The Cylinder. Helmut Müller-Sievers

entirely to the realm of mechanical forces, even produced . . . by turning a crank.” The instantaneous transmission of motion by a crank suspends the effects of gravitational and inertial forces; it is the—often overlooked—ideal in Kleist’s anecdote. Herr C. believes that perfect grace can be embodied, not in marionettes, but in crank-driven mechanisms.¹⁹

      From the pendulum to the crank: it is hard to exaggerate the significance of this transition. Both are material objects built for a specific use, but both are also, in Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s felicitous terminology, “epistemic things”: they embody ways of knowing and doing that exceed their functionality and historical employment.²⁰ Residing below the threshold of fully articulated theories, they can serve—as Herr C. shows with the pendulous marionette—as their material critique and challenge. The pendulum, beginning at the latest with Galileo’s (mistaken) assumption that its period is isochronous and can therefore be used to translate space into time, has both spurred and defied the development of modern physics and mechanics.²¹ Cranks, from an epistemic point of view, are the answer to the weaknesses of the pendulum: they seek to overcome the inertial lag inherent in pendulums through direct, continuous contact.²² This means that their motions are defined, no longer by the forces governing Newtonian mechanics, but by their own shape. In the following pages we will see that the rudimentary shape governing the construction of all motion transmission, including the crank, is the cylinder. The pendulum is a passive instrument, but the crank drives a transmission. Hoping for a transition from one to the other, as Herr C. does, and discovering grace in fully contiguous motion, signals the advent of a new understanding and appreciation of machines.

      Yet it is not only from the theoretical heights of such concepts as “epistemic things” that the transition from pendulums to cranks gains relevance. To the contrary, at the time of Kleist’s writing this transition had become the crucial factor in the very real process of industrialization that was beginning to take hold in England. As we will see in greater detail in the next chapter, James Watt’s decisive innovation in the design of steam engines concerned the manner in which the steam cylinder was connected to the working beam. Before his patent for the ingenious “parallel-motion” transmission, this connection consisted of chains or ropes—steam engines were, in essence, gigantic pendulums and were therefore limited to do lifting and pumping work.²³ Watt’s transmission, which used the connecting rod as a crank, freed steam engines from this limitation and thereby turned them into the universal engine of industrialization. These new mechanisms, and with them the new era of motion control, would have been all the more desirable for someone living in Berlin in 1810: with his imposition of the Continental System in 1806, Napoleon had cut off the Continent from British imports and technical knowledge. The expression of a desire for a crank-driven mechanism also carried a distinct—and in Kleist’s case certainly not unwelcome—whiff of anti-Napoleonic polemics.

      Another dimension to Kleist’s anecdote further connects the motion of the marionettes to the motion of machines and to the massive metaphysical and cultural shift they will bring about. While Herr C. concentrates on the two dimensions in which the puppets transform the linear impulse of inertial motion into the pendular “curves” of the limbs, the narrator notes that part of the naturalness in the puppets’ dance stems from the way they dance “a round dance” (die Ronde).“A group of four peasants doing a round dance to a rapid beat could not have been more prettily painted by Teniers.”²⁴ The ronde—the Reigen, whose motion Arthur Schnitzler would famously use as a narrative figure in his eponymous novella—is a dance that represents not so much curvilinear as rotational motion. Facing and holding each other’s hands, the dancers rotate around a common center; they experience, and by the grip of their hands counter, the centrifugal forces that Newton identified as “real” indicators of the immutability and absoluteness of space.²⁵ The rich cultural significance of this type of dancing can be gleaned from the scene in Goethe’s Werther where the protagonist falls in love with Lotte while waltzing with her—the waltz, like the ronde, consists in a rotational figure the axis of which intersects the gaze of the dancers while their bodies form a virtual cylindrical space around them. We will encounter multiple avatars of this motion in nineteenth-century artifacts; what is important at the moment is the difference between circular or curvilinear motion—which Newton’s mathematical success in calculating the orbits of planets and comets had explained as the sum of two compounding translational motions—and rotation, which is a genuine motion without translational displacement. This difference, as chapter 3 will show, is at the heart of Western valuations of motion, in which rotation has traditionally been associated with transcendence and divinity. The difference between a pendulum arrangement—like Newton’s bucket, like the marionette—and a rigid linkage like a crank to induce rotation will become crucially important in nineteenth-century machines (one of the favorite apparatuses of the time, the chairoplane, uses both).

      It is not simply a deconstructive metaphor to claim that Kleist’s text itself resembles a machine that provokes and produces its own interpretations. Its composition, its logical and performative contradictions, even its mode of publication generate so much friction that attentive readers, like attentive engineers, try to supply argumentative lubrication to make the text and its arguments run more smoothly. The present account of the techno-historical subtext of the dialogue by no means seeks to invalidate or replace other attempts, nor does it claim to cover all or even most of the text’s many facets. There are other aspects, however, that attention to the history of kinematics can also elucidate. The first is the convincing reading of the essay’s arguments as a long poetological metaphor, in which Herr C.’s mechanized dancers function as the vehicle for the idea that bare, linear language could be converted into “round,” troped language and vice versa, and that this could be done without the imponderable intercession of an author’s intention. In fact, Kleist’s linguistic companion piece to the “Marionettentheater,” the equally performative treatise “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking” (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden), advocates the same transition from pendulum to rigid linkage for the basic relation between language and mind. “Language then is not a rope, a brake on the wheel of the mind, but rather a second wheel rotating along parallel on the same axis.” (Die Sprache ist alsdann keine Fessel, etwa wie ein Hemmschuh an dem Rade des Geistes, sondern wie ein zweites, mit ihm parallel fortlaufendes, Rad an einer Achse.)²⁶ German literary aesthetics at the time was fascinated with the prospect of mechanical transmission between poetic registers or “tones”; the idea that the difference between the genres, or the laws of prosody, or the sequence of a plot could somehow be calculated and reproduced mechanically held wide currency at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.²⁷ At the end of this book we will encounter a less metaphorical attempt by Kleist to explain his vision of tragedy by means of a primitive machine; suffice it at the moment to underscore that the analogy between the movement of machines and mechanisms and that of poetic language is itself a standard trope of literary practice and criticism of Kleist’s time.

      The reason why this analogy could grip the thought of such a diverse group of writers and philosophers—this is the second aspect brought into relief through the history of kinematics—is its importance for theology, or rather for the philosophy of history that emerged as its secularized translation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Common to both religious and secular thinkers was the idea that the language of paradise—or that of ancient Greece, for the “pagans”—had no need for the distinction between prose and poetry, between the linear language of propositions and the metaphor that always contains a moment of self-reflection, of turning round on itself in the act of establishing a relation. Edenic language in its undisturbed form was a language not of communication, where the intention of the author is always under the threat of dissipation and misunderstanding, but of simple naming: word and referent were indissolubly merged in one unit. This unity was torn asunder by the desire for propositional knowledge, theologically known as original sin. Poetic language, then, is both a mournful sign of lost unity and an expression of the desire to regain it. If a way could be found to heal the rift between prose and poetry, and if that process could be advanced and perfected by mechanical, that is, faultless, rather than inspirational means, humankind could