In 1948, as Humphrey Jennings was still amassing the quotations for his book Pandaemonium, the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion published a brilliant and powerful book called Mechanization Takes Command. The books could be said to have the same subject: the profound consequences of the Industrial Revolution. And indeed, they belong next to each other on the bookshelf. But they tell two different stories, as one can see by comparing the subtitles of the two books.
That of Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History.
That of Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers.
The history of mechanization is “anonymous history” in a complex sense. First, anonymous history involves “humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration”—technological developments in home furnishings, for instance, or bathrooms and kitchens. But this history is anonymous in another way as well: It describes an unchosen and undirected “process”—a word used many dozens of times in the book. “Mechanization is an agent, like water, fire, light. It is blind and without direction of its own.”
If Giedion’s work is a history of this blind agent of change, Jennings is concerned with something different: the experience of those whose lives are altered by this blind process. As I noted in my previous essay in this sequence, Jennings hoped to tell “the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the political history, nor the mechanical history, nor the social history, nor the economic history, but the imaginative history.” And the most fundamental point to make about what people imagined, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, is this: They did not perceive it as an undirected process. They perceived it to be animated by some spirit, or Spirit.
“Mechanization is an agent.” A few years ago, in an essay on similar themes, I wrote about the essential ambiguity of the word agent:
In much contemporary philosophy, an agent is one who operates with volitional independence: To have “agency,” then, is to act for yourself. But in general usage, an agent is one who works on behalf of another: a secret agent for a government, a literary agent for an author. An agent in this sense is dependent rather than independent.
So if “mechanization is an agent” and “without direction of its own,” that doesn’t mean that it is undirected; it simply means that mechanization doesn’t direct itself. Which raises the question: Who or what is directing it? This is why, as we saw in the previous essay, ironworkers are called “daemons” and “Genii.” They seem to be at work on behalf of something larger, something with a purpose of its own that remains inscrutable to us.
But for that astute cultural and social critic John Ruskin we can at least be sure that such a purpose is alien to the human—that it diminishes the human and indeed the organic world as a whole. Viewing a locomotive, Ruskin cannot help thinking of it as a living creature that “take[s] its breath at the railway station,” that is like a “serpent” that has an “anatomy”—but an anatomy “compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile:”
What would the men who thought out this—who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will—feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-colour, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else—mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?
What those “Genii” would think of Ruskin is simply that by attending to the organic in preference to the mechanical—as he habitually does—he prefers the inferior to the superior. By making his feeble drawings with his weak hand (“failure in every motion, and endless disappointment”), he does the same: Why not instead use the superior technology of photography?
So the agents of mechanization would surely think, and not without reason. We should remember that Jennings has placed this quotation from Ruskin in the section of his book called “Confusion.” For Jennings, by 1886—the terminus ad quem of his anthology—the Industrial Revolution is essentially complete: It has taken command. Yes, industrialization would continue to develop, and the mechanization of human work, in the form of Taylorism, would accelerate dramatically. But these are, for Jennings and perhaps for Giedion as well, wrapping-up operations in a struggle already decided. Though neither Jennings nor Giedion say so, ample evidence for that belief could be found in the Great War just concluded when Giedion’s book appeared, a war largely won, as Paul Kennedy argues in Engineers of Victory, by superior mechanization. In the aftermath of this great universal conquest, what remains is to resolve one’s confusion about it, to make a clear and firm assessment.
So, if we can guess what the “Genii” think of Ruskin, what does Ruskin think about them? His feelings are initially mixed, of course. Certainly the locomotive he notices catching its breath at the railway station is impressive—he sees it with “amazed awe”—but the key phrase in the paragraph, I think, comes when he says that, in comparison to the locomotive, “the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile.” The superiority of the mechanical to the organic is obvious only to those who have not truly observed. And this is why Ruskin wrote a book called The Elements of Drawing and established a Drawing School at Oxford in 1871: to create careful observers, observers not deceived by immediate appearances.
The quotation I have been unpacking comes from a little-known book by Ruskin called The Cestus of Aglaia, and that section of the book continues thus:
Perhaps I am then led on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers’ fingers.…
The “Tenth Muse” is the muse of mechanization, of industrialization—it is, as Hugh Kenner wrote in a brilliant study of the effects of these developments on literary Modernism, The Mechanic Muse. Ruskin continues:
Then it cannot but occur to me to inquire how far this modern “pneuma,” Steam, may be connected with other pneumatic powers talked of in that old religious literature, of which we fight so fiercely to keep the letters bright, and the working valves, so to speak, in good order (while we let the steam of it all carefully off into the cold condenser), what connection, I say, this modern “spiritus,” in its valve-directed inspiration, has with that more ancient spiritus, or warm breath, which people used to think they might be “born of.”
Ruskin is drawing here on the etymological curiosity that the Greek word pneuma and the Latin word spiritus, like the Hebrew word ruach, can in different contexts mean spirit, breath, or wind, or perhaps all three at once. These “daemons,” these “Genii”—of what spirit are they the agent? Or are they but molecules of air, that is, wholly material? The question, then, is this:
Whether, in fine, there be any such thing as an entirely human Art, with spiritual motive power, and signal as of human voice, distinct inherently from this mechanical Art, with its mechanical motive force, and signal of vulture voice. For after all, this shrieking thing, whatever the fine make of it may be, can but pull, or push, and do oxen’s work in an impetuous manner.
Ruskin’s prose is obscure here, as it often was at this stage of his career, as he was working through his complex and emotionally fraught responses to social and technological change. The question he is asking seems to have an obvious answer: Yes, of course there is “an entirely human Art” distinct from “this mechanical Art”—it is the watercolor drawing you have just been doing. But because the answer is so obvious, I suspect that I have mischaracterized the question. I think the real question may be this: Can the works of the Tenth Muse, the Mechanic Muse, be put to genuinely human uses, made subservient to genuinely human purposes? Or must the products of mechanization work according to their own logic, obedient to their own spirit, one distinct from the human work inspired by the original Nine Muses?
If I have identified the question rightly, it is a shrewd one, and sufficiently challenging that not everyone wishes to face it. Giedion, for instance, immediately after identifying mechanization as an “agent,” says “It must be canalized…. To control mechanization demands an unprecedented superiority over the instruments of production. It requires that everything be subordinated to human needs.” His fundamental assumption is that mechanization can be managed: controlled and directed for human purposes. It is just this that Ruskin doubts.
Living in the New Pandaemonium
It is impossible, for me anyway, not to see this story of a technological revolution completed, victorious, functionally irreversible, and requiring only assessment and response, in light of our own moment. By the time of World War II, itself best seen as a continuation of the Great First, the triumph of the Industrial Revolution was not only assured—that, as Jennings suggests, had been the case nearly a century earlier—but also complete. Its work was done, and the carnage and destruction seen in Europe and Asia between 1914 and 1945 marked that completion. But that era also marked a new revolution and ushered in the next technological era, the Information Age or Digital Age. (As has often been noted, the two defining texts of that age are Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” and Claude Shannon’s “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which appeared in 1936 and 1948 respectively.) We today live in the aftermath of its victory and are seeing its “wrapping-up operation” in the form of machine learning—what the hucksters call “artificial intelligence.”
And it seems to me that Ruskin’s two questions—What do the “Genii” of the defining technology of our age think of me? What do I think of them?—are the right ones now, as they were the right ones then. We live in the New Pandaemonium: how do we live well here? Or is living well impossible under the reign of the Mechanic Muse? What does the story of the former Pandaemonium have to teach us about this new one?
First, that today’s Genii think of us as resources to exploit or impediments to brush aside.
Second, that we should expect our period to be one of “Confusion.” Assessment of where this age has landed us will take time and energy.
Third, that such an assessment cannot be made by “careless observers.” People, and especially young people, must be as carefully trained in the scrutiny of our media environment as Ruskin wished to train his aspirant artists. And perhaps, as Ruskin believed, it is observation of the natural world that lays the proper foundation for the observation of everything else. Those who cannot see the clouds at sunset, or a narcissus, cannot see Technopoly either.
Fourth, that an essential element of such observation is “testing the spirits” (1 John 4:1): dokimazete ta pneumata in the Greek, probate spiritus in the Latin of the Vulgate.
Fifth, that we may greatly aid our observation and testing by collecting, as thoughtfully and shrewdly as Humphrey Jennings did, the most illuminating responses to the emergence of the order that is now overwhelmingly dominant.
Sixth, to think mythologically.
And finally, we may take a lesson—though, I suspect, only with difficulty—from the title of the book by Ruskin that I have been quoting, The Cestus of Aglaia. A cestus is a girdle or belt, commonly associated with Aphrodite. But Ruskin associated it only secondarily with Aphrodite and primarily with Aglaia, one of the Graces, or indeed Grace (Charis) itself. He explains his intricate reading of the relevant myths in his curious work Munera Pulveris:
With the usual tendency of long repeated thought, to take the surface for the deep, we have conceived these goddesses as if they only gave loveliness to gesture; whereas their true function is to give graciousness to deed, the other loveliness arising naturally out of that. In which function Charis becomes Charitas [Charity]; and has a name and praise even greater than that of Faith or Truth, for these may be maintained sullenly and proudly; but Charis is in her countenance always gladdening (Aglaia), and in her service instant and humble; and the true wife of Vulcan, or Labour. And it is not until her sincerity of function is lost, and her mere beauty contemplated instead of her patience, that she is born again of the foam flake, and becomes Aphrodite; and it is then only that she becomes capable of joining herself to war and to the enmities of men, instead of to labour and their services.
This cestus when deployed by Aphrodite can inflame our desires and put us at war with one another; but when used by Aglaia (the “true wife of Vulcan”), it can bring grace to our labor, to what we make, whether for beauty or daily use—yes, to our technologies. Under the governance of Aphrodite our works compete and destroy; wearing the Cestus of Aglaia what we make and use can gladden our hearts, and the hearts of others, whom we serve in love. Put as a more abstract thesis: The sole criterion of our making is charity; the essential prerequisite for charity is grace. This is the spirit that must be sovereign over the Tenth Muse, as it should be sovereign over all the others.
Like all of the beliefs to which Ruskin was most deeply committed, this one is hard to get your head around. Looked at one way, it is inspiring; looked at another way, it is crazy. But maybe—I’m going with this—it is just crazy enough to work.