Carl Gelderloos

How might we situate Paul Scheerbart within German modernism? The work of excavating his oeuvre, its conceptual and generic contours, and its entanglements with other figures and constellations of German modernism has begun in earnest, yet he is still known primarily as a theorist of glass architecture, on the one hand, and as a decades-long, subterranean influence on Walter Benjamin, on the other—Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s 1913 novel Lesabéndio from Gershom Scholem as a wedding present, and continually returned to the utopian aspects of Scheerbart’s writing. In his 1914 treatise, Glasarchitektur (“Glass Architecture”), Scheerbart calls for nothing less than the total spiritual renewal of humankind by means of building with colored glass, an avant-garde architectural utopianism that would influence Bruno Taut, as well as artists associated with Bauhaus and Dada. “Glass Architecture” was published in Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist journal Der Sturm, and Scheerbart associated with the artists in the orbit of Der Sturm, a prominent modernist constellation in Berlin that included figures such as Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and others. Yet despite these associations, and despite the multimedial sweep of Scheerbart’s work—which includes dozens of novels, as well as the treatise on glass and a 1910 account of his attempt to build a perpetual motion machine—Scheerbart’s contributions to German modernism still await a fuller reckoning. In part this is surely because the books themselves, idiosyncratic, whimsical, and always of uncertain genre, at times seem written to defy the attempt to take them seriously: Scheerbart’s narrative worlds are outlandish and weightless, while his style exhibits none of the density, difficulty, or self-awareness typically associated with literary modernism. As Benjamin wrote in praise, Scheerbart’s prose is transparent, fresh as “a nursling’s cheeks.” Yet this transparency associated with both Scheerbart’s prose and his architectural fantasies about glass exhibits multiple ambiguities—ambiguities that prove quite generative for thinking about some of the discursive, disciplinary, and medial contours of German modernism, especially its engagement with questions of perception and embodiment, its relationship to monism, its retheorization of the subject, and its interrogation of the relationship between art and society. This essay reads Scheerbart’s 1913 “Asteroïdenroman” (“asteroid-novel”) Lesabéndio, to flesh out the relationship between this ambiguous transparency, on the one hand, and the novel’s utopian vision of boundlessly mobile, embodied perception, on the other. By unfolding a tension between fantasies of transparency and embodied vision, the novel engages with a key problematic of the avant-garde, yet closer examination suggests the presence of another context, namely the popular intellectual currents that circulated under the names of monism and panpsychism. Indeed, the strange, alien bodies in this novel might be seen as a missing link between modernism and monism. The ambiguous transparency of both glass and monism pivoted on the paradoxical relationships between materiality, embodiment, and perception, as a new, specific inflection of the relationship between mind ( Geist) and body. In the ways in which glass in architectural discourse around 1913 flickered in and out of different modes of signification—is it transparent or is it a surface? Does it allow us to see clearly or is it what is meant to be seen? Is it material, medium, metaphor, or all three?—these questions reflect monism’s revision of the relationship between matter and spirit. Far from representing a reactionary flight into mysticism, the monist fancy that characterizes Lesabéndio ought to be seen as a playful literalization of contemporary ambiguities surrounding transparency, embodiment, perception, and materiality.