Tiffany, "The Lyric Automaton" (Kleist, de Man)

[Dave Monroe]

... from Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric
(Berekely: U of California P, 2000), Chapter 3, "The Lyric Automaton,"
pp. 63-94.  Had hoped to post exceprpts from a few of the texts referred
to first, but ...

The prominence of the pleasure principle in La Mettrie's man-machine
signals a decisive shift in the discourse of automata from natural
philosophy to the domain of aesthetics, combined with a revival of the
technological disposition of the Heronic tradition in antiquity (though
its emphasis on hedonism is far more explicit).   Moreover, teh effort
to coordinate the automaton with a philosophy of pleasure signals the
demise of mechanical philosophy as a viable matrix for theoretical
physics ... (64)

The new aesthetic disposition of the automaton did not come at the
expense of philosophical atomism, however, but rather through a
relaignment of its principal components, the discourses of fatlity and
wonder (Demovritean physics and Epicurean hedonism).  At teh same time,
in the context of late eighteenth-century philosophy, the concept of
aesthetic pleasure was undergoing a formalization or, more aptly
speaking, mechanization.  Thus, as the figure of teh automaton, no
longer at home in the discourse of teh exact sciences, exercised anew
its lyric affinity, the philosophy of pleasure, culminating in Kant's
Critique of Judgment, sought to assimilate aesthetic experience to teh
purest expression of mechanical philosophy--to mathematics.  (64)

The chiasmic exchange bewteen the automaton and teh discourse of
aesthetic pleasure memerges in distilled form in Kleist's classic text,
"On the Marionette Theater" (1810), published four years before E.T.A.
Hoffmann's tales about automata. (64)

Kleist's "On the Marinette Theater" is conveniently online @
http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/DRAMA/HistDrama2/KleistMarion.html

Hoffmann's "The Sandman" is @
http://www.vcu.edu/hasweb/for/hoffmann/sand_e.html

The first crucial observation to make about Kleist's philosophical tale
is that a marionette is not, strictly speaking, an automaton.  Yet this
displacemnet from automaton to puppet or doll is, as we shall discover,
an essential feature of teh evolving modernity of teh automaton figure.
Indeed, as Roman Paska observes, Kleist's narrative advances "the
Romantic view of the puppet as a representational figure intent on
acquiring mecahnical automaton." (65)

[Here, see Roman Paska, "The Inanimate Incarnate," in Fragments for a
History of the Human Body, Part I, ed. Michel Feher et al. (New York:
Zone, 1989].  A translation of Kleist's essay is included in the volume
as well--Tiffany's parenthetical page numbers, which I'll include, refer
to that trans.]

The limbs of the marionettes are said to move "in a mechanical way," yet
"the whole figure, shaken at random, often assumed a kind of rhythmical
movement that was similar to dance" ([Kleist] 415).   Indeed, their
[Kleist's interlocutors'] comments focus generally on "the line taht the
center of gravity had to describe," characterized as "teh path of the
dancer's soul" ([Kleist] 416), and on the mechanicity of the figures
"described" by the puppet's dance.  (65)

Ultimately, however, it is analytical geometry that ... subsumes the
"line" issuing from the mechanic's [i.e., teh puppeteer's] deliverance
of the puppet to the force of gravity: "The movements of his fingers are
realted to the movements of teh puppets attached to them somewhat like
numbers to their logarithms or the asymptote to the parabola" ([Kleist]
416).  Although Kleist's deployment of mathematical terms may not be
altogether reliable ... the correlation of rhetoric and mathematics
remains fundamental to his undestanding of the automaton. (65-6)

In a critique of Kleist's essay, paul de Man focuses precisely on
"Kleist's notion of the 'mathematical' as a model for aesthetic
formalization," on "the articulation between trope and epistemology,"
carried to its limit in "mathematical language."  He draws attention to
fact that the line of the "dancer's soul" (described by the puppet's
movement) is at once a trope and a geometrical curve (or formula).
Hence, teh line of a puppet's soul is, as Kleist puts it, a
"logarithm"--a word combining "word" and "number." (66)

[Here, Tiffany is referring to Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization:
Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater," The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New
York: Columbia UP, 1984)]

Further, Kleist's anatomy of the marionette turns on "th anamorphosis of
teh line as it twists and turns into the tropes of ellipses, parabola,
and hyperbola.  Tropes are quantified systems of motion" ([de Man]
285-86).  Here de Man makes his point about the convergence of aesthetic
and mechanical "laws" in Kleist's marionette by exploiting certain
figures (ellipses, parabola, hyperbola) that function both in geometry
and rhetoric.  The reference to anamorphosis (a distortion of
representational reality) is essential to de Man's reading of teh
automaton, since mimesis can never be more than a contingent figure in
the tautology of the geometrical formula and teh figure of speech
(embodied by the puppet's movement).  hence, in de Man's view, the
formal (that is to say, figurative or mathematical) character of teh
marionette involves not so much a flight from realism as a provisional
realism that refers, on closer inspection, to a state of "grace"
unattainable by any human being.  (66)

In addition, we discover, teh anamorphic character of the marionette
comprises not only the geometric formality of tropes but also the utter
weightlessness of its frame: "these puppets have teh advantage of being
antigravitational [antigrav (square backets in text)].  They know
nothing of the inertia of matter."  the marionette thus appears to defy
the first principle of its physical being: mass.  Although the puppet's
movement follows mechanically from "the line that its center of gravity
had to describe" ([Kleist] 416), the puppet's body is somehow,
paradoxically, immune to the effects of gravitation.  (67)

... "There could be more grace in a mechanical puppet than in teh
structure of the huamn body"; ... "It was absolutely impossible for man
to equal a puppet in this.  Only a god could compete with matter in this
field" ([Kleist] 418).  The idea that teh paradoxical materiality of teh
puppet is commensurable only with the incorporeality of a god spurs de
Man to invoke the figure of the angel ... (67)

Given, however, the materialist orientation of Kleist's equation of
puppet and god (which implies a theological materialism), we should
perhaps emphasize a correspondance bewteen the dialectical materiality
of atomism and the anomalous corporeality of the gods in antiquity....
(67)

Implicit in Kleist's anatomy of the marionette is, as de Man reminds us,
an equation between mechanical gestures and figurative language.  The
line described by teh automaton is a geometrical figure but also a
trope, that is, an image, a device essential to poetry and poetics.  The
specifically lyric connotation of Kleist's marionette emerges more
explicity, as we shall discover, in essays by Baudelaire, Rilke, and the
surrealists ....   Yeats's elaboration of the mecahnical singing bird
... (68)

Allegory, in de Man's view, is characterized not by an absence of
representational realism but by a provisional realism that defers, on
closer inspection, to a world based on teh constitutive power of
tropes.  Thus teh allegorical object, like teh substance of teh
corpuscular "machine," is founded on the curious matter of tropes.  Thsi
does not imply tyhat lyric substance, or the world it comprises, is
essntially unreal, but rather that things under teh spell of lyric
oscillate between the literal and the immaterial, real and unreal.  If
we recall de Man's reference in teh Kleist essay to teh marionette's
simultaneous compliance with "mechanical" laws and its infidelity to
mimetic structures, we must reagrd the automaton, in its uncanny
effecst, as an emlblem of allegory.  For the automaton, like the
allegorical object, appears at first to be "real," only to recede
irrevocably into metaphysical uncertainty. (71)

... but it's amazing sometimes just what you just happen to have at
hand, is all.  Gravity, grace, automata, tropes, allegory, hyperbole,
the mechanical, the parabolic, modernity, romanticism, you name it.  To
be continued ...