Mundane Cyborg five: technological sublime and the pastoral/Arcadian

I'm looking at a few pieces of a puzzle for my cyborg book. One piece is the way we have traditionally viewed the cybernetic and the organic, the machinic and the “natural.”

In “Re-viewing Nature; Machines and Industry; Greek Revival Architecture,” Tuomi J. Forrest argues that early Americans saw both the wilderness and the city as profane and dangerous. Reading Leo Marx among other theorists, she documents the shift from Nature as “howling wilderness” to Nature as viewed by Romanticism. The natural world still evoked fear, but this fear was folded into a larger view of Nature as a sublime source of spiritual renewal. (Forrest’s piece is on the web and lovingly illustrated, and includes a terrific Bierstadt piece that evokes this American romanticism perfectly). In time, for both Americans and for Europeans like Wordsworth, technologies like the steam engine and railroad would come to vie with Nature as a source of the sublime in life. And the tension between romantic and utilitarian views of the natural world also held sway in the design of powerful new technologies like Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works (which the article uses as a model of technologies which merged desire for power with desire for beauty in a ‘third way” of Greek Revival architecture. Forrest writes,

Perhaps in response to human fears about the power unleashed by the steam engine and other new marvels, some manufactures sought to 'disguise' their new machines with painted and molded leaves, vines, and flowers, or with architectural motifs. This practice visually linked technology to the natural world, and with the trends such as Greek Revival architecture. And as the historian Roger Kennedy claims, the new Greek buildings occupy the desired pastoral 'middle state' "between corruption (Europe) and savagery (the West)."

The article raises a number of issues, including the way practical Americans like Franklin argued that the beautiful for democratic peoples had to be utilitarian, not ornamental as it was for the wealthy in Europe:

In the early republic, many sought to balance the value of 'usefulness' versus that of 'beauty'. As de Tocqueville noted: "democratic peoples. . .cultivate those arts which help make life comfortable rather than those which adorn it. They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful." He seems to be echoing that most practical of Philadelphians, Benjamin Franklin, who claimed "nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful." However, as John Kasson has observed, "yet the converse was true as well: American wanted the useful to be beautiful."(142)

There is something in the cyborg that calls to us from this matrix of history, ideology, and material practice. The cyborg motions to the inner landscape as the Romantics did, and suggests that at the moment that (inner human) “nature” is being threatened by urbanization and by technology, a powerful desire for the sublime moves us toward a redefined and exalted human (the Romantics imagined we could find transcendent meaning and power in our relation to the natural world) and toward a connection with newer sublimes (from God to Nature to railroads and telegraphs and new stories of the cosmos and the microscopic).

And for Kevin’s work (Kevin Bell that is, my friend and co-conspirator), the image of a Water Works from the early 19^th Century that promises a merging of utility and beauty via Greek revival architecture, and which delivers it, but also delivers massive pollution from the mills that use this power will most likely provide him with a precursor to the transformation of the Columbia River, that “organic machine,” a transformation paved with good intentions. Here is Forrest on the outcome of this merging of power and beauty in the form of technological advancement:

The problem with this approach--the exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of the public--is another side of the Water Works' story. The system, at least for a period, was able to tenuously balance public and private needs; a public park, and public water supply benefited the entire city. The site's uniqueness and fame proved a boon to hoteliers and restaurateurs, and the dam that funneled water into the wheel houses also allowed for the passage of barges. However, the same mills that Coxe advocated ultimately destroyed the water quality of the Schuylkill. And through the mid 1800's the city bought plots of land upstream from the works in an attempt to rid the banks of the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon of the many polluting factories.

Hundreds came to marvel at the huge “gears and wheels, moving efficiently, noiselessly, and powerfully.” Yet these powerful gears were housed in a Greek temple, and Forrest argues that the entire Water Works was an attempt to merge the natural and the human in order to produce Leo Marx’s pastoral ideal.

I think this notion of utility of nature is itself corrosive of most attempts to make technological advances pastoral. This indeed is what most of the Romantics thought as well (Shelley, especially, but also Thoreau and Emerson), and it informs Heidegger’s famous essay on technology and the view of the world as simply raw material.

But I am also fascinated by our desire for power and for beauty, and the early attempt to link this utility of technology to categories of the beautiful and the pastoral, and to democratic roots of Greek revival as opposed to Roman Imperial England fascinates me.

And I’m using a slightly different terminology to address this: I’m interested not so much in the pastoral but in versions of the Arcadian. I’ll elaborate later, when it is not 1:30 am!

The entire essay by Tuomi Forrest can be found at:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96/forrest/ww/home.html