Remarks on Gustafsson’s ‘The Machines’ – Hermeneutics of Machines

This paper offers some remarks on Lars Gustafsson’s poem ‘The Machines’ and its accompanying commentary from a critical hermeneutic point of view. Gustafsson seems to argue that machines acquire meaning only when decontextualized since they ‘stand out’, are ‘denaturalised’. Only then, they become an object of reflection and are thus in need of an interpretation. Furthermore, he seems to extend a cybernetic analogy to language, arguing that grammar is a generative machine that produces language. Through close reading, this paper reconstructs four theses from Gustafsson’s work: the acquired meaning of machines, the cybernetic human, grammar as a machine, and linguistic transparency. It then interrogates these theses through the lens of philosophical hermeneutics and argues that Gustafsson’s prioritisation of syntax offers a reductive view of both machines and language. By reintroducing the pragmatic and semantic dimensions, the paper contends that understanding a machine is not merely a syntactic operation but a hermeneutic practice similar to interpreting a text, where parts and whole inform each other given a specific context. The paper concludes that while Gustafsson’s mechanized worldview fruitfully opens ways of self-reflection, it risks an Engführung, a narrowing of our relation to the world and ourselves – that a thorough hermeneutic stance helps to avoid.