bound by a synchronous, “analog” logic that radiates out both to the motor and to the tool and limits their form; but there is also a history of these forms that has rarely been told and that leaves an imprint not only on the machines but also on the objects they produce and on the culture in which they move. The titular result of this history is the epochal importance of the cylindrical form for a full comprehension of the nineteenth century.
In keeping with the superimposition of the parts of the machines and the senses of interpretation, the attention to transmissions could be said to explicate the allegorical sense of machines. It is certainly true that in a “literal” sense the transmission is the allegorical part of the machine—it is nothing for itself, it is designed to make motion “other,” it refers from one part (the motor) to another (the tool), and so forth. We will encounter this literalization of allegories and metaphors throughout the following pages; revolution, translation, horizon, freedom all have very literal, three-dimensional meanings in kinematics. Another egregious example is the notion of Gestell, which in Franz Reuleaux’s kinematics denotes the one member in a linkage that is fixated so that the others can move. We now know that Martin Heidegger read Reuleaux in preparation for his essay “The Question of Technology,” which launched Gestell into conceptual orbit.32
Allegories are, in the tradition of rhetoric, extended metaphors. The late German philosopher Hans Blumenberg—perhaps Heidegger’s worthiest and most powerful opponent—published his Paradigms for a Metaphorology in 1960 partly as a counterproject to Heidegger’s incessant reliance on etymologies and to the obscurity of his concepts. His principal claim is that some metaphors, rather than supplementing or adorning concepts, are originary (Blumenberg calls them “absolute”) and only later become hardened into the currency of concepts. The use of such metaphors can only be exemplified but not theorized (hence the title Paradigms); it is born from the initial speechlessness with which human beings confront the world. For Blumenberg, the usage and conceptualization of metaphors is an instance of technologizing (Technisierung) that helps reduce the complexity of the world to manageable and predictable features and that is later forgotten as such. In this view, metaphors and their extensions, allegories, are linguistic machines that help negotiate the anthropological mismatch between world and words. Since Blumenberg conceived of his writings on metaphorology as a technological history of the mind, it is only fitting that from his papers the volume Geistesgeschichte der Technik (Intellectual History of Technics), which seeks to open an avenue complementary to the project of metaphorology, was just published.33 In these brief and suggestive essays, Blumenberg sketches out a history that pairs notions and practices in technics with their philosophical and theological counter parts, thus bringing them into a new state of oscillation and radiance. In his short histories, notions such as “invention,” “law,” “fall,” “acceleration,” and “imitation” are charged with a semantic energy that exceeds their use in either metaphysics or technics. The following pages aim to expand on this project.
The dimensions of hermeneutics, rhetoric, and theology implied in Kleist’s text also help to situate the present project vis-à-vis the dominant discourse on nineteenth-century culture, the writings of Walter Benjamin and his innumerable followers. In his Arcades Project, the culmination of a long effort to unsettle the conventions of literary and cultural criticism, Benjamin read texts, artifacts, and practices of the nineteenth century like allegories, like words that refer to other words while their reference to worldly phenomena is obscured by ideological and theological forgetfulness. The purpose of this reading was to escape the hermeneutic ideology of the symbol for which every artifact is an expression of an ineffable individual and, increasingly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of a national spirit. Like Kleist, Benjamin saw in Schiller’s celebration of such imponderables as “grace” and Bildung a stifling and potentially dangerous tendency to disable critical analysis in favor of affirmation and sentimental identification. To give an obvious example, calling a monument like the Eiffel Tower an allegory of industrial production rather than an expression of French spirit was a means of maintaining a critical distance to a cultural object and connecting it to other objects and phenomena (bridges, clocks, lighthouses) that it could in turn illuminate. Modern, commodity-producing societies, according to Benjamin’s underlying argument, forget and indeed repress the allegorical function of their products in favor of the fetish of their originality and independence. Benjamin brought this insight to bear on the mode of his writing: the Arcades Projects, as much as we can determine from the methodological reflections it contains, was an attempt to reconstruct a network of cross-references that would convince readers, by sheer force of evidence, of the repressed inner coherence of industrial, social, cultural, and political production. Like Aby Warburg’s contemporary Mnemosyne project, Das Passagen-Werk was to be an atlas of quotations that would reveal the allegorical fabric of the epoch.34
But Benjamin was not content just to reconstruct the kinematics of signification in the archives of the nineteenth century in Paris and Berlin. As we know from the very same theoretical reflections, as well as from his later essayistic and biographical writings, he experienced incessant translation, where every word and every object means something else and obeys only the parameters of communicative or transmissive functionality, as a deficient, fallen mode of signification compared to an ideal, paradisiacal state where every thing was in its place and every word, like a name, meant just itself. While Kleist at the beginning of the epoch of kinematics hoped for a return to paradise through the total elimination of (kinematic) freedoms, Benjamin at its end hoped for the messianic interruption of incessant translation. Although in his personal recollections Benjamin often expressed delight in the transitoriness of nineteenth-century phenomena—for example, in his childhood reflections on the large cylinder of the Kaiserpanorama—his “doctrinal” writings vibrate with disdain for the obliviousness and profanity of the epoch, for its aversion to the possibility of any messianic arrest of history. Unlike Herr C., Benjamin did not see any grace or hope in the motion of machines, nor did he expect redemption from mechanisms that could convert the translational motion of falling and alienation into the rotational motion of reflection and self-containment. That is why all of his key methodological terms—standstill, shock, rupture, epic theater, flash point—are antikinematic; unlike the dancer’s crank, they all aim at interrupting rather than translating motion.35 Benjamin’s anagogy, unlike Kleist’s, requires the destruction of the world of machines.
If the following pages adopt the perspective of the eccentric dancer rather than of Benjamin’s messianism, it is not because of principled objections to its impetus but because issues such as apokatastasis (the most comprehensive rotation possible), justice, and salvation are just too vast for a modest book on mechanics and literary history. The restricted focus, and the empathetic admission that there may be a potential for grace in the products of mechanical engineering, allows for greater attention to details and to immanent developments, and it affords, hopefully, a more comprehensive view on phenomena that otherwise have seemed unrelated. In the resulting reassembly and rearrangement of disparate phenomena—in particular the integration of nineteenth-century narratives into the discussion of kinematics—and the use of multiple vocabularies to describe them I hope to convince the reader that there is a level of description that the prevailing literal, moral, and allegorical readings of nineteenth-century culture have not reached. It goes without saying that many of the phenomena here discussed have other than kinematic and literary dimensions; but, as both Kleist and Benjamin knew, the sphere in which to address such dimensions is not academic scholarship but political debate and action.
. . .
The following chapters will unfold and demonstrate the centrality of the cylinder in subsequent steps. After a genealogy of kinematics, centered on the presentation of its greatest synthesizer, Franz Reuleaux, a brief overview of the metaphysics of motion that issues in the rise of the cylinder rounds out the first part. The second part is chiefly concerned with demonstrating and illustrating cylindrical devices, showing the cylinder in its role as motor, as tool, and as enclosure, and arguing for the importance of the screw as the machined conjunction of translational and rotational motion. Spliced into these technical
