The Cylinder

[Dave Monroe]

>From Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder : Kinematics of the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 2012), Ch. 1,
"Introduction" (pp. 3-19):

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.

This hope in the redemptive power of mechanical motion, then, was a
broadside against Weimar Classicism, which, championed by Wilhelm von
Humboldt and his Bildungs-reforms, had arrived in the Prussian capital
just when Kleist published his short text. (p. 7)

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wm934n6
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270770
http://books.google.com/books?id=c20OPrl7zq0C&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false

Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater‎" (1810)

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1144768

"A remarkable innovation would be the use of automata, to play Su
Feng's handmaidens.  'A German engineer is building them,' said
Itague.  'They're lovely creatures: one will even unfastened your
robe. Another will play a zither--although the music itself
comes from the pit.  But they move so gracefully!  Not like machines
at all." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 396)

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