[D66] Digital Romanticism in the Age of Neo-Luddism

[R.O.]

https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013152ar/

I. The Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, and Romantic Circles as Case 
Studies: The Transformation and Future of Romantic Scholarship


  Digital Romanticism in the Age of Neo-Luddism: the Romantic Circles
  Experiment

  * Steven E. Jones

…more information

  *

    *Steven E. Jones*
    Loyola University Chicago

Logo for Romanticism on the Net
<https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/>

Online publication: July 4, 2006

URI
    https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/013152ar CopiedAn error has occurred
    <https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/013152ar>
DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7202/013152ar <https://doi.org/10.7202/013152ar>


      Abstract

Abstract

The Romantic Circles Website, along with a number of other major 
projects in digital Romanticism, came online around 1995, a historical 
moment that also saw the emergence of neo-Luddism, in part as a reaction 
to the techno-hype of the Internet boom. At the time. neo-Luddites often 
claimed as a precedent the original historical Luddism of 1811-16, but 
they usually also Romanticized that collective labor subculture to fit 
their own late-twentieth-century ideas of “technology.” This essay looks 
back at the interlinked assumptions in the air around 1995–neo-Luddite 
and Romantic–as the context out of which Romantic Circles defined its 
own engaged experiment in technology. Iw ill cite specific examples of 
digital technologies from our first year (two editions about technology, 
including the technology of texts), and one from our most recent year 
(an experiment in podcasting), in order to explain how we at Romantic 
Circles have attempted to work at the crossroads of Romanticism and 
technology, while stubbornly refusing to play the role of "natural 
Luddites,"


    Article body

    Another expression of a Luddistic kind, also contemporary with the
    Luddites, was Romanticism, beginning with Blake and Wordsworth and
    Byron particularly, who like the machine breakers were repulsed by
    the Satanic mills and getting-and-spending of the present and like
    them were mindful of the ruined paradise of the past.

    —- Kirkpatrick Sale (1995) 

    Intellectuals and romantics like the poets Blake, Byron, Shelley and
    Wordsworth picked up that anti-technology theme, but identified with
    its other side. In the “dark Satanic mills” of industry, they saw
    the human spirit being stifled . . . .

    —- William Safire (1998) 

The Romantic Circles Website, along with a number of other major 
projects in digital Romanticism, came online around 1995, at the same 
historical moment when neo-Luddism emerged as a cultural phenomenon. 
This essay looks back at the interlinked assumptions in the air around 
1995–neo-Luddite and Romantic–as the context out of which Romantic 
Circles defined its own engaged experiment in technology. I will cite 
specific examples of digital technologies from our first year (two 
editions about technology, including the technology of texts), and one 
from our most recent year (an experiment in podcasting), in order to 
explain how we at Romantic Circles have attempted to work at the 
crossroads of Romanticism and technology, while stubbornly refusing to 
play the role of what C. P. Snow called "natural Luddites" (22).

By now the association of Romanticism with the Luddites and, in turn, 
with the Luddites’ presumed anti-technology philosophy is widespread in 
popular culture. It also persists among some literary academics. My 
opening quotations above could have been multiplied indefinitely, but 
these two, from the most influential neo-Luddite writer of the 1990s and 
from a popular newspaper columnist, together exemplify the moment around 
1995 when technology “futures” (in every sense of the word) were at a 
peak, and when, in reaction, a neo-Luddite “movement” briefly arose and 
was reported on by the media.[1] 
<https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013152ar/#no1> 
What often went unnoticed at the time was how much this conflict between 
technology and its discontents depended on established clichés about 
Romanticism. Their politics may be very different but Kirkpatrick Sale 
and William Safire share the fundamental literary-historical assumption 
that the Romantics were “natural Luddites.” Romanticism, full of 
mindfulness, nostalgia and the transcendence of “the human spirit,” is 
on one side of the assumed opposition; the Satanic Mills of industry, 
consumerism, and technology are on the other.


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