The Cylinder. Helmut Müller-Sievers

      For anyone searching for an infallible means of testing who your real friends are, I recommend subjecting them, with no end in sight, to incessant talk of cylinders, rotation, and kinematics. Those who years later will still speak to you either have great patience or great powers of feigning interest, both excellent character traits in one’s friends.

      Among those who survived the ordeal and who supported the project in its various stages I want to mention in particular Marshall Brown, Robert Buch, Ruediger Campe, Tom Cummins, Heinrich Detering, Eric Downing, Peter Galison, Michael Gamper, Peter Geimer, Eva Geulen, Anthony Grafton, Sepp Gumbrecht, Michael Hagner, Deborah Hodges Maschietto, Michael Hutter, Albrecht Koschorke, Karen Lang, Elmer Lewis, David Maisel, Ethel Matala de Mazza, Charlotte Metcalf, Gloria Meynen, Bob Pippin, Lois Renner, Simon Schaffer, Henning Schmidgen, Anette Schwarz, Mark Seltzer, Bernhard Siegert, Davide Stimilli, Ralph Ubl, Joseph Vogl, David Wellbery, Christopher Wild, Carsten Zelle.

      Moving to the University of Colorado at Boulder not only has placed me in a physical environment in which one of the key concepts of this book, torque, can be experienced on rides up Lefthand Canyon but also has given me new friends, colleagues, and interlocutors: Adam Bradley, Chris Braider, Jeff Cox, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Anne Schmiesing, John Stevenson, Davide Stimilli, and Paul Youngquist. My assistant at the Center for Humanities and the Arts, Paula Anderson, has helped greatly with the last versions of the manuscript (and assorted emergencies). Ed Dimendberg has accompanied this project with unfailing kindness, professionalism, and intellectual guidance.

      PART ONE

      The Prehistory and Metaphysics of the Cylinder

      CHAPTER 1

      Introduction

      The nineteenth century abounds in cylinders. Locomotives and paper machines, gasholders and Yale locks, sanitation pipes and wires, rotary printing presses and steam rollers, silos and conveyor belts, kymographs and phonographs, panoramas and carousels, tin cans and top hats—each of these objects is based on the cylindrical form, and each could be—and some have been—the starting point for a comprehensive interpretation of the epoch’s culture. To state it in the form of a necessary condition, without the cylinder the Industrial Revolution, and the culture it brought forth, would be unthinkable.

      How can we account sufficiently for this proliferation of cylindrical objects and processes? The answers given in the following pages are at the same time obvious and recondite, factual and metaphysical, technical and historical. In their most basic form, they amount to the proposition that cylinders allow the isolation, transmission, conversion, and application of rotational and translational (straight-line) motion in machines. The displacement of translational motion is necessary to do work; but since machines and mechanisms are (like their makers) finite, this motion has to be “returned.” Translational motion has to be forced into reciprocating and rotational motion, while rotational motion has to be forced and anchored by straight guides and frames. The cylinder embodies both translational motion along its axis and rotational motion around its wall. Because every point on the cylinder’s wall is equidistant from its central axis, the wall’s surface is intrinsically flat and thus can impart the all-important motion of rolling.

      On these bare kinetic explanations rests a vast edifice of historical and metaphysical dimensions. Philosophical speculation in the West begins with the dispute about the reality of motion as the elemental distinction between being and nonbeing. The genealogy of the cylinder reveals the opposition of rotational and translational motion as one of the starkest conceptual oppositions in Western metaphysics, one that until the Scientific Revolution and beyond was tantamount to the distinction between divine and human, perfect and imperfect, rational and irrational qualities.

      This opposition—and the fact of its forced reconciliation in the cylinder—arises from an absence that for all its simplicity still is stunning: nothing on earth rotates.¹ Nothing in our life-world turns continuously around its own axis, least of all parts of our own bodies. That is why rotational motion is always forced, technical motion, and that is why the question of technics on its most fundamental level equals the question of whether and how to force continuous rotation. It is the epochal achievement of nineteenth-century machines and their cylindrical components to have made rotation universally available, and at the same time to have brought to light the limits of technics: it begins where the body ends. The machines born in the nineteenth century are not sufficiently understood as tools, they are not monstrous “projections” of human organs into the world. Rather, they disrupt the imaginary continuity of nature and human being and introduce with their motions a literally “inhuman” element into the world. The negotiation of the limits between human and inhuman motion is going to be the subtext of most of the object descriptions that follow.

      Before exemplifying these propositions and looking more closely at the various cylinders that populate the nineteenth century we may do well to probe into the relations between rotation and translation, freedom and force, inhumanity and technics at the outset of the age of machines, and to set them in a historical frame that encompasses their theological, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions. A singular and visionary text written at the inception of the cylinder’s epoch will be our guide.

      . . .

      In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist published an essay entitled “Über das Marionettentheater.”² It recounts an accidental conversation between the narrator and the primo ballerino of the local opera house, Herr C. When the narrator finds him watching the performance of a puppet theater in the public gardens, C. professes to be fascinated by the puppets’ movements, and in the course of the conversation he outlines his idea that only a fully mechanized, unconscious body could be truly graceful. Both interlocutors go on to relate examples of the interference of consciousness with the grace of human motion, but it is Herr C. who most passionately advocates the elimination of all subjectivity from dance, going so far as to liken the goal of full mechanization with the return to paradise.

      The text appeared, in four installments, in Kleist’s own Berliner Abendblätter, one of the early daily newspapers in Germany still printed on hand-operated presses that could perform only translational up-and-down movements and on paper produced sheet by rectangular sheet. While the slowness of this process was the reason for the slight volume of the paper—not more than six to eight pages per edition—the Prussian censors made sure that the content consisted mainly of trivial police reports, epigrams, and Kleist’s seemingly innocuous anecdotes.³ There was to be no news that could foster unrest among the citizens, no opinion piece that would directly address the oppressed state of city and country. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the subsequent trauma of French occupation, the governor of Berlin had justified strict censorship of the press with perhaps the most famous order in the German language: “Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht” (Rest is every citizen’s first duty).⁴

      “Über das Marionettentheater” is uniquely concerned with the state of unrest. It seeks to articulate in deliberately provocative ways the relationship between motion, subjectivity, and redemption. To propose an exhaustive account of motion without any regard to subjectivity and theology had of course been the goal of Newton’s science of rational mechanics since the late seventeenth century; and a century later, Pierre Simon Laplace (for a brief time Napoleon’s minister of the interior) had succeeded in purging Newton’s theory of its last metaphysical remainders, such as the apparent irregularities of planetary orbits that required God’s redressing hand.⁵ Newtonian mechanics described a world in which all causes of motion were external to bodies and in which every motion, every change in motion, could be expressed in mathematical equations. Translated back into the realm of human history and community, the key concepts of rational mechanics—inertia, resistance, mass, collision, equation, revolution—could take on disturbing political overtones. The cult of reason before and during the French Revolution had all but deified Newton and had made ample, cross-cultural references to his achievements. After all, the emblematic mechanism of the terreur, the guillotine, harnessed gravity to do rationally what had hitherto been reserved for the extravagant demonstration of a sovereign’s wrath.⁶

      It