Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature by Jörg Kreienbrock (review)

Feet are no longer just feet when they rest threateningly, encased in boots and noisome filth, on the train cushion beside a quietly fuming traveler’s knees, their soles impertinently encroaching upon his personal space and, Jörg Kreienbrock argues, upon his very subjectivity. This particular image, taken from Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s novel Another One (Auch einer, 1879), is one of many that illustrate Vischer’s own notion of the “Tücke des Objekts” (and in particular here, the “impudence of the foot”), and that pepper Kreienbrock’s new cultural study of irascible subjects reacting to allegedly malicious objects. Moving between a panoply of theorists and four modern novelists (modernity here is understood quite broadly), Kreienbrock chronicles the history of a seemingly quotidian phenomenon—the object that, by failing to perform its intended function, resists the will of the subject, and that the subject thus imbues with malicious intent—that speaks to the development of the modern subject through fiction, science, literature, philosophy, and ethics. In this ambitious second book Kreienbrock draws on Joseph Vogl’s influential edited volume Poetologien des Wissens (1999) and its approach to both cultural studies in general and the production of knowledge in particular, to propound a poetics of the malicious object. What, Kreienbrock asks, allows us to attribute ill intent to an object that seemingly acts out and provokes? How are we to understand the phenomenon—the ascription of agency to objects and the ensuing explosive reaction to them—as a process embedded in a history of its own?

Objects, as understood here, are equipment, Zeug, and thus purely functional means to an end. When they break down, however, they short-circuit this process of mediation and become ends in themselves. In failing to execute their function—and here Kreienbrock takes his lead from Martin Heidegger, who forms the backbone of the study—they paradoxically reveal their hitherto concealed essence as tools, as objects. This irruptive enunciation proves problematic, however, for it can occur only when the object has subverted or thwarted the subject’s effort to attain some end of his own. To know an object as a tool is to experience its malfunction. This is apparently quite irritating for Kreienbrock’s subjects.

Initially, these malfunctioning objects, or “technologies of the self,” to borrow Foucault’s term, serve as a means of steeling the subject against the contumacies of a reality composed of both people and things. The squeaky parlor door in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, and Phutatorius’s open breeches, make possible a sensuous interaction between object and subject (in these cases an irritating squeak or a piping hot chestnut in one’s pants) that the Stoic subject must resist in order to cultivate his philosophy of life. Yet Phutatorius’s response to the chestnut, an unprintable curse, illustrates the tenuous hold Sterne’s subjects have on the stoicism they espouse.

In Jean Paul, we find a similar dynamic at work, with an added corrective so as to enliven what the poet deems a certain dullness in Stoic ataraxia (the preference for reason over affect). For Jean Paul, strategies of projecting human intentions upon the recalcitrant object—and the reader’s subsequent recognition of this fallacy—succeed in adding humor to, and defusing, the irritating situations his protagonists Siebenkäs and Frohauf Süptitz encounter; the projection of anthropomorphism, Kreienbrock argues, serves as “a coping strategy of the cornered subject himself” (121). This solution, however, marks a shift from maintaining a subjective distance against the encroachment of objects (Sterne) to attributing agency (and thereby subjectivity) to objects, if playfully (Jean Paul). Having given life to the Hydra of the anthropomorphized object with malicious intent, Jean Paul establishes a trope that his literary heirs, at the latest with Vischer, will invert and transform into something much more invidious.

Indeed, as Vischer’s image of the impudent feet...