THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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body as ‘practicable clockwork’, and Lohenstein gathers up the wheels of his fallen ‘Agrippina’, the female tyrant, ‘who had the strange idea the clockwork of her
brain/Was powerfully to revolve the orbit of the stars’. But the new element was in fact added as the shudder of exposure, precisely in mechanics: the fact that living
man is a piece of clockwork which is self­winding. This sort of thing seemed to become apparent in the automata which emerged at that time: in the singing nightingale,
the mechanical violin­player, the mathematical wizard, all made of wax and inside only clockwork, but all alive as it were. It was characteristic that the clockwork was
not concealed, it was merely draped with Rococo clothes or rich Turkish costume and thus doubly apparent. The mechanism was emphasized in a downright coquettish
fashion in all these figures, the skirt or curtain drawn back from the wheels displayed the mechanics precisely as a new magic abyss. There is an echo of this in the
keeper of the stool­shop from the ‘Tales of Hoffmann’: with a barometer, hygrometer, and glasses, whoever looks through them sees everything that is dead as alive; all
the more so in Doctor Spallanzani, the physicist who hatches automata. There is still an echo in the advertising preparations of modern chemical laboratories: the
sparkling glass itself, and the bright mechanistic light reaches into old, strangely increased imagination. At any rate, mechanics also seemed to reveal something secret, a
land of adventure and hubris beyond the frontiers, in the midst of sobriety. The golem was to be found in there too, not just in the pre­mechanical region in which rabbi
Löb as a cabbalist wanted to attempt the business of creation, with a lump of clay and a magic slip of paper. Thus the various Cagliostros were not made totally
impossible even by the Enlightenment, especially when they used a mechanical­technological language apart from the magic one.
Moreover, even today we still say that a liar ‘invents’ something. The strange, bad and good ambiguity of this word particularly found adherents at that time, among
bankrupt and bored princes. And it was the age of the rising bourgeoisie, very interested in profitable inventions. But inventing was still bizarre, so to some extent it was
uncritically merged in human consciousness as something à la Münchhausen and as something technological. Consequently, adventurers of the kind that were called
‘projectors’ in the Baroque also moved into technology; as much on a wishful basis as on one of swindling and shudders of horror. These project­makers or ‘donneurs
d'vis’ effortlessly switched at that time from the domain of state finances, where they were never at a loss for any ‘invention’, to the domain of technology, again with an
often complicated mixture of conning