire” or discuss, do not dream but organize or resist. Romantic liberation is replaced by “true” liberation. But can such a sharp distinction between dream and reality be sustained? And do these objections to political romanticism not share romanticism’s modern dualist thinking? This chapter further discusses these well-known criticisms of romanticism but focuses on technoromanticism, and especially the relation between romanticism and new technologies. Furthermore, I also present a criticism of the end-of-the-machine vision constructed in the previous chapters. We may think we can now celebrate our romantic cyborg existence, but actually the machine is still there and is perhaps more than ever before present and controlling our lives—a criticism that in turn is vulnerable to objections by both romantic and nonromantic interpreters of technology. I start by asking if it is possible to go beyond a romantic understanding of the world and, hence, of human-technology relations. Furthermore, it is not my aim simply to repeat, endorse, or counter the criticisms, but also to show that the problems are not so clear as is often assumed. It will turn out that antiromantic thinking itself is also more ambiguous about romanticism and

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technology than one might expect. Moreover, I will argue that romanticism has the resources to counter some of these criticisms. For instance, there is also an antidualistic and anti-Platonic strand in romanticism that does not identify with its Platonic cousins but tries to overcome dualism rather than maintain it. And we will see that in response to the claim that our romantic selves and identities are commodified by means of contemporary information and communication technologies, one could argue that romanticism is more resistant to this process of commodification than commonly assumed. First, I introduce what could be seen as traditional criticisms of romanticism by Irving Babbitt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Raimund Popper. Then I discuss some criticisms of contemporary hybrids of romanticism and technology introduced in the previous chapter—cyberromanticism or technoromanticism—and of the end-of-the-machine vision. This will include a discussion of Marcuse and a brief exploration of less dualistic and less romantic epistemology and politics. Finally, before moving on to the next chapter where I suggest paths that may lead beyond romanticism and antiromanticism, I explore if, in spite of all the problems indicated, there are nevertheless lessons we can learn from romanticism. My main purpose in this chapter, however, is not to defend romanticism against its critics, but rather to continue my discussion about the relation between romanticism and technology and, against simplistic views of this relation, bring out how ambiguous and unclear this relation is. For instance, even antiromantic criticisms of technology seem to rely on oppositions that have been invented by the romantics. In this light, what could it possibly mean to be “nonromantic”? I show that the criticisms discussed here may well be antiromantic, but largely (but not completely and not always) remain within the romantic order with its romanticism-classicism and romanticism-Enlightenment oppositions that have defined our field of thinking since the birth of romanticism. For instance, I construct the view that in contemporary consumerist and capitalist culture, our romanticism and our romantic selves tend to be commodified, bought, and sold. This leads me to articulate and discuss what we could call Marcuse’s objections to romanticism (they are not always very explicit). But I also show that this criticism and this discussion remain largely within the limits of modern-romantic dichotomies and discourse. Drawing on phenomenology and Coyne’s reading of that philosophical tradition, I then start exploring what a less dualistic and less romantic view would look like. In the next chapter, I further discuss what would be needed to overcome romanticism.

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Traditional Criticisms of Romanticism: Narcissus at the Pool and the Platonic-Romantic Dream of Arcadia Romanticism is often criticized for resulting in an attitude that is too sentimental, too self-absorbed and even narcissistic, and too unconcerned with politics—or if it is political, then in an entirely bad or evil way. It is said to lead to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, especially Nazism. I articulate some of these criticisms by reviewing Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), in which he criticizes Rousseau, Wordsworth, and other romantics. I also briefly discuss Berlin’s and Popper’s assessment of romanticism, which enables us to further explore the supposedly antagonistic relation between romanticism and liberalism—a relation that will turn out to be much less straightforward than usually assumed by romanticism’s critics.

Figure 6.1 Friedrich John, Franceschini, Marco Antonio: Narcissus, 1830 (copperplate). Salzburg: Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg, Graphiksammlung, G 822 II.

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Narcissus’s Reverie: Babbitt’s Criticism of Rousseau In 1919 Irving Babbitt, an American professor of French literature at Harvard University and literary critic, objected to what he took to be Rousseau’s romanticism. What did Babbitt mean by “romanticism”? He defines the romantic as the “wonderful”: “A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique, etc.” (4) It can also mean “wild, unusual, adventurous” (7). He contrasts Rousseau’s romanticism with Voltaire’s classicism. Genius is not about imitation, Rousseau thought, but about the “refusal to imitate” (34). Romanticism emphasizes feeling and the breaking down of barriers, and seeks the extreme. Romantics do not “shrink at the wildest excess of emotional unrestraint” (97). They cherish illusion for its own sake (260). They are lovers of delirium: in contrast to “genuine religion“ (182), which seeks the infinite of religion and conversion (252), tormented by the demon in their heart (252), they pursue “delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake” (180) in their “cult of intoxication” (183) and suffer from restlessness (252) as they experience infinite nostalgia (251). They value spontaneity and childhood. They desire a utopian dream land, which they place in ancient Greece or (later) in the Middle Ages. They prefer the simple and primitive life, and follow the voice of nature rather than being “perverted by society” (131). Rousseau went into the wilderness “to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint and at the same time to practice the new art of revery” (277). He wished to “fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders of nature” (285), seeking an “ecstatic” animality (286). For Babbitt, this is all temperamental and a desire for “unreality” (110). Instead of analysis or reality, romanticism wants “illusion” (185). The imagination is used to escape to dreamland, where there is neither inner nor outer control. Ethically speaking, it is “glorification of instinct” (147) rather than “inner” check, which is according to the ancient Hindu divine (148). It is irrationality and madness, and in the case of Rousseau even psychosis: “He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had we are told an unspeakable affection for his dog” (143). But what was Babbitt’s own view? According to Babbitt, Rousseau was too sentimental. Although he valued art and imagination, Babbitt thought that what humanism really needs is discipline. He argued against the aim to gain emotional unity through intoxication (184). Rather than wasting ourselves, Babbitt argues, we should exercise “sober discrimination” (184). Instead of primitivism, we need civilization. His humanist ethics is one of restraint. Although life is but a dream (Babbitt quotes Shakespeare’s famous lines here), “it is a dream that needs to be managed with the utmost discretion” (xiv). Note, however, that

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Babbitt also rejected positivism, Cartesian mechanism, and utilitarian and scientific naturalism, which he regarded as another naturalist excess. His book on Rousseau is directed against “emotional naturalism” (x). Against the “oneness” of naturalism and against Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness, Babbitt relies on Aristotelian dualism: we have two selves, a “natural” and a “human” one, and we should “not let impulse and desire run wild” (16). We have to follow the latter: our “ethical self” (49). For Babbitt, imagination plays an important role in life, but he argued against the Romantic imagination, which he says “has claimed for itself a monopoly of imagination” (18). He prefers “the ethical imagination,” which follows the law of heaven. Platonically, Babbitt thinks that human law is only a shadow of this (48). We have to use our imagination in order to “imitate rightly” (69). The classical imagination is not free “to wander wild in some empire of chimeras” but “is at work in the service of reality” (102). The romantics, by contrast, long “to escape from the oppression of the actual into some land of heart’s desire.” Babbitt rejects such “dangerous prevalence of daydreaming” and the “vagabondage” of Rousseau’s wanderings (72). While a longing for Arcadia is ineradicable (73), he warns that one should not blur the boundaries between “statues” and “living men” or between fact and fiction; this could lead to madness (73). Against eighteenth-century rationalism, romantics want unity, but, he asks, “What is the value of unity without reality?” (185). Babbitt also rejected not so much modern individualism but romantic individualism, which he claims does not recognize a measure outside itself: “His own private and personal self is to be measure of all things and this measure itself, he adds, is constantly changing” (xii). Against the romantic concept of genius and its focus on uniqueness, Babbitt defends the “Greek” idea that the genius perceives the universal, with the aid of the imagination—a “strict discipline of the imagination to a purpose” rather than a free imagination (41–42). Rousseau contrasts nature with convention, and if we have chosen convention, this is a kind of Fall: In permitting his expansive impulses to be disciplined by either humanism or religion man has fallen away from nature much as in the old theology he has fallen away from God, and the famous “return to nature” means in practice the emancipation of the ordinary or temperamental self that had been thus artificially controlled. (Babbitt 1919, 45–46)

Instead of imitation, the romantic genius wants to attain self-expression. We should not lock ourselves up in “a set of formulae”; we are unique (46). Romantics such as Rousseau were “quite overcome” by their “own

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uniqueness and wonderfulness” (50). They feel amazed at themselves. Instead of establishing “orderly sequences and relationships and so work out a kingdom of ends,” the “Rousseauist” (Babbitt’s term) embraces wonder and “the creative impulse of genius as it gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious” (51). Ignorance and innocence are praised; rationality is sacrificed. The aim is to sink back to the “state of childlike wonder” (51) since it is thought that “what comes to the child spontaneously is superior to the deliberate moral effort of the mature man” (52). Instead of the Rousseauist, who “specializes in his own sensations” (58), Babbitt argues for ethics, a dualist one that draws us out of our “ordinary self” and toward an “ethical center.” According to him “genuine religion must always have in some form the sense of a deep inner cleft between man’s ordinary self and the divine” (115). The romantic, by contrast, rejects this ethical center as artificial (53) and strives for oneness. Genius is “hindered rather than helped by culture” (65). The romantic wants to shock the philistine by means of the “violence of eccentricity” (64). But, Babbitt argues, this is also lazy: it is easy to be a Rousseauist following your temperament, whereas to become an ethical person requires more work (65). If you want to become a genius, you have to “bestir yourself”; genius is not “a temperamental overflow” (66). Referring to the Confessions, he accuses Rousseau of lacking humility and rejects his focus on the “ordinary” self (127–128). The (true, classical) humanist wants to improve the self, wants to become more virtuous rather than following natural passions. “Even” the Buddhists, misused by romanticists such as Arthur Schopenhauer, offered “a psychology of desires” (149) aimed at “inhibition or inner check upon expansive desire”—in other words, an ethics of control (150). We have to overcome our inner laziness; we are not naturally good as Rousseau thought. The latter is, according to Babbitt, “an encouragement to evade moral responsibility” (155). We must remain fighters in the “civil war in the cave” (187) and reject the lazy peace of following our passions. Romanticism, Babbitt suggests, boils down to egoism: romantics are “men who have repudiated outer control without acquiring self-control” (192). It gives us the moral psychology of the restless “half-educated man … who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not sufficient to acquire new standards that come with a more thorough cultivation” (194). Romantics want to have it all (peace and brotherhood) without paying the price (restraint). Like Nietzsche’s superman, the romantics want “infinitude” and resist proportionateness. But the latter, Babbitt holds, is an important

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virtue. Instead of wanting infinity, we should adjust ourselves to “the truth of the human law” (195). We need ethos, not pathos (201); we need to take distance from convention but by means of the Socratic ethical self, not our “unique and private self” (245). We have to learn to say “no” rather than “yes.” Babbitt also rejects political romanticism. This means for him rejecting the following: a society without traditional inhibitions (193), the aspiration of plebian people to be taken seriously rather than being mocked in comedy, the fascination with “every form of insurgency” such as the heroic insurgencies of Prometheus and Satan (139), the “fraternal spirit” (140) instead of self-control and other personal virtues, and the “new morality” according to which employers should pay a working girl more in order to avoid her taking up prostitution and the related “tendency to make of society the universal scapegoat.” Babbitt justifies the latter by saying that we should “find mechanical or emotional equivalents for self-control” (156). Rather than changing society, then, Babbitt’s classical humanist ethics and political conservatism asks of “man” and “the working girl” to restrain themselves. We have to make ourselves (163); we cannot blame outer, natural forces. By embracing natural passions and forces, romanticism instead discredits “moral effort on the part of the individual” (163). Romanticism, he suggests in a fully sexist mode, should be left to women, who “are more temperamental than men” (158) and to men like Rousseau who shares “this feminine fineness of temperament” and whose “mingling of sense and spirit” is “also a feminine rather than a masculine trait” (158). Thus, Babbitt’s political view turns out to be in line with traditional and conservative Western thinking about ethics and about men and women. If women are like the moon and men like the sun (159), then Romanticism is “bathed in moonshine” (159)—in other words, Babbitt sees it as too feminine. Elsewhere he also speaks of nature as our “mysterious mother”: for Babbitt, women are (potential) prostitutes, workers, or mysterious divine beings. He prefers a classical male-centered ethics, an ethics that aims at what we may call “making men,” rather than women or—worse—hybrids. A man knows how to control himself and tries to achieve clarity by means of analysis. Romantics, Babbitt argues, prefer darkness and the twilight. These “twilight men” admire in women “her unconsciousness and freedom from analysis” (159). (Yet in another place he rejects the supposedly “medieval” view that “woman is … depressed below the human level as the favorite instrument of the devil in man’s temptation … or else exalted above this level as the mother of God” [221].)

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Babbitt presents a very one-sided reading of Rousseau and, for instance, completely fails to see Rousseau’s Stoicism. The book is also rather unfair as an assessment of Romantic thinking as a whole, which, as we have seen, is much richer than a simple appeal to sentiment or a celebration of primitivism. For instance, many romantics thought about how to change society and improve the lives of others. They have been daydreaming, for sure, but frequently their dream concerned revolutionizing the world— transforming society and culture rather than only themselves. Furthermore, although they were often inspired by more archaic cultures and societies such as those found in ancient Greece, many of them, including Rousseau, did not preach an actual return to those societies, let alone to so-called primitive societies. Instead, many were interested in reimagining modern society: reenchanting it, making it more whole, rendering it less “artificial.” Moreover, they highlighted sentiment and pointed to the limitations of rational thinking, especially what would later be called instrumental rationality, but most romantics did not reject reason or rationality as such. It seems that they rather criticized the unbalance between the sentiment and rationality that they found in the Enlightenment. Finally, Babbitt’s political conservatism is disappointing, if not shocking, and his remarks about women are unacceptable in the eyes of a contemporary reader, if not already in this own time. His conservatism could be criticized on the basis of Enlightenment thinking. And the romantics were not always as conservative and sexist as Babbitt. For example, in William Morris, we find a slightly more ambiguous view, including what is perhaps a mixture of traditional and more progressive beliefs about women and about relationships. In his utopia, there is still a traditional division of labor: women are respected as child bearers and work mainly in the household. But Morris also argues against oppression of women by men and at least leaves room for women to do other things as well. Thus, when it comes to gender, Babbitt’s humanism may actually be more conservative than the views of some of the romantics he criticizes. Furthermore, in contrast to Babbitt, romantics were also influenced by Enlightenment ideas. And finally, Babbitt’s humanism seems to be nostalgic about a constructed ancient Greek past when men “knew how to control themselves.” This could also be seen as a form of romanticism. However, there is also some truth in Babbitt’s descriptions of romantic thinking and practice. For instance, he is right when he says that Rousseau sets up a new dualism between artificial society and nature (130). Incidentally, perhaps he is also right that we are living in a world where dogs (“here,” our pets) are often better treated than other people (people who are

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“elsewhere,” out of view). This may indeed have to do with romanticization. And his remark that most romantics “showed themselves very imitative even in their attempts at uniqueness” (61) still holds in our time: we all want to be unique romantic individuals, but in practice, this often leads to imitation rather than true uniqueness (whatever that may mean). In many ways, in spite of our search for romantic uniqueness and perhaps partly because of our romanticism, we are still living in a society that is similar to the mass society and the consumerist society criticized by twentiethcentury thinkers. Our romantic selves have fallen prey to advertisement, marketing, manipulation, commodification, and data milking. We do what “they” do—to use a term from Heidegger. This is very ironic, although irony was and, is of course, also romantic. It is also true that there is a gap between our romantic attitude toward nature and actual practice, another problem Babbitt correctly identifies. In spite of our romantic reverence of natural beauty, we have done very little to preserve it. Babbitt writes about the nineteenth century: “No age ever grew so ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century, at the same time no age ever did so much to deface nature. No age ever so exalted the country over the town, and no age ever witnessed such a crowding into urban centers” (301). The same could be said about the past century. Furthermore, Babbitt blames this on “the Rousseauist” who is “simply communing with his own mood” (302). I think he is right to question selfabsorption and contemplation, at least if this means the individual becomes more distant from the natural environment and no longer refers to anything or anyone outside herself. I have also criticized this kind of romanticism elsewhere when I argued against a romantic environmental ethics (Coeckelbergh 2015a). The myth of Narcissus can do some work here. And indeed Babbitt compares the Rousseauist to Narcissus, who only sees his own image in the pool. We are lost in melancholy and self-pity. If this is romanticism, then for sure it is highly problematic and we better make sure our new romantic technologies do not lead to a kind of cyberromanticism understood as cybernarcissism. We do not want to become cyber-Narcissus—if only because that would mean that we die: only in death do we become totally related only to ourselves, that is, we become totally unrelated. (However, this assumes that such a death is possible; in the next section, I return to this issue.) Furthermore, Babbitt (1919) criticizes not only “the Rousseauist” who escapes in reverie but also the Baconian scientist. He warns against all lusts, including the lust of knowledge: a Baconian humanity “is only an intellectual abstraction just as the humanity of the Rousseauist is only an

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emotional dream” (344). Babbitt sees that scientific and rationalistic humanitarianism are “subject to similar disillusions” (344). He also warns of “the most dangerous of all the sham religions1 of the modern age—the religion of country, the frenzied nationalism that is now threatening to make an end of civilization itself” (345). When there is a “union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint” (346), we get imperialism and war. Babbitt suggests that Rousseau’s romanticism made possible German nationalism. Instead of following the humanistic Goethe (362), most people were induced by emotional romanticism. This link to nationalist politics remains a problem for romanticism and raises the question: What should the relation be between emotions and politics? Does a rejection of political romanticism mean that emotions should play no role in politics? Would that be possible at all? And might there be good elements in political romanticism that should be saved, or does it necessarily lead to totalitarianism and tyranny? Is utopia always and necessarily bad? Is the analytical intellect better equipped to avoid these extremes, or can it also corrupt society—for instance, by means of lethal technologies or utilitarian politics? And what is the relation between romantic political utopianism and contemporary technology? Babbitt did not ask these questions but was certainly aware of the danger of “Baconian” projects. As an antidote, he defended the virtue of humility, which he calls “the supreme virtue of the humanist” (380). He says about science that it needs to know its proper place. In line with his ethics, he writes that the most important thing is self-mastery, not mastery over nature: The discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. (Babbitt 1919, 383)

Thus, for Babbitt, science and technology need to be kept within ethical limits by the virtue of self-mastery and self-discipline. However, I doubt if only scientific mastery is the problem, whereas self-mastery is not: perhaps both forms of mastery are problematic. Is discipline necessarily good? Do we have to choose between self-control or total lack of control? Is “control” the most important dimension for ethics? How much mastery and control is good for us? These questions strike at the heart of Babbitt’s humanism, which, like Romanticism, lives in that tension and that continuum. Can we

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leave it? Can we get beyond the control discussion? I say more about this in my final chapter. In any case, it is clear that Babbitt’s antiromanticism does not entail an uncritical support for science and technology. Babbitt also has a point when he says that “genuine savages are … the most conventional and imitative of beings” (110). This is an incorrect presentation of Rousseau’s view, who was thinking of the simple life of the farmer rather than the “savage,” and who criticized a particular kind of conventionalist society rather than sociality as such. It is also misguided to think that some peoples are or were more conventional than others. And of course the uncritical term of the term savages in this text is annoying to contemporary critical readers. But Babbitt is right if he means that there is no original state of nature. Humans have always followed conventions and have always imitated others. We have always been social beings. We might be able to escape from the convention of our own society, but as Babbitt rightly remarks, the people we meet in foreign countries “have not escaped from their convention” (111). They also live in a society with its own “discipline” (11). Insofar as romanticism suggests otherwise, it is indeed mistaken. Finally, insofar as romanticization and reenchantment take on an escapist, reverie type of form, they may indeed lead to disappointment and bitterness when they clash with the real: “The Rousseauist begins by walking through the world as though it were an enchanted garden, and then with the inevitable clash between his ideal and the real he becomes morose and embittered” (105). Using Jean Paul’s words, he writes that after the hot baths of sentiment, we get a cold douche of irony (264)—the irony of “emotional disillusion” (266). However, both the romanticism criticized here and Babbitt’s objections to it presuppose a dream/real or virtual/real duality. In contrast to contemporary posthumanism, Babbitt’s humanism does not cross barriers. Babbitt’s criticism of Rousseau and romanticism brings out what is at stake in the discussion about romanticism: it concerns human beings and ethics and, ultimately, the nature of reality. For instance, in light of our previous discussion about boundaries, it is interesting that Babbitt, referring to Goethe, wants to reinforce the boundary between dead “statues” and “living men” (73). Indeed, Goethe (1870) wrote, “As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live” (54). Babbitt reinforces this Platonic distinction between the real and illusion. He claims that we should discriminate between both worlds. Moreover, as an anti-Romantic, he clearly favors one side of the

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distinction: reality. He rejects Rousseau’s “pastoral dream” and his “primitivism” (Babbitt 1919, 76). He does not have a problem with longing for a golden age if this remains a kind of hobby, something for one’s leisure time, for women, or for art. But, he argues, we should not confuse such a fantasy world with a state of nature, and we should not reject civilized life in favor of “something that never existed” (79). In other words, he thinks that Rousseau’s Arcadia and Schiller’s Elysium are beautiful but should remain poetry, to be enjoyed in one’s free time. Rousseau’s state of nature belongs to “dreamland,” as does the romantic conception of a pure Greece presented by Schiller, Shelley, and Hölderlin: “a wonderland of unalloyed beauty” that is also “Arcadian sentimentalizing” (81). Novalis’s Middle Ages “never had any equivalent in reality” (110). The romantics want utopia; Babbitt choses the real. Against the “hypochondriac misery” (85) of Rousseau and his focus on feeling (87), which leads him to a reverie that naturalizes “man”—he says of Rousseau that he wanted to “become an oak tree and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity” (269)—Babbitt argues that reverie “should be allowed at most as an occasional solace from the serious business of living”; it should not be its substitute (90). He calls romantic philosophy “at best only a holiday or week-end view of existence” (289). The romantic has nostalgia for the unknown, indeed for escaping home rather than homesickness (92–93). But such an epistemological project to explore the unknown and escape home leads to something Babbitt rejects: going “across all frontiers, not merely those that separate art from art, but those that divide flesh from spirit and even good from evil, until finally he arrives like Blake at a sort of ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’” (94). He writes about “the Rousseauist”: His breaking down of barriers and running together the planes of being results at times in ambiguous mixtures—gleams of insight that actually seem to minister to fleshliness. One may cite as an example the “voluptuous religiosity” that certain critics have discovered in Wagner. (Babbitt 1919, 210)

Thus, the romantic breaks barriers, transgresses, mixes, and—with a “voluptuous religiosity”—con-fuses. The romantic “seeks to discredit all precise distinctions whether new or old” (287). Babbitt opposes this “breaking down barriers” (94). Contemporary technoromanticism, by contrast, seeks to do precisely that. Its technologies offer the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” which con-fuses boundaries such as those between flesh and spirit and between ethics and aesthetics. This reading of Babbitt thus suggests again that Haraway’s cyborg myth is deeply romantic. And from Babbitt’s

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point of view, it shows how “feminine” posthumanism’s horrible “mingling of sense and spirit” is. Babbitt’s remedy for this posthuman horror would be: restrain yourself, behave “like a man.” His humanism does not allow for mixes and confusions; he believes that boundaries and barriers need to be respected. More generally, Babbitt’s comments remain within the romanticism-classicism dichotomy that the romantics themselves set up. As many classic or Enlightenment critics of romanticism and indeed like most of us, Babbitt lives in a romantic split universe and split view of the human being, with reason and control on one side and imagination and sentiment on the other side. Yet his book also shows that Babbitt does make some efforts to escape, not perhaps the romanticism-classicism opposition, but at least the romanticism-Enlightenment opposition. He criticizes both positivism and the “Voltairean side of the eighteenth century.” In other words, he also criticizes (a caricature of) the Enlightenment: a hyperrationalist Enlightenment. He wants to make room for his classic humanism, a kind of third way between romanticism and Enlightenment. He wants to rehabilitate Platonic and Aristotelian reason grounded in insight, “inner perception,” in order to avoid “mere” rationalism and its “quantitative method” (169) and tendency to convert man himself into a “walking theorem” (170). He writes: “A ‘reason’ that is not grounded in insight will always seem to men intolerably cold and negative and will prove unable to withstand the assault of the primary passions” (171). We need insight and experience, and they are not opposed. Babbitt’s own epistemology focuses on “good sense or practical judgment” (172). He held that the epistemological problem can only be solved “practically” (xvi). The solution is a focus on experience: “There is a center of normal human experience, and the person who is too far removed from it ceases to be probable” (173). But intuition has to mediate between particular instances and general principles (173). Intuition brings together experience and the golden mean. This epistemology distances him not only from romanticism but also from the romantic caricature of Enlightenment rationalism. It also brings him closer to pragmatism, for instance. Babbitt rejected pragmatism for its naturalism and since he wanted to hold on to transcendent ethical principles: utility should be tested by truth rather than the other way around (see also Ryn 1997, 82). Yet his focus on experience is at least in line with pragmatism, and he comes closer to pragmatism when, at the end of the book, he writes that the full life is “found practically to make for happiness” (Babbitt 1919, 393) and especially when he praises Aristotle for his treatment of habit and indeed praises habit itself, against

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Rousseau’s alleged view that we should not form any habit. But then, instead of embracing the American pragmatism of his day, he rejects John Dewey for being “naturalistic” and for defending “vocational training” aimed at material efficiency rather than forming habits (386–388). Whether Babbitt is right about this, his rejection of Dewey is puzzling; maybe Babbitt could have learned something from Dewey’s account of habit. Nevertheless, on the whole, Babbitt must be situated mainly on the side of classicism, a humanist classicism rooted in Aristotle and Plato. Although he certainly avoids the caricature of Enlightenment rationalism, his objections to Rousseau’s romanticism—which, to be fair, stand in a long dualistic tradition that runs from Aristotle to modern thinkers—seem to amount to what romantics would call a rather philistine defense of restraint and common sense. We are allowed to imagine, but the imagination must be restrained and used as an instrument for judgment. We are allowed to look at ancient civilizations for inspiration, but only if we select “the idea of proportionateness” and restraint from Greek culture—not the “pagan riot” that he thought amounted to “excessive immersion in this world” (116), not Greek polytheism, pantheism, or (later) the deist idea that “God reveals himself also through outer nature” (121), and, of course, not the romantic version of Greek culture presented by Rousseau, Novalis, and others. Dionysus is for your free time. Babbitt endorses “the great humanist virtue—decorum or a sense of proportion” (142). Distinctions need to be maintained. There needs to be humanist-classicist discipline. Romanticism is at best for the weekend or vacation, when you can enjoy your private fantasies. Real life requires us to make and maintain distinctions. Babbitt praises “the analytical head,” which discriminates between reality and dream: It is only through the analytical head and its keen discriminations that the individualist can determine whether the unity and infinitude towards which his imagination is reaching … is real or merely chimerical. (Babbitt 1919, 167)

In this sense, Babbitt’s sober, commonsense approach launched against the incontinence of romanticism is not only very selective in its philosophical and religious imagination. Like many other criticisms of romanticism, it also remains safely within the realm of modern-romantic oppositions such as the romantic-classicism opposition, and indeed firmly within a dualist Aristotelian tradition that romanticism at least tried to overcome. His thinking brings no real end to the oscillation between two modern extremes (to use the words of Babbitt 1919, 354). With Babbitt’s

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humanism, we plug into a long Aristotelian tradition that certainly has its own merits, but because of its dualism, we do not really move beyond romantic-modern thinking. In its antiromanticism, Babbitt’s humanism remains firmly tied to the romantic binaries. And through its Aristotelianism, it remains affiliated with a tradition of thinking that has always been dualist through and through with regard to its view of the human being and its metaphysics. It also remains affiliated with conservatism, sexism, and fear of hybridity. To this aspect of his work, we may respond with similar words Babbitt used for Rousseau: he asked the right questions—for instance, about the nature of reality (boundaries) and about ethics—but failed to give the right answers. There are other criticisms of romanticism, of course—for instance, Benjamin’s objections, which I mentioned in chapter 3. Romanticism has also been associated with the Nazis, who saw romantic art as “degenerate.” And in their own time, the Romantics were opposed by Goethe, who “associated Romanticism with self-indulgence, extreme subjectivity, neglect of the objective, and ultimately madness” (Allert 2004, 273). (Goethe’s humanism may be close to Babbitt’s on these points.) I next further outline and discuss more traditional criticisms of romanticism by juxtaposing Berlin’s and Popper’s view. Berlin’s versus Popper’s Evaluation of Romanticism: Revisiting Romantic Epistemology and Discussing the Relation between Liberalism and Romanticism Romanticism has received criticism not only from classical humanists but of course also from Enlightenment thinkers, who perceived it as an “antiEnlightenment” or “counter-Enlightenment,” as Isaiah Berlin called it in his essay with that title (1973). Berlin, however, does not simply reject romanticism. He articulates a more nuanced view and pays attention to romantic thinking after Rousseau. For instance, he calls Schelling “the most eloquent of all the philosophers who represented the universe as the selfdevelopment of a primal, non-rational force that can be grasped only by the intuitive powers of men of imaginative genius” (22) and says about Johann Gottfried Herder—himself not a nationalist, according to Berlin— that he is “the greatest inspirer of … direct political nationalism … in Austria and Germany” (15). In contrast to many contemporary philosophers, Berlin took seriously “the great river of romanticism” (23) and spent much of his time on it. We next take a look at his book The Roots of Romanticism (1999) and confront it with Popper’s objections to romanticism to show again how ambiguous romanticism was and is, also politically.

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Berlin’s book, which is based on his lectures on romanticism, starts with the claim already cited in chapter 2: Romanticism is “the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thoughts of the Western world” and “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred” (1–2). He sees romanticism as an attack on the Enlightenment and “the whole Western tradition,” which rested on three principles: (1) “all genuine questions can be answered,” (2) “all these answers are knowable,” and (3) “all the answers must be compatible with one another.” In other words, the idea was that life is “a jigsaw puzzle. … There must be some means of putting these pieces together” (26–28). Romanticism questions these principles, and Berlin sympathizes with this aspect of romanticism: he calls the belief that there is one single solution “ruinous,” especially if this is linked to the belief that “you must impose this solution at no matter what cost”; this leads to violence and despotic tyranny (169). Instead, he argues, we better accept that there are many values. Romanticism can therefore give rise to pluralism. Thus, on the one hand, romanticism also could have a good, positive impact on politics. On the other hand, Berlin acknowledges that romanticism is dangerous politically. This is especially clear in this famous article, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in which he criticizes the “true” freedom of “romantic authoritarians” (197) and writes that “the romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of the West” (167). But at the same time, in The Roots of Romanticism Berlin shows that through the notion of plurality, Romanticism also inspired a better, more sustainable, and certainly more tolerant kind of liberalism, which accepts imperfection. Berlin suggests that romanticism’s epistemology is sensitive to the unknown and to plurality, and that this gives us more hope for a tolerant society than an arrogant rationalist epistemology with claims that there is one answer and that we can fully know it. Berlin’s nuanced treatment of Romanticism is very different from Popper’s, which is a more one-sided view of romanticism. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1962), Popper criticized Romanticism for its “hope for political miracles”: Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate home for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach “back to nature” or “forward to a world of love and beauty”; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven

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on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell—that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men. (Popper 1962, 168)

Thus, whereas Berlin optimistically suggests that Romanticism may transform reason and liberalism into more modest, tolerable, and tolerating forms, Popper’s view is much more pessimistic and sees in Romanticism an essentially antiliberal project. His view is a typical “Enlightenment,” antiRomantic view that, even more than Berlin’s, remains imprisoned in the rationality-emotion dichotomy. Nevertheless, it is clear that a political romanticism has its dangers. Like Babbitt, Popper (1962) argues that Romanticism was based on Rousseau, a “brilliant” writer whose romanticism he sees as “one of the most pernicious influences in the history of social philosophy” (257). He locates the roots of romanticism in Rousseau’s “Platonic Idea of a primitive society” and, ultimately in Plato. In his notes to chapter 4, he says that it is “historically indeed an offspring of Platonism.” The Romantics wanted to return to Arcadia, a primitive Greek pastoral society (221). As Popper sees it, there was already a “strong element of romanticism in Plato”: his “Dorian shepherds” influenced England and France via Sanazzaro’s Arcadia (246; see also 293). Plato is presented by Popper as hating his society and as having “romantic love for the old tribal form of social life,” which is supposed to explain “the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis.” Popper thinks there is too much “mysticism and superstition” in Plato (84). He also reads in Plato “the sweep of Utopianism, its attempt to deal with society as a whole, leaving no stone unturned,” its belief in leadership (7), and its dream of “the apocalyptic revolution which will radically transfigure the whole social world” (164). Against this Platonic-Romantic nightmare, Popper wants to break “the spell of Plato” (7) and presents his “open society” guided by a liberalism that Berlin thought was not opposed to Romanticism, but instead had benefited from it, if not been cured by it. For Popper, here is no way out of the opposition Romanticism-Enlightenment. Biting the bullet, he accepts the kind of Enlightenment view the Romantics objected against. More precisely, he sketches an “exaggeration,” a caricature of “the” Enlightenment view, which was of course never homogeneous and was, like Romanticism itself, hybrid enough. The opposite of an organic society is an abstract one. Indeed, Popper’s open society is explicitly “abstract,” and he even imagines a society without face-to-face contact “in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation”: a “completely abstract or depersonalized society” (174). Whereas the closed society is organic, romantic, and “magical,”

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the open society is abstract, “rational and critical” (294). In practice modern society is not that abstract, he concedes, but in principle it will always be more abstract than an organic one. This is not a problem for him, since he thinks the new kind of society is better. Popper is prepared to accept that the open society is more abstract because he thinks there are gains—in particular, freedom: we can freely enter personal relationships. Popper can be interpreted as himself proposing a new utopia, albeit this time a hyperrationalist one. Interestingly, however, Popper admits that “the magical attitude has by no means disappeared from our life, not even in the most ‘open’ societies so far realized, and I think it unlikely that it can ever completely disappear” (294). With this remark, he thus casts doubt on Weber’s disenchantment thesis (an issue I return to in the next chapter) and therefore allows room for the interpretation of contemporary technological practices as technoromantic practices. Insofar as they are romantic, however, these technological practices are then vulnerable to the same objections launched against romanticism at large. Criticisms of Technoromanticism Criticisms of Technoromanticism and of the End-of-the-Machine Vision: The Dialectic of Romanticism As I suggested in my introduction to this chapter, we can do the exercise of applying traditional criticisms of romanticism to contemporary romantic technologies and technological practices, including escape to virtual worlds, gaming, use of smartphones, and social media, but also romantic robots and cyborgs or, for instance, the Internet of things as a realm of enchanted objects. What may be problematic about technoromanticism and about the celebration of what I have called the end of the machine? First, many contemporary romantic technologies have an escapist aspect: information technologies enable users to escape reality, a reality that romantic users experience as too boring or too difficult. By immersing yourself in, say, a game world, you can forget about reality, enjoy new and exciting enchanted environments, and face challenges that are neither too easy (boring) nor too difficult (frustrating). The same is true, to a lesser extent perhaps, for augmented reality and the Internet of things: the technologies reenchant the world, and in this way, the user escapes the boring nonaugmented reality, the mute, nonsmart world. And robots as partners

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may romanticize the world in a different way, giving the romantic the partner of his or her dreams. Against these escapist tendencies, it could be argued that we should turn to the real world, which needs our response. We should not live in illusion, so the argument goes, but try to cope with the real world and live in it. Living in a virtual technoworld is indeed a dream, but it is time to wake up and face reality. Moreover, if it is boring or problematic in other ways, we can also try to improve reality, whereas—again, so the argument goes— playing (for instance) a computer game does not improve anything in real life. Furthermore, we better face real relationships and real others instead of projecting our dreams onto a machine (see also again Turkle’s argument in the previous chapter). And things should not be enchanted objects but useful tools by means of which we can improve our lives. Note, however, that there is at least one difference between this technoromanticism and Rousseauistic reverie: these technoworlds are more limited than the fantasy worlds of Rousseauistic reverie, which can take any form. Here the imagination is strictly tied to the constraints of the technologically mediated world. The technology restricts and guides our imagination. Hence we may ask if there really is an end of the machine in this case; it seems rather that the machine is there, albeit very well hidden. We live in the illusion of a merger of humans and machines, a fusion of imagination and technology, but “the machine” is still there and controls us. Moreover, Rousseau, Thoreau, and other romantics turned to nature for their reverie. They did not think artificial environments could provide the scene for romantic dreaming. For a real romantic, it seems, such artificial environments are totally opposed to the naturalness of nature. How can we connect to the nature in ourselves and the nature “out there” to which we are related if we are locked up in a virtual world? Thus, apart from classicist and Enlightenment objections that encourage us to “get real,” this kind of technoromanticism can also be criticized from a romantic point of view: we think that we can find enchantment and meaning in those technoworlds, but the best place to escape to is nature, not the artificial computergenerated environments. Romantic cyborg fantasies, however, might be less escapist insofar as they seek realization in material-physical reality, insofar as they are indeed about transforming that reality. And interacting with robots is also not necessarily escapist or virtual, although, for example, in the discussion about robots in health care, terms such as illusion and deception are sometimes used in discussions about ethics: robots are accused of deceiving users, of having fake emotions, and of pretending to be a kind of entity

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they are not (see Sparrow and Sparrow 2006; Coeckelbergh 2012b). Such criticisms could be construed as objections to a technoromanticism that seeks to care for people by deceiving them, by giving them a fictional world—by means of film, VR, or indeed robots. The criticism is again that this is “fake,” that there is a real world out there to which we should turn instead. (Yet this argument may also be cast differently: not so much as an antiromantic point but as a romantic objection. We do not want “cold” technology but “warm” people, “real,” fleshy, and complicated love instead of predictable “fake” interactions with a machine. I return to this point in the next pages.) Second, there indeed seems to be the danger of narcissism, which Babbitt already identified. Romantic technological practices such as using the Internet, smartphones, and social media may easily become narcissistic and self-absorbed. This is not only so since users seem to be turning away from the “real” world to the world of the Internet and social media, often literally by looking at and interacting with their smartphone rather than engaging with the immediate others; the narcissism is also built into the technology, which encourages us to exhibit and focus on ourselves and provides an epistemic tunnel view of the world shaped by our preferences. The contemporary Internet is all about me. With Web 2.0, the Internet has become “my” Internet, the phone becomes an “i”-phone, and so on. We are profiled and monitored, and the Internet and the phone then give us what algorithms predict we want and search for. Increasingly, as the technologies adapt to our “preferences” and behavior, we risk living in our own media bubble, where we receive information from the outside world filtered through the technology and adapted to our data profile. Instead of engaging with real others and with the real environment, we are living in an illusion. Can we still encounter others, or even things? David Lewin thinks it is impossible: In the age of nihilism we do not encounter things which have a nature, rather we encounter only ourselves projected out onto a world of devices whose being is a function of the meaning-given subject. … Indeed, the very idea of encounter—in the sense of being in the presence of an other—becomes impossible in such an age. (Lewin 2011, 190–191)

He compares this loss of the encounter to the epistemic situation of the supermarket: “What we meet on the supermarket shelf is only ever what we know, what we have determined in advance” (Lewin 2011, 223). Similarly, one could argue, the new “social” technologies and “social” robots give us what we know and what we can (easily) know. When we “meet” a robot, for

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instance, there is (according to this argument) nothing hidden. In the mirror of our social media and our machine companions, in other words, we meet only ourselves. Whether or not this is a good phenomenology of supermarket experiences and interactions with robots—there may be a lot more room for surprises and hidden things—the criticism is clear and echoes Babbitt’s rejection of narcissism. Yet again Lewin’s objection could also be seen as a romantic criticism: what is lacking today is a “real,” “natural” encounter. And romanticism stresses the unknown; what technoromanticism presents us, by contrast, is the supermarket view of the world. But real romanticism, so it could be argued, must reject this supermarket epistemology and this view of the self. Again the romantic vision of the disappearance of the machine turns out to be merely an illusion. We think it is all about us, about our authenticity and our freedom. In reality, the machine in the form of algorithms controls us. Instrumental rationality rules us, as our selves and identities are turned into data and sold and used for manipulating us. To paraphrase a well-known contemporary aphorism about the “free” Internet: we are no longer the customer but the product that is being sold. This is unacceptable to “real” romantics and unacceptable to critical theory thinkers inspired by the Enlightenment. Technoromanticism, so it could be claimed, does not really liberate: it offers neither romantic liberation nor Enlightenment emancipation. It leads to unfreedom. (I return to these kinds of arguments below.) However, the interpretation that Narcissus (and therefore the user of electronic media and technologies) sees only himself can be contrasted to a very different and equally interesting interpretation by McLuhan. In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan applied the Narcissus myth to the gadget lover: people become “fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves” (45). But what happens here, McLuhan argues, is not that users fall in love with themselves but the opposite: they mistake themselves for another person, or for something else, something external, whereas actually it is a mere extension of themselves. CyberNarcissus is “hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form” (12). According to McLuhan, the problem with media and technologies is that we see them as external rather than as extensions of the human. This criticism concerns the numbness, narcosis, of the gadget lover, but it is not a criticism of technology as such; it is a criticism of our relation to technology. According to McLuhan, the problem is not that we only look in the mirror, but that we fail to recognize ourselves in technology: we fail to recognize ourselves as technological beings and

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technology as being an extension of the human. We think that media and technologies are external and neutral things, whereas they are part of us; they are extensions of us. This view leads us beyond romanticism, at least beyond antitechnological romanticism, and perhaps even beyond machine thinking (see the final chapter). If it fits with romanticism, it is the cyborg romanticism variant, which accepts and promotes the merger of humans and machines. But McLuhan’s claim that by continuously embracing technologies we “serve these objects,” these idols, and become its “servo-mechanisms,” “the sex organs of the machine world” (51), can also be used in a modern argument that we must remain the master of the machine. We made machines to serve us, but now we are the servants, slaves of the machines. And McLuhan’s complaint about “the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world” (67) can also be used in a romantic argument about illusion and control. The romantic wants a real encounter (or an encounter with the real), a real surprise, and so on. But what if there is only illusion? McLuhan, as a technoromantic, hoped that a transfer of consciousness to “the computer world,” the “translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information,” would “make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness” (67). But what if this does not happen? What if the technological changes give us only more numbness and fragmentation? Third, this phenomenon that—ironically—romantic technologies turn into their very opposite also seems true for our romantic use of the Internet and social media aimed at authenticity. Insofar as we do what “one” does—using our smartphones, relying on algorithms for our work and leisure, playing video games, and so on—and also think what others think because of our use of social media, the new “romantic” technologies do not give us romantic authenticity but quite the opposite. We become entirely unauthentic because we are totally dependent on the opinion of others. Instead of the authenticity Rousseau and Heidegger tried to achieve, we are more part of artificial society and the “they” than ever before. Artificial society now is being mediated and enforced through social media, which entirely deliver us to the arbitrary “likes” of “they.” And the summit of inauthenticity seems to be living with robots: here the “they” literally is a machine. We literally do what the machine wants. The other is entirely artificial. Again this objection has a romantic aspect insofar as the opponent assumes a romantic view of authenticity. Moreover, “the machine” is still there: hidden behind the faces of our “friends,” the machine grinds on, the

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wheels keep turning. If there is an embrace between humans and machines, it is one that is a rather deadly embrace—deadly for any kind of romanticism that strives for authenticity. Fourth, however, both these romantic technological practices and the criticisms constructed here assume a number of dualisms, in particular dualisms grounded in the Platonic dualism between reality and appearance: there is a virtual reality versus a real reality, virtual or artificial others versus real others, artificial society versus nature, real authenticity and the illusion of authenticity, fake emotions and fake love versus real emotions and real love, and so on. But as I already suggested in the previous chapter, this dualistic way of looking at what is happening today when we use contemporary technologies is problematic. I say more about this later in this chapter. Fifth, how political is our contemporary technoromanticism? On the one hand, it could be argued that insofar as we escape to dream worlds, it does not have any real effect on real politics. On the other hand, it is not true that contemporary technoromanticism is always apolitical or antipolitical; on the contrary, utopian romantic politics is possible and also has effects in the real world, for instance, when smartphones are used in revolutionary movements or insofar as technologies such as the Internet of things, 3D printing, block chain technology, and sex robots are given a romantic-utopian promise that influences real investments in these technologies and real uses of these technologies, which in turn may have effects on real social relations and real societies. Here the dangers of romantic utopianism surface. Thinking that we need to radically alter the world, turning every stone of it regardless of the consequences, opens a road toward totalitarianism. Our romantic technologies may create a new kind totality that, based on a technoromantic utopia, controls every aspect of our lives. Instead of more romantic freedom, we might get more repression. Again romanticism risks turning into its opposite. Evgeny Morozov (2011) has argued that the Internet promised freedom and democracy but that cyberutopians were wrong about that. They “did not predict how useful [the Internet] would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become” (xiv). Instead of remaining intoxicated with cyberutopianism, Morozov argues, we better see its “pernicious influence” (xiv). Again a romantic intention turns out into its opposite: an antiromantic nightmare. One could say that there is no “end

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of the machine” here but rather the victory of the machine—albeit a machine that is, again, disguised as something else, something more romantic: the Internet presented as transforming the world and the self, enchanted objects with revolutionary potential, artificial partners that will change the world of relationships, devices that will enable revolutionary groups to achieve their goals, and so on. Note that this scenario of machine victory is different from one in which “the machine takes over” or from the idea of the so-called technological Singularity.2 The latter scenarios also project the victory of the machine and perhaps, as in Kurzweil (2006), a merging with the machine, but the machine is not disguised. The victory does not happen in the name of romantic values, and it is relatively clear what is supposed to happen. The scenario suggested here, by contrast, involves an antiromantic nightmare in the name of romantic values. The criticism is that we wanted romantic technologies but instead end up living in an antiromantic machine (world) that is at least initially invisible to us. We become enslaved by the machine, but at first we do not notice. Thus, just as critical theory argued that the Enlightenment has turned into its opposite (especially the so-called Frankfurt School; see, for instance, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno [1944], who argued that the Enlightenment turned into new forms of domination such as National Socialism and Stalinism), one could argue that Romanticism has turned into its opposite: it wanted to end the machine by reenchanting the world and transforming ourselves, but through technoromanticism, it has achieved the very opposite of its aim: a new metamachine that controls us and a summit of inauthenticity. What I propose to call the dialectic of Romanticism seems to apply to technoromantic practices. Note again that these criticisms are also based on a dualistic view: dream versus reality, aesthetic imagination versus rational imagination, utopia versus reality, humans versus machine, and so on. And the very duality of romanticism-technology remains intact. We remain within romantic thinking, within the romantic order. Before rejecting the dualist assumptions of the objections to technoromanticism, however, I further construct and critically discuss the dialectic of Romanticism argument and in particular the argument that the end-of-the-machine version of technoromanticism does not really achieve what it pretends to achieve, that we are just deceived and that the machine never left the stage but instead controls us. For this purpose I use critical theory, in particular Marcuse.

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Using Marcuse to Criticize the End-of-the-Machine Vision: More on the Dialectic of Romanticism Inspired by critical theory, we could frame the argument as follows: we think we have romanticized technology now and made it harmless and domesticated, or even made the machine disappear, but what is really going on is that the machine commodifies our romantic selves and identities and manipulates, exploits, and sells off our romanticism and our selves and identities. We live in a romantic illusion of harmony between humans and machine, but the romance is fake. In reality, the machine is still there; it dominates us and enables forms of domination by other humans. In the end, technoromanticism does not lead to the end of the machine but turns us into machines. Dehumanized and repressed, we wake up from the dream and take the cold shower of critical theory, which alerts us not only to the dialectic of Enlightenment but also—it turns out, unintended—to what I have called the dialectic of Romanticism. I further articulate and discuss this position by using Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt school, who argued against romanticism and—as I interpret him—presents resources to argue against the vision of the end of the machine. A discussion of Marcuse also shows how the dialectic of Enlightenment and the dialectic of Romanticism may be on more intimate terms with one another than one may expect. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse argued that people are made part of the system through mass media and advertising. The private has been integrated in the system. Marcuse writes that the private sphere, in which “man may become and remain ‘himself,’” has been “invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual” (12). Technology is used for domination and social control. Domination now “extends to all spheres of private and public existence” (20). New needs are created. Individuals become cogs in the consumer machine. Even so-called free, pluralistic, and democratic societies have a totalitarian tendency: By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. (Marcuse 1964, 5)

According to Marcuse, “the machine” can potentially lead to freedom, but it can also be used as a political instrument. We are controlled by economic forces and relationships. We are given what Marcuse calls “false needs”:

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“the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate” (7). Now one could argue that this also happens today to our romantic selves, but this time through so-called social media as “romantic machines,” which turn us into inauthentic consumers. Of course communication technologies have changed since Marcuse. They are, for instance, much more horizontal than vertical: communication, and hence manipulation, is done not only by companies and governments; there is also communication, and hence manipulation and exploitation, between citizensconsumers. But generally the analysis Marcuse offers seems remarkably applicable to today’s Internet technologies. Social media serve to integrate the private romantic self into the system. There is no longer a private sphere or inner space. The private romantic aspirations of individuals are transformed into data, which can then be used in marketing and advertisement. Romantic needs are identified and created, and then romantic products are provided. Our “labor” on the Internet is exploitative (see also Fuchs 2013 on the exploitation of the Internet “prosumer”; as Alvin Toffler [1980] already argued, consumers now help to improve and create the goods on the marketplace). But we do not see the manipulation and exploitation. We do not even see the labor as labor. And we are given the idea that romantic values such as authenticity and naturalness can be bought. We find ourselves in the romantic supermarket. We are happy to buy the products “they” buy. As consumers we are bound “more or less pleasantly to the producers” (Marcuse 1964, 14) of romantic goods. With the tools of Internet 2.0 at our disposal, we are also given the idea that we are all artists. Marcuse writes: It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into his drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which remakes their content. (Marcuse 1964, 68)

The result is one totality in which romantic desires and activities—one could say the romantic making of the self through smart devices and online activities—mix with consumerist economics through the use of new media. Immersed in social media, we think we are authentic artists, but the new media make us “love and hate what others love and hate” (7). And as users of the Internet and new media, we become part of “a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe” (20). We have to

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remain connected. Our “content” has to be remade continuously. We have to sustain the system. We have to “give” our romantic self to the system; it has to be used and exploited, turned into data and sold. We are the new laborers, but the labor is invisible, unpaid, and we do not have rights. We only have the illusion that we are achieving the romantic ideals when we are “pleasantly” immersed in the new media. In reality, our bodies-minds are mined for data; constantly connected to the Internet, we are living in data battery cages on information farms and factories. Yet Marcuse is still rather romantic, and in any case modern and dualist, insofar as he assumes that authenticity and freedom can be clearly defined. In contrast to what Marcuse’s analysis suggests at this point in the text, under contemporary romanticism (romantic culture and romantic technology), it is no longer possible to distinguish true from false needs and clearly differentiate between “we” and “they.” Like Rousseau and Thoreau, we reject the artificial needs of society. But since we are all romantics, society itself becomes a romantic society. The “one” or the “they”—to use Heidegger’s term—now has become a romantic “one”: “they” are romantic and I am romantic. We all want to be authentic and natural. This means we can no longer turn away from a society that shares our romantic values. What is left is one romantic-technological-economic totality. We are part of one large romantic machine. As children and grandchildren from the countercultural period in which Marcuse’s ideas thrived, today we all think, like Marcuse, that “the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves” (8). Like Marcuse and his countercultural contemporaries, we are all romantic individualists. But this romantic individualism has been absorbed by “the system,” which tries to give us the feeling that it is there only to serve our romantic selves, but at the same time manipulates and exploits us. Instead of achieving self-expression, liberation, and self-transformation (or Dionysian rapture—see again my comments on the Borg), we experience more alienation, fragmentation, and unfreedom. As Romanticism has become part of the totality, it is used for our domination. Marcuse still entertained the very romantic thought that we might escape to fiction (251), but today fiction is also part of the “romantic system” or “romantic machine.” If we follow this argument, there is no escape. Resistance is futile. We need less dualistic and less modern conceptual tools to think our way out of this problem (see later in this chapter and the next chapter). At the same time, Marcuse was also anti-Romantic. As an Enlightenment thinker, what he finds in the literature he recommends (e.g., Beckett) is “Reason” with a capital R, which is supposed to be “overtaking

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imagination” (251). But his thinking is richer than that: for instance, he must be credited with at least suggesting a merger of Romanticism and Enlightenment—a merger that horrified him. He writes that magic and science merge, that there is an “obscene merger of aesthetics and reality” that “refutes the philosophies which oppose ‘poetic’ imagination to scientific and empirical Reason. Technological progress is accompanied by a progressive rationalization and even realization of the imaginary” (253). Interestingly, Marcuse thus thinks that technology and instrumental reason did not lead to the disappearance of imagination but to its integration with the realm of material production and needs. Although initially the imagination was rejected, afterward the gap between imagination and reason was reduced. He refers to romantic science here: In reducing and even canceling the romantic space of imagination, society has forced the imagination to prove itself on new grounds. … Separated from the realm of material production and material needs, imagination was mere play, invalid in the realm of necessity, and committed only to a fantastic logic and a fantastic truth. When technical progress cancels this separation … it also reduces the gap between imagination and Reason. The two antagonistic faculties become interdependent on common ground. … The romantic idea of a “science of the Imagination” seems to assume an ever-more-empirical aspect. (Marcuse 1964, 253)

In other words, based on Marcuse, we could say that today the problem is not that romanticism leads to mere play, but rather the opposite: it is taken seriously and has merged with reason and technology, and with materiality and needs. Romanticism has taken the form of romantic science and romantic technologies, indeed technoromanticism. For Marcuse, this merger of imagination and reason is monstrous and does not lead to freedom. He would have been very much opposed to the end-of-the-machine vision I constructed in the previous chapters. With Marcuse, we could criticize that vision for leading merely to the creation of more system, more machine. It brings us nearer to a dangerous totality of romanticism and instrumental reason, another form of manipulation and consumerism. The fusion of imagination and technology leads not to the end but the reinforcement of “the Machine” as the romantic imagination is manipulated and turned into commodities. As Marcuse put it: “Imagination has not remained immune to the process of reification. We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images” (254). Within this kind of thinking, Marcuse’s metaphor gives us a very good description of our age. As users of the new technologies, we “suffer our images” as our identities are reified in the information process and we are bound to the technological-culture whole

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in a way that leaves no exit. Our private romantic selves are mercilessly sucked up by capital-technology, the vampire machine. The imagination— our living imagination—has been turned into data and sold off to the big companies and governments that exploit and control us. We are the living dead. Here we meet again romanticism, and even gothic. Of course, Marcuse’s Enlightenment recipe is not more but less romanticism. In an antiromantic move, he says that we should not give imagination “all the means of expression” since this would lead to “horror” and more rather than less repression; instead he recommends a rational imagination (254), which is supposed to help individuals “liberate themselves from themselves” by means of central planning (255). He also points to opposition by “outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable” (260), who “start refusing to play the game” (261). (Note that women do not seem to appear in this list, at least not as a separate category. And animals are entirely absent.) In other words, his modern recipe is planning and refusal, guided by a critical theory that, contrary to political romanticism, holds no promise (261). We again get the cold shower of critical theory, powered by Enlightenment thinking. Yet even if Marcuse’s thinking has a strong nonromantic and even antiromantic aspect, it is not totally devoid of romantic aspirations, for instance, authentic freedom. It also remains within the boundaries of modern thinking, using dichotomies such as reason and imagination and seeing hybrids as horrible (see also Latour 1993). Can we get beyond modern thinking? Can we get beyond the romantic order? In the next section, I start exploring less dualistic ways of thinking in response to the problems and issues identified so far. Only then can we begin to get distance from modernromantic thinking and its dualities, which still haunt critical theory and other approaches that may shed light on technology and our relation to technology. Less Distance, Please, and an Alternative Epistemology: Toward Less   Dualistic Thinking How could we move toward less dualistic thinking? I make some suggestions, and then continue the discussion in the next chapter. First, if we want to overcome dualistic thinking in order to better understand and evaluate what the Internet and other new technologies are doing to us, we need to problematize the real/virtual distinction, the online/ offline distinction, and so on. For this purpose, we need a different

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epistemology. Instead of seeing the real as something “out there” that has nothing to do with us human subjects, or instead of seeing it as something that cannot be known at all, as postmodernism claims in its radicalization (or perversion) of romanticism, we could redefine the real as something that has to do with our experience. But this experience should not be conceptualized in terms of mind. Instead, we could see the real as something that is related to what we do, to praxis. Inspired by the romance of subject and object in romantic epistemology, but also by the lessons of phenomenology and pragmatism, we could redefine the real as that which we engage with and constitute, through and in practice. New technologies and media, then, do not necessarily create an illusion as opposed to an external reality; rather, they play a role in the ongoing and mundane human-technological shaping and transformation of reality. Reality should not be seen as something that is distant from us, as Enlightenment thinking and some versions of romanticism assume. Instead, a relational epistemology acknowledges the entanglement of subject and object. What does this mean? As I suggested earlier in this book, an epistemology that assumes an entanglement of subject and object was developed by the early Romantics. In response to the “cold,” “disenchanted” view of the world that splits subjects and objects, the early Romantics viewed reality as being continuously transformed by us and vice versa—indeed, we are also transformed as part of the larger process. But there is still a lot of modern dualism and contradiction in their view, which sits in the way of developing it into a more radically relational one. They wanted to connect to the whole, but at the same time they viewed their environment as a disenchanted wasteland. They wanted to go beyond the self, but at the same time they were obsessed with it. They wanted an epistemology and a spirituality that transcends all borders, but as (post-)Christians and (neo-)Platonics, they were still bound to a dualist worldview. As the previous remarks about an alternative, relational epistemology show, we can imagine a different view. To articulate this, however, is quite a challenge. Sometimes an alternative, less dualistic or nondualistic epistemology is also hinted at in the literature on technoromanticism. In particular, Coyne’s book is helpful here since it suggests turning to practice by means of a phenomenological approach: Once we see the real as contingent on practice (rather than the object of representation), then the problematic posed by virtual realities fades from view. VR does not “challenge the concept of reality,” which is already subject to the practical field. The most we can claim is that VR introduces new modes of practice and discloses aspects of our current practices. (Coyne 1999, 120)

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Thus, on the basis of this epistemology, to make a distinction between the real and the virtual is rather misleading. Shapiro even thinks that it is dangerous to make the distinction. This is what he writes when he accuses people of cyber-romanticism: Johnson and Post claim repeatedly that their legal regime merely reflects “taking cyberspace seriously.” But, unwittingly, they are not taking cyberspace seriously at all. For if cyberspace is taken seriously, then what transpires in our online interactions will have a deep, tangible impact on our lives. Cyberspace will be pervasive, fluid, and imminent. The cyber-romantic vision suggests we will sneak off to cyberspace—with its fantasy-game rules—and then return to the “real” world where the “old” rules apply. A more robust vision of cyberspace—what I would call a “technorealist” view—acknowledges that it is part of our world and that it may profoundly affect our existing social, political, and legal structures. Increasingly, it will be impossible, and even dangerous, to draw a distinction between cyberspace and real space, and between the law of cyberspace and the law of real space. (Shapiro 1998, 714–715)

This view is in line with Floridi’s (2014) concept of “onlife experience,” which I mentioned in the previous chapter, and in line with the epistemology I am trying to articulate here. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, our experience of “Internet” is no longer an experience of “Internet” at all, if this means something external or something that happens in a different reality. We live online and offline at the same time. We are simply involved and engage with reality in various ways. Sometimes there is more distance— for instance, when we feel romantic wonder or gothic fear or when we think we practice “objective” science. But usually we are very engaged and involved in what we do, and this is also the “default”: usually we do not take distance but are engaged, are in the world. The phenomenological tradition can help to articulate this view. As Coyne (1999) puts it: “The phenomenological position is that there is first of all worldly engagement that we later articulate in various ways” (148). This means that when we contemplate “external reality” in a romantic way, we create distance; we deny basic worldly engagement and discourage a more engaged relation to reality. But engagement is the typical relation; contemplation at a distance is the exception: The putative act of gazing in wonder at the spectacle of the data stream accords with the romantic’s contemplation of the beautiful and the sublime. According to the phenomenological position, rather than moments of contemplation, our most typical moments are those when we are engaged, absorbed in an undifferentiated world of involvement. We are busily going about our business of doing and making. (Coyne 1999, 147)

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There are of course distancing epistemological relations such as detached scientific reflection, and indeed for distancing activities such as “exploring cyberspace” 1990s style: “The scientist stands detached before objects, and in a state of theoretical reflection. The cybernaut stands within the data stream of cyberspace. Here, the world consists of objects standing apart from an observing subject” (151). These are particular modes of relating to the world, and romanticism seems to encourage these “distancing” relations. But it is also possible to engage more with the world. In a sense, we are always standing in a relation of engagement, we are in-the-world “before” we gain distance by means of technoromantic practices. Similarly, we are always already connected to others “before” we start up romantic arguments about authenticity and escaping society. Coyne: “There is already a solidarity, a being-with that is the human condition, into which we introduce various technologies” (147). We can be more or less distant to others, but we start from this basic sociality, this being-with. But whereas phenomenologists such as Hubert Dreyfus or Albert Borgmann tend to see (modern) technology as necessarily introducing distance, we could instead see technology as shaping our basic engagement with the world (or rather our being-in-the-world) and our being-with (Mitsein) in a way that can go in various directions—not necessarily distancing or disengaging. Our human condition is already being transformed by the technologies we use in various ways. And this can be studied in the domain of “fantasy”—which, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, is not a supplement but “bears all the hall-marks of reality” (172)—and in our actual practices. If we focus on the latter, “emphasis shifts from the mysterious, enchanted realm of computer-mediated spaces, new realities, and idealized digital futures to use, social practices, and equipmental concerns” (181). A phenomenological-hermeneutical and pragmatist approach enables us to focus on the phenomenology and use of technology as praxis: Phenomenology and hermeneutics offer a potent critique of the subject-object dialectic on which notions of digital transcendence are based. The whole does not emerge from the sum of the parts, language is not representation, and developing, using, and understanding computers is a matter of praxis. (Coyne 1999, 257)

Second, this less dualistic view also implies that the concept of selfabsorption used in objections to romanticism makes less sense. To say that we are “self-absorbed” assumes a duality between an “inner,” private world and an “outer” world of praxis. But this view is misguided: both “worlds,” if the distinction makes sense at all, are always already connected. Even in

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our state of “self-absorption” and “narcissism,” we remain both social and worldly beings. Even Narcissus is still such a being, and in this sense he cannot die. Of course we can be more or less self-absorbed when we use the new technologies, but there is a sense in which even in our most romantic moments of reverie, we remain related to others and to the environment— albeit here, through the new technologies. Our practical and experiential relation to the world is mediated by romantic culture and romantic technologies. Here, McLuhan’s reading of the Narcissus myth is also helpful: McLuhan argued that technology is not something external but is an extension of ourselves. The problem, then, is not so much self-absorption but rather a fixation on technological gadgets as idols, as something external we worship and serve. This fixation is rooted in a dualistic and dialectical view of the human-technology relation, which should be replaced by a less dualistic view: one that sees humans and technologies/media as entangled in experience and in praxis. Perhaps this metaphor is less dualistic than McLuhan’s metaphors of extension and amputation, since the latter assume that one can easily distinguish, separate, and disentangle the human from the extension of the human, the body from the prosthesis, the natural from the artificial. This assumption is untenable once one rejects what McLuhan calls “the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us” (75). Yet recognizing the deeper interdependence of humans and technologies may render it necessary to even dispose of the metaphor of extension, which still makes a distinction between what is extended and the extension. This distinction is problematic, insofar as what we call “the extension” is already human and what is extended is already technological. We are technological beings, and our being is technological. For our relation to the self, this means that we encounter ourselves through technology. This mediation by technology, by itself, is not the problem. The problem concerns what kind of self and what kind of subjectivity emerge from this human-technological experience and praxis, which is also mediated by language. And given these mediations by language and technology, the problem is what kind of knowledge we can have of the self and if we can fully know that self. Indeed, like the romantics, we must give up the idea that there can be a totally transparent, unmediated relation to the self. Influenced by John D. Caputo and Derrida, Coyne (1999) also argues that we can have no unmediated contact with the self (237). As the early romantics taught us, there is no possibility of having complete self-knowledge. There is mediation by language, by society and culture, and by technology. Hence it is impossible

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to know or “find” yourself, let alone your “authentic” self, if this means a self that is divorced from others and from the linguistic and material environment. Whether this means that we should give up the concept of authenticity altogether, as postmodern thinking seems to do, is a different matter. But it is clear that we cannot assume that there is a fully transparent and clear self we can easily and fully know. Third, based on the same phenomenological approach, similar remarks can be made about the authentic and real, natural self, which in a Rousseauistic romanticism is opposed to an unauthentic and illusory or artificial self. Where could we find a “natural” and an “authentic” self? We can only find a self that is already related to others and to society. There is no asocial or presocial authenticity. In spite of his own thinking, Rousseau’s authenticity was one that was already transformed by his engagement with society. When he retreated from society and turned against it, he did so as a social being and as a being already related to others. Moreover, we are already natural, and our nature is already social. There is no unmediated “natural” self that is fully transparent to us. We learn to know our naturalsocial selves through the social and through technology. If authenticity has any meaning at all, then, it cannot mean being unmediated or being divorced from the social. In anthropological theory there also have been criticisms of the romantic nostalgia for a world unmediated by the digital technologies where we might find our authentic self. Interestingly, the technologies themselves, and especially the way we speak about them, may have made possible the emergence of that very distinction between a mediated and an unmediated world. Miller and Horst (2012) have argued that speaking about the digital may make appear “the nondigital world in retrospect as unmediated and unframed” (13), which they think is not insightful. Against studies that suggest the unmediated nature of the nondigital world—studies perhaps influenced by a Protestant ideal of immediacy (13)—they assert that in anthropology, there is “no such thing as pure human immediacy” since face-to-face interaction is also culturally mediated; in general, the so-called nondigital world is already mediated and framed. Hence the authentic, if it exists at all, must not be sought in a nondigital, offline, analogue world as opposed to a digital, online one. The authors see both worlds (if it still makes sense to speak of two worlds at all) as arenas for “expressive practice” (13). Thus, there is neither pure immediacy nor total transparency. What the self and reality is, is always known to us through mediation—including mediation by language, as authors such as Derrida and others echoed after Heidegger. Here, language about technology—for example, speaking about

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“the digital”—shapes our understanding of the technologies, of our world, and of ourselves. However, note again that claims like Derrida’s become too much illustrative of a kind of postromanticism or hyperromanticism if they mean that we cannot know ourselves at all, that we are a total mystery to ourselves. To prevent this radical, nihilistic, and perhaps even nonsensical conclusion, we may want to follow Coyne’s suggestion and turn to the pragmatic self, the working self, the living, experiencing self, which we can always know to some extent since we know it “in praxis” and “in experience”—even if that knowledge is always situated and mediated through technology, media, and language. Moreover, against the postmodernist all-toosuspicious hermeneutics, we may want to turn to a different, more hopeful hermeneutics, for instance, a narrative one. Making a narrative and hermeneutic turn, we could use Paul Ricoeur (1980, 1983, 1985) and Hans-Georg Gadamer ([1960] 2004) and construct the view that we can know the self to some extent, but not directly: just as human experience and understanding in general is always a matter of hermeneutics and narratives, we experience and understand the self through interpretations and narratives. According to this view, we can have some knowledge of ourselves, but we are never completely transparent to ourselves. There is never total immediacy in our relations to others or in our relations to the world or to ourselves. There is still some mystery, some darkness, some ambiguity. There is always mediation: mediation by narratives (and hence by language and by society) and mediation by technologies, which in turn interact with the narratives (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2015, 2016). But we can become aware of and influence these mediations; there need not be total darkness. This route seems to solve the problem of having to choose between total transparency and total mystery. Coyne (1999) is also sympathetic to a narrative approach. He argues that a narrative-hermeneutic approach enables us to study digital cultures as “interpretative communities engaged in the work of constructing narratives of the self” (247). Indeed, technologies have what we may call a narrative function, which configures our relations to others and to the world (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2015, 2016) and helps us to understand ourselves. For instance, computer networks may encourage a network type of relations and, as Coyne argues, also disclose something about our concepts, for instance authority and authenticity: Computer networks disclose … that the author was always an illusive concept, and that authority, authenticity, and originality have always depended on social

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practices and agreements rather than notions of empirical fact, proof, or truth propositions. (Coyne 1999, 276–277)

In the next chapter, I will say more about the possibilities of a narrative approach. Fourth, if we shed dualism, we can no longer use dualistic categories to criticize romantic politics or articulate an alternative to romantic politics inspired by Marcusian critical theory. Instead, we must recognize that in contrast to the (roughly) Marcusian argument I constructed, there is a sense in which “the machine” is already part of us. What the romantics wanted to achieve was always there: we have always been cyborgs. As I suggested earlier, we have always been technological beings, and technology has always been human. Humans and technologies have always liaised and mixed. If this is true, then this does not imply that we can no longer be critical of technologies. But the problem needs to be reframed: the phenomena identified in the previous critical discussion (see for instance criticism of social media by romantics, anti-romantics, and critical theory) raise not so much a problem of humans versus technologies, but rather a problem of how humans relate to technologies and indeed how they should relate to technologies. Thus, once we attain a better understanding and evaluation of these relations, guided by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism, we may then want to steer and change society. Yet given the entanglement of humans and technology, and hence society and technology, this needs to be done by changing technologies, next to changing social structures by other means, for instance by engaging in classical political activities such as discussion and various forms of resistance, which are usually seen as only related to humans (constructed as separate from, and in opposition to, technology). It seems that we need a cyborg politics that assesses and intervenes in specific human-technology entanglements and critically discusses issues of power within such cyborg-like humantechnology entanglements rather than juxtaposing humans and technology. Through changing technologies, we can change humans and change society. However, we should be careful with relying too much on agency and choice. We can learn from Heidegger, and maybe also from some earlier strands of romanticism, that this is problematic. Heidegger (1977) suggested that we have a technological conception of choice and emphasis on agency. To move away from this conception, we might have to turn to different ways of understanding the world.

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Some think that such a different understanding can be found in religion, or at least in a different religious outlook (see the next chapter). Lewin (2011) argues that if we were to live “within the horizon of an ultimate concern” (205) instead of “the current horizon of freedom and agency” (209), we would have the chance to respond, to choose “to participate in something other (and greater) than us. We must, then, be grasped, seized, and transfigured” (205). This “being grasped” does not mean passivity but is rather “both active and passive” (212). I read Lewin as saying that our contemporary technoromanticism is often not romantic enough (if there is no encounter with the other and only narcissism), not religious enough (if it lacks sensitivity to something that is greater than the individual), and perhaps also not Heideggerian enough (if it puts too much emphasis on agency). Lewin also argues that the social should not be atomized but is “altogether more mysterious” (211) and that art should not be reduced to self-expression (208). Perhaps these suggestions about religion and art can take us beyond romanticism, or at least beyond its dominant version, which also seeks mystery but fails to have an encounter with the other and is perhaps too focused on self-expression, individuality, and agency. Whether or not we want to embrace this particular vision of how to move forward, we have now an overview of good arguments against at least a simplistic form of romanticism, and I have also started to explore alternative, less romantic epistemologies and politics. But at the same time, I have indicated that romanticism remains a source of inspiration or has at least unintended influence. If we acknowledge this influence, perhaps we could construct a better, richer form of romanticism. Or we could at least use some romantic insights to explore a route toward a different understanding, including a different understanding of technology. This brings me to the last section of this chapter. Can (Techno)Romanticism Be Redeemed? I just used the qualification “simplistic” in relation to romanticism. Indeed, the least we can do while staying within the romantic order (given that it is so hard to move beyond) is to recognize that it is a richer and more complex tradition—a philosophically significant one that may provide guidance for our lives and perhaps even for our politics and efforts at social change. For romanticism to achieve this recognition may be difficult, however, since there is an influential and continuing countertradition and, as Eldridge (2001) observes, Romanticism has had a bad press throughout the twentieth century. For instance, “Romanticism is typically faulted,

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following Hegel’s lead, for its subjectivism: too much visionary blathering; too little attention to both material reality and social forces” (5). But I agree with Eldridge that this is based on a caricature of Romanticism. In the previous chapters, it became clear that Romanticism is more than “sentimentalism, or wallowing in the personal” (5). Babbitt’s criticism therefore must be seen as directed against a simplistic, caricatural form of romanticism. This book does not endorse or defend romanticism. But what I encountered during my research and thinking about romanticism and technology was a philosophically interesting and vital tradition, from which we may learn a lot more for understanding technology than philosophers of technology have done so far.3 Before we continue our exploration of how to move beyond romanticism, therefore, I first make a distinction between two kinds of romanticisms: •

A one-sided version or caricature of romanticism—a pop version of (techno)romanticism, a watered-down version, perhaps even a perversion of romanticism; this “romanticism” is and remains very problematic. • The richer philosophical and cultural tradition described in the previous chapters. It turned out that there is more in romanticism than sentimentalism and nostalgia and that there are various strands, some of which suggest that perhaps we can construct a version of romanticism that avoids some of the criticisms directed at the first kind of romanticism. (This version of romanticism includes, for instance, the interesting epistemology I have articulated throughout this book.) I grant that it is difficult to see, at this stage of the journey, what shape such a richer form of romanticism would take. Would it be a “cured” version, one cured by phenomenology (but was, for instance, Heidegger not also romantic)? Would it involve some kind of synthesis between Enlightenment and Romanticism (but this has already been tried through various “romantic machines,” and contemporary technoromanticism seems to have failed insofar as it turned into its opposite)? In any case, Romanticism has a number of conceptual building blocks to offer, which cannot and should not be rejected simply because they are “romantic” and may actually help philosophers of technology and others to move toward a different, less modern and less dualist understanding of (our relation to) technology. I suggest at least the following building blocks: A nonrepresentationalist, transformationist, and less dualistic epistemology, which may be “enhanced” into one that is closer to the nondualistic thinking about reality suggested at the end of the previous section. •

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Knowledge about the romantic machines, the romantic scientists, and the romantic machine visions of the past and the present, which at least attempt to go beyond dualism, including human-technology dualism; the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic machines, mechanical romanticism, romantic science, and especially what we may call “cyborg romanticism” may be interpreted in these terms. • A view of the self and reality that resists total transparency and total reification. • The suggestion that political dreams and utopia do not preclude real political action, but may inspire it and continue to be a vital source for social change. • The value of pluralism, in politics and elsewhere. • The thought that, in contrast to what Enlightenment-minded technooptimists claim, we (humanity, individuals) lack complete control over our destiny. • The recommendation that in our lives we need to protect a space for reflection and contemplation. •

These elements can help us to throw more critical light on the contemporary literature and public debates about technology and machines. For instance, contemporary discussions about transparency and the quantified self may benefit from recognizing its sources in the Enlightenment-Romanticism dialectic. When in his book To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), Morozov criticizes Internet utopianism as a new “religion” (23), as being about a “mythical entity” (21), as offering “myth like stories that draw on historical events” (51) and a “teleological account of how all other technologies paved the way for ‘the Internet’”(57), and as endorsing “epochalism,” meaning that we live in exceptional times now (75), then he voices typical Enlightenment objections against a romantic-utopian grand narrative. At the same time, when he suggests that transparency is not necessarily and not always good (82), he criticizes the “Enlightenment-era attitudes toward the liberating power of information” that presume that more information is always better than less (86). And when he opposes Google’s “march of science” (147), he sides with the romantics. The EnlightenmentRomanticism dialectic is especially clear in the discussion about the quantified self, also mentioned by Morozov: Should everything be “subject to measurement, analysis, and sharing” and should even the bedroom become “a temple of surveillance” (227)? According to Enlightened “datasexuals” (227) the road to progress is self-evident; romantic critics, by contrast, are less prepared to “tolerate the pathologies of quantification” (Wolf quoted in

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Morozov 2013, 231) and do not believe in a “fixed, coherent, and transcendental self” (233). They do not desire the triumph of objectivity and are prepared to accept that human communication and understanding is imperfect (292) and that humans are “complex and occasionally irrational creatures” (352). If put in the light of the Enlightenment-Romanticism tension, the stakes of the contemporary debate become clearer and historically situated: it turns out that this discussion about technology, about what a human being is and should be, and about the good life, has deep roots in the history of modernity and romanticism. Another example concerns technology and destiny. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee end their book The Second Machine Age (2014) with the claim: “We shape our destiny.” This remark touches on an important tension in philosophy of technology and indeed in thinking about machines and automation: does technology determine us, or do we control technology? As Carr puts it in his popular The Shallows (2010), technological determinism and instrumentalism are the two ends of the spectrum. The first sees technology as an autonomous force; the second sees technology as a mere means to human ends (46). The romantic tradition, from the early Romantics to Heidegger and the postmoderns, issues a warning to instrumentalists and techno-optimists who think that we may fully master technology and the new challenges it creates. Our destiny is something we also receive, not only something we make. With Mary Shelley (1818) and with Heidegger (1977), one could say that modern technology promotes a way of thinking that tricks us into believing that we can simply turn everything into things we can use and control. But even technology that is of our own making cannot be completely put under our control. Coping with technology may also require at least attitudes other than the technological-modern one. There is a lot of middle ground here between the two extremes, and the romantic tradition may help in finding a more nuanced position. To say that we are merely “the sex organs of the machine world,”(51) as McLuhan (1964) put it, goes too far (as probably Heidegger also went too far), but the instrumentalist and neutralist view of technology as a mere tool that we can master or learn to master is equally misleading. Moreover, when in The Shallows (2010) Carr argues for less disturbance by the business of the Internet, he evokes Romantic writing. Commenting on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964; see chapter 3), he tells how Hawthorne went to a “quiet clearing in the woods,” which provided him “a protected space for reflection,” a space where he was not “overwhelmed by the noisy world’s mechanical business” (167). Whether or not the romantic attitude to nature is unproblematic (Coeckelbergh 2015a), the question

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concerning what kinds of environments we need for good thinking is an important one, and some recognition of the romantic heritage could enrich this discussion (in this case by putting it in the context of the ambiguous attitude of American Romanticism toward technology; see chapter 3). These are just some examples that suggest the relevance of romantic thinking for contemporary debates. Developing the building blocks I provided here into a (more) coherent philosophical view—also a more coherent philosophy of technology—requires more work and, in particular, a selective reading of romanticism and a reworking of it by means of creative interpretation. Here and in the previous chapters, I have made some suggestions, also based on recent literature. For thinking about technology, it is important to take into account such suggestions, since they might help us better understand our contemporary relation with technology and explore how we might cope with it in alternative ways. However, a general reworking of romanticism is not my main project in this book, which focuses on the relation between romanticism and (contemporary) technology rather than an understanding, evaluation, or revision of romanticism as such. Furthermore, for the reasons indicated in this chapter, which contained many valid criticisms of romanticism, it is now my priority to explore further how we may go beyond romanticism and what that means for thinking about technology. This is what I will do in the next, and final, chapter. So I ask the question once more: Given the problems indicated in this chapter, can we move beyond the modern-romantic discourse about technology? Can we move beyond romantic technologies? Can we move beyond the end-of-the-machine vision I constructed in the previous chapters? Can we move beyond modern-romantic machine thinking, which would really take us to the end of the machine?

7  Beyond Romanticism and beyond Modernity: Toward the (Real) End of the Machine?

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-themachine 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

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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

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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

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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

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(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: 1. Binary within modernity: Enlightenment versus romanticism (= reaction): technology versus romanticism 1 (romanticism as antitechno­ logical). 2. Attempt at a synthesis. Modernity: (Enlightenment and romanticism 1) versus (romanticism 2: cyborg romanticism, the end of the machine): attempt to fuse Enlightenment and romanticism, to reach a synthesis of Enlightenment and romanticism 1. This is partly successful but remains within machine thinking. 3. First attempt to move beyond modern thinking: (modernity: Enlightenment, romanticism 1 + 2: disengagement, distance, detachment, dualism) versus (skilled engagement, immediate, embodied; different technologies? premodern nonmachines?). However, this attempt seems romantic. 4. Second attempt to move beyond modern thinking: we are always already engaged in the world and have never been modern: not romantic technology but animistic. Is this a better view? Or does it also lead back to romanticism? 5. General discussion about limits to what we can do to move away from modern-romantic thinking. Beyond the Machine (The End of the Machine 2): Skilled Engagement and Narrative Technologies 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,

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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. Skilled Engagement 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

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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-themachine 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

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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 Enlightenmentromantic 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,

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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

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(nonmodern) sense we seek in this chapter (the end of the machine as the termination of modern machine thinking and machine practice). Narrative Technologies 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

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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 “firstorder 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.

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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. Beyond the Disenchantment Myth 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

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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:

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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 socialtechnological 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 EnlightenmentRomanticism 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

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“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

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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 humanmade 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 socialspiritual 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.

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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

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“‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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. Conclusion: Romanticism Once More? 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

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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-firstcentury 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.

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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

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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

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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 moderntechnological 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

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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.

Notes

1  Introduction: The Question Concerning Technology and Romanticism 1.  I use romanticism (without capital R) rather than Romanticism (capital R) to refer to the broader cultural current not limited to historical Romanticism, yet also different from the narrow definition as “going back to the past” or “sentimental” (as in “romantic love”). I return to this issue in chapter 2. 2.  See, for instance, the 2015 Eurobarometer study: http://ec.europa.eu/public  _opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_427_sum_en.pdf.

2  Romanticism 1.  Not only the early Romantics valued childhood. As Safranski points out, the later Nietzsche celebrated the innocence and the “new beginning” that the child is. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning” (Nietzsche 1891, 31). Consider also Jugendstil—youth is life—and, later, twentieth-century youth culture. 2.  Safranski warns against the aestheticization of politics; but can politics do  without? And is there a political danger in vulgarized (neuro)science? 3.  Whether Protestantism was indeed as disenchanted and secularized as portrayed by the romantics is not so clear. Campbell (1987), for instance, presents a different view. 4.  Similar to my use of “Romanticism” versus “romanticism,” I use “Gothic” (capitalized) to refer to the historical, nineteenth-century movement, whereas “gothic” (not capitalized) will refer to the broader term encompassing contemporary gothic. 5.  Ruskin refers to Plato’s Phaedrus here. 6.  Cyberpunk is a science-fiction genre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and combined a cyber interest in virtual reality, cyborgs, and the boundary between humans and machines, being controlled by a computer system, and so on, with a

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punk attitude of antiauthoritarianism, rebellion, fascination with drugs, and do-ityourself (Nicol 2009, 165–166). 7.  For more on the life of William Morris, see MacCarthy 1994. A summary of  the arts and crafts movement is provided at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and  _Crafts_movement. 8.  Black (2002) also discusses other philosophical currents. For example, he see Dewey’s pragmatism as part of the “romantic continuum” (76). And he sees romanticism in tension with Habermas’s “hopes for communicative rationality”: romantics think that reason is “part of the very problem it seeks to solve” (97). Instead of Habermas’s criteria (the ideal speech situation—see for example Habermas 1990), Black proposes to see communication in a romantic way: there is always going to be a gap between sender and receiver, a gap “making every message fraught with risk and intrigue,” no matter how intimate the act of communication “be it a lover’s whisper or a World Cup telecast” (139); romantics can live with that gap and  that risk. For new media, this also means that immediacy is not a guarantee of authenticity (140). 9.  http://www.nexthelsinki.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/193  _Socialsculpture.pdf. 10.  On the history of the 1960s communes, see, for instance, Miller 1999.

3  Romanticism against the Machine? 1.  A cella is the inner chamber of a temple. 2.  Leo Marx’s book has been very influential in the American context. Consider, for instance, the use of the “machine in the garden” metaphor by Goldberg in his book about telerobotics and knowledge at a distance (2000). 3.  Note that there was not only romanticism. Technology also became a means to control people, and this was not always seen in a negative light at the time. Benesch (2002) refers to the British mathematician Charles Babbage, credited with the design of the first programmable computer, but also the author of a treatise in which he argues that the great advantage of the machine is that it can be used “to discipline the human work force”; in other words, the workers were imagined as “pacified automata” (77).

4  Romanticism with the Machine (1): From Frankenstein’s Monster to Hippie Computing 1.  The instruments thus enabled vision and interpretation mediated by skillful engagement with and the instrument (Herschel’s telescopes).

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2.  See also, for instance, the work of Bruno Latour. 3.  To see how Freud employs this method see, for instance, his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). 4.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling. 5.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind. 6.  It is because of this lineage that Joel Faflak (2008) can argue that there is a “Romantic Psychoanalysis” and even that Romanticism, including Romantic poetry, invented psychoanalysis in advance of Freud. 7.  The 1969 transcription of the Apollo 11 air-to-ground voice, provided by NASA, reads: “Good evening. This is the Commander of Apollo 11. A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow” (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission  _trans/AS11_TEC.PDF, 588). 8.  Note that there are also other romantic aspects; for instance, there is a longing for a condition in which “mankind still lived in pristine holy harmony with  nature” and is encompassed with “a holy music” and “wondrous tones” that  speak of “the mysteries” of Mother Nature’s activities (97). But here I will focus on technology. 9.  See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_and_religion_in_Star  _Wars. 10.  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/28/william-gibson-neuromancer  -cyberpunk-books. 11.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I.

5  Romanticism with the Machine (2): Cyberromanticism, Uncanny   Robots, Romantic Cyborgs, and Spooky Science 1.  Against this vision, one can then voice a romantic criticism that, like Heim (1993), evokes the “real meeting,” “the living, nonrepresentable face” (102), and “the Zionites, the body people who remain rooted in the energies of the earth” and will “nudge us out of our heady reverie” and remind us of “the heartbeat behind  the laboratory” (107). But criticism is for later; here I want to draw attention to the Platonic side. 2.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD.

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3.  As Gunkel (2007) shows, VR was often connected to drugs. The new technology is compared to the experience of hallucinogenic drugs, a comparison that was already made by McLuhan, who compared watching TV with LSD and said that the electronic environment is “a drugless inner trip” (87–88). As in the 1960s counterculture, the aim is to achieve “mind expansion” or “altered consciousness” (89). There are utopian and dystopian ideas. And drugs can be addictive. The main  Platonic problem, and therefore the main problem of any Platonic-Romantic drug user, however, was already touched on in the Phaedrus: as in the case of the technology of writing, the potential danger is in a replacement of reality and truth (99). 4.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus. 5.  Later in Alone Together (2011) Turkle becomes more critical. Instead of embracing computers as postmodern test objects, she suggests they may deceive us and alienate us from one another: focusing on “digital natives” who grow up with cell phones, she argues that we are increasingly anxious about relationships and turn to technology for relationships and protection from the risks associated with relationships. We “fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other” (xii). I will say more about this in the next section, since this part of Turkle’s work is based on the development of new kinds of robots and on social media at the beginning of the twenty-first  century. 6.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. 7.  See also my previous reference to Turkle’s warning concerning information. One could also use a Heideggerian argument here: the concept of information turns everything into data, understood as a standing reserve for human use. However, with regard to Floridi’s view my qualification “insofar” is important. It is not clear if this is the implication of his view and if my interpretation does justice to its complexity. Floridi may respond that, in his view, everything is information only at one particular level of abstraction. However, if at the most fundamental level everything and everyone is information, then this is still a metaphysics that is unacceptable to romantics who are opposed to all kinds of scientific and metaphysical abstracting and reducing, and it is certainly not the only way one could deal with the subjectobject problem and conceptualize the blurring of boundaries between “online” and “offline.” 8.  I refer here to Walter Benjamin’s essay (see chapter 3), in particular, his view of the relation between self-alienation and modern technology: mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an  aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 1936, 235). 9.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pierre-omidyar/social-media-enemy-of-the  _b_4867421.html. 10.  http://www.slideshare.net/saxo0990/romanticism-in-video-games.

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11.  Of course this particular idea of friendship may be criticized: there may  still be a difference between friendship mediated by games, social media, and so  on and others. Is it true, as Turkle suggests, that these kind of friendships mask  that we are lonely? In the next chapter, I outline some criticisms of this form of technoromanticism. 12.  http://www.slideshare.net/Alan_Hook/immersion-transformation-and-agency. 13.  Note that this is also true for augmented reality; see below. 14.  http://www.ultrasaurus.com/2015/06/the-transformative-power-of-games/. 15.  http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm. 16.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/disneyland-ghost_n_6772018  .html. 17.  http://fox6now.com/2014/09/25/do-you-believe-in-ghosts-police-in-new  -mexico-believe-surveillance-camera-captured-image-of-a-ghost/. 18.  Consider for instance these images: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/  36-beautiful-landscapes-that-prove-that-video-games-are-art#.utN4m40Ag. 19.  http://whatculture.com/gaming/8-utterly-beautiful-video-game-settings-that  -blew-you-away.php/1. 20.  http://joannaetaylor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-modern-sublime-gaming-and  -romantic.html. 21.  https://www.rijksmuseumtwenthe.nl/content/559?lang=en_US. 22.  http://joannaetaylor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-modern-sublime-gaming-and  -romantic.html. 23.  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/18/google-image  -recognition-neural-network-androids-dream-electric-sheep. 24.  http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-111971378/stock-photo-beautiful-and  -romantic-flower-modern-fractal-art-design.html. 25.  http://www.karinkuhlmann.com/fractals-9-digital-art/spiral-romance/spiral  -romance.html. 26.  See, for instance, Hiroshi Ishiguro’s humanoid robots. Creating robots with human appearance, he claims to have “copied” himself and some other people, and predicts that human-like robots will not only be used in private, intimate environments, but will also be functioning as newscasters, receptionists, shop assistants, models, actors, singers, and even lecturers. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hiroshi  -ishiguro-robots-like-mine-will-replace-pop-stars-hollywood-actors-1497533.

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27.  A contemporary idea that takes this “perversion” and “kinship” a step further is the concept of metasexuality, which crosses the species boundary also in the sexual domain. See http://www.metahumanism.eu/. 28.  Note also that her interest in evolution is not “merely” scientific but might have been influenced by her study at the Teilhard de Chardin Foundation, a figure many (cyber)romantics refer to. Even in her dissertation, she was interested in metasexuality organicism, a typical romantic preoccupation. 29.  Consider, for instance, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s efforts to create a robot  that has a human appearance and artists such as Patrick Tresset, Louis-Philippe Demers, and Kris Verdonck who work with robots. In these technological-artistic and artistic-technological practices, there is no longer a boundary between art and technology. 30.  http://stelarc.org/?catID=20218. 31.  http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/projects/fractal/index.html. 32.  http://humanityplus.org/about/. 33.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism. 34.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity. 35.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism. 36.  Note that some transhumanists also take all kinds of pills—usually for sustaining health and life extension rather than for intoxication. 37.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading. 38.  http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/murphy20130617. 39.  http://www.metahumanism.eu/. 40.  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/25/forget-internet-of  -things-people. 41.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality. 42.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass. 43.  https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us. 44.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_no_man_has_gone_before. 45.  http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-hololens-hands-on-2015-1?r=US. 46.  http://uk.businessinsider.com/virtual-reality-vs-augmented-reality-2015-6?r=US. 47.  http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider. 48.  http://www.livescience.com/50262-spooky-action-is-real.html.

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49.  http://secondnexus.com/technology-and-innovation/physicists-demonstrate  -how-time-can-seem-to-run-backward-and-the-future-can-affect-the-past/. 50.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/. 51.  http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/courses.php. 52.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole. 53.  http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/black-hole-batteries-keep-blazars-going  -and-going. 54.  http://www.haystack.mit.edu/ast/uvlbi/mm/eht.html. 55.  http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/nustar/will-the-real-monster-black-hole-please  -stand-up. 56.  See, for instance, the Human Brain Project (HBP), a large European research project https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/mission;jsessionid=1ufyp7vmqdskmqrc d09p2t6g0.

6  Criticisms of Romanticism and of the End-of-the-Machine Vision 1.  Note that it is not clear why he calls romanticism a sham religion and other relations “real” religions. Apparently the only “real” religions he recognizes are the ones he defends: Christianity, perhaps, and Buddhism and Hinduism. These are all religions that, according to Babbitt (1919), hold a nonromantic view of the self and preach an ethics of self-control. He thereby excludes other forms of religion and spirituality. He also (mis)interprets Taoism (“Chinese primitivism”) as being close to Rousseau and as recommending “wise passiveness” (395). His Aristotelianism makes him more sympathetic to Confucianism. However, it is interesting that he links romanticism to the breaking down of discrimination and—here—the affirmation of the “identity of contradictories” (395). 2.  See again Kurzweil 2006. 3.  Eldridge (2001) says that romanticism is an important, and even exemplary, form of philosophical understanding, which is neither necessarily escapist nor necessarily or merely sentimental. I do not go that far; I argue in this chapter that romanticism offers some valuable insights but remains highly problematic, and that it is desirable to explore ways of moving beyond it.

7  Beyond Romanticism and beyond Modernity: Toward the (Real) End of the Machine? 1.  See, for example, David Gunkel’s book The Machine Question (2012) and my own work on this topic, such as Growing Moral Relations (Coeckelbergh 2012b) and “The Moral Standing of Machines” (2014).

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Index

Aestheticism, 227 Aesthetic movement, Gothic as an, 47–51 Aesthetic pleasure, 42, 80–81 Aesthetics, 54–57, 72, 102. See also Gothic, historical Freud and, 46, 109 religion and, 39 and the sublime, 42, 44 (see also Sublimity and the sublime) “Age of wonder,” 101, 204 Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, The (Holmes), 98–101. See also Holmes, Richard Akerlof, George A., 207 Aldini, Giovanni, 47, 100 Aldini, Jean, 48f Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 150–152, 156 Alienation, 23, 24, 29, 143, 263, 266 locomotive as symbol of, 85 Marcuse on, 125 Marx on, 36–37, 52, 56 romanticism and, 167, 168, 238, 261 social media and, 162 technological warfare and, 80–81 from our technologies, 277 technology and, 161, 261, 284n5

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Turkle), 162–163, 176, 284n5 Alternative modernities, 105 Altruism, 104 Ampère, André-Marie, 103 Androids dreaming: from sublime game worlds to the magic of algorithmic art, 172–174 Angus, Ian H., 72 Animal spirits, 206, 207 in economics, 206–207 Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller), 207 Animism, 136, 257, 268 Freud and, 110–111, 113 Antimoderns, 265 Antiromanticism, 32, 234–235 Babbitt’s humanism and, 222, 226 (see also Babbitt, Irving) information society and, 149 Marcuse and, 240 technology and, 78, 83, 84, 213, 235 Antiromantic thinking, 212–213 Apollo 11, 283n7 Apple Macintosh, 127, 130, 132, 133. See also Jobs, Steve Arcadia, 85, 141, 256 Arcadia, the Platonic-romantic dream of, 212, 216, 223, 228 “Arcadian sentimentalizing,” 223

302 

Art, 35 in the age of mechanical reproduction, 78–81 fractal, 173 romanticism in 20th-century, 61–64 Artificial intelligence (AI), 120–121, 177, 195 Artist(s), 36, 44, 56, 66, 133, 138, 173 autonomous, 2, 31, 66 everyone is an, 36, 58, 63, 84, 237 Gothic, 50–51 Nietzsche on, 40 Novalis on, 31, 36 romantic, 1–2, 26, 27, 36, 40, 42, 61, 63, 66, 84, 138, 173 William Morris and, 56, 58, 60, 61 Arts and crafts movement, 55–57, 138, 146. See also Craftsmanship Asceticism, 74 Ashton, Kevin, 197 Astronomy, 204–206 Augmented reality (AR), 199 reenchanting the world by merging real and virtual, 199–202 Augustine of Hippo, St., 25 Aura, 79–81 Authenticity art and, 79, 237 desire for, 4, 238 digital age and, 245, 258 Enlightenment and, 147 illusion and, 212, 234 (see also Illusion) vs. inauthenticity, 211, 254 Internet and, 139, 140, 233 machines and, 232–235, 237 Marcuse and, 237, 238, 240 problems with the concept of, 212, 245 romanticism and, 5, 26, 79, 139, 147, 211, 212, 233, 237, 238, 245, 254 Romanticism and, 1–2, 235

Index

Rousseau and, 1, 12, 22, 24–26, 233, 245 technology and, 211, 233, 245 Authentic self, 126, 139, 211, 245, 266 Automata, 90–91 in the stories of Hoffmann, 109, 110, 116–119, 153, 177 “Automata” (Hoffmann), 116–118 Autonomous artist, 2, 31, 66 Autonomous self, disappearance of an, 186, 189 Autonomy, 18 Azuma, Ronald, 199 Babbitt, Irving, 221, 225 boundaries and, 216, 222–224, 226 classicism and, 225 epistemology, 223–224 on ethics, 215–218, 221–224, 226, 287n1 on gender issues, 218, 219, 224 on genius, 216–217 Goethe and, 222, 226 humanism, 215, 218–222, 225–226, 257 on illusion, 215, 221–223 on imagination, 216 on individualism, 216 on narcissism, 231, 232 nature and, 222, 223 philosophical positions, 215–216 political conservatism, 219 pragmatism and, 224–225 religion and, 215–217, 221, 223, 225, 287n1 reverie and, 24, 220, 223 on romanticism, 215–223, 228 on Rousseau, 24, 215–226, 228 Balance, life out of, 91–92 Banks, Joseph, 100 Beauty. See Aesthetics Being and Time (Heidegger), 77, 78, 253

Index 

Being-with (Mitsein), 243 Being-with technology, 8, 82 Benesch, Klaus, 7, 90, 91, 282n3 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 71, 78–81, 284n8 Bentham, Jeremy, 169 Berlin, Isaiah, 21, 22, 26, 226–228 Beuys, Joseph, 63–64 Binaries, 17–18, 105, 136, 226, 254–255, 257. See also Dialectic(s); Dualism and dualistic thinking Black, John David, 149, 171, 282n8 on art, 35 and the body, 194 dualism, nondualism, and, 194 Haraway and, 184–185 Marx and, 37 on nihilism, 62 on postmodernism, 61 on Romantic epistemology, 61–63 on romanticism, 7, 9, 27, 35, 55, 62–63, 88, 147 on surveillance society, 171 Black holes, 205–206 Blake, William, 32, 42 Bohemianism, 65–67 Bono, 129–130 Borg (Star Trek), 185–187, 189 Borgmann, Albert, 260 Bostrom, Nick, 190–193 Botting, Fred, 121 Boundaries, 63, 117, 118, 120, 149, 152–153 Babbitt and, 216, 222–224, 226 blurring and erosion of, 151–152 Kurzweil and, 195, 196 Turkle and, 151, 153–154 Boundary-crossing posthumanisms, 196 Boundary crossings/transgressions, 118, 120, 152–153, 189, 196–197 Brain, 193 Breton, André, 63 British Romanticism and beyond, 42–61 Brown, James, 141

303

Brun, Jean, 183 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 251, 257 Buddhists, 217. See also Zen of Gaming, toward the Burke, Edmund, 42–44, 46 Byron, Lord, 47–48 Campbell, Colin, 66–68 Capital (Marx), 36, 52–54 Capitalism, 52–54, 73–74, 129 Carr, Nicholas, 197 Carroll, Lewis, 150. See also Alice in Wonderland Carson, Rachel, 91 Castle. See also Gothic castles romantic, 15, 68, 74 Catholicism, 39, 44 Cell phones, 157, 160, 161, 269, 272. See also Smartphones Christianity, 30, 39, 44, 142, 164, 273 Clarke, Arthur C., 198 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42 Commodity fetishism, 104 Computer(s). See also under Turkle, Sherry hippie computing, 124–133 and liberation, 126, 128, 131, 141 as a “romantic machine,” 152–157 and wonder, 128, 155–156 Comte, Auguste, 104–105 Conrad, Joseph, 100 Consumerism Campbell on, 66–68 counterculture in 1960s/1970s, rock ’n’ roll romanticism, and (anti-) consumerism, 64–66 romanticism and, 21, 52–54, 65–68, 84, 213, 220, 237, 239 Coyne, Richard, Technoromanticism, 7, 9, 138–140, 144, 145–147, 164, 179, 241–244, 246–247 Craft-centered view of the history of science, 103

304 

Craftsmanship, 131, 260. See also Arts and crafts movement; Digital cowboys: and the craft of hacking industrial revolution and, 55 Morris and, 57, 60 romanticism and, 55–56, 261, 276, 277 skilled engagement and, 259–261, 277 technology and, 260, 261, 276–277 Heidegger on, 75–76 Pirsig and, 259–260 Critical theory, 83, 147, 232, 235–236, 240, 247, 254 Crowe, Catherine, 110 Culture gap between technology and, 3 romanticism in 20th-century, 61–64 Cunningham, Andrew, 97–98 Cybercarnival, 145 Cybercowboy, 137–138, 201 Cybernarcissism, 16, 220 Cyber-Narcissus, 230, 232 Cybernauts, 140, 141 Cybernetic loop, 166 Cybernetic organisms, 175, 180, 186, 187 Cybernetics, 126, 140, 141 Cyberpunk, 51, 120, 141, 188, 281n6 Cyberromanticism, 135, 137, 139, 144, 147, 148, 185, 220, 242 Cyberspace, 137 Cyberutopianism, 234 “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century, A” (Haraway), 9, 180–184. See also Haraway, Donna Cyborg romanticism, 185, 233, 250. See also Romantic cyborgs Cyborgs. See also Romantic cyborgs cultural cyborg of the 1990s, 179–185

Index

defined, 180 fleshy-material cyborgs of early 21st century, 185–189 Darkness, 35, 144, 184, 205, 246. See also Cyberpunk; Gothic first explorations of the incomprehensible, 42–54 Heidegger on, 77 psychoanalysis and, 108, 109, 112 romantic, 83 Romantics and, 218 Dark night, 29, 46–47 Dark side of the Force (Star Wars), 122 Deception, 230–231. See also Illusion De Chardin, Teilhard, 193, 194, 196 Deleuze, Gilles, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 52, 61, 244–246 Dery, Mark, 140–141 Descartes, René, 192–193 Dewey, John, 225 Dialectic(s). See also Binaries; Dualism and dualistic thinking of historical Romanticism, 229–240, 254 romantic, 3, 6, 13 (see also Romanticism, historical: dialectic of; Romanticism-Enlightenment dialectic) Romanticism-Enlightenment, 236, 250, 257, 259, 260, 266, 273 Dick, Philip K., 120, 173 Digital cowboys. See also Cybercowboy and the craft of hacking, 137–148 Digital narratives, 138, 147 Dionysianism, 183 Disenchantment, 73 in modern society, Weber on, 72–75 Disenchantment myth, beyond the, 264–274 Doctorow, Cory, 123 Double, nightmare of the destructive. See Robots

Index 

Dreyfus, Hubert L., 260, 261 Drugs, 284n3. See also Intoxication Dualism and dualistic thinking, 105, 254. See also Binaries; Dialectic(s) Haraway on machine technology and, 136, 170, 171 overcoming, 164, 240–250, 254, 258–260 gaming and, 167, 168 as goal of 19th-century romantics, 261 technoromanticism and, 164, 165 Economics, animal spirits in, 206–207 Ecopsychology, 270–271 Education, Rousseau on, 22–23 Egoism, romanticism and, 217 Electronic consciousness, shared, 145 Ellul, Jacques, 83, 92 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 82, 87 Enchanted objects, 178, 197, 198, 229, 235 robots as, 175 Enchanted Objects (Rose), 197–199 Enchantment, 28, 72, 135–136, 178. See also Disenchantment; Reenchantment; Virtual worlds nature and, 38 robots and, 175–176, 178 End of the machine, 4, 261–262. See also specific topics new material romanticism and, 15 new technologies in 21st century and, 136 robots and the, 178–179 romantic cyborgs and, 158 romantic machine and (almost) the, 156–157 skilled engagement, narrative technologies, and, 257–262 End-of-the-machine thesis, 5–6 End-of-the-machine vision, 6, 11, 229–240, 258, 262

305

Enframing of modern technology, 76, 172, 278 Engels, Friedrich, 37, 58, 61 “Engineering” type of philosophy of technology, 3, 82–83 Engineers, 3, 126, 133, 182 Enhancement, human. See Human enhancement Enlightenment, Age of dialectic between Romanticism and, 236, 250, 257, 259, 260, 266, 273 liberation and, 150, 232, 240, 250 religion and, 29 Rousseau and, 21–22 Enlightenment rationalism, 1, 15, 34, 98, 147, 164, 168, 181, 224, 225, 274 Environmentalism, 65, 266 Environmental philosophy, romantic, 106, 220, 255, 272 Environmental skill, 176 Epistemology, 101, 103, 182, 249. See also Dualism and dualistic thinking antiromantic, 149 Babbitt’s, 223, 224 Comte’s, 104–105 nonrepresentational, 62 organicist, 104 relational, 104, 241 romantic, 10, 103, 108, 149, 170–171, 207, 223, 226–229, 241 Freud’s, 108–111 Heidegger’s, 75–77, 276, 278 scientific experimentation and, 203, 206 skilled engagement and, 258–259, 261 technology and, 106, 273–274 Romantic, 61–63 Black on, 61–63 overview of, 62 postmodernism and, 61

306 

Epistemology (cont.) romantic-gothic, 79 (see also Romantic-Gothic epistemology) technology and, 150, 206, 231–232 toward an alternative, less dualistic, 240–248 (see also Dualism and dualistic thinking: overcoming) Escapist aspect of romantic technologies, 229–231 Ethics, 73–74. See also Environmental philosophy, romantic Babbitt on, 215–218, 221–224, 226, 287n1 Eureka moment, 99 Evocative objects, 159, 160 Existential vulnerability, 160 False needs, 236–238 Feminism, 180, 181, 184. See also “Cyborg Manifesto” Ferber, Michael, 32 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 31, 36 Fleshy-material cyborgs of early 21st century, 185–189 Floridi, Luciano, 161–162, 242, 284n7 Foucault, Michel, 61, 168–169 Fractal art, 173 Fractal Flesh (Stelarc), 188, 189 Frankenstein, Dr. Victor, 139 compared with real-life scientists, 100–101, 153 monster of, 51, 145, 175, 178, 185 Frankenstein (Shelley), 32, 47, 48, 69, 82. See also Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein films, 98, 113 Frankenstein problem, 135, 178 Frankfurt School, 235, 236 Freedom. See Liberation Freud, Sigmund, 26, 61–63, 85, 153 animism and, 110–111, 113 romantic epistemology and, 46, 108–111

Index

romantic science and, 107–113, 116 The Uncanny, 46, 118 on the unconscious and uncanny, 46, 107–113 Friedrich, Caspar David, 42, 172 Friendship, 29, 166, 176, 285n11 From the Earth to the Moon (Verne), 115 Galvani, Luigi, 32, 47 Gaming, 123, 200–202 liberation, identity, and intimacy in early video games, 143–144, 155 and the loss of the distinction between real and virtual, 165–168 from sublime game worlds to the magic of algorithmic art, 172–174 transforming daily life in early 21st century, 162, 165–168 Gender, 218, 219, 224. See also Feminism Genius, 27, 216–217 German Romanticism, 1–2, 21, 54–57, 79, 103 Novalis and the depths of the spirit, 27–41 German Romantics, 27, 32, 35, 38, 75, 227 “Ghost in the machine,” 181, 194 Ghosts, 109–111, 193–194. See also Darkness: first explorations of the incomprehensible; Science fiction: 20th-century gothic, in contemporary surveillance, 168–172 use of the term, 172 Gibson, William, 120, 121. See also Neuromancer Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 97, 222, 226 Gothic, defined, 281n4 Gothic, historical, 281n4 as an aesthetic movement, 47–51

Index 

definition and terminology, 281n4 social and political dimension, 51–54 Gothic castles, 45, 50, 77, 78, 170, 278. See also Castle Gothic epistemology, 75. See also Romantic-Gothic epistemology Gothic horror, 1, 42, 44–46, 49, 51, 52, 77–78, 119, 143 Gothic monsters, 46–48, 51, 53, 54, 103–104, 153, 180 Gothic Romanticism, 45. See also Romantic-Gothic epistemology Gothic-Romantic themes, 45–54 Goths and the sublime, 44–46 Greek culture, 225 Groom, Nick, 50–51 Gunkel, David, 137, 148, 185–186, 284n3 Haraway, Donna, 9, 174 cyborg myth, 223 on machine technology and dualistic/ binary thinking, 136, 170, 171 on marriage of technology and romanticism, 183 monsters and, 180, 182 posthumanism, 196 posthumanist romanticism, 179–187 postmodernism, poststructuralism, and, 180–184 Hardy, Lucien, 204 Hasbach, Patricia H., 270–271 Haughton, Hugh, 46 Hedonism, 66–67 Heidegger, Martin on agency, 247, 248 on art, 76–77 concealing, revealing, and, 40, 75–76 on ending and death, 253 enframing, 172 existententialism and, 77–78 Goths and, 77 information and, 284n7

307

language and, 34, 245, 274–276 Lewin and, 248, 276, 278 on National Socialism, 38 on nature, 266 poetry and, 276 on “present-at-hand,” 162 romantic epistemology, 75, 78, 276, 278 Romantic-Gothic epistemology, 75–78 romanticism and, 13, 38, 61–62, 72, 75, 77, 78, 81, 84, 238, 247, 249, 251, 276, 278 on the self, 5, 17, 245 on “standing-reserve,” 5, 17, 76, 86, 129, 266 technology and, 13, 38, 75–78, 81–84, 86, 92, 101, 162, 247, 251, 278 enframing of modern technology, 76, 172, 278 on “they,” 220, 233, 238 thinking and, 274, 278 writings Being and Time, 77, 78, 253 “The Question Concerning Technology,” 75–76 “The Turning,” 77 Heim, Michael, 141–142, 152, 200, 283n1 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 35, 36 Hermeneutics, 243, 246, 262, 265 narrative approach and, 246, 262 phenomenology and, 75, 243, 247 Ricouer’s, 262 romantic, 204 romanticism as precursor of, 62 technology and, 10, 75 Hermeneutic science, physics and, 204 Hindle, Maurice, 49 Hippie computing, 124–133 Hippies, 64–67, 141 Hitler, Adolf, 38

308 

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (cont.) Hobbes, Thomas, 23 Hoffmann, E. T. A. stories of, 116–117 “Automata,” 116–118 automata in the, 109, 110, 116–119, 153, 177 Freud and, 109, 110, 118 mesmerism in the, 116 “The Sandman,” 110, 118 use of uncanny effects in the, 109 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 39–40, 75 Holmes, Richard, 106, 204 The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, 98–101 Tresch and, 102, 105, 106 Home-based lifestyle, 269 Horror, 1, 121. See also Monsters; Sublimity and the sublime gothic, 1, 42, 44–46, 49, 51, 52, 77–78, 119, 143 Heidegger on, 77–78 on the Internet, 151, 157, 172 Marx and, 52–53 romanticism and, 45, 52, 77–78, 119, 143 and the sublime, 42–45 (see also Sublimity and the sublime) technology and, 119 of the uncanny, 109, 110 of war, 80, 91 Horror films, 51, 113 Horst, Heather A., 245 Hughes, James J., 192, 195, 196 “Human 2.0,” 192 Human enhancement forms of, 190–191 transhumanism and, 190–197 Humanities, science, and technology, 3, 82–83, 133 Hyperromanticism, 246. See also specific topics

Index

“I,” 1, 26, 27, 35–36, 38, 108, 159, 231. See also Individuality; Self “i” (romantic self), 159 I, Cyborg (Warwick), 186–187 Idealism, 34, 35, 67, 68, 108 Identity in cyberspace, virtual reality, MUDs, and early video games, 137–157 “iDevices,” 159 Illich, Ivan, 92 Illusion authenticity and, 212, 234 Babbitt on, 215, 221–223 consumerism, pleasure, and, 66–67 machines and, 230, 232, 236 vs. reality, 212, 222–223, 230, 231, 233, 234, 241, 245, 254 robots and, 230 romance, intimacy, and, 176–177 romanticism and, 147, 212, 215, 232, 236, 238, 245, 254 Romanticism and, 66, 67, 222–223 technology, 147, 231, 233, 241 Imagination, 27–28, 30, 34, 167, 216 vs. Reason, 238–239 Individualism, 55, 216 contemporary romantic, 27 Individuality, 26, 189. See also “I” Industrial revolution, 42, 55–56, 58, 101 Informational romanticism, 123–124, 179, 185 Information and communication technologies (ICTs), 2. See also specific topics romanticism as one of the parents of contemporary, 124–133 Information technology, 129. See also specific topics Infosphere, 161 Ingold, Tim, 266, 267 Internet. See also Cyberromanticism authenticity and the, 139, 140, 233 dark sides of the, 137, 141, 144

Index 

experience of, 242 future of, 157 horror on the, 151, 157, 172 the 1990s Internet and its romantic spaces, 137–157 as a Platonic transcendence machine, 140 religion and the, 143, 250 romantic science and the, 189 as simulation machine, 152 as sublime, 144–145, 149, 157 (see also Sublimity and the sublime) and the Web, 146, 158 wonder and the, 139, 151, 242 Internet of Things (IoT), 197, 229 reenchanting the world, creating a new enchanted garden, 197–199 Intimacy of computers, 155, 156, 161 in cyberspace, virtual reality, MUDs, and early video games, 137–157 of machines, 156, 174, 176, 178 of phones, 160–161 Intimate partners, robots as, 175–178 Intoxication, 167–168, 215 Dionysian, 30, 40–41, 189 Nietzsche on, 40–41 unity through, 167–168, 215 Irrationalism, romantic, 73 Isaacson, Walter, 129–133 Jardine, Nicholas, 97–98 Jaspers, Karl, 83 Jentsch, Ernst, 109 Jobs, Steve Gates, Bill, compared with, 132 Isaacson on, 129–133 as magician, 130–133 personality of, 129–133 hippie side, 129–130 as romantic hero, 132

309

romanticism and, 131, 182 technological, 129 romantic technologies and, 131, 132, 277 Kahn, Peter H., 270–271 Kant, Immanuel, 43 epistemology, 33 metaphysics, 33, 62 moral judgment and, 33 mysticism, spirituality, and, 33 romanticism and, 32, 33, 62 and the sublime, 43, 149 Swedenborg and, 32–33 Kelly, Sean D., 260, 261 Keynes, John Maynard, 206–207 Knowledge, 62 Koyaanisqatsi—Life Out of Balance (film), 72, 91–92 Kropotkin, Peter, 58 Kurzweil, Ray, 194–196 Labor. See Marx, Karl Lacan, Jacques, 61, 112 Latour, Bruno, 83, 264–266 Levy, David N. L., 177 Lewin, David, 231, 232, 248, 273 Heidegger and, 248, 276, 278 Liberalism. See also New Left romanticism and, 226–229 Liberation, 138 art and, 41, 65 computers and, 126, 128, 131, 141 counterculture in 1960s and 1970s and, 64, 65 in cyberspace, virtual reality, MUDs, and early video games, 137–157 Dionysian forms of, 141 Enlightenment and, 150, 232, 240, 250 imagination and, 30 Internet and, 139–142, 150 Marx on, 37

310 

Liberation (cont.) Platonic, 140–142 Romanticism and, 1, 2, 30, 65, 150 Rousseau on, 1, 12 social media and, 164 technoromanticism and, 232 through technology, rhetoric of, 142 types of, 141–143, 145, 146, 212, 232 Life out of balance, 91–92 Lyon, David, 169 Lyotard, Jean-François, 61, 62 “Machine-in-the-garden” metaphor, 91, 282n2 Machines, 2, 3. See also specific topics Machine(s), romantic, 4, 101–102, 105, 154, 238, 250, 262 and (almost) the end of the machine, 156–157 information, Alice in Wonderland, and the new, 148–156 moving beyond, 195 romancing the machine, 163, 195 The Romantic Machine (Tresch), 7, 101–102 social media as, 237 Macintosh. See Apple Macintosh; Jobs, Steve Magic, 71, 79, 86, 256 cell phones and smartphones as, 160, 162 Dionysiac, 41 gaming, augmented reality (AR), and, 200–202 Internet and, 143–144 Jobs, Steve, and, 130–133 loss of, 72, 74 newness and, 160 particle physics and, 203 rationalism and, 119 robots and, 175, 177 romanticism and, 71, 81, 102, 203, 270, 272–274

Index

science and, 49, 86, 103, 116, 239, 268, 270, 273 science fiction and, 115–119, 122–124 technology and, 198, 199, 267–269, 273 world of, 52–54 Magical idealism, 34 Magicians, 80, 87, 175, 177 Jobs, Steve, as magician, 130–133 Marcuse, Herbert on art, 237 authenticity and, 237, 238, 240 Enlightenment and, 236, 240 on false needs, 236–238 machines and, 236, 239, 247 One-Dimensional Man, 125–126, 236 reason, imagination, and, 239 romanticism and, 236, 238–240 technology and, 237–239 Marx, Karl on alienation, 36–37, 52, 56 on commonality fetishism, 104 on finding pleasure in work, 58 Gothic socialism, Gothic romanticism, and, 51–55 on labor and capitalism, 52–54, 56 on liberation, 37 Morris and, 58, 59, 104 romanticism and, 36, 37, 52, 54, 59, 104 romantic technologies and, 105 socialism of, 51, 52, 54 on the sublime, 37, 86 vampire metaphor in, 51–54, 129 writings Capital, 36, 52–54 The Communist Manifesto, 52 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 37, 52 The German Ideology, 37 Marx, Leo alienation and, 36

Index 

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 72, 84–91, 251, 282n2 Materialism, 184 Material romanticism, 37, 57 “Material” turn in the philosophy of technology, 8 McAfee, Andrew, 251, 257 McCurdy, Howard E., 115 McGonigal, Jane, 166–167 McLuhan, Marshall, 148, 232–233, 251, 277, 284n3 on Narcissus myth, 149, 232–233, 244 on a shared electronic consciousness, 129, 145 on technology and social transformation, 126 technoromanticism and, 233 on tribal form of social life, 148 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 145, 148, 232 visions and, 129, 145, 146 McLuhanesque performances of the 20th century, Stelarc’s, 185–189 McNally, David, 53–54 Mechanical monsters, 53 Mechanical philosophy, 90 Mechanical reproduction, art in the age of, 78–81 Mechanical romanticism, 4, 105, 156 and other romanticisms for the masses in 20th-century science fiction, 113–124 Tresch on, 101–102, 105 19th-century, 88, 101–102, 104, 120, 153, 179, 184, 185, 250 20th-century, 120 Mechanical romantics, 138–139, 196 new, 179 19th-century, 123, 128 Melville, Herman, 68, 92 Moby-Dick, 72, 88–90, 92

311

Mermin, N. David, 203 Miller, Daniel, 245 Mitcham, Carl, 7, 8, 82–83 Mixed reality, 200 Moby-Dick (Melville), 88–89, 92 Modernism, 153 Modernities, alternative, 105 Modernity, 68, 72, 81, 148, 251, 257 art and, 79 community and, 170 disenchantment myth and, 264, 266 machines and, 102 narratives in, 263 Novalis on, 27 romanticism and, 74, 78, 107, 273, 274 Romantics on, 27 technology and, 3, 78, 266–269 tradition and, 268, 273 wonder and, 12, 27 Moderns vs. antimoderns, 265 Monsterology, 53 Monsters, 106, 112, 114, 116, 123, 205, 206. See also Frankenstein, Dr. Victor: monster of functions, 182 gothic, 46–48, 51, 53, 54, 103–104, 153, 180 Haraway and, 180, 182 humanism, posthumanism, and, 196 Marx and, 53, 54 robots and, 174, 175, 178 in video games, 144 Monsters of the Market (McNally), 53 Mori, Masahiro, 112 Morley, David, 7, 9, 142, 160, 268–270 Morozov, Evgeny, 234, 250 Morris, William on art and artists, 56–58, 60, 61 capitalism, socialism, and, 54, 59 Goths and, 54 on machines, 57, 59–60 Marx and, 58, 59, 104

312 

Morris, William (cont.) material romanticism, 57 News from Nowhere, 58–59 romanticism and, 54, 57, 60–61 Romantic-socialist utopia, 54, 56–61 on women and relationships, 219 MUDs (multiuser dungeons), 144, 151 Murphy, B., 194 Murray, Janet, 166 Mysteries, 28 Myths, 29. See also specific myths Narcissism, 90, 211, 214, 231–232, 244. See also Cybernarcissism Narcissus, 214f, 233, 244 at the pool, 220 (see also Narcissus myth) Narcissus myth, 220, 232, 244. See also Reverie: Narcissus’s Narcosis, 232 Narrative technologies, 262–264 National Socialism, 38 Natural self, 245. See also Authentic self Nature, 87–89, 99–100. See also specific topics Babbitt and, 222, 223 Novalis and, 27–28, 38 Romanticism and, 38 Rousseau and, 1, 21–27, 35, 38, 216, 219, 223, 230 Nazism and romanticism, 38, 226 Neocleous, Mark, 52 Neoromantics, 65, 275 Neuromancer (Gibson), 120–122, 140 and the darker side of this Platonism, 142 dystopia, 122–123, 137 Fractal Flesh compared with, 188, 189 gothic cyberpunk of, 137, 188 gothic elements, 51, 144 Heim on, 141–142 information and, 141–142

Index

plot, 120 as a romantic novel, 138 technology, romanticism, and, 120–121 New Left, 64, 65, 125 Nicol, Bran, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 31 The Birth of Tragedy, 40–41 on the Dionysian, 38, 40–41 on the Enlightenment, 40, 61 Human, All Too Human, 40 nature and, 40 romanticism and, 40 Romantics and, 40, 191, 217, 281n1 transhumanism and, 191 Nihilism, 40, 62, 231 Nonduality. See Dualism and dualistic thinking Nonmachines, 6, 18, 255, 258, 275, 276, 278–279 Novalis, 79, 223 art and, 31, 36, 97–98, 152 German Romanticism, depths of the spirit, and, 27–41 idealism and, 33–34 on language, imagination, and metaphor, 34 nature and, 27–28, 38 philosophy, 33–34 religion and, 27, 31, 39, 42 on the self, 28, 31 Oberth, Hermann, 115 Object-subject binary, 267. See also Subject-object dichotomy Object-subject border, 265 Ong, Walter J., 7, 147 “Onlife,” concept of, 161, 162 “Onlife” experience, 161, 242 Ontological security, 269, 270 Paganism, 143, 256, 268 Novalis and, 30

Index 

Romanticism and, 39, 50 technoromanticism and, 164 Pastoralism, romantic, vs. modern technology life out of balance, 91–92 pastoralism and technology: in search of balance, 84–88 romantic ambiguity about modern technology, 92 from the romantic garden to the gothic churchyard, 89–91 Phenomenological approach, 241–245 Philosophy. See also specific topics romanticism in 20th-century, 61–64 Phone-borgs, contemporary, 185–189 Phones. See also Cell phones; Smartphones romantic, 272 Physics modern, 203–206 particle, 202–205 technologies of, and the question of whether the moon is there if we do not look at it, 202–206 Pirsig, Robert M., 260 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 167–168, 254, 259, 277 Plato, 192–193, 228, 284n3 Pleasure, aesthetic. See Aesthetic pleasure Policante, Amedeo, 52, 53 Political romanticisms, 37–38, 183, 212, 218, 221, 228, 240 Popper, Karl Raimund, evaluation of romanticism, 226–229 Positivism, 104 Posthumanism, 163, 180, 186, 187, 190–192, 196, 222, 224. See also under Haraway, Donna Postmachines, 6, 178, 258

313

Postmodernism, 149, 186, 241, 245, 246, 251, 254, 258, 263. See also Cyborgs; Poststructuralism binaries and, 136 Haraway and, 180–184 Internet and, 150, 151 reason and, 61 romanticism, technology, and, 7, 153 vs. Romanticism, 62 truth and, 62 Turkle and, 150, 151, 153 Postmodernist romantics, 149, 153, 193 Postobjects, 199 Poststructuralism, 61, 62, 184. See also Postmodernism Pragmatism, 224–225, 241, 243 Printing press and printing culture, 147–148 Privatization, “mobile,” 269 Progress and Romanticism, 34–35 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 73–74 Protestantism, 28, 39, 42, 44, 51 Weber and, 67, 72–73 Psychoanalysis, 108. See also Freud, Sigmund darkness and, 108, 109, 112 Romanticism and, 283n6 Puritanism, 67, 68, 73 Puritans, 68, 72–74 Quantum physics, 203–204 Questioning of technology, 82 Rationalism, 119, 227 Enlightenment, 1, 15, 34, 98, 147, 164, 168, 181, 224, 225, 274 romanticism and, 16 (see also Rationalism-romanticism dichotomy) Romanticism and, 31, 34 Rationalism-romanticism dichotomy, 6, 103, 105, 168, 282n8

314 

Rationality, 35, 65, 67, 82, 83, 125–127, 178 Rationality-emotion dichotomy, 228 Rationalization, 73, 74 Reason, 27, 61 vs. imagination, 238–239 Reenchanting the world Internet of things, creating a new enchanted garden, and, 197–199 by merging real and virtual, 199–202 Reenchantment. See also Physics art and, 35 gaming and, 165, 167 Internet and, 143 machines and, 124, 163, 235 Novalis and, 30, 31 purposes and functions of, 30–31 Romanticism and, 1, 27, 30–31, 38–40, 42, 47, 164–165, 235, 264 romantic project of, 261, 270, 272, 277 technology and, 122, 130, 144, 152, 157, 229 technoromanticism and, 179, 235 Reggio, Godfrey, 92 Reijers, Wessel, 262 Relational artifacts, 176 Relational epistemology, 63, 104, 241 Relationality, 196 Relativity, Einstein’s theory of, 203, 205 Religion, 39, 44, 136, 215. See also Christianity; Paganism; Romanticreligious thinking art, aesthetics, and, 35, 79 atheism and, 268 Babbitt and, 215–217, 221, 223, 225, 287n1 Bostrom on, 192 Comte and, 104 counterculture in 1960s and 1970s and, 64, 65 culture and, 267–268, 273

Index

and disenchantment, 73 Eastern, 64, 126, 130, 131 Enlightenment and, 1, 27, 29, 32, 40, 124, 164, 192, 273, 274 “genuine,” 215, 217 Internet and, 143, 250 Kurzweil and, 195, 196 Lewin and, 248 love and, 28 machines and, 78 Morris and, 58, 59 nature and, 24–25, 27, 39, 135 Nietzsche and, 40 Novalis and, 27, 31, 39, 42 original meanings of the term, 39 phones and, 160 reuniting philosophy, science, and, 32 romanticism and, 71, 73, 74, 85, 104, 140, 191, 194–196, 199, 215, 225, 248, 256, 268, 274, 287n1 Romanticism and, 1, 2, 39, 50, 64, 164 Romantics and, 29, 31, 32, 39, 40, 101 Rousseau and, 23–25, 39, 215–217 science and, 72–74, 101, 126, 191 in science fiction, 122 secularization and, 27, 28, 42, 44, 50, 73, 74, 124, 192, 273, 277 and the sublime, 44 technology and, 71, 73, 74, 78, 85, 122, 126, 140, 164, 273, 277 transcendence and, 136, 140, 142, 192, 194, 199 transhumanism and, 136, 191–192, 196, 268, 273 Weber and, 72–73, 78, 268 Religion of Humanity, 104 Reunification, Romanticism and, 38–39 Reverie, 222, 244, 259 Babbit and, 24, 220, 223

Index 

Narcissus’s, 215–226, 244 nature and, 230 Reveries of the Solitary Walker, The (Rousseau), 24, 25 Ricoeur, Paul, 263 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 30 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 23 Robots and the end of the machine, 178–179 as evocative and enchanting morethan-machines, 175–176 as intimate partners, 176–178 uncanny machines and the romantic dream of the artificial partner, 174–179 Rock ’n’ roll romanticism and counterculture of 1960s and 1970s, 64–65 Romantic cybercowboy, 138. See also Cybercowboy Romantic cyborg dream, 184 Romantic cyborg fantasies, 230 Romantic cyborg project of merging humans and machines, 266 Romantic cyborgs, 186. See also Cyborg romanticism; Cyborgs humans as, 18, 158, 185, 279 nature of, 253 the romantic dream of merging culture and matter, humans, and machines, 179–189 Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (Benesch), 7 “Romantic,” definitions and meanings of the term, 2, 215 Romantic dialectic, 3, 6, 13. See also Romanticism, historical: dialectic of; Romanticism-Enlightenment dialectic Romantic-Gothic epistemology. See also Moby-Dick

315

Heidegger’s, 75–78 psychoanalysis and, 111 Romanticism, 7, 10–11. See also Romanticism, historical; Technoromanticism; specific topics Berlin’s vs. Popper’s evaluation of, 226–229 in contemporary times counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, 64–65 20th-century philosophy, art, and culture, 61–64 we are still romantics, 65–69 criticisms of overview of the, 211–212 traditional, 214–229 definitions, 62, 215, 281n1 dialectic of, 3 (see also Romantic dialectic; RomanticismEnlightenment dialectic) mechanical and other romanticisms for the masses, 113–124 nature of, 62, 215 technological, 129, 131, 133 technology and, 71, 97, 106 uploaded (see Transhumanism: human enhancement and) uses of the term, 81–82 Romanticism, historical. See also German Romanticism; Romanticism; specific topics birth of in France, 21–27 British Romanticism and beyond, 42–61 dialectic of, 229–240, 254 (see also Romantic dialectic; RomanticismEnlightenment dialectic) Romanticism-Enlightenment dialectic, 236, 250, 257, 259, 260, 266, 273 Romantic Machine, The (Tresch), 7, 101–102

316 

Romantic machines. See Machine(s), romantic Romantic mirrors and identity machines, beyond, 157–158 gaming as a (real) practice, 165–168 “phones” and social media, 158–165 from sublime game worlds to the magic of algorithmic art, 172–174 Romantic-religious thinking, signs of, 191–192 Romantic system, 238. See also Machine(s), romantic Romantic technologies, 84, 103, 220, 244, 277 authenticity and, 233 concept of, 262 escapist aspect, 229–231 impact, 275 nature of, 256 problems with, 233–235, 254 romanticism and, 84, 105, 239, 254 social media and, 170 social relations and, 104 Romantic Uneasiness, 7, 82 Rose, David, 197–199 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on art, 26–27 authenticity and, 1, 12, 22, 24–26, 233, 245 Babbitt and, 24 Babbitt’s criticism of, 215–226 becoming the people of “society” despised by, 5, 17 Berlin, Isaiah, and, 22, 26 on education, 22–23 Enlightenment and, 21–22 German Romantics, German Romanticism, and, 21, 27, 35, 38 on liberation, 1, 12 naturalism and, 216 nature and, 1, 21–27, 35, 38, 216, 219, 223, 230 Platonism, 228

Index

religion and, 23–25, 39, 215–217 reverie and, 24, 25, 215–226, 230 romanticism and, 82, 212, 215–217, 221–223, 225, 228, 230, 245 birth of romanticism in France, 21–27 science, technology and, 23–24, 228, 230 and the self, 25–27, 38, 217, 220, 245 Stoicism, 22, 219 writings Confessions, 25–26 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences/The First Discourse, 22, 23, 82 Emile, 22–23, 25–27 La Nouvelle Héloïse, 25 The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 24, 25 Rousseauism, “vulgar,” 65, 66 Ruskin, John, 21, 54, 56 The Stones of Venice, 45–46 Safranski, Rüdiger, 27, 28, 35, 38, 39, 41, 65–66 Sandberg, Nick, 193 “Sandman, The” (Hoffmann), 110, 118 Schelling, Friedrich W. J., 32, 75, 100, 103, 227 Berlin, Isaiah, on, 226 on self-consciousness, 108 on the uncanny, 109, 111 on the unconscious, 108 Schiller, Friedrich, 72, 223 Schlegel, Friedrich, 34 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 38 Science magic and, 49, 86, 103, 116, 239, 268, 270, 273 romantic, 88, 103, 116, 153 (see also Science fiction) astronomy as a, 205 Freud and early-20th-century, 107–113, 116

Index 

Internet and, 189 Marcuse and, 239 modern physics as a, 204 21st-century, 185, 187 Romantic, 47, 97, 98, 110–112, 116 (see also Verne, Jules) Romanticism and, 31–32 and technology and wonder in early 19th century, 98–107 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 72–73 Science fiction, 137, 153. See also Cyberpunk 20th-century, 113–124 Scientific romance, 114 Scientists Frankenstein compared with real-life, 100–101, 153 romantic, 154 Romantic, 101 Secrets, 182 Self, 5. See also “I”; Identity in cyberspace; Individuality authentic, 126, 139, 211, 245, 266 (see also Authenticity) illusory, 245 (see also Illusion) Rousseau and the, 25–27, 38, 217, 220, 245 transcending the, 31 Self-alienation, 80–81 romanticism and, 80–81, 163 technology and, 163, 284n8 Self-expression, 1, 4, 15, 36, 137, 159, 164, 248 Self-knowledge, 244–245 Self-mastery, 221 Self-object, 176 Self-transformation, 127, 191–192 Shakespeare, William, 215 The Tempest, 86 Shapiro, Andrew L., 242 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 32, 47, 51, 97, 100, 153, 154. See also Frankenstein

317

Gothic and, 49, 101 Romanticism and, 101 science and, 47–49, 101 technology and, 13, 14, 47–48, 251 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32, 47, 48, 194 Shiller, Robert J., 207 Silver, Carol, 59 Simulation, culture of, 151 Simulation machine, Internet as a, 152 Skilled engagement, 257–262, 267, 277 of gaming, 168 notion of, 255, 261 Zen of, 168 Smartphones, 136, 160, 178, 187, 189, 198–201, 231, 270, 272 as “evocative objects,” 160 social evolution of, 159–162 transforming daily life in early 21st century, 157–162 Socialism, 58–61 Gothic, 51–54 Romantic-socialist utopia, 54–61 Social media, 170, 211, 231–233, 237, 270 defined, 158 gothic, romanticism, and, 169–170 and surveillance, 169, 170 transforming daily life in early 21st century, 157–162, 164 Social transformation, romanticism’s ambiguous attitudes toward, 107 Solutionism, 278 Space travel, 115, 116 Standing reserve, 76, 86, 129, 266 Star Trek, 121, 122, 185, 186, 200. See also Borg Stelarc, 185, 188–189 Stoker, Bram, 49–50 Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin), 45–46 Streeter, Thomas, 7, 9, 16, 127, 129, 132–134, 137–139, 145, 146 Subject-object dichotomy, 38, 79, 161, 241, 243, 265, 267

318 

Subject-object relationship, 104 Sublime landscape, 92 Sublime Landscapes (museum exhibit), 172 Sublime machine, 86, 88 “Sublime science of simple souls” (Rousseau), 24 Sublime technology, 15, 92, 100, 102. See also under Sublimity and the sublime Sublimity and the sublime, 1, 46, 100, 149. See also Horror Burke’s sublime, 42–46 in dreams, 45–46 Goths and, 44–46 on the Internet, 172 Internet as sublime, 144–145, 149, 157 Marx on, 37, 86 nature as sublime, 89 nature of, 42–44 Romantic Age and Romantics’ interest in, 41, 42 romantic interest in, 80 terror, horror, and, 42–46 virtual reality as offering the romantic experience of, 173, 202 Surveillance romantic utopia and gothic ghosts in contemporary, 168–172 social media and, 169, 170 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 32–33 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 266 Taylor, Charles on nature, 24, 35, 36, 39, 40 on Romanticism, 27, 28 Rousseau and, 22, 24 Sources of the Self, 22, 27, 28, 35–36, 39 Taylor, Jo, 172 Technological Dionysianism, 183 Technological romanticism, 129, 131, 133. See also specific topics

Index

Technology. See also specific topics as autonomous force, 260 essence of, 75–76 contemporary philosophy of, 2–3, 7–9, 71–73, 251, 252, 256, 260, 273, 275 as antiromantic and (therefore) romantic, 81–84 Weber, Heidegger, and Benjamin on modern, 72–84 Technoromanticism criticisms of, 240–248 and of the end-of-the-machine vision, 229–240 redemption, 248–252 Technoromanticism (Coyne), 7. See also Coyne, Richard Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 86 Terror, 77–78, 89, 114–116 and the sublime, 42–46 Test objects, 153, 156 Things, Internet of. See Internet of Things Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (Mitcham), 7, 8, 82 Thinking through technology(ies), 262, 267–268 Thoreau, Henry David, 68, 85, 87–88 idealism, 88 nature and, 230 Walden, 85 Thorpe, Lucas, 32–33 Tillich, Paul, 192, 273 Totems, 269–271 Transcendence, 57, 136, 140, 165, 179, 192, 194 longing for, 28, 64, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147, 165, 179, 192, 195, 196, 273 Transcendence machine, Internet as a Platonic, 140 Transcendentalism, 31, 33–34

Index 

Transhumanism, 136, 156, 165, 273 human enhancement and, 190–197 religion and, 136, 191, 192, 196, 268, 273 “Transhumanist Journey to Becoming Gods, Angels, and Ghosts, A” (Murphy), 194 Transhumanist quest for immortality, 268 Transition(s), 150–153, 194–195 Tresch, John, 13 on alternative modernities, 105 on binary oppositions, 105 Gothic interest in monsters and, 103–104 Holmes and, 102, 105, 106 on machines, 102–104 mechanical romanticism and, 101, 102 romanticism and, 105–107 Romanticism and, 106 The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, 7, 101 on romantic machines, 101–103 technology and, 104–106 Tribal character, 148, 256 Tribal form of social life, 228 Turkle, Sherry, 150–151 Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 162–163, 176, 284n5 on artificial pets, 176–177 boundaries and, 151, 153–154 on cell phones/smartphones, 160, 161, 178 on computers and computing technology, 81, 150–156 on culture of simulation, 151 humanism and, 149 Internet and, 150, 151 machines as relational artifacts, 176

319

on “romancing the machine,” 163 on romanticism and technology, 150, 153–154 The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 155, 167, 176 on test objects, 153 on video games, 167 Turner, Fred, 124–126, 128–129 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 42 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Verne), 114–115, 119 Uncanny, the Freud on the, 46, 108–113, 118, 175 meanings and terminology, 109 nature of, 46 Uncanny, The (Freud), 46, 118 Uncanny machines and the romantic dream of the artificial partner, 174–179 Unconscious, Freud on the, 46, 108–109 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan), 145, 148, 232 Uneasiness. See Romantic Uneasiness Utopia, 145, 146, 223, 228, 229, 234. See also specific topics vs. dystopia, 5, 122–123 romantic, 168–172 Romantic-socialist, 54–61 Utopianism, Internet, 250 Vampire metaphor in Karl Marx, 51–54, 129 Vampires, Gothic, 45, 49, 51–54 Verne, Jules, 114–116, 119, 283n7 Virtual environment (VE), 194, 199 Virtual reality (VR), 199. See also Virtual worlds drugs and, 284n3 Virtual worlds, fluid identities, and emotional lives, 148–156

320 

Vita-More, Natasha, 192–194 Volta, Alessandro, 32 Von Braun, Wernher, 115 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 103 Vulnerability, social and existential, 160 Wagner, Richard, 40, 51 Walden (Thoreau), 85, 87–88 Walpole, Horace, 45 Wånggren, Lena, 54 Warwick, Kevin, 186–187 Web 2.0, 158, 231, 277 Web 3.0, 277 Weber, Carl Maria von, 51 Weber, Max, 3, 13, 71, 83 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 73–74 “Science as a Vocation,” 72–73 Wertheim, Margaret, 142–143 Whole brain emulation, 193 Wikipedia, 10–11, 159 Willis, Martin, 116, 117 Wilmer, Clive, 57 Wonder, 151 age of, 98–99, 101, 204 computers and, 128, 155–156 gothic, 44, 45, 118, 119 Internet and, 139, 151, 242 modernity and, 12, 27 Novalis and, 27, 29 romanticism and, 15, 59, 98–101, 106, 114, 116, 118, 119, 156, 242 Rousseau and, 217 science, technology, and wonder in early 19th century, 98–107 in science fiction, 114–119 Wordsworth, William, 42 World of Warcraft, 123, 172 World Wide Web, 144, 157. See also Internet; Web 2.0 Internet and, 146, 158 Wright, Joseph, 99, 99f

Index

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), 167, 168, 259. See also Pirsig, Robert Zen of Gaming, toward the, 165–168 Zombies, 53, 123, 144, 175, 198