UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Dream machines Author(s) Connor, Steven Publication date 2017 Original citation Connor, S. (2017). Dream Machines. London: Open Humanities Press. Type of publication Book Link to publisher's https://openhumanitiespress.org/ version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2017, Steven Connor. This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/5670 from Downloaded on 2021-10-04T03:57:02Z DREAM MACHINES BY STEVEN CONNOR Dream Machines Technographies Series Editors: Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so exten- sively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of ‘through what?’. Writing about technographies in history, our con- tributors will themselves write technographically. Dream Machines Steven Connor OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2017 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2017 Copyright © 2017 Steven Connor This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or simi- lar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Freely available online at: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/dream-machines/ Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration: Writin, Machin, Cod (2016) gouache on paper Copyright © 2016 Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND Print ISBN 978-1-78542-036-8 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-037-5 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents 1. Psychotechnographies 7 2. Transports 25 3. Dream Machines 50 4. Pleasure Machines 66 5. Medical Machines 103 6. Radiation Machines 118 7. Invisibility Machines 143 8. Perpetual Motion 160 9. Shutdown 186 Works Cited 189 Index 207 1 Psychotechnographies the soul it self by these middle things recollecteth it self Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1651) Machines are thought to belong to the realm of the definite and the actual, and therefore to be opposed to the softer, less substantial world of dream, fantasy and vision. The aim of this book is to use the analysis of a number of imaginary or frankly impossible machines to isolate a certain strain of the visionary that may be involved in all thinking and writing about machines. Technologies are ‘dreamed up’ and machines require a great deal of lucid dreamwork in order to be brought into being. So the actual development of technologies like those of flight or phonography has usually been preceded by centuries of more or less concrete embodiment in fantasy. This means that the very idea of the machine becomes entangled with magical thinking. Sometimes these dreams are extreme wish-fulfilment, the ultimate cognitive labour-saving device; but they can also be nightmare visions, machines that have no other purpose than to propagate or perpetuate themselves, like Novalis’s 1799 vision of ‘a monstrous mill, driven by the stream of chance and floating on it, a mill of itself without builder or miller and really a true perpetuum mobile, a mill grinding itself’ (Novalis 1997: 144), or Conrad’s vision, almost a century later, of the ‘knitting-machine’ of the cosmos, that ‘has made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart […] It knits us in and it knits us out’ (Conrad 1983: 425). Machines that depend on or result from dream have a way of turning back on the dreamer, and figuring the machinery of the act of dreaming itself. It is this apparitional function of the dream machine that much literary writing isolates and allows us to think about. Machines are not real; they are machines of the real.This book aims to be a contribution to technography, which may be defined at its simplest through the spelling out of its elements: technography is the writing of technology. In its earliest uses, in classical and Hellenistic writing, the word referred to a technical treatise on rhetoric, with Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Alexander and Rhetoric being described as the two earliest examples (Kraus 8 Chapter 1 2011: 279). This is still the sense in which the word ‘technography’ is employed by historians of rhetoric (Heath 2004). ‘Technography’ has also been used to mean the technical language employed by a particular profession, as in a 1920 reference in a discussion of silver candlesticks in the Burlington Magazine to ‘silver mountings as they are called in the technography of the trade’ (Veitch 1920: 18). In 1963, H.C. McDaniel, an ex-president of the Society for Technical Writers and Professionals, proposed the word technography as ‘the generic descriptor encompassing all the functions normally associated with technical writing, editing, illustrating, publishing and allied operations’ (Galasso 1963: 23). The SWTP Review, the house journal of the Society of Technical Writers and Professionals was accordingly subtitled The Journal of Technography for some years. Douglas Kahn’s deployment of the term (2004) to describe his study of the use of technology in the work of composer John Bischoff marks a shift to the idea of technography as an historical account of a technology. In 2007, Greenwood Press released fourteen volumes of what it called Technographies, each subtitled The Life Story of a Technology. The series, which included volumes on the railway, firearms, the car, the radio, and the book aimed to provide something like a biography, each volume outlining ‘the artifact’s antecedents or “family” background, its “youthful” development, subsequent maturation, and either its eventual absorption into ubiquitous societal adoption or its decline and obsolescence’ (Cutliffe 2007: 165). The term ‘technography has found a variety of further uses, in fields as diverse as ethnography (Woolgar 1998: 444; Kien 2008: 1101), techno-culture (Vannini, Hodson and Vannini 2009: 462; Jansen and Vellema 2011: 169), computer-mediated collective writing (Ball n.d.), and the ludic experiments of Oulipo (Harris 1970). Technography therefore seems to involve a kind of oscillation of positions, not to say specifically of prepositions, with regard to the technical, in which writing of techne can switch into the writing in or through techne. James Purdon derives his notion of technography from ‘a union of the material and the symbolic [which] is ingrained within the concept of technology itself from the earliest times’ (Purdon 2016). His interest, like mine, is in the ways in which discourse attaches to machines and mechanisms, and ‘a specific kind of discourse which prioritizes an awareness of the process of its own mediation; a kind of writing which seeks to bring to consciousness the technicity of text and the textuality of technics; the kind of writing which we have sometimes been inclined to call literature, but which encompasses symbolic operations – techniques or indeed technics – across many media forms’ (Purdon 2016). My own definition of technography, as ‘any writing about any technology that implicates or is attuned to the technological condition of its own writing’ is in accord with this. Technography is not just one mode or mood of literary writing; rather, all the writing we tend to call literary must be regarded as technographic, in that it is ‘the engineering in writing of the particular kind of engine of writing it aims at being. So modern literary writing is ever more Psychotechnographies 9 technographic, not in the simple sense that it is concerned with other kinds of machinery, but in the sense that it is ever more taken up with the kind of machinery that it itself is’ (Connor 2016a: 18). But, as Purdon observes, while ‘writing is technological, through and through, technology is also written, through and through’. Technography therefore ‘seeks to bring us back to that symbiosis of the technical and the symbolic that is written into the idea of technology from the beginning’. It is ‘less a method than a resistance to settling at one or other end of the object- discourse axis’ (Purdon 2016). Sean Pryor and David Trotter accordingly define technography as ‘a reflection upon the varying degrees to which all technologies have in some fashion been written into being’. But reversibility is again apparent in technography, in that it is attuned not only to the ways in which technologies are written, but also to the ways in which they in themselves constitute styles, or kinds of writing. As such, technographies ‘attend equally to the rhetoric sedimented in machines, to machines behaving rhetorically, to rhetoric that behaves mechanically, and to rhetoric behaving in pointed opposition to mechanism’ (Pryor and Trotter 2016: 16).