a space so vast that indeed they could be treated as imaginary point masses. But what explanatory and predictive power do the laws of motion have for bodies moving close at hand—for bodies that can exhibit grace to human eyes? There is, of course, the anecdote of the falling apple at Woolsthorpe that the Newtonians kept reciting to underscore the universality of gravitation; but aside from ballistics experts, who would routinely experience the free fall of objects, let only find their translational motion graceful? What can Newton’s laws say about objects that do not simply fall but move nonetheless, such as wagon wheels, water pumps, pendulum clocks?18
This is the point of Herr C.’s fascination with, and critique of, marionettes. In a double sense he interprets them as pendulums: first, because the puppet follows the hand of the “machinist” with the lag of a string pendulum such that the straight-line motion of the hand is translated into the lagging curve of the logarithmic or hyperbolic function; second, because the limbs of each individual puppet, “which are only pendulums,” are not tied to “myriads” of strings and therefore follow the “gravitational center of the motion” in the puppet with a hesitation that inevitably results in “curves.” For marionettes as pendulums, the law of gravity is literally suspended—they are “antigrav,” as Kleist says—but the law of inertial motion persists. That persistence, and the lag that results from it, is precisely the reason for the marionette’s imperfection: it grants an abode for the “last fraction of human volition”—later in the essay it is called “affectation” (Ziererei)—that threatens to interrupt the grace of motion. The only way to overcome this danger is to eliminate the effects of inertia as well, and that is exactly what Herr C. hopes for: “Yet he did believe this last fraction of human volition could be removed from the marionettes and their dance transferred 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
