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The Technological Unconscious: Ernst Kapp and Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is, to use Jonathan Harker’s phrase, “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” Its heroes enthusiastically make use of newly available media technologies as they defend Britain against a vampire from the East: Harker writes in shorthand in his diary, Dr. John Seward records on his phonograph, and Harker’s fiancé Mina types up, in triplicate, on her portable typewriter, both Harker’s shorthand and Seward’s wax cylinders, along with the numerous other documents that make up the body of the text (letters, memoranda, telegrams, newspaper clippings). The novel is obsessed with the circulation and inscription of bodies, brains, and information. The human circulatory and nervous systems unconsciously exposed to the vampire’s “experimentation”—vampirized subjects made to to receive transmissions from their Master, to wander in search of other bodies, to desire—are also involved in a manifold of communication and transportation systems, systems of reporting, cataloging, scheduling, shipping, and publishing, the minutiae of which are almost excessive in the text.

Friedrich Kittler has drawn attention to Dracula’s emphasis on technical media, which he claims has been mostly ignored in the critical literature. In “Dracula’s Legacy” (1982), Kittler wants to turn us away from all-too-human approaches to sexuality and social history in the interpretation of Dracula, and to turn us toward the media that are their conditions. Broadly, Kittler’s essay traces the technical neutralization of unconscious desire: it is thanks to Mina’s typewriting that the vampire is finally eliminated. “Stoker’s Dracula is no vampire novel,” Kittler writes, “but rather the written account of our bureaucratization. Anyone is free to call this a horror novel as well” (73). Such a reading has the advantage of being able to handle—to take as non-incidental—the effects of what we might call, in Kittler’s vocabulary, the “discourse networks” or Aufschreibesysteme (“writing-down-systems”) that appear throughout the novel. It has the disadvantage of sometimes appearing to pit modern information processing against human subjectivity as though they were exclusively combatants, presenting the victory of the former over the latter as inevitable, as the ascendancy of science and analysis over the unconscious.

Kittler’s reading makes great use of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. For Kittler, Stoker’s horror novel and the discoveries of Sigmund Freud coincide in more ways than one. But I want to add a specific pre-Freudian conception of the unconscious to the picture, one which might illuminate various underdeveloped aspects of Freud, Kittler, Stoker, and Lacan. This would be the unconscious of Ernst Kapp, a 19th-century geographer and philosopher of technology, and an influence on Kittler’s thought. Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik [Elements of a Philosophy of Technology], Kapp’s magnum opus, published around two decades before both Stoker’s novel and Freud’s studies on hysteria, outlines a technological theory of the unconscious. Kapp’s is an unconscious which arrives only in the course of technical externalization: the making of tools, the arrangement and operation of machines, the production of language. It specifies a relation to the extimate, an intimate exteriority or exterior intimacy. Kapp’s unconscious interweaves organic and inorganic processes, forming a surface on which the projection of images of alterity—images of the nonhuman—brings the human back to itself. Kapp’s philosophy, like Stoker’s novel, derives its effect from the possibility that what presents itself to consciousness as its Other might be, through interminable processes of technical inscription and projection, precisely what is constitutive of the human being.

In the Dracula essay, Kittler’s conception of the unconscious comes most immediately not from Kapp or Freud but from Jacques Lacan. “Dracula’s Legacy” was written on the occasion of Lacan’s death, and it begins by establishing parallels between Dracula and Lacan’s seminar. The primary source is Seminar XX (1972), entitled Encore, whose stated objective is to situate Woman’s/women’s position in relation to desire, love, and knowledge. Other than the theme of feminine sexuality, Encore shares with Dracula a fixation on inscription. The seminar keeps marking its own discourse as one that is constantly in the process of being recorded (and processed by Lacan’s own vampirized secretary, Jacques-Alain Miller). It is in this regard a non-exclusive discourse, and Lacan compares it to “current discourse [discourse-courant],” a “disc recording [disque-oucourant],” or a “Blabla” which “goes around and around for nothing, quite precisely.” For Lacan, all speakers and auditors, all subjects, all meanings, are effects of such discourses, for there is “no pre-discursive reality” that is not mythical (Encore, 32). Discourses, whatever they mean, create a “social link” instead of preceding from one. There is in fact a necessity of discourse, of that which “doesn’t stop being written/writing itself [s’écrire]” (94). And only through discourse is it possible to register that there is also something which “doesn’t stop not being written/writing itself”—something that escapes discourse. (It turns out, for Lacan, that this is the sexual relationship.)

Vampirism doesn’t stop (not) being written in the diary of Jonathan Harker, on the phonograph of John Seward, and finally, above all, on the typewriter of Mina Harker. This Aufschreiben produces a mass of material in which there is, in Mina’s words, “hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting” (402). The “inauthenticity” of the documents, of course, means nothing in practice (“We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” says Van Helsing [402]). Harker’s shorthand diary, which details his harrowing experience in Dracula’s castle; Seward’s phonographic diary, which captures both his sighs of unrequited love and the delirium of Renfield; Mina’s journal, which records the vampirization of her friend Lucy Westenra and the arrival of Count Dracula in England aboard the schooner Demeter—these along with correspondence, newspaper articles, legal documents, and more are assembled by Mina in chronological order. “In this matter dates are everything,” she writes (224). They are also set in uniform type, ensuring an optimal access time which might not have been possible in the original media. Across the documents, the symptoms and spread of vampirism are stored for strategic reference. Vampirism appears in the documents as a disease of disordered desire, disordered thought, and disordered metabolism, all of which center on an oral relation: the sucking of blood. The vampirized subject, characterized by deficiency (of blood, of life/death) does little other than desire, in a disordered, partial, and unconscious way. The subject is reduced to an oral drive that compels bizarre couplings and exchanges. There are the female vampires’ seduction of Harker, Lucy’s trysts with a dark shadow and her feeding on local children, Renfield’s zooophagous chain, Mina drinking from the Count’s breast. Such activities are strange doublings of the “natural” exchanges involved in human and animal behavior, perverse desires that do not originate from the right places.

According to psychoanalysis via Lacan, desire is the desire of the Other, which is to say that desire, the insistence of the drives, is occasioned by something which is not a privileged and volitional point which we might call the ego, but by some Other that desires on the subject’s behalf, and more precisely by a lack in this Other. In the vampire novel, the figure of the Other is the vampire, an archaic, foreign count, a primal father, himself consumed by a desire which he passes on to his victims. For the most part, however, he is not characterized by a commanding presence or by mastery—although we do hear of some fantastic instances of mastery, in spite of the Count’s “child-brain.” But these instances of mastery—manipulation of wolves, gypsies, fog—frighten precisely because they are never fully exhibited. The Count is better characterized by his absence, or by a flickering, uncanny absence of absence, sensible through chains of replication, infection, and inscription. He comes from a place that Harker describes as an “imaginative whirlpool” (8), a region of eastern Europe where trains give way to horse-drawn carriages, a Gothic zone of indistinction where everything is shrouded in fog and darkness. He cannot be viewed in a mirror or photographed. He cannot be reached by following train schedules or maps. He and his disease escape the usual procedures of scientific inquiry. Only an uneven and constant writing of the vampire—a hysteric’s discourse—is capable of writing his absence. As it unfolds throughout the novel, this writing constantly combines diverse fields and registers, encompassing diary writing, journalism, law, medicine, social science (degeneration theory, philosophies of crime, sciences of “character”), natural science (Darwin), psychology and psychophysics, and folk knowledge.

If we continue to follow Lacan, this is a hysteric’s discourse because it is an incessant and inarticulate issuing-forth of symptoms as riddles and questions that echo among nearly all of the characters involved. “In God’s name what does this mean? Dr. Seward, Dr. Van Helsing, what is it? What has happened? What is wrong? Mina, dear, what is it? What does that blood mean?” asks Jonathan Harker (302). Dr. Van Helsing, a follower of the great Jean-Martin Charcot, attempts in his slightly garbled speech to answer these and other riddles posed by hysterical subjects, a set which does not necessarily exclude Van Helsing himself. What is it that the vampire wants? What does he lack? These questions imply others, not explicitly posed. What is it that I am in relation to him? What is it that the Other’s lack, the Other’s desire, makes me? What am I really? Hysterical discourse aims at the master signifier—it demands the master signifier that would fill the lack and halt the movement of signifiers—but what it produces instead is a surplus of signification that fails to fill the lack. The lack is itself the truth of the discourse, the object-cause (or objet-a) of the desire in which the subject sustains itself. It is through failing to receive the master signifier, the final closure of the circuit, that the discourse is retroactively maintained. And it is precisely through this failure that it is possible to make contact with the real.

Hysterical discourse projects the Other into the past, from which continuous writing might retrieve it. Consider the scene of writing described early on in the novel by Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s castle, the place where the solicitor’s ego is gradually unraveled. “Here I am,” Harker writes, “where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (36–37). There is an obscure origin, a desire which must be traced back. “Mere ‘modernity,’” may be insufficient for neutralizing it, but there is nonetheless a compulsion to know—to write, to count, to map the archaic source. This would form the basis of analytic treatment, as well as that of the “counterattack” of the vampire hunters. It finds its fullest realization in Mina’s secretarial practice, an information-generating process that is supposed to reduce the promiscuous entropy of the vampiric situation.

But does it? Certainly, Mina’s typewriting accomplishes what Harker’s stenography and Seward’s phonography aimed at. It facilitates an extensive writing of the unconscious. It leads the vampire hunters into contact with the real, with the Other. But it also transforms the subjects of this writing, which is done without thinking. “I must keep writing at every chance, for I dare not stop to think,” writes Jonathan Harker in his diary. “All, big and little, must go down; perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most” (308). Everything must be written down; everything must be said, even if it cannot be—this perhaps, is “the teaching.” Here is the dichotomy that Kittler sets up and unsettles in the same movement: on the one hand, there is unconscious desire expressed in vampirism, submission to the powers of the old centuries—Lucy Westenra. On the other hand, there is a drive to write all and organize all into a single writing medium, performed by a New Woman with modern technology—Mina Harker. It is difficult to distinguish the vampiric network from the Victorian network because of the possibility that the drive to inscribe collapses into the drive to vampirize. Mina herself becomes a vampire and drinks from Dracula’s breast in an exchange that Kittler calls “nothing more than a flow of information” (77), since it results in Mina’s conversion into a telepathic radio transmitter. The bureaucratic and democratic revolution of “modernity,” which Kittler understands as the neutralization of discourses, makes sexual difference disappear just as it makes the difference between the living and the dead disappear. Whether it really makes vampires disappear is an unresolved question, but what is clear by the end of Kittler’s essay is that everything and everyone has been vampirized by the automatic “writing-all” of discourse networks.

In Dracula, writes Kittler, “the unconscious as a discourse on ‘the Other’ has technological status” (79). Such a formula is perhaps nowhere as clearly stated as in the work of Ernst Kapp, a thinker who made the unconscious an essentially technological concept, an effect of technological activity. The German-born Kapp wrote his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877) after spending almost two decades in Quincey Morris’s Texas, where he worked as a farmer and participated in a frontier socialist experiment. At its core, his work puts forth an analogical-dialectical theory of mechanical technology as “organ projection,” something that mirrors the hysterical circularity of vampire fiction in the age of technical reproducibility. In organ projection, Kapp writes, “the human being unconsciously transmits the form, functional relations, and standard proportions of his bodily organization to the works of his hands”—that is, to technics, to the manufacturing and use of artifacts that separate and combine—“and then it is only after the fact that he becomes conscious of these analogical relations with himself.” Technics accomplishes the “objective of human activity”—which Kapp understands to be human self-knowledge—by producing “images” (3). Kapp uses the term “image,” which is somewhat misleading since it is associated with vision; what he essentially means by “image” is a phenomenon of correspondence which is mediately available to consciousness and which facilitates self-knowledge. Because the human being is not immediately available to itself, its self-knowledge must be mediated by images. The pre-technical materiality of the human organism has no reality except as a prototypal image (a Vorbild, which could also be translated as “fore-image”). The prototypal image is imagined retroactively, in a kind of Nachträglichkeit, only after the presentation to consciousness of an after-image (a Nachbild). Prototypal images are the models for technologies, for technical objects; they are the forms that apparently remedy a lack or deficiency in the human lifeworld and find their expression in artifacts. After-images represent those artifacts insofar as they are encountered and recognized by consciousness. When humans create artifacts, therefore, “the conscious and the unconscious are both equally operative”: the unconscious prototypal image and the conscious after-image function as moments in a dialectic (23). The mechanics, as it were, of the artifactive drive toward self-knowledge can be restated as follows:

This self-awareness is effected through the human being’s use of and comparative reflection on the works of his own hand. Through this authentic self-exhibition [wahrhafte Selbstschau], the human being becomes conscious of the laws and processes that regulate his own unconscious life [unbewussten Lebens]. For the mechanism, which is unconsciously formed on the model of an organic prototypal image [Vorbild], serves retroactively in its turn as the prototypal image through which the organism—to which the mechanism absolutely owes its existence—is later explained and understood.

Only by way of this detour—through its spontaneous creation of cultural means—does humankind deliver itself from the base consciousness of sensation and attain the higher consciousness of thought and self. (24–25)

An original and originating separation, inaccessible to consciousness, an impossible relation, doesn’t stop (not) being exhibited in the technical domain, in the works of the hand. Cultural reflection on these works—explanation, understanding, analysis—is the necessary detour that sheds light on the “laws and processes” regulating the unconscious.

This should not be regarded as an idealism. Kapp insists from the beginning upon the embodiment of the human being, against any idealism or dualism that would privilege thinking substance over extended substance. “What is meant today by the Self of which the human becomes conscious is not the same as it once was” (7). The Self [Selbst] is si-liba, Kapp says, “life and limb.” Thinking does not take place only in the brain, which is “incapable of thinking for itself”; rather, “the entire organism unconsciously thinks with it” (23). Thinking is a continuous, respiratory movement of externalization and internalization: “like breathing, [it] is an uninterrupted process of taking in and issuing forth” (14). As with Dr. Seward’s Burdon-Sanderson, David Ferrier, and William Benjamin Carpenter, physiology and psychology are the references here, brought together in the burgeoning field of psychophysics which would also be indispensable to Freud. But for Kapp, as for his primary influence, Hegel, this process is not limited to individual human organisms. The process scales up, from tools to apparatuses, from machines to the State. What is at stake is not only “the union of mind with the individual body,” but also “the union of humankind with its planetary dwelling [planetarischen Wohnhause]” (17). Citing recent Lamarckian and Darwinian theories of evolution, Kapp will suggest that the entire history of the planet is a kind of technics, a technical ontogenesis that continuously produces the human being, who turns out to be the “general culmination of an entire vast sequence of stages of inorganic and organic creation” (20), the “purpose and aim of planetary development” (17).

The ontogenesis of the human in technology is both inorganic and organic, both artificial and natural. And it involves the unconscious, in the sense of the term that Kapp pulls from Carl Gustav Carus’s Psyche (1846) and Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). The human does not simply impose its conscious will on the world; rather, it discovers itself, or becomes self-conscious, as an outcome of unconscious tendencies. For Carus, writes Kapp, the unconscious is “the principle subtending the historical development of the human psyche”; for Hartmann, it is “the principle of our orientation in the world,” and contains “that which had always already constituted the ground of all philosophical systems” (117). These accounts make for a sort of “pantheism of the unconscious.” What is located in the unconscious is nothing more than “the infinite threads that interweave the human being into the entire universe”; therefore, “all philosophy is actually also a philosophy of the unconscious—and its ultimate outcome is our self-conscious awareness of the unconscious” (120). Kapp, however, wants to introduce organ projection as a missing middle term, one that structures and specifies the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness and accounts for the participation of both “bodily life” and “spiritual activity” in self-consciousness. The human being that coincides with the world is to be understood not by recourse to an original sensing body, a body devoid of any extensions or augmentations or lack, free of fantasies and unmarked and uncastrated by the symbolic, nor in the exclusion or repression of bodily life as such, but with reference to the artifactive dimension that externalizes it and inscribes it into discourses that give it sense. The artifactive dimension is therefore the condition of possibility for both the unconscious and its becoming-conscious: an “ongoing process of self-finding.” “Just as finding and intentionally devising persist in reciprocity, so do the conscious and unconscious incessantly displace and work through one another” (100).

Kapp shows us how technical objects like axes, artificial limbs, musical instruments, bridges, steamships, railroads, and telegraph lines must be understood as concretizations of unconscious frameworks. Railroad networks are not only just like the human circulatory system; telegraph networks are not only just like the human nervous system; they are these systems, unconsciously projected. The analogies are evidence of the process by which the human being comes to know itself through its technicity. It is not only that there are isomorphisms, superficial coincidences of form. Rather, Kapp argues, we come to understand something (e.g. neural networks) after analogous technical systems are realized (e.g. the telegraph). The first moment, the image of the organic system, is simply an unconscious prototypal image; the second moment, the image of the technical system, is a conscious after-image; a third moment would then incur the realization that these two images are stages in a process of exteriorization and interiorization. The Vorbild unconsciously configures a technical object, apparatus, or network; the Nachbild indexes it back into consciousness; and the self-consciousness that then emerges becomes the starting point for another cycle.

Taken literally, the dialectic of organ projection seems far-fetched. The human circulatory system does not actually function like a railroad network in any nontrivial sense. But insofar as it describes a certain logic of fantasy, an imaginary correspondence that is open to analysis, the theory of organ projection is striking. We might compare, for instance, the theory of partial objects, important for Lacan’s reworking of psychoanalysis in particular. Separated off from the organism, or in Kapp’s terms, “projected” by the organism, technical objects are on the one hand rejected as failed substitutes for the human being. They are the Other of the human being—what Kapp calls “counter-images.” But they are nonetheless familiar, and uncannily so. As they function alongside us, they are identified as lost parts, supports for desire. They become indissociable from the human being, constituting it at the same time as they are rejected. These objects as well as their negation have to be included in what we are. The world of technical partial objects, or artificial organs, appears as a paradoxical kind of “inorganic life,” which the art historian Wilhelm Worringer regarded as the hallmark of Gothic style. Technical objects exhibit a Gothic “unrest,” a “seeking” which “has no organic life that draws us gently into its movement; but there is life there, a vigorous, urgent life, that compels us joylessly to follow its movements” (77). An undead redoubling, in other words, which resembles the insistence of the Freudian drive. Vampires and humans converge in this Gothic movement, an uncanny looping by which we, like Harker in Dracula’s coach, seem to be “simply going over and over the same ground again,” like the howling wolves that sound from the forest around the coach “as though they were following in a moving circle” (19). The coach does, eventually, arrive. But where?

Joan Copjec has argued that vampire fiction can be theorized precisely in terms of the extimacy of partial objects: an anxiety-inducing “overproximity” to the extimate, to “a bodily double that we can neither make sense of nor recognize as our own” (128). What I take Copjec to mean is that this overproximity, as it is written in the discourse of the hysteric, does keep revealing that the double is our own, that its emptiness is our own, that its partiality is our own. When we are at a remove from the extimate object, it functions as “a lost part of ourselves whose absence prevents us from becoming whole”; it is objet-a, the object-cause of our desire. When the distance is reduced, the extimate object appears on the contrary as “a complete body, an almost exact double of our own, except for the fact that this double is endowed with the object that we sacrificed in order to become a subject” (129). Surplus and deficit; this is the contradiction or oscillation that inheres in the inorganic life of both technical media and vampires.

Copjec, following Lacan, says that this dynamic is what produces the “aura of anxiety” that surrounds vampire fiction. “Rather than an object or its lack, anxiety signals a lack of lack, a failure of the symbolic activity wherein all alienable objects, objects that can be given or taken away, lost and refund, are constituted and circulate” (119). Is an aura of anxiety present in Kapp’s theory of organ projection? It is difficult to furnish evidence of an aura, but I would like to suggest that it is. At first glance, the dominating affect of Kapp’s discourse would be better described as jubilance, to use a nontechnical Lacanian term: the jubilance of the human infant before his mirror image(s), the jubilance of Spirit as it circles upwards toward Absolute Knowing, punctuating its movements with exclamation points. Is there a moment of anxiety in the dialectic of organ projection? Or might jubilance itself be the cover for an underlying anxiety? That there is precisely nothing behind technics other than what technics itself unconsciously projects is what Kapp’s theory keeps insisting: a nothingness that keeps progressively appearing as something, or a something that appears where there should be nothing. This is simply another way of formulating anxiety. On the other hand, it is not the case that Dracula is free of mixed affects. There is the jubilance which Mina expresses, for instance, as she marvels at her typewriter and performs her secretarial duties, or the jubilance expressed by the victorious characters at the end of the novel, which closes with an image of Van Helsing with a child on his knee. These characters may have missed the fact that things have concluded too abruptly to have actually concluded. Dracula may not have been killed properly, as Kittler points out, stabbed with a knife and not a stake. The vampire will reappear, if only in other media. And the typewriter cannot be discarded so easily by the secretary. Jubilance, which occurs in the fleeting moments of recognition made possible by new technologies of inscription, is always temporary, and it covers up the fact that it is impossible to say or to write or to know all, that something always remains unwritten and unwritable just as one thinks that everything has been written.

Works cited

Copjec, Joan. “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety.” Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. MIT Press, 1994.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Kapp, Ernst. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture. Edited by Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, Translated by Lauren K. Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Kapp, Ernst. Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. Westermann Verlag, 1877.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer, Stanford University Press, 1990.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich A. “Dracula’s Legacy.” Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, edited by John Johnston, G+B Arts International, 1997, pp. 50–68.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Lacan, Jacques. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, edited by Joan Copjec, W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Penguin Classics, 2003. Originally published in 1897.

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Translated by Michael Bullock, Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.

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