New Romantic Cyborgs
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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 main- stream classicism, Enlightenment rationalism, scientific objectivism, disen- chantment, 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 transgres- sion, 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 imag- ery. Romanticism created imaginary worlds ranging from sweet medieval- ism 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 over- whelming forces of nature. In Germany, intuition and emotion were prized over Enlightenment rationalism and the “I” was seen as intimately con- nected 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 2 Chapter 1 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 revolu- tionary, 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 contempo- rary 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 interest- ing “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 rela- tion 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 Introduction 3 society. Computers, electronic devices, robots, and other devices are still mainly interpreted as belonging to the world of the rational, the instru- mental, 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 romanti- cism 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 romanti- cism 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 cri- tique 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