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romantic_machine_notes [2017-10-02 17:59] – created majaromantic_machine_notes [2018-06-03 10:23] (current) nik
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-==== Romantic Machine Notes ====+==== Romantic Machine – John Tresch ====
  
 [[reading notes]] for Romantic Machine, Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon by John Tresch, 2012. [[reading notes]] for Romantic Machine, Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon by John Tresch, 2012.
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 === Part 3 === === Part 3 ===
  
-(still to type)+The New Christianity and the action of the priest would awaken the dormant powers of machines, nature and human relationships; individuals - human and otherwise - became autonomous through their participation in a vast organization that was the size of the world. Enfantin also turned increasingly to the question of female oppression and its domestic forms. As has been pointed out by Claire Goldberg-Moses and Naomi Andrews, and others, feminism and socialism were closely linked in the 1830s and 1840s; Saint-Simonian "predications" denounced the hypocrisy of bourgeouis marriage and the subordinate position of women, seeing feminine liberation as a crucial aspect of the society that was to come; women furthermore played an important and active role in the movement.  
 + 
 +Enfantin spoke in this period of the "play" that forms social rites as means of experimentation and instruction: "Think of the Catholic mass and the play involved there! How much everyone learns from it!" The Saint-Simonians' rituals, according to Antoine Picon, were spectacles that realized in the present the future order of the world.  
 + 
 +"Algebra and geometry will have been redressed in a living, poetic and religious character. May algebra at last take its place in moral life, so that the veritable infinitesimal era of the human mind, indicated by Leibniz, will have begun." Calculus and descriptive geometry would be the "points of departure for the new sciences, divine motors, sublime instruments which place the intelligence of man into communion with time and space." 
 + 
 +The Saint-Simonians imagined a continuity between human-built technologies and the living order of nature. As jarring as it may sound to modern ears, this interpretation of technology was in harmony with their doctrine that matter and spirit were two modes of a single divine substance. The Saint-Simonians' pantheism was also expressed in a theory of "association": each individual element expressed its freedom through its participation in a much wider whole, though its submission to "the Will of God: (as determined by self-appointed priests). Their arguments laid the groundwork for French socialism, while their actions built the infrastructure for French industrialisation. Thanks to labor, technology and love - fraternal and procreative - their technical networks were fruitful and multiplied.  
 + 
 +Jacques Ranciere has written the tragic-comedy of the crossed communication between the Saint-Simonians and the workers for whom they claimed to speak, showing how workers cherished a dream rather different from the "majestic" ambition of being defined by their work. Instead, Ranciere showed, the utopia for many workers was to cease to be defined by work, to have the time to write poetry; they wanted not to be fitted into a vast international hierarchy, but to organise their own local lifeways that might operate on a smaller scale.   
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 +While a "labor saving" machine in the hands of an unjust employer could pose a threat to those skilled workers it replaced, such a device, if collectively owned and deployed as part of a thoughtfully organised and democratically administered system of labor and consumption, could be a prophetic tool of liberation.  
 + 
 +"Society is not a being, in the same sense as we are beings. Society is a milieu, which we organize from generation to generation to live there... Life is a multitude of relations between man and the different beings which co-exist with him in the world." - Pierre Leroux  
 + 
 +The practical and artisanal orientation of his philosophy reveals that along with the arts and the sciences, machines - like [Leroux's] pianotype - were inseparable from the incessant processes of natural development that shaped the human milieu. In his words, industry and art are "no longer nature left to itself," but instead, "nature continued by man"; and mankind was "placed on the face of the earth in order to achieve the work that God charged him with finishing." 
 + 
 +Poetry is this mysterious wing which floats at will in the entire world of the soul, in this infinite sphere of which one part is colors, another sounds, another movements, another judgements, etc., but which all vibrate at the same time following certain laws, such that a vibration in one region communicates with another region, and the privilege of art is to feel and to express these relations, profoundly hidden in the very unity of life. For from these harmonic vibrations of the diverse regions of the soul there results a chord, and this chord is life; and when this chord is expressed, it is art; now this chord, expressed, is the symbol; and the form of its expression is rhythm, which itself participates in the symbol: this is why art is the expression of life, the repercussion of life, and life itself." - Pierre Leroux 
 + 
 + 
 +"The typographic case is nothing but a series whose movable units can serve indistingushably to reproduce all imaginable words." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 
 + 
 +The reformers immersion in the press-s logic of monthly, weekly or daily installments may well have helped form their series imaginings. "Series" was thus a foundational principle of historical sequence, epistemological order, social organization, and the temporality of mass communication.  
 + 
 +"Human life is the knowledge, the sentiment, and the sensation that result from the co-existence of man and society. Suppress one or the other and life stops and disappears, like the image. ... Man and society, even so, are just as distinct, just as independent as are our body and the mirror in which we look at ourselves. But it is the case that between the man and society, between society and the man, there is a mutual penetration by which they merge without ceasing to be distinct." (LerouxSociety is a mirror that reflects the individual back to himself, creating the image in which he exists in a state of "mutual penetration." 
 + 
 +Society is a fluid entity halfway between a discrete individual and an independent collective body.  
 + 
 +Leroux's concept of milieu was part of what should now be a familiar theme among the mechanical romantics, that of freedom-in-connection - of participation without submersion (...). Leroux expressed his metaphysics of the in-between by using the Leibnizian language of virtuality. He wrote, for instance, that each individual is "a real being in whom lives, in the virtual state, the ideal being called humanity." 
 + 
 +As Humboldt so vibrantly demonstrated, instruments revealed the individual components of a given ecological niche or milieu and made it possible to trace their harmonic interactions; they articulated the relation of part to a whole. For this reason, for Leroux, scientific instruments and experimental devises could be cosmic symbols, truly romantic machines... 
 + 
 +The milieu nurtured an organism, standing between it and other beings; it was the medium of transmission of light, sound, and communication.  
 + 
 +[Leroux's] philosophy has been recognised by his successors in socialist thought as an important source for the later ideas of anarchist cooperatives and mutualism. Further, his philosophy had implications not just for the relations between humans and the means of production, but between humans and nature; many of Leroux's ideas anticipate contemporary notions in deep ecology. Humanity's constitutive milieu was not only social but natural. A man's life, he believed, "does not belong to him entirely, and is not in him only, it is in him and outside of him; it lives... undivided, in his fellows and in the world that surrounds him."
  
 === Conclusion === === Conclusion ===
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