Animals, Machines, and AI On Human and Non Human
Emotions in Modern German Cultural History, 1st Edition
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Animals, Machines, and AI
Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies
Edited by
Irene Kacandes
Volume 31
Animals, Machines, and AI
On Human and Non-Human Emotions in Modern German
Cultural History
Edited by
Erika Quinn
Holly Yanacek
ISBN 9783110753660
e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110753677
e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110753738
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are
available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Contents
Acknowledgements
Erika Quinn, Holly Yanacek
Introduction: Feeling beyond the Human
Emotions and Human/Non-Human Boundaries
Madalina Meirosu
Mechanical Feelings
The talking Turk
Uncertainty and automatic doubles
The garden: A respite from anxiety
The human – a feeling machine
The human as marionette in the hands of politics
Conclusion
Derek Hillard
Animals and Aesthetic Empathy in Germany around 1900
Animal emotions and human compassion
Einfühlung and aesthetics
Animal aesthetics
Projection and expression
The symbolic
Jared Poley
Biology, Behavior, and Emotion
Emotional Functions of Non-Humans
Sarah L. Leonard
Expressive Creatures
Questions from animal studies
The role of objects
Non-human animals in early German photographs
Children and animals
Brett Martz
Between the Animal and the Reader
Who’s laughing? Discursive authority and the limits of
emotions
Ineffable vulnerability in “The Lady from Portugal”
Presentation matters
Conclusion
Erika Quinn
Robots, Machines, and Humanity
Machines as beasts, humans as machines
The robot
The robot and the masses
Empathic Understanding between Humans and Non-
Humans
Claudia Mueller-Greene
“Penetrating the Innermost Heart”
The cultural and aesthetic context of “The Automata”
Encounters with the non-human in “The Automata”
Music, human feeling, and the non-human
Staying human in a technological world
Andrea Meyertholen
I Know What the Caged Cat Feels
My animal, my other: Why anthropocentrism matters
Trapped in paradise: Inside the concrete jungle of
Slevogt’s zoo cats
The subjunctive jump: Feeling into Rilke’s panther
Holly Yanacek
Benevolent Bots
Notes on Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly changed the lives
of people around the world forever. We never could have
imagined that we would start and finish writing the manuscript
for a co-edited volume during a global pandemic. However, this
work was incredibly stimulating and a welcome distraction
during a time of many challenges and uncertainties. We loved
collaborating on this volume, and we cannot express enough
gratitude to the individuals who supported this project in
different ways. First of all, we would like to thank James Madison
University and Eureka College for funding that supported the
volume’s publication, as well as our colleagues and friends at
these institutions for their encouragement. Funding from the
JMU College of Arts and Letters and a Center for Global
Engagement International Development Grant supported initial
research for this project in Berlin. A faculty development grant
from Eureka College and a JMU College of Arts and Letters Mini-
Grant helped cover publication costs. Thank you to Irene
Kacandes and Myrto Aspioti for the opportunity to publish this
volume in De Gruyter’s Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies
series. We are grateful for their insightful feedback and
enthusiastic support at every stage of this project. It was a true
pleasure to work with them, Stella Diedrich, and the entire
editorial team at De Gruyter. Thanks to our colleagues in the
German Studies Association, particularly other members of the
GSA Emotion Studies Network, who engaged with our work and
allowed us to test out some of these ideas at recent conferences.
We are particularly grateful to Emotion Studies Network Co-
Chair Derek Hillard for his interest in and support for this
project. Thank you to historian Ute Frevert, Director of the
Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Development (MPIB) in Berlin. The opportunity to
conduct preliminary research for this project as a Visiting
Researcher at the MPIB in Summer 2019 was especially
impactful. Special thanks to Mira Gruber and all of the former
JMU students who participated in the Humanities 200 general
education literature course on the topic “Humans, Animals,
Machines” over the last few years. Their receptiveness to the
course content encouraged the development of this project on
emotions and human/non-human relationships. Many thanks to
Sofia Samatar for reading an early draft of our introduction. We
are also grateful to Thilini Prasadika for her enthusiasm for this
project and the kind invitation to talk about our work on her
humanities podcast. The Diversity, Decolonization, and the
German Curriculum virtual writing groups organized by Carol
Anne Costabile-Heming and Ervin Malakaj provided
accountability and helped overcome the isolation of working on
the volume manuscript during the pandemic. Thanks also to our
contributors for their insightful essays and their interest in
pushing the boundaries of emotion studies research to examine
non-human emotions and human/non-human relationships, and
to Chris Wille for his striking cover art. Finally, we are filled with
gratitude for our families, especially the human and non-human
members of our quaranteams. We could not have written this
volume without their love and support. This volume is dedicated
to our families and our canine companions – Blaze; and Caspar
and Luna – for the inspiration, companionship, and comfort they
provided for the duration of this project.
Introduction: Feeling beyond the
Human
Erika Quinn
Holly Yanacek
A human becomes emotionally attached to a machine – this
basic plot is found in a number of recent books, films, and
television series about humanoid robots and digital assistants;1
however, depictions of the emotional attachment of humans to
machines are not new. In German literary history, one of the
most well-known examples is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella “Der
Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” 1816), in which the young student
and Romantic poet Nathanael projects his desires for a woman
partner onto the automaton Olimpia. Not long after Nathanael
calls his human fiancée Clara a “lifeless, damned automaton”2
for rejecting his gruesome poetry, Nathanael becomes more and
more attracted to Olimpia, who, unlike Clara, appears to listen to
him with interest and only sighs “Oh, oh!” in response.3 A
critique of Nathanael’s narcissistic projections and desire for a
passive partner without her own thoughts or feelings is evident
through Hoffmann’s use of narrative irony, which also helps
undermine the polarized early nineteenth-century gender roles
in “The Sandman.”
Olimpia is both an object of desire and danger for
Nathanael, and the automaton changes human relationships in
the town. When Olimpia is destroyed and Nathanael finally sees
that she is a lifeless doll, the narrator notes that “madness
seized him with its fiery claws and bored its way into his inner
being, tearing his mind and thoughts apart.”4 His attraction to
Olimpia consumes him and negatively impacts his thoughts and
emotions as well as his relationship with Clara. Nathanael’s
spectacular destruction typifies early Romantic emotional styles
and gender roles. The masculine antihero needed a female muse
(Clara) to reflect back his genius to him; her refusal to do so
ultimately leads to his passionate self-destruction.
The narrator reveals that the story of this automaton deeply
affects the people of the town and their relationships with their
human partners, not just Nathanael:
[…] [T]he story of the automaton had taken root deep in their souls, and
indeed, a horrible distrust of human figures crept in. In order to be
completely convinced that they were not in love with a wooden doll, a
number of lovers wanted their beloved to sing and dance a little out of
rhythm, to embroider, knit, play with their little dog, and so on, while
being read to, but above all, to not merely listen, but also occasionally
speak in such a way to demonstrate that their speech required actual
thoughts and feelings.5
This passage suggests that imperfection (e.g., singing and
dancing out of rhythm and being distracted) is desirable
because imperfection, like having one’s own thoughts and
feelings, is authentically human. It also implies that a difference
exists between real and simulated thoughts and emotions,
something that is becoming more difficult to distinguish today
with new artificial intelligence (AI) and emotion AI technologies
like chatbots and virtual agents powered by conversational AI
and natural language processing.
Non-human entities can affect communities by evoking not
only fear and distrust, as seen in Hoffmann’s tale, but also
admiration and empathy. Franz Kafka’s short story “In unserer
Synagoge” (In our synagogue, 1922) presents such a dynamic. In
the story, villagers encounter a mysterious animal that has been
living in the synagogue for a long time. The narrator observes,
“If only one could communicate with the animal, one could, of
course, comfort it by telling it that the congregation in this
mountain village of ours is becoming smaller every year.”6 He
longs to connect with the mysterious animal living in the
synagogue and imagines that the animal’s emotional life is
similar enough to his own that it can be understood. The
narrator asserts that, in fact, the animal is more troubled than
troubling; indeed, “if it were not for the women, one would
hardly be aware of the animal’s existence.”7 This puzzling story
raises several questions about the emotions of non-human
animals and humans’ feelings about them. While humans may
seek to understand and connect with animals, the animal’s body
itself is illegible. The narrator observes that the animal is the size
of a marten, and it is thought to possess matted, bluish green
fur, which could simply be the result of exposure to dust and
mortar. The animal’s body, and therefore its nature, remains
inscrutable as it rarely shows itself, eludes categorization, and
cannot speak. The pity and curiosity the animal evokes in the
male narrator are belied by the other men’s treatment of it. In
the past, the men tried to drive the animal out as a nuisance, but
because they don’t come into physical proximity with it, they
now, excepting the narrator, ignore it. The men exhibit
emotional detachment or indifference to the animal, deeming it
unthreatening. In this they adhere to normative gender roles as
stoic protectors. They take no notice of the “pet” the animal has
become.8 Animals can present a threat to humans, as the men in
the synagogue first imagined. However, animals can also be
alluring or attractive to humans for a variety of reasons. We may
use them for our own instrumental desires; at first glance the
animal in the synagogue is “frightening,”9 but the women in the
story use their purported fear of the animal to garner the
attention they crave (from men) while adhering to their town’s
and religion’s emotional regimes around gender. They play the
role of damsel in distress, using the animal as the threat, and
engage (we assume) men’s sympathy and protective stances.
What of the animal itself? It remains a mystery, a screen
onto which human longing and fear is projected. The forms
those projections take carry the cultural understanding of
gender with them. Like Nathanael’s relationship with the
automaton Olimpia in Hoffmann’s novella, the villagers’ interest
in the animal reflects their own agendas, to provide safety or to
attract attention.
This interdisciplinary volume examines depictions of
affective relationships between humans and non-humans in
German cultural history from the Enlightenment to the present.
Historically, dominant understandings of emotion have tended
to limit the faculty of emotions to human beings, though some
accounts have allowed that non-human animals, especially
certain mammals, may also experience some emotions. By
investigating claims that suggest the emotionality of machines
or AI technologies, our volume questions established
assumptions regarding emotions, such as distinctions between
emotional experience and expression or real and simulated
emotion as raised in Hoffmann’s text. Yet rather than focusing
on what or whether non-humans such as animals and robots
feel, we ask what kind of emotional lives have been attributed to
non-human animals and machines in German literary and
cultural history and why? What do depictions of animals, robots,
and machines in the modern era reveal about changing
understandings of the human and the human/non-human
boundary? Why are so many automata, robots, and virtual
assistants, both real and imagined, gendered feminine? Which
emotional functions have non-human animals and machines
served in different historical periods? What are the implications
of emotional attachments to and empathy for non-humans such
as pets and humanlike social robots? Our volume seeks to use
animals and machines as heuristic lenses through which to
investigate human emotions and more specifically, humans’
affective relationships with non-human animals and machines.
Following previous animal studies scholarship, we use the term
“non-human animal” whenever possible in this volume.
In recent years, developments in robotics, fascination with
machines, and the rapid growth of animal studies in the
academy and beyond have given rise to questions about the
nature of humanity. While older distinctions and definitions of
what distinguishes humans from other organic animals, which
rest on features such as tool use, use of language, and social
structure, have been sidelined, questions persist about what, if
anything, separates humans from other organic life forms.
Neurologists’ and psychologists’ work on brain science also has
deepened and complicated our understanding of brain
functions, and studies of emotions, in particular, have been at
the forefront of these scientific fields.
As cyberneticists currently work to create more and more
sophisticated robots and AI algorithms, anthropologists,
ethicists, and engineers ask questions about such developments
and their potential hazards. Now that the old mind/body duality
has been largely dismissed by brain scientists, the role of
emotions in creating AI applications is all the more pressing.
Thinking about human labor being replaced by robotic labor,
and eventually, AI, has become a leading political and economic
concern for some policy makers and corporate leaders. Creating
AI forces programmers and engineers to investigate and
confront the nature, function, operation, and expression of
human emotions.
While anthropomorphism, the attribution of human
characteristics, especially emotion, to non-human animals
gained a bad reputation beginning in the Enlightenment era, the
practice of imagining animal emotions, which emerged in the
early nineteenth century, could well have served as a tool similar
to empathy – one that aided in seeing animals as beings
possessing minds, will, and pain. The development of biological
and brain research has led to the growing recognition that
humans are entangled with non-human animals. This has
complicated the neat distinction of animal/human that has long
reigned.
Scholarly interest in emotions can be traced back to the late
nineteenth century with important developments in biology and
the emergence of psychology as a field of study. Charles Darwin
focused on one aspect of emotion – expression – in his
pioneering study of the behavior of humans and non-human
animals.10 Psychologist William James began to investigate the
causes and function of emotion, asserting they arose from
physiological processes; similar work was undertaken by Danish
physician Carl Lange. German philosophers Friedrich Theodor
Vischer, Robert Vischer, and Wilhelm Dilthey developed
principles of aesthetic empathy or Einfühlungsästhetik. The
historians of the Annales school in France, such as Lucien Febvre
and Georges Lefebvre, as well as Norbert Elias in Germany, also
contributed to emotion studies in the 1930s with their
conceptions of mentalités, which included examination of the
values and assumptions that shape emotional expression and
norms.11 Critiquing the methodology of the Annalistes,
psychohistory as a field emerged in the late 1960s. Its best
known proponent, Peter Gay, focused attention on the
emotional-cultural context in which individuals operate.12 The
1980s and 1990s saw a resurgence of scholarly interest in
emotions, for instance in the work on the emotional economy of
the family by historians David Sabean and Hans Medick, the
coining of “emotionology” in the research of Peter Stearns and
Carol Stearns, and the development of the idea of “emotives” by
William Reddy.13 Groundbreaking research by Barbara
Rosenwein on emotional communities, as well as theoretical
interventions, individual case studies, and historical overviews
have established the field of the “history of emotions.”14 Much
of the historical work on emotions has been undertaken by
specialists in medieval or early modern history, with the modern
era, until recently at least, receiving relatively little attention.15
One important exception to this in the German-speaking world is
the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Research
Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin, where Director Ute
Frevert and her researchers focus on the modern period in
Europe, North America, and South Asia. Inspired by their work,
we hope to address the need for more scholarship on emotions
in modern German cultural history in this volume.
The centrality of emotions to the human experience has
recently been underlined in the sciences. Beginning around 2000
with fMRI and other brain imaging technology, cognitive
psychology and neuroscience began “mapping” emotions onto
the brain. Scientists Antonio Damasio and Lisa Feldman Barrett,
and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, among others,
demonstrated that thinking and feeling – cognition and emotion,
rationality and hysteria – to sum up some of the binary pairs
through which human experience has been understood in the
past – are actually interconnected processes that cannot be
disentangled from each other.16 It is now widely maintained that
emotions play an important role in moral reasoning, decision
making, and communication.17 Emotions scholars in the
humanities have a varied response to the methodologies and
findings of medical sciences. Indeed, cultural studies of
emotions are adept at investigating this ongoing scientific
