Routines of Writing: Administration and the Poetics of Movement in Robert Walser’s Works and the Film All This Can Happen

Simon Roloff

doi:10.18061/ijsd.v7i0.5457

Abstract

This article contextualizes Robert Walser’s The Walk and All This Can Happen through Walser’s literary practice and the social technologies of his time. It is argued that walking, perceiving, and writing in both works become part of a quasi-bureaucratic routine and therefore reflect certain historical changes in the office as an architectural and technical means of administration. Walser’s earlier novel Jakob von Gunten is referred to in order to expand the argument and develop the final thesis that Walser’s poetics of movement mirror an administrative control of “life” that was strongly shaped and remodelled around 1900.

Highlights

This essay contextualizes The Walk and its interpretation in the film All This Can Happen through Walser’s literary practice, which links perceiving, walking, and writing in a quasi-bureaucratic routine
Where the poetics and motives of The Walk and Walser’s earlier novel Jakob von Gunten refer to this chain of operations in their portrayals of institutions, they reflect the historical changes leading to new techniques and practices of administration around 1900
Walser’s poetics of movement make visible a biopolitical control of “life” that came into existence at his time

Summary

Introduction

This essay contextualizes The Walk and its interpretation in the film All This Can Happen through Walser’s literary practice, which links perceiving, walking, and writing in a quasi-bureaucratic routine. The aforementioned dialogue in the tax office concludes with an overview of the following events by the narrator: the totality of what is written down, everything that happens in the text and in life, is recorded as if for official purposes At this point, we can say something about the poetics of life in Walser’s literature: the perception and capture—the “study” of “every smallest living thing,”[10] which the narrator defines as the basic aim of the walker—does echo the intentions of our diarist and very clearly resembles the poetic intentions of The Walk. While showing how consistently Walser developed his poetics of life administration, I would like to stress the wider historical context for this literature, in particular the rise of bureaucracy as one of the most dominant techniques of social control in the 20th century

A New Institutional Regime

Conclusion