Simondon and Novalis: Notes for a Romantic Mechanology Bryan Norton SubStance, Volume 53, Number 1, 2024 (Issue 163), pp. 85-100 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2024.a924144 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/924144 [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Simondon and Novalis: Notes for a Romantic Mechanology Bryan Norton [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Abstract German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon’s writings. In Mode of Existence, Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis’s poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy. Introduction This article amplifies a series of resonances between Novalis’s aspirations for German Romanticism and the form of thought Gilbert Simondon calls mechanology. In a striking entry to his Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, the poet-engineer Novalis suggests that the novice “may not yet reason. [S]he must first must become mechanically adept, then [s]he can begin to reflect” (3: 245 n 47). Before beginning to engage in reason or contemplation, the sort of conceptual activity most often associated with romanticism, Novalis urges readers to engage in the material, technical specificities of mechanical knowledge. Friedrich Hölderlin similarly suggests that poets should embrace what the Greeks called mechané (μηχανή), a process “through which the beautiful is brought forth” (Sämtliche Werke 5: 195).1 Just as aesthetic decision-making plays a key role in technical design, a feature of mechanology Simondon emphasizes in an unsent letter to Jacques Derrida, Novalis and his Romantic compatriots draw attention to the role technics plays in aesthetics, politics, and nature philosophy (“On Techno-Aesthetics” 2). Mechanics “lives from perpetual motion,” Novalis writes in the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, “and at the same time seeks, as its highest problem, to construct a perpetuum mobile” (3: 296 n 314). Romantic activity, whether aesthetic, political, or technical, aims at the concretization of a fully functional negentropic machine. Perpetual motion, for Novalis, represents the highest form of synergistic exchange between humans and nature. © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc. SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 85 86 Bryan Norton A similar mode of relationality underwrites Simondon’s concept of mechanology. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon defines mechanology as a comportment towards technical objects that moves beyond the generalities of what he calls organology.2 While organology interrogates technical objects at the level of simple elements, seeking to grasp the tool’s basic function, mechanology explores more complex and “complete technical individuals” (Simondon, Mode of Existence 66). This historical attunement to the specificities of individuation provided by mechanology presents a way of understanding how tools, instruments, and more advanced machinery are developed through a genetic process that unfolds in an intimate exchange with a particular cultural and geographic landscape (Simondon, Mode of Existence 57-58). In this way, Simondon’s philosophy of technology also presents a philosophy of nature, as commentators such as Yuk Hui have noted (Recursivity and Contingency 41-85). While Simondon turns to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Mines of Falun” to illustrate how catastrophe unfolds when humans do not respect the terrestrial limits presented by specific landscapes (Mode of Existence 107), Novalis develops what has been called a “relational concept of the absolute” (Nassar 38-43), leading to a radically new mode of inhabiting the Earth. The ecological implications of Romantic mechanology, we will see, possess drastic theoretical and political consequences. Overcoming the rigid divide between word and deed found at the center of Carl Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism, Novalis’s mechanology unfolds as nothing less than a new a tool-based nomos of resonance in which poetry and philosophy are seen as participants in a form of radical self-governance for the entire planet. Perpetuum mobile between speculation and figuration At the core of Novalis’s theorization of a perpetuum mobile lies an attempt to understand, and eventually overcome, the restrictions placed by Kant on poetic creation. Whereas Kant sought to maintain a divide between philosophical speculation and natural observation, for Novalis, “the true observer is an artist. The empirical and the speculative search are both infinite” sets of operations (3: 391): “Seeking both at once—the experimental path, it is the true way” (3: 393). While for Kant modes of aesthesis seem to have little effect on the constructive processes of poesis, just as natural observation has no real effect on the forms provided by the architecture of the understanding, for Novalis observation is imbued with a subtle form of material agency that strives to realize a new “schema of the future” (3: 420). Such embrace of corporeal contingency, in fact, leads Novalis to outline a novel mode of sensing that seeks to create a revised version of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic by moving the material relation- SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 Simondon and Novalis 87 ality of mechanics to the forefront of aesthetic perception: “Space and Time – Sense Intu[ition] a priori – w[hat] / i[s] t[hat] / Geometry Mechanics / Figural Schema of / Motion” (3: 392 n 660). This suggested recursive loop between technical operation, natural process, and the architecture of the understanding leads Novalis to highlight what he sees as a direct correlation between the motivating question of Kantian philosophy and the negentropic aims of what Simondon will later call mechanology: [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Kant’s question: are synthetic judgments possible? may be specifically expressed in the most varied manner. E.g. = is philosophy an art (dogmatics) (science) = Is there an art of invention devoid of data, an absolute art of invention […] = is perpetuum mobile possible? (Cf. Wood 328) The possibility of a priori synthetic judgments, capable of mediating between thought’s architecture and the sensuous stuff of the phenomenal world, becomes bound to the task of constructing a negentropic perpetual motion machine. Here we see the outline of Novalis’s attempt to articulate the role technics plays in what he calls a “self-sorting system of nature,” an autopoetic mode of self-expression in nature that will be further developed in his Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (3: 340 n 475). Perpetual motion provides a vision of nature and technical mediation where “thing and tool” are combined into one, and where knowledge becomes integrally linked to the material processes of poesis. “We only know,” writes Novalis in his Pollen fragments, “insofar as we realize” (3: 357 n 539). This attempt to overcome what Hölderlin calls the ‘Kantian boundary’ is by no means unique to Novalis (Cf. Hölderlin 1: 9a-27). As commentators such as Manfred Frank have noted, the desire to overcome the Kantian divide between realism and idealism can be understood as a defining feature of German Romanticism (Einfürhung 138-139). What is peculiar to Novalis’s work, however, is the way in which mechanics serves as a starting point for radically rethinking the relationship between nature and technics.3 Whereas for Kant the concept of mechanism is diametrically opposed to the organism, just as realism is opposed to idealism, mechanical activity, on Novalis’s view, reveals a hidden range of technical, epistemic, and aesthetic possibilities that open out through the sensory apparatus onto the natural world. The subject “understands how to bring about a world,” he writes, “the only thing that is missing is the proper apparatus, the proper fitting of his sensory tools” (2: 453 n 88). In this way, Novalis’s interrogation of the relationship between life and tool resembles several key aspects of the relationship between concretization and individuation that can be found at the heart of Simondon’s own vision of encyclopedics. “For Simondon,” Jean-Hughes Barthélémy summarizes, it is […] a matter of thinking the “concretization” of technical objects as an “individualization” for which the living being provides the model, SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 88 Bryan Norton which is only ever approached by the technical object in its relation with its “associated milieu.” (Life and Technology 20) The negentropic activity of life presents technics with a model for its own individuating activity, which it can only ever approximate. A combination of speculation and technical activity, for Simondon and Novalis, lies at the heart of this energetic relation to the natural world. The goal is never to simply equate life with technics, however, subsuming the former to the latter: If, therefore, there are for Simondon “phylogenetic lineages” of technical objects, the analogy between the living being and the machine is not for all that an assimilation of the first to the second, and the machine is only made possible as something that functions because it is itself the work [œuvre] of a living being. So, Simondon’s thought finds its general structure in an analogy which is not an identity between the technical and the living. (Barthélémy, Life and Technology 20) Novalis’s own search for an ‘intellectual motive principle’ in the wake of Kant’s philosophy of nature leads him to suggest that the relationality inherent to mechanical forms of motion might provide a radical new form of aesthesis rooted in the material operations of technical media (2: 384). This mode of relationality highlights the way in which Romantic considerations of complex technical assemblages are not excluded from the recursive logic of reciprocity used to explain life, as was the case with Kant, but instead become part and parcel to a dynamic overlay of organic and mechanical modes of approaching nature. As with Simondon, Novalis seeks to explore biological life alongside technical activity in the hope that a deeper knowledge of tools and complex machinery may help develop novel modes of engaging in the world, an aspect of the poet-engineer’s work that has been highlighted by Jocelyn Holland (“From Romantic Tools to Technics”). While searching for what he calls an absolute “art of invention” that might help us understand the functionality of a priori synthetic judgments, judgments that should bridge the gap between nonempirical and empirical modes of experience, Novalis turns away from the rigid architecture of Kantian reason and towards a more dynamic, flexible system of organization aimed at the construction of a functional perpetuum mobile (3: 388). Novalis’s mechanics, viewed in this light, becomes a material and experimental science seeking to establish synergistic relations between technical objects, humans, and the natural environment. Romanticism, in effect, is nothing less than mechanology avant la lettre, seeking to promote the work of individuation through technical and speculative activity. “Future doctrine of mankind,” writes Novalis, “everything that is predicated from God contains the future human doctrine. Every machine, that now lives from the great perpetuo mobile, should itself become a perpetuum mobile” (3: 297 n 320). SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Simondon and Novalis 89 Through a modified and non-determinative understanding of mechanics, Novalis seeks first of all to provide a material, technical a priori that serves to ensure and maintain the subject of Kant’s sensus communis (cf. Arendt 106-120). Such stability is not provided by the transcendental self-positing of Fichtean idealism, however. This form of dynamic equilibrium is established by a material, technical externality capable of mediating relations among multiple subjects and between the subject and its environment. Mechanics itself, when properly understood, is a constellation of flexible material operations. It is up to Romanticism to tap into these hidden resources and to experiment with the unforeseen possibilities opened up by this unique mode of sensing. Novalis’s call for the novice to become ‘mechanically adept’ attempts to restage the dialectical relationality of Kantian mechanics as a radically material approach to natural knowledge grounded in an exteriorized mode of cognition. At the center of Novalis’s vision of a technically mediated understanding of the natural world lies an attempt to show how the extensive space of the polis, where sovereign decision making takes place, becomes irredeemably embroiled in the environmental container-space of khôra, calling back to Plato’s Timaeus and echoed by later commentary from Derrida (Khôra). A new form of entanglement between these realms is outlined by Novalis through the metaphor of the ship, a medium implicating Romantic cosmologies of nature in the complex operations of technical processes these cosmologies aim to describe. In a fragment from the Pollen collection, Novalis writes that, while tools serve to “arm the human,” such reciprocal interaction contains the seed of a more dramatic co-evolutionary process undertaken by the Romantic subject and the technical object: One can very well say that the human knows how to bring about a world, he just lacks the appropriate apparatus, the commensurate armature of the tools of the senses. The beginning is there. Thus lies the principle of a ship in the idea of the master shipbuilder, who is able to embody this idea through heaps of men and appropriate tools and materials by making himself, as it were, an immense machine. The idea of a moment thus often requires immense organs, immense masses of material, and the human is therefore, if not actu, nevertheless potentia creator (2: 453 n 88). The ship provides Novalis with the metonymic means of understanding the turn from organology to mechanology, a key moment in the genetic development Gilbert Simondon refers to as the process of individuation and concretization (Modes of Existence 66). Novalis’s reflection on the complexity of technical assemblages reveals a similar change in our vision of the human, who appears now as both creator and symptom of technical media. SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 90 Bryan Norton Mechanology and future technics: the construction of a living encyclopedics Novalis’s most enduring reflections on a perpetuum mobile can be found in his encyclopedia project, the Allgemeine Brouillon. Consisting of fragments composed in the years 1798 and 1799, Novalis’s Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedic presents both a formal poetic enquiry into the ability of the Romantic fragment to mediate successfully between part and whole, as well as a speculative attempt to articulate what it might mean to construct a perpetuum mobile for romantic mechanology (cf. LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 39 - 58). To begin, let us turn to the way in which the call for mechanics to construct a negentropic machine is embedded within a series of reflections on the shifting relationship between life, technical mediation, and the organization of knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. In one self-reflexive entry marked “Encyclopedics,” Novalis states that “Every S[cience] has its God, which is also its aim. Thus mechanics actually lives from perpetual motion—and seeks at the same time, as its highest aim, to construct a perpetuum mobile” (2: 296 n 314). This vision of encyclopedic organization forgoes any linear relationship between empirical data and systems of knowledge, favoring a recursive loop that sees progressive speculation as an integral mediating force in the relationship between knower and known. A feedback system of theorization and observation is instead proposed, placing the knower squarely within the natural operation being examined. In another entry marked “Encyclopedics Nr. 517,” Novalis writes that “[a]ll good researchers— doctors, observers and thinkers—do things like Copernicus. They turn the data and method inside out in order to see if there isn’t a better way” (3: 355 n 517). This Romantic approach to encyclopedics, what Novalis refers to as a “self-sorting system of nature,” presents an alternative to Enlightenment practices of knowledge formation. Romanticism seeks to participate in the autopoetic activity of the natural phenomena encyclopedics seeks to describe (Novalis 3: 422 n 784). In Simondonian terms, this reflexivity places Novalis’s romantic knowledge practices beyond the merely descriptive approach taken by the French Encyclopédistes, also avoiding the totalizing, technocratic vision of technology later apparent in twentieth-century cybernetics (Simondon, Mode of Existence, 109-110; cf. Barthélémy, Simondon). The interactive process of unfolding presented by Novalis as a fruitful alternative, which Simondon refers to as “genetic encyclopedics” (Mode of Existence, 77-81), is further explored in an analysis of the double history of the encyclopedic object and its concept: 598. Enc[yclopedics]. Every S[cience] has a double hist[ory]—the Hist[ory] of the object—the history of [the] Obj[ect], as concept. History SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 Simondon and Novalis 91 of the [Matter]—Hist[ory] of the S[cience]. (Every Hist[ory] is 3fold— past, present, and future). (Novalis 3: 372 n 598) Objects are bound to the discursive relations that describe them. Human ways of relating to nature and technics are inextricably bound to the stories we tell about life and technics. This experimental comportment does not mean, however, that we are free to construct any fictions we please. As Simondon emphasizes in his own readings of Romantic literature, mechanology is first and foremost developed through a relational exchange between a tool and a particular landscape. In another note on the construction of a perpetuum mobile, this time in a note on the nature philosopher Schelling’s cosmological treatise On the World Soul, Novalis remarks that [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Nature is eternal—not vice versa—it maintains itself by itself. What it is once brought to do, it continues producing eternally according to the law of inertia. The reason for transience is to be sought in the intellect. Perpetuum mobile. (3: 110-111) A key feature of the project of constructing a living encyclopedics consists in the way such organizational activity proves capable of articulating a view of the natural world that is integrally opposed to the anthropocentric forms of knowledge Romantics like Novalis find in Kant. Whereas Kant insists on keeping the observer at an ontological remove from the natural world, presenting a transcendental framework that does no justice to organic life or to the role played by technics in knowledge formation, Novalis’s Allgemeine Brouillon enacts a relational and material mode of construction and critique. His proposed “critique of human intelligence as the highest metric [hochstgrädigen Meters] we have” would enable humans to forge new relations between nature and technology, providing a “propaedeutic of all other critical disciplines” (3: 359 n 540). This form of critique, referred to elsewhere as a doctrine of the “regular, complete construction of philosophy’s task,” consists in nothing more than an “ordering of data according to the required equivalences” (3: 347 n 488). Forgoing the Kantian split between natural knowledge and technical discourse, Novalis’s thought experiments concerning the perpetuum mobile collapse into the attempt to articulate a “doctrine of formation [Bildungslehre] of the universal scientific organ—or better yet, of intelligence” (3/5: 361 n 552). Novalis’s project of becoming ‘mechanically adept’ opens out onto a broader cosmological principle of energetic reciprocity in which human knowledge and technical mediation are embedded within environmental processes, participating in the construction of the natural operations they describe (3: 245 n 47). In order for Novalis to ensure that this project of Romantic mechanology ends in the affirmation and self-articulation of the lifeworld, resulting in stability for the natural environment rather than SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 92 Bryan Norton entropic decay, he must also clarify the position of the subject along this circuit between natural and technical processes. Selfhood, for Novalis, represents a material point of relation between machine and milieu: “the seat of the soul is there, where inner and outer worlds touch. Where they interpenetrate—it is at every point of their interpenetration” (2: 418-419 nn 19-20). This medial status of selfhood must be embraced. The subject presents a “self-tool,” Novalis writes elsewhere, pointing out two possibilities for the observation of complex mechanical assemblages: Main observation of the mechanic: one considers the machine (Conc[ept] of the Machine) either in static, or mechanical moments, i.e. either in relation to the equilibrium of its parts, or in motion. (3: 245 n 46) While insisting on the relational force of this interactivity, Novalis aims to show how human agents, no longer at the center of the post-Copernican universe, can nevertheless be kept in the loop when confronted with complex technical and natural processes by participating in encyclopedic design. This form of symbiosis is achieved when humans begin to see themselves as a medium of expression for nature. In a note from his “Medical Notebooks,“ Novalis turns directly to this role of the human knower as a participant in the self-articulation of the universe: Authentic desire is also a Perpetuum mobile—it always produces itself anew (Mechanics is by and large the most useful form of analogy for Physics) and that this doesn’t happen—Friction—is the reason for all displeasure in the world. (3: 562 n 47) True desire does not necessitate a colonial attitude towards the lifeworld. Novalis’s experiments with perpetual motion serve to highlight alternative modes of entanglement with the universe via the organizational capacity of technical media. The speculative labor this requires, however, must be met with an experimental ethos rooted in an ethical approach towards the living. This relational view of selfhood and its integral role in the project of Romantic mechanology is illustrated in “All the People I See Living,” a late poem by Novalis which thematizes the speculative activity of constructing a living encyclopedics by cataloguing different forms of motion arising in response to a variety of observational vantage points with respect to nature. The first lines of the poem open at a distant remove from the action observed by the speaker, much in the way Kant’s transcendental subject exists at an ontological remove from the natural world: All the people I see living Many floating gently on Few are toiling, striving forward Yet it falls just to the one Lightly striving, floating living (1: 420 n 32) SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 Simondon and Novalis 93 Over the course of the poem, this transcendental attitude is replaced by a viewpoint from which the hero-sage finds himself in a “fight with storm and waves,” at the end finding that “[r]est is only given to the gods” (1: 420). Since “for us, life is acting,” the only possible pleasure the speaker finds is through an “exercise of potency” in collaboration with natural forces (1: 420). While rejecting any mode of observation that would privilege an anthropocentric attitude towards natural knowledge, the poem underscores a series of energetic opportunities unfolded within what Novalis refers to as the “betrayal of time,” the negentropic capacity of life to explore different forms of motive power such as “striving onward,” “floating by,” and “lightly striving.” For similar reasons, Gabriel Trop has identified a novel “thermodynamic” conception of the absolute in the poem (277). Novalis’s encyclopedic documentation of forms of motion and their affective resonances presents Novalis with a chance to investigate energetic potentialities in human relations to nature, while also reflecting on the role played by technical media in this process. In this way, human systems of knowledge provide a medium for nature’s own activity as a “self-sorting system,” opening up a recursive exchange between speculation and observation that enables us to understand the experimental attitude underlying Novalis’s calls to construct a perpetuum mobile: [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Encyclopedics 320. Fut[ure] doctrine of human[kind], everything that is predicated from God contains the future human doctrine. Every machine, that now lives from the great perpetuo mobile, must become a perpetuum mobile—each human, who now lives from and through God, should become God. (3: 297 n 320) Human beings, like the sage in Novalis’s poem, should strive to embed themselves inextricably in the motions and rhythms of nature, losing themselves in the energetic embrace of the cosmos. Kuber as Cosmogram: towards a new nomos of technical resonance The mechanological comportment required to construct a perpetuum mobile necessitates a drastic shift in the Romantic technical imagination. Humans must account not only for simple tools but for more concrete mechanical assemblages, machines that force us to reconsider the ways in which human entanglements with the natural world are technically mediated and highly individuated. The ship provides Novalis with a vivid example of this process of concretization, providing a metonymic tool for the establishment of Romantic mechanology writ large. Further contours of this development appear in Novalis’s outline of a living encyclopedics, highlighting the ways in which technical relationality serves as a mediating force between local techno-cultural practices and the holistic cosmology informing Novalis’s natural philosophy. The aim of such me- SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 94 Bryan Norton diating activity is nothing less than the articulation of negentropic forms of interaction between humans, technical media, and nature as a whole. The construction of a perpetuum mobile constitutes a material process that Novalis sketches in his notes on Kant, in his remarks on Schelling’s World Soul essay, and in the Encyclopedia project. The outcome of this heightened sense of attunement between nature, technics, and humans, however, is by no means a foregone conclusion: “[t]he result of a complete scientific universal-machine would be nature, or chaos” (3: 91). Attempts to construct a functional perpetuum mobile can lead to entropic decay and disorder if we do not properly attend to the epistemic and ethical aspects of the relationship between humans and nature. An important way Novalis works to insure this project against ecological catastrophe is by highlighting the ways in which the subject itself is always already imbricated in technical media and natural processes. This co-determination of humans, nature, and technicity undermines anthropocentric attitudes toward the employment of reason, foreshadowing later critiques of technology levelled by philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk (47-142) and Martin Heidegger (xii-xv). Warning against the “mechanistic triumph” of machines over the lifeworld signified by the paradoxical adherence to an ideology of the organism, Heidegger urges his readers to take seriously the threat posed by the enframing function of modern technology, which threatens to colonize every aspect of the lifeworld (cf. Holland, “From Romantic Tools to Technics”). This resonance between the critique of anthropocentric forms of knowledge in Romanticism and the critique of technology leveled by Heidegger has much in common with the experimental attitude towards nature and technical objects found in Simondon’s conception of mechanology, as many scholars have noted (cf. Hui, Recursivity and Contingency 1-40). Novalis, of course, adopts a more progressive attitude towards the possibilities inherent to complex technical assemblages than Heidegger does. Like Simondon, he holds an experimental attitude towards the construction of negentropic technical objects. Highlighting the need for synergistic machines, Novalis presents a broader view of the universe itself as a functional, cosmological perpetuum mobile. While Schelling’s World Soul essay provides Novalis with the blueprint for a complex, dynamic machine with infinite motive power, it is up to the Romantic encyclopedist and poet to document and experiment with the ways in which technical objects can tap into and equitably distribute the resources made available to humans who view nature as a perpetuum mobile. This dual feature of the Romantic attitude towards technical objects, viewed as what John Tresch refers to as a “cosmogram” which links concrete devices to abstract metaphysical structures, is highlighted by Novalis at the outset of Heinrich von Ofterdingen (cf. Tresch, “Techno- SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 Simondon and Novalis 95 logical World-Pictures” and The Romantic Machine, 1-27). This novel tells the story of an eponymous hero journeying with his mother from their native home in Augsburg to his grandfather’s court in Thuringia. While the plot appears to be set entirely in the high Middle Ages, readers are confronted in the opening lines with an anachronistic timekeeping device that seems ill-placed in this universe. In the first sentence, readers hear the ticking second hands of a wall clock, a device that was not invented until a number of centuries after the supposed setting (Landes 129): [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries The parents already lay asleep as the wall clock beat its steady pulse and wind rustled outside the rattling windows; the room brightened from the alternating glance of the moon. The young man lay restless in bed, thinking of the stranger and his tales. (Novalis 1: 195) This temporal solecism opens up a space of alterity between the selfenclosed cosmos of the novel’s setting and the standardizing rhythms of modernity that were slowly setting in during the time of Novalis’s writings. While the clock’s second hand never makes a second appearance, it calls the reader’s attention to a dual aspect of technics: while constituted by concrete technical objects, the technosphere also possesses the additional function of participating in the construction of vast cosmologies—stories we tell ourselves about the ways in which nature, technical media, and humans interact. One of the most important of these stories explored by Novalis’s novel concerns the status of the nomos with respect to the distribution of spatial relations between humans and the environment. While scholars such as Frederick Beiser have highlighted the ways in which Romantic aesthetic production seeks to combine natural knowledge with ethical action, providing points of contact between Kant’s “starry heavens” of the physical universe and the “moral law” inside the subject, little has been written on how the externalization of the technic of nature by Novalis and early Romantics leads to the articulation of a radically concrete ethos in Simondon’s sense: a Romantic political ecology that is rooted in the complex operations of technical media (Beiser 6-22; Cf. Kant 5: 161). After being confronted with his father’s cynical attitude towards the aim of creating more equitable relations between humans, technical objects, and the natural universe—“Träume sind Schäume,” his father exclaims after hearing about his dream of the blue flower, “dreams are suds”—Heinrich finds himself searching for an alternative to this cynical law of the father, according to which dreaming of a better world appears as a useless task (Novalis 1: 195). Along his journey, Heinrich and his mother are accompanied by two well-traveled merchants who recount wonderous stories of their encounters with an array of characters. Heinrich is especially taken by the tales he hears about poets from a mythical golden age. In these SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 96 Bryan Norton stories, Heinrich is introduced to a new cosmology in which “the entirety of nature” appears “livelier and more sensible” than the present, a time in which “hidden effects moved lifeless bodies” (1: 195). The Romantic longing for an irrecoverable past, as many scholars have noted, is used by Novalis as a means of illustrating a more forwardlooking vision for life on earth, providing the contours of a future in which technical mediation establishes the basis for more sustainable interactions between humans and nature (cf. Mähl 322-328 and Mahoney 13). While the subtitles of the novel’s first section, Die Erwartung, and of the incomplete second part, Die Erfüllung, seem to remind the reader of the difficulty of realizing any emancipatory dreams, the poetics of Heinrich von Ofterdingen nevertheless insist on the urgent need to reject the complacency of conservative cynicism regarding the deployment of new media with an experimental and open approach towards technical objects. In one of these tales, Heinrich hears a version of the legend of Arion, a lyre-playing hero from Herodotus’s Histories. Without revealing his source directly, Novalis adapts the legend as told by Herodotus in order to recover an often-overlooked usage of the term nomos in ancient Greek: the ‘stirring song’ of the órthios nomos (Herodotus 1: 24-25). Providing a musical alternative to the unmediated harmony between Kant’s “law within” and the physical law of the “starry skies above,” this forgotten understanding of the term nomos does not reduce law to natural necessity, physis; nor does it defer to the arbitrary decision-making of a sovereign being or state, a false dilemma which lies at the heart of Aristoteles’s Niccomachean Ethics and Plato’s Meno. The órthios nomos provides Novalis with a way of showing how attunement to the operations of technical media can create material points of resonance between ecology and political life, establishing a more flexible understanding of natural processes and human activity than can be found in the current embrace of a “new nomos of the earth” by thinkers such as Bruno Latour (219-54). This alternative nomos has important political connotations: the term is introduced by Aristophanes in the Knights fragment as the chorus celebrates the removal of a tyrant by the demos, who finally recognizes Arion as its rightful leader (1279). Novalis’s main source for invoking this nomos of resonance is Herodotus’s Histories. Although the legend provides material for a number of Romantic writings, including poems by Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis’s treatment of the tale in Heinrich von Ofterdingen is unique in its insistence on tracing the ‘stirring song’ of the hero back to the material, medial conditions of the song’s production. In Novalis’s retelling of the myth, a “miraculous instrument” or “tool” is placed in Arion’s hands that is capable of reanimating the slumbering forces of the natural world (1: 207). Arion, whom the merchants of Novalis’s novel refer SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 [171.66.161.67] Project MUSE (2024-04-15 23:51 GMT) Stanford Libraries Simondon and Novalis 97 to tellingly as a “Tonkünstler,” a “sound artist,” embarks on a seaward journey to a foreign land while carrying a brilliant trove of gifts bestowed to him over the course of his travels (1: 208). Upon his departure, the sound artist Arion is overcome by a band of marauders who threaten to steal his wealth and toss him into the sea. The hero begs for his life, but quickly realizes such pleas are useless. The assailants present him with a choice: Arion must kill himself immediately to receive a proper burial on land or allow himself to be cast into the ocean’s depths. Overcome with despair, the hero chooses the latter, asking for one dying wish: he requests to play a final song on his instrument, the “miraculous tool” that accompanies him on his journeys (1: 209-210). The mention here of the instrument upon which the órthios nomos is played is not found in Herodotus’s Histories. It is a unique invention by Novalis, whose storytelling merchants highlight the importance of technical objects in establishing new points of resonance between humans and nature. After throwing himself overboard, Arion is unexpectedly rescued by a large sea creature, who thanks him for playing his song (1: 211). Tool-based harmony provides the basis for a new type of attunement between humans and nature, a type of synergistic relational exchange made available when technical media are seen as externalizations of the recursive functionality of Kantian reciprocity. The challenge posed by Novalis’s vision of Romantic mechanology is the following: how might this law of technically mediated attunement be introduced to a world that is no longer defined solely by simple tools and instruments? The introduction of complex machines can afford humans greater access to the motive resources of the cosmos, as Novalis explains throughout his writings on the perpetuum mobile. Such advanced machinery, however, can also accelerate processes of entropic decay, contributing to the destruction of life and chaotic disequilibrium for the natural universe. With the careful construction of poetic and epistemic media as described in the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, however, Novalis seeks to call attention to the synergistic capabilities inherent to machines, which allow us to forge increasingly complex ways for humans to relate to themselves and to nature. In the Pollen fragments, Novalis employs the metonymic device of a ship and shipmaking for conceptualizing ways in which an evolutionary uptick in technological complexity experienced at the turn of the nineteenth century can be met with a new understanding of the human as irreducibly embedded within natural and technical processes (2: 453 n 88). In his retelling of the Arion legend, Novalis once more turns to the ship as a way of conceptualizing the historical shift from organology to mechanology. In one more striking revision of the legend, Novalis’s merchants describe how the catastrophic fate awaiting Arion’s assailants may be tied to the loss of control over the ship’s steering, which SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 98 Bryan Norton is itself an unintended consequence of their ignorant refusal to listen to the órthios nomos. While the marauders of Herodotus’s version of the legend happily listen to the stirring song of the hero before throwing Arion overboard, their counterparts in Heinrich von Ofterdingen fill their ears with wax so as not to be swept away by the music: They knew full well that, if they listened to his magic song, their hearts would soften and they would be seized with remorse; they therefore decided to grant his request, but filled their ears during the song, hearing nothing so they could stick to their plan. (1: 211) In a striking reversal of Homeric ocularcentricism, Novalis presents the hero’s lied as a siren song for the assailants. As cynics of the Anthropocene, the antagonists fear the resonant power of Arion’s music, the hidden capabilities of his instrument. While Herotodus’s hero relates his tale to his companion Periander after returning to shore, and he is even able to confront his assailants when they arrive upon the mainland, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the marauders’ failure to hear the órthios nomos sets them on a path of irreversible self-destruction. At first, they fight ruthlessly among themselves over Arion’s splendid riches. A deadly fight takes many of their lives, and the treasure itself is lost in the struggle. The confusion and loss of life also leads to a loss of control for the remaining crew on board: “the few who remained were unable to govern the ship alone, and were quickly swept to shore, where the ship collapsed and sunk” (1: 211). Coda: Romantic Ecology and Planetary Governance While allegorizing the catastrophic effects of ignoring the tool’s mediated form of resonance, Novalis uses the verb regieren in Heinrich von Ofterdingen to call attention to the way in which the ship might be understood as a metonymic device for working through the political and ecological changes initiated by the historical appearance of complex machines. After refraining from listening to the nomos of even a simple instrument, Arion’s assailants are poorly equipped to deal with the more complicated feedback mechanisms of the ship’s steering rudder. They are not attuned to the ways in which the ship’s motion might respond to the ocean’s ebbs and flows. Externalizing the complex recursive functionality of the Kantian mode of reciprocity, the failed steering presented in Heinrich von Ofterdingen suggests an important point of nondistinction between the environmentality of the ocean and the realm of political decision-making. Falling neither on the side of a realist technic of nature, according to which interaction between humans and the natural environment is determined by the laws of the physical universe alone, nor on the side of an idealizing technics that would reduce the alterity of natural motion to a projection of human desire, the ship’s capacity to run SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024 Simondon and Novalis 99 aground under these conditions presents a stark warning from Novalis to his readers: already by the beginning of the nineteenth century, humans are entering a time in which they can no longer distinguish between the governmentality of the polis, with its extensive technologies of control presented through the familiar metaphor of a ship, and the non-extensive space of what the ancient Greeks called khôra, signifying both the sea itself as a space outside of the polis and the metaphysical container upon which the entirety of the universe rests (Derrida, Khôra 75). Completing the collapse of Kant’s absolute non-empirical space into the relative space of perceived phenomena, a technically mediated epistemology and poetics that Novalis began to articulate in his vision of the novice “becom[ing] mechanically adept,” Novalis puts forth an understanding of technical mediation which harbors no Promethean illusions about the impact of technology on nature. Human beings cannot simply engineer their way out of disaster by filling the planet with new mechanisms of control (3: 245n 47). On the other hand, Novalis’s vision of Romantic mechanology also resists the cynical realism embraced as a “new nomos of the earth” (Latour 219-254), a naturalist determinism which would ignore the mediating status of technical objects in the organization of knowledge, as well as the vital role played by the polis in keeping humans afloat during times of acute planetary crisis. Stanford University Notes 1. For a fuller analysis of Hölderlin’s own concept of mechanics, see Rainer Nägele’s extensive study, Hölderlins Kritik der poetischen Vernunft. 2. In this way, this article also seeks to supplement Leif Weatherby’s work on organology in Novalis and romanticism. See Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, 206-260. 3. For a more detailed extrapolation of the role of technics in Novalis and romanticism, see Jocelyn Holland’s “The Poet as Artisan.” Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Das Urteilen. Piper, 2012. Aristophanes. Aristophanes: Acharnians. Knights. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson, revised edition, Harvard University Press, 1998. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Edited and translated by Robert Crisp, Cambridge University Press, 2014. Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. Life and Technology: An Inquiry Into and Beyond Simondon. Meson Press, 2015. ---. Simondon Ou l’encyclopédisme Génétique. Presses Universitaires de France, 2008. Beiser, Frederick C. The Romantic Imperative. 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Trop, Gabriel. “Novalis and the Absolute of Attraction.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 276-94. Weatherby, Leif. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism Between Leibniz and Marx. Oxford University Press, 2016. SubStance #163, Vol. 53, no. 1, 2024