The Cylinder

[Dave Monroe]

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Cylinder
> Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century
> Helmut Müller-Sievers (Author)
>
> http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270770
>
> http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wm934n6
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=2W_iQWTOsesC

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.

[...]

In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist published an essay entitled "Über das
Marionettentheater." 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.

[...]

"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. 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.

[...]

The thrust of Kleist's text against this fusion of motion,
subjectivity, and grace-against the core convictions of Weimar
Classicism-must have been easily detectable for readers in 1810. Herr
C.'s argument that inhuman marionettes exhibit more grace in their
motions than human dancers, that, in fact, every instant of reflection
prevents gracefulness, aims straight at the center of Schiller's (and
Goethe's) attempt to bridge the chasm between body and mind, to
install aesthetics above mechanics. At the same time, however, Herr
C.'s quest for grace in motion reintroduces into natural philosophy
the very theological parameters that Newton and the Newtonians had
sought to eliminate. When the two interlocutors equate the loss of
grace with the expulsion from paradise, they shift the attention from
the moral to the anagogical sense of the concept. In its theological
context, grace in motion-Grazie or Anmut-is the sign of paradisiacal
wholeness, an embodied reminder of the innocence that was shattered
irrevocably by the desire for knowledge. Weimar Classicism, cheerfully
proclaiming its own paganism, held that paradise was just a
mythological name for a historical formation, namely ancient Greece,
that its loss was the result not of sin but of a history of decadence
decisively shaped by the Christian Church, and that regaining paradise
was, at least in principle, possible through a reawakening of the
aesthetic sensibilities of antiquity, such as the moral feeling
expressed in graceful motion. The notion of Bildung, so often evoked
in the context of nineteenth-century German pedagogy, expressed this
hope for an individual and secular recuperation of grace. Kleist's
Herr C. explores a radically different avenue to the restitution of
grace: rather than promoting aesthetic education, he speculates that
the return to grace will come as the result of a complete
dehumanization and mechanization of motion.

[...]

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." 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. 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.

[...]

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270770

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wm934n6

http://books.google.com/books?id=2W_iQWTOsesC