Human Agency in a Human-less Landscape

A key characteristic that often marks Precisionist paintings is the lack of human presence: cities are deprived of citizens, factories are wiped clean of labourers, and machines are stripped of their mechanics. The silence of these industrial landscapes have been interpreted in many ways, which I explored in my previous {post}: 1) it was a reaction to fears of overcrowding, 2) it reflected the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, 3) it represented the idealization of human-less cities, 4) it was a visual depiction of efficiency, and 5) the human form simply did not fit the aesthetic. These views are not mutually exclusive, nor can they be applied to all Precisionist paintings equally, as the artists held a wide range of attitudes toward their subject matter. This list is also limited in scope.

In this post, I want to put forth an additional interpretation: the human-less paintings symbolically represented the perceived decline of human agency in relation to technology. By diminishing or removing humans from industrial settings, their agency was visually portrayed as reduced or removed. I was inspired toward this view after reading Leo Marx's essay: “Technology”: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. First, I will discuss Marx's arguments and how they led to this interpretation.Then I will discuss how Precisionists both represented this lack of agency and simultaneously overcame it through the act of painting.

# Technology and the Semantic Void

In his essay, Marx builds on Raymond Williams idea that changes in language correspond to changes in society. When there is no word to adequately describe a new set of social circumstances, this creates a semantic void. Marx therefore asks: what semantic void existed in society that led to the emergence and popularization of the word 'technology', which is in fact a recent semantic and cultural invention—even though we project the word into the past. According to Marx, this semantic void was caused by both ideological and substantive changes in American society.

# The Ideological Change

The ideological change occurred when the mechanic arts were reconstructed as self-justifying ends. For earlier republican thinkers, “advances in science and the mechanic arts were chiefly important as a means of arriving at social and political ends.” (Marx, 1997, pg. 970)—those ends being progress. But by the 1840's, the distinction was blurred; the mechanic arts were no longer merely instrumental—a means of progress—but symbols of progress itself. The belief was 'so long as we made the technology available, progress was inevitable'.

Terms like 'machines', 'inventions', and 'mechanic arts' inspired a vision of instrumentality, but "What was needed was a concept that did not merely signify, like the useful arts, a means of achieving progress, but rather one that signified a discrete entity that, in itself, virtually constituted progress.” (pg. 978). This is where the term 'technology' came into use.

Movements like Precisionism “helped to elevate motifs formerly treated as merely instrumental to the plane of having intrinsic (verging on ultimate) aesthetic value.” (pg. 975). If Precisionists chose mechanical and industrial objects out of optimism for the progress that America could achieve, it was likely because they perceived subjects like the railroad, not as a means for that progress, but as the visual embodiment of America's progress itself. When artists like {Elsie Driggs} or Charles Demuth painted steel mills and skyscrapers and telephones, what they were painting was progress embodied, not progress anticipated.

# The Substantive Change

The substantive changes that Marx outlines is the shift from simple to complex systems. In the material matrix, innovations in the mechanic arts went from being concerned with self-contained, discrete material components (the locomotive, the steam engine, the power loom) to complex systems, of which the material component was one part. For example, when we speak of ‘automotive technologies’, we are not just talking about the engine—which is the material component—but also the assembly line, the work force, the engineers, the technical knowledge, the corporations; these constitute cognitive, financial, technical components, and so on. Unlike 'mechanic arts', 'technology' was a term that could refer to complex socio-technical systems.

Marx argues that the term 'technology' is hazardous, because it appears to refer to discrete things like the mechanic arts did, yet it is amorphous—referring to socio-technical systems that have no clear boundaries between its parts, and between society. This makes it susceptible to reification. While he does not go into exact detail about how he is using the word reification, Marx appears to borrow from Lukács to refer to the phenomenon when something that is actually within human power appears to be autonomous, and out of our control. The subject (humans) becomes an object, and the object (technology) becomes a subject, exerting influence over its objects. In this way, Marx argues that the term 'technology' has taken on "an objective character, as if it existed independent of its human creators, and is capable of controlling them by virtue of an autonomy alien to them.” (pg. 982). We see this demonstrated in phrases like "Where is technology taking us?" and "Technology is making us more... " and so on.

# Projecting Agency Through Painting

What we have is the perception that humans are no longer the agents of issuing progress—their goal is to work on and deploy the technologies, which embody progress and issue it on behalf of them. We also have the perception that technology has an objective character, and possesses its own will and force, with boundaries that cannot easily be marked. Together, this creates the view that humans lack agency to drive their own future. Precisionists effaced the humans from their paintings, and focused on a subject that was perceived as having greater agency. The paintings, like the term 'technology', obscure the face of the human actors that create, direct, and are responsible for such technologies. Even in the style that Precisionists like {Charles Sheeler} employed—which emphasized a streamline rendering and the removal of visible brushstrokes—there is the sense that the artist has removed their own presence and the signs of their creative agency.

Having said all this, I don't mean to imply that Precisionists advocated for this agency decline, nor did they passively reflect it. It is possible that by choosing to paint these industrial subjects, they were in fact artistically projecting their agency back into these landscapes—they drew it as a means of having an aesthetic power over it, in the same way that artists may draw their fears and struggles to regain a sense of control and power over them. One such artist who was known for drawing his fears as a method of therapy was H.R Giger. In my next post, I plan to expand on the subject of art, agency, and 'technology' in relation to the works of Giger.

References:

Marx, L. (1997). “Technology”: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Social Research, 64(3), 965–988.

> Posted: March 11 2023