The Romantic Machine: Material Transformation and Metamorphosis

Much romantically driven critical theory throughout the 20 th Century has placed special significance on the epistemic relationship between artistic products and the critical response of the subject. Terms such as indirection, non-linearity, and formal self-awareness have been utilized to exemplify the distinctive qualities of a recognizably ‘romantic’ form. This type of approach places a special emphasis on questions of subjectivity, criticism and analysis, and the related formal qualities of individual artistic products (encompassing film, literature, painting, and music) that either subscribe to a series of normative criteria, or actively and self-reflexively reject such normativity in order to provoke new responses. In this paper, I suggest that an analysis of romantic form is not limited to such questions. To substantiate this claim I will focus on bridging the gap, both historical and conceptual, between early German romantic responses to form and contemporary technological-aesthetic products, exemplified in the development of moving images. I will go so far as to suggest that cinema can be placed in a distinct lineage of romantic thought, which primarily focuses on the formal-material transformation of nature (which, from a romantic perspective, necessarily includes the material rendering of ideation) through technological devices. Alexander von Humbolt referred to such devices as ‘new organs’, which served to stimulate new potentials for thought and sensibility, philosophy and art. This is not an example of romantic frivolity; Ritter, Von Hardenberg, and Schelling shared in Von Humbolt’s response to the revelatory nature, both aesthetic and intellectual, of technological devices. By arguing for such a lineage, I will draw from recent work that suggests a fruitful relationship can be developed between romanticism and film-theory (Sinnerbrink, 2011; Kearney, 2006), as well as recent studies in romanticism arguing that the trajectory of romantic thought is fundamentally intertwined with an upsurge in technological development (Holland, 2009; Tresch, 2012). In drawing these fields together, I will agree with Jocelyn Holland’s central premise that ‘the role of the instrument in Romanticism has long been underestimated’, and that an appreciation of the centrality of ‘romantic machines’ can add an important dimension to the aforementioned work in film-theory. By synthesizing these fields, this paper attempts to develop a more robust relationship between the early German romantic enthusiasm for the transformative capacity of technological instruments in the late 18 th Century and the arrival of moving images, which to some extent fulfilled the promise such enthusiasm, in the late 19 th Century.