Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth Vi
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Telling Technology Contesting Narratives of Progress in Modernist Literature: Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth Vincent Hessling Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Vincent Hessling All rights reserved ABSTRACT Telling Technology Contesting Narratives of Progress in Modernist Literature: Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth Vincent Hessling Telling technology explores how modernist literature makes sense of technological change by means of narration. The dissertation consists of three case studies focusing on narrative texts by Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth. These authors write at a time when a crisis of ‘progress,’ understood as a basic concept of history, coincides with a crisis of narra- tion in the form of anthropocentric, action-based storytelling. Through close readings of their technographic writing, the case studies investigate how the three authors develop alter- native forms of narration so as to tackle the questions posed by the sweeping technological change in their day. Along with a deeper understanding of the individual literary texts, the dissertation establishes a theoretical framework to discuss questions of modern technology and agency through the lens of narrative theory. Table of Contents ABBREVIATIONS ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: Toward a Narratology of Technological Change 1 CHAPTER I: Robert Walser’s Der Gehülfe: A Zero-Grade Narrative of Progress 26 1. The Employee as a Modern Topos 26 2. The Master and the Servant: A Farce on Progress 41 3. Irony of ‘Kaleidoscopic Focalization’ 50 4. The Inventions and their Distribution 55 5. Technomania. Technology Beyond Rationalization 76 6. Acceleration, Deceleration, Untimeliness 87 CHAPTER II: Paul Scheerbart’s Perpetuum mobile as Anti-Science Fiction 96 1. Daedalus and Icarus: A Primal Scene of Invention 96 2. Changing Grounds for Technological Skepticism around 1900 101 3. Paul Scheerbart’s ‘Invention’ between Fiction and Feasibility 109 4. Die Geschichte einer Erfindung as Anti-Science Fiction 115 5. Das Perpetuum Mobile as Anti-Geschichte 128 CHAPTER III: Joseph Roth’s Technographic Feuilleton 148 1. Literature as ‘News that Stays News’: Technology in the Feuilleton 148 2. Technological Progress between Destruction and Consumption 162 3. Technology as Infrastructure: Traffic and Transportation 176 4. Dreams of Mankind and the Techno-Metamorphosis of Humanity 200 5. “Glauben und Fortschritt”: Critique of Progress as Political Intervention 223 CONCLUSION 231 1. Theoretical Framework and Epistemological Challenges 231 2. Summary of the Chapters 234 3. Theoretical Yield of the Case Studies 248 WORKS CITED 262 i ABBREVIATIONS References to editions of the three authors’ works are abbreviated as follows: DG {page} Robert Walser. Der Gehülfe. Ed. Jochen Greven. Volume V. Genf, Hamburg: Verlag Helmut Kossodo, 1972. Print. PM {page} Paul Scheerbart. “Das Perpetuum mobile. Die Geschichte einer Erfindung.” Gesammelte Werke in elf Bänden. Vol. 9. Ed. Thomas Bürk and Uli Kohnle. Linkenheim: Edition Phantasia, 1994. 371–443. Print. {volume} {page} Joseph Roth. Werke. Ed. Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989-91. Print. Individual volumes are abbreviated as follows: I Das journalistische Werk 1915–1923 II Das journalistische Werk 1924–1928 III Das journalistische Werk 1929–1939 IV Romane und Erzählungen 1916–1929 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation did not dispel my initial doubts in progress, but it certainly strengthened my faith in growth. Growing does not always mean to expand in size or to gain in strength; sometimes it simply means to discover one’s limits, to say farewell to the past, and to become wiser along the way. None of this would have been possible without all the helping minds, hearts, and hands, who made sure that there was enough nourishment and light, who helped me concentrate on the vital parts and who gave me courage to prune back the dispensable. First of all I would like to thank my advisors, Harro Müller, Andreas Huyssen, and Oliver Simons, who all supported me with great trust, patience, and candor during my work on this ambitious project. Their intellectual experience, their critical minds, and their open spirits inspired and pushed me to get to the heart of the questions that challenged me. I am also grateful to Dorothea von Mücke for her kind support and helpful advice in arduous times. She introduced me to Mieke Bal, to whom I owe my heartfelt thanks for an insightful conversation about narratology and preposterous history at her home in Amsterdam. Thanks to generous grants from the Columbia GSAS and from Humboldt Universi- ty I was able to spend over two years in Germany, which was of immense benefit to this pro- ject. This allowed me to use the rich literary resources in Marbach and Berlin, to co-organize a philosophical conference about ‘progress’ at Technische Universität Berlin, and to partici- pate in the Critical Theory Summer School about Progress, Regression and Social Change. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of this summer school for a very stimulating iii exchange of ideas. My warm appreciation also goes to Joseph Vogl who encouraged me in my academic endeavors from the start and who kindly welcomed me during the last months of this project as a guest researcher with the Graduiertenkolleg Kleine Formen at Humboldt University. I am also grateful to Bill Dellinger and Peggy Quisenberry who facilitated my long distance communication between the old country and New York, and who always wel- comed me with a friendly smile upon my returns to alma mater. Special thanks go to my mother for her unconditional love—and to my father, who sowed the first seeds of this project with his enthusiasm for literature, but who sadly did not live to see the ripened fruit. And finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Simon—for his perpetual support and true friendship—and to Phoebe: I cannot begin to say how her positive spirit, her encouraging generosity, and her warming love have helped me grow and to bring this project to its completion. iv INTRODUCTION: Toward a Narratology of Technological Change “Technik ist Prozess”—“technology is process.” (Bense 1998, 172). I decided to take this lapidary statement by the philosopher Max Bense as a starting point for my reflections, because it helps bring across two central points of this dissertation: the view of technology as a process informs both the selection of the literary texts I investigate and my methodological approach to them.1 I chose to examine ‘technographic’2 prose by Robert Walser, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth, because these authors decidedly engage with the ‘process properties’ (Hans Jonas)3 of modern technology.4 They reveal technology as an all-encompassing dynamic of change, which at the same time poses particular challenges to narration as a technique of literary worldmaking, or poiesis. 1 With such a processual approach to technology I am in good company, especially among more recent scholarship concerning this subject. Cf., besides Max Bense and Hans Jonas: Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Simondon 2001), Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (Stiegler 1994), Bruno Latour We have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993) and An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (Latour 2013), Dirk Baecker’s essay “Technik und Entscheidung” (Baecker 2011), and N. Katherine Hayles “Komplexe Zeitstrukturen lebender und technischer Wesen” (Hayles 2011). 2 In a primary meaning I use this expression to simply designate writings focusing on technology. In a secondary, tentative understanding, the expression could emphasize the fact that these texts, in their reflexivity, are written ‘through technology,’ i.e. from the standpoint of an inherently technological condition. With this dissertation, I decided to highlight the primary meaning. Viewing the literary texts as technographic in the latter sense would have lead to a more media-theoretical reading—an approach that has been explored extensively by literary scholarship of the recent decades. By approaching the relationship of literature and technology from a different angle I hope to establish a more direct entry point to questions of technology and agency. 3 Partly in line with Bense’s view of technology, Hans Jonas argues that the ‘process properties’ are what sets apart modern technology from its pre-modern equivalents: “We are concerned with characteristics of modern technology and therefore ask first what distinguishes it formally from all previous technology. One major distinction is that modern technology is an enterprise and process, whereas earlier technology was a possession and a state.” (Jonas 1979, 34) 4 In the context of this dissertation, the emphasis on modern technology as a process should not be understood as an ontological statement. If the dichotomy between structure and process rests on the assumption that the former implies reversibility while the latter implies irreversibility (Müller 2016, “Lust und Schrecken. Beobachtungen zu Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie,’” 72), then it takes both concepts to construct a full picture of historical reality. If this dissertation focuses on the processual aspects of modern technology, this is simply a methodological choice to gain a better understanding of the agentic and irreversible dimension of this phenomenon.