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 indeed, as Herr C. and his interlocutor speculate, return to paradise through the backdoor.
This anagogical tendency of Kleist’s text, well within the boundaries of idealist philosophies of art at the time, has a mechanical corollary that is important for any understanding of the age of machines. For the other consequence of the expulsion from paradise was the condemnation of the offended God: “Cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17). Work thus became the indelible sign of God’s curse, a curse that—according to Christian theologians—could be lifted once and for all only by the apocalyptic destruction of the world. In the meantime, however, anything that helped to alleviate the weight of toil played a role in the drama of salvation. Therein lay the eschatological potential of machines that provided the background for even the most technical discussion of linkages and transmissions.28 This potential was radically ambivalent, as were the debates it would provoke: either machines were seen as the means of breaking the sanctions of work and mortality that characterized all human life after the Fall, or they were hailed as the tools of emancipation with which human ingenuity managed to mitigate, and perhaps overcome, the curse of work. These positions were not necessarily articulated in theological terms—the ecological criticism of machines that started early in the nineteenth century substituted the integrity of nature (and later that of Being) for the will of God, and the awe of machines and engineering was certainly not anti-Christian—but they were part of a deeper reflection that accompanied the rise of machines. The provocative point Herr C. makes—that we will have regained grace, and with it admission to the Garden of Eden, to the fullness of life and language once we have installed machines that counter the trajectory of falling things—stands at the beginning of this history of interpretation.
Kleist’s text, then, links the most mundane questions of motion transmission to the last questions of biblical hermeneutics. In the scenes between Herr C. and the narrator, it enacts a dialogue about the meaning of mechanisms, specifically about the relation between the induction of motion and salvation. In hermeneutic terms, this is the relation between the literal and the anagogical meaning of a term. Medieval interpreters of the Bible had simplified the multiple senses of the Scripture—they, too, were a result of the fall from grace—into four categories: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. The classical example is Jerusalem. On the literal level, it is the historical city, on an allegorical level the church, on a moral level the soul of the believer, and on an anagogical level the heavenly city of salvation.29 Kleist directly conjoins the literal and the anagogical sense of the marionette while disregarding its allegorical value—the puppet does not signify anything else than itself, whereas in Schiller’s and Kant’s aesthetics it signifies heteronomy and absence of feeling—and disdaining the moral dimension, which he belittles as “affectation.” For the formulation of the literal sense, Kleist invokes, as we have seen, the mathematical language Newton had proposed to purge science from the three spiritual senses; in his anagogical questioning he envisions a reopening of the gates of paradise through the elimination of the literal, physical fall, the effects of gravity and inertia. In the hermeneutic tradition, anagogy wants to know how and when the injustices of the world will be righted, and what clues Scripture, or the book of nature, furnishes us to understand where we are in the history of salvation. Traditional anagogical interpretation, then, has as its vanishing point the apocalypse. Kleist’s anagogy imagines a return to paradise without prior judgment and without prior destruction of the world.30
This vision of the anagogical role of machines motivated, as mentioned, a great deal of advocacy for and activism against machines in the nineteenth century, whether explicitly or not. It was accentuated by the new physics of thermodynamics, and in particular by the law of entropy: rather than a day of wrath visited on the world from the outside, apocalypse in the nineteenth century became a predictable, inevitable feature of the world conceived as a finite configuration of energy. Machines could either be seen as accelerating this end—if the focus was on the consumption and pollution of their motor—or as slowing it—if the focus was on the optimization of energy/motion transmission. The latter was the position taken by kinematicists, as the next chapter will show, and was behind their secret conviction that kinematics and its associated practices (like the emergent science of lubrication) had a key role to play in nineteenth-century culture.
The anagogical horizon of thermodynamics, of course, was not yet circumscribed at the time of Kleist, but the differentiation of machines into multiple senses was well under way. Already at the end of the eighteenth century, when the success of the steam engine had prompted further reflections on the nature and history of machines, French scientists had begun to discuss and institutionalize the analysis of machines in terms of their motor, transmission, and tool functions.31 It was in this division that kinematics as the science of transmissions was first named and defined. While there are problems with this view—Where, for example, is the tool of a locomotive?—it survived as a heuristic approach throughout the century. It is tempting to speculate whether it was consciously modeled after the hermeneutics of Scripture, with the motor representing the literal engagement of the machine with the world, the transmission the allegorical transport of motion, and the tool the moral interaction of machine and man. Much less speculative is the assumption that cultural, social, and literary criticism of machines has focused almost exclusively on the first and last of these “senses.” Motor criticism, so to speak, is concerned with the unnaturalness and danger of thermally produced power, with its outsized dimensions, and with its ecological consequences. A great deal of late Romantic affect against machines and industry, in Wordsworth, Raabe, or Baudelaire, is fueled by this thought. Tool criticism, as it were, is mostly concerned with the degradation of work, with the displacement of the hand from direct contact with the object of work, and with the social deformations ensuing from the factory system. Disraeli’s novel Sybil comes to mind, or William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but mostly, of course, Karl Marx, to whom later chapters will return.
Within this horizon, the concentration in the following pages on transmissions and their discourse, kinematics, seeks to fill a gap. The intention is certainly not to disregard other discourses on machines but to insist that there is an irreducible “transmissive” sense of speaking about machines and that this sense has been obscured by the disproportionate attention paid to motors and tools. Since in transmissions motion is transferred by contiguous contact, kinematics focuses on the form of machine parts and on the
