In 1810, a year before taking his own life, Heinrich von Kleist wrote a text, a short essay entitled On the Marionette Theatre, which would be published in four instalments in the “Berliner Abendblätter”. The text is a philosophical dialogue between the author and a puppeteer. A peculiar dialogue, poetic and philosophical at once (a lyrical essay, one would say today), in which what emerges with force is the thought expressed by the puppeteer, as radical as it is firm and clear. The premise that the perfection and grace of movement lie on the side of the marionette rather than of the human being: «Every movement, he explained to me, has a centre of gravity; it is enough to master this, inside the puppet; the limbs, which are nothing but pendulums, follow mechanically of their own accord, with no need for intervention»[1].

But this simplicity, the street artist goes on, does not at all mean that the movement is mechanical, or banal, quite the contrary. In a certain sense, the dance of the marionette expresses something sublime, something superior. Had a skilled craftsman been able to build a marionette with a perfect mechanism, the puppeteer could have performed with it a dance that no dancer would have been capable of matching. For in that marionette every element, every gesture would have been founded on a precise centre of gravity, able to gather and concentrate its essence.

But what would be the advantage of this marionette? «First of all a negative advantage, my esteemed friend, namely that it would never be affected. For affectation appears, as you know, whenever the soul (vis motrix) is located at some point other than the centre of gravity of the movement. Now, since the puppeteer, by means of the wire or the string, has no other point in his power but this one, all the other limbs are what they ought to be, dead, mere pendulums, and obey only the law of gravity»[2]. The advantage is negative, the puppeteer states, but negative purely in the sense of subtraction: compared with the human being, what the marionette lacks is knowledge, awareness of itself and of the world. That is to say, it is impossible for the marionette to err («I began to laugh. Of course, I thought, the spirit cannot err where it does not exist»[3]).

And this is the extraordinary conclusion of Kleist’s text. The superior grace of the marionette lies precisely in its not being conscious of itself, in its being devoid of spirit. This allows it to be immediately and wholly wrapped in the beauty and grace of its movements, far more than the greatest of dancers.

And so, gradually, the path typical of religious anthropology is reversed, the path that rises from the inanimate and the animal to man as a divine creature, endowed with that grace which can lead him to salvation. Kleist, by contrast, through the extraordinary figure of the puppeteer, entirely overturns the argument, delivering to us a conclusion that opens onto a series of thoroughly contemporary readings: «Well then, my excellent friend (…), you now possess all that is necessary to understand me. We see how, in the measure that reflection grows dim and weakens in the organic world, grace emerges there ever more radiant and dominant. But just as the intersection of two lines, on one side of a point, after passing through infinity suddenly reappears on the other side, or as the image in a concave mirror, after receding into the infinite, suddenly reappears very close to us, so too grace returns once knowledge has passed, so to speak, through an infinity, so that it is manifested, in its purest form, in that human body which has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, that is, in the marionette or in the god»[4].

A dialogue of just a few pages, published in instalments in a German newspaper at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And yet, rereading Kleist’s brief text at a distance of more than two centuries, those words, those images echo with extraordinary force.

The automaton, the marionette, the artificial, mechanical, or rather technological, being. The enhancement of bodies by means of devices (such as artificial limbs, digital implants, the technological extension of the body) stands, in Kleist’s vision, as the equivalent of perfection, which has two poles: infinite (divine) consciousness, or the total absence of consciousness.

The marionette is perfect; it can set itself up as a mirror, as a line opposite to but convergent with the divine, the human cannot. Rethought through a contemporary lens, the Kleistian dialogue seems to retrace retrospectively the manifold images and incarnations of the marionette over the course of the twentieth century and into the new millennium: incarnations that open different paths, like the converging vanishing lines at the end of Kleist’s text.

Here indeed we see moving, along the line of the perfection of gesture, the Benjaminian automaton with which the Theses on the Concept of History open: «The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure it the victory. A puppet in Turkish attire, a pipe in its mouth, sat before a chessboard that rested on a broad table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. In reality a hunchbacked dwarf, a master at chess, was crouched inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. Something similar to this device can be imagined in philosophy. The puppet called «historical materialism» is always to win. It can readily take on anyone at all if it enlists into its service theology, which today, as is well known, is small and ugly and must not let itself be seen by anyone»[5].

Benjamin’s puppet, imagined a hundred and thirty years after Kleist’s, immediately presents itself as a conceptual persona: the automaton must have within it a soul (vis motrix, Kleist would say) that allows it to move effectively, to unite the rigour of materialism with the transfiguring power of theology. And here, then, is a first incarnation of the marionette that sets itself up as a superior form of being: the incarnation, that is, of the hybrid form, of the power of the mechanism joined to the vital force of thought, or of the soul. As Michael Löwy observes, thought that becomes pure analytical method is an empty form, incapable of winning the game. In Benjamin’s eyes, for the Marxists of his day historical materialism becomes a kind of automatic machine, «a method that conceives of history as a kind of machine that leads “automatically” to the triumph of socialism»[6]. But this incarnation moves in a direction other than the power of Kleist’s marionette. Benjamin’s automaton is one of the first representations of the rational power of technique (whether it be material technology or the technology of a method for analysing reality changes little); a power that runs through the whole of the twentieth century and that the expressive and artistic forms of the short century represented so effectively.

Benjamin is thus an example of that need the twentieth century always felt to animate the machine, to instil into the marionette the élan vital of the spirit. The twentieth century did in fact conceive of life as a relationship between the organic and the inorganic, as a problematic and open relationship, conflictual even, between automation and will, between the mechanical and the human. The automaton is therefore that which frightens if it is not controlled by man, by a spirit that prevents its existence as something radically other. Spirit and machine, the Ghost and the Machine, must blend together in such a way that neither prevails over the other. The machine is frightening when severed from human control.

The robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is one of the first representations of this fear. An automaton with the appearance of a real woman, one that seduces and captures the gaze, that incites the populace to revolt, to revolution. One that must be destroyed, on pain of the total destruction of the city of Metropolis. The robots imagined by literature and cinema, from Karel Čapek, who invents the name in R.U.R. (1920), to Asimov, who codifies their dependence on man in the famous three laws of robotics in I, Robot (1950); from Fritz Lang, who reveals their uncanny side, to the replicants of Philip K. Dick made famous by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1981), these robots/automata, twentieth-century forms of the marionette, display the disquiet of what Kleist presents as the sublime form in the marionette theatre: the perfection that dispenses with the human, that surpasses its affectation, its self-consciousness, its will.

Do the two lines that intersect in Kleist’s text, then, do nothing but move apart? Does the contemporary marionette set itself up as the bugbear of a world with no more humanity in it? In reality there is another line that takes shape out of the German writer’s reflections: the opposite one, that of the marionette as a radical form of the human. Can the inorganic body, the marionette, the puppet that moves only thanks to the puppeteer, have a life of its own? It is no accident, then, that Pinocchio flies into a rage precisely when the Talking Cricket reminds him that he is a puppet made of wood: «Poor Pinocchio! I really do feel sorry for you!… – Why do you feel sorry for me? – Because you are a puppet and, what is worse, because you have a head made of wood»[7].

To be a puppet, to have a wooden head: it is against this that Pinocchio rebels, hurling the hammer at the Talking Cricket’s head. And yet in this figure of a stringless puppet, the extraordinary, unique figure that is Pinocchio, a powerful archetype is at work, as Manganelli and Agamben remind us (the latter departing from it a little): the puppet as a victory over the purely natural condition and over the purely mechanical one, since Pinocchio adheres to neither of the two and moves along both dimensions: «A hard-won victory! Collodi shows how, in order to obtain it, one must renounce all faith in human institutions, free oneself entirely from the illusion of justice and of utopia»[8]. Here is the other direction of the diverging lines of the marionette theatre: the one that makes the marionette’s existence autonomous, without any control on man’s part (Pinocchio rebels from the very first moment of his existence, staring shamelessly at Geppetto as he creates him from a piece of wood).

If the puppet or the marionette no longer need to be guided but instead acquire will and self-awareness, they become absolutely human, they are the most authentic version of the human, free from the illusions of free will, of volition and of self-control. The human being who discovers himself to be a puppet realises the power of the forces that condition him, that make him what he is. And it is Pasolini who is perhaps the author who has carried this recognition to its highest degree, in that masterpiece of a short film, Che cosa sono le nuvole? (“What Are the Clouds?”, 1968). While a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello is taking place in a puppet theatre set in some unspecified outskirts of Rome, the puppets themselves begin to talk among themselves, to ask questions about their role, their freedom, the truth. Othello (Ninetto Davoli) then asks the puppeteer (Francesco Leonetti), and then Iago (Totò), the meaning of his existence:

«Othello – Eh, maestro! But why do I believe Iago? Why am I so stupid?

Puppeteer – Perhaps… it is because it is you who want to kill!

Othello – What? I like killing? And why?

Puppeteer – Perhaps…. because Desdemona likes being killed…

Othello – Ah! Is that how it is?

Puppeteer – Perhaps, that is how it is.

Othello – But then what is the truth? What I think of myself, what people think, or what that fellow in there thinks…

[..]
Iago – Do you feel something inside you? Concentrate hard! Do you feel something? Eh?
Othello – Yes… yes…. I feel something… that is there…

Iago – Well… That is the truth… But sssshh, one must not name it, for the moment you name it, it is there no more…»[9]

It is here, then, in this dialogue between Othello, the puppeteer and Iago, that another line of the marionette theatre finds one of its highest expressions. From the marionette that exists only insofar as it is “animated” to the puppet that becomes the true representation of the human, the path is rich, extraordinarily rich in examples, in ways of seeing that have built itineraries, imaginaries, visions.

But Kleist’s enigma continues, because at bottom the disquieting equivalence between a god and a marionette casts the pursuit of perfection as that which lies beyond the human, beyond every imperfection, hesitation, thought and doubt that stirs the human dimension. Kleist thus reaches beyond the twentieth century. The machine/marionette has nothing to do with the human, but with absolute perfection, with god. Its disquieting and fascinating dimension is bound up, then, with the imaginary of the new millennium, with the new myth of the quest for artificial intelligence, of the existence of the machine not as a substitute for the human, but as a new dimension of the divine.

This is the last, radical and utterly contemporary line that must be followed, the one that connects the German writer’s text directly to our own century, the century of the dream/nightmare of the artificial mind, of the universe of Matrix by the Wachowski sisters (1999–2022), of the world of machines of James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), all the way to the first pale, stammering (and unsettling) attempts at existence of ChatGPT or MidJourney. To return to Kleist perhaps means, then, to make once more that movement already announced at the end of the text; in passing and distractedly, but with resolve. To create a new thought, a new knowledge, capable of being not merely witnesses to a radical mutation, to the advent of a new metaphysics of the machine, precisely during an age that perceives itself as the last: «“So,” I said, somewhat distractedly, “should we then have to eat once again of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?” “Oh yes,” he replied. “This is the last chapter of the history of the world.”»[10].

Daniele Dottorini and Sandra Viviana Palermo

Notes

[1]E. von Kleist, Sul teatro di marionette. Aneddoti, saggi, Guanda, Parma 1986, p. 32.

[2]Ibid., p. 33.

[3]Ibid., p. 34.

[4]Ibid., p. 37.

[5]W. Benjamin, Tesi sul concetto di Storia, Mimesis, Milano 2013, p. 6.

[6]M. Löwy, Segnalatore d’incendio. Una lettura delle tesi Sul concetto di Storia, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2004, p. 37.

[7]C. Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino, Rizzoli, Milano 1949, p. 12.

[8]G. Agamben, Pinocchio. Le avventure di un burattino doppiamente commentate e tre volte illustrate, Einaudi, Torino 2021, p. 12.

[9]Dialogue from the film.

[10]H. von Kleist, Sul teatro di marionette, cit. p. 37.