Hugo and the Automaton

Dr. Dennis M. Weiss

Justin Nicholas
English and Humanities Department
York College of Pennsylvania
York, Pa 17405
dweiss@ycp.edu

Hugo and the Automaton

Abstract:
This essay seeks to advance our understanding of human-technology relations through a
reflection on Martin Scorseses Hugo (2011) as well as its source material, Brian Selznicks
childrens novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. We argue that central to the story of Hugo Cabret
is a sophisticated philosophical account of technology that contributes to our understanding of
how technology mediates culture while simultaneously being mediated by culture. An account of
mediation is an important feature of much recent philosophy of technology, especially the work
of Peter-Paul Verbeek and other Dutch philosophers of technology. While these accounts of
technology are sophisticated developments in understanding the nature of human-technology and
move us beyond simplistic accounts of technology as neutral or autonomous, they 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. 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 humantechnology relations in our lives, Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret 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 this essay we would like to advance our understanding of human-technology relations through
a reflection on Hollywood cinema, in particular Martin Scorseses 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 The Matrix, it seems Hollywood is not in the habit of deeply
analyzing technology even as it uses the latest cinematic technologies to enhance the
experience of cinematic storytelling.

This love/hate relationship with technology, the yin and yang around which Hollywoods
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
Hollywoods 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 humantechnology 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 dont exist in separate spheres but are part of a technoanthropological
whole.
Accounts of technological mediation perceptively diagnose the manner in which technologies are
not mere instruments passively employed by human beings but co-shape and are inextricably
interwoven with our lives. But while such accounts of technological mediation and humantechnology relations seem right relative to our increasing reliance on technology and its growing
pervasiveness in our lives, these accounts are often under-theorized, especially in regard to
examining the nature of these relations and their shape relative to specific human beings, the socalled users of technology. By portraying technology as fundamental or pre-eminent to human
existence, as the starting point of ethical reflection, and one of the most important powers that
shape subjectivity, these accounts often fail to attend to the ways in which technology not only
constitutes the human lifeworld but, in turn, the human lifeworld, especially the symbolic realm
of culture, constitutes 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 childrens book on which
it was based, Brian Selznicks 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 Mlis, 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 humantechnology 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 Mazlishs Fourth Discontinuity, Elaine Grahams and Philip
Hafners Christian accounts of human-technology co-evolution, Andy Clarks account of natural
born cyborgs, Coeckelberghs technoanthropological approach, and Verbeeks philosophy of
technological mediation, technology is seen as central to the human condition and the human
being is portrayed largely 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.
Despite diverse theoretical backgrounds and commitments, these authors advocate a technoanthropological approach to the human being, suggesting that we have entered a post-human
period in which technology has become foundational. The human being, it is suggested, 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
4

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

The Invention of Hugo Cabert is a young adult novel that at 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 uncles 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 Mlis.

Mlis 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
automatons various mechanisms made by his father. When Hugo doggedly begs the old man to
return this notebook, Mlis 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 Mlis 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 Hugos father once saw, and below the picture the automaton signs the name George
Mlis. 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.
It is at this point that we start to discover the strange history of Georges Mlis. 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 Mlis, 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 Mlis and a professor at the Academy of Film in Paris who is an admirer of
Mlis work and a lifelong fan of the man himself. Mrs. Mlis at first forbids this meeting
because of her husbands intense sensitivity to the mere mention of what he considers to be his
past failures, but once Mlis 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 Mlis family and
with Georges Mlis being honored by the Academy of film as a pioneer in the film industry.
6

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.
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 Latours actor-network theory and Ihdes 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 (Verbeek 2009,
9).
Rejecting an instrumental approach to technology, 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 (Verbeek 2009, 10).
The mistaken modernist metaphysics makes it impossible to properly discern the
interrelatedness and interconnectedness of subject and objectof humankind and technology
(Verbeek 2009, 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 (Verbeek, 2012, 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
threat or a lie, a simulation that undermines the authentically human. Our ethics must be a coproduction 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 itincluding its relations to other peopleacquires a desirable shape(Verbeek
2012, 22). The central question of such a technological ascesis becomes what do we want to
make of human beings and the interwoven character of humans and technology becomes the
starting point of ethical reflection (Verbeek, 2012, 21).
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 humantechnology relations? In this section wed like to suggest so. In fact, in drawing on both
Scorseses film and Selznicks book, wed like to suggest that we get a fuller and more complete
8

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.
Its 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 Mlis
are deeply attracted to machinery and that Georges too long ago loved the automaton. Hugo and
Mlis share a mechanical aptitude and a love for and connection to machinery.
Beyond the automaton, Hugos 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
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 films 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 Lumires 1895 sort film L'arrive d'un train en gare de
La Ciotat, which is also featured in Hugos narrative and provides the inspiration for Mlis
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 steamengine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age...The clockis a piece of powermachinery whose product is seconds and minutes (Mumford 1934, 14-15). And clocks too
9

play a pivotal role in Hugos 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 play a significant a role
in the films mise en scene and the clicking sound of time passing is often analogized to the
unspooling of film. Mlis 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
Mlis, 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 Isabelles life and is central to the
rediscovery of Mlis. 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
Labisses 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 Selznicks 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 Mlis 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. Scorseses 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. Id imagine the whole world was one big machine (Selznick 2007,
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
10

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 couldnt be an extra part. I had to be here for some
reason (Selznick 2007, 378). Hugos 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. Mary Midgley has observed that new technologies have often played a central role in
defining world views or metaphysical systems. From the clock to the computer, we have drawn
on technology to provide such metaphysical sketches, ambitious maps of how all reality is
supposed to work, guiding visions, systems of direction for the rest of our ideas (Midgley 2003,
119).
The automaton too plays such a role in Hugos life, becoming a central metaphor for
understanding what it means to be human, particularly what it means to be a broken human
being. Selznicks novel regularly employs metaphorical language serving to connect human
beings to their technological others: Hugos 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 Mlis describe themselves
as broken; Mlis in particular feels like a broken windup toy. Scorseses take on the automaton
noticeably diverges from Selznicks, in that while Selznick adheres more closely to the
traditional image of an automaton dressed in clothes and with wooden arms, Scorseses is all
lovingly glossy and gleaming, a Victorian take on a digital avatar.
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. Isabelles favorite book is on Greek
mythology. Both Prometheus and Hugo are thieves and both are ultimately rescued and set free.
In this regard, Selznicks childrens novel interestingly points in the direction of Bernard
Stieglers appropriation of the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus in volume one of Technics
11

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 (Clark 2003). 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 braces squeakiness and propensity to seize up and get caught on
things is the source of much of the movies 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.Im 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.
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 dont 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 todays viewers of film have probably grown more sophisticated in thinking that film as
a visual medium doesnt simply record reality but also highly mediates reality. What we see is
12

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 Mlis 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 Mlis 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.
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. Our twin
narratives make a strong case for rejecting problematic views of technology that either treat it as
mere passive instrument or celebrate or demonize it. Our lives are indeed inextricably bound up
with technology and the thesis of technological mediation would seem validated. 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
13

made today when we place too much emphasis on the power of technology and forget that it too
has cultural, historical, and social dimensions. While an account of technological mediation may
be necessary to ethical reflection, it is not sufficient and we cannot lose sight of competing ways
of thinking and seeing.
Lets begin with Hugos 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, Hugos treatment of time. While Hugos 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 (Selznick 2007, 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 (Selznick 2007, 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 Dalis experiments with dripping and melting clock pieces and Joyces 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.

14

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 Hugos and Mlis 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 knowsfixing machinesto 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. Mlis 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
desires first cooked up in the alchemical beakers of hermetic mysticism. The powerful
aura that todays 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 technologys
unconscious, its own arational spell. (Davis 1998, 38)
This same theme is emphasized in Gaby Woods Edisons Eve, which partly inspired Selznicks
novel. Subtitled A magical history of the quest for mechanical life, Woodss book recounts the
15

strange mixture of magic, technology, and desire that went into the early development of the
automatons. Following the rediscovery of Mlis 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, he says (Selznick 2007, 506). Mlis 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 Verbeeks account of technological
mediation. Ultimately on these matters, Verbeeks account of mediation focuses almost
exclusively on technological mediation. The relations that co-constitute the human being are
largely technological and the focus remains squarely on the technology. 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(Verbeek, 2009, 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 (Kaplan 2009, 238). The human
beings in human-technology relations are simply human beingsnot 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 (Verbeek 2005, 9). As philosophers of
technology analyze 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. If
we are to take seriously the mutual shaping of human-technology relations, as the thesis of
technological mediation insists, then we need to focus not only on the technologies, what things
do as the title of one of Verbeeks books suggests, but also on the human beings to whom these
things are being done and who, in turn, are doing things to technologies. Hugo gives us an
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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, faith in world views inspired by technology).
In focusing on human-technology mediation, it is never sufficient to simply focus on how our
lives are mediated by technology as our appropriations of technology are themselves 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. As Mary Midgley observes, metaphysical sketches inspired by technology
are not in any sense wrong or false. The trouble only comes in with the obsession with a
particular model that drives out other necessary ways of thinking (Midgley 2003, 120).
There are still further challenges to Hugos 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 upand Hugos future seemed to fall perfectly into place, (Selznick 2007, 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 Hugos father had to die, his uncle had to imprison him in
the clock tower, and his loneliness is completely explicable. And Hugos loneliness and his
disconnection from people are almost palpable. After being caught by Gustav, he implores:
Listen to me! Please! Listen to me! You dont understand! You have to let me go! I dont
understand why my father died! Why Im 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 (Selznick 2007, 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 in 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. Hugo begins to push back
against a metaphysical picture of the human being suggested by the automaton and common to
western thought, from Julian de la Mettries Man a Machine to Bruce Mazlishs The Fourth
Discontinuity.
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, Youll 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 dont need
one. You dont need a family! Gustav is the human equivalent of the clock work mechanism.
Hes a social automatonisolated 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 its the heart that Hugo previously dreamed disappearing, and its 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, its perhaps partly because Hugo has provided
him with a new prosthesis. But its equally because he has a new relationship. He speaks first to
the musicians he had previously run into: Dont worry. Im now a fully functioning man. Then

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he looks directly at Lisette and continues, Arent I, dear? displaying one of the three smiles he
has mastered.
By the end of film and novel, Hugo and Gustav, as well as George Mlis 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 Verbeeks 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,
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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
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. (Sherwin 2008, 12)
Before we become the iPad dependent, smart phone toting adults we become, we all start out as
children dependent on others in our social environment. As Annette Baier has observed, all
persons start out as children. Persons require, according to Baier, successive periods of infancy,
childhood and youth, during which they develop as persons. In virtue of our long and helpless
infancy, persons, who all begin as small persons, are necessarily social beings, who first learn
from older persons, by play, by imitation, by correction (Baier 1991, 10). It is our social nature,
the fact of mutual recognition and answerability, our responsiveness to other persons, that shapes
and makes possible our personhood. The more refined arts of personhood are learned as the
personal pronouns are learned, from the men and women, girls and boys, who are the learners
companions and play-mates. We come to recognize ourselves and others in mirrors, to refer to
ourselves and to other (Baier 1991, 13). Persons are self-conscious, know themselves to be
persons among persons. Our self-consciousness is connected to being addressed as you. As
Baier explains, If never addressed, if excluded from the circle of speakers, a child becomes
autistic, incapable of using any pronouns or indeed any words at all (Baier 1985, 90). It is in
fact in the learning from others that we acquire a sense of our place in a series of persons, to
some of whom we have special responsibilities. We acquire a sense of ourselves as occupying a
place in an historical and social order of persons, each of whom has a personal history
interwoven with the history of a community (1985 90).
Hugo comes into his own and accedes to his full humanity as he risks moving out of the clock
tower and setting aside his automaton and entering into interpersonal relations with Isabelle,
Georges, and even Gustav. Hugo Ultimately, both Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret are
20

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
picturethe Enlightenment model of a clockwork mechanism. Weve come to read our current
technological condition, a technoanthropological condition, as the condition for all of humanity
and this may be shortsighted. Weve 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
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 Hugos 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
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must begin with the importance of human-human relations. We dont 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 shouldnt demonize it. But we shouldnt 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 shouldnt take the technological mediation to be the founding experience as
we sometimes do in the 21st century.
Hugo doesnt 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 isnt 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 play in our lives.

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