For us, Romantic ideas on science and the world offer several conceptual tools with which to approach the problems of the technosphere. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romantic thinkers began to criticize the scientific approach of the Enlightenment for its treatment of man and nature as mutable, reducible, and disenchanted entities—masters and slaves. In contrast, Romantic attempts to rediscover society’s lost unity with the natural world came to idealize the “other” as a source of understanding of our place in that world, rather than our mastery over it. Authors such as Adelbert von Chamisso combined mythical tales on the workings of nature with the travelogues of diligent Humboldtian naturalists, encouraging us to rediscover our wanderlust, and our ability to wonder and discover. On the other hand, the Romantic fascination with otherness, the sublime, or the uncanny also led to a renewed politics of marginalization and abuse. It was in this period that industrialization and colonization moved ahead, laying the foundations of the global technological society.

To wander and wonder …

To bridge the historical distance between nineteenth-century colonial Romanticism and twenty-first-century technospheric Romanticism, we take several intermediary intellectual stopovers. During the first stop, we provisionally take on the position of bourgeois flâneurs, as they appear in Baudelaire’s Paris; as “passionate spectator[s], [for whom] it is an immense joy […] to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world,”11Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, tr. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1995, p. 9. and as they return in Walter Benjamin’s meditations, as aloof yet keenly observant bourgeois dilettantes whose “uncertain economic position correspond[s to] the uncertainty of their political function.”22Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlan. Cambridge: Balknap Press, 1999, p. 10. As we produce this work, we remain mindful of our interpellation by social, political, and economic processes, and our implication in the contradictions inherent in the leisurely contemplation of urgent activity.

The passive act of collecting intermittent fragments from the constant flow of commercial and human movement yields different results in Berlin’s Westhafen-Moabit as compared with the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, yet the problematics and systems of knowledge creation in the two instances beg comparison. Following Georg Simmel, Benjamin understands the uneasiness of the urban panorama of social life to stem from its “marked preponderance of visual activity over aural activity”33Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings: Volume 4 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003, pp. 19–20. Benjamin references the fourth edition of Georg Simmel’s Soziologie, p. 486.—that is, a lack of sonic communication that makes the visual representations of the city and its inhabitants more ominous because they are less knowable. By first disarticulating the aurality, visuality, and temporality of Westhafen-Moabit, and then re-collaging them together, we explore what can be regained through aesthetic experiences of the technosphere’s local manifestation.

Open, closed, sparse …

A second halt brings us to the attempts of systems thinkers in the 1960s, aimed at dissolving the place opposite that of our environment altogether. At that time, systems ecologists and cyberneticists searched for alternatives to species-based and geographically limited classification schemes for vegetation.44See, for example, Francis Raymond Fosberg, A Classification of Vegetation for General Purposes. Section IPB/CT (Conservation of Terrestrial Communities), International Biological Programme (IPB), 1967 Their attempts brought about a new focus on abstraction: on structure and basic functions independent of taxonomy and topography (and materiality) that we picked up on in our contribution. Their classifications did not depend on floristic criteria or particular plant species. Rather, they aimed at capturing the physiognomy, the vegetational arrangement in space: whether it was open, closed, or sparse. They purposefully avoided the incorporation of place-specific environmental information, such as climatic or geographic details, into their vegetation categories. In this way, they hoped to generate new fundamental knowledge without drawing premature conclusions about the functioning of systems or communities from isolated elements. We share in these attempts to rethink the regimentation of inherited epistemes, and to look again at the ontological division between nature and machinery. In this, our gaze is led by interesting spatial arrangements and structures, rather than by any a priori distinction between types of matter or substance.

Juxtaposing the Romantic ambitions of unknowing the familiar and rediscovering the mundane with the cybernetic attempts to reconceptualize the distinction between nature and technology (or the lack thereof), our contribution to the “Romancing the Anthropocene” seminar combines video, sound, and image material that we collected during our field exercise in Berlin’s Westhafen shipping district.

In recording the industrially generated techno-biodiversity of the port district, we suggest new perspectives and ways of breaking up and opening rigid classification systems that capture and limit the knowledge of our environment in perhaps obsolete ways. As we consider the problematics of our subject positions, our creative repurposing of the sensory experience in an industrial transportation hub during springtime is an attempt at subversion. We attempt to inflect our wandering contemplation, collection, and reconfiguration of aesthetic practices that go some way towards recuperating a Romantic taxonomical project.