Hugo and the Automaton

Dr. Dennis M. Weiss

Justin Nicholas

English and Humanities Department

York College of Pennsylvania

York, Pa 17405

dweiss@ycp.edu

I

In this essay we would like to advance our understanding of human-technology relations through

a reflection on Hollywood cinema, in particular Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo. Now one

might be forgiven for being somewhat incredulous for thinking that we could advance our

understanding of human-technology relations through a reflection on Hollywood cinema. After

all, as Hollywood has turned its lens on technology it has often lurched from one caricature of

technology to another, from a technophiliac celebration of technology as our savior to a

technophobic damnation of technology as the matrix that swallows up our humanity. From

Terminator to Star Trek, Avatar to Omega Man, it seems Hollywood is not in the habit of deeply

analyzing technology even as it uses it to “enhance” the experience of cinematic storytelling.

Consider, for instance, the aforementioned Terminator franchise. In this series we are immersed

in a universe where technology has quite literally turned on its human masters. Embodying the

worst of Luddite fears, the film seeks to inspire sheer terror at the thought of a future filled with

machines that no longer need humanity to survive; but even here we see contradictions. Even

while the movie seeks to demonize technology it is in a very literal sense the product of it. Every

installment of the franchise has sought to push the limits of special effects and to awe us with the

sheer spectacle of the fantasy world. Gleaming CGI machines represent the pinnacle of movie

making technology as we push the limits of what we can force our computers to generate for our

entertainment.

Indeed we can see this fetish as well in more recent films like Avatar, which while using the

most advanced technology available, preaches a painfully obvious “back to nature” message. In

fact while the film obviously decries the horrors of industrialization and the wanton waste

produced by modern technology, the entire movie is itself a computer generated feat of industrial

movie making that cost over 200 million dollars to produce (Vanity Fair).

However one cannot forget that Hollywood also casts technology as the savior of humanity in

many of its epics. The most notable franchise in this regard is clearly Star Trek, in which the day

is saved not only by our enlightenment-era heroes but by the ever enterprising efforts of the

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technological apparatus by which they explore the galaxy. Indeed the Enterprise and the many

engineers and scientists who maintain it are portrayed as the best humanity can offer thanks in no

small part to the technological utopia from which they emerge. In the world of Star Trek

technology itself has annihilated disease, hunger, and discontent with them the painful social

divisions that plague our society.

What all these characterizations of technology have in common is not their final stance on

technology, but rather their shallow and polarizing rhetoric about technology itself. We are left

with two diametrically opposed positions, neither of which seems to accurately reflect our

everyday experience of living as technologically immersed beings.

This love/hate relationship with technology, the yin and yang around which Hollywood’s

portrayal of technology has often orbited, increasingly misrepresents the technological warp and

woof of our daily lives as well as the understanding of technology currently dominant in

philosophical thinking. In a world in which Steve Jobs has been beatified as the patron saint of

the digital revolution, in which we are already on our fifth generation of iPhone, and we are

watching our movies and reading our books on iPads, we have a right to be incredulous about

Hollywood’s take on human-technology relations. Philosophers of technology too have long

rejected these caricatures of technology and we are now well into the third or fourth wave of

philosophy of technology where scholars have pushed beyond simplistic accounts of technology

as neutral tool, demon, or salvation. Perhaps one of the more interesting developments over the

past decade in philosophy of technology, especially in understanding the complexity of human-

technology relations, is the move toward a philosophy of technological mediation, exemplified in

the work of diverse theorists of technology such as Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler,

and the Dutch philosophers of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh. Common

to each of these figures is the claim that technology fundamentally constitutes human life.

Humans and technologies don’t exist in separate spheres but are part of a technoanthropological

whole.

While such an account of technological mediation and human-technology relations seems right

relative to our increasing reliance on technology and its growing pervasiveness in our lives, these

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accounts are often under-theorized, especially in regard to examining the nature of these relations

and their shape relative to specific human beings, the so-called users of technology. Turning to

film and literature in this context helps us to examine in a more substantial form the thesis of

technological mediation and its role in shaping human-technology relations. Technologies of

various sorts play a central role in both Hugo and the children’s book on which it was based,

Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The issue of technology is also of course both

front and central to the history of automatons and the history of cinema, key thematic elements in

both book and film. A central character in both is the early film pioneer and inventor George

Méliès, responsible not only for many early advances in cinematic technology but also for work

on developing complicated and life-like automatons. In examining the role of technology in

Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret we will argue that book and film articulate an argument

in favor of the thesis of technological mediation. Furthermore, though, we think that both book

and film ultimately challenge a central tenet of that thesis, that human-technology relations are

somehow fundamental or foundational, more important than even the domain of the symbolic. In

the growing emphasis on human-technology co-evolution, which can be seen in texts as diverse

as Bruce Mazlish’s Fourth Discontinuity, Elaine Graham’s and Philip Hafner’s Christian

accounts of human-technology co-evolution, Andy Clark’s account of natural born cyborgs,

Coeckelbergh’s technoanthropological approach, and Verbeek’s philosophy of technological

mediation, technology is seen as central to the human condition and the human being is

portrayed as a product of technological relations. These texts pay witness to a move to the

material and technological world which collapses the distinction between the animate and

inanimate, the organic and inorganic, the human and the technological. These accounts often

portray technology as the dominant factor in our lives: we are tool-using animals. We need a

techno-anthropological approach. We’ve entered a post-human period in which technology has

become foundational. The human being has been swallowed up by technology and our formerly

anthropocentric, humanistic concerns must now be mediated through and by technology.

Hugo, we argue, offers a more nuanced view of the nature of human-technology relations which

suggests that indeed human life has always been shaped and mediated by technology but that we

human beings are never simply tool-using animals. While foregrounding the role and

significance of human-technology relations in our lives, Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret

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also suggest that we need to situate those relations in larger networks that must include human

relations, as feminist philosophers have long argued, as well as broader cultural frameworks and

in which we recognize that technology is itself mediated by symbolic or narrative frameworks. In

the following two sections we will briefly summarize the central narrative strands that inform

both book and film as well as provide a brief overview of Verbeek’s philosophy of technological

mediation. We then turn to an analysis of book and film with a view toward articulating the

argument that we believe is central to their common narrative.

II

Before turning explicitly to our two texts, we should perhaps explain why we see the

examination of popular culture, indeed even a young adult novel, as a valid exercise for serious

philosophy. First we must mention that we are examining mediation here, that is to say we are

seeking to understand how technology engages with humanity. Few technologies are as self

reflective in this regard as the media technologies of film and literature. Indeed the film Hugo is

in many ways a film about the medium of film, and the book itself a literary attempt to capture

the magic of the silent film on the page. Therefore if we seek the truth about our relationship to

technology, we should look at those technologies that closely examine the way in which they

relate to humanity. Second we must understand that few people in our age (or perhaps any age)

regularly read philosophy, and fewer still philosophy of technology, so when one wishes to see

the state of our relationship to technology, that is to say the narrative out of which the “general

attitude” toward technology emerges, it seems reasonable to analyze the media that the general

public consumes. Finally it seems necessary to point out the incredibly obvious. Antoni Gramsci

once said that “An original idea that remains the property of a few people is a less important

intellectual event than the dispersal of an old idea among masses of people who never knew it

before.”(Satz 70) Simply put if we think that philosophy of technology is important, necessary,

and that it should influence the way we connect with our technology and with each other, we

should seek to promulgate our work to the general public in a way that is more accessible than

the arcane core of philosophical cannon, and the analysis of popular media allows us that

opportunity.

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The Invention of Hugo Cabert is a young adult novel that upon first glance seems like a simple

coming of age story, a PG Oliver Twist knockoff with a steam-punk splash, but it evolves to be

more than it first appears. It begins by introducing us to Hugo, a twelve year old boy living in

Paris just after the Great War. Hugo exists alone. He lives in the walls of a train station and

manages to escape notice as he maintains all the elaborate timekeeping equipment in the station.

He inherited this job upon the death of his uncle a remorseless drunk who takes Hugo in after the

death of his father. The only reason Hugo maintains the elaborate clockwork of the station is to

keep himself from being sent to an orphanage by the station inspector.

Hugo makes his living as a thief because, while he works his dead uncle’s job, he is unable to

cash any of the deceased man's paychecks and thus must steal to survive. He therefore spends

much of his time trying to outwit the station inspector a stern man with a steel leg brace who

takes peculiar delight in shipping children to the local orphanage. Hugo's only reason for

existence, his only purpose, is to finish repairing an elaborate machine, an automaton, that he had

worked on with his father while he was still alive. To fix this elaborate device Hugo must steal

the necessary parts from a windup toy stand in the train station, and this is how he meets the

mysterious George Méliès.

Méliès runs a small stand at the train station where he sells windup toys and various clockwork

creations to the many passersby. He catches young Hugo stealing parts for the automaton and as

a result takes one of Hugo's prized possessions a notebook filled with drawings of the

automaton’s various mechanisms made by his father. When Hugo doggedly begs the old man to

return this notebook, Méliès states that he will return the tome only if Hugo works off his debt at

the toy stand. Hugo agrees and thus he begins to form a relationship with Méliès and his

goddaughter Isabelle.

Given his new access to an abundance of machine parts, Hugo manages to reconstruct the

automaton and realizes that its purpose is to draw a picture. The picture it draws is a scene from a

movie that Hugo’s father once saw, and below the picture the automaton signs the name George

Méliès. Hugo and his new friend Isabelle, find this exceedingly strange and set about finding out

the automaton's origins and how it is connected to the owner of the humble toy shop.

6

It is at this point that we start to discover the strange history of Georges Méliès. It seems that

before he was the toy shop owner, he was famous magician who upon seeing the first films

thought they were magic in its purest form. He gave up his successful stage act and became a

director. He was successful for a while and his movies were considered genius by his legions of

fans. However the Great War arrived made his movies seem like escapist frivolities in

comparison to the real horrors seen on news reels. No-one it seems had time for his lighthearted

fantasies, and thus the great George Méliès, his dreams destroyed, sold his studio and became the

old and bitter owner of the mechanical toy shop in the train station.

Upon their discovery of his tragic history, the children Hugo and Isabelle set about arranging a

meeting between Méliès and a professor at the Academy of Film in Paris who is an admirer of

Méliès work and a lifelong fan of the man himself. Mrs. Méliès at first forbids this meeting

because of her husband’s intense sensitivity to the mere mention of what he considers to be his

past failures, but once Méliès is reintroduced to his past he realizes that his perceived failures

were actually an important part of the history of film and his life.

The movie and the book both end happily with the adoption of Hugo by the Méliès family and

with Georges Méliès being honored by the Academy of film as a pioneer in the film industry.

III

Early philosophers of technology such as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers were

very critical of technology and sought to clearly demarcate the boundaries between humanity and

technology. Technology threatens dehumanization and its limits must be closely circumscribed.

In more recent philosophy of technology, however, there is a growing critical awareness of the

weakness of this analysis and an effort to tear down the boundaries between human being and

technology. One sees this most clearly in the interest paid to technological mediation in the work

of Bruno Latour, Don Ihde, and the Dutch philosophers of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek and

Mark Coeckelbergh. As it is Verbeek who offers the most fully developed philosophical of

technological mediation, we will briefly summarize the key tenets of his approach.

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Verbeek argues that much of philosophy of technology is still held captive by a modernist

metaphysics that insists on the separation of subjects from objects, humans from artifacts, and

portrays technology as a largely external, negative, dehumanizing force. Verbeek argues that we

must question our usual distinctions between subjects as active and having intentionality and

freedom, and objects as lifeless, passively serving as the projections or instruments of human

intentions. Drawing on Latour’s actor-network theory and Ihde’s post-phenomenology, Verbeek

argues that “We must give up the idea that we exercise a sovereign authority over technology and

that we employ technologies merely as neutral means towards ends that have been autonomously

determined. The truth is that we are profoundly technologically mediated beings” (“Philosophy

of Man” 9).

Verbeek argues that technologies co-shape the appearance of the world, they structure and

organize the world, and human beings are fundamentally interwoven with technology.

Technology and the human being are not two fundamentally distinct spheres in which the human

being is or ought to be sovereign over technology. Rather they are inextricably interwoven with

one another: “There is an interplay between humans and technologies within which neither

technological development nor humans has autonomy. Humankind is a product of technology,

just as technology is a product of humankind” (“Philosophy of Man” 10).

The mistaken modernist metaphysics makes it “impossible to properly discern the

interrelatedness and interconnectedness of subject and object—of humankind and technology”

(“Philosophy of Man” 10) We must, Verbeek argues, shape our existence in relation to

technology. “In our technological culture, humans and technologies do not have a separate

existence anymore, but help too shape each other in myriad ways” (“Technological Mediation”

19). Technology fundamentally mediates what kind of humans we are.

We should recognize the engaging nature of technology and its meditational and relational

nature, and then trust ourselves to it, co-constituting ourselves in that relationship. Our ethical

stance toward technology cannot be predicated upon a notion of risk, the purity of the human, or

the threat that technology poses to humanity. We must trust ourselves to technology and give

shape to the relationship between people and technology rather than portray that relationship as a

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threat or a lie, a simulation that undermines the authentically human. Our ethics must be a co-

production of subject and object in which we practice a technological ascesis: “In our culture,

technology is one of the most important powers that help shape subjectivity. Technological

ascesis consists in using technology, but in a deliberate and responsible way, such that the self

that results from it—including its relations to other people—acquires a desirable

shape”(“Technological Mediation” 22). The central question of such a technological ascesis

becomes what do we want to make of human beings?

IV

Returning from these lofty philosophical heights, we do so with our incredulity intact. Can a

family-friendly 3-D movie featuring cute kids and even cuter dogs directed by a figure known

more for exploring the seamier side of life really advance our understanding of human-

technology relations? In this section we’d like to suggest so. In fact, in drawing on both

Scorsese’s film and Selznick’s book, we’d like to suggest that we get a fuller and more complete

understanding of human-technology relations than that currently offered in philosophical

accounts of technological mediation. We begin to make this case by suggesting that book and

film do indeed underscore the claim that we are profoundly technologically mediated beings.

It’s clear that both book and film have technology at their heart, a metaphor we will return to,

and both demonstrate the centrality of technology to our lives. On both page and screen we have

clear representations of the very materiality of technology and an environment deeply shaped by

the pervasiveness of technology, beginning most obviously with the automaton and its role in

bringing together Hugo and his father and sustaining Hugo once his father tragically dies and

disappears from his life. Both Hugo and his father are drawn to the automaton and feel a deep

reverence if not love for the automaton. Indeed, we learn in the novel that both Hugo and Méliès

are deeply attracted to machinery and that Georges too long ago loved the automaton. Hugo and

Méliès share a mechanical aptitude and a love for and connection to machinery.

Beyond the automaton, Hugo’s environment is shaped by less obvious technologies, but for all

that technologies that have done more to influence the shape of everyday life, beginning with

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two technologies that have played dominant roles in arguments about the “machine age”: the

clock and the steam engine. Much of the action in both film and book takes place in the Gare

Montparnasse railway station, and the sounds and sights generated by its giant steam engines

shape the film’s mise en scene. The steam engine is central to both the narrative of film and book

as well as to the history of cinema. The Gare Montparnasse became famous for an incident in

which a locomotive derailed and crashed through the station, a scene reenacted in both Hugo and

The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The steam engine is also a central character in one of the first

documentary films ever produced, the Lumières’ 1895 sort film L'arrivée d'un train en gare de

La Ciotat, which is also featured in Hugo’s narrative and provides the inspiration for Méliès’

love of cinema.

While the steam engine is often credited with powering the industrial age, Lewis Mumford has

argued that the clock is equally, if not more, important. As he notes: “The clock, not the steam-

engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age...The clock…is a piece of power-

machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes…” (Mumford 14-15). And clocks too play a

pivotal role in Hugo’s life. He has, after all, been consigned to the clock towers of the

Montparnasse train station where he must labor in the upkeep of the clocks, lest he be discovered

and sent to an orphanage. The clicking of clocks and the passage of time plays as significant a

role in the film’s mise en scene and the clicking sound of time passing is often analogized to the

unspooling of film. Méliès cannibalizes parts of his automaton in order to build his first movie

camera. And all the characters are deeply aware of the passing of time, none more so than

Méliès, who resents having been all but lost to history.

Beyond these early technological forces in the industrial machine age, we also have the

technology of the book, which occupies a key role in Isabelle’s life and is central to the

rediscovery of Méliès. The movie goes to some lengths to emphasize book culture, including a

touching scene in the movie not included in the book in which the owner of a used book

emporium, Monsieur Labisse, gives Hugo a gift of the book Robin Hood. Isabelle had just

thanked Hugo for taking him to the movies (Isabelle declares, “It was a gift.”) and then Labisse

gives him a book that was intended for his godson. Both movies and books are gifts. Hugo had

earlier commented that Labisse really has purpose and both he and Isabelle find refuge in

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Labisse’s book shop. One sees in both book and film a love and regard for book culture, even in

the midst of the high technology of 3-D, special-effects driven film. This is especially

noteworthy in Selznick’s very non-traditional graphic novel which incorporates narrative with

drawings and film stills, literally enacting a kind of textual and technological mediation.

The theme of technological mediation is further driven home in the manner in which both Hugo

and Méliès appropriate technological metaphors as they grapple with their own existential

situation and try to understand their place in a fractured world. Both textually and visually, Paris

is itself transformed into a giant mechanism, suggesting that we view the city through the lens of

the Enlightenment clockwork model. Scorsese’s film opens with a scene of a clockwork

mechanism which morphs into the streets of Paris. As Hugo grows closer to Isabelle, he takes her

to the clock tower and shows her the cityscape, commenting: “Right after my father died, I

would come up here a lot. I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine” (378). Indeed,

Hugo blows this image up into a metaphysical scheme meant to account for his very place in the

world and his purpose for being. As he continues: “Machines never come with any extra parts,

you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world

was one big machine I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason” (378). Hugo’s

very purpose is vouchsafed by this grand technological metaphor and we see how a technology

such as the clockwork mechanism can itself function as tantamount to a myth, a story we tell

ourselves to articulate our place and significance in the world.

The automaton too becomes a central metaphor for understanding what it means to be human,

particularly what it means to be a broken human being. Selznick’s novel regularly employs

metaphorical language serving to connect human beings to their technological others: Hugo’s

mind was spinning, travelers are cogs in an intricate machine, Hugo feels the cogs and wheels in

his head spinning in different direction, the imaginary gears in his head were always turning. And

both Hugo and Méliès describe themselves as broken, Méliès in particular feels like a broken

windup toy. Scorsese’ take on the automaton noticeably diverges from Selznick’s, in that while

Selznick adheres more closely to the traditional image of an automaton dressed in clothes and

with wooden arms, Scorsese’s is all lovingly brushed and gleaming clone, a Victorian take on a

digital avatar.

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Novel and film also, in interesting and contrasting ways, point both backwards and forwards to

indicate how deeply implicated technology is in human life and underscoring how human life has

always been mediated by technology. A central element of the novel that all but disappears in

the film is the myth of Prometheus, the Titan and trickster figure who steals the gifts of technical

knowledge and fire for humankind and is linked in the novel to the founding of cinema.

Prometheus steals fire from the gods to create movies. Isabelle’s favorite book is on Greek

mythology. Both Prometheus and Hugo are thieves and both are ultimately rescued and set free.

Some of you may be familiar with Bernard Stiegler’s appropriation of the myth of Epimetheus

and Prometheus in volume one of Technics and Time, where he connects Epimetheus’ act of

forgetting to bestow any talents on human beings to Prometheus’ gift of technology, which then

becomes the ground of our being. Our anthropogenesis is simultaneously a technogenesis. Hugo

too is forgotten and in this void, technology too serves as his anthropogenesis, or better his

technogenesis.

The figure of Prometheus is all but displaced in the Scorsese film. We have instead the figure of

the Station Inspector, who plays a much larger role in the film than he does in the book. And here

too we are reminded of our technoanthropological nature, of our being natural born cyborgs, to

borrow a phrase from Andy Clark. The Station Inspector, Gustav, was injured in World War One.

The injury will never heal and he is forced to wear a leg brace, which becomes his defining

feature. Indeed, the brace’s squeakiness and propensity to seize up and get caught on things is the

source of much of the movie’s comic set pieces. By the end of the movie, though, Hugo, our

modern Prometheus, has redesigned the brace, which now works flawlessly, and Gustav reports:

“It does not squeak at all.…I’m now a fully functioning man.” With his take on the automaton

and the Station Inspector, Scorsese embraces a steampunk aesthetic that reminds us that our

current fascination with artificial life and cyborgs already has a long history that predates our

digital era. While we may sometimes feel that we are living in a technologically disruptive and

potentially posthuman age, our current technologies and our technologically mediated ways of

being are in fact deeply continuous with earlier ages and previous technologies.

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Hugo finally then seems to affirm that notion that our humanity is shaped by our technology. We

see the evidence of our technological side in the film and we understand the role that

technological artifacts play in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

Furthermore, and on a different level, the specific vehicle of film technology also underscores

the thesis of technological mediation. We have been insisting that technology mediates our

world. We don’t have unfiltered access to the world. To some extent this seems to run counter to

what film might suggest. A camera simply points and records and gives us an unfiltered picture

of the world. But as we increasingly deal with digital technology, it is clear that this is not the

case and today’s viewers of film have probably grown more sophisticated in thinking that film as

a visual medium doesn’t simply record reality but also highly mediates reality. What we see is

itself mediated by technology. This is especially clear as we consider the kinds of films that have

been popular in Hollywood for some time now: the big budget action/sci-fi films that are really

special-effects driven narratives. Such films perhaps wear their simulation on their sleeve, so to

speak, such that they prime the audience to expect a visual treat but one that is divorced from

reality. They foreground the simulational nature of the experience and in this way underscore

how technology mediates. All of which is to suggest that perhaps it is more apparent today that

film is a technology that mediates our experience of the world while simultaneously shaping our

experience of the very technologies portrayed in film. Hugo is especially knowing in this regard,

as it uses and foregrounds contemporary digital technologies to tell a story about the invention of

film technology. We learn in both book and film that Méliès was an early adapter of film as a

source of magic and illusion and mystery and many of his films dealt with fantastic tales and

relied on what was at the time advanced techniques to create fantastical images and scenes. Hugo

literally pulls back the curtains so to speak on the technological production of film, showing us

how Méliès accomplished some of his tasks. Hugo itself, as a 3D film, engages in some of these

very same practices of spectacle. It takes complicated technology to produce Hugo, further

underscoring the mediating nature of film technology, especially in the hands of a consummate

director such as Scorsese.

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V

All of this seemingly suggests that Hugo has escaped the double bind of traditional Hollywood

cinema and given us a more thoughtful take on human-technology relations that accords with the

current recognition of how human life is fundamentally mediated by technology. But now we

would like to read both texts somewhat against this grain and suggest that in fact Hugo does

philosophy of technology one better. While a strong case can be made that the theme of

technological mediation is central to Hugo, an even better case can be made for the claim that

Hugo suggests that while our lives are indeed mediated by technology, we ought not to make the

mistake of placing technology in a fundamental or foundational position, a mistake too often

made today when we place too much emphasis on the power of technology and forget that it too

has cultural, historical, and social dimensions.

Let’s begin with Hugo’s cosmological metaphor: the clockwork universe. While there are a

number of elements in both book and film that embrace this technologically mediated vision of

the cosmos, there are an equal number which push back against it and which look for competing

narratives and competing mediations in our lives.

Consider, for instance, Hugo’s treatment of time. While Hugo’s uncle tells us that time is

everything, we also learn in the conclusion to the book that “Time can play all sorts of tricks on

you” (509). While time might mean the fixed, orderly world of clock time, in which time

inevitably and inexorably moves forward, analogous perhaps to the fixed and orderly unfolding

of the visual scene on the screen as the spool of film inevitably and inexorably unwinds, time

might also mean our sense of lived time, in which time speeds up and slows down, or even

cinematic time, in which time freely moves backwards and forwards. Hugo itself is an argument

for the mutability of time as its narrative repeatedly takes us backwards in time. And as Selznick

notes in regard to time and the cinema, “In the darkness of a new cinema that opened in a nearby

neighborhood, Hugo was able to travel backward through time and see dinosaurs and pirates and

cowboys, and he saw the future, with robots and cities so gigantic they blocked out the sky”

(492). Scorsese seemingly emphasizes this alternative sense of time by inserting Salvador Dali

and James Joyce into the action of the Parisian train station, perhaps recalling Dali’s experiments

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with dripping and melting clock pieces and Joyce’s experiments in Ulysses with narrative time in

which hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words are used up in the expanse of a single

day. While much of Hugo emphasizes the inexorable and mechanical passage of time, it also then

develops this counter-narrative of time as a human and aesthetic phenomenon. Time from this

alternative perspective is not merely the mechanical passage of seconds and minutes marked by

the mediation of technical artifacts, but the dramatic and symbolic time mediated by narrative

and cinema and aesthetic phenomena.

Indeed, we may read Hugo as suggesting that while our lives are indeed technologically

mediated, our appropriations of technology are themselves always mediated by complex

symbolic constructions. So, for instance, while horology is often elevated to a cosmological

vision, it is also deeply tied to magic and Hugo’s and Méliès love of magic, illusion, myth, and

fantasy. Hugo comes from a long line of horologists charged with fixing clocks and keeping

time, but what he really wants to be is a magician. Hugo disrupts the simplistic technological

metaphor of the clockwork mechanism, a dominant theme in the Enlightenment and one that still

rules today. We see that Hugo is struggling with this metaphor and using it, employing it to make

sense of his life and the misfortunes he has been subject to. But we also see him struggling

against it and resisting it much in the same way that he struggles against his family heritage of

being clockmakers. Hugo adopts what he knows—fixing machines—to thinking about the

universe as a whole, including thinking about the issue of purpose. His discussion of being

broken or fixed, of having extra parts, of fitting in (analogous to how all the parts have to fit the

automaton precisely) all suggest a particular mechanical and therefore technological take on the

world. But this picture of the world must compete in both book and film with an alternative

picture of the world shrouded in mystery and illusion and dreams and predicated not on

mechanical fixity but the power of fate. Méliès too represents the admixture of technology and

magic and both book and film seem to suggest that magic represents the underside of technology

and the counter to a technologically mediated cosmography. Indeed as Erik Davis reminds us in

his book Techgnosis:

While technology has certainly hastened the horsemen of secular humanism and the rise

of mechanistic ideology, it has also subliminally reawakened and fleshed out images and

15

desires first cooked up in the alchemical beakers of hermetic mysticism. The powerful

aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or

their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realization of the virtual

projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s

unconscious, its own arational spell. (38)

This same theme is emphasized in Gaby Woods’ Edison’s Eve, which partly inspired Selznick’s

novel. Subtitled “A magical history of the quest for mechanical life,” Woods’s book recounts the

strange mixture of magic, technology, and desire that went into the early development of the

automatons. Following the rediscovery of Méliès in book and film, he triumphantly takes the

stage and addresses the audience as they truly are: “wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers…

and magicians.” “Come dream with me,(506)” he says. Méliès is not simply one of the early

inventors of film but the inventor of film as fiction and our appropriations of technology are

never far from the powerfully mediating influences of narrative and myth and even Hollywood

magic.

Importantly, in this respect Hugo points to weaknesses in Verbeek’s account of technological

mediation. Ultimately on these matters, Verbeek’s account of mediation focuses almost

exclusively on technological mediation. The relations that co-constitute the human being are

largely technological. His framework says very little about the broader cultural forces that shape

both human beings and technology and he has paid relatively little attention to the human beings

that are being constituted. Technology, Verbeek repeatedly asserts, is the starting point.

“Technology,” he writes, “forms the tissue of meaning within which our existence takes

shape”(“Philosophy of Man” 10). As philosopher David Kaplan has noted, Verbeek “tends to

treat mediation as a personal affair, not a social affair.” Verbeek, Kaplan argues, remains

relatively uninterested in the historical nature of mediation and “the material conditions that

shape and affect the present.” The human beings in human-technology relations are simply

human beings—not flesh and blood actual beings with a determinate history, culture, gender, or

class. Indeed, Verbeek suggests that technology transcends the domain of the symbolic. “We fail

to understand technology adequately if we only characterize it in terms of interpretation, for this

reduces it to the domain of the symbolic, which is what it precisely transcends” (What Things Do

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9). As philosophers of technology analyze about technology, they still tend to approach it in

rather clinical, empirical, rational terms which are largely descriptive and fail to get at the messy

details regarding how human beings appropriate technology and how it gets taken up in very

messy ways by human beings. Hugo gives us an example of how technology gets taken up by

human desire and exists not so much in a clean realm of reason and instrumentality but in a

world of magic and illusion and desire and faith (faith in technology, faith in the technological

fix). In focusing on human-technology mediation, it is never sufficient to simply focus on how

our lives are mediated by technology as our appropriation of technology is itself mediated by

narrative and myth and human desire. If we are going to understand human-technology relations,

we are going to have to understand them through complex, pluralistic, multiple models, maps,

and metaphors.

There are still further challenges to Hugo’s clockwork universe where everything has a place and

happens for a reason. While the novel concludes on the optimistic note that “The machinery of

the world lined up…and Hugo’s future seemed to fall perfectly into place,(507)” we also have to

assume that if the world is a vast machine where every part has a purpose and there is a reason

for everything, then Hugo’s father had to die, his uncle had to imprison him in the clock tower,

and his loneliness is completely explicable. And Hugo’s loneliness and his disconnection from

people are almost palpable. After being caught by Gustav, he implores: “Listen to me! Please!

Listen to me! You don’t understand! You have to let me go! I don’t understand why my father

died! Why I’m alone!” Hugo is as much characterized by his being alone as by his mechanical

aptitude. As we learn in the novel, “When he saw them from above he always thought the

travelers looked like cogs in an intricate machine. But up close, amid the bustle and the

stampede, everything just seemed noisy and disconnected” (142). Cogs make sense. Humans are

noisy and disconnected. Hugo has an almost autistic love of machinery and fear of connection.

It is this fear which drives a central and emotionally compelling scene of the film in which Hugo

wakes up from a nightmare only to hear a ticking coming from within himself. He rips aside his

nightshirt and discovers that he is himself an automaton and his heart has been replaced with

machinery. He dreams of being enclosed and trapped within the walls of the clock tower as his

humanity slowly seeps out. He finally awakens in a fright. While Hugo is attracted to the

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automaton and finds it beautiful, he also fears being turned into it. What Hugo lacks, both

figuratively and in the case of the automaton literally, is a heart and he ultimately depends upon

someone else to provide that missing piece, taking the difficult step of learning to trust Isabelle

and reach out to someone or something other than the automaton.

And indeed this same theme ultimately takes center stage with our cyborg Station Inspector

Gustav. Near the end of the film Gustav finally captures Hugo and locks him up until he can be

taken away to the orphanage. He tells Hugo, “You’ll learn a thing or two. I certainly did. How to

follow orders, how to keep to yourself. How to survive without a family, because you don’t need

one. You don’t need a family!” Gustav is the human equivalent of the clock work mechanism.

He’s a social automaton—isolated and alone, singular, without a family, simply following orders

and keeping to himself. But of course also yearning for a relationship with the flower girl Lisette.

The flip side of the Enlightenment metaphors of the clock work mechanism and the automaton is

the view of human relations as socially atomistic. And yet Scorsese portrays a film rife with

people yearning for relationship and connection: Hugo and Isabelle, Gustav and Lisette, Emilie

and Frick, even the dogs get in on the action as Emilie and Frick are brought together through the

amorous pairing of their dogs. As Gustav moves to arrest Hugo, Emilie appeals, “Gustav, have a

heart.” And it’s the heart that Hugo previously dreamed disappearing, and it’s the heart that

Isabelle finally provides to animate the automaton, in the form of a heart-shaped key that brings

life to the automaton and hope to Hugo. A heart-shaped key Isabelle had stolen from Mamma

Jeanne who received it as a gift from Papa Georges. While fatherhood plays an important role in

Hugo, or at least the absent father does, it is relationships to women, mediated by the presence of

a heart, that finally redeem Hugo and Georges and Gustav. When Gustav finally accedes at the

end of the film to being a fully functioning man, it’s perhaps partly because Hugo has provided

him with a new prosthesis. But it’s equally because he has a new relationship. He speaks first to

the musicians he had previously run into: “Don’t worry. I’m now a fully functioning man.” Then

he looks directly at Lisette and continues, “Aren’t I, dear?” displaying one of the three smiles he

has mastered.

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By the end of film and novel, Hugo and Gustav, as well as George Méliès of course, find their

place. They belong. They are not alone. And this sense of belonging, of place, could not be

provided by the automaton or the clocks or any of the other myriad mechanisms Hugo and

Georges and the Station Inspector have surrounded themselves with. Both film and novel suggest

that relations are important and that human beings can only be understood from the standpoint of

a relational ontology. Technology plays a role in that ontology and we human beings are

technologically mediated tool-using animals. But before any of those tools can do the work they

are supposed to do, we human beings must first have a heart and enter into a more fundamental

relation with other human beings.

All of this suggests that in working towards a more comprehensive framework for the evaluation

of human-technology relations, we need to keep in mind that the human being is more than a

mere user of technology and exists in relation to more than technology. Technology is not the

tissue of meaning within which our existence takes shape. Human culture and society is, of

which surely technology is a large part, just not the only part and sometimes not even the most

fundamental part. We are not first and foremost tool using animals but social animals shaped and

mediated by human community. This is a theme that has been central to much of feminist

philosophy, especially feminist ethics, for more than thirty years and feminist ethicists have long

argued for precisely the kind of relational ontology that is at the heart of Verbeek’s amodernist

philosophy of technology. But where Verbeek and other philosophers of technology begin with

human-technology relations, feminist ethicists argue that it is caring that forms the core relation

in shaping human life and community, not our relation to technology. A relational ontology of the

sort championed by Verbeek, Latour, and others might begin not with our relation to technology

but with our relation to one another. Feminist ethicists have long recognized the significance of

such an ontology and its challenge to the same Enlightenment (and one might add masculinist)

model critiqued by Verbeek, Latour, and other contemporary philosophers of technology. As

feminist philosopher Susan Sherwin notes in “Whither Bioethics? How Feminism Can Help

Reorient Bioethics,”

Feminist relational theorists have helped make vivid and comprehensible the fact that

persons are, inevitably, connected with other persons and with social institutions. We are

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not isolated atoms, or islands, or self-contained entities, but rather products of historical,

social, and cultural processes and interactions. The existence of any person is dependent

on the existence and social arrangements of many others. Our interests are discovered by

and pursued within social environments that help to shape our identities, characters, and

opportunities.

Ultimately, both Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret are less about technology than about

what it means to be human in a technological world. And what it means to be human is defined

as much by our relations to others and our dreams and our desires for a little bit of magic as it is

our relations to technology.

VI

Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret represent a world that is very much ours, a world

shaped by technology, from the technology of the automaton to the technology of the cinema.

And these technologies are intimately related to core questions we human beings often ask

ourselves: what am I? what is my place in the world? Hugo initially turns to technology to

answer these questions. The world is a giant mechanism, it has all the parts it needs and every

part plays its role and so he simply needs to play his part. If he can only repair the automaton its

secrets will be revealed and he will once again be connected to his father via the magic of

technology. Like Hugo, we are often overly preoccupied with technology and with a particular

world picture or myth that crowds out other ways of thinking. Ours may be digital rather than

mechanical but it is still a technological picture and one that is the descendant of an earlier world

picture—the Enlightenment model of a clockwork mechanism. We’ve come to read our current

technological condition, a technoanthropological condition, as the condition for all of humanity

and this may be a mistake. We’ve come to think that the human condition is fundamentally

mediated by our technologies. And like Hugo, we suppose that we will find answers in the

gleaming screens of our iPads and Droids. Our two texts make a case, sometimes explicitly

sometimes implicitly, for bringing a series of critical questions to bear on these technological

world pictures. We are always looking outside ourselves to try and understand the human

condition, finding mirrors of our natures in our technologies and artifacts, believing that the

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primary model for thinking about what it means to be human is a technological model, typically

drawn from the latest technology. Hugo suggests this is nothing new. But Hugo’s deeply textured

life, while shaped by technology, is also shaped and mediated by stories and desires and the

search for meaningful human relations.

As we begin to assess the significance of human-technology relations and think about our

relation to the object world, we ought not to begin from the standpoint of the technology but

must begin with the importance of human-human relations. We don’t begin with technology but

with human cultural life and the community that sustains it. Contained within human culture is

technology. It is a part of our lives and we shouldn’t demonize it. But we shouldn’t begin with

technology either and our focus on human beings has to be a focus on the actual beings that we

are, in all our humbleness recognizing our deficiencies and vulnerabilities but wary of employing

technical fixes for those vulnerabilities and deficiencies. Our relationships are mediated by

technology but we can’t take the technological mediation to be the founding experience as we

sometimes do in the 21st century.

Hugo doesn’t fall into the usual traps of Hollywood approaches to technology. It does not present

technology as neutral or autonomous or as our savior or our damnation. Instead, it represents

technology in a complex, ambivalent manner and suggests that it is one of many cultural forms

that mediate human life. It presents instead a mature vision of human-technology relations in

which it is situated in our lives, takes up its rightful place in our lives, but isn’t necessarily the

dominant cultural form or only form of mediation in our lives. Hugo displays directly how our

lives are mediated by technology but also displays a new maturity in recognizing the appropriate

role technology ought to place in our lives.

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