Discourse Networks, 1800/1900

p
 Friedrich A. Kittler

Discourse Networks
1800 /1900
TRANSLATED BY M I C H A E L M E T T E E R , W IT H CH RIS CULLENS

FOREWORD BY D A V I D E. W E L L B E R Y

S T A N F O R D U N IV ER SIT Y PRESS, S T A N F O R D , C A L I F O R N I A
 / lT -40

Assistance for the translation was provided by Inter Nationes

Discourse Networks, i8oo/ipoo was originally published in German in 1985 as

Aufscbreibesysteme 1800/ipoo, © 1985,1987 W ilhelm Fink Verlag.
The Foreword has been prepared specially for this edition by D avid E. Wellbery.

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California

© 1990 by the Board o f Trustees o f the Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States o f America
Original printing 1990
Last figure below indicates year o f this printing:
09 08 07 06 05 04 03

CIP data appear at the end of the book q

t
 Contents

Foreword vii

I. 1800
The Scholar’s Tragedy: Prelude in the Theater 3

TH E M O TH ER ’S M OUTH 2-5
Learning to Read in 1800, 27. Motherliness and Civil Service, 53.

LAN GU AGE CH AN N ELS 70

The Im-possibility of Translations, 70. “ The Golden Pot,” 77.
Authors, Readers, Authors, 108.

TH E TO AST 124
Function: Feminine Reader . . . , 124. . . . and the Kingdom of
God, 148.

II. 1900
Nietzsche: Incipit Tragoedia 17 7

TH E GREAT LALULA 206

Psychophysics, 206. Technological Media, 229.

Vi CONTENTS

REBUS 265
Untranslatability and the Transposition of Media, 265.
Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow, 273. A Simulacrum of Madness, 304.

Q U E E N ’ S S A C R IF IC E 347

Afterword to the Second Printing 3 69

Notes 375
Works Cited 419
Index o f Persons 449
 Foreword
D A V I D E. W E L L B E R Y

Post-H erm eneutic C riticism

Fashion, Georg Simmel once remarked, is distinguished from history
by the fact that its changes are without substance. Whether ties are thick
or thin, collars loose or buttoned down, sets no preconditions for subse­
quent development except for the empty or nonsubstantial one that what
follows be different. Alterations of fashion are without consequence,
mere signals of the new, empty of emergence. The remark is a sort of
ideological crystal that assembles the tacit axiology of our fashion talk—
surface versus depth, sign versus meaning, semblance versus seriousness,
repetition versus growth— into symmetrically juxtaposed facets. It mini­
aturizes a code, reduces the already said, the already thought, the always
already known, to the bounded framework of a sentence. Hence its evi­
dentiary force, its effect of perceptual immediacy.
The axiology at work in Simmel’s apergu has recently become audible
in the discussion of post-structuralism within American criticism. With
increasing frequency one hears or reads the claim: the fashion of post­
structuralism has worn thin (like last year’s coat), has lost its appeal, is no
longer in. This diagnosis betrays, I believe, a good deal about the present
state of critical discussion in the United States. The claim that post­
structuralism is going out of style serves to contain, in the tactical sense of
the term, the disruptive and transformative potential of post-structuralist
thought, to render it inconsequential. The prognosis of demise is a wish-
fulfillment fantasy: the wish, precisely, that post-structuralism made (and
makes) no real difference, that its intervention on the American critical
viii FOREWORD

scene was as ephemeral as last year’s Paris designs. At last we can ex­
change this vocabulary for a new one, and keep on doing— what else?—
what we were doing all along.
O f course, even where the instruments and strategies of post-structuralist
thought have been enthusiastically adopted, they have often served as a
modish disguise. Thus the reception and broad dissemination of Derrida
in the United States has taken shape as a blending of New-Critical imma­
nent interpretation, on the one hand, with a negative theology of the lit­
erary work in which texts figure as the hopefully hopeless allegory of
their own failure, on the other. The difficult term deconstruction has be­
come a laxly used synonym for negative critique. Advocacy of this sort,
held in thrall to fascination, is merely the inverse of the accusation of
fashionableness. Information, according to Gregory Bateson’s definition,
is a difference that makes a difference. By consigning post-structuralism
to the realm of fashion, American literary criticism has systematically re­
fused to be informed.
A literary criticism informed by post-structuralism: what would be its
protocols, its theoretical objects, its aims? The American critical debate
has refused to work through this question in any practical way. By keeping
post-structuralism at a distance, by assigning it the status of an ex­
otic fashion, American criticism has avoided the experience of post­
structuralism, in Hegel’s sense of experience as a transformative suf­
ferance in which not merely consciousness changes, but also its objects
and its criteria of truth. For this reason, the American publication of
Friedrich Kittler’s book Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 is particularly
propitious. What distinguishes this book above all is that it is thoroughly
informed by post-structuralism; it has suffered through the difference that
post-structuralism makes. Kittler’s book is not about post-structuralism,
does not take post-structuralism as its theme. Rather, it presupposes
post-structuralist thought, makes that thought the operating equipment,
the hardware, with which it sets out to accomplish its own research pro­
gram. In Discourse Networks, post-structuralism becomes a working vo­
cabulary, a set of instruments productive of knowledge.
That this transformation should occur in Germany is not without its
paradoxes. On occasion the resistance to post-structuralism within the
German discussion has been organized around the fashion topos men­
tioned above, echoing with phrases such as “ the Parisian philosophy a la
mode” (Manfred Frank) cultural anxieties and animosities that go back
at least to the eighteenth century. But far more significant as a barrier to
authentic engagement with post-structuralist thought has been the pre­
dominant role of hermeneutics in defining research agendas within the
so-called “ sciences of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften). Hermeneutics,
 FOREWORD IX

of course, is no German monopoly, as the distinguished work of Paul

Ricoeur and Emilio Betti demonstrates, but nowhere, I think, has it so
exclusively set the framework for discussion as in the Federal Republic,
where, since the publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s monumental
Truth and Method in i960, hermeneutic terminology has become the
koine of intellectual work. Within literary studies the Constance School
of reception theory has been the most influential tributary of Gadamer’s
work, but literary sociology, as in the case of Peter Burger’s institutional
theory, has also drawn on hermeneutic motifs. Even the neo-Marxist
Frankfurt School, in its redaction as a theory of communication and
understanding (in, for example, the work of Jurgen Habermas), has
adopted major presuppositions of the hermeneutic position. This breadth
of appeal, moreover, is built into hermeneutic theory itself, which con­
ceives of interpretation as our stance in being: we cannot but interpret,
we are what we are by virtue of acts of interpretation. Hence the “ univer­
sality claim” ( Universalitatsanspruch) of hermeneutics, its claim to the
position of queen of the sciences.
Given this hermeneutic hegemony, one might naturally expect that the
importation of post-structuralism into the German context would elicit
attempts at ameliorative appropriation. Precisely this occurs, for ex­
ample, in Manfred Frank’s book on Friedrich Schleiermacher (The Indi­
vidual Universal, 1977), which purports to rediscover major tenets of
Derrida’s thought in the work of the father of Romantic hermeneutics.
But a second type of response is equally imaginable, a response that actu­
alizes aspects of post-structuralist thought incommensurate with the her­
meneutic paradigm, and this is the direction that Kittler’s book takes.
Thus, Discourse Networks reveals more clearly than has been the case in
the American discussion up to now that a literary criticism informed by
post-structuralism is, in fact, a post-hermeneutic criticism. It abandons
the language game and form of life defined by the hermeneutic canons of
justification and enters into domains of inquiry inaccessible to acts of ap-
propriative understanding. Post-hermeneutic criticism, to put the matter
briefly, stops making sense.
Nietzsche once punned on Schleiermacher’s name by literalizing it: the
father of hermeneutics, he asserted, was really a veil maker (Schleier-
Macher). Kittler, attending no less intensely than Nietzsche to the power
of the letter, tears the veil away from hermeneutics and dispels its aura, its
shimmering suggestion of sacral authority. This dismantling of herme­
neutics follows two tightly interwoven strands of argument, the first of
which is historical or, more accurately, genealogical— in the Nietzschean
sense of the term. Under the optic of genealogical analysis, the univer­
sality claim of hermeneutics evaporates and hermeneutics is exposed in its
X FOREWORD

situational boundedness, its particularity. Hermeneutic understanding is

not at all what human beings always do with written or spoken texts, it is
not a foundational condition for the processing of significant marks.
Rather, it is a contingent phenomenon within the evolution of discursive
practices in Europe; it rests on a host of preconditions such as alpha­
betization, the expansion of book production, the organization of the
modern university, the emergence of the civil service; it presupposes spe­
cific forms of socialization to which in turn it contributes; and it is linked
with other, equally contingent discourses such as those of pedagogy and
poetry (Dichtung). Finally, hermeneutics draws on and ratifies a specific
rendering of linguistic materiality, the myth of the silent inner voice that
Derrida has described as foundational for the modern philosophy of the
subject. In Kittler’s analysis, however, this myth appears less as a philo­
sophical hallucination than as a function of instructional practices and
technologies. Far from being our natural or human condition, hermeneu­
tics merely results from a specifically trained coordination of children’s
eyes, ears, and vocal organs. It is a discipline of the body.
The genealogy of hermeneutics cannot itself be written in the her­
meneutic manner; it cannot stylize itself (as hermeneutics inevitably does)
as a resuscitation of the living spirit from the tomb of the letter. Rather
than eliminating the truth of hermeneutics, Kittler describes it from the
outside, as an observer of the system and not as its interpreter. What dis­
tinguishes his account of the emergence and functioning of hermeneutics
from all the narratives constructed on hermeneutic presuppositions, in
other words, is that it is the story of a finitude. At the end of the introduc­
tion to his Lectures on the Philosophy o f History, Hegel writes that there
is really no historical past: everything that was true and substantial in
history lives in an eternal present, which is the element of historical-
philosophical thought. Kittler’s historiography rejects precisely this claim.
The discourse network of 1800 within which hermeneutics comes into
being is a passing phenomenon, radically finite, and it contains no truth or
substance that would preserve it from the erosion of time. Man, Foucault
writes at the end of The Order o f Things, is a figure inscribed in the sand at
the ocean’s edge, destined to be effaced by the waves of the future. Kittler’s
analysis provides the corollary of this claim: hermeneutic humanism is a
finite and contingent inscription, written on the background of a granular
noise and powerless against time’s turbulence.
Despite this theoretical acceptance of finitude, however, Kittler’s gene­
alogy of hermeneutics is nonetheless a history of the present, a narrative
of how our current practices of academic literary study came to be. For
there can be no doubt that our entire system of literary education and
scholarship continues to be defined by the hermeneutic language game
 FOREWORD xi

and by the form of life within which that language game functions. This
applies to Anglo-American literary culture as well as to the German con­
text, even though the former has relied less on an explicitly formulated
hermeneutic theory. On both sides of the Atlantic the presupposition of
sense remains intact, the heyday of meaning (Ian Hacking) continues, and
the task of literary education is still the formation of the individual uni­
versal that the discourse network of 1800 called into being. The thrust of
Kittler’s analysis is to show that as long as we continue to operate within
the hermeneutic paradigm we are paying homage to a form of language
processing long since deceased. Gadamer’s Truth and Method is indeed a
monument, a kind of memorial that holds the present in thrall to an an­
cient (but really not so ancient) law. Rather than breaking new ground,
the hermeneutic turn of the 1960’s appears from Kittler’s perspective to
be a restabilization, a defensive shield that protects the inherited discourse
network against social and cultural mutations threatening to render her­
meneutics obsolete. Moreover, it is not the first such apotropaic maneuver:
already at the turn of the century Wilhelm Dilthey had erected a her­
meneutics of vital expressivity that succeeded in barring the forces of mo­
dernity— those forces Kittler describes in the second section of his book
(1900)— from the temple of the history of spirit (Geistesgeschichte). It is
no accident that Dilthey’s defensive action, as recent research has shown,
is accomplished by suppressing Nietzsche, a suppression that continues in
Gadamer and Habermas. Hermeneutics maintains its ghostly afterlife by
refusing to hear the verdict pronounced upon it by the solitary of Sils-
Maria.
Kittler’s genealogy of hermeneutics is intertwined, as I mentioned,
with a second strand of argumentation. One might call this the properly
theoretical dimension of Kittler’s book were it not for the fact that theory
here has so thoroughly passed over into practice that it is hardly distin­
guishable as a separate component. Nevertheless, one can abstract from
Kittler’s text certain theoretical presuppositions that serve to enable his
critical enterprise. These premises represent a remarkable condensation
of the theoretical work accomplished by the post-structuralists, especially
Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. Indeed, one of the most striking fea­
tures of Kittler’s book compared with even the finest American adapta­
tions of post-structuralist thought as well as with the work of the post­
structuralists themselves is the absence of partisanship and schoolishness
that characterizes its theoretical stance. It is as if the three variants of
post-structuralist thinking had shed here the contentiousness of their in­
dividual articulations and entered into the anonymity of an episteme. Kitt­
ler’s w ork cannot be classified as Derridean, Foucauldian, or Lacanian;
rather, it grounds itself on what might be termed the joint achievement of
Xll FOREWORD

the three. Perhaps this is the major methodological innovation of Kittler’s

book. By eliciting from the divergent elaborations of post-structuralist
thought a collective epistemological apparatus, Kittler establishes a posi­
tive research program for a post-hermeneutic criticism.
The first component of this program— the premise that determines its
overall perspective— might be termed the “ presupposition of exteriority.”
The task of Kittler’s critical investigation, in other words, is not to reab­
sorb the scattered utterances and inscriptions of the past into an in­
wardness that would endow them with meaning, be this inwardness the
reflexivity of the subject as in Romantic hermeneutics or the reflexivity of
language itself as in Gadamer. Rather, he practices what Foucault, in an
early essay on Maurice Blanchot, called the “ thinking of the outside,” the
thinking of language as a domain recalcitrant to internalization. Later in
his career, Foucault named this domain “ discourse” and set out to de­
velop a lexicon of exteriority— series, event, discontinuity, materiality—
with which to describe it. Kittler’s discourse analysis follows the Fou-
cauldian lead in that it seeks to delineate the apparatuses of power, stor­
age, transmission, training, reproduction, and so forth that make up the
conditions of factual discursive occurrences. The object of study is not
what is said or written but the fact— the brute and often brutal fact— that
it is said, that this and not rather something else is inscribed.
Inscription, in its contingent facticity and exteriority, is the irreducible
given of Kittler’s analysis, as the original German title of his book—
Aufschreibesysteme— makes evident. That title, a neologism invented by
Dr. Schreber, can be most literally translated as “ systems of writing
down” or “ notation systems.” It refers to a level of material deployment
that is prior to questions of meaning. At stake here are the constraints
that select an array of marks from the noisy reservoir of all possible writ­
ten constellations, paths and media of transmission, or mechanisms of
memory. A notation system or, as we have chosen to translate, a dis­
course network has the exterior character— the outsideness— of a tech­
nology. In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments with
which “ man” produces his meanings; they cannot be grounded in a philo­
sophical anthropology. Rather, they set the framework within which
something like “ meaning,” indeed, something like “ man,” become pos­
sible at all.
Writing (or arche-writing) as the condition of possibility of meta­
physical conceptuality: this, of course, is a major tenet of Derrida’s work.
In Lacan, the cognate notion is that our existence is a function of our
relation to the signifier. Kittler concretizes this post-structuralist theme
by situating his analysis not at the level of writing or the signifier in gen­
eral, but rather at the level of the historically specific machineries— scrip­
 FOREWORD Xlll

tural and otherwise— that in their various arrangements organize in­

formation processing. His post-hermeneutic criticism, in other words,
renders explicit and productive the tendency toward a radical historicism
that is in fact immanent to the work of all the post-structuralist thinkers.
To be sure, this historicism is no longer the narrative of a subject— a hero
of knowledge, labor, or liberty— in the manner of the master plots of mo­
dernity; nor is it a particularist anamnesis of the lived past such as the so-
called new historicism pursues. Like Foucault’s, Kittler’s historiography
has a systematic thrust, tends toward the delineation of types. These
types, denoted simply by the dates 1800 and 1900, are the discourse
networks— the linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and
bodies— that have orchestrated European culture for the past two hun­
dred years.
The presupposition of exteriority, I claimed, determines the overall
perspective of Kittler’s post-hermeneutic criticism. The field within which
that criticism operates, its domain of inquiry, is carved out by a second
major premise, which I shall call the “ presupposition of mediality.” Here
too Kittler develops insights that emerged within post-structuralism, for
instance, in the investigations of the cinematic apparatus carried out by
Christian M etz and Jean-Louis Baudry, investigations themselves strongly
influenced by the Lacanian notion of the unconscious as a machine. O f
course, the studies of Metz and Baudry are concerned with the medium of
film alone, and it is principally in the area of film studies that, in both
Europe and the United States, the concept of medium is broadly em­
ployed. The decisive methodological step undertaken by Kittler is to gen­
eralize the concept of medium, to apply it to all domains of cultural ex­
change. Whatever the historical field we are dealing with, in Kittler’s
view, we are dealing with media as determined by the technological possi­
bilities of the epoch in question. Mediality is the general condition within
which, under specific circumstances, something like “ poetry” or “ litera­
ture” can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism),
therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies.
This reclassification of literary criticism necessarily elicits a rethinking
of its object of study. First and most obviously, if literature is medially
constituted— that is, if it is a means for the processing, storage, and trans­
mission of data— then its character will change historically according to
the material and technical resources at its disposal. And it will likewise
change historically according to the alternative medial possibilities with
which it competes. In this regard, too, Kittler’s w ork leads to a radical
historicism that finally dissolves the universality of the concept of litera­
ture. Moreover, this dissolution does not bear merely on distant epochs
such as the medieval period, where the question of orality versus literacy
XIV FOREWORD

has long been a focus of research. It operates in our own historical back­
yard, severing, as Kittler shows, Romantic “ poetry” (produced under the
monopoly of print and universal alphabetization) from modern “ litera­
ture” (where writing enters into competition with the technical media of
phonograph and film). From this perspective, the typewriter, still a com­
ponent of our historical a priori, can be seen to initiate a fundamental
mutation in the mode of existence of language.
But the notion of mediality recasts our notion of literature in another
sense. As soon as we conceive of literature as medially instantiated, then
we must view its meaning as the product of a selection and rarefaction.
All media of transmission require a material channel, and the characteris­
tic of every material channel is that, beyond— and, as it were, against—
the information it carries, it produces noise and nonsense. What we call
literature, in other words, stands in an essential (and again, historically
variable) relation to a non-meaning, which it must exclude. It is defined
not by what it means, but by the difference between meaning and non­
meaning, information and noise, that its medial possibilities set into
place. This difference, obviously, is inaccessible to hermeneutics. It is the
privileged locus, however, of post-hermeneutic thought.
A criticism oriented by the presuppositions of exteriority and medi­
ality has no place for creative human subjects, allows no room to psy­
chology and its internalizations, refuses to anchor itself in a notion of
universal human being. This non-anthropological bent of Kittler’s work
will seem disturbing to many readers of the bookj who will rightly ask:
What is the interest that motivates this critical enterprise? Where are its
bonds of solidarity? An answer to these questions, I believe, is implied by
the third premise of post-hermeneutic criticism, the premise that defines
not its analytical perspective (exteriority), nor its domain of study (medi­
ality), but rather its point of reference and focus of concern. I call this
premise the “ presupposition of corporeality.”
The reason that the concept of corporeality defines the point of refer­
ence for post-hermeneutic criticism is clear. The body is the site upon
which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves, the
connecting link to which and from which our medial means of process­
ing, storage, and transmission run. Indeed, in its nervous system, the
body itself is a medial apparatus and an elaborate technology. But it is
also radically historical in the sense that it is shaped and reshaped by the
networks to which it is conjoined. The forerunner of this thinking in
terms of corporeality, of course, is Nietzsche, whose philosophy follows,
as he put it, the body’s guiding thread and whose aesthetics, as he often
insisted, is a physiology. Among the post-structuralists, Foucault cleaves
most closely to this aspect of the Nietzschean program, especially in his
 FOREWORD XV

work on the history of punishment and on sexuality. But in Lacan, too,

for whom subject formation takes place at the intersection of the body
and the signifier, and in Derrida, whose reading of Freud focuses on the
question of intra-psychic inscription, the theme of corporeality is insis­
tent. One widespread reading of post-structuralism claims that it elimi­
nates the concept of the subject. It would be more accurate to say that it
replaces that concept with that of the body, a transformation which dis­
perses (bodies are multiple), complexifies (bodies are layered systems),
and historicizes (bodies are finite and contingent products) subjectivity
rather than exchanging it for a simple absence.
The presupposition of corporeality has two major methodological
consequences for post-hermeneutic criticism. The first is that the question
of agency recedes into the background. The body is not first and foremost
an agent or actor, and in order to become one it must suffer a restriction
of its possibilities: the attribution of agency is a reduction of complexity.
As a result, culture is no longer viewed as a drama in which actors carry
out their various projects. Rather, the focus of analysis shifts to the pro­
cesses that make that drama possible: to the writing of the script, the re­
hearsals and memorizations, the orders that emanate from the directorial
authority. This (in my view) important conceptual shift can be formu­
lated somewhat less metaphorically as follows: post-hermeneutic criti­
cism replaces the foundational notion of praxis (the materialist version of
subjective agency) with that of training. Culture is just that: the regimen
that bodies pass through; the reduction of randomness, impulse, forget­
fulness; the domestication of an animal, as Nietzsche claimed, to the
point where it can make, and hold to, a promise.
The second methodological consequence of the presupposition of cor­
poreality is that the sufferance of the body, its essential pathos, becomes a
privileged locus for the analysis of discourse networks in terms of both
their systematic character and their effectivity. In other words, the point
at which discourse networks reveal most sharply their specific impress is
in the pathologies they produce. Just as post-hermeneutic criticism fo­
cuses on the difference between information and noise, sense and non­
sense, that defines every medium, so too it attends to the difference be­
tween normal behavior and aberrance (including madness) that lends
every cultural formation its identity. The victims who people Kittler’s
book— the Bettinas, the Giinderodes, the Nietzsches, the Schrebers—
speak the truth of the culture they suffer. Whoever would look for the
bonds of solidarity that orient Kittler’s investigation will find them here:
in its unmistakable compassion for the pathos of the body in pain. Her­
meneutics would appropriate this corporeal singularity in the construc­
tion of a meaning. Post-hermeneutic criticism, however, draws its respon­
xvi FOREWORD

sibility precisely from the unassimilable otherness of the singular and

mortal body. This is the ethical reason it stops making sense.

R om anticism
— Ach, ich bin des Treibens miide. Goethe

German literary historiography normally distinguishes between Clas­

sicism (Klassik) and Romanticism (Romantik) as two differently oriented
movements in literary and cultural history around the turn of the nine­
teenth century. The former term is more restricted in its temporal scope
and cast of players insofar as it refers principally to the joint endeavors of
Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and a few other fig­
ures during the last decade of the eighteenth century, whereas Roman­
ticism extends well into the nineteenth century and includes a large num­
ber of writers, from Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis,
Ludwig Tieck, and the philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich
Schelling to Joseph von Eichendorff, Clemens Brentano, and E. T. A.
Hoffmann, to mention only some of the major names. In Hegel, the two
movements are sometimes thought to converge, or find their dialectical
synthesis. Since the lives and works of most of the writers mentioned fall
within Goethe’s life span (174 9 -18 3 2 ), and since Goethe’s cultural es­
teem came to exceed that of all his contemporaries, the entire period is
often called the Age of Goethe.
In Anglo-American historiography, however, such distinctions are un­
known. The entire period in question is simply called Romanticism, and
Goethe, insofar as he is acknowledged, is viewed not merely as a contem­
porary, but as an affine poet and intellect to Wordsworth. For this reason,
the first part of Kittler’s book fits well with the scholarship produced in
the English-speaking world. Beneath the title “ 1800” it collectively treats
most of the Classical and Romantic writers mentioned as participating in
a common enterprise, or rather a common discourse network. It is a
study— although it doesn’t employ the term— of the German variant of
European Romanticism.
What is the view of Romanticism that emerges from Kittler’s post-
hermeneutic reading? To answer this question let us first imagine another
sort of reading, let us imagine, in fact, a book about Romanticism that
carries the title The Ideology o f Romanticism.. This book would be a
critical study of Romanticism in the sense that it doesn’t— as indeed Kitt­
ler’s book doesn’t— consider as fundamentally true the tenets of Roman­
tic writing. Rather, as its title indicates, it sets out to demonstrate that
these tenets involve an ideological mystification, that they cover up some­
thing, that they are delusions from which we must free ourselves. Accord­
 FOREWORD XVII

ing to our fictional book, the center of the Romantic ideology is the ex­
travagant view of art it propagates: the view that art is an autonomous
sphere in which, above and beyond the social and political clashes of his­
torical reality, something like a totalization of human experience occurs.
The Romantic doctrine of artistic autonomy, together with cognate no­
tions such as genius, organic form, creative imagination, is a flight from
reality, a denial of the social functions of art, a sublimated projection un­
aware of the rifted world from which it springs.
O f course, no such book exists that argues its case quite this simply,
but the caricature I have sketched can nevertheless be applied to a num­
ber of studies published during the seventies in Germany (when the ques­
tion of artistic autonomy was intensely discussed) and no doubt to certain
works produced within Anglo-American scholarship as well. The point
of my little fiction, however, was not to open a discussion of research on
Romanticism, but to provide a reasonably recognizable contrasting im­
age to the critical approach charted in Kittler’s reading. The first feature
that emerges in this regard is that Kittler nowhere employs the notion of
ideology. He dismisses the rather complicated apparatus that notion im­
plies: the opposition between reality and its distorted representation, the
theory of ideational sublimation, the distinction between mental and ma­
terial production, the notions of expression and projection. His theory of
Romanticism is not that of an alternate world that exists alongside the
authentic world of social forces and forms of organization, and ada­
mantly not that of a superstructural configuration produced by and yet
dissimulating the nature of its infrastructure. On the contrary, he takes
the Romantic texts he analyzes quite literally, he reads them as a certain
technology of the letter. There are no hidden truths to be uncovered here,
no depths beneath the texts that it is our task to appropriate. Everything
lies on the surface, precisely because this surface materiality of the texts
themselves— their inscription within a discourse network— is the site of
their historical efficacy.
Another way of marking this difference between traditional ideologi­
cal analysis and Kittler’s discourse analysis is to say that in the latter the
concept of the social function of literature undergoes a fundamental
transformation. As in the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann, the no­
tion of society itself is abandoned in favor of an investigation of interact­
ing subsystems endowed with their particular technologies and protocols.
This shift in focus from a totalizing concept of society to an analysis of
specific subsystems brings with it a tremendous gain in analytical preci­
sion and concreteness. Indeed, one might even claim that the old talk of
“ society” and “ social function” in literary criticism did no cognitive
work at all. “ Society” was simply the marker of correct political senti­
x v iii FOREWORD

ment, the membership card to a particular discursive fellowship. Be this

as it may, the decisive methodological point is clear enough: for Kittler
there is no longer any totalizing term— say, “ bourgeois society” — that
can serve as an explanans for individual and local cultural phenomena.
These are, quite positivistically, what they are: data selected and steered
by their commands and addresses. Kittler’s innovation is to replace the
traditional causal-expressive model of sociological explanation with a
cybernetic one.
Romanticism, then, is a certain technology of the letter. W hat limits
this technology and therefore renders it historically describable is the
documented existence of other technologies, most notably that of mod­
ernism, described in the second section of Kittler’s book. The differences
between the two discourse networks (1800/1900) provide the epistemo-
logical lever that enables each to be viewed from the outside. O f course,
this systemic comparison is burdened by the linearity of the medium
“ book” in which it is carried out: in order to see the various functions
described in the first part of the book as functions— that is, as variable
and substitutable— the reader should ideally have read the second part,
and vice versa. Kittler solves this problem in two ways. First, his descrip­
tion of the Romantic discourse network is interlaced with comparative
remarks that anticipate the findings of the modernism section. Secondly,
he develops his analysis of Romanticism through an implicit juxtaposi­
tion with an anterior system, which he calls the Republic of Scholars.
This prior discourse network does not receive a full and detailed char­
acterization, but its contours should be relatively familiar to the reader.
We are dealing here with the system of learning that developed in early
modern Europe in the wake of printing, a system in which knowledge
was defined in terms of authority and erudition, in which the doctrine of
rhetoric governed discursive production, in which patterns of communi­
cation followed the lines of social stratification, in which books circulated
in a process of limitless citation, variation, and translation, in which uni­
versities were not yet state institutions and the learned constituted a special
(often itinerant) class with unique privileges, and in which the concept of
literature embraced virtually all of what was written. The breakdown of
this system occurred gradually, beginning with Descartes’ rejection of eru­
dition and rhetoric and his simultaneous grounding of the truth of dis­
course in the inwardness of the ego in the Discourse on M ethod; and it
extended across the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century that are
generally referred to as the Enlightenment. Kittler, for economic reasons,
leaves this period of disintegration and reorganization out of his account
and draws his retrospective comparisons solely between Romanticism
and the old res publica litteraria.
 FOREWORD XIX

The strategy of periodization leads us to a second comparison, for the

book most similar to Kittler’s Discourse Networks, the paradigm of its
genre, is clearly Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences, The Order
o f Things. In that study, Foucault contrasts three successive epistemic sys­
tems within which European culture has thought the domains of life, la­
bor, and language. At the close of his study, Foucault speculates on the
end of the third of these epistemes (which he calls “ modern” ), an end that
coincides with the end of “ man” as the central figure of knowledge. What
I referred to above as the Enlightenment is discussed in detail by Foucault
under the rubric of the “ classical” episteme, a system of knowledge
preceded in his account by the “ Renaissance.” Thus, Kittler’s vaguely
sketched Republic of Scholars correlates to Foucault’s Renaissance and
classical epistemes, his “ 1800” to Foucault’s modern system, and his
“ 1900” to Foucault’s roughly sketched postmodernism. Where Foucault
develops a rigorous analysis of two distinct “ premodern” configurations
of knowledge, Kittler operates with a nebulous, but generally accessible
characterization of the older discursive formation. By contrast, where
Foucault leaves things in a speculative haze, Kittler unfolds a detailed in­
vestigation. For the latter, in other words, the “ postmodern” period (my
term of convenience, not Foucault’s or Kittler’s) is not a future about to
break in upon us, it has already occurred— during the thirty or so years
surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Foucault’s and Kittler’s
periodizations exactly coincide (and this overlap is legible in Kittler’s
references to Foucault’s work) with regard to the phase the former calls
“ modern” and the latter— without connotational baggage— “ 1800.”
This is likewise the phase traditional literary historiography refers to as
Romanticism.
Further comparisons of Foucault’s investigation of the Romantic pe­
riod with that developed in Kittler’s Discourse Networks would not be
very fruitful here. Their respective inquiries into this period evidently bear
on different objects and employ divergent modes of analysis. Foucault dis­
cusses cleanly circumscribed scientific disciplines; his orientation is prin­
cipally semantic in character. Kittler, taking “ literary” texts as his point
of departure, considers a wider array of discourses and pursues a more
pragmatic line of inquiry. But the general methodological tenet they hold
in common nevertheless deserves emphasis. In both Foucault and Kittler,
the Romantic period is delimited not genetically, not in terms of what it
came from and what it developed into, but rather systemically, that is to
say, in terms of differences that set it off from other historically describable
systems. Romanticism, in the work of both writers, is a model, a product
of analytic construction. Historiography here, even as it accounts for dia­
chrony, sheds its traditional dependence on narrative linearity.
XX FOREWORD

Beyond the matter of periodization, however, Foucault and Kittler

share a further strategy— a strategy for the presentation of their respec­
tive arguments— that can lead us back to the specifics of Kittler’s descrip­
tion of the Romantic technology of the letter. No reader of The Order o f
Things will forget the discussion of Las Meninas with which the book
opens. There Foucault uses the painting as a kind of paradigmatic scene
in terms of which to outline the various parameters of the classical epis­
teme. It is as if Velasquez’s masterpiece condensed all the elements and
relations that Foucault’s meticulous analysis of classical representation
later unfolds across some hundred pages. Kittler begins his discussion of
Romanticism with a similar primal scene, the “ Scholar’s Tragedy” that
opens Goethe’s Faust. In his construction, the drama played out across
Faust’s series of readings and writings— the Nostradamus manuscript,
the evocation of the Earth Spirit, the translation from the Gospel of John,
and finally Faust’s signing the pact with Mephistopheles— enacts nothing
other than the collapse of the Republic of Scholars and the emergence,
out of this obsolete system, of the Romantic discourse network. Perhaps
it was for the sake of this example that Kittler chose to use the older sys­
tem of erudition, the res publica litteraria, rather than the classical epis­
teme of transparent representation as the contrasting configuration to
Romanticism. For Goethe sets his drama in the distant past of humanism
and reformation; Faust is a contemporary of Luther, whose translation of
the Bible he repeats. As Kittler shows, however, this repetition occurs
with a difference: Luther’s interpretive dictum of “ sola scriptura” is dis­
placed by a hermeneutics that moves beyond, beneath, and before the
letter in order to seize the seminal act— the pure movement of origina­
tion— that produced the Word.
One of Kittler’s many allusions can reveal the profile of the strategy
organizing his reading of Faust. In the famous introductory sentences to
the Critique o f Fure Reason, Kant delimits his project by distinguish­
ing between “ beginnings” (chronological and empirical) and “ origins”
(achronological and transcendental). The latter, designated by the Ger­
man verb entspringen (“ originate” ), turn out to have their own ultimate
origin in the free act of auto-constitution that characterizes the transcen­
dental ego, the sheerly active Ich that becomes the central philosopheme
of post-Kantian Romantic thought. Faust arrives at this pure act prior to
all language and externality in his translation of John, when he finally
writes: “ In the beginning was the A ct.” Faust’s free translation, in other
words, replaces, as does Idealist philosophy in general, the divine institu­
tion of the Word and the Law with the freedom of originary, generative
subjectivity. The reason this complex is important to Kittler’s analysis
becomes clear when we consider the other element (which is also the
 FOREWORD xxi

element of the Other) in Kant’s enabling opposition. To designate begin­

nings in the domain of empiricity— a domain that from the transcenden­
tal perspective is secondary and derivative— Kant uses the verb anheben
(“ commence” or “ begin” ). Precisely this word, today somewhat anti­
quated and therefore conspicuous as an allusion, determines the predi­
cate of Kittler’s first sentence, which opens his reading of the Faustian
primal scene: “ Die Deutsche Dichtung hebt an mit einem Seufzer.”
(“ German Poetry begins with a sigh.” ) This citation of the Kantian verb
does not merely signal that the analysis to follow is empirical and histori­
cal as opposed to transcendental in orientation. That would merely con­
firm the Kantian opposition and leave intact the hermeneutics resting on
that opposition. What Kittler’s reading shows, rather, is that the scene in
which the origin is imagined is not an origin at all. The origin— the pris­
tine moment of auto-constitution— itself derives from a non-origin, from
a beginning that is intrinsically plural, empirical, and other. This begin­
ning is the system of forces and relations that make up the Romantic dis­
course network.
The Romantic reverie of the origin— one variant of which is her­
meneutics— is not a universal dream. It does not emerge from the in­
wardness of an unconscious whose actants (say Mother, Father, Child)
are everywhere the same. Nor does it play out the drama of an ahistorical
subject’s initiation into an equally ahistorical “ language” or regime of the
signifier. Rather, it is a function of historically specific discursive tech­
nologies. This is the point where Kittler’s reading of Romanticism departs
from psychoanalysis, with which it nevertheless shares several motifs. In
order to conceptualize this difference I would offer the following hy­
pothesis. While Kittler accepts the Lacanian dictum that the unconscious
is the discourse of the Other, he reads this formula from the standpoint of
Foucault. That is to say, the term discourse no longer refers, as in Lacan’s
rendering, to the linguistic and therefore abstract notion of extended
speech, but rather to positive modes of existence of language as shaped by
institutions of pedagogy, technical means of reproduction, storage and
transfer, available strategies of interpretation, and so on. Likewise the
Lacanian Other is for Kittler not the general and sovereign instance of the
one Law, but rather (and again, with Foucault) the network of forces and
resistances, commands and addresses, that constitute historically specific
configurations of domination. If the Romantic dream conforms in several
of its features to the psychoanalytic family scenario, then, it is merely be­
cause the psychoanalytic script itself was written in reference to this his­
torical field.
To see how this methodological fusion of Foucault and Lacan is worked
out concretely, let us return to the primal scene of Romantic writing.
x x ii FOREWORD

Faust’s translation of John, his hermeneutic reappropriation of the origin,

is a compensatory action. It fills a “ lack” or “ deficiency” (Goethe’s word
is Mangel), which itself is figured in liquid terms (“ thirst” ; a “ drying up”
of the “ stream” that “ springs forth” within his own “ breast” ). The desire,
the inner trouble and turbulence that propels his writing and that will
find its satisfaction and consolation (getrost) in the inscription of the ori-
ginary deed preceding all language, is nothing other than Faust’s separa­
tion from Nature herself. Romantic writing returns to the lost natural
origin by translating Nature’s wordless speech. Furthermore, as the se­
mantics of “ liquidity” reveals, this Nature is itself a figuration of the
Mother. Faust’s quest for the transcendental signified, the originary act
and meaning from which language springs, follows a beckoning maternal
imago. As Kittler points out, this logic of Faustian desire provides the link
to the “ Gretchen Tragedy” that in Faust I succeeds upon the “ Scholar’s
Tragedy” : Faust’s singular beloved Gretchen is Mother and Madonna in
one, another representative of the natural-maternal source. And Faust II
remains faithful to this paradigm, culminating as it does in the apotheosis
of the “ Eternal Feminine” that orients our striving. To begin with the
Faustian primal scene, as Kittler does, is to broach a reading of Romantic
desire and writing as fixation on the imago of the Mother.
Kittler’s elaboration of this reading across the first part of Discourse
Networks, however, does not abide within the confines of psychoanalytic
literary theory. He rejects a strictly psychoanalytic reading of the Roman­
tic complex on the grounds that it would be hermeneutic and tautological.
That is to say, insofar as it endeavors to return the text to its origin in the
phantasm of the mother-child dyad, and insofar as it conceives this phan­
tasm as the latent meaning of the text, the psychoanalytic interpretation
of Romanticism repeats the fundamental gesture of hermeneutics. M ore­
over, a hermeneutic reading of texts that institute hermeneutic reading (as
does the Faustian primal scene) is merely a tautological rewriting of those
texts. Psychoanalysis, with its insistence on the Mother as a primary in­
terpretive datum, remains immanent within the Romantic discourse sys­
tem, remains, let us say, applied Romanticism. Indeed, the claim that the
Mother is the origin repeats Romanticism’s own most insistent assevera­
tion. The methodological task, then, is to take up a position external to
psychoanalysis while accounting for the (semantic) pertinence of a psy­
choanalytic reading.
Such a step to the outside is accomplished through the above-mentioned
fusion of Lacan and Foucault. By bending the Lacanian concepts of dis­
course and Other in the direction of a Foucauldian “ thinking of the out­
side,” Kittler arrives at a thesis on Romanticism that avoids the trap of
hermeneutic tautology. With all due precautions regarding oversimplifi­
 FOREWORD x x iii

cation, I would formulate this thesis as follows: Romanticism is the dis­

cursive production of the Mother as the source of discursive production.
Before the phantasm of the Mother and before the attachment of desire to
this phantasm, in other words, there is a discursive network, and both
phantasm and desire are functions of and within this network. The Ro­
mantic (and psychoanalytic) origin derives from a beginning, from a net­
work of technologies themselves empirical, historical and other.
Romanticism is the discursive production of the Mother as the source
of discursive production. The demonstration and concretization of this
thesis in the first part of Discourse Networks takes us into regions en­
tirely foreign to traditional literary criticism. Kittler begins with the new
pedagogy of the late eighteenth century, a discourse that addressed itself
to mothers and thereby constituted the Mother as the agency of primary
socialization. It is the Mother who manages the child’s initiation into the
cultural techniques of reading and writing, and in doing so invests this
initiation with an aura of erotic pleasure. This pleasure clings especially
to the maternal voice, a kind of aural envelope that binds the mother-
child dyad in a pre-articulate unity. Hence the Romantic fascination for a
primary orality, for an inner voice, for a speechless transcendental speech.
But orality is not merely a dream, it is a technological reality: the reforms
initiated by the Bavarian school official Heinrich Stephani (1761 — 1850)
produced this orality as an effect of didactic procedures. Stephani’s
method of teaching children reading and writing by teaching them the
sounds the letters mark, however self-evident it may seem to us today,
was in fact a discursive event of major proportions. It produced not
merely a new conception, but a new and effective organization of lin­
guistic materiality. Romanticism, it has long been held, rests on a revolu­
tion. For Kittler this is also the case. The revolution in question, however,
is no longer the French one so dear to the hermeneutics of liberty, but
rather the revolution of the European alphabet that occurred with its orali-
zation around 1800.
Primary orality, the Mother, the self-presence of the origin: these are
not merely sublimations or philosophical hallucinations, they are discur­
sive facts, nodal points in a positive and empirical discursive network,
functions in a system of relays and commands that has no center or ori­
gin. As such they do not disguise a reality that is anterior to them and
from which they would spring; they produce reality by linking bodies
(e.g., the eyes and ears and hands of children) to the letter and to in­
stances of power. Soon this system develops its own theory (a linguistics
of the root and the verb), its own imaginary (Poetry as translation of the
language of nature), its own protocols of reading (the Romantic her­
meneutics of the signified). It realizes itself across institutional reforms
x x iv FOREWORD

(from primary schools to university lecture halls), it is codified in laws

(the Universal Prussian Law of 1794 mandates both authorial copyright
and maternal breast feeding), it shapes careers (as the new genre of the
Bildungsroman reveals). These aspects of the Romantic discourse net­
work are described in great detail in Kittler’s study: the ABC books that
lead children from primal sounds (ma) to primal signifieds {Mama), the
university reforms that institute Faustian hermeneutics, and especially the
literary texts at once programmed by the discourse network in which
they are written and programming their readers as subjects of that dis­
course. All of these subsystems, in their specific dispersion and paths of
connection, are what is meant by the thesis: Romanticism is the discur­
sive production of the Mother as the source of discourse.
I have stressed the “ maternal” strand in Kittler’s reading of Roman­
ticism in order to highlight the specifics of his method. As the reader of
Discourse Networks will soon discover, however, the thesis I have sum­
marized is in fact only one component in a much more complicated con­
struction. Romanticism is also the institutionalization of authorship, the
emergence of a pragmatics of universal poetic address, the monopoly of
writing as a medium for the storage and transfer of kinaesthetic data. In
particular, my discussion has ignored the commands so central to Kittler’s
reading, that area in which his Foucauldian reworking of the Lacanian
Other assumes prominence. After all, Faust’s translation is guided not
only by his yearning for the Mother, but also by the poodle present in his
chamber. This poodle soon reveals himself as Mephistopheles, the spirit
(Geist) with whom Faust joins in the infernal pact that determines the
remainder of the drama. Starting from this pact, and in particular from
the signature that makes it binding, Kittler unfolds an analysis of the im­
peratives and obligations that the discourse network of 1800 dispenses.
The Romantic subject is not merely a subject tethered to the imago of the
Mother, it is a subject functioning within a specific constellation of
powers. It is a bureaucratic subject, a civil servant (state-employed teacher,
university professor, jurist, secretary, etc.), and, as such, a subject en­
gaged in particular ways with the production and interpretation of writ­
ten material. Romanticism is the discursive production of the Mother as
the source of discursive production, to be sure; but it is also the discursive
production and distribution of bureaucratic governance. Furthermore,
these two aspects, even as they mark off exclusive realms, are fully soli­
dary with one another and mutually sustaining. Romanticism is a dis­
course network organized as a productive tension between Mother and
State.
Everything begins with Goethe’s Faust, and there too everything ends.
Gretchen, pressed into service as maternal imago, murders her mother
 FOREWORD XXV

and child. This crime (against motherhood) earns her madness and, ac­
cording to the judgment of Mephistopheles, who speaks for the State,
execution. Faust, who had found in her the source of his desire and aspi­
rations, goes on to a magical invocation of classical Greece and a philo­
logical-poetic marriage to Helen of Troy. In Kittler’s reading, this is not a
fiction, but a program. His study of Romanticism closes with the case of
Karoline von Giinderode, the beloved of the classical philologist Friedrich
Creuzer. For Creuzer, she was the inner voice that guided his researches,
the secret addressee of his translations from the classical sources. Pressed
into service as maternal imago— a discursive impress that bars her from
speech— Karoline drowns herself in the Rhine. The Rhine, it is often said,
is the most Romantic of German rivers.

M odernism
Sehen Sie, mein Herr, ein Komma! Holderlin

Styles are necessarily various. There is, as Derrida showed in his study
of Nietzsche {Spurs), no one style, but inevitably many. Derived from the
notion of stylus, or writing instrument, the concept of style designates
a labor of differential inscription that is both prior and irreducible to
meaning.
This point marks a difficulty for the English reader of Discourse N et­
works. In order to register stylistic effects, a reader must be in a position
to note differences from other styles. For the German reader of Kittler’s
book this is an easy task. His or her reading eye and inner ear have been
trained to follow the syntactic-rhetorical ductus of German intellectual
writing. Such writing is characterizable (I am simplifying, of course) as
Hegelian suada: elaborate grammatical constructions, antithetical peri­
ods, conceptual reversals, nominalized adjectives— in short, dialectical
resolutions. Above all, what distinguishes this style (which both Schopen­
hauer and Nietzsche derided in vain) is a certain superior distance from
the language of everyday life. The brevity and choppiness of mundane
talk, as well as its factual references and concreteness, are dissolved in a
nimbus of generality. From Dryden to the present, by contrast, English
prose has maintained a closeness to the patois of mundane social inter­
course. The English intellectual style is inflected more by conversational
affability than by the constraints of philosophical abstraction; its home is
the practical sphere of commerce rather than the isolated study. For this
reason, the difference that Kittler’s style makes is lost in translation. His
prose is written against the language of dialectical resolution. It is charac­
terized by syntactic concision, by a certain “ hardness” and concreteness
of diction; it has the literalness sometimes of “ lower” (or informal) collo­
XXvi FOREWORD

quial exchange, sometimes of the technical language of engineers; its sen­

tences often attain the compactness of a telegram message, or a command.
Rendered in English, this stylistic profile necessarily loses its sharpness
and tends to disappear in a sea of ordinary talk.
What won’t disappear, however, is the stylization of the book as a
whole, its precision and symmetry. Two sections, entitled only by dates.
Two epigraphs, both mathematical equations. (The first of these, by the
way, can be interpreted as an algorithm of “ growth,” the movement of
progressive augmentation that characterizes the discourse network of
1800. The second formalizes the pulse of differential alternation that per­
meates the modernist discourse network.) Part I begins with a primal
writing scene, Faust in his study destroying the discourse system of the
Republic of Scholars and inventing Romantic hermeneutics. Part II like­
wise opens with a primal writing scene, but this time it is Nietzsche with
pen (and later typewriter) in hand, and this time it is the Romantic dis­
course network that crashes to the ground in order to make room for the
intransitive scriptural practice of modernism. At the same time, the Faust­
ian opening of Part I points forward to the conclusion of the entire book,
the “ systematic reversal” of Romantic writing in Valery’s redaction of
Goethe, ‘My Faust.’ With regard to their internal articulation, the two
parts are also strictly correlated: in both cases an introit (Faust versus
Nietzsche) followed by three large, symmetrically divided subsections. In
short, the design of the book is so deliberate as to suggest mathematical
formalization or musical seriality. The musical analogy holds for Kittler’s
style of argumentation as well, which deploys across its linearity a system
of recurring leitmotifs (e.g., the sigh “ oh” [German “ ach” ]). Discourse
Networks is a constructivist assemblage, a model for a chess game, a ma­
chine diagram. This compositional strategy suits well the book’s post-
hermeneutic critical practice.
And it suits equally well Kittler’s allegiance with modernism, an alle­
giance that derives not from uncritical advocacy, but rather from the
sober recognition that modernism— the discourse network of 1900— has
defined the state of the art(s) as it exists today. What Kittler’s analysis of
modernism reveals, in other words, is that the thirty or so years that re­
volve around the axis 1900 have decisively altered our epistemological
situation (perhaps by rendering it post-epistemological); that intellectual
work today, in its most advanced inquiries, has its roots in the modernist
transformation of discourse; that we are postmodern in the sense that the
modernist intervention is irrevocable. This also is the indirect lesson of
post-structuralism: Foucault develops his genealogical method through
a reading of Nietzsche, Derrida his theory of arche-writing through a
reading of Saussure, and Lacan his version of psychoanalysis through a
 FOREWORD XXV11

reading— an endless reading— of Freud. Nietzsche, Saussure, and Freud

all play a significant role in Kittler’s discussion of modernism as well, but
not (and this is decisive) as authors and authorities. In Discourse N et­
works the three figures of the Modernist theoretical triumvirate lose their
individuality and are reabsorbed into a circumambient system. Our his­
toriography of post-structuralism has been up till now mere intellectual
history, a story of thinkers and their ideas. Kittler’s book is the first to
break with this antiquated paradigm and to reveal the discursive begin­
nings of our contemporaneity.
Our contemporaneity: the possessive here is meant to refer to Anglo-
American readers of the 1990’s, who will find in the modernism section
of Kittler’s book much more that is recognizably their “ own” than in the
1800 portion. The first part of the book, I said, is a study of the German
variant of European Romanticism, and with few exceptions the textual
examples there come from the German-speaking lands. This means that a
considerable labor of translation and transposition will be required of the
reader who wants to think through, for instance, the implications of Kitt­
ler’s investigation for English Romanticism. How does the English his­
tory of pedagogy compare with the German developments described by
Kittler? Does the somewhat earlier establishment of copyright in England
inflect the concept of authorship differently than in Germany? Is there an
English process analogous to the German statification of the university?
O f course, research on English Romanticism has long stressed German
influences (especially with regard to Coleridge). Perhaps Kittler’s book
will incite a rereading of those borrowings and adaptations in terms of
specific discursive conditions. Perhaps too it will prompt the so-called
new historicists, who are increasingly turning to Romanticism after
having plowed the fields of Renaissance and eighteenth-century research,
to ask themselves what their object of study actually is.
The fact that the modernism section of Discourse Networks is more
international in its range than the first section derives from the nature (or
non-nature) of the modernist discourse network it describes. At one point
Kittler cites the dissertation of the postal inspector and expressionist poet
August Stramm on the “ empirical law of the production of correspon­
dence according to which every letter sent from one country to a second
elicits a similar mailing from the second to the first.” Stramm is writing
about the economy of the world postal system, which, by the beginning
of the twentieth century, had a real institutional existence, with codified
agreements bearing, for example, on rate equivalences. In other words,
the exponential explosion and acceleration of international communica­
tion Stramm’s remark documents is a defining historical feature of mod­
ernist discourse. (In Ulysse grammaphone, a book written after D is­
x x v iii FOREWORD

course Networks and, as it were, in its wake, Derrida demonstrates the

effects of this discursive fact on Joyce’s novel.) It is no accident, then, that
Kittler’s investigation of modernism ranges across national borders, that
its onomastic repertoire includes Mallarme, Villiers de PIsle-Adam, and
Proust in addition to Nietzsche, Benn, and Kafka; Edison, James, and Stein
in addition to Lumiere, Bergson, and Salome; Rilke along with Valery.
Communication in Romanticism, of course, also had its international as­
pect, but it was not technically and institutionally international in the
same way as with modernism: its framework remained that defined by
the nation state. Hence the Romantic cultivation of national literary tra­
dition; hence the modernist inmixing of traditions and languages (e.g., in
Pound). The general point here is not unimportant for comparatist studies:
the reference of the term international is a function of historically variable
technologies of postal transport. As Goethe already recognized, “ world
literature” (Weltliteratur, the late Goethean coinage often thought to be
the forerunner of “ comparative literature” ) has its condition of possi­
bility in Verkehr, in commerce, exchange, communication.
The noise of all those letters and telegrams noted by Stramm is the
same noise K., the protagonist-letter of Kafka’s novel, hears in the tele­
phone lines when he attempts to call the castle. It is (technically, not
metaphorically speaking) the noise of modernism. Romantic discourse
had its “ origin” in the pure inwardness of the maternal voice, a voice cre­
ated by pedagogical reforms such as Stephani’s oralization of the alpha­
bet. The modernist exchange of letters likewise has its technical coupling
between body and signifier, a coupling produced not by philanthropic
pedagogues, but by the science of psychophysics (which soon found its
pedagogical application). Hermann Ebbinghaus’s memory experiments
of the 1880’s, in which the new discipline emerges, mark, in Kittler’s
analysis, a discursive event, a mutation of linguistic materiality. Readers
of Discourse Networks will encounter here perhaps the most indigestible
aspect of Kittler’s argument, insofar as the inherited conception of liter­
ary modernism has systematically excluded a serious engagement with
the historical accomplishments of positivism. Kittler’s demonstration,
however, is so compelling that one is led to suspect that the traditional
exclusion (and even scapegoating) of positivism was in fact an attempt to
save Romantic-hermeneutic discourse from the cultural forces that were
dismantling it. What better way to do this than by making modernism
itself a matter of ideas and worldviews? I have already mentioned Dilthey’s
suppression of Nietzsche in this connection, of the Nietzsche, that is, who
devoted the little reading time his near-blindness allowed him to treatises
in physiology and whose theory of violent memory inscription becomes,
as Kittler shows, an experimental reality in the work of Ebbinghaus. The
 FOREWORD x x ix

“ literary” or “ humanist” reading of Freud, which inevitably accentuates

his transcendence of biologism, is likewise relevant here. Psychoanalysis
has its conditions of possibility in the discursive field opened up in psycho­
physics. The unified and unifying Geist of Hegel has long been replaced
by the functional multiplicity of Broca’s brain and maintains its ghostly
afterlife only in hermeneutic philosophy and literary criticism.
Ebbinghaus’s experiment, in its basic outlines, is quite simple. In order
to measure memory he lets pass before his eye a series of nonsense syl­
lables and counts the number of passes required for the memorization of
combinations of these syllables. In this procedure Kittler discloses the
complexity of a discursive beginning. There is first of all the body of the
experimental subject: stripped of the cultural equipment of subjectivity, it
has become a physiological surface upon which the syllables— once,
twice, or several times— are inscribed. Secondly, there is the source from
which the syllables emerge: not books, not the maternal voice, but a
mechanism for the production of random configurations. Having passed
across Ebbinghaus’s field of vision, having engendered there their instan­
taneous shocks, these syllables return to a storage mechanism of similar
construction. Finally, there is the form of language the system employs, a
language without syntactic coherence or semantic content, mere letters in
their materiality and in the differential pulse of their alternation. The ex­
periment, in short, institutes language as writing, a system of inscribed
differences emerging as a selection from a reservoir of nonsense, etching
their differences on the body’s surface, and returning to the murmur of
the source. The situation of Postal Inspector Stramm is no different: the
noise of letters and telegrams out of which some few pass across his desk
in order to be reabsorbed in the turbulent sea of communication from
which they had come. And neither the postal nor the experimental ob­
server is there to interpret, but merely to count and quantify, to measure
either for economic or scientific purposes, the differential values of the
selections that confront him. According to Nietzsche, qualities are in fact
quantitative differences of force. This is the view that Ebbinghaus’s ex­
periment proves.
Psychophysics takes language to a point where it stops making sense,
or rather, it shows that all sense making has its frontiers (and therefore its
definition) in domains of nonsense and in automatized operations that no
longer belong to a subjective authority. On the margins of language use
there proliferate a host of breakdowns: dyslexias, aphasias, agraphisms,
asymbolisms; the strict division between normal and pathological is
transformed into a gradient of standards; intentional agency is dispersed
in a system of organic and nervous functions. Speech no longer has its
norm in the meaningful utterance of an authorial subject. It has become a
XXX FOREWORD

selection and rarefaction embodying what cyberneticians call the order-

from-noise principle. In short, the modernist discourse network unravels
language, reduces its wholeness and centeredness to a tangle of nervous,
sensory-motor threads, to a scatter of differential marks.
The precondition of this unweaving is the minimal experimental con­
dition of psychophysics: that writing, as writing, be written down. In
order for this detachment of writing from subjectivity to occur, however,
inscription had to become mechanized, and this happens with the type­
writer. The typewriter, Heidegger noted, alters our relationship to being:
it takes language away from the hand, which— and here Heidegger is
faithful, as so often, to Aristotle— distinguishes “ man.” Kittler, without
sharing the philosopher’s nostalgia, renders this Heideggerian intuition
historically concrete. The typewriter frees writing from the control of the
eye and of consciousness; it institutes spacing as the precondition of dif­
ferentiation; it stores a reservoir of signifiers that strike the page much as
Ebbinghaus’s syllables strike the body’s sensory surface. Nietzsche’s no­
tion of moral inscription is modeled on the typewriter, one of the earliest
versions of which he owned and used. Saussure’s linguistics, in Derrida’s
reading a linguistics of arche-writing, has its technological correlate in
the typewriter. Freud’s psychic apparatus, as he called it, is a writing ma­
chine. Moreover, as Kittler shows, the literacy production of the era is no
less dependent, in conception and practice, on the new technology of the
letter. Mallarme calls for the disappearance of the elocutionary subject
and derives poetry from the 26 letters of the alphabet and the spaces
between them. Kafka’s instruments of torture are writing machines. Mor-
genstern develops a poetics of autonomous punctuation. Like psycho­
physics (for which it is a technological precondition as well), the type­
writer alters the status of discourse and repositions literature, science,
and theory. The end of “ man” postulated by Foucault is brought on by a
mechanism that writes writing.
One way of formulating the discursive effect of psychophysics and the
typewriter is to say that only with them does language become percep­
tible as a medium. But it is not the medial technology of the typewriter
alone that makes this perception possible. The development of this tech­
nology around 1900 is co-emergent with other medial technologies, in
particular the gramophone and film, both of which figure centrally in the
Modernism section of Discourse Networks. Note the structural simi­
larity of the three: just as the typewriter allows for the processing of scrip­
tural differences that pass beneath the threshold of consciousness, so too
film records data of the visual unconscious (as Benjamin noted) in dis­
crete frames that cannot themselves be perceived in the film image; and
 FOREWORD XXXi

so too the gramophone records and renders reproducible differences of

vibrational frequency that escape conscious audition. The technological
dissolution of the noematic world (the world of intentionality) in each of
the three media has its counterpart, moreover, in the distribution of the
possibilities of information processing among them. Kittler’s thesis in this
regard is especially provocative. In his view, the three Lacanian regis­
ters— the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real— are effects of medial
specialization. Writing conveys the differences of the symbolic order;
film, with its simulation of visual presence, transmits imaginary contents;
and the phonograph allows for the technical recording of the real. The
writers who around 1900 transformed literature into an intransitive
practice of writing (quite literally “ literature” ) had systematic rather than
thematic reasons for doing so. In the modernist landscape of medial spe­
cialization, writing is one medium among others, with its own limitations
and possibilities, and the writer a media specialist, a professional of the
letter.
Kittler’s argument regarding the medial constellation of modernism
deserves accentuation. The emergence of technological media around
1900 represents a decisive historical and discursive caesura that alters the
structure, placement, and function of cultural production. The only critic
or theoretician I know who views the historical significance of the media
in a similarly radical way is Walter Benjamin. In his brief and rightfully
famous essay, “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc­
tion,” Benjamin argues that modernism is the destruction of aura, that is,
of the sacral distance and otherness of the art w ork stemming from its
singularity. With film, a mode of artistic creation comes into being that,
from the beginning, is fashioned as reproducible. The film knows no au­
thentic singular instance, has no original, and for this reason it marks the
historical emancipation of art from its mythic-religious roots.
Readers familiar with Benjamin’s essay (and with his Baudelaire studies
that deal with related issues) will recognize the similarities between his
work and Kittler’s Discourse Networks. To cite merely two examples:
both critics strongly emphasize the importance of “ shocks,” of unfore­
seeable and instantaneous perturbations, as a key component of experi­
ence in modernism; both stress the connection between film, the distracted
form of attention it elicits, and the “ popularity” or “ mass-oriented” nature
of its contents. O f course, a detailed comparison between Benjamin and
Kittler would have to distinguish these points of similarity more sharply
(by asking, for example, what the specific source of the “ shocks” in each
case is) and develop others as well (e.g., the link in both writers between
media and the unconscious). I shall leave this task to the reader, however,
X X xii FOREWORD

and emphasize here merely one major difference between Benjamin and
Kittler that strikes me as methodologically crucial. There is in Kittler’s
analysis of the emergence and significance of technical media no sense of an
overriding narrative that event would instantiate. Like Benjamin, Kittler
sees the modernist intervention as a break or rupture, but he refuses to
invest this transformation with the historico-philosophical meaning of
“ emancipation.” Benjamin’s end-of-art thesis, in other words, rests on a
diegetic scaffold that remains essentially Hegelian. Kittler is an evolu­
tionist in the sense that he attributes no a priori directionality to historical
change. The medialization of modernist discourse is a contingent event, an
historical clinamen, not the realization of a project unfolding across the
centuries.
In my discussion of the Romanticism section of Discourse Networks, I
focused on the thesis that Romanticism is the discursive production of the
Mother as the source of discursive production. Here too I have restricted
my remarks to a single thread of Kittler’s construction, the question of
linguistic materiality and mediality. Much more than this, however, awaits
the reader: for example, a discussion of the emergence of singularity
(contra Benjamin) as a recordable datum, of the symmetrical and com­
petitive positions of psychoanalysis and literature within the modernist
discourse network, of the impossibility of translation and the constraints
of medial transposition. As I mentioned, the Las Meninas of Kittler’s con­
struction is the Nietzschean writing scene that opens the 1900 section
and which leads into a reading of Nietzsche’s entire work as a paradigm
of modernism.
I shall let these aspects of Kittler’s analysis stand without commentary
in order to mention briefly one final point. The discursive production of
the Mother in Romantic discourse subsumed women in the prototype of
the one Woman, the infinitely productive silence that is the source and
ideal recipient of male poetic speech. One could speak here of a mono-
sexualization of gender: the one Woman— the Mother— is essentially a
narcissistic prop for male identity formation. The modernist discourse
network institutes a linguistic materiality no longer grounded in the ma­
ternal voice and thereby makes possible what Romantic discourse could
only acknowledge as an empirical deficiency: the plurality of women.
Modernism, in other words, fundamentally restructures the triangular
relation among men, women, and language, and therefore the relations
between women and men. Especially revealing in this regard is Kittler’s
discussion of the emergence of the secretary/typist, of the medial media­
tion of writers’ amorous attachments, of the modernist rediscovery of
premodern women writers, of the role of women in psychoanalysis. But
perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his analysis is this: whereas the Ro­
 FOREWORD x x x iii

mantic discourse network monosexualizes gender, modernist discourse

discloses a sexual difference that resists homogenization. The relation be­
tween the sexes, Nietzsche wrote, is essentially agonistic. This agon,
in Kittler’s view, is an effect of the discourse network that defines our
contemporaneity.
Berlin
September 1989
 I

1800

e'* = cos x + i sin x Leonhard Euler

 The Scholar’s Tragedy:
Prelude in the Theater

German Poetry begins with a sigh.

Habe nun, ach! Philosophic,

Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit hei£>em Bemiihn.

Have, oh! studied philosophy,

Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through— 1

If this is not the sigh of a nameless self— no self appears in the sentence—
it is certainly not the sigh of any known author. What moves through the
cadence of old German Knittel-verse is a pure soul. The verses of the
other German Classical Poet confirm this: the sigh “ oh!” [acb\] is the sign
of the unique entity (the soul) that, if it were to utter another signifier
or (because signifiers exist only in the plural) any signifier whatsoever,
would immediately become its own sigh of self-lament; for then it would
have ceased to be soul and would have become “ Language” instead. (The
title of Schiller’s distich is unambiguous.)

Warum kann der lebendige Geist dem Geist nicht erscheinen?

Spricht die Seele, so spricht, ach! schon die Seele nicht mehr.

Why cannot the living Spirit manifest itself to the Spirit?

Once the soul speaks, then, oh!, it is no longer the soul that
speaks.2
4 i8 o o

Where speaking takes place, there the Other of the soul begins: academic
titles and pedagogical deceit.
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heifie Magister, heifie Doktor gar,
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schuler an der Nase herum.

And here I am, for all my lore,

The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
And up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose. (358 —63)

Thus the university discourse of all four faculties brings forth the
sigh— in the historical formation known as the res publica litteraria. The
Republic of Scholars systematically prevents the fortunate occurrence
that a living Spirit could manifest itself to another Spirit. It unilaterally
instructs all its members— these “ doctors, and teachers, and scribes, and
Christers” (or, more exactly, physicians, philosophers, jurists, and theo­
logians) to go “ rummaging in phrases,” for as long as life or reading lasts,
in a heap of books “ gnawed by worms, covered with dust” (“ Doktoren,
Magister, Schreiber und Pfaffen,” 367; “ in Worten kramen,” 385; “ Den
Wiirme nagen, Staub bedeckt,” 403). Faust, M .A .— indeed, Ph.D. to
boot— sits in a library without new acquisitions, reads, makes extracts,
and writes commentaries, in order then to dictate to his students in lec­
ture what old books have dictated to him. The Republic of Scholars is
endless circulation, a discourse network without producers or consum­
ers, which simply heaves words around. Faust’s raid on his stacks locates
no one who could be the writer, creator, or author of a book— no one,
then, who could understand, digest, or process any of these books. In a
word: the old Republic of Scholars cheats Man of Man.
German Poetry thus begins with the Faustian experiment of trying to
insert Man into the empty slots of an obsolete discourse network.
The first test in the series introduces into the anonymous junk heap of
books the product of an author with a name.
Und dies geheimnisvolle Buch
Von Nostradamus’ eigner Hand,
1st es dir nicht Geleit genug?
Erkennest dann der Sterne Lauf,
Und wenn Natur dich unterweist,
Dann geht die Seelenkraft dir auf,
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY 5

Wie spricht ein Geist zum andern Geist.

Umsonst, dafi trocknes Sinnen hier
Die heil’gen Zeichen dir erklart:
Ihr schwebt, ihr Geister neben mir;
Antwortet mir, wenn ihr mich hort!

And this book full of mystery,

Written in Nostradamus’ hand—
Is it not ample company?
Stars’ orbits you will know; and bold,
You learn what nature has to teach;
Your soul is freed, and you behold
The spirits’ words, the spirits’ speech.
Though dry reflection might expound
These holy symbols, it is dreary:
You float, oh spirits, all around;
Respond to me, if you can hear me. (419—29)

To take a book by an author— his autograph manuscript, moreover— out

of the dusty pile is to put a stop to the endless circulation of words.
Among the copies of copies that fill the libraries of scholars, the author
Nostradamus (who, not accidentally, is also a magician) manifests him­
self in the inimitable character of his manuscript. His imaginary presence
makes scholarly brooding on signs as superfluous as the voice does writ­
ing. Everything takes its course as if his book were no longer a book. De­
scribed or designated signs are supposed to be able to hear the reader,
and thus a virtual orality emerges. What the distich identifies as impos­
sible happens: a Spirit manifests itself to another (as Schiller writes) or (as
Faust says) speaks. Insofar as impossibility never ceases not to write it­
self,3 this invocation of Nostradamus, through which something ceases
not to write itself in order to assume instead the name of Spirit or Soul, is
the contingency that since then has been called German classical literature.

If only the author Nostradamus had not written. “ Was it a God that
wrote these signs?” (“ War es ein Gott, der diese Zeichen schrieb,” 434) is
Faust’s first ecstatic question as he glimpses the symbol of the macro­
cosmos among the magic ideograms. But this supposed G od— a magni­
fied image of the authorship— manifests himself only for an instant, in
the apprehension of his act of writing. Once what has been written has
been seen and is known, authors withdraw behind their signs like God
behind his Creation. The signs lead the reader, to whom they designate
pure “ creative Nature” (“ Die wirkende Natur,” 441) away from the
producer to the product. Consequently, the macrocosmos ideogram rep­
resents how “ all weaves itself into the whole” (“ Wie alles sich zum
Ganzen webt,” 447) and thus how the designated cosmos has the texture
6 i8 o o

of the sign that designates it. In this “ continuum of representation and

being,” this “ being as expressed in the presence of representation,” there
is no absence and no gap4 except that the divine act of writing and creat­
ing is lacking. Hence Faust the interpreter of signs is once more robbed of
what his experiment meant to introduce into the configuration of early
modern knowledge: Man standing behind and above all bookish rubbish.
With a return of the primordial sigh, a failed experiment breaks off.
“ What a spectacle!, but oh!, only a spectacle!” (“ Welch Schauspiel! Aber,
ach, ein Schauspiel nur!” 454).
The second test takes the opposite path: the consuming reader, rather
than a productive author, is introduced as Man into the heap of books.
For once, Faust does not just glimpse and gaze at signs. The first un-
performable stage direction in European theatrical history declares that
“ he seizes the book and mysteriously pronounces the sign of the spirit”
(at 481). “ Mysteriously” indeed. This event, speaking out loud, is pos­
sible for books composed of letters, but not for a collection of magic
ideograms, especially when the ideograms combine unsayable figures and
equally unsayable Hebrew letters. Magical signs exist to be copied under
the midnight moon, not to be spoken out loud. But the Faustian experi­
ment consists in turning the semiological treasury of signifiers into the
oral reserves of a reader.
Therefore the designated Earth Spirit becomes a voice, which calls
both itself and Faust voices as well:

Du flehst eratmend,' mich zu schaun,

Meine Stimme zu horen, mein Antlitz zu sehn. . . .
Wo bist du, Faust, des Stimme mir erklang?

You have implored me to appear,

M ake known my voice, reveal my face; . . .
Where are you, Faust, whose voice pierced my domain? (486—87,
494)

One who has become a vocalizing reader, and hence breath, also experi­
ences written signs as the breath of a mouth. Where the Republic of
Scholars knew only pre-given externalities, a virtual and supplementary
sensuality emerges. Faust no longer transforms the sign of a sign into the
representation of an absent author (as in the case of the macrocosmos)
but into its effect on him, the reader.
Wie anders wirkt dies Zeichen auf mich ein!
Du, Geist der Erde, bist mir naher;
Schon fiihl’ ich meine Krafte hoher,
Schon gluh’ ich wie von neuem Wein. . . .
Ich fiihl’s, du schwebst um mich, erflehter Geist.
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY 7

H ow different is the power of this sign!

You, spirit of the earth, seem close to mine:
I look and feel my powers growing,
As if I’d drunk new wine I’m glowing. . . .
I feel you near me, spirit I implored. (460—63, 475)

It is no longer a question of the author’s sacred power to create signs, but

rather of the magic power of signs to liberate sensual and intoxicating
powers in the reader once the signs have disappeared into the fluid me­
dium of their signified— a voice. The chain of these forces climaxes in a
moment of consumption: the reader Faust, whose mouth can drink signs-
become-oral like young wine, replaces the author Nostradamus. This
fulfills hiswish no longer to experience mere spectacles butrather by
an act of reading to suck on “ breasts” or “ Wells that sustain alllife”
(“ Quelien alles Lebens,” 456)— an elementary and infantile form of con­
sumption.
But one cannot invoke the Mother by her metaphors with impunity.
Faust’s drinking of signs is an ecstasy and production that exceeds his
powers. Instead of remaining master of the conjured sign, the reader dis­
appears into the weave or textum of the signified. The Earth Spirit, who
weaves “ at the roaring loom of the ages” (“ am sausenden Webstuhl
der Zeit,” 508) literally on the text of history, reduces Faust again to
nothingness.

These two failed experiments delimit the borders within which the
third takes place. The third test concerns neither the production of a for­
eign author, who disappears behind the representative signs, nor the con­
sumption of signs to the point of intoxication, then drowning in the in­
exhaustible text. Faust gives up wanting to liquefy archaic ideograms
with his alphabetical orality. First, he opens a book composed of quite
ordinary Greek letters, which has always been there to be read. The book
has authors with names, but Faust does not name them. Furthermore, the
book has a reader, Faust himself, but this reader remains forgotten and is
bypassed because he is involved only as Man. The third test puts in the
place of the productive author and the consuming reader a single au­
thority, which thus represents the enthroning of Man. A new return of the
primordial sign finally leads to success.
Aber ach! schon fuhl’ ich, bei dem besten Willen,
Befriedigung nicht mehr aus dem Busen quillen.
Aber warum mufi der Strom so bald versiegen,
Und wir wieder im Durste liegen?
Davon hab’ ich so viel Erfahrung.
Doch dieser Mangel lafit sich ersetzen,
Wir lernen das Uberirdische schatzen,
8 i8 o o

Wir sehnen uns nach Offenbarung,

Die nirgends wiird’ger und schoner brennt
Als in dem Neuen Testament.
Mich drangt’s, den Grundtext aufzuschlagen,
M it redlichem Gefiihl einmal
Das heilige Original
In mein geliebtes Deutsch zu iibertragen.

But oh! Even now, however, though I tried my best,

Contentment flows no longer through my breast.
W hy does the river rest so soon, and dry up, and
Leave us to languish in the sand?
How well I know frustration!
This want, however, we can overwhelm.
We turn to the supernatural realm,
We long for the light of revelation
Which is nowhere more magnificent
Than in our N ew Testament.
I would for once like to determine—
Because I am sincerely perplexed—
H ow the sacred original text
Could be translated into my beloved German. (12 10 —23)

This feasible job is the continuation and translation of an unquenchable

longing. Faust opens the Bible in order to overcome a shortcoming, which
always drove him “ oh! to the source of life” (“ Ach, nach des Lebens
Quelle,” 1201) in order to slake a thirst— and which after two failed tests
makes even the poisonous brown juice of phiole look good. But in the
meantime he has grown more modest. Gratification no longer needs to
stream into that lack from the unique Source but rather from a text,
which substitutes for it. Instead of the absolute and fatal consumption of
the Earth Spirit, which is the essence of life itself, or of the phiole, which
is termed the essence of all blissfully intoxicating juices, he consumes a
surrogate. In its verbal form, to be sure, the surrogate has the value of an
original, its opposite; but it remains a surrogate, because even the Pri­
mary Text is a text like all others in the heap of books. For once, Faust
seems not to transgress the limits and restrictions of the university dis­
course; he translates “ the source of life” in good humanistic fashion as
bibliophile ad fontes and takes a book as a voice of nature. But this limi­
tation assures that the third test will be successful. German Poetry does
not begin with the magic testing of unalphabetical signs, nor does it
renounce the themes and texts that were stored in the great archive of
the Republic of Scholars; it merely gives up the manner of dealing with
texts prescribed in that Republic. Faust translates, like innumerable schol­
ars before and after him, from papers handed down from antiquity. The
fact that he does not write Latin does not yet speak against “ the proper
 THE SCHOLAR’ S TRAGEDY 9

guild-scholarly character of his historical world.” 5 What turns the ex-

M .A. into an anachronism and hence into the founding hero of an in­
cipient, a transcendental Knowledge, is something else. Translation be­
comes hermeneutics.
Geschrieben steht: „Im Anfang war das Wort!”
Hier stock’ ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmoglich schatzen,
Ich mulS es anders iibersetzen,
Wenn ich vom Geiste recht erleuchtet bin.
Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn.
Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile,
Dal? deine Feder sich nicht iibereile!
1st es der Sinn, der alles wirkt und schafft?
Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraftl
Doch auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe,
Schon warnt mich was, dafi ich dabei nicht bleibe.
M ir hilft der Geist! auf einmal seh’ ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat.

It says: “ In the beginning was the Word.”

Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The Spirit helps me. N ow it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act. (1224—37)

Saying (in words) that he cannot possibly value words or even (as the se­
cret eavesdropper of this private conversation will paraphrase it) “ thinks
the word so beggarly” (“ das Wort so sehr verachtet,” 1328) Faust takes
his exit from the Republic of Scholars. The rules decreed by Humanism
and the Reformation for dealing with books were becoming obsolete.
Fhimanism proceeded as philological activity, and philology means love
of the word. Luther’s belief in and translation of the Bible were obedient
to the rule of sola scriptura and meant in a quite practical sense that stu­
dents in the catechumenical schools that arose along with the Reforma­
tion had to be able to learn sacred texts by heart and “ recount” them
“ word for word.” 6If the Primary Text were, for example, the Decalogue,
then the Little Catechism (in contradistinction to the later Analytical) pro­
grammed a learning by heart not only of that law but also— although with
io 1800

the question “ What is that?” it was supposed to mediate between law and
persons— of Luther’s explanations.7 Incontrovertible word sounds as re­
duplication of an incontrovertible wording— that was true scriptural
faith.
“ Someone has been found who all day long speaks only the words:
‘The Bible is in my head, my head is in the Bible.’ ” 8 N o words could
better express the early modern order of words. But in 1778, the year
they were recorded, their speaker was in an insane asylum. Two hundred
years of inscribed faithfulness to Scripture suddenly sounded pathological
to the new sciences of man. There was now every reason to exchange the
wording for what should have been written if the translator had had his
way. Faust’s Germanicization of a sacred original solely on the basis of
sincere feeling is an epistemological break. “ The slightest alteration in the
relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of
exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings
that anchor his being.” 9
The beginning of the Gospel according to Saint John is a unique weave
or textum of words, which with complete autonymity calls the Word the
Beginning. The beginning with the word word, this beginning in its un­
speakable replication— which all discourses, because they are themselves
composed of words, cannot overtake— gave rise, until the early modern
period in Europe, to the form of the commentary.

The language of the sixteenth century— understood not as an episode in the his­
tory of any one tongue, but as a global cultural experience— found itself caught,
no doubt, between these interacting elements, in the interstice occurring between
the primal Text and the infinity of Interpretation. One speaks upon the basis of a
writing that is part of the fabric of the world; one speaks about it to infinity, and
each of its signs becomes in turn written matter for further discourse; but each of
these stages of discourse is addressed to that primal written word whose return it
simultaneously promises and postpones.10

A teachable form of such commentary, in practical and scholastic relation

to canonical or sacred texts, constituted the rhetoric of the technique of
tossing words back and forth between two Words:

The first mute, indecipherable, fully present to itself, and absolute; the other, gar­
rulous, had only to voice this first speech according to forms, operations, and
conjunctions whose space measured its distance from the first and inaudible text.
For finite creatures and for men who would die, Rhetoric ceaselessly repeated the
speech of the Infinite that would never come to an end.11

In the new space of the scholar’s tragedy, such industrious humility

does credit only to the famulus Wagner, this bookworm with his critical
zeal, his learned hunt for sources, and his dream of rhetorical persuasion.
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY II

Faust, by contrast, ostracizes rhetoric and rhetoricians with the same rhe­
torical question:
Das Pergament, ist das der heil’ge Bronnen,
Woraus ein Trunk den Durst auf ewig stillt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Seele quillt.

Parchment— is that the sacred fount

From which you drink to still your thirst forever?
If your refreshment does not mount
From your own soul, you gain it never. (566—69)

He wants, not to leave thirst and desire open, as do philologists and rhet­
oricians, but to quench them so thoroughly that they are extinguished.
The name of the death of desire, however, is soul. Therefore the new re­
freshment, when applied to the Gospels, consists in translating from one’s
own soul and honest feeling. Certainly, feeling and soul are also only
translations, a nominalizing paraphrase of the sigh oh! as the unique sig­
nifier that is not a signifier. But they make possible another beginning and
alter the function of all rhetoric. One who no longer wants to know
about parchments and the letters on them does not simply give up read­
ing and explicating, rhetorical variations and mutations. Even the lonely
scholar works with paper, which he fills up, like the teachers and students
of old-European universities and Latin schools when they imitated classic
or sacred texts, that is, wrote paraphrases. On Faust’s writing paper, too,
“ word” is paraphrased and replaced successively by “ mind,” “ force,”
“ act.” But in the speeches that comment on this writing, the transcription
is not described as a rhetorical procedure. The paraphrases are no longer
understood as drawn from a treasury of tropes and figures; they are as­
signed the inverse function of denoting the true and authentic meaning of
a word. This word turns out to be the word word. It is not one word or
signified among others; it is the word as signifier submitted to the pri­
macy of the signified. By means of rhetorical variation Faust undertakes a
semantic quest for the transcendental signified.12
The transcendental signified, however remote from language it may
seem, arises technically or grammatologically from a sequence of reiter­
ated crossings-out. As soon as Faust writes down a word (niederschreibe,
1234), a strange Something pulls him and his pen up short. This Other,
though called “ Spirit,” is not too supersensory to have eyes. A gaze reads
along with what the hand writes down and by so doing makes sure
that the pen does not run away with itself (“ Feder sich nicht iibereile!,”
1231). Indeed it is characteristic of manual writing under normal circum­
stances— in sun or lamplight, and given eyesight— that one can watch
12 i8 o o

one’s hand in the present moment of writing and, where necessary, make
corrections. In the lucid words of Angelo Beyerlen, the typewriter engi­
neer: “ In writing by hand the eye must continually observe the place
where the writing goes and this place only. It must supervise the emer­
gence of every written sign, must measure, keep in line, in shbrt, lead and
guide the hand in the execution of every movement.” 13 By Contrast, the
eyes of theatergoers cannot look over the shoulders of the heroes of
Scholarly Tragedies. We must resort to a hypothetical reconstruction.
The sheet of paper on which Faust wrote must have looked something
like this:

the Act.
the Force.
In the Beginning was
the M ind.
the Word.

These crossings-out distinguish hermeneutical translation from rhetorical

paraphrase. With the revocation of the first and absolute Word disap­
pears the free play of the many varying and verbose words that can repre­
sent each other in one and the same syntactical position. The logic of sig­
nifies is a logic of substitution; the logic of signifieds, a fantasy according
to which one irreplaceable signified replaces all replaceable signifies. If
three of them were not crossed out, the words on Faust’s page would
form a paradigm of signifies in Saussure’s sense. They do not because in
his freedom the translator does not perceive their coherence (what indeed
is called a system). Faust hesitates, but not because no one can pronounce
simultaneously all the exclusive elements of a paradigm. He hesitates be­
cause he seeks the one and only meaning lying outside all differentiality
and therefore no longer sees words that have already been crossed out.
If he had seen them, it would have been readily apparent that all his
trial runs are the vain efforts of a German to exhaust the polysemy of the
Greek word for “ word.” Had Faust consulted his Greek dictionaries,14 he
would have noticed that he, Faust of the honest feeling, does not under­
take the substitutions, but rather that already speaking in advance of him
is the entire tradition that successively translated the logos as scholastic
sensus, Leibnitzean force, and transcendental philosophical act, in so
many epochs in the history of being. But this Occidental “ series of sub­
stitutions of center for center” in which “ successively, and in a regulated
fashion, the center receives different forms or names” 15 and hence be­
comes endlessly further inscribed and denied, is already a matter of no
consequence for the translator, because he himself is stepping out to
found a new and irrevocable center. Faust characterizes in the “ history of
the sign” the moment without “ paradigmatic consciousness.” 16
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY 13

Faust’s syntagmatic consciousness isn’t much better. For sheer love of

semantics the word sequences of the primary text are left unchanged or
simply ignored. Faust is far from orienting his search for signifieds along
the contextual lines of John. He does not hunt around in his heap of
books for a commentary on parallel passages. His pen already balks at
the first line; no glance falls on the following lines or on the text as a
whole, which would illuminate the mysterious word via its concordances.
The barking and howling of a dog is enough to prevent Faust on that day
and forever from reading further.
Signs are found in three formal relations. If the two outer relations of the
sign— to its immediate neighbors in what precedes and what follows in the
discourse and to its virtual substitutes in the treasury of language— are
both excluded, then there remains only the inner or imaginary relation
between signifier and signified. This relation is what, particularly since
Goethe’s aesthetics, is “ commonly called a symbol.” 17 For a century the
Faustian coup suspended the attribution of the sign to the group of which it
is an element. This loss has very pragmatic grounds, for the relation to the
signified is the sole one that does not attend to the discourse of the Other.
To observe textual recurrences would mean to submit the translation to a
superior author or work worthy of imitation. To observe paradigmatic
columns, as Faust’s pen inconsequentially piles them up, means to submit
translation not to honest feelings but to the rules of a language.
But Faust is alone. He writes without consulting books, outside any
discursive network. N o one ordered a Bible translation from him, no one
is going to get one dedicated to him or receive it as due— not his nearest
colleague and not the nearest publisher. They, however, are the control
mechanisms of scholarship, and they alone hold scholars to the obser­
vance of the formal relations of the sign. In dictionaries dwell the para­
digms, in grammars the syntagms. As a student of philology, Nietzsche
described how his guild would have had to scrutinize or rap the knuckles
of this ex-M .A.:
Whenever such types deign to practice philology, we are in our rights to raise our
eyebrows a little and scrutinize attentively these strange workers. H ow they are
accustomed to do things in philological matters Goethe told us in the mirror of
his Faust. We recall the hair-raising methods by which Faust treats the beginning
of the John Prologue and confess the feeling worthy of a Wagner that for us Faust
is utterly ruined, as a philologist at any rate.18

Faust’s deed is a free translation. N ot only semantically, in that the

word word is not repeated in the wording of the text, but above all prag­
matically: because it does not attend to any external discursive controls.
A hair-raising discursive practice only fills in what the many negations of
the introductory monologue have already sketched out:
14 i8 o o

Mich plagen keine Skrupel noch Zweifel,

Fiirchte mich weder vor Holle noch Teufel—
Dafiir ist mir auch alle Freud’ entrissen,
Bilde mir nicht ein, was Rechts zu wissen,
Bilde mir nicht ein, ich konnte was lehren,
Die Menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren.

N o scruple nor doubt could make me ill,

I am not afraid of the Devil or hell—
But therefore I also lack all delight,
Do not fancy that I know anything right,
Do not fancy that I could teach or assert
What would better mankind or what might convert. (369—74)

The renunciation of impossible teaching made possible a free writing,

which exceeds philological or indeed theological scruples. Free writing
has no definite function for definite addressees and therefore does not
lead students about by the nose. It finds no place in the discourse network
from which Faust derives, because it itself begins a new discourse net­
work. Having reached the zero point, Faust rejects along with traditional
knowledge Knowledge itself, without (like his many successors) pro­
claiming free writing as the new science that more than any other would
harbor the conceit of bettering and converting human beings, indeed, of
making them for the first time into human beings.

Knowledge and ignorance, new doctrine and free act: in the zero hour
of transcendental knowledge, these still lie side by side. “ The explication
that Faust attempts, the opposition of word and meaning, of deed and
force, is— despite the reference to Fichte— neither philosophically clear
nor purely poetic; it is, therefore, one of those places where philosophy
and poetry are disinclined to join together in a complete unity.” 19 This
nonclosure characterizes the new beginning. In free translation poetic
and philosophic discourse conspire in a fashion that henceforth will be
called German Classicism. Schiller reads Kant for three years in order to
be read himself for a century from the standpoint of Kant. Hegel reads
and interprets poetry until his philosophy of art enters into relationship
with poetic imagination.20Thus an oscillation comes into being between
poetry and thought, which do not join together in complete unity because
the two discourses are not even close to being able to write down the
points where they cross one another.
Faust’s A ct is the fleeting act of writing itself. To write “ In the Begin­
ning was the Act” truly marks the end. First, the translation comes to an
end because it has at last found the beginning itself. Second, the transla­
tion comes to the conclusion that the sought-after transcendental sig­
nified of logos lies in the search itself. Faust’s crossings-out and substitu­
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY 15

tions receive a name, which gives a brand name as well to the authentic
meaning of what has been crossed out, in Greek as well as in German.
The translator, who so despises words, nonetheless does nothing but
make words. N o acts other than that of writing are seen in the quiet study
in which the poodle no longer barks and has yet to bark again. Conse­
quently the free translation ends as anonymously as the Gospels had be­
gun. On the one hand there is the Word, from which all words stem, even
those of the Gospel writers— on the other is the act, which is all that writ­
ing is, even the writing of the translator. A writer who writes around the
sentence “ I am writing,” however, fulfills the modern conception of
authorship. Free writing has brought Faust back to his first test. The au­
thor Nostradamus, whose manuscript momentarily guarantees his pres­
ence for the reader, is replaced by the author Faust, whose handwriting is
the act of his own self-presence. Other translations of logos could justify
themselves by counting out an average of common connotations between
the primary text and the translation; translation as “ act” is itself the act
of writing off the wording (or casting it to the winds) instead of further
copying it (or passing it down to posterity).
An act, in actuality, neither philosophical nor poetic. Before the Faus­
tian revolution, poetry had a lot to do with the written and nothing with
the strange, fugitive act of writing. The order of representations excluded
the representability of the act of production. What philosophy had to say
in the classical age, when it explicated Ffoly Scripture, is in accord with
the outcome of Faust’s gesture, but not with the gesture itself. Spinoza’s
Tractatus Logico-Politicus, which was certainly before the eyes of the au­
thor of the Scholar’s Tragedy, justified Faust’s high-handed treatment of
the Bible by anticipating his contempt of words, but did not go so far as
to make a new and free translation of those incriminated written words.
I only maintain that the meaning by which alone an utterance is entitled to be
called Divine, has come down to us uncorrupted, even though the original word­
ing may have been more often changed than we suppose. Such alterations . . .
detract nothing from the Divinity of the Bible, for the Bible would have been no
less Divine had it been written in different words or a different language. That the
Divine law has in this sense come down to us uncorrupted, is an assertion which
admits of no dispute.21

The difference between German Poetry and classical philosophy is

produced by the words of the philosopher themselves. They are and re­
main commentaries, no longer upon the text but upon its pragmatic and
semantic aspects. Therefore they dare to voice the scandalous suspicion
that others could have changed or falsified the text of the Bible, but they
keep silent about their own systematic falsification. Faust, by contrast,
does not say whether or that he falsifies; when he does something, he
16 1800

does it. Hence the philosopher replaces “ discourse” and “ word” seman­
tically with “ meaning,” the poet pragmatically with “ act.” That it is an
intrusion and a falsification to understand the words of the Apostle “ and
I think also that I have the Spirit of G od” as “ by the Spirit of God the
Apostle here refers to his mind, as we may see from the context,” 22Spinoza
had prudently not mentioned. Only poetry, a century later, first lifted the
veil and publicly translated the spirit of God as its own.
In the classical period representations or (to put it plainly) deceit and
masquerade went that far. Earlier, the Tractatus had insisted that no one
could doubt the divinity of scripture, while its own “ scripture” did nothing
else; but this was done, for reasons of security, to deceive readers and stu­
dents. Faust’s farewell to his M .A. status, which only led students around
by the nose, announces to this strategy and this art of writing, which arise
from within and against persecution,23that he is quitting. Poetic free writ­
ing exits from the discourse of the Other. At the precise place where the
name MAster turns into “ empty sound and smoke,” Faust’s authorship
begins. And as always, when someone tries not to deceive others, only
self-deception remains.
Faust lays claim to the beginning as an act this side of all representa­
tions, an act that is first of all his own.24 And yet he does not write with
complete freedom. In the quest for the signified of a Something that
Aoyo? means, without its yet being the verbal meaning, hence like “ the
symbol which is the thing, without being the thing, and yet the thing” 25—
Faust has a method. Words, which could not possibly mean \0y09, no
matter in what language game or in what professional jargon, are ex­
cluded. German Poetry in its foundational act is not so free as to write in
place of T > apxi) W d A.oyo?, let us say:

In the beginning was blabla

There are grounds for the omission. N o discourse, not even the freest
possible translation, can manage without authorized controls. In no cul­
ture is the dice throw of discourse not steered and curbed, checked and
organized. For the ex-M .A., it is true that all controls that circumscribed
the traditional European universities by means of estates and guilds fall
by the wayside. But even in his lonely study Faust does not remain alone.
For one thing, there is the poodle, whose barking triggers the translation
attempt and later puts a stop to it. That Faust orders the poodle (in vain,
incidentally) to “ Stop howling so!” (“ Pudel so la£ das Heulen,” 1239) so
 THE SCHOLAR’ S TRAGEDY 17

he can search in peace for the Word instead of the word already betrays
an authorized control, which is to some extent universal. It orders human
beings to distinguish between human language, animal howling, and in­
human blabla. And at the other end there is “ the Spirit,” whose counsel
enables the translation attempt to be completed. The fact that Faust twice
justifies his unheard-of Germanizing as the input of “ the Spirit” points to
a second authorized control, whose emergence in turn can be precisely
dated.
An anonymous Spirit, which has little to do with the Biblical Xoyo?
but bears a close relation to Spinoza’s bold conjecture about the passage
from Paul, curbs his freedom. Faust translates according to the spirit and
not the letter, but he does translate. A privately-shouldered obligation has
replaced the professional one vis-a-vis the proper academic addressees
and overseers. That does not alter the fact of discourse control. The Spirit
does just what the good and evil spirits of the Republic of Scholars did: it
can “ illuminate” and “ warn” ; it brakes the quick tempo of writing. Its
“ reservations” help ensure that German Poetry does not start out with
howling or blabla.
The lonely study, too, is therefore a scenario and therefore always al­
ready destined for the stage. “ The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist if we
mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author.” 26 Aside from the
mysterious poodle, a writer and a speaker act together in the playlet.
“ The Spirit” does not write but rather speaks. The translator writes, but
when he reflects on what has been written, “ the Spirit” is the agent. At
times it becomes unclear which of the two speaks: whether, for example,
in the command of “ I” to his pen as “ your [deine]” pen (1231) Faust has
the floor or whether it is “ the Spirit” who uses the familiar form of
address.27
As so often in dialogues, the name of “ the Spirit” remains unstated.
Instead, something simply happens on stage. Out of the poodle comes,
aroused by vexatious biblical words, a Spirit. The mask drops— Mephisto
was seconding the entire scene of writing. Indeed, there cannot be more
than one Spirit in the same room. The scene of the Logos has never been
read literally enough: it describes the birth of German Poetry out of the
Spirit of Hell.

Faust’s first question to the Spirit after its unmasking reads: “ What is
your name?” (“ Wie nennst du dich?” 1327). That is a hard question to
answer when posed of someone who “ holds semblance in disrepute / And
craves only reality” (“ weit entfernt von allem Schein, / Nur in der Wesen
Tiefe trachtet,” 1329 —30), of someone, that is, who embodies sheer con­
tempt of language. Thus Mephisto can continue to conceal his name. But
i8 1800

there are indices, nonetheless. A Spirit who, like the contemporary direc­
tors of the Gymnasien, becomes restless and displeased when someone
still practices reading and translating the Bible; a Spirit who can offer all
earthly joys and in exchange wants only the soul; a Spirit, too, whose
royal self in the Tragedy: Part Two invents paper money— that can only
be the “ new idol,” 28 which Nietzsche finally called by its true name. The
lectures “ On the Future of Our Educational Institutions” describe with
an outlaw’s keen sight a lecturing procedure that corresponds point by
point with Faust’s writing procedure, at the end of which the idol removes
his mask.

The student listens to lectures. When he speaks, when he sees, when he is being
social, when he is practicing the arts, in short, when he lives, he is independent,
that is to say, independent of the educational institution. Very often the student
writes at the same time he listens to lectures. These are the moments when he
dangles from the umbilical cord of the university. He can choose what lectures he
wants to listen to, he does not have to believe what he hears, he can close his ears
when he is not in the mood to listen. This is the “ acroamatic” theory of teaching.
The teacher, however, speaks to the students who attend his lectures. W hat­
ever else he thinks and does is cut off by a monumental divide from the conscious­
ness of his students. Often the professor reads while he lectures. In general, he
wants as many students as possible; if need be, he is satisfied with a few, almost
never with just one. A speaking mouth and many, many ears, with half as many
writing hands: that is the external apparatus of the academy; set in motion, that is
the educational machinery of the university. Moreover, the possessor of this
mouth is cut off and independent from the possessors of the many ears: and this
double independence is celebrated with lofty pathos as “ academic freedom.”
Moreover, the individual— to raise this freedom a notch higher— can say more or
less what he wants, the others can hear more or less what they want: only, stand­
ing at a modest distance behind both groups, with a certain tense, supervisory
mien, is the state, there in order to make clear from time to time that it is the
purpose, goal, and essence of this odd speaking and listening procedure.29

Faust’s free translation is clearly a special instance of state-permitted

academic freedom. The two licenses— for the student to hear more or less
what he wants and for the professor to say more or less what he wants—
come together to produce the Faustian scene of writing. As students do
not have to believe what they hear, so Faust can hear the message of the
Easter bells without conviction and translate the Prologue to Saint John
without mentioning the words the Word or the Son.30 As professors say
more or less what they want, so Faust does not read what is written but
what should be written. As students write while they are listening, so the
translation follows the dictates of the Spirit, who does not write but
speaks. And finally, as professors read while they speak, so the Faustian
new beginning rests on a read text. Accordingly, within the poetic free­
dom that is Faust’s act appears, as its precondition, the academic freedom
of the new state universities. But Faust, whose first words already an­
 THE SCHOLAR’S TRAGEDY 19

nounce to the old university system that he is quitting, does not yet know
this and cannot know yet how well a professorship in the new system
would suit him. O f course, he does not plan a “ reform of the univer­
sities,” 31 but he triggers one. After 1800, professors, especially in chairs
of philosophy, made a career of free translation— of Faust in particular.
In the course offerings of nineteenth-century universities (in the words of
their best specialist), “ the old expression tradere continued to be used,
but even the youngest of lecturers— indeed perhaps he the most— would
have seen in this an insult were it to be taken at face value.” 32
Academic freedom and poetic freedom (not to be confused with poetic
license) are both guaranteed by the state. To pose the act in place of the
word is above all a political act. In enlightened Prussia in 1794, one and
the same code, the Allgemeines Landrecht, granted a copyright to books
(which made the act of their authors inalienable) and a new statute
to institutions of learning, which “ separated them from the organs of
churchly administration dependent on tradition” : 33 “ Schools and univer­
sities are institutions of the state.” 34
In their alliance the two legal acts founded the “ alliance between the
state and the educated,” which not only led to the “ transformation of the
form of rule and government” 35 but for a century bore along German Po­
etry. The Spirit in Faust’s study is no solitary. Everywhere reformers, ap­
pointed and protected by the articles of the Landrecht, visited the studies
and educational institutions of the Republic of Scholars, in order to write
down everything about them that required reform. The Gymnasium di­
rector Minister Gedike pilloried it as an “ absurdity”
that today in a number of trivium schools even the Bible, sometimes as a whole,
sometimes in pieces, is degraded to the level of a reader. . . . Just recently in a
school with a great many students, I heard children of five and six reading from
Isaiah 15: “ The burden of M oab. Because in the night Ar of M oab is laid waste,
and brought to silence; because in the night Kir of M oab is laid waste, and
brought to silence; He is gone up to Bajith, and to Dibon, the high places, to
weep: M oab shall howl over N ebo, and over Medeba . . . And Heshbon shall cry,
and Elealeh: their voice shall be heard even unto Jahaz.” All throughout this the
teacher was completely unembarrassed, and it had probably never occurred to
him in the simplicity of his heart to ask: Do you yourself understand what you are
reading? . . . It is not hard to believe that it was his deliberate intention to make
the Bible, which was being degraded to a common reader, an inferior and in­
different object to the children. And yet whoever, in justified zeal for the honor of
the Bible, would dare to tear from the hands of this teacher the Bible he was pro­
faning, or at least to advise him to have his pupils read only what they can under­
stand or what he himself understands, would run the risk of being labeled an
iconoclast and a heretic by him.36

Such school visitors were all the rage circa 1800. Jean Paul Richter
called it “ one of the greatest pedagogical errors” that “ religious books are
2,0 i 8 oo

turned into reading machines” ;37 the Journal o f Empirical Psychology re­
laxed its customary discretion to castigate by name a living teacher whose
“ literal method” (as the word already indicates) in N ew Testament in­
struction required students to begin by “ noting” “ the name,” then to
write on the blackboard names and other curious features as abbreviated
initial letters, and finally to learn them by heart. For the empirical psy­
chologist, an alarming question was raised: “ To what extent would such
a dreadfully one-sided development of so subordinate an intellectual
power as memory derange human reason?” 38
Thus one and the same Spirit growls at the reading of the Bible like the
poodle and furnishes inspired readings of the Bible like “ the Spirit.” Ar,
Moab, Bajith, Dibon, Nebo, Medeba, Heshbon, Elealeh, Zoar, Luhith,
Horonaim— so read the words to which Faust too cannot pay much heed
and whose memorization39is dismissed in the act of writing act for word.
The discourse network of 1800 revokes Luther’s commandment to “ re­
count from word to word.” This is replaced by the new commandment to
have only that read which students and teachers “ understand.” It is for­
mulated clearly enough and, as the “ only” indicates, enforces a selection
and control of discourse like all others, even if hermeneutics owes its vic­
tory to having initially masqueraded as the opposite of that control. But
people did not fall for it right from the start. Like Faust’s thesis— namely,
that his translation into his beloved German was at the same time a reve­
lation of the sacred original— the project of the reformers, of replacing
the Bible with primers simply to preserve its sanctity, was a transparent
strategy. “ The question was put as follows: Is it not sacrilege toward the
books of religion to use them to teach children to read? Whereupon a
general Yes! resounded. Really the question was meant as follows: Isn’t it
time to do away with or limit the old instructional materials?” 40 And
“ Understanding” was meant as it was understood. In 1776 a new A B C
Speller and Reader for Nassau-Weilberg, which appeared without the
Ten Commandments, Articles of Faith, and Lord’s Prayer, aroused armed
resistance. “ N o longer secure in his residence, the Prince sought help
from the Palatine. Eight thousand Palatine troops marched in to pacify
the popular uprisings.” 41 A Kulturkampf, therefore, a century avant la
lettre.42
Doing away with old instructional materials, even in literal ABC wars,
marks the birth of the new. Instead of the word, the act enters, and in­
stead of the Bible, Poetry: from the primer to the National Classic or
from Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow’s The Child’s Friend to Faust I;
from the sigh “ oh!,” which “ the creative child breathes out in artless
song” to “ the greatest system of art, itself containing several systems
more” ;43 or from Bettina Brentano’s love letters to Faust: Part Two.
 THE SCHOLAR’ S TRAGEDY 21

Poetry is at once the means and goal of understanding, as demanded

by the reformers in office, hence the correlative (and not the object) of the
new human science: hermeneutics. Its distinction lies in linking together
all the information channels participating in understanding. First, poetry
itself functions as understanding, that is, as the transmission of words
into pure meanings; second, it allows understanding, that is, a reading
that does not have to struggle with the verbal monsters of Isaiah 15. Fi­
nally, it can understand others and other things and be understood by
others— otherwise. The discourse network of 1800 has in essence been
accounted for once this three-part schema is filled in with appropriate
names and terms.
First, however, we must emphasize that power stands over the entire
relation. The discursive net called understanding has to be knotted. There
is such a thing as understanding and being understood only once a new
type of discourse control has learned to practice its “ modest distance” in
order merely to point out from time to time that the state is the “ purpose,
goal, and essence of this odd speaking and listening procedure.” Over the
free space of hermeneutics there stands, as above every language game, an
“ order-word.” 44 This command is the unique knot that itself will not and
cannot be understood. The state remains closed off to every hermeneutic.
Because understanding, despite its claim to universality, is one speech act
among others, it cannot get behind the speech act that instituted it. Texts
that are part of the hermeneutic net allow the power that governs them to
come to light only in a masked fashion. The translator Faust is watched
over by a devil in poodle’s garb.
The only texts that are unmasked are those that exist not to be read
and understood. In the drama, Faust’s academic freedom remains as mys­
terious as it does in its innumerable interpretations; no one can say
whether the free writing has addressees or who they are.45 The Code
Napoleon, by contrast, names naked necessity as the origin of the desire
to understand; it is the first law book that punishes judges if they refuse
hermeneutics: “ The judge who shall refuse to judge, under the pretext of
silence, obscurity, or the inadequacy of the law, can be pursued as guilty
of the denial of justice.” 46 Words of power, and only they, are what make
necessary— that is, make a matter of life and death— the search for a
transcendental signified even where (according to judges) there is no em­
pirical signified or where (according to Faust) there is only a word. A new
law decrees hermeneutics and with it readers/writers who apply it in all
its senselessness, and in so doing surround it with a cloud of meaning.
The judge must apply the law because otherwise he would fall outside it.
The poet must apply interpretations because otherwise— Faust’s transla­
tion in the presence of that poodle being in the last resort an apotropaic
22 l8 0 0

act— he’d go to the devil. The cloud of meaning legitimating the judge’s
activity is the illusion that, despite its incomprehensible nature, the law
nevertheless validly applies to a referent, a punishable body. The nebulous
legitimation of literature is that texts appear to be hermeneutically intel­
ligible and not, rather, a matter of what has been programmed and pro­
grams in turn.
There is evidence of this in the Scholar’s Tragedy. Only its hero can
believe that texts and signs are all designed to be understood and to cor­
respond to understanding (in the way he reproaches the junkpile of books
for making understanding impossible, attributes understanding to the
signs of Nostradamus and the Word of John, and finally puts understand­
ing into practice in his own translating). This belief in meaning— with
which the Scholar’s Tragedy ends— encounters its truth. The devil is
merely Faust’s confrontation with a text that cannot understand nor be
understood but is power itself. Mephisto demands Faust’s signature.
Signatures, like law books, program people without taking the detour
of understanding. The pact scene is therefore the opposite of free transla­
tion. In the latter we have the poetic or academic freedom of paraphrase;
in the former, the bureaucratic act of signing one’s name, which hence­
forth founds between the devil and the ex-M.A. “ not a mere contractual
relation based on deed and reciprocal deed but rather a unique relation of
service and power and at the same time a relation of trust. . . . It is, if not
indissoluble, nonetheless on principle and in fact of life-long duration.” 47
This relation— as will not be hard to guess— is that between civil servants
and the state.
When Goethe was named privy minister of the Duchy of Saxony-
Weimar, obligations to which he was bound until death were “ read out
loud and put before” the author of the Scholar’s Tragedy.48 So too ought
Faust’s “ spoken word” be “ sufficient warrant” to commit his days “ eter­
nally” (“ Ist’s nicht genug, dal? mein gesprochenes Wort /Auf ewig soil
mit meinen Tagen schalten?” 1718 —19). Among the young duke’s over­
tures to reform were “ suggestions for simplifying the forms and flour­
ishes on decrees— for example the full array of titles and offices cited on
even the simplest documents.” 49 But this paper campaign foundered on
the resistance of his minister Goethe, whose memorandum concludes: “ A
Chancellory does not have anything to do with material things; for him
who is concerned only with observing and drawing up formalities, a little
pedantry is necessary. Indeed, even if the ‘By God’s Grace’ should be re­
tained only as an exercise in official script by the chancellors, there would
be some sense in it.” 50 In the Tragedy, the same word, pedant, charac­
terizes the devil, who, as if there were no such thing as spoken words,
demands from Faust “ for life’s sake, or death’s . . . a line or tw o” (“ Um
 THE SCHOLAR’ S TRAGEDY 23

Lebens oder Sterbens willen . . . ein paar Zeilen,” 1 7 1 4 —15). In this per­
verse world where privy ministers are more bureaucratic than their duke,
Mephisto figures as the official and Faust as the poet. This doubling, for
its part, simply duplicates the double life with which German Poetry be­
gins. “ In contrast to his poetic style, Goethe’s files are marked by their
elaborate, stilted bureaucratic style. With justice he could say in this re­
spect: ‘two souls dwell, oh! in my breast’— the bureaucrat and the poet.” 51
The object of exchange in the devil’s pact is the soul. A stroke of the
pen transfers ownership to the devil for life and thereafter. Thus the soul,
instead of merely forming “ the reactivated remnants of an ideology,” is
“ the present correlative of a certain technology of power,” as central Eu­
rope conceives of it circa 1800.
It is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection, or
technical invention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theolo­
gians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in him­
self the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A “ soul” in­
habits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that
power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political
anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.52

It is no wonder that Faust shrinks back from the demand for a signature
as from a spook. The facility of the kind of writing that understands gives
way to a symbolic bonding— poetry gives way to power. In signatures
there is nothing to interpret or to quibble about. The “ A ct” that took
place in free translating could play about or paraphrase the naked fact of
writing: the “ A ct” was and remained “ in the beginning,” or in the past
tense. The act of signing, by contrast, knows only the pure present and
the precise future of its fatality. In his striving Faust attains a status that is
certainly the loftiest of all but that, in its ever-binding fatality, is also the
most burdensome.
It is sublime and honorable, for the unique goal of his public and private striving
is humanity unified into a commonality of citizens; it is burdensome, for the
learned professor bears the responsibility of living only for the state, of devoting
every moment of his existence to the latter’s purposes, of devoting himself to it
with everything he calls his higher or his baser possessions, of regarding his entire
sensibility, thought, and action, his physical, moral, and rational being, all his
powers, drives, and talents, not as his but rather as the property of the state, so
that no moment of his activity is thinkable, which does not belong to the state.53

The “ pact” that educational bureaucrats concluded with the state

circa 1800 was to this extent “ extravagantly extensive” in its “ substantial
and formal content.” 54Faust, because he cares little for the beyond prom­
ised to him by the Bible, signs in this world and for this world so as to
assure it and his contractual opposite “ That all my striving I unloose / Is
24 i8 o o

the whole purpose of the pact” (“ Das Streben meiner ganzen Kraft / 1st
grade das, was ich verspreche” ; 174 2 —43). Transcendental knowledge
sets up a new beginning, which bursts open solitary studies. Faust, the
man who writes, vanishes in order to become the myth of German educa­
tional bureaucrats and of literary criticism; Faust, the man who is con­
signed to the devil, steps onto the stage.
Henceforth there is no further mention in The Tragedy, Part I of writ­
ing and reading. “ Faust’s writing skills attested to in literature aren’t
worth much” : they are “ exhausted in the five words of the Bible transla­
tion” and the “ signing of the pact.” 55 He who from a limited academic
has become Universal Man, after a brief detour into the cellar of aca­
demic freedom, takes a path that his interpreters call the way to nature.
But it is much more plainly a way of speaking and listening. After the last
writing scene, the devil’s pact (which is never mentioned again), only
voices are heard. Power remains modestly in the background in order to
make room for the impossible: a “ natural” discourse. In higher educa­
tion, M .A .’s conversed with their assistants; devils disguised as Ph.D.’s,
with their pupils— it was a matter of males and only males. Whoever is
fed up with this art of deceit has to go back beyond writing and reading.
Genuine nature can only be conveyed through channels that are funda­
mentally excluded from the discourse of the university. Taking one step
back, the ex-M.A. Faust discovers the Other, the female Other who in the
discourse network of 1800 calls forth Poetry.
 The Mother’s Mouth

Nature, in the discourse network of 1800, is jH-rtf Woman.1 Her function

consists in getting people— that is, men— to speak. Given these premises,
which are not accidentally Freudian, two sentences that in the Age of
Goethe went under Goethe’s name and a century later led Freud to the
invention of psychoanalysis take on precise meaning. The grammatical
subject of each sentence is Nature.
Sie saumet, dafi man sie verlange; sie eilet, dafi man sie nicht satt
werde.
Sie hat keine Sprache noch Rede; aber sie schafft Zungen und
Herzen, durch die sie fiihlt und spricht.

She tarries, so that one calls out for her; she hurries, so that one
never tires of her.
She has neither language nor speech; but she creates tongues and
hearts, through which she feels and speaks.2

Such is the definition of an infinite beloved. Infinite, because nature cun­

ningly assures that the longing for her never dies. Infinite, too, because
this desire exists only in the language and speech of her lovers, whereas
she remains mute and mysterious. Nature therefore accomplishes a p r o ­
d u c t i o n o f d i s c o u r s e s . She creates— since the text names only tongues
and hearts, but no hands for writing or eyes for reading— a primary
orality. In doing so she liberates herself from the Word of God. Instead of
sighing until she rests in the Name of the Father, she creates human
speech organs, which pursue self-enjoyment in her place. The origin of
language, once a creation ex nihilo, becomes maternal gestation. Because
 r

26 1800

this mother presents herself as a lover to her human children and trans­
lators alike, she meets all the psychoanalytic criteria o f Woman.
If the libido is simply masculine, it is only from there, the only place where she is
everything (which, of course, is the place from which man sees her), that the dear
woman can have an unconscious. And what good does that do her? It allows her,
as everyone knows, to make the speaking being, which we confine here to man,
speak; in other words— I don’t know if you have noted this in psychoanalytic
theory— it allows her to exist only as mother.3

The discourse that the mother in the discourse network of 1800 cre­
ates but cannot pronounce is called Poetry. Mother Nature is silent so
that others can speak of and for her. She exists as the singular behind the
plurality of discourses. This is demonstrated in the relationship between
Gretchen and Faust, who, like all of Goethe’s wanderers, finds in his lover
a Mother and nature madonna.4 Whereas the original Dr. Faustus of the
Historia was for sound satanological reasons allowed, even required, to
have affairs with many women,5 in the Tragedy there is only the One, and
“ without the assistance of the Devil in person the great scholar could not
have brought [her seduction] about.” 6 O f course, Faust has always rum­
maged through books and signs in search of a life source, but only be­
yond the libraries and their fraternities does his longing find fulfillment:
Gretchen represents, for her lover no less than for the little sister she cares
for, the milk-giving Mother. Masculine discourse responds thankfully
to the stream of milk. Gretchen’s “ curtness and brevity” (“ kurz ange-
bunden” ; 2617) become material for endless interpretation. Her old-
fashioned, catechizing question gives rise to the most famous declaration
of belief and love in the German language (3426—58). Woman’s mandate
to make men speak just is that strong. Faust answers with a speech that,
like the new anticatechismal school curriculum,7 evades all theological
commitment and instead understands the religion in question as the
poetico-erotic inner life of the questioner herself. Faust “ responds to
Margaret’s question about his religious convictions with her love for
him.” 8Thus, having put writing behind him in that last and horrible act
in which he signs the devil’s contract, Faust becomes the hermeneutic in­
terpreter of Woman’s soul. As if to confirm Schleiermacher’s extension of
hermeneutics to orality,9 the traditional exegesis of Scripture shifts to an
exegesis of Woman. The spirit that suggested to Faust the transcendental
signified of Xoyo? is joined by the “ motherly spirit” that “ daily instructs”
Gretchen’s nature (“ miitterliche Geist,” “ taglich unterweist” ; 2702—4).
The mother as primary instructor is, quite literally, an invention of
1800. “ My, but what this century has invented!” cries the cool and con­
servative Brandes in mock astonishment; he then denounces in particular
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 2.7

the new “ relationship between parents and children,” above all the use of
the familiar form of address between them, as a “ great harm done by
mothers.” 10 The lengthy process of reshaping the population of central
Europe into modern nuclear families was directed by paternal figures
only during its first phase— in Germany, up to Lessing’s time. Daughters,
to whom even the titles of Lessing’s plays were devoted, grew up under
and were subject to the instruction of their fathers. In a second phase,
which coincided with the Age of Goethe, “ the Lord of Creation loses his
place.” 11 Mothers stepped into the position previously held by fathers—
juridically, in an essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Berlin
that in 1785 requested a reevaluation of maternal authority,12 and poeti­
cally, in the rewriting that turned Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Career
into Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. With that a transition took place
in the materiality of acculturative speech. The word of the father came to
young men and virgins as articulated doctrine; the motherly spirit that
daily instructs Gretchen, being a construct of her lover, has little to do
with her real mother. It doesn’t speak, it only “ murmurs” (“ sauseln” ;
2703). The maternal gift is language in a nascent state, pure breath as a
limit value from which the articulated speech of others begins. Once
again the psychoanalytic definition of woman applies exactly, but only
within the boundaries of a specific historical field.

L earning to R ead in 1800

Maternal instruction, in its positivity, was the input component of ele­
mentary acculturation techniques. Around 1800 a new type of book be­
gan to appear, one that delegated to mothers first the physical and mental
education of their children, then their alphabetization. The list of such
books is long: Friedrich Wilhelm Wedag, Handbook o f Early Moral
Education, Intended Primarily for Use by Mothers, in Epistolary Form
(1795); Samuel Hahnemann, Handbook for Mothers, or Rules for the
Early Education o f Children (after the Principles ofj. J. Rousseau) (17 96);
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, G ood Advice for Mothers on the Most Im­
portant Points o f Physical Education in the First Years (1799); Johann
Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, an Attempt to
Provide Guidance for Mothers in the Self-Instruction o f Their Children
(1801); The Mother’s Book, or Guidelines for Mothers in Teaching Chil­
dren to Observe and Speak (1803); Christian Friedrich Wolke, Instruc­
tions for Mothers and Child Instructors on the Teaching o f the Rudi­
ments o f Language and Knowledge from Birth to the Age o f Learning to
Read (1805); Heinrich Stephani, Primer for Children o f Noble Educa­
28 i8 o o

tion, Including a Description o f My Method for Mothers Who Wish to

Grant Themselves the Pleasure o f Speedily Teaching Their Children to
Read (1807).
The titles speak for themselves. They leave little doubt about the iden­
tity of the instructor recommended; they emphasize that it is only by con­
ferring elementary acculturation techniques on mothers that the Self of
this identity has been found. In fact, by addressing themselves to mothers
the pedagogical tracts and primers shortcircuited existing official chan­
nels. Everything that people in Europe before 1800 had had to learn—
behavior and knowledge, reading and writing— had been passed on
within differentiated groups and classes. There was no central locus of
acculturation that could claim legitimacy in Nature; in particular, the
treasure of formal knowledge reached children via a long path and many
representative authorities. The first attempt to base a method of ele­
mentary instruction on mothers failed to make its way through the cir­
cuit. This occurred when Austrian priests preached Johann Ignatz von
Felbiger’s instruction method to nuns in order to enable them to teach
mothers to become teachers and better mothers.1
But in 1800 the system of equivalents Woman = Nature = Mother
allowed acculturation to begin from an absolute origin. A culture estab­
lished on this basis speaks differently about language, writes differently
about writing. Briefly put, it has Poetry. For only when phonetics and the
alphabet shortcircuit the official route from a natural source to those on
the receiving end can a kind of speech arise that can be thought of as an
ideal of Nature. This placing of mothers at the origin of discourse was the
condition of production for Classical poetry, and the Mother was the first
Other to be understood by poetical hermeneutics. Here, the analysis will
remain at an elementary level: that of the materiality of language. “ When
a new ABC book is invented for whole regions to read, the minor details
that accompanied its birth in the guise of mothers and midwives take on
great significance.” 2 Because small changes in the play of letters and
paper have changed the course of the so-called world, psychological intro­
spection is superfluous. What is important are not biographical mothers
with their comedies and tragedies, but the mothers and midwives of a
completely new ABC book; not the transformation of dreams or desires,
but a new technique of transcription that determines writing. “ In the be­
ginning” was, not the Act, but the ABC book.3
The primers of 1800 were written for and given to mothers in order
for them to do the same violence to letters that Faust did to words. The
project was to replace rote learning with “ understanding.” In this, mothers
assumed strategic positions. The word embedded in a sentence easily
allows paraphrases that translate according to the spirit and not the
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH

letter. The simple letter, however, on which centuries of reading and writ­
ing in the Near Eastern and European domain rest, is the cliff against
which hermeneutics can be dashed. Letters have no meaning. Letters are
not like sounds, related by the voice to the body and to Nature. The con­
sequences drawn from this basic deficiency differentiate discourse net­
works. This deficiency is foundational for the age of representation and
for the age of the signifier. The old primer wisdom, according to which
“ pictures like that / in which both pieces / namely sound and figure / are
equal to the letters / won’t be found in nature,” 4 coincides with the
fundamental principle of psychoanalysis: “ letters . . . do not occur in
nature.” 5
The whole of primary education circa 1800, however, attempted the
impossible proof for which the writer Carl Philipp M oritz was known,
namely, “ that letters are not arbitrary, but grounded in human nature and
native to all the distinct regions of inner consciousness.” 6 In a first phase
at the turn of the century, this naturalization of the alphabet was medi­
ated by supplementary sensory stimuli. In a second and decisive phase, all
arbitrariness disappeared in an inner sense called the M other’s voice.
The introductory verse of Carl Friedrich Splittegarb’s New A B C Pic­
tures provides the motto of the first phase:
h o l d e s k in d ! von welcher Wonne
Wird dein junges Herz geriihrt,
Wenn bey sanfter Fruhlingssonne
Vater
dich ins Freye fiihrt.
Mutter
Ha! da winket deinen Blicken
Bald ein Bliimchen, bald ein Stein,
Bald erfiillt ein Vogelein
Dich mit innigem Entziicken;
Bald ein Lammchen auf der Weide . . .
Just so, unter lauter Freude,
Ohne Schwierigkeit und Schmerz,
Dich in unsre Biicherwelt,
Die so manchen Schatz enthalt,
Angenehm hineinzufiihren,
Und dein weiches, zartes Herz
Fruh mit Tugenden zu zieren:
Dieses Gluck sey meinem Leben
O ft durch dieses Buch gegeben!

d a r l i n g c h i l d ! what delight
Will fill your young heart,
W X i C l l I I I the soft spring light

Father |
M other J walks you in the park
30 i8 o o

Ha! there you will see

A flower, there again a rock,
And here is a buzzing bee
And a little lamb that walks
On the meadow; what joy . . .
Just so, my little girl, my boy,
Without difficulty, with pleasure
To our world of books
I’ll lead you, a world of treasure.
Your heart young and tender
Will learn beauty and virtue:
Such happiness to see,
This book, in life, oft gives to me.7

This very broad comparison merges the world of spring and the world of
books, nature and culture. An imagined walk with mother and father
makes the coercive act of alphabetizing seem pleasurable. It is not yet
clear, however, from whom the young Faust, who is supposed to discover
the source of life and nature in books, will acquire this ability to trans­
late; were it otherwise, Splittegarb would not have to leave the prag­
matics of his primer typographically open. The names father and mother,
written in a column, enlist unspecified parents in a task that Splittegarb’s
primer is as yet unable to accomplish methodologically.
This vacant post is where the philanthropists began. In an area where
after millennia of alphabetizing there would seem to be nothing more “ to
discover and invent,” their invention consisted in drawing the method
out of the children themselves and thus in becoming “ the counsel of the
current and of all future generations of children.” 8 Because the child is
supposedly absorbed in natural pleasures, Johann Heinrich Campe prom­
ises, in his New Method o f Easy and Enjoyable Reading Instruction
(1778), to present the alphabet as “ candy.” 9 Because such pleasures are
to be thought as natural as possible, Johann Bernhard Basedow’s Elemen­
tary Instruction provides a “ letter game” : Franz, not yet two years old, is
allowed to figure out first letters, then syllables, and finally such pleasure-
promising words as “ pud-ding— cook-ies— rai-sins— straw-ber-ries.” 10
At the end of his stay in Dessau, Basedow, much to the distress of his col­
leagues and readers,” hit upon a non-metaphoric truth that today sur­
vives only in vestiges (as garnish for soup, decoration for Christmas
trees): he had edible letters baked for use in his curriculum. Philanthropic
alphabetization aimed at a culinary orality for which the unspoken,
riddle-solving word was Mother.
Encyclopedists and artists were the first to find this password. N o ­
where, writes August Hermann Niemeyer, should “ instruction, especially
private instruction, be more like play” than in reading and writing—
from which it follows “ that Mothers would perhaps make the best teach-
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 31

ers.” 12 And Basedow’s Elementary Instruction displays (not in the text,

which leaves the direction of the letter game to older children and head­
masters, but in Daniel Chodowiecki’s plate xxvib) an ideal of the nuclear
family: the older sons map and study the course of the sun; the father
abides in “ silent meditation and consciousness of his self” 13 (which, how­
ever, has the appearance of an absence and an after-dinner nap); and the
mother teaches her youngest child to read.
The second phase of reform transformed this ideal into institution and
method. The acquisition of language became the mother’s prerogative.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (in order first to confirm the statistical gener­
ality of the phenomenon) rejected all school reading-instruction methods
because “ in the educated classes reading begins before entry to public
schools” and because “ household reading usually proceeds under the di­
rection of mothers.” 14 Hoping to ground child discourse completely in
the elementary and oral dispensation of mothers, which leads directly
from natural sounds to language,15 Pestalozzi cursed schools with their
grammars and ABC books,16 yet failed to produce a substitute.17 But at
the cutting edge of progess was the royal Bavarian church and school
minister Heinrich Stephani, who dispensed with sugarcoating and curses
32 i8 o o

alike by liquidating letters in their inmost domain. He produced a primer

that mobilized play, motherliness, and orality. It could even explain why
it was new, that is, why mothers “ have hitherto not cared to concern
themselves in these matters” and instead left them to such improper au­
thorities as fathers and schools.18The reason is simple: as long as reading
was a function of writing, it excluded women. Stephani, however, revolu­
tionized the material basis of letters by christening a purely phonetic
method, like that Franz Xaver Hoffmann had attempted in 1780, but
failed to produce.19 As Stephani explained the method to mothers:
There are actually only two other methods of instruction besides the phonetic
method: the syllabic and spelling methods. All others are merely variations of
these and their deviations often consist only in extraneous helpful measures. The
syllabic method shows children syllables and their pronunciation and has them
repeat these. Through much practice children then learn syllables and words in
the entire outline of their forms, as well as their pronunciation. But you will
understand how difficult this procedure is, and children, if they have not been
fortunate enough to notice for themselves the sound of letters, always run into
trouble when they encounter syllables and words of unfamiliar composition.—
The spelling method proceeds from the mistaken assumption that the name of
the letter is also its sound, and that therefore it is necessary to precede the pro­
nunciation of every syllable with spelling (the naming of each letter). To grasp the
uselessness of this method, take, for example, the word ship and mentally spell it
out for a child: es ach i pe. Can you imagine that a child would know how the
sounds of the first two letters are spoken together after having repeated the names
of the letters? We do not connect names when we pronounce a word (translate
visual language into audible language), but rather sounds. And in this method
children remain completely ignorant of the sounds. But if you teach your child to
pronounce the sounds of these two letters, first individually and then together, the
child will have completely learned how to read the word.20

The revolution of the European alphabet was it oralization. Simple

primers contributed to the epistemological shift from a general grammar
to the science of language.
With Rask, Grimm, and Bopp language is treated for the first time . . . as a total­
ity of phonetic elements. . . . A whole mystique is being born: that of the verb, of
the pure poetic flash that disappears without trace, leaving nothing behind it but
a vibration suspended in the air for one brief moment. By means of the ephemeral
and profound sound it produces, the spoken word accedes to sovereignty. And its
secret powers, drawing new life from the breath of the prophets, rise up in funda­
mental opposition . . . to the esoteric nature of writing, which . . . presupposes
some secret permanently lurking at the centre of its visual labyrinths. Language is
no longer to the same extent that sign— more or less distant, similar, and arbi­
trary— for which the Logique de Port-Royal proposed as an immediate and evi­
dent model the portrait of a man, or a map. It has acquired a vibratory nature
which has separated it from the visible sign and made it more nearly proximate to
the note in music.21
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 33

Stephani’s concept of “ pronunciation” marks the shift exactly. The alpha­

bet is learnable only as “ visual language” translated to “ audible lan­
guage.” The syllabic method had left this rather Faustian translation to
children; the spelling method made it impossible for them. The former
consisted in rote learning of the links between optical and acoustic syl­
labic images; the latter, in rote learning of simple words, the names of
letters, the ridiculousness of which is shown in Stephani’s technique of
transcription es ach i pe— even in this mockery the advocate of contem­
porary children.22 Spontaneous readability was excluded in both cases.
The new method opposed all rote learning and exteriority with an inner
voice, which made letters (as if to illustrate the epistemological break)
into “ nothing but notes.” Stephani advised mothers:

In order to provide you with a correct view [of my method], I must ask you from
now on to consider our mouth with its different constituent parts as an instru­
ment upon which we are able to play certain meaningful tones that together we
call language. Like any other instrument, this one can be played with or without
notes. We practice the former when we speak, the latter when we read. (Note:
from this point of view writing could be considered as a kind of composition for
the mouth instrument.) Reading then consists in the art of playing our language
instrument from the page of notes before us. You will now easily guess what it is
that letters represent from this point of view. They are really nothing but the notes
invented for this purpose.23

The phonetic method culminated in the description or prescription of

a new body. This body has eyes and ears only in order to be a large
mouth. The mouth transforms all the letters that assault the eyes and ears
into ringing sounds. This was not a new concept as regards the ear, but in
relation to the eyes and letters it was a revolution. In losing their names,
letters also lost their status. N o tradition has defined writing as composi­
tion for the mouth instrument because letters are and remain graphic ar­
ticulations (even if, since Aristotle, they have been defined as the signs for
spoken sounds). There is, after all, a physiological reason for this: the
difficulty of distinctly pronouncing together many single consonants,
which of course take their names from the act of being “ sounded with”
one another. Ferdinand Olivier, Basedow’s assistant, to whom the in­
vention of the pure phonetic method is still occasionally attributed, also
sacrificed purity on account of this difficulty. To Stephani’s annoyance he
had “ in his method, which became known at the same time as mine,
letters followed with a long e, and he names them she, me, b e ” 24 This
crutch, which was called schwa and was used from the publication of the
New Berlin School Book (1760) until the time of Basedow and Campe,25
remained faithful, even in its name, to the consonantal and written char­
acter of the first, that is, Hebraic alphabet. When Stephani discarded the
34 i 8oo

schwa, pure phonetics was established for the first time. He granted that
vowels are untroublesome only in one aspect— namely, not because they
can be pronounced in isolation, but because of the accidental fact that
“ their sounds have also become their names.” 26 Therefore the practicing
mouth instrument does indeed begin with a d e i o o u i i , a “ natural scale
that ascends from the lowest to highest note” ; those who are more ad­
vanced, however, can produce single and isolated consonants with just as
much virtuosity. One need only have intimately experienced one’s own
oral cavity, ranging over all the folds and hollows, in a sensual phonetics
that develops all sounds out of one another. An example is the continuum
between m, n, and /:

Did you know, ladies, that you can close the oral cavity without any help from the
lips, simply by firmly pressing the forward part of the tongue tightly against the
gums and thereby forcing the same original voice sound to travel also through the
nasal passage? If you try this you will firld that you have made a voice sound
different from the previous ones,, which is designated n in our speech notation
system. N ow try it again, but with the slight change of allowing a little of the
original voice sound to escape on either side of the tongue. The sound that you
now hear is the sound of the letter I.27

A primer for children had unexpectedly produced a (not accidentally

contemporaneous) Finishing Manual, by Karl Czerny, for musical women
and mothers without a piano. Where earlier analphabetics learned to
read, mothers now first learned to know their own mouths. Autoexperi-
mental phonetic practice first established the mother’s mouth with its
passages, hollows, and depths. And children, instead of attending to
books or philanthropic letter games, were all eyes and ears for the instru­
mental presentations of this mouth. If later in life they should happen to
speak what She spoke before them in earliest childhood, they would have
the feeling that “ often still [they] watched her lips and repeated her
words.” 28
The Mother’s Mouth thus freed children from books. Her voice sub­
stituted sounds for letters, just as in the course of his Scholar’s Tragedy
Faust substituted meanings for words. The phonetic experiment gave rise
to a psychology or psychagogy that made possible the complete consum­
ing of texts. Only the mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the
optic form of the letter. And when later in life children picked up a book,
they would not see letters but hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice be­
tween the lines.29
This voice works unheard wonders. It does not speak a word, let alone
a sentence. The educational goal of children in reading is to speak out the
written discourses of others, but this is not their mothers’ goal. Once
more, Lacan’s definition of Woman exactly fits or (if historians would
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 35

rather read it) so does Johann Christoph Tobler’s definition of Nature.

She doesn’t speak, she makes others speak. Mothers learn something else.
First, they relieve their children of all practice in optical discernment of
letters (pattern recognition), and thus pretend that for them an alphabet
can exist without writing. Given the hidden premise that the mothers
have learned to coordinate eye and mouth under the old-fashioned
method, they are capable of moving their mouths to notes and do not
mistake a u for an x. (Behind the phonetic method is the discourse of the
Other, which it repudiates.)
Second, mothers learn articulation under the guise of teaching children
to read. Stephani’s method for mothers is their “ self-education as teach­
ers” and belongs to the great program of education for educators that had
been in progress since Lessing and Kant.30 Self-education dismissed im­
itative learning and produced pure pronunciation for its motherly teach­
ers through a methodical exploration of the oral cavity. All of Stephani’s
reading- and writing-instruction books declare war on the copying of em­
pirical, and therefore imitative, models. Because in “ previous methods
children always imitated the pronunciation of their teachers, which of
course always has provincial aspects,” 31 mothers’ mouths are made to
practice until u no longer sounds like *<and g no longer sounds like ch.
The discourse of others, those who mistook i for u., is thus eradicated:
words like Vergniigen lose all Saxon accent.32 The mother’s pleasure is at
once the methodical production and the methodical purification of
sounds. An accomplished M other’s Mouth at the end of its self-education
no longer works in an empirico-dialectical manner, but becomes the
mouthpiece of an “ original voice sound” that generates all others. The
transcendental signified in Faust corresponds to the transcendental voice
of Stephani. For the first time in history it teaches how “ to pronounce
words the way that language would have them pronounced, that is, so
that their pronunciation is everywhere the same. It is therefore also the
nation’s means of gradually suppressing all the different dialects and re­
placing them with a completely pure pronunciation.” 33
With this measure, however, the phonetic method guaranteed that all
discourses inscribed in the discourse network of 1800 would be homoge­
neous. Only through “ suppressing” or “ banning” all “ provincialisms”
and “ deficient dialects” could German become High German.
Human language might have originated in a lengthy process of listening— an un­
conscious imitation as well as familiarity with certain signs— this is the language
that the child learns from its parents, with all the deficiencies and imperfections
that they naturally have; it is also the way in which most people learn to speak.
But human language, in its particular and general aspects, can also be considered
as a plenitude of artfully formed signs, determined by exact rules and fully ade­
36 i8oo

quate to thought. This type of human language is the product of a careful devel­
opment of the instruments of language and understanding. Am ong Germans this
is the pure, High German idiom .34

The basic differentiation in transcendental knowledge between copying

and development, imitation and methodologically purified production,
applied also to speech. As in other fields of knowledge, a norm appeared
that redefined the many regional usages as pathologies35 and called, under
the name of the high idiom, for a parousia of pure signifieds or “ thoughts.”
The norm was eloquent and effective enough to call its reign a power.
Stephani wanted a language “ as language wants it” ; in his Monologue
Novalis called the will to speak an imperative that followed only the w ork­
ings “ of language” and that constituted his dignity as poet.36The norm was
thus universal enough to apply to everything from the babbling of children
to the poetizing of poets. Because the norm worked in an “ artful” manner,
it became the vital element of German Poetry.

This preparation of a general, purified, homogenous medium was

something new. Until the time of Johann Bodmer and Johann Breitinger,
who sent their manuscripts to Leipzig for proofreading, the standard of
High German was empirical rather than transcendental: the Meissen
idiom (which was later to become the norm) functioned as one among
many and was distinguished only by use and respect. The M other’s
Mouth, by contrast, assured that the high and literary idiom would con­
sist in the very absence of dialect. The young Goethe had only the beloved
dialect of his native region to counter the “ pedantic regime” of Saxony.37
With the planned normalization of speech circa 1800, a campaign against
all dialects began. In 1779 the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg
offered prizes to mechanical engineers and organ builders for construct­
ing an automaton that would be capable of purely pronouncing the five
vowels. Antoine de Rivarol, not coincidentally the author of A Treatise
on the Universality o f the French Fanguage, praised one of the machines
subsequently developed and predicted that it would terrify all Gascon
and Swiss language teachers and cause them to lose their jobs, because
exact reproducibility would henceforth protect vowels from any idi­
omatic or historical denaturation.38 Traditional language acquisition was
thereby held to be denaturing because it merely handed the language on.
Tradition produces copies of copies of copies and so on endlessly, until
even the concept of the original is lost. A transcendental M other’s Voice,
however, is inalienably identical with its oral experience, just as an au­
tomaton is the distortion-free identity of its mechanism.
Under the technical conditions of 1800, when automatons were me­
chanical rather than electrical or electronic, the M other’s Voice assumed
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 37

the task of establishing Rivarol’s dream of the purity and universality of

standardized high idioms. Because the phonetic method did away with
the rules of traditional acquisition, it was not merely a speech system but
a writing system. It guaranteed iteration in a pedagogic (not technical)
manner, thus assuring a structural transcribability of sound. Ferdinand
Olivier, who in his philanthropic work in Dessau was himself one of
Rivarol’s despised Swiss French teachers, promised that his half-hearted
phonetic method for fathers and mothers “ would succeed eventually and
with near necessity in unifying all dialects of a given language into, as
their accepted foundation, the finest and purest idiom.” 39 Through “ The
Theory and Analysis of Speech Sounds,” “ the sounds of language will be
taken from their indefinite and fluid condition, in which they have been
held by an incomprehensible prejudice, and, under a new relationship,
will be defined almost as they once were in their visible form through the
invention of writing.” 40 To speak plainly, phonetic reading instruction is
thus a writing system and not merely a method of speech. Only as such,
through the regulation of pronunciation according to a hypothetically
“ accepted” norm, could it teach children orthography prior to any in­
struction in penmanship.41 The phonetic method, a revolutionary devel­
opment equalled only by the invention of writing itself, and therefore of
high culture generally, would have been a worthy recipient of the St.
Petersburg Academy prize.
In Germany the methodological purification of speech began with
Johann Gottried von ITerder. In the context of his secondary school re­
form, Fierder, a head consistorial counselor, delivered a speech entitled
“ On the Education of Students in Language and Speech,” which for a
century was again and again hailed as the founding document of German
as a school subject42 and which constructed the image of the new sub­
ject’s enemy:
When we come into the world we are of course able to scream and cry, but not to
talk or speak; we emit only animal sounds. These animal sounds remain with
some people and races throughout their entire lives. One has only to stand at a
distance from which the sound of the voice and accent can be heard without the
meaning of the words being conveyed: in some people one will hear the turkey,
the goose, the duck; in many speakers it will be the peacock, the bittern; in pre­
tentious dandies it will be the canary; it will be anything but the human voice.
Thuringia has many good things, but fine-sounding speech is not one of them.
One realizes this when one hears sounds, sounds mixed together, but does not
understand the meaning of what is said. Youths who have acquired this unpleas­
ant dialect of merely animal sounds, whether they come from the cities or the
country, should make every effort in school to acquire a human, natural speech
possessed of character and soul and to rid themselves of their peasant or shrieking
back-alley dialects. They should leave off the barking and yelping, the clucking
and cawing, the swallowing and dragging together of words and syllables and
speak human rather than animal language. Happy is the child, the boy, who from
38 i8 o o

his first years onward hears understandable, human, lovely sounds that un-
noticeably mold his tongue and the sound of his speech. Happy is the child whose
caretaker, mother, older siblings, relatives, friends, and finally first teachers speak
to him in their bearing and speech with reason, decorum, and grace.43

The dichotomy of norm and deviance is so powerful that dialects are

no longer conceptually considered human and are instead relegated to the
animal realm. Nonetheless, the school reformer knew of no measures
against animalization besides his own speeches and fortunate childhood
contingencies. So school reform created a gap that the pure phonetic
method would fill. Stephani turned Herder’s fortunate contingencies into
a systematic semiotechnique. The irreplaceable Mother replaced all the
various caretakers, siblings, friends, and teachers. She separated the child
from everything animal because she did not speak or did not speak to
anyone at all; rather, she practiced vowels and consonants. A concept like
communication is inadequate for grasping the production conditions of
literature, which included machines that generated presignificant sounds.
What matters in the discourse network of 1800 is the difference that lan­
guage, in order to become a high idiom and thus the medium of Poetry,
opened between itself and animal sounds. “ Language” became a mythi­
cal being at the very moment when its anthropological grounding bur­
dened the scapegoat animal with the old-European techniques of lan­
guage instruction and sent it out into the desert.44
What Herder celebrated as the specific difference of the t,6>°v koyov
e\ov (“ animal that possesses language” ), this language without barking
and yelping, clucking and cawing, was simply a new alphabetization.
Friedrich Herrmann’s New Primer warned, in one of the rare sentences
not to be spoken by the child itself, that the child should not be an ani­
mal.45 Stephani’s primer instituted this difference even in the most minute
of its methodological steps. From the purified M other’s Mouth the child
learns, besides vowels, some noisy consonantal combinations, such as bl,
br, pf, pr, fl, dr; although they create the “ greatest difficulty while read­
ing,” the child “ can play them with the greatest ease on his mouth instru­
ment.” 46 The rk in bark and the Ip in yelp no longer reminded one
of animals. Although it could be overcome, the difficulty was so great
that one primer, which introduced Stephani’s Bavarian state-approved
method to Baden, joined the ranks of the most heroic lipograms. It con­
tained, in spite of its piety, “ in the whole book not just one syllable
words, but only words beginning with a single consonant” ; so, for ex­
ample, the multiple-consonant word “Jesus Christ” occurs only in an
“ afterword” for teachers.47
The first German-language primers, during the Reformation, intro­
duced consonants and consonantal combinations very differently. Griiss-
beutel’s Little Voice Book presented ss as a hissing snake, p f as a snarling
 THE MOTHER’ S MOUTH 39

cat being barked at by dogs.48 Peter Jordan’s Lay Book gave these rules of
pronunciation: “ The I as the ox lows. The m as the cow moos. The r as
the dog growls. The s as the young doves whistle and coo.” 49 Finally, Val­
entin Ickelsamer, whose German Grammar was the source of such ani­
mal voice catalogs, hoped that they would provide exactly what Stephani
sought from mothers: substitution of the sounds designated by letters for
the traditional letter names. In this, however, he was as far from being the
precursor of the pure phonetic method as the animals are from being the
mother.50The sixteenth-century conception of language directed children
toward the many languages of creation, toward the materiality and opac­
ity of signs.51 With Stephani’s phonetic exercises, mothers become aware
of the musicality of their mouths.
The dog that distracted the translator Faust in 1799 disturbed earlier
readers so little that he could figure as one of the models for reading.
Some sound or other could be usefully extracted from his barking/2 The
secondary-school students who terrified Head Consistorial Counselor
Herder in 1796 with their Saxon animal sounds were not the mythic wolf
children of the new anthropology of language, but simply parrots of their
primers or house pets of their teachers. Even the Prussian King Frederick
was said to have learned to read from epoch-making primers like the
Little Voice Book.53 Herder’s belief that “ our spirit secretly accommo­
dates all dialects of the mother tongue” 54 applied initially only to the
spirit of his school reform and of maternal phonetics. But there have been
times when, to the contrary, language accommodated dialects and dia­
lects accommodated the creatures of the earth.55 In the discourse network
of 1800, however, the place of the many animals— dogs, cats, oxen,
cows, doves, snakes— became that of Woman.
This happened quite explicitly. The founding document of the anthro­
pology of language, Herder’s Treatise on the Origin o f Language, has the
human language of human beings, that necessary Other to the connatural
baby crying or student alley dialects, proceed from naming an animal.
The target of this act is a “ white, soft, woolly” lamb, which (as these at­
tributes suggest) could better be called a ewe. According to Herder, in
order for man, this creature of lack and uncertain instincts, to arrive at
the freedom of name giving, he must lack the instinct of a bloodthirsty
lion, even that of an ardent ram, both of which might “ throw themselves
over” the lam b56— which would be perverse if a child or a neuter were
concerned.
If the lamb stands for Woman, then the instinctual lack posited in
Herder’s anthropology is simply the cessation of male desire. A desire
ceases and the capacity to speak emerges. The first name bestowed articu­
lates this difference. The difference is in the name itself— between the
natural-language bleating of the lamb or ewe and its “ onomatopoeic”
40 i8 o o

repetition.57 “ The sheep conies again. White, soft, woolly— the soul sees,
touches, remembers, seeks a distinguishing mark— the sheep bleats,
and the soul recognizes it. And it feels inside, ‘Yes, you are that which
bleats.’ ” 58 Such repetition, which at once displaces and differentiates, so
that natural language is displaced onto human language and a human-
animal difference is opened up, could perhaps be read in light of Derrida’s
differance.59 But what is ignored in such a reading is that repetition and
displacement are themselves a displacement of sexual difference. The
explicit distinction between ram and man is not the first sign of this.
Herder’s initial thesis that “ while still an animal, man already has lan­
guage” projects a whole language of crying and weeping, of exhausted
breaths and half sighs, that mocks alphabetization and transcription.60
Herder leaves open the question of who speaks this language, but M e­
phisto makes it clear. To the keen-eared devil, “ the dull ‘ach!’ ” and “ the
fiery ‘oh!’ ” — all the sounds of nature that Herder writes down as un-
transcribable61— are well-known symptoms of women, “ to be cured in
one way.”
But the cure does not take place. An incest barrier separates Stephani’s
child from the mother and her natural sounds. An instinctual lack sepa­
rates Herder’s human beings from the ewe, and the barrier of centuries
separates them from the language of Nature, which is not accidentally
called the “ original wild mother” of all discourses.62 In both cases an un­
bridgeable distance makes them speak. Mephisto’s advice remains un­
heeded so that sound can become language. Mother and Woman are
agents of discourse production.
As the product of its Other, articulated and transcribable discourse is
never a pure beginning. Herder does not make the “ absolutely absurd”
mistake of denying that a kind of language is the precondition for the first
forming of names.63 The hypothetical “ baah” of the ewe is this precondi­
tion. It enters her human name in the same way that the natural sounds of
the “ feelings” and “ passions” (however great the distortion) enter the
“ roots” of the earliest languages.64 Thus prior to any discourse lies an­
other, a dark and unarticulated discourse that stands to the articulated
and articulating signifiers as their signified. The discourse network of
1800 measures the space of this difference under the title “ Language” :
W hy cannot the living Spirit manifest itself to the Spirit?
Once the soul speaks, then, oh! it is no longer the soul that speaks.

When “ language” is defined within the system, the outcome is at once

not (yet) language and the sole signified of language. Herder’s essay de­
nies the transcribability of this discourse prior to language, and Schiller’s
distich denies its speakability. And yet “ the soul” speaks/writes itself.
After the caesura in the pentameter— that is, precisely where the line’s
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 41

heaviest accent falls— one hears/reads a pure sound of nature. The “ soul”
pushes toward language so forcefully that even lines of poetry, in which
the unfulfillable character of the soul’s wish becomes language, grant the
wish and write down an autonymic signifier of the soul. This “ oh!” is at
once a word and not a word; it speaks and contradicts language; it con­
stitutes the beginning of language yet is subsequently betrayed by all
speaking. The discourse network of 1800 rests on a signifier that remains
the network’s limit value, because all articulated signifiers refer to it as
their signified.
The Courses o f Life as an Ascending Line, by Theodor Hippel, insti­
tutes that signifier in an abyss that separates it from all others. “ Don’t call
sighs, half-uttered ‘oh’s’ dead words, you wordhacks! They count for
more than all your sad songs and condolences. In ‘oh,’ the Spirit releases
the muted body and rushes forward to speak for it, but the Spirit alone
speaks. There are unspeakable ‘oh’s’ !” 65
In the name of the unspeakable, then, Hippel set an explicit limit
to discourse. Thereafter, it was forbidden to say that the one and only
signifier reputed to be free of materiality and body (as if sighs were
not expressions in which the body replaces the mute spirit) was merely
one signifier among others. This rule of language had far-reaching
consequences.
Gretchen opposes the exchange value of gold, which like discourse sets
in motion an endless circulation, with the cry, “ Oh! we poor!” (“ Ach, wir
Armen!” ; 2804).
After it becomes clear to what vagaries love’s desire will be exposed by
seemingly straightforward yet nonetheless so misusable proper names,
Alcmene ends the tragicomedy of Kleist’s Amphitrion with her simple
“ oh” — only to remain mute in the unwritten tragedy of her further
marriage.66
And when in Hoffmann’s “ The Sandman” a student is driven into par­
anoia and even his fiancee can offer no help beyond “ profound philo­
sophical letters,” 67 he suddenly and decisively falls in love with another,
who gives him less or more than theory.
He sat beside Olympia, her hand in his, and with fervor and passion he spoke of
his love in words that no one could understand, neither he nor Olympia. But per­
haps she did, for she sat with her eyes fixed upon his, sighing again and again,
“ Oh, oh, oh!” Whereupon Nathanael answered: “ Oh, you magnificent and heav­
enly woman! You ray shining from the promised land of love! You deep soul, in
which my whole being is reflected,” and more of the same. But Olympia did
nothing but continue to sigh, “ Oh, oh!” 68

Nathanael’s rejection of Clara, who has been all too alphabetized, fol­
lows the new language regulation word for word. Only a beloved given
totally to “ oh” -saying can fulfill the wish that language (mathematically
42 i8 o o

put) should have no greater power than the soul, that it should really and
exclusively “ portray man’s inner life.” 69 Olympia is the soul that, instead
of speaking, makes her lover speak and speak exactly that inner life. The
promised beyond of language, also called love, ensures that Nathanael
talks and talks until all the women “ vanish from his memory” and only
Woman remains.70 Her unique signifier brings about a complete indi­
vidualization of speech. It does the impossible: not only to designate but
also to signify an individual. And to make the impossible as true as it is
reproducible, one had only to construct an automaton according to St.
Petersburg specifications for producing vowel sighs. Nathanael’s beloved
Olympia is the mechanical doll built to Spallanzani’s specifications, and
Woman, a mechanical effect of discourse. Her name (Gretchen, Alcmene,
Olympia) is irrelevant.
The mechanical program allows discourses to be decomposed into the
most basic elements, which can function as “ natural as well as intentional
signs,” as “ feeling and speech sounds.” 71 Herder’s bleating sheep did this
for the first time, and Schiller’s distich “ Language” did it with admirable
economy. As Joseph Heselhaus has observed, the sustaining opposition
of the verse, the contra-diction between the title and the tone-setting
signifier, is implied in the materiality of language, prior to any authorial
intention whatsoever. In the graphics and/or phonics of the title word
Sprache dwells the syntagma ach.

The decomposition Spr - ach - e represents the basic mechanical oper­

ation in the discourse network of 1800. It defines that machine precisely
because it never occurs as a mechanical decomposition, being instead re­
written and reproduced by women and texts. Every culture has different
techniques and standards to govern the concrete manipulation of lan­
guage. The threshold that determines the possible extent and usefulness
of analyses differentiates discourse networks from one another. In 1800
the threshold was drawn at the minimal element of significant sounds and
sound combinations. This means two things. First, the decompositions
possible in what murmurs and gleams from all sides did not stop at the
word, which is scorned by Faust, Herder, Hippel, and Nathanael. Second,
the decompositions did not cross the threshold beyond which the great
Kingdom of Nonsense would begin. In 1800 the “ love of the word” or
“ philology” applied neither to the word nor to those asignificative ele­
ments known as phonemes or letters. Instead it was devoted entirely to
the Spirit or signified of language, through whose working “ every word
expresses a form, every usage a grouping, every choice of words a nuance
of the picture” and (this is decisive) “ the syllable also becomes mean­
ingful.” 72With its meaningful syllable this definition named the limit and
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 43

goal of all language analysis: a minimal element that unifies sound and
meaning, Nature and Spirit. It is at once the ground and summit of lan­
guage: a ground insofar as scientific analysis “ seeks the particular signifi­
cance of every vowel and consonant, for their more abstract aspects (lip
movements, gum and tongue movements), and then for their combina­
tion;” 73 a summit insofar as at the end of a sequence of iterated decom­
positions the minimal signified equaled Poetry. “ The finest poem consists
of nothing but verses; the verses of words; the words of syllables; the syl­
lables of single sounds.” 74
There is a world of difference between this minimal signified and the
language elements that would be generated in the discourse network of
1900. Only the ahistoricism that afflicts literary histories of Modernism
could allow A. W. Schlegel’s definition of poetry to be set beside the
“ word-in-itself-poetry” of Ivan Goll or Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s phrase
“ The material of poetry is words.” 75 The phoneticism of syllables and
sounds blocks such an equation. They had nothing of the literal, written
character of the literary word and instead remained “ pure poetic flash
that disappears without a trace, leaving behind it but a vibration sus­
pended in the air for one brief moment.” 76 Philosophy in 1800 made this
claim, and linguistics set about empirically confirming it. Thus Hegel
called tone “ the fulfilment of the expressiveness by which inwardness
makes itself known” because it is “ determinate being within ft'me,” and
therefore “ determinate being which disappears in that it has being.” 77 Au­
gust Bernhardi’s grandiose and monomaniacal On Language was oc­
cupied with the thought that the whole of Nature sounded in minimal
signifieds; man imitates these sounds and finally, in his perfection as poet,
by abrogating all vestiges of writing returns to the original sounds.78 In
Herder’s words: language in 1800 “ was . . . full of living sounds.” 79
There were, moreover, explicit sanctions against equating the minimal
signified with graphic signs. Whoever dared to count the sigh “ oh!” as
one signifier among others would be one of Hippel’s despised wordhacks.
Of meanings in the original language, Herder wrote: “ In their living con­
texts, in the total picture of pulsating nature, accompanied by so many
other phenomena, they are moving and sufficient unto themselves. Se­
vered from everything else, torn away, deprived of their life, they are, to
be sure, no more than ciphers.” After the forbidden decomposition
nothing would remain of the “ voice of nature” but “ an arbitrarily pen­
ciled letter.” 80
In 1800 linguistic analysis was not allowed to approach the two for­
bidden borders of the word and the letter. Instead, analysis was confined
within the concept of the root, as instituted by a new science of language.
Roots lead whole words back to an original historical significance that
44 i 8 oo

binds all Indo-European languages in a proper nuclear-family affection

and makes them daughters of one mother. At the sight of “ several
samples of handwriting in Sanskrit,” the hero in Ferdinand von Loeben’s
novel Guido says, “ Languages have always seemed to me to be lost holy
children who cover the whole world in search of their mother.” 81 This
mother, once found, could not be further analyzed. The indivisibility of
Sanskrit roots promised the origin of all meaning. This thought would
lead Jakob Grimm audaciously to extend a minimal but present meaning
beyond the roots of words to morphemes, such as the series of graded
vowels a, i, u.S2
The combinatory rules of a given discourse network correspond to its
rules of decomposition. Thus a nonproblematic and symmetrical proce­
dure led linguistic science in 1800 from isolated elements back to words.
“ If one goes back in history to the origin of all languages, one finds that
out of simple, unarticulated sounds increasingly articulated, complex
combinations of words arose— this process is the way of nature.” 83 This
historical-systematic observation was transferred to instruction in lan­
guage and reading. Olivier, for example, explains his phonetic method:

The means that my method of instruction, like the old spelling method, will em­
ploy in preparing the reader’s competence are nothing but the entirely natural dis­
solution of the language’s every word into actual, distinctly audible components,
into the completely pure, simplest sounds or elements. To comprehend this analy­
sis, one need only hear it, as the child is prepared in advance to do by its linguistic
capacity. Hence the one thing that the child must accomplish in this preparatory
exercise is to learn the technique of taking the more or less completely dissolved
whole— that is, the dissolved word— and putting it back together, thus restoring
it to its recognizable form. This technique is almost mechanical and therefore
very easy.84

Because the analysis obeys the most natural Nature, the recombination is
as good as accomplished. The postulate of the minimal meaning dras­
tically limits combinatory possibilities: all assembly is excluded. (By as­
sembly I mean first the three types of mathematical combinatorics— per­
mutation, combination, and variation— and second aleatory possibilities,
for example, those produced in a crossword puzzle between the columns
and series of letters.) Products of assembly are as little constrained to
make sense as the corresponding method of decomposition is to return
always to signifieds: this is the simple secret of every characteristica uni­
versalis and is addressed in a satire by Christian Liscov.
The miserable scribes write books. A book is actually nothing but a lot of leaves
covered with letters. If there is some agreement among these letters, then the book
they make up is a genuine book. There is agreement among the letters if and only
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 45

if they are combined in such a way that comprehensible words result. These
words can be combined and recombined in all languages countless numbers of
times, without any harm to the so-necessary agreement of the manifold, and so it
is left to anyone’s whim how the words of the language in which he writes will be
mixed together.85

Decomposition and composition in the age of representation had fol­

lowed the rules of a combinatory system that played on all levels of lan­
guage at once and that was immortalized in Swift’s Lagado Academy. In
the writing system of 1800, by contrast, nonsense letter and word per­
mutations were not even worthy of being ignored. In it, augmentation as
a combinatory technique corresponded to implication as a technique of
decomposition. Just as ach was contained in Sprache, so Sprache, theo­
retically and literally, proceeded from ach. Augmentation led from mean­
ing to meaning; it came into play where minimal signifieds grow into
meanings and so conformed to the organic model in which elements not
fortuitously named roots grow whole words.
Assembly and augmentation as historically different manipulations of
language stand to one another as do fugue and sonata, contrapuntal line
and thematic-motivic work. The fugue contained no continual expansion
and acceleration of its themes, only the whole-number amplification and
diminution of note values. Furthermore, its technique of construction
took into account the column and the series to which each tone belonged.
Finally, the rules for the formation of crab motion, retrograde, and mir­
ror crab were textbook examples of mathematical combinatorics. By con­
trast, the themes of the classical-romantic sonatas consisted of motifs that
were at once minimal musical materiality and elementary meaning. In the
opening motif of his C M inor Symphony, Beethoven, whose notebooks
demonstrate an obsession with the smallest possible motifs, exemplified
how a maximum of meaning can be drawn from a minimum of note
value. Finally, thematic-motivic work proceeds by extensions and varia­
tions according to the combinatory rules of continual augmentation. Out
of minimal meanings grew symphonies that culminate in the brotherly
embrace of humanity.

In the primers of 1800 one can read how the changeover from one
combinatory technique to another was effected. They intentionally elimi­
nated very old combinatory games that had been brought to Germany in
primers of the Reformation period. Combinations appeared first in the
primer of Jacob Griissbeutel (1534);86 in that of Ickelsamer (1534) ap­
peared the first column-and-series crosses, assembly techniques that led at
most marginally to the output of meaningful words.87
46 i8 o o

ba ab a
be eb e
bi ib sch i rtz
bo ob o
bu ub u

In 1800 a children’s crusade was mobilized against the kind of nonsense

generated by assembly techniques. Several of the early reform primers still
included the Babylonian ba be bi,ss but it became “ almost a point of
honor for the authors of prim ers. . . to include only meaningful words.” 89
In 1796, August Niemeyer signaled some of the first opposition to the
assembly method. “ In teaching syllables one should not choose the mean­
ingless ab, eb, ib, etz, quau, quay, and so on, but rather one-syllable
words to which meanings can be attached: bath, board, yard, pond, tooth,
corn, hat, town, etc.” 90 Language instruction thus would do away with
nonsense, latent as a threat or possibility in the material and combinatory
character of all alphabetical writing. Thus a search began for “ meanings”
or signifieds inherent in the smallest sound combinations. In all their
German holiness, Faust’s words mind, force, act— all monosyllabic and
shorter than the word they are supposed to translate— function like a
word-example hodgepodge of the same type as bath, board, yard.
Ernst Tillich first introduced into pedagogy the genetic-methodologi­
cal, and so truly augmentative merging of such minimal meanings. For
Niemeyer and Faust the monosyllabic meanings fall from heaven as
“ whole impressions,” 91 whereas for Tillich they arise in a sliding transi­
tion out of single sounds. Without any introduction, the First Reader for
Children begins with the sequence:92

a A Aah h
ab ba ap pa ma am Ad da at ta
An na ak ka ag ga af fa va wa
as sa ass ssa asch scha Ach cha

The beginning of science thus creates, as in Hegel’s Logic, an uncondi­

tional immediacy: the primal sound, pure, undisturbed, uncolored. Just
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 47

as Being is not anything intuited, but rather pure, empty intuition itself,
so a is not an element of any given language, but pronunciation itself.93 In
the beginning, in other words, is the sound and not the letter a; from the
ancient beginning symbol alpha there could be no path leading to Aah,
for such a path can only be made by a voice’s distortion, coloration, and
extension of the unconditional— by an augmentation. Karl Philipp M or­
itz described this kind of elongation and even provided guidelines to syl­
labic “ meaning” in his German Prosody, which enabled Goethe to ver­
sify his Iphigenia.94 In Tillich a few old-fashioned variations follow, but
only to bring the voice from pure sound to minimal meaning: to the ach
(the sigh oh), which is, as we have seen, the language of Nature. With
that, one has already run the entire course that Tillich’s massive tome
opens up. Eight pages later, the Ach that has been created by augmenting
a undergoes its own augmentation:

ach n ach r ach pr ach spr ach

The language of culture {sprach) springs suddenly out of the language of

Nature without the children noting the slightest differential step. With
magnificent autoreferentiality, Tillich’s First Reader magically draws the
name of speaking out of the minimal signified ach. If the soul sp-o-ke,
then, “ oh,” the soul almost spoke. Here this is demonstrated in reverse;
the structure of material implication that is the secret of Schiller’s distich
is technically proved. In an illustration of the logic of pedagogical writ­
ing techniques, Tillich, after hundreds of pages in which sounds give rise
to syllables, syllables to words, words to sentences, and sentences to
stories, ends his first edition (1803) with a story called simply “ Growth.” 95
This story follows the same rules of construction as “ the finest poem”
(in the words of the elder Schlegel) and gives augmentation, that gradual
formation of discourse from the M other’s Mouth, its proper name in
German.
Biological time and its measurement became part of the pedagogical
movement. They were used to calculate norms applicable not merely to
ranking classes in schools but to minute steps in a child’s lessons and prog­
ress in learning.96The steps outlined in the primers were not guided by the
experimental approach to child measurement developed in the discourse
network of 1900, but by a pseudobiology of language development based
on pedagogical assumptions. Pestalozzi provided the commentary for
what Tillich accomplished rigorously and without any commentary at all.
48 i8 o o

I tirelessly put together rows of syllables and numbers and filled whole books
with them. I tried in every way to make the introduction to spelling and figuring
as simple as possible; furthermore, 1 tried to put the introduction into a psycho­
logically sophisticated form so that the child would be led gradually from the first
step to the second, and then, on the basis of a firm understanding of the second
step, to the third and fourth steps with rapid, certain progress.97

But this way of planning the first step, which was to provide the effort­
less, sliding transition from Nature to culture, did not entirely guard Pes-
talozzi against lapses. Letter combinations such as eph, ephra, ephraim /
buc, buce, bucephal i ul, ult, ultra, ultram, ultramontanisch are indeed
minimal steps in learning, but rather than proceeding through the con­
tinuum of the voice (like Tillich’s “ a Aab” ), they merely move across dis­
crete quanta of letters.98 Pestalozzi reverts from augmentation to whole-
numbered rhetorical amplification.
Herder, in his Alphabet and Reading Book, argued against the mistake
of beginning with such artificial sound combinations as ultramontanisch
(or artifiziell). His primer instead used imperceptible grammatical exer­
cises with minimal signifieds, such as I am / you are, whereas previously
“ the most difficult words, geheiliget, Benedicite, and so on, stood on the
first pages,” so that “ children did not understand anything of what they
were spelling and reading.” 99 The comment could apply to Pestalozzi’s
ephraim or to “ the difficult Biblical names, such as Nebuchadnezzar,
Abednego, etc.,” that mystified Anton Reiser when he was learning
to read.100 Such references constituted not only a vocabulary of old-
fashioned, yard-long words but a particular discourse, the theological. The
“ freeing of school governance from church governance” was simple:101
the new primers depose Christianity by banning its key words.
This is not to say that gods or goddesses faced extinction: that simply
doesn’t happen. Herder’s imperceptible grammatical exercise I am / you
are was not an empty recitation but offered a saying different from the
command Benedicite. It constituted training in an elementary speech
situation. Where previously the Many had called upon One God, hence­
forth One Child spoke to the first You. The minimal signifieds of the new
primers were the autonyms of primary education. A benediction of the
nuclear family superseded praise of God. “ The stability of religion derives
from the fact that meaning is always religious.” 102
To make meaning is, of course, the definition and the cunning of mini­
mal signifieds. A professor of psychology who inaugurated the systematic
observation of infants, beginning with his own newborn son, and who
thus became not a father but the father of child psychology, heard his son
“ purposefully articulate and repeat sounds” on M arch 14, 1782.103 At
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 49

this, the person whom the psychologist, Dieterich Tiedemann, designated

as “ mother” — with proper scientificity or infantilism— rather than as his
wife “ pronounced the syllable ma’’ ’ for the baby. The experiment was a
success, for on November 27 the child “ speaks a few words clearly and
also knows their exact meaning: namely, Papa and M am a.” 104
The case indicates the stringent logic of minimal signifieds. Unlike
Nathan the Wise (the eponymous hero of Lessing’s play), who pro­
vided his child with instruction, that is, with articulated doctrine, this
father retreated to writing articulated essays about the child. He left
uttering the syllable, the hesitant beginning of articulation and signifi­
cation, to a “ mother” who did not even continue to speak— she made
the child speak. The syllable became a name only when repeated in
the child’s mouth, which in a fitting autonym called out the very one
from whom all language learning proceeded. In Herder’s essay, man
translated the ewe’s “ baah” by onomatopoeic repetition; Tiedemann’s
son translated his mother’s “ ma” by a reduplicating repetition in lan­
guage: both are textbook cases of augmentation. Thus arose a “ clear pro­
nunciation” and a “ meaning” that was clearer still: it had no referent.
Young Tiedemann employed his “ ‘M am a’ not in order to call the person,
but almost arbitrarily, without wanting to say anything,” 105 and there­
fore proved that there is no empirical place at which the Mother could be
addressed.
Mama or ma functioned as the most distinguished minimal signified in
the writing system of 1800. It was the earliest one to be discussed, ar­
chived, and fed back into the system. Mama did not indicate, as it would
a century later, the existence of a children’s language beyond any national
language, which could contribute to a general linguistics.106 Instead, it
was pronounced by parents only so that it might recur in children’s
mouths— as a signature for the new education. What occurred, then, was
true programming, which could thus be continued by automatons. The
Baron of Kempelen boasted that his automaton of 1778 could say, aside
from a few other words, mama and papa. These two words constituted
the entire vocabulary of the patented doll that Johann Maelzel exhibited
in Paris in 1823.107
The pedagogic movement took the curiosities and ephemera of contem­
porary technology (because pedagogy could manipulate phonetics and the
pragmatic linguistics of the minimal signified) and from them fashioned
a functioning feedback-control system. Stephani’s Primer promises in its
subtitle to give mothers the pleasure of speedily teaching their own chil­
dren to read and then begins, after briefly introducing the single syllables
to be practiced in the mother’s mouth, with a syllable list:
50 i8 o o

ju jo ja jo ja je ju ji jau
mu mo ma mo ma me mu mi
mei mai mau mau M a-M a

In what follows the same vowels are combined with the consonants h b p
d t k f, from which the words Bu-be and Pa-pa arise as quickly and natu­
rally as did the primal word Ma-ma.ws Thus after three run-throughs of
sounds and sound combinations, the phonetic method led to the significa­
tion and benediction of the nuclear family (not accidentally from the per­
spective of the “ Bu-be,” the boy). The holy triad was named. But in the
beginning was and remained Ma-ma, the minimal signified that, as in the
example of young Tiedemann, produced by augmentation an entire so-
called world of meaning.

Acculturation in 1800 shortcircuited the circuit of discourse. In teach­

ing their children, above all their sons, to speak and read, mothers taught
them the transition from natural sounds and mouth exercises to calling
the mothers’ own names.
As soon as the child’s awareness has developed sufficiently, sometime in its second
year, it will hear its mother speak each time she gives it something: “ Look what
Mother has for you.” Later, or as soon as it has a better understanding of lan­
guage: “ You’re hungry, you want to eat; it wouldn’t feel good to go a few more
hours without food, or if no one were here when you’re hungry, if no one loved
you and wanted to help you. Don’t worry my child! Your mother is here!” 109

This eloquent doubling of the mother-child relation— a doubling that

makes the relation possible in the first place— is the subject of the engrav­
ing that appears as the frontispiece to Stephani’s book.
The engraving can also be used for this purpose. Your children should love and
respect you as their educator rather than merely as their mother. If you have
taught your children to read, show them the picture and lead them into a conver­
sation about how much these children love their mother because of the burden
she assumed in teaching them to read and about how pleased this mother was to
instruct her children because she felt they would owe her twice as much love.110

A picture presented and introduced the mother as Bildnerin, or “ culti­

vator.” Bildung, that key word of 1800, arose by folding an empirical
learning situation onto one that was ideal and programmed. When re­
form pedagogy merged the two situations, the core of the nuclear family
became doubly erotic. The engravings, which both Stephani and Daniel
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 51

Chodowiecki used to present a mother and child with the image of a

mother and child engaged in the task of Bildung, accomplished the dou­
bling: they presented an image of both the Arcadian beginning and the
Elysian end of the new alphabetization. Only in a picture can the child
really be initiated “ without difficulty, with pleasure to our world of
books,” as Karl Splittegarb promised in a pure paradox. In order to be
receptive to written consolation, the child must already have been ac-
culturated; the consolation is always too late. But the engravings and the
maternal discussions they prompted were different. They accomplished
the aim of the phonetic method: the effortless glide from ma to Mama,
Nature to culture, sound to language. Pictures and orality tucked writing
into the kind of love that the original maternal cultivator displayed and
deserved. Stephani’s advice to mothers programmed an infinite inten­
sification of their image. An alphabetization in which all real w ork was
taken on by the mother ceased to be an incision or pain; the latter, the
forceable violation required to mark human beings with a storage or
memory capacity, had always been forgotten because it was the precondi­
tion of memory itself. The discourse network of 1800 reversed this and
made possible memories that reached back to a fully affectionate, mater­
nal alphabetization.
52 i8 o o

Rousseau, a matricide at birth, was thrust at the age of five or six by

the unconsolable widower, his father, into the explicit place of the one
they had lost: at night he would read aloud to his father the novels that
previously had been held and read by his mother. N ot until this erotically
charged cache of books had been used up did the two of them have re­
course, by day, to the father’s library in the Republic of Scholars. V io­
lence and a chance event, then, brought a child and the ability to read
together in the place of the child’s mother. The author of the Confessions
was therefore unable to recall how he learned to read around 17 17 . He
could recall only his “ first reading experiences and their effects,” which
naturally amounted to a solitary eroticization.111
In 1800 the chance event became an institutionalized program and the
violence became love. Probably the first document supporting a gentle,
maternal experience of learning to read was provided by the Memoirs of
Karl Heinrich von Lang. But what Lang called “ very tiresome and silly” 112
soon revealed itself to be a pervasive, portentous pleasure. Rousseau and
Christoph Martin Wieland were taught to read by their fathers, but
Lriedrich Schleiermacher, Lriedrich Jahn, Johann Tieck, Friedrich von
Raumer, and the brothers Grimm were taught by their mothers.113 Only
for such as them, in contrast to Rousseau, do memories of the earliest
alphabetizing become possible, because along with reading the mother
taught that her gift of love was unforgettable— as a great range of result­
ing nineteenth-century autobiographies confirm.114
Such capacity for recollection could be augmented further. In 1809 a
certain primer nostalgia appeared, one that via Karl Hobreker infected
Walter Benjamin.115 Friedrich Hempel, a judge and government official
stricken with insomnia by the sufferings of those condemned by the laws,
but not by his own feelings, found his sole consolation in conjuring up his
first primer and its alphabet, then devoting himself to a phantasmal,
book-length commentary.

Yes! It was you, my beloved ABC book, you who rescued me from this hellish
ordeal, this torture chamber, and took me back to the charming fields of my
youth. You healed the sufferings of my soul with the balm you poured from the
nectar cup of memory! I wandered through the paradisiacal meadow of my
springtime and was seized with a longing like the thought of a lost lover.116

This inspired comment neglects only one thing: like comedy and tragedy
for Aristotle, the beloved ABC book and the disdained law statutes con­
sist of exactly the same letters. The truth may have tortured government-
appointed judges to a degree equaled only by the fate of their victims;
nonetheless, judges learned to read only to be able to decipher and apply
the laws. The functions of memory and storage on which the law is based
dominate the phantasm of a “ recollection,” which in spite of its name
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 53

was evoked to make the truth forgettable. As such, the recollection is

bathed in the paradisiacal glow of an always-lost childhood lover.
For Tieck, the mother-beloved who instructed his alphabetical imagi­
nation and gave him memory of alphabetization was his real mother. He
told his first biographer that he “ learned to recognize letters on mother’s
lap, and the learning went quickly when imagination came into play. The
letters seemed to be alive; they turned into droll figures of all kinds.” One
who learned to read at an age of “ barely four years” and at the same time
learned to recollect it pleasurably for a lifetime was all but predestined to
become the romantic poet of droll figures.117 He was able to write an art­
ist’s fairy tale in which the heroine recalls how as a child she ran away
from a tyrannical stepfather and was taken in by a wise woman who lived
in a forest; there she learned to read and found it “ a source of unending
pleasure.” 118
Writing about learning to read and write constituted a large feedback
loop. It returned to the place from which all acculturation proceeded in
order to retrieve it from forgetfulness. As Nature and Ideal, the Mother
oriented the entire writing system of 1800. The various discourses whose,
regulated interplay constituted the system can be differentiated only in
pragmatic respects. Each one of them operated as a return to the source
by different paths and detours.

M oth erliness and C iv il Service

A simple and direct shortcircuit characterized pedagogical discourse.
Educational tracts and primers written explicitly for mothers obliterated
their own textuality for the sake of their addressees. Books disappeared
in a M other’s Mouth whose original self-exploratory experience had
been instituted by those very books. Stephani’s Primer was a model of
this disappearance. The phonetic method— in other words, the pretense
of uncoupling learning to read from the discourse of the Other— sub­
stituted for the textuality of the book and alphabet a Voice that neither
read aloud nor imitated, but instead spontaneously created the pure
sounds of the high idiom or mother tongue. The inexplicable difficulty
was how mothers who had not already learned to read before reading
Stephani could know the pronunciation of certain black squiggles on
white paper. They would have been unable to decipher even the primers
designed for their use. For the sake of the Mother, a book would forget
being a book.
Pestalozzi made this shortcircuit explicit in his joyful exclamation,
“ The book is not yet there, and already I see it disappearing again through
its effects!” 1 The preface to his The Mother’s Book assured each and
54 i 8 oo

every mother of its intention to place its pedagogical contents “ most per­
fectly into your soul and into the soul of your child” and went on to
remark:

I know that these are just forms, but as forms they are the containers of a power
that will bring intelligence and life to you and your child. Mother! The spirit and
power of perfection lie within you, and for the sake of your child you should de­
velop them into your spirit and your power. You can and should do this, other­
wise you are worth nothing, nothing at all. I will speak the truth and speak it
plainly: you, friends and foes of the method, test it on this one characteristic, and
then accept or reject it according to the results. Let me say it plainly right away:
the method is worthless if it does not allow every reasonable mother who has
practiced it carefully and sufficiently to rise to the point where, with psychologi­
cal certainty, she can put the books aside as superfluous and proceed indepen­
dently with the tasks they contain.2

There could hardly be stranger standards for the fitness or unfitness of

scientific method. Pestalozzi delivered a mere form that was or was not
given materiality only by mothers’ use of it.3 A man’s book counted only
when it disappeared as a book. Pestalozzi’s book announced the emer­
gence of a new pedagogy that would proceed with psychological certainty
to derive all pedagogy from the mother’s inherent educational gifts, in
order, finally, to be swept aside with the same psychological certainty and
be declared superfluous before those inherent educational gifts.
The Mother, or source of all discourse, was at the same time the abyss
into which everything written vanished, only to emerge as pure Spirit and
Voice. N ot just lyrical literary lullabies, starting with “ The Traveler’s
Night Song,” were called forth, then consumed by Mother Nature;4 sci­
ences were no more resistant. The elimination of books was proclaimed
in all the titles of pedagogical treatises. It made literal truth of Faust’s turn
from dusty books to the life source: the phylogenetic source of discourses
reabsorbed those that had hardened into books. N o wonder The Mother’s
Book was never finished.
Instead, the German states went to the source. Saxony dispatched high
officials of education to Pestalozzi’s school at Ifferten,5 and Prussia, more
advanced, “ in order to view all aspects of the improved method of public
education and to benefit from every experience offered by the contempo­
rary state of educational science,” sent young people there, with the de­
clared intention of “ having exceptionally apt and well-prepared subjects”
(in the lexical sense of subject, namely, civil servants) “ upon their re­
turn.” 6 In place of a disappearing book that never appeared, one had the
state. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the educational institutions of his century
was thus quite accurate: “ The mother actually dictates, the evil or false
one, the one whom the teacher, as a bureaucrat of the state, cannot help
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 55

but simulate. She pulls strings in the form of an umbilical cord attached
to the paternal belly of the state. All movements proceed from the body of
the father, who represents the alma mater.” 7
The alma mater or Mother, the addressee Pestalozzi apostrophized
with every device that could be borrowed from the sublime, became con­
cretized in a bureaucratic and therefore textual apparatus that was at
once its caricature and its serial continuation. Pedagogical discourses dis­
appeared into the M other’s Mouth only to reappear multiplied in the
form of a bureaucratic administration. Indeed, such a process corre­
sponded to the structure of address in a book in which the singular
“ Mother!” stood next to the multiplicative address “ friends and foes of
the method” as a means of inviting the “ critique” of official experts. The
Prussian reformers— Heinrich vom Stein, Johann Fichte, Wilhelm von
Humboldt8 needed only to take the invitation seriously and actually in­
spect, as desired, all aspects of Pestalozzi’s improved method of public
education. The method was approved and thus consumed a second time.
First the Mother drank, then the civil servants lined up.
This by no means resulted in the state’s disrupting the shortcircuit be­
tween the maternal producer of discourses and pedagogical discourse.
The state could not usurp the rights of an authority deemed by Nature—
in other words, by itself— to be responsible for primary education.
What Faust called a life source became institutionalized. The mother
“ must be an educator” because “ the child sucks in its first ideas with the
mother’s milk.” 9
In 1800 the state acted in accord with such maxims. Napoleon, the
master of cannon fodder, directed Madame de Campan, headmistress of
a boarding school for the daughters of indigent officers of the Legion of
Honor, to provide him with mothers.10 German administrations, in their
circuitous yet ultimately more efficient manner, instituted this master’s
order. In the discourse network of 1800 political theory declares that the
most sacred duty the state is:
To do everything possible to educate the daughters of our age and make them into
better mothers, so that the state will be able to place its future citizens into good
hands rather than simply abandoning many of them, as it is now forced to do.
Therefore let me repeat that I view the problem of women’s education as one of
the most sacred duties of the state and I would charge all those who neglect this
problem, the ministers of education departments, consistorial presidents and ad­
visors, school inspectors, and whatever other titles those responsible for public
education may have, with crimes against suffering humanity.11

It became a duty to produce authoritative producers of discourse. The

state of Bildung turned biological reproduction, that bare recurrence of
56 i8 o o

the same, into cultural production. There came to be more and more
mothers who were more and more motherly.
Historically, this was a new “ determination of woman.” A book pub­
lished in 1802 described this determination in terms of “ higher intellec­
tual development.” Amalie Holst hardly intended, by providing women
with higher education, to redress a previous state of powerlessness and
submission; she has nothing but scorn for old-European patriarchal fan­
tasies of potency. “ The more a husband brags about dominance, the less
he has it.” 12 Another woman provided an even more succinct justification
for the necessity of state-supported schools and colleges of education for
women: “ Whether men care to face it or not, women rule the world.” 13
Accordingly, higher education was not compensation for powerlessness,
it was a mutation of power.
We are no longer satisfied with this form of power; we have awakened from
a slumber and will now cast away the invisible threads with which we have
hitherto, from behind the scene, directed all the action on the great stage of the
world. We do this because it is beneath our dignity as human beings to continue
to disguise ourselves and pursue our ends with deceit and force.14

The old puppet theater is very well suited for staging strategic-political
scripts of victories in the war between the sexes. But such victories are
disdained for the sake of a more important form of power. When the old-
European pedagogues took into account the cultural influence of women,
they always thought exclusively in terms of its impact on the surrounding
world of men.15 They therefore lacked, politically and erotically, the pre­
programmed power of expansion that was invented in 1800 by exchang­
ing the world of men for the world of children.16 Amalie Holst wanted
first to provide women with higher education and then to add authority
over “ the primary education of both sexes.” The third step would be to
secure an “ influence that we consider to be infinitely more important than
that exercised by people in state revolutions, in that we consider our in­
fluence to be the basis for the future character of individuals and so to
have an effect on the whole.” 17
Thus a woman who explicitly rejected the role of revolutionary was
able to outdo any revolution. The dispensation of the new gender deter­
mination called motherhood was a psychological power that subsumed
all power. In the shift from “ worldly woman” to “ mother,” 18 status to
development, leisure to education, the recoding of women transformed
them into the Truth. Only Truth, of course, can effortlessly transform
agglomerates into wholes, make human beings “ human beings in the
noblest sense of the word,” 19 and achieve its victory nakedly, without de­
ception. Mother and Truth became synonymous. Anyone who could de­
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 57

termine the very possibilities of being human by controlling the primary

education of children had attained a transcendental power surpassing all
empirical and political conditions.
The state could never control such an authority; it could only accom­
modate it. The state relinquished aspects of its judicial, bureaucratic, and
political power in certain areas and instead instituted the function of
Motherhood. An example was the Louise School in Berlin, an educa­
tional institution for daughters of the educated classes founded in 1 811
and aptly named for the Prussian queen whom Novalis celebrated for
having familialized political power and to whom Amalie Holst dedicated
her book.20 According to its program this institution was not to be a
school so much as “ a large family.” “ The principal would be called
father, the headmistress and her assistants mothers.” 21 And “ every state,
every municipality is to have” such “ maiden houses” in which “ every­
thing is completely regulated according to familial relations” because
they created mothers in the image of The Mother.22
A constantly swelling current of discourse, one held to be pure Truth,
flowed between instructing mothers, girls educated to be mothers, and
finally children. It traversed political currents and took its power from the
separation between women and the state that it achieved. Pestalozzi dem­
onstrated this separation quite clearly when he addressed his pedagogical
discourse first and most importantly to mothers, then second and more
distantly to educational theorists and civil servants. With the single, per­
haps ironic exception of Theodor Hippel, who hoped that female civil
servants would lead to An Improvement in the Status o f Women,23 re­
formers of both sexes agreed that “ such a total change in the public
order” would only “ create havoc.” 24 “ The woman” must remain “ con­
tinually distant from any direct service to the state” because “ her condi­
tion, which was dictated exclusively by nature, would often come into
conflict with the functions of a state office.” 25 From today’s standpoint,
Hippel may well have spoken the truth. But he was far from the truth of
his epoch’s discourse.
The exclusion of women from state power and its bureaucratic dis­
courses did not leave the determination of women vague or their achieve­
ments unused. The very exclusion of women from offices summons women
to their official capacity, as mothers, to elicit discourses generally and
magically to transmute them into Nature. Because they “ are connected to
the state, church, public, and so on, only through their husbands,” women
live “ in an actual condition of nature.” 26 Only the separation between the
state and civil servants on one side, and families and mothers on the
other, guaranteed that the function of Motherhood would not be em­
pirically corrupted. If, as Hippel had wished, “ female doctors, judges,
58 i8 o o

preachers, etc.” had been produced, then “ children would be left to grow
wild, corrupt.” 27 The exclusion was not an excommunication; it con­
tributed to a relationship of productive complementarity between the
new determination of women and a civil service that was becoming the
very foundation of the state. In the Mother the state found its Other,
without whom it could not exist— as evidence, consider the passionate
appeals to ministers, consistorial councilors, and school inspectors (in
other words, to all the heads and members of the educational bureaucracy)
to place the function of Motherhood above all political considerations.
The German classical philosophy of the sexes made this complemen­
tarity explicit. When the pedagogue of The Elective Affinities wanted “ to
sum up the whole task of education in a few words,” he formulated it as
follows: “ Let the boys be raised as servants and the girls as mothers, then
all will be well.” 28Philosophers had only to provide a theoretical basis for
this practical maxim. Karl Heydenreich demonstrated in his Man and
Woman that nature had created a sex that was bound “ to found, order,
govern, and administer the state” because “ it is only in the state that man­
kind can be raised to the greatest possible enlightenment” and reaches its
zenith in the pedagogic civil servant or “ instructor of mankind.” 29 But
because human beings, in contrast to animals, can only be biologically
reproductive when they are culturally productive and perfectible, nature
also devised a sex different from men. This sex is excluded from bureau­
cratic careers for the most sacred reasons: women, “ as mothers of help­
less children, constitute, I should say, an end in itself in the state, without
ever having to become, like men, a means for the state.” Because with
species-specific “ progress in civilizing and culture” the administration of
the state becomes progressively more complicated,30 the historical role of
men is an endless bureaucratization undergone solely to create the possi­
bility of The Mother, the only end in itself that exists in the world.
The official role for men, civil service, entered a new phase in 1800.
The German territorial princes of the early modern period had, in part by
authority delegated to territorial churches, informally bound certain edu­
cated classes and the institutions that produced them to their lands: first
judges and theologians, then in 1700 physicians. When the new idol re­
placed the prince, or civil servants replaced courtiers,31 the old order
of estates became a universal order: “ Every citizen of the state is a civil
servant,” as a poet cum civil servant concisely put it.32 Any attempt to
derive the modern system of forming bureaucrats from medieval or early-
modern procedures runs into a barrier at this juncture.33 Only since 1800
have there been created universal bureaucrats, to whom mankind and
even humanness are subordinated.
Heinrich, Freiherr vom Stein complained that the old-Prussian cour-
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 59

tiers knew no science and that for them “ participation in literary life was
as good as forbidden.” 34 Humboldt responded by recruiting civil servants
via a general system of examinations based on revolutionary standards.
“ Nothing is as important in a high-level official of the state as the com­
plete conception he has of mankind— how he conceives its dignity and its
ideals as a whole— and as the degree of intellectual clarity with which he
ponders these questions and responds to them emotionally. There is
nothing so important as his interpretation of the idea of Bildung.” 3S
Spirit, Man, Bildung— such standards are absurd for the territorial state
judge or church minister. But active civil servants who had had a literary-
philosophical education and who were “ charged with improving the
inner condition of man” were indeed, according to Heydenreich’s fine ex­
pression, instructors of mankind, or in Stephani’s neologism, “ education
officers.” 36 The new status of the German servant of the state in 1800
rested on the claim that “ along with the preexisting spheres of law and
legal scholarship, medical science and medicine, the henceforth equally
justified modern system of education must take its place.” 37 In 1787
Friedrich August Wolf obtained an administrative mandate “ to establish
a philosophical seminar as a center for the development of teachers in
scholarly institutions,” a mandate that was given “ more than twenty
years before the institutionalization of a separate class of teachers” and
that produced scholars who were independent of the church.38 In 1794
the General Provincial Law [Allgemeines Landrecht] declared all pro­
fessors and secondary-school teachers to be civil servants.39 In 18 17, at
the end of this founding period, when the Prussian Ministry of Culture
declared the state itself to be an “ institution of education writ large,” the
circle closed.40A state that reaches beyond its own laws and punishments
to grasp the modern possibility of universal discipline must necessarily
form a pact with that most universal and “ indispensable class of civil ser­
vants” known as teachers. At the conclusion of a document entitled A
Defense o f Rights and Claims Based on the Highest National Purpose o f
Scholar-Teachers, the teachers addressed an apostrophe to their state in
words that provided a straightforward description as well as the terms for
a pact. “ You must recognize that without us you have no moral value and
will not be able to achieve any, just as our profession would be com­
pletely devoid of substance without you.” 41
“ In the developing constitutional state of the early nineteenth century,
the educated class . . . through the conception of the unity of the ideas of
state and culture” advanced to a dominant position.” 42 Official educators
came to control the complex functions of reading and writing indispens­
able for all other administrative and state officials. “ We cannot govern
without reading and writing.” 43 The identity established between being
6o 1800

human and being alphabetized became a simple necessity,44 at a time of

“ thoroughgoing implementation of bureaucratic principles in the au­
thority structure of administrative departments and in the professional
civil service.” 45
The system would be left with a central gap, however, if it could not
provide for the production of civil servants who made other civil servants
out of men or human beings out of civil servants. It needed an authority
to educate the education officer and to teach reading and writing to the
administrators of reading and writing. This elementary prerequisite of
disciplinary power was as necessary as it was unwritten because it consti­
tuted the center of the system. Constitutional law and administrative
method provided only the nexus between the state and the civil service,
just as pedagogues provided the nexus between mother and child.46 The
two threads came together between the lines in poetry. When a servant of
the state named Homburg impetuously disobeyed tactical commands of
the elector and was condemned to death, he took leave of his beloved by
requesting that she search in the mountains along the M ain until she
found a child with blond hair like his own, that she hold the child against
her bosom, and that she teach it to stammer the one word “ M other!” 47 So
goes recruitment for the civil service.
Thus different discourses, like the dismembered limbs of a phantasm,
indicated their empty crossing point: the nexus between Motherhood and
the educational bureaucracy. That nexus was unwritten and unavoidable,
as was shown by all determinations of Woman. Only the Mother admin­
istered early childhood alphabetizing. Only she raised men who were
solely and completely human. The Mother was the origin of pedagogic
discourse, which returned and disappeared into her to be resurrected in
officially educationalized form.
Social history interprets the fact that in 1800 women suddenly were no
longer simply subordinate to the father of a household but were defined
as standing in a polar and complementary relation to the other sex as a
result of increasing bureaucratization, principally because the new defini­
tion arose within the administrative, educated middle class. As befits its
emphasis on the grand scale of history, it views the macrosocial processes
as causes, the gender processes as effects.48Jacques Donzelot was able to
show, however, that the transformation did not occur “ without the active
participation of women,” who acted in a “ privileged alliance” as the
partners of doctors and teachers.49 The situation was therefore at once
simpler and more complex: it consisted of interlocking circuits rather
than simple causes. In order to generate universal civil servants, the
Mother was generated, who in turn generated . . . and so forth. The edu­
cational state did not simply fall from the sky, and “ the Creator ex nihilo
[is] an absurdity.” 50
 THE MOTHER’ S MOUTH 61

That the polar arrangement of the sexes can nonetheless appear to be a

cover for a persisting patriarchy requires a different explanation. The
Woman does not exist. This is one way of saying that the educational
state, as a dance of innumerable civil servants around the alma mater,
necessarily excluded women as a plurality. In the reorganization of the
system of higher education in 1800, which was explicitly devoted to the
induction of civil servants,51 a number of interlocking decrees achieved
this exclusion. First, the university as alma mater lost one of its corporate
rights: an informal, occasional procedure for admitting students (e.g.,
after a conversation concerning admittance). A written examination [das
Abitur] took the place of such spoken occasions. In 1788 Prussia intro­
duced the examination with the declared intent of regulating, by a single
act and document, graduation from secondary schools and admittance to
universities. In 1834 matriculation was refused without prior examina­
tion, a step that accomplished what the secondary-school committee,
above all Friedrich Gedike, had been demanding since 1787.52 As a well-
known back-room decision maker put it, the Abitur “ would allow the
state from the moment of the exam to look closely at those who would be
its higher servants and to inform itself about their qualities.” 53 M an, the
individualized universal, came into being under recruiting inspection.
The Latin schools to which the state delegated its inspecting eye became
the modern secondary schools, whereas other schools lost access to the
university.
Second, the course of university studies for the new educational civil
servant was regulated. A Prussian edict of 1810 replaced the countless
old-European certificates of qualification, some of which were academic,
others ecclesiastical, with the examination pro facultate docendi, our well-
known state exam for teachers.54A “ circuit of legitimation” 55 with its sub­
station in the secondary school for boys thus created a formal, inescapable
linkage between the universities and the administrative state. “ The ‘con­
nection’ of ‘official agency’ and ‘individual,’ this objective bond between
the knowledge of the state and the knowledge of civil society, the state
exam is nothing other than the bureaucratic baptism o f knowledge.” 56
Because girls’ schools were created to create mothers, the intrusion of
the state meant the opposite of what it did at boys’ schools and universities.
According to one teacher, official “ public duty” was “ neither healthy nor
desirable for a woman.” 57 Such a desire would unlink a chain of legitima­
tion. The Louise School, for instance, designed its program so that “ in­
struction will take the form more of family life than that of school . . .
without ever having public examinations.” 58 The fatal results of igno­
rance in old-fashioned girls’ schools that broke this rule became a theme
of the highest literature. In Goethe’s Elective Affinities Ottilie embodies a
silent inwardness and fails in a public examination, only to prove in life
62 i8 o o

and death that she could superbly pass another examination, namely
whether domesticity and ideal motherhood constituted the determination
of woman. That too was a baptism or induction, albeit an unbureaucratic
one: in the boarding school Ottilie learned “ not as student, but as a future
teacher” 59 and with that met, a year avant la lettre, Betty Gleim’s demand
for boarding-school teachers who would be essentially mothers.60Ottilie’s
antipode Luciane passed the same public examination with flying colors,
only to suffer the bitter fate of being entrapped in worldly appearances.
Without intending to comment on the latter’s fate, Goethe’s pedagogical
friend Niethammer deduced the same result from the essence of Woman.

How will our daughters react to the quiet of the household when in raising them
we ourselves involve them from infancy in every public pastime? We are not
merely ruining them for domestic life; we harm virtue much more by making our
daughters’ education so public that they cannot learn or produce anything that
cannot be shown off. H ow is a spoiled girl to enjoy the quiet tasks of housework,
which remain unknown to the public?61

Luciane is not an Ideal Mother like Ottilie, and rather than discourse-
productive silence she commands speech— she also disappears from the
novel without a trace.62 Likewise, women as a plurality were excluded
from the discourse network of 1800. An Abitur in inwardness would be
unthinkable. Educational reformers and most historians of education
have suppressed this by-product of the chain of legitimation that forcibly
linked boys’ secondary schools, universities, and the state apparatus.
When the system of higher education assumed a leading position in the
state, women became that which never ceases not to write itself— Lacan’s
definition of impossibility.
The impossible Luciane isn’t dumb and is not without curiosity in
theoretical matters. She elicits specialized or professional knowledge
from every man that appears. Her existence would have been possible be­
fore the establishment of the function of Motherhood. Certainly, statutes
that forbade women in public office had long been in existence,63 but none
barred women from the public or the Republic of Scholars. As late as
1742, Dorothea Christina Leporin could justify her recent academic ac­
complishments with famous examples, a preface by her father, and a
striking argument. “ If a woman intends to achieve a doctoral degree, pos­
sesses as a candidate the requisite knowledge, and passes the examination
of the respective faculty, then a degree in law, medicine, or philosophy
cannot be refused her, unless there is a constitution to forbid it.” 64For the
same reasons life stories in the eighteenth century could be played out in
ways that read like word-for-word productions of Lessing’s plays. One
father who was as wise as Nathan tutored his daughter, providing her
with knowledge sufficient to allow her, in the domestic setting of another
 THE MOTHER’ S MOUTH 63

professor, to pass her matriculation examination and to appear a few

years later— dressed as a bride, as per the wishes of none other than her
father— before the academic public to receive her master’s and doctoral
degrees. These events occurred in 1787 and resulted in the second doc­
toral cap in German women’s history.65
But whatever scholarly women undertook became impracticable when
the system of higher education was coupled with the state and became an
instrument of gender differentiation. Women were no longer daughters,
that is, brides of their (in fortunate circumstances, enlightening or profes­
sorial) fathers; they became incipient-mother daughters of their mothers.
In Stephani’s newly invented science of state education, to which we owe
such fine school subjects as social studies and political education,66 a
strict division separated academic discourse, the autoproductive system
for civil servants, from women’s education, the self-regulative feedback
loop of primary education.67

What the manifestos of the bureaucratic and human sciences left un­
said was that a strict division was also the closest correlation. There was
no place, in a system of polar sexual difference, where the two sides of the
system could both be written down. They remained separated by the
abyss that divides writing from the voice. Civil servants wrote (not just
anything, but the determination of Mankind); the Mother did not write,
she made men speak. This double determination endows the human
being with universality and so it can be written only at the price of univer­
salization, or in other words, only as philosophy. Philosophy could for­
mulate the discursive network of the two sexes, but in so doing it named
the mother “ Woman” and the civil servant the “ human being.” This led
to the necessary contradiction of writing man as double and directing the
definition of the human race to two addressees. Friedrich Schlegel ad­
dressed his treatise On Philosophy to his beloved and to the public.
Perhaps you would prefer a conversation. But I am wholly and thoroughly a
writer. The written word has an elusive magic for me, which perhaps comes from
the dawning of eternity that surrounds it. Indeed I must confess that I often mar­
vel at the hidden power that lies in these lifeless marks; the simplest expressions,
which seem to be nothing more than accurate and correct, can be so meaningful
that they seem to gaze at one out of clear eyes, and as expressive as the un­
embellished accents from the inmost soul. One seems to hear what one is merely
reading, and yet someone w ho reads such beautiful passages aloud can do nothing
more than attempt not to spoil them. The silent marks of writing seem to me to be
more fitting vessels for the deepest, most immediate expressions of the spirit than
the noise of the lips. I would go almost as far as to say in the somewhat mystical
language of our H. that life is writing: the sole determination of man is to in­
scribe, with the stylus of the imaginative spirit, the thoughts of the divinity into
the tablets of nature. But as far as you are concerned, I think that your role in this
64 i8 o o

determination of the human race can be perfectly fulfilled if you continue to sing
as before, outwardly and inwardly, in an ordinary and symbolic sense; you should
be less silent, and read now and then divine writing with reverence rather than
have others read aloud for you and tell you stories. But above all you must appre­
ciate the sacredness of words more than you have in the past. Otherwise my pros­
pects would not look good. For of course I have nothing to give you, and must
expressly stipulate that you expect nothing from me but words, expressions for
what you have long felt and known, although not in as clear and orderly a way.68

Schlegel’s letter, written in 1799, proclaimed a new century. All the

definitions of the human species that had been transmitted from the
Greeks and Romans, according to which man is the animal that possesses
language or reason, were replaced by the written sentence “ He is the
writer.” Only as an author is man free from the constraint of being also
that which he is not; as author he fully and completely assumes his es­
sence. This overflowing identity remains irrefutable to the degree that it
stands written on the page. And yet it is not divine. For the writer has an
office, whose givenness or authority separates him from the identity of
1 = 1, and with the office he acquires a superior. “ The civil servant class
has always been an annex of the ruling warrior or priestly classes; it is
their appendage, their tool, their corps of assistants or servants.” This
holds also in Germany, which “ like China in Asia or Egypt in antiquity”
is “ the classic bureaucratic country of Europe.” 69 The secondary-school
principal Hegel described philosophic logic as “ the exposition of God as
he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite
mind.” 70 The writer Schlegel described philosophic writing as inscribing
the thoughts of the divinity on the tablets of nature with the stylus of the
imaginative spirit. The educated class attained leadership by conflating
conceptions of the state and of culture. The discourse of the university
therefore flowed from the discourse of a master, and the doctrine of being
(of the concept or of man) obeyed the imperative of a signifier. Philoso­
phy was never any different.71
But just where its despotic signifier appeared, philosophy in the dis­
course network of 1800 executed a new maneuver. The very Nature that
the philosopher’s stylus uses as a writing surface for inscribing divine
thoughts is at the same time, but in direct contradiction, the source of all
writing. N ot God, but a tranquil, immediate Nature guides the pen from
the depths of the soul through clear eyes. Written translation of Nature is
necessary because its speech remains transcendental, not because Nature
is a tabula rasa. The silent or even dead marks of writing accomplish
what the sound of the lips— the colloquial, animal, or at any rate em­
pirical play of voices and mouths— is unable to do: writing reproduces
unembellished accents from the profoundest regions of the soul as clearly
as direct speech would sound. The minimal signified as the murmuring
 THE MOTHER’ S MOUTH 65

source of language remains merely itself as long as it does not speak; the
stylus comes to its aid.
One thus has a metaphysics of silent reading, whose prerequisite was
the alphabetization of central Europe. The jealous philosopher attacked
those who read aloud and thus gave pleasure to Dorothea Veit; method­
ologically, he wanted to annihilate any others who read aloud because
every letter presented them with a small puzzle to solve. Hegel was deter­
mined that silent reading should be schooled by habit, for only then
would reading return to the “ ground of inwardness,” or to authoritative
discourse production.

The achieved habit [of silent reading] eliminates the peculiar quality of alpha­
betical writing, which is that in the interest of seeing it appears as a detour
through audibility to the signified representations, and transforms the alphabet
for us into a hieroglyphic writing so that we do not require a conscious mediation
through sounds when using it; by contrast, people who are hardly used to reading
pronounce what they read out loud in order to understand it in sounds.72

Schlegel was well advised, then, to bind to her own reading a beloved
who so enjoyed listening to stories. Only silent reading makes a habit of
inwardness. And only silent reading prevents language from responding
to the discourse of the Other, which it had done in old Europe as it wan­
dered from one generation to the next, “ with all its deficiencies and im­
perfections . . . through the unconscious imitation and the habituation of
certain thought signs.” 73 Everything changed when language acquisition
began to occur through learning to read. Various inwardnesses gave rise
to the language of the classical-romantic texts, a language no mouth had
ever spoken. For one who wanted to be “ wholly and absolutely an au­
thor,” there was reason enough to sweeten the new technique of dis­
course with every word of his letter.
Instead of hearing the factual occurrence of speech, “ one seems to hear
what one is merely reading.” A voice, as pure as it is transcendental, rises
from between the lines. When the written lines become so “ meaningful
that they seem to gaze at one out of clear eyes,” the hallucination becomes
optical as well as auditory. The reader is no longer reading; in his joy he
encounters a phantasmagorical Nature-body. It is not hard to say to
whom it belongs. The only alphabetization technique in which one seems
to hear what has been read is the phonetic method from the M other’s
Mouth. Writing as a philosophical function thus obeys a master and a
mistress. In its complexity the text transmits the understandably complex
thoughts of God to Nature. In its elementary status of being written
rather than spoken, however, the text is an expression of Nature, a fixing
of its unembellished accents and minimal signifieds, and the only repro­
duction that Nature does not betray to language. If minimal signifieds,
 66 i8 o o

according to Olivier, are themselves fixations, a writing rather than a

speech system of the transcendental Voice, then the transition of that
voice into philosophical writing follows as a matter of course.
With a master signifier above and nature as signified below, philoso­
phy in the writing system of 1800 was the effacement of sexual difference.
It mediated the two authorities, state and Mother, that otherwise re­
mained unwritten in its discursive network. When educational officials
administer the complex functions of writing and mothers administer the
elementary function of alphabetizing, the resulting writer, upheld by both
authorities, is a true human being— because he “ attempts to moderate
and find a counterweight for the character of the sex, rather than exag­
gerating it, for after all that character is an inborn, natural endowment,”
until his “ humanity” finds itself “ at home” “ in the middle” between male
and female.74 With that, however, the author of the letter had proved
what he set out to prove: that writers like himself simply fulfilled the hu­
man condition. He could sign his letter and send it to Dorothea Veit.
This determination of the human race, however, was not the deter­
mination of the two sexes that constitute so-called humanity. The letter
was forced to continue because all the rights of man proclaimed in 1800
were— as Marie Olympe de Gouges recognized— rights for men. Schlegel
doubly inscribed the phallic stylus: first in the register o f sex and then in
the register of a sex. There remained the determination of that other sex,
to which the addressee belonged. But that was no trouble for the pen. “ It
doesn’t take a lot to discover that the female organization is directed com­
pletely and exclusively toward the beautiful purpose of motherhood.” 75
Women play their “ role in this determination of the human race per­
fectly” by remaining voices without writing, either outwardly and em­
pirically or inwardly and transcendentally. The difference between the
sexes therefore coincided in a mathematically exact way with the dichot­
omy between writing and authorhood on the one hand, and with that
between the voice and motherhood on the other. The difference allowed
the Woman as the Mother’s Mouth every right to be a Voice, but no right
to have one. Schlegel found it out of the question “ to allow Nature a vote
and voice in the law-giving council of Reason,” 76 and Ernst Brandes held
that “ the exclusion of women from the deliberative bodies in the state”
was “ very wise.” 77 This did not mean that philosophical discourse would
simply provide ideological backing for the discourse of administrative
method. The two very similar exclusions were not identical, but con­
gruent, as in geometry. Voices of pure song that are never spoken or writ­
ten remain excluded, first from the state civil service, second from the dis­
course of the university— that is, from the two subsystems connected by
the circuit of legitimation. A university within whose departments the

ft
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 67

philosophical faculty in 1800 had risen from the lowest ranking to the
highest because of the necessity of forming universal educators before
state clergymen, judges, and artists, designated itself “ the law-giving
council of Reason.” That philosophy happened to exclude the daughter
of an Enlightenment philosopher marked the whole difference between
Dorothea, nee Mendelssohn, and the doctoral women of the Republic of
Scholars.
In its mandate to write down the whole, philosophical discourse went
the discourse of administrative method one better. It formulated a rela­
tionship between the sexes. Not, to be sure, as a relationship of power
between state and alma mater, as Nietzsche would mercilessly note, but
as the normative relationship between the bureaucracy of writers and
women. It was a twofold relationship between production and distri­
bution and between distribution and consumption.
Through their mandate to represent The Mother, women made au­
thors write. The Mother neither speaks nor writes, but from the depths of
her soul arise the unembellished accents that the author rescues by writ­
ing. According to Schlegel, all the words that made up his letter— ad­
dressed to his beloved, the mother of two children— were “ expressions
for what you have long felt and known.” There would be every reason for
the letter On Philosophy to conclude like The Mothers’ Book: namely,
by announcing that all the words placed across the pages of writing paper
were to be consumed once more by the M other’s Mouth. But the philo­
sophical discourse was not pedagogical; inasmuch as it proclaimed the
destiny of man to be authorhood, it created the need for another type of
reception. Women stood at the origin of discourse only insofar as they
represented the Mother; insofar as they existed as a plurality, they were
charged with reading. Although everything written was only an augmen­
tation of maternal feeling, Dorothea was requested to “ appreciate the sa­
credness of words more than you have in the past. Otherwise my pros­
pects would not look good.”
Schlegel’s letter inscribed each of the two sexes twice into the discourse
network of 1800. Whereas men constituted the human being in general
and the male, women played the role of absolute precondition for dis­
course and a facilitative function in establishing real discourses. Schlegel
concluded his letter:

I have surprised myself, and now I am aware that it has actually been you who
have introduced me to philosophy. I wanted to impart philosophy only to you;
the genuine desire rewarded itself, and friendship has taught me to find a way of
joining philosophy with life and humanity. In the process I have in a certain sense
imparted philosophy to myself; it will no longer remain isolated in my mind, but
will spread its enthusiasm to all regions of my being. And what one learns to com­
68 i 8oo

municate outwardly through this inner conviviality, will become, through such
general communication, that much more our own.
In thankfulness for this, I will, if you have no objections, soon have this letter
published.78

To the author’s surprise, his words have not been his at all. It is as if they
had been whispered by a prompter who in turn had them from the
Woman or Nature. “ I did not speak of her. No, it was she who said every­
thing, the true and the false” — this was already clear in the Fragment on
Nature.79 And yet Dorothea Veit’s leading voice counted only insofar as
it could be exploited. The discourse she prompted has underscored its
written character— the sacredness of the words and the erection of the
stylus— much too passionately to be able to return and cross it out. N ot
only in Schlegel’s philosophy but also in his profession as a writer written
discourse was the difference that maintained the separation of the two
sexes. As a text written by a man, On Philosophy remained “ touched
with the dawn of eternity,” and so too much for Mothers’ Mouths to
swallow. This gave rise to a second reader beside the addressee: the for­
mer or apparent author himself, who by writing has unconsciously trans­
mitted the prompted philosophy to himself. In order to become aware of
this, Schlegel had to read the letter another time before he could under­
stand it. His “ inner conviviality” was a doubling of the functions of au­
thor and reader and so circulated the origin for the first time. It had the
effect of technical amplification and therefore always had more readers in
view. In spite of the greatest intimacy between the writer and the ad­
dressee, the letter went to press. Finally, then, Schlegel did attain the eter­
nity to which writings have been eternally addressed. He said of his com­
plicated eroticism: “ I don’t know if I could pray to the universe with the
whole of my soul if I had never loved a woman. But then, the universe is
and remains my watchword.” 80
Philosophy, the love of wisdom or Sophia, becomes possible only
through the love of women as they exist in plurality. But after love has
become writing, it returns to the world with its eternity, its generality, its
universality, and— the university. The author Schlegel forged his way to a
career as a professor of philosophy with published love letters.
Writing and publication, insofar as they were not just used but empha­
sized and taken into account in the very act of writing, distinguished such
discourses from pedagogical discourse. In place of the negative feedback
that returned pedagogic output to be devoured at its origin, supplemen­
tary couplings were inserted between authors and readers to achieve a
programmed circulation that involved others besides The Mother. These
others could only be: (i) the author, insofar as he could acquire Bildung
 THE MOTHER’S MOUTH 69

by rereading his texts; (z) other women, insofar as they had and became
mothers; and (3) other men, insofar as their destiny dictated their be­
coming authors through independent reading. Schlegel’s letter On Phi­
losophy developed only the schematics of such circulation. Its realization
was the mandate of poets.
 Language Channels

The output of Poets in the discourse network of 1800 constituted a d i s ­

t r i b u t i o n o f d i s c o u r s e s . It provided discourse with a maximum num­

ber of addressees. Schlegel’s Fragment on a Characteristic o f the German

Classic noted in praise of the classical writer Georg Forster that “ conviv­
ial communication” was “ one of the ideas he was most fond of, one that
presented itself to his spirit frequently and in the most varied forms.” In
this the writer was not far from the merchant. Just as the latter “ princi­
pally provides for the exchange of material goods,” the writer makes pos­
sible the “ interchange of intellectual goods and creations.” 1 Thus an end
was set to the limited economy of circulating texts in the Republic of
Scholars and to the “ annoying” prejudice by which “ the sciences are
there only for certain classes, and are not to be seen as a store for all man­
kind.” 2 Forster and Schlegel saw in the “ interweaving and connecting of
the most varied insights” and in their “ more widespread distribution . . .
the most characteristic advantage of our century.” 3 Writing was granted
literally universalizing and literally textualizing functions: it wove a dis­
course that encompassed or generated mankind as a whole. “ The fine arts
are the bond that holds men together.” 4

The Im-possibility of Translations

A simple precondition had to be met before authors could become
“ spiritual economists” : 1 there had to be a general equivalent for the texts
they would spin out. Otherwise the business transaction could not take
place. Reformed alphabetization provided this general equivalent. It was
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 71

the signified, the element that first had been subtracted from letters or
signifiers and then had taken a superordinate position. “Just as the ex­
change of goods is regulated by money as a general equivalent, the ex­
change of knowledge is regulated by concepts.” 2
To base a discourse on signifieds, however, means to make it trans­
latable. “ Translations” are the discursive “ market, to which the most
distant merchants come with their wares.” 3 The poet who led his Bible-
translating tragic hero to the threshold of the new poetry had to guaran­
tee fully the possibility of translation. Goethe saw the translatability of all
discourses, even of the most sacred and formal, as ensured by the primacy
of content (Gehalt) over the effects of the signifier.

I value both rhythm and rhyme, whereby poetry first becomes poetry; but what is
really, deeply, and fundamentally effective, what is really permanent, is what re­
mains of the poet when he is translated into prose. Then the pure, perfect sub­
stance remains. . . . I will only, in support of my position, mention Luther’s trans­
lation of the Bible, for the fact that this excellent man handed down a work
composed in the most different styles and gave us its poetical, historical, com­
manding didactic tone in our mother tongue, as if all were cast in one mold, has
done more to advance religion than if he had attempted to imitate, in detail, the
peculiarities of the original.4

The existence of untranslatable elements in the signifiers of any language

was not denied, but it was discounted. The general equivalent came out
as the precipitate of a “ remainder” : the “ pure, perfect substance,” or sig­
nified. Its effects were necessarily somewhat flattening: as in Wilhelm
Meister’s Mignon translation, “ disconnected” material was “ joined to­
gether.” 5 Exemplary translations like Luther’s Bible molded the most var­
ied discourses (poetical, historical, pedagogical), according to Goethe’s
assessment of the Book of (many) Books, into a single and coherent style.
In the discourse network of 1800, the general equivalent was a basal
construct that allowed for modifications. Herder’s theory of national po­
etry allowed for the existence of untranslatable idioms (like the Johannine
koyos); in practice, however, Herder germanized folk songs from the
most distant languages and cultures. Hegel, in his capacity as principal of
a new humanistic secondary school— for transparent reasons, in other
words— stressed the untranslatability of the Greek;6 his aesthetics, how­
ever, the first such work based on contents or signifieds, made do largely
without citations from the Greek and asserted that a poetic w ork could
be translated “ into other languages without essential detriment to its
value.” 7 Only the new linguistics in the discourse network of 1800 had
the option of dealing with the untranslatable. August Ferdinand Bernhardi
declared that poetry was untranslatable, “ because the identity” — namely,
the identity of signifieds— “ must be represented by rhyme.” 8 Above all,
72, i8oo

however, “ grammatical composition has regularities which are not trans­

parent to the signification of the discourse. Moreover, since signification
can be transformed, practically unimpaired, from one language to an­
other, these regularities allow us to characterize the individuality of a
particular language.” 9 Linguistics in 1800 stood at one extreme of a logic
of the signified: at the other extreme was Poetry. In its striving to be truly
educative and ennobling, Poetry embraced the general equivalent and
with it inherent meaning, which is always religious, whether in Luther or
Faust. “ In the end all Poetry is translation.” 10
O f course, the new writing still embraced the myth of Babel whenever
it declared its intention of “ reuniting all essentially interrelated sciences, 1
despite their current divided and fragmentary state.” 11 A discursive origi­
nal unity could not have existed before the invention of the general equiva­
lent. Printing alone did not guarantee “ an integrating and interrelating
that is anything but innocent.” 12 German poetry was not a reunification:
instead, it was an unprecedented introduction of discursive unities. The
“ owe mold” or style unified syntactically; the primacy of the signified uni­
fied semantically; and this was accomplished pragmatically by the re­
ceiver to which all translations from 1800 on were sent: humanity, the
reader, and “ general world trade.” 13
In 1798 Novalis began his Allgemeines Brouillon. The adjective in the
title signaled unification and universalization, whereas the substantive in­
dicated how one would go about making a single discourse out of the
most varied scientific discourses— by mixing and shaking. The Brouillon’s
method was to translate particular data from the sciences (ranging from
poetics to physics) out of one vocabulary into another via systematic
analogies. O f course, as a poet Novalis was even better equipped for a 1
trouble-free poetization of the sciences.14 In the novel Heinrich von Offer- 1
dingen, general translatability is not achieved by any technical procedure; !
it simply comes into being via the ear of the Poet. True to Novalis’s state- 1
ment that “ to translate is to write poetry as much as creating one’s own t

works,” 15 the hero sets off on a journey in pursuit of Bildung during i

which practically nothing happens except that nearly all forms of knowl- 1
edge and practice are present themselves in speech. Pure listening to eco­
nomic, historical, archeological, religious, poetic, and mythological dis- 1
courses is necessary and sufficient to form the archetypical Poet, who at
the conclusion of the novel will be able to set everything he has heard into
his own words and works. Ofterdingen made systematic truth of the
proposition that poetic translation in 1800 had acceded to the status
of art.16 t

Only one discourse remained untranslatable— for the simple reason 1

that it did not occur. Businessmen, poets, monks, knights, miners— all
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 73

explain the signifieds of their activity to the novel’s hero, with the one
exception of the girl who loves him. Instead, the girl’s father speaks of this
subject: “Just consider love. Nowhere else is the necessity of poesy for the
continuation of mankind so clear. Love is mute; only poetry can give it
voice. Or love is the highest form of natural poesy.” 17 The constitutive
exception to universal translatability is erotic discourse. O f course, love
guarantees its basic translatability by being Nature’s most sublime Po­
etry; but as the most sublime Poetry of Nature it is inaccessible to the
articulated word. In order to be, then, love needs intercessors, or mouth­
pieces, or translators. Because Mathilda, who is the novel’s allegory of
speechless Love, cannot even express her speechlessness, her father speaks
up for her. And because Love makes men speak, Heinrich, the novel’s al­
legory of Poetry, translates Mathilda’s speechless love and so becomes a
poet. This relationship between Love and Poetry, which determines the
novel, reproduces exactly a relationship defined by Herder: “ Nature, the
whole world of passion and action that lay within the poet, and which he
attempts to externalize through language— this nature is expressive. Lan­
guage is only a channel, the true poet only a translator, or, more charac­
teristically, he is the one who brings Nature into the heart and soul of his
brothers.” 18
Nature, Love, Woman— the terms were synonymous in the discourse
network of 1800. They produced an originary discourse that Poets tore
from speechlessness and translated. It is technically exact to say that lan­
guage in such a function can only be a channel. If language had its own
density and materiality, its own dead spots and transmission lapses, there
would be no question of an all-encompassing translatability. Though
Herder’s proposition would sound scandalous in the realm of poesie
pure, it was very much at home in the discourse network of 1800, which
was not at all “ defined in terms of language as language,” but which leads
through language on to something else.” 19 The very fact that discourses
have no intrinsic worth ennobles the soul/love/woman/nature, which,
when it speaks, is already no longer the one speaking. The authority of
discourse production traversed translations and the circulation of dis­
course in a manner that historically and technically divided the scholarly
republican from the poetic means of distribution. Without the invention
of a speechless and withdrawn origin, universal translation would have
been confined to the surface of representation. Only when the untrans­
latable also became the task of the poetic translator could circulation
without authors and consumers cease. Ofterdingen does not simply pro­
long talking about the sciences and professions; he couples them to an
origin and aim of discourse: Love and Poetry. Poetry in 1800 was a
doubled, simultaneous movement: first, it translated heterogeneous dis­
74 i 8 oo

courses that were still stored within Faust’s “ beloved German” or Luther’s
“ mother tongue” ; second, it translated the originary discourse that never
transpires— in other words, it translated out o f the mother tongue.
When the prepositional phrase is read as a subjective genitive, “ the
love of the mother tongue” constitutes the object; when the phrase is read
as an objective genitive, it constitutes the subject of poetical translation.
Translating into the mother tongue is something that can be taught,
something that can be transmitted in new-style humanistic preparatory
schools to every future civil servant.20 Translating out of the mother
tongue was and remains a paradox, whose overcoming distinguished
those who were Poets from those who were not. The discourse network
that introduced the rule that no one could be taught to be a Poet simulta­
neously envisioned an exceptional rite of individual initiation for the
rising generation of poets.21 The test question was whether the initiate
could become, in the course of his alphabetization, “ the transmitter of
Nature to the heart and soul of his brothers.” The Bildungsromane were
the proving ground for this test.

For seven years the child Anton Reiser was “ always sad and alone.”
Finally, in the eighth year his father took pity on his son— instructing
mothers had not yet been invented— and bought him two books: one was
Instruction in Spelling and the other, a Treatise Against Spelling. Reiser
chose the first book; in the second he might have encountered a forerun­
ner of the phonetic method. Having made his choice, he was stuck with
the tiresome spelling of yard-long Biblical names (“ Nebuchadnezzar,
Abednego, etc.” ), until he made a discovery: “ However, as soon as he no­
ticed that it was indeed possible to express reasonable ideas through the
combination of letters, his desire to learn to read grew stronger by the
day. Even now he recalled fondly the joy he experienced when, with effort
and a great deal of spelling, he managed to make sense of the first few
lines that contained something he could think about.” 22 Reiser’s discov­
ery led to signifieds or ideas, the general equivalent of words. Compared
with the alphabetical hodgepodge of the Biblical names, which are pure
signifiers without translation, ideas were as enticing as Basedow’s rai-sins
or straw-ber-ries. This had several consequences. First, signifieds sweet­
ened the pain and violence of alphabetization to such a degree that the
hero Reiser, the artistic creation of a man who also wrote Memories from
the Earliest Years o f Childhood,23 unlike Rousseau has no difficulty re­
membering how he learned to read. Second, the signifieds awaken such
an intense desire to read that Reiser soon spends days living on nothing
but air and signifieds, without taking a bite to eat— reading, as “ an opi­
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 75

ate,” outdoes his hunger.24 Third, signifieds secure the translatability of

writing and orality.
But he could not understand how it was possible that other people could read as
quickly as they spoke; at that time he despaired of ever making this much prog­
ress. His amazement and joy were so much greater when, after a few weeks, he
had progressed that far.
Apparently this also earned him some respect from his parents, and even more
from his relatives.25

When the new reader, still wet behind the ears, manages to dodge the
time lag inherent in the language channel of writing, reading becomes
equivalent to speaking. At a time when it was common to mumble half
out loud while deciphering letters on the page, people took note. Reiser—
and this translation into the mother tongue is the first precondition for
the Poet— can consume written texts as if he were speaking them; in later
years he was to practice this extensively with theological, dramatic, and
narrative texts. But the true test of the poetic profession is still to come.
Under the title “ The Sorrows of Poetry,” one reads:

When the fascination of poetry suddenly seized him, there first arose a painful
sensation in his soul, and he had a thought of something in which he lost himself,
against which everything that he had ever heard, read, or thought was also lost,
and whose existence, could he but portray it in some way, would produce a plea­
sure surpassing anything he had ever felt or known. . . . In such moments of
blissful premonition, it was all his tongue could do to stammer out a few sounds;
it was somewhat like certain odes by Klopstock, in which a gap between words
was filled in with a series of periods.
These isolated sounds, however, always designated a general feeling of what
was splendid, noble, of tears of bliss and what not.— It would last until the feeling
collapsed back into itself, without, however, having given birth to even a few rea­
sonable lines as a beginning of something definite.26

This is the stillbirth of poetry out of the spirit of reading. The pleasant-
painful feeling that refuses to become lines of poetry results from the lev­
eling of all signifiers; the feeling traverses the reader and, because he has
attained the fluency of speech, can only leave vague generality in its wake.
Thinking and thought are the effects of a disembodiment of language. If it
were otherwise, whatever had been thought would not be capable of sur­
passing all the oral and written discourses that have ever transpired. It
surpasses them, however, in the joy of its positive namelessness. Reiser’s
antipathy for words, the return of his disdain for letters in his childhood,
reaches the point where he calls words “ a wooden w all” in front of, or
“ an impenetrable covering” over, pure thought; he “ at times tortured
himself for hours in the attempt to see if it were possible to think without
words.” 27
j6 1800

Such experimental conditions for an attempt to write poetry allow

only stammered, isolated syllables to appear, but no words. Writing po­
etry tests the possibility of voicing a thought consisting in pure signifieds.
Therefore it begins, like the phonetic method, with minimal signifieds—
interjections and sighs, which since Klopstock could be written with
punctuation marks that had acquired an “ expressive” function rather
than “ an exclusively discriminative function.” 28
But the pure reader’s soul, which desires to write, remains as empty as
Olympia’s “ ah!” All particularity is lost in the quid pro quo of the most
individual and most general, and so Reiser must conclude: “ It was cer­
tainly a sure sign that one had no calling to be a poet when a mere vague
feeling was all that moved one to write, and when the particular scene
one wanted to write did not precede that feeling or at least did not occur
with it simultaneously.” 29 The translation of the untranslatable fails be­
cause it would have required the ability to write down pure feeling. By the
end of the Bildungsroman, the hero, who in the meantime has moved to a
university, stands amid the ruins of his theatrical and poetic plans. A
double displacement takes the place of the poetry Anton Reiser failed to
write: the educational bureaucracy and the authorship of Karl Philipp
Moritz. Instead of becoming a poet by translating from the M other’s
Mouth, Moritz worked in central control stations— a military orphan­
age, secondary schools in Berlin and Neukolln— for the reform of higher
education in Prussia. His program of reforms included the interpretation
of German poets rather than instruction in rhetorical eloquence,30and the
thorough investigation of student psychology rather than the violence of
catechizing; as the prefaces to Anton Reiser make clear, the novel re­
capitulated, documented, and announced this program to a whole world
of readers. Thus the official educator, as the metamorphosis of the failed
poet, in turn metamorphoses the practice of reading poets.
O f course the novel does not tell us any of this. Because “ the end of
such apprenticeship consists in this, that the subject sows his wild oats”
and enters into the “ rationality” of reality or of the state,31 the Bildungs­
roman can only lead as far as the threshold of that bureaucracy. Such
novels say nothing of the institutions that have made possible writing as a
reasoned (say, psychological) analysis of youthful errors. The hero re­
nounces his poetic or theatrical dream; the novelist as civil servant
(whether his name be M oritz or Goethe or finally Gottfried Keller) fol­
lowed him only as far as his complete accommodation to the “ rational
order.” What came later, public service as a dance around the new idol
represented by the alma mater, remains a “ blind spot.” 32
Here, however, the institution of Motherhood that was established in
1800 created another possibility. The romantic Bildungsromane did not
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 77

necessarily let their artist-heroes fail. Anton Reiser had to discover on his
own that poetry could only be written as translation from the M other’s
Mouth, for his mother, who very early had resigned herself to marriage,
did not love him and did not alphabetize him. Her only passive interven­
tion in his reading instruction was to let Anton read the novels that his
father had forbidden rather than the Pietist tracts his father propagated,
for Anton’s mother (like Rousseau’s mother) had “ once found intense
pleasure” in reading them.33
But the new mothers were different; they dreamed of poetic careers for
their sons.
I heard Johann Kriesler tell a story of how the madness of a mother led to the
most devout education of her son as poet.— The woman believed herself to be the
Virgin M ary and her son the unrecognized Christ, and whereas he walked on
earth, drank coffee, and played billiards, the time would soon come when he
would gather the community of the faithful and lead them straight to heaven. The
son’s lively imagination found an indication of his higher calling in his mother’s
madness.34

Although this is a spoof of Zacharias Werner, it is also the autobiography

of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who grew up without a father and whose mother
was nearly psychotic. Monomaniacal mother love made possible a double
life divided between poetry and prose, the earth and ascension, Dresden
and Atlantis. Thus the judicial civil servant Hoffmann found a poetic dis­
course capable of measuring the entire field, from M other’s M outh to
educational bureaucracy, from untranslatable origin to the universal cir­
culation of discourses. Where the failed artists of the Bildungsromane fell
silent, “ a modern fairy tale,” as Hoffmann’s “ The Golden Pot” is sub­
titled, still has something to say. With that the impossible poetic career
became reality and the translation of the unspeakable was realized.

“ The Golden P ot”

The hero of this modern fairy tale is a student by the name of An-
selmus, though what he is studying remains unspecified. However, An-
selmus’s “ schoolmasterish air,” 1 as well as his friends— a registrar, a dean
and philologist of ancient languages, and soon a privy archivist— indicate
that he is planning a career in the educational or administrative bureau­
cracy. He also “ has a splendid classical education, which is the basis for
everything.” 2 In spite of or because of this, all his dreams center on a po­
etic career. His ability “ to write very neatly” is useful in both professions:
the poetic career and the “ writing service” 3 projected for him by Dean
Paulmann.
y8 1800

On Ascension Day, which “ had invariably been a family celebration

for him,” Anselmus is initiated under the blossoming elder tree— in one
of the places, that is, where mother goddesses dwelt before Christian
colonization.
Then a whispering and a lisping began, and it seemed as if the sound of little crys­
tal bells were coming from the blossoms. Anselmus listened and listened. Then—
he himself knew not how— the whispering and the lisping and the tinkling turned
into half-heard words: “ Betwixt, between, betwixt the branches, between the
blossoms, shooting, twisting, twirling we come! Sister, sister, swing in the shim­
mer— quickly, quickly, in and out. Rays of sunset, whispering wind of evening,
sounds of dew, singing blossoms— we sing with the branches and the blossoms;
stars soon to sparkle— we must descend; betwixt, twisting, turning, twirling, sis­
ters we!” 4

Nature poetry begins with lisping, whispering, and tinkling. Such sounds
of feeling came to Anton Reiser in his poetic dreaming, although he, and
consequently the narrator of his story, were unable to write them down.
Here, however, they ring clearly for the hero, narrator, and reader. Even
the punctuation to which Reiser wanted to commit the unsayable be­
tween the isolated and unconnected sounds has been written. Anselmus’s
initiation is an auditory hallucination of the M other’s Mouth.
What the nameless sisters are singing— Wagner, in his admiration of
Hoffmann, would later compose it as the sound of the Beginning5—
sounds like one of the alphabetizing exercises of Stephani or Tillich. Three
women move their tongues under the elder tree; the result is an exercise
in the consonantal combinations schl, scb, and zw [in German, the sis­
ters sing: “ Zwischen durch— zwischen ein— zwischen Zweigen, zwis-
chen schwellender Bliiten, schwingen, schlangeln, schlingen wir uns—
Schwesterlein— Schwesterlein, schwinge dich im Schimmer— schnell,
schnell herauf— herab— ” ], or, for Wagner’s three Rhine maidens, an
exercise in w.6 Tillich conjured the following sequence with the end syl­
lable gen:7

klin gen sprin gen rin gen drin gen schwin gen schlin gen

Hoffmann simply reverses the beginnings and endings of a similar verb

series. In this way meanings come into being on the border between
sound and word through the augmentation of minimal signifieds. The
rhymes and assonances of the little round dance miraculously produce
the identity of the signified, in conformity with the romantic conception
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 79

of language. The instructional goal of all primers is realized. In spite or

because of this, the event remains an enigma for the alphabetized listener.
Anselmus has no idea how meaningful words could come out of sounds,
nor does he have a clue as to the referent of their meanings. Nature poetry
no longer reveals who is designated by the “ we” and the “ sisters.”
Only when Anselmus hears “ a chord of pure crystal bells” over his
head— Wagner would expand and intensify this chord through the 137
measures of the prelude to the Rheingold, thus transposing the halluci­
natory effects of romantic poesie into the technologically real— only then,
“ in the twinkling of an eye,” do intuition and reference become possible:
Anselmus “ glanced up and saw three little snakes, glistening green and
gold, which had twisted around the branches.” The consonantal com­
bination schl is an autonym for singing snakes [Schlangen], as ma is for
speech-eliciting mamas. Just as the primers of the Reformation had con­
jured up the image of a snake as a creaturely example to accompany the
letters s and sch, whereas the new phonetic method left all complications
of pronunciation to a purified M other’s Mouth, so the little snakes begin
by oscillating between being sounds of nature and daughters of a matri-
lineal family. Anselmus hesitates, unsure whether “ the evening wind” is
suddenly “ whispering distinct words,” or whether the longed-for girls at
a family celebration are speaking to him.
The first clarification comes when the ringing chord makes the sisters
visible, or when the auditory hallucination yields vision. At the chord a
single sister emerges from the nameless, undifferentiated dance of the sis­
ters. From women in the plural comes— as had been preprogrammed by
the epoch-making dream of the blue flower in Novalis’s Heinrich von
Ofterdingen— the Woman. Two “ marvelous blue eyes looked down at
him with unspeakable desire, so that an unknown feeling of both su­
preme bliss and deepest sorrow seemed to tear his heart apart.” 8
By the time this gaze has been met by a hallucinatory gaze, the enigma
under the elder tree has clearly become a reprise of Schlegel’s letter On
Philosophy. Once more things “ can be so meaningful that they seem to
gaze at one out of clear eyes, and as expressive as the unembellished ac­
cents from the inmost soul.” Voice and gaze— an expression and window
of the soul— are revealed. Wherever possible, the voices of the snakes re­
main “ half-heard words” in order not to prostitute such souls with speech,
given that they can store only the silent marks of writing rather than any
talent for reading aloud.
Voice and gaze, acoustical and optical presence— the figure of the
ideal beloved arises out of the originary play between sounds and speech.
Anton Reiser poetically despaired because what was “ vague” in emotion
was never accompanied or anticipated by a vision of “ the particular scene
8o 1800

he wanted to write.” But Anselmus, in his ecstasy beneath' the elder tree,
is given a vision by two dark blue eyes that entirely determines his future
career. He can become the beloved of that gaze and therefore a Poet.
For one who has learned to read from yard-long biblical names, there
is no bridge between signs and feelings. But one who has been from the
beginning alphabetized with meaningful words is always in a scene that
encompasses him and the Mother. He still needs to learn how the voice
that was originally Nature can be made into a book, without having the
vision collapse into letters. Anselmus, who is all eyes and ears under the
elder tree, has a poetic path before him that will finally enable him to read
and write the visionary moment of his own initiation. The agent of this
sliding, pedagogical transition is a father. Anselmus hears from several of
his bureaucratic friends that a mysterious privy archivist named Lind-
horst wants to employ him as a scribe. Before beginning his secretarial
duties, Anselmus learns from Lindhorst that “ the three gold-green snakes”
are Lindhorst’s daughters and that his own love has been drawn to “ the
blue eyes of the youngest, named Serpentina.” 9 A father’s word, then, fi­
nally transforms the undifferentiated hallucination of nameless voices,
which already had become one figure, into a name and therefore a love
object. “ On n’est jamais amoureux que d’un nom,” as Lacan said.
The discourse of the father is interpretation: interpretation, but not en­
lightenment. Far from reducing the voices under the elder tree to the
whispering wind, as earlier the father’s words translated the Elfking’s
daughters into the mere rustling of leaves,10Lindhorst augments the mini­
mal signifieds supplied by the voices into a positive and genealogical dis­
course. After the event it is revealed that the half-heard words, bright
gaze, and tangled bodies of the snakes all embody the name Serpentina.
So out of the “ very unchristian name” 11 (as is immediately apparent to
the fine ear of the citizens of Dresden) come the minimal signifieds under
the elder tree. The new humanists say Serpentina; the eyes say Schlang-
lein; and the ears say only schl. Such is translation into the mother tongue
or Mother’s Mouth. In order to complete the poetical translation cycle,
Anselmus will only have to translate out of the mother tongue as well.
And if in 1800 letters were consistently thought to be unnatural, becom­
ing a Poet was a matter of perceiving what was written as a Voice.
Initially the father’s word translates the elder-tree voices into writing.
Lindhorst is not an archivist for nothing. Genealogies exist only as texts
because the chain of signifiers known as filiation presupposes the death of
the persons signified. Lindhorst can, of course, orally name his daughters
“ daughters,” but the encompassing web of filiation, in which the archivist
is also archived, necessarily is written. In Lindhorst’s library is a roll of
parchment that contains the mythic genealogy of his family back to the
beginning of the world. Secretary Anselmus is supposed to copy it.
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 81

A written initiation by the father follows upon the spoken initiation by

the daughters. Before taking up his position, Anselmus must first produce
samples of his calligraphy. But even “ writing in the finest English style,”
that is, “ English cursive script,” fails to impress Lindhorst.12 Like a good
educator-bureaucrat, he forces Anselmus to judge and condemn his own
writing.

When Anselmus saw his handwriting, he felt as if a thunderbolt had struck him.
The script was unspeakably wretched. The curves were not rounded, the hair-
stroke failed to appear where it should have been; capital and small letters could
not be distinguished; in truth, the messy scratchings of a schoolboy intruded, fre­
quently ruining the best drawn lines. “ Also,” Archivarius Lindhorst continued,
“ your ink is not permanent.” Dipping his finger into a glass of water, he ran his
finger over the lines and they disappeared, leaving not a trace behind.13

This annihilating criticism, transmitted from the archivist to his secre­

tary, finally purges the future poet or “ child” of the old alphabetical
method.14 The criticism thus stands in the spot where other romantic
fairy tales typically indict the dark figure of a scribe. In the tale of Klingsohr
contained in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a magic water dissolves the
manuscripts of “ the Scribe,” who as a representative of writing and rea­
son must yield to the singing child (of Poetry).ls In the same way another
child, a stranger who appears in the title of one of Hoffmann’s fairy tales,
teaches earthly children by means of poetry to escape the alphabetical
method of their writing master.16 But “ The Golden Pot,” the explicitly
modern fairy tale, combines the magical annihilation with exact technical
criticism. In this it contributed to the reform of writing instruction that
Stephani, building on the earlier work of Heinrich Muller and Johann
Paul Pohlmann, was able to complete.17 Such was the solidarity of poetry
and the schools in 1800.
A year after the publication of Hoffmann’s fairy tale, Stephani pub­
lished the Complete Description o f the Genetic Writing Method for Pub­
lic Elementary Schools. The book attempted to abolish (as did his pho­
netic reading method) an old cultural technique of imitation in order to
transform it into psychologically motivated, self-initiated activity.

As in most subjects, writing teachers were accustomed to using only the most me­
chanical teaching techniques and did not have the slightest inkling that writing
instruction should be employed as material for the autonomous development o f
intelligence and imagination. . . . Up to now the usual procedure consisted in
constraining students to copy and recopy examples until they developed a me­
82 i8 o o

chanical skill that allowed them to copy correctly. Although they practice for
nearly six years, most students progress only to the point of being able to produce
a decent copy as long as the model is at hand. Very few students are able to mas­
ter the style so thoroughly that they can continue writing without the model and
develop fine handwriting.18

Addressed to the old schools, the passage reiterates the charge against
using an empirical standard rather than the general norm of a “ national
script.” 19 Like sounds and sound combinations, letters and their com­
binations are henceforth to arise (as in the book’s title) genetically out of
the pure ego. But given a long-established repertoire of signs, a magical
emergence of writing cannot occur of itself. Lirst, the method had to
break down all letters transmitted by tradition into basic elements. In
Stephani these elements took the form of a vertical line, a half-circle to
the right or to the left, a half-oval to the left— in other words, the basic
elements were primal geometrical phenomena in which the “ roundness”
desired by Lindhorst predominated. Stephani’s predecessor in Erlangen,
Pohlmann, had come up with a much larger number of basic elements,
and because these were intended “ to make the student as fully conscious
as possible not only of what was to be done, but also of exactly how it
was to be done,” 20 his method was more time consuming and corre­
spondingly took up more, of one’s life.
Second, the reunifying of the analytically acquired basic elements had
to be practiced (provided there was enough instructional time), not with
mere assembly or combinatory techniques, but via an aesthetic that would
guarantee their “ combination into a true whole.” “ There is nothing more
offensive to the aesthetic sense of the eye than the sight of something di­
vided that should have the inmost connection.” 21 Numbers constituted an
exception to this inwardness: they must remain apart “ so that one num­
ber cannot be so easily changed into another number, a circumstance that
could lead to serious deception in bourgeois life.” 22 Letters followed an
inverse pattern. Although they must remain distinguishable, they were to
be interrelated, not by the differentiality of the grapheme, but in the same
manner as the sounds of the phonetic method, namely, by their family
relatedness and transitiveness. Mothers demonstrated how one speech
tone moved into another by a minimal change in the position of the
mouth; teachers demonstrated the same technique with letters and hand­
writing motions. Wherever there was no threat of economic deception,
then, an organically coherent handwriting (read: bourgeois individual)
could arise.
The third step in the process was to transform the newly reconstituted
letters into the elements of words. The guiding principle is again the indi­
vidual or simply indivisible connection, the goal being “ easily flowing”
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 83

handwriting rather than writing that “ often breaks off.” 23 The point was
to be repeated hundreds of times between the children (c) and the teacher
(t ) until the last and dullest had been individualized:

T: (who has accurately and in proper style written the word centner on the
board): Which word have I just written on the board?
c: Centner.
T: Is the first e separated from the preceding C or not?
c: It is not separated.
T: So the two letters belong together. Which letter of this word is separated from
the others?
C: N o letter is separate.
T: W hat can one then say about all the letters of this word?
C: That they all go together.
T: There is no error in the way this word is written. Now, if you were to write this
word and left every letter separate from every other, would that be the right
way to write it?
c: No.
T: H ow do you know that?
c: Because if it were right, you would have written it that way.
T: To be sure.24

The common goal, then, after Rossberg’s Systematic Instruction in

Fine Penmanship (1796—1811) did away with the old, disconnected
Fraktur handwriting, was a new aesthetic of “ fine and accurate” connec­
tion.25 Whoever wrote in block letters would not be an in-dividual. (This
indivisible being therefore did not survive the typewritten typescripts and
aleatory writings of 1900.) The great metaphysical unities invented in the
age of Goethe— the developmental process of Bildung, autobiography,
world history— could be seen as the flow of the continuous and the
organic simply because they were supported by flowing, cursive hand­
writing— as Gerhard Riihm’s concrete poem ironically indicates.26 The
continuous connection of writing and/or the individual was of such im­
portance in 1800 that Stephani found it necessary to include in his les­
sons, which were designed to promote “ the simple and pleasing connec­
tion of every letter with every other,” exercises for connecting capital and
small letters, given that the former could hinder the ideal flow of writing
just as consonantal combinations could break the flow of the voice.27

"mein leben
Finally, as a fourth step following the progression through the aug­
mentative continuum between the elements and connections of writing,
there were exercises aimed at achieving an aesthetic balance of bold and
84 i8 o o

thin lines, of shading and light, and of degrees of pressure by the pen.
They underscored once more that writing is something that flows and
connects: pressure is applied to the elements of letters; it is diminished on
the connecting curves. Individual and independent handwriting was born
in the interplay between “ drawing” (i.e., connecting exercises) and “ paint­
ing” (i.e., pen or calligraphic exercises).28 Individuality was not a product
of any particularities that would allow graphologist character-experts or
police handwriting-experts to make identifications; rather, the organic
continuity of the writing materialized the biographical-organic continuity
of the educated individual in a literal, that is, letter-by-letter manner.
“ Thus, then, if at first the specific nature and innate peculiarity of the in­
dividual along with what these become as the result of cultivation and
development are regarded as the inner reality, as the essence of action and
of fate, this inner being finds its appearance in external fashion to begin
with in his mouth, hand, voice, handwriting.” 29
To develop handwriting formed as out of one mold means to produce
individuals. The norm-setting writings of Pohlmann or Stephani were
foundational script systems for the discourse network of 1800. Before
Anselmus can join the system in his glory as Poet, he must first submit to
writing instruction that will bring his handwriting up to the ideal norm.
Stephani’s letter elements correct the lack of “ roundness” that Lindhorst
faulted in his secretary, because “ the angular form” would “ insult the
eye.” 30 The “ messy scratchings,” which “ frequently ruin the best lines,”
interrupt the fluid continuum of writing. Anselmus has also not mastered
the relation between “ capital and small letters” or proper pressure and its
diminution; in other words, he has perfected neither “ drawing” nor
“ painting.” It follows that his handwriting is not a self-sufficient expres­
sion of his individuality, but rather the botched effort of a schoolboy. So
much for “ a splendid classical education” when judged by the reform
pedagogue.
The new goal is presented directly after this annihilating criticism.
Rather than imitating deceptive models, Anselmus must learn to bring
forth letters as only the genetic writing method can. The ideal father
Lindhorst directs this “ learning to learn” 31 and so appears in the guise
of the reformer of writing instruction. In contrast to the new reading
methods (all but written into the bodies of mothers), writing instruction
remains even in the titles of relevant treatises a domain of fathers and
teachers. N o reformer defied Schlegel’s prescription, by which writing,
though the determination of the entire human race, applied to only one
sex, whereas the other was charged with developing orality, from inner
singing to reading and reading instruction. “ One must learn speaking
from women, writing from men.” 32 Therefore in literature after Wilhelm
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 85

M eistefs Apprenticeship the father of writing stood next to.the mother of

speech.33
Lindhorst is an incarnation of this ideal father. When old-European
teachers taught writing, they wrote; by so doing, however, they had their
students copy their own imperfect copies. By contrast, Lindhorst does
not write; he makes someone else write— just as the Mother makes
others speak.34The development of a continuously flowing handwriting is
left to the initiate. The decisive test occurs after Anselmus has successfully
completed an exercise in Arabic script. Lindhorst gives his secretary the
task of copying a roll of parchment, but the signs it contains are unlike all
traditional types of letters. They represent the mythic origin of writing
itself. With extraordinary abruptness, then, the student finds himself
faced with the question of whether he can produce letters “ genetically”
from their origin. “Anselmus was more than a little struck by these sin­
gular intertwined characters, and as he studied the numerous points,
strokes, dashes, and twirls in the manuscript, which sometimes repre­
sented plants or mosses or animals, he almost despaired of ever copying
them accurately.” 35
The originary text, the mythic beginning of all writing, can be identi­
fied because it is not (yet) written. N o one could write or read this text,
this “ writing without alphabet, in which signs, signifiers, and signifieds
are identical.” 36 Nature is convolution. And yet Lindhorst has said that
the plant- and animal-hieroglyphics that he placed before his despairing
secretary are the work of the “ Bhagavad-GitcCs masters” 37 and so consti­
tute a text in Sanskrit. His parchment consequently has the same status as
the handwritten text of Nostradamus in Faust, which is a foreign-language
text and a revelation of Nature. In fact, all poetically described texts in
1800 are characterized by an oscillation between a foreign culture and a
foreign Nature. Novalis called the “ great cipher-text” of nature “ real
Sanskrit.” 38 Von Loeben has “ flower petals” become “ leaves of parch­
ment full of writing and painting,” which a woman then “ binds together
into a book.” 39 The rhetorician’s metonymy, “ leaf/leaf,” was taken liter­
ally in the writing system of 1800.
Because it oscillates between Nature and culture, the originary text is
very difficult to reproduce (as Anselmus complains); at the same time, the
text can be reproduced (as Stephani insists). The text eliminates the com­
pulsion that would otherwise force one to receive the form of the Euro­
pean alphabet as something positive and real; the signs in the original
text might be of the utmost complexity, but they are nonetheless related
to familiar forms of Nature. In this the poetically described text realized
something that would be “ much more advantageous” in the school cur­
riculum. The reformer Friedrich Gedike demanded “ that instruction and
86 i8 o o

practice in drawing precede exercises in calligraphy. Drawing is infinitely

more pleasant for a child than writing. Drawing the delicate outline of
any object familiar to the child— for example, that of a flower— incon­
testably gives the child more pleasure than drawing the very uninteresting
form of a letter.” 40
The genetic writing-method is fulfilled by viewing the original text as
the genesis of writing from Nature. The impossible, namely the presence
of letters in Nature, is then realized. The originary text thus occupies the
same position in the field of writing that the M other’s Voice, as the natu­
ral origin, occupies in the field of speaking and reading. But because the
voice is the material reality of language, linked to the body through the
oral and respiratory cavities, the discourse network of 1800 has a much
easier time with orality. The construct of the originary text, which has no
basis in the real, can be possible only through a parasitic relation to the
Mother’s Mouth. A fine illustration of this is provided by a parallel text
to the plants and mosses in “ The Golden Pot” : “ I stole out to my favorite
stone, upon which mosses and lichens formed the strangest images and
which I never tired of contemplating. I often believed that I could under­
stand these signs, and it seemed to me that I could see in them the most
wondrous stories, such as those that my mother had told me.” 41 This pas­
sage from “Johann Kreisler’s Certificate of Apprenticeship” provides
technical instructions for the construction of the original text. In order
for the signs to be comprehensible rather than simply readable, they must
first be endowed with the figural quality of images drawn from nature,
then these images must be animated by the hallucinated M other’s Voice.
As in the phonetic method, optical signs are surrounded with the echo of
maternal orality. The result is that instead of signifiers one has signifieds
that can be “ seen,” as if the text were a film.
The copyist Anselmus has the same parasitic relation to the imaginary
being of The Woman. The beloved Serpentina appears constantly be­
tween or behind the lines presented by Lindhorst. His first exercises with
Arabic are accomplished as follows:

In truth, he could not understand the speed and the ease with which he was able
to transcribe the convoluted strokes of these foreign characters. It was as if, deep
within him, he could hear a whispering voice: “ Ah! could you really w ork so well
if you were not thinking of her, if you did not believe in her and in her love?”
Then, throughout the room, whispers floated, as in low undulating crystal tones:
“ I am near, near, near! I am helping you. Be brave. Be steadfast, dear Anselmus! I
am working with you so that you may be mine!” And as soon as Anselmus heard
these sounds with inner rapture, the unfamiliar characters grew ever clearer to
him, and he hardly needed to look at the original script at all; in fact, it seemed as
if the characters were already outlined on the parchment in pale ink and there
was nothing more for him to do but fill them in with black. Thus he worked on,
surrounded by those precious, inspiring sounds, that soft, sweet breath.42
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 87

The pure signifiers— convoluted, foreign, incomprehensible— become

readable and comprehensible through the agency of an obsessionally cur-
sivized her. The Woman. She comes in response to a voice from the depth
of feeling, which in turn emits the “A h !” of the beloved’s passion, here
and everywhere else in the fairy tale a reprise of what was heard under the
elder tree.43 The imaginary presence of The Woman can then also arise as
a voice. As if to confirm Herder’s ascription of the origin of all discourse
to the breathing spirit, Serpentina is speech before any articulation, whis­
pering, singing, breathing, blowing; an inspiration in the etymological
sense thus surpasses the mechanics of copying. Indeed, the inspiration ex­
plains its own power. For it is not Anselmus, but a voice from his inmost
soul that tells how the spoken word can make written work possible and
delightful.
Splittegarb’s New Child’s A B C promised to introduce children “ with­
out difficulty, with pleasure into our world of books,” just as parents
show them the pictorial beauty of nature. In “ The Golden Pot” the
Woman’s Voice both makes and fulfills this promise, because both prom­
ises come from the same place. A pedagogical reformer wrote the primer
that speaks to children in its own right and transforms books into nature.
And a father and bureaucrat instituted the beloved voice that helps An­
selmus in his copying. All the encouragement that Anselmus feels rising
from his inmost soul actually comes from the complete opposite: that
Serpentina exists and is called Serpentina, that she will appear to him as
long as he “ continues to work industriously,” indeed that it all happens
because she “ loves” him— the student would know nothing of this if
Serpentina’s father had not spoken about it.44 Over and above the imagi­
nary presence of the Voice stands the discourse of the Other, which has
no legitimation beyond its very occurrence.45 As always, the inmost soul
simply repeats this discourse.
Lindhorst thus directs the whole scene of writing and Serpentina is the
appointed representative of the state or state bureaucrat, who after 1800
remains at a modest distance. That is why Lindhorst has substituted self­
initiated activity for copying and extended the promise of erotic satisfac­
tion to make sure that Anselmus “ could not understand the speed and the
ease” of his hand as it guided the pen— attributes that read like direct
quotes from Olivier’s promise to cathect reading and writing instruction
“ with wondrous speed and ease compared to all our previous experience,
and what is of greater and inestimable importance in the matter, with the
strangest pleasure, indeed with near incomprehensible desire.” 46 If it
seems to Anselmus that the characters are already outlined on the parch­
ment in pale ink and need only to be blackened in,47 that is because
Lindhorst has magically accomplished a recommendation of Basedow’s
88 i8 o o

Elementary Exercises: “ whole words can be written in pencil, which the

student will go over in ink.” 48
Such smooth transition confirms Basedow’s title and makes writing an
elementary exercise. First, the lightly prepared words blur the binary op­
position of white and black, paper background and letter, which always
carries the impact or shock of an event. Circa 1800 it was fashionable to
print books “ with gray rather than black ink (because it is softer and
stands out more pleasantly on white paper).” 49 Second, the unbroken
transition makes it unnecessary “ to look at the original.” Anselmus cop­
ies, as he is paid to do, and yet he does not copy. There is no immutable
model to guide his writing, and this is in keeping with Lindhorst’s or
Stephani’s “ higher purpose” of letting students “ teach themselves good
handwriting.” 50 Such freedom opens up an area of play in which the dis­
course of the teacher and the voice of the inmost soul become interchange­
able. The unconscious of which Hoffmann is the reputed storyteller is a
secondary effect of pedagogy. When fathers and teachers abandon their
“ positions as lords of creation,” 51 their place is filled by the state-instituted
Mother, who rises to it from an abyss of inwardness. The voice of the soul
glides without transition into the voice that breathed onto Anselmus
under the elder tree. There in the middle of Lindhorst’s library, as A n­
selmus is copying Arabic script, “ whispers floated, as in low undulating
crystal tones.” A mother goddess emerges from the cultic merging of
teachers and students, the manifest secret of the bureaucratic system.

The third vigil of “ The Golden Pot” begins with a mythical genealogy.
As in other modern fairy tales circa 1800, the narrative breaks a basic
rule of specified reference and speaks even at first mention of “ the spirit”
and “ the mother,” rather than of a spirit or mother.52 It thus begins like
an absolute quote, which only later can be identified as the first-person
narrative of the archivist. In retrospect it becomes apparent that Lind­
horst has been telling his bureaucratic colleagues in Dresden the story of
his own genealogy as a cosmogonic myth.
It is a genealogy in the precise, double sense of the word, as the story of
a family and as history— just as Nietzsche’s genealogy of the scholar
would be.53 Because the kinship terms are employed without singularized
reference, the family story and history of the bureaucrat Lindhorst have a
simple structure. In each generation of the cosmogony a male fire spirit
mates with a female earth spirit; the latter perishes in the mating, like
Semele, but not without giving birth to a virgin who again becomes the
mother.54 Lindhorst belongs to the fiery race of spirit princes, and his own
marriage “ with the green snake” produced “ three daughters, which ap­
pear to men in the shape of their mother.” 55 The romantic myth of the
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 89

bureaucrat’s genealogy could hardly be told less romantically. With proper

administrative method women are determined as the endless reproduc­
tion of a single Mother, whereas men are determined as the endless (re-)
discovery of the Mother. So Anselmus, when Serpentina appears to him,
becomes the representative of the third-mentioned generation of men to
meet with the “ great-great-great-great grandmother.” 56
As a rebirth of “ the green snake,” Serpentina is a snake in the diminu­
tive. It is all-important to maintain this miniaturization. Anselmus and a
bureaucrat’s daughter by the name of Veronica, who is in love with the
boy, know all too well what can happen when a little snake suddenly be­
comes a snake in earnest, for in addition to Lindhorst, the good spirit
prince and wise man, there is also an old and wise wom an57 whom Ve­
ronica recognizes as her childhood nanny. The old woman now appears
to be an adherent of black magic, however, and on the day that Anselmus
is to begin his secretarial duties she appears to him in the form of a de­
monic snake, which had been a simple bell rope.
Horror possessed Anselmus and thrilled through his limbs. The bell rope reached
downward and changed into a white, diaphanous, enormous serpent, which en­
circled and crushed him, its coils squeezing him more and more tightly until his
fragile and paralyzed limbs cracked into pieces and his blood gushed from his
veins into the transparent body of the serpent, dyeing it red. “ Kill me! Kill me!”
he tried to scream in his terrible agony, but the scream was only a muffled groan.
The serpent lifted its head and placed its long, pointed tongue of glistening brass
on Anselmus’s chest; then a cutting pain pierced the artery of life, and he lost
consciousness.58

Clearly, Serpentina is the diminutive of an enormous serpent, one that

is insane or causes insanity. As the virgin rebirth of the Mother, she stands
as an apotropaic figure before the nightmarish vision of an enormous
woman who is not the, but a mother, or not a mother at all, but one of
the midwives of old Europe. As in “ The Sandman,” where her frightening
stories unleash phantasms of dismembered bodies,59 the nanny over­
whelms the coherent individual until he can only wish to die.
The entire genealogy of the race of salamanders, or bureaucrats, nar­
rated immediately after Anselmus regains consciousness, functions to
bury that woman in the Orcus of prehistory. To call this female figure
phallic would be euphemistic. Women as they exist in plurality, more real
and threatening, appear in the form of nannies and break into a discourse
that legitimizes only a single Mother. The European reform of child rais­
ing began by systematically repressing midwives, wet nurses, and nan­
nies, and replacing them with civil servants and middle-class, educated
mothers.60Lindhorst’s myth, which repositions the green snake as the pri­
mal mother of spirit princes and spirit bureaucrats, is this repression.
90 i8 o o

Only the nanny remembers that Lindhorst, the bureaucrat, and she, the
hag, are a dark, unspeakable pair.61 “ It seems that he is the wise man, but
I am the wise woman.”
Old Mrs. Rauerin is excommunicated because her troublesome spirit
impedes the progress of alphabetization. She is Lindhorst’s enemy be­
cause she takes pleasure, in her last encounter with Anselmus, in tearing
the pages out of folios.62 When the dean’s daughter Veronica, already in
love with Anselmus, goes to meet with her for the first time, Veronica has
heard that the old woman has the power to make reading and writing
unnecessary. The information came from a friend of Veronica’s, who had
heard nothing from her fiance (a soldier away on a campaign) in months;
Mrs. Rauerin was able to read in a magic mirror that the fiance was “ pre­
vented from writing by a deep but by no means serious wound in his right
arm, inflicted upon him by the sword of a French Fiussar.” 63 Such divina­
tion is not difficult; one has only to take signifiers as signifiers (the officer
in question is named Victor). But such practice was inopportune in a
writing system whose technicians were engaged in setting up the first op­
tical telegraphic connections between major cities and correlated battle
fields,64 and whose educational bureaucrats esteemed the one signified
above all signifiers. When women’s knowledge can replace wounded offi­
cers’ arms that are no longer able to write and can lame the arms of edu­
cational bureaucrats just as they are about to assume their duties, the
whole alphabetical improvement of central Europe threatens to go down
the tubes. In the modern fairy tale, therefore, the wise man and his
mother/daughter must triumph over the wise woman.65 Serpentina, Lind­
horst’s messenger to Anselmus, is the slim, diminutive snake that makes
writing possible and necessary where the enormous serpent intends to
make it unnecessary.
After Anselmus has successfully completed the test of Arabic script, he
advances (as is customary in Bildungsromane) to his apprentice work:
copying the Bhagavad Gita, or originary text. Faced with this task, with
the “ singular intertwined characters,” alone in Lindhorst’s library, An­
selmus at first experiences something like an officer’s wound. But he sum­
mons courage and begins to study “ the exotic characters contained on
the roll of parchment,” in however unacademic a manner.
He heard strange music coming from the garden, and he was surrounded by sweet
and lovely fragrances. . . . A t times it also seemed to him that the emerald leaves
of the palm trees were rustling and that the clear crystal tones he had heard under
the elder tree that eventful Ascension Day were dancing and flitting through the
room. Marvelously strengthened by this sparkling and tinkling, Anselmus ever
more intensely focused his eyes and thoughts on the writings on the roll of parch­
ment, and before long, almost as in a vision, he realized that the characters
therein could represent only these words: “About the marriage of the salamander
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 91

and the green snake.” Then the air reverberated with a strong chord of clear crys­
tal bells; the words “ Anselmus, dear Anselmus!” floated down to him from the
leaves; and— wonder of wonders!— the green snake glided down the palm-tree
trunk. “ Serpentina, lovely Serpentina!” Anselmus cried in a madness of absolute
bliss.66

Critics have overlooked the fact that Hoffmann’s admirably plain text
constitutes a contract for a new type of the fantastic in literature. Fou­
cault called this a “ fantasia of the library” :
Possibly, Flaubert was responding to an experience of the fantastic which was sin­
gularly modern and relatively unknown before his time, to the discovery of a new
imaginative space in the nineteenth century. This domain of phantasms is no
longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before de­
sire, but, on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and
constant vigilance. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black
and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens
with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed
library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight
enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. The imagi­
nary now resides between the book and the lamp.67

The new fantastic is, first, an endless oscillating from Nature to books
back to Nature. Before the enchantment of the solitary reader begins,
Lindhorst takes hold of one of the palm leaves in his library “ and A n­
selmus perceived that the leaf was, in fact, a roll of parchment, which the
Archivarius unfolded and spread out on the table before the student.” 68
As in Loeben’s Guido, the wordplay leaf/leaf first moves from Nature to
culture, from palms to libraries. As one of the first histories of German
literature puts it, “ Over and against the lush vegetation of the south, the
north brings forth an immeasurable world of books. There nature flour­
ishes, here the spirit, in an ever-changing play of the most wondrous crea­
tions.” 69 But to assure that bookworms and literary historians will not
abandon their northern haunts to wander under palm trees, the story
then moves in the reverse direction: sufficient absorption in the written
page leads back to the palm and its hamadryad. The emerald-green leaves
turn into Serpentina, “ the green snake.” The law that says daughters of
the Great Mother will appear to men as their mother is strictly enforced.
Second, the new fantastic is identical with a technology. Whoever lim­
its his field of vision to the space between book and lamp does not follow
Nature. The literary criticism that constantly stresses the two realities in
Hoffmann (the bourgeois and the Serapion brothers, the empirical and
the fantastical) has overlooked this, probably because it still obeys the
same technology. The image of a woman as beautiful as Serpentina would
never have appeared in the leaves and lines of a text if the student con­
cerned had not chosen the new university curriculum. But with the found­
92 i8 o o

ing of seminars on philology, which around 1800 began to drive out the
lecture, or Vorlesung (literally, the “ reading before” an audience),70 aca­
demic freedom moved into reading as well.
For Friedrich August Wolf, who as a student took the freedom of en­
rolling, in 1777, in the unheard-of discipline of philology, and then as a
professor was permitted to found the first department of philology,

The most important thing is that students get a sense of the whole instead of
merely reading words. An introduction and perhaps also a synopsis of the content
are useful in this regard. If it is impossible to complete a whole text in the origi­
nal, students should be given a translation. . . . W olf did not think much of study­
ing grammar. When Kloden, a geographer, wanted to take up Greek and asked
Wolf about the best book on Greek grammar, he replied that “ he didn’t know,
that he didn’t bother with grammar much and that Kloden would also be better
off not worrying about i t . . . of course, one did have to learn to decline and con­
jugate, but that wasn’t difficult and could be learned by someone who hadn’t
studied any Greek, because one could use German words instead. For example,
W olf took the word machen [“ to make, do” ] and put it in the form jxaxsiw, from
that the forms fxaxo), /zayei?, fxaxsi, followed pretty much naturally, and all the
other forms could be derived from them.” 71

This fine autonym, in which the word to make is used to make up one’s
own pidgin Greek, invited imitation. It is an amusing illustration of the
general translatability of languages circa 1800. When professors are this
free with translations, Anselmus has no need to study the primal mother
tongue, Sanskrit. He can go to work unarmed— without grammars, dic­
tionaries, or inventories of written characters— as long as he grasps the
essence of individual reading and so concentrates his attention on the ob­
scure roll of parchment in front of him. He is thus a heightened Faust,
though Faust could still read Greek. The honest concern for accuracy that
thoroughly informed the standard of scholarly knowledge became in the
established discourse network a “ feeling as of the inmost soul” : a feeling
of glorious autarchy and ignorance.
The page on which the student has concentrated his attention soon
sends back his echo: the meaning and thoughts of the text. Academic
freedom finds what it had read into the material. Anselmus, may God
help him, stands in the mighty fortress of his inwardness before a free
translation inspired by feelings that have floated through him as in a
dream. The meaning and thoughts of the text are his translation into a
pure signified: a book title in German. Whereas old Mrs. Rauerin still
found signifiers in a magic mirror, the student of Lindhorst finds “ mean­
ings” as meanings.
Anselmus is indeed Lindhorst’s student. When the privy archivist and
salamander tells his bureaucratic colleagues gathered in a cafe the story of
the genealogy of bureaucracy, everyone bursts out laughing except the fu­
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 93

ture bureaucrat Anselmus, who could not listen “ without shuddering in­
ternally in a way he himself could not comprehend.” 72 Only he has heard
the truth in its structure as fiction. Lindhorst’s genealogical tale breaks off
in that laughter before it can make good the promise of designating the
place in the kinship system of the one who, after the father and mother, is
referred to by ethnologists as “ ego.” But the text “About the marriage of
the salamander and the green snake” is the seamless continuation of the
genealogy, and the salamander is Lindhorst himself. Anselmus again re­
produces with his inmost soul the discourse of the Other, Lindhorst’s un­
spoken continuation of the genealogy. And no wonder: if the new free­
dom of academic bureaucrats allows them to say more or less whatever
they like, there will necessarily be favorite students who, by free transla­
tion of any text, will have overheard exactly what their teachers wanted
to say. N o doubt the teacher would appear as the hero and son of an alma
mater in such texts.
Marriages with green snakes tend to bring more green snakes into the
world. The translator Anselmus rediscovers this third generation as well.
This time, however, it does not occur in, but between, the lines of the text.
The Sanskrit text has just been translated into the mother tongue when
the fruit of the sacred marriage it announced appears: Serpentina in per­
son. “ Strangely convoluted” and, according to the story, unreadable
characters release their incarnation. The scene under the elder tree has
already constructed the augmentative word bridge from schl to schling to
Schlange. Consequently, when she slithers her way down the trunk of the
palm tree, Serpentina is and designates simply the winding curves of the
well-rounded ideal handwriting of 1800. She spirits through the lines like
the erotic, that is, speech-producing phantom of the library. So any stu­
dent of Stephani would have been able to say what she was up to with
Lindhorst’s student.
She sat down on the same chair with Anselmus, clasped him in her arms, and
pressed him to her so that he could feel the breath coming from her lips and the
electric warmth of her body as it touched his. “ Dear Anselmus,” Serpentina be­
gan, “ now you will be completely mine” . . . Anselmus felt as if he were so com­
pletely in the grasp of the gentle and lovely form that he could neither move nor
live without her, and as if her beating pulse throbbed within him. He listened to
every word she uttered until it resounded in his heart and then, like a burning ray,
kindled divine bliss within him. He had put his arms around her very dainty
waist, but the strange, ever-changing cloth of her robe was so smooth and slip­
pery that it seemed as though she might writhe out of his arms at any moment
and, like a snake, glide away. The thought make him tremble. “ Oh, do not leave
me, lovely Serpentina!” he cried involuntarily. “ You alone are my life!” “ N ot
now,” said Serpentina, “ not until I have told you all that you, because of your
love for me, will be able to understand: dearest one, know then that my father is
of the marvelous race of salamanders . . . ” 73
94 i8 oo

And so on and so forth for several pages, until Lindhorst’s genealogical

tale reaches the narrative present, that is, until the slippery little genealo­
gist mentions herself. O f course nothing is as consistently slippery as self-
referential erotic speech.
Chodowiecki’s engraving in Basedow’s Elementary Exercises shows a
mother and child snuggled together over reading lessons at a table. One
can see the same thing in an engraving in Stephani’s Primer, but with
commentary as well. Serpentina is just as close to Anselmus when she
tells him about Serpentina and Anselmus. Self-referential coupling as­
sures that the eroticism will become ever more erotic. Anselmus must also
feel that he is bound to love Serpentina twice as much for her trouble and
instruction.74Her speech is not just a story of the past, it is also an appeal
that warns of the dangers posed to the race of salamanders by evil spirits
and wise women: consequently it ends with the plea “ Stay true! Stay true
to me!” Anselmus can only answer by pledging his eternal love.75
This eternal love is known as hermeneutics. Anselmus is among the
marvelous beings who can interpret the uninterpretable and read what
has never been written. They came into the world at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.76 In Hoffmann, for example, a library contains an un­
readable parchment, which in turn contains script of serpentine charac­
ters; before the parchment sits a solitary student, who is charged with
copying it into serpentine handwriting. But the student does not copy; he
understands. Similarly, in Nietzsche’s cynical appraisal, hermeneutical
reading consists in effacing the specificity of particular wordings.77 In­
stead of looking at the text, Anselmus is all ears, all attention for a mouth
that will make him palatable for other purposes. He was only able, in a
rather strange way, to make sense of the title, “ About the marriage of the
salamander and the green snake” ; Serpentina’s voice substitutes for, or
reproduces, the text that follows. First she gives the student a spoken in­
troduction, as Wolf recommends, and probably she includes an overview
of the content of the parchment. Then she allows for the comprehension
of the whole, again in accordance with Wolf, by providing a seamless
continuation of the genealogy that her father left as a fragment. In short,
Serpentina teaches reading in the sense of that word in the discourse net­
work of 1800. She is the M other’s Mouth.
The mothers who put into effect Stephani’s method presented their
children with sounds in an auditory field rather than with visual graph­
emes. A mother’s voice substituted for and reproduced letters just as N a­
ture was to substitute for and reproduce the artificial. Her phonetic
method created a methodically purified high-idiom tone in place of the
animal pictures in the Reformation primers; with Serpentina, a spoken
love story replaced characters “ which sometimes represented plants or
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 95

mosses or animals.” Hermeneutic reading makes this displacement of me­

dia possible. Instead of solving a puzzle of letters, Anselmus listens to
meaning between the lines; instead of seeing signs, Anselmus sees a be­
loved appear to him in the shape of The Mother.
The coupling of alphabetization and erotic orality was not without
consequences. Georg Lichtenberg notes: “ Our young people certainly
read much too much, and one should write against reading, as one would
against— self-abuse.” 78 In fact, a practice of solitary reading that is above
the law of the letter (as draconian as it is arbitrary) and a sexuality that is
no longer constrained by the laws of kinship and the incest taboo come to
the same thing.79 The great children’s crusade against onanism, begun in
1760 with the publication of Simon Tissot’s Onanism; or, A Treatise on
the Illnesses Produced by Masturbation, held that among the principal
causes of the vice was the all too early social and literary education of
children. Johann Friedrich Oest and Joachim Campe, in their large Re­
vised Pedagogy, had the following recommendation: “ One should select
with the greatest care the few books to be given to children, and reject not
only those that contain suggestive or seductive passages, but also those
that excite the imagination of children. . . . All books of poetry and prose
whose subject is love, which can powerfully arouse children’s imagina­
tion, should be forever banned from children’s homes and classrooms.” 80
Even if Serpentina were to speak of less fiery lovers’ embraces than those
habitually practiced by salamanders, Anselmus would still not be pro­
tected from the solitary vice. Serpentina herself remains as ever changing
and slippery as the cloth of her robe. A fantastic spirit of the library, who
arises out of convoluted lines in order to incarnate all readers’ fantasies,
who sits on the copyist’s bench to whisper about salamander eroticism—
such a being never stops seducing. Whatever the content of what is read,
reading instruction from the M other’s Mouth is erotic from the beginning.
The pedagogical therapies for children’s vice suffered from their own
logic. A discourse network that subordinated discourses to the signified
made its own pragmatics easily forgettable. N ot love as a subject matter
in the sense that Oest and Campe banned it from children’s books, but
love as the situation of instruction led to the early, all too early literary
education of children in 1800. The coupling of reading oneself and satis­
fying oneself became unbreakable: because the children’s crusade against
both wandered into a “ labyrinth of paradox,” arming itself with weapons
that in turn had to be read,81 and, more generally, because a culture that
sweetened acculturation with culinary or motherly orality provoked the
very transgressions against which it invented so many words.82Historians
of sexuality currently tend to assume that the ritual claim, often heard
around 1800, of an unheard-of increase of masturbation is a self-serving
96 i8 oo

lie covering increased repression. But perhaps it reflects a certain reality:

namely, the effect on children of an environment insulated against nan­
nies, domestic girls, and neighbors, and locked into mother love and
education.
In Lindhorst’s story of his mythic prehistory, the eroticism of the sala­
manders is simply genital. Fiery couplings give birth to new generations.
The eroticism between Anselmus and Serpentina consists of his hearing
her words, feeling her breath, melting at the beating of her heart, and in
the end praising her in a language that is simultaneously “ glance,” “ word,”
and “ song.” 83 Thus the situation of reading instruction is intensified by
mutual stimulation, plus oral and kinesthetic pleasures: sensing and
praising of the One who makes men speak.
According to Jean Paul Richter, Fixlein’s “ advantage” is being able to
tell his story to a living mother. “Joy flows into another heart and rushes
out again with twice the strength. . . . There is a greater intimacy of
hearts, as of sound, than that of the echo: the greatest intimacy joins
sound and echo together in a resonance.” 84
Resonating systems cut off their relation to others. Between mother
and child arises an eroticism of the “ greatest intimacy,” which is no
longer fed by previous generations or directed toward future ones. In­
stead of creating children as his spiritual father did, Anselmus remains a
child. Pleasures other than the oral or kinesthetic would deprive the func­
tion of motherliness only of its educative effects. In order to invent lan­
guage, man in Herder’s essay must never be allowed to mount Mother
Nature.

Childhood sexuality thus became functionalized. The very educators

who complained about too early and too frequent reading did more to
propagate the practice than anyone else; moreover, they did so by creat­
ing a systematic double bind rather than, say, by advancing two different
and contradictory levels of theory.85 The path that led through hermeneu­
tic reading was the most elegant method of recruiting poetical writers.
The appearance of a dream lover— the first act of a masturbatory fan­
tasy— leads immediately (and this is the second act) to a new dexterity.
A kiss was burning on his lips. He awoke as if from a deep dream. Serpentina had
vanished. The hour of six was striking, and he felt oppressed because he had not
copied a single letter. Deeply troubled, fearful of the reproaches of Archivarius
Lindhorst, he looked at the sheet before him— Oh wonder!— the copy of the mys­
terious manuscript was perfectly complete, and when he examined the letters
more closely, they spelled out the story Serpentina had told about her father, who
was the favorite of Phosphorus, the Prince of the Spirits of Atlantis, the Kingdom
of Marvels. Archivarius Lindhorst entered the room now . . . he looked at the
parchment on which Anselmus had been working, allowed himself a hefty pinch
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 97

of snuff, and with a smile said, “ Exactly as I thought! Well, Herr Anselmus, here
is your silver taler.” 86

The fingers have been busily writing, then, and the head has simply not
noticed. By giving Anselmus the taler, Lindhorst confirms that the copy
flows as beautifully as Serpentina’s nature and official instructions dic­
tate. The entire erotically charged scene is at once bureaucratic entry ex­
amination, performance of duty, and source of income— with the decided
advantage of not appearing to resemble such activities. Such wonders are
made possible by the new childhood sexuality, which is smilingly over­
seen by the teachers/fathers concerned. Reading and writing have been
slipped into or hidden in listening to an eroticizing voice, via the magical
transformation of the most complicated of the three, namely writing,
“with its materials, muscular gymnastics, and manual technique,” 87 into
the easier reading, and reading in turn into pure listening. A continuum
has been established between Serpentina’s preverbal breathing and her
actual writing, and with that the goal of the augmentation technique and
the new anthropology of language has been reached.
Once again Hoffmann’s fairy tale has put a simple school program into
practice. The instructional practices of his time aimed to link listening,
reading, and writing in what was then called the writing-reading method.
Olivier’s project, to be accomplished by pure pronunciation, is announced
in the title of his book, The Art o f Learning to Read and Write Reduced
to the One True, Simplest, Surest Principle. Its bold definition of letters as
“ the simple signs for sounds,” 88 or alternatively as “ notes for the mouth
instrument,” 89 already encoded letters as aspects of spoken language. But
a psychologically effective primary instruction explicitly coupled differ­
ent modes or media of discourse. In order “ to combine as many purposes
as possible in one lesson,” Niemeyer gave children “ nothing to read or
write that they cannot understand.” 90Ernst Christian Trapp intended “ to
combine learning to write with learning to read from the very begin­
ning.” 91 Johann Baptist Graser’s Reading Instruction Methods, published
in 1819, though not “ the first book based on the unity of reading and
writing,” 92 was the first to advance the grandiose theoretical argument
that the forms of letters are primitive images of corresponding positions
of the mouth.
If writing proceeds from reading and reading proceeds from listening,
then all writing is translation. And if Anselmus unconsciously writes
down what he consciously encounters as original sound, then he accom­
plishes a translation from the M other’s Mouth. The impossible task by
which Poets prove themselves and Anton Reiser fails is solved via the
writing-reading method. Through continued hermeneutic absorption, in
which Anselmus reads his own copy rather than the original text, Serpen­
98 i8 oo

tina’s spoken story has been perfectly written down and lies waiting on
the table. There is no longer a foreign language or text “ written in exotic
letters that belong to no known language” 93— the Bhagavad Gita, believe
it or not, lies there in the mother tongue. This is the effect of a discourse
network that traces Indo-European languages back to their mother, San­
skrit, and elder-tree maidens back to The Mother.
The textual issue of the M other’s Mouth in the discourse network of
1800 is called Poetry— both the substance of Poetry and Poetry as an act
of writing. The concluding sentences of the fairy tale explicitly equate An-
selmus’s written description of life in the marvelous land of Atlantis with
a life in Poetry.94But he has already proven his identity as Poet by writing
down the story, not as a mere copy of a text in a foreign language, but in
German as a story identical to Hoffmann’s text. To be inspired by the
heavy breathing of love in the library, to write with unconscious dexterity
what attention and thought have divined— such feats are possible only
for Poets. “ To understand completely a work of art means, in a certain
sense, to create it.” 95
The creation of texts translated into and out of the M other’s Mouth is
also the self-creation of an author. Anselmus rides the crest of his herme­
neutics and has forever left the backwater of the copyist’s office. Stephani
called his “ improved,” and, in Bavaria’s teaching program, “ adopted writ­
ing method” a victory over the “ delusion” (current among the “ unkempt
masses” ) that instruction in copying would also provide one “ with the
ability properly to express one’s thoughts in writing, which belongs to
the higher art of writing alone.” 96Anselmus is therefore the living reply to
Stephani’s rhetorical question, “ Are we diligently instituting writing in­
struction in all public schools merely to deliver one or two good copyists
to our official departments?” 97
Lindhorst’s pedagogy saved from such secretarial humiliation a stu­
dent with a “ schoolmasterish air” for whom his friend the dean could
project at best a career in the bureaucratic “ writing service,” although
“ there is a great deal in him . . . a privy secretary or even a court coun­
cilor.” 98 After the initiation that Anselmus passed, like his poet-creator,
“ with the most distinguished skill” and “ exemplary performance,” 99 An­
selmus is allowed, unlike his poet, to give up the official departments for
the sake of a higher writing destiny. Bureaucrats and poets are thus two
complementary sides of a single coin. They are divided only by a small
but decisive difference.
Every once in a while Anselmus has certain fits, and not only in front
of the Bhagavad Gita or Serpentina, which make others fear for his san­
ity. Because his bureaucratic friends consider Anselmus “ mentally ill,”
they recommend him, “ in an attempt to divert his thoughts,” for the
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 99

copying job with Lindhorst.100 They plan a psychiatric cure true to the
method of Thomas Willis, Johann Christoph Hoffbauer, and Johann
Christian Reil for psychiatry in 1800 sought its so-called psychic cures
primarily by distraction.101 The lowly bureaucrats could have no idea that
Anselmus and Lindhorst would sacrifice the simple “ copying of manu­
scripts” — healing insanity by mechanical w o rk 102— to a higher art of
writing. Instead, it is for them that the mechanics of the alphabet is fate.
Heerbrand, already promoted to registrar, defends Anselmus from the
charge of insanity and folly with foolish words:

And, dearest mademoiselle, worthy dean! . . . is it not possible for one to sink
sometimes into a kind of dreamy state even while awake? I have myself had such
an experience; for instance, one afternoon while at coffee, in the kind of mood
produced by that special time of salutary physical and spiritual digestion, I sud­
denly remembered, as if by inspiration, where a misplaced manuscript lay— and
only last night a magnificent, large Latin paper came dancing before my open eyes
in the very same way.103

This apology for fits of poetic inspiration demonstrates that the bu­
reaucrat is the parody of the Poet. Heerbrand attributes what he calls in­
spiration to coffee rather than to Serpentina; thus it is rationality rather
than inspiration.104 Whether he restores order to the archives and honor
to his position as registrar or hallucinates letters with typographic preci­
sion, Heerbrand deals only with the dead letter that no voice animates.
That type of delirium may have been a matter of course in the Republic of
Scholars, but in a discourse network whose center was Poetry, it became
the very madness it was intended to dispute. A certain Klockenbring, a
high official in the police department of Hanover, entered the Georgen-
thal sanitarium in 1793 with symptoms of mania and the baffling ability
to combine bits and pieces of poetry that he had learned by heart into
poems— as if Klockenbring, “ although he possessed not a single book” in
the sanitarium, could see writing before his eyes like Heerbrand.105
Foucault described the fantasia of the library— that invention of the
nineteenth century— with reference to Flaubert’s Temptation o f Saint
Anthony, as the dance of black letters on white paper. But it could not
attain such a technical definition until the turn of the century. The limit­
ing and defining shadow that would fall across Poetry, the shadow of the
technological media, had not been cast in 1800. Within the medium of
writing there was only the opposition between Heerbrand’s “ angular and
pointed” Fraktur and the “ fine, graceful curves” of Anselmus’s roman
script.106 Bureaucrats had to continue writing the empty phrase By G od’s
Grace, if only, as Goethe put it, “ as practice in Fraktur and in official
writing for the officials.” But men and poets were forbidden anything that
might lead to the dance of black letters on white paper: from baroque
io o 1800

typographical poetry to what one learned by heart in elementary school.

“ To learn words without thinking is like a destructive opiate for the soul,
one that first might provide a pleasant dream, a dance of syllables and
im ages,. . . but later, as with ordinary opium, one begins to sense the bad
consequences of these word dreams.” 107 Whereas the caffeine-drunk bu­
reaucrat Heerbrand beheld dancing Fraktur letters and the insane Klock­
enbring hallucinated the syllables and images of absent books, the Poet
Anselmus hears only a single Voice whose flow makes his roman letters
rounded, individualized, and— the distinguishing feature— unconscious.
Poetry in 1800 did not, like literature in 1900, place “ the never-articulated
sentence I am writing” at the basis of all writing.108 Poetry wrote around
that sentence, attributing a spoken quality to it, one taken from the earliest
memories of learning to write. “ Maternal dictation fixates— orally— in the
scene of writing and in the written sign, what constitutes the psychological
structure of childhood, the mode of existence of what is remembered in the
individual.” From this imaginary but insistently conjured spoken quality
comes not the textual, but rather the “ virtually textual nature of the
bourgeois” and his poetry.109
N ot that poetry would vanish again into the M other’s Mouth. Unlike
pedagogical discourse, poetry possessed a barrier preventing such a
shortcircuit: the description of writing itself. But writing was not pressed
to its senseless and material extreme, where it becomes mere scribbling. It
simply flows quickly, lightly, and dexterously from the hand. Thanks to
his higher art of writing, the Poet Anselmus can write down effortlessly,
completely, and unconsciously whatever a M other’s Mouth dictates— in
contrast to other educated people, friends of Hoffbauer, who have not
been won for the world of books and who “ can read letters or books
without moving a lip, but when they want to write something, even just a
few lines, have to dictate it to themselves.” 110
Only the caricature of the working or dreaming bureaucrat— its very
existence is an indication of a constantly threatening, buffoonish prox­
imity— is overrun with typefaces; poetic justice pursues the bureaucrat
whose written sentences pursue and harass people. By contrast the ideal
of the Poet reaches the same people through the same channel, without
molesting them with typefaces. The Poet addresses their souls with the
pure, vocal signified, before which all signifiers are reduced to transla­
tions, just as the imaginary lover addressed the poet. Poetry in the dis­
course network of 1800 had the fundamental function of establishing
connecting circuits between the system and the population.
The separation of poetic from bureaucratic writing in Hoffmann’s text
explicitly secured this phatic function. A counter test for inspired writing
shows that when Poets act like bureaucrats in their offices, the soul-to-
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS IO I

soul connections are immediately broken. After completing the uncon­

scious transcription from the M other’s Mouth, Anselmus is invited by his
bureaucratic friends to a social evening with punch; by the end of the eve­
ning, when all are thoroughly drunk, the student, dean, and registrar yell
out the mythic secrets of the salamander while Veronica is listening. An­
selmus participates even though, or because, “ it seemed obvious to him
that he had always thought of no one but Veronica; indeed the shape that
had appeared before him yesterday in the blue room had been none other
than Veronica, and that wild story of the marriage between the sala­
mander and the green snake had simply been copied by him from the
manuscript and was not at all related to what he had heard.” 111 The scene
thus becomes negative proof of Schlegel’s philosophy. Anselmus momen­
tarily forgets that writing is supposed to reproduce unembellished accents
from the depths of the soul as clearly as they exist in their original state.
Instead he reduces The Woman to a woman, Serpentina to Veronica, with
the result that even his writing is reduced to mere writing. Such canceling
of the constitutive spoken quality of poetry tempts Anselmus to say out
loud, indeed to yell, what Serpentina had whispered as a story. The high­
est punishment follows upon such noisiness. Although he has a severe
hangover the next morning, Anselmus nonetheless tries to continue copy­
ing the original text.
But he saw so many strange, crabbed strokes and twirls all twisted together in
inexplicable confusion, perplexing the eye, that it seemed to him to be almost im­
possible to transcribe this exactly; indeed, looking it over one might have thought
that the parchment was a piece of thickly veined marble, or a stone sprinkled with
mosses. He nevertheless resolved to do his very best and boldly dipped his pen in
the ink; but regardless of what he tried, the ink would not flow. He impatiently
flicked the point of his pen and— O heavens!— a huge blot fell on the outspread
original! . . . The golden trunks of the palm trees changed into gigantic snakes,
which knocked their frightful heads together with a piercing metallic clang and
wound their bodies around the distracted student. “ Madman! N ow you must suf­
fer the punishment for that which you have done in your bold irreverence!” 112

Any copyist who does not hear a voice and consequently can neither
read hermeneutically nor write with a fine, serpentine script must en­
counter the enormous serpent rather than the little snake. She punishes a
madness and blasphemy that amount to nothing more than an honest at­
tempt at copying and demonstrate the undeniable materiality of the signs.
(One has to be very well brought up to regard handwriting as anything
other than blobs of ink.) A bureaucracy that forgets the secret orality
leads directly to the spot of ink that destroys the beautiful, voice-supported
flow of handwriting inspired by Serpentina.
In 1787 Lichtenberg came up with a plan for a “ family archive” that
would store every child’s earliest attempts at writing as so many “ signa­
102 i8 oo

tures that the progress of the mind has left behind.” Thanks to such pa­
rental love, there would come to be a writing system for the most material
effects of writing. “ If I had a son, he would never be given any paper ex­
cept bound paper, and if he tore it or made a mess of it, I would write
next to it with paternal pride: my son made this mess on the X day of year
X .” 113 This curiosity, archived in Lichtenberg’s Scribble Book, obviously
occupies Father Lindhorst, who from the beginning (as if to provoke the
transgression) warned of the terrible consequences that would follow if
the copyist allowed any spot of ink to fall on the original. A spot of ink is
the necessary outpouring of any reading that materializes ideal women,
and it literally links what Lichtenberg had linked in a merely analogous
way: reading and “ self-pollution.” Anselmus’s reduction of Serpentina to
Veronica goes back to a dream that had evoked Veronica in an erotically
charged fashion. His spot of ink is as obscene as the noise of lips betray­
ing the secrets of the soul or Serpentina, which can only be written.
The spot of ink opposes the ideal of the finely rounded, continuous,
and thus individual handwriting with a metaphor of pollution. It desig­
nates the trace of a desire that, instead of wandering through the many
channels, connections, and detours of the world of language and books,
shoots through them like an arcing current. When Charlotte, in the Elec­
tive Affinities, adds an approving note to her husband’s invitation to the
captain, “ she wrote with an easy flow of the pen, expressing herself affa­
bly and politely” ; however, “ she finally smudged the paper with a blot of
ink, to her great annoyance; and the blot only became larger when she
tried to dry it up.” 114 From this growing spot will later come, on his ma­
ternal side, little Otto.
The captain is a bureaucrat and Veronica, one of Hoffmann’s cunning
daughters of bureaucrats, who singlemindedly intends that Anselmus
should become Herr Court Councilor and she Frau Court Councilor.115
Eroticism and the materiality of writing were intertwined in 1800. Ac­
cording to the rule that whatever is foreclosed from symbolization appear
in the real and therefore the impossible, they are present only in delirium
or hallucination.116 A spot of ink, we recall, means nothing less than mad­
ness. And the party that gathered to drink alcoholic punch concludes
with the paradoxical shout of Dean Paulmann: “ But I must be in a lunatic
asylum. Have I gone crazy myself? What kind of gibberish am I uttering?
Yes, I am mad, I am also insane!” 117 The thread of madness in his speech
is apparent in that he affirms himself with every word he speaks, and yet
every word he speaks cancels out his own words. The delirious speech of
the drunken bureaucrat parodies the poetical speech of Serpentina, just as
the delirious writing of a drunken bureaucrat parodies the self-forgetful
writing of Poet Anselmus. The two elementary, never written sentences “ I
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 103

am writing” and “ I am delirious,” which will support literature in 1900,118

are the impossible real and the shadow of Poetry in the discourse network
of 1800. The sentence “ I am writing” appears, but only in Heerbrand’s
daydream; the sentence “ I am delirious” appears, but only in Paulmann’s
drunkenness. Both appear, then, in order to restore to poetic writing its
own nature, which would assure that such writing passes from voice to
voice, and prohibit it from becoming literal and taking the form of bu­
reaucratic madness.

The modern fairy tale is consistent enough to develop the difficult rela­
tionship between Poetry and a bureaucratic position in the figure of its
lord and master himself. Lindhorst, at once the privy archivist and poet
prince of Atlantis, indicates that these functions can and can’t be unified.
The lowly bureaucrats may represent nonunity for the student-poet, but
the highest and most pedagogical bureaucrat in the text knows better. He
leads a double life. A double life in itself causes no difficulty, but to pub­
lish it is another matter. The fact that a poet’s life and a bureaucrat’s posi­
tion cannot be unified comes to our awareness only when poets break a
gag rule and talk about the unity of both. This is the subject of the corre­
spondence between the writer and the master of the modern fairy tale.
Hoffmann appears under his own name in the last vigil and explains that
his bureaucratic duties and bureaucrat’s prose have kept him from finish­
ing “ The Golden Pot.” He is rescued from this dilemma by a note, written
in the finest German bureaucratese, from Lindhorst.
Respected Sir: I am familiar with the fact that you have, in eleven vigils, written
about the extraordinary fate of my good son-in-law, Anselmus, erstwhile student,
now poet, and that you are at present most sorely tormenting yourself so that in
the twelfth and final vigil you may write something about his happy life in Atlan­
tis, where he now lives with my daughter on a pleasant estate which I own in that
country. Now, notwithstanding my great regret that my own singular nature is
hereby revealed to the reading public (seeing that this may expose me to a thou­
sand inconveniences in my office as privy archivarius; indeed, it may even, in the
collegium, provoke the question of how far a salamander may justly bind himself
through an oath, as a state servant) . . . notwithstanding all of this, I say, it is my
intention to help you complete your w ork.119

With this offer of assistance to a poet-bureaucrat, the poet-bureaucrat

Lindhorst betrays his trade secrets. These are summed up in the title of a
then-current work, The State Civil Servant as Writer or the Writer as
State Civil Servant: A Documentary Account. M ax Friedrich Gravell’s
tract posed the very questions that preoccupy Lindhorst and his col­
leagues: “ To what extent are the privileges of the writer limited by the
duties of a servant of the state? To what extent can both roles be unified?
104 i 8oo

Who decides when one does something as a writer or servant of the

state?” 120
There is no doubt about Lindhorst’s reply. His letter provides docu­
mentary evidence, in such phrases as “ erstwhile student, now poet,” for
the unity of both roles. Bureaucrats can be poets and poets bureaucrats.
The matter becomes delicate only when the double life is not merely con­
fided to official yet confidential letters, but seizes an entire world of poetic
readers, which includes bureaucratic colleagues. Lindhorst is not worried
about the characteristically nonprivate title of privy archivist, but he is
concerned about the essentially public title of Poet. States demand a com­
mitment from their servants that forbids poetizing and fictionalizing.
Once more the Faustian free speech called Poetry encounters a pact that
makes discourses the basis of the state and itself becomes a discursive
event in the bureaucratic oath. To keep secret the “ deliberations of the
collegium” and all other affairs of state requires— in the words of Hoff­
mann’s appointment as a state judge— “ his oath of duty in his new capac­
ity.” 121 This is the reason the lowly bureaucrat Heerbrand sees letters as
letters, and this is the reason the lowly bureaucrat Paulmann is horrified
to hear his own insane words about his own insanity.
And yet the oath of office and the life of poetry remain disunited in
only one of the two discourse formations: Lindhorst’s collegium. In the
other, the opposite holds. “ Whatever a state civil servant does as a writer
is not done in his capacity as civil servant, but is sanctioned by universal
freedom and specific civil rights.” 122 Hoffmann and Friedrich von Har-
denberg, Goethe and Schiller— all knew the possibility and the secret of a
double life. And when isolated poets, such as Holderlin or Kleist, fail at
the transition from tutor to educational bureaucrat or from solitary cru­
sader to adjunct to the king because they know nothing of a double life,
the end comes in a tower in Tubingen or on the shore of the Wannsee. *
Poetry and bureaucracy can be depicted in Poetry as united because
the description of this unity recruits more poet-bureaucrats. This is the
reason Lindhorst pardons the writer of the fairy tale for exposing Lind­
horst’s double life. “ It is my intention to help you complete the work,
since much good of me and my dear married daughter (if only the other
two were also off my hands!) has been said therein.” 123 This “ somewhat
abrupt” but deeply felt sigh longs for the return of the Golden Age. “ N ot
before” he has found husbands for all three of his daughters will the Poet
in Lindhorst be permitted to throw off “ his earthly burden” of bureau­
cracy and resume his leadership of Atlantis. But the advertisement for

Holderlin spent his last, insane years in a Tubingen tower; Kleist committed suicide on
the banks of the Wannsee near Berlin. [Trans.]
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS IO5

more sons-in-law with “ childlike poetic natures” 124can only go out as po­
etry. Hoffmann reads this between the lines in Lindhorst’s letter.

He was here offering me a helping hand to complete my work. And I might, from
this, fairly conclude that he was at heart not opposed to having his wondrous
existence in the world of spirits revealed through the printed word. It may be, I
thought, that through this means he perhaps expects to get his two other daugh­
ters married sooner. W ho knows but that a spark may fall in the heart of this or
that young man and therein kindle a desire for another green snake— whom he
will immediately seek out and discover on Ascension Day, under the elder tree.125

The function of initiation that Lindhorst supervised for the fairy tale’s
hero is thus transferred for all future readers to the writer of the fairy tale.
His writing is publicity, and in a technical sense of the word he is a multi­
plier who transmits the wishes of his lord and master Lindhorst. “ The
Golden Pot” and the Golden Age become possible because Lindhorst’s
letter gives poetry, until then the despairing expression of an inwardness,
a function in the nexus of discourses. It becomes an advertisement for
advertisers. It must therefore fall into the externality of publication. As
Lindhorst is at once a poet prince and sworn archivist of the state, so his
ambassador Hoffmann is at once a dreamer and media technician. One
formulates his wish in the finest bureaucratic form, and the other is
charged with translating it into poetic gems and passing it along. That is
why poetry wrote around its written character rather than obliterating it,
as pedagogy did. If poetry were not published, it would not be possible to
recruit the sons-in-law necessary for the poetic project of redemption. If
the stories of the salamanders were to appear as sheer texts, they would
be as inaccessible to readers as Registrar Heerbrand’s lost documents.
But because Lindhorst leads Hoffmann to substitute a poetical archive for
Lindhorst’s bureaucratic one, the whole technology of storage is trans­
formed into psychology. Readers can then take the circumscribed, writ­
ten quality of poetry to heart and translate it back into speech or into the
childhood sexuality of a phantom lover.
The poetic texts of 1800 were devised with such backward-moving
translation in mind. The story of the poet princes and poets that we have
from the pens of the fairy tale’s hero and writer need not refer to the two
other sisters of Serpentina as single, individual figures. Because the sisters
all appear to men in the shape of their mother, it is enough to elevate
Serpentina as the one signified. Readers can provide the referent for the
signified; indeed, readers’ longing for the green snake or mother guaran­
tees a successful reception. “ One starts out by seeking the girl in one’s
favorite novels— and in the end no one fails to find what he was looking
for.” 126
It is a particular pleasure to introduce the empirical proof for the pre­
1 06 1800

ceding argument. Hoffmann’s readers will inevitably find the two other
daughters of Lindhorst because both resemble Serpentina, who in turn
resembles The Mother or snake. The snake, again like Serpentina, was an
element of contemporary ideal handwriting, and therefore was capable of
being copied. “ When snakes crawl they never move in a straight line. In­
stead they move in a series of curves, so that, if one were to crawl across
fine sand, it would leave behind a line like this (Fig. 19 [in orig.; see the
reproduction, below]). Therefore we call a line that curves up and down a
snake line. Anyone who wants to learn to write well will have to master
the drawing of such a line.” 127 We can now for the first time publish a
picture of Serpentina. Behold in Pohlmann’s Figure 19 the ideal form in
which Hoffmann’s readers can easily recognize Lindhorst’s daughters:

The poetic effect of multiplication thus proceeds quite elegantly

through the logic of the signified. In poetry the word does not need to
have any reference, it only needs meaning. It need not carry any responsi­
bility, like an oath of office or a pact with the devil; it need only have a
textuality that can be translated back, while one reads or writes, into the
image and the whispering of the green snake.
The Fairy Tales o f the Modern Age are word-for-word realizations of
Herder’s definition of poetry. The poet brings Nature or the M other into
the hearts and souls of his brothers. His addressees are men who read,
and they are rightfully called brothers because all their love is devoted to
the alma mater. Writing and speech are merely channels that flow from
childhood sexuality to childhood sexuality. In front of or behind the
channeling network stands a secret bureaucrat who hopes that it will
allow his release.
What a state civil servant does as a writer is not done as a bureaucrat,
but is sanctioned by universal freedom. At the end of the fairy tale, Lind­
horst makes his double life into a division of labor between himself and
Hoffmann. O f course, he must return to the collegium and sit through the
discussion of his fitness for the oath of office, but no one can forbid his
appointing another private secretary to take the place of Anselmus. Lind­
horst’s letter invites Hoffmann into the poetical office in which he initiates
his spiritual sons into poetry. The story that Anselmus was writing until
he was interrupted by the fatal spot of ink, the story that the narrator was
writing until the pressure of his everyday life became too great— this
single and yet doubled story is finally completed. The inner knowledge
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 107

called poetry receives its bureaucratic baptism (as M arx would later call
the state examination) in Lindhorst’s archive. Only this baptism gives it
discursive reality. ^
Hoffmann writes and writes because Lindhorst has set the central sym­
bol of the fairy tale, a gold pot full of arrack, on the writing table.128 As
Hoffmann drinks he falls into a hallucination in which everything that is
unimaginable under the conditions of prose is given sensual certainty. As
if confronted with a magic lantern that could project images to all five
senses, he sees Anselmus and Serpentina, finally united at the fairy tale’s
end in the land of Poetry. The hallucination begins with tactile and olfac­
tory stimuli, which barely cross the writer’s perceptual threshold,129 and
culminates in optical and auditory manifestations of love, which could be
taken either as “ glances” or as “ song.” 130
The alcoholic intoxication of the fairy tale’s writer achieves the same
end as the romantic intoxication of the fairy tale’s hero: both make pos­
sible a writing so hallucinatory that it never reaches consciousness. Fi­
nally Hoffmann discovers the secret of Lindhorst’s double life. In retro­
spect he is able to figure out that it was all just another fantasy of the
library. “ For the vision in which I now beheld Anselmus bodily in his
freehold of Atlantis I stand indebted to the arts of the salamander, and it
was fortunate that when everything had dissolved in air, I found a paper
lying on the violet table with the foregoing account written beautifully
and distinctly by my own hand.” 131 Such are some of the pleasures of the
double life: in the shortcircuiting of hallucination and writing, intoxica­
tion and duty, the writer of the fairy tale becomes the return of his sem-
hlable, the hero of the fairy tale. He is also the counterpart of the lowly
bureaucrats, who under the influence of alcohol merely hallucinate that
they are hallucinating, or in daydreams see the dance of Fraktur letters.
By contrast, poetic daydreams are a hallucinatory, multimedia love scene;
and poetic inebriation, instead of forfeiting the word, is the neat but un­
conscious inscription of such scenes.
It is a joy of writing that only the lowly bureaucrats seem to ignore.
The reform-minded pedagogues praised it and, indeed, held themselves
up as examples. One has, for instance, Peter Villaume’s M ethod for Aid­
ing Young People to Acquire the Skill o f Expressing Their Thoughts in
Writing. “ I do not know if it happens to other writers, but whenever I
write the image of my subject is always present, and even in the most ab­
stract matters I see a kind of phantom, my subject, whatever it may be.
And I simply write, without thinking of words or rules. The words take
care of themselves; I am hardly aware of them. When this occurs the
writer puts down what is fitting and nothing more.” 132 In just this way
Hoffmann acquires the ability to write down the phantom Serpentina.
io8 1800

His automatic writing has no rules or consciousness of words and is thus

in need of historical legitimation.133 Lindhorst appears once more because
the writer of the fairy tale does not immediately understand that poetry is
the doubling of happy intoxication and bureaucratic duty, vision and a
written text. Hoffmann’s sigh of regret at having sojourned only briefly in
the fantasy of the library and not at all in Atlantis has no basis, and the
highest official has the last word. “ Be quiet, be quiet, my revered friend.
Do not lament so! Were you not yourself just now in Atlantis, and do you
not at least have there a lovely little farmstead as a poetic possession of
your inner mind? Is the bliss of Anselmus anything else but life in Poetry,
Poetry, where the sacred harmony of all things is revealed as the most
profound secret of nature?” 134 Thoroughly consoled, the narrator can
write, with Lindhorst’s blessing, “ The End of the Fairy Tale.” His text has
become a work and he has become an author.

Authors, Readers, Authors

Historians differentiate between two types of culture with regard to
writing: a culture of the scribe, in which the ability to write is a privilege
and thus a function of the ruling class; and a culture of the learned, in
which reading and writing are coupled together and thus can be univer­
salized.1 In the European Middle Ages, for example, scribes, being purely
copyists or calligraphers, had no need of being able to read what they
were manually multiplying: the discourse of the Lord. Moreover, medie­
val readers had to dictate to a scribe their own commentaries or con­
tinuations of texts. The discourse network of 1800 was the opposite: a
culture in which reading and writing were coupled and automatized. The
purpose of this coupling was a universal education, and its prerequisite
was an alphabetization that connected reading and writing by linking
both back to a singular kind of listening.
This system of education did not simply continue the process begun by
the printing trade and the Reformation. Instead, the realization that “ Eu­
rope would surely sink into error or even into madness because of its pub­
lic instruction,” as long as it had its eyes “ on the idolized new knowledge,
which is limited to letters and books,” 2 created a caesura in the alpha­
betizing process. Reading and writing became common property in 1800
only under the condition of simulating a pure, nonalienated listening. As
if to stage a confrontation between the two types of cultures, Anselmus
finds himself in the predicament of having to copy unreadable characters
that seem completely to exclude listening and understanding. But when
Serpentina’s voice reaches him, not only is this anachronistic situation
avoided, but the reader is also promoted to Poet. And because Poetry, un­
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 109

like wisdom or insight, regulations or the teachings of the gods, cannot

exist without readers, the reader-poet Anselmus generates more and
more reader-poets, beginning with his writer Hoffmann and moving on
through him as relay station to many other poetic youths. In this way
reading and writing became universal.
The continuous transition from authors to readers to authors was a
kind of mobilization. N ot only technical innovations, such as the in­
vention of uncut rolls of paper, and not only social changes, such as the
much-touted rise of the middle class, but rather mutations in the practice
of discourse itself led to the proliferation of the book industry in 1800.
The fact that belles-lettres led the statistics in publishing would be an ac­
cident if technological or social causes were brought in to account for the
expansion. But belletristic texts themselves wrote the history of this sin­
gular occurrence. German poetry is so constituted that— beyond any par­
ticularities of content or philosophical differences of opinion— it pro­
grams its readers for the proliferation of Poetry.
There is thus no reason to peel away the endless layers of idealist sys­
tems of aesthetics in an attempt to arrive at the intentionality of words
like poetry, author, or work. Simple narratives determine such words
more elegantly. The end of the fairy tale “ The Golden Pot” says it clearly.
Poetry as a “ possession of the inner mind” arises in erotic and alcoholic
intoxication; authorship arises in rereading what had been unconsciously
written in the delirium; poetic works, finally, are media for the halluci­
natory substitution of realms of the senses. These three key concepts in
the discourse network of 1800 are as many promises of happiness.
On its inner side— that turned toward the world of readers— the me­
dium of writing constituted a psychology. It was to the latter that writing,
a cold, age-old technology, owed its sudden universalization. What techni­
cally would be signifieds without referents became psychologically endog­
enous voices or images that created pleasure and authors. In Anselmus’s
romantic intoxication, as well as in his author’s arrack intoxication, Ser­
pentina shines— whereas Lindhorst’s letter names her very referentially
as “ my dear married daughter” — as an audiovisual hallucination. She
exists only as the inner possession of senses that are dead to the world.
The precondition of marriage with and according to Serpentina is psy­
chological: the “ childlike poetic nature.” N o one who is adult and sober,
then, believes that a beloved voice dwells among the pages of a book. In­
toxication or mania is a necessary condition for the production of the
transcendental signified in its empirical nonbeing.
The rule of the Serapion brotherhood, the group in which Hoffmann’s
stories were told, was to do ample justice to a bowl of punch and at the
same time mimic the pseudo-Serapion, who could “ quite clearly” see the
n o 1800

towers of Alexandria while looking at the towers of Bamberg and who in

the stories of his madness could even bring the best psychologically
schooled listeners “ with magical power as if in a dream” to hallucinate
his words.3In the Biographies o f the Insane, a love-sick reform economist
needs only to see a vision of his dead mother to halt “ the ever-turning
wheel of the imagination, which like a magic lantern throws out images
of the past and future across the soul.” The vision of his mother became
an “ image that refused to move, that constantly occupied the mind and
drove it to madness.” 4 In Tieck’s Runenherg a woman emerges from
ruins and the night to present the hero, Christian, a tablet, “ as an eternal
remembrance,” which is covered with wondrous, incomprehensible script,
and with that she fixates once and for all his insane longing.5
In such examples poetry was at the cutting edge of its age. The new
human sciences, with their medico-psychological investigations of in­
sanity, discovered around 1800 among the countless manifestations of
unreason a distinguished form that revealed the very nature of unreason.
This was the idee fixe. “ Since it is the nature of madness to fasten onto
any given idea or concept, often to the exclusion of almost all others,” 6
the fixed idea moved into the center of nosological categories, etiological
explanations, and psychic cures, which were directed above all toward
distraction. But most importantly the fixed idea became the sole form of
unreason to be accorded the rank of poetic dignity. “ That fixed idea that
at least periodically dominates every genius and enthusiast nobly sepa­
rates men from the table and bed of the earth.” 7 Thus Jean Paul’s insig­
nificant educational bureaucrat, a writer who cultivates the idee fixe in
miniature, can only be called Fixlein.
Whereas the century of Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum would discover a
thousand crossings between genius and madness, the writing system of
1800 knew only one, special connection. It was not Tasso’s mania or para­
noia, but his erotic fixation on the image of the Woman that made him a
possible subject for one of Goethe’s tragedies. It was not sheer stupidity
or flight of ideas, but the “ fixed idea” 8of taking on the role of the martyr
Serapion while in full possession of logic and transcendental philosophy
that made the hermit of Bamberg the T/pco? sirovviios of the poetry club.
For only fixed ideas can realize empirically, in a psychology, what the
magic mirror achieves in the modern fairy tale: it “ throws everything
back into its true form, destroys all illusion, and eternally holds the pri­
meval image.” 9 Offices of the registrar such as Heerbrand’s or archives
such as Lindhorst’s become historically unnecessary when souls are ca­
pable of directly storing ideas. The eternally held primeval image in
Christian Heinrich Spiess, Tieck, Hoffmann, Jean Paul, and Novalis was,
of course, the Mother.
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS III

Hector Berlioz provided or suffered (with the time lag typical of

France) the biographical evidence. The Symphonie fantastique, which
carries the programmatic subtitle “ Episode in the life of an artist,” first
smuggled into symphonic music a paradoxical motif that was removed
from all thematic-motivic development. Its function was to fixate an idea
that would be the programmatic-musical representation of the artist’s
lover as she appeared in an opium dream. Hardly had Berlioz married
that lover several years later, than she became, in all the fullness of the
body, the matron . . .
Once a hallucination has produced a fixed idea in the first act of poetic
production, the second act begins as the pen does its fixating. For if a
fixed idea is related to poetical and, as in the case of Anselmus, prelingual
breathing, then all mechanical distraction therapies, such as those planned
by Heerbrand and Paulmann, come to nothing. Only the touch of the
spear that opened it can heal the wound of such madness. After sobering
up, the hero and the writer of “ The Golden Pot” find their fixed ideas
written down by their own poet-hands.
Tiedemann’s Investigations into Man reported the case of a “ young
man who had dedicated himself to poetry and could spend a whole day
without writing one line,” until somnambulism came to his aid. He “ got
up in the middle of the night, wrote, then read over what he had written
and applauded himself by laughing loudly.” 10 The Life o f Fibel (or Pri­
mer) reports the opposite youthful exercises, in which Fibel “ wrote for a
long time without looking at the paper, not in order to show off any skill,
but in order to have one in case he ever had to w ork in the dark.” Such a
case does occur during one night when a dream hen gives Fibel the letter
h as the first letter of his primer.11 The famous nocturnal outpourings of
the youth Goethe had in fact little originality. Poetic writing in 1800 al­
ways meant letting oneself go; for “ the time for rewriting, deleting, and
polishing what needs to be polished can always be found.” 12 Only upon
returning from intoxication or dream and in rereading the unconscious
handiwork does an ego appear, together with its narcissism. The young
man applauds; Fibel reaches the goal he dreamed of; Hoffmann admires
his beautifully and distinctly written text of “ The Golden Pot” ; and
Goethe had “ a particular reverence” for poems that were “ unpremedi­
tated effusions” and had to be “ fix[ed] down at once” by “ writ[ing] in the
dark.” 13 Thus the narcissistic pleasure of rereading one’s unconscious po­
etic liberties gave birth to the “ authorial function.” 14 Authorship in the
discourse network of 1800 is not a function simultaneous with the act of
writing, but a deferred effect of rereading.
Empirical evidence for this also can be gained simply by turning the
motion-picture camera— as an early literary screenplay recommended in
112. i8 oo

19 1 3— onto the poets. Immediately we see someone “ moving around

nervously in a room. He writes a line on a piece of paper that has been
folded in odd ways. He stands in front of the mirror and reads the line
and admires himself. He lies down with evident satisfaction on a couch.” 15
Self-forgetful writing, mirror stage, authorship— these are the three
technological steps to the poetic career. But in order to record them a me­
dium beyond books is necessary, a medium that was lacking in the writ­
ing system of 1800. What the motion-picture camera would debase a cen­
tury later, to the laughter of both sexes, shone in 1800 as the highest
technological achievement in the medium. Central Europe entered— not
in the statistical sense that concerns social historians, but in a program­
matic sense that made the future— the condition of general alphabetiza­
tion. Writing no longer required the virtues of vigilance and attention, the
ascesis of a learned class. It could become a skill of the fingers, which
would write on through dreams, drunkenness, or darkness. W ithout dis­
turbance or channel interference, without delay or transmission losses,
the medium of writing transported pure signifieds or— fixed ideas. A l­
phabetization in the flesh made possible an automatic writing that was
not automatic writing. For only from 1896 on, when rereading was pro­
hibited, would unconscious writing yield pure signifiers. In 1800, how­
ever, an act of writing as punctual as it was unambivalent stood between
two universal poles that neutralized the act: before it was the signified
that had to be translated, behind it was an authorship that could enjoy
the work of independent fingers as its own possession.

Poetry established its technical standard as the rule in the discourse

network of 1800. Jean Paul, for example, with his passion for facts,
traced all the writing of his time, including the most renowned, back to a
primal author, Fibel, whom “ no one in the German nation knows by
name,” but whom everyone had read because Fibel’s original primer “ not
only found millions of readers, but before that had made them into read­
ers.” 16The aesthetic disquisitions of the philosophers also exemplified the
process, in reverse. When defining Poetry they forgot, fundamentally, that
the poetry in front of them had been written and printed. Fibel’s forgot­
ten and thus constantly imitated work made poetic writing so easy that
philosophers could call it speaking.17 The philosophers also forgot that
speaking is a technique of the body. The M other’s Mouth had made
speaking so easy that it could be called the representation of a representa­
tion, or the hallucination of a fixed idea.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Lectures on Literature and the Line
Arts, addresses the question “ What is poetry?” as follows:
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 113

The other arts possess, according to their limited modes or means of representa­
tion, a definite domain that is more or less susceptible to delimitation. The me­
dium of poetry, however, happens to be identical with that through which the
human spirit first attains consciousness, and through which its ideas obtain the
power of voluntary connection and expression: language. Therefore poetry is not
bound to any objects but rather creates its own; it is the most comprehensive of
all arts and at the same time the universal spirit present in them all. That which in
the portrayal of other arts lifts us above commonplace reality into an imaginary
world, is what we call the poetic element in them.18

Hegel’s Aethestics, on the theme of poetry, agrees:

That is to say, it works neither for contemplation by the senses, as the visual arts
do, nor for purely ideal feeling, as music does, but on the contrary tries to present
to spiritual imagination and contemplation the spiritual meanings which it has
shaped within its own soul. For this reason the material through which it mani­
fests itself retains for it only the value of a means (even if an artistically treated
means) for the expression of spirit to spirit, and it has not the value of being a
sensuous existent in which the spiritual content can find a corresponding reality.
Amongst the means hitherto considered, the means here can only be sound as the
sensuous material still relatively the most adequate to spirit.19

Poetry enjoyed a privileged place in the systems of aesthetics. The

other arts were defined by their respective media (stone, color, building
material, sound); the medium of poetry, however— language or tone, lan­
guage as tone, but certainly never language as letters— disappears be­
neath its content so that, as with Nostradamus/Faust, the spirit can ap­
pear directly to the spirit. The concluding line of Stefan George’s poem
“The Word” — “ Without the word no thing can be” — would have been
impossible or sacrilegious in the writing system of 1800. First, all real
languages can be translated into one another; second, language itself is
merely a channel. So poetry can establish a direct connection between
“ the meanings of the spirit” (signifieds) and the world (the set of all refer­
ence), a connection that establishes and guarantees the general equivalent
and the universal translatability of all sensuous media. “As for poetry’s
mode of configuration, poetry in this matter appears as the total art be­
cause, what is only relatively the case in painting and music, it repeats in
its own field the modes of presentation characteristic of the other arts.” 20
Of course, poetry cannot accomplish this materially, but that is not the
point. It is precisely the translation of other arts into a nonmaterial and
universal medium that constitutes poetry. This medium is variously la­
beled fantasy or imagination. Imagination generically defines all the arts,
but it specifically defines one highest art. Only poetry can claim “ the
imagination itself, that universal foundation of all the particular art-
forms and the individual arts” as its proper material.21 Such definitional
ii4 iBoo

doubling guaranteed that poetry could not be derived from words or let­
ters or written signs. Poetry can manage magically to transform the rush
of events and the beauties of the world into products of culture only by
being the art of the nonmaterial imagination. “ The imagination is that
marvelous sense that can replace all of our senses.” 22
Some have thought it strange that Goethe’s periodical Propylden called
upon its readers to submit themes from poetry that they held to be appro­
priate for painting. But this simply represented a reversal of his practice
of translating images back into the general equivalent. In Wilhelm Meis-
ter’s Years o f Wandering, not only has Saint Joseph the Second mastered
this practice, but the entire art curriculum of the Pedagogical Province
teaches its use. One of the masters stands before a statue and calls upon
his students “ to awaken the imagination with fitting words in the pres­
ence of this stationary work, so that everything that appears fixed regains
its fluidity without losing its character.” 23 Again, poetic words are to
liquidate material media. It was not enough that in their own domain the
flow of sound rather than letters should dominate; poetic words would
liquidate, that is, liquefy, stones and colors, sounds and building materi­
als, all kinds of materialities and techniques of the body, until the Imagi­
nation could replace all senses.
In Lessing’s Laocoon the poet is instructed: “ In this moment of illusion
we should cease to be conscious of the means that the poet uses for this
purpose, that is, his words.” 24 As part of a formulation of basic differ­
ences among the arts, such a phrase presupposed a readership for which
words had not yet become simply fluid. Only a completed alphabetiza­
tion would make Lessing’s poetic effect into a pedagogically guaranteed
automatism. Jean Paul once had to remind his readers (in the middle of
an address to the reader) that what they were reading, without noticing
it, was in printed type. One of the fantastic episodes in “ The Golden Pot”
is presented as the optical vision of the apostrophized reader.25 And in
“ The Sandman” the inner image, as brought forth in hallucinations by
“ that remarkable species of author,” is to be presented to the public in
the full intensity of “ its vivid colors, the light and the shade.” 26 All such
programs of poetic effects presupposed an ability to read pure signifieds.
The philosophical imagination that in 1800 attained the status of the
nonmediate medium of poetry is archeologically a simple effect of
primers.
There is textual and empirical evidence for this assertion. Textual evi­
dence is provided by the patron saint of Hoffmann’s poets’ club. Hun­
dreds of pages after Serapion relates his fantastic fixed idea, his simple
secret is told. He has— as a model for all future poets— “ spun stories out
of his inner self as he saw it all with his own eyes and not as he had read
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 115

it.” 27 The transformation of Bamberg into Alexandria has thus been a

fantasy of the library, and the madness of fixed ideas an effect of reading.
Empirical evidence is provided by the reading experiences of Karl
Friedrich von Kloden, who did not have to await W olf’s instruction to
bridge the gap between two discourse networks. In 1793, at the age of
seven, Kloden entered a school for the poor. He later reported being end­
lessly bored by the “ <z, b, ab, a, ba” and complained that the rote learn­
ing of passages from the Bible produced “ no understanding,” which
he significantly qualified as “ no representation, no picture.” N ot until
Kloden’s mother, who enjoyed reading, proceeded to “ explain the mean­
ing” rather than the letters did Kloden gradually come to understand
what he was reading. Like Anselmus, however, Kloden did not learn the
perfect reading technique— which reveals the poetic in poetry, namely,
the substitute for all the pleasures of the senses— until he fell into a de­
lirium. While febrile, Kloden received a copy of Campe’s bowdlerized
Robinson Crusoe from his mother, and this led to reading with “ real
craving,” which “ represented every scene plastically” and “ painted every
scene down to the smallest detail.” 28
Understanding, representation, hallucination— the phantasmagorical
modality of hermeneutics could not be more solidly displayed. After al­
phabetization became (with Pestalozzi) instruction in seeing and (with
Stephani) conversation with the M other’s Mouth, it supplemented all
other media. Self-proclaimed drug experts acknowledged this by using a
“ metaphor that turned up with near-epidemic frequency on the eve of the
French Revolution” and that called the no less epidemic reading of poetry
an opiate.29 Reading became a “ need” that, in the view of one contempo­
rary primer, presupposed and heightened itself.30 This, however, is a
clinical definition of addiction. Thus Anton Reiser describes his reading
as a “ need, such as opium perhaps is for the people of the Orient, who
use it to produce a pleasant numbing of the senses.” 31
“ Sublimation” and “ internalization,” two of today’s current explana­
tions for the new addiction, do not go far enough.32 Lachrymose pity for
a middle class supposedly alienated from its so-called drives remains psy­
chology and thus obfuscates positive technical effects. Everything but
sublimation had occurred. In the discourse network of 1800, the Book of
Poetry became the first medium in the modern sense. Following McLu-
han’s law, according to which the content of a medium is always another
medium, poetry supplemented the data of the senses in a way that was
reproducible and multiplicatory. Atlantis, the secret of “ The Golden
Pot,” is simply a written desire of the eyes and ears. But such writing must
take place. There were no techniques in 1800 to record the singularity
and seriality of a progression of sounds or images. Musical scores al-
ii6 i8oo

lowed for the serial storage of data, but not in its singularity. (The nine­
teenth century would therefore invent the orchestral director as a surro­
gate for the then-impossible reproduction of sound.) In painting and the
plastic arts, the output of singular data always occurs in a parallel way.
Mechanical apparatuses for recording sound, such as the vocal automa­
tons of Wolfgang von Kempelen or Lazzaro Spallanzani, remained curi­
osities or ephemera; so did mechanical apparatuses for recording serial
images: one had only the illusions of a movable camera obscura or those
children’s picture books that, when their pages are rapidly fanned, sug­
gest a series of movements.33
Aside from mechanical automatons and toys, there was nothing. The
discourse network of 1800 functioned without phonographs, gramo­
phones, or cinematographs. Only books could provide serial storage of
serial data. They had been reproducible since Gutenberg, but they be­
came material for understanding and fantasy only when alphabetization
had become ingrained. Books had previously been reproducible masses of
letters; now they reproduced themselves. The scholarly republican heap
of books in Faust’s study became a psychedelic drug for everyone.
As long as the book remained without competition, people believed its
impossible promise. But Wagner’s monomaniacal anticipation of the
gramophone and the movies, his Artwork o f the Future, would be at once
capable of and constrained to settle accounts with “ the solitary art of po­
etry,” which “ suggested, without satisfying its own suggestions; urged to
life, without itself attaining life; gave the catalog of a picture gallery, but
not the paintings.” 34
Automatized reading is the art of leaping over the gulf that separates
the catalog from the pictures. At the sight of a tablet full of the crystalline
signs of an originary text, Tieck’s “ Runenberg” visitor Christian begins
deciphering like a director, and the signs become a hallucinatory produc­
tion, as if “ the magic lantern of our imagination,” 35 which had been se­
questered from madness in the fixed idea, had suddenly begun to turn
again, the signs open up within Christian an “ abyss of figures and melo­
dies, of desire and voluptuousness,” 36in other words, a multimedia show.
The fixed idea and poetry are thus connected technologically (and not
theologically),37 like parallel input and serial output.

The new status of letters and books in 1800 produced books of more
than the new poetry. Its retroactive power could alter texts that previ­
ously had belonged to the Gutenberg galaxy and the Republic of Schol­
ars. The club members of The Brothers o f Serapion go beyond phantom
texts like the Bhagavad Gita and establish, according to the critic Peter
von Matt, a “ veritable ars legendi,” 38 which organizes the historical
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 117

changes of real books. One of the brothers digs up Johann Christoph

Wagenseil’s Nuremberg Chronicle of 1697, but not in order to produce
“ an antiquarian, critical study.” 39 A book that had been a classic among
Gutenberg texts, that had reproduced pre-Gutenberg, that is, handwrit­
ten sagas of the Wartburg singers’ contest, is hermeneutically reworked
until it can reproduce its own sensuousness. The solitary reader Cyprian,
“ captured by the magic and mystery of the past,” closes the book and
begins to ponder what he has read. Empirical sights and sounds blur, and
“ an inner voice” begins to speak. The reader falls into a daydream in
which the minnesingers named in the Chronicle appear in a charming
landscape that does everything but call out the minnesingers’ names, until
Wagenseil himself appears and identifies the figures in his book. Indeed,
“Wagenseil looked just as he did in the ornate baroque engraving at the
front of the book.” 40Alphabetization could hardly accomplish a more ele­
gant translation of Gutenbergiana into phantasmagoria. The writer of an
old book becomes an inner voice; the frontispiece becomes an inner
image; the list of characters becomes a scene; and the chronicle’s cold
medium becomes a time-series of sounds and sights— it is sound film
avant la lettre.
Such sensuousness (and sensuality) stored in Poetry is characteristic of
an age in which the medium of the book is first universal— for all realms
of the senses and people— and second without competition from other
sound and image media. N ot until the emergence of a technical storage
capacity, such as that which shaped the discourse network of 1900, would
hallucinatory sensuousness be abandoned to the entertainment industry
and serious literature renew its commitment to the ascesis that knows
only black letters on white paper. Film historians alone have recognized
that the high texts of 1800 were at an opposite extreme, wallowing in
audiovisual sensuality.41 But the pleasure that made the unheard-of boom
in belle lettres possible would remain obscure for interpreters who con­
tinued to indulge in it themselves. For hallucinatory staging, which put
voices and visions in between the lines of texts, was the transmission tech­
nique that made new authors out of readers. Poetic texts were on the
technological cutting edge because more than any others they could speak
to and exploit alphabetized bodies.42 They operated on the threshold of
response itself, where discursive powers paraded as the innocence of
bodies and Nature. For this reason, there were more and more writers.
“There are so many writers because these days” — 1801— “ reading and
writing differ only by degrees.” 43 First, “ if one reads correctly” — that is,
if one was taught to read correctly— “ a real, visible world unfolds within
us in the wake of the words.” 44 Second, if inner worlds constitute the
ground of possibility for authorship, it is sufficient to run through texts
n8 1800

like films in order make readers into writers. As evidence for this stands
out one of the canonical Kunstleromane (“ artist novels” ) of 1800.
On his educational journey to Augsburg, the future poet Heinrich von
Ofterdingen happens into the cave of a hermit who, like Lindhorst, ar­
chives books. The hermit notices that Heinrich enjoys leafing through
books and so detains him in the library while his fellow travelers wander
off to look at other parts of the cave. Immediately the boy, who has been
cunningly separated from the others, sinks into a vision “ that can never
have its fill of seeing. . . . They were old histories and poems. Heinrich
leafed through the large, beautifully written pages; the short lines of
verse, the headings, particular passages, and the sharply drawn pictures,
which appeared here and there like embodied words in order to lend sup­
port to the reader’s imagination, powerfully aroused his curiosity.” 45
Here the historical remake reaches further back than with Cyprian, ex­
tending to pre-Gutenberg handwritten texts. But the medieval verses are
set off typographically, as was normal only with the new editions of the
eighteenth century; the old miniatures take on hallucinatory effects: they
“ open a fresh, endless area of play for the imagination, without which no
one should read.” 46 Heinrich is thus not reading in the time of his trou­
badour’s contest, but in the discourse network of 1800. His adventure
continues in that vein.
At length he came across a volume written in a foreign language that seemed to
him to have some similarity to Latin and Italian. He wished most fervently to
know the language, for the book pleased him exceedingly without his under­
standing a syllable of it. It had no title, but as he looked through it, he found
several pictures. They seemed wonderfully familiar to him, and as he looked more
sharply, he discovered a rather clear picture of himself among the figures. He was
startled and thought he was dreaming, but after looking at it repeatedly, he could
no longer doubt the complete similarity. He hardly trusted his senses when soon
after he discovered in another picture the cave, the hermit, and the miner at his
side. Gradually he found in other pictures Zulima, his parents, the landgrave and
landgravine of Thuringia, his friend the court chaplain, and several other ac­
quaintances of his; yet their clothes were altered and appeared to be those of an­
other age. He could not name a great many figures, but they seemed to be familiar
to him. He saw his own likeness in various situations. Towards the end he seemed
larger and more noble. A guitar was resting on his arms, and the landgravine was
handing him a wreath. He saw himself at the imperial court, on shipboard, in the
confiding embrace of a slender, lovely girl, in battle with wild-looking men, and in
friendly conversation with Saracens and Moors. A man of serious mien often ap­
peared in his company. He felt a deep respect for this great figure and was happy
to see himself arm in arm with him.
The last pictures in the book were dark and unintelligible; still, several figures
of his dream struck him with deepest ecstasy; the end of the book seemed to be
missing. Heinrich was greatly distressed and wished for nothing more fervently
than to be able to read the book and to possess it altogether. He looked at the
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 119

pictures over and over and was dismayed when he heard the company returning.
A curious embarrassment seized him. As he did not dare to let them notice his
discovery, he closed the book and merely asked the hermit casually about the title
and language of the book and learned it was written in Provencal.
“ It is a long time since I read it,” the hermit said. “ I can’t exactly remember the
contents anymore. As far as I know, it is a novel about the wondrous adventures
of a poet, in which poesy is presented and praised in its manifold relations. The
finale is missing in this manuscript, which I brought with me from Jerusalem.” 47

The text, once more handwritten, in a foreign language, and unread­

able, strikes the imagination like a silent film. A long optical hallucination
is played out according to the rule of continuous augmentation (it grows
toward the end); the hallucinatory character of the whole is manifest
when it coincides with a dream that Heinrich has already had. The imagi­
nation is simply the wonderful sense that can replace all our senses. As in
“The Golden Pot,” dream and speech, vision and book, become one. The
one difference from Atlantis is that there are no acoustic data; even con­
versations are in some magical way seen rather than heard. The sequence
remains a silent film because it is only a hermit who, as spiritual father,
directs commerce with books; at the end of the novel a “ mother’s story”
was to have gone over Heinrich’s path to poetry and duplicated it in
audio.48
Heinrich has good reason not to believe his senses. What he sees inter­
sects everything visible, like the invisible seeing eye. The book’s signified
(given several displacements of the signifiers of “ clothing” ) is the one who
contemplates it. Heinrich’s own past in Thuringia is unmistakably repre­
sented; the future yet to come is blurred; the present moment of leafing
through the book can hardly be believed. A life is played out as in time-
lapse photography, as a sequence of minimal signifieds in minimal inter­
vals.49 The images can be called minimal signifieds because they have no
redundancy. They represent Heinrich’s own figure reasonably well, but
that is the limit of their accuracy. They are certainly not portraits, which
would encompass an excess of meaningless detail and so would pass be­
yond the signifieds stored in one’s own body image. Heinrich does not
encounter any personal file or mug shots. The similarity between the pic­
ture and the one who contemplates it must remain within limits if the
imagination is to have a fresh, endless area of play.
The manifest secret of a discourse network that places ultimate value
in the individual is never to inscribe the individual. “ There are no indi­
viduals. All individuals are also genera,” declared Goethe.50 Thus all the
Bildungsromane and Kiinstleromane of 1800 only sketch the physical
image of their heroes in general terms. N o one knows what Wilhelm
Meister or Heinrich Ofterdingen looks like. Yet, despite or because of this,
12,0 i 8 oo

doubles constantly appear, as in the count’s castle in Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship and the hermit’s book in Ofterdingen. In the end the hero
and the double share only a “ single trait” which for Goethe was a silk
bathrobe and which for Freud was a sufficient and necessary condition of
psychic identification.51
The tactic of the single trait is obvious. The engravings in Stephani’s
Primer accomplish the same thing as the miniatures in Novalis’s text.
While browsing, Heinrich “ discovers a picture of the cave with the hermit
and old man next to him” ; on the frontispiece of the primer the mother
and child learning to read will see a mother and child learning to read. In
each case the book doubles the present moment of commerce with itself
and reflects information back. In each case identification is anything but
an accident. The ideal image, in spite or because of the fact that it cannot
and must not have any of a portrait’s individualized features, is supposed
to engage a remote-control fantasy. The fact that a child learning to read
experienced the honor of being included in and sustained by a discourse
network has seduced many other child readers to take their places in the
system.
Situations rather than particular marks or signs (as with Odysseus’s
scar, or, from 1880 on, with anthropometric data) make identification a
possible, narcissistic happiness. More than any other, the visually doubled
reading situation is suited to stimulate the growth of new writers. Thus
there was a theory of literary effect in the poetics of 1800, but it mini­
mized the response threshold. In technical terms, the output impedance
of a work, already reduced by the sensuous embodiment of the words, is
brought near zero by using surrogates that double for the senses.
With minimal output impedance the connection back into the system
can and must provide a maximum retroactive effect. In the hermit’s cave
the feedback between the book and its consumer transforms the book’s
identity and makes the consumer into a producer. At first the handwrit­
ten manuscript had no ending nor (as was common in the medieval pe­
riod) title, or author’s name. It receives a title only when Heinrich asks
about the book; it receives an author when Heinrich discovers his like­
ness. The two modifications go together because, located on the book’s
margin, the title and name of the author have the same function.52 First,
the title of the novel, O f the Wondrous Adventures o f a Poet, does not
designate just any hero, but a poet or author. Second, the title and name
of the author function strictly to unify stacks of paper in the discourse
network of 1800.
There is evidence for both points in a fragmentary novel that continues
and completes Heinrich von Ofterdingen. After having told the poet and
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 121

hero of von Loeben’s Guido a fairy tale about a poet hero, a wise old
man says:
J
Fairy tales are deceptive, and one can often read them ten times before one real­
izes it. But then suddenly it’s clear, and now you know that you’ve really been
taken in, that we have had to imagine ourselves a figure among the strange, con­
fused appearances. In the end all such stories are connected like the individual
chapters of a book from which the title is still missing.53

The title thus includes (as with the Bhagavad Gita and Ofterdingen) the
reader as part of the book. Only the title can guarantee that all the stored
discourses constitute a unity— indeed, a trinity, of hero, receiver, and
poet. It amounts to a nice denial of the apparent fact that Guido, in listen­
ing to the fairy tale, has been led around by his nose.
Authorship is no different. Throughout the novel the poet-hero is in
search of a mysterious original manuscript, which, as usual, is written on
plant leaves and which is simultaneously promised and withheld by his
spiritual fathers. At the glowing conclusion of the novel, Guido receives
the manuscript and the realization of what remained a premonition for
the aspiring poet Ofterdingen in the unfinished novel Ofterdingen. This
realization is, quite simply, that any primer has always been written by
someone named Primer.
They occupied themselves in searching out an endless number of passages and
pictures in the book; the king [Guido] could no longer imagine that he had once
believed that the book didn’t stem from him. He was the poet of this immeasur­
able work; his deeds, his love were the content of the great poem; and in the pic­
tures he found nothing but objects that had been effortlessly woven into his life.
Possessing this poem made him supremely happy.54

A veritable paroxysm of authorship occurs here: the reader promoted to

author forgets that there were days when he had forgotten his author­
ship. In the fresh forgetting of this forgetfulness, the book closes like a
trap and the anthropology of language that derives words from man has
another adept. As if to confirm the etymology of the word text, the words
and illustrations “ weave” people into the medium of poetry.
The greatest cunning of the anthropology of language is to place this
conclusion at the very end of the novel and defer it as long as the title and
author of the manuscript are missing. Otherwise, the thoroughly familiar
and traditional relationship known as prefiguration would link the text
with the biography of the reader— just as the Bible presents an anticipa­
tion and model of something to be accomplished through a lifetime of
imitation.55 In the discourse network of 1800, by contrast, the opposite
tendency leads to filling the margins and empty spaces of the text with
whatever has not been represented in it. Such is the meaning of Ofter-
122 i8 o o

dingen’s reading adventure. That the final portion of the book— its end—
happens to be missing guarantees that “ life,” in proper transcendental-
philosophical fashion, “ is not a novel given to us, but one made by us.” 56
Because the front matter— the title and name of the author— are missing,
the man who creates language and the novel is given a very definite task
to fulfill. The poet Heinrich already is must verify the title, O f the Won­
drous Adventures o f a Poet; the author that the contemplator of the book
has not yet become must proceed from recognizing himself in the hero of
the book. N ot for nothing does the hermit, who pretends to have already
forgotten the book, speak such portentous words at their parting. He is
cunning and denial through and through, and everything about him pro­
vokes a child’s most passionate wish for alphabetization. Heinrich feels
that the old man knows of his discovery (that he is the hero of the manu­
script) and has obliquely referred to it.57 Thus the spiritual father has kept
the secret and, like Lindhorst, left the initiate to discover his own author­
ship. The contemplator-hero-author of the book can proceed to receive
his identity-saturated title.58

Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Habent sua fata libelli. “ There was a time when those texts which
we now call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were ac­
cepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity
of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or sup­
posed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity.” 59 In the begin­
ning, the novel lies in medieval simplicity, without title or author’s name,
in the hermit’s cave. But an incipient poet arrives, opens the book, and
the handwritten text suddenly finds itself in the discourse network of
1800. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth, laws were established to regulate the rights of authors, the re­
lationship between authors and publishers, the rights of republication,
and so forth.60This new judicial phase, like that of media technology, had
retroactive power. N ot only contemporary books with a claim to poetic
worth had to have a title page with an author’s name; earlier books were
retrospectively altered. The rediscovered Jena Song Manuscript “ pre­
occupied [Johann Christoph] Gottsched particularly with the question of
who had written the book. But most of his efforts to find out failed.” And
when Bodmer published the Nibelungenlied, “ he concentrated all of his
 LANGUAGE CHANNELS 1 23

efforts on discovering who the author of the book was. He clung above all
to the name Chuonrat injthe Lament. Bodmer believed until the end of his
life that the Song o f the Niebelungen had a single author.” 61
The transformation of books into poetry through the attribution of a
single, named author is an obvious intrusion. Critics like Gottshed and
Bodmer, contemplators of books like Ofterdingen and Guido, dream
readers like Cyprian and Anselmus: under the appearance of simply
transmitting a text they all generate further poetic producers. Whenever
possible in fiction, in its superiority over the empirical fact of literary his­
tory, this producer becomes identical with the reader. Cyprian, the spell­
bound reader of Wagenseil, betrays to his dearly beloved reader that the
daydreamer whose fantasy of the library he is describing is “ the one who
is leading you even now among the masters” 62— Cyprian himself as the
author of that Serapion story. Friedrich Schlegel’s progressive universal
poetry thus constituted a real definition for poetry in 1800. Semantically
it translated heterogeneous discourses into the single M other’s Mouth;
pragmatically it set its readers among the masters or authors.
By altogether bypassing reading, which disappears into a halluci­
natory modality, universal poetry celebrated its final victory. The au­
thorial function, that phantom of universal alphabetization, is epitomized
and confirmed in a truly spectral art. When a phantom whose library
contains the complete works of a well-known composer can sight-read
these works at the piano, even though, to the indescribable astonishment
of the witness and listener, the book contains only empty pages, then and
only then is that reader the author. Hoffmann, the narrator, has it from
the specter’s mouth: the dead Gluck “ said in a hollow voice, while hastily
turning more empty pages of the book, ‘I wrote all this, my good sir,
when I came from the kingdom of dreams.’ ” 63
 The Toast

Function: Feminine Reader . . .

“ M y good sir” — among men, and therefore among authors, it is no
secret that only empty pages can be brought back from the kingdom of
dreams. Whoever produces in the act of consumption has no real ac­
quaintance with books. “ Out of something dead, an object, . . . a thought
that by being written has become a mere thing . . . subjectivity” imme­
diately returns.” 1 In order to have tangible existence in real books, Poetry
in 1800 needed recourse to non-masculine bodies. These bodies were
“ not Fs” to the cursive “ I” of authorship and transcendental philosophy.
They were women as women exist in plurality.
Let us return once more to Schlegel, philosophy, and Dorothea. “ /, at
least, live in the world as an author,” wrote that author to his beloved.2
From this a complementary function necessarily follows: that of a femi­
nine reader. We recall that Dorothea Veit was advised to be less silent and
to read divine texts with reverence, rather than having others read to her
or tell her stories. It was particularly necessary that she respect the sa­
credness of words more than she had in the past. Otherwise the prospects
of a certain “ I” would not look good.
So it was that feminine readers saved an author from having written
nothing at all. Only their cultic worship could secure a positive reality for
printed matter. Prospects would not look good for writers if women were
to remain in the great kingdom of murmuring and hearsay, of gossip and
slander, in which no Gutenberg had distinguished certain elect types of
speech from all the others.3Prospects would be even worse if the progres­
 THE TOAST 1 25

sive universal Poetry encountered women who were just as progressive,

that is, continuously writing feminine readers. A form of reading divided
off from speaking and writing was the necessary and sufficient function of
the other sex. Thus the very “ reputation” of “ literature in Germany” 4—
thus it is written— depended on a reading by the other sex performed as a
spiritual interest in poeticizing men. In other words, literature depended
on a pure c o n s u m p t i o n o f d i s c o u r s e s . The other sex is necessary be­
cause it possesses “ taste” but not the “ creative power of genius” : “ good
taste comes to the serious, masculine character from the fair sex, and so it
comes to society, and everyone benefits.” 5
In order to integrate women into this new function, the network had
recourse to its most basic operations. What made women read was a
Mother who raised mothers. “ While I can scarcely allow Nature a seat
and vote in the law-giving council of Reason, I am nonetheless convinced
that there can be no truth that Nature has not already indicated in her
beautiful hieroglyphics; indeed I believe that Nature itself has endowed
women with the domestic spirit and leads them to religion.” 6 Woman,
insofar as she persists as One, remains at the originary ground of all dis­
course production and is thus excluded from the channels of distribution
as these are administered by bureaucrats or authors. She remains this un­
approachable ground in order to confine women, in their existence as
plurality, to a domesticated reading, which, as reverence for divine texts,
is indeed religion. In this respect the division of the sexes in the discourse
network of 1800 was quite simple. Because the Mother produced authors
as the unifying principle of poetic works, women had no access to any
such unity. They remained a manifold grouped around the authorial
lodestar.
A manifold, however, is a realm of accidents. Nothing hindered women
from taking up the pen from time to time. O f course, there was also
nothing to prevent each such exception from remaining an exception.7
Statistical and stochastic processes could do nothing against a rule based
on Nature itself.
Florentin: A Novel Published by Friedrich Schlegel reads the title of a
story of an artist’s development, one written not by the developing artist
Friedrich Schlegel but by his companion, a woman excluded from writ­
ing. To be sure, this was done only “ to procure him leisure, to earn our
bread as a modest working woman, until he be capable of it.” 8That pur­
pose was served by the title page: in an age when men went to press with
such identity-drunk title pages as Fibels’ Life o f Fibel or Ofterdingen’s
Ofterdingen, the writer Dorothea Veit vanished to the greater glory of a
man’s name, even if he is figured merely as the “ editor.” 9She “ never had
iz 6 i8 oo

the ambition to be known as a writer, and never published under her own
name. Her literary activity was not an end in itself, but stood completely
in the service of the man whom she so blindly loved.” 10
Huber’s Collected Stories, Continued by Therese Huber, nee Heyne is
the title of a four-volume work, and the title loses no time in separating
the man and author from his wife and continuator. On the one hand
stands the simple and dignified last name, the sufficient condition for in­
dividualization in the system of authorship; on the other hand, one has a
first name and two last names, which are necessary for the individualiza­
tion of women in a middle-class system of names. On the one hand, there
is the collected work guaranteed by the name of the author, on the other
hand, there is an apologetic foreword by Therese Huber, nee Heyne.

A vivid and sharply drawn image of feminine charm and duty had from the begin­
ning led me to view the profession of writing as denaturing and distorting for my
sex. In my eyes each exception was— an exception! and now that I have striven
for twenty-four years to be an exception, I am more than ever convinced of this
truth. Huber discovered my ability to present my experiences and observations in
the form of well-thought-out stories, and for devout reasons I was bound to exer­
cise this talent. For ten years even our closest friends had no inkling of my part in
my husband’s creative work, and during these ten years even I was unaware that a
portion of the praise, the honorable judgments pronounced by gladdened readers
of stories my husband published, belonged to me. I was too deeply devoted to
him, too immersed in my domestic duties, to call anything my ow n.11

Nature keeps strict watch over women and any possibility that they
might distort their domesticity by authorship. If an author is defined
simply by naming certain discourses his own, women by contrast are de­
fined by being the author’s “ able housewives,” those who do not name
anything their own any more than they “ inspire” a husband to do “ crea­
tive work.” 12 Even women who write constitute an innocent accident in
this silenced and anonymous function. “ The girl who can write a poem”
by no means desires the status of author; she “ should not take any more
credit for it than she would for a well-prepared recipe.” 13 Women take up
the pen only by pretending that the age is still one of medieval anonymity.
M y name was never published, and I guarded against its occurrence, for this si­
lence was the last vestige of the pure, feminine relationship to writing that re­
mained for me from the period of Huber’s life. An announcement of my Letters
from Holland in the Morning Review mentioned my name— so far as I know —
for the first time. It was uncalled for, neither the author nor the public was served,
and the “ Th. H .” set on the title page by the publisher gave the advertiser no
right. Later, brave Gerhard Fleischer in Leipzig thought it would be expedient to
publish my name beneath an insignificant piece in his journal Minerva, and from
then on my incognito became a charade that conflicts with my feminine instinct
as much as does authorship itself.14
 THE TOAST I ZJ

If authorship, as a distinguishing feature of the human race, distinguishes

only one of the two sexes, women who wrote circa 1800 remained essen­
tially anonymous or pseudonymous.15 A Mother dwelt within them who
was the adversary of anything public. Only an accidental chain of events,
set in motion by men, could lift the veiling incognito of feminine modesty.

There is, of course, nothing in the realm of accidents to hinder women

from forgetting the topos of modesty deemed appropriate for them. “ I
feel that I could bring the whole world into the world with my mouth,”
wrote Bettina Brentano to her friend Karoline von Giinderode (who
wrote poetry under the male pseudonym Tian).16 Her comments are the
wild oscillations of an orality that stands the relationship between the
world and what is in it on its head and in so doing appears to announce
literary ambitions. But because Bettina Brentano is unable to provide her
discourse with any basis of ownership or unifying principle, her high
spirits remain as far from authorship as Therese Huber’s modesty topos.
Fm so glad to be an unimportant person, there’s no need to come up with any fine
thoughts when I write you, I can just talk about things, though I used to think one
couldn’t write letters without putting in some moral content or something intelli-.
gent, the way one usually weighs down a letter, but now 1 don’t care about chisel­
ing out a thought or gluing one together, I’ll leave that to others— if I had to do it
I wouldn’t be able to think any more.17

Do I understand myself?— Even I don’t know.— I’m so sleepy my eyes have fallen
shut with the thought that tomorrow morning I have to give this letter to the mes­
senger, and besides my light is so dim, it’s sure to go out, so good night, Letter!
The moon is shining so brightly in my room that it seems to ring— the mountains
across the way are so mighty, they steam fog into the moon. Meanwhile the light
really wants to say goodbye, but I’d like to see if I can write by m oonlight.18

Out of such enthusiasm comes a feminine ecriture automatique that

parodies the Poet’s freedoms. Bettina Brentano too can write uncon­
sciously and in the dark. But instead of rising to consciousness and author­
ship through rereading, she does not bother to read her moonlight delir­
ium again. She “ has to” let her letters “ flutter away like sounds carried by
the wind.” 19 What the parody neglects, then, is the feedback between
writing and reading, by which, according to poetics and the reading-
writing method, one makes a well-formed work out of wild oscillations.
Bettina’s brother the poet answered by becoming a reading-writing
technician. Clemens Brentano recommended that the passionate letter
writer not simply note down “ broken off thoughts,” which only the re­
ceiver can unify, but that, in the “ interest of art,” she “ also write to her­
self,” because only rereading leads to “ full and concise expression.” 20
128 i8 o o

Above all, however, he recommends to his sister, because she is a woman,

the reverse feedback loop: intensive reading, during which Bettina, when­
ever possible, should “ write down her impressions during or after read­
ing” and send them to her brother. By this account, skillful, professional
writing has nothing to do with women other than to confirm the feminine
reading function.
I would be glad if you read some history, but otherwise mostly Goethe and always
Goethe, above all the seventh volume of his new works; his poems are a fitting
antidote for extreme sensitivity. . . . In general I have been bothered by the fact
that you write nothing to me concerning your own inner development, that you
don’t ask me what you should be reading, and so on. W hat good can come of
your restless love for me, when it simply repeats again and again what is already
the case, namely, that we have affection for one another, as is proper with sib­
lings. It would be better if you put your trust in me to some use, if you granted me
some influence on your education, if you asked for my advice in all matters of
reading.21

Since Reinhold Steig’s discovery of the original of this letter, no one

can claim any longer that the published version in Clemens Brentano’s
Spring Wreath, is one of Bettina’s pretty forgeries, nor should anyone
continue to overlook the reasons why Germany has classical writers. The
name Goethe (like the Name-of-the-Father in other cultures) combines
all the controls that the discourse network of 1800 needed. If Bettina
would only listen to her brother, the network-appropriate division of the
two sexes would be achieved. Men move up into the function of author­
ship by rereading their own writing; women move into the complemen­
tary reading function by describing what they read. On the one hand
struts the primal author Goethe, setting the norm of Poetry as he pub­
lished his collected writings. On the other hand, there are women,
who, rather than externally repeat an amorous automatic writing, read
mostly Goethe and always Goethe, until in gathering the fruits of their
reading they secure the reputation of German Poetry. Here we have the
production of books that dream-interpret unreadable originary texts
or inaudible M other’s Voices; there we have the duty of intensive reread­
ing, which a Faust, Anselmus, or Cyprian would never have taken to
heart.
What remains in doubt is whether pure discourse consumption can, as
promised, provide the antidote to feminine hysteria. Because Brentano’s
required reading is the “ poet of femininity,” 22 a woman’s reading of
Goethe cannot be without consequences. There is a close connection be­
tween heroines and female readers. Brentano’s sending his sister Wilhelm
Meister began the most famous romantic reading affair of amorous sen­
sibility. Bettina Brentano took the book to bed like a beloved and discov­
ered in the child sweetheart of the hero her own likeness.23 Indeed, her
 THE TOAST 1 29

ostensibly so passive sensibility was bold enough to make its way from
the book to its author. Bettina took her brother’s advice all too literally,
for not only did she write down her feelings during or after her reading,
she sent her notes as letters to Weimar. The result was Goethe’s Corre­
spondence with a Young Girl.
To write to an author and tell him that, first, he loves the women that
his fictional heroes love,24 and second, that the undersigned is very much
like these women— such writing up of one’s own reading takes the femi­
nine reading function to an extreme. All the transcendental signifieds of
Poetry suddenly acquire referents: Woman becomes a woman, the hero
becomes the author, and the author becomes a man. Thus a strict appli­
cation of the new hermeneutics can only lead to escalating love. A book
that had recently appeared, The Art o f Reading, Including Information
on Books and Authors, advised as a first step that one “ fan the fires of the
imagination in order to breathe life into the notions one reads.” Bettina
Brentano does this when she supplies referents to notions such as the
hero and heroine. Faithful to his subtitle, Johann Adam Bergk comes
right out and asks “ not only that we love the books, but that we extend
our love to the person of the author as well.” 25 Bettina Brentano does this
when she admits that all her acts of hermeneutical insertion are a declara­
tion of love, and then follows her own letters to Weimar. “ To see person­
ally those authors whose works have made a great impression on one,” is,
of course, under the conditions of authorship, “ natural to women.” 26
The authorial function, like any divinity, is supported by a certain
Real. In this case it is women’s pleasure. “ What they were attempting to
do at the end of the last century, during Freud’s early years, what all those
good people in Charcot’s circle and others were looking for, was a way to
reduce mysticism to sex. If you consider the matter carefully, it becomes
clear they had it all wrong. For this jouissance that one experiences and
knows nothing of, does it not start us off on the path of ex-istence? And
why not interpret one aspect of the Other, that of God, as what is sup­
ported by feminine jouissance}” 27
Feminine readers, too, knew this pleasure that is experienced and not
known. As Dorothea Schlegel said of November 14, 1799, the day of her
first encounter with Goethe: “ To know that this god was so visible, in
human form, near to me, and was directly concerned with me, that was a
great, everlasting moment!” 28 Rahel Varnhagen said of August 20, 1815,
the day of her second encounter with Goethe: “ M y knees, my limbs trem­
bled for more than half an hour. And I thanked God, I said it out loud to
his evening sun like someone gone mad . . . my own dear eyes saw him: I
love them!” 29
The author becomes God because women’s pleasure supports him.
Women’s bodies are experienced because they experience the god and are
130 i8 oo

capable, in the logic of the minimal signified, of “ interpreting every word,

every syllable, every ‘ah’ ” that falls from his mouth.30 A hermeneutic-
erotic circle encloses feminine readers and the author; it regulates both
reading and love. “ One,” that is, a woman, “ cannot love without loving
Goethe.” 31 All equations of hero with author, heroine with women who
read, serve this love. But because women’s reading and love have already
been inscribed in the works women read, it is the author who encounters,
when this reading and love coincide in him, his truth.

Es ist sehr billig, dafi die Frauen dir

Aufs freundlichste begegnen: es verherrlicht
Dein Lied auf manche Weise ihr Geschlecht,

It is quite proper that we women should

Be well disposed towards you; for your poem
In many ways has glorified our sex.32

says the Princess in Goethe’s Tasso to her Poet, who is therefore a “ poet
of femininity” as much as is his author. The woman who speaks knows
better than anyone what cordiality and glorification signify. When, spend­
ing her youthful years without health, without a beloved, without a hus­
band, until her one pleasure, singing, was also finally forbidden by her
doctors, the Princess “ cradled all my pain and longing / and every wish in
sweet and gentle tones” (“ Schmerz und Sehnsucht / Und jeden Wunsch
mit leisen Tonen eingewiegt” ; 1808—9). For her, the diagnosis of hys­
terical sensitivity applied to Bettina Brentano would seem appropriate.
And for the Princess, as well, a sickness of the soul is the best soil for
transforming the appearance of the Poet into that of God. On her first
meeting with Tasso, her experience is like that of Dorothea, Bettina,
Rahel e tutte quante when they first saw Goethe.

Ihn mufit’ ich ehren, darum liebt’ ich ihn;

Ihn mul?t’ ich lieben, weil mit ihm mein Leben
Zum Leben ward, wie ich es nie gekannt.

I had to honor him, therefore I loved him;

I had to love him, since with him my life
Became a life, such as I’d never known. (1887—89)

When the Poet glorifies the female sex, he makes women’s “ every mood
more individual and charming through [his] loving understanding.” 33
Only he can give them individual life, which consists in love for the
author-individual. But the inverse question of whether the author, in his
writing and love, has an individual woman in mind, must remain open.
The discourse network of 1800 does not record particulars, whether par­
ticular names or unmistakable images. Women, as they exist in plurality,
 THE TOAST 131

do not appear in Poetry because they fulfill the feminine reading function
for Poetry. In place of women the Woman is written— “ the model of
every virtue, every beauty,” according to Tasso, or (in Plato’s “ Greek” )
the idea tov dy adov, which the author of Tasso perceived fundamen­
tally as the form of wojrnan. “A noteworthy self-reflection on Goethe’s
part: that he conceives of the Ideal in feminine form or in the form of
woman. What a man’s essence might be, he simply doesn’t know.” 34
The Woman, the One who is written, is at once image and name, with­
out, however, having an image or a name. Leonora Sanvitale, one of
Tasso’s feminine readers, recognizes that “ he can enrich with multiple
conceits / A single image in his many rhymes” (“ mit mannigfalt’gem
Geist ein einzig Bild in alien seinen Reimen verherrlicht” ; 183 —84) and
that he “ carries what he loves from every sphere / Down to a name the
two of us share in common” (“ was er liebt, aus alien Spharen auf einen
Namen niedertragt” ; 2 1 4 -1 5 ) . Tasso picked up this trick from Goethe,
who observed it in old Zeuxis. So, for instance, the author of Werther
granted himself “ permission to model [his] Lotte on the figures and char­
acteristics of several pretty young girls.” 35 Single traits are combined and
dissolved in order to construct the Woman out of women: a technique of
poetic production corresponding to the aesthetic effects of the three
daughters of Lindhorst and their one form. Thus the single image and one
name in Tasso’s verses have much the same influence as the M other on
future authors. The “ plaintive euphony” (“ die sel’ge Schwermut” ; 195)
with which he sings of his fair lady “ Lures every ear, and every heart must
follow” (“ lockt ein jedes Ohr und jedes Herz mufi> nach” ; 197).
What produces a glorious proliferation of discourse in a new crop of
authors is not, however, without danger for feminine readers. Leonora
and the Princess, as mouthpiece and ear for such poetic effects, are both
within their domain of reference. They have women’s ears and hearts.
Consequently, the Princess attempts to limit Tasso’s seductive power by
coupling the model Woman with a singular referent. N ot every woman’s
heart need fall to the poet, for
Wenn er seinen Gegenstand benennt,
so gibt er ihm den Namen Leonore.

When he gives a name to his one theme

That name, be sure of it, is Leonora. (198—99)

But the one thus called by name has no trouble replying.

Es ist dein Name, wie es meiner ist.
Ich nahm’ es iibel, wenn’s ein andrer ware.
Mich freut es, dafi er sein Gefiihl fur dich
In diesem Doppelsinn verbergen kann.
13Z i8 o o

But that’s your name, Princess, as well as mine.

And any other name I’d hold against him.
I’m pleased that in such ambiguity
He can conceal his feelings towards you. (zoo—4)

The homonymy of the poetic image of Woman is thus, as one of the two
Leonoras clearly recognizes, neither accident nor exception. Poetry in the
discourse network of 1800 has by rights such double meaning. The fact
that Tasso breaks the rule of individualization in the middle-class system
of names is not a transgression; rather, according to Leonora, transgres­
sion would consist in compliance with the old rule. Authors and feminine
readers can play their two complementary roles only through the system­
atic polysemy of women’s names and images in Poetry. Poets can write
their desire without setting it down inalterably; women in plurality can
become the desire of this desire. Polysemy produces discourse: it makes
men write and women decipher what is written. This too is an effect of an
anthropology of language that posits man and a soul at the origin of
speech.
The two women in Tasso indulge in a passion for riddles that at once
goads and rewards their reading. Either one Leonora encourages the
other by attributing the written name to her alone, or the other Leonora
reads the double meaning in the name as unambiguously her own. They
are, however, simply taking paths marked out by the creator of the hom­
onym. God has given the author Tasso the ability to speak, poetically and
therefore polysemously, where man in his torment is dumb. But this gift,
far from inscribing desires in real areas of discourse, is itself torment. Be­
cause unambiguously naming a woman’s name would be a transgression,
poetic homonyms preserve one from falling silent, but what the poet
Tasso envies in Antonio, the proto-bureaucrat, is a political practice for­
bidden to the poet, namely, the right to prepare treaties or contracts,
which are then put into action by the single, unambiguous signature of
the Prince. To achieve the same sort of definiteness for Poetry, by naming
or embracing a woman who is not merely the Woman, is Tasso’s desire,
insofar as it is the desire of a desire. His relationship with the Princess is
transversed by all the anguish and bliss of an attempt to shed ambiguity.
The author of Wertber not only granted himself “ permission to model
[his] Lotte with the figures and characteristics of several pretty young
girls,” but also, by contrast, borrowed “ the main characteristics from the
most beloved.” Correspondingly, Tasso explains to the Princess how little
generality there is in his general glorification of women.
Was auch in meinem Liede widerklingt,
Ich bin nur einer, einer alles schuldig!
Es schwebt kein geistig unbestimmtes Bild
 THE TOAST 1 33

Vor meiner Stirne, das der Seele bald

Sich iiberglanzend nahte, bald entzdge.
Das Urbild jeder Tugend, jeder Schone;
Was ich nach ihm gebildet, das wird bleiben.
Und was hat mehr das Recht, Jahrhunderte
Zu bleiben und fin stillen fortzuwirken,
Als das Geheimnis einer edlen Liebe,
Dem holden Lied bescheiden anvertraut?

Whatever in my poem may re-echo,

Only to one, to one I owe it all.
N o vague and merely mental image hovers
Before me when I write, now brightly close,
N ow dim again, withdrawing from my soul.
With my own eyes I’ve seen the prototype
O f every virtue, every loveliness;
W hat in that image I have made, will la s t. . .
And what is better fitted to live on
For centuries, effective, though in silence,
Than the kept secret of a noble love,
Humbly confided to the lilt of rhyme? (10 9 1—98, 110 4 —7)

The self-commentary that reduces the double meaning of the name

Leonora to a single referent and thus gives the author’s own work the
function of revealing biographical secrets is as risky as it is authoritative.
(Poets on Poetry is not always gossip designed for literary seminars.)
Denying the Woman gives one woman a clear hint that can be answered
only by a similar gesture. The Princess takes Tasso’s rhetorical question a
step further.
Und soil ich dir noch einen Vorzug sagen,
Den unvermerkt sich dieses Lied erschleicht?
Es lockt uns nach, und nach, wir horen zu,
W ir horen, und wir glauben zu verstehn,
Was wir verstehn, das konnen wir nicht tadeln,
Und so gewinnt uns dieses Lied zuletzt.

And shall I tell you one more rare distinction

That unremarked, your poem gains by stealth?
It draws us on, and on, we listen to it,
We listen and we think we understand,
W hat we do grasp of it we cannot censure,
And so we are won over in the end. (110 8—13)

The hermeneutic path from the ear to the heart, from a reading that
moves as automatically as listening to an understanding that discovers the
author in the text— one Leonora describes this as the path for feminine
readers in general; the other claims that it belongs to her alone. At the
limit of what she can allow herself to say, the Princess says that Tasso’s
134 1800

polysemy, rather than only praising the Woman, has “ won” him a woman.
And when the author of this understanding hears about understanding
from a woman’s mouth, when he for his part thinks he understands, then
the erotic trap of the text has closed on him as well.36 Erotomania and
paranoia, the final stages of Tasso’s psychopathological tragic drama, are
not the endopsychic aberrations of an individual; they result from the
very structure of address of Poetry. When the referent of the polysemous
signifiers remains open for the sake of a transcendental signified, and
when this signified remains an indelible fixed idea at the origin of Poetry,
author and feminine readers succumb to a paranoia that attributes to
every word and scrap of paper the unspeakable but also indelible truth.
Whereas Antonio prepares treaties for signature and sends off diplo­
matic dispatches, Tasso stumbles through a labyrinth of signs in which
misplaced letters and lost papers reveal intention and betrayal. Poets and
bureaucrats, these two fragments of “ one man,” (1705) are complemen­
tary. It makes little difference whether Tasso is in the right or is crazy; his
paranoia demonstrates that people charged with social tasks connected
with language and writing must often largely bear the symbolic discor­
dances of their culture.37 For the poet who harbors suspicions about mis­
placed letters and lost papers dispatches similar pieces of writing with
near-professional industry. Like messages in bottles, Tasso’s poems glori­
fying the one and doubled Leonora hang everywhere in the trees of the
garden of paradise at Ferrara. Yet in all the lines that Poetry has the Poet
and feminine readers say about Poetry, there is not a word about this dis­
persing of words. Only the subject of what is written (the poetic double
meaning), not how it is written (its strategic function), becomes a theme.
Tasso is finally wrecked upon, yet clings to, a cliff by the name of An­
tonio, where writing is sheer power. But the discourse network of 1800
would rather not know anything about it.

As with the author, so with his feminine readers. Goethe’s Correspon­

dence with a Young Girl realizes what Tasso had described or prescribed.
Here, however, the feminine reader falls victim to the confusion between
poetic and family names, poetic writing and letter writing, and, unlike the
taciturn Princess, expresses her paranoia. Bettina Brentano, who even be­
fore reading Goethe endlessly repeated a declaration of love, finally ob­
tained an answer that was not an answer. Instead of a declaration of love
in reply, a sonnet arrived in Frankfurt, one that— according to the accom­
panying letter of the author, or hero of the epistolary romance, Goethe—
should satisfy the girl. But the reply remained obscure, not only because
Poetry had to sidestep any particular referent, but because it continued
the game of names in the manner of Tasso’s bottle messages in the garden
 THE TOAST 135

of Ferrara. The sonnet was entitled “ Charade,” and to the infatuated

feminine reader of Goethe it seemed an open invitation to tease her own
name from the game. To speak with the Princess, it is a teleguided para­
noia of attribution.
Es lockt uns nach, und nach, wir horen zu,
W ir horen, und wir glauben zu verstehn,
Was wir verstehn, das konnen wir nicht tadeln,
Und so gewinnt uns dieses Lied zuletzt.

It draws us on, and on, we listen to it,

We listen and we think we understand,
What we do grasp of it we cannot censure,
And so we are won over in the end. (1 1 1 o — 13)

In keeping with this, “ Charade” is about two words that the poet
hopes to merge in one image and pronounce as the name of his beloved—
very much Tasso’s logic of woman’s name and image. But Bettina Bren­
tano, less or more fortunate than the two Leonoras, cannot discover the
two disguised words of the charade and therefore her own name.
Who are the two? W ho is my rival? In which image shall I mirror myself?— and
with whom shall I melt in your embrace?— Ah, how many riddles are hidden in
one riddle, and how my head spins. . . . You see, my friend, how you lead me on
into an eternity of surmise; but the earthly word, which is the key to all, I am
unable to find.
But you have achieved your purpose, that I should surmise and be satisfied, for
in this I have divined my rights, my recognition, my reward, and the strengthen­
ing of our bond, and every day I will divine your love anew.38

The feminine reader believes the sonnet is a letter addressed to her. As

Goethe had remarked, “ Women understand everything a la lettre or au
pied de la lettre.” 39N ot contented with a transcendental signified, Bettina
Brentano would like to see the “ earthly word” in writing. But it eludes
her, for good reason. Herz and lieb, the two solution words of the sonnet
“ Charade,” are not only artfully disguised; if discovered and brought to­
gether, they would form the last name of another dream love of Goethe’s:
Minna Herzlieb. The author has fused poetic metaphors and middle-class
names for women, nonreferential play and autobiographical confession.
Because his sonnet makes exoteric sense, Goethe can send it to feminine
readers who long for a reciprocal declaration of love, and because the
esoteric meaning remains hidden between the lines, he can lead those
readers around by the nose. Such is the cunning of literary works that
also function as letters.
Because whether and who an author loves remains a mystery, feminine
readers develop a hermeneutic love for his works. “ Oh! one cannot love
without loving Goethe,” as Rahel Varnhagen recognized. The open secret
136 i8 oo

of Poetry is to speak to women with a forked tongue. Whoever mails off a

sonnet like “ Charade” is not without love for his reader, and yet he
dreams of someone else. There is always a remainder— one of those sweet
images of a beloved woman that, following Keller, are not nurtured by
the bitter earth. Beyond the eloquent women who write letters, there is
always, taciturn and lapsing into silence, one “ Herzlieb” or another.
After his ineffaceable vision of the Woman, the hero of Tieck’s Runen-
berg attempts to achieve forgetfulness by marrying one of those who exist
in plurality. But the fixed idea in his soul is more powerful. At the end of
the fairy tale, Christian leaves his wife Elizabeth for the sake of the image,
but not without imparting, in his last words to her, his duplicitously
double-edged wish.
“ I know you very well, he said . . . you’re Elizabeth.” The woman started, afraid.
“ But how is it that you know my name?” she asked, trembling, as if she knew the
answer already. “ Dear G od!” said the unfortunate, “ I am Christian, who once
met you as a hunter. Don’t you recognize me?”
In her fright and profound pity, Elizabeth could not think of anything to say.
He embraced her and kissed her. . . . “ Don’t worry,” he said, “ I am as good as
dead to you; out in the forest the beautiful, powerful one is waiting for me, the
one with the golden veil.” 40

The hero of the fairy tale is obviously not without love for his wife, but
another desire— the very waiting of the other woman— exiles him from
the living. For someone to say between kisses that he is as good as dead to
the one he is kissing demonstrates the paradoxical split between love and
desire. And there the hero represents the author. Manfred, who narrates
the story in the novella’s frame and (as he emphasizes) invented it, ob­
serves at its end that his “ listeners, particularly the women among them,
had turned pale” (as if Elizabeth’s fright were contagious).41 Instead of
heightening an erotic atmosphere among the men and women present by
means of an erotic Poetry of men and women, and thus following the sec­
ular model of the Decameron, the romantic poet fascinates and seduces
his feminine listeners by a different tack. He confronts them, in his story­
telling as in his story, with another desire. On one hand, there is the
proper love for one’s wife and a family life; on the other, there is an in­
sane desire for the signified, Woman. Afterwards, each one of the paled
plurality can ask herself what she is to the storyteller: an Elizabeth or a
powerful Beauty.
A text that describes writing and reading circa 1800 like no other
could not have neglected the function of the feminine reader: let us re­
turn, then, to Hoffmann and “ The Golden Pot.” Tasso’s two Leonoras,
Goethe’s two Herzlieben, and Christian’s two women make clear this
function in Hoffmann’s tale. Aside from the One Woman in “ The Golden
 THE TOAST 1 37

Pot,” there is another woman who is simply one among many. Like the
powerful Beauty, Serpentina possesses the gift of making the unreadable
readable through her voice; she embodies the beloved muse who must
precede all writing. An opposite position in the field of writing, however,
is occupied by Veronica— a simple consumer who asks herself whether or
not the fantasy of the library is a charade concerning the reciprocated
love she desires.
When the dean and registrar touch upon Anselmus’s prospects—
which, thanks to Lindhorst’s connections in the state, could include those
of “ a privy secretary or even court councilor” — the discussion leaves the
bureaucrat’s daughter Veronica with “ a very special impression.” 42 She
immediately lapses into daydreaming. Whereas Gretchen could pluck the
petals of an aster in the presence of her beloved (“ he loves me, he loves me
not” ), her less fortunate sister has to guess about the absent Anselmus’s
affections. O f course, in daydream Veronica has no trouble retrieving one
sure sign of love after another, until she finds herself Frau Court Coun­
cilor in an imagined future, living in a magnificent house on Dresden’s
Castle Street, or in N ew Market, or on Moritz Street and hearing every
possible compliment from people on the street or from her husband An­
selmus. The daydream culminates in an auditory hallucination, which—
just as with Anselmus under the elder tree— unconsciously prompts her
to speak aloud. This happens to be a classical symptom of mental distur­
bance, however.43 “Are we having fits like Anselmus?” asks her father, the
dean and philologist of ancient languages, who has been disturbed in his
reading of Cicero. He says this without considering that he might be in­
terrupting the composition of feminine nature poetry. But immediately
the hallucination darkens; “ it seemed as if a hostile figure was invading
these beautiful visions” and spitefully insisting that Veronica would never
become Frau Court Councilor, for Anselmus does not love her after all.
“Tears almost welling in her eyes, she said aloud, ‘Ah! it is only too true.
He does not love me, and I shall never ever be Frau Court Councilor!’
‘Romantic rot, romantic rot!’ Dean Paulmann cried, and then, snatching
up his hat and his cane, he indignantly and hurriedly left the house.” 44
On one hand, the “ ah!,” the minimal signified of poetic love; on the
other hand, a repeated and more forceful disturbance of the bureaucrat’s
reading of Cicero, which finally enables that reader to say what, ah, hap­
pens to be true. When the sigh speaks nothing but its truth out loud, it is
convicted of being an effect of reading. The clash is not between poetry
and prose, a middle-class world and that of the Serapion brothers (what­
ever “ world” might mean); rather, it is between two opposed techniques
of reading in the same room. It is the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous:
the father (as if to confirm Rolf Engelsing’s sociology of reading) practices
13 8 i8 o o

an intensive rereading, which educational officials semi-officially owe to

the treatise De Officiis; the daughter, meanwhile, reads the latest novels,
which in the discourse network of 1800 are written by “ life.”
It makes little difference whether someone like Anselmus reads his ro­
mance out of leaves that he cannot yet read, or whether someone like Ve­
ronica reads hers out of a romance that is still unwritten. By the end of
the fairy tale, at the latest, it will be available “ written beautifully and
distinctly” by the narrator himself. Veronica prefigures Hoffmann’s ac­
tual feminine readers much as the poet Anselmus prefigures Hoffmann. A
Poet and man might read about love without reading and speak out loud
without addressing any listener, but when a woman attains such spiritual
heights it is not the same. The difference lies in the unwholesome desire of
women to take everything a la lettre or au pied de la lettre. Veronica in­
terprets the interpretive career that Lindhorst holds out to her beloved
quite literally as the prospect of a bureaucratic position. The old woman
Frau Rauerin used the same method to read in the name Victor (the fi­
ance of Veronica’s friend) that man’s imminent promotion to captain.45
The fact that such oracles tend to be accurate, given the new alliance con­
cluded between the state and the educated class, makes this type of
woman’s knowledge offensive. Instead of following hermeneutic detours,
it simply pronounces the name of the power they serve.
But Frau Rauerin reads in a magic mirror, whereas Veronica reads in
“ The Golden Pot.” The place of the old witch is taken by a young girl,
that of magic, by its historical, namely hysterical, parody.46 When Ansel­
mus, drunk with punch, roars “ the green snake loves me for I have a
childlike nature and I have looked into Serpentina’s eyes,” Veronica is left
to sob “ out her pain and sorrow on the sofa.” 47 The woman’s knowledge
in her has been demoted to the historically new feminine reading func­
tion; instead of conjuring and casting spells, it can only relive hysterically
the fantasies of the new authors. So Veronica fears she is not loved, “ de­
spite her blue eyes,” 48 despite the fact that it was blue eyes that individu­
alized a Serpentina from the dance in the elder tree, and despite the fact
that Anselmus, faced with his spot of ink, has recognized that his library
muse is a phantasmagoric version of Veronica’s voice. The real Veronica,
however, can only go on guessing what she is to Anselmus: a figure in a
double life in Dresden-Atlantis, or the dreary alternative to the Woman.
This riddle remains unsolvable, because by setting up the transcendental
signified, Woman, the polar definition of the sexes also distorts the sig­
nifier man. “ What a man’s essence might be, he simply doesn’t know,” as
Goethe knew. Thus men who read on their way to authorship have no
trouble locating a referent for any description of the Woman (they all
have a mother); but women who read cannot rediscover a man described
 THE TOAST 1 39

in the describing author. For “ men, although they make the female sex
the means and stuff of their speech,” draw a veil over their own sex. Their
sex remains “ the one that writes and speaks and in so doing keeps silent
about itself.” 49
Veronica will never learn whether Anselmus will have loved her or Ser­
pentina and hav^ become poet or bureaucrat— not even when, at the end
of the fairy tale, Registrar Heerbrand appears and announces to Veronica
that he has just been named court councilor and has the papers, cum no­
mine et sigillo Principis, in his pocket; or when, in consequence, he asks
for her hand in marriage and so realizes her daydreams. For this ending
(entirely appropriate to poetic ambiguity) makes two types of reading
possible. According to one reading, which Veronica proposes, her be­
loved student Anselmus left her because of his love for the green snake
Serpentina, who is “ more beautiful and rich,” leaving Veronica “ to love
and revere” the Councilor Heerbrand “ as befits a true and faithful wife.” 50
Just this type of reading would be recommended in text and illustration
to elementary school students, a typical love story of the forked-tongued
Poet of 1800.
The fairy tale’s ending makes possible a second reading, proposed by
Heerbrand. The fact that Anselmus left the foolish and shrewish Veron­
ica because of his love for another writer’s companion, a woman to
whom his drunken images of women more readily applied, is “ nothing
but a poetic allegory, like a poem in which [Veronica] celebrates her final
complete farewell to the student.” 51 Anselmus is thus still present, but not
as an idealized student-poet. With her renunciation, Veronica would have
been simply taking to heart the second commandment in Schleiermach-
er’s Catechism o f Reason for Noble Women, which (as if to demonstrate
the shift from Bible to primer) makes an erotic norm of the feminine read­
ing function. “ You should not create an ideal for yourself, neither an an­
gel in heaven, nor a hero of a poem or novel, nor one dreamed-up or fan­
tasized by yourself; rather you should love a man as he is. For Nature,
your Mistress, is a strict divinity, one who will pursue the idle dreaming
of young girls become women into the third or fourth generation of their
feelings.” 52
To love a man as he is can only mean to love a state official. If Ver­
onica’s “ romantic rot” has made the ideal author Anselmus out of a stu­
dent, her withdrawal cure, prescribed by Nature, will make a student, as
if by bureaucratic baptism, into a bureaucrat by the name of Heerbrand.
According to Jochen Schmidt, the two men (like Tasso and Antonio)
stand for one man.53 In fact, if one adds a poetic first name without a last
name, which would qualify one to be Serpentina’s poet, to a middle-class
family name without a first name, which would qualify one to be bureau-
140 i8 oo

In the first quarter [of Chodowiecki’s Plate L] you see a well-educated young woman, who,
with a mistrustful expression, refers her friend, a man w ho wanted to become her husband,
to a passage in a letter, with stern criticism. A pair of finely bound books lie on the table.
The man is a writer, and in a passage in his book he has described the advantageous quali­
ties possessed by a certain person w ho resembles a young woman, their mutual friend, more
than the man’s sweetheart. The author has given a copy of the book to the friend a few
hours earlier than he has to his sweetheart. The sweetheart has found out about this and
becomes suspicious; she thinks the man loves her friend more than he does her, that he is
carrying on a forbidden liaison with her, and that this passage in the book, which of course
was written for the sake of the content, had been written in particular admiration of the
friend. The man was wise enough to leave the foolish and shrewish woman. (Basedow, Ele-
mentarwerk, I: 149!.)

crat and bridegroom of Veronica, the sum would be the signifier Ansel­
mus Heerbrand— just as a judge by the name of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm
Hoffmann became, by baptizing himself, the poet Ernst Theodor Ama­
deus Hoffmann.
But the identity neither of A and A, Anselmus and Amadeus, nor of
A. H. and A. H. are written down. Poets in the discourse network of 1800
write around their own writing; they do not write down the system itself.
(When philosophers, by contrast, write the proposition of identity, A =
A, it means merely, with the exclusion of all proper names, 1 = 1.) The
network produces linkages precisely at this empty slot. The empty slot
does not point to extradiscursive facts, such as the much touted material
 THE TOAST 141

basis; it simply programs the technical expansion of discourses. It does

not arise because, as in the much-belabored philosophical argument, an
autonym is always aporetic, but because it permits filling pages that for
men remain fundamentally empty. The empty slot in poetic texts recruits
feminine readers. The whole point of “ The Golden Pot” is that its point,
as discovered by Schmidt, transcends the text.

All the Veronicas who read Hoffmann’s fairy tale could sharpen their
hermeneutic skills on the puzzle of whether they would be a Serpentina or
Veronica to Hoffmann. All the Ottilies who sought the “ hidden” moral of
The Elective Affinities were its ideal public.54 To a man who criticized his
novel for lacking any moral, Goethe replied that he hadn’t written it for
him; he had “ written it for the young ladies.” 55
To write for the young ladies was a historical innovation. Richard Ale-
wyn has shown how Klopstock’s poetry, ignored by scholars, created a
new public: the illiterate, the young, and above all women. Understand­
ing, until then a specialized technique in the Republic of Scholars, be­
came a psychic qualification that measured man in general and women in
particular. “ N ot only is the ability to understand a poem now the crite­
rion for a woman’s value, but the effect of a poem on a woman reader or
listener is also the criterion for a poem’s value.” In consequence, Klop­
stock, this poete a femmes, repeatedly read his own love story, which he
had cunningly written into his Messias, to circles of charming, feminine
Klopstock readers “ surrounded at a distance by men.” 56
Gerhard Kaiser has argued that Tasso’s tragedy is also that of his fa­
vorite feminine reader. “ The modern dilemma of aesthetic existence seen
in the Princess corresponds to the dilemma of the modern poet, the for­
mer being as much the cause as the effect of a vital weakness. In the Prin­
cess we see the rise of a new public for the new type of poet, a public that
no longer looks to art for a transfiguration of what exists so much as it
seeks the realization of what is nonexistent, the dawning of a utopia tran­
scending the contradictions of reality.” 57 Lacking a husband and child,
the Princess seeks in Poetry a substitute for life; unlike Tasso, however,
she does not transform this supplement into an objective work, she
simply consumes it. “ The Golden Pot” takes this hysterical trait in the
feminine-reader function to an extreme, as its young lady sobs on the
sofa. But this excess reveals the rule.
The discursive connections begun experimentally by founding figures
like Klopstock and Goethe spread far and wide in 1800. In order to
achieve “ the most important reforms,” or, in other words, “ to w ork on a
large scale,” Poets would henceforth “ educate and inspire young men and
women.” 58 Their texts, encoded so as to lead to the author, generated
142. i8 oo

ever more authors-as-young-men, and, being written for young women,

ever more feminine readers. The new crop of authors made the pro­
grammed move into the position of the author-hero; the feminine readers
identified the author-hero with the author, and the ambiguous descrip­
tion of women with themselves. This bifurcation was necessary because
the proliferation of authorship (as one of the first histories of German
literature recognized) would mathematically eliminate male consumers.
“ We can assume that at present there are nearly fifty thousand men living
in Germany who have written one book or more. If their number con­
tinues to increase at the same rate, it will be possible to prepare a register
of all earlier and current German writers that would include more names
than a register of all living readers.” 59 More and more authors, however,
pose a threat to the name of the author, which, unlike the personal pro­
noun, is supposed to anchor the referent to a man behind the discourse.
The author’s name would become as elusive as the shifter I. The threat
was not limited to productive men, who always translated written texts
back into subjectivity, that is, back into the shifter. The function of the
feminine reader also labored under discursive conditions geared to an
endless multiplication of authors. On the one hand, the god by the name
of author was supported by the pleasure of women. But on the other
hand, the more these names increased and substituted for life and love,
the more vulnerable to substitution they became. One of the endings of
“ The Golden Pot” demonstrates this, as does the fact (somewhat more
positively) that Goethe’s Correspondence with a Young Girl breaks off
immediately before the author Arnim’s marriage to a young woman
commenced.
The law that “ governs both natures, in an intellectual sense as well as
others,” according to which “ the woman puts to use what the man makes
and procures,” has a corollary: “ Women, even the most educated, have
more appetite than taste. They are attracted by whatever is new, and like
to sample everything.” 60 Thus a mode of consumption came into being
that had disastrous consequences for the intended permanence of poetic
writing and was an exact parody of the consumption practiced by aspir­
ing poet-readers. Words that are merely sampled or merely devoured can­
not endure. Unlike the works of elementary pedagogy, they are absorbed,
not by the M other’s Mouth, but rather by small talk, gossip, and forgetful­
ness on the part of the many. This is the nosology of the much-discussed
reading addiction circa 1800. Too-extensive reading robbed words of the
stature necessary for a work to constitute an unshakable authority and
have an unforgettable author.61 Women were at the source of this danger,
for they are “ the half of the human race that by virtue of the duties con­
signed to them, have much more leisure than men, while their more lively
 THE TOAST 1 43

spirit and active imagination only rarely and unwillingly dwell on serious
matters.” 62 Dean Paulmann therefore studies D e Officiis for pedagogical
purposes, while his daughter “ fills her time reading such books as are
suited to a woman’s vivacity and more subtle feelings.” In actuality, then,
she reads novels that have yet to be written.
The symptoms of the feminine reading disease were clear, but thera­
peutic measures became delicate and controversial. Only the simplest
measures assumed as a starting point that the new “ automatic” 63 alpha­
betization would just as automatically cure the disorders it had brought
about. “ The reading mania is a foolish, damaging misuse of an otherwise
good thing, a truly great evil which is as contagious as the yellow fever in
Philadelphia. . . . It does nothing for the mind or the heart, because read­
ing becomes mechanical. . . . One reads through everything without pur­
pose, enjoys nothing and devours everything; there is no order to it,
everything is read lightly and just as lightly forgotten, which is just as use­
ful considering most of what is read.” 64 The fact that fully mechanized
reading makes the consumption of useless books forgettable is not enough
to save the work of great authors. Thus the reading mania, a contagious
evil and a parody of the programmed proliferation of Poetry, cannot be
abandoned to natural healing powers. A whole new branch of physicians
intervened as “ friends and guardians of humanity” ;65 as the title indicates,
they were relatives of instructors of mankind and educational bureau­
crats. Realizing that certain measures advocated by others (censorship,
book banning, indexing of certain books and book channels)66 would
achieve nothing, because coercion only makes the addict mistrustful and
fuels the addiction, the bureaucrats of discourse consumption found indi­
rect and inconspicuous means more expedient. First, there was (to use
Nietzsche’s expression) an active forgetfulness rather than the merely
natural, widespread variety. If all educated men, reviewers, and editors of
literary periodicals would follow the “ principle of ignoring bad products,
they will not be read.” 67 Second, (and this was decisive) was the contribu­
tion of hermeneutics.
Around 1800 there appeared, escalating the new primers’ self-referenti-
ality, the first books whose theme was the reading of books. Fichte, him­
self an early and painful case of reading mania,68 planned off and on to
publish “ popular aids” intended to “ make the art of understanding a
work more accessible to the greater public.” 69 Bergk did publish a more
methodical work, The Art o f Reading, Including Information on Books
and Authors. A good Kantian, Bergk makes his therapeutic program the
central concern of his book and mentions the conditions that caused him
to write it only in passing at the end:70 namely, the reading addiction in
“ Germany, where never has so much been read as now” and where
144 i8 oo

women especially waste their time reading empty novels. Because “ read­
ing is dangerous if we bring to it a merely receptive rather than an active,
productive mind,” 71 the philosophic aspect of the therapy (like reading
and writing instruction) guards that productivity against all externality.
“ Our interiors must be the workshops in which we undertake all opera­
tions conducive to understanding a book. We must never lose sight of
ourselves in order to maintain our presence of mind, lest we fall into dis­
traction and from there into insanity.” 72
The insanity of distraction is thus driven out by that of a fixed idea: the
reader-ego that must be able to accompany all my reading. The hero of
the Runenberg is thus very up to date when he goes insane at the sight of
a tablet covered with originary script. To ensure that all readers have his
experience, hermeneutics needed only to add a technical rule to its philo­
sophical principle. Thus, the fixation of the reader-ego is accompanied by
a restriction to certain reading material.73
With that the art of reading is back where it started: the all-consuming
reading mania. Bergk does concede that, particularly with “ works of fine
art, we can seldom bring ourselves to begin a second reading of a book
whose content is known to us.” 74 But because an autonomous ego and
reading material can be distinguished only when an act of recognition or
memory confronts the flow of appearances or newly appearing books, it
is “ of course better for us to read a work of art more than once.” 75 Other­
wise the sacred work of art could not exist.
Technically, then, the therapy for reading mania required intensive re­
reading, even under the conditions of an expanding book market. It was
impossible to reread in the same way as before 1800, when people read
and reread the Book of Books in the rhythm of the Church calendar. But
one could reread in a new way, a way that replaced the Bible with Poetry
and selected a loose group of classical works out of the flood of books in
order to reread them until they became unforgettable. Hereafter, a multi­
tude of common and thoughtless books produced according to the law of
the marketplace will stand opposed to a few original and intelligent
books, determined by the unity of the author and formed into the requi­
site unity of a work by autonomous, intensive rereading.

Possibly with these measures the art of reading overreached its thera­
peutic goals. The consumption of books is a danger if we bring to it a
merely passive rather than autonomous mind. Yet, in a good Kantian man­
ner, such receptivity is said to define women.76The sex most afflicted with
the mania cannot be reached with the cure. Books on the correct method
of reading even admit this. Jean Paul’s Lecture for and to the Reader,
more concerned with diagnosing the reader’s “ practical reading meth­
 THE TOAST 145

ods” than with therapy, addresses the reader directly, but the feminine
reader indirectly, in its Brief Afterword to the Foreword on Aesthetics.
Dear reader, in order for you to make proper use of these priceless gifts, you need
advice and instruction. Although you have been through preschool and after­
school classes, through philosophic schools and royal academies, and have been
in singing, dancing, and fencing lessons, a lesson in reading was never offered to
you. . . . As for your wife, dear reader, namely, the feminine reader, her reading
habits are ten times worse, but a hundred times less curable. Let us by all means
leave her to do what she will— the silk scrap or thread may fall out of her book,
or the open book on her lap may be turned upside down and shut by someone
else, so that she won’t know where she was. Or, for the sake of the story, she may
begin with the Revelation of St. John and then read until she reaches Genesis and
the creation— at least she will finish her book, and let that be sufficient for every­
one. Indeed she will finish it sooner than a male reader, because she is not delayed
by any sentences, to say nothing of words, that she doesn’t understand; rather,
more concerned with the whole, she will continue on. She owes this splendid
habit at least in part to the conversation of men, where daily hundreds of tech­
nical words from law and medicine and other areas fly by her, without anyone
taking the time to explain them.77

For men and male readers, the failures of discourse-pedagogic institu­

tions can be corrected. Jean Paul, a second Bergk, proceeds to open this
reading school for them himself, a school that was entirely absent in the
early modern system of corporeal training. But for feminine readers and
women, there is only the knowing smile between the author and the
reader. The feminine parody of hermeneutics is incurable, principally be­
cause nothing written, not even Jean Paul’s hermeneutics, can count as
instruction for women. Open on the lap of a sleeping woman— in the dis­
course network of 1800 that is the degre zero de Vecriture.
Men are not entirely innocent in this merciless consumption of books
by women, in this reading of the “ whole” that is so complete no “ sen­
tences, to say nothing of words,” survive. In this the afterschool aestheti-
cian Jean Paul and the Bavarian school reformer Friedrich Immanuel
Niethammer agree.
We have been persuaded to see education as knowledge itself, and imagine that a
man is more educated to the degree that he has more knowledge in diverse
areas. . . . Since then, polyhistory has become fashionable and so has placed an
unavoidable demand on anyone who seeks to adopt the proper tone. The wisdom
of the paperback book, the science of the magazine and journal have since be­
come the order of the day: everywhere lectures for women and dilettantes are an­
nounced; everyone reads and attends universities to become educated; and this
love of education has become a national vice in the form of an insatiable lust for
reading, which must always have something new to devour. . . . The pedantry of
men used to be moderated by the natural and free spirit of women, but what hap­
pens now? Are they not themselves in the grip of the worst possible pedantry,
these feminine know-it-alls? Is it possible to escape the atmosphere of the study in
146 i8 o o

their company? Are we still able to exchange our knowledge for the pure gold of
natural feeling and unprejudiced judgment? Do they not pay us back now with
our own paper currency?78

It makes little difference whether the women attending the new lec­
tures held for them simply let the words fly by, as Jean Paul would have it,
or devoured them, as Niethammer put it: their consumption first revealed
that paper is only paper. The function of the feminine reader was thus
coupled with the positive reality of texts in 1800. The proliferation of
authorship had produced its own abuse. One might send women the
latest paperbacks and almanach (as if to confirm Niethammer’s argu­
ment), whose newness would stimulate the lust to read, and yet accom­
pany such Greek gifts with a lecture for women (as if to ignore Nietham­
mer) written against the misuse of reading.
Dearest Friend!
For some time I’ve had an almanach I meant to send to you lying on my desk,
and now finally I’ll forward it; I only hope that my delay will not have caused it to
lose the charm of novelty. Yet this story is certainly good enough to be read from
time to time, and in any case the beauty of a work of art is decided only by the
pleasure of repeated contemplation— by the fact that one gladly returns to it. . . .
I don’t know how it happens that I always find my way into generalized reflec­
tion on any topic; but you will forgive a man who once got a master’s degree and
has since dragged this title along with all its baggage, as if it were a messenger of
Satan that pummeled him with its fists. . . .
Your sincere friend, H egel79

If even the most reflective of philosophers succumbs to the pragmatic par­

adox of attempting to regulate a woman’s reading by lecturing to her in
magisterial style, then the therapy for women’s reading addiction must
have recourse to simpler and more direct measures. Hegel’s demon drives
him to make aesthetic reflections on the meaning of aesthetic reflection
(the practice of intensive rereading as the technical method of constitut­
ing a work of art); the true M .A .’s, namely, the educational bureaucrats,
came up with more elegant solutions. A teacher at a girls’ school gladly
gave those in his charge books to read, but only books he had selected.
The reason was: “ When those who write for women argue against all
reading by women, they contradict themselves in the most ridiculous
way— their writing ought to be read!” 80 Niethammer, a leading educa­
tional bureaucrat, was still more perspicacious in realizing that any at­
tempt “ to develop the artistic sense through the theory o f art” would
simply turn “ art and the artistic sense into mere talking about art.” 81 The
necessary conclusion demanded that, prior to any aesthetic, anthologies
of poetry be created to separate enduring works from the flood of books
and to put a stop to the devouring reading mania. Anthologies present
 THE TOAST 1 47

works in a manner that slakes any thirst forever. The canonization of

German Poetry began with such didactic anthologies rather than with
theories.
The anthology was invented as a didactic tool circa 1800. The “ his­
torical background of this didactic development,” however, can only be
attributed to “ the rise of capitalistic mass production” 82 insofar as Poetry
itself became alphabetically reproducible. Poetry anthologies only re­
peated in the repeatability of an institution, the new school, the command
repeatedly to read “ mostly Goethe and always Goethe,” which Brentano
gave to his sister. Women, instead of “ eternally repeating what is already
the case,” which is called love, took their oaths by reading and rereading
the German classics in secondary schools for girls. This was the reason
for establishing the German classics. According to the most knowledge­
able expert in the field, “ the best of all available aesthetic readers” 83 was
written by a teacher at a girls’ school in Bremen. Betty Gleim was unsur­
passed in deriving the basic theorems for her Education and Instruction
for the Female Sex from Poets (Goethe, Schiller, Novalis). She was also
unsurpassed in the degree to which her selection of poems, stories, and
dramas adhered to the principle of “ considering classicism especially, so
that the experience of reading will also be one of forming taste.” 84 And
yet, as the rather sparse evidence available from girls’ secondary schools
suggests, Gleim’s collection of classics represents a general tendency. In
Caroline Rudolphi’s school for women in Heidelberg, in the Hirschberg
academy for women, in Blankenberg, in Goslar, and of course in Gleim’s
school for girls in Bremen, everywhere from 1792 to 1806 contemporary
German poetry was put into the weekly lesson plan.85 Tasso’s Princess,
the prototype of the new reading public, was mass produced. Countless
girls followed the One Woman in the belief that Gleim’s scholastic poetry
reader transmitted to them: namely, that “ only divine Poesy leads one
into true, complete humanity. To view the world with poetic vision, to
beautify life with ideal meaning and feeling, to carry the unearthly magic
of the infinite into the prose of earthly life, this is what the educators of
mankind should encourage.” 86
N ot for nothing did Gleim’s reader surpass all others in its adoration
of Goethe. In the process of educating man- and also womankind, the
Poet— particularly the poet who like no other “ looked so deeply into
woman’s nature . . . as if the whole sex, from the most noble to the most
common, had brought their confessions to him” 87— returned to the source
of his inspiration. A loop closed and the danger of the author’s oblivion
was banished. When educated young women read Goethe, they learned
neither writing nor the talk about Poetry that horrified Niethammer—
that is, they learned none of the discursive practices that would further
148 i8 o o

multiply the multiplication of authors. The weekly lesson plan for Poetry,
the canon of Poets, and the readers were geared exclusively to consump­
tion. Even Rudolphi, a poetess, taught her girls none of the techniques
of writing. She too limited her lessons in German to the reading, recita­
tion, reception, and enjoyment of verse.88The discourse network of 1800
solved its “ halting problem” 89 by having girls read in their classrooms.
As often happens with wishes, the young philosopher’s wish— that his
beloved should consider words more sacred than she had in the past and
more often read with reverence in divine writings— was realized through
institutionalization. Poets and thinkers could babble about the essence of
Woman, while teachers at girls’ schools would see that it was brought
into existence. What “ exalted poets always demand” is “ for a start” only
that “ a woman go into a somnambulistic fit of delight over everything
they say, that she sigh deeply, roll her eyes, and now and then have a little
fainting spell, or perhaps go hysterically blind as a sign of the highest level
of feminine femininity.” 90What the teachers at girls’ schools do with this
dream wish is assign the reading of Poets while forbidding any writing.
“ Once one recognizes the established difference between genius and taste,
one will realize that practice in the fine arts should be recommended to
girls for the formation of taste rather than for the creative power of ge­
nius.” 91 With this philosophic-pedagogical insight, the schools would
spend a century producing women who drank their fill of Poets’ words
with infinite enjoyment.

. . . and the Kingdom of G od

The pleasure of women makes waves. In the year that Gleim’s reader
appeared, the Bavarian minister of education Immanuel Niethammer
proposed to his superior and to his poet the project of creating not a, but
the anthology. This was a megalomaniacal project, intended to cure the
reading mania outright rather than begin the cure at specific institutions
or with one sex; moreover, the cure was to be accomplished by commit­
ting Poetry entirely to pedagogy. “ We have our national classics, but we
do not know them; we read them, perhaps, but we do not learn them.
The reading mania that has become a national vice of the Germans al­
ways demands something new, it devours the good with the bad.” 1 The
project was megalomaniacal because it pleaded for the absolute scholas­
tic reader “ just as we petition for the advent of the Kingdom of G od.” 2
Indeed, the early romantics’ lucid dreams of a unique historical oppor­
tunity to establish, following the state’s dismissal of the Bible as an ele­
mentary reader, a new, but poetic Bible would have attained discursive
reality in the One Reader of all German schools.3 Niethammer, rather
 THE TOAST 1 49

than Schlegel or Novalis, articulated this nexus. Only because “ the Bible
has ceased to be a unifying point for the education of all classes” and
“ can hardly be expected to attain that position again, given the kind of
thinking now in ascendancy” was there “ the need for a National Book.” 4
The many anthologies that began to appear around 1800 were at once
the scars and the bandages of this wound. How could people like Gleim,
C. F. R. Vetterlein, or Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker save Germany? A poetic
Bible cannot be assembled from “ the abritrary choices and preferences”
of individuals. The w ork must “ be classic as a collection in order, by its
inner value and external authority, to earn its position above all other
arbitrarily produced collections,” which means it must “ unify the Ger­
man nation in the use of the one classical collection either by free choice,
or by an agreement that could easily be reached.” In short, the poetic
Bible would be “ a gift of G od.” 5
Therefore, God must write it. After recommending “ only two men,”
Goethe and Johann Heinrich Voss, to his administration, Niethammer fi­
nally offered the project to Goethe alone. A reader that “ is to attain clas­
sical authority can only be created by classical writers.” 6 The school re­
former had quite an exact understanding of private audiences in Weimar
“ on education and national culture, and in particular on the Bible and
traditional books of the people” 7— an understanding, that is, of the Faus­
tian act. The age in which the unthinkable reduplication of the word
word at the beginning of a gospel provided the ground and measure of all
doctrine was past. An age had arrived in which the authorial act, that of
writing act for word, placed the ground and measure of all doctrine in
the unthinkable reduplication of authorship. If the one classical writer
were to label his own works classics in the very personal act of selecting
them for inclusion in the new poetic Bible, the etymology of the title au­
thor would become literal truth. The absolute “ authority” required by
Niethammer’s pedagogy applied in 1800 only to words “ accompanied by
the name of an author.” 8A classical reader provided by the pen of a clas­
sical writer would not cease to inscribe/(ascribe) itself— the definition of
necessity.
But the great deed failed. Goethe apparently did not understand
Niethammer as profoundly as Niethammer understood him. His exten­
sive preliminary work on the national book came down to two historical-
empirical collections of texts rather than to a personal authorization of
his own works; the collections, although quite substantial, fell short of
the phantasm of the One Book.9In any case, “ the episode” did more than
demonstrate that “ the prince of poets did not intend to stand before the
school gates.” 10 If he had entered with all due state-programmed cere­
mony and presented the secondary schools with the Kingdom of God, the
150 i8 o o

discourse network of 1800 would have imploded. The institutionalized

rereading by all students of “ mostly Goethe and always Goethe,” or the
establishment of a litany to be memorized,11 one that would be unques­
tionable because authorized by the master’s word in the discourse of the
master, would have eradicated all room for movement in the discourse of
the university and the circuit of legitimation stretching to it from the sec­
ondary school.12 Because the discourse network of 1800 existed through
its hermeneutic recruitment of authors, even and especially a discourse of
the masters must necessarily devolve on discretionary determinations of
its selection, definition, and interpretation. The formation of a canon
would have established a rigidly incontestable selection under Goethe’s
direction; under the direction of educational bureaucrats it became mere
continuation. A number of different and uncertain canonizations ap­
peared around the hole left by the non-appearance of one classic classical
reader, and these became the constant, repeatedly renewed business of
the schools.13

Thus Niethammer had to suffer and practice the arbitrariness that a

gift from God was to have absolved. N ot Goethe himself but the adminis­
trative chain of command put “ Goethe’s songs” as lyric poetry, Hermann
and Dorothea as epic, and “ Goethe’s works” as drama into the lesson
plans of the secondary schools in Bavaria.14Because these General Norms
were contingent, despite their title, they could be removed at any time. By
the time of Niethammer’s successor in the educational bureaucracy, Ger­
man classicism was no longer inscribed within the classrooms. Because
the New High German texts (with the exception of the Messias) did not
require the study required for older texts, Thiersch relegated the former
to reading for the students’ free time. With that Bavaria returned to a
practice that was dominant in the other German states around 1800.15
While all young women at the higher schools had lessons in the read­
ing, reception, recitation, and enjoyment of German poets, the young
men in the gymnasiums became new humanists. It was deemed inap­
propriate for them “ to dally with contemporary poets and writers during
school time” and to enjoy German lessons “ like a continuous holiday.” 16
Future servants of the state were to be above pure consumption. Their
free-time reading in German, encouraged and guided by newly founded
school libraries, was to bear fruit. “ The status of German in the lessons of
the upper classes [was] significantly shifted” by the Prussian Abitur: the
rhetorical circulation of texts in the old schools gave way to the “ prin­
cipal goal of a written essay prepared privately by the student.” 17 This
was the German essay. Johann Meierotto’s plan in 1794 for a native-
language canon of German writers for the secondary schools, though still
 THE TOAST 151

titled a “ Rhetoric,” was designed to instill the ability “ to prepare reports,

deductions, legal opinions, and other documents” so necessary “ to the
administrative service of the state.” 18 The Abitur essay of 1810 carried
out this writing project. Gymnasium students who were to go on to uni­
versities “ must be brought to the point where they can begin service as
writers who command language.” 19 From the time that “ the state as­
sumes the responsibility of ensuring that its citizens can write,” 20 the re­
sponsibility includes bureaucratic as well as poetic writing, Lindhorst as
well as Anselmus. The topic of the German Abitur essay can be freely
chosen and thus its theme can “ never be merely factual,” in that “ the es­
say should give evidence of the development of the understanding and of
the powers of fantasy.” 21 Writing out fantasies puts “ the whole individ­
uality” of the student, “ his innermost self, . . . into the hands of the
teacher.” Such is “ the significance of the essay written in the mother
tongue.” 22
German was not a central subject at the higher boys’ schools, it was a
surplus of the lesson plan. Gymnasium students— who sought out their
native-language authors only in libraries during their free time, reflected
on their private reading in personal reading journals (as they were en­
couraged to do),23 and stored the imaginative power and individuality
thereby produced until it could become productive in the Abitur essay—
were doing their part in the discourse network of 1800. Because Goethe’s
anthology of Goethe texts did not exist, the individual student, through
selection and interpretation, had to play the roles of reader, anthologist,
and author in miniature.
None of the (old or new, laudatory or critical) statistics concerning
curriculum planning since its invention circa 1800 have measured any­
thing bearing on the difference between the sexes. The available, late fig­
ures do indicate, however, that the new subject German was at once the
center of education for young women and the beyond for the education of
bureaucrats. In the Prussian curriculum plan of 1810 for the gymnasium,
German claimed “ a quarter of [the time allotted to] ancient languages,” 24
7 percent of language time in later plans at the gymnasium, and 10 per­
cent of the course load in schools not aimed at preparing students for the
university. The girls’ schools, with 20 percent, included twice as much
German.25 The existence and reputation of German poetry may have
owed a great deal to the other sex, but the publicly employed sex needed
for its satisfaction an active mental life that reading could not offer, be­
cause public employment had come to include public writing.26 In the
pedagogically institutionalized difference between the sexes, girls’ schools
thus directed reading mania into the consumption of German classics by
providing ample time in the lesson plan, whereas boys’ schools directed
152 i8 o o

reading into generalized essay writing by releasing it from the lesson plan.
Humanistically educated future bureaucrats learned what works and
authors are by studying the ancients.27 German as a subject remained
marginal in that, according to Schleiermacher, it transcended all school
subjects. “ Instruction in the German language is not merely language in­
struction but rather, in that the mother tongue is the immediate organ of
the understanding and the general medium of the imagination, provides
the occasion for everything the school can accomplish in the free and
formal development of the mind, including all training for philosophy.” 28
In German as a subject in boys’ schools, then, the philosophers of
1800 had what they wanted. German, like Poetry or the imagination a
spiritual medium of all media, was in the gymnasium and yet beyond the
gymnasium; it linked subject disciplines to private reading and to a sci­
ence not taught at all in the gymnasium, but taught in universities. The
chain of legitimation linked institutions of higher learning institutionally,
and German linked them in particular subjects. Philosophers required of
“ M an” precisely such a process of augmentation from the gymnasium to
the university. Bergk’s art of reading educated readers in autonomous
philosophical reflection; Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher and artist,
philosophized: “ the artist should desire neither to rule nor to serve. He
can educate and nothing more, and thus do nothing for the state but edu­
cate rulers and servants, nothing but raise politicians and economists to
the level of artists.” 29 And so it goes in German, when from a point be­
yond the state, where since Schiller neither rulers nor the ruled are sup­
posed to exist, the free and formal development of the mind and the aes­
thetic education of mankind penetrate the future rulers and servants of
precisely this state. For what philosophers called the raising of rulers and
servants to the level of the artist was rewritten into entrance requirements
by pedagogues like Niethammer. “ It should become a legal requirement
for entrance into the higher positions of state service, of administration,
of legislation, of moral and religious education, and so forth— in short, of
those positions directed toward the realm of ideas, that no one shall be
admitted who has not been educated and legitimately certified in the do­
main of higher ideas.” 30
The old faculties in the Republic of Scholars became a civil-servant
factory that produced, beyond the traditional elites of judges and priests,
moral educators (in other words, teachers), who in turn formed elites,
and so on. The new conditions of admittance made new qualification cri­
teria necessary. Unlike the time when Faust, the ex-M .A., broke the cycle
of reading, explication, and lecturing, the mere circulation of knowledge
no longer constituted legitimation in the domain of higher ideas. Only by
writing productively could one demonstrate that he was cultivated [ge-
bildet\ rather than simply erudite. One could not learn such writing from
 THE TOAST I 53

theory, however; it had to be learned from German Poetry, which had

invented it in the first place. Johann Wilhelm Suvern’s Prussian curricu­
lum plan for the gymnasium placed “ the study and development of great
masterpieces of poetry and rhetoric” above all scholarship because such
study promoted “ the aesthetic sense and” — decisively— “ the ability to
present one’s own thoughts.” 31 Even more precise (and for that reason
they read like a prophecy of today’s state examination themes) were the
questions that the state ideal of Bavaria put to its future crop of bureau­
crats. “ Is he capable of developing the spirit of any secular writer? Can he
present his ideas clearly and completely in the mother tongue? What are
his views of the writer? Can he analyze the writer philosophically and
explain his relation to current philosophical trends? . . . How is his own
style?” 32
Present-day academic interpreters hardly notice the engima of a legiti­
mation of and through literature.33 They are still following rules decreed
170 years ago. Classical Poets achieve legitimation because they provide
civil servants with the norm of their own legitimation, a “ legitimation in
the domain of higher ideas.” It was a hermeneutic circle and a reciprocal
means of establishing evidence.

The midpoint through which the two extremes, Poetry and the bu­
reaucracy, had to pass in order to reach their respective conclusions was
called philosophy. According to Schleiermacher, German breaks the
boundaries of any subject matter because all preparation for philosophy
enters into it. According to Siivern, the study of masterpieces in the gym­
nasium awakens philosophical spirits. Christian Daniel Voss argued in
his Essay on Education for the State as a Need o f Our Time that “ every
servant of the state ought to have achieved a thorough grounding and
education in philosophy, in that he cannot be expected to find fulfillment,
given his subordinate position, in the moral and cultural domain of the
state; for every servant of the state has an essential need for spiritual
freedom.” 34
The circuit of legitimation between German as school subject and phi­
losophy at the university had institutional consequences. First, the philo­
sophical faculty was emancipated: whereas earlier it had preceded the
three important faculties as a simple propaedeutic, it now ranked as
the highest faculty. “ When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
preparation for all university studies was shifted to the gymnasium, the
philosophical faculty, until then a general-education preparatory course
for the three older faculties, attained an independent position. Along with
the supervision of scholarly research, it had the particular responsibility
of preparing students for the teaching profession.” 35
Second, philosophy as a subject had to break the bonds of received
1 5 4 tSoo

ideas within its own faculty. Spirit became the new philosophical concern
so that it could be freed in the new crop of bureaucrats. The philosopher
H. F. W. Hinrichs could show, by direct reference to Faust, that univer­
sities served “ state functions” and had their highest calling in a science
that “ cannot be considered a faculty in the ordinary sense, in that philos­
ophy . . . is not limited to particulars, but rather raises what is particular
in the subject matter of the other faculties to universality.” 36 An explicit
Phenomenology o f the Spirit was not necessary for such spiritual emanci­
pation and universalization. It was enough to alter philosophical dis­
course pragmatically, even if semantically it retained signifieds such as “ I”
and “ knowledge.” Fichte accomplished a reordering of rules of produc­
tion and consumption in The Foundation o f the Complete Science o f
Knowledge:

The Science o f Knowledge is so constituted that it cannot be communicated in

any way by the mere letter, but must be imparted through the spirit; its funda­
mental ideas must be produced by the creative imagination of every person who
studies it. It could not be otherwise in a science that returns to the very first foun­
dations of human knowledge, in that the very enterprise of the human spirit pro­
ceeds from the imagination, and in that the imagination cannot be grasped except
through the imagination.37

Faust sought “ how one spirit speaks to another” (“ Wie spricht ein Geist
zum andern Geist” ; 425) as he opened the manuscript by Nostradamus.
Fichte’s answer is that it occurs through the Science o f Knowledge, or as
philosophy. Out of the simple propaedeutic in the Republic of Scholars
came, once the emphasis had been shifted to Spirit, a “ matter [concer­
ning] the whole of man,” 38 infinitely noble, but also infinitely difficult.
Anyone who simply writes using letters of the alphabet can no longer be
considered a philosophical author, nor can anyone who simply reads re­
ceive philosophy. In the discourse network of 1800, what distinguished
philosophy was its maximization of all the postulates of autonomy char­
acteristic of the new art of reading and its establishment of alphabetiza-
tion-made-flesh or “ imagination” as an admissions requirement. Thus an
inescapable, double-connection was established between Poetry and phi­
losophy. On the institutional level, the chain of legitimation linking Ger­
man as a school subject with philosophical study at the university cor­
responded to the reception of philosophical texts through the creative
imagination as it was practiced on the basic level of reading. Thus Kleist,
quite unfaithful to the letter of the scholarly-republican philosopher of
Konigsberg, read Kant until a crisis point that had very little to do with
philosophy but much to do with narrative perspective. And thus Novalis,
quite faithful to the letter of the letter-despising Fichte, read, excerpted,
commentated upon, and finally by creative imagination so transformed
the Science o f Knowledge that reading philosophy veered into writing
 THE TOAST 1 55

novels.39 But according to Fichte himself precisely this path from the Ger­
man essay to authorship is the only one worthy of man:
Always to r e a d to follow another’s train of thought; to make one’s mind the re­
ceptacle of nothing but foreign and not always similar thoughts; this can be tir­
ing, it slackens the soul and lulls it with a certain indolence. But there is no hap­
pier way of interrupting the stagnation thus induced in the human spirit than the
development of one’s own thoughts. . . . There is certainly no greater spiritual
pleasure for those capable of it than that which one experiences through, or dur­
ing, writing itself, and which . . . would remain so even in a world where no one
read or heard of anything read. One then returns to reading with a sharpened
mind, puts oneself more confidently and subtly into the spirit of the author; one
understands him more accurately and judges him more thoroughly, and one is no
longer intimidated by the man whose nimbus fades and has become our own.
Certainly no one can completely understand a writer and feel himself his equal
who is not already in some sense a writer himself.40

The clear implication is that, in the writing of the Science o f Knowl­

edge as well, the imagination had surpassed all letters. For free writing
that cannot be intimidated by any established author is, according to
Schlegel, the very determination, and according to Fichte, the highest
pleasure “ of man.” N ot for nothing was the Science o f Knowledge sub­
titled “ manuscript” [als Handschrift]. It was at once the provisional ar­
rangement and the triumph of a new type of thought production. Indeed
Fichte, all too rapidly promoted from farm boy in Lausitz to tutor, then
from tutor to professor, had nothing at all to present when his first lec­
tures at the university in Jena were announced. At the time of the Re­
public of Scholars a lecture meant paraphrasing a standard text possessed
by the professor and his students. “ Even in the early eighteenth century a
‘textbook’ was still defined as a ‘Classick Author written very wide by the
Students, to give Room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, & c.,
to be inserted in the Interlines’ (O.E.D.).” 41 Such interpretation in the lexi­
cal sense, however, would be beneath the dignity of a philosopher who
had oriented production and consumption to the creative imagination
and productive writing. In full consciousness of the great historical mo­
ment, Fichte laughingly dismissed the old-European, endless circulation
of books. “ N ow that there is no longer a single branch of science that is
not represented in a surplus of books, one nonetheless still feels obligated
to republish this whole world of books through the university, and to
have professors recite what lies printed on the page for all to see.” 42
Whereas Kant, a transitional figure, played the double game of lectur­
ing on an outdated ontology and writing its critique, the new philosophy
shortcircuited production and consumption. Fichte accomplished an act
as revolutionary as that of Faust. Realizing that reading and particularly
lecturing can indeed be tiresome, Fichte did not base his first lecture
source on a textbook or the work of other philosophers; rather, he lec­
156 i8 o o

tured on his own book. There was, however, a small problem: because he
had yet to make up his mind on all his deductions,43 he had to produce his
own textbook from hour to hour and have it appear at the same rate. “At
least three sections” of the Science o f Knowledge appeared each week
during the semester and were given to Fichte’s students— and to Goethe.44
Such was the provisional and triumphant beginning of a new epoch in
philosophy: the literary. A lecturer who wrote the material on which his
own lectures would be based became an author in the fullest sense of the
word in 1800. A writer who published arguments without knowing quite
how he would be able to support them in the next publication mimicked
the new freedom of Poets, who could simply write on and wait until the
moment of rereading to come to corrections, consciousness, and coher­
ence.45 Where previously the printing presses and professors simply re­
published the whole world of books, the author-ego (to use his favorite
term) Fichte published himself. In the same year, 1795, his essay On the
Spirit and Letter in Philosophy announced to the reading public that an
aesthetic drive— an inner, molding, and shaping force— was by no means
particular to Poets, but distinguished philosophers as well, who heeded
the creative imagination rather than the mere letter.
There was thus something of a scramble for the central position in the
discourse network of 1800, where the “ whole man” wrote for the “ whole
man.” Poetry claimed it and so did philosophy; a conflict resulting from
the competition seemed unavoidable. One poet’s initial reaction to Fich­
te’s essay signalled the collision. As editor and publisher of the journal
The Horai Schiller declined to publish On the Spirit and Letter, not only
because the essay contradicted his own The Aesthetic Education o f Man,
but for the principal reason that philosophy must not compete with Ger­
man Poetry. Schiller bluntly replied to Fichte’s assessment of the reception
they would both have from future readers:

One hundred or two hundred years from now, when new revolutions will have
occurred in philosophic thinking, your writings will certainly be cited and judged
according to their merit, but they will no longer be read; this is as much in accord
with the nature of the matter as the fact that my writings . . . will not be read any
more frequently, but certainly not any less frequently than they are at present.
And what might be the reason for this? The reason is that writing that has its
value only in the results it obtains for the understanding, as excellent as these
results may be, becomes superfluous to the degree that the understanding even­
tually determines that the results are indifferent to it, or discovers a more expedi­
tious path to the same results; but writing that produces effects independent of its
logical content, and in which an individual gives living expression to himself, can
never become superfluous, for it contains an ineradicable principle of life, in that
each individual is single and therefore irreplaceable and inexhaustible.
Therefore, dear friend, as long as you provide nothing more in your writing
than what can be attained by anyone who knows how to think, you can be sure
 THE TOAST 1 57

that another will come after you and say it differently and better. . . . But this
cannot occur with w ork produced by the imagination. I admit that now and in
the future much, perhaps the best, of what I have written can be communicated
only with difficulty, and to some not at all. . . . But it is equally certain that the
greatest part of the effect produced by my writing (whether among the few or the
many) is of an aesthetic nature, and thus the effect is secured for all following ages
in which the language of the author is understood.46

This is one passionate reply to Fichte’s proposition that spirit in philos­

ophy and spirit in the fine arts are related like two species of a single
genus.47 According to the poet, only the aesthetic treatment of aesthetic
themes, not the aesthetic treatment of speculative themes, guarantees im­
mortality. Men of words secure their territory by such self-referentiality.
Far from counting only on the higher levels of literary theory, the irre­
placeable individuality of the author is a bone for which poets and phi­
losophers contend on the battlefield of public reception. The historical
moment’s force lines are inscribed in this battlefield. The sorry fate that
Schiller predicts for Fichte’s reputation amounts to the observation that
under the conditions of an expanding book market, someone who first
publishes in a factual field in which others will continue to publish will
easily be forgotten. The order of discourse euphemistically named “ read­
ing mania” by its contemporaries spelled failure for the philosophers’
longing for authorial fame while promising success to the strategy of
Poets. Thus Schiller attacked his rival with the latter’s own arguments.
For Fichte promised that only productive writing in the spirit of the Ger­
man essay would lead to understanding of the author one was reading
and beyond: namely, that the author from whom one’s own writing pro­
ceeded would lose his nimbus and no longer intimidate. With the same
logic the Poet prophesies that the Thinker will be forgotten in one or two
hundred years.
The two hundred years are almost up, but among the remaining read­
ers “ Fichte” still intimidates just as much as “ Schiller.” The prophet over­
looked something because he left something out: his own essay, with
which Fichte was not allowed to compete in The Horai, was indebted to
the Science o f Knowledge, just as his poet’s letter on the ephemerality of
philosophers owed much to the philosopher Fiumboldt.48 Given that phi­
losophy circa 1800 had anything but a one-sided, parasitic relationship
to Poetry, the two discourses did not cancel each other out. Fichte and
Schiller soon put their conflict behind them. Fichte’s demand that specu­
lative and aesthetic writing be on an equal footing was withdrawn in a
conciliatory gesture by Schelling and others, in that they had philosophy
issue into Poetry and Nature only at the end of its worldwide odyssey.
More fundamental than the momentary flare-up of 1795 was a system­
atic connivance of both discourses, a game of give and take in which each
158 i8 oo

stabilized the other and both endowed one another with the desired
“ effect for all following ages.”

To the Absolute:
A toast!
With kindest regards,
the Ur-Phenomenon.

In a greeting written in his own hand, inscribed in a copy of his Theory

o f Colors sent to Hegel,49 Goethe celebrates that connivance. The indis­
solubility of poetic Ur-phenomena and the complete dissolution, referred
to as the Absolute, do not coincide, but neither do they collide with one
another; they are separated and linked as sender and receiver. The words
with which the poet greeted the thinker were not accidentally accom­
panied by a drinking glass from Carlsbad, not just because the glass illus­
trated certain properties of color. Beyond any scientific study, goblets are
for drinking. Goethe’s toast, like grace before dinner, offers his own po­
etic corpus for consumption— a consumption quite different from that of
reading-addicted women, of course, for it would respect or even heighten
what was unthinkable or inexhaustible in Ur-phenomena. The toast in­
vites the philosopher to interpretation, not reading.
When philosophy became literary around 1800, the event affected Po­
etry itself. In the “ intellectual work of art,” the “ poetic work of art” ac­
quired a new addressee.50 Poetry did not cease to be written for young
women and their directed reading. But because reading cannot suffi­
ciently do justice to author-individuals, the distribution rules provided
for another channel by which works could attain philosophical treatment
and thus acquire a certificate of inexhaustibility.51 The literary philosophy
of 1800 became interpretation.
There is testimony, and not just any testimony, to this innovation. The
tragedy Faust, which, upon completion, as if to put all the rules of poetic
production into operation, would run from a starting point in the mini­
mal signified “ oh” to the transcendental signified of the Eternal Feminine,
appeared in 1790 [as Faust, ein Fragment] to a rather cool reception.
“ The important philologist Heyne, Wieland, Schiller’s childhood friend
Huber, and Schiller in his prephilosophical period were critical and re­
served.” 52 The multiplication of authors programmed by a discourse net­
work is, of course, not exactly the most favorable environment for sin­
gular works. For this reason a feedback link was added to the program.
 THE TOAST 1 59

Philosophers constituted its final control mechanism, and it converted au­

thors like the mature Schiller to philosophy and Faust. Indeed,
all significant representatives of classical German philosophy, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, received the [Faust] fragment enthusiastically and immediately recog­
nized its importance as universal poem. And this reception was by no means lim­
ited to the leading figures of the philosophical revolution, for it soon spread
throughout the younger disciples of the movement. When Goethe talked with the
historian Luden in 1806, the latter talked about the feeling concerning the Faust
fragment that prevailed among those reading philosophy during his student
years. According to Luden the students of Fichte and Schelling would say things
such as the following: “ In this tragedy, when it is finally completed, the spirit of
the whole of mankind will be portrayed; it will be a true image of the life of man­
kind, encompassing the past, present, and future. In Faust mankind is captured in
its essence; he is the representative of humanity.53

Georg Lukacs has reason to applaud his forebears, for they founded
all the interpretive techniques that refer interwoven words to a single and
universal “ man.” When the production and consumption of philosophi­
cal books demand “ the whole man,” then the philosophical interpreta­
tion of works must also proceed toward this essence. Otherwise they
would remain philological critique, scholarly commentary, or subjective
judgments of taste— in other words, secondary texts of the old and out­
moded variety. They would never be able to prove that Faust was the
“universal poem” or (what amounts to the same thing) “ the one abso­
lutely philosophical tragedy.” 54
Speculative extrapolation, which could discover the whole course of
history in a fragment and anticipate unwritten endings, led to the recipro­
cal stabilizing of Poetry and philosophy. In the Aesthetic Fectures on
Goethe’s Faust, which Hinrichs, a student of Hegel and philosopher in
Heidelberg, held in the winter semester of 1821 —22, the demonstration
that Goethe had written the philosophical tragedy provided at the same
time a Contribution to the Scientific Judgment o f Art.55 Hegelians could
thus hold out the goblet that justified their dipsomania to the enemies of
philosophic poetry consumption (which, as usual, was called science).
The fact that Goethe’s fragment was received coolly by poets and en­
thusiastically by thinkers does demonstrate something. Ulysses was not
the first instance in which Poetry became “ a production industry for a
reception industry” of equal professionalism.56 N ot only “ borderline
cases,” such as Schlegel or Novalis, contributed to the immediate contact
between Poetry and philosophy, whose proclamation of eternal truth is
justifiably questionable.57 Rather, the discourse network of 1800 formed
the configuration that established in Western Europe a new relation among (say)
literary production, positive law, and the critical institutions of evaluation, pres­
ervation, archiving, and legitimation by founding and awarding titles— every­
i6 o 1800

thing, then, that has its particular place and form in the universitas. The model of
the university, within whose borders we in the West w ork— more or less well for
some time still— was . . . established in the moment of (or in relation to) the in­
scription of the fundamental rules that regulate the ownership of works, the rights
of authors, of republication, translation, etc. . . . This event had an essential,
inner, and decisive bearing upon what others would call the inmost inner produc­
tion of literary and artistic forms in general.58

The configuration is as obvious as it is overlooked. An investigation

entitled The Origin o f Art as a Middle-Class Institution59 considers it un­
worthy of mention. Court ceremony in Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, the
situation of the artisans, the Protestant rectory— all have been illumi­
nated by the social historians of German Poetry. But the new universities,
culminating in philosophy, are taboo. The temple in which they, too, con­
tinue to celebrate remains unnamed.

German idealism, with its social locus in “ Germany’s higher schools

and universities,” 60 made German Poetry into universal and university
Poetry. There was no media-technical divide in 1800 between “ higher”
and “ lower” forms of literature, but Rinaldo Rinaldini was mentioned in
diagnoses of reading mania, whereas Faust was the subject of philosophy
lectures. Fichte wrote one of the essays that led to the codification of au­
thors’ copyrights; Schelling, as if to prepare the return of his philosophy
to literature, came up with the antiquarian and speculative dates out of
which— they were unavailable to lay readers and so could only be profes­
sionally decoded— came the “ Classical Walpurgisnight” ;61 Hegel fur­
nished evidence for his dictum concerning the absolute philosophical
tragedy. Philosophy, in the discourse network of 1800, was the title-
founding and -awarding legitimation of Poetry. Goethe’s toast was one of
thanks.
The absolute Spirit raises the goblet to its lips— and “ its infinity foams
forth from the chalice of this realm of spirits.” 62 It was a thirst that grew
as it was quenched and a stream that became more inexhaustible as it was
consumed: German Idealism found at once desire and fulfillment in Ger­
man Poetry. When Hegel’s absolute Knowledge, having come home at
last to its philosophical beyond, looks back at all the phenomenal forms
of Spirit that have carried it along on its ascending journey, it sees them as
a “ gallery of images” and the transversed “ realm of spirits” as therefore
an aesthetic realm. Thus when the god or philosopher wishes to express
this highest knowledge, verses of German classical Poets come to mind.
The verses that sign and seal The Phenomenology o f Spirit are not cited,
however, nor have they been looked up— “ recollection, the inwardizing
of that experience, has preserved” them.63 Otherwise, it would read “ chal­
 THE TOAST l6 l

ice of the” realm of spirits rather than the “ chalice of this realm of spirits”
and the author’s name “ Schiller” would stand under the correct quota­
tion from the poem “ Friendship.” Two minute deviations, but they are
evidence enough that philosophy circa 1800 is based on completed al­
phabetization (which is why it “ inwardizes” rather than reads Poets) and
constitutes a free-interpretive continuation of texts (which is why the
name of the author cannot intimidate).
The goblet that the Absolute receives from Poetry in order to drink
itself into infinity does not contain mere water. According to a Poet, the
Foundation o f the Complete Science o f Knowledge should have been
called the Complete Guide to Drinking.64 Hegel thanked Goethe with the
promise that he would peer into the Ur-phenomenal only while drinking
wine.65 Like the animals Hegel mentions, thinkers are also initiates in the
Eleusinian mysteries: given the supplementary sensuality offered them by
poetry, “ they fall to without ceremony and eat it up.” Because philo­
sophic truth is “ the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not
drunk,” 66 hardly one among all the quotations in the Phenomenology
taken from Goethe, Schiller, Diderot, and Lichtenberg remains true to
the letter of the text. When Friedrich Schlegel describes to his brother his
reading of Hamlet, how he had grasped the “ spirit of the w ork” behind
every “ husk,” the reason for the disloyalty to the letter comes out. “ I have
nothing more to say to you about Hamlet for now; of course there is
much more to be said, but that would mean I would have to read it once
more, and that would disturb me too much.” 67
An interpretation that seeks the Spirit or M an behind every word is not
a reading. It remains unconstrained by the therapeutic requirement of re­
reading in order to become itself as free as its interpretandum. Faust’s
style of translating infected his descendants. That is why the system func­
tion of philosophical “ re-collection” (so vastly different from memory) is
so easy to overlook. If every discourse network fundamentally requires
some means of storage, the network of 1800 invented an archive in which
the data, instead of being solely accessible as such, as in ROM s (Read
Only Memories), could always be altered. But precisely because it func­
tioned as R A M (Random Access Memory), philosophy in 1800 was safe
from the most acute of all threats: that of becoming superfluous. In a
philosophical history of the whole world of books, one that made a rigor­
ous distinction between a past epoch of scholarly feuilletons devoted to
literature and an “ age of the science of reason” that had just begun,
Fichte explained how the science of reason altered the method of archi­
ving scientific and poetic authors.
In order to demonstrate our necessity, we must do something that the other either
has not been able to do, or has not been able to do without accomplishing a par­
i6 z 1800

ticular task of which we have relieved him. We cannot tell our reader for a second
time what the author has already said once; the author has said it and the reader
has many ways of finding this out from him. But what the author does not say,
through which he arrives at all his writing, can be imparted to the reader. We
must discover what an author himself is inwardly, for this can remain hidden
from his gaze; we must discover the particular means by which he develops his
style— in short, we must elicit the Spirit from the letter.68

Philosophy avoids becoming a superfluous leftover by swallowing up

authorial leftovers, down to the last word. Random access also implies
the absolute and arbitrary right to scan and select. A discourse would be­
come superfluous only if (according to Fichte) it republished the whole
world of books or if (according to Schiller) it merely provided results. But
the individual irreplaceability that Poets claim becomes the interpretan­
dum; a paraphrase as distant from the letter of the text as Faust’s is
“ said” by the soul that the author cannot speak (because otherwise it
would be simply language), which is nonetheless his “ being,” because it
brought him to everything he says in his work. The noble question ri
early (“ what is it?” ), asked of the cosmos by the Greeks and of God by
the monks, was asked in German Idealism of the author.
We return to Goethe and to Faust. What would an author of an ab­
solute philosophical tragedy never have said? Only this: that Faust,
rather than being simply a depressive scholar in the Republic of Scholars
who was on the threshold of a new science of reason, represents Self-
Consciousness outside all place and time. But that is exactly what Hegel’s
interpretation claims; for the first time in the history of philosophical evi­
dence and proof, it raised a fictional hero to the same level as Robespierre
or a slave owner of antiquity. In the tragedy, Mephisto characterizes his
companion:

Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,

Des Menschen allerhochste Kraft,
Laf? nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
Dich von dem Liigengeist bestarken,
So hab’ ich dich schon unbedingt—
Ihm hat das Schicksal einen Geist gegeben,
Der ungebandigt immer vorwarts dringt. . . .
Und hatt’ er sich auch nicht dem Teufel ubergeben,
Er miifite doch zu Grunde gehn!

Have but contempt for reason and for science,

Man’s noblest force spurn with defiance,
Subscribe to magic and illusion,
The Lord of Lies aids your confusion,
And, pact or no, I hold you tight.—
The spirit which he has received from fate
 THE TOAST 163

Sweeps ever onward with unbridled might, . . .

And were he not the Devil’s mate
And had not signed, he still must perish. (1851 —57, 1866—67)

In The Phenomenology o f the Spirit, the Spirit elicited from the letter
says, citing freely as always:
Es verachtet Verstand und Wissenschaft
des Menschen allerhochste Gaben—
es hat dem Teufel sich ergeben
und muE zu Grunde gehn.

It despises intellect and science

The supreme gifts of man
It has given itself to the devil
And must perish.69

“It,” namely “ Self-Consciousness,” and “ he,” namely Faust, M .A .— this

is the difference between the Being and text of an author. German Ideal­
ism legitimized German Poetry by rewriting its phenomena as a Aoyo?
and its heroes as a Spirit. Consequently all names disappear from the ar­
chive, Faust no less than Goethe or Schiller. What remains behind is only a
gallery of pictures in which the portraits (the discourse network of 1800
does not write down individuals) all represent Man in his world-historical
and “pedagogical” development.70 It is the apotheosis of the educational
bureaucrat.
Now the one particular incarnation of the one Educational Bureau­
crat— who was otherwise known as Faust, but who in the Kingdom and
gallery of God is henceforth “ Self-Consciousness, which . . . knows itself
to be reality” — makes the mistake of plunging into life. Disdaining sci­
ence, Faust finds for himself the “ ripe fruit” of a “ natural consciousness
or one developed into a system of laws,” otherwise known as Gretchen.
At which point philosophy can only note that “ the pleasure enjoyed has
indeed the positive meaning that self-consciousness has become objective
to itself; but equally it has the negative one of having reduced itself to a
moment.” 71 In the orgasm, then, Hegel sees Mephisto’s oracle of destruc­
tion fulfilled and substantiated. Orgasm is forbidden, so that philosophy
may exist. The highest pleasure for children of the earth (contrary to
Goethe) is still the personality and not its negation. Being, as always, one
more negative experience the richer, the Spirit leaves its incarnation in
Faust and proceeds to the next, whose bureaucratic ethos includes “ the
universal of law immediately within itself.” 72
It is no accident that this interpretation in terms of Spirit calls on an
authority that is already Spirit. The name of Hegel’s chief witness for
Faust and Gretchen, Pleasure and Necessity, is Mephisto. But for a thinker
164 i8 oo

who admittedly dragged his title as M .A. around with him like a demon,
it matters little that this Spirit had characterized himself in the unquoted
portion of the text. If Mephisto’s autonym “ spirit of deceit” had not been
left out, the interpretation of Faust would stand in the dark shadow of the
man from Crete who said that every Cretan lies. But a science that would
turn disdain for science into pleasure, and pleasure into necessity, must
cite cunningly. It must overlook its own name wherever it happens to
appear.

Hegel lied. O f all the candidates that could stand in for “ Self-Con­
sciousness,” not one perishes or is destroyed: not Faust or Mephisto any
more than Goethe or Hegel. Their careers fill libraries. Only Gretchen
goes down, in that she is merely “ natural consciousness” and, in accor­
dance with her “ true concept,” an “ object of pleasure.” 73 But what is the
death of a woman in the world-historical-pedagogical path from sense
certainty to philosophy, from alphabetizing elementary instruction to the
highest faculty of universities? The Phenomenology does not close acci­
dentally with the poem “ Friendship” as a way for the god or philosopher
to express his pleasure in the poets that preceded him. Like the relation­
ship of Aristotelian friends, who love the good in one another insofar as
they love G od’s highest goodness, the friendship between German Ideal­
ism and German Poetry is also homosexual. Sexual difference doesn’t
count.74
The evidence for this is provided by the most natural consciousness
with which Knowledge starts out: sense-certainty. It poses for the Phe­
nomenology its very first object or interpretive theme.
The question must therefore be considered whether in sense-certainty itself the
object is in fact the kind of essence that sense-certainty proclaims it to be; whether
this notion of it as the essence corresponds to the way it is present in sense-
certainty. To this end, we have not to reflect on it and ponder what it might be in
truth, but only to consider the way in which it is present in sense-certainty. It is,
then, sense-certainty itself that must be asked: “ What is the This?” If we take
“ This” in the twofold shape of its being, as “ N o w ” and as “ Here,” the dialectic it
has in it will receive a form as intelligible as the “ This” itself is. To the question:
“ What is N ow ?” , let us answer, e.g., “ N ow is Night.” In order to test the truth of
this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a
truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose any­
thing through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written
truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.75

Knowledge, then, is sensual long before it is called Faust, and its object,
long before it is called Gretchen, is night. All the truth on earth is put
down on paper and reads
 THE TOAST 1 65

N ow is Night

If we look at Hegel’s example again, on this Monday before Lent,

1981, we will have to admit that it is not an example. Philosophy neces­
sarily starts out during a night “ in which all cows are black” 76 and in
which all women are confounded. Before the law of truth is written down
and so becomes the state, it is a vo/aos aypacfyos (“ unwritten law ” ): a law
that is not “ above ground and in the light of day,” but rather “ in weak­
ness and darkness.” Because they are familiar with the subterranean re­
gions, as Antigone is familiar with her grave, women rule on behalf of the
law. Such is the care with which Hegel reads “ the most magnificent and
satisfying work of art,” 77 the Sophoclean tragedy, in order to be able to
forget it again in writing his own tragedy. He neglects to mention that the
night of the senses is also called woman. And yet the chapter on Antigone
and ethics (with the subtitle Man and Woman) stands in a relation of rig­
orous homology to the chapter on sensuality. An unwritten word also
marks the beginning of the unwritten scene of writing that is the whole
Phenomenology. Sense-certainty, like women in Greece, also knows noth­
ing but night. The night must be destroyed, as Antigone is by a decree of
the state; but the decree, which begins all dialectical progress, is issued by
philosophical writing itself.
A question of feigned innocence marks the beginning of the end of
night. The philosopher (who, like his reform-pedagogical comrades in
arms, wishes to lead no one around by the nose) poses the question of
time. But the ontologist’s lips magically transform “ this” into “ the This”
and “ now” into “ the N ow ,” so that the question “ What is the N ow ?,”
impossible among ordinary speakers, must receive the equally impossible
answer “ The N ow is Night.” A more clever answer would have been no
answer at all. But once Hegel is given an .inch, he can proceed to his
“simple experiment.” Standing at a modest distance has paid off; the ser­
vant of the state now shows his concerned, overseer’s face. The sentence
spoken for the record is put into the record— but not without the for­
mulaic concession that writing something down is an act without conse­
quences for truth, or in other words is not an act at all. Such is the logic
of a discourse network that never quite drops the pretense of not being a
discourse network. But what sees the light of proverbial day twelve hours
later is the fact that writing and archiving are concrete discursive prac­
tices and are fatal to truth. In R A M philosophy nothing that people have
said is correct any more.
1 66 1800

This is not because the night of sense-certainty— according to Hegel—

is nonexistent, but because his own writing destroys something spoken.
The night has done its duty, which consists in getting men to speak and
philosophize; it can now dawn. Hippel’s quip, that one should learn
speaking from women and writing from men, became true. The osten­
sible observer, who wanted to let the subject and object of the senses be,
throws off his mask and steps into the truth of his bedeviled M .A. degree:
a teacher of reading and writing like Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow,
Pohlmann, Johann Christian Dolz, Stephani, and Lindhorst.
Rochow’s Child’s Companion, the first literary primer, tells its begin­
ning readers the sad story of Farmer Hans. He lent money to a city
slicker, but being illiterate he accepted meaningless scribbling instead of a
proper receipt and therefore never saw his money again. Belatedly con­
vinced of The Usefulness o f Reading and Writing, Hans immediately sent
his children to elementary school.78
At the beginning of the system of higher education— and The Phe­
nomenology o f the Spirit, as a preparation for philosophy, is nothing
else— there thus stands a reprise or reflection of the system of elementary
education.79 The discourse network of 1800 centered on the question of
how the most rustic, natural, or sensual consciousness could be made to
see the importance of reading and writing. Anyone who only speaks or
hears will necessarily be cheated— by those who can write, like middle-
class citizens, or by hollow truths like the night. Thus only the reverse
deceit will work. Anyone who learns to believe that writing and reading
are innocent and necessary has already passed the point of no return and
taken the first step into the Kingdom of God. Reading, as the stoic Zenon
was once told by Pythia, reading means having intercourse with the dead.
Whereas Poetry, as midpoint in the classical discourse network, pro­
cured its medial pleasures or the leap into pure signifieds, the two ex­
tremes, elementary instruction and philosophy, dealt with writing in its
materiality. The false receipt is effective as a signature, and the recorded
sentence at the beginning of philosophy is effective as a date.80Thus both
discourses played with the linking of writing and power. But because ped­
agogy spoke so vaguely about “ these children” and “ this mother,” 81 in
order to trap all children, just as philosophy legitimized the translation of
“ this” into “ the This,” any possibility of the signature has already been
sublated. After canceling speaking and dating, the Phenomenology can
bring on the forms of Spirit like the successive pictures in a gallery, just as
Poetry could let its film roll. All that remains of the conspiracy between
writing and power is the fact of its having been brought about. The writer
Hegel can forget it for that reason and thus go out after readers.
“ The N ow is Night” must be read twice to be falsified. The iteration
 THE TO AST 167

does not involve the two moments of writing and of refutation. O f course,
the law of the dark allows for writing, but not reading— as evidenced by
the poetic freedom of 1800. Night, woman, and speaking go together like
day, philosophy, and writing. Thus the night is not a mere example and
the successive moments of reading and writing are irreversible. The re­
corded sentence produces its two possible readings only in the light. The
first, insipid reading takes it as meaning simply a particular time marked
by the adverbial “ now,” the other, speculative reading as determining the
essence of the similarly named, but substantive category. In the first case
the sentence is false during the day, but was once true; in the second case
it is entirely false, because categories cannot be dated. They can only take
predicates, which exceed the subject of the sentence in generality and in
so doing “ destroy” it. That is precisely Hegel’s theorem of the speculative
sentence and his practice in refuting the night.82
There is something very simple to both theory and practice here. What
is true can no longer be inscribed in a single sentence, which can now
figure only as an element in a larger speculative movement, or, in other
words, in a book. Philosophy owes its raison d’etre to the refuted night.
At the same time, what is true can no longer be read in a single reading.
As a network of speculative sentences filling a book, it escapes all reading
mania and forgetfulness. Hegel’s cunningly constructed requirement of
“returning to the sentence and understanding it differently” is of course
the reason “ that in such circumstances, in order that the thought ex­
pounded might be fathomed, no advice can be given other than to read
the book twice.” 83 Consequently the writer of philosophy owes to the re­
futed everyday sentence his rescue from a danger clearly immanent in the
discourse network of 1800: he, too, could be as gracelessly consumed and
disposed of as the philosophy texts of old Europe were by a book of his
own entitled the Phenomenology.84 But philosophemes that contain two
possible readings and thus must be read repeatedly become just as un­
forgettable as (according to Schiller) poetry alone.
The philosopher thus exults victorious after the final refutation of
“thisness.” Lovers of the sensual, no matter what their sex, will never be
able to devour these sentences, in which Hegel gives them a piece of his
mind.
They speak of the existence of external objects, which can be more precisely de­
fined as actual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things, each of
them absolutely unlike anything else; this existence, they say, has absolute cer­
tainty and truth. They mean “ this” bit of paper on which I am writing— or rather
have written— “ this” ; but what they mean is not what they say. If they actually
wanted to say “ this” bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then
this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by
1 68 1800

language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently univer­

sal. In the actual attempt to say it, it would therefore crumble away.85

After a mere piece of paper has registered and refuted the recorded sen­
tence, it becomes a piece of dialectical evidence. In the process, however,
the material of storage turns into the material of decay. Hegel’s sentences
rise above the stuff on which his handwritten first draft was recorded; a
book that must be read again and again, that transcends all “ Thisness”
through technical means of reproducibility and reception— such a book
can safely let its manuscript go the way of all trash. From night to book—
the logic of the signified was never more brazen. It triumphs because the
materiality of the signifiers becomes “ beyond reach” for readers and
opponents.
The demonstration of his being beyond reach encourages the philoso­
pher to conclude with an even more deictic refutation of “ deixis.” Once
he leafs back through his own manuscript “ on which I write this, or
rather have written it,” he makes excessive use of the elementary power of
the pen to underscore. And that real, absolutely singular, wholly per­
sonal, individual Being, which in keeping with or because of his sentences
comes to nothing— that Being returns with Hegel’s simple “ I.” For once
the word I, otherwise used very unpoetically by philosophers as a neuter
or substantive, appears in the first person. The strange fate of all shifters
(“ here, now, this, that, it, I, you” etc.) in the sciences is to be “ usually
taken as the occasion for repair or revision practices,” which “ clear up,
translate, or interchange” 86 the shifters or even (as in the Phenomenol­
ogy) charge them with absurdity. When Hegel makes an exception of his
pen or even (as at the end of the book) brings it in, he repairs the repara­
tion. Whereas in Schiller only “ infinity” foams up out of “ the chalice of
the whole realm of spirits,” the god or philosopher (of) Hegel enjoys “ his
infinity out of the chalice of this realm of spirits.”

In the discourse network of 1800, the philosophical expurgation of dis­

courses constitutes a purge in the political sense of the word. Every “ this­
ness” disappeared in the face of the totalitarian “ thisness” of the author.
It began with women as they exist in plurality and proceeded as far as the
devil, whose quoted speech in the Phenomenology had its shifters ampu­
tated. The mopping up thus did not stop with educational bureaucrats.
Consider Hegel’s comments on Schelling’s System o f Transcendental
Idealism and on the author of a critique of that work, Wilhelm Traugott
Krug, later a professor of philosophy at Leipzig.

The second inconsistency Mr. Krug notices is that it was promised that the entire
system of our representations was to be deduced; and although he himself had
 THE TOAST 1 69

found a passage in the System o f Transcendental Idealism that explicated the

meaning of this promise, he nevertheless cannot keep himself from forgetting that
it is a question here of philosophy in general. Mr. Krug cannot keep himself from
treating the matter like the most common plebeian and demanding that every dog
and cat, and even Mr. Krug’s own writing quill, should be deduced; since this
doesn’t occur, he avers that his friend should be reminded of the mountain that
gave birth to a mouse; one shouldn’t have tried to give the impression that one
could deduce the entire system of representations.87

The author foams at the mouth and pen when it seems to him or a one­
time friend [Schelling] that for once there is no infinity foaming out of his
spirit realm. Krug has the audacity to want to see the most unreachable of
all unreachable “ thisnesses” deduced: the pen that writes down his cri­
tique. Rather than study German Idealism in tireless rereadings and in so
doing pay homage to the absolute pen, he writes his own replies. This
merits the philosophic death sentence: banishment into “ the rabble” and
the declaration that all other “ thisnesses” “ have more to do with philoso­
phy than Mr. Krug’s pen and the works it has written.” 88
Dieter Henrich has shown that Hegel’s “ mocking and ostensibly supe­
rior polemical tone conceals uncertainty about the problem,” 89 an uncer­
tainty inspires the Phenomenology to “ this piece of paper,” and the En­
cyclopedia to the promise that, after all other problems are resolved, one
would be able “ to give Mr. Krug hope for this achievement and respective
glorification of his pen.” 90But all Hegelian critiques of Hegel remain glori­
fications of the totalitarian pen, just as they include Krug’s exclusion. And
yet the Saxon philosopher— if only in the beyond that gives his autobiog­
raphy date and signature— unambiguously declared his pen-deduction
wish. For Krug, as if to sign the death sentence Hegel issued, informs the
“dear reader” that “ I have already, as they say below, passed away, and
am now sitting and writing up here in heaven; I will send this manuscript
with the next express mail, that is, with the next comet that will touch the
earth with its tail, to my friend the bookseller N. N., so that he can have
it published.” 91
In his past days on earth, however, the autobiographer confesses that
he had written less absolutely and with a pen much shorter than a comet’s
tail. A “ brief report on his literary activity in Wittenberg,” which is intro­
duced by references to a mysterious sadness and “ frequent, very frequent
writing,” cites as the seventh of Krug’s early works the Letters on Recent
Idealism: Against Schelling. N ot until after the publication of this list of
publications, only in the divine kingdom of completed alphabetization,
where one “ no longer blushes, because the ethereal bodies have no blood,
at least not red blood,” does Krug confess: “ There was a third reason
why I became such a copious writer. It was— can I admit this without
blushing?— love.” 92 It is always the same story in 1800. A “ miserable ad­
170 i8 oo

junct of the philosophical faculty” strove “ for literary fame” only because
“ his beloved was keen on writing, because she spoke with enthusiasm of
well-known authors.” But the future thinker did not think of marrying
the woman. “ I would have had to elope with her, and elopement was al­
ways abhorrent to me. It seemed so common to abscond with a woman.”
Deprived of his happiness by abhorrence of the rabble to which Hegel
would consign him, poor Krug could only “ cry like a child that has been
torn from its mother’s breast before it has quenched its thirst.” 93 Such
crying was synonymous with writing in 1800. Thus the pleasures of love
turn once more into necessity. In place of the impossible sexual relation
there arises, with an air of quiet grief, an educational bureaucrat, whose
works incessantly implore other educational bureaucrats to deduce, along
with the universe, this one, particular, irreplaceable pen. For only under
the (admittedly improbable) condition that the educational bureaucrats
could determine who had made him, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, cry and
speak and write, “ would he have no hesitation in signing his name to the
whole system with his deduced pen.” 94
But there are no women in philosophical discourse; it remains in a
neutered mode between friends or men. Krug revealed his motive for
writing among the dead and the Poets; Hegel, because his experience was
never very different,95 never sought where he might have found. And thus
philosophy forever lacks the signatures of those concerned. That is the
difference between philosophy and poetry, and whereas the latter did not
name any of the plurality of women, it did have the double-tongued, ref-
erence-as-you-like signified: Woman. In consequence, any number of
feminine readers signed the Poet’s text.
The difference was thus not determined by a doctrine of author-
individual versus the results of thought (as Schiller put it). The differ­
ence occurs only at the level in which such talk deals with the origins of
the different doctrines. Poets could claim singularity and thus love be­
cause they invoked the lost Woman who made them speak and write.
Philosophic doctrine, having lost or destroyed women (whether named
Gretchen or nameless like Krug’s mother-beloved), remained limited to
the male brotherhood of educational bureaucrats and returned only at
the end, as to a thoroughly constructed ideal, back to Mother Nature.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both projects. The poetic
project of translating out of and into the mother tongue constantly brings
about an insanity to which philosophy is immune: philosophy does not
know the unspeakable night except by writing, and can consider Reiser’s
or Franz Anton Mesmer’s attempts “ to think without words” only as
“ unreason.” 96 That is precisely why Poets could leave the recruitment of
readers to the ersatz modes of sensuality that came into being behind
their words; the philosopher, however, who stored sense-certainties and
 THE TOAST 171

spoken words only in written sentences, had to devise his own theory and
practice of the speculative sentence in order to make a necessity of the
repeated rereading of his work.
Poets and thinkers— the two remained separate even as the discourse
network of 1800 brought about their conjunction. Goethe called philoso­
phers “ those whom I could never do without and with whom I could
never come to terms.” 97 In a system that first produced, second dis­
tributed, and third consumed discourses, the poetic profession of distri­
bution was never very far from its productive abyss. The Poetry that in
1800, but no earlier, became the wine of the new aesthetics of content
interposed itself between the consumption of philosophic discourse and
the institutional authority in charge of its production. The Other— mean­
ing always the other sex— is repressed in poetic discourse and foreclosed
in philosophic.
Evidence for this is provided by a professor of philology, one whose
efforts (in the fine phrase of a successor to the same chair) made philoso­
phy out of what had once been philology.98 Friedrich Creuzer, married to
the widow of his doctoral adviser but in love with one of the impossible
woman poets of the period, contributed to the bond of friendship be­
tween Poetry and Idealism through his work on mythology, though the
myths in question had stood under a very different sign. But to reconceive
The Study o f the Ancients as Preparation for Philosophy had a price.99
This was “ an old, melancholy story” that “ one could just as well forget”
were it not “ characteristic of the spiritual mood of the age in which dwell
the finest memories in the history of German intellectual life.” 100
For Creuzer owed the inspiration that led him to works such as D io­
nysus or Symbolism and Mythology o f the Ancients to Giinderode, his
beloved. Creuzer identified her, beyond all sexual difference, with the god
in his treatises, who of course dissolved all differences; he also identified
himself with her. The study Dionysus was to have “ attained its purpose
when you realize how much I wish to be one with you in spirit and in my
work (where that is possible).” 101 Nothing is more necessary than “ to
harken to you in such research,” and nothing is more logical than “ to
write for you” 102a philosophical transposition of mythology. In an appar­
ent exception, then, philosophy retracted its constitutive foreclosure; like
Poetry, it invoked the feminine producer of discourse.
But letters are not lectures. Public speech among the latest crop of bu­
reaucrats, and therefore men, required that the mystical union of Diony­
sus, poetess, and philosopher be expressed differently. Creuzer did not
speak the name of the one who put words into his mouth.

I must tell Poesy the story of how I happened to quote some of her verse in a
lecture lately. It was in ancient history, where I wanted to explain how after the
172. i8 oo

death of Alexander the Great the ensuing wars . . . gave birth to a new world.
W ho was it that put these words into my mouth?
Such powers, too, the universe requires
and is never suited by standing at rest.

To which I added, quite properly and soberly, “ as a new poet has said so well.”
Later I was happy about the event and had to smile, until my genius came sadly
forward and spoke the Greek words: poetry brings you love at the lectern but
never to your bed.103

The incident demonstrates what became of women’s names in the dis­

course of the university. They vanished through a double substitution.
The letter accomplished a first substitution in a manner homologous
to that of poetry, in that the impossible author’s name “ Giinderode” is
replaced by “ Poesy.” Women could not write poetry because they were
Poetry— and thus accidents like Sophie Mereau or Giinderode could only
be named the Woman or Poesy.104An Eternal Virgin remains a virgin even
when one sleeps with her (though not in the marriage bed).10s But that is
not enough; the repression must be repressed until sex no longer counts.
Properly sober, Creuzer moved toward foreclosure. Rather than “ Poesy,”
which in turn stands for Caroline von Giinderode, the students hear “ a
new poet.” The homosexuality of philosophy and poetry has just de­
stroyed another woman.
Whether publishing Giinderode’s dramas in his scholarly journal or
dodging his wife’s suspicion of love letters, Creuzer constantly gave Giin­
derode masculine names. Thus she became, in word and deed, one of
those boys who ultimately were the reason for the refusal of her constant
plea to be allowed to live in the same city as her beloved. A pseudony­
mous Eusebio answers his (fe)male beloved:
Indeed, let it be said, for once I want to think selfishly only of Eusebio: his life’s
work is to open up the silent temple of antiquity for a number of boys. But where
will he find the calm presence of mind necessary for the task, when he is driven, as
if by malevolent spirits, back and forth through fruitless effort and storms of op­
position against a bitter fate? Beloved, please understand! I owe you a great debt,
a debt to be weighed against the value of life (because only you have given me a
life worthy to be so named)— but you owe me peace, and you will grant it to
me .106

Thus the ethos of educational bureaucracy in its relation to women: a

Kingdom of God revealed to boys through the philosophic interpretation
of antiquity has as little room for women’s bodies as it does for their
names. Any noise of the lips, whether it be speaking or kissing, disturbs
the hermeneutic of silent temples. Only as long as women do not set foot
in Heidelberg and remain instead the distant source of all philosophizing
can the initiation ritual of the university be successful. One can lead stu­
dents around by the nose for years with a new poet.
 THE TOAST 1 73

Six weeks after this letter the exchange was perfect. For his lifelong
debt, Creuzer received peace: Giinderode drowned herself— Winkel on
the Rhine, July z 6, 1806, irrefutable night.
The discourse network of 1800 closes like a trap on its victims. It rests
on corpses. With that we close its book.
p
p
 II

1900

y = (+a) + ( - a ) + (+ a) + ( - a ) + . . . Bolzano
 Nietzsche: Incipit Tragoedia

“ M y time extend s on ly from the sum m er m onths in Sils-M aria (N ie tz ­

sch e’s ‘ F orew ord to the Early W o rk s’ ) and in the foo th ills o f A ntibes, as
M o n et painted it, in to this w in ter o f d am n ation and nights o f fire.’ ’ ' T h e
historical adventures o f sp eakin g d o not form a con tin u u m and so d o not
constitute a history o f ideas. T h ey are m arked by b reaks that in a single
stroke can consign entire discourse n etw o rk s to o b livio n , and th ey have
plateau s that m ake on e forget the ad vance o f arm ies and hours even d u r­
ing the w inters o f w o rld w ars. W hat cam e to an end d u rin g the sum m ers
o f S ils-M aria, those fe w sum m ers o f free w ritin g , w a s ev eryth in g “ in the
o rd e r o f culture, scholarship , and scien ce, o f the fam ilial and b en evo len t
ch aracter that distinguished G erm an literature o f the nineteenth cen tu ry
in so m any w a y s.” 2 T h u s G o ttfrie d Benn, w ith ch aracteristic exactn ess,
selected and gathered up the p articu lar fu n ctio n s that con stitu ted the d is­
cou rse n etw o rk o f 1 800. T h e official lo c u s o f p rod u ction fo r G erm an P o­
etry w as the nuclear fam ily; scholars saw to its m u ltip licatio n ; and a sci­
en ce that claim ed the title S cien ce p ro v id e d its justification. If, w ith
H ofm an nsthal, on e claim s that on ly this orga n iza tio n o f d iscou rse is le­
gitim ate, then everything that b egan w ith N ietzsch e com es to nothing. In
the em pty space w h ere one w o u ld w ish t o see a “ n ew literatu re,” there
w ould be only “ G o e th e and b egin n in gs.” 1 But the b reak w as so radical
that th o se fascin ated w ith G o e th e had difficulty recogn izin g that the
“ literature” that developed in place o f G erm an P oetry w as in fa ct litera ­
ture. “ T w o men determ ine the G erm an aesthetic o f our tim e: G o e th e and
N ietzsche. O n e form s it, and th e oth er destroys it.” 4 W h en the one
M o th e r ga v e w a y to a p lu rality o f w om en , w hen the a lp h ab etizatio n -
[y8 1900

m ade-flesh gave w ay to tech n ological m edia, and w h en p h ilosop h y gave

w ay to the p sych op h ysical or psych o a n a lytic d eco m p o sitio n o f lan gu age,
Poetry a lso disintegrated. In its place arose, w h eth er G erm an o r not, an
artistry in the full range o f this N ietzsch ean term : from the m agic of
letters to a histrionics o f m edia.
O v e r the beginning o f literature circa 190 0 stands a curse. “ W h oever
k n o w s the reader w ill henceforth d o nothing fo r the reader. A n other cen ­
tury o f readers— and the spirit itself w ill stink. T h a t ev eryo n e m ay learn
to read, in the lon g run corru pts not only w riting but also th in k in g.’’ 1
Z a ra th u stra ’s curse strikes at the tech n ological-m aterial basis o f the dis­
course n etw o rk o f 1800: universal a lp h ab etizatio n . N o t con ten t o r m es­
sage but the m edium itself m ade the Spirit, the corp u s c o m p o sed o f G e r ­
man Poetry and G erm an Idealism, in to a stin kin g cad aver. T h e m urderer
o f the letter m et its ow n d eath.
N ietzsch e th erefore described, alth ou gh in a tran svalu ation o f all v a l­
ues just w h a t the readin g and w ritin g reform ers o f 1800 did. E x c e p t for
the sign determ in ing value, there is n o difference betw een the tw o f o llo w ­
ing descriptions o f readin g (the first pu blish ed in 1 7 8 6 , the second in
1886).

W ith p ra c tic e , e v e ry th in g sh o u ld b e c o m e a k n a c k as n a tu r a l a s feeling, so th a t

o n e c a n su rv ey th e w h o le easily a n d q u ick ly w i th o u t b e in g c o n sc io u s o f every
sin g le d e ta il, and th e n m ake o n e ’s cho ice. K n o w le d g e o f le tte rs is n o t yet k n o w l­
ed g e o f re a d in g , even th o u g h m ec h an ic al re ad in g is n o th in g m o re th an p r o n o u n c ­
in g letters. O n ly o n e w h o c an ta k e in w h o le w o rd s o r even lines a t a g lan c e, w ith ­
o u t th in k in g o f in d iv id u a l le tte rs , k n o w s h o w t o re a d .6

J u s t a s little a s a re a d e r to d ay re a d s all o f the in d iv id u a l w o rd s (let a lo n e syllables)

on a p a g e — r a th e r he p ick s a b o u t five w o rd s a t ra n d o m o u t o f tw en ty a n d
“ g u e sse s” a t th e m e a n in g t h a t p ro b a b ly b e lo n g s to th e se five w o rd s — ju st a s little
d o w e see a tre e exactly and c o m p le te ly w ith re fe re n ce to leaves, tw igs, c o lo r, a n d
fo rm ; it is so very m u c h easie r f o r us sim ply to im p ro v ise s o m e a p p r o x im a tio n of
a tree. . . . All th is m ea n s: basically a n d from tim e im m e m o ria l w e a re — accus­
tom ed to lying. O r to p u t it m o re v irtu o u s ly a n d h y p o c ritica lly , in s h o r t, m o re
p lea sa n tly : o n e is m u ch m o re o f a n a r tis t th a n o n e k n o w s .7

N ietzsch e’s d escrip tion confirm s the great exten t to w hich the e d u c a ­
tional p rogram s o f 1800 had achieved statistical rea lity .' But a sob erin g
period fo llo w s that trium ph. H erm eneutic readin g, o n ce praised as k n ack
o r even feeling in o rd er to m ake it p alatab le, is scorned and called a lie.
W hen unfeelingly described as discursive m anipulation rath er than view ed
from the inner p ersp ective o f its beneficiaries, universal alp h a b etizatio n
turns ou t to be the begin nin g o f self-deception and, as such, o f the p r o ­
liferatio n o f artists. M o d e rn readers w h o arbitrarily hit u pon five w o rd s
o u t o f tw e n ty in ord er to g e t to the m eaning as q u ick ly as p ossible p ra c ­
tice the sam e tech n iqu e as w riters and rew riters.
 NIETZSCHE 179

T h e m o st a s to n is h in g th in g m ay c o m e to p a s s — th e h o s t o f th e h isto ric a lly n e u tra l

is alw ay s th e re re a d y to su p e rv ise th e a u th o r o f it even w hile h e is still fa r off. T h e
e c h o is h e a rd im m e d ia tely : b u t alw ay s a s a “ c ritiq u e ,” th o u g h th e m o m e n t b e fo re
th e critic did n o t so m uch as d ream o f th e p o ssib ility o f w h a t has b e en d o n e . T h e
w o rk nev er p ro d u c e s an effect b u t only a n o th e r “ c ritiq u e ” ; and th e c ritiq u e itself
p ro d u c e s n o effect e ith e r, b u t a g a in o nly a f u r th e r c ritiq u e .’

From skipping ov er letters to su rveyin g an au th or, from an elem entary

trick in readin g to sem i-official literary criticism — the m ethod rem ains
the sam e. A cco rd in g to Fichte, herm eneutics sim ply m eans w ritin g a n y ­
thin g a b o u t a w o r k , w ith the ex cep tio n o f its actu al te x t. N ietzsch e’s d i­
agn osis o f a p ath o lo gical increase in the p o p u lation o f a u th ors continues
a com p lain t m ade w hen the m alad y had just b e g u n ;10 bu t N ietzsch e
nam ed the ro o t o f the evil. In H um an, A ll to o H um an, on e reads in the
section entitled “ T h e N am e on the T itle-P a g e” :

T h a t th e n a m e of th e a u th o r sh o u ld b e in sc rib e d o n th e b o o k is n o w c u sto m a ry
a n d a lm o st a d u ty ; y et it is o n e o f th e m a in re a so n s b o o k s p r o d u c e so little effect.
F or if they a re g o o d , th e n , as the q u in te sse n c e o f the p e rso n a lity o f th e ir a u th o rs ,
th ey a re w o r th m o re th a n th ese; b u t a s so o n a s th e a u th o r a n n o u n c e s h im s e lf o n
th e title -p a g e , th e re a d e r a t o n c e d ilu tes th e qui n tesse n ce a g a in w ith th e p e rso n a lity ,
in d ee d w ith w h a t is m o st p e rso n a l, and th u s th w a r ts th e o b je c t o f the b o o k ."

A lp h ab etized readin g, w h ich w o u ld con tin u e w ritin g rather than rec­

ognize letters on the page, thus has a correlate in p ro d u ctio n : the fu n c­
tion o f authorship. From the sam e e x te rio r position in w hich his irony
revealed the arb itrary c h o ic e am o n g tw en ty w ord s, N ietzsch e a lso scorns
the new rule o f discourse that em bellishes title pages w ith nam es. T h e hu­
m an, all to o hum an o r personal, in d eed , m ost p erso n a l, w h ich is attributed
by the a n th ro p o lo g y o f lan gu age to all signs, burdens a readin g that “ at
on ce looks beyon d the w o r k ” and asks after “ the history o f its au th or. . . .
in the previous and possible future progress o f his d evelo p m en t.” 12
A lp h ab etiza tio n , readin g that continu es w ritin g or the nam e o f the a u ­
th o r— w ith the excep tion o f the fem inine reading fu n ctio n , N ietzsch e’s
u n sparin g analysis brings together all the con trol loops o f the classical
discourse n etw o rk . T h e sum m ary results in a negative evalu ation . W ords
have no effect because they are skipp ed over; readin g issues o n ly in w r it­
ing; a u th o rs’ nam es detract from the phenom enon o f the b o o k . In ret­
rospect the discourse n etw ork o f 1800 is a single m achine designed to
neutralize discursive effects and establish “ ou r absurd w o rld o f ed u ­
cato rs” — “ to the ‘ able servant o f the state’ this p rom ises a regu lating
sc h e m a ” — foun d ed on th e ruins o f w o rd s.13
O n the basis o f this a n a lytica lly v e ry a ccom p lish ed su m m ation , Z a ra -
th u stra can dare to call the Spirit a stin kin g cadaver.
N ietzsch e k n e w w h at he w as ta lk in g about. T h e form er student o f the
 i8 o 1900

royal acad em y truly ow ed “ the totality o f his ed u cation ” to the d iscou rse
n etw o rk o f 1800; a cco rd in g to the rector, P forta under Prussian o c c u p a ­
tion constitu ted “ a self-con tain ed ed u cational state, w hich com p letely a b ­
sorb ed all a sp ects o f the life o f the in d iv id u a l.” 14 In 18 5 9 , on the on e-
hundredth birthd ay o f Schiller, students heard a teacher, w h o had been
com m ission ed by Prussian au thorities to w rite the first textb o o k on G e r ­
man literary history, d eliver an address on the greatness o f the Poet; they
then spent the even ing hours, after a celeb ra to ry dinner, in general, but
private, readin g o f Schiller in the sch ool library.11 O n e spent the rest o f
o n e’s school tim e attem p ting to d ea l w ith on e’s o w n person in the m anner
that Karl A u g u st K ob erstein ’s literary history dealt w ith the classical w r it­
ers. A s Poet and C ritic unified in o n e person, the sch o o lb o y N ietzsch e
w ro te , aside from poetic w o rk s, the corresp on d in g p o etic a u to b io g ra ­
phies, w h ich , after conjuring the in exh au stible days o f his c h ild h o o d ,
regularly listed his private reading and w riting. “ M y L ife ” ; “ C o u rse o f
M y L ife ” ; “ A L o o k B a c k ” ; “ From M y L ife ” ; “ M y L iterary and M usical
A c tiv ity ” — and so on runs the list that an a u th or fro m the n ew c ro p by
the nam e o f N ietzsch e added to the classical d iscou rse n etw o rk . O n ly
m uch later, nam ely, at the university level o f the sam e ed u cation al path,
could he read the “ a u to b io gra p h ical co n stru ctio n s, w h ich w ere to have
justified the co n tin gen cy o f his b ein g” 14 fo r w h a t they w ere: G erm an es­
says, program m ed by p ed agogu es and w ritten by students in the royal
academ y. L ook in g lon gingly to w a rd a different “ Future o f O u r E d u ca ­
tional Institutions,” N ietzsch e, the professor o f p h ilology, described their
nineteenth century:

T h e la st d e p a r tm e n t in w h ic h th e G e rm a n te a c h e r in a p u b lic sc h o o l is a t all a c ­
tive, w h ich is a ls o re g a rd e d as h is s p h e r e o f h ig h e st a ctiv ity , a n d is h e re a n d th e re
even c o n sid e re d th e p in n acle o f p u b lic -sc h o o l e d u c a tio n , is th e “ G e rm a n essa y .”
B ecause th e m o st g ifte d pupils a lm o s t alw ay s display th e g re a te s t e a g e rn e ss in th is
d e p a rtm e n t, it o u g h t to h a v e b e e n m a d e c le a r h o w d a n g e ro u sly s tim u la tin g , p re ­
cisely h e re, th e ta s k o f th e te a c h e r m u st be. T h e G e rm an essay is a call to th e
in d iv id u a l, a n d th e m o re s tro n g ly a pupil is c o n sc io u s o f his d istin g u ish in g q u a li­
tie s , th e m o r e p e rso n a lly w ill h e d o his G e rm a n essay. T h is “ p e rso n a l d o in g ” is
fu rth e r e n c o u ra g e d a t m o st sc h o o ls by th e c h o ic e o f essay to p ic s, a n d I find th e
s tro n g e st e v id e n c e o f th is in th e lo w e r g ra d e s, w h e re p u p ils a re given th e n o n -
p e d ag o g ica l to p ic o f d e sc rib in g th e ir o w n life, th e ir o w n d e v e lo p m e n t. . . . H o w
often d o e s so m e o n e ’s la te r lite ra ry w o rk tu rn o u t to b e th e sa d c o n se q u e n c e o f th is
p e d ag o g ica l o rig in a l sin a g a in st th e s p i r i t! 17

All the sins o f the classical discourse n etw o rk thus con cen trate in the
G erm an essay. A lo n e, cryin g in the w ild ern ess, N ietzsch e discovered the
m aterial basis o f any literary w o rk an d , in p articu lar, o f his o w n . T h e
pam phlet O u r S ch o o l Essay as a D isg u ised D im e N o v elist w a s soo n to
appear in mass ed ition s; with affectionate stylistic criticism it d em on ­
 N IE T Z S C H E I8 I

strated the identity b etw een, on the one han d , K arl M ay, B u ffalo B ill, and
T exas Jack , and on the o th e r hand, the 386 m od el essays on Iphigenia
w ritten by te a c h e rs."
T h e S pirit stin ks because o f th e p ed ag o gic origin al sin a ga in st it. First
the G erm an essay generates p ro d u ctive literary men (m ore precisely,
sch oolb oys); secon d, it generates the au to b io gra p h ies o f their p ro d u c ­
tion ; third, it generates— because they so glad ly m ake “ o b lig a to ry ” the
“ judgm ent o f w o rk s o f p o etry ” '*— the literary-critical con tin u ators, those
w h o w r o te “ Letter to M y Friend, in W h ich 1 R ecom m end the R ead in g o f
M y Favorite Poet” and generally n eutralized discursive effects.20
Even in dead-silent, solitary room s, the gym n asiu m students o f the
nineteenth cen tu ry w e re n ever alo n e; the “ to tality o f their ed u ca tio n ”
con tain ed them as the G erm an essay con tain ed the literary industry. T h e y
cou ld intend and understand everyth ing that paper patien tly to o k and
gave— excep t the “ influence o f w o m e n ,” as N ietzsch e later learned to his
“ aston ishm en t.” 2' T h ey w ere very w e ll prepared for a cu ltu re o f universal
alp h abetizatio n .
T h u s the classical-rom an tic discourse n e tw o rk ended in m egalom an ia
and desperation. A fragm en t, n ot accid en tally entitled “ E u p h o rio n ,” sets
the courtly signature “ F W v N ietzk y , hom m e etudie en lettres” beneath a
self-p ortrait o f naked despair.

It is d e a th ly still in th e ro o m — th e o n e so u n d is th e p e n s c ra tc h in g a c ro s s th e
p a p e r — for I love to think by w ritin g , given th a t th e m ach in e th a t c o u ld im p rin t
o u r th o u g h ts in to s o m e m a te ria l w ith o u t th e ir b e in g sp o k e n o r w ritte n h a s y e t to
b e in v en te d . In fro n t o f m e is an inkw ell in w h ic h I c a n d ro w n th e s o rro w s o f m y
b la c k h e a rt, a p a ir o f sc isso rs t o a c c u sto m m e t o t h e id ea o f s littin g m y t h r o a t,
m a n u s c rip ts w ith w h ic h I c a n w ip e m yself, a n d a c h a m b e r p o t.22

T h is is a prim al scene, less w ell k n o w n b u t n o less frau gh t w ith co n se­

quences than the despair o f Faust in and over his study in the R ep u b lic o f
Scholars. T h e scholar is replaced, h ow ever, by the very man o f letters
w h o m Faust m ade to ap p ear m agically as the redeem er from heaps o f
b o o k s. T h e on e w h o signs h im self “ hom m e etudie en lettres” has e x p eri­
enced n oth in g b eyon d the fo rm ative ed u cation o f the gym n asiu m , w hich
as an “ appeal to the in d iv id u a l” is the o p p o site o f sch olarly train ing. T h e
scen e o f w riting is therefore bare o f all library prop s, and thus b are, to o ,
o f any enigm a a b o u t h o w supposed te x ts are to be translated in to Spirit
and m eaning. T h e solitary w riter is a w riter and n oth in g m ore: n o t a
tran slator, scribe, o r interpreter. Bare and im poverished, the scratch in g o f
the pen exposes a fun ction that had never been described: w ritin g in its
m ateriality. T h ere is n o Bible to G erm an ize, n o v o ic e to tran scrib e, and so
there are none o f the m iracles that in 1800 o b scu red that m ateriality. O n e
n o lo n ger w rites aroun d the fa c t o f w ritin g — w ritin g has b eco m e its ow n
182 1900

m edium . Even in the clin ic fo r nervous diseases in Jena, N ietzsch e w a s

“ h a p p y and in his elem ent” as lo n g as he had p en cils.21 But alread y the
man o f letters F W v N ietzk y , in con trast to the sch o o lb o y W ilh elm
Friedrich N ietzsch e, is th rou gh w ith p u ttin g literary w o rk s, literary a u to ­
b io grap h ies, and discussions o f literature on p a p e r— b eyo n d the act o f
w ritin g there is n oth in g at all. W h eth er o r not the star pupil o f the
Sch ulp forta G ym n asiu m w o u ld have h ad anythin g to say, had the p ed ­
a g o g u es left him alon e, is u n im p ortan t. In the “ E u p h o rio n ” fragm en t, in
the countless n o teb o o k s that until the final day in T urin recorded
thoughts and lau n d ry receipts, possible b ook titles and h ead ach e rem e­
dies, to say n oth in g o f the few scribbles from the insane a sylu m , w hich
found their w a y b ack to the em p ty schem a o f the a u to b io gra p h ical G e r ­
man essay,24 N ietzsch e’s papers-record on ly the prim al scene and its en ­
d u rin g en igm a.

W h a t is m o s t d is tu rb in g in th e p o s th u m o u s fra g m e n ts is th e f a c t th a t th e y a re n o t
a c o lle c tio n o f n o te s , b u t ra th e r a c o lle c tio n o f w ritin g e x e rc ise s, in d e e d rh e to ric a l
e x ercises in th e se n se o f a tte m p ts a t v a rio u s styles, in w h ic h th e id ea s a re th e n ru n
th ro u g h th e ir d e clen sio n s. N ie tz sc h e finally a c h ie v e d a lex ic o n in w h ic h w o rd s
e m p tie d o f all c o n te x t w e re b ro u g h t back in to p h ra se s , o r w e re id io m iz e d , so to
sp e a k ; it w a s a m u te e x ercise, c arrie d o n w ith o u t fu rth e r c o m m e n ta ry , b e tw ee n
th e v o c a b u la ry n o te b o o k , th e tr a n s la tio n g u id e , and th e c o lle c tio n o f sty listic
h o w le rs.25

W hen w ritin g rem ains a w ritin g exercise, a spare and dism al act w ith ­
o u t any extension in to w h a t is called b o o k , w o r k , o r genre, there is n o
p la ce for the “ personal presentation and form ation ” so dear to the essay
ped agogu es. T h e “ appeal to the in d ivid u al” to b ecom e an in d ivid ual and
author com es to n o th in g precisely because the m odel pupil takes it liter­
ally. For the on e w h o takes up the pen and w rites is n o o n e; instead o f
serving an ind ivid u al, the inkw ell drow ns a black heart; instead o f aid in g
the process o f revision and rereadin g, the technical prem ises o f a u th o r ­
ship, the p air o f scissors has a qu ite different task. A n d as w ith the in d i­
v id u a l, so to o w ith his p ro d u c tio n — m anuscripts destined fo r the c h a m ­
b e r p o t. Z a ra th u s tra ’s nose fo r S pirit o r the stench o f th e w r itin g cu ltu re
thus com es from a scene o f w ritin g in w hich the p ro p s— pen, in kw ell,
scissors, ch am b er p o t— have d on e a w a y w ith the eg o and its m eanings.
T h e a u th or d isap p ears, to say n oth in g o f the readers he m ight ad dress; in
the “ E u p h orion ” fragm en t w ritin g produces refuse and feces rather than
p oetic w o rk s. Precisely becau se N ie tzk y is an oth er E u p h orion , w h o p o s ­
sessed in his p aren ts a co m p lete classicism and rom an ticism , in that he
had at his com m an d every facility o f the classical-rom an tic d iscou rse net­
w o rk , the p e d ag o gic prom ises and the literary train ing, there w a s n o eu­
ph oria; he fell, true to his nam e until the end.
 NIETZSCHE 183

M odern texts w o u ld fo llo w this d o w n w ard trajecto ry in va rio u s w ays.

N ietzk y -N ietzsch e tou ch ed on the z e ro point on w hich literature in 1900
w ould build. It is intransitive w ritin g that is n ot d irected to w a rd w ritten
truths or readers; rather, “ all its threads c o n v erge upon the finest o f
p o in ts— singular, instan taneou s, and yet ab so lu tely u n iversal— u pon the
sim ple act o f w ritin g ” ; it is w ritin g that “ b reaks w ith the w hole definition
o f genres as form s ad ap ted to an ord er o f representation ” and th at can be
“ a silent, cau tio u s d ep osition o f the w o rd upon the w hiteness o f a piece o f
paper, w here it can possess n either sound n or in terlo cu to r.” 24
In the deathly still room , on ly the pen m akes a soun d. N eith er sound
n or p h on etic m ethod supports a w ritin g th a t occu rs w ith o u t prelim inary
speech and so w ith o u t a sou l. If som ething precedes its m ateriality, it is
only the m ateriality o f sound itself. A n isolated, early o b servation by
N ietzsche records the d eafen in g noise in this still scen e o f w ritin g : “ W h a t
I fear is not the h orrib le shape behind m y chair but its v o ice: n ot the
w o rd s, but the frightenin gly inarticu late and inhum an ton e o f that shape.
If on ly it w o u ld speak as p e o p le sp e a k !” 27
In its begin nin g G erm an Poetry had shut out the anim al sou n d s o f a
po o d le and preferred, when tran slating prelingu istic feelings, to fo llo w
the advice o f a Spirit that only later articu lated its o w n nam e. A n in a r­
ticulate ton e defines the z e r o point o f literature, a ton e not o n ly inh u m an ,
but also n o t anim al o r d em on ic. T h e creaturely so u n d s th a t filled the lan ­
gu age space o f the sixteenth cen tu ry w ere silenced w h en M a n becam e
aw are o f a beloved lan gu age o r a w o m a n ’s voice. T h e inhum an ton e b e­
hind N ietzsch e’s b ack is not the speech at the b egin nin g o f a rticu latio n ; it
is not speech at all. All discourse is pow erless against it because all d is­
courses add to it and fall prey to it. W ith in the realm o f all soun ds and
w ord s, all organism s, w h ite noise appears, the incessant and in erad icab le
b a ck g ro u n d o f in form ation . For the very channels through w h ich in fo r­
m ation m ust pass emit noise.
In 1800 sim ple, un articu lated tones w e re excom m u n ica ted . T h e y fo ­
mented an insanity that, in con trast to the fixed idea, had n o po etic value:
that o f the im becile.2' If o n e had n o “ ability to com prehend the speech o f
oth ers,” o n e w a s required to assu m e “ the posture o f readin g a lo u d and
slow ly d urin g an a tta ck .” 2’ W riters like Fau st o r A n selm u s w ere allow ed
to trust their inm ost feeling only because it w as su p ported by readin g,
w hich in turn w as sup ported by a hum an lan gu age o r voice.
N ietzsch e, h ow ever, w ro te before and a fter w hite noise. Fie to o k so
literally the G erm an essay’s appeal “ to listen to o n e’s ow n th o u gh ts and
feelin gs” th at thoughts and feelings turned in to their op p osites: the lis­
tener hears a “ hum m ing and roarin g o f th e w ild cam p s” w ith in him ,
w hich fight an irrecon cilab le “ civil w a r.” W here there shou ld have been a
184 1900

prelinguistic inw ardness, susceptible to articu latio n and d evelopm en t, “ a

roar w ent through the air.” 10
T h e frightenin g, inarticu late tone that N ietzsch e heard behind his b ack
hum s in the ears them selves. W h at does not sp eak as p eo p le sp eak w o u ld
be called (if it co u ld have a nam e) “ N ietzsch e.” T h e a u to b io g ra p h y d em ­
onstrates this for N ie tz sc h e ’s o w n beginning: “ A t an absu rd ly ea rly age,
at seven, I alread y knew that n o hum an w o rd w o u ld ever reach me.” 31
T h e m edical records from Jena dem on strate it for his end: “ O fte n scream s
inarticulately.” 32 E verything began fo r him, then, w hen hum an o r p e d a ­
g o g ica l en cou ragem en t w as unable to cover over the noise at the basis o f
all inform ation channels and instead m erged w ith it. A n d ev eryth in g
ended w hen he left T h e W ill t o Pow er sittin g on his desk, turned arou n d
in his chair, and d issolved in to the noise th at had h orrified him for as lon g
as he lived o r w ro te.
T h e w o m a n ’s vo ice that m ade A n selm us w rite occu p ied the sam e chair
he did: it exem plified the in terlo ck in g m edia n etw ork o f sp ea k in g and
w ritin g , o f th e soul and Poetry. T h e vo ice th a t form ed the grou n d for
N ietzsch e’s w ritin g exercises rem ained behind his ch air, and he w as u n ­
a b le ever to unlearn th e h o rro r it inspired. It halted all ero tic ex ch a n g e
betw een orality and w ritin g , red u cin g w riting to pure m ateriality. “ You
should have su n g, m y so u l,” is a pathetic sen ten ce— in th a t “ there is n o
so u l” and “ aesthetics is n oth in g b u t a kind o f applied p h y sio lo g y .” 33
H en cefo rth , there ex ist on ly the tw o sides o f an ex clu sio n . Behind the
ch air there is w h ite noise, that is, p h ysio lo g y ; in fro n t o f the chair, there
are the in k w ell, the scissors, p a p er, and w o rd s as m ultiple as they are
em pty. For if the incessant noise can w h isp er anything to w riters, its m es­
sage can o n ly be N ietzsch e’s sentence “ 1 am a m aker o f w ord s: w h a t do
w ords m atter! w h a t d o I m atter!” ’4

W ritin g and w riters as accid en tal events in a noise that generates a c c i­

dents and thus can n ever be overcom e by its accid en ts: N ietzsch e com es
quite close to the poetics o f M a llarm e. Faust’s helpful Spirit diverted the
a ct o f w ritin g tow ard a go a l in the b ey o n d , the tran scen dental signified o f
the w ord ; H ip p el’s anathem a exclu d ed literary hacks from the realm o f
souls; m akers o f w ord s, how ever, never escape the m edium they institute.
An an ecd ote con cern in g M a llarm e illustrates this. “ D eg as o ccasio n a lly
w ro te verses, and som e o f those he left w ere d eligh tfu l. But he often
found great d ifficulty in this w ork accessory to his painting. . . . O ne day
he said to M allarm e: ‘ Yours is a hellish cra ft. 1can’t m anage to say w h a t 1
w an t, and yet I’m full o f ideas. . . .’ And M a llarm e answ ered: ‘ M y dear
D egas, on e does n ot m ake p o etry w ith ideas, but w ith w o r d s ' ” 35 T h e last
 NIETZSCHE l8 j

p h ilosoph er and the first m odern poet agreed even in their ch oice o f
w ord s. M a llarm e d ecom poses the phrase m aker o f w ords in a single sen­
tence. For N ietzsch e it becam e im possible to put his o w n th o u gh ts and
feelings on p a p e r becau se all m eanin g w as lo st in n oise. F or M a lla rm e
m eanin gs o r ideas had been played o u t, so th at there w a s n o lo n g er any
translation from on e m edium , literature, to another, such as painting.
T here w a s n oth in g to m akers o f w ord s (accord in g to the w o rd -m a k er
N ietzsche); M a llarm e called his hellish profession the “ elo cu tio n a ry dis­
appearance o f the p o e t, w h o cedes the initiative to w o rd s.” 34 W ritin g that
can discover the basis o f its rights neither in w h at is w ritten n or in the
w riter has its m essage only in the m edium it constitutes. In 190 0, in direct
descent from N ietzsch e, “ w o rd art” becam e syn o n ym ou s w ith literatu re.37
A professor w h o w as no longer a professor and an ed u cation al b u re a u ­
c ra t w h o n o longer w a n te d to be on e sto od at the thresh old o f a n ew d is­
course n etw o rk .3* S o o n every child w o u ld learn th a t m akers o f w ord s are
n ot authors and th a t w ord s a re n ot id eas. T h e con fu sion betw een w o rd s
and ideas that had sup ported an entire classicism did not end on ly in so li­
ta ry room s. O n D ecem ber 4, 1890, the em p eror’s irrefu tab le m outh
issued an order p la cin g G erm an as a school su b ject at the center o f all
p ed ag o gy and essay w ritin g at the center o f this center.3’ W ith th at, G e r ­
man ceased to be b e y o n d all school in stru ction , a realm w h ere w ord s
w ere a lw ays bypassed fo r their m eanings and thus fo r the u n iversity d isc i­
pline o f ph ilosophy. C on seq u en tly, a decree o f 190 4 did a w a y w ith the
study o f p h ilosop h y as an “ o b liga to ry part o f the d o cto ra l ex a m in a ­
tio n .” 40 Indeed, the great exp erim ental p sych o lo g ist Flerm ann E bbing-
haus n early succeeded in h avin g p h ilosop h y replaced by p h ysio lo gical
p sych o lo g y in exam in ation s fo r teach in g p osition s. S ch ools also cam e
close to teach in g that aesthetics is n oth in g m ore than applied p h ysio lo gy.
But if w ritin g came to be at the center o f the center in sch o o l, p h ysio l­
o g y also fo u n d its w a y in to the classroom , even w ith o u t b eing included in
exam in ation regulations. T h e n oise that grou n d ed N ietzsch e’s w ritin g
w as put d o w n on paper. Free essays, ad vocated b y the art-edu cation
m ovem en t begin nin g in 190 4, con trib u ted neither to u n fo ld in g the in d i­
vid u ality o f th eir authors n or to the ideality o f th eir th o u gh ts. A t an e x ­
trem e th ey sim ply led to w ritin g d o w n the d ro n in g in feverish ch ild ren ’s
heads. W hat N ietzsche alread y k n e w at the absurdly early age o f seven
years attained positive discursive reality. A rt ed u cation gave up on rea ch ­
ing its pupils w ith hum an o r ped agogical w ord s. Instead, it em p hasized
h o w “ p rod u ctive the child is w ith its lan gu a g e,” and com p lain ed that
children should be “ forced to prod u ce in a foreign lan gu age, nam ely that
o f the a d u lt.” 41 L ittle m akers o f w o rd s w ere m ost free if their sp eakin g
i 86 1900

and w ritin g rem ained u n tou ched by a m oth er’s m outh. In 190 0 linguists
and psych ologists claim ed that even “ the n ew bo rn child brings lan gu age,
universal lan gu age, in to the w o rld : w e d o not teach it to sp ea k , w e on ly
teach it o u r o w n lan gu ag e.” 42 It th ereby fo llo w s th a t there is n o M o th e r’s
M o u th at the origin o f hum an speech and m asculine w ritin g . Instead of
the fem ale O th er, w h o w ith the m inim al signified ma created the b egin ­
ning o f articu lation and Poetry, there is an au tarch ic child ren ’s lan gu age,
which can n o t be form ed by parents because it respects n o n ational b o u n d ­
aries and sp on tan eou sly prod u ces signifiers such as A m m e o r M a m a .41
M a k e rs o f w ord s thereby lose the a u th o rity th at had o n ce m ade them a u ­
thors. Ever since, there has been o n ly deathly stillness and w h ite noise in
th e w ritin g room ; n o w om an o r m use offers h er kiss.
T h e discourse n etw ork o f 1900 co u ld not build on the three fu n ctio n s
o f p ro d u ctio n , d istribu tio n , and con su m p tion . D iscursive p ractices are
so historically variab le that even elem entary and apparen tly universal
concep ts are lacking in certain system s.44 In 190 0 n o authority o f p ro d u c ­
tion determ ines the inarticu late begin nin g o f articulation. A n inhum an
noise is the O th e r o f all signs and w ritten w o rk s. N o d istribu tion can use
lan guage as a m ere channel and thus a ttract ever m ore w riters and read ­
ers. L.ike any m edium in 1900, discourse is an irred u cible fa ct that w ill
n o t d isappear in ph ilosop h ical m eanin g o r p sych o lo g ica l effects. T h e r e ­
fo re it can n o t a llo w a consum ption that w ould retranslate speech b a ck to
its origin.
T h is all constitutes a largely un w ritten c h a p te r in literary studies, and
it still needs to be described in its tech n ological and institution al aspects.
But the herm it o f Sils had alread y traversed this sp ace, w ith ou t in stitu ­
tio n s, alm ost w ith o u t tech n ologies, sim ply as his tragedy. A lth o u g h he
d oes not seem an im posin g figure, a fou n d er o f a n ew d iscou rse,43 in his
failed experim ents N ietzsch e w as the victim offered up to a w ritin g oth er
than the classical-rom an tic.

T h e experim ents began w ith a th eory o f lan gu age con cern ed , to q u ote
the title o f an essay, w ith “ Truth and Falseh ood in an E xtra m o ra l Sense.”
C on sid ered ap art fro m the osten sible truth-tellin g dem ands o f m oralistic
or even educative voices, lan gu age is n o lon ger the tran slation o f p relin ­
gu istic m eanings, but rather o n e m edium a m o n g oth ers. M e d ia , how ever,
exist only as a rb itrary selections from a noise that denies all selection .
N ietzsche a b so rb ed the lesson o f the scene o f his w ritin g so co m p letely
that “ N a tu re ” itself, rath er than assum ing hum an o r m aternal fo rm b e­
cam e on e w ith the frightenin gly inarticu late ton e. “ She th rew a w a y the
key: and w o e to the fateful cu riosity that on ce w o u ld lo o k o u t and d o w n ­
 NIETZSCHE 187

w ard through a crack in the room o f consciousness and w o u ld sense that

m an, in the indifference o f his ign o ran ce, rests on the m erciless, the c ra v ­
ing, the vo ra cio u s, the m urderous, and hangs in dream s on the b ack o f a
tiger.” 4*
N o m edium o f inform ation can translate the terror that ex clu d es c o n ­
sciousness and that consciou sness in turn exclu des. F alseh ood , in an e x ­
tram oral sense, is truth. A lie is on ly a lie o f selection , w h ich veils the
terror o r even , like som eon e at his d esk, turns his b a ck on it. R ead in g is
o n e ex a m p le, in th a t N ietzsch e com pares the actu al te xt from w h ich ran ­
dom selection w as m ade to an u n th in k ably co m p lex o b ject o f nature. But
lan guage itself does not fu n ction any differently.

A ju x ta p o s itio n o f d iffere n t lan g u a g es sh o w s th a t w o rd s n e v er h a v e a n y th in g to

d o w ith tru th o r a d e q u a te e x p re ss io n : fo r o th e rw ise th e re w o u ld n o t b e so m a n y
d iffere n t lan g u a g es. T h e “ th in g in its e lf” (a n d t h a t w o u ld b e p u re , in c o n s e q u e n ­
tial tr u th ) is in c o m p re h e n sib le a n d u tte rly u n w o r th y o f e ffo rt f o r th e c re a to r o f
la n g u a g e as w ell. H e d e sig n ates o n ly th e re la tio n s o f th in g s to m en a n d fo r th e ir
e x p ressio n m a k e s use o f th e m o st d a rin g m e ta p h o rs . F irst o f all a n e rv o u s im p u lse
is tra n s la te d in to an im ag e. F irst m e ta p h o r. T h e im a g e is a g a in fu rth e r fo rm ed
into a s o u n d ! S econd m e ta p h o r. A nd each tim e th e re is a c o m p le te le a p , fro m o n e
sp h e re in to a c o m p le te ly d iffere n t and n e w o n e .47

W hereas in the discourse n etw ork o f 1800 an o rga n ic con tin u u m e x ­

ten d ed fro m the inarticu late m inim al signified to the m eanings o f factu al
lan guages, there is n o w a b re a k . L an gu age (as its plu ral suggests) is n ot
the tru th and consequently n ot any truth a t all.411 T h o u g h there is n o n a­
ture o f lan gu age for p h ilosophers to uncover behind its b old m etap h ors,44
another, p h ysio lo gical nature ap p ears. N ietzsch e’s theory o f lan gu age,
like his aesthetics, proceeds from nervous im pulses. O p tica l and acou stic
responses to im pulses, im ages and sou n d s, bring a b o u t the tw o aspects o f
lan guage, as signified and signifier. Yet they remain as separated from one
another as they are from the pure sto ch astic processes to w hich th ey re­
spond. T h e b reak b etw een the im aginal signified and the acoustic signifier
ca n n o t be bridged by con tin u ou s tran slation; on ly a m etap h o r o r tran s­
position can leap the gap . Separate sense m edia com e togeth er again st the
b ack g ro u n d o f an om n ipresen t n o ise— as “ com pletely d ifferent and new
spheres.” Instead o f deriving m edia from a com m on sou rce like the p o etic
im agination , N ietzsch e divides op tics and aco u stics into a “ w orld o f
sigh t” and “ w orld o f so u n d .” 50
E ach o f the tw o m edia repeats its co m m o n relation to an origin that,
being a random generator, is n ot an origin . N ietzsch e dream ed o f a m usic
th a t w o u ld n o t, like all G erm an m usic, “ fade aw ay at the sight o f the v o ­
luptuous blue sea and the brightness o f the M ed iterran ean sk y ,” m usic
that “ prevails even b efore the b ro w n sunsets o f the d esert.” 51 O n ly an au ­
i88 1900

dible w orld in w hich sound and c o lo r trium ph over form and m orality
w o u ld rem ain, d esp ite any process o f selection, close to its inh um an
b a ck g ro u n d , o n e th a t (as w e k n o w ) answ ers to the g o d ’s nam e D ion ysu s.
But the o p tica l m edium o f A p o llo d o e s not fu n ctio n any differently.

W h en a fte r a forceful a tte m p t to g a ze o n th e s u n w e tu rn a w ay b lin d e d , w e see

d a rk -c o lo re d s p o ts b e fo re o u r eyes, a s a c u re, as it w ere. C onversely, th e b rig h t
im ag e p ro je c tio n s o f th e S o p h o c le a n h e r o — in s h o r t, th e A p o llo n ia n a s p e c t o f th e
m ask — a re necessary effects o f a g la n c e in to th e in sid e a n d te r r o r s o f n a tu r e ; a s it
w e re, lu m in o u s sp o ts to c u re eyes d a m a g e d by g ru e so m e n ig h t.52

N ietzsch e’s visual w orld is born in the eye itself. E n to p tical visions heal
a n d tran sp o se pain in the ey es , w h ich , in a reversal o f all trad itio n , is not
caused by a b lin d in g sun but by a horrible night. This gro u n d , against
w hich co lo rs and form s are o n ly selectio n s, is at o n ce preserved (by pain)
and m etap h orically veiled (by th e reversal o f d arkness in to light). A p o llo ­
nian a rt, to o , fulfills a c o n d itio n co n stitu tive o f tech n olog ical m edia by
m eeting th e “ dem and th a t it shou ld n o t o n ly be sim ilar to the o b ject, but
should furnish th e gu aran tee f o r this sim ilarity by being, so to sp e a k , a
creation o f the o b ject itself, that is, by b ein g m echanically p rod u ced by
it.” 51 N o im agination can stand up to such dem ands; w here p sych olog ica l
tran slation on ce sufficed, m aterial tran sposition n ow b ecom es necessary.
M o v in g “ im ages o f ligh t” by w hich the eye form s an im age o f its ow n
retina have little to d o w ith p rod u ction s o f S oph ocles at Athenian fes­
tivals. N ietzsch e’s A p o llo n ia n art describes som ething q u ite d ifferen t—
the tech n ological medium o f film , w h ich the L um iere broth ers w o u ld
m a k e p u b lic o n D ecem b er 28, 1895. N ietzsch e an d the Lum ieres based
A p o llo n ia n art and the m ovies on applied p h ysio lo gy: the en top tical after­
im age, o r the illusion, created by afterim age and strobe effe ct, in w hich
discrete im ages p roceedin g w ith sufficiently high frequ ency a p p e ar to
form a con tin u u m . And if the A p o llo n ia n hero is “ in the last analysis
nothin g but a brigh t im age projected on a dark w a ll, w h ich m eans ap­
pearance through and th rou gh ,” 54 then all the elem ents o f film have com e
together: first, the b lack b efore each selection , w h ich for N ietzsch e w as
origin al night and in film is the protective con cealm en t o f the reel d u rin g
tran sport; secon d, the op tica l o r even en to p tical h a llu cin a to ry effect;
third, the projection screen, precisely the co n trib u tio n o f the L um ieres,
w hich m ade Edison’s cin em ascope o f 18 9 1 into the m ovies.55
A music that holds its o w n in the d esert and a th eater that is film avant
la lettre5t— by their ph ysio lo gical effects these inn ovations ex p lo d e the
lim its o f E uropean art. T h e y b ecom e m edia. A s in W agn erian o p era, their
h eroic predecessor, m edia n o lon ger speak “ the lan gu age o f the cu ltu re o f
a caste and in general n o lon ger recognize any d istin ction betw een the
 NIETZSCHE 189

cultivated and th e u n cu ltivated .” 57 O n ly the ingrained a lp h a b etizatio n o f

1800 made it possible to celebrate and understand the “ p h ilo lo g ist-p o et”
G o e th e in the w ay that his D iscou rse o f the M a ster u n d erstood u n d er­
standing. A n aesthetics o f applied p h ysio lo gy, by con trast, required nei­
ther train in g n or elite culture.
But N ietzsche w as not W agner. F o r m akers o f w o rd s, even if they
dream o f m usic and m ovies, there rem ains on ly the p arad oxical desire to
break open the general m edium o f cu ltu re w ith in and by m eans o f its ow n
structure. T h erefo re N ietzsche began by cou n term an d in g the Faustian
revolution. G o e th e ’s un iversality joined p h ilo lo g ica l and p o etic practice
to create Spirit from letters and human happiness from study. W h en even
as a student N ietzsch e scold ed Faust fo r his m ethod o f tran slation , he did
so in the nam e o f a p h ilo lo g y th a t w as still a p articu lar com peten ce o f the
R e p u b lic o f Sch olars. A n old -fash ion ed profession al eth ic co n fro n ted uni­
versal alp h ab etizatio n . W hereas “ w e m oderns read n o th in g but th o u g h ts”
and distill Faustian m eaning fro m five ou t o f tw e n ty w o rd s, N ietzsch e
praises the ascesis o f the p h ilo lo g ist w h o still reads w o rd s and under­
stands “ conjectural criticism ” as “ an activity o f the kind em p lo yed in
so lvin g a reb us.” 5"
All appearances to the contrary, N ietzsch e m ade n o serious a ttem p t to
rescind the historical fa ct that everyon e w as n o w able to learn to read. He
did not plan an “ im itation o f the historical practices o f c o m m u n ica tio n ”
fo r their o w n s a k e ;54 th ey w e re o n ly to p rovid e him w ith the m eans o f and
w ea p o n s fo r his ow n w ritin g p ro ject. Instead o f p ra cticin g con jectu ral
criticism to solve the rebus o f pu rpo rted texts, he invented riddle a fter
riddle. P hilological insights, fo r instance, that in H o ra ce’s po etry “ this
m inim um in the exten t and n um ber o f the sig n s” a tta in s “ the m axim u m
. . . in the en ergy o f th e sign s” in that “ every w o r d — as sou n d , as place, as
con cep t, p o u rs o u t its force rig h t and left,” 60 becam e f o r N ietzsch e the
w riter a design for his ow n experim ents. Zaratbustra w as a “ play o f every
kind o f sym m etry” “ d ow n to the ch oice o f vo w els.” 61
In the guise o f historical regression, N ietzsch e pushed the stru ctu res o f
w ritin g to an extrem e. Faust’s tran slation o f Xo'yo? m arked a m om en t in
the history o f th e sign w h en there w a s n o aw areness o f th e p arad igm atic;
by con trast, N ietzsch e’s w ritin g , in its p ro g ra m and practice, established
pure d iffe re n tia lly . A to p o lo g y o f the signifier, as Saussure w o u ld ap p ly it
to the p arad igm atic and syn tagm atic axes, orders the text and therefore
its program m ed reception as w ell. N ietzsch e dem anded an “ art o f inter­
pretation ” by which each sign w as to be read together with co n tigu o u s
signs as w ell as w ith those fo r w hich it w as a su bstitute. In place o f h er­
m eneutic rereading he saw a sim ple, p h ysio lo gical “ ru m in a tio n — so m e­
190 1900

th in g for w h ich one has alm ost to be a c o w and in any case n o t a ‘ m odern
m an.” ’ 11 A ll o f N ietzsch e’s stylistic techniques em b od y this on e co m ­
m an d — including the sentence that issued it. His ty p o grap h ica l accen ts
w ere intended to keep the reader from “ sk ip p in g o v er” the im perative
and, being “ held by the restrictive clause, to spell it.” 6' A lp h ab etize d flu­
en cy is th rottled ; the insistence o f th e signifier ta k es th e parad igm man/
anim al ap art syntagm atically (in a tran svalu ation o f all con n oted values).
A s co w s, the readers (or rather the fem inine readers) N ietzsch e dem anded
b ecam e a n alp h abetical. “ H e w h o k n ow s the reader d o es n othin g fu rther
fo r the rea d er” ; but w h ere n onreaders are b eing elim inated, style itself
m ust en force the difficult p ro cess— the old -E u rop ean n orm — o f spellin g
ou t the text.
Ever since N ietzsch e, the lo g ic o f the signifier has b ecom e a techn iqu e
o f sparseness and isolation , and m inim um signs release m axim u m energy.
H erm eneutic theories, w ith their n otion s o f co n tex t, are inad eq u ate to
such a calcu lu s. They are fam iliar on ly w ith o rga n ic relationships and
w ith a co n tin u o u s— th at is, p sych olog ica l o r h isto rical— narrative repre­
sentation o f them. T h e relative value o f signifiers, by con trast, is given
m athem atically; its articu latio n is called cou n tin g.
T o cou n t w o rd s— in the days o f rom an ticism this w as the rid icu lou sly
ou tm o d ed fixed idea o f a Fixlein w ith his k ab a la o f the B ib le ;M in the age
o f m edia it becom es a p rim ary and elem entary necessity. M a lla rm e de­
rives the essence o f literature from the fa ct that there are tw e n ty -fo u r let­
ters.*5 In the op en in g line o f a poem , R ilke raises his eyes “ from the b o o k ,
fro m the near, cou n tab le lines.” W h at N ietzsch e praises in H o ra ce a p ­
plies a lso to the “ telegrap h ic style” o f his ow n ap h orism s.“ F or sim ple,
econ om ic reasons telegram s d em and the pau city o f w ord s that for N ie tz ­
sche had a p h ysio lo gical basis in nearsightedness and lenses o f fou rteen
d iopters.
W here the herm it o f Sils seems to retreat from universal a lp h a b e tiza ­
tion into the prehistorical, he is prep arin g the w ay fo r the rule o f the en ig­
m atic letter in the discourse n etw ork o f 1900. T h e to p o lo g y and e c o n o m ­
ics o f the signifier are a m atter m ore fo r engineers than fo r R enaissance
p h ilologists. O n ly a very o rd in ary un derstan d ing o f the S o cio lo g ica l
Foundations o f Literary E xpressionism in Germ any cou ld see in A u gu st
Stram m and Ferdinand H a rd e k o p f “ a certain d isju nction betw een their
avant-garde literary activity and their profession s as p o stal official and
parliam en tary sten o grap h er.” 67 In reality there is n o tru er o r m o re urgent
juncture. S tram m ’s poem s, w ith their six to eight lines o f on e to three
words each, are the telegrap hic style as literature. T hey are entirely a p ­
p rop riate from a postal in sp ector w h o , a fter th o rou gh train in g in the
 NIETZSCHE 191

postal and telegrap hic services, w ro te a d o cto ra l thesis entitled “ H isto ri­
cal, C ritica l, and Fiscal P olicy Investigation o f the W orld Postal System ’s
Postage R ate and Its Basis” fo r the ph ilosop h ical facu lty o f the U niversity
o f H a lle. O n ce there is a w orld postal system , signifiers h ave stan dardized
prices that m ock all m eaning. O n ce there are telegram s and p o stcard s,
style is no lon ger the m an, hut an econ om y o f signs.6* W h a t H o ra ce m eant
to N ietzsch e the ph ilologist o f ancient lan guages is fo r Stram m “ the gen ­
eral business principle o f o b ta in in g the greatest possible value fo r the
least exp en se.” It w as, o f c o u rs e, a principle th at raised “ ex c h a n g e o f in­
form ation ” and, in particu lar, exp ressionist p o etry to the secon d pow er:
the costs are “ costs that d o not im m ediately create value o r raise values,
but w hich m ake the creation o f value p o ssib le .” 6’ T h e y are d iscou rses in
the g o o d N ietzsch ean m anner, then, a s a self-heigh tenin g o f stru ctu res o f
m astery, w hich becam e ever m ore necessary under the co n d itio n s o f stan ­
d ard ized and m ass p ro d u ced in fo rm ation . O n ly the m in im ax o f sign en ­
ergy escapes the fate o f in calcu lable m asses o f d a ta , as in N ietzsch e’s inner
civil w a r. From the “ em pirical law o f corresp on d en ce p ro d u ctio n , a c ­
cord in g to w h ich ea ch letter posted from on e cou n try to a n o th er cou n try
elicits an oth er letter from the secon d cou n try to the first,” 70 there fo llo w s
finally only noise.

In T h e W anderer a nd H is S hadow , N ietzsch e first exp erim en ts w ith

the telegrap hic style. T h e con jectu ral critic had b eco m e so ill, his eyes so
nearsighted, that each letter he read ex a cted its price. T h e p rofessor from
Basel had b ecom e so tired o f his profession that the n ight in his eyes gave
birth to a shad ow , one beyon d cu ltu re and the university.

M y sick n ess also gave m e th e rig h t to c h a n g e all m y h a b its c o m p le te ly ; it p e rm it­

te d , it com m anded m e to fo rg e t; it b e sto w e d o n m e th e n e ce ssity o f lying still, o f
leisure, o f w a itin g a n d b e in g p a tie n t.— B ut th a t m e a n s, o f th in k in g .— M y eyes
a lo n e p u t a n e n d to all b o o k w o rm ish n e ss— in b rie f, p h ilology: I w a s d eliv ered
from th e “ b o o k ” ; fo r y e a rs I d id n o t re ad a th in g — th e g re a te s t benefit I ev er c o n ­
fe rre d o n m yself.— T h a t n e th e rm o s t self w hich h a d , a s it w e re, b e en b u rie d a n d
g ro w n silen t u n d e r th e c o n tin u a l p re ssu re o f h a v in g t o listen to o th e r selves (a n d
t h a t is a fte r all w h a t r e a d in g m ea n s) a w a k e n e d slow ly, shyly, d u b io u s ly — b u t
e v en tu ally it sp o k e a g a in .71

A p h ysio lo gical accid en t m ade N ietzsch e’s second exp erim en t p o s ­

sible. N ear-blin dness released w riting from b eing the p ro d u ctive co n tin u a ­
tion o f readin g it had b een in 1800 o r the com m en tary on a pile o f b o o k s it
h a d been in the R e p u b lic o f S ch olars. T h o u g h N ietzsch e’s m eth od o f p h ilo ­
log ical spelling out governed his o w n w o rk , he w a s n o lon ger a scholar,
one “ w h o at b ottom does little n ow ad ays but thum b b o o k s — p h ilo lo ­
gists, at a m oderate estim ate, a b o u t 200 a d ay.” 72 A t the po in t w h ere the
192- 1900

eyes or im agination o f others see printed paper, night intervenes. H e g e l’s

refutation o f sense-certainty w o u ld d o n oth in g for som eone to o blin d to
read. T h e abso lu te certain ty o f night and shad ow put the cu ltu ral m e­
dium o f the b o o k on the sam e level as p h ysio lo gical m edia, w h ich had
their g ro u n d and cou n tersu p p ort in the desert, noise, and blinding d a rk ­
ness. In p la ce o f the u n cou nted w ord s alread y w ritte n , in place o f p h ilo lo ­
gists’ tw o hundred b o o k s per day (first cou nted by N ietzsch e), an u n co n ­
scious self appears, w hich in its refusal to d o the required rea d in g is as
foreign and p h ysio lo gical as the v o ic e behind the chair. W h a t finally b e ­
gins to sp eak is, o f course, never reached by any w o rd . N ea r blindness,
m ore effective than the d evou rin g o f b o o k s by w om en ever w as, grants
forgetfulness.
But the accid en t o f illness b ro u g h t a b o u t m erely the con d itio n s that
distinguish all signifiers. In ord er fo r a sign to exist, it m ust necessarily
stand a gain st a b ack gro u n d th at ca n n o t be stored by a n y m echanism . For
letters, this is em pty w hite paper; in another case, the m irror-im age tran s­
position o f w ritin g , it is the em pty b lack sky.

To w rite —
T he in k w e ll, crystal c le a r lik e a c o n sc ie n ce , w ith its d r o p o f d a rk n e s s a t th e
b o tto m , so th a t so m e th in g m ay c o m e o u t o f it: th e n , set aside th e la m p .
You n o tic e d , o n e d o e s n o t w rite the a lp h a b e t o f s ta rs lu m in o u sly , o n a d a rk
field, only, th u s is it in d ic a te d , b a re ly b e g u n o r in te rru p te d ; m an p u rs u e s b lac k
o n w h ite.
T h is fo ld o f d a r k lace, th a t h o ld s th e in fin ite, its se c re t, w o v en by th o u s a n d s ,
e ach o n e a c c o rd in g to its o w n th re a d o r u n k n o w n c o n tin u a tio n , a sse m b le s d is ta n t
in te rla c e d rib b o n s w h e re a lu x u ry y e t to b e in v e n to rie d sleeps, v a m p ire , k n o t,
leaves a n d th e n p re se n t it.73

T h e in k w ell, in w h o se darkness N ietzk y w o u ld d ro w n his b lack heart;

the lamp set aside, w h ich the half-blind hardly need a n y w a y; the dark
field on w h ich stars are stars and w h ere the afterim ages o f A p o llo n ia n
visions ease p a in — the m ateriality o f signifiers rests on a ch ao s th a t de­
fines them differentially. N ietzsch e co u ld call his styles, because o f their
“ v a rie ty ” o r in spite o f it, “ the op p o site o f c h a o s.” 74 A p recon d ition for
som ething to “ com e o u t,” that is, to be w ritten d o w n , is a relation to the
dark grou n d . T h e fa ct that w ritin g reverses this relation o f figure and
grou n d (M a x W ertheim er w o u ld soon study the p h ysio lo gy o f percep tion
involved) into dark m arks against lum inous space chan ges n o th in g in its
logic. As a “ fo ld o f dark lace” that “ assem bles distant interlaced rib ­
b o n s ,” letters are determ ined by the sp a c e betw een them .
T h e lo g ic o f ch a o s and intervals w as im plem ented as a te ch n o lo g y by
the d iscourse n etw ork o f 19 0 0 — through the invention o f the typ ew riter.
W hen his eyes decreed an end to all b o o k w o rm ish n ess, N ietzsch e
 NIETZSCHE 193

w ro te that he had n o idea how he w o u ld hand le w ritten m aterial (letters

and notes). H e w as th in kin g abou t gettin g a typ ew riter, and he had been
in co n ta ct with its inventor, a D an e from C o p e n h a g en .75 Five m onths
later, Paul R ee b ro u g h t the m achine, w h ich cost 450 R eich sm ark, to
G e n o a . It had “ un fortunately been dam aged d u rin g the trip. A m echanic
w a s able to repair it w ithin a w eek , but it so o n com p letely ceased
fu n ctio n in g.” 76
N ietzsche as typ ist— the exp erim ent lasted fo r a cou p le of w eeks and
w a s broken off, y e t it w as a tu rn in g po in t in the o rgan ization o f discou rse.
N o o th e r p h ilosop h er w o u ld have been p ro u d to a p p e a r in the Berlin
D aily as the ow ner o f a strange new m achin e.77 A s far as one can reco n ­
struct the un w ritten literary history o f the typew riter, o n ly journalists
and reporters, such as M a rk T w ain and Paul L in d au , th rew a w ay their
pens in the p ioneerin g days o f 188 0. T h e stin kin g Spirit, as it led its sk im ­
m ing readers, a lso m ad e its m ove to a m achine that, in con trast to the
pen, w a s “ cap ab le o f pu tting o n e’s first th ou ghts, w h ich a re w ell k n o w n
to be the best, o n to paper.” 7" N ietzsch e’s decision to b u y a ty p ew riter,
b efo re greater interest in the n ew tech n o lo g y arose in E u rop e arou n d
1890, had a different m otivation: his half-blindn ess. Indeed, the first
typew riters (in c o n tra st to the R em in gton o f 1873) w e re m ade fo r those
w h o w ere b lin d , and som etim es (as w ith F oucauld and Pierre) by those
w h o w ere blin d. N ietzsch e’s D an e from C o p en h a g en was M a ilin g H a n ­
sen, p asto r and teacher o f the d ea f and dum b, w h o se “ w r itin g baH” o f
1865 o r 18 6 7 “ w as designed fo r use o n ly by th e b lin d ," bu t by virtu e o f
im proved m echanics and w o rk in g speed “ w as the first p ractical and us­
able ty p e w rite r.” 79
N ietzsch e, w h o even as a school b oy dream ed o f a m achin e that w o u ld
transcribe his th o u gh ts, kn ew better than his b io grap h er K urt Paul Janz,
w h o w ith feigned outspoken n ess (and p ro b ab ly o u t o f respect fo r fa b ­
ricators o f m unitions and bu yers o f typ ew riter patents like the R em in g­
tons) flatly denied the D an e (w hom he calls Hansun) an y cred it fo r the
inven tion .80 N ietzsch e’s c h o ic e , b y con trast, as half-b lind as it w a s certain ,
picked out a m achine w hose rounded k eybo ard co u ld be used “ e x c lu ­
sively th ro u g h the sense o f to u c h ,” because “ on the su rface o f a sphere
each spot is designated w ith com plete certain ty by its spatial p o sitio n .” 81
Spatially designated an d discrete signs— that, rather than increase in
speed, w as the real inn ovation o f the typ ew riter. “ In place o f the im age o f
the w o rd [in handw riting] there appears a geom etrical figure created by
the spatial a rran gem en t o f the letter k ey s.” 82 Indeed, a pecu liar relatio n ­
ship to place defines the signifier: in con trast to ev eryth in g in the R eal, it
can be and not be in its p la ce.83 A s soon as the ty p e w rite r w a s read y to g o
into mass p ro d u ctio n , th erefore, “ a pow erfu l m ovem ent in fa vo r o f intro-
194 i9 °°

d u cin g a universal k eyb o ard g o t under w a y , and the 1888 congress in

T o ro n to agreed on a standard o n e.” ’ 4

Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L
Z X C V B N M

In an apparatu s and its discrete letters, T o ro n to in 1888 realized (be­

yon d G utenberg) w h at S ils-M aria praised in H o ra ce and his verse: that
elem ents o f a k ey b o ard can be stru ctu red to the “ right and left” and
th ro u g h o u t the w h ole. In the play betw een signs and intervals, w ritin g
w as n o longer the h an d w ritten , co n tin u o u s transition from n atu re to cu l­
ture. It becam e selection from a c o u n ta b le , spatialized supply. T h e equ al
size o f each sig n — a lofty, d ista n t goal for th e genetic m ethod o f w ritin g
in stru ction — cam e a b o u t o f itself (if only, as in H ansen’s ty p ew riter, b e­
cause the m achine had n oth in g but capital letters). T h e only ta sk s in the
 NIETZSCHE 195

transposition from k eybo ard to text rem ained the m an ipu lation s o f per­
m utation and com bin ation . “ Yes! W ith its 24 signs, this L iterature p re­
cisely nam ed L etters, as w ell as throu gh its num erous fusions in the e la b ­
oration o f sentences and then verse, a system arran ged like a spiritual
zo d ia c, con tain s its o w n d octrin e, ab stra ct and esoteric like a th e o lo g y .” *5
In ty p ew ritin g, sp atiality determ ines not o n ly the relations am o n g
signs but also their relation to the em p ty grou n d . T yp e hits p a p er, leavin g
an im pression, o r som etim es even a hole. N o t for n oth in g w as the ty p e­
w riter born in the realm o f blindness. W hereas h a n d w ritin g is su b ject to
the eye, a sense that w o rk s across distance, the typ ew riter uses a blin d,
tactile pow er. B efore the in trod u ction o f John T . U n d e rw o o d ’s “ view
ty p e w rite r” in 1898, all m odels (m uch to the d isad van tage o f their p o p u ­
larization) w r o te invisible lines, w hich b ecam e visible o n ly after the fact.**
But U n d e rw o o d ’s im provem ent did little to chan ge the fun dam en tal d if­
ference betw een h a n d w ritin g and typescript. T o q u o te A n g e lo B eyerlen ’s
en gineering expertise:

In w ritin g by h a n d , th e eye m u st c o n s ta n tly w a tch th e w ritte n line a n d o n ly th a t.

It m u st a tte n d to th e c re a tio n o f eac h w ritte n line, m u st m e a su re , d ire c t, a n d , in
s h o rt, g u id e th e h a n d th ro u g h eac h m o v e m e n t. F o r th is , th e w ritte n lin e , p a r tic u ­
larly th e line b e in g w r itte n , m u st b e visible. By c o n tra s t, a f te r o n e p re sse s d o w n
briefly o n a key, th e ty p e w rite r c re a te s in th e p ro p e r p o sitio n o n th e p a p e r a c o m ­
p le te letter, w h ich n o t o n ly is u n to u c h e d by th e w rite r’s h a n d b u t is a lso lo c a te d in
a p lace entirely a p a r t fro m w h e re th e h a n d s w o rk . W h y sh o u ld th e w r ite r lo o k a t
th e p a p e r w h en e v e ry th in g th e r e o c c u rs d e p e n d a b ly a n d w ell as lo n g a s th e keys
o n th e fin g e rb o a rd a re u se d c o rre c tly ?
T h e s p o t th a t o n e m u st c o n sta n tly k e ep in view in o rd e r to w rite c o rre c tly by
h a n d — nam ely, th e s p o t w h e re th e n e x t sign to b e w ritte n occurs— a n d th e p r o ­
cess th a t m ak e s th e w rite r believe th a t th e h a n d -w ritte n lines m u st b e seen a re
precisely w h a t, even w ith “ view ty p e w rite rs ,” cann ot b e seen. T h e only re a s o n ­
a b le p u rp o s e o f visibility is n o t fulfilled by th e “ view ty p e w rite rs .” T h e s p o t th a t
m u st b e seen is a lw ay s visible, b u t n o t a t th e in s ta n t w h e n v isibility is b elieved to
b e re q u ire d .’7

U n d e rw o o d ’s innovation unlinks hand, eye, and letter w ith in the m o ­

m ent that w as decisive fo r the a g e o f G o e th e . N o t e v e ry discursive co n fig­
uration rests on an origin ary prod u ction o f signs. C irc a 190 0 several
blindnesses— o f the w riter, o f w ritin g , o f scrip t— com e together to g u a r­
antee an elem entary blindness: the blind spot o f the w ritin g act. Instead
o f the play betw een M an the sign-setter and the w ritin g su rface, the ph i­
losop h er as stylus and the tablet o f N atu re, there is the play betw een type
and its O th er, com pletely rem oved from subjects. Its nam e is inscription .
Instead o f w ritin g on his b ro k en m achine, N ietzsch e con tin u ed to
w rite a b ou t the typew riters that had m ade certain very forgetfu l “ slaves
o f affect and desire” in to so -ca lled hum an beings. O u t o f te ch n o lo g y
196 1900

com es science, but a science o f techn iques. “ O u r w ritin g m aterials c o n ­

tribute their part to ou r th in k in g ” reads on e o f N ietzsch e’s typed letters.**
Five years later T h e G en ea logy o f M orals ga th ered a w h o le arsenal o f
m artyrs, victim s, m aim ings, pledges, and practices to w hich p eople, very
tangibly, o w e their m em ories: “ perhaps indeed there w as n oth in g m ore
fearful and un cann y in the w hole prehistory o f man than his m nem otecb-
nics. ‘ If som eth ing is to stay in the m em ory it must be burned in: o n ly that
w hich never ceases to hurt stays in the m em ory.’ ” *’ This w ritin g out o f
fire and pain, scars and w ou n d s, is the op p o site o f a lp h ab etizatio n m ade
flesh. It d oes not o b ey any v o ice and therefore forbid s the leap to the sig­
nified. It m akes the tran sition from nature to culture a sh o ck rath er than
a continuu m . It is as little aim ed at readin g and con su m p tion as the pain
applied ceases not to cease. T h e signifier, by reason o f its singular rela ­
tionship to place, becom es an inscription on the body. U n derstan d ing
and interpretation are helpless b efore an u n con sciou s w ritin g th at, rather
than presenting the subject w ith som ething to be deciph ered, m akes the
subject w h a t it is. M n em o n ic inscription is, like m echanical inscription ,
alw ays invisible at the d ecisive m om en t. Its blindly ch o sen victim s are
“ virtually com pelled to invent g o d s and genii at all the h eights and depths,
in short, som ething that roam s even in secret, hidden places, sees even in
the d ark , and will not easily let an interesting, painfu l sp ectacle pass
u n n o ticed .’” 0

N ietzsch e’s third exp erim en t w as to step into the place o f such a g o d . If
G o d is d ead , then there is n oth in g to keep on e from inven ting go d s. D io ­
nysus (like D racu la several yea rs later) is a ty p e w rite r m yth. T h e m ne­
m onic techn ique o f inscription cau ses bodies so m uch pain that their la­
m en tin g, a D ion ysian d ith yram b in the m ost literal sense o f the w o r d , can
and m ust invent the g o d D ionysus. H ardly an yth in g distinguishes the
dram a described in the G en ea logy from N ietzsch e’s d ith yram b “ A riad n e’s
L am en t.” ” T ortured and m artyred by an Invisible O ne w h o represents the
naked po w er o f inscription , N ietzsch e’s A riad n e puzzles o v e r the desire o f
this O ther. Such speech w a s not heard , indeed w o u ld have been unheard
o f, in the classical-rom an tic d iscou rse n etw o rk . It w as first n ecessary to
w rite w ith and abou t typew riters; the act o f w ritin g had first to b ecom e a
blind incidence from and upon a form less grou n d b efore speech c o u ld be
directed tow ard the un an sw erin g con d itio n s o f speech itself. A riad n e sp eaks
as the being w h o has been tau gh t to speak by tortu re, as the anim al w h o se
forgetfulness has been driven ou t by m nem on ic techniques; she talks a b o u t
and to the terror th at all m edia presuppose and veil. She becam e “ the
fateful cu riosity th at o n ce w o u ld lo o k o u t and d o w n w ard th rough a cra ck
in the room o f consciousness and w ould sense that m an . . . rests on the
m erciless, the cra vin g, the vo racio u s, the m u rd ero u s.”
 NIETZSCHE 197

But because lan gu age itself is a tran sp o sition , the desire o f this O th e r
rem ains un spoken . A riad n e says it.

S tich w eiter!
G ra u s a m s te r S tachel!
Kein H u n d — dein W ild n u r bin ich,
g ra u s a m s te r Jag er!
d e in e sto lz e ste G e fa n g n e ,
d u R a u b er h in te r W o lk en . . .
S prich en d lich !
D u B litz-V erhiillter! U n b e k a n n te r! sp ric h !
W as w illst du, W eg elag erer, von m ir?

S ta b fu rth e r!
M o s t c ru el th o rn !
N o t a d o g — 1 am y our tra p p e d a n im a l
m o st c ru el h u n te r!
y o u r p ro u d e s t p riso n e r,
you b a n d it beh in d c lo u d s . . .
S peak finally!
You w h o h id e in lig h tn in g ! S tra n g er! sp eak !
W h a t d o y o u w a n t fro m m e ? , h ig h w a y m a n . . .

D ion ysu s, hidden in form lessness, stabs but does not sp ea k. T h e torm ents
and only they are his style. For that reason A riadne, in co n tra st to w om en
in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1800, k n o w s nothing o f au th orsh ip o r love.
She can only speak in m on ologu es that can call the inscription “ love” just
as w ell as “ h atred .”

W as w illst d u d ir e rh o rc h e n ?
w as w illst d u d ir e rfo lte rn ,
d u F o ltere r
d u — H e n k e r-G o tt!
O d e r soli ich, d e m H u n d e gleich,
v o r dir m ich w alzen ?
H in g e b e n d , b e g e iste rt a u sse r m ir
d ir L iebe— zu w ed eln ?

W h a t w o u ld y o u c o m m a n d ?
w h a t w o u ld y o u e x tra c t,
you to r tu r e r
y o u — h a n g m a n -g o d !
O r sh o u ld I, like a d o g ,
th ro w m yself b e fo re you?
C o m e w a g g in g , d e v o te d
and beside m y se lf— w ith lo v e ? 97

It w as as N ietzsch e w ro te: “ W h o besides m e kn ow s w h a t A riad n e

is!— F or all such riddles n o b o d y so far had any solu tio n ; 1 d o u b t that
an y b o d y even saw any riddles here.” 93 W hen F riedrich Schlegel w ro te O n
198 igo o

P hilosop h y to his beloved , there w as neither riddle nor so lu tio n . T h e man

enjoyed his hum an d eterm in ation, au th orsh ip ; the w om an rem ain ed the
m ute fem inine reader o f his love and o f the confession th a t it w as n ot he,
but she w h o had introd u ced him to ph ilosop h y. W ith the “ n e w s” th a t far
from d ocen ts and professors there w as a “ ph ilosopher D io n ysu s,” all the
rules o f the university discourse w ere reversed .’ 4 A riadne and her “ p h ilo ­
so p h ic lover” co n d u ct “ fa m o u s d ialogu es on N a x o s ,” ’ 5 w h ere first and
forem ost a w o m a n sp ea k s and learn s from her m ute execu tio n er-go d that
“ lo v e — in its m eans, [is] w ar, at b o tto m , the deathly hatred o f the sex e s.” ’ 6
T h e discovery o f “ how foreign man and w om an are to one a n o th er” ’ 7
does away w ith the possibility o f p lacin g the tw o sexes in p o la r or co m ­
plem entary relations w ithin a discourse n etw ork . H en ceforth there is no
lon ger any discursive representation o f on e through the oth er, as Schlegel
presupposed and practiced it. B ecause they are at w ar, D ion ysu s d oes not
speak for A riad n e, and A riad n e certain ly never speaks for D io n ysu s. T he
discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 codifies the rules that “ one class can n o t repre­
sent a n o th er” and “ that it is m uch less possible for on e sex to represent
an o th er.’ ” ' Thus “ a p articu lar lan g u a g e” com es into being: “ the w o m ­
an’s lan gu age.” ”
A n oth er lan gu age fo llo w s im m ediately after the w o m a n ’s lan gu age,
after A ria d n e’s lam ent. F o llo w in g the stage direction “ Lightn ing. D io n y ­
sus appears in em erald beau ty,” the g o d speaks and thus m aterializes the
lo g ic o f media. In his shroud o f lightning D ion ysu s gives A ria d n e’s eyes
the reversed afterim age effect that turns glim psed darkness into light in
ord er to p rotect the retin a. W here earlier p o etic hallu cin ation had passed
quietly over the reaction-tim e threshold o f the senses, the ligh tn in g sends a
dark and assau ltin g light, w hich transposes speech into its oth er m edium .

Sei k lu g , A ria d n e ! . . .
D u h a s t k lein e O h re n , d u h a st m ein e O h re n :
steck ein k lu g es W o rt h in ein !—
M u ss m an sich n ic h t e r s t h a s s e n , w e n n m a n sich lie b e n soli? . . .
Ich bin dein Labyrinth . . .

Be w ise, A ria d n e! . . .
You h a v e sm a ll e a rs, y o u h a v e m y e ars:
stick a w ise w o rd in !—
M ust w e n o t first h a te eac h o th er, if w e a re to love o n e a n o th e r . . .
/ am your labyrinth . . .

T h e go d does not answ er o r grant a n yth in g w ith his w o rd s, rather, he

heightens the enigm a. R ather than dissolve the am bigu ity o f light and
darkness, love and hatred, he underscores it. A D ion ysian “ y e s” — his
w ise w ord nam es th e d a rk grou n d behind all w ord s, even as he incarnates
that grou n d . If A ria d n e’s lam ent w as a glim pse ou t o f the room o f c o n ­
 NIETZSCHE 199

sciousness in to the abyss, then D ion ysu s transgresses this tran sgression.
W ith the line “ / am you r labyrinth,” the a b y ss o f lan gu age declares that it
is an abyss. A ria d n e’s lam en t rem ains unheard: “ the ea rs o f the g o d b e­
com e sm aller and m ore lab yrin thine, and n o w o rd o f lam ent finds the
w a y th ro u g h .” 100 Som eth ing else happens instead. If, in co n tra st to the
m any he- and she-asses, A riad n e has sm all ears, if she stick s the w ise
w ord in, then what takes place is not elegy, m o n o lo gu e, o r ep ip h an y b ut,
very sud d en ly and technically, d icta tio n . T h e p h ilosop h er D io n ysu s, un­
like his university-tam ed predecessors, utters a D iscou rse o f the M aster,
or despot. A dictate (in the d o u b le m eaning o f the w ord), how ever, is not
to be un derstood o r even read; its sense is literal .101 “ Stick a w ise w ord
in!” A riad n e’s lam ent began with w ord s a b o u t torture, stab b in g, and in­
scrip tion ; it en d s w ith a w ord th a t stabs.
N ietzsch e, w h o w as prou d o f his sm all ears just as M a lla rm e w as
proud o f his satyr’s ears, thus w ro te the program o f his p rogram . R ather
than sim ply b eing th o u gh t as T h e G en ea logy o f M orals, typ ew riter be­
came act in the d ith yram b . T h e rhythm o f the lyric has, o f cou rse, the
“ a d va n ta g e” o f “ better im pressing” w ords “ in to m em ory.” (H u m an be­
ings are that forgetfu l, and go d s that hard o f h ea rin g . ) 102 H ence, instead
o f declaring an am biguou s love to w om en w ith classical-rom an tic lyri­
cism , N ietzsch e stages a scene o f torture. “ If som ething is to stay in the
m em ory it m ust be burned in: on ly th at w hich never ceases to h u rt stays
in the m em ory.” T h is fixed som eth in g is neither signified n or fixed idea; it
is a d ictated w o rd . N ietzsch e as lyric po et, o r “ H o w to W rite Poetry w ith
a H am m er.”
T h e end o f all w o m en ’s lam ents is based on the historical fa c t that
scrip t, instead o f con tin u in g to be translation from a M o th e r’s M o u th ,
has becom e an irred ucible m edium am o n g m edia, has b ecom e the ty p e­
w riter. T h is d esexu alization a llo w s w om en access to w ritin g . T h e fo llo w ­
ing sentence applies literally to the d iscou rse n etw o rk o f 1900: “ T h e
typ ew riter open ed the w ay fo r the fem ale sex into the office .” 103 N ie tz ­
sch e’s A riad n e is not a m yth.
In p lace o f his b ro k en M a ilin g H ansen typ ew riter, the half-b lind
N ietzsch e en gaged secretaries— fo r B ey o n d G o o d a n d E vil, a M rs. R oder-
W ied erh old . She had such difficulty, h o w e v e r— as if in em p irical d em o n ­
stration o f the title and o f N ietzsch e’s d ith yram bs— in tolera tin g the anti­
dem ocratic, an ti-C h ristian m aster’s discourse stuck in to her ear that she
“ cried m o re often ” than her d ictato r “ cared fo r .” 104 A ria d n e ’s lam ent . . .
W om en circa 190 0 w ere n o longer the W om an , w h o , w ith o u t w ritin g
herself, m ade men sp e a k , and they w ere n o lon ger fem inine consum ers,
w h o at best w ro te d o w n the fruits o f their readin g. A n ew w isd om gave
them the w ord , even if it w as for the d ictatio n o f a m aster’s d iscou rse.
200 1900

W henever the herm it o f Sils w en t ou t am ong p eople, he con sorted with

em ancipated w o m en — that is, w ith w om en w h o w ro te . For their part,
from 1885 on they traveled to Engadine “ only in o rd er to m ake the a c ­
quain tan ce o f Professor N ietzsch e, w h o nonetheless seem ed to them to be
the m ost dangerous enem y o f w o m e n .” 105 T h e qu iet m oun tain valley thus
w itn essed the future o f o u r ed u cational institution s. W h ereas until 1908
Prussia’s b u reau cratic university held fast to its fou n d in g ex clu sio n , S w it­
zerlan d had lon g adm itted w o m e n to the university .106 L ou vo n S alom e is
on ly the m ost w ell k n o w n a m o n g th e m ; a sid e from h er and oth er w om en
students, at least three w om en P h .D .’s ap p eared in N ietzsch e’s circle:
M e ta vo n Salis, R esa vo n Schirn hofer (to w h om N ietzsch e vainly reco m ­
m ended him self as a dissertation to p ic ),107 and on e o f the first w om en to
earn a d o cto rate after the great historical turnin g p o in t, Flelene D rus-
k o w itz. Yet this c o n te x t o f N ietzsch e’s w ritin g rem ains as u n an alyzed as it
is d ecisive .108 W ith w r itin g w om en as w ith w r itin g m achines, th e m an o f
m any failed exp erim ents w a s the first to use discursive inn ovations.
T h e te xt that N ietzsch e first com po sed and then tran sferred into A ria d ­
n e’s lam ent cam e from L ou Salom e. O n e has on ly to ex ch a n g e “ enigm a” or
“ enigm atic life” fo r “ D ion ysu s” in the “ Flym n to L ife ,” and the w o m a n ’s
verse “ If yo u have no happiness left to give me, g o o d then, yo u still have
p a in !” b ecom es N ietzsch e-A riad n e’s “ N o ! C o m e b ack ! W ith all your
m a rtyrin g !” T h e d ith yram b (to say nothing o f the rest o f N ie tz sc h e ’s rela­
tionship to Salom e) thus rem ains quite close to w hat suffragettes called
“ the lan guage o f w o m a n .” In a letter to his sister from Z u rich , w here
D ru sko w itz w as a student, N ietzsche reports:

T his a fte rn o o n I to o k a long w a lk w ith m y n e w friend H e le n e D ru sc o w ic z , w h o

lives w ith h e r m o th e r a fe w h o u se s u p fro m th e P e n sio n N e p tu n e : o f all th e
w o m e n I h a v e c o m e to k n o w sh e h a s re a d m y b o o k s w ith th e m o st se rio u sn e ss,
a n d n o t f o r n o th in g . L o o k a n d see w h a t y o u th in k o f h e r la te st w ritin g (Three
English Poetesses, a m o n g th e m E liot, w h o m she g re atly e stee m s, a n d a b o o k on
Shelley). . . . I w o u ld say she is a n o b le a n d h o n e s t c re a tu re , w ho does n o h a r m to
my “ p h ilo s o p h y .” 10’

A w om an (N ietzsch e’s sister) is thus w ritten that oth er w om en w rite —

particu larly a b o u t oth er w om en , w h o w ith o u t d isparagem en t are called
“ poetesses.” She reads further that w ritin g w om en are the m ost serious o f
N ietzsch e’s readers, w ith o u t any doubt a b o u t their indepen den ce. T here
is n o longer any talk a b o u t the ravages o f fem inine readin g m ania.
N ietzsch e learned w ith great care the negative lesson o f th e P forta sch o o l,
w h ere pupils cou ld b eco m e acq u ain ted w ith everyth in g bu t w o m e n . H is
“ ph ilosop h y,” therefore set betw een qu otation m arks, reversed th e u n i­
versity discou rse. O u t o f th e exclu sion o f th e oth er sex cam e, circa 1900,
an inclusion . “ / am y ou r labyrinth,” says D ionysus to on e w h o in the
 NIETZSCHE 201

Cretan cultic dance w as herself the mistress o f the lab yrin th . N o t on ly

because N ietzsch e ex p lo d e d the interpretation rules o f 1 800 is it un neces­
sary to identify A riad n e w ith C o sim a W agner, as so often o ccu rs. T h e
enigm a at the origin o f all discourse has been played out; hen ceforth
“ w om en ” count only insofar as they are k n ow n to N ietzsche and are a c ­
quain ted w ith N ietzsch e’s w ritin g.
W om en are n either O n e n or all, but rather, like signifiers, a num bered
m ultitude, o r w ith L eporello, m ill’e tre. A ccord in gly, their relation to
N ietzsch e’s “ p h ilo so p h y ” is ordered by selection. G e o rg e ’s m ale circle,
w hich w o u ld im plem ent a red u ction o f b o o k s and b o o k d istrib u tio n , w as
not the first to put an end to the classical p roliferation o f texts. First,
Zaratbustra w as already, in a direct reversal o f the reception aesthetics o f
1800, A B o o k fo r E veryone a nd N o O n e . Second, Zaratbustra c o n ­
cluded w ith a secret fou rth p art, carefu lly planned as a private ed ition .
T h ird , N ietzsch e dispatched this private ed ition w ith all the w iliness o f a
D ion ysu s, w h o passed his w iliness on on ly to certain w om en . O ne co p y
w en t to H elene D ru sk o w itz, w h o , h ow ever, “ to o k it to be a loan and
soon returned the b o o k to K oselitz’s address, w hich m ade N ietzsch e and
Koselitz quite happy, fo r N ietzsch e later— co rre c tly — characterized his
trust o f her as ‘ stup id ity.’ ” 110
W hether k n o w led g e o f a stu p id ity o r stupidity o f a k n o w le d g e, there
arises a type o f b o o k d istribu tion that w as n ot d istribu tion at all. T h e
public shrinks to private printings and private addresses, to b o o k s as
loans, even m isun derstood ones. In the w ar betw een the sexes, any m eans
is justified to select w om en w ith sm all ears o u t o f an open g ro u p . O n ly
fo r a tim e did D ru sk o w itz b elon g to the happy few w h o read N ietzsch e
w ith o u t any harm to N ietzsch e. O n ce she w as called “ m y n ew frien d ,”
another tim e “ that little literature-ninny D ru sco w itz,” a n y th in g but “ m y
p u p il.” 111 D ion ysus, to o , on ce praises A riad n e for h er sm all ears; an oth er
time he asks her w h y she doesn ’t have larger o n e s.112 U n stable c ircu m ­
stances, d ictated by p h ysio lo gy and chan ce, co n fro n ted w ritin g men and
w ritin g w om en circa 1900. T h e p h ilosoph er w h o had com e up w ith p ro ­
vo ca tiv e theses on w om an as truth a n d untruth recom m en ded to w om en
(as if to realize as q u ick ly as possible his w ell-kn ow n dream o f chairs in
Z a rath u stra studies) d o cto ral w o rk on these theses. But w hen the w om en
philosophers th en — as in the b o o k s D ru sk o w itz w ro te after her d isserta­
tio n — w ro te abou t and against Zarath u stra, Z a ra th u stra ’s dispatch er
had to w on d er fo r on ce w hether b e w ere not the lon g-eared jackass. A s
lon g as w om en w rite b o o k s, there is n o lon ger any gu aran tee that their
torm en t and pleasure w ill consist in receivin g w ise w ord s.
D ru sk o w itz, w hen N ietzsch e w as in an insane a sylu m , rose in the titles
o f her b o o k s to “ D o c to r o f W orld W isd o m ” and (as if to p a ro d y F W v
202 1900

N ietzky) into the aristocracy. But that w as not en ou gh : b efore she herself
vanished in to an insane asylu m , she also published on ly “ fo r the freest
sp irits.” Thus w as issued an answer to D ion ysu s and Z a ra th u stra , w h o ,
a fte r all, ap p roach ed w o m en w ith d eclarations o f w a r, w h ip s, and to r­
ture. D ru sk o w itz’s last b o o k deals w ith “ the male as a logical and tem ­
poral im possibility and as the curse o f the w o r ld ” :

T h r o u g h o u t t h e e n tire o rg a n ic w o rld , t h e su p e rio rity c la im e d o n b e h a lf o f th e

m ale se x u a l fo rm h a s b e e n lo st by th e h u m a n m ale in tw o senses: ( i ) as re g a rd s
th e m o re a ttra c tiv e p a rt o f th e a n im a l k in g d o m , (2 ) as re g a rd s his fe m in in e c o m ­
p a n io n . T h e sh e -g o a t a n d fem ale a p e w o u ld m o re d eserv e to be c alled his n a tu ra l
c o m p a n io n s . F o r he is h o rrib ly m a d e a n d c a rrie s th e sign o f his se x , in th e sh a p e
o f a se w e r p u m p , b e fo re him like a c rim in a l.113

T h e fem inist, despite N ietzsch e’s den ial, just m ight b e a true p u p il. “ M u st
w e not first hate each oth er, if w e are to love one a n o th er?” T h e p o la rity
o f the sexes in 1800 unified m o th ers, w riters, and fem inine readers in
O n e l.ove, but n o w tw o scare ta cticia n s, as hostile as th ey are eq u al, enter
the scene. T h e lan gu age o f man and the lan gu age o f w om an deny one
another w ith the ch arge that everyth in g said by on e side is determ ined by
w h a t is said by the o th er. D issuasion includes “ asking^behind,” a phrase
coined b y N ietzsch e. D ru s k o w itz sees in his p h ilosop h y only a dusty love
o f the G reek s, determ ined by his n eohu m anist ed u cation ; N ietzsch e, per­
haps because he recom m ends his p h ilosop h y to w om en as a dissertation
to p ic, sees in their b o o k s only a gym n asiu m -d eterm in ed , stin kin g alpha-
betism . “ For heaven’s sake d o n ’ t let us transm it o u r gym n asiu m ed u c a ­
tion to girls! A n ed u cation that so often takes spirited, kn ow ledge-thirsty,
passionate y o u n g people and m akes o f them — i m ages o f their te a c h e rs!” 114
“ A sk in g-b eh in d ” can be p recariou s. N o sooner has one traced certain
discourses o f oth ers to the D iscou rse o f the O th e r, than the to p ic turns to
b oys w h o are im ages o f their teachers and w h o are thus precisely the D is­
co u rse o f the O th e r in that th ey are also im ages o f the star pupil w h o
w rites. T h e escalation o f sca re tactics in the w a r betw een the tw o sexes
can thus only end in d ith yram b ic self-scorn.

H a ! H e ra u f, W iirde!
T u g en d -W iird e ! E u ro p a e r-W u rd e !
B lase, b lase w ie d er,
B lasebalg d e r T u g en d !
H a!
N o c h Ein M ai b riillen ,
M o ra lis c h b riillen ,
Als m o ra lisc h e r L ow e
V o r d e n T o c h te m d e r W iiste briillen!
— D enn T u g e n d -G e h e u l,
Ih r a lle rlieb ste n M a d c h e n ,
 NIETZSCHE 203

1st m ehr als Alles

E u ro p a e r-ln b ru n s t, E u ro p a e r-H e is sh u n g e r!
U nd d a s te h e ich sc h o n ,
Als E u ro p a e r,
Ich k a n n n ic h t a n d e rs, G o tt helfe m ir!
A m en!

H a ! U p w a rd , dig n ity !
V irtu e-d ig n ity ! T h e E u ro p e a n ’s dig n ity !
blow , b lo w a g ain
b e llo w s o f virtu e!
H a!
R o a r o n c e m o re,
th e m o ral ro a r,
ro a r like a m o ral lion
b e fo re th e d a u g h te rs o f th e d e se rt!
— For v irtu e -w a ilin g ,
y o u d e a re st girls,
is m o re than a n y th in g
th e E u ro p e a n ’s a rd o r, th e E u ro p e a n ’s crav in g !
A nd th e r e I am ,
as a E u ro p e a n ,
I h ave n o c h o ic e, G o d h e lp me!
A m e n ! 115

T h is w as the riskiest o f exp erim ents, and therefore it rem ained on

paper. Before the daugh ters o f the desert, one prostitutes a discourse,
w hich as the D iscourse o f the O th e r rules anim als and can m ake them
speak. W hat the P fo rta sch ool denied to its star pupil is realized in the
desert: w om en ap p ear, very different fro m gym n asiu m pupils and their
em ancipated copies. T h e y neither speak nor w rite; a m oralistic h o w lin g
m onkey, a lth ou gh he calls him self the lab yrin th o f w o m e n , finds that
Dudu and Suleika, these “ m ute, om in ou s she-cats,” “ resp h in x” him . T h e
enigm a o f sexual difference, the phallus that N ietzsche transfigures into a
D ionysian instrum ent o f tortu re and that “ Erna (D r. H elene von D rus­
k o w itz)” p roclaim ed w as a stigm a in the shape o f a sew er p u m p — in the
d esert its on ly invitation is to play.

D iese sc h o n ste L u ft trin k e n d ,

M it N iiste rn g e sc h w ellt gleich B echern,
O h n e Z u k u n ft, o h n e E rin n e ru n g e n ,
So sitze ich h ier, ih r
A llerlieb sten F re u n d in n e n ,
U n d s e h e d e r P a lm e z u ,
W ie sie, e in e r T a n z e rin gleich
Sich b ieg t u n d sc h m ie g t u n d in d e r H iifte w ie g t
— m an th u t es m it, sie h t m a n lange zu!
E in er T an z erin gleich , d ie, w ie m ir sc h e in e n w ill,
2 .0 4 1900

Z u lan g e sc h o n , g e fah rlic h lan g e

Im m e r, im m er n u r a u f E inem B eine sta n d ?
— D a v e rg ass sie d a r o b , w ie m ir sc h e in e n w ill,
D a s a n d re Bein?
V ergebens w e n ig sten s
S uchte ich d a s v erm isste
Z w illin g s-K le in o d
— n a m lich d a s a n d re B ein—
In d e r heiligen N a h e
Ih res a lle rlie b s te n , a lle rz ierlich ste n
F acher- u n d F la tte r- und F litte rro c k c h e n s.

D rin k in g th is finest a ir,

w ith n o strils filled like C h a lic e s,
w ith o u t fu tu re , w ith o u t m e m o rie s,
h e re I sit, y o u
d e a re st frien d s,
and w a tch th e p a lm tree ,
h o w like a d a n c e r
she p lay s a n d sw ay s h e r hip
— o n e d a n c e s a lo n g if o n e w a tc h e s f o r long!
L ike a d a n c e r, w h o , it seem s t o m e,
s ta n d s to o lo n g , d a n g e ro u sly lo n g ,
a lw ay s, a lw a y s only o n O n e Leg?
— She fo r g o t, it seem s to m e,
th a t o th e r leg?
I a t lea st
have lo o k e d in vain
f o r th e m issin g tw in jew el
— th e o th e r leg, n a m e ly —
in sa c re d n e arn e ss
to h e r d e a re s t, m o st g raceful
s p a rk lin g , flu tterin g , fa n lik e d re ss.

T h e ph allus is missing o r forgotten o r there, w h ere it is not: on w om en.

T h e palm tree, instead o f im m ediately b ecom in g a p iece o f paper, as under
the con d itio n s o f n orthern cu lture, d an ces the erection . Even the h o w lin g
m onkey, instead o f m erely learn in g to read and w rite from w om en as
from palm trees, su ccu m bs to the rhythm ical im perative. T h e m usic that
N ietzsch e had vainly aw aited from W agner, B izet, K oselitz, or G a st arises
after all: a m usic equal to the b ro w n sunsets o f the desert. W om en w h o
are daughters o f the desert, and therefore do not exist in the sin gu lar at
all, place w ritin g on the unm easured ground w ith o u t w h ich signs and
m edia w o u ld n ot exist. T h e d esp o t’s dream o f being able to fix w o rd s as
purely and sim ply as incessant pain w o u ld burn itself in evap orates in the
em ptiness that reduces w ord s to sm all, am using acciden ts. (The h o w lin g
m on key him self m o ck s the w ord resphinx as a sin again st lan gu age.) “ Un
c o u p d e d es jam ais n’ abolira le hasard .”
 NIETZSCHE 20 J

In the desert o f chan ce there is neither future n or m em ory. F ix ed ideas

m ight o n ce m ore ex cite the E u rop ean ’s a rd o r, b u t circa 190 0 an o p p o site
sym ptom groun d s the a ct o f w riting: the flight o f ideas. H avin g b eco m e a
lion o r h o w lin g m onkey, the p h ilosop h er can finally p a rtak e o f the p riv i­
lege o f an im als— an active forgetfu lness, w hich d o e s not m erely forget
this o r that, b u t forgets forgettin g itself.1'6 M n em o n ic techn iqu e, sim ply
by b ein g c alled technique rather than being, like m em ory, an inborn fa c­
ulty, exists o n ly as a resistance to the incessant and thou ght-fleeing in n o ­
cence o f speech.
T h e d ithyram b ic, flight-of-ideas wish to be ou t o f E u rop e and in the
desert, to lose o n e’s head a m o n g its d au ghters, w as not unfulfilled. In a n ­
oth er desert, the institute for the c u re and care o f th e insane in Jena, the e x ­
professor d em on strated this fulfillm ent in fron t o f exp erts. W h a t “ cam e
to ” the psychiatrists w ritin g the case report and listen ing to N ietzsc h e’s
speech w as w h a t alw ays occu rred to them circa 1900: “ flight o f id eas.” 117
 The Great Lalula

In the discourse n etw ork o f 1900, discourse is p rod u ced by r a n d o m

g e n e r a t o r s . P sych o ph ysics constructed su ch sources o f n oise; the n ew
tech n ological m ed ia stored their ou tp u t.

Psychophysics
T w o years b efore N ietzsch e a rgu ed that m nem on ic techniques w ere
the gen ealogy of m orals, a professor o f p sych ology in B reslau, H erm ann
E bbinghau s, published a sh o rt but revo lu tion ary w o r k en titled O n M e m ­
ory. W hereas the last p h ilosop h er ended the history o f W estern eth ics by
red ucin g history and ethics to m achines, E bbinghaus m ade a new, that is,
tech n ological con trib u tion to k n o w le d g e o f an a ge-o ld ph enom enon.
A n d w h erea s the p h ilosop h er and m an o f letters d escrib ed the scene o f
w ritin g w ith every line he w ro te until such au toreferen tiality issues in a
m egalom an iacal scream (or the book E cce H om o) and b ro u g h t p sych ia ­
trists into the pictu re, E bbinghaus w as qu ite reticent a b ou t the subject
o f his painfu l a u toexp erim en t o f m em ory q u an tification . T h is silence
m akes it possible to turn the great w ords o f the ex-p rofessor in to science.
W here the on e had com e to his end w ith psychiatrically defined flight o f
ideas, the oth er risked the sam e fa te exp erim en tally; his te xt, h ow ever,
records on ly num bers, n ot a w o rd o f pain o r pleasure. Yet num bers are
the only kind o f in fo rm ation that rem ains relevant beyon d all m inds,
w h eth er insane o r professorial: as an inscription in the real.'
“ D u rin g tw o period s, in the years 18 79 — 80 and 1883 — 84,” E b b in g­
haus d aily con d u cted au toexp erim en ts, beginning at varied tim es o f the
 THE GREAT LALULA 207

day in the first period but using the early aftern o on d u rin g the second.
“ C a re w a s taken th a t th e o b jective con d itio n s o f life d u rin g the period o f
the tests w e re so con trolled as to elim inate to o great chan ges o r irreg u ­
larities .” 2 W h o m ight have created such ch a o s— servants o r w ives, stu ­
dents o r co lleag u es— rem ains unspecified. W h a t m atters is that a G erm an
professor m odified his life during specified period s in o rd er to be able to
count som ething that w as p reviou sly deem ed com m on k n o w le d g e and
therefore beneath n otice: his o w n m em ory cap acity.

H o w d o e s th e d is a p p e a ra n c e o f th e ability to re p ro d u c e , fo rg e tfu ln e ss, d e p e n d

u p o n th e len g th o f tim e d u rin g w hich n o re p e titio n s h ave ta k e n place? W h a t p r o ­
p o rtio n d o e s th e in cre ase in th e c e rta in ty o f re p ro d u c tio n b e a r to th e n u m b e r o f
re p e titio n s? H o w d o th ese re la tio n s vary w ith th e g re a te r o r less in te n sity o f th e
in te re s t in th e th in g to be re p ro d u c e d ? T h e se a n d sim ila r q u e s tio n s n o o n e can
a n sw er.
T h is in a b ility d o e s n o t a ris e fro m a c h a n c e neg lect o f in v e stig a tio n o f th ese
re la tio n s. W e c a n n o t say th a t to m o rro w , o r w h e n e v e r w e w ish to ta k e tim e , w e
can in v estig ate th ese p ro b lem s. O n th e c o n tra ry , this in a b ility is in h e re n t in th e
n a tu re o f th e q u e stio n s them selves. A lth o u g h th e c o n c e p tio n s in q u e stio n —
nam ely, d eg rees o f fo rg etfu ln ess, o f c e rta in ty a n d in te re s t— a re q u ite c o r re c t, w e
h ave n o m ea n s o f e sta b lish in g su c h d e g ree s in o u r e x p e rie n c e e x c e p t a t th e e x ­
trem es. W e feel th e re fo re th a t w e a re n o t a t all in a c o n d itio n t o u n d e rta k e th e
in v estig a tio n . . . . F o r e x a m p le , to e x p re ss o u r id ea s c o n c e rn in g th e ir [m e m o rie s’]
p h y sical b a sis w e use d iffe re n t m e ta p h o rs — s to re d -u p id e a s, e n g ra v e d im a g e s,
w ell-b e ate n p a th s. T h e re is only o n e th in g c erta in a b o u t th e se figures o f speech
and th a t is th a t th ey a re n o t a c c u ra te .3

W h at seem s m ost fam iliar to introspection here b ecom es an ob ject o f

research. A n d the cu stom ary m etaphors and im ages o f p sy ch o lo g y c a n ­
n ot be eradicated w ith o u t m ortification . N ietzsch e had d erived the m ost
spiritual o f m em ories fro m the b o d y and its suffering; p sych o p h ysics a p ­
p roach ed the sam e enigm a m athem atically, w ith m ethods th at H. L .F .
von H elm h oltz and G . T . Fechner had d eveloped to m easure p ercep tio n .4
A shift in parad igm s occu rred : N ietzsch e and E bb in ghau s presu p posed
forgetfulness, rather than m em ory and its cap acity, in ord er to place the
m edium o f the soul against a b ackgrou n d o f em ptiness o r erosion . A zero
value is required b efore acts o f m em ory can be q u an tified . E bb in gh au s
ban n ed introspection and thus restored the prim acy o f forgettin g on a
theoretical level. O n the one hand, there w as N ietzsch e’s d eliriou s joy at
forgettin g even his forgetfu lness; on the other, there w as a p sych o lo g ist
w h o forgo t all o f p sy c h o lo g y in ord er to forge its a lg eb ra ic fo rm u la. T h is
is th e relation o f the D iscou rse o f the M aster to that o f the university, o f
N ietzschean com m an d to tech n ological ex ecu tio n . R ather than give a
p h ilosophical description o f m nem on ic inscription and p ra ctice it in
d ithyram b s, E bbinghau s to o k th e place o f N ietzsch e’s victim o r e x p e ri­
208 1900

m ental sub ject and then retroactively becam e the ob server o f his o w n e x ­
perience in order to q u a n tify w h a t he had suffered.
R ead in g aloud at a tem po d ictated by the tickin g o f his p o ck et w atch ,
the professor spent years readin g line after line o f m eaningless syllab les,
until he cou ld recite them fro m m em ory. “ H is idea o f using m eaningless
syllables as experim ental m aterial solved in a single strok e the introspec-
tionist prob lem o f finding m eaning-free sen sation s.” 5 From that p o in t on,
the b are relation o f num bers cou ld serve as a m easure fo r the force o f
psych op h ysical inscription . Lines o f seven syllables can be learn ed in­
stantly, lines o f tw elve syllables h ave to be read sixteen tim es, and lines o f
tw en ty-six syllab les have to be read fifty-five tim es b efore the m echanism
o f reprod u cible m em orization c lic k s o n . It w a s n o t a lw a y s easy, h ow ever,
to exclu d e self-fu lfillin g prop hecies in the num erical results; the fo rg e t­
tin g o f forgettin g rem ains as p a ra d o x ica l as the effort “ to rid on eself o f a
th o u gh t and by that very attem pt foster that th o u g h t.” 6 A fter three q u a r­
ters o f an hou r o f uninterrupted m em ory exercises, “ o ccasio n a lly ex h a u s­
tion , h ead ach e, and oth er sy m p to m s,” set in, “ w hich if continu ed w o u ld
have com plicated th e con d itio n s o f th e ex p erim en t.” 7 P sych o p h ysics is
thus quite real, particu larly fo r its inventor, for w h o m it (like all m nem on ic
techniques, acco rd in g to N ietzsche) causes ph ysical d isco m fo rt. It w as
k n o w n in the classical age that “ such a d read fu lly one-sided a p plicatio n
o f so subordin ate a m ental po w er as m em ory can d eran ge human rea­
son” ;* but fo r this reason A n selm us circum vented m echanical repetition
th rou gh herm eneutics. In 190 0 the op p o site is necessary. A su bordin ate
m ental fun ction becom es the m ost fu n dam en tal, because it is q u an tifi­
a b le .’ For the sa k e o f a few form u las, E bbinghau s sacrificed (as N ietzsch e
did fo r the desert) his subject o f k n o w le d g e.10 D izzy, num bed by all the
syllables, his mind b ecam e a tabu la ra sa ."
T h e test’s individual co n d itio n s all co n trib u ted to such em ptiness. L an ­
g u a g e w as artificially reduced to a ra w state. First, E bb in gh au s did not
a llo w “ the m eaningless syllab les to be con n ected w ith an y associated
m eanings, as is ch aracteristic o f certain m nem on ic tech n iq u es.” 12 S econ d,
the em p ty p age he had b ecom e w as cleansed o f m em ories and his native
lan guage. T o isolate m em ory from all oth er cultural p ra ctices, E b b in g­
haus elim inated signifieds fro m the b egin n in g, becau se th ey m ight have
p rovok ed herm eneutic activity. “ A ssociation s tending in d ifferent d irec­
tion s, differing degrees o f interest, the recollection o f p articu larly strikin g
o r beautiful verses, etc.,” all such ord inarily san ction ed m en tal a ctiv ity
am ounted on ly to “ d istu rbin g influences.” ” W ith h is h ead spinning,
E bbinghaus achieved an u n th in k able distance w h ere n oth in g, bu t n othing,
m eans anyth in g. H e instituted the flight o f ideas.
 THE GREAT LALULA 209

T h e re is n othin g ex o tic in d istance, and the g rea t k in gd o m o f nonsense

is n o ex cep tion . In o rd er to p ro v e that recollectin g m eaningless m aterial
w as the rule, E bbinghaus co n d u cte d cou n ter exp erim ents. A s if to test
N ietzsch e’s thesis o f the b asic utility o f m etrics, E bb in gh au s m em orized
c a n to s fro m Byron’s D o n Ju an under the sam e exp erim en tal cond itions
as b efore. Even he w a s surprised by the result. “ From this po in t o f v ie w it
alm o st seems as if the difference betw een sense and nonsense m aterial
w ere not n early so great as on e w o u ld be inclined a priori to im ag in e.” 14
T h u s the great d octrin e bestow ed by the discourse n etw o rk o f 1 800 on its
reform ed prim ers is shaken: nam ely, the notion that readers w ould learn
signifieds, because o f their im m anence in the m ind, w ith much greater
speed than they w o u ld learn signifiers by rote. T o the con trary, pure n o n ­
sense reveals certain specific aspects o f attention th a t herm eneutics co u ld
n ot even conceive. “ T h e hom o gen eity o f the series o f syllab les falls c o n ­
siderably short o f w h at m ight be exp ected o f it. T h e series ex h ib it very
im portant and alm ost incom prehensible variation s as to the ease o r d iffi­
cu lty w ith w hich they are learn ed .” 15 J ust b eyon d th e pu rp o se o f th e test,
then, there is som ething that n o longer concerns E bb in ghau s b u t that w ill
interest Freud and th e w riters; it is th e d ifferen tiality that precedes all
m eaning: the n aked, elem entary existence o f signifiers. If “ from this point
o f v ie w ” the difference betw een sense and nonsense d w in d les, then the
kin gdom o f sen se— that is, the entire discourse n e tw o rk o f 1 8 0 0 — sinks
to the level o f a seco n d ary and excep tio n a l p h en o m en o n . N eith er u n d er­
stan din g n or the previou sly fun dam en tal c a p a c ity o f “ in w a rd izin g” o r
recollection has any significant effect on the m echanics o f m em ory.
If signifiers obey law s that are as fu n dam en tal as they are in com p reh en ­
sible, it is essential to have the test m aterial exp ressed in strict, statistical
term s. L o n g before the expressionist “ lan gu age ero ticism ” [S p ra ch ero tik]
that “ first m ust dem olish lan gu a g e” and “ establish the ch ao tic, origin ary
con d itio n , the absolute h o m o gen eity o f the m aterial,” “ E bb in gh au s w en t
to w o rk on the sam e p roject. T h e nonsense that he spent h ou rs, d ays,
w eeks, and years m em orizing w as never picked up from any native sp e a k ­
ers in any locality. It w as generated by a calcu latio n at the b egin nin g o f
every test series. T h ro u g h an exh au stive com bin ation o f eleven vo w els,
nineteen begin nin g con son an ts, and (for the sake o f p ron u n ciation ) o n ly
eleven end con son an ts, there cam e to be “ c a . 2,30 0 ” o r (as an yon e m ight
calcu late) 2,299 trip th o n g sy lla b les.17 T h e ran dom gen erator can not keep
a fe w m eaningful G erm an w ord s from appearin g in a series, “ d o sch pam
feu r l o t . . .” " T h ese, h o w e ver, are excep tion s that can be read o v er (like
lo t five seconds ago) and that have little effect. “ A m o n g m any th o u san d
com bin ation s there o c c u r scarcely a few d o ze n that h a ve a m eanin g and
2 10 1900

am o n g these there are again on ly a few w hose m eanin g was realized

w hile they w ere b ein g m em orized .” ”
N ever before had such passion been d evoted to syllab les. O f cou rse,
R eform ation prim ers did, to the dism ay o f the classical age, play through
single vo w el-co n son an t com bin ations o f the secon d ord er. But their a b e b
ib o b u b / ba be b i b o bu w as on ly an exa m p le; the go a l w as n ot a m athe­
m atically gu aran teed com pleteness o f assem bly. T h e discourse n etw o rk o f
1 900 w as the first to establish a treasu ry o f the signifier w h o se rules w ere
entirely based on ran dom ness and com b in atorics.20 It is not th at, w ith
E bb in ghaus’s num bered sou n d s and sou n d co m bin ation s o r M a lla rm e ’s
tw en ty -fo u r letters, an old -E u rop ean discursive p ractice returns fro m its
repression circa 18 0 0 .2' T h e fa ct that com b in atory grou p s d o n o t neces­
sarily prod u ce sense a lso applied to the letters and w ords o f the m iserable
scribes o f 17 3 6 . But n ot even L is c o v ’s satire had the scribes system atically
avoid “ agreem ent a m o n g the letters” the w a y E bbinghaus did. T h e d iffer­
ence betw een the p o lyp h o n ic line and the tw elve-ton e techn iqu e is sim i­
lar; the latter n o t o n ly revives all con tra p u n ta l-co m b in a to ry arts, but a lso
avoid s all accid en tal h a rm o n ic effects just as cou n terp oin t had avoid ed all
dissonance.
T h e h o m o lo gies betw een d o d eca p h o n y and E bb in gh au s, w h o b egan a
w h o le positivist m ovem ent, are so far-reach in g that a search fo r fa c ­
tual cross-con n ection s w o u ld be w o rth w h ile (though it w o u ld not be
m erely the investigation into the am bien ce o f V ienn ese co ffee houses that
A d o r n o ’s ph ilosop h y o f m odern m usic in all seriousness prop oses). First,
E bb inghaus m em orized the m eaningless syllables in grou p s o f seven to
tw en ty-six, w hich, like S ch on b erg’s tw elve tones, are called series. Sec­
o n d , he elim inated the d istu rb in g effects o f easily learned syllab les by p u t­
ting asid e the sylla b les from the a va ila b le su p ply o f 2,299 com b in ation s
that had alread y b een m em orized until all the o th er com b in ation s had
been gone th rou gh .22 D o d eca p h o n y proceeded in the sam e w a y w ith se­
rial tones that had alread y been em p loyed : these w ere ta b o o until the re­
m ain ing eleven had been run throu gh . T h ird , in order to refute the d o c­
trine o f free association tau gh t in 1800, E bb in ghau s prod u ced a very
com plicated dem onstration sh o w in g that the in tercon n ection o f m em bers
o f a ro w facilitates m em orization; fo r exam p le, if an alread y m em orized
series d o sch pam feur lot . . . , is reordered in to the series lot pdm feur
do sch . . . . A ccord in gly, “ n ot only are the origin al term s associated w ith
their im m ediate seq u en ts,” that is, th o se fo llo w in g in eith er d irectio n , but
“ con n ection s are a lso established betw een ea ch term and those w h ich fo l­
lo w it beyond several intervening m em bers.” 23 Sch on b erg p ro ceed ed in
the sam e m anner b y b yp assin g certain notes in a m elod y and tran sferrin g
them to parallel vo ice s.24 In both cases a com bin atorics presented in the
 THE GREAT LALULA 2.11

origin al m aterial is subjected to a further com b in atorics o f the series and

colum n.
Perm utations o f perm utation s elim inate any n atu ra l relation. N o n ­
sense syllab les o r ch ro m atic tones o f equal value con stitu te m edia in the
m odern sense: m aterial prod u ced by random gen eration , selected and
g roup ed into ind ivid ual com plexes. T h e fa ct that these m aterials alw ays
join discrete elem ents and d o n ot d ev elo p in con tin u ou s genesis from
an un articulated nature distinguishes them from m inim al signifieds. T o
E bb in ghaus the unique “ o h ” w o u ld sim ply be on e a m o n g the 209 p o s­
sible d ip th o n g com bin ation s. It w o u ld n ot take until the y ear 2 4 0 7, as
C h ristian M o rgen stern ’s G ingganz ann ou n ces, for “ the great paper-
shredding sn ow cen trifu ge o f the A m erican N atu re T h ea te r C o m p a n y
Ltd. o f B rotherson & Sann” to tak e the place o f o rga n ica lly gro w n sn ow
crystals.25
If a syllab le such as ma does not gro w out o f a m oth er-child love tran ­
scen d in g w o rd s and then glide in to the first w o rd o f the high idiom ,
M a m a, but rather is th row n ou t like d ice , it forfeits any ran kin g above
the countless oth er syllab les that are and rem ain m eaningless. O n the
contrary, the effe ct o f m eaning, greeted by Tiedem ann and Stephani as a
revelation from b eyon d all lan gu age, b ecom es a d istu rban ce th at trou b les
the pure flight o f ideas w ith m em ories and association s. T h in k in g and in ­
tending, h ow ever, are th e im aginary acts that led th e p h ilosop h ers of
1800 to assert the prim acy o f the o ral. In con trast to the tech n ologies
o f the letter, only sp eakin g— an extern alization that im m ediately dis­
app ears— could figure as the frictionless unification o f Spirit and N atu re .
But orality, together w ith th o u g h t, vanishes from ran d om ly generated
lan guage m aterial. O f cou rse, E bbinghau s w o rk e d with ph onem es in
ord er to b e able to read a lo u d , b u t they w ere presented to him as w ritin g.
Syllable after syllab le com es ou t o f the ran d om gen erator, o n to the d esk
and into the file o f w o rked -th ro u gh alternatives, until all 2,299 h ave been
used and output and input can begin again.
M em o ry tests in w hich the exp erim en ta l su b ject necessarily thinks
n othin g and aban d o n s the p o sition o f k n o w in g su b ject have an eq u ally
subjectless observer, w h o is n o t as fa r from N ietzsch e’s n e w g o d as hasty
d istin ction s betw een m yth and positivism w o u ld have it. T h e tw o m e­
chanical m em ories on either side o f the tab u la rasa E b b in gh au s— the one
generatin g the syllables and the oth er record in g them a fter they have
passed b e fo re him — form a w riting m achine that forgets n oth in g and
stores m ore nonsense than people ever cou ld : 2,299 nonsense syllab les.
T h is is the necessary con d itio n f o r a psych op h ysical investigation o f
m em ory: m em ory is ta k en fro m p e o p le and delegated to a m aterial o r g a ­
nization o f discourse. T h e discourse n etw o rk o f 1800 played the gam e
2 12 1 900

of not b eing a discourse n etw o rk and pretended instead to be the in­

w ardness and vo ice o f M a n ; in 1900 a type o f w r itin g assum es po w er that
d oes n ot c o n fo rm to trad ition al w ritin g system s but rath er rad icalizes the
tech n ology o f w ritin g in gen eral.14

T h e m ost radical ex tra p o la tio n from a discourse n etw ork o f w ritin g is

to w rite w riting. “ All letters that have ever been w ritten by man c o u n t.’ ’ 17
Given an assortm en t o f letters and d iacritical signs, like a ty p e w rite r k e y ­
b oard (even, after 1888, in its stan dardized form ), then in prin ciple it is
possible to inscribe m ore and different sorts o f things than any voice has
ever sp ok en . O f cou rse, such n otation s have n o purpose b eyon d n otation
itself; they need not and can n o t be dem aterialized and consu m ed by a
herm eneutics; their indelible and indigestible existence on the p age is all
th a t the page conveys.

THE GREAT LALULA

K ro k lo k w a fzi? Serhem erhi!

S e io k ro n tro — p ra frip lo :
B ifzi, b a fzi; h u lale m i:
q u a sti b a sti b o . . .
L ain lalu lalu lalu la!
H o n tr a ru ru m iro m e n te
z ask u zes rii rii?
E n te p e n te , leio len te
k le k w a p u fz i lii?
L alu lalu lalu lalu la!
S im a ra r k o s m a lz ip e m p u
s ilz u z a n k u n k re i (;)!
M a r jo m a r d o s: Q u e m p u L em pu
Siri S uri Sei []!
L alu lalu lalu la lu la!

B efore M o rg en stern ’s 1905 collection G a llo w s Songs, n o poem had

existed as a sm all discourse n etw o rk . L iterary h istorians h ave sou gh t
classical-rom an tic m odels fo r these poem s and have fou n d som e n on ­
sense verse here and there.1* But even the “ W ien un g q u atsch , Ba nu, Ba
nu n’am tsche fa tsch ,” su n g by a d ark -skin n ed co o k in C lem en s B ren tan o’s
Several M illers o f Sorrow , if it is not pidgin R u m anian, is at least speak-
able.1’ N o vo ice, how ever, can sp eak parentheses that en close a sem icolon
(as specified in “ T h e G reat L alu la ” ) o r e v e n — to d em on strate on ce and
fo r all w h at m edia a re — b rackets th at su rro u n d an em p ty space. System ­
atic nonsense, w h ich dem ands inhum an storage cap acities, ex ists on ly in
w riting. T h e fa c t that M orgen stern ’s syllables ow e their existen ce not to a
com b in atory m ethod b ut, at first sight at least, to lovely ch an ce doesn ’t
 THE GREAT LALULA

m ake them all that different from E b b in g h au s’s series. “ T h e G reat L a lu la ’ ’

is a lso m aterial w ith o u t an au th or; the m ore chan ce enters, th e m ore liter­
ally does the im perative in the m o tto o f the G a llo w s Songs apply: “ Let
the m olecules roar / w h atever they dice to g eth er!’’
Clearly, th e discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 is a dice gam e w ith “ serially
ordered discrete un ities,’ ’ 10 w hich in the lyric are called letters and p u n c­
tuation signs, and to w h ich w riters since M a lla rm e h ave ceded the ini­
tiative. M o re a n a rch ic than l.isco v’s m iserab le scribes, w h o can at least
discard a bad dice throw , less Faustian than all p oeta e m inores o f 1800,
w h o prod uced quantities o f m eanin g in inverse relation to their stature,
literature th row s out signifiers. “ T h e G reat l.a lu la ’ ’ says that, in the b e­
gin nin g and in the end, lan gu age is B lab la. “ You can say w hat you like,
people m o re often than n ot d o n oth in g b u t— b ark , c a c k le , crow , bleat,
etc. Just listen fo r o n ce to the anim al conversations in a b ar.’ ’ 11
W h at rem ains is the enigm a o f the signifiers’ use. T o w rite d o w n scrip t
that is sim ply script had n o appeal fo r h erm en eu tic interpreters o r for
ph ilosophers, w h ose chief concern is “ n atu rally the stress on the fa cto r of
m eaning’ ’ and therefore “ n atu ra lly’ ’ G erm an Poetry.12 “ L a lu la ’ ’ is m ore
useful to cry p to g ra p h ers (of w h o m m ore will be said). But p sych op h ysics
w o u ld have the greatest use fo r such w ritin g . T h e re are people in w h o m
M o rgen stern ’s nonsense “ lives on as a fo u n t o f cita tio n ” — the m o st cer­
tain “ sign fo r w h at w e call a classic p o e t” 11— th ough on e does not k n o w
h o w such m nem on ic technique w o rk s. Because “ n ew creation in la n ­
gu age has som eth in g in com m on w ith the invention o f u n dream ed -of
physical ph en o m en a,” 14 the “ L a lu la ” w ou ld be an occasio n fo r readers to
instigate au toexp erim en ts in m em ory, especially since E bb in gh au s h im ­
se lf fudged things a bit. In ord er to m easure eventual differences betw een
sense and nonsense, the psych op h ysicist introd u ced verses by B yron
and thus determ inants supplem en tary to m eaning: rhym e and m eter. In
“ L a lu la ,” by con trast, on ly these tw o redundancies, w ith n o m eanin g, r e ­
strict chance. A s a m issing link betw een the sylla b ic h o d g ep o d ge and the
lyric form , “ L a lu la ” cou ld bring experim ental clarification to the c o n tro ­
versial question w h eth er rhym e and m eter, in their m n em on ically co n v e­
nient conspicuousn ess, represent the identity o f signifieds o r are the
effects o f signifiers.15 In this w ay on e could distinguish th ose fu n ctio n s
that, in B yron , rem ain clum ped together as “ unified strains o f sense,
rhythm , rhym e, and m em bership in a single lan g u a g e.” 14 N ietzsch e’s d o c ­
trine of the utility o f poetry, w hich stressed m nem on ic tech n iqu e and
questioned rather than su p ported the possibility o f th e tran sm ission o f
m eanin g, c o u ld be b ro u g h t to b e a r on T h e Scientific F oundations o f P o ­
etry more m aterially through “ T he G reat L a lu la ” than the a p ostle of
naturalism , W ilhelm B olsch e, had intended in his title.
214 1 9° °

F ollo w in g the h eroic au toexp erim en ts o f E bb in ghau s, b reak in g d ow n

discourses into single and discrete fu n ctions becam e the task o f an en­
tire p sychop hysics o f com plex cu ltu ral practices. T h ese fu n ctio n s have
nothin g to d o w ith on e anoth er o r w ith any unity im posed b y c o n scio u s­
ness; th ey are a u to m a tic and au to n o m o u s. “ W e m ay sum up the e x p e ri­
m ent by sayin g th at a large n um ber o f acts ord in arily called intelligent,
such as readin g, w ritin g , etc., can g o on quite autom atically in ordinary
p eop le.” 17 In 1900 sp eakin g and hearing, w riting and readin g w ere put to
the test as isolated fu n ctio n s, w ith o u t any su b ject o r th o u gh t as their
sh a d o w y supports. “ Betw een finitude and infinity the w ord has am ple
room to be able to d o w ith o u t any help from th o u gh t.” 1* R ather than the
lon g genetic path o f the w ord from its begin nin g in nature to its end in
culture, w h a t cou nts is the signifier’s m echanism and h o w it runs under
eith er norm al o r path o lo gical circum stances. P sychoph ysics is not a p e d a ­
g o g y th at ta k es necessary truths from M o th e r N atu re fo r m o th ers and
teachers; rather, it inventories p reviou sly unresearched particu lars. C u l­
ture [Bildurtg], th e great u n ity in w h ic h sp eakin g, hearing, w ritin g , and
readin g w o u ld achieve m utual tran sparen cy and relation to m ean in g,
b reaks a p art. E ven if sch oolm en d ra w m assive con clu sion s fro m the in­
ventory, the experim enters are at the w heel. P ed agogic reform s are on ly
applications; they ap p ly to o n ly on e cu ltu ral p ractice; indeed, th ey tend
to m ake instruction in reading o r w riting into a so m ew h at m uddled ord er
o f research. T h u s even in its o w n field, in the “ p sych o lo g y o f read in g,”
“ the co m p eten ce o f p e d a g o g y ” en d s.1’ Exit Stephani.
T h e v ic to r y o f p sych op h ysics is a parad igm shift. Instead o f the classi­
cal question o f w h at p e o p le w o u ld be cap ab le o f if they w ere ad equ ately
and affection ately “ c u ltiva ted ,” on e asks w hat people have alw ays been
cap ab le o f w hen au to n o m ic fu n ctio n s are singly and th o ro u g h ly tested.40
B ecause this cap ab ility is not a g ift o f p rod u ctive nature, but as sim ple as
either sp ellin g o r w ritin g “ L a lu la ,” it has n o ideal com p letio n o r en d ­
point. T h ere is n o universal norm (inw ardness, creative im ag in a tion , high
idiom , Poetry) tran scen din g the p articu lar fu n ction s. Each has a standard
only in relation to defined exp erim en tal subjects and con d itio n s.
W hen ten pupils from each o f ten gym n asium classes read alo u d and
as q u ick ly as possible on e hun dred con n ected w ords from E gm on t, the
m easured average readin g tim e fo r those in the sixth class is 55 secon d s,
for those in the fifth class 43 secon d s, and fo r those in the first class 23
secon d s.41 These stan dards m ean n oth in g to ed u cation ally b u reau cratized
lovers o f G o e th e. E bbinghau s adds to these num bers his o w n , nam ely
0 .1 6 secon ds per w o rd o f G o e th e, thus leveling any d istin ction in rank
betw een pupils and professors, em pirical evidence and norm . T o m easure
on e’s ow n reading p a ce as w ell as that o f the sixth class m eans m ethod i­
 THE GREAT LALULA 21 5

cally disposing o f cultu re [B ildung], T h u s E bbinghau s d oes not an n ou n ce

any record, because “ the num bers con tin u e to dim inish w ith further
practice in readin g.’ ’ 42 So the transcendental norm falls in to an endless
series, at w h o se irreal end m ight be som eone w h o co u ld on ly speedread.
If psych op h ysical standards had ideals rather than p rovisional records,
those ideals w o u ld resem ble the genius o f K a fk a ’s hunger artist. Indeed,
the first Germ an gra p h o lo g ist to o k such interest in cripples w h o w ro te
with their m ouths o r feet that he attem pted to d o so him self and re­
prod uced facsim iles o f his efforts.4’ P sychophysics ceased su b jectin g c u l­
tural p ractices to a d ich o to m y o f the norm al and p a th o lo g ica l, th e d evel­
op ed and un derdeveloped. It investigated cap ab ilities that in ev eryd a y life
w o u ld have to be called superfluous, p a th o lo gical, or ob solete.
E bbinghaus, h avin g been a lp h abetized , cou ld read silently, w ith ou t
m ovin g his m outh , but fo r test series he preferred the old -fash ion ed
m eth od o f readin g a lo u d at a tem p o that cou ld be m ech an ically di­
rected .44 O f course, typew riters that elim inated all the in d ivid u a lity o f
script had recently a p p eared ,4’ but a psych op h ysical g ra p h o lo g y arose in
a c o u n ter m ovem ent and focused on the difference betw een stan d ard ized
letters and u n con sciou s-au tom atic hands that w rite. It w a s concern ed
w ith w h at under norm al con d itio n s w ould be considered a “ sup erflu ou s
ad dition to the letters.’ ’ 44 If “ it is em p h asized — and rightly s o — that a
pupil should not learn m aterial that is m eaningless to h im ,” 47 each p sy ch o ­
physical exp erim ental su b ject— from the infant to the p sy ch o lo g y p ro ­
fessor— is an excep tion to such p ed ag o gica l norm s. All the a bilities and
inabilities despised in 1 800 return, not as sim ple regressions from an erst­
w hile culture, but as ob jects o f analysis and d ecom p o sition .
T h e cu ltu ral-tech n o lo gical stan d ard s d o not represent M a n and his
N o rm . T h e y articulate o r d ecom po se bodies that a re alread y d ism em ­
bered. N ature d oes its o w n w o r k b efore any exp erim en ter a rrives.48 A p o ­
plexy, bullet w o u n d s to the h ea d , and p aralysis m ade possible the fu n d a ­
m ental discoveries upon w hich every con n ection d raw n betw een cultural
practices and p h ysio lo gy is based. In 18 6 1 Paul B ro ca tra c e d m o to ric
aph asia, o r the inab ility to p ron ou n ce w o rd s despite un im paired c o n ­
sciousness and hearing, to lesions in a circu m scrib ed area o f the cerebral
co rtex . In 18 7 4 Karl W ernicke m ade the m irroring d iscovery that sensory
aphasia, o r the inab ility to hear w ord s despite unim paired speech c a p a c ­
ity, corresp on d ed to a deficit in oth er areas o f the brain. T h e m ethod o f
isolating and m easuring cu ltu ral practices by reference to deficien cies led
finally to the d ecom position o f discourse into single p aram eters.49 C irca
1900 op tical disturbances co rresp o n d in g to the aco u stical d istu rban ces
investigated by B roca and W ernicke, the a lex ia s or a grap h ias, also b e­
cam e fam iliar. Further, a certain reversal in relation to lingu istic reference
2 16 I 900

and its agn osias w as discovered, for there turned o u t to be an o ra l, and

then a g ra p h ic a sym b olia, o r the inab ility “ to find the verbal im age o f an
o b je c t” even w h en the d o c to r w o u ld sh o w it to the patien t.50D iverse su b ­
routines finally had to be distinguished w ith in each cu ltu ral p ra ctice; for
ex a m p le, w ritin g included “ d ictatio n , co p y in g , w ritten d escrip tion , and
sp on tan eous w ritin g ” 51— and each o f the su b ro u tin es m ight lead to d if­
ferent results. W hat w e ord in arily call lan gu age is thus a co m p lex lin k age
o f brain centers through n o less num erous d irect and indirect nerve c o n ­
nections. A s N ietzsch e had prophesied and, as a p aralytic, d em on strated
to his psychiatrist T h e o d o r Ziehen, lan gu age breaks d ow n in to ind ivid u al
elem ents: in to o p tica l, aco u stica l, sensory, and m oto ric n ervous im pulses
and on ly then in to signifier/signified/referent.
R esearch into aphasia m arked a turnin g point in the ad ven tu res o f
speech. D istu rbances in lan gu age n o lon ger con verged in the beau tifu l
w ordlessness o f the rom an tic sou l. If there are “ as m any sources o f la n ­
gu age d isturbance as there a re organ s o f speech w a n tin g to sp e a k ,” 52 then
the single “ o h ” b ecom es on ly an incidental case.55 T h e Poetry that lis­
tened to o r inspired th at “ o h ” is replaced by sciences. O n ly on the basis o f
p sych op h ysics does it m ake term inological sense fo r Saussure, in fou n d ­
ing a new linguistics, to d ecom pose the linguistic sign into the notion o f a
concept (signified) and an acoustic-sensory im age (signifier),54 or for
Freud, m ore copied than u n derstood by his students, sim ilarly to d ivid e
“ th in g representation” [Sachvorstellung] from “ w ord representation ”
[ W ortvorstellung].”
T h e cultural go al o f universal alp h abetizatio n fades a w a y w ith the
“ o h ” o f the soul. T h e p ed ag ogy o f 1900, because it w as a pplied p h ysi­
o lo g y, w a s preoccu pied w ith stan dardizin g, in d ivid u ally and successively,
the brain regio n s o f its pupils. T h e cen ter o f concrete representations,
the m o to ric and sensorial centers fo r speech and w ritin g — all had to be
a p p roach ed separately. “ T h e readin g-w ritin g m ethod in n o w a y co rre ­
sponds to the state o f contem porary scien ce.” 54 Because n ot every local
cen ter has direct nerve con n ection s to ev ery o th er, there is n o unity o f the
transcendental signified cap ab le o f organ ically d ev elo p in g sp ea k in g and
h ea rin g , w ritin g and rea d in g ou t o f on e another. T h e p ed agogical un­
co u p lin g o f the cu ltu ral-tech n o lo gical subroutines sim ply fo llo w ed cu ts
m ade by the scalp el. C h ild ren circa 1900 learned to rea d w ith o u t u n d er­
stan din g and to w rite w ith o u t th in kin g. T h e investigation o f aph asia is
alw a y s alread y its p rod u ction .
In 1 9 1 3 W assily K and in sky published a volu m e o f poem s in G erm an .
H e accom p an ied the title Sounds w ith som e very p ractical tips. H e m eant
not rom an tic prim al sou n d s, bu t “ inner sou n d s” that rem ain w h en on e has
repeated w ord s until they b ecom e senseless— a proven and oft-em p loyed
 THE GREAT LALULA

m eans o f sim ulating aphasia. T h u s K a n d in sk y ’s p o etry isolated the sou n d

im ages o f w ord s p h ysio lo gically w ith th e exactn ess that his p ain tin g iso­
lated co lo rs and form s. T h a t does not hinder G erm an ists from a tta ck in g
him in th e nam e o f a linguistics th a t grew o u t o f the sam e prem ises.57 But
a le x ia seems to h aun t th e b o o k s o f its forgo tten investigators . . .
In 190 2 H o fm an n sth al’s A L etter appeared w ith a self-d iagn osis o f the
sender.

A n d c o u ld I, if o th e rw is e I a m still th e s a m e p e rso n , h a v e lo st fro m m y in s c ru ta b le

se lf all tra c e s a n d sc a rs o f th is c re a tio n o f m y m o st in te n siv e th in k in g — lo st th e m
so c o m p le te ly th a t in y o u r le tte r n o w ly in g b e fo re m e th e title o f m y s h o r t tre a tis e
sta re s a t m e stra n g e a n d co ld ? A t first I c o u ld n o t c o m p re h e n d it a s th e fa m ilia r
im age o f c o n jo in e d w o rd s , b u t h a d to stu d y it w o rd by w o rd , as th o u g h th ese
L atin te rm s th u s s tru n g to g e th e r w e re m e e tin g m y eye fo r th e first tim e . 51

O ne w h o w rites that he is hardly able to read any m ore is virtu ally fo r ­

m ulatin g a case o f sensory and n ear-am nesiac a le x ia . But the person is
Phillip Lord C h an d o s, and the pile o f letters th a t refuses to coalesce in to
th e im ages o f w ord s is the title o f a Latin tract th a t C h a n d o s has recently
w ritten . In the m eantim e he has not lost the ability to w rite (say letters).
But h e has lost a part o f h is ability to read, and h e suffers from a th o r­
o u g h ly ph ysio lo gical “ d ulln ess” o f the “ b ra in .” 5’ W h ereas O fterd in gen o r
G u id o could give to even the m o st foreign b o o k s th e ir o w n titles, the
w riter o f 190 2 can n o lon ger even understand his o w n title . W e can read
“ C h a n d o s” in place o f “ the patien t” when a great ph ysio lo gist describes
the sym ptom s o f alexia:

T h e p a tie n t c a n see th e le tte rs sh a rp ly e n o u g h , h e can w rite them s p o n ta n e o u s ly ,

e v en tu ally he can even c o p y th em w ith o u t e r r o r — a n d y et h e is u n a b le to re a d
a n y th in g p rin te d o r w ritte n , even th e w o rd s he had just clearly a n d c o rre c tly w r it­
te n (n o tes, s h o r t letters). . . . T h e a le x ic reco g n izes single le tte rs o r ev en sy llab les,
b u t he c a n n o t g ra s p th em successively a n d re ta in th e m as c o m p le te w o r d s so a s to
a rriv e a t an u n d e rs ta n d in g o f w h a t he h a s re a d , even fo r single w o r d s .60

T h e solid arity o f p h ysio lo gy and literature exten d s to concrete details.

O n e isolates the sym p to m s to w hich the o th e r attests. N ietzsch e praised
the half-blindness that kept him fro m readin g and allow ed on ly the w rit­
ing o f signifiers. C h an d o s experiences a sim ilar blindness vis-a-vis sig ­
nifieds, but he d evelops a n ew d iscou rse ou t o f alexia (just as sensory lan ­
gu age disturbances often influence the m oto ric a sp ect o f la n g u a g e ):61 he
avoids “ even p ro n o u n cin g ” signified s, ab ove all the tran scen dental on es
(“ Spirit, soul, o r b o d y ” ), and en vision s instead “ a lan gu age in w hich not
one w o rd is k n o w n to m e, a lan gu age in w h ich m ute things sp eak to
m e.” 62 In much the same w ay, p ed agogu es versed in p sych op h ysics sep a­
rated readin g and w ritin g , because neither should be con fu sed w ith sig-
218 1900

nifieds and referents, from w ord less ob servation al o r p ractical instru c­

tion .63 A s if he w ere a pupil in their sch ool, the L ord finds that “ a d o g in
the sun, an old ch u rchyard , a crip p le” and so on are “ sublim e revelation s”
b eyond all w o rd s.64 T h is is n ot su rprising in the cripp le he h im self is. B e­
cause they sw itch off m edial o p eratio n s o f selection , aphasia and a le x ia
necessarily present the nam eless and form less. In a p h asics, N ietzsch e’s
terrible vo ice returns to the p h ysio lo g y o f everyd ay life. “ S p eak in g, w h is­
tlin g , cla p p in g the hand s, e tc ., everyth in g is to th eir ea rs the sam e in ­
com prehensible n oise.” 65

A p h a sia, a le x ia , agrap h ia, agn osia, a sy m b o lia — in this lo n g list o f dys-

fu n ctio n alities the noise that precedes every discourse b ecom es at o n ce
them e and m eth od . T h e p ro d u cts o f d ecom posed lan gu age ob served in
the exp erim ental subjects are as usable as the m aterial p ro v id e d by the
exp erim en ters. W h at terrified N ietzsch e and C h a n d o s d iscovered as a
w o n d ro u s, foreign realm can a lso be transm itted. D iscursive m a n ip u la ­
tio n s in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 w ere quite extensive. P sych o­
physics transm its w h ite noise through a certain filter so that w h a t com es
across is, say, pin k noise; w h atever the eyes and ears o f the receiver m ake
o f this is then the ex p erim en ta l result.
E bb inghau s furth er tested his nonsense syllables on oth ers. But som e­
thin g rem arkable o c c u rre d , fo r not all experim ental su b jects had his c o m ­
m and o f the flight o f ideas. For som e,

a t le a st in th e b e g in n in g , it is h a rd ly p o ssib le to re fra in fro m th e le a rn in g a id s o f

all s o r ts o f m e m o ry s u p p o rts , to perceiv e th e syllables as m e re le tte r c o m b in a tio n s
a n d m e m o riz e th e m in a p u re ly m e c h a n ic a l fa sh io n . W ith o u t a n y e ffo rt o r voli­
tio n o n th e ir p a r t, all k in d s o f a sso c ia te d re p re se n ta tio n s c o n s ta n tly fly to w a rd
th e m fro m in d iv id u a l syllables. S o m e th in g o c c u rs to th em , in d e e d a m o tle y o f
thin g s: a sy llab ic a sso n a n c e , re la tio n s a m o n g letters, sim ila r so u n d in g m e a n in g fu l
w o rd s o r th e n a m e s o f p e rso n s, a n im a ls, a n d so fo rth , m e a n in g s in a fo reig n la n ­
g u a g e, e tc . . . . F o r e x a m p le , pek is e x p a n d e d t o Peking, chi to child; sep recalls
Joseph, neis th e E n g lish w o rd nice. . . . In th e case o f o n e su b je c t, th e sy llab les
faak neit stim u la te d th e id ea “ F a h re n h e it,” in a n o th e r c ase, jas dum (via th e
F re n c h jaser ) su g g e ste d th e n o tio n o f s tu p id ja b b e rin g ; th e syllable se q u e n ce
dosch pant feur lot w a s o n o n e o c c a sio n jo in e d to g e th e r in th e b rie f se n ten c e:
“ T h e b re a d fire lic k s .” 66

Such is the cou ntertest to aphasia. T h e fa rra g o o f syllab les that aphasi-
acs p ro d u c e from signifieds is pu t b efore norm al sp eakers in o rd e r to see
h o w th ey prod u ce signifieds o u t o f a syllab ic h od g ep o d ge and at the sam e
tim e betray a sen se-p rodu cin g n otion , w hich in the case o f jas d u m still
m eans ta lk in g nonsense. In this w ay, the difference betw een H earing a n d
Understanding can be q u an tified . A n exp erim ent run under th a t title sent
nonsense syllables, such as paum and m aum , throu gh telephon e and
 THE GREAT LALULA 219

p h on o grap h channels; subjects (in spite or o f because o f the frequency

band restriction) received “ the m ore probable baum [‘ tree’ ],” thus p r o ­
viding experim ental verification o f N ietzsch e’s oracles o f lan gu ag e theory,
o r d em on strating that discourses are “ eclectic co m b in atio n s” o f noise
spectra.*7 “ We find it m uch easier to fantasize an a p p ro x im ate tree. . . .
W e are artists m ore than w e su sp ect.”
T h u s a ph ysio lo gical w o rk entitled T h e Brain a n d Language, w hich
reconstructs the path from the speechless p atch es o f ligh t and noise the
infant perceives to the ord erin g o f im ages and speech sou n d s, co m es to
the c o n clu sio n : “ W e p ro ceed like p o ets.” ** But such p o etic a ctivity, rh ym ­
ing B aum and m aum o r hittin g upon faak neit / Fahrenheit, h avin g been
confirm ed by N ietzschean brain researchers, n o lon ger has any need o f a
m use. Even in the greatest au th ors, the u n con sciou s fu n ctio n s o f the brain
are at w o r k . A judgm en t on A n selm u s’s ecstasy beneath the eld er tree,
“ m ade possible on the basis o f a psychiatric and scientific c o n trib u ­
tio n ,” *’ led the p sych ia trist O tt o Klinke to co n clu d e th at A n selm u s, in lis­
tening to the w h isp erin g o f the three sisters, w a s clin ically psych otic:

It c an a ls o h a p p e n , a n d w ith th e m e n ta lly ill it d o e s , t h a t th e s e s o u n d s a n d w o rd s

in a c e rta in rh y th m . . . a re h e a rd by th e in n e r e a r as o c c u rrin g a t a re g u la r te m p o
a n d a re p ro je c te d to a s p o t in th e p e rso n ’s o w n b o d y o r o n to th e e n v iro n m e n t.
T h is rh y th m , e x p a n d in g to a sso c ia tio n s, a llite ra tio n s , a n d e v en rh y m e s , is o ften
b ro u g h t a b o u t by n o ises in th e e a r th a t a re s y n c h ro n o u s w ith h e a rt o r p u lse ra te s,
b u t it can also be p ro v o k e d and m a in ta in e d by re g u la r e x te rn a l so u n d s , such
as m arc h in g to rh y th m , o r, recently, th e re g u la r r o llin g o f tra in w heels. W e see
A n selm u s in a sim ila r situ a tio n a t th e b e g in n in g o f th e sto ry .70

This con clusion abolishes the precon d ition for Poetry.71 T h e noises that
led A n selm us to the M o th e r’s M o u th lose all hum an qu ality, w h ile his
interpretation o f them , called Serpentina, loses any basis. B ut m agic is n ot
lost, as it w a s in the a g e o f enlightened fathers, w hen the Elf K in g ’s w h is­
p erin g vo ice becam e rustling leaves. P sychophysics ad van ces, b e y o n d all
attrib u tio n o f m eaning and its tran sparen t arbitrarin ess, to the m ea n in g­
less b od y, w h ich is a m achin e am o n g m achines. A ro a rin g in the ears and
the roarin g o f trains are eq u ally c a p a b le o f p ro v id in g disordered brains
w ith asson an ces, alliteration s, and rhym es. T h e fa c t th at “ Sister, sister,
sw in g in the shim m er” w as once w ritten dow n as Poetry is n o lon ger a p ­
plauded by psych op h ysics.
It had hardly any o ccasio n to ap p lau d . C irca 190 0 noise w as every­
w here. A p sych o tic in his cell con stan tly hears im becilic voices that snap
up w ord s in the im becility o f his surrou nd ings “ w h ich h ave the sam e or
n early the sam e s o u n d as w h a t they have to say o r rattle o ff.” L ike the
subjects in E b b in gh au s’s ex p erim en t, the h allu cin ation s rhym e “ S a n tia g o ”
w ith “ C a th a r g o ” o r (in a so m e w h a t S axon accent) “ B riefb esch w erer”
220 1900

w ith “ H err Priifer sch w o rt.” 72 A psychiatric research er d rew the sad c o n ­
clusion from his association tests that rhym es such as H erz/Scbm erz or
B ru st/L u st, th o se h on orab le old w arh orses o f G erm an Poetry, flood the
inner ear “ on ly in psychic disorders, that is, w h erever so-called flight o f
ideas is the ru le.” Z ieh en cites a m anic patient w h o associates H und-
Buttd-Scbuttd [d og-band-trasb],7J and w h o thus calls the o u tp u t o f rh ym ­
ing w ord s by its p rop er nam e.
D ecisively, trash and nonsense had been scien tifically recorded in 1 893,
n ot on ly in 192 8 , as even an inform ed literary scholarship w o u ld a d m it.74
L y ric poetry, to o , w o u ld have to ch eck over its jingles in the H a n d b o o k o f
P hysiolog ica l P sycholog y (the title o f Z ieh en ’s b o o k ). “ B ru st/L u st” and
“ S cb m erz/H erz" are am o n g the exam p les presented by A rn o H o lz in his
Slim y R hym es a n d th e N o n sen se o f R hym es in G eneral. T h e tran sition to
m odern free verse can n o t a lw a y s be described as an inherently literary
in n ovation . W hen rhym e sh o w s up in lab oratories and m adh ou ses, it
m ust vanish from the printed p a g e if poets and p sych o tics arc n ot to be
confu sed .
Yet free verse w as on ly on e historical op tion circa 1900. A secon d,
p a rad o x ical o p tio n w as m im icry. If the clatterin g o f trains co u ld suggest
rhymes to the m entally ill, the lyric poet co u ld detect n ew rhym es in such
p o etry o f the b o d y. T h e railro ad itself, rather than an au th or o r H igh G e r ­
m an, speaks in D etlev von L ilien cron ’s “ R a ttattattat.” 75 A n d if m arch ing
to rhythm has the sam e effect, then L ilien cron ’s rhym e play o f “ Persian
S h a h ” and “ k lin glin g, bum bum and tsch in gd ad a” lo g ic a lly fo llo w s.
A m ilitary-m usical sound sou rce transm its tschingdada; the e x p eri­
m ental subjects are asked if any rhym es o c c u r to them . Such w as the p r o ­
ced u re, in the year o f the G a llo w s Songs (19 0 5 ), o f N arziss A c h , M .D .
a n d P h.D . H is test consisted in m eaningless syllables (exclu d in g the syl­
lable a ch , u n fortu nately), to w h ich su b jects, under hypn osis and in a n o r­
mal state, w ere to respond w ith m eaningless rhym es o r asson an ces.76
D ifficulties ap p ear o n ly if the perm itted reactions, u n like A c h ’s test or
“ L a lu la ,” are to be exclu sively m eaningful w ord s. H erm ann G u tzm a n n ’s
eclectic com bin ation m a u m lB a u m is harm less; tschingdada provok es
foreign w ord s; but things b ecom e truly aporetic with Stefan G eo rg e. T h e
inventor o f so many u nheard-of and nonetheless G erm an rhym es has all
discourse culm inate in a syllab ic h o d g ep o d ge th at ch o k es off any reaction
in the experim ental subjects.

W e w e re in th a t sp e c ia l reg io n o f u n re m ittin g p u n is h m e n ts w h e re th e p e o p le a re
w h o had been u n w illin g to say, “ O L o rd !,” and w h e re th e angels a re w h o sa id ,
“ W e w a n t.” T h e re in th e p la c e o f th e ir to r m e n t th e y b la s p h e m e th e e te rn a l ju d g e
a n d p o u n d th e ir b re a sts ; th ey claim to b e g r e a te r th a n th e b lessed a n d d e sp ise
th e ir joys. B ut ev ery th ird d a y a shrill v o ice calls fro m ab o v e: “ T ih o lu - T ih o lu ” —
 THE GREAT LALULA 221

a ta n g le d c o n fu sio n results- th e d a m n e d fall sile n t; tre m b lin g , g n a s h in g th e ir

te e th , th e y p ro s tr a te th em selv es o n th e g r o u n d o r tr y to h id e th em se lv es in th e
g lo w in g d a rk d e p th s .77

Th e dream o f “ T ih o lu ” perverts G e o r g e ’s lifelon g inspiration fo r rhym e

and tran slation: D an te’s D iv in e C o m ed y . D an te inflicted on his dam ned
every im aginable speech distu rbance, w hereas the blessed w e r e w ith the
W ord and G o d in on e and the sam e m easure. G eo rg e, how ever, has the
dam ned sp eak, but only so lon g as that shrill v o ice , in its m ech an ically
regular a ct every three d ays, does n ot d eliver its catch p h rase. N on sen se
syllab les are the divin e punishm ent that reduces them to a ch ao s o f
bodies. People w h o did not w ant to call out to their Lord are answ ered by
the D iscourse o f the M aster w ith his o w n , ve ry co n tem p o ra ry perversion:
hell as a random generator.
In discussing his theory o f m em ory and its inscription , N ietzsche on ce
m entioned the “ slogan and catch p h ra se” [Schlag- und S tich w o r t] 7‘ and
w ith th a t illustrated the process he w as describing.* P sych o p h ysical e x ­
perim ents im pose slogan s and catch p h rases until the tortu red d isappear
into glo w in g depths o r render up the p h ysio lo gy o f cu ltu ral practices.
W ith patients like C h a n d o s, w hose disturbances a llo w them “ to read co r­
rectly individual letters, bu t not to com bin e them in to w o rd s,” Z ieh en
recom m ends th at o n e “ spell a w o rd fo r the patient and have him put it
together, o r, in reverse, present a w ord som eh ow and h a ve the patient
spell it.” ” T h ese catchp h rases w e re such hits that they rea p p e ar e v e ry ­
w here circa 1900.
Freud analyzed a fem ale hysteric w h o “ at nineteen, . . . lifted up a
stone and foun d a toad under it, w h ich made her lose her po w er o f speech
for hours a fterw ard s.” Em m y v. N. fled a p sychiatrist “ w h o had c o m ­
pelled her under hypnosis to spell o u t the w ord ‘ t . . . o . . . a . . . d .’ ”
Before she w o u ld g o to the cou ch , she m ade Freud “ p rom ise never to
m ake her say it.” *0 A s if he had been a w itn ess to the first p sych iatrist’s
con su ltatio n , M a lte Laurids Brigge overhears a d o cto r-p a tien t c o n v ersa ­
tion through the w alls o f the Salpetriere, Jean M a rtin C h a r c o t’s great
h ealing o r breeding institution fo r hysterias:

B ut su d d e n ly e v e ry th in g w a s still, a n d in th e stilln ess a s u p e rio r, se lf-c o m p la c e n t

v o ice , w h ic h I th o u g h t I k n e w , sa id : “ R iez!” A p a u se . “ Riez! M a is riez, rie z !”
I w as a lre a d y lau g h in g . It w a s in e x p lic a b le t h a t t h e m a n o n t h e o th e r s id e o f th e
p a rtitio n d id n ’t w a n t to lau g h . A m ac h in e ra ttle d , b u t w a s im m e d ia tely silen t
a g a in , w o rd s w e r e e x c h a n g e d , th e n th e sa m e e n e rg e tic v o ic e ro se a g a in a n d

• T h e p re fix e s Schlag a n d Stick lite ra lly m e a n “ b lo w ,” o r “ h it,” a n d “ s ta b .” T h e G e r ­

m an te rm s fo r “ s lo g a n ,” “ c a tc h p h r a s e ,” a n d “ h e a d e r ” thus retain v io le n t o v e r to n e s o f f o r c ­
ible, a b b r e v ia te d m n e m o n ic im p re ss io n less o b v io u s in th eir E n glish e q u iv a le n ts . (T ran s.]
222 1900

o rd e re d : “ D ite s-n o u s le m o t: a v a n t.” A n d sp e llin g it: “ A -v -a -n -t.” Silence. “ O n

n ’e n te n d rien . E n co re u n e fois . . .” *'

Even in its o ral, im perative form , the slogan and catch p h rase is in scrip ­
tion. C h o p p in g and iteration reduce discourse to discrete unities, w h ich
as k eyb o ard o r store o f signs im m ediately a ffect b o d ies. Instead o f tran s­
lating visual lan guage into au d ib le lan gu age, as the p h on etic m ethod did,
b reath in g the b eau tifu l inw ardness o f m usic into speech, p sych op h ysics
im poses the violen ce o f spacing. L o ca lizatio n is the catchp h rase o f all
aphasia research, sp ellin g th e p sych iatrist’s overheard com m an d . It is
on ly logical for the catch p h rase tech n iqu e to be applied to readin g and
w riting.
F o llo w in g the p roced u re o f H elm h oltz, w h o built device a fte r d ev ice to
m easure reaction-tim e th resh old s, the psych op h ysics o f the nineties w en t
to w o rk m easuring readin g w ith k ym o grap h s, tach istoscop es, horop ter-
scopes, and ch ro n ograp h s. T h ere w as intense com p etition am ong these
m achines to determ ine the sm allest fraction o f tim e in w hich readin g
cou ld be m easured in exp erim ental subjects. T h u s the p h ysio lo gy o f the
senses and aphasia research w ere joined: Jam es M cK een C attell calcu lated
in m illiseconds the tim e in which a letter, exp osed to view for on e ligh t­
ning instant, traveled fro m on e lan gu age area to the next. In oth er e x p e ri­
m ents, h ow ever, he (and later B enn o Erdm ann and R aym on d D od ge)
w o rk ed with tenths o f seconds, w hich could m easure su b jects’ eye m ove­
ments and their b ack tra ck in g to reread. By contrast, W ilhelm W u n d t’s
experim ental tach istoscop e con tin u ou sly dim inished a letter’s ex p o su re
tim e to the lim it valu e o f null. O n ly at o .o i sec “ can on e be sure th at any
m ovem en t o f the eye o r w an d erin g o f attention is im p ossible.” 82 E xp eri­
m ental subjects (w h o w ere o n ce m ore a lso the professorial d irectors o f
the experim ents) thus sat, chain ed so as to hinder o r even p ro h ib it m ove­
ment, fa cin g b la ck vie w in g b oxes out o f which fo r the d u ration o f a
flash— a pioneer o f readin g research, Frans C o rn eliu s D on d ers, actu ally
used electrical ind u ction s p a r k s " — single letters shone o u t. T h is is m o ­
dern ity’s a llego ry o f the cave.
“ L ightn ing. D ion ysu s appears in em erald b eau ty,” said the d ith yram b .
A tach isto sco p ic trick — and letters appear for m illiseconds in scriptual
beauty. “ Stick a w ise w ord in ,” said D ion ysu s in A riad n e’s ear. T h e device
also w rites signs, w heth er w ise o r m eaningless, o n to the retina, signs that
can on ly be taken literally. A fte r the elim ination o f rereading and the rec­
ognition o f com plete w ords, even the educated fall back on “ the m ost
prim itive spellin g” as the m inim um a nd standard o f all readin g.84 T his
w as p ro b ab ly the first time that people in a w ritin g culture w ere reduced
to the naked recogn ition o f signs. W ritin g ceased to w ait, q u iet and d ead ,
on patient paper fo r its consu m er; w riting ceased to be sw eetened by pas-
 THE GREAT LALULA 11 $

try b ak in g and m oth ers’ w h isp erin g— it n ow assaulted w ith the p o w er o f

a sh o ck . C atch p h rases em erge from a store o f signs to w hich they return
. w ith un im agin able sp eed , leavin g behind in the su b ject inscriptions w ith ­
o u t ink o r consciousness. T h e tach istoscop e is a ty p e w rite r w h o se type
hits the retina rather than paper. T h e m indless d eciph erin g o f such blind-
ings can be called readin g on ly by a com plete u n co u p lin g from orality,
as if the m adness o f H eerbran d and his d an cin g F raktu r letters had b e­
com e a stan dard. T h e helplessness o f the experim ental su b jects b efo re the
tachistoscop e ensures that all “ processes” w h o se “ u n com m o n ly c o m p lex
em b od im en t” is r e a d in g " — from the recogn ition o f letters to that o f
w ord s, from speed to erro r q u o ta — w ill yield on ly m easu rable results.
Standards have n oth in g to d o w ith M a n . T h ey are the criteria o f m edia
and psych op h ysics, w hich th ey abru ptly link together. W ritin g, d isc o n ­
nected from all discursive tech n ologies, is n o lo n g er based on an in d iv id ­
ual cap ab le o f im buin g it w ith coheren ce th rou gh co n n ectin g curves and
the expressive pressure o f the pen; it sw ells in an a pparatu s th a t cuts
up individuals into test m aterial. T ach istoscopes m easure au to m a tic re­
sponses, not synthetic judgm ents. But they thus restore the reputation o f
spelling, which had generally com e to be view ed with con tem pt.
In 1803 the psychiatrist H offbau er neatly calcu lated the norm ally ed u ­
cated person’s readin g speed.

An av erag e a cc o m p lish e d re a d e r re a d s th re e sig n a tu re s p e r h o u r, w h e n th e la tte r

a re o f th e ty p e o f th e p re se n t volu m e a n d th e su b je c t o f th e b o o k c a u se s him n o
difficulty. O n a ro u g h e stim a te , he n eed s n o m o re th a n o n e a n d a q u a r te r m in u te s
to r e a d o n e p a g e . T h e re a re th irty lines to th e p a g e, a n d every line c o n ta in s th irty
letters; th u s in o n e a n d a q u a rte r m in u te s o r seventy-five se c o n d s h e m u st re c o g ­
nize and d istin g u ish n in e h u n d re d letters. T h e re c o g n itio n o f a letter o c c u rs as th e
re su lt o f a n in feren ce. T h u s o u r r e a d e r m ak e s tw elve d iffe re n t in fere n ce s in a sec­
o n d . . . . If o n e a ssu m e s th a t th e re a d e r is fo llo w in g th e w rite r, so th a t th e la tte r ’s
th o u g h ts a re tra n s m itte d to th e so u l o f th e re a d e r, o n e is stru c k w ith a m a z e m e n t.
S om e h ave w a n te d to c o n c lu d e fro m th is a n d o th e r e x a m p le s th a t w e p erceive
o b jec ts w ith o u t being c o n sc io u s o f it. T h is d o e s n o t seem to fo llo w in th e le a s t."

T he m athem atics o f Bilduttg went this far and n o further, if fo r n o oth er

reason than that num bers w ere w ritten o u t. A recon stru ction o f c o m ­
pleted alp habetization, from a w h o le signature b ack to a single letter, c u l­
minates in reverence for a consciousness, that can m ake 12. inferences per
secon d, inferences that certain ly d o n o t justify the con clu sion that the
consciousness that has to acco m p an y all m y readin g (to adapt K a n t’s
phrase) am ounts to n oth in g. A s lon g as rea d in g tran sported thou gh ts
fro m soul to soul and had its norm , as w ith A n to n Reiser, in the tem p o o f
speech, it w as in fa c t recogn ition , and any n otion o f the u n con sciou s,
technically defined, w as absurd.
T h e autom atism o f tach istoscop ic w o rd exp osition is n ot d esigned to
224 19 ° °

tran spo rt th o u gh ts. But there are oth er reasons the 10 ms for entire
w ord s u n d ercu ts H o ffb a u er’s tw e lfth o f a second per letter. A n a pparatu s
d o e s n ot let alp h abetizatio n run its cou rse, then applau d it afterw ard s.
T h e apparatu s itself, like D ion ysu s, dictates the tem p o o f ex p o sitio n w ith
ligh tn in g speed. Such procedures sh ed ligh t on fu n ctio n s as foreign to the
individual and consciou sness as w ritin g ultim ately is. P sych o ph ysics (and
it thus m ade film and futurism possible) investigated “ on ly the m ove­
ments o f m atter, w hich are n ot su b ject to the laws o f intelligence and for
that reason are m uch m ore sign ifican t.” *' C u ltu ra l tech n ologies cou ld be
attributed to M an only as long as they w ere m arked off a lo n g the abscissa
o f b io logical tim e, w h ereas the time o f the apparatu s liquidates M a n .
G iven the apparatu s, M a n in his unity d ecom poses, on the o n e h an d , into
illusions dangled in front o f him by con sciou s abilities and faculties and,
on the oth er hand, in to u n con sciou s autom atism s that H o ffb a u er hardly
felt the need to d ign ify w ith a refutation .
It w as illusion fo r the first typists to w a n t to be able to see and read the
te xt as it w as being w ritten , to w a n t “ view typ ew riters.” A u tom atized
hands w o rk better w hen blin d. It w as illusion for ed u cated subjects to be
“ certain ” that they had “ seen the ‘ w h o le ’ ” in the tach isto sco p e. In the
realm o f m illiseconds, unaffected by in trosp ection , even the m ost trained
reader’s eye proceeds by successive spelling.** It w as an illu sion o f “ su b ­
jective jud gm en t” that F ra k tu r w as m o re readable than rom an script.
Precisely the “ people w h o m uch prefer to read F rak tu r and believe they
can d o so with greater ease are the ones w h o require m ore reading tim e.” *’
H erm ann Bahr h it upon a su ccin ct rule for all such illu sion. C lassical
alp h abetizatio n had attem pted to m ediate betw een M a n and W orld (w hile
avoid in g all discourses), bu t: “ T h e exp erim en t w ith man has failed . A n d
the exp erim en t w ith the w o r ld has fa iled . T h e exp erim en t can n o w take
place on ly w h ere m an and the w o rld com e to g eth er (sensation, im pres­
sio n .’ ” 0 A ll that rem ains o f the real is a c o n ta c t su rface or skin, w h ere
som ething w rites on som ething else. T his is precisely the tach isto sco p ic
effe ct planned by a literature intent on addressing “ nerves” in ord er to
“ bring abou t certain m o o d s” rather than “ stam m ering a b o u t nonsensical
pleasures.’ ” 1 It w o u ld thus assault the lan gu age cen ters in the brain in d i­
vid u ally and successively. N ietzsch e’s vie w that lan gu age first tran sposes
nervous im pulses in to im ages and then im ages in to soun ds is the m ost
ex a c t c h ara cte riza tio n o f literary lan gu age. H o lz n o t on ly rep la ced rhym e
w ith a n um ber o f aco u stic effects; he also asked “ w h y the eye should n ot
have its p articu lar pleasures in the printed type o f a p o em .” ’ 2 T h ese p lea­
sures are n ot m iniature im ages o f M a n and W orld , but rather (as if they
w ere calculated on the tach istoscop e) ergo n o m ica lly op tim al uses o f read ­
ing time. B eginning in 18 9 7 , H °lz ty p o grap h ica lly centered the lines of
 THE GREAT LALULA

his poetry for p h ysio lo gical readin g ease. “ If 1 left the a xis at the b egin ­
ning o f the line, rath er than in the m iddle, the eye w o u ld alw ays be forced
to travel tw ice as fa r.” ’ 3 W hat the verses have in view , then, are not read ­
ers and their understanding, but eyes and their psychop h ysics, in other
w ords: “ M o vem en ts o f m atter, w h ich are n ot su b ject to the law s o f in tel­
ligence and fo r that reason are m uch m ore significan t.” H o lz ’s Phatttasus,
rather than addressin g fantasy as the su rrogate o f all senses in the finest
rom antic m anner, reckon s w ith u n con sciou s o p to k in etics (w h ich H us­
serl’s con tem p o ran eou s ph en o m en o logy them atized). T h e aesthetics o f
reception had b ecom e quite d ifferent circa 1900: instead o f co m m u n ica ­
tion and its m yth o f tw o souls o r consciousnesses, there are num erical
relations betw een the m ateriality o f w ritin g and the p h ysio lo g y o f the
senses. W h e th er and h o w actu al readers approve o f their nerves h avin g
been saved such and such m any m illiseconds is o f n o concern to H o lz the
lyric p o et. W h ereas his predecessors had invited readers to pass over
letters, he w as concern ed with technical calcu latio n s con cern in g the m a­
teriality o f his m edium . Spengler’s desire th a t “ m en o f the n e w generation
d ev o te them selves to technics instead o f lyrics, the sea instead o f the
paint-brush, and politics instead o f ep istem o lo g y ” cam e so m e w h at after
the fa ct.” Since N ietzsch e, “ aesthetics is n o th in g but a kind o f applied
ph ysio lo gy.”

T h e m ovem ents o f matter had their greatest trium ph in the field o f w r it­
ing. A n experim ental su b ject w r o te in a test jou rn al, a fte r thirty-eight d ays
devoted to typ in g practice, “ T o-d ay 1found m yself n o t infrequ en tly strik ­
ing letters b efore 1w a s con sciou s o f seeing them . T h e y seem to have been
perfectin g them selves just b elo w the level o f co n sciou sn ess.” ’ 5 P sych o ­
physics investigated o r generated u n con sciou s autom atism s in h a n d w rit­
ing as w ell. Ecriture autom a tiqu e appeared as ea rly as 1850 , bu t on ly
a m o n g Am erican spiritualists; it w as n o t analyzed until the turn o f the
century.” A fte r the theoretical w o r k o f F. W . H . M yers and W illiam
Jam es, profane autom atic w ritin g arrived in the H arvard la b o rato ry
o f the G erm an p sych olog ist and inven tor o f p sych o tech n o lo gy H u g o
M unsterberg. In ord er to dem onstrate the n orm ality o f hysterical a u to ­
m atism s, tw o students, w h o cou ld be called norm al a cco rd in g to a va g u e
estim ation o f their introspective cap acity (even if the y o u n g G ertru d e
Stein w a s on e o f them ), p articip ated in experim ents that m ade them n o
less delirious than E bbinghau s. B ecause reading runs m o re q u ick ly and
thus u n con sciou sly than w ritin g , exp erim ents in a u tom atic readin g w ere
included at the outset.

“ T h is is a very p re tty e x p e rim e n t b e ca u se it is q u ite easy a n d th e re su lts a re very

sa tisfac to ry . T h e su b je ct re a d s in a low voice, and p re fe ra b ly s o m e th in g c o m ­
12.6 1900

p a rativ e ly u n in te re s tin g , w h ile th e o p e ra to r re ad s to him an in te re s tin g sto ry . If he

d o e s n o t g o in sa n e d u rin g the first few tria ls h e w ill q u ick ly learn to c o n c e n tra te
his a tte n tio n fully o n w h a t is b e in g re a d to h im , y et g o o n re a d in g ju st th e sa m e.
T h e re a d in g b e co m es c o m p le te ly u n c o n sc io u s fo r p e rio d s o f a s m u ch as a p a g e .97

It is a pretty exp erim ent indeed, on e m ade as if to dism iss herm eneutic
readin g. A t on e tim e o u r inner selves w e re supposed to be the w o rk sh o p
in w hich all readin g o p eratio n s w e re co n d u cted ; ou r e g o w as alw ays to be
kept in view because o f the risk o f insanity by d istraction . But n ow the
p ro to co l calls fo r just w h at had scan d alized B ergk , and o n ce the ro ck o f
insanity has been circu m n avigated , everyth in g runs as u n con sciou sly as it
does norm ally. Rather than b eing rooted together in on e vo ice from the
inm ost sou l, the isolated routines o f readin g, listening, and sp ea k in g b e­
com e a u tom atic and im personal: “ the vo ice seem ed as though that o f a n ­
oth er p e rso n .” 9*
In a m ore ad van ced step, Leon S olom on s and G ertru d e Stein e x p e ri­
m ented w ith a c o u p lin g o f a u tom atic readin g and w ritin g. “ For this p u r­
pose the person w ritin g read a lo u d w h ile the person d ictatin g listened to
the reading. In this w a y it not infrequen tly happened that, at interesting
parts o f the story, w e w o u ld have the cu riou s ph enom enon o f on e person
un con sciously dictatin g sentences w hich the oth er u n con sciou sly w ro te
dow n; both persons m eanw h ile b eing absorb ed in som e th rillin g story.” 99
T h e division o f the unity o f M a n can thus be accom p lish ed by tw o read ­
ers o r w riters. W h ile both consciousnesses are fed w ith signifieds, on e u n ­
co n scio u s tak es d ictatio n from the o th e r— just as th e p sych o a n a lyst
“ m ust turn his ow n u n con sciou s like a receptive organ tow ards the trans­
m ittin g u n con sciou s o f the patien t.” 100 T h e deceptive p ro x im ity o f this
w ritin g situation to the ro m an tic fantasy o f the library in fa ct m arks the
la tter’s total perversion. W hen Serpentina w hisp ered their love sto ry to
the student A n selm u s, his hand w ro te a lo n g in unconscious d ictatio n . But
nothing cou ld be less im personal than a p h an tom -b eloved cap able o f
p layin g the M o th e r’s M outh for a m an ’s sou l. For that reason her voice
never really uttered a n yth in g alo u d ; it arose as a u topian sh a d o w th row n
by very real but u n read able signs. Because the W om an does not exist and
plural w om en had n o p la ce in the ed u cational system , an im aginary
w o m a n ’s vo ice had sim u ltaneou sly to rem ind y o u n g au th ors o r b u re a u ­
crats o f their w ritin g duty and to tran sform it m agically in to infantile
sexuality.
C irca 1900, how ever, exp erim entation dissolved the u to p ia .101 G ertru d e
Stein, not fo r nothing M iin sterb erg ’s ideal stu d ent,102 cou ld study p s y c h o ­
physics like an yon e else. W h ile G erm an universities still trem bled at
the th o u gh t o f the ch ao s w om en students w o u ld p ro v o k e , the H arvard
P sych o lo gical L ab o rato ry had long been d esexu alized . In their test re­
 THE GREAT LALULA 227

port, Solom on s and Stein a re referred to th ro u g h o u t as “ h e .” 101 T h e s c i­

entific d iscou rse gives on ly hints th at d u rin g this strange c o o p era tio n the
man dictated and the w o m a n w ro te. G ertru d e Stein, fo r y ea rs em p loyed
as an academ ic secretary, w as in the exp erim en t sim ilarly “ the perfect
blanc w hile som eone practises on her as an a u to m a to n .” 104 N o th in g is
said o f w h y th e tw o sexes w ere divid ed in that w ay. T w o years later, h o w ­
ever, w ith Solom on s significan tly absent, Stein continued her a u to e x p e ri­
m ents w ith oth ers— w ith the exp licit purpose o f “ com p ariso n betw een
male and fem ale exp erim ental su b jects.” 105 Such a question a lread y re­
veals w h at sup ports the new scien tific discourse. Real w om en , as they
exist in plurality, had attained access to w ritin g as practiced in university
d iscourse. T h e ir h ysteria, rather than rem aining o u t o f the w a y as som e
idiosyncrasy like B ren tan o’s sister, w as exp erim en tally sim ulated in order
to m ake it a com pletely norm al m oto ric autom atism . A s u n con sciou s as
she w as ob ed ien t, G ertru d e Stein to o k dictation from her fello w student.
W ith that, the position s o f the sexes in the d iscou rse n etw o rk o f 1800
w ere reversed. Into the place o f the im aginary M o th e r’s M o u th steps a
man w h o dictates fa ctu ally; into the com plem en tary place o f the un­
co n scio u s a u th o r steps on e o f m any w om en w h o have stud ied en ou gh to
be able to ta k e d ictatio n — A riad n e, F rau R o d er-W ied erh o ld , Resa von
Schirnhofer, G ertrude Stein, and so on. T h e fa ct that on e o f them becam e
a w riter is part o f the lo g ic o f the exp erim e n t.100
T h e greatest trium ph o f p sych o tech n o lo gy w as to have m ade d ictated
w riting into spontan eou s, a u tom atic w ritin g. A fter their p ractice e x p eri­
m ents in readin g and takin g d ictatio n , Solom on s and Stein w en t to w o rk .
A w o m a n ’ s hand prod uced texts w ith o u t k n o w in g that o r w h a t it w rote.
W ith this, p sychop hysics discovered the rules o f literary au to m a tic w ritin g
lon g before the surrealists. First, it is forbidden to reread a n yth in g w r it­
ten— precisely the a ct that m ade au th ors ou t o f w ritin g hands “ stopped
autom atic w riting.” 107 S econ d , the annoying intrusions o f an e g o are to be
put o ff by repeating prew ritten sentences with an ob stin acy that m atches
their m eaninglessness. T h irty years later A n d re Breton translated these
tw o fundam ental rules in his Surrealist Manifesto-.

W rite quickly, w ith o u t any p re co n c e iv e d su b je c t, fa st e n o u g h so th a t y o u will n o t

re m e m b e r w h a t y o u ’re w ritin g a n d b e te m p te d to re re a d w h a t y o u h a v e w r it­
ten . . . . P ut y o u r tr u s t in th e in e x h a u s tib le n a tu r e o f th e m u rm u r. If silence
th re a te n s to se ttle in, if y o u sh o u ld ever h a p p e n to m a k e a m is ta k e — a m ista k e ,
p e rh a p s d u e to c a re le ssn ess— b re a k off w ith o u t h e sita tio n w ith a n o v e rly c le a r
line. F o llo w in g a w o rd th e o rig in o f w h ic h seem s su s p ic io u s to y o u , p la c e any
le tte r w h a tso e v e r, th e le tte r “ I” fo r e x a m p le , a lw ay s th e le tte r “ I.” 100

H avin g been educated as a psychiatrist, Breton can n o t not have k n ow n

w here such rules o f literary p ro d u ctio n cam e from . T o give con sciou s,
228 1900

that is, d istortin g attention to repeated iterations o f a sign reverses p sych i­

atric diagnosis. T h e “ senseless repetition o f the sam e letter fo r a half o r
w h o le line, as in children’s w r itin g b o o k s ,” w hich psychiatrists call, in the
m entally ill, “ w ritten verb igera tio n ,” that is, flight o f id ea s,109 b ecam e, as
ecriture a u tom a tiqu e, the d u ty o f n oth in g m ore and n oth in g less than
literature. A s this scene o f inscription reveals, a u tom atic w ritin g is a n y ­
th in g b ut freed om . T h e alp h ab etizatio n cam p aign o f 1800 also intended
to autom atize cu ltu ral practices, but on ly in order “ to fou n d and p u rify
the groun d o f inw ardness in the subject.” 110 W hen, by con trast, G ertru d e
Stein w o rk e d through a series o f failed exercises and finally arrived at the
experim ental go al o f “ autom atic w riting by inven tion ,” precisely the
freest invention conju red up inevitabilities as b in d in g as the sentence, d e­
cades later, that a rose is a rose is a rose. T h e lon gest o f the fe w exam ples
cited by Solom on s and Stein says this clearly: “ H ence there is n o possible
w a y o f a vo id in g w h a t I h ave spoken o f , and if this is n ot believed b y the
p e o p le o f w h o m y o u have sp o k en , then it is n ot p ossible to preven t the
p e o p le o f w h o m you h ave sp oken so glib ly . .
W h a t speaks, w hen It sp eaks, is alw ays fate. T h is w as n o n ew s to
Freud. T h e m edium and the m essage coincide because even in gram m ar
the repetition com pu lsion ru les. Such discourse is u n avoid ab le precisely
because it is em pty. A u tom atic w riting says n othin g o f th o u gh t o r in­
w ardn ess, o f intention o r u n derstan d in g; it speaks o n ly o f speech and
glibness. N eith e r the in evitab le n or the people it threatens ex ist ex c ep t by
hearsay. In the m ethod ic isolation o f her lab oratory, cu t off fro m all the
classical determ inations o f w om an and integrated into the new desexu -
alized university, an ideal student speaks and w rites as if the rejected
truth o f W estern thought had returned. P sychophysics thus to o k the place
o f o ccu lt m edia (read: w om en ). A lo n e and dazed, a Pythia sits on the tri­
pod again , and men o r priests w h isp er to her the secret fears o f the
people. But the m istress o f the o racle can n o t con sole. W h atever she says
b ecom es unavoidable because she says it. N o on e is m ore trag ic than C a s ­
sandra. U n con sciou s w o rd s transpire, and im m ediately the listeners har­
b or a suspicion close to a truth intolerable fo r ph ilosophers: th at d is­
courses con ju re up w h a t they seem on ly to describe. W h eth er under the
sign o f m yth o r o f p ositivism , the release o f a u to m a tic sp ea k in g m eans that
C a ssa n d ra w ill n ot be believed and will find n o w a y to w arn the people
w h o have just been sp oken o f so glibly. T h u s, literally and w ith o u t c o m ­
m entary, the leading journal o f A m erican exp erim ental p sych o lo g y, v o l­
um e 3, 18 9 6: “ H ence there is n o possible w a y o f avoid in g w h a t I have s p o ­
ken o f, and if this is n ot believed by the p eo p le o f w h o m yo u h ave sp ok en ,
then it is n ot possible to p rev en t the people o f w h o m you have sp oken so
glib ly . . .”
 THE GREAT LALULA 229

Technological M edia

A m edium is a m edium is a m edium . A s the sentence says, there is n o

difference betw een o c c u lt and tech n ological m edia. T h eir truth is fatality,
their field the un con sciou s. A n d because the u n con sciou s never finds an
illusory belief, the u n con sciou s can on ly be stored.
In the discourse n etw ork o f 1900, psych op hysical exp erim en ts w ere
incorporated as so m any random gen erators that prod u ce discourses
w ith o u t sense or th o ugh t. T h e ordinary, p u rposefu l use o f lan gu a g e—
so-called com m u n ication w ith o th ers— is excluded. S y lla b ic h od g ep o d ge
and autom atic w ritin g , the lan gu age o f children and the in san e— none
o f it is m eant fo r un derstan d ing ears o r eyes; all o f it takes the q u ick est
path from exp erim ental con d itio n s to data storage. G o o d , old -fash ion ed
handw riting is the storage m echanism fo r a u tom atic w ritin g , w ith the
slight m od ification that G ertru d e Stein w atch es her hands like separate
m achines w ith a m odicum o f curiosity rather than co m m an d in g them to
w rite p articu lar sign s.1 In oth er cases, deposition into w ritin g is im p o s­
sible, because the random gen erators prod u ce effects on ly at extrem ely
high speeds. A utom atic w riting and reading alread y e x h ib it a tenden cy
to w a rd increasing speed: the tem p o o f dictation races ahead o f the hands,
th at o f reading exceed s the articu latin g o rg a n s.2 T h u s, in o rd e r to retain
anything at all, p sych op h ysics had to join w ith the n ew m edia that revo ­
lutionized op tics and acou stics circa 1900. T h ese, o f course, are Edison’s
tw o great innovations: film and the gram op h o n e.
T h e lon g process that culm inated in the Lum ieres’ cin em atograp h s
w as d ictated by the technical-industrial necessity o f su rpassing the h u ­
man eye’s lim ited cap ab ility to process single im ages. T h e b irth o f film
w a s attended by E ad w eard J. M u y b rid g e’s serial p h o to g ra p h s, Etienne-
Jules M a rey and G . E. J. D em en y’s p h o to g ra p h ic gu n, and Johann H ein ­
rich E rnem ann’s slo w -m o tio n ph otograp h y. T h e gra m o p h o n e a lso d e­
pended on being able to function at speeds slow er than people can talk.
It c o u ld n o t have been inven ted— con tem poraries w ere w ro n g a b o u t
th is ’— b efore Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier’s m athem atical analyses o f
am plitude o r H elm h oltz’s studies in p h ysio lo gical aco u stics. T h e te ch ­
nical sim ulation o f both optical and acou stical processes presupposed
analyses m ade possible by the speed o f the apparatu ses them selves. V oice
reprod uction required a frequ ency b an d betw een 90 and 1,20 0 H ertz
even fo r the fundam ental tones; studies o f b o d y m ovem ents required illu ­
m ination speeds in th e realm o f m illiseconds.
T h e ability to record sense data tech n o lo g ica lly shifted the entire d is­
course n etw ork circa 1900. For the first tim e in history, w ritin g ceased to
be syn o n ym ou s w ith the serial sto ra ge o f data. T h e tech n ological record ­
230 1900

ing o f the real entered into com petition w ith the sym b o lic registration
o f the S ym bolic. T h e w o n d erfu lly super-elevated Edison w h o m P hilippe
V illiers de l’ lsle-A dam m ade the hero o f his T o m o rro w ’s E ve concisely
form ulated the n ew developm ent. M u sin g am ong his devices and a p p a ­
ratuses, he b egin s a m on ologu e, ign ored by literary theorists, th at w ill
b rin g Lessing’s L aocoott up to date in 1886.

T h e W o rd M a d e Flesh p a id little a tte n tio n to th e e x te rio r a n d se n sib le p a rts e ith e r

o f w ritin g o r o f sp e e ch . H e w r o te o n o nly o n e o c c a sio n , a n d th e n o n th e g ro u n d .
N o d o u b t H e v a lu e d , in th e sp e a k in g o f a w o rd , o n ly th e in d efin ab le beyondness
with w h ic h p e rso n a l m ag n e tism in sp ired by fa ith can fill a w o rd the m o m e n t o n e
p r o n o u n c e s it. W h o k n o w s if all th e re st isn ’t triv ia l by c o m p a ris o n ? . . . Still, th e
fa ct re m a in s . H e a llo w e d m en o n ly to p rin t h is te s ta m e n t, n o t to p u t it o n th e
p h o n o g ra p h . O th e rw ise , in s te a d o f sa y in g , “ R e a d th e H o ly S c rip tu re s,” w e w o u ld
be say in g , “ L isten to th e S acred V ib ra tio n s .” 4

Believers in the B o o k w ere proh ib ited in the nam e o f their Lord from
celebratin g the exterio rity and sensuality o f the w o rd and scrip tu re. T h e
perm itted m edium o f printin g m ade it possible to bypass signs for sense,
the “ b e y o n d ” o f the senses. O n ly under the cou n ter-com m an d “ H ear the
sacred vib ra tio n s!” d o es the sym bo lic registration o f the S ym b olic lose its
m on opoly. V ib ratio n s, even in G o d ’s vo ice, are frequencies far b e lo w the
threshold o f perception and n ota tion fo r single m ovem ents. N eith er the
Bible nor the prim er can record them . T h erefo re, p h o n o g ra p h ’s Papa, as
Edison is k n o w n in the novel, rethinks the sacred itself. H e d ream s o f
ideal p h on o grap h s c a p a b le o f registerin g the “ oracles o f D o d o n a ” and
“ ch an ts o f the S yb ils” (to say n othin g o f pure “ n o ise ” ) in ind estru ctib le
recordings f o r “ son orou s archives o f cop p er.” 5 T h e d ream s o f an A m e ri­
can engineer dream ed by a French sym bo list c o m e qu ite close to the
strange occu rren ces in M iin sterb erg’s lab oratory. W h a t the stu d en t as
m edium cou ld hardly note dow n fo r all her p sychotech n ical ecstasy is
cau g h t by the gra m o p h o n e as m edium — the m urm uring and w hisp erin g
o f u n con sciou s oracles.
But n ot all w om en o f 1900, as oracles o r students, w e re abreast o f
their age and tech n ology. A m o n g the G erm an s there w ere still fem inine
readers. A n n a P om ke, “ a tim id, well b rou gh t-u p g irl,” can on ly regret
“ that the ph on o grap h w as not invented in 18 0 0 .” For, as she confesses to
a favorite professor: “ 1w o u ld so m uch like to have heard G o e th e ’s voice!
He w as said to h ave such a beautiful vocal o r g a n , and ev eryth in g he said
w a s so m eanin gful. O h , if on ly he had been able to sp eak in to the gra m ­
ophone! O h ! O h ! ” 4 A m o n g the believers in culture, h oly vib ra tio n s are
n ot sibylline w hisp erin gs but the ton e and con ten t o f a vo ice that has lon g
d elighted fem inine readers in the im aginary and that m ust n o w d o so in
the real. A lo vin g professor, h ow ever, cou ld n ot resist that sigh o f lo n gin g
and the w ish to m od ernize a love o f b o o k s . A b n o ssah P sch orr sn eaks into
 THE GREAT LALULA 23 I

the cem etery, m akes a secret m old o f G o e th e ’s sk eleton , reconstru cts the
laryn x, w ires it to a p h o n o g ra p h , and puts together this fine com p o site o f
p h ysio lo gy and tech n o lo g y in the office o f the G o eth e H ouse. For “ w h e n ­
ever G o eth e sp o k e , his voice created vib ra tio n s,” w h o se reverberations
“ b eco m e w ea k er w ith the passage o f tim e, but w hich can n o t actu ally
cease.” T o filter the sound o f G o e th e ’s vo ice ou t o f the noise o f all the
discourse th at had occu rred , on e fed im pulses into a “ receivin g o rg a n ”
that sim ulated his larynx, w ith the help o f an am plification device that
w as brand-new in 1 9 1 6 .7 A ccord in gly, Salom o F ried laen d er’s sto ry is
called “ G o e th e Speaks into the G ra m o p h o n e.” T h e story has a sad and
logical ending: n o engineer can stan d h avin g w o m e n love not the in­
vention itself but its ou tp u t. In jea lo u s com petition betw een m ed ia, P ro ­
fessor Pschorr destroys the only record in g o f the b ea u tifu l, m on strou s,
and absent vo ice that in 1800 com m an d ed an entire d iscou rse n etw o rk .
A roll cap ab le o f record in g D od on ian oracles, a roll cap ab le sim ply o f
record in g the poet: those w ere the w riter’s dream s in 1900. T h e lyric poet
and feuilletonist, bohem ian and am ateur, w h o cam e up w ith the technical
principle o f the ph on o grap h in 1 8 7 7 , gathered all these dream s in verse
under the significant title Inscription.

C o m m e les tr a its dans les cam ees

J ’ai voulu que les voix aim ees
S o ien t un b ien , q u ’o n g a rd e a jam a is,
E t p u isse n t re p e te r le reve
M u sic a l d e l’h e u re t r o p b rev e;
Le te m p s v e u t fuir, je le so u m e ts.

L ike th e fa c e s in c am eo s
I w a n te d b elo v ed voices
To b e a fo rtu n e w hich o n e k eep s forever,
A nd w hich can re p e a t th e m usical
D re a m o f th e to o s h o rt h o u r;
T im e w o u ld flee, I su b d u e it.’

But C h arles C r o s , the w riter, on ly pointed tow ard the p h o n o grap h and
n ever built it. T h e deeds o f E dison, the p ra ctica l m an, are m ore profane,
less erotic, and m ore forgettable than w riters’ dream s o r novelistic fan­
tasies. Precisely that is their greatness. T h e ph onograp h and the ty p e ­
w riter exist for the sam e reason. Edison w as nearly d ea f, and the blind
w ere forem ost a m o n g the builders o f typew riters. M e d ia , like p sy ch o ­
physical experim ents, begin w ith a p h ysio lo gical deficiency. T h e very first
tin-foil roll to record a voice, on D ecem ber 6, 1 8 7 7 , registered the shouts
o f its inventor, a v o ic e that rem ained distant and u n reachab le to his a c ­
tual ears. Edison roared “ M a ry H ad a L ittle L am b ” in to the p h o n o ­
graph’s bell-m o u th .’
T h e history o f sound recordin g did not b egin w ith o racles o r poets, but
232. 1900

w ith child ren ’s songs, though in the roar o f a deaf and childish engineer.
In 1 888, h ow ever, w h en his gra m o p h o n e had just go n e into m ass p ro d u c ­
tion , Edison b egan to m arket dolls in w hich the speech roll had been re­
corded by y o u n g girls .10A gain one h eard — the hit a m o n g tw elve ch oices—
“ M a ry H ad a Little Lam b,” but this time as a children ’s song sung by
a child. W hen V illiers, w ith a sy m b o list’s love o f oracles and sib yls, had
E dison listen via stereoph o n ic record in g and p la y b a ck d evices to his
y o u n g d aughter sin g “ rin g-aro u n d -a-rosy” in fron t o f th e lab o rato ry, he
ap p roach ed the engineer’s profane illu m in atio n ."
T a lk in g d olls a lso m ark the tu rn in g po in t betw een tw o d iscou rse net­
w orks. K em pelen’s and M a e lz e l’s m echanical children o f 1 7 7 8 and 1823
repeated the m inim al signifieds o f lo vin g parents fo r those parents. C irca
1800 there was no child ren ’s lan gu age independent o f p ed ag o gica l feed­
b ack . In the Edison ta lkin g d o ll, by con trast, real children san g ch ild ren ’s
songs a b o u t little M a ry s and their lam bs. T h e cen tu ry o f the ch ild began
with such self-relatedness, u n reachab le by any M am a/P ap a p sych ology.
A cco rd in g to Ellen Key, T h e C en tury o f the C h ild b ro u g h t an end to
“ soul m urder” in sc h o o l.u Instead o f establishing p ed ag o gica l norm s fo r
w hat should be sp oken by ch ild ren , on e gave free reign to lan gu age gam es.
But these standards (in spite o f all ch ild ’s-century oracles) w e re te ch n o ­
logical from the begin nin g. T h ere can n o t be any children ’s lan gu ag e un­
filtered throu gh the lan gu age o f adults until d iscou rses can be recorded in
their positive reality. T h e classical ped agogical dream o f form in g adults
w ith an alytic, slow -m otio n p ro n u n ciatio n — w a lk in g ph on em e archives
for their ch ild ren — becam e obsolete. Edison’s invention w as n ot called a
p h on o grap h for n othin g: it registers real sounds rather than translating
them into p h on em ic equ ivalen cies as an a lp h ab et d o es . Emile B erlin er’s
m o re m odern d evice, w h ich replaced rolls w ith record s, w as n ot called a
gram op h o n e for n othin g: true to its nam e, it retains “ the soun ds of
letters” and has a w ritin g angel as its tra d e m a rk ."

T ech n ologically possible m anipu lation s determ ine w h a t in fa c t can

b ecom e a d isco u rse.'4 T h e p h on o grap h and gram oph on e allow slow -
m otion studies o f single sounds far b elo w the percep tion thresh old o f
even Stephani’s ideal m others. T h o u g h the frequ en cy b an d w id th possible
circa 1900 cou ld n ot m atch the entire speech sp ectru m and particu larly
 THE GREAT LALUI.A 233

distorted s-soun d s (w ith frequencies u p to 6 kH z), this w as not a h a n d i­

cap . T h e ta lk in g m ach in e m oved in to lab oratories and sch ools very soon
after its invention. In lab oratories its very d istortion s m ade it p ossible to
m easure h earin g.15 In schools it w as useful because “ it is essential for
ach ievin g an accurate im pression o f the m ost fleeting, unrepresen table,
and yet so im p ortan t, ch ara cte ristic a sp e cts o f lan gu age, o f line ph onetics
(speech m elody) and o f line rhythm ,” w h ereas (because o f its accu rate re­
cording) it “ is n ot suited fo r pure p ron u n ciation p ra ctice.” “ T h u s w ro te
Ernst Su rkam p, publisher o f a journal that is nearly im possible to lo cate
today, Instruction a n d Talking M a ch in es— as if any fu rther d em on stra­
tion that the epoch o f H igh G erm an ph on etic norm s is past w ere n eces­
sary. O f course, ta lk in g m achines can create “ a store o f readily accessible
lan guage sounds in exem p lary, faultless a ccen t” and d icta to ria lly inscribe
schoolchild ren w ith lan gu age sounds o r universal k e y b o a rd s .17 But th ey
can d o m ore and different things. T o the stu d en t R ilk e, w h o se physics
teacher had his students reconstruct and exp erim en t w ith a p h on o grap h
that he had acq uired as soon as the m achine w a s on the m ark et, the regis­
tered sounds op en ed “ as it w ere, a n ew and infinitely d elicate po in t in the
texture o f reality.” 1* T h e fa ct that a purely em pirical ph onetics (in rig o r­
ous distinction to p h o n o lo gy) suddenly becam e possible led to storin g
real ph en om en a acco rd in g to technical standards rath er than to regu lat­
ing them accord in g to ed u cation al norm s. O n e cou ld record the w ild
arm y that N ietzsch e despaired o f ever gettin g d o w n . B ecause “ d ialects in
sch ools deserve every possible en cou ragem en t, th e ta lk in g m achin e can
be effective in that its undistorted oral presentations nourish o n e ’s delight
in a n ative lan gu ag e.” 1’
In the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900, m edia rehabilitated d ialects, those
o f group s like those o f children. N o t the d elight o f the subjects but the
d elight o f the researcher cam e to pow er. In the absence o f n orm ativiza-
tion, this d elight b ro u g h t to light discourses that p revio u sly had never
passed a record in g th resh o ld — “ a n ew and infinitely delicate point in the
texture o f reality.”
O n the second G erm an A rt-E du cation D ay in H erd er’s W eim ar, a
speaker dism issed the unified lan guage that for a hun dred years had ruled
over teachers and students.

T h e sc h o o l-a g e c h ild b rin g s his o w n la n g u a g e t o sc h o o l, his n a tiv e la n g u a g e , his

fam ily lan g u a g e , th e la n g u a g e o f h is p la y m a te s, his o w n n a iv e , in tu itiv e lan g u a g e :
o u r ta s k a n d o u r d e sire is to te a c h him o u r lan g u a g e , th e la n g u a g e o f o u r p o e ts
a n d th in k e rs. . . . B ut isn’t it a sk in g a g re a t d eal w hen w e d e m a n d th a t c h ild re n ,
from th e first d a y o f s c h o o l, sp e a k n o th in g b u t s c h o o l la n g u a g e? . . . It is n o t lo n g
b e fo re th e c h ild re n w ill b e o v e rta k e n by b o o k s a n d b o o k la n g u a g e : a c h ild le a rn s
to r e a d . R e a d in g , h o w e v er, w e a k e n s a n d c u ts a c ro s s — it c a n n o t b e o th e rw is e —
th e ch ild ’s c o h e re n t, flu en t sp e e ch , a n d b o o k la n g u a g e b e g in s m o re a n d m o re to
234 1900

influence and co n tro l school la n g u a g e ; finally, in its o ften foreig n and refined w ay,
it c re a te s a child w h o is n o w shy and m o n o sy lla b ic .20

This sp eaker adm its that b o o k lan gu age represents a never-spoken e x c e p ­

tion and im pedes actual speech. T h e m ost fluent sp eaker is the on e w h o ,
like children or the w riter o f E cce H o m o , never reads a line. T h erefo re
progressive p ed agogu es can only com pete w ith the m edia. L ik e the bell o f
a record in g p h o n o grap h , they abso rb every freely flo w in g w o rd , every na­
ive pun o f children’s d ialects.
C h ristian M o rgen stern , the child o f G erm an letters, im m ediately rec­
ogn ized and ex p lo ited this developm ent. Even if he w a s later to d eclare in
m ediocre verse that the gra m o p h o n e w a s the w o rk o f the d evil— b efore
his m aster, R u d o lf Steiner, said the sam e th in g 21— his heroes kn ew better.

K o rf u n d P a lm stro m n eh m en L ek tio n en ,
um d a s W etter-W en d isch e zu lernen.
l a g lic h p ilg e m sie z u d e n m o d e rn e n
O llen d o rffsc h e n S p ra c h le h rg ra m m o p h o n e n .

D o rt n u n lassen sie m it vielen a n d e rn ,

w e lc h e g leic h fa lls steile C h a ra k te r e
(gleich a ls o b s ein Z iel fiir E dle w are),
sich im W etter-W en d isc h en b e w a n d e rn .
D ies Id io m b e h e b t d e n G e ist d e r S chw ere,
m ac h t sie u n s te t, lau n isc h und ch o lerisch . . .
D o ch d ie S ache b leib t n u r p e rip h e risc h .
U n d sie w e rd en w ie d e r— C h a ra k te re .

K o rf and P a lm s tro m a re tak in g lesso n s

From O lle n d o rff’s d id a c tic g ra m o p h o n e s ;
T o lea rn W e a th e r-W e n d ish ’s g ra m m a r a n d to n e ,
T h e y w a n d e r h en ce fo r d a ily sessions.
T h e r e th e y p u t w ith all th e rest,
W h o a re stiff c h a ra c te rs , too, it seem s,
(the place a ttra c ts elite esteem )
T h e ir W ea th e r-W e n d ish t o th e test.

T h e idiom te n d s to untie fe tters,

M a k e p eople m o o d y , th in g s look d ism al,
B ut still it all re m a in s p e rip h e ra l,
a n d th ey re v ert o n c e m o re — t o c h a ra c te rs .22

T h is poem , entitled “ L an gu age Studies,” may be an e x a c t d escrip tion —

e x c e p t that Surkam p w o u ld be a m ore ap p ro p ria te nam e than O llen d o rff.
H einrich O lle n d o rff’s m ethod o f lan gu age instruction em p hasized co n ­
versation m ore than the rules o f gram m ar, but Su rk am p’s co m p a n y had
at the time a n ear-m on op o ly on lan gu age-in stru ction al gra m o p h o n es and
strongly en cou raged d ialects in th e schools. In 1 9 1 3 K o r f and Palm strom
 THE GREAT LALULA 235

cou ld choose am o n g m ore than a thou san d in stru ction al records. T h e fact
that they chose W eather-W endish legitim ately established the new status
o f dialects as an au ton ym o f “ naive and in tu itive” ch ild ren ’s lan gu age.*
T h e play on eth n ograp h y and w eather reports is like the children’s puns
and jok es th a t w ere recorded by the p sych o lo g ist Stanley H all.

W o rd s, in c o n n e c tio n w ith rh y m e, rh y th m , a llite ra tio n , c a d e n c e , e tc ., o r even

w ith o u t th ese, sim p ly a s so u n d -p ic tu re s, o fte n a b s o r b th e a tte n tio n o f c h ild re n ,
a n d yield th e m a really a e s th e tic p le a s u re e ith e r q u ite in d e p e n d e n tly o f th e ir
m ea n in g o r to th e u tte r b e w ild e rm e n t o f it. T h e y h e a r fa n cied w o rd s in n o ises a n d
s o u n d s o f n a tu r e a n d a n im a ls, a n d a re p e rsiste n t p u n n e rs. A s b u tte rflie s m a k e
b u tte r o r e a t it o r g iv e it by sq u eezin g , so g ra s s h o p p e rs g iv e g ra ss, b ees g iv e b e a d s
a n d b e a n s, k itte n s g ro w o n th e p u ssy -w illo w , a n d all h o n e y is fro m h o n e y su c k le s,
a n d even a p o p lin d re s s is m a d e o f p o p la r -tre e s ."

. . . and so on and so forth , until even the W ends speak W eather-W endish.
T h e ir fantastical Slavic has its grave op p o site in w h at the art-edu cators
designated as the w eak en in g, intim id ating high id iom . Either there are
characters, ind ivid uals, and the on e norm , o r gra m o p h o n ics raises all the
unstable, cap ricio u s changes in speech to the level o f stan dards. T h en
“ there is in fa c t n o reason, as lon g as on e recogn izes W endish as a lan ­
gu age, th a t the sam e recogn ition should n ot be exten d ed to W eather-
W en d ish.” 24
K orf and Palm strom , o f cou rse, b ro k e off their g ra m o p h o n e studies
and becam e ch ara cters— th at is, and n ot o n ly in G r e e k , letters o n c e m ore.
M o rgen stern ’s sim ulated children’s lan gu age rem ained high id iom , w r it­
ten lan gu age, w hich q u ick ly m ade its w a y in to child ren ’s readers and d is­
sertations.25 D iscourses th a t had p reviou sly never been able to cross a re­
cord in g threshold w ere stored and returned; the g ra m o p h o n e had paid
its debt.
But heroes in poem s w ere n ot the only ones to discover the ta lk in g m a ­
ch in e. T h ose w h o w ro te poem s w ere a lso tem pted to give it a try. In 1 897
the W ilhelm ine poet laureate, Ernst von W ild en bru ch , w as p ro b a b ly the
first G erm an w riter to record his v o ice on a w a x roll. (H is K aiser had
lo n g since preceded him .) W ild en bru ch w ro te a p o em exp ressly for the
occasion , “ F o r the P h on o grap h ic R eco rd in g o f H is V o ic e ” ; the history o f
its tran sm ission says it all. T h e C o lle c te d W orks did n ot co lle ct it; W alter
B ruch, w h o as the inven tor o f the P A L television system had access to
archives o f historical recordings, had to tran scrib e the verses fro m the
roll. T h e y w ill be q u o ted here in a fo rm that w ill h o rrify p o ets, c o m p o si­
to rs, and G erm an ists.

* W'endisch is th e la n g u a g e o f th e W e n d s , a S la v ic g r o u p th a t o n c e in h a b ite d p a rts o f

e aste rn G e r m a n y . [T ran s.]
236 1900

S h ap es c an c o n s tra in th e h u m a n v isage, th e eye b e held fa st in an im a g e , o n ly th e

voice, b o r n in b re a th , b o d ile ss d ies a n d flies off.
T h e fa w n in g face can deceive the eye, th e s o u n d o f the v o ice can nev er lie, th u s
to m e is th e p h o n o g ra p h th e s o u l’s o w n tr u e p h o to g ra p h ,
w h ic h b rin g s w h a t is h id d e n to lig h t a n d fo rces th e p a s t to sp e a k . H e a r th e n ,
f o r in th is so u n d y o u w ill lo o k in to th e so u l o f E rn st von W ild e n b ru c h .2*

A cop iou s w riter, W ild en bru ch did not a lw a y s rhym e so poorly. But in
the m om ent he to o k leave o f the G u ten b erg g a la xy , he w as overco m e by
w ritten lan gu age. A s if in G ertru d e Stein’s d ark o racle, an in evitab ility
app ears and d oes a w a y w ith all p o etic freedom s. W ild en bru ch had to talk
into a b la ck p h on o grap h ic speaker, w h ich stored pure soun ds rather than
his w ord s and n otion s. O f course, the voice did n ot cease b ein g born in
b reath ; it retains the vib ration fu n dam en tal to classical-rom an tic lyric
p o etry; b u t— and this is to o em pirical o r trivial a fact fo r F o u cau lt’s
grandly styled history o f d iscou rse— the voice can n o lon ger be pure p o ­
etic breath that vanishes even as it is heard and leaves n o trace. W h a t on ce
necessarily escaped becom es inescapable; the bodiless b ecom es m aterial.
T h e gram op h o n e is n ot qu ite as v o la tile, c ap ricio u s, and secon d ary as
K o rf and Palm strom thought. T h e lyric poet W ild en bru ch reacted like a
rat in a test lab yrin th . H is m usings on ph ysio gn om y and p h otograp h y,
w hich a llo w their subjects cu nn ing cou nterm easu res and escape hatches,
circum scrib e only the op tica l m edium that he w as fam iliar w ith: w ritin g .
W h en the p h on o grap h forces the hidden to sp e a k , h ow ever, it sets a trap
fo r sp eakers. W ith it, sp eakers are not identified in the sy m b o lic w ith a
n am e, o r in the im aginary by hero-reader id entifications, but in the real.
A nd that is not c h ild ’s play. W ild en bru ch allu d ed to the sy m b o lic and
im aginary registers w hen he cou p led the sou n d o f the poem w ith his ow n
n oble p ro p er nam e and a lo o k into his po etic soul in ord er n ot to sp eak o f
the real, the sp eakin g body.
H erder dream ed long before A n n a Pom ke o f an im proved “ reading
and nota tiona l system ” in w hich one “ w ill p ro b ab ly also find a w a y of
d esignatin g the ch aracteristic su bstance and tone o f a lyric p ie ce .” 27 W ith
the gra m o p h o n e’s c a p a c ity to record lyric poetry, the dream b ecom es at
o n ce reality and n ightm are. It is on e thin g to w rite p rou d ly a b o u t the
p h o n o g ra p h ic record in g o f all voices, as C h arles C ro s d id ; it is an oth er
thing to w rite, as W ild en bru ch did, “ For the P h on o grap h ic R eco rd in g
o f H is V oice” and then to have to speak it. W hat go o d are the poetic
m nem on ic techniques o f rhym e and m eter w hen w a x rolls can store not
on ly substance and ton e but real sounds? L ike A lfred D o b lin ’s defiant
m o tto , “ N o t p h on o grap h y, but a rt,” 2* W ild en b ru ch ’s poetaster rhym es
bear w itness to an em bittered com petition betw een p o etry and tech­
n ological m edia.
Sound is a co m p lex o f p h ysio lo gical d ata that are im possible to put
 THE GREAT LALULA 237

into w ritin g o r to cou n terfeit. In the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 , p sy ch o ­

physics and m edia subvert the im aginary b o d y im age that ind ivid u als
have o f them selves and substitute a forth righ t positivity. T h e p h on o grap h
is called the true p h o to g ra p h o f the sou l; g ra p h o lo g y is called the “ X r a y ”
o f h and w ritten “ ind iscretion s.” 29
M o c k in g the d octrin e o f p sych olog ica l p h ysio gn o m y in 1800, p h i­
losophers could joke: n othin g m ore w a s required than a d ecision o f the
ind ivid ual to m ake itself incom prehen sible f o r cen tu rie s." T h a t is w h a t
W ilden bruch hoped to accom p lish w ith his line a b o u t the fa w n in g face
d eceivin g the eyes o f the ph ysiogn om ist; but given a m achin e that d od ges
the tricks people use with on e another, the lau ghter has died a w a y a fter a
century. P h o n o grap h y means the death of the au th o r; it stores a m ortal
v o ice rath er than etern al th o u gh ts and turns o f phrase. T h e past that the
p h on ograp h forces to sp eak is on ly W ild en b ru ch ’s helpless euphem ism
for his sin gular body, w hich w as posthu m ou s even w h ile he lived.
T h e death o f m an and the preservation o f co rp o rea l evid ence are one.
In a brillian t essay, C a r lo G in zb u rg has show n that around 19 0 0 a new
paradigm o f k n o w led g e gained ascendancy, on e that o p erated only w ith
un fakeab le, th a t is, un con sciou s and m eaningless, d eta ils— in aesthetics
as w ell as in p sych oan alysis and crim in o lo gy.11 T h u s a w riter in Scientific
Am erican said o f the p h on o grap h , which w as just then g o in g in to m ass
p rod u ction , “ It can be used as a reliable w itness in crim inal in vestiga­
tion s.” '2 T h e individual o f 1800, w h o w as an ind ivid u al un iversal, did
n o t survive this fine-grained investigation. W h a t on e can k n o w o f a
hum an being today has n oth in g to d o with the 4,000 pages that Sartre,
posing the sam e q uestion , devoted to the p sych ology o f F lau b ert. O n e
can record p eo p le’s vo ices, their fingerprints, their p a ra p ra x es. G in zb u rg
also underestim ates the m odernity o f these en croach m en ts w h en he puts
the origin o f the gatherin g o f evidence am o n g p reh istoric hunters and R e ­
naissance p h ysician s. T h e sn ow that helped trackers w a s an a ccid en t;
E dison ’s tin-foil roll o r Francis G a b o n ’s fin gerprin t a rch ive w ere p u r­
posefully prepared record in g su rfaces for data that co u ld be neither
stored n or evaluated w ith o u t m achines.
T h u s W ild en b ru ch ’s m ediocre verse points o u t w h o m the p h o n o grap h
benefits. A lyric p o e t im m ortalized in the groo ves on a record enters, not
the pan th eo n , but the arch ive o f the new “ d ep osition p s y c h o lo g y .” U nder
this nam e W illiam Stern and oth ers instituted a scien ce based on the su ­
p eriority o f technical over literary storage devices. W h e th e r fo r crim inals
o r fo r th e insane, th e use o f “ stylized d ep osition s often prod u ces a false
im pression o f the exam in ation and ob scu res the p sych o lo g ica l signifi­
cance o f ind ivid ual statem ents.” B ecause each an sw er “ is, from th e po in t
o f view o f exp erim ental p sych ology, a reaction to the op erative stim ulus
in th e q u estion ,” experim enters and investigators p ro v o k e co u n tertactics
238 1900

in their subjects as lon g as they use the bu reau cratic m edium o f w r it­
ing. If, how ever, on e selects “ the use o f the p h o n o grap h as an ideal
m eth o d ,” ” then, esp ecially if the record in g is d o n e secretly, any parasitic
feed back betw een the stim ulus and th e reaction w ill be prevented. Se­
crecy is “ abso lu tely essen tial” w ith children in ord er to “ gu aran tee the
genuine inn ocen ce o f their responses.” ”
A s a p h otograp h o f the sou l, the ta lk in g m achine p u t an end to the
inn ocen t d o ctrin e o f innocence. C irca 1800 inn ocen ce w as a h istorical-
ph ilosop h ical limit con cep t; it referred to a region it itself m ade im pass­
ible. “ O n ce the soul speaks, then o h !, it is n o lon ger the soul that sp ea k s.”
A lth o u gh this loss o f the so u l’s identity w ith itself had been attributed to
the progress o f the hum an race o r to the division o f lab o r, it resulted, in
the final analysis, sim ply from the tech n ological im possibility o f sto r­
ing the n ew ly discovered vo ice in any form ex cep t that o f w ritin g . O ly m ­
p ia ’s autom atized “ o h ” w o u ld oth erw ise never h a ve been so fascin ating
and terrifyin g. C irca 1900, by con trast, the builders o f au to m a to n s had
carried the day. T h ere w as n o lon ger any innocence b e lo w the recordin g
threshold; there w as on ly the tactical rule o f an ticip a tin g c o u n ter reac­
tions w h ile recordin g. But the inn ocen ce that com es in to b ein g w h ere
bodies and m edia techn ologies com e into c o n ta c t is called flight o f ideas.

In ord er to investigate “ glo sso p h ysica l” d istu rbances, o r those that,

b eyon d alalia o r aph asia, a ffect entire sequen ces o f sp eech, the V ienn ese
psychiatrist Erwin S tran sky devised a n ew type o f experim ental p r o ­
cedure. A fter havin g “ shut o u t as far as possible all extran eo u s sense
stim uli,” Stran sky had his subjects “ lo o k and sp eak d irectly into the
painted b la ck tu b e” o f a p h o n o grap h ic receiver fo r on e m inu te.” T h e
subjects w ere selected partly from am o n g S tran sk y’s psychiatric c o l­
leagues, partly from am ong his patients. T h e principal d istin ctio n b e­
tw een the cohorts, how ever, w as that m ost o f the patients reacted w ith
fright to the inten tionally stim ulus-free (that is, b lack) field o f the re­
ceiver, w ith the un fortu nate result that their responses had to be recorded
sten o grap h ically rather than p h on o grap h ically.” But in the absence of
any transcendental norm , psychiatrists and psych iatric patients exh ib ited
the sam e speech b ehavior. A fte r an initial trial period, they co u ld p ro d u ce
nonsense fo r on e m inute (the record in g tim e fo r on e roll). T h e com m and
to speak as m uch and as quickly as possible, together w ith a recorder
capable o f registering m ore m aterial at a q u ick er pace than the a lp h abet,
b ro u g h t a b o u t an experim entally gu aran teed h od g ep o d ge o f w o rd s. A s in
the experim ents o f E bbinghau s, the initial difficulties resu lted fro m the
p a ra d o x ic a l im perative to b ra ck et the op erative im peratives o f norm al
speech.
 THF. GREAT LALULA 239

In th e b e g in n in g , it w a s n o rm a l fo r su b je c ts t o g et n o fu rth e r th a n th e first few

se n ten c es; th ey w o u ld stall a n d claim th a t n o th in g o c c u rre d to th e m , th a t th ey
c o u ld n o lo n g e r sp e a k . . . . W e a re o rd in a rily so a c c u s to m e d to th in k in g u n d e r
th e d ire c tio n o f g e n e ra l c o n c e p ts th a t w e c o n s ta n tly fall b a c k in to th is te n d e n c y
w h e n ev e r w e a re p re se n te d w ith a p a rtic u la r aim , even w h e n th is aim c o n sists in
sh u ttin g o u t all g e n e ra l c o n c e p ts . . . O nly w h e n th e su b je c ts re aliz e d th a t search­
ing fo r v erb al ideas w as c o m p le te ly u n n e ce ssa ry , th a t th ese ideas w o u ld c o m e
s p o n ta n e o u s ly a n d p ro fu se ly to th e fo re g ro u n d , d id th e in itial sta llin g rap id ly
c e a se so w e c o u ld p ro c e e d to th e a c tu a l e x p e rim e n t .37

From a tech n ological m edium that records their voices w ith o u t askin g
for hidden thoughts o r id eas, exp erim ental subjects lea rn ed “ the release
o f linguistic exp ression from m ental life” through their o w n bod ies. In its
“ a u ton om y,” 38 lan guage proceeds w ith o u t a n y need to lo o k fo r signifieds.
N ietzsch e ann oun ced lon g b efore Stran sky that he learned to find once he
grew w eary o f seekin g; lon g after Stransky, Breton urged w riters to trust
the inexhaustible m urm ur.
T h e resultant o u tp u t is all p ractically in terchangeable. A u to m atic
w ritin g generates sentences rem iniscent o f “ Rose is a rose is a ro se.”
Stran sky’s ph on o grap h reco rd s the sequence, “ H o p e, green belief, green,
green, green , green is an em erald, an em erald is green, a sapphire is green,
a — a sapphire is green, green is, that isn’ t rig h t,” 3’ etc. H en cefo rth speech
k n o w s only ta u to lo g y and co n tra d ictio n , the tw o em pty, inform ation less
extrem es o f truth values.4" In id en tifyin g the new artistic age o f technical
reprod uction w ith film, B enjam in singled o u t the m ovie screen as m akin g
the sin gle im age ob solete and therefore estab lishin g the rule o f d istrac­
tion , rather than b ou rgeo is concen tration . But the prin ciple applies m ore
generally and rigorously. Film has no privileged position am ong the m e­
dia that have revolutionized literature and art. A ll have b ro u g h t a b o u t, in
ex a ct psychiatric term s, the flight o f ideas; corresp on d in g term s in cu l­
tural criticism , such as “ d istractio n ,” rem ain euphem istic.
Stran sky’ s p h o n o grap h did not record m ere lapses in atten tion o r m o ­
m ents o f d istraction ; it registered disdain fo r p o litical and p ed agogical
norm s, norm s that w ould not have endured fo r a day w ere it n ot fo r a
norm ativized lan gu ag e.41 T h e catato n ic H einrich H ., for instan ce, re­
sponded to test questions con cern in g the nature o f state and school regu ­
lations thus;

T h e sta te is m a n y p e o p le living to g e th e r, h o u r by ho u r, p lac es se p a ra te d by h o u rs,

b o rd e re d by m o u n ta in s o n fo u r sides.

[School re g u la tio n ] is th a t law o v e r sc h o o l-a g e c h ild re n w h o a re o ften in c o n d i­

tio n s o f illness, w h e n th ey sta y h o m e a n d w h e n th ey sh o u ld b e w o rk in g o u t o n th e
la n d . A lte rn a te daily, w h e n th e y w o rk fo r tw o d a y s a n d g o to sc h o o l f o r tw o d a y s,
th ey c h a n g e every w e e k . W h e n th ey w o rk fo r a w eek a n d g o to sc h o o l f o r a w eek,
2 4 0 1 9 0 0

all sc h o o l-a g e c h ild re n w h o a re ill a n d have to stay hom e a n d save tim e , th u s save
tim e , stay hom e, p e rh a p s to w o rk , p e rh a p s to co o k , p e rh a p s to w ash c a rro ts . . .42

Responses on the order o f vegetable stew effectively dism an tle the pow ers
on w hich ed u cation had been based since 1800. Fritz M a u th n e r’s p ro p h ­
ec y that “ the states w ill one day have to pay fo r m a k in g their sch o o ls into
institutions in w h ich the m inds o f children are system atica lly d estro y ed ”
w as fulfilled b efore it w as w ritten .4' W h a t the tech n olog ica l m edia record
is their ow n o p p ositio n to the state and sch ool. P eople w h o are en co u r­
a ged to sp eak m ore quickly than they th in k, that is, to o u tp a ce the c o n ­
trollin g fu n ctio n , necessarily begin gu errilla w arfa re against d iscip lin ary
pow er. T h e one w h o not on ly forgets, but in a N ietzsch ean m anner a lso
forgets his forgetfu lness, a lw a y s delivers, like K a fk a ’ s drunken m an, the
D escrip tion o f a Struggle:

N o w th e d ru n k jerked u p his ey eb ro w s so th a t a b rig h tn e ss a p p e a re d b e tw ee n

them a n d his eyes, a n d h e e x p la in e d in fits a n d s ta rts : “ It’s lik e th is, y o u see— I’m
sleepy, you see, s o th a t’s w h y I'm g o in g t o sle ep .— You see. I’v e a b ro th e r-in -la w
o n th e W en z elsp la tz — t h a t ’s w h e re I’m g o in g , f o r I live th e r e , f o r t h a t ’s w h e r e I
have m y b e d — so I’ll b e off— . But I d o n ’t k n o w his n a m e , y o u see, o r w h ere he
lives— seem s I’ve fo r g o tte n — b u t never m in d , fo r 1 d o n ’t even k n o w if 1 h a v e a
b ro th e r-in -la w a t a ll.— B ut I’ll b e o ff n o w , you see— . D o y o u th in k I’ll find h im ?” 44

Stransky hoped that by using a neutral record in g d evice he w o u ld

avoid the psych op h ysical d anger o f p ro d u cin g m ere “ la b o rato ry a rti­
fa cts,” 4' o r o f program m in g the response in to the stim ulus; yet steno- and
p h o n o g ra p h ic recording fu n ctio n s like a lco h o l in the passage from
K a fk a . It pro vo k es the p ro v o cativ e responses that n o self-resp ecting ser­
vant o f the state or ed u cation al b u reau crat w ould have w an ted to w rite
d o w n . A s catchp hrases pron ou n ced by the exp erim enter, “ s ta te ” and
“ sc h o o l” can no lo n g er be subsum ed under any m ore general heading.
P sychiatry a lso realized, then, that “ en u m eratio n s” — catch p h rases, in­
ventories, address b o o k s, gra m m ars— are them selves instances o f the
flight o f id e a s;4* to w h ich the p ed ag o gy o f learn ing im pairm ents cou ld
respond that h yperactive children ’s fligh t o f ideas w a s a result o f enum er-
ative te x tb o o k s .47 T h u s w hen Stran sky stated that “ the form ation o f g e n ­
eral co n cep ts” m ight have been inhibited fo r “ p a th o lo g ica l o r e x p eri­
mental rea so n s,” 4* the “ o r ” should be replaced by an equal sign.
T h e very fa c t th at fligh t o f id eas governed b o th sides o f the e x p e ri­
mental situation a llo w ed it to be tran sposed into oth er m edia. By su b ­
stitu ting ord inary w ritin g m aterials f o r the p h on o grap h and artificial
la b o rato ry artifacts f o r p h o n o grap h ic ones, on e c o u ld achieve “ the re­
lease o f linguistic expression from m ental life” in literature as w ell. T h e
physician G o ttfrie d Benn d em on strated this w hen he had his fellow p h y ­
sician Jef van Pam eelen “ en ter the foyer o f a hospital fo r p ro stitu tes” and
 THE GREAT LALULA 241

registered the association s o f this his d op p elg an ger w ith p h o n o grap h ic fi­
delity. T o be sure, n oth in g at all occu rs to the su b ject Pam eelen. In his
“ d read at his inability to exp erien ce a n y th in g ” he sees o n ly “ an em p ty
hall w ith a c lo c k .” But hardly have these w ord s escaped him w h en a
disem bodied “ v o ice ” sounds a b o v e him . “ An em pty hall w ith a clo ck ?
Further! E xtension! Y ie ld ! T h e d o o rm an ’s apartm ent? T h e hairpin s on
the groun d? T h e garden on th e right? A n d so ? ” T h ere are o n ly d isco n ­
nected catchphrases, but like “ sta te” or “ sch ool regu la tio n s” th ey d e­
mand con tin u ation , if only into ideational flight. A c tin g the part, as if to
m ake things easier for his archivist, Pameelen consents to the flight of
catchphrases:

pameelen (acting th e part): I k n o w a h o u s e v e ry sim ila r to th e o n e y o u h a v e ju st

d e sc rib e d , H e r r D o c t o r ! I e n te re d it o n a w a rm sp rin g m o rn in g ; first th e re w a s
a n e m p ty h a llw a y w ith a c lo c k , th e d o o r m a n ’s a p a r tm e n t w a s o n th e rig h t,
h a irp in s w e re lying o n th e g r o u n d , very fu n n y , a n d o n th e rig h t th e re w a s a
sm all g a rd e n , a b e d o f ro ses in th e m id d le , tw o w e th e rs g ra ze d teth e re d to th e
g ra ss, p ro b a b ly th e A q u a ria n g o a ts .4’

T ruly an “ ep istem ological d ra m a ” (as T h e Survey D irecto r is subtitled):

although it dutifully, indeed exh au stively runs th rou gh the catalo g u e o f
questions, Pam eelen’s an sw er confu ses identity, the ep istem o lo gical b ed ­
ro ck , w ith m ere sam eness.50 C lea rly dram a (long b efore P eter H a n d k e ’s
Kaspar) is a b o u t sp eakin g rather than a ctio n . Identity falls in to sim u ­
lacrum w ith o u t any extradiscu rsive co n tex t. E m pty w ords circu late b e­
tween Pameelen and the vo ice with no figure behind it, w o rd s w ith o u t
points o f view , address, o r reference, determ ined and gu id ed by the im ­
perative o f a sso ciatio n .51 T h e vo ice notes d o w n Pam eelen’s ven erealogical
jok e abou t the A q u arian go ats as a “ very g o o d ,” nam ely, “ distant a sso ­
ciation that plays on the m eaning o f hospital w ith a light, h u m orou s
to u ch .” T h e m edical profession d oes n ot exem p t on e from the status
o f experim ental sub ject in dram a any m ore than it d oes in a lab o ra to ry
full o f ph on o grap h s. T h e vo ice that d irects Pam eelen is a n yth in g but tran ­
scen dental— he addresses it as “ H err D o c to r !” T h is exp erim en ter shares
Stran sky’s insight that any search fo r verbal ideas is superfluous. W h e n ­
ev er “ peripheral fa tig u e ” o r “ c o rtica l fa d in g ” in Pam eelen ’s “ brain” h in ­
der the associatio n s, the d o c to r cra ck s his w h ip and com m an d s “ fu r­
th e r!” 52 Pam eelen is o b vio u sly am o n g the “ w o rst cases” o f im becility
w h o “ alread y g ro w tired o f the p roced u re by the 58th rea ctio n .” 55 W ith
his w h ip , how ever, the d o c to r (like the p h o n o g ra p h ) com m an d s speech at
a tem po that separates discourse from mental life o r “ exp erien tial p er­
sp ectives.” D ram a, on ce the genre o f free subjects, b ecom es p a th o lo gical
“ o r ” exp erim ental.
T h is is because free subjects ap p ear in b o o k s o f ph ilosop h y, w h ereas
24 2 I 900

experim ental subjects ap p ear in the field o f psych op h ysics. “ T h e one

science that m ost stron gly cap tu res the w o r ld ’s attention th ro w s its light
and sh a d o w across prose fiction as w ell. Since a b o u t i8 6 0 this has
been p ath o lo gy, p h ysio lo gical and p sy ch o lo g ica l.” '4 T h u s the en igm a o f
the w h ip -b ran d ish in g H err D o c to r can be q u ick ly clarified . O n e need
on ly w rite ou t the previously qu oted dram atic d ialo g u e in the fo llo w in g
m anner:

VOI CE PA MEE L E N

H all w ith a clock? first th e r e w a s an e m p ty h a llw a y w ith a clock

D o o rm a n ’s a p a rtm e n t d o o rm a n ’s a p a rtm e n t o n th e rig h t
H a irp in s o n th e floor? th e re w e re h a irp in s o n th e flo o r, very fu n n y
A g a rd e n o n th e r ig h t a n d to th e rig h t th e r e w a s a sm all g a r d e n , a b e d o f
ro se s in th e m id d le

N e x t read on e o f m any published p a g es o f interview s that the p sych ia ­

trist Z ieh en con d u cted w ith sch o o l children in Jena.

O . G ., 1 2 y e ars, 9 m o n th s . F a th e r ta ilo r. S chool p e rfo rm a n c e q u ite v a ria b le , a v er­

age. Ju ly 3, 1 8 9 8 . 9 A . M . P rev io u sly o n e h o u r o f class (re a d in g a n d e x p la n a tio n o f
a p o e m a b o u t th e Pied Piper o f H a m e lin ).

STIMULUS W O R D R E S P ONS E

Teacher Herr Stichling (te a c h e r, w ith w hom h e w as ju st in class)

Father my father
Snow some fell (th o u g h t o f y e ste rd a y ’s sn o w fall)
Blood when an animal is slaughtered (th o u g h t o f a c o w h e saw
sla u g h te re d th e d a y b e fo re y esterd ay )
Rat how the rat catcher lures the rats into the trap
Snow white ( “ th a t ’s o n the g r o u n d ” ) 55

C on sid er, finally, that Z ieh en ’s Idea A sso cia tio n s o f th e C h ild aim ed to
“ determ ine the speed o f a sso cia tio n ,” indeed “ to determ ine the a sso c ia ­
tion process and its speed under special co n d itio n s (fatigu e, e tc.),” “ and
on e w ill h a ve a lso deduced the special con d itio n o f the w h ip . F rom this, it
is only a step to recogn izin g th at the h ead ph ysician o f the psych iatric
intern G o ttfrie d Benn w as none o th er than P rofessor T h e o d o r Z ieh en .
It hard ly m atters w h e th e r the exp erim ental su b ject is a child o r a d o c ­
tor, is O . G ., J. v. P., o r G . B. For the ph ysician W erff Ronne, the h ero o f
Benn’s first n ovella, to p ractice random association w ith o u t the w h ip o f
an experim enter, is m erely a further transposition o f psychophysical tech ­
niques into literature. But the only genre that can present an e x p eri­
m enter and an exp erim en tal su b ject as separate a gen ts is the d ram a. T h e
h ero o f Benn’s n ovella, by contrast, stands under an o rd e r o f a ssociatio n
that fu n ctio n s d esp otically because it has tran sposed itself in to flesh and
b lo o d . T h e lab o ra to ry a rtifa c t becom es abso lu te. N o interpretation cou ld
recogn ize it. O n ly the schoolch ild ren in Jena w ith w h o m Z ieh en e x p e ri­
 THE GREAT LALULA 243

m ented, w h ile atten d ing to his patient N ietzsch e o n the side, w o u ld have
k n o w n w h y R onn e w o u ld intensify, in a continuous com m en tary that is
also the n arrative perspective, the m u m b o ju m bo he hears in the officers’
mess over the strangely so ft tropical fruit. H e can d o n oth in g else. “ It w as
only a m atter o f transm ission, all the p articu lars rem ained u n tou ch ed ;
w h o w as he to approp riate o r oversee or, resisting, to create?” 57
V erbal transm ission as n eu rosis, w ith o u t any basis in a tran scen dental
o r creative Poet’s ego; m edial selection w ith o u t reference to the real, to
the incom prehen sible b ack gro u n d o f all m edia— even in his delirium ,
R on n e ob eys orders. Pameelen h as to transm it the d o o rm a n ’s ap artm en t,
hairpins, the hospital hallw ay, and g o a ts, and R on n e has to transm it
everyth in g heard and said. W h a t his acq u ain tan ces in the m ess say, w h at
th ey associate w ith this, w h a t he him self says and associates w ith w h a t is
said and a sso ciated — it all becom es im p ossib ly exh a u stin g. “ T h e stru ggle
betw een associatio n s, th a t’ s the final e g o — he th o u gh t and w a lk ed b ack
to the institute.” 5*
W here else should one go, excep t in to a catato n ic s tu p o r? 5’ T h a t at
least a llo w s R onn e to forget his forgetfu l pro ject leader. B ut b efore final
p aralysis, the failed d o c to r extend s his associatio n s to th e ir m aterial
basis, the brain itself. “ I have to keep investigating w h a t m ight have h a p ­
pened to me. W h a t if the forceps had d u g a little d eeper in to the skull at
this point? W h a t if I had been hit repeatedly on a p articu lar spot on the
head? W h a t is it w ith b rain s, a n y w a y ? ” 60 In an ap o retic attem pt to get
behind his o w n th in kin g, that is, to lo calize it using his ow n m edical
kn o w led g e, R onn e literally sacrifices his k n o w in g su bjectivity. T h e fa c t
that he has w o rd s and association s at all becom es an im p rob ab le e x c e p ­
tion to the countless possible deficits and disturbances. L an gu age ceases
to be a b astion o f inw ardness; the gesture that sim ulates tu rn in g his brain
inside o u t a lso reverses the con d itio n o f lan gu age in to on e o f chan ce and
exteriority.
T h erefo re R onn e (in direct descent from N ietzsche) never en cou n ters a
“ w ord that reached m e.” 61 W hen b lo w s to the head lead to aphasia in one
instance, to association s and w o rd s in oth ers, the p recon d ition s o f Poetry
becom e on e m ore casualty. T h e w o rd that had a lw ays reached people o p ­
erates at a certain psychic reaction th resh old, w h ich w as called the d is­
cou rse o f nature and the n atu re o f discourse. P sychoph ysics does aw ay
w ith both o f them. T h u s n oth in g rem ains fo r a p sychiatrist w h o has b e­
com e a psych iatric case, like Ronne, and w h o nonetheless w ants to be
reached by som ething, n othin g rem ains but to u n dertake T h e Journey
into other m edia.

H e lo o k e d d o w n th e s tre e t a n d sa w w h e re to g o .
H e ru sh e d in to th e tw ilig h t o f a m o v ie h o u s e , in to th e u n c o n s c io u s o f th e first
244 19° °

flo o r. R ed d ish lig h t sto o d in la rg e c aly x es o f flat flow ers up to h id d e n la m p s. T h e

so u n d o f violins, n e a rb y a n d w a rm ly p la y e d , s c ra p e d o v e r th e c u rv e o f his b ra in ,
d ra w in g o u t a tru ly sw ee t to n e. S h o u ld e rs le a n e d a g a in s t sh o u ld e rs, in d e v o tio n :
w h isp e rin g , c lo sin g to g e th e r, to u c h in g , h a p p in e s s . A m a n c a m e to w a rd him , w ith
w ife a n d c h ild , sig n a lin g fa m ilia rity , h is m o u th w id e a n d la u g h in g gaily . B ut
R o n n e n o lo n g e r re co g n ize d him . H e h a d e n te re d in to th e film , in to th e s h a r p
g e stu res, th e m y th ic force.
S ta n d in g la rg e b e fo re th e sea, h e w ra p p e d h im self in his c o at, its s k irts fla p p in g
in th e fresh b re ez e; h e a tta c k e d th e a ir a s he w o u ld an a n im a l, a n d h o w th e d rin k
co o le d th e la st o f th e trib e .
H o w he s ta m p e d , h o w v ig o ro u sly h e b e n t his k n ee. H e w ip e d a w a y th e a sh e s,
in d iffe ren t, a s if p o ssessed by g re a t th in g s th a t a w a ite d him in th e le tte r b ro u g h t
by th e o ld se rv a n t, o n w h o se k n e e th e a n c e s to r once sat.
T h e o ld m an w a lk e d n o b ly u p to th e w o m a n a t th e sp rin g . H o w s u rp rise d th e
n a n n y w a s, a s she p u t h e r h a n d k e rc h ie f to h e r b r e a s t. W h a t a lovely p la y m a te !
L ike a d e e r a m o n g y o u n g bulls! W h a t a silvery b e ard !
R onne h a rd ly b re a th e d , careful n o t to b re a k it.
T h e n it w a s d o n e , it h a d c o m e t o p ass.
T h e m o v e m e n t a n d sp irit h a d c o m e to g e th e r o v e r th e ruins o f th e p e rio d o f
sic k n ess, w ith n o th in g in b e tw ee n . T h e arm sailed clearly fro m a n im p u lse ; fro m
light to th e h ip , a b rig h t sw ing, fro m b ra n ch to b r a n c h .62

A m ovie theater in the suburbs o f Brussels in 1 9 1 6 is this C h risto lo g i-

cal go al o f all journeys. T h e n ovella m akes w h at w as accom p lish ed in the
film unam biguously clear. “ M o v e m e n t” can n ow be recorded in the tech ­
nological real, n o lon ger only in the im aginary.6' Ronne, the man w h o m
n o w ord reaches, is n o t a ltogeth er b eyon d co n tact, b u t his reaction
threshold fu n ctio n s p h ysio lo gically rather than psychically. Film estab ­
lishes im m ediate con n ection s betw een tech n ology and the b o d y, stim ulus
an d response, w hich m a k e im aginary con n ection s unnecessary. R eflexes,
as in P avlo v’s anim als, o ccu r w ith “ nothing in b etw e en ” : they arc b e­
tw een sen sory im pulses and m oto ric reactions. T h is is true o f the figures
op tica lly portrayed in the silent film ; it is true o f the a cco m p a n yin g m usic.
T h e vio lin s p la y in g in th e d a rk theater b ecom e an im m ediate presence for
the p h ysio lo gically schooled listener: just as in S ch on b erg’s “ P ierrot lun-
aire,” they p la y on th e curves o f his b rain .6* For that reason the in d ivid u al
nam ed R on ne, w h o in the m edium o f lan gu age had just renew ed a cq u a in ­
tanceships, fa lls in to a con d itio n for w h ich his con tem p o rary psychiatrists
had the fine w o rd asym bolia: R onn e n o lon ger recogn izes anyon e.
P sychiatry o r no, asym b olia is the stru ctu re o f the m ovies.6' O n e a u to ­
b io g ra p h e r w h o (as the sad title o f his b o o k , T h e W ords, alread y indi­
cates) la ter becam e on ly a w riter, w ro te o f his first visits to the m ovies:
“ We had the same m ental age. 1 w as seven years old and k n e w how to
read, [the n ew art] w as tw elve years old and did not know h o w to ta lk .” 66
T h e new m edium , w h eth er in Paris in 1 9 1 2 o r Brussels in 1 9 1 6 , presented
lan guage deficits as happiness. W ith his m other, w h o loved m ovies,
 THE GREAT LALULA 245

Sartre fled his grand father, a m an o f letters, w h o like all the b ou rgeo isie
w ent faithfully to the theater only to be able to g o h om e “ insidiously p re­
pared for cerem on ious destinies.” T h e m ovies release Ronne from a d is­
cou rse th a t is as incessant as it is em pty. T w o literary d escrip tion s o f film
celebrate, in sim ple solid arity, “ the u n con sciou s o f the first flo o r” and
“ the livin g n ig h t” o f the p rojection s as the en d of the b o o k ’s m on opoly.*7
Film tran sposed into the tech n ological real w hat Poetry had prom ised in
the age of alp h abetizatio n and gran ted through the fantasy o f the library.
Both cineasts attribute the highest, that is, u n con sciou s pleasu re to the
heroes and audience; both subm erge them selves in a c ro w d that is b od ily
co n tact and not m erely (as in Faust) a p h ilosop h ic h u m an ity; b o th blend
into boundless identification w ith the ph an tasm agoria. O n e transfers
w ord s spoken at the C ro ss to film , the other w rites m ore garru lou sly, bu t
in th e sa m e vein.

All o f this w a s o n e a n d th e sam e: it w a s D estiny. T h e h e r o d is m o u n te d , p u t o u t

th e fu s e , th e tr a ito r s p ra n g a t h im , a duel w ith k nives b e g a n : b u t th e a c c id e n ts o f
th e duel lik e w ise p a r to o k o f th e rig o r o f th e m usical d e v e lo p m e n t: th ey w e re fa k e
a c c id e n ts w h ic h ill c o n c e a le d th e un iv ersal o r d e r. W h a t joy w h e n th e la st k n ife
stro k e c o in c id e d w ith the last c h o rd ! I w a s utterly c o n te n t, I had fo und th e w o rld
in w h ic h I w a n te d to live, I to u c h e d th e a b s o lu te .68

H abettt sua fata libelli. T h ere w ere tim es w hen the A b so lu te w as

m anifest to people as a gallery o f im ages o f Spirit, that is, as p o etic-
ph ilosophical w riting. T h e re are o th er tim es w hen it d ep arts from the
heaps o f paper. C oh eren ce, iden tification , u n iversality— all the h o n o rary
titles conferred upon the b o o k by universal a lp h ab etizatio n are tran s­
ferred to the m edia, at least am o n g the com m on p eople. Just as in 1800
the new fantasy o f the library, despised by sch olars, becam e the joy o f
w o m e n , child ren , and the u n ed u cated , so to o , a cen tury later, did the a p ­
paratus o f film , despised by library fantasts. A psych iatrist w h o has sunk
to th e level o f a patient m eets an acq u ain tan ce at th e m ovies “ w ith w ife
and c h ild ” ; am on g the Sartres, m oth er and son g o to the m ovies, w hereas
the w riter and theater-goer gran d fath er can on ly ask stupid question s:
“ ‘ L o o k here, S im onn ot, yo u w h o are a seriou s m an, d o yo u understand
it? M y d au gh ter ta k e s m y grand son to the c in em a !’ A n d M . Sim on n ot
replied, in a co n ciliato ry ton e: ‘ I’ve never b een , but m y w ife som etim es
goes.’ ” ',,
As tech n ological m edia, the gram op h o n e and film store aco u stical and
op tical data serially w ith superhum an precision. Invented at the sam e
tim e by the sam e engineers, th e y launched a tw o -p ro n g ed atta ck on a m o ­
n op oly th a t had n ot been granted to the b o o k until the tim e o f universal
alp h abetizatio n : a m o n o p o ly on the sto ra ge o f serial d ata. C irc a 1900,
the ersatz sen suality o f P oetry could be replaced, n ot by N atu re, but by
246 1900

tech n ologies. T h e g ra m o p h o n e em pties out w ords by b yp assin g their

im aginary aspect (signifieds) fo r their real aspects (the p h ysio lo gy o f the
voice). O n ly a W ild en bru ch cou ld still believe that a d ev ice w o u ld be
prop erly attentive to his sou l, to the im aginary itself. Film d evalues w o rd s
by setting their referents, the necessary, transcendent, indeed absurd ref­
erence points fo r d iscou rse, right b efore o n e ’s eyes. W h en N o v a lis read
rightly, a real, visible w orld u n fold ed w ithin him in the w a k e o f the
w ord s. R onne, struck w ith “ m yth ic fo rce” b y the fa cticity o f gestures and
th in gs in the silent film , n o lon ger needs such m agic.
W riters w ere justified in co m p la in in g that “ the w o rd is grad u ally
losin g cred it” and “ is alread y som eth in g som ew h at to o con sp icu ou s and
at the sam e tim e o d d ly un differentiated fo r us to d a y .” 70 T o use L acan ’s
m eth od ological distin ction betw een sym bo lic, real, and im aginary, tw o of
these three fu n ctio n s, w h ich constitu te all info rm ation system s, becam e
sep arable from w riting circa 1900. T h e real o f speakin g to o k place in the
gra m o p h o n e ; the im agin ary p ro d u ced in sp eakin g o r w ritin g b elon ged to
film. Flanns Fleinz E w ers, a u th or a n d screenplay w riter o f T h e S tu d en t o f
Prague, stated this distribution (though with a certain bias): “ 1 hate
T hom as A lv a E d iso n , b ecau se w e o w e to him on e o f the m ost heinous o f
inventions: the p h o n o g ra p h ! Yet 1 love him : he redeem ed ev eryth in g
w h en he returned fantasy to the m atter-of-fact w o r ld — in the m o v ies!” 71
W h ile record groo ves recorded bodies and their hein ous waste m ate­
rial, the m ovies to o k ov er the fan tastic o r im agin ary things that fo r a cen ­
tury had been called Poetry. M iin sterb erg, inven tor in w ord and deed of
p sych otech n olo gy, provided in 1 9 1 6 the first historical theory o f film in
his dem onstration that film techniques like projection and cutting, close-
up and flashback, techn ically im plem ent psychic processes such as h a llu ­
cination and associatio n , recollectio n and atten tion , rather th a n , like
plays o r novels, stim u lating these processes descriptively w ith w o rd s.72 As
m echanized p sych o tech n o lo gy the “ w o rld o f the m ovie” has “ b ecom e
synonym ous w ith illusion and fantasy, turnin g society into w h a t Joyce
called an ‘ allnights new sery reel,’ that substitutes a ‘reel’ w orld for rea l­
ity. . . . H is verdict on th e ‘ a u tom atic w ritin g ’ that is p h o to g ra p h y w a s
th e abn ihilization o f th e ety m . " 73
In 1800 w ords went a b ou t their task o f creatin g a real, visible w o rld in
such an undifferentiated w ay that visions and faces, w hich the book de­
scribed for the pu rpose o f recru itin g au th ors, shared only one trait w ith
their readers. Film exh ib its its figures in such detail that “ the realistic” is
“ raised in to the realm o f the fa n ta stic,” w h ich su ck s u p every th e m e o f
im aginative literature.74 Q u ite logically, early G erm an silen t films repeat­
edly to o k up the m otif o f the d op p elgan ger.75 In G o le m , in T h e O th e r , in
T h e C a b in et o f D r. Caligari, in T h e S tudent o f Prague— everyw h ere dop-
 THE GREAT LALULA 247

pelgangers ap p ear as m etap h ors fo r the screen and its aesthetic. A film
trick dem onstrates w h a t happens t o people w hen the new m edium takes
hold o f them . These d op pelgan gers, instead o f sharing a single trait w ith
their origin als, as in a b o o k o r screenplay, are the heroes o f the films and
therefore the focus o f identification. W ith its gu aran teed p erfectio n in
preserving evidence, film d oes n o t need, like the solitary h e r o o f a ro m an ­
tic novel, to talk the reader in to iden tification ; w h at the m oviego er R onn e
called his entry into film can o ccu r au to m a tica lly and w ordlessly.
M o vies thus to o k the place o f the fantasy o f the library. All the tricks
that o n ce m agically tran sform ed w ord s into sequential h allu cin ation s are
recalled and surpassed. “ In the m ovies,” not just the “ m ost b e a u tifu l” but
a lso the “ m ost co m m o n ” is “ m iracu lo u s.” 76 L ike any u n co n scio u s, the
un con sciou s o f the m ovie h o u se is determ ined by th e pleasure p rin ciple.

T h e sc h o o lb o y w a n ts t o s e e th e p ra irie s o f h is W este rn s; h e w a n ts to see s tra n g e

p eople in stra n g e c irc u m s ta n c e s ; h e w an ts to see th e lu sh , p rim itiv e b a n k s o f
A sian rivers. T h e m o d est b u re a u c ra t a n d th e h o u se w ife locked into h e r h o u se h o ld
lo n g f o r th e s h im m e rin g c e le b ra tio n s o f e le g a n t society, f o r th e fa r c o a s ts a n d
m o u n ta in s to w h ic h th e y w ill n e v e r trav el. . . . T h e w o r k in g m a n in h is ev ery d a y
ro u tin e b e c o m e s a ro m a n tic a s so o n as h e h a s so m e fre e tim e. H e d o e s n ’t w a n t to
see a n y th in g re alistic ; ra th e r, th e realistic s h o u ld b e ra ised in to an im a g in ary , fa n ­
ta s tic re alm . . . . O n e finds all this in th e m o v ie s .77

T o counter this trium phant com p etition , literature has tw o op tion s.

O n e easy o p tio n tends tow ard “ trivia lizin g m echan ism s” : nam ely, w h ile
underrating the tech n ological m ed ia, to join them .7’ S ince 190 0 m any
w riters have given up on gettin g their nam es into the p o etic pan th eon
and, inten tionally o r n ot, h ave w o rk ed fo r the m edia. W h e rea s W ild ­
enbruch sum m oned up pathos and sp o k e his nam e and soul in to the p h o ­
n o g ra p h , o th er lyric poets, preferring a n on ym ity and success, prod u ced
texts for p h o n o grap h ic hits. T h e first screen play w riters a lso rem ained
anon ym ou s. W hen H einrich L au ten sa ck in 1 9 1 3 pu blished the w ritten
te x t o f a screenplay a fte r the film had been shot, the sen sation al use o f his
nam e dem on strated “ that real poets, to o , have w ritten films, even if
anon ym ously (how m any m ight have don e that, because o f the m oney,
o ver the yea rs!).” Before L au ten sack, “ H . H . Ew ers [was] p ro b a b ly the
only k n ow n author w h o se name appeared with his film s.” 7’
M ass literature has been identified as non-valu e ever since herm en eutic
readin g guides distinguished betw een w o rk s and m ass p ro d u cts, repeated
rereading and reading m ania. But when texts could be transposed to
other m edia, the difference becam e on e o f m ethod o f p ro d u ctio n . T he
judgm ent that “ the best novel and best dram a are d egrad ed into dim e
novels in the movies, full o f sensationalism and m ake-b elieve” can be re­
versed.80 A udiovisual sensuousness, a lso em p loyed by high literary texts
248 1900

in 1800, becam e the sp eciality o f b o o k s that aim ed at h a llu cin a to ry

effects w ith the m ethodical efficiency o f d igita l-an alo g converters. Turn-
of-the-century bestsellers w ere q u ick ly m ade into film s: historical novels
like Q u o Vadis (w hose w riter w on the N o b el Prize), stories o f d o p p e l­
gan gers like T h e G o lem , p sych o p ath o lo gica l thrillers like Paul L.indau’s
T h e O th e r , to say n oth in g o f B uddettbrooks. For “ the Paul L.indaus have
their m erits and their im m ortality.” 81 T h ey w ere there w h en the ty p e ­
w riter m ade the p u b lishin g process m ore eco n o m ical; they k n ew w hat
w as go in g on w hen psych op h ysics reduced the m ystery o f the soul to fe a ­
sibilities. T h eir b o o k s thus appeared w h ere they belonged: on the m ovie
screen. L in d au ’s “ O th e r ” is a district attorn ey; w hen a crim e occu rs in his
house, he uses the best crim in o lo gical m ethods to gather evid ence, only to
discover that he him self, as d op p elgan ger o r sch izop h ren ic like Jekyll and
H yd e, w as the perp etrator. A y e a r earlier, H allers, the d istrict attorney,
had had a riding accident and injured the occip ita l lobe, on w h ich brain
localization theories focus . . .
O f course, role inversion w as ch aracteristic o f literary heroes like
R o n n e and literary techniques like a u tom atic w ritin g circa 1900, bu t on ly
in film cou ld h allu cination b ecom e real and indices like a c lo c k o r p o r ­
trait bring a b o u t un am b igu ou s identifications. C rim in o lo g y and p s y c h o ­
p a th o lo g y w o rk w ith the sam e tech n ologies as the en tertainm ent in d u s­
try.82 A d istrict attorn ey w h o u n con sciou sly (as his frien d , a psychiatrist,
exp lain s to him ) every night becom es his ow n o th e r is a m etap h o r fo r the
shift from b u reau cracy to tech n ology, from w ritin g to m edia. In the u n ­
con sciou s o f th e m ovie h ou se, m odest bureaucrats o r w om en trap ped in
their h ousehold s d o n ’t w an t to see sym b o lic o r real servants o f th e state.
W h at they w an t is im aginary reversal.
L iterature’s oth er op tion in relation to the m edia is to reject them ,
a lo n g w ith the im agin ary and real aspects o f discourse to w hich they
cater, and w hich have b ecom e the province o f p o p u la r w riters. B ecause
“ kitsch w ill never be elim inated from hu m anity,” one g ro u p o f w riters
renounces it.81 A fter 190 0 a high literature d evelop s in w hich “ the w o r d ”
becom es som eth in g “ to o co n sp icu o u s,” that is, it b ecom es a purely d iffer­
ential signifier. O n ce im aginary effects and real inscription have been re­
n ounced , w hat rem ains are the rituals o f the sym bo lic. T hese rituals take
into accou n t neither the reaction thresholds o f people nor the support o f
N ature. “ Letters o f the a lp h ab et d o not o ccu r in nature.” W ords as literal
anti-n ature, literature as w o rd art, the relation b etw een both as m aterial
eq u a lity — this is their con stellatio n in the purest art fo r a rt’s sake and in
the m ost d arin g ga m es o f the avant-garde. Since D ecem ber 28, 18 9 5,
there has been on e infallible criterion fo r high literature: it can n o t be
film ed.
 THE GREAT LALULA 249

W hen idealist aesthetics b ou nd the variou s arts togeth er as parts o f a

single system , sculpture, painting, m usic, and arch itectu re w ere u n am ­
biguou sly determ ined b y their respective m aterials— sto n e, sou n d , c o lo r,
bu ild in g m aterial. Poetry, how ever, as the universal art, w as perm itted to
reign over the universal m edium o f the im agination . It lost this special
status circa 190 0 in the interest o f th o rou gh eq u ality a m o n g m aterials.
Literature b ecam e w o rd art put togeth er by w o rd p ro d u cers. A s if to c o n ­
firm L acan’s th e o ry o f love, K u rt Schw itters w as in lo ve w ith his A n n a
because “ h er nam e [can be spelled] b ack w ard s as w ell as forw ard s: a-n-n-
a .” It is hardly controversial to m ake this claim w ith respect to the w riters
o f experim ental m odernism . But even w riters like H o lz o r H ofm an n sth al,
often seen as con tin u in g the projects o f H erder o r H u m b o ld t o n e hundred
years after the fa ct, expressed con cern to d o justice to the m aterial they
w o rk e d w ith .” H ofm an nsth al argued con cisely that the basic co n cep ts o f
classical-rom an tic P oetry w ere so m uch b lab la in relation to its m aterial,
th e w ord . “ I w o n d er w h eth er all th e tiresom e jab b erin g a b o u t in d iv id ­
uality, style, ch aracter, m ood , and so on has n ot m ade yo u lose sig h t o f
the fact th a t the m aterial o f p o etry is w ord s. . . . W e sh o u ld be allo w ed to
be artists w h o w o rk w ith w o rd s, just as oth ers w o rk w ith w h ite o r c o l­
ored stone, shaped m etal, purified to n es o r d a n c e .” ' 5
Less con cise, but aston ishing in a d irect descendant o f Schleierm acher,
is D ilth ey ’s line that b efo re any herm eneutics there are “ sen sually given
sign s” : “ stones, m arble, m usically form ed sounds, gestures, w o rd s, and
scrip t.” 86 N o vo ice, then, n o m atter h o w trad itional its id iom , can be
heard locatin g Poetry in an im m aterial im agination . It is sim ply w r o n g to
assign “ an abstraction from the realm o f literary-h istorical m edia to the
period” in w hich “ the parad igm s o f media used in p o sitivistic literary his­
tory w ere w id en ed to include film , rad io, and record s.” 87 W h a t is here
vaguely circum scrib ed as “ a b stra ctio n ” had lon g cem ented the classical
bond o f friendship betw een poets and thinkers. But in 190 0 film and the
gra m o p h o n e (rad io w o u ld not appear until tw enty-five years later) w o u ld
lead t o the very op p o site result by isolatin g the w o rd th eoretically as w ell,
lea vin g to the m edia its previou s effects on the im agin ation . T h e ran kin gs
o f th e individual arts in a syn ch ron ic system in evitab ly s h ifte d ." But h is­
torical d erivation s o f m odernist w ord literature, such as G u n th er Sasse’s,
are perhaps superfluous; by presu p po sin g a “ situ ation in need o f cla rifica ­
tion , nam ely, that not until on e h undred y ea rs after the th em atiza tio n o f
lan guage in ph ilosophy, did the sam e problem b ecom e central in litera­
tu re,” *’ such an approach creates m ore problem s than it solves. But b e­
cause there w as on ce a b rief friendship betw een literature and p h ilo s o ­
ph y, literary historians still read H u m b old t’s p h ilo so p h y instead o f test
series.
250 1900

A ll the evidence indicates that the high literature o f 190 0 gave up

its sym p h iloso p h izin g because oth er con tem p o rary m ovem ents gain ed
prom inence. T h e n ew sciences and techn ologies m ade it necessary to re­
n oun ce the im agination . M a lla rm e stated this when he answ ered an in ­
quiry O n the Illustrated B o o k w ith a decided “ N o .” “ W h y ,” he asked in
response, “ d on ’ t y o u g o right to th e cin em atograp h s, for their sequence
o f im ages w ill replace, to great ad van tage, m any b o o k s in im age and
te x t.” ’ 0 If reform p rim ers and novels o f a rtistic d evelopm en t cu nn ingly
used im ages to con trib u te to an im perceptible a lp h ab etizatio n and id en ti­
ficatio n , high literature cu t ou t everyth in g availab le to the o th e r m edia.
F o r all his love o f film , K a fk a conveyed to his publisher his “ h o rro r” at
th e very th o u gh t that an illu strator o f his M eta m orp hosis “ m ight even
want to draw the insect itself. N o t that, please! I don’t w ant to dim inish
the area o f his au thority, but issue my request on ly on b eh a lf o f m y n atu ­
rally better g ra sp o f the story. T h e insect itself ca n n o t be d ra w n . It can n o t
be d raw n even fro m a great d istan ce.” ” Literature thus o ccu p ies, w ith
creatures o r noncreatures that can o n ly be fou n d in w ord s, the m argin left
to it by the oth er m edia. Illustrations o u tgrew their baby shoes, their c o n ­
trib u to ry role, and learned to w a lk and w ield po w er in the u n con sciou s o f
the m ovie house; the sym bo lic rem ained, au to n o m o u s and im ageless as
once on ly G o d had been.
T h e literary ban on im ages a llo w ed on ly tw o excep tion s. O n e occu rred
w hen Stefan G eo rg e w an ted to docu m en t the fa ct that he w as n ot a classi­
cal author and thus not fo r the y o u n g ladies. H e ga v e his artist and b o o k
designer, M elch ior Lechter, “ a nonartistic ta s k ” that “ leaves the realm o f
a rt” and ended any further c o lla b o ratio n betw een th em .’ 2 T h e C o m m e m ­
oration fo r M axim in w as to be prefaced , not by the h an d -d raw n p o rtrait
Lechter suggested, but by M a x im ilia n K ro n b erger’s p h o to g ra p h . O n ly
the scandal o f tech n ological m edia in the m idst o f the ritual o f letters
could m aterialize the scandal o f the m aster desiring a sin gu lar and real
body.
T h e oth er exception w as system atic. A fter 1900 letters w ere perm itted
to con stru ct figures, because they had a lw ays been figures. T h is to o d i­
rectly reversed classical norm s. Sch leierm acher “ co m p letely ” exclu ded
from Poetry verses in dialect as well as those others “ that lo o k like an axe
or b o ttle.” ’ 1 N in ety-eigh t yea rs later, A p o llin a ire justified his Calli-
gram m es by citin g the com petition o f film and records.

It w o u ld have been s tra n g e if in an e p o c h w h en th e p o p u la r a r t p a r e x ce lle n ce , the

c in e m a , is a b o o k o f p ic tu re s , p o e ts h a d n o t tried to c o m p o s e p ic tu re s fo r m e d i­
ta tiv e a n d refined m in d s th a t a re n o t c o n te n t w ith th e c ru d e im a g in in g s o f th e
m a k e rs o f film s. T h e s e la st w ill b e c o m e m o re p e rce p tiv e , a n d o n e c a n p re d ic t th e
d a y w h e n , th e p h o to g r a p h a n d th e cin e m a h a v in g b e c o m e th e only fo rm o f p u b ­
 THE GREAT LALULA 25 I

lic a tio n in use, the p o e t w ill have a free d o m h e re to fo re u n k n o w n . O n e s h o u ld n o t

be a sto n is h e d if, w ith the m eans they n o w have a t th e ir d isp o sa l, p o e ts set th e m ­
selves to p r e p a rin g th is n ew a r t.”

Pictures made o f letters rem ain in the cleared area, in the tech n ological
niche o f literature, w ith ou t suffering any m aterial in equ ality vis-a-vis the
oth er m edia that, A p ollin aire prophesies, w ill soon be the on ly on es. Such
pictures had been despised for a century, because any em phasis on the
figural q u ality o f letters w o u ld have m ade it m ore difficult to ign ore them .
To achieve the psych op h ysical in sight, to see letters “ as a great q u an tity
o f strange figures on a w h ite b a c k g ro u n d ,” o r as calligram m es, “ on e has
only to lo o k at a n ew spaper p a g e upside d o w n .’ ’ 5 T h e literality and m a te­
riality o f the w ritten can be realized o n ly at the exp en se o f read ab ility and
in lim ited exp erim ents. A p ollin aire and M a lla rm e com peted w ith the
techn ological m edium o f film, w h ereas it w o u ld h ave seem ed sufficient to
distinguish letters and b o o k s fro m trad ition al painting. T h e call fo r a cult
o f typefaces issued by w riters circa 1900 had n oth in g to d o w ith fine
w ritin g , everything to d o w ith m achines. In the w ord s o f A n to n Kaes:
“ T h e reform m ovem ent in literature that ran parallel to the rise o f the
m ovies as a m ass m edium to o k shape against the b ack g ro u n d o f the n ew
tech n ological m edia.” ”

Research in to the localization o f lan gu age replicated the typ ew riter.

Th e tach istoscop e o f the p h ysio lo gists o f readin g w as the tw in o f the
m ovie p rojector, w ith the side effect o f ty p o grap h ica lly o p tim izin g the
typew riter. Brain p h ysio lo gy did aw ay w ith the illusion that lan gu ag e is
m ore “ than a play o f m echanical equipm en t learned by p ra ctic e,” w hich
“ is set into ordered m otion by ideas, just as on e can op erate a sew in g,
ad din g, w ritin g , o r ta lk in g m achine w ith o u t needing to be fam iliar w ith
its co n stru c tio n .” ’ 7 Prior to con sciou sn ess, then, th e re are sensory and
m otor, aco u stical and o p tic lan gu age centers linked by nerve paths just as
the w o rk in g parts o f a typ ew riter are con n ected by levers and rods. As if
ta k in g N ietzsch e’s d ictatio n style as a m etap h or, brain p h ysio lo g y fo rm u ­
lates th e path from th e sound im age o f th e w ord to th e h an d that w rites
and to con sciousn ess as an inau d ible d ictatio n , to w hich on ly a u to n o m ic
reaction is a p p rop riate at the level o f con sciou sn ess.” T o p ro d u c e actu al
discourse, there m ust be im pulses in the cerebral co rtex “ throu gh w hich
the w o r d , as an a co u stica l and op tical im age, is transposed in to its sen­
sory sound parts on a sound cla vier.” A ll k eybo ard s (inclu d ing those that
prod uce sounds), h ow ever, are spatial arran gem en ts, o r a sort o f ty p e­
w riter k eyb o ard o f lan gu age. A “ cortical so u n d b o a rd ” virtu ally con ju res
up the lever system o f the o ld R em in gton s.”
252 1900

As soon as one conn ects the brain p h ysio lo gy o f lan gu age w ith the
p sychop hysics o f the senses via the tach istoscop e, the h yp o th etica l m a­
chine in the brain b ecom es a real m ach in e in fron t o f the retina. T h e
letters and w ord s presented fo r m illiseconds by the tach istoscop e are a l­
eatory ch oices from prep ared stores or vo cab u laries. T h e p roced u re is
on ly apparently arb itrary and “ pecu liar to o u r exp erim en ts.” For “ as rich
as the num ber o f w ord s in our civilized lan guages has gra d u ally becom e,
their num ber dim inishes con sid erab ly in each lan guage d u rin g a p a rticu ­
lar p e rio d , fo r a p articu lar dom ain o f literature, and fo r a p a rticu la r au ­
th o r.” 100 Periods, genres, a u th o rs— all play on u n con sciou s w o rd k e y ­
board s and even m ore u n con sciou s letter k eyb o ard s. T h e p h ilosop h er
becom e exp erim en ter E rdm ann says n oth in g o f them ; instead, he presents
the basic rule that w ord s are reco gn ized in their “ to tality ,” that is, by
th o se traits “ in w h ich the b lack m arks o f the letters co n tra st w ith the
w hite b a c k g ro u n d .” In w hich case, “ the su rface areas o f the w hite b a c k ­
grou n d are as essential fo r the w h o le con figu ration as the b la ck on es
a re .” 101
Erdm ann’s follow ers and critics, how ever, w ere not p h ilosop h ers or
herm eneutic interpreters, and they lim ited their investigations to the m a ­
teriality o f letters. T h e y turned th e tachistoscop es to speeds higher than
th o se at w hich readin g can take place because on ly d istu rban ces and defi­
ciencies b etray the fundam ental secrets o f letters and form s o f script. T h e
film p ro je c to r’s tw in thus functions in an op p o site m anner. T h e p r o ­
jector, in the u n con sciou s o f the m ovie house, presents a con tin u u m of
the im aginary, generated through a sequence o f single im ages so precisely
c h o p p ed up by and then fed throu gh the p ro je c to r’s m echanism that the
illusion o f seam less unity is p ro d u ced . W ith the ta ch isto sco p e, in the
darken ed lab o rato ry o f the a lp h abetical elite, a cut-up im age assaults as a
cut in order to establish o u t o f the torm en t and m istaken readings o f vic­
tim s the p h ysio lo gically optim al form s o f letters and script. A s w ith the
typ ew riter, w hich has its o w n key fo r spacing, intervals are b u ilt in to the
experim ental proced u re. But they a lso b ecom e the test result. T h e ta ­
chistoscop e dem onstrates that on the m ost basic level readin g consists in
perceiving not letters but the differences b etw een them, and that w ord
recogn ition proceeds by h ittin g upon d iscon tin u ou s, single letters that lit­
erally stick out. System atically evalu ated m isreadings indicate that letters
at x-h eigh t (vow els and som e consonan ts) are relatively undifferentiated,
but that con son an ts w ith ascenders o r descenders serve as ty p o g rap h ic
recogn ition sig n a ls.102 A cco rd in g to Julius Z eitler, the historically re­
newed prim acy o f the letter is based on a “ d ecom p o sition o f the letter
continuu m into g ro u p s.” “ T h ere are w hole series o f w ord s, a n a lo g o u s in
their letter com p o sition , th at run throu gh heterogeneou s m eanings if on e
 THE GREAT LALULA 253

letter in the sam e position is chan ged . . . . If the new m ean in g o f the w ord
image that has been altered in this w ay is to be registered, the letter m ust
be determ in ed, that is, it m ust be spelled o u t. W hen this does n ot occu r,
the origin al w o rd im age is constan tly reassim ilated, as is the origin al
m eaning a lo n g w ith it.” 103
T h e letter-crossw ords w ith w hich R eform ation prim ers liked to play
could therefore be resurrected . O n e theorist o f elem entary ed u cation il­
lustrated Z e itle r’s theory for his d ea f and dum b children w ith the fo llo w ­
ing exam ple:

P
ca n

O ne need o n ly read this series as a co lu m n — and Saussure’s th eory o f lan ­

gu age as a co m b in ato ry system is born . A s it says in the stru ctu ralist
b ib le :105

In every such case th e iso late d so u n d , lik e every o th e r u n it, is c h o se n a fte r a d u a l

m e n ta l o p p o s itio n . In th e im a g in a ry g ro u p in g anma, fo r in sta n c e , th e so u n d m
sta n d s in sy n ta g m a tic o p p o sitio n to its e n v iro n in g s o u n d s and in a sso c ia tiv e o p ­
po sitio n to all o th e r s o u n d s th a t m ay c o m e to m ind:

a n m a
v

But, as D errida w as the first to rediscover,1"6 the m odest letter re­

searchers o r gram m ato lo gists w ere m ore rigorou s than lin gu istics’ fo u n d ­
ing hero. T h eir tach istoscop e locates pure differentiality n o t in “ so u n d s,”
th at is, in in corpo real sound im ages o f w ord s, b u t in the m aterial signs o f
type. T h u s the m achin e d em onstrates a n d p ractices w h a t stru ctu ral lin ­
gu istics accom p lish es insofar as it w rites d ow n nonsense w o rd s such as
anm a, even th o u g h it stresses their use in speech. In ord er to en grave an
exam ple o f the differen tiality o f phonem es in to his o w n te xt, Saussure
254 i 9 °°

w as forced to shift to the distin ction betw een necessary and arb itrary,
graphem atic and grap h ic differences betw een letters.

T h e v a lu e o f letters is p u re ly negative and d iffere n tia l. T h e sam e p e rso n can w rite

t, fo r in sta n c e , in d iffere n t w ays:

T h e only re q u ire m e n t is th a t the sign fo r t n o t b e c o n fu se d in h is sc rip t w ith th e

sig n s used fo r /, d , e tc . 107

It is because the exam p le o f the three h and w ritten t's does not constitu te
an exam p le, but is rather a conclusive d em on stration w ith w h ich differ­
ences in sou n d could never com pete, that stru ctu ral linguistics and psy­
ch oph ysical positivism b elon g to g eth er. Instead o f co n tin u in g in the line
o f Schleierm acher’s h erm en eu tics,10* Saussure system atized , at the price o f
a m eth od ological phonocentrism , the countless scriptural facts that e x ­
perim ents circa 190 0 prod u ced and let stand in their facticity.
But the love o f facts can also bear fruit. It m ight not p rod u ce a system ,
but it does prod u ce typ o grap h ies. Erdm ann’s m easurem ent o f the relation
betw een letters and b ack gro u n d , Z e itle r’s differentiation o f letter reco gn i­
tion acco rd in g to x -h e ig h t, ascenders, and descenders, O sk a r M e ssm er’s
ca lcu la tio n o f the frequ ency o f these three types in coheren t texts, all c u l­
m inated in a k n o w led g e o f d ifferen tiality th a t c o u ld b ecom e im m ediately
practical. T h e secular w a r betw een F raktu r and rom an scrip ts, fo r in­
stance, no lon ger need be burdened w ith th e im aginary v a lu es o f T h in gs
G erm an in o p p ositio n to the w o rld . A fter sim ple tests w ith both ty p e s o f
scrip t— w ith the tach istoscop e, in lo w light, w ith begin n in g pupils and
professors— the su p erio rity o f rom an w a s a m atter o f fact. Sem iotic p o si­
tivism allow ed Friedrich Soen necken to exp lain that rom an consisted of
tw o basic lines, w h ereas F raktu r consisted o f “ n o less than six ty -six basic
lines differing in form and size.” "” T h is sort o f m assive differential d iffer­
ence m ade decision s easy fo r researchers w h o published w o rk s such as
T h e E conom y a nd T ech n o lo g y o f Learning: 110 “ A n yo n e w h o has ever e x ­
perim ented w ith the tach istoscop e k n o w s that the sim pler a type o f script
is, the easier it is to learn .” 111
Indeed, under the con d itio n s o f pure differen tiality there is n oth in g
sim pler than the o p p ositio n that, in th e o ry and p ra x is, d eterm ines the
current century: bin ary o p p o sitio n . If rom an consists o f only tw o “ ele­
m ents, the straight line and the h a lf c ircle,” 117 then an ideal script has
been fou n d , on e w h o se elem ents can be com bin ed and a n alyzed q u ite d if­
 THE GREAT LALULA 2J5

ferently from P ohlm ann’s o r S tep h an i’s h a n d w ritin g norm s. An econ om y

to o k the p la ce o f o rg a n ic m erging, on e th at (perhaps fo llo w in g the new
standard o f M o rse code) techn ically o p tim ized signs and the differences
betw een them .
T h u s differences appeared even in rom an typ eface, the v e ry m ini-
m alization o f difference. Saussure distinguished necessary and arb itrary
differences am o n g letters; em b racin g necessary difference, since 1900 the
various rom an typefaces that reject ornam en t have flourished and b e ­
co m e as pervasive as chem ically pure industrial d esig n .111 Form s to be
filled out call fo r block letters; low er case and sans serif are the height o f
M an h attan ad vertisin g chic.
T h e call w as answ ered. B ecause rom an capital letters are w h at “ the
child first en counters at every tu rn ” — “ on street signs, street cars, post
offices, train station s” 114— the block letters o f tech n olog ica l in fo rm ation
channels fou n d their w a y into elem entary-school in stru ction . R u d olp h
vo n L arisch ’s students in V ien n a learned from a m anual Instruction in
O rna m ental Script; but they learned a su rface art that rejected all “ p e r­
spective and sh a d o w effects” o f the Stephani type o f w o rd p ain tin g. T h e
go al, “ in com petition with oth er d em an d s,” w as “ a h i g h e r d egree o f
re a d a b ility ” : “ that the characteristic qualities o f a letter be stressed w ith
all possible force and the difference from sim ilar letters be stressed .” 115
P sychophysicists and stru ctu ral linguists hardly sa y it m ore clearly. T h e
medium o f w riting and paper n o lon ger pretended to be a sp rin gb oard
to painted nature. U sing u n iform ly thick lines, E ckm an n and Peter
Behrens,116 Larisch and Soennecken drew b lo ck letters as b lo ck letters.
T h e d ecom po sition o f rom an letters, as it con fron ts elem entary bin ary
op positio n , is the m irror im age o f their co m p o sitio n . T o w rite b lo ck
letters is not to co n n ect signs w ith oth er signs but to com bin e discrete
elem ents piece by piece. In the a ge o f engineers an arm ature co n stru ction
set replaces the gro w th o f plants and origin ary sc rip t.117 Separate letters
consisting o f separate elem ents are b ased, in strict op p ositio n to classical
w ritin g rules, on Saussure’s m ost d arin g op p o sitio n : that b etw een signs
and em ptiness, m edium and b ack gro u n d . “ T h e beginner has to learn to
look, not sim ply at the form o f the letters, but con stan tly b e t w e e n the
letters; he m ust use all the po w er o f his vision to grasp the surface form s
that arise b etw een the letters and to assess the effect o f their op tical
m ass.” 11’ A reversal o f every habit o r fa cility thus grants the “ b e t w e e n ”
the same status as the positive m arks it separates. So Larisch k n ock ed
children o v er the head w ith the lesson that p sych op h ysics p rod u ced w ith
the ta ch isto sco p e and w ith n ew spapers turned upside d ow n : the fa c t that
letters are w hat they are only against and upon a w hite b a c k g ro u n d . A
“ b e t w e e n ” in capital block letters is a sheer a u ton ym . And if ed ucators
156 1900

circa 1800 aim ed at m itigatin g the shock o f bin ary o p p ositio n by c o n ­

n ecting lines and an atten uation o f the b la ck -w h ite co n tra st, L arisch — as
a student o f W illiam M o rris— gave his students the “ feelin g o f h o w
p o o rly the soften in g h alfton e fits in to a printed b o o k ,” in th at “ sim ple,
p ow erful outlin es and the full con trast o f b la c k and w h ite spaces h a ve an
ap p earan ce ch aracteristic o f printed ty p e .” " ’

_____ C_______________ O______

II 1 O w V I 11
HAUS
A n d y e t— the im plications o f the tach istoscop e and the eco n o m y o f
letters for literature and literary science b ecom e even m ore o b scu re, if
possible, here on the page, for all its black and w h ite sp ace. O n e needs
the w hole po w er o f o n e’s vision to glim pse the o v erlo o k ed visib ility of
texts. T h e b lack and w h ite o f texts seem s so tim eless that it never occu rs
to readers to think o f the arch itects o f that space. T h e forgo tten tech n i­
cian s o f 1900, how ever, revo lu tion alized th e page o f poetry, from the
m ost playfu l verses to the m ost ritualized. M o rg en stern ’s G a llo w s Songs
en a ct the derivation o f w h at the S tefan G eorge typ eface practiced in m ute
solem nity.

Es w a r e in m a l ein L a tte n z a u n
m it Z w isc h e n ra u m , h in d u rc h z u sc h a u n .
Ein A rc h ite k t, d e r dieses s a h ,
s ta n d e in es A b e n d s p lo tz lic h d a —
u n d n a h m d e n Z w is c h e n ra u m h e ra u s
u n d b a u te d ra u s ein g ro sse s H a u s.
D er Z au n in d esse n sta n d ganz d u m m ,
m it L a tte n o h n e w as h e ru m .
Ein A n b lick g ra sslich u n d g em ein.
D ru m z o g ihn d e r S enat a u c h ein.
D er A rc h ite c k t je d o c h entfloh
n a c h A fri- o d - A m e rik o .

T h e re used to be a p ic k e t fence
w ith sp a c e to gaze fro m hence to th e n c e .
 THE GREAT LALULA 2.57

A n a rc h ite c t w h o saw th is sig h t

a p p ro a c h e d it su d d e n ly o n e n ig h t,
removed the spaces fro m th e fence
a n d b u ilt o f th em a resid en ce.
T h e p ick e t fe n ce s to o d th e re d u m b fo u n d e d
w ith p ick e ts w h o lly u n s u rro u n d e d ,

a view so n a k e d a n d o b sc e n e
th e S en ate h a d to in te rv en e .
T h e a rc h ite c t, h o w e v er, flew
to A fri- o r A m e ric o o . 120

“ T h e Picket Fence” is the fairy tale o f a n ew age. W here A n selm us saw

the w oven arabesques o f han d w ritten letters, the cold eye o f the arch itect
sees the op posite. O n e even ing L.arisch’s im perative— to lo o k con stan tly
b f .t w f . e n the letters, to g ra sp the sp ace ou tlin ed betw een them w ith all

o n e’s stren gth— is realized w o rd for w ord . In so d oin g, the arch itect does
n ot d iscover m erely h o w indispensable concep ts o f relation a re .121 S om e­
thing m ore tan gible is at stake: the fa ct that the readab ility o f signs is a
function o f their spatiality. T h e architect’s m anipu lation o f space d em on ­
strates that, w hen the lack is lack in g and n o em pty spaces rem ain , m edia
disappear, “ naked and ob scen e,” in to the ch a o s fro m w h ich th ey w ere
derived.
C o n sid er the final stan za o f “ T h e Picket F en ce” in light o f the arch itec­
ture o f block letters. W hereas “ the alliteration o f A frica and A m erica
feigns an en d ing in -(i)ca , " ' 22 w hich also plays w ith the en d ing o f oder
[the placem ent o f “ o r ” ], a “ b etw een ” appears in the realm o f the g r a p h ­
em e: the space designated by the dash. T h e w ord s o f the p o em , com plete
autonym s in this sense, foregrou n d their ow n intervals b etw een stem and
ending. M o rgen stern ’s con stru cted arch itect d oes n ot d isappear into far-
off lands, but into the sp ace betw een signs that he had usurped.
From this van ishing po in t called paper, it is on ly a step to “ the ideal o f
purely a bstract, absolute p o e try ,” an ideal o f such b rillian ce “ that it a lso
m eans the end o f p o etry; it can n o longer be im itated o r surpassed; it is
transcended on ly by the em pty w h ite p a g e.” '2’ “ T h e P icket Fence” d e­
scribes the b in ary op position b etw een letters o r pickets [L ettern /L a tten ]
and the space betw een them , bu t “ Fish’s N igh t S o n g ” u n iq u ely en acts this
o p p ositio n w ith o u t any description at a ll.'24 In it, the red u ction to straight
line and half curve that distinguishes rom an from F rak tu r scripts b e ­
com es textual event. C ircu m flex and dash, tw o signifiers that define
them selves through m utual opposition and relation, are the absolu te
m inim um eco n o m y o f the signifier. T h eir binary o p p o sitio n to each oth er,
can celed o r articulated through the shared op position o f both to paper,
258 1900

constitutes the poem that meets all the readin g-p sych ological desiderata
o f its ep och . Period. For there is n o th in g m ore to w rite a b ou t a m inim al
signifier system .

V-X w

c/

O r there w o u ld be n oth in g m o re to w rite if the poem did not h ave a

title com po sed in the very different, redundant, signifier system o f the
tw enty-six letters. T h ro u gh the title, one discourse n etw o rk answ ers an ­
o th er across the turnin g po in t that divides them . “ Fish’s N ig h t S o n g ” is
the can cellation o f G o e th e ’s “ W an d erer’s N igh t S on g II.” In the latter, a
hum an voice ou tlasts the su rro u n d in g sounds o f nature for one breath in
ord er to express th e prom ise that it, to o , w o u ld find rest in th e lap o f
M o th e r N atu re. In th e form er, th e text brings a m ute fish n o t to speech,
but into a typogram . It thus realizes S ch leierm ach er’s nigh tm are: nam ely,
that a real optics w o u ld render superflu ou s the im aginary, im aginal as­
pects that m eaningful w ord s suggest to alp h abetized readers. A s m ute
and d ea d as any scrip t, the fish n o lon ger needs the p h o n o cen tric c o n s o la ­
tion o f a seam less tran sition betw een speech and nature. T h e signs on the
page can n o t be sp oken by any v o ice — regardless o f w h eth er on e reads
them as fish scales o r discrete elem ents of the rom an typ eface. M an and
soul, in any case, n o lon ger apply. W ith all the w anderers betw een day
and night, Spirit and N atu re, m ale and fem ale, M a n sim ply died arou n d
1900. It w as a d eath to w hich the m uch-discussed death o f G o d is a
foo tn o te.
Stephani w ro te that w ritten letters provide notes fo r the m outh instru­
ment. But a m ute fish dem onstrates that signs can m ock all speech and
nonetheless still be w ritten signs. T h e h a lf curve and dash, the tw o m in i­
mal signifieds o f Soennecken and o f th e “ N igh t S o n g ,” can be fou n d on
every universal k eyb o ard . T h e first G erm an m on ograp h on the typ ew riter
 THE GREAT LALULA 259

thus celebrated the fa ct that “ w ith a little inventiveness one can prod u ce
very fine bord ers and flourishes” on Rem ingtons and O liv e rs .125 It p re­
sented the p ro to ty p e o f m odernist ideal poetry years b efore M o rgen stern .

((— )) ((— )) ((-))

N o t on ly is the hum an vo ice in capable o f rep ro d u cin g signs p rior to

and b eyon d alp habets, b u t w riters, by prescribin g their ow n alp h abets,
can rem ove their texts from herm eneutic con su m p tion . T h e existen ce o f a
Stefan G eo rg e script in the discourse n etw ork o f 190 0 d em on strates that
“ Fish’s N igh t S o n g ” is the sign et o f the w h o le system .
T h e Stefan G eo rg e script, w hich L ech ter fabricated and used th ro u g h ­
o u t the first edition o f G e o rg e ’s C o lle c te d W orks, w as ad ap ted from
G e o rg e ’s h an d w ritin g. But it w as h a n d w ritin g on ly in nam e. First, the
single letters— b eyon d any sup posed C aro lin g ia n referen ce— w ere based
on a con tem p o rary advertising g ro tesq u e.12* S econ d, any h a n d w ritin g
th at can be tran sposed into reusable typeface fu n ctio n s fu n dam en tally as
m echanized script.
T ech n ology en tered the scen e in arch a ic dress. Larisch cam e up w ith
“ the ideal o f a personal b o o k ” that w o u ld be “ self-designed, -w ritten , -
ornam en ted, and -b o u n d .” 127 T hat is e x a ctly w h a t G eo rg e did b efore
Lechter and G e o rg Bondi m ade him aw are o f the possibility o f te ch n o lo g i­
cal reprod u ction . U nder the pressure o f m edia co m p etitio n , high literatu re
returned to the m on astic copyists w h o m G u ten b erg had rendered un neces­
sary and Anselm us had m ade to seem foolish . A t the sam e tim e, h ow ever,
the personal b o o k (that o x y m o ro n ) w as to be set in block letters that,
“ equal in their ch aracteristics,” have none o f the redundant differences o f
individual han d w ritten letters. A cco rd in g to L arisch , the histo ric “ m o ­
m ent” w as “ fa v o ra b le ” fo r old -fash ion ed , m anually m ade b o o k s because
“ precisely n ow the use o f typew riters is b ecom in g w id esp re ad .” 12’
T he ascetics o f h a n d w o rk art, even when they played at b ein g m ed i­
eval, w ere in co m p e titio n w ith the m odern m edia. A s so o n as there w ere
typew riters, there w ere fashioners o f texts like M ark T w ain o r Paul
L indau, w h o had “ the p ro d u ctio n m eans o f the printing press at their d is­
p o sal” on their desks. A cco rd in g to M arsh all M cL u h a n , the fa c t th at “ the
typew riter fuses co m p o sitio n and p u b lica tio n ” b ro u g h t a b o u t “ an en ­
tirely n ew attitud e to the w ritten and printed w o r d .” 12’ L ike in n ovation ,
its effects surpassed its ap plication s. W hen L arisch and G eo rg e stylized
their h and w riting until it b ecam e a typ eface, they a ch ieved w h a t M a ilin g
260 1900

Hansen and N ietzsch e had been praised for: script “ as b eau tifu l and
regular as p rin t.” ,w “ Perfect lyrical creations and p erfect techn ical o b ­
jects are on e and the sam e.” 1"
T h e n ew relation to the printed w ord becam e printed rea lity in the
layo u t o f G e o rg e ’s b o o k s. From the tim e o f his b re a k w ith Lechter, at the
latest, his b o o k s con stitu ted an im ageless cu lt o f letters. T h e cry o f m ate­
rial eq u ality extend ed from the single lyrical w o rd to the entire a lp h a ­
betical m edium . If m odern, M orris-in sp ired pu b lication s, such as G o a ls
o f Internal B o ok D esign, state in tau to lo g ica l conclusion that “ paper and
ty p e m ake up a b o o k ,” the poets o f the G eo rg e circle w ere “ m ore o r less
the first to realize that a b o o k consists o f p a p er and ty p e .” ” 2
But it is not on ly the fa c t that b o o k s o f the turn o f the cen tu ry “ look ed
very b o o k lik e ” that places them in to tech n ological c o n te x ts.1” M o re im ­
portan t, th e Stefan G eo rg e script (as typ eface, in th e form o f its letters,
and in its o rth o g ra p h y and pu n ctuation) presu p posed , m a xim ized , and
exp lo ited exp erim en tally o b ta in ed stan dards. In term s o f the p h ysio lo gy
o f reading, it w as evident that the “ letters and oth er elem ents o f the ty p e ­
fa ce ” and “ the capital and sm all letter should be as sim ilar as p o ssib le.” It
fo llo w s that rom an is b y far “ m ore efficien t” than Fraktur, w hich w o u ld
be “ u n thinkable as a typew riter ty p e fa ce.” ” 4 T h e Stefan G eo rg e script
met just these standards; in its new letter form s fo r e, k , and t, capital and
low ercase letters w ere even m ore alik e than in ord in ary rom an ty p e .” 5
G eo rg e elim inated the ascenders fro m tw o o f the tw en ty-six letters (k and
t). T h is m ight seem a m inim al in n ovation , but in com bin ation w ith
G rim m ’s orth o g ra p h y (the use o f sm all letters fo r n ouns, the elim ination
o f h from m any th com bin ation s, and the use o f ss rather than the
E szett), it had a significan t cum ulative effect. W h ereas the p h ysio lo gist
M essm er co u n ted 270 letters above o r b elo w x-heigh t in an ord in ary te x t
a thousan d letters long, I find in G eo rg e an average o f on ly 200 extend ed
as o p p o sed to 800 sm all letters. (T he sam e passages in D uden o r th o g ra ­
phy w ould contain nearly on e hundred m ore ascenders and descenders.)
M essm er cou ld show that w o rd s such as p h ysiolog ica l o r p sy ch o lo g i­
cal, taken sim ply as co llectio n s o f letters co n tain in g a high percen tage of
ascenders and descenders, d o not con vey the “ u n itary w hole im pression ”
that distinguishes w ord s such as w im m ern, nennen, o r w ein en .'i* E x ­
tended letters q u icken the pace o f ta ch isto sco p ic w o rd recogn ition , bu t in
a special scrip t o r cu lt o f the letter intended to hin der any alp h abetized
sk ipp in g o v er o f letters, m aterial eq u ality is ev eryth in g and a gain in
speed is n othin g. T h e re fo re m asses o f w ord s like w im m ern, nennen, and
w einen fill the eighteen volu m es o f an oeu vre w h o se esotericism is ph ys­
io lo g ica lly gu aran teed . In it, h o m o lo gies, recogn ition s, and k n o w in g
sm iles are exch an ged betw een the m ost aristo cratic o f w riters and the
 THE GREAT LALULA 2.6 l

m odest exp erim enters o f 1900. T h e inven tor o f p sych o tech n o lo gy c o n ­

firm ed an esotericism in the inven tor o f the S tefan G eo rg e scrip t th a t— a
first in the histo ry o f w ritin g — cou ld be m easured. “ T h e fa c t that the
elim ination o f capital letters fro m the b egin nin g o f nouns constitu tes a
stron g check again st rapid abso rp tion can be easily verified, shou ld read ­
ers o f Stefan G e o rg e find it necessary, by p sych o lo g ica l exp erim en t in an
easily m easurable p ro ced u re.’’ 1'7
T h ese lines are as true as they are prop h etic. W h ereas readers of
N ietzsche stum bled only here and there over italicized in trojectio n s, read ­
ers o f G e o rg e have trouble w ith every letter. A p erfect exp erim en tal p ro ­
cedure forestalls un derstan d ing in ord er to fix the eyes on signifiers as
m urky as the “ Fish’s N igh t S o n g .” B ut the readers w ere fascin ated and
fo rgo t they w ere exp erim ental subjects. In o p p ositio n to the te ch n o lo g i­
cal m edia, they conjured up a secon d hand old E u rop e. C o n sid e r G e rt
M a tte n k lo tt’s con sid eration o f G eo rg e: “ T h e im age o f Stefan G eo rg e a p ­
p ears finally as the sheer allegorical corpse. . . . E verything a rb itra ry and
individual is tran scribed in to a m eaningful un iversal, perhaps m ost
clearly w hen G eo rg e m ade his o w n h a n d w ritin g resem ble a ty p eface in­
tended to replace the con ven tion al o n e.” 1,8 T h ese lines are as false as th ey
are B enjam inesque. T h e ir w riter is sim ply u n aw are o f the tech n ologies o f
his o w n century. T h e facts that the typ ew riter m ade it in evitab le that
h an d w ritin g should co m e to resem ble ty p e , that there w as the p ro je c t o f a
“ w o rld letter” to unburden m em ories,1" and that the lo g ic o f the signifier
ex p lo d es the “ m ean in g” o f the age o f G o eth e all fall victim here to an
a llegory o f allegory. “ C on ven tio n al h a n d w ritin g ” is a n on -con cept. If his­
tories o f the m aterial basis o f literature are to be possible, ap p a ren t c o n ­
ventions, esp ecially in the elem ental field o f w riting, m ust be dism an tled
and exam ined as feed back con trol loop s and program s. G eo rg e, w h eth er
a co rp se o r n ot, w as evidence o f an ep och al inn ovation.
N o appeal to tim eless co n v en tio n s cou ld e v e r explain w h y a nam eless
artist (not G eorge) chan ged his h an d w ritin g three tim es between 1 8 7 7
and 18 9 4 , attractin g the attention o f psychiatrists w ith the third ch an ge
and lan d in g am o n g them w ith the fou rth . A b o v e all, how ever, co n v en ­
tions can n o t exp lain w h y scien ce to o k precisely this patien t at his w o rd
o r pen and m ade facsim iles o f his h a n d w ritin g .'*’ O nly the assum ption
th at the four w ritin g exp erim ents p o rtray an u p h eaval, as if in tim e-lapse
p h otograp h y, can exp lain both acts o f w ritin g , that o f the patien t and that
o f the psychiatrists. P roceedin g e x a c tly as had G eo rg e (w h o , o f cou rse,
w as n ot born w ritin g b lo ck letters), the an on ym ou s artist m ade the tran ­
sition fro m the rounded and con n ected h a n d w ritin g ideal o f Stephani or
L in d horst to the cult o f the letter. O n e o f the first studies o f its kind, en ­
titled H andw riting o f th e In san e, n oted that it w as “ in n o w a y a ccid en ­
2.62. 1900

ta l” that patien ts’ h a n d w ritin g lost “ the n orm al con n ectin g lines betw een
ad jacent letters.’ ’ 141 A s if to dem onstrate the ex p lo sive fo rce o f discursive
even ts, the isolation o f letters leads to the isolation o f their w riters.

7 ^.

In 18 9 4, the E n cy clo p ed ic R eview com m ission ed a y o u n g m edical

student to query w riters a b o u t the recent ap p earan ce o f gra p h olog y.
M a llarm e’s answ er runs:

Yes, I th in k t h a t w ritin g is a c lu e ; y o u say, like g e stu re a n d p h y sio g n o m y , n o th in g

m o re c e rta in . N e v e rth e le ss, by p ro fessio n o r by ta s te , th e w r ite r recopies o r sees
first in th e m irr o r of his m in d , and then tra n s c rib e s in w ritin g o n c e a n d fo r a ll, as
if in v a ria b le . T h e im m e d ia te effect o f his e m o tio n s is th e re fo re n o t visib le in his
m a n u s c rip t, b u t th e re o n e c a n ju d g e his p e rso n a lity as a w h o le .l4J

T h is states the issue directly. W h ile gra p h o lo g y w as b eing d eveloped to

provide an oth er typ e o f evidence, literate people fell into tw o subclasses:
on the one hand, those w hose h an d w ritin g w as a d irect reflection o f their
un con sciou s and so cou ld be evaluated p sych o lo g ica lly o r crim in o lo gi-
cally; on the oth er, the profession al w riters, w h o w e r e w ritin g m achin es*
w ith o u t h an d w ritin g . A m o n g the latter, w hat appears to be the p ro d u c ­
tion o f a soul is alw a y s on ly the reprod u ction on a k e y b o a rd o f invariable
letters. W riters’ texts therefore co u ld not be interpreted unless g ra p h ­
o lo g y m ade “ m ajor m od ification s.” T h a t is ex a ctly w h a t happ ened w hen
L u d w ig K lages studied an original m anuscript o f G eo rg e (as w as exp lic-

* H e r e a n d th r o u g h o u t th is c h a p te r , th e re is a p la y o n th e e t y m o lo g y o f Schreibmaschine
(“ t y p e w r ite r ,” b u t lite ra lly “ w r itin g m a c h in e ” ). (T ran s.)
 THE GREAT LALULA 263

Stefan Gtor^t
itly noted in G eo rg e’s W orks): “ * “ orn am en t,” rather than the usual “ e x ­
pressive m ark s,” necessarily b ecam e the o b ject o f in terp reta tio n .144 P ro ­
fessional, intransitive w ritin g b arred the abyss o f the u n con sciou s and
ruled ou t the techniques o f gath erin g evid en ce. T h e rem ain ing w o rd sp e­
cialists q u ick ly learned the lesson that the p h on o grap h tau gh t fo o lh a rd y
W ild en bru ch . M a llarm e becam e an incom prehen sible p ersonality en
b lo c; G e o rg e w as practical enough, in his m onthly dealings w ith the
D eutsche B an k, to have his fa vo rite disciple w rite the signature on h is
checks, Stefan G eorge. “ H e said that G u n d o lf cou ld sign h is nam e in
such a w ay that even he co u ld n o t tell, a t a later d ate, w h eth er he o r
G u n d o lf had signed it.” 14*

For all the disdain o f w ord s that m ade him the fo u n d in g hero of
B ildung, Faust still believed in and o b ey ed the b in d in g po w er o f his sig n a ­
ture. W ith o u t the b u reau cratic eth o s, the p a c t betw een the hu m ane d isc i­
plines and the state w o u ld n ot have com e a b o u t. F o r all his cu lt o f the
w ord , G eo rg e, the technician in spite o f him self, played a little strategic
gam e in his com m erce with the b an k. A signature that, like the graph-
o lo g ica lly dreaded “ m achin escrip t,” avoids “ every trait o f in tim a cy ” and
thus can a lw ays be forged , can be fou n d in p rin t.144 A lth o u g h the tech n i­
cians, on th e ir side, so o n discovered G e o rg e ’s trick , he did dem on strate

DAS W O R T

W undcr von feme oder iraum

B r a c h i ich a n meines land e s saum

U nd h o m e b is die graue nom

Den nomen fo nd in ihrem b om -

Drauf Konni ichs greifen d ic h i und sianc

N un bIQhi und g lfln z i es durch die m a rx ...

E in s i lang i ich an nach g u ier fahrr

Mix einem xleinod reich und zorr

Sie s u ch ie long und g ob mir xund:

>So s c h ia fi hier n ic h is au f xiefem grund<

Worouf es meiner hand entronn

U nd nie mein lan d den s c h o iz g e w a n n ...

S o lerm ich traurig den verzichi:

Kein ding sei w o d o s w o n geb richi.
264 1900

som ething. O n ly as long as people believed in their inw ardn ess did that
inw ardness exist. M an stands o r falls w ith the signature o f his signature.
It is im possible to give exem p lary status to M a n and to L an gu age in one
and the sam e discourse n e tw o rk .14'
T h u s circa 1900 the universal bu reau cratic ethos o f the age o f G o e th e
w as replaced by professional ethics. In the com petitive struggle o f m edia
everyone sw ears by a p articu lar profession alism . It can m ean nothing else
when lyric poets after G eo rg e prom in ently publish poem s entitled “ t h e
w o r d .”

THE WORD

I c a rrie d to m y c o u n tr y ’s sh o re
M a rv els a n d d re a m s, a n d w a ite d fo r
T h e tall a n d tw ilit n o m to tell
T h e n a m e s sh e fo u n d w ith in th e w ell.
T h e n I c o u ld g r a s p th e m , th ey w e re m in e,
A n d h e r e I see them b lo o m a n d sh in e . . .
O nce I had m ade a happy haul
A n d w o n a rich a n d frag ile jew el.
She p e ere d a n d p o n d e re d : “ N o th in g lies
B elow ,” sh e sa id , “ to m atch y o u r p riz e .”
A t th is it g lid e d fro m m y h a n d
A n d nev er g ra c e d m y n a tiv e lan d .
A n d so I sadly c a m e t o see:
W ith o u t th e w o rd n o th in g c a n b e .14'
 Rebus

Untranslatability and the Transposition of M edia

A m edium is a m edium is a m edium . T h erefo re it can n o t be tran slated.

To tran sfer m essages fro m on e m edium to an oth er a lw a y s involves re­
shaping them to c o n fo rm to new standards and m aterials. In a discourse
n etw ork that requires an “ aw areness o f the abysses w h ich d ivid e the
one o rd e r o f sense exp erien ce from the o th er,” ' transposition necessarily
takes the place o f tran slation .2 W h ereas tran slation ex clu d es all p a rticu ­
larities in favor o f a general eq u ivalen t, the tran sposition o f m edia is a c ­
com plished serially, at discrete points. G iven M ed iu m A , organ ized as a
d enum erable co llectio n o f discrete elem ents Ef . . . E*, its tran sp o sition
into M ed iu m B w ill con sist in rep rod u cin g the internal (syntagm atic and
paradigm atic) relations betw een its elem ents in the co llectio n E^ . . . E „ .
Because the n um ber o f elem ents n and m and the rules o f associatio n are
hardly ever id en tical, every tran sposition is to a degree arb itrary, a m a­
n ipulation. It can appeal to nothing universal and must, therefore, leave
gaps. T h e elem entary, u n avoid ab le a ct o f e x h a u s t i o n is an en cou n ter
w ith the lim its o f m edia.
T h e lo g ic o f m edia m ay be a truism in set theory o r in fo rm ation the- •
ory, but for Poets it w as the surprise o f the century. B efore they fou n d ed
T h e N e w Em pire, the k in gdom o f blan k m achine-w ritten bodies o f w ord s,
p o ets m ore than any oth er profession rem ained faithful to the classical
d iscou rse n etw ork . T h e tran slatab ility o f all discourses into p o etic sig ­
nifieds en d ow ed poets w ith such privilege th at on ly b itter exp erien ce
forced them to renounce their constitu tive illusion. For an entire cen tury
poets had w o rk e d w ith lan gu age as if it w ere m erely a ch an n el.1 L ove and
266 1900

in to x ica tio n tran sported the a u th or into hallu cin ation s that he w o u ld
later, as “ m arvels and d ream s,” have o n ly to transcribe. B eing th e general
eq uivalen t o f all the senses, the im agination gu aran teed that every “ je w e l”
w o u ld h ave n o tro u b le finding a nam e. B ecause ad d icted m asculine and
fem inine readers q u ick ly read past these n am es, their effect w a s an yth in g
but eq u ality am o n g the variou s aesthetic m aterials: th ro u g h b ack w ard -
m ovin g tran slation, discourses becam e on ce m ore a sensual N a tu re , one
that “ bloom s and shin es.”
In 1 9 1 9 the ex ch a n g e b ro k e d o w n . T h e n orn w ith w h o m a Poet b a r­
tered his im aginative visions for w ord s is n o lo n g er a M o th er, the one
w h o , as the u n articu lated begin nin g o f articu latio n , gu aran teed unlim ited
exp ression . T h e norn has only a bourn or treasury in w h ich signifiers c o ­
exist spatially as d en um erable elem ents. W h atever jew els g lo w in oth er
m edia need not necessarily have equivalents, even in S tefan G eo rg e script.
A fte r a lo n g and ex h au stive search , the norn breaks this sensational new s.
W h ereas p o etic tran slation w as led on by the con stan t prom ise o f fu lfill­
m ent, literature is a tran sposition o f m edia; its stru ctu re is first revealed, in
th e best p o sitivistic and con sequ en tly D aseitt-an alytic m anner, by deficits.4
E xperim enters w ith the tachistoscop e and w riters at the norn bourn
agree that in every lan gu age “ the num ber o f w o rd s is lim ited at a p a rticu ­
lar tim e, in a p articu lar dom ain o f literature, and fo r a p a rticu la r a u th o r.”
An econ om y o f the scarcity o f signs replaced universal trad e in 1900.
G eo rg e did not lim it his eco n o m izin g w ith w o rd s to his p rog ram m atic
p o em . H e w as a lso the “ first m odern G erm an poet w h o se v o ca b u la ry
is con tain ed in a com plete d ictio n a ry ,” w h ich , how ever, does not m ake
him into an “ u n fath o m ab le sp rin g.” 5 It w o u ld h ave been b ette r— aside
from the exh a u stib ility o f even the deepest norn b o u rn s— to ch eck at
least on ce w ith the positivists. P oetic lan gu ages, like that o f the sy m b o ­
lists, w hich “ m ade it necessary to com p ile a special d ictio n a ry fo r their
w o rk s (J. P low ert, Petit glossaire p o u r servir a Pintelligence des auteurs
decadents et sym bolistes),” thus identify them selves as “ profession al
jarg o n .” 6
C on seq u en tly, G e o rg e ’s final stan za celebrates T h e W ord as the ethic
o f a m edia profession al. In w h at sounds like resignation, H eid egg er’s un­
errin g art o f reading deciphers som eth in g qu ite different.

H is re n u n c ia tio n c o n c e rn s th e p o e tic re la tio n to th e w o r d th a t h e h a d c u ltiv a te d

u n til then. R e n u n c ia tio n is p re p a re d n e s s fo r a n o th e r re la tio n . If so , th e “ can b e ”
in th e line, “ W ith o u t th e w o r d n o th in g c a n b e ,” w o u ld g ra m m a tic a lly sp e a k in g
n o t b e th e su b ju n c tiv e o f “ is,” b u t a k in d o f im p e ra tiv e , a c o m m a n d w h ic h th e
p o e t fo llo w s , to k e e p it fro m th e n o n . If so, th e “ m ay b e ” in th e line, “ W h e re
w o rd b re a k s off n o th in g m ay b e ,” w o u ld m ea n : d o n o t h e n c e fo rth a d m it any
th in g as b e in g w h e re th e w o r d b re a k s o ff .7
 REBUS 267

An im perative issues from th e realization that th e tran sp o sition o f m edia

is alw ays a m anipulation and m ust leave gap s betw een on e em bod im en t
and an oth er. T h is im perative d o e s not deny that th ere are m edia oth er
than w ritin g ; it rejects them . O n the thresh old o f the Indian tem ple caves
o f Shiva, w hose nam e, E llo r a , G eo rg e celebrates as he had the nonsense
w o rd T ih o lu , are the lines:

Pilger ihr e rreich t die h iird e.

M it den triim m e rn e itle r b iird e
W erft d ie b lu m e n w e rft d ie floten-
R est von tro stlic h e m geflim m e!
T on u n d fa rb e m iisst ih r to te n
T re n n e n eu ch von lic h t und stim m e
A n d e r sc h w elle v o n E llo ra.

P ilgrim s, y o u h a v e re a c h e d th e gate
W ith y o u r pack o f w o rth le s s freight.
L eave th e g a rla n d , leave th e flute,
S h red s o f so la ce , sh re d s o f sh o w .
T in ts shall fade and so u n d be m u te ,
L ig h t a n d v o ic e s c ease to flow
O n th e th re s h o ld o f E llo ra .'

T o deny the oth er m edia w o u ld be absurd, becau se c o lo r and sou n d , light

and the v o ic e h ave b ecom e record able, b ecom e part o f the general a ccel­
eration, “ in the sense o f the technical m axim ization o f all velocities, in
w h ose tim e-space m odern tech n ology and apparatu s can a lo n e be w h at
th ey are.” ’ H en ceforth com m an d will con flict w ith co m m an d , m edium
w ith m edium . H igh literature circa 190 0 becam e a d esp otic, indeed m u r­
derous com m an d to lim it data to w h a t the m edium o f scrip t co u ld e x ­
haust. Its spirit [G e isf], accord in g to M o rg en stern ’s very serious play on
w ord s, o u g h t to be nam ed “ It is called / It co m m an d s” [H e fssf].10 T h e
spirit— o r G e o rg e — becam e a d ictato r g iv in g d ic ta tio n , fo llo w ed by y o u n g
m en w h o killed off w h a t w as real in them and recorded by secretaries
w h o derived a com plete p e d a g o g y from the record in g thresh old o f E llora.
A t conferences o f the art-edu cation m ovem ent “ the p ossibility o f tran s­
lation in the deepest sense” w as rejected precisely in a figure w h o p ro ­
m oted tran slatability and w orld literature. Stephan W a etzo ld t, an official
in the Prussian M in istry o f C u ltu re , E du cation , and C h u rch A ffairs, e x ­
perim ented w ith n ative and foreign stu d en ts to determ ine w h eth er it w as
possible to translate G o e th e ’s poem “ D ed icatio n .” His results w ere:

It is n o m o re p o ss ib le f o r a F re n c h m a n to b e co m e a G e rm a n th a n it is to tra n s la te
F ren ch in to G e rm a n o r vice versa. O n ly w h e re ev ery d ay m a tte rs , th e b a n a l, o r th e
strictly m a th e m a tic a l a re e x p re ss e d , c an th e r e be a n y q u e s tio n o f re a l tra n s la tio n .
O n e can re th in k o r re -fo rm s o m e th in g in a n o th e r la n g u a g e , in a n o th e r im ag e o f
268 i9oo

th e w o rld , b u t o n e can nev er a c tu a lly tra n s la te . H o w could you e v er tra n s la te

M u s se t, and h o w c o u ld you ev er tra n s la te G o e th e ! "

T h e im aginary (the everyday) and the real (the m athem atical) can thus
be tran slated, but the sym b o lic a llo w s on ly tran sposition s. Poem s th ere­
fo re provide the greatest inner resistance to tran slation. T o d em on strate
(again in o p p o sitio n to G oeth e) that the poetic effect is nearly lost in
prose tran slations, despite his o w n d octrin e o f herm eneutic u n derstan d ­
ing, D ilth ey cited Fechner, the inven tor o f p sych o p h y sics.'2 R eference to
scientific studies w as the innovation here. M a g ica l o r th e o lo g ic a l un-
tran slatability w as an ancien t top os that becam e fash ion ab le again circa
1 9 0 0 ," but n o appeal to m agical spells co u ld hide the fact that p sych o-
technical u n tran slatab ility had been exp erim entally and recently esta b ­
lished rath er than m iracu lou sly fou n d .
M a g ica l spells o r incantation s are isolated, foreign b od ies in actu al la n ­
gu ages; circa 1900, h ow ever, entire artificial lan gu ages w ere deliberately
created. R eferring to his con tem p o raries, M o rgen stern claim ed the right
o f “ im aginative you ths . . . to invent a tribe o f Indians and all it entails,
its lan guage and n ational h ym n s” and, w ith reference to his “ L a lu la ,”
term ed h im self “ on e o f the m ost en thusiastic V o la p iik ists.” “ A rou n d
18 8 5, there w as a fash ion ab le p ro ject to co n stru ct “ Id eal-R om an ic”
(rem iniscent o f the w o rld lan gu age o f V olap iik ) as an e x tra ct o f the v a ri­
ous form s o f V u lg a r L atin. L o tt, Liptay, and D aniel R osa co n trib u ted to
this linguistically m uch “ m ore solid ed ifice,” '5 as did (a little later) a stu ­
dent o f R o m an ce lan gu ages by the nam e o f G eo rg e, w h o invented his L in ­
gu a R o m a n a in 1 8 8 9 .16
T he L in gu a R o m an a allow ed G eo rg e to an ticipate W a etzo ld t’s e x p eri­
m ents w ith students using his ow n G erm an ic and R o m a n ce-la n g u a ge m e­
dium : he w ro te tran slations o f Id eal-R om anic poem s in G erm an and vice
versa. Since C h am p o llio n , the d ecod in g o f u n kn ow n lan gu ages had rested
upon the fou n d atio n o f a bilin gu al in form ant. But this w as n ot so fo r the
languages that G eo rg e constructed at the age o f seven o r nine for him self
and his friends, sh ortly b efore M o rgen stern ’s Indian lan gu age ga m e. H is
poem “ O rig in s” presents a ch ild h o o d o n th e p a g a n —R om an R hine, w h ich
has co m e under the influence o f the lan guage o f the C h u rc h — until G eo rg e
counters the trad ition al incantation hosanna w ith one o f his ow n m akin g.

A u f d iesen triim m e rn b o b d ie k irc h e d a n n ih r h a u p t-

D ie freien n a c k te n Ie ib e r h a t sie s tre n g g e sta u p t-
D o c h e rb te sie d ie p ra c h te d ie n u r s ta rr e n d schliefen
U n d iib e rg a b d a s m aass d e r h ohen u n d d e r tiefen
Dem sin n d e r beim h o sia n n a h iiber w o lk e n b lieb
U n d d a n n z e rk n irsc h t sich a n d e n g ra b e rp la tte n rieb .
 REBUS 269

D o ch a n d e m flusse im sc h ilfp a la ste

T rie b u n s d e r w o llu st e rh a b e n s te r sc h w a ll:
In einem sa n g e d e n k e in e r e rfa ss te
W aren w ir h e isc h e r u n d h e rrs c h e r v o m All.
Suss u n d b e fe u e rn d w ie A ttik a s c h o ro s
U b e r d ie biigel u n d inseln k lan g :
C O B E S O S O PA SO JE P T O R O S
C O ES O N H A M A PA SO JE B O A N .

T h e C h u rc h th e n re a re d h e r h e a d a b o v e th e se sto n e s, a n d sh e
G r e w ste rn a n d sc o u rg ed th e flesh sh e fo u n d t o o b a r e a n d free.
B ut sh e w as heir to p o m p , aflash in d e a th -lik e sleeping,
A nd g a v e th e s ta n d a rd set f o r h e ig h t a n d d e p th s in k eep in g
To m in d s th a t in H o s a n n a h s w h e ele d a b o v e th e c lo u d s
A n d o n th e sla b s o f to m b s in se lf-a b a se m e n t b o w e d .
B ut n e ar th e stre a m in a p a la c e o f re ed
O n by th e tid e o f o u r lu st w e w e re sw irle d ,
S inging a n a n th e m w h ic h n o o n e c o u ld re a d ,
W e w e re th e m a s te rs a n d lo rd s o f th e w o rld .
Sw eet a n d inciting a s A ttic a ’s c h o ru s
O v e r th e m o u n ta in s a n d isla n d s flung:
C O B E SO SO PA SO JE P T O R O S
C O ES O N H A M A PASOJE B O A N . 17

T h e poem en acts its them e. T h e secret lan gu age o f th e i m r i trium phs

because it rem ains a norn b ou rn . G eo rg e w o u ld q u o te and a llu d e to it
m any tim es," w o u ld even present it in conversation to a linguist and e x ­
pert in secret lan guages, w h o im m ediately confirm ed that it w as a rare
exam ple o f w h o lly invented gram m ars and vo cab u laries " — bu t the g rea t­
est tran slator in the G erm an lan gu age did not thin k o f tran slatin g it as
w ell. W hen G eo rg e’s d isciples discovered a han d w ritten tran slation o f
portions o f the O d yssey into the i m r i lan gu age am ong G e o rg e ’s papers,
it w as logical and not m erely pious o f them to d estroy the single bilin gu al
docum ent.
A cco rd in g to N ietzsch e, lan gu age exists on ly because nature has
th row n aw ay the keys to its secrets. G e o rg e ’s q u otation from his o w n lan ­
gu age, in a poem entitled “ O rig in s ,” show s th a t the w riters o f 190 0
w o u ld yield n oth in g to nature, c o b e s o s o p a s o j e p t o r o s / c o e s o n
h a m a p a s o j e B O A N . H ow p ain fu lly trivial, then, is the “ su sp icion ” o f a

literary critic that “ the conten t o f those lines cou ld be p ain fu lly tr iv ia l.” 20
Precisely because the i m r i u n d o the act w ith w hich the C h u rch tran s­
ferred the m easure o f heights and d epths to m eaning o r the signified,
m any w orse things are possible: the tw o lines m ight not have any conten t
w hatsoever.
Literature that sim ulates or is constru cted out o f secret lan gu ages and
270 1900

that thus a lw ays stands under the su sp icion o f b eing “ a kind o f n o n ­

sense,” 21 fo rce s interpretation to rearran ge its techniques. T h e classical
path to origin s in the soul o r ch ild h o o d o f the a u th or is go n e; a “ litte-
rature a rebus” dem ands (not only with Dilthey) an ob jective in terpre­
tation on the m odel o f c ry p to g ra p h ic d ecod in g techniques. T h e “ n ew
sym bo lism ” em p loys “ sym bols in a com pletely different w a y ” than w as
com m on in the classical-rom an tic lyric; it ta k es not “ feeling itse lf” as its
them e “ but a n o th er and distant o b je c t” under the rules o f the tran sp o si­
tion o f m edia.22 T h u s a techn ical, rath er than a p sych o lo g ica l-h isto rica l,
un derstan d ing retransposes o r decodes the tran sp o sition . G e o r g Sim m el
dem on strated this fo r p o etic w o rk s as w ell as for b la c k -b o x m achines.

A c re a tio n o f th e m in d th a t is in te n d e d t o b e u n d e rs to o d can b e c o m p a r e d to a
p ro b le m o r p u z z le th a t th e in v e n to r has c o n s tru c te d w ith a c o d e w o rd . If s o m e ­
o n e a tte m p tin g to so lv e th e p u z zle sh o u ld find a se c o n d w o r d , o n e th a t, o b je c ­
tively, solves th e p u z z le w ith e q u a l log ical a n d p o e tic success, th e se c o n d w o r d is
a s perfectly “ c o rre c t” a s o lu tio n as th e o n e in te n d e d by the p o e t; in d e e d the la tte r
h a s n o t th e slig h te st p rio rity o v e r th e fo rm e r o r o v e r all th e o th e r, in p rin c ip le
u n lim ite d , c o d e w o rd s th a t m ig h t still b e fo u n d .21

Interpretation is on ly a special instance o f the general techn iqu e o f

tran spo sin g media. T h ere is n o p sych olog ica l b rid ge b etw een the e n ­
c o d in g author and the d ecod in g interpreter, bu t a technical contest. Each
has at his disposal a norn bourn, so that w ith luck, w hich nothing and n o
on e guaran tees, the elem ents and associative rules o f M ed iu m A can be
reprod uced in the elem ents and a ssociative rules o f M ed iu m B. W h en
B ettina B ren ta n o attem pted to interpret G o e th e ’s “ C h a r a d e ” as a recip ro ­
cal d eclaration o f lo v e , w ith o u t b ein g able to c ra c k the H erzlieb c o d e , she
w as un fortu nately w o rk in g in a different discourse n etw o rk . H ad she
b een able to attend Sim m el’s sem inars in S trasb ou rg, as m any w om en did
arou n d 190 0, m uch w o u ld have been easier. A n interpretive m ethod
w ith ou t an a u th or as idol ob viates not only the vain effo rt o f d ecipherin g,
but a lso the threat o f d isco ve rin g H erzlieb in the riddle a fte r all.
Indeed, f o r sh o rt periods th e tran sposition o f m edia c a n be lifesaving.
In 190 2 Emil Strauss published a novel a b o u t a gym n asiu m student and
born m usician w h o is driven to su icide by the d ust-covered n ew h u m a n ­
ism o f his teachers and th e ir lesson plan s. A fte r havin g been forbid d en to
play his beloved vio lin , H einrich Lindner spends every aftern o on d oin g
his h o m ew o rk .

D u rin g th e first fe w d a y s it w a s n o t so b a d ; in d e e d , h e th o u g h t w ith slig h t b itte r ­

ness: E v ery th in g is tu rn in g o u t w ell! But o n th e fo u rth d a y h e su d d e n ly c a u g h t
him self n o t c o n c e n tr a tin g o n th e e q u a tio n h e w as su p p o s e d to b e so lv in g b u t r e a d ­
in g th e le tte rs as n o te s , a n d , w ith o u t b e in g a w a re o f it, h e b a d a lre a d y h u m m e d a
w h o le p a g e o f th e b o o k .
 REBUS 27I

“ G o o d G o d !” he cried o u t lau g h in g , “ w h a t n o n se n se !” But h e c o u ld n o t resist

lo o k in g a t th e p a g e o n ce m o re a n d c o n sc io u sly a tte m p tin g to see if th e re m ig h t
be, so m e w h e re a m o n g th e b o r in g letters, a h id d e n m usical c o m b in a tio n . S o o n ,
h o w e v e r, h e w a s n o lo n g e r la u g h in g ; h e n o tic e d th a t he c o u ld n o lo n g e r c o n c e n ­
tra te o n th e m a th e m a tic a l v alu e o f th e le tte rs , a n d th a t th e sim plest se q u e n c e o f
le tte rs w o u ld re m in d him o f a m usical p h ra s e o r su g g e st a m o tif.2'*

It is thus sheer m o ck ery w h en the o b tu se bu reau crats h erm en eu tically

certify that their prob lem student, despite “ very irregu lar rea d in g,” is c a ­
pable o f “ pen etratin g the spirit o f an a u th o r.” 25 O n e w h o reads note va l­
u es rather th a n algeb raic variables (and a ls o letters in oth er places), is
p roceedin g neither irregularly nor acco rd in g to an a u th o r’s p sych o lo g y.
H is reading is con ceivab ly a precise tran sposition o f media and can be
interpreted and legitim ized by Sim m el’s o b jective in terpretation . It is n o
less rad ical an act in that L indner is n ot alo n e. H is co n tem p o ra ry A lb an
Berg tran sposed letters in to notes (as a m eans o f erotic disguise); f o r the
hero o f the n ovel, the sam e process is an u n con sciou s and thus lifesavin g
com pulsion , a special instance o f alexia w ith the pu rpose o f evad in g high
school alp h a b etizin g . In fa c t, research in to speech deficits h as un covered
cases (aside from the strategic sim ulation o f aphasia) in w h ich patients
“ lose w o rd s, but retain the m eaning o f n otes.” 26
The Trio fo r Piano, V iolin, and V io lin cello by H einrich L indner, O p u s
1, is subsequently inspired b y a train station. T h e com poser m anque
h ears the station m aster sin g com m an d s as m elod ies (like the “ children
w h o w h ile p layin g give rhythm and alternation to their c a lls ” ). Shortly
a fterw ard s the co n co u rse soun ds in a con fu sion o f voices, b u t this does
n othin g to disturb Lin dner’s m usical dream , because all media circa 190 0
presuppose w h ite noise. T h e “ confu sion o f voices, letting n o single sound
reach o r disturb h im ,” inspires the p reco cio u s and su p posed ly un gifted
student to O p u s 1 ,17
If the tran sposition o f m edia can m ake m usical notes out o f letters and
scores out o f a confu sion o f voices, a d eco d in g o f the d arkest and least
tran slatable o f texts is also possible and necessary. “ T h e G re a t L a lu la ”
has, if n o t m eanin g, at least m ethod , and n o t m erely as “ a m ore o r less
m o d u la to ry expression o f an entirely definite and to the greatest ex te n t
exscene w o rld co m p reh en sivew o rd ch ild a n d a rtview .” 2' For the d eco d in g
that M o rg en stem him self prod u ced , alb eit as “ Jerem ias M u eller, P h .D .” —
that is, w ith profession al distance from his o w n w o rd ch ild a n d a rt— allow s
no m od ulation w hatsoever.

THE GREAT LALULA

T oo m u ch h a s b e en a ttr ib u te d to th is s o n g so far. All i t h id es is sim p ly —

c h e c k m a te . N o chess p la y e r w ill ev er h ave u n d e rs to o d it any o th e r w ay. B ut in
o rd e r t o a c c o m m o d a te th e la y m a n a n d b e g in n e r, I w ill o u tlin e th e p o s itio n here.
K ro k lo k w afzi = K a 5 (w hite) k ing a 5. T h e q u e stio n m ark signifies so m e
27 2 1900

q u e stio n a s to w h e th e r th e p o sitio n o f the k in g m ig h t be s tro n g e r in a n o th e r p o si­

tio n . But let us p ro c e e d .
S erhem erhi! = S e i (b lack ) k n ig h t e i . T h e e x c la m a tio n p o in t signifies a s tr o n g
p o s itio n .”

And so on and so forth , until all the nonsense w ords are exh au sted and a
crazy checkm ate position is left. T h e self-com m en tary, far from tran slat­
ing any life o f the sou l, is o n ce again a tran sposition o f m edia. T h e c o n ­
tents o f the system o f n otation cou n t only insofar as they equal a h o m ­
on ym in the second system . (N o th in g in S e i exp lain s the m and i of
Serhemerhi.) W hether from alg eb raic variab le to note values o r from
letters to chess abb reviation s, every tran sposition leaves ga p s. M o st im ­
portan tly, how ever, the result is never a surplus o f m eanin g. “ T o o m uch
has been attribu ted to this so n g so f a r ” — that co u ld be w ritten on the
gravestone o f an entire literary criticism .
A tten tion to m aterials and the tran sposition o f m edia are tw o sides o f
the sam e positivism . O n ly the m eth o d o lo g ica lly rigorou s isolation o f in­
d ividual g ro u p s o f signs o r cu ltu ral techn ologies can m ake such e x a c t
conn ection s po ssib le. V oice and gesture, lettering and o rn a m en t, p ictu re
and soun d , letters and notes, Stefan G eo rg e script and the “ o ra l readin g
o f p o em s” 10— all o f these con n ection s presuppose techn ical analyses.
T here are od d and qu ite com pellin g indications o f this.
W h en M o rg en stern ’s late m aster invented a n ew ty p e o f d an ce, w h a t
had on ce been a p a ro d y o f ex p licatio n , as in “ L a lu la ,” becam e d ea d se­
rio u s. E u ryth m y consisted in ta k in g letter after letter, p a rt o f speech after
part o f speech, o u t o f G o e th e ’s poem s and assign ing to each p articu lar
signifier an iterab le exp ressive gesture. O n c e th ese had been definitively
established, the m aster, R u d olf Steiner, w o u ld sim ply com m an d “ faster,
faster” — and the fem ale disciples, w h o se “ ow n , very w ise head is som e­
w h at ou t o f it, help the essential po w er o f the sound gain its a u to n o m o u s
effect.” 1'
W h eth er o r n o t such w o m e n w ere o f flesh and b lo o d has n oth in g to d o
w ith the parallel con n ection o f m edia. T h e E dison o f V illiers’ n ovel c o n ­
structs a m echanical E ve w ith a p h o n o grap h ic vo ca b u la ry o f 2 X 7 hou rs
p layin g tim e rather than hum an lungs and so-called lingu istic c o m p e ­
tence. B ecause this vo ca b u la ry is denum erable, Edison is able to sy n ­
chronize Eve’s recorded speech ca p a city w ith her n o less m ech anical e x ­
pressive m ovem ents.12 W h a t will and m ust strike the future beloved o f the
future w om an as a coheren t organism is actu ally tech n ological eurythm y.
W h a t happened in the novel also happened in reality, b u t w ith far-
reaching socioh istorical effects. From the very begin nin g the silent film
w as cou p led (either m echanically o r throu gh subaltern a cc o m p a n ists)11
w ith recorded soun d. T h e tw o separate m edia, picture w ith o u t sound and
 REBUS 273

sound w ith o u t pictu re, allow ed syn ch ron ization . T h e progressive literati
A lb ert Ehrenstein, W alter H asenclever, Else L asker-Schiiler, K u rt Pinthus,
Franz W erfel, and Paul Z e c h w ere dism ayed that “ dism al b ack g ro u n d
p ian o clin k in g ” and (the scen e is D essau in 1 9 1 3 ) “ a n arrator co m m en t­
ing on the actio n in a m ighty S axon a c c e n t” d ro w n e d ou t the film .14 But
their suggested im provem ents, all o f w h ich tended to w a rd a m edia-true
Part p ou r Part o f the silent film, them selves co u p led the m ovies and the
professionalism o f w riters. T h e screen plays that Pinthus and his c o m ­
rad es offered to the industry as their M o v ie B o o k dem on strate w ith every
w ord that the u n tran slatability o f media is essential to the p o ssib ility o f
their co u p lin g and tran sposition .

Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow

T h e tran sposition o f m edia co u ld be applied from jok es to m ysticism
to the cu ltu re industry. M o re o ve r, it cou ld be grou n d ed m eth o d o lo g i­
cally, and so it becam e the parad igm o f a n ew scien ce. F reu d ’s Interpreta­
tion o f D ream s, in the date on its title page p rou d ly and p rolep tically d is­
p layin g the z e r o n um ber o f a n ew century, inau gu rated the tran sposition
o f m edia as science.
B efo re there can be any interpretation o f dream s, three secu lar fa lla ­
cies need to be dism issed. T h e first is the p h ilo so p h e rs’ p reju d ice, w h ich
holds th at d ream s are w ith o u t ob jective, reasonab le co n n ectio n and are
un w orthy of interpretation . A s o p p osed to H egel (w h om , justifiably, he
cites only in d irectly),1 Freud prefers to fo llo w the lay op in ion that a s­
sum es “ a m eaning, th o u g h a hidden o n e ” in the dream . But p o p u la r
dream interpretation has rem ained tran slation in tw o com p lem en tary
w ays: it m akes the w h o le dream “ sym b o lic” o f glo b a l m eanings, o r it
translates parts o f a dream by “ m echanically tran sferrin g” each part
“ into an oth er sign havin g a k n o w n m eaning, in accord an ce w ith a fixed
key.” 2 Both techn iques, the an alogical and the d igital, presu p pose that
the tw o m edia, the dream and lan gu age, are either sim ilar o r coexten sive.
Th e new science rejects these tw o view s as naive. In a w ell-kn ow n c o m ­
p arison, Freud defines his p roced u re o f strict tran sposition o f m edia.

T h e d re a m -th o u g h ts a n d th e d re a m -c o n te n t a re p re se n te d t o us lik e tw o v e rsio n s

o f th e sa m e s u b je c t-m a tte r in tw o d iffere n t lan g u a g e s. O r , m o r e p ro p e rly , th e
d re a m -c o n te n t se e m s like a tr a n s c rip t o f th e d re a m -th o u g h ts in to a n o th e r m o d e
o f e x p re ss io n , w h o s e c h a ra c te rs a n d s y n ta c tic law s it is o u r b u sin e ss to d isc o v er
by c o m p a rin g th e o rig in a l a n d th e tra n s la tio n . T h e d re a m -th o u g h ts a re im m e ­
d iate ly c o m p re h e n s ib le , a s so o n a s w e h a v e le a rn t th em . T h e d re a m -c o n te n t, o n
th e o th e r h a n d , is e x p re sse d as it w e re in a p ic to g ra p h ic s c rip t, th e c h a ra c te rs
of w hich h a v e to b e tra n s p o s e d in d iv id u a lly in to th e la n g u a g e o f th e d re a m
th o u g h ts . If w e a tte m p te d t o re a d th e se c h a ra c te rs a c c o rd in g to th eir p ic to ra l
274 19 ° °

v a lu e in ste a d o f a c c o rd in g to th e ir sy m b o lic re la tio n , w e sh o u ld clearly be led in to

e rro r. S u p p o se I h a v e a p ic tu re -p u z z le , a re b u s, in fr o n t o f m e. It d e p ic ts a h o u se
w ith a b o a t o n its ro o f, a single letter o f th e a lp h a b e t, the figure o f a r u n n in g m an
w h o s e h e a d h a s been c o n ju re d aw ay, a n d so o n . N o w I m ig h t b e m isle d in to ra is ­
ing o b je c tio n s a n d d e c la rin g th a t th e p ic tu r e as a w h o le a n d its c o m p o n e n t p a rts
a re n o n se n sic a l, A b o a t h a s n o b u sin e ss t o b e o n th e ro o f o f a h o u se , a n d a h e a d ­
less m a n c a n n o t ru n . M o re o v e r, th e m a n is b ig g er th a n th e h o u s e ; a n d if th e
w h o le p ic tu re is in te n d e d to re p re se n t a la n d s c a p e , le tte rs o f th e a lp h a b e t a re o u t
o f p la c e in it sin ce such o b je c ts d o n o t o c c u r in n a tu re . B ut o b v io u sly w e c a n o n ly
form a p r o p e r ju d g e m e n t o f th e re b u s if w e p u t a s id e c ritic ism s su c h as th e se o f
th e w h o le c o m p o s itio n a n d its p a rts a n d if, in ste a d , w e tr y to re p la c e e a c h se p a ­
ra te e le m en t by a sy lla b le o r w o rd th a t c a n b e re p re se n te d by th a t e le m e n t in s o m e
w a y o r o th e r. T h e w o rd s w h ic h a r e p u t to g e th e r in th is w a y a re n o lo n g e r n o n ­
sensical b u t m ay f o r m a p o e tic al p h ra s e o f th e g re a te s t b e a u ty a n d sig n ifican ce.
A d re a m is a p ic tu re -p u z z le o f th is so rt a n d o u r p re d e c e sso rs in th e field o f d re a m -
in te rp re ta tio n h a v e m a d e th e m is ta k e o f tre a tin g th e re b u s a s a p ic to ria l c o m p o s i­
tio n : a n d as such it h a s seem ed to th em n o n se n sic a l a n d w o rth le s s .1

Interpretive techniques that treat texts as charades o r dream s as p ic ­

ture puzzles h ave n o th in g to d o w ith herm en eutics, b ecau se th ey d o n ot
tran slate. T h e tran slation o f a rebus fails because letters d o n o t o c c u r in
nature, the ultim ate reference o f all tran slation. In G e o rg e ’s poem “ T h e
W o rd ,” the p o etic im agin ation and the treasury o f lan gu age are not c o ­
extensive, just as in Freud’s com pariso n the pictu re o f the lan d scap e is n ot
coextensive w ith an alp h ab etic sign system . N eg ativ e findings such as
these necessitated a n ew a p p ro a ch . In order to tran spose the m anifest
co n ten t o f dream s in to latent dream thou gh ts, each o f the tw o m edia
m ust first be designated as defined sets o f elem ents w ith defined rules o f
association (law s o f articu latio n ). If Faust m arked the m om ent in the his­
tory o f the sign in w h ich there w as n o aw areness o f the parad igm a tic a xis,
T h e Interpretation o f D ream s con d u cts the analysis o f signs solely a c ­
cord in g to the place values o f discrete elem ents.4 It does n ot establish the
status o f a sym bol in the classical sen se— in oth er w o rd s, a tran scen den ­
tal signified, w hich previou sly absorb ed all w o rd s, a b o v e all the w o rd
w ord. In its place there are n ow sep arate subsystem s o f signifiers, in
w hich the parts o f the rebus m ust b e tentatively p laced until they fit in a
subsystem . Rebus is the instrum ental case o f res: things can be used like
w ord s and w o rd s like things. Interpretation has everyth in g to learn from
“ the linguistic tricks o f child ren , w h o som etim es actu ally treat w o rd s as
though they w ere o b jects, and m oreover invent new lan gu ages and a r­
tificial syn tactic fo rm s.” 5 T h erefo re every m an ipu lation o f letters and
w o rd s is allow ed w ith in the fram ew o rk o f a determ ined lan gu age.
D ream s, “ im possible as a rule to translate into a foreign lan g u a g e,” 6 tra v ­
erse all the associative dom ains o f a given lan gu age. T h e tran sp o sition o f
m edia is thus an e x a c t correlate o f un tran slatability.
 REBUS 275

N eith er sim ilar nor coexten sive, d ream -con ten t and d ream -th ou gh ts
relate to on e another like “ L a lu la ” and checkm ate in chess. Freud, “ on e
o f the m ost d arin g language adventurers and w ord m y stics,” is a lso “ a
broth er o f M o rg en stern .” 7 T h e d ecod ed d ream -con ten t is n o m ore po etry
than chess n otation s are poem s. D ream s could pass as P oetry only as lo n g
as op tical and acoustical h allu cin ation s w ere cou n ted as p a rt o f the
dream . N o th in g rem ains o f the beau tifu l ap p earan ce w h en the elem ents
o f a d ream -con ten t are tran sposed on e by on e in to signifiers, even if the
result is a p o etical phrase o f the greatest significance. F reu d ’s irony is in­
ten d ed on ly fo r those w h o w o u ld see in the picture p u zzle the substitutive
sensuousness o f a d raw in g o r lan dscape. A s true “ syllab ic ch em istry” *
w ith w h ich the d ecod in g m ethod com petes, the dream is a lread y a piece
o f techn ique distant from nature and painted lan dscapes.
But this techn ique bears the stam p o f its era. B ahr, fo r ex a m p le, em ­
phasized that “ n atu re,” w h ere it co u ld “ express itself freely and w ith o u t
restrain t,” n am ely in dream s, “ proceeds pu n ctu ally and e x a c tly a cc o rd ­
ing to the prescription o f the new sc h o o l” o f sym bo list “ rebus litera ­
tu re .” ’ W ith Freud, dream interpretation presu p poses cuttin g a p a rt any
continuous series o f im ages b efore syllab les o r w o rd s can substitute fo r
them . It is n o accid en t that the rebus Freud describes o r m akes up c o n ­
tains a running figure w h o se head has b een conju red aw ay. O n ly a cripple
w ith o u t a head yields an u n con sciou s, and on ly the d ism em bered p h e­
nom ena o f the dream yield readable script. T h e poem o f the p ick et fence
divides syllab les by the space betw een them in ex a ctly the sam e w a y ; and
in ex a ctly the sam e w a y the film cam era cu ts up co n tin u o u s m ovem ent.
T h e fa ct that T h e Interpretation o f D ream s ign ores the phenom enon o f
the dream is the first step to w a rd d eciph erin g dream s. T ran sp osition s
liquidate the m edium fro m w h ich th ey proceed. E very syllab le and w o rd
o f F reu d ’s requirem ent that on e substitute fo r every im age a sylla b le or
w o rd is to be taken literally. T h is is dem on strated in his treatm ent o f h y s­
terics, w h o are “ fo r the m ost p a rt visu ally o rien ted .”

O n c e a p ic tu r e h a s e m e rg ed fr o m th e p a tie n t’s m em o ry , w e m ay h e a r him say th a t

it b e co m es fra g m e n ta ry a n d o b s c u re in p r o p o r tio n as h e p ro c e e d s w ith his d e ­
sc rip tio n o f it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid o f it by turning it into words.
W e g o o n to e x a m in e th e m em ory p ic tu re itself in o rd e r to d isc o v er th e d ire c tio n
in w h ic h o u r w o rk is to p ro c e e d . “ L o o k a t th e p ic tu re o n c e m o re . H a s it d is­
a p p e a re d ? ” “ M o s t o f it, y es, b u t I still se e th is d e ta il.” “ T h e n th is re s id u e m u st
still m ea n so m e th in g . E ith e r y o u w ill se e so m e th in g n e w in a d d itio n to it, o r
so m e th in g w ill o c c u r to y o u in c o n n e c tio n w ith it.” W h e n th is w o r k h a s b e e n
a c c o m p lish e d , th e p a tie n t’s field o f vision is o n c e m o re free a n d w e c a n c o n ju re u p
a n o th e r p ic tu re . O n o th e r o c c a sio n s, h o w e v er, a p ic tu re o f th is k in d w ill re m a in
o b stin a te ly b e fo re th e p a tie n t’s in w a rd e y e, in s p ite o f his h a v in g d e sc rib e d it; a n d
th is is a n in d ic a tio n t o m e th a t he still h a s so m e th in g im p o r ta n t to tell m e a b o u t
276 1900

th e to p ic o f th e p ic tu re . A s so o n a s th is has b e en d o n e th e p ic tu re v a n ish es, like a

g h o st th a t has been la id .10

F. L. G o ltz showed that A D o g W ithou t a C erebrum has n o visu al rep­

resentations. Freud sh o w s h o w one can elim inate im ages from a dream
o r m em ory w ith o u t a scalpel (and attribu te the elim ination to the p a ­
tients them selves). “ Putting into w o rd s” blinds the “ inner e y e ” in w h ich
A nselm us and H offm ann delighted. Sensitive souls can rep eat the fa sh io n ­
able cond em nation that Freud burdened an e c o n o m y o f libidinal e x p e n ­
diture w ith an ob solete M o sa ic ban on im ages." But it w as on e o f the few
op tio n s left to w riters in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900. Up again st a
com petition that cou ld replace substitutive sen suality w ith the real flow
o f d ata, the adm in istrators o f w o rd s sw o re by the phrase “ L o o k at the
im age again. H as it d isap p eared ?” T h e flo o d o f im ages is literally e x ­
hausted, that is, taken apart elem ent by elem ent in such p a ra d o x ica l
questions. W hen even the m ost im aginative hysterics lose their sto re o f
im ages on the co u ch , they a lso learn the renun ciation that w riters co m ­
pleted and ann oun ced circa 1900: “ W ith o u t the w o rd , n o th in g can b e .” 12
U n d w e in en d a ss d ie b ild e r im m e r fliehen
D ie in sc h o n e r fin stern is g e d ie h e n —
W an n d e r k la re k a lte m o rg e n d ro h t.

A n d w e e p b e ca u se th e visions w h ic h assail
In e x u lta n t d a rk n e ss a lw ay s p ale
W h en th e c le a r a n d c o ld o f d a w n r e tu r n ."

G e o rg e w ro te it d o w n , and S ch on b erg’s m usic m ade it u n fo rg ettab le . . .

But w h a t spirit has been laid to rest on ce the hysteric’s flood o f im ages
has been tran sposed into w ords? It is im possible to id en tify w ith cer­
tainty, but there are indices. T h e im ages appear b efore an inner eye; they
appear in a m alad y that, by con trast to im ageless ob sessional neurosis,
m ost com m on ly affects w om en ; th ey illustrate a love that is o b ed ien ce to
the nuclear fam ily. C o u ld the spirit that Freud drives o u t n ot be sim ply
the classical fu n ction o f the fem inine reader? T h e h ystericizin g o f w om en
circa 1 800, after all, consisted in teach in g them to read in such a w a y that
po etic conten t w as tran slated, through enjoym ent and h allu cin a tio n , into
signifieds. W h a t w as b ro u g h t to light on the cou ch m ay thus h ave been
only a historical sed im e n t," at the m om ent when it becam e d y sfu n c­
tion al, in ord er to teach an oth er kind o f readin g, the literal, o f everyd ay
experience. P sych oan alysis w o u ld have sto o d at the sp ot o f a “ b ifu rca ­
tio n ” that from 1900 on divid ed high and p o p u la r cultures a cco rd in g to
the “ phrase, b o o k o r pictu re; there is n o third c h o ic e .” " W om en, ch il­
d ren , and the insan e, instead o f co n tin u in g to d ream im ages in b o o k s,
discovered the u n con sciou s o f the m ovie house; the scien ce o f p s y c h o ­
 REBUS 277

analysis, b y con trast, discovered in w om en, children , and th e insane, in

order to inscribe it in to them , an elite u n con sciou s o f secret scriptural
c o d e s.16 A t the end o f her cure, on e o f F reud’s fam ou s hysterics dream ed
that even she w as readin g calm ly in a “ b ig b o o k .” 17
Im m ediately a fter the initial sh o w in g o f the first G erm an art film, O tto
Rank b egan to p sych o a n a ly ze it. O n e o f his assum ptions w as “ that repre­
sentation in the m ovies, w h ich is suggestive o f dream tech n iqu e in m ore
than on e respect, expresses in clear and sensual pictu re lan gu ag e certain
p sych o lo g ica l cond itions and con n ection s th a t th e Poet can n o t alw a y s
grasp w ith w o r d s .” 1' Instead o f pursuing such a sso ciatio n s, R ank tran s­
posed the film sequences o f T h e S tu d en t o f Prague serially in to the le x i­
con o f literary d op p elgan ger m otifs and this lexico n in turn in to th e a n a ­
ly tic theory o f narcissism . P rofessional readers o v erlo o k the fa c t th a t the
d op pelgan ger m o tif films the a ct o f film ing itself. T h e m ovies are on ly the
“ actual psych ic su rface,” the “ arb itrary and banal starting point for
b roach in g extensive p sych olog ica l p rob lem s.” ” R a n k is thus q u ite c o n ­
vinced o f the m anifest-latent d istin ctio n — n ot only for the psych ic a p p a ­
ratus, but fo r the co n n ectio n betw een the technical and literary.
A nd Freud? In 18 8 3, d irectly con tin u in g the w o rk o f M u y b rid g e,
A lb ert L ond e built an electrical “ sh o rt-exp osu re series” cam era, and tw o
years later C h a rc o t used it to film his hysteric patients in the Salpetriere.
T h e y o u n g n eu ro lo gist Freud w as w a tch in g .20 But fo r him , as w ell, film
record in gs— that is, the cu ttin g up o f the great hysterical cu rv e— w ere
only an arb itrary and banal starting point. His approach to hysterics
b roach ed the com pletely different problem o f ex h a u stin g the flo o d o f im ­
ages. M o vies aren’t m entioned in T h e Interpretation o f D ream s. U w e
G a u b e’s fine study Film a nd D ream s fills this gap b y citing A m erican
p sych ologists, w h o read the m anifest d ream -con ten t cin em atograp h i-
cally.21 P h ilo lo gically and h isto rically sp eakin g, h ow ever, it rem ain s a fact
that Freud did not even ign ore the O th e r o f his d eco d in g . T h e film like,
presentative sym bolism o f the d ream im ages van ished in the rhetorical-
scriptural dom ain instituted b y psych oan alysis. W h a tev er “ visu al form s
o f the fligh t o f id eas” haunted u n fo ld in g dream s w ere e x c lu d e d .22 A s w ith
Saussure, w h o se linguistics co u ld b egin o n ly after the m yth ical separation
o f firm am ent and w ater,23 o f thou ghts and sound, o f a n y th in g h a llu c i­
n atory a n d undifferentiated, the m ovie pleasures o f view ers lik e R onn e
and Pinthus rem ained a limit con cep t on the system ’s edge. “ T h e unity o f
this w o rld appears to me to be som ething o b v io u s , u n w o rth y o f em p h a ­
sis. W h a t interests me is the dissection and division o f so m e th in g th at
w o u ld o th erw ise be lost in the prim al so u p .” 24
T h e soup is thus not denied, but circu m vented. T h a t was the p ro fes­
sional path, by con trast to m ystical and p h ilo so p h ica l con tem p o raries.
278 1900

R u d o lf Steiner m ade into a secret d octrin e B enedict’s d iscovery that those

saved from death had seen their lives pass b efore them as in a tim e-lapse
film .25 H enri Bergson den ou n ced, in favor o f his C reative E v o lu tio n , the
“ cin em atograp h ic m echanism o f co n sciou sn ess,” w h ich w a s unable to
process the con tin u ou s flo w o f the duree and w as lim ited to discrete im ­
ages.26 T h e p h ilosop h y o f life thus becam e a kind o f m ovie that w o u ld
have sacrificed its w o r k in g p rin ciple, the cu ttin g o f im ages, to w h at w as
on ly a cunn ingly prod u ced illusion in the view er. Freud, how ever, p e r­
sisted, like the researcher on the tach istoscop e, in investigating a m ech an ­
ics o f d ream w o rk th a t w a s accom p lish ed n o t by an illu sory con sciou sn ess
but by the u n con sciou s itself.

T h e fact that p sych oan alysis, given the op tion s o f cin em atic dream and
the tach istoscop e, chose the sym b o lic m eth o d is indicative o f its place
in the system o f sciences in 1900. T h is place had n o th in g to d o w ith a
“ scientific self-m isu n d erstan d ing” and for that reason a lso had little to d o
w ith the hum an sciences.27 In his ad m irab le uncertainty abou t w hether
the return o f lan gu age circa 1900 represented the last m oraine o f tran scen ­
dental k n ow led g e o r a new b egin nin g, Foucault placed p sych oa n a lysis,
ethn ology, and stru ctu ral linguistics in a position w h ere the hum an sc i­
en ces’ inner perspective on M a n w as transversed by lan gu age as an e x ­
te rio r elem ent. T h e u n certa in ty arose b ecau se F ou cau lt con ceived dis­
cursive rules as com preh ensible and therefore o v erlo o k ed tech n ologies.
But inn ovations in the te ch n o lo g y o f inform ation are w h at p ro d u ced the
sp ecificity o f the discourse n etw ork o f 1900, sep a ra tin g it fro m tran scen ­
d ental k n ow led g e and thus sep a ra tin g p sych o a n a ly sis fro m all hum an
sciences.
F reu d ’s early w o rk O n A p h a sia w as a brillian t, im m ediately acclaim ed
critique o f brain p h ysio lo gy and its relation to lan gu age. W ith o u t d o in g
any origin al exp erim ents o r d issection s, the n eu rologist d em on strated to
his colleagu es that their all to o localized lan gu age centers did not tak e
in to acco u n t the prim acy o f fu n ctio n . T h e critic m aintained his allegiance
to all the assu m ptions o f that theory o f lan gu age; he drew con clu sion s
fro m deficiencies and isolated discursive fu n ction s, a lth o u g h n o t p ri­
m arily in an an a to m ical sense. His P roject fo r a Scientific P sycholog y
consequently con tain s a top ical m odel o f isolated fu n ctio n s (con sciou s­
ness and the u n con sciou s), w h o s e p o sitio n s rem ain strictly fu n ctio n a l.
T h e P roject provided the very m od el o f co n tem p o ra ry m odels; the soul
becam e a b la ck b o x . O n e need on ly com p are the h yp o th etical p ath w ays,
d ischarges, cath ex es, and (of cou rse discrete) n eurones o f F reud’ s te x t w ith
statem ents a b o u t th e m aterial o f brain ph ysio lo gy, w h ic h , since Sigm und
Exner, had described the brain as a “ street system ” w ith m o re o r less
 REBUS 279

deeply engraved “ d rivin g tra c k s,’ ’ 2* o r as a n etw o rk o f telegrap h ic “ relay

sta tio n s’ ’ w ith m ore o r less p rom p t con n ection s.2’ F reu d ’s m ental a p p a ­
ratus, w hich has recently been interpreted as p ro to stru ctu ra list, m erely
co n fo rm s to the scientific stan dards o f its d ay.30T h e sole differen ce, thou gh
one fraught w ith consequences, betw een it and n eu ro p h y sio lo g y is its
lack o f anatom ical localization . P sychoan alysis, not con ten t w ith lo o k in g
forw ard to “ filling in this g a p ’’ in a d istan t fu tu r e ,3' u n d erto o k an oth er
kind o f localization .
F reud’s study o f aph asia inherited all the m aterial on speech deficits
and defects that d o c to r s had o b tain ed by distin gu ishin g and lo ca lizin g in ­
d ivid ual aphasias. “ ‘ Q u ill pen’ instead o f ‘ pen cil,’ ‘ b u tter’ [Butter] for
‘m oth er’ [M utter], ‘ Fother’ fo r ‘father’ and ‘ m o th er’ ” 32 are o n ly selected
exam ples, and their o d d ly Freudian q u ality is n ot just an effe ct o f the c o n ­
text they appear in. T h e P sy ch opa th ology o f Everyday L ife th an kfu lly
made use o f the p a rap raxes in sp eakin g, reading, and w ritin g that the In-
d ogerm an ic linguist R u d o lf M erin ger and the psychiatrist K arl M a y er
had gathered fro m c o lle ag u es and patients, in their attem p t to d em o n ­
strate, first, th at p a ra p ra x e s w ere n ot a m atter o f free “ su b jectivity ” 33
and, secon d, that they cou ld be localized in an an a to m ically con ceived
system o f lan guage rules. Freud thus had an im m ense store o f nonsense at
his disposal, m aterial that had been statistically ord ered by d o c to rs and
linguists so as to provide inferences from the k n o w n d eficien cies to brain
fun ctions and from those to lan gu age as a system . But an yon e w h o
attacks localization breaks the on ly thread h o ld in g togeth er the statistics
and lists. T h e co llectio n o f n onsense b ecam e a m ere aggregate. T h a t
w as reason en ough to reverse the sortin g proced u re. Instead o f o rd erin g
the d ata o f countless sp eakers in colu m n s until the rules o f lan gu age
em erged , psychoanalysis assem bled the linguistic errors o f on e speaker
into a te x t in w hich the rules o f his ind ivid u al speech cam e to light.
There w ere sound p sych o p h ysica l prem ises for su ch a m eth o d o lo g ica l
shift. T he psych o a n a lytic d istin ctions o f cond ensation and d isplacem en t,
m etaphor and m etonym y, on the on e hand, and the structural linguistic
distinction o f the p a rad igm a tic and syn tag m atic on the o th er, are on ly
tran sposition s o f the fu n d am en tal p rin cip le o f associatio n ist p sych ology.
Z ieh en established that all a ssociatio n s play o n ly on sim ilarity o r c o n ­
tiguity, on the p arad igm atic o r syn tagm atic a x e s ."
Scientific discretion led M erin ger and M a y er to indicate o n ly p a ren ­
thetically and w ith abb reviation s w h ich co lle ag u es o r patients com m itted
particular solecism s; they recorded the fine specim en “ F reuer-Breudian
m eth od ” '5 u n der the ru b ric in itial-co n son an t-syllab ic co n fu sio n , o r a c ­
cord in g to rules o f sim ilarity. Freud had only to leaf throu gh the co n ­
tiguity o f their pages to find the sam e sp eaker com m ittin g another d istor­
i8 o 1900

tion o f F reud— and the Breuer-Freudian m ethod cou ld su p pose, qu ite

un lin guistically, that the particular acad em ic “ w as a co lle ag u e and n ot
p articu larly d elighted w ith this m eth od .’ ” 6 N o th in g co u ld be easier. T h e
experim ental o r statistical jum ble o f syllables is given an oth er locatio n on
paper. R a th er than p la cin g fo th e r, the w o rd c o m b in ed from father and
m other, u n d er the head ing o f general p arap hrase, as w o u ld have been
d on e in the early d ays o f n eu ro lo gy, the a n alyst Freud reads it, in the c o n ­
te xt o f all the oth ers provided by the sam e patient, as p a rt o f a single
rebus. O f cou rse, father-an d -m other is this con text.
T h e sam e shift in m ethod also b rou gh t Jung to psych oan alysis. H is
first efforts in psych iatry carried o n the statistical exp erim en ts in a sso c ia ­
tion and flight o f ideas o f investigators like Emil K raepelin , Z ie h e n , and
Stran sky, a lth ou gh his su b jects w ere lim ited to the patients in Eugen
B leuler’s institute in B u rgh olzli. From report to rep o rt the statistics d i­
m inished and th e space d evoted to p articu lar cases increased. Just tw o
associatio n s o f a h ysteric w om an, read togeth er, “ dem on strate b ea u ­
tifu lly ” th at “ the co n scio u s eg o is m erely a m arion ette th at d ances on the
stage o f a hidden a u tom atic m echanism .” 17 T h u s on e day Jung reversed
the sortin g procedure and w orked exh au stively w ith a single s c h iz o ­
phrenic patien t. All the p atien t’s n eologism s w ere recorded and sp oken
b ack to her, until “ all a sso ciatio n s” o f each “ stim ulus w o r d ” w ere p ro ­
duced and could in turn be used to prod u ce associatio n s, and so on, to
the p o in t w here even hieroglyp hs p rovided m aterial for p sych o a n a ly tic
d eco d in g .1' But Jung w as unable to hear that he had him self b ec o m e a
telephon ic instrum ent o f torture. “ H er suffering had n o rhym e o r reason
fo r her, it w as a ‘ h iero g lyp h ic’ illness. T h e fa ct that she had been locked
up for fourteen years, so that ‘not even [her] breath could e sca p e ,’ seem ed
to be n othin g m ore than an ex aggerated declaration o f her fo rce d in stitu ­
tion alization . T h e sufferin g th rou gh ‘ m outh pieces th at are held in from
the outside,’ seem s to refer to the ‘telep h o n e,’ or vo ice s.” 1’
P sychoan alysis does not cut across the hum an sciences from an ou tside
called lan gu age; it traverses the field o f p sych op h ysics, w o rk in g w ith the
latter’s prem ises and m aterial. T h e shift o f focu s from lan gu age as system
to speech does not im ply that ind ivid u ality has b ecom e the o b ject o f in­
vestigations. “ N o on e m akes an a rb itrary erro r in speech” — this alread y-
established fa c t in anatom ical and lingu istic system s is b ro u g h t to bear
on the sin gular system o f the u n con sciou s.4" T h e ind ivid u al falls in the
crossfire b etw een p sych op h ysics and psychoanalysis; in its place is an
em pty point o f intersection constitu ted by statistical gen erality and un­
con sciou s singularity. A s an instance o f in itial-co n son an t-syllab ic c o n fu ­
sion a nd o f Freud repression, a p articu lar co lleag u e is fully classified.
W hereas ind ivid u als consisted o f m atured and unified speech and w r it­
 RE BUS 281

ing, individual cases are specified by the scattered debris o f their lan gu ag e
use. Uniqueness in the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 is a lw a y s a result o f the
d ecom po sition o f a n on ym ou s, m ass-prod u ced p rod u cts. A c c o rd in g to
R ilke, tw o “ com pletely sim ilar” knives bought by tw o sch o o lb o y s on the
same day are only “ rem otely sim ilar” a w eek later.41 T o use therefore
means to w ear d ow n : out o f industrially gu aran teed sim ilarity com e
b rok en , but sin gular things. B ecause these things, on ly a little the w orse
for w ear, gather together w h o le case histories at once, the d etectives
Holm es and Freud carry the day. D r. W atson doesn ’t have a ch an ce w hen
he attem pts to foil his m aster w ith the fo llo w in g ch allen ge: “ ‘ I have heard
you say that it is difficult fo r a man to have any o b ject in daily use w ith o u t
lea vin g the im press o f his in d ivid u ality upon it in such a w a y th a t a
trained observer m ight read it. N o w , 1 have here a w atch w h ich has re­
cently com e in to m y possession . . .’ ” 42 T h e scratches on the w atch p r o ­
vide the cocain e user H olm es w ith the w elcom e op p ortu n ity to turn p age
after page in the secret fam ily history o f his con stan t co m p a n io n . A s
Bleuler recogn ized , the sciences o f gatherin g evidence “ certain ly have a
future.” From h an d w ritin g , from “ its style, indeed from the w ear o f a
pair o f shoes,” it is possible to deduce the w h o le person.4’ B leu ler’s as­
sistant, Jung, investigated the p sych o tic w ear and tear on the finished
p ro d u ct o f lan guage.
T h e cocain e user Freud, how ever, in his great sm all-m indedness, w o u ld
begin an a n alysis by consid erin g a n eu rotic m isuse o f th e finished p ro d u ct
that is the alp habet. A tw en ty-fou r-year-old patient on the cou ch in the
B erggasse told “ the fo llo w in g sto ry from the fifth y ear o f his c h ild h o o d ” :
“ H e is sittin g in the garden o f a sum m er villa, on a sm all ch air beside his
aunt, w h o is teach in g him th e letters o f th e alp habet. H e is in difficulties
o v e r the difference betw een m and n, and he asks his aunt to tell him h o w
to k n o w on e from the other. H is aunt points ou t to him that the m has a
w h o le piece m ore than the n — the third stro k e.” 44 T h e patient sees this as
a rom an tic ch ild h o o d scene, one that brings back sum m er and the h isto ri­
cal happiness o f b eing alp h abetized by the M o th e r ’s M o u th . T h e an alyst
does not dispute the reliability o f the m em ory, bu t d o e s q u estio n its
im aginary significance. H ad he d on e the form er, Freud w o u ld have been
like the p h ysio lo gists o f reading, w h o never en cou n tered any con fu sion
betw een m and n (only con fu sion betw een n and r, and m and tv). B e­
cause he w as concern ed m ore w ith the differences betw een letters than
w ith letters, and m o re w ith letters than w ith significan ce, Freud tran s­
posed the intervals in a lan gu age to the intervals in sp eech . A t the very
place w here S tep hani’s m oth ers’ m ouths slid lustfully and con tin u ou sly
from m to n, Freud confirm s a harsh bin ary o p p o sitio n . T h e o p p o sitio n
betw een m and rt stands in as a “ sym b o lic representation ” fo r an oth er
282 1900

op p ositio n that can and m ust be w ritten as the p atien t’s rebus. “ For just
as at that tim e he w an ted to k n o w the difference betw een m and rt, so
later he w as a n x io u s to find o u t the difference betw een b oys and girls, and
w o u ld h ave been very w illin g for this p a rticu la r au n t to be the on e to
teach him. H e also discovered then th at the difference w as a sim ilar o n e—
that the boy, to o , has a w h o le piece m ore than the g ir l.” 45
An inscription as m eaningless as it is u n forgettab le can thus be de­
coded. T h e trium ph o f the Freudian tran sposition o f m edia is to have
m ade it possible to solve sin gu lar problem s o f d ifferentiation with an in ­
d ividual exp erim ental subject. P sychoph ysicists had certain ly recogn ized
that small letters at x-heigh t “ are m ost often su b ject to c o n fu sio n ” ; 46 b u t
n o o n e had asked w h y individual subjects (them selves as- w ell) p rod u ced
one kind o f m istake and no other. E bb in ghau s w as on ly surprised that
nonsense ex h ib ited “ very significan t and n early in com p reh en sib le d if­
ferences” in w h a t people retained (as the tw en ty-fo u r-year-o ld d em o n ­
strated). G utzm ann w as led on ly as far as “ the discovery o f certain sus­
pected trains o f th o u g h t” by the “ p h o n o g rap h ic te sts” he co n d u cte d , in
that exp erim en ta l su b jects a u tom atically and su sp iciou sly h eard o r w ro te
nonsense as m eaningful w o rd s.47 But any aspects o f test m aterial that
cou ld n ot be evaluated p h ysio lo gically o r ty p o grap h ica lly w e r e discarded.
T h e discarded m aterial w as so c o p io u s and so literal that n o on e, in clu d ­
ing the tw en ty-fou r-year-old , c o u ld approach it save as a n ovice. T h is is
the reason fo r p sych oan alysis. M aterial discarded by p sych op h ysics can
be resorted and then d ecod ed . F reud’ s d iscou rse w as a response n o t to
individual m iseries but to a discourse n etw ork that ex h a u stively records
n onsense, its purpose being to inscribe people with the n e tw o r k ’s logic o f
the signifier.
P sych o an alysis m ade into som eth ing sign ifican t— indeed, into the sig ­
nifier itself— the nonsensical attribu tion o f nonsense to the fa c t that
som eone confu sed precisely the letters m and rt. A n o p p o sitio n o f letters
yields the m inim al signifier o f a sexu alized b o d y. From this po in t o n , the
p atien t k n o w s that alp h abetizatio n w a s on ly a screen fo r his sex u a lity and
that sexu ality is on ly a m etap hor f o r the elem entary o p p o sitio n . W h a t is
scan d alou s in Freud is n o t pan sexu ality, b u t the return to a lu cid and ta n ­
gib le play o f letters o f an eroticism that, as Spirit and N a tu re , had p er­
vad ed the so-called w o rld circa 1800. T h e ph allus is as nonsensical and
b lo ck -letter-lik e as the sm all m ark th a t the m has and the rt does n o t
have. N o h a n d w ritin g o f a con tin u ou s in d ivid u al can get a ro u n d the
latter difference, n or can any illusion in the w a r betw een the sexes survive
the form er difference. W h a t the b o y ’s au n t began as p ed agogical ed u c a ­
tion ends in a system o f n o ta tio n that abolish es p e d ag o gy and the soul.
 REBUS 283

W h a t m ust b e sa id , w ith A risto tle , is th a t it is n o t th e so u l th a t sp e a k s, b u t m an

w h o sp e a k s by m e a n s o f his s o u l— as lo n g a s w e ta k e in to a c c o u n t th a t h e h a s
received th is la n g u a g e , a n d th a t in o rd e r to su s ta in it h e th ro w s in m u c h m o re
th a n his so u l: ev en his in stin c ts, w h o se g r o u n d re so n a te s in th e d e p th s o n ly to
se n d b a c k th e e c h o o f th e signifier. It is such th a t w h e n th e e c h o re tu r n s th e
s p e a k e r is d elighted and re sp o n d s w ith th e p ra ise o f a n e te rn a l ro m a n tic is m .
“ W h en th e so u l speaks, th e n ” . . . th e so u l d o e s sp e a k , th a t is, . . . “ o h ! it is n o
lo n g e r th e sou l th a t sp e a k s.” You c a n h e a r i t; th e illu sio n w ill n o t la st lo n g .4'

All o f F reud’s case histories dem on strate that the rom an ticism o f the
soul has yielded to a m aterialism o f w ritten signs. W hen a patient “ d e c o ­
rates his w ritin g and notes w ith an S ,” it is only because S is “ the first
letter o f his m oth er’s nam e” (and n ot, say, an abb reviation o f a u th o r­
ship).4’ W hen the W o lf-M a n , recou ntin g a d ream , says E spe rath er than
the hallucinated W espe [“ w a s p ” ], the am pu tation o f the initial letter rep­
resents a castration com plex that is ty p o grap h ic, and the rebus w o rd E sp e
is the abb reviation S.P., o r the prop er name o f the W o lf-M a n .50 Precisely
because they d o n ot occu r in nature, letters are the keys to the u n co n ­
scious. T h ey can cel o u t con sciou s intention and herm eneutic u n derstan d ­
ing in order to ex p o se people to their su b jection to lan gu age. B ut m eth ­
od o lo g ica lly this m eans that Freud (to use a pervasive m etap h or o f 1900)
w as a proofread er. Instead o f reading o v e r m istakes because o f his c o m ­
plete alp h ab etizatio n , he seeks o u t m istakes.51 In line w ith such p ro fessio n ­
alism , in the B erggasse m istakes such as ( W) E sp e are neither p rod u ced nor
recorded in w ritin g . T h e patients sp eak; as a g o o d in terview p sych o lo g ist,
the d o c to r avoids ta k in g notes d u rin g the session. O th e rw ise he w o u ld
only disturb the flow o f speech, m ake “ a d etrim en tal,” that is, m eanin gful,
“ selection ” and d istract his free-floating atten tion w ith b u reau cratic
tasks.52 P sychoan alysis provides the sin gu lar exam ple o f a d iscou rse net­
w o rk that has w ritin g as its o b jec t but w ritin g ’s com p lete o p p o site as
m ethod. Even this rebus can be solved.

J u s t as th e p a tie n t m u st re la te e v e ry th in g th a t his se lf-o b se rv a tio n c a n d e te c t, a n d

k e e p b a c k all th e lo g ic a l a n d affectiv e o b je c tio n s th a t seek to in d u c e him to m ak e
a se le c tio n fro m a m o n g th e m , so th e d o c to r m u st p u t h im self in a p o s itio n to
m a k e use o f ev ery th in g h e is to ld fo r th e p u rp o se s o f in te rp re ta tio n . . . w ith o u t
s u b s titu tin g a c en s o rs h ip o f h is o w n for th e se lec tio n th a t th e p a tie n t h a s fo rg o n e.
To p u t it in a fo r m u la , h e m u st tu rn his o w n u n c o n sc io u s like a re c e p tiv e o rg a n
to w a rd s th e tra n s m ittin g u n c o n sc io u s o f th e p a tie n t. H e m u st a d ju st h im s e lf to
th e p a tie n t a s a tele p h o n e receiver is a d ju s te d to th e tra n s m ittin g m ic ro p h o n e .
J u s t a s th e receiver c o n v e rts b a c k in to so u n d -w a v e s th e e le c tric o sc illa tio n s in th e
te le p h o n e line w h ich w e re s e t u p by s o u n d w aves, so th e d o c to r ’s u n c o n s c io u s is
a b le , fro m th e d e riv a tiv e s o f th e u n c o n sc io u s n e s s w h ic h a re c o m m u n ic a te d to
h im , to re c o n s tru c t th a t u n c o n sc io u s , w hich has d e te rm in e d th e p a tie n t’s fre e
a sso c ia tio n s.55
284 1900

T h e p a ra d o x o f w ritin g w ith o u t script can on ly be solved w ith tech ­

n ological media. Freud, determ ined to sacrifice his k n o w in g su bjectivity,
produces a tran sposition o f m edia o n to him self: his ears b ecom e a tele­
ph one receiver. A s it is w ritten , men have ears on ly in ord er n ot to hear
(and to tran sform everyth in g into sense). O n ly the con n ection betw een
electroaco u stical transducers gu aran tees the reception o f a full spectrum
o f noise, on e that is inform ative to the degree that it is w hite. O n ce m ore,
the w o rd is “ Listen to the Sacred V ib ra tio n s.” A ll co n scio u s “ co m m u ­
n icatin g” betw een the tw o cou n ts o n ly as a keyed rebus tran sm itted from
one u n con sciou s to the other. Its m anifest sense is nonsense; Freud the
telephon e receiver picks out the p a rap ra x es that w o u ld be m ere debris
under a po stu late o f sense.
In order to be able to fish m in o r S.IP. as telltale, interspersed signifiers
o u t o f a flo w o f speech that is m erely the intim idation and resistance, the se­
d uction and d istortion , o f a consciou sness, the d octor m ust have recorded
them in ad vance. Freud’s telephon e a n a lo gy does n ot g o far en ou gh . A l­
though it avoids th e traditional record in g device o f w ritin g , p s y c h o ­
analysis w o rk s like a p h on o grap h that in its d evelop ed form cou ples
electroaco u stical transducers w ith m em ory. O n ly sou n d recorders can
register sp oken ty p o g rap h ic errors (an o x y m o ro n ic c o n c e p t in itself).
Benjam in syn chron ized p sych oan alysis an d film w ith th e argu m en t
that the form er “ isolated and m ade an a lyza b le thin gs w hich had h ereto­
fo re floated along un noticed in the b ro a d stream o f p ercep tio n ,” w h ereas
the other “ fo r the entire spectrum o f o p tica l, and n ow also aco u stica l,
perception . . . has b ro u g h t a b o u t a sim ilar deepening o f a p p e rcep tio n .” 54
T h a t doesn ’t quite d o justice to the facts. T ech n ologies and sciences o f
media tran sposition d o n ot sim ply exten d hum an cap acities; they d eter­
mine recording thresh olds. In the p h ysio lo gy o f the senses these thresh­
olds cannot be determ ined to o ex actly. Freud’s treatm ent o f dream and
m em ory im ages is n ot the first o r on ly instance o f his ex clu sio n o f the
w h o le op tica l realm . T h e fa c t that the d o c to r and h ysteric patien t are
n o t allow ed to lo o k at on e an oth er m eans that the cou ch (in the best
N ietzschean m anner) is a pure realm o f hearing. Both p eop le are in the
sam e room , so that eye and oth er form s o f c o n ta c t w o u ld be ex p ected .
But because m ouths and ears have b ecom e electro a co u stical tran sducers,
the session rem ains a sim ulated lon g-d istance call betw een tw o psychic
apparatuses (in F reu d ’s fine phrase). P sychoan alysis has n o va g u e p a ra l­
lels to film ; it has m uch m o re p recisely learned the lesson o f tech n ological
sound recorders. Its p h o n o grap h y o f u n con scious sound w aves fishes, not
in the w id e stream o f percep tion , bu t on ly am o n g acou stical data.
T h e catch is restricted to discrete elem ents. N o t only the im agin ary sig­
nificance, but a lso the real aspects o f discourse are exclu d ed . Freud had
 RE BUS 285

as little to d o w ith the p h ysio lo gy o f speech (precisely, that studied by

his teacher, E. W. B rucke) as he did w ith escapin g to th e im ages in the
m ovies. Fem ale hysterics, those born starlets, c o u ld run th ro u g h , instead
o f the single “ o h ,” the m any real pleasures and pains o f sp eech on the
c o u c h — from spastic haltin g to stuttering, clicking the ton gu e, gasp ing,
o r m uteness— but the sup posed ly filterless receiver filtered them all ou t.
Freud’s inim itably forth righ t justification: he “ co u ld n o t,” u n lik e any b oy
on the street, “ im itate” these real aspects o f speech.55 T h e on e w h o on ce
diagnosed his o w n “ m oto ric a p h a sia ” recorded, in a com p lete reversal o f
Berliner’s gra m o p h o n e, the letters o f so u n d — ev eryth in g that w a s alread y
w ritten , but o n ly that, in the flow o f speech.56
M o vies and the gram ophon e rem ain the u n con sciou s o f the u n co n ­
scious. P sych o an alysis, the scien ce b orn w ith them , co n fro n ts sequences
o f im ages w ith a prim al repression and sequences o f sound w ith their d is­
tortion into chain s o f signifiers. O n ly the d a y w h en psych oan alysis b e ­
com es psych och em istry— F reu d ’s d ream and the nigh tm are o f o th e r s 57—
m ight w itness the repression o f this repression as w ell.

A transposition o f m edia that transposes im ages and soun ds into

letters d o e s n ot sto p there. By the force o f its o w n lo g ic it finally tran s­
ferred the letters in to b o o k s. T h is is the relatio n betw een an a lytic practice
and theory. W h a t w o u ld have disturbed free-floating atten tion d u rin g the
session later occu rs a fte r all: Freud reaches fo r his pen. A s W alter M u sch g
recogn ized early on , Freud b elon ged “ to the m od ern m o vem en t o f G e r ­
man letters.” 51
W ritin g circa 190 0 m eans being w ith o u t voice and w ritin g w ith the
alp habet. Fundam entally, psych oan alysts m ust k n o w w hen to rem ain si­
lent vis-a-vis their w ord -ju m b le generators. N o t on ly fo r “ persons w ith
hysterical m utism ” did w ritin g b ecom e a “ v ic a rio u s ” m eans o f ex p res­
sion; ” the m oto ric aphasic behind the cou ch did n ot suffer from agrap h ia,
either. W ritten case histories m ade a “ talkin g c u re ” in to — literature. T h e
exp ression itself sh o w s h o w this h app ened . Freud had n o such strikin g
expression fo r his inven tion ; his first p a tien t, A n n a O . (alias B erth a vo n
Pappenheim ), gave her “ n ew ty p e o f treatm en t the nam e ‘ ta lk in g c u re ’ [in
E nglish].” 60 T h e w rite r in Freud had o n ly to put the foreign w o rd s on
p a p e r and h o n o r them by his definition.
But this relationship betw een speech and w ritin g , prom p ter and a u ­
thor, so fundam ental betw een Freud and his hysteric patien ts, does not
m ake him a Schlegel o r A n selm u s, o r Pappenheim a D o ro th e a o r Serpen­
tina. T h e sim ple fa ct that Anna O . “ du rin g this period o f her illness re­
m arkab ly sp oke and u n derstood on ly E nglish,” 61 separated her from a
M o th e r’s M o u th that cou ld w h isp er even San skrit texts in H igh G erm an .
286 1900

T h e discourse n etw ork o f 1900 determ ined that Freud w o u ld not on ce

put the exp ression “ ta lkin g cu re” into G erm an . P sychoan alysis is n o t a
tran slating universalization that m akes the speech o f m any w om en into
the origin ary lan gu age o f O n e W om an. In p ra ctic e as in th eory, in listen­
ing as in record in g, p sych oan alysis rem ained the feed b ack o f d ata that
circum scrib ed an individual case. “ If” F reud’s fam ou s h ysteric patient
should “ by ch an ce” co m e to read the Fragm ent o f her analysis, she w o u ld
read n oth in g that she and o n ly she did n ot “ alread y k n o w .” But becau se
o r in spite o f this, an “ em b arrassm en t” aw aits h e r :62 the parts o f her
speech that have fou n d their w a y into print are n ot the exp ression s o f a
naive lay p h ilosop h y o f the sort that Schlegel ascribed to w om en , b u t of
the o rgan s and fu n ctio n s o f her sexuality.
The m eticulous Freud calls his a ctiv ity the “ w ritten record ” and “ a c ­
cord in gly n o t a b so lu tely — p h o n o g ra p h ica lly — fa ith fu l.” But in this e x ­
plicit co m p etitio n it has such a “ high degree o f d ep en d a b ility ” that
W ild en bruch w o u ld fo r o n ce be m ade n ervou s by literatu re.63 E very m e­
dium that brings the hidden to the light o f day and forces the past to
sp eak contrib u tes, by gath erin g evid ence, to the death o f M a n . T his d is­
tinguishes psych oan alytic case-study novels from the classical-rom an tic
ep ic form . W hen G o eth e pu t togeth er his heroines fro m the differen t indi­
vidual features o f different w o m e n , inviting all fem inine readers to id en ­
tify them selves w ith the W om an , the m od els, a lth ou gh they m ay have
seen them selves robbed o f eyes, hair, o r m outh s, hardly had the fe a r or
pleasure o f b eing publicly recogn ized . T h e discourse n e tw o rk o f 1800
had n o need o f form al, legal guidelines a b o u t au th orial d iscretion , be­
cause it volu ntarily, o r ph ilosop h ically, saw the ind ivid u al as genus. N o t
until the cu rren t cen tu ry did p o p u la r literature begin by d isclaim in g any
sim ilarity betw een fictional heroes and livin g m od els. O n e p o p u la r n ovel­
ist, T h o m a s M ann, w as d raw n into an exem p lary trial in 190 5 and had to
d efend B u d d en b ro o ks against the charge o f being a rom an a c le f by
stressing the transposition o f media as his artistic achievem ent.64 In the
same year, an oth er novel “ F ra g m en t” began: “ I am aw are th a t— in this
city, at least— there are m any ph ysician s w h o (revoltin g th o u g h it m ay
seem) ch oose to read a case history o f this kind n ot as a con trib u tion to
the p sych o p ath o lo gy o f neuroses, but as a rom an a c le f designed fo r their
private d electation . I can assure readers o f this species that every case his­
to ry that I have o ccasion to publish in the future w ill be secured again st
their persp icacity by sim ilar gu aran tees o f secrecy, even th o u gh this reso­
lution is bou nd to p u t quite e x tra o rd in ary restrictio n s u pon m y ch o ice o f
m aterial.” 65
T h e novelist Freud thus does n o t rule out the n ovelistic readin g o f his
case histories. H e sim ply d isapproves. It is possible, b u t d istastefu l, to d e­
 RE BUS 2 87

cod e p sych oan alytic d ecod ings o f individual cases. Such are the in tim id a ­
tion tactics o f o n e w h o turned the su b ject in d ex in M ay rin ge r-M e re r,
excuse m e, M erin ger-M ayer, into a secret-person in d ex. Such is the p ro ­
tection o f data records, w hich are exh au stive on ly because he, the d iscreet
d o cto r, in a m ove o f fine sym m etry, fo rb a d e his patients to have any d is­
cretion. F reud b rok e off the analysis o f “ a high official w h o w as b ou n d by
his oath o f office n o t to com m u nicate certain things because they w ere
state s e c r e t s . T h e shift from bu reau cratic ethos to p sych op h ysics, from
an oath o f office to the exh au stin g o f m aterial, co u ld hard ly occu r m ore
drastically. W ritin g circa 190 0 necessarily conflicted w ith rules o f d iscre­
tion — sim ply because it w as n o lon ger the im agination that dictated .
Freud w o u ld so o n e r ren o u n ce w ritin g b o o k s than su b ject signifiers to the
kind o f d istortion s that o n ce translated recogn izab le, b o u rg eo is V eron icas
into the pure signified o f a Serpentina.

If th e d is to rtio n s a r e slig h t, th ey fa il in th e ir o b je c t o f p ro te c tin g th e p a tie n t fro m

in d isc re e t c u rio s ity ; w h ile if they g o b e y o n d this th ey re q u ire to o g re a t a sacrifice,
fo r th ey d e stro y th e in te llig ib ility o f th e m ate ria l, w h ic h d e p e n d s fo r its c o h e re n c e
precisely u p o n th e sm all d e ta ils o f real life. A n d fro m this la tte r c irc u m s ta n c e fo l­
low s th e p a ra d o x ic a l t r u th th a t it is fa r e asie r to d iv u lg e th e p a tie n t’s m o st in ti­
m a te secret? th a n th e m o6t in n o c e n t a n d triv ia l fa cts a b o u t him ; fo r, w h e re a s th e
fo rm e r w o u ld n o t t h r o w a n y lig h t o n his id en tity , th e la tte r, b y w h ic h h e is g e n e r­
ally re co g n ize d , w o u ld m ak e it o b v io u s to ev ery o n e .67

W hat distinguishes case histories from P oetry is the fa ct that the depths
o f the soul d o not b etray the identities o f the persons described to readers
addicted to d ecod ing. T h a t Freud did n ot ad vance as far as the p h o n o ­
gra p h , w hich w ith p articu lars like the vo ice o r b reath w o u ld have b e­
trayed p erso n s’ identities to even the m ost naive m edia consu m ers, is the
very structure o f w riting. O n ly sm all, factu al details rem ain as indices,
w hich as p eop le’s sym b o lic aspect inscribe them in p u b lic n etw o rk s o f
discourse. C ertain ly F reud’s novels leave “ n o nam e stan din g w hich cou ld
put a lay reader o n to the right tra c k .’’ ** B ut because p sych o a n a lysis is
concerned w ith gath erin g evidence o f the letter, nam es rem ain essential.
W ith o u t the p la y o f signifiers, w h o se differences a re as in com p rehen sible
as they are im portan t, u n con sciou s co n n ectio n s w o u ld be d estroyed.
U nder the hesitantly established heading, “ T h e Presentation o f M a n ”
in Freud, M u sch g w rites o f the “ rem ark ab ly a n o n ym o u s ch aracters that
o c c u p y his w ritin g s.” *’ It is indeed a strange anon ym ity that consists o f
indices and nam es. O bsessional n eurotics ap p ear as the R a t-M a n or
W o lf-M a n ,70 hysterics as A n n a O ., Frau E m m y v. N ., D o ra, Fraulein
E lizabeth v. R. F or these figures the texts develop neither im aginative im ­
ages n or novels o f B ild u n g — none o f the representations o f m an in the
Spirit o f 1800, in oth er w ord s. O n ly a mass o f sp ok en m aterial is p re­
288 1900

sented, throu gh w h ich u n con sciou s inscriptions run their jagged , telltale
co u rse. T h e rebu s is w ritten d o w n as rebus. Because Freud’s o w n texts
w ill be scrutinized by distasteful colleag u es, the texts en co d e each rebus a
second tim e a cco rd in g to the rules o f m edia tran sp o sition . T h u s w h erever
a rebus appears to be solved, anoth er on e begins (alo n g w ith y et an oth er
b o o k on Freud). A n y o n e w h o can d ecipher the initials o f the W o lf-M a n
in the castrated w o rd (W )E s p e , just as th e form id ab le S h erlock H olm es
discovered the place name Ballarat in the o rd in ary w o rd rat,7' has still n ot
fixed upon a referent, to say n oth in g o f a m an behind the w o rd s. Sim m el’s
ob jective interpretation a llo w s for solu tion s quite oth er than those o f the
author; Freud perm itted and p ractices “ C o n stru ctio n s in A n a lysis,’ ’ 72
w hich beyon d psych o a n a lytic p ra ctice determ ined the con stru ction s o f
his w riting as w ell. T h e surnam e o f the W o lf-M a n has on ly recently been
revealed. For seventy years it w as an yon e’s guess as to w h eth er the initials
S. P. corresp on d ed to the W o lf-M a n ’s passp ort o r w h eth er th ey w ere the
discreet fictio n o f a w riter w h o had en cod ed a solved reb u s a second tim e.
Small fa c ts like initials o r abb reviated nam es are thus qu ite literally the
co n ta ct surface on w hich tw o discourses o p p o se a n d tou ch on e another:
on on e side the speech o f the p a tien ts, on the o th er side the w ritin g v o c a ­
tion o f their d octor. It is finally im possible to determ ine w hich o f the tw o
on e m ight be readin g at any given m om en t, sim ply because inscription s
on on e side trace th rou gh to the reverse side. T h e c o n ta c t su rfa c e — as is
o n ly p rop er in a discourse n etw ork th a t does justice to the m aterial a s ­
pects o f m edia— consists sim ply o f paper. W heth er in Freud’s sense or
n ot, his paper is and rem ains the place w h ere the d iscou rse n e tw o rk o f
1 900 com es into c o n ta c t w ith people. Either the patients really sp o k e as if
speech w ere a m asquerade for the rebus, o r p sych oan alysis selected from
the flo w o f the vo ice on ly w h a t it could tran spose into signifiers and then
tran spose a secon d tim e to foil rom an a c le f readers. In any case, p s y c h o ­
analysis occu p ies the system ic position taken by Poetry in the discourse
n etw ork o f 1800. T h e position consists in the place o f initiation . If voices
and dream im ages are to be grounded in the lo g ic o f the signifier, they
must first cross the threshold o f p sych oan alysis; if, in return, any rituals
o f the sign o r p sych op h ysics are to be in scribed on in d ivid u al b od ies, they
must first cross the thresh old o f psych oan alysis. T h e d iscou rse n etw o rk of
190 0 places all discourse against the b ack gro u n d o f w h ite n oise; the pri­
mal soup itself appears in p sych oan alysis, but on ly to be articu lated and
thus sublim ated via w ritin g prop er.73

T h ere is n oth in g further to say abou t the w id er effects o f such a strat­

egy. T h e only n ontrivial problem is one o f m ethod. If Freud’s techn iqu e
con sists in tran sp o sin g o p tica l and aco u stical stream s o f d a ta in to w ord s
 REBUS 289

and w ord s into the signifier scrip t o f his ow n texts, then his universal s c i­
ence co n fro n ts on ly on e superfluity o r im possibility: d a ta th at h a v e a l­
ready assum ed w ritten form . W h erever articu lation has a lread y o ccu rred ,
“ the dissection and division o f som eth ing that w o u ld oth erw ise be lost in
the prim al so u p ” is unnecessary. T h u s Freud granted texts, regardless o f
w h o their authors w ere, a special status. W h eth er o r n ot the texts w ere
distinguished by literary hon ors w as secon d ary to a certain testim on ial
fu n ctio n .74
T h e p a ct betw een Freud and the p e o p le w h o believed th at d ream s
could be rea d , d esp ite the o b jectio n s o f all ph ilosoph ers, w o u ld have had
no discursive su p p ort if the sp ok en dream sto ries o f patients had n o t been
m edia-transposed by literary dream texts and confirm ed by the ord in ary
docum en tary m eans o f pen and paper. T h e m ere w ritten existence o f
Jensen’s Gradiva, a n ovella abou t mania and dream s, w a s sufficient to d e­
fend Freud against a ttack . T h a t it is n o t o f p articu larly en d u rin g valu e,
that its a u th or “ refused his co -o p era tio n ” 75 w hen ap p ro a ch ed and thus
w o u ld n ot personally a u th orize its tran sp o sition into the m edium o f p sy ­
choan alysis, is insignificant. O b je ctive interpretation can d o w ith o u t a u ­
thorial assent. Freud thus reached th e fo llo w in g con clu sion on th e rela ­
tionship betw een w riters and analysts: “ We p ro b ab ly d ra w from the
sam e source and w o r k upon the sam e o b ject, ea ch o f us by an oth er
m ethod. A n d the agreem ent o f o u r results seem s to gu aran tee that w e
have both w o rk ed correctly. O u r p roced u re consists in the co n scio u s o b ­
servation o f abn orm al m ental processes in oth er p eo p le so as to be a b le to
elicit and an n oun ce their law s. T h e a u th o r n o dou bt proceeds differently.
He directs his attention to the u n con sciou s in his o w n m ind, he listens to
its possible d evelopm ents and lends them artistic exp ression instead o f
suppressing them by con sciou s criticism . T h u s he exp erien ces from h im ­
self w h at w e learn from oth ers— the law s w h ich th e activities o f th is u n ­
con sciou s m ust obey. But he need n o t state these law s, n or even be clearly
aw are o f them ; as a result o f the to lera n ce o f his intelligen ce, they are
in corporated w ithin his creatio n s.” 7*
T h e same source, the same o b ject, the sam e result— w riters and p s y ch o ­
analysts m oved into a p ro x im ity equal to that w hich joined the T h in k e rs
and Poets o f 1800. Yet the reverse con clu sion is eq u ally p o ssib le and lo g i­
cal: nam ely, that w riters end up on the side o f the patients. If Freud’s p a ­
tients and the h ero o f the novella share the sam e d ream s, p a ran o id stru c ­
tu res, and hysterias, then these m ust b elo n g to the w r ite r ’s u n co n scio u s as
w ell. T h ere is on e sm all difference, how ever: h ysteria sp e a k s, b u t Jensen
publishes. M ania a n d D ream s can n o lon ger be attribu ted to an in d iv id ­
ual case. T h e m aterial alread y present in the m edium that su p ports the
p sych oan alyst has achieved “ artistic ex p ressio n .” R ather than p roceed in g
290 1900

accord in g to the rules o f herm eneutics and assum ing that fictional heroes
n aturally dream the dream s o f their a u th ors, Freud finds in G radiva w r it­
ten dream s “ that have never been dream t at all, th at w ere invented b y a
w riter and attributed to fictional ch aracters in the c o n te x t o f a sto ry.” 77
T h erefo re , there is n o need to portion out statistically d istribu ted n o n ­
sense to individual cases. Jensen, n o d ifferent in this from F reu d , is sep a­
rated by a thin but im perm eab le piece o f paper from its reverse side, from
m ania and dream s, and is a b o v e the susp icion o f being their referent. H is
relation to th e prim al sou p is n o to n e o f p articip atio n , bu t sim u lation. For
invented ind ivid u als he invents dream s that in spite o f this squ ared fiction
“ con tain in em b od ied fo r m ” all the “ la w s” of the u n con sciou s. L a w s, let
us n ote, and n ot, say (as on e often prefers to read) conten ts. W ith its cen ­
tral m etaphor, the burial o f Pom peii under lava and ash, Jensen’s novella
does n ot sym bo lize this o r th at repressed co n ten t, b u t rath er p ro v id e s a
“ p a rab le” o f the m etap sych olo gical process o f repression itself. “ T h ere
really is n o better a n a lo g y .” 7*
In distin ction from the d o c to r (Freud on ce m ore leaves out the m ystery
o f his self-analysis), the w riter d oes n ot ex tra p o la te the law s o f the u n ­
con sciou s from o th ers’ m ou th s, w h ic h a re u n able to say w h y th e ir sense
becom es nonsense and their nonsense sense. A strange listen ing in o n his
ow n m ental processes gives him n ot on ly their repressed conten ts but b e­
yon d that their sign ifyin g logic. O n ce again , then, the w riter seeks out a
n orn -like au th ority, w hich adm inisters the rules o f all w ritin g , b u t b e­
cause they are rules, it rem ains unnecessary and im possible to “ p ro ­
n o u n ce” the u n con sciou s law s that have been discovered. It is enough
that they have been given a m aterial locatio n : paper, on w h ich discursive
rules such as repression are “ em b od ied .”
In w ritten m aterial, th erefore, the localization that defines p s y c h o ­
analysis in the discourse n etw ork o f 1 900 is left o u t— because it has al­
rea d y o c c u rre d . If the diverse local centers o f the b ra in -p h ysio lo gical
lo caliza tio n d octrin e are linked together in the typ ew riter, p sych o a n a ly ­
sis— m ysteriously true to its n eu ro p h ysiological b egin nin gs— reverses the
fo u n d in g relationship. Its textu al theory replaces that b o d y w ith a type-
w riterly corpus.
T h e te xt as em bod ied p sych oan alysis d oes n ot distinguish the literary
o r even the classical. It is sim ply the effe ct o f a m edium th at govern s the
an alyst him self, first w hen he reads the flow o f the vo ice as a rebus, and
second w h en he w rites. In o rd e r to achieve this effect, it is sufficien t fo r a
m ania, rather than flood F reud’s senses w ith hysterical visu ality and the
sp o k en faqade o f d ream s, to h ave b een w ritten d o w n . If and b ecau se a
w o rk called M em oirs o f M y N ervo u s Illness is present in the form o f a
 RE BUS 291

b ook, p sych oan alysis treats it very differently than it w o u ld a m en tally ill
person o n th e couch .
F reud’ s “ P sych o -an alytic N o te s on an A u to b io grap h ica l A c c o u n t o f a
C ase o f P aran oia” seems at first to be a com p rom ise solu tio n arrived at in
an attem pt to extend his p ractice to cases w h o , in c o n tra st to n eurotics,
can n o t w an d er arou n d freely and so (if they have n ot lo st lan gu age a lto ­
gether) can o n ly send o u t m essages in b ottles. P aran oiacs can n o t be a n a ­
lyzed; they “ can n o t be com pelled to overcom e th eir internal resistances,
and . . . in any case they only say w h a t they ch o o se to say.” Such, h o w ­
ever, ev er since P ilate’s o ye.ypa<J>a yeypa<J>a (“ W h a t I have w ritten I have
w ritten ” ; John 1 9 : 22), is the very definition o f a text. W h ich is w h y “ pre­
cisely” in the case o f a p a ran o iac “ a w ritten report o r a printed case his­
tory can take the place o f personal acq u ain tan ce w ith the patien t” (read:
.his sp o k en sto ry).7’
So m uch fo r the in trod u ction to and justification fo r the a n a lytic act.
By the end everyth in g read s m uch differently. Schreber’s b o o k , instead o f
simply rep lacin g the flow o f the h ysteric’s vo ice, attains all the h on ors o f
theory, in that the M em oirs o f M y N erv o u s Illness a lso con tain s w h a t
is indeed m em orab le: the em bod ied law s o f the u n con sciou s. A s w ith
Jensen, the w rite r F reud greets as a colleag u e, alb eit o n e w h o w a s at the
tim e a patien t in the Sonnenstein asylum in Pirna.

S ince I n e ith e r fe a r th e c riticism o f o th e r s n o r s h rin k fro m c ritic iz in g m y se lf, I

h ave n o m otive fo r a v o id in g th e m e n tio n o f a sim ila rity w h ic h m ay po ssib ly d a m ­
age o u r lib id o th e o ry in th e e stim a tio n o f m a n y o f m y re a d e rs. S c h re b e r’s “ ra y s o f
G o d ,” w h ic h a r e m a d e u p o f a c o n d e n s a tio n o f th e s u n ’s ra y s, o f n erv e-fib res, a n d
o f s p e rm a ta z o a , a re in re a lity n o th in g else th a n a c o n c re te re p re s e n ta tio n a n d p r o ­
jec tio n o u tw a r d s o f lib id in a l c a th e x e s; a n d th ey th u s len d h is d e lu sio n s a strik in g
c o n fo rm ity w ith o u r th e o ry . . . . th ese a n d m a n y o t h e r d e ta ils o f S c h re b e r’s d e lu ­
sio n al s tru c tu re so u n d a lm o s t like e n d o p sy c h ic p e rc e p tio n s o f th e p ro c esses
w h o se e x is te n c e I have a ssu m e d in th e s e p a g e s as th e ba sis o f o u r e x p la n a tio n o f
p a ra n o ia . I c an n e v e rth e le ss call a frien d a n d fe llo w -sp ec ia list to w itn e s s th a t I
had d eveloped m y th e o ry o f p a r a n o ia b e fo re I becam e a c q u a in te d w ith th e c o n ­
te n ts o f S c h re b er’s b o o k . It re m a in s fo r th e f u tu re to d e c id e w h e th e r th e re is m o re
d e lu sio n in m y th e o ry th a n I sh o u ld like to a d m it, o r w h e th e r th e re is m o re tru th
in S c h re b e r’s d e lu sio n th an o th e r p e o p le a re a s yet p re p a re d to believe.*0

A fter seventy-five pages o f interpretation , Freud p roclaim s that inter­

pretation has hardly been necessary. Fie finds the basic assu m ptions o f his
lib id o theory in Schreber also. T h ere cou ld b e n o clearer literary testi­
m on y from on e a u th o r to another. Flere p sych oan alysis runs in to legal
difficulties quite d ifferen t from those en cou ntered in w ritin g case h isto­
ries: in case histories, the analyst must p ro tect the identities o f those d e ­
scribed, b ut here the author must p ro te ct his co p y rig h t. In S ch reb er’s case
292 1900

“ the o b ject o f the analysis is not actu ally a person, b u t rather a b o o k

p rod u ced by that p erso n ,” and so “ the prob lem o f profession al discretion
does n ot enter in .” 81 Yet a m ore serious problem raises its head. In order
to present Schreber as a m ere w itn ess and n ot cede him the p s y c h o a n a ­
lytic c o p y rig h t, Freud has to call an oth er w itness to the stand. A p sych ia­
trist friend w ill sw ea r to the fa ct that the patient and his analyst (in the
term s custom ary fo r fictional disclaim ers) arrived independently at the
sam e results.
P sychoan alytic discourse itse lf m ust be at stake if its fou n d er m oves to
head off charges o f plagiarism . In fact, S ch reber’s m ania archives as b od y
and text the lib id o th eory th at p sych oan alysis reached only th rou gh the
lon g detours o f interpretation . Schreber’s relation to the th eory is th at o f
all w riters. Jensen, acco rd in g to Freud, could register and w rite d ow n
processes o ccu rrin g “ in his ow n m in d ” ; Schreber, a cco rd in g to Freud,
does this w ith “ en d op sych ic p ercep tion s.” T h e M em oirs d ep icts a nerve-
diseased b od y as the theater for w hole theom achies, w h ere d ivin e nerve
rays invade and retreat, d estroy o rgan s and e x tra ct brain fiber, lay d ow n
lines o f com m u n ication and transm it in fo rm a tio n — a psych ic in fo rm a ­
tion system that Freud takes at its w o r d rath er than as m ania. Freud is not
so believing at oth er points, as, fo r exam ple, w hen the paran oiac accuses
his psychiatrist, Flechsig, o f persecutorial intent; behind this im age o f his
colleagu e Freud senses on ly the p atien t’s father. In d escrib in g the m ind as
inform ation system , h ow ever, the psych otic text, w h ich describes the sys­
tem th ro u g h o u t its fou r hundred pages, is said to be the u n m etap h oric
truth.
T here a re grou n d s fo r this m eth od ological d istin ctio n . T h e O ed ip u s
c o m p le x is the nucleus o f the neuroses, b u t the m ental a p p a ratu s is c o ­
extensive with p sych oan alysis itself. O nly b y “ assum ing the existen ce o f a
spatially exten d ed , ad van tageou sly constru cted apparatu s d evelop ed in
m eeting the exigencies o f life,” can Freud build his scien ce “ on a basis
sim ilar to th at o f oth er natural scien ces.” But these bases a re n o t availab le
fo r experim ental verification . O n e can on ly infer them w ith the help o f
“ artificial a id s,” because “ ‘re a lity ’ w ill alw a y s rem ain ‘ u n k n o w a b le .’ ” 82
A ccord in gly, “ rea lity ” w o u ld be a necessary and im possible lim it con cep t
on the edge o f the system , w ere it n ot for S ch reb er’s en d o p sych ic p er­
ception s, w hich w ith o u t dou bt describe a b o d y, his o w n , as a spatially
extend ed m ental apparatu s. T h e c o rp u s o f the p s y c h o tic te x t provides
p sychoan alysis w ith its indispen sable bu t u n discoverab le basis: a body.
A b od y is the piece o f evidence w ith o u t w hich psych oan alysis, by co n ­
tem porary stan dards, w ould have rem ained em pty speculation .
F rom the first, aphasia studies had m ade brain localiza tio n in to a
m eth od ological space; p sych oan alysis becom es the d estin ation o f the
 RE BUS 293

lon g route th at traverses this space. Schreber’s m ania gu aran tees th at

there is “ n ot m o re m ania co n ta in ed ” in a n a lytic theory than its inven tor
w o u ld “ w ish .” Processes that a llo w en d op sych ic percep tion s in an e x p e ­
rim ental su b ject, h ow ever d eliriou s, can n o t n ot ex ist from a p s y c h o ­
physical stan dpoint. S ch reber’s b o d y is the verso o f the p a g es Freud filled
w ith w riting.

T h e D o c to r o f L aw D aniel Paul Sch reber (1 8 4 2 — 1 9 1 1 ) , son o f the

w id ely k n ow n inven tor o f the Schreber gard en, w h ich is still cu ltivated on
the edge o f G erm an cities, entered the L e ip z ig U niversity N erve C lin ic o f
D r. Paul Emil Flechsig in 1884 as a failed can d idate fo r the R eich stag,
w as released in 18 8 5, w as appo in ted in 1893 to the secon d highest ju d i­
cial position in the K in gd om o f S axon y, the Presidency o f the Senate o f
the Suprem e C o u rt, im m ediately thereafter entered Flechsig’s clin ic on ce
m ore, w as transferred several tim es, w a s released in 19 0 2 , and in 19 0 7
w as finally in stitution alized until his death. T h e M em oirs appeared in a
private edition in 1903 w ith the d eclared intention o f a llo w in g “ exp ert
exam ination o f m y body and ob servation o f m y personal fate d u rin g my
lifetim e.” *5
Freud’s “ P sych o -an alytic N o te s ” thus appeared just at the m om en t to
fill out and cash this blan k check.*4 In 1 9 1 1 , w h o e ver gave his b o d y over
to science w ould get a response posthaste. N o t only is the mental a p p a ­
ratu s, as described b y the psych otic and psych o a n a lytic c o rp u s, a single,
highly co m p lex info rm ation system ; the tw o co rp o ra in tandem co n sti­
tute this system a second tim e. T id in g s o f the im possible reality reach the
sym bolic, via m ed ia tran spo sition . F reu d receives w h a t Sch reber sends;
S chreber sends w h a t Freud receives. A ll th a t rem ains unsaid is w h y the
w h o le d iscou rse n etw o rk w o rk e d so p rom p tly and precisely arou n d on e
individual b o d y . Freud w as m uch to o concern ed w ith the testim on ial
value o f the received m essages to investigate the lo g ic o f the chan nels.
W h at Schreber w rites, w h a t w riters w rite — everyth in g becam e for Freud
an anticipation o f p sych oan alysis. A n d he is n ot alone in this. Schreber
to o grants poets like W agner o ccasio n a l an ticip ation s o f his n eu ro ­
theology.*5 In the com petition for corp oreal k n o w le d g e, th e n , the q u es­
tion a b o u t w h ich channels o f k n o w le d g e con stitu te the b o d y is left o u t.
T h e discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 w ith h o ld s its prop er nam e.
T h e M em oirs constitutes an “ ex h a u stio n ” 54 o f Sch reber’s body w h ile
he w a s still alive. T h e tran sposition o f a b od y in to a corp u s w a s just as
necessary— nam ely, as necessary for su rvival— as w as the fictional c o m ­
p o ser L indner’s tran sposition o f letter to n ote values. A fte r Sch reb er has
published his b o o k (against the w ishes o f his fam ily and the m edical es­
tablishm ent), the natural sciences o f the mind have on ly to op en it— and
294 19 ° °

S ch reber’s person is “ o ffer[ed ] . . . as an o b je ct o f scientific observation

fo r the jud gm en t o f exp erts.” O th erw ise, “ at som e future tim e” the e x ­
perts co u ld on ly confirm “ such peculiarities o f m y n ervous system . . . by
dissection o f m y b o d y ,” fo r “ I am inform ed that it is ex trem ely difficult to
m ake such ob servation s on the livin g b o d y.” 17
Schreber as w riter or Sch reber as anatom ical p rep ara tio n — these are
the on ly alternatives in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1 900. Like all w riters of
the ep och , he plays the role o f the “ victim o f his o w n w ritin g ,” “ in order
to be able, in place o f his autopsy, to prepare refuse, a b od ily su bstitu te, a
text. O n ly thus can his case rem ain “ soul m u rder” 8’ and not descend to
the postm ortem exam in ation o f those peculiarities that m ake people w ith
nervous diseases so attractive to their psychiatrists. T h e patient dissects
his ow n organ s and notes their m odification s w hile he is still alive, w ith a
positivism that h on ors p sychop h ysics and com es close to co rrectin g fa c ­
tually K raepelin’s Psychiatry (on the su b ject o f h allu cin ation s). Sch reber
thus p racticed , as if to realize N ietzsch e’s assertion “ fo r there is n o so u l,”
preventative soul m urder.
But “ soul m u rder” — in Schreber’s divin e “ p rim ary-” o r “ nerve-lan-
g u a g e ” an a u to n ym f o r the n eu ro p h ysiological relationship betw een him
and G o d — is also a chap ter title in Ellen K ey ’s T h e C en tu ry o f the C h ild .
Schreber cou ld once m ore co n fro n t his blind exegetes and their m ultiple
association s on the ph rase, w ith the e x te n t o f his rea d in g o f co n tem p o ­
rary w o rk s, w h ich aside from K raepelin, D u Prel, and H aeck el, a lso in­
cluded her. W h a t is called divine nerve-lan gu age in divin e n erve-langu age
and n ot accid en tally contain s m any “ expressions w hich w o u ld never
have o ccu rred to ” Schreber, nam ely exp ressions “ o f a scien tific, and p a r­
ticularly m edical n atu re,” ’ 0 is sim ply the c o d e o f the ep och . In 1903 it did
n ot tak e private religious illum in ations to reduce, in the first sentence o f
o n e ’s b o o k , the soul to n ervous tissue and to the lan gu age o f nervous
tissue, o r in the final sentences to see o n e ’s ow n mental illness “ in the
sense o f a nervous illness,” although not in its o rd in ary sen se.’ 1
B ut if the soul has on ly n eu ro p h ysiological reality, university nerve
clin ics are m ore likely than Ellen K ey’s sch ools to be responsible for soul
m urder. A b o o k th a t does n ot bear the title M em oirs o f M y N erv o u s Ill­
ness w as unable to use the w ord s nervous illness w ith o u t the ep ith et so-
called, and set forth from the begin nin g the d octrin e that there are “ n o
independent illnesses o f the m ind w ith o u t th o se o f the b o d y .” ’ 2 T h e b o o k
is Paul Flechsig’s inaugural lecture as the second p rofessor o f psychiatry
in the history o f the U niversity o f L eipzig. T h e first w as nam ed Johann
H einroth and w as fa ith fu l to H offbau er and Reil in teach in g the “ m is­
taken d o c trin e ” o f m ental cures. A “ chasm ” thus “ g a p e d ” betw een him
and his successor Flechsig, one “ n o less d eep and w id e than the chasm
 RE BUS 29S

betw een m edieval m ed icin e” and m odern m edicine.’ 1 In “ the age o f

Flechsig and W ern ick e,” (Benn’s term ),” souls becam e nerve info rm ation
system s, and cures becam e exp erim ents. T h e “ ‘ localization o f nervous
diseases’ ” entered “ a new e p o c h ” (as Freud sa y s)’ 5 w ith Flechsig, w h o
posed fo r his festschrift p h o to g ra p h in fro n t o f the picture o f a m assive,
cut-open brain. O n ly the individual case created difficulties, relative ones,
in the L eipzig University N erve C lin ic; on ly cu rin g such a case created
absolute difficulties. O n the one hand, the brain con tain s “ the key to
every natural con cep tion o f mental a ctiv ity ” and a fortiori to those o f
mental d isturbances.” O n the other, “ the p ro te cted position o f the b rain ”
m eans that the substratum o f the p sych oses, nam ely, chem ical and p h ysi­
cal nerve d am ag e, “ can be detected in the living on ly throu gh m o re or
less com p o site inferences.” T h u s the p sychiatrist F lech sig w as im pelled
o n to a royal d iag n o stic road that w as sim ultaneously a therapeu tic dead
end: “ the em phasis on postm ortem ex a m in a tio n .” ’ 7
N o sooner said than done. T h e corp se o f H o ld erlin , an insane or, in
oth er w ord s, n o t b u reau cratically em p loyed teacher, w a s a m o n g th e first
to enter the new o rd er o f things via the dissection ta b le .” T h e corp se o f
Schreber, a judicial b u reau crat w h o had gon e over into the new ord er,
suffered the sam e, n ow foreseeable, fate (w ith o u t the feared o r h op ed -for
m odifications in nervous tissue being fou n d ).”
A nd yet, w h a t w as said had alread y been done. A fter Flechsig decreed
postm ortem exam in ation to be the psychiatric royal road , Sch reb er’s dis­
creet, an on ym ou s reference to h avin g “ been in fo rm ed ” a b o u t the d iffi­
culties o f in v iv o diagnosis o f insanity is superfluous. In Sch reb er’s case,
the situation o f the text leaves n o d ou b t: the im aginative c o p y rig h t to the
patien t’s th eology, developed from the notion o f the ep istem o lo gical a d ­
vantages o f b eing a co rp se, belon gs to Paul F lech sig.100

T h e a b o v e p ic tu re o f th e n a tu re o f G o d and th e c o n tin u e d ex isten ce o f th e h u m a n

soul a fte r d e a th differs m a rk e d ly in so m e re sp ec ts fro m th e C h ris tia n v ie w s o n
th ese m a tte rs . It seem s t o m e t h a t a c o m p a ris o n b e tw ee n th e tw o c an o n ly fa v o u r
th e fo rm e r. G o d w as n o t om niscient a n d omnipresent in th e sen se th a t H e contin­
uously saw in sid e every in d iv id u a l liv in g p e rso n , p e rce iv e d every feelin g o f his
nerves, th a t is to say a t all tim es “ trie d his h e a rt and re in s .” B ut th e re w a s n o need
fo r th is b e ca u se a fte r d e a th th e n erv es o f h u m a n beings w ith all th e im p re ss io n s
th ey h a d received d u rin g life lay b a re b e fo re G o d ’s eye, so th a t a n u n fa ilin g ly ju st
ju d g m e n t c o u ld b e re a c h e d as to w h e th e r th e y w ere w o r th y o f b e in g received in to
th e realm s o f h e a v e n .101

T he precision o f this im age o f G o d is equaled only by Flechsig’s festschrift

p h otog rap h . E verything runs accord in g to the plan set o u t in Flechsig’s
inaugural lecture, Brain a n d S o u l. T h a t G o d can d iscip lin e his still-livin g
victim s w ith m ental cures o r p sych olog ica l in trospection is an age-old
fallacy. T h e soul consists o f nervous tissue, w h ich m akes in v iv o inves­
296 1900

tigation im possible, b u t the nerves are perfect data recorders and fo r that
reason w ill yield all their secrets to the clin ical ey e at the m om en t o f d is­
section. In o th e r w ord s: acco rd in g to this th eology, “ w ithin th e O rd er o f
the W orld, G o d d id not really understand the living hum an being and
had n o n eed to understand him , because, accord in g to the O rd e r o f the
W orld , H e d ealt on ly w ith co rp ses,” until he initiated his w orld -o rd er-
d efyin g relationship to S ch reb er.102 T h e th e o lo gy sim ply equates G o d
w ith the professor. P sych ophysics banned all in trosp ection , and th eo lo gy
com plied ; Flechsig restricted all d iagnoses to corp ses, and pio u s Schreber,
p erfo rm in g the w ritten dissection o f his nerves, could only accom m od ate
him . W ith th at Schreber fabricated, to the joy o f Freud, on ce a n eu ­
rologist, th e im possible piece o f evid ence fo r psych oanalysis: en d o p sych ic
perception s o f brain fu n ctions.
C h an n els o f inform ation are indeed intim ately linked. S ch reb er’s case,
rather than being an independent and ind u b itable piece o f evidence for a
lib id o theory, dem onstrates the n exu s between p sych op h ysics and psy­
choanalysis. A s reader and w riter, Freud w alk ed blin dly into the d is­
course n etw ork to w h ich he him self b elon ged . T h e P roject fo r a Scientific
P sychology and the M em oirs o f M y N ervous Illness are tw o co n tin u a ­
tions o f a single discourse. N o w o n d er th ey ran in to the plagiarism p ro b ­
lem o f being reverse sides o f on e another.
Just w h ere Freud cou ld have resolved the im aginary rivalry, his keen
intellect failed b efore the discourse o f the O th er. A lth o u gh he can n o t not
have noticed that the lan gu age o f Schreber’s nerves and delirium is the
lan guage o f the exp erim en tal n eu ro lo gist F lech sig,101 his interpretation
system atically replaces the nam e Plecbsig w ith that o f the inventor o f the
Schreber G ard en . A ll the patien t’s sentences con cern in g his d o c to r and
“ G o d F lechsig” 104 are treated on ly as the displacem ent o f a h o m o sex u al
libid o d irected a t the father. W ith this, Freud fou n d ed the boundless
Schreber literature that a n ch o rs all the sufferings o f Schreber fils in the
w ild child rearin g m ethods o f D aniel G o ttlie b M o ritz Sch reber. T h e head
bandages o r o rth op ed ic bed invented by Schreber senior and m entioned
in passing in the M em oirs are then d eclared the “ true b a ck g ro u n d of
Schreber’s co n cep tio n o f G o d as O n e W h o k n o w s m an on ly as a c o rp se .” 105
F lechsig’s m essage o f the death o f m an, m ore hidden than N ietzsch e’s, has
n ot reached the exegetes. A g ain and again the attem p t is m ade to explain
the secon d industrial revolu tion by the first: Schreber as in fo rm ation sy s­
tem is related to o rth o p ed ic m echanics, the w ritin g m achin e in K a fk a ’s
“ Penal C o lo n y ” to frieze heads and planers. B ut nerve-lan gu age rem ains
nerve-langu age, and typ ew riters w ith their o w n specially constru cted
m eans o f m akin g script visible are U n d erw o od m o d els.104 T h e system o f
1900 cou ld spare itself the effort to spare m uscular energy becau se it un­
 REBUS 29 7

d erto o k to create substitutions for the central nervous system itself. Be­
yond m echanical head b an d ages, Schreber’s p aran oia fo llo w ed the lead of
an insane n eu ro p h ysiologist. H is book begins (running the risk o f libel
suits) w ith an open letter to Flechsig, askin g the distinguished privy c o u n ­
selor to put aside his a n ger fo r o n c e , as the u ndersigned has d o n e, and
answ er the rigorous scien tific q u ery w heth er he possibly

like so m an y d o c to rs , c o u ld n o t c o m p le te ly resist th e te m p ta tio n o f u sin g a p a tie n t

in y o u r c a r e as an object for scientific experim ents a p a r t fro m th e re a l p u rp o s e o f
c u re , w h e n by c h a n c e m a tte rs o f th e h ig h e s t scien tific in te re s t a ro se . O n e m ig h t
ev en ra is e th e q u e stio n w h e th e r p e rh a p s all th e ta lk o f v o ic e s a b o u t so m e b o d y
h a v in g c o m m itte d soul m u rd e r can b e e x p la in e d by th e so u ls (rays) d e e m in g it
im p e rm issib le th a t a p e rs o n ’s n e rv o u s sy stem sh o u ld b e in flu en ced by a n o th e r ’s to
th e e x te n t o f im p riso n in g his w ill p o w e r, such a s o c c u rs d u rin g h y p n o s is .107

T h e professor in L eip zig never answ ered this open letter (w hich appeared
in Leipzig). W hereas Schreber could em broil his later psychiatrists in
exp ert-testim on y disputes, w hich his legal un derstan d ing helped him to
w in , the soul m urderer m aintained a silence that even to d a y puts exegetes
on the w ro n g track . A ll the interest in Schreber’s so-called father p r o b ­
lems substitutes consan gu in ity fo r enm ity, causality fo r w ar. But the cla s­
sical p ed agogic po w er o f Schreber senior can on ly be equated w ith the
extrem ely efficient disposition o f po w er in 1 90 0 .108 T h e n erve-lan gu age at
the basis o f the new disposition states that “ an ed u cative influence d i­
rected o u tw a rd s’’ has been played o u t .109 B ecause G o d o r psychiatrists,
accord in g to the w o rld order, can only know corp ses, a tem ptation
to c o n d u ct p sych op h ysical exp erim ents arises. “ T h e m iracles d irected
against my h e a d a nd the nerves o f m y hea d ” 110 inscribe them selves into
the n ervou s system w ith o u t a p ed ag o gic d etou r and substitute an e x p eri­
m ental arran gem en t fo r the im possible cure fo r paran oia. T h e practical
con sequ en ce is that anything identifiable as “ influences on m y nervous
system em anating from you r [Flechsig’s] nervous system ” b reaks d ow n in
th e discourse o f the d o c to r o r exp erim enter in to “ m ere ‘ h a llu cin a tio n s’ ’’
o f his p a tien t.1"
If p sychop hysics can exp lain its effects o u t o f existen ce, then e x p eri­
mental subjects have n o ch o ice bu t open w arfa re and thus pu b lication .
Schreber w rites to Flechsig in F lech sig’s lan gu age in o rd e r to dem on strate
in the latter’s ow n territory that Schreber’s pu rpo rted hallu cin ation s are
facts effectuated by the discourse o f the O th er. T h e M em oirs stand and
fight in the w a r o f tw o discourse n etw ork s. T h e y constitu te a sm all d is­
course n etw ork w ith the single purpose o f d em on stratin g the d a rk reality
o f another, hostile one.

T h e m e n tio n e d w ritin g -d o w n -sy ste m is e x tra o rd in a rily difficult to e x p la in to

o th e r p e o p le even vaguely. . . .
298 1900

B ooks or other notes a re k e p t in w h ic h fo r years have been written-dow n all

m y th o u g h ts , all m y p h ra se s , all m y n e ce ssa ries, all th e a rtic le s in m y p o ssessio n
o r a r o u n d m e, all p e rs o n s w ith w h o m I c o m e in to c o n ta c t, etc. I c a n n o t say w ith
c e rta in ty w h o d o e s th e w ritin g d o w n . As I c a n n o t im a g in e G o d ’s o m n ip o te n c e
lacks all in tellig en ce, I p re su m e th a t th e w ritin g d o w n is d o n e by c re a tu re s given
h u m a n sh a p e o n d is ta n t celestial b o d ie s . . . b u t la c k in g all in te llig e n ce ; th e ir
h a n d s a re led a u to m a tic a lly , as it w ere, b y p a s s in g ra y s fo r th e p u rp o s e o f m a k in g
them w rite d o w n , so th a t later rays can again look a t w h a t has b een w ritte n .
T o illu m in a te th e p u rp o s e o f th is w h o le sy ste m I m u st e n la rg e f u r th e r .112

E nlargin g so m ew h at further, it first o f all shou ld be ex p la in ed th at rays

are n erve-langu age inform ation channels that m aintain a psych otech n i-
cal, m aterial link betw een Schreber and Flechsig (or his incarnation as
G od ), very m uch cou n ter to the con d itio n s o f the w o rld order. Rather
than m anifesting H im self only to corp ses, G o d occu p ies Sch reb er’s ner­
vous system by innervating all local lan gu age centers w ith the excep tion
o f the extern al speech apparatu s; that is, like a g o o d ap h asia researcher,
he stim ulates only sensory and m otoric w ord im ages ." 3 N o w on d er, then,
that the nerve-lan gu age appears to be h allu cin ated, n o w o n d e r th at it can
also bridge cosm ic distances. A cco rd in g to Flechsig, w h o w rote an influ­
en tial m on ograph on nerve tracts, “ the greatest p a rt o f the hum an cere­
b ru m ” consists “ in n oth in g m ore than m illions o f w ell-isolated circu its,
m easuring th ousan ds o f k ilo m eters.” 114 A ll the data on Schreber w anders
through such interw oven cables to its destination on distant planets. T h e
inform ation com es in, is registered, and can be reread by other rays,
w hich are preparing to m ove in the op p osite d irectio n . T h e n eu rologist-
g o d o f 1900 is a single discourse n etw o rk . W h eth er he (like the go d s o f
Rousseau o r the A p ocalyp se) still uses the b o o k as a sto ra g e bank no
lon ger m atters. All b o o k s are discourse n etw o rk s, but n ot all discourse
n etw ork s are b ooks. If the record in g occu rs m echanically and w ith o u t
any G eist, the p ro b a b ility o f its b ein g a purely technical p roced u re is
greater. “ It is presum ably a ph enom enon like telep h on in g .” 115 There is,
fo r ex a m p le, the a p p e ara n ce o f a w ritin g angel in the trad em ark o f a
gra m o p h o n e com pany.

It is n o a ccid en t that the n eu ro th eo lo gical discourse n etw o rk stores

particulars, and stores them exhaustively. N o t one o f Sch reber’s thou ghts,
sentences, o r personal possessions is left o u t. T h e p aran oid m achin e op-
 RE BUS 299

erates like an integrated system o f all th e d ata-storage devices that revo lu ­

tion ized record in g circa 1900. A n d because its strategy w a s aim ed n ot
at statistical series b ut at ex h a u stin g the arb itrary case o f Schreber, it a lso
exem p lifies the m eth od ological p roject at the basis o f psych oan alysis.
In 1882 Stanley H all b egan , in w h a t w as still a very statistical p ro c e ­
dure, to gather material for a study entitled T h e C o n ten ts o f C h ild r e n ’s
M inds. Soon thereafter the investigation a lso included ind ivid u al cases, as
when the vo ca b u la ry and n eologistic creations o f tw o thirteen-year-old
girls w ere in v en to ried .114 C on seq u en tly, Erdm ann could define even a p o ­
etic v o ca b u la ry as a d en um erable grou p o f w ord s. A n d con sequ en tly
Freud, in his case histories, cou ld develop a “ n eu ro sis in ven tory,” w hich
included all the thoughts, turns o f phrase, and significan t persons in the
lives o f his patients. T h e feeble-m inded discourse n etw o rk around S ch re­
ber is thus (as if to d em on strate Freud’s rem ark on the in calcu lab le p r o x ­
im ity betw een m ania and th eory) th e d iscou rse n etw o rk o f 1900. O n ly
delirious m em oirs betray the actu al pu rpose o f the im m ense e ffo rt at re­
cord in g and storage, w h ich “ has increased to such an ex te n t th at it n ow
includes alm o st all the w ord s used in the hum an lan gu a g e.” 117
E xhaustion links individual cases to the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900.
T h e m aterial taken from Sch reber’s nerves and sto red on d istan t suns is
exp licitly intended fo r inscription . B ecause it “ seem s to lie in the nature o f
the rays that they must speak as soon as th ey are in m o tio n ,” they grant
their victim , by virtue o f an app rop riate au ton ym ity, this “ la w ” 111 and
then further the w ord s for everyth in g that Sch reber co in cid en tally hap­
pens to be doing. It is thus m ade certain that his nerves d o n o t con stitu te
an ex cep tio n to the law , bu t rath er serve up a verbal ste w w ith co m p u l­
sive autom atism . T h e rays have “ th e boundless im pu d en ce— I can use n o
o th e r exp ression — to d em and that I should express this falsified nonsense
in spoken w o rd s as if it w ere m y o w n th o u gh ts.” 119 A s w ith Pam eelen, the
discourse n etw ork dictates n onsense, w h ich , h ow ever, does n o t rem ain in
the n o m an’s land o f p sych op h ysical exp erim ents, bu t dem ands S ch reber’s
signature. It is not enough that he suffer the com pulsive need to sp eak,
w hich robs him o f sleep and “ n ot-th in k in g-o f-a n yth in g-th o u gh t,” 120 those
basic rights o f m an, b ut he m ust also say that he is the sp eaker o f all the
nonsense. T h is is inscription as cou plin g.
T h e sudden, d irect link betw een d ata-storage m achines and ind ivid u al
cases liquidates a b asic con cep t o f 1800: the ow n ersh ip o f discourses.
T h a t Schreber is forced to sign the nonsense forced upon him log ica lly
reverses the sto rage procedures that ensnared him and his c o n te m p o ­
raries. G o d in his ign oran ce o f M a n counten an ces w h a t by the b u re au ­
cratic n orm is the “ com p letely m istaken v ie w ” th a t w h en Schreber, “ fo r
exam p le, reads a b o o k o r n e w s p a p e r ,. . . the th ou ghts con tain ed therein
are my o w n th ough ts.” T h e patient threatened w ith soul m urder need
300 i 900

only quite accid en tally sing a fe w n otes from the revenge aria in the M agic
Flute, and im m ediately his brain fills w ith w hisp erin g voices “ w h ich p re­
sume that . . . I am actu ally in the grip o f d esp air.” 121 D ata-storage m a­
ch in es are m uch to o accurate to m ake the classical d istin ctio n s betw een
intention and citation , independent th o u gh t and the m ere repetition o f
som ething alread y said. T h e y register discursive events w ith o u t regard
for so-called persons. T h u s the pretext o f being able to distinguish be­
tw een m ental ow n ership, citatio n , and parap raxes becam e as superfluous
as in p sych o a n a lysis.122 T o attribute each and every flatus vocis to a
sp eaker as his m ental p rop erty m eans to divest him o f ev eryth in g and
drive him in to in san ity— an u n p aralleled trick indeed.

T h e w ritin g -d o w n a lso se rv es a s a n o th e r p e c u lia r tric k w h ic h a g a in is b a se d o n

a to ta l m is u n d e rs ta n d in g o f h u m a n th in k in g . It w a s b elieved t h a t m y s to re o f
th o u g h ts c o u ld b e e x h a u s te d by b e in g w ritte n -d o w n , so th a t e v en tu ally th e tim e
w o u ld c o m e w h e n n e w id ea s c o u ld n o lo n g e r a p p e a r in m e. . . . T h is w a s th e
tric k : as s o o n as a n id ea I h a d h a d b e fo re a n d w h ic h w as (a lre ad y ) w ritte n -d o w n ,
re c u rre d — such a re c u rre n c e is o f c o u rs e q u ite u n a v o id a b le in th e c ase o f m an y
th o u g h ts , f o r in sta n c e th e th o u g h t in th e m o rn in g “ N o w I w ill w a s h ” o r w h e n
p la y in g th e p ia n o th e th o u g h t “ T h is is a b e a u tifu l p a ssa g e ,” e tc .— as so o n as su c h
a b u d d in g th o u g h t w a s sp o tte d in m e , th e a p p ro a c h in g ra y s w e re se n t d o w n w ith
th e p h ra s e “ W e h a v e a lre a d y g o t th is ,” scil. w r itte n - d o w n .12'

It m akes n o difference, then, w h eth er the heavenly secretaries inscribe

sentences o r d escrib e things as they o ccu r. A t one m om ent Sch reber has
to sub scrib e to the view that the im becility forced on him is natural to
him, at a n o th er that w h a t is natural to him is im becility. A s precisely as
E bb in ghaus sorted o u t p reviou sly learned nonsense, the nerves note all of
Schreber’s p reviou sly spoken sentences, so that he is su b ject to the recur­
rence o f recurren ce itself. In triu m phant Saxon accen ts, the nerves m ock
the co rrect High G erm an faith o f the b ureau crat on leave, a cco rd in g to
w hich th in kin g and speaking are the nature o f M a n . W ith the eternal re­
currence o f “ W e alread y h ave’t; w e alread y h ave’t” [ham m irschon ham-
m irschon\ eternal recu rren ce trium phs over original genius, as does psy­
chop h ysics over A b so lu te Spirit. In ord er to m ake som eon e an im becile, it
suffices to im pute to him an exhaustible supply o f p ossible th o u gh ts.
Every discursive m anipu lation produces w hatever claim s it happens to
m ake. It is n ot fo r n oth in g that the b eings in charge o f record in g have no
need for m inds; their im becilic in ven toryin g drives Schreber o u t o f his.
T h e psychiatric insight that lists, address b o o k s, inventories, and a fortiori
discourse n etw ork s are fu n dam en tally exam ples o f the flight o f ideas, b e­
com es practice. T h e case o f Schreber verifies on ce m ore S tra n sk y ’s ob ser­
vation that the flight o f ideas can have p ath o lo gical grou n d s as easily as it
can have exp erim en tal grounds.
But w hen exp erim en t and p a th o lo gy coin cid e and the exp erim en ter in­
 RE BUS 301

deed does drive the experim ental su b ject crazy, the rem ain ing p rob lem is
self-defense. All the go d s th at pursue Schreber ann ou n ce their plan as
“ We w a n t to destroy y o u r rea so n ” ; a ga in st all such pu rsu it Schreber a t­
tem pts “ my allotted task o f at all tim es c o n v in c in g G o d . . . o f m y un­
dim inished pow ers o f reason .” 124 T o this end he n o t o n ly reads n e w s­
papers and b o o k s, but also cultivates the “ n o tio n ” th at “ hum an th in kin g
is in exhaustible; for instance readin g a b o o k o r a n ew spaper alw a y s stim u ­
lates new th o u gh ts .” '25 T h e b asic principles o f th e classical d iscou rse net­
w o rk have thus deteriorated in to being the defensive w eap o n s o f a m ental
patien t. In the crossfire o f psych op h ysics, the last b u reau crat is left w ith
only the sed im en t o f his ed u cation , w h ose n orm s, h ow ever, are taken
a p a rt bit by bit. Inexhaustibility, this signum o f great w o rk s , b ecom es in
Schreber’s desperation an attribute o f n ew spapers as w ell. Poem s suffer a
sim ilar fate. A m o n g the “ m ethods o f defen se” that m ake “ even the m ost
d ra w n -o u t voices finally p e rish ,” Schreber included reciting verses learned
by heart, “ particularly S ch iller’s b a lla d s.” But he then had to realize that
“ how ever insignificant the rhym es, even o b scen e verses” did just as w ell
as his classical poet. “ As m ental nou rish m ent” obscen e verses are “ w orth
their w eigh t in gold . . . com pared w ith the terrible nonsense m y nerves
are o th erw ise fo rce d to listen to.” 126
N ew sp ap er rather than oeu vre, m em orization rather than u n d erstan d ­
ing, b a w d y verse rath er than S ch iller— the President o f the Ju d icial Senate
(on leave) him self takes ap a rt the ed u cation that shou ld have p rovid ed a
defense again st his neu rologist-torm enter. T h e o ld b u reau cratic race of
the Schrebers m ust pay for the fact th at Flechsig’s p lo t denied Schreber
“ ch oice o f those professions w hich w o u ld lead to closer relations w ith
G o d such as that o f a nerve sp ecia list .” 127 O n ly co u n terin g on e m edium
w ith another can save one from p sych op h ysics, an d o n ly m im icry can
save one from voices that level all discourses to the stratum o f their m ate­
riality. “ T here had been tim es w h en I cou ld n o t help m yself but speak
aloud o r m ake som e noise, in order to d ro w n the senseless and sham eless
tw ad d le o f the vo ices .” 128 T h a t this ta ctic, despite every refinem ent, “ a p ­
peared as ravin g m adn ess to the ph ysician s w h o did n o t k n o w the true
reason” sim ply dem onstrates o n ce m ore h o w indistinguish able p a th o lo gy
and exp erim en t are.'2’ G o d m akes an im becile o f som eon e w h o resists the
on slaught w ith im becility. T h e vo ices generate “ m ore o r less senseless and
partly offensive phrases, v u lg a r term s o f abuse, e tc .” ; 130 Schreber c o m ­
bines Schiller and b a w d y verse, poetry and noise. A s in ev ery w a r, the
defensive forces have to learn fro m the a tta ck in g side. T h e case o f Schreber
is “ the un heard-of even t,” as G o eth e defined the p rop er m aterial o f the
novella, o f respondin g to Flechsig’s p sych op h ysics w ith a p sych op h ysical
nonsense.
302 1900

A n d that, if it is n ot m adness, is at least literature. In the Sonnenstein

asylum high ab ove the E lbe, a solitary and u n recognized exp erim en ter
practiced the a p o tro p a ic techniques that tw elve years later w o u ld win
fam e and a p u b lic fo r the Z u rich D ad aists in the C a fe V o lta ire. O n
M a rch 29, 1 9 1 6 , R ichard H uelsen beck, Tristan T z a r a , and Emil von
Jan ko appeared

in th e p e rfo rm a n c e o f a poem e simultan. T h is is a c o n tra p u n ta l re c ita tiv e , in

w h ich th re e o r m o re voices sp e a k , sing, w h istle , a n d so o n sim u lta n e o u sly , so th a t
th e ir e n c o u n te rs c o n s titu te th e elegaic, c o m ic , o r b iz a rr e c o n te x t o f th e th in g . T h e
o b stin a c y o f th e v o ic e is s ta rk ly e x p ressed in su c h s im u lta n e o u s p o e m s , a n d so to o
is the d e te rm in in g effect o f a c c o m p a n im e n t. T h e noises (an rrr d ra w n o u t for
m in u te s, b a n g in g s o u n d s o r the w ail o f a sire n , and so o n ) have an e x is te n c e
w h o se en erg y su rp a sse s th a t o f th e h u m a n voice. T h e poem e simultan deals w ith
th e v a lu e o f th e v o ic e . T h e h u m a n v o ic e re p re se n ts th e so u l, th e in d iv id u a lity in its
e r r a n t journey a c c o m p a n ie d by d e m o n ic guid es. T h e noises p ro v id e th e b a c k ­
g r o u n d — th e in a rtic u la te , th e fa ta l, th e d e te rm in in g . T h e p o e m a tte m p ts to e x ­
p o se m a n 's e n ta n g le m e n t in m e c h a n istic p ro cesses. W ith ty p ic a l a b b re v ia tio n it
sh o w s th e c o n flict o f th e v o x humana w ith a w o rld th a t th re a te n s , stra n g le s, a n d
d e stro y s, w h o s e speed a n d n o ise a r e in e s c a p a b le .'3'

T h e insane asylum and the artists’ cafe w itness p erfo rm an ces to o sim i­
lar to require com m en t. O n ly H u g o B all’s com m en tary requires c o m ­
m ent, in that it aban d o n s its o w n insight into the d eterm in ing im portan ce
o f indeterm inate and unarticulated elem ents. Sch reber to o w an d ered b e­
tw een d em on ic guides and m echanistic processes, but he did n ot em p lo y
the v o x hum an a (w hich is an organ register, n ot N atu re) in ord er to as­
sert individuality. H e sim u lated — as H u elsen beck , T z a r a , and Janko also
d id — noises w h ose energy surpassed that o f his o w n voice. H e to o k the
side o f the u n articu lated, w h ich is the b ack gro u n d o f all m od ern m edia.
T h o se w h o roar, h o w l, o r w h istle are not presentin g lach rym o se theories
o f M an in a tech n ological w o rld ; rather, they aim at discursive effects
against definite and hostile discourses. T h e inhum an discourse n etw o rk
o f 1900 is as inescapable as G ertru d e Stein’s dark o racle, but precisely its
inh um an ity a llo w s on e to escape from the im perative o f sense. L ik e the
audience in the coffee h ouse, Schreber is released from all “ effo rt” to
“ distinguish single w o rd s in the con fu sion o f v o ice s,” ' 32 just as in the c o f­
fee house w ord s drow n in the noise o f the self-p rod u ced confu sion o f fou r
artists’ vo ices. W hen po w er rescinds its classical im perative o f estab lish ­
ing only signifieds, even the victim s gain new pleasure. T h e rays are by
nature flighty and forgetfu l; thus Schreber to o can indulge his beloved
tho ugh ts-th in kin g-n oth in g. G o d , the n eu ro lo gical m utant, places p h ysi­
cal pleasure above all m orality; thus Schreber t o o is perm itted en joym ent
on consistent grou n d s: “ O n the oth er hand G o d dem ands consta nt e n ­
jo y m en t,, as the n orm al m ode o f existen ce fo r sou ls w ithin the O rd e r o f
 RE BUS 303

the W orld. It is my d uty to p rovide H im with it in the form o f h igh ly de­

veloped soul-voluptuou sness. . . . If I can get a little sensuous pleasu re in
th is process, I feel I am entitled to it as a sm all com pen sation f o r the e x ­
cess o f suffering and privation that has been m ine fo r m any years p ast.” m
W herever sense ends, en joym ent begins: a pleasure in the m argin s that
a discourse n etw o rk o f pure signifiers leaves to its victim s. R eco llection
and the establishm ent o f sense, w o rk and the d eferral o f drives m ay o n ce
have been the tasks o f an ind ivid u al, judicial b u re a u c ra t— but the nerves
and their slave p ractice a N ietzschean o r “ natural tendency . . . to fo rg e t”
that “ w o u ld soon have erased any . . . im pressions” 1’4 and k n o w s on ly
the m any present m om ents o f volu ptu ou sness. B ecause there is alread y an
exhaustive com p reh en sion o f d ata, d ata-storage m achines need not be
im planted in people as w ell, thus giv in g each a sou l. T h e d iscou rse n et­
w o rk arou n d S ch reber is m ore m erciful than L in d h o rst’s archive. R o a r ­
ing, forgetfu l, sufferin g flight o f ideas, the S enate P resident on leave can
enjoy a freedom this side o f bu reau cratic and hum an dignity. T h a t free­
dom has been the definition o f a subject since 1900. Schreber, because
Flechsig’s p sych op h ysics used or m isused him in exp erim en ts cou n ter to
the w o rld order, becam e sin gu lar as on ly used pencils, knives, and w atch es
could be. In op p ositio n to the p rod u ctive in d ivid u al, he is a llo w ed sim ply
to consum e w h atever “ falls o ff” chain s o f signifiers in the w a y o f “ sensual
pleasure.” T h e subject o f the u n co n scio u s is literally a “ resid u u m .” 135
Individual differences d ro p o n to the p o sitio n o f the su b ject. W heth er
the arb itrary case is called Sch reber o r N ietzsch e m eans little. A ssistant
physician D r. Z ieh en said o f his patien t, N ietzsch e: “ He speaks rapidly,
loudly, and w ith o u t coherence, often for m any hours. His m ood is m o r­
bidly cheerful and exalted .” 136 D r. W eber, d irector o f the Sonnenstein in ­
sane asylum , said o f Schreber, his gu est at the fa m ily d in n er ta b le: “ O b ­
vio u sly it often requires his greatest energy n o t to u tter the ‘ b ello w in g
n oises,’ and as so o n as the tab le is cleared w h ile he is still on his w a y to
his room one can hear his inarticu late sou n d s.” 137 T h e “ h o w lin g m o n k e y ”
N ietzsche prod uced just such h ow ls o r “ m iracu lou s b e llo w s” b efore the
daughters o f the desert. But w h ereas N ietzsche still appeared as a E u ro ­
pean w h o foun d the p e rfe ct “ sign am nesia” 138 on ly in the envied o p p o si­
tion o f tw o w om en , Schreber to o k the flight o f ideas so far as to forget h is
gender. If “ m y w h o le b o d y is filled w ith nerves o f vo lu p tu ou sn ess from
the top of m y head to the soles o f m y feet, such as is the case only in the
ad ult fem ale b od y, w hereas in the case o f a man, so far as I k n o w , nerves
o f volu ptuousness are only found in and im m ediately around the sexu al
o rg a n s,” 13’ then this b od y is “ a w o m a n .”
N o t the W om an, w h o d oes n o t exist, bu t a w o m a n w ith the great
privilege from w hich drive deferm ent and b u reau cratic duties have kept
304 1900

her: “ succu m bing to in tercou rse.” 140A n y m an w h o b ecom es a n eu ro p h ysi­

o lo g ica l case can n o lo n ger be a m an. In repeated petitions addressed to his
d o cto r, as form al as they w ere pressing, a Senate President requested an
experim ental test o f his prop osition th at he w a s a w om an w ith nerves o f
volu ptuousness interpenetrating his b o d y from head to toe.
Thus the n eu ro lo gist’s strategy to extract S ch reber’s brain tissue failed
d ue to its su ccess.'4' Sensual pleasu re is gain ed by k illin g o ff M a n and the
male. Schreber en joyed the b ecom in g-a-w om an that threatened him ; he
used the d iscou rse n etw ork that em p tied him. A lth o u gh the M em oirs o f
M y N ervous Illness n o soo n er prom ises than forgets to p rovid e an “ a n ­
th o lo g y ” 142 o f all the senseless, insulting, c o m m o n , and ob scen e d is­
courses that the discourse n etw o rk has stored and m ob ilized in m a k in g
Schreber an im becile— the bulk o f its fo u r hundred pages is just this a n ­
th o lo gy. In the M em oirs a ch oice a n th o lo g y o f sex u a l d escription s th at
the b u reau crat Schreber w o u ld never have uttered o r pu t on paper can
and must be w ritten d o w n . T h e m oral and legal m easures Sch reber co u ld
have taken to ensure an a u th o r’s m ental ow n ersh ip fail w hen it com es to
w ritin g d ow n a d iscou rse n e tw o rk .141 H avin g b ecom e a w om an in ord er
to tak e the d ictatio n o f a n eu ro lo gist G o d , having b ecom e a tak er o f d ic­
tation in ord er to be perm itted to w rite the volu ptu ou sness o f being a
w o m a n , Sch reber is free. Schreber as W riter [Schreber als S ch reib er ] 144
w rites up w hat has w ritten him off. W ith o u t origin ality, m echanically,
like n oth in g so m uch as those m indless beings w h o attend to the task of
recordin g, he put F lech sig’s n eu ro p h y sio lo g y o r im becilic nonsense on
p a p e r. N o th in g and n o on e cou ld hinder him in so d oin g. “ F o r all m ir­
acles are pow erless to prevent the exp ression o f ideas in w r itin g .” 145

A Simulacrum of Madness
In th e eyes o f I d o n ’t k n o w w h ic h ,— p e rh a p s a very n e a r c u ltu re w e w ill b e th e
o n e s w h o b ro u g h t tw o s e n ten c es in to th e clo sest p ro x im ity , se n ten c es th a t a re b o th
as c o n tr a d ic to ry and as i m p o ssib le a s th e fa m o u s “ I a m ly in g ,” and th a t b o th d e sig ­
nate th e sa m e em pty a u to re fe re n tia lity : “ I am w ritin g ” and “ I am m a d .” '

Literature in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1 900 is a sim ulacrum o f m a d ­

ness. A s lo n g and insofar as som eone w rites, his delirium is p rotected
from the loss o f the w o rd . D istin gu ished from m adness b y a n oth in g
nam ed sim ulacrum , by a foil nam ed paper, w ritin g traverses the free
space o f eternal recurrence. L iterary w ritin g is its ow n justification p re­
cisely in its em p ty self-referen tiality.2 W hereas the claim o f n o t b eing d e­
lirious necessarily leads, under the discursive cond itions o f brain p h ys­
iology, to the delirium o f o rigin ality and au th orsh ip , the reverse claim
 RE BUS 305

achieves discursive reality. A delirium w ritten dow n coin cid es w ith w h a t

sciences and m edia them selves w ere d oin g.
T h e sim ulation o f m adn ess presupposes that the sciences o f nonsense
have becom e possible and d om in an t. O n ly when there is p sych op h ysics
to serve as a random gen erator and p sychoan alysis to ensure the e x h a u s­
tion o f nonsense w ill a u t i l i z a t i o n o f r e f u s e [A bfallverw ertung], as
nonsensical as it is ind isp u table, finally tak e effect. Even after Flechsig has
extracted all the nervous tissue from the brain and Freud has d ecod ed
all the libid inous cathexes o f an arb itrary case, som eth ing rem ains: the
fact o f a delirious m em oir. A ll exp erim en tal m easures o r m iracles are
pow erless against texts that d o not pretend to m ake sense but rather insist
on their purely w ritten ch aracter. T h e nonsense o f w ritin g d o w n n o n ­
sense is as po w erfu l and indisputable as W ilhelm Jensen’s u n d ertak in g to
supply inven ted p erso n s w ith invented m anias. “ E very nonsense carried
to ex trem e s destroys itself in the en d ” w r o te the sh arp -w itted Schreber
(or the G o d that d ictated to h im ).’ W hen that has h app ened , there is one
m ore literary text.
T od ay “ in the place o f L an celo t w e have Judge S ch reb er.” 4 D eliriou s
te x ts entered the realm o f literature w hen literature b egan to sim ulate
m adness. Schreber m akes delirium in to literature w hen he describes every
hallucination as a fact o f the nerve-lan gu age rather than u n d erw ritin g
each w ith an au th orial nam e, and w h en in defense against the im becility
forced on him he o ccasio n a lly sim ulated the im becile. T h ese w ere reco rd ­
ing m easures and sim ulations that, in all justice to the m aterial and aside
from any p sych olog y, necessarily lead to m asses o f w o rd s. T h e reb u s does
n ot end w ith its p sych oan alytic d ecod in g; victim s and sim u lators o f m a d ­
ness rem ain to tin ker “ w ith w o rd s instead o f th in gs.” 5 N o t on ly the “ nerve-
lan gu a g e” itself, but also the en orm ous q u an tity o f nam es and idiom s,
d ialect w ord s and obscen ities, th at the lan gu age, th ro u g h its n eu ro lo gical
short cu t, inscribed in S ch reb er’s brain is sim ply a discursive even t. W ords
that did not exist in K raepelin o r even in Bleuler w ere p u t d ow n on paper.
Such is also the practice o f a literature that “ seeks n ew w ord s fo r new
m o o d s.” 6 It is on ly a step from the m em orable prod u ction s o f Schreber’s
nerve-language to “ N a s o b e m ,” w hich does not occu r in A lfred Brehm
and M e y e r because it first saw the light o f d ay in M o rg en stern ’s w o r k .7 If
the m adness o f 190 0 is allow ed to seep b ey o n d the p o e tic freed om o f d ra ­
m atic m o n o lo gu es and o verflo w lex ico n , sy n tax , and o rth o g ra p h y as
w ell,* then literature is its sim u lation. N asob em s cou n ter “ a con cep t o f
the linguistic exp ression ” in w hich “ it is app rop riate to have a m ean in g.”
The insane and their sim u lators instead prod u ce pu re signifiers o r “ a n y ­
th in g at all w h ich appears and claim s to be an exp ression , w h ereas w h en
306 1900

one lo o k s m ore closely, this is not the c a se .” ’ W ith M o rg en stern , this

sim ulation occu rs on the su rface o f scien tific-lexical sto ra ge; w ith H u g o
B all, it occu rs on the su rface o f psych iatry itself. A m o n g B all’s Seven
S chizophrenic Sonnets, “ The Green K in g ” stands o u t w ith its claim of
im perial p rop ortion s.

W ir, J o h a n n , A m a d e u s A delgreif,
F iirst von S a p ru n t u n d beiderlei S m e rald is,
E rz k a ise r iib e r a lien U n te rsch le if
U n d O b e rsa c k e lm e iste r v o n S c h m atk a ld is,

E rheben u n se rn g rim m e n L o w e n sc h w e if
U nd d e k re d e re n v o r d e n lee ren Saldis:
“ Ihr R a u b e rh o rd e n , e u r e Z e it ist reif.
D ie H a h n e n fe d e rn a b , ihr G a rib a ld is !
M a n n sa m m le alle B la tte r u n s e re r W ald er
U nd sta n z e G old d a ra u s, soviet m an m ag.
D a s a u s g e d e h n te L a n d b ra u c h t n e u e G e ld er.
U n d e in e H u n g e rs n o t liegt klar am Tag.
S o fo rt versehe m an die S c h a tz b e h a lte r
M it B lattg o ld a u s dem n a c h ste n B u c h en sch lag .”

W e, Jo h a n n A m ad eu s N o b le g rip p ,
P rin ce o f S a p ru n t a n d o f b o th S m erald is,
E m p e ro r o f all th e ra ff a n d riff
A nd C h ie f Sack M a s te r o f S c h m alk a td is,
L ift u p o u r te rrib le lion’s m an e
A n d d e cre e b e f o re th e e m p ty Saldis:
“ You r o b b e r h o rd e s, y o u r tim e h a s com e.
D o w n w ith y o u r c o c k fe a th e rs , y o u G a rib a ld is !

C o lle c t all th e leaves fro m th e fo re s ts ’ tree s

A nd fa sh io n co in fro m th e m , as m a n y as y o u m ay.
T h e e x te n d e d n a tio n n e e d s n e w ru p e e s.

A n d s ta rv a tio n is a s c le a r as day.
So fill rig h t u p th e tre a s u ry shieves
W ith b e e c h -le a f co in w ith o u t d e la y .” 10

T h e poem preserves the form s o f the son net and o f the d ecree only in
o rd e r to m ake a delirious claim in its em p ty interior. It proclaim s a p o w er
w ith o u t referent, w hich confirm s the diagnostic criteria o f sch izoph ren ia
in the self-referen tiality o f the a ct o f w ritin g . A prince w h o se entire em ­
pire consists in the neologism s o f his title raves d eliriou sly as he w rites.
W ith the in ex o ra b ility o f im perial m essages, that van ishing po in t o f K a f­
k a ’ s w ritin g , his decree establishes the m on etary valu e o f puns. A ll sh o rt­
ages vanish thanks to a w ord o f p o w er, w h ich , as in F reud’s insight, w o rk s
“ w ith w ord s instead o f things.”
 RE BUS 307

O f course, this proced u re affects above all w ord s them selves. Schreber’s
im becilic voices rhyme w ith o u t any regard fo r “ sense,” sim ply acco rd in g
to the “ sim ilarity o f the sou n d s,” as in such distant signifiers as “ ‘ S an ­
tia g o ’ or ‘ C a th a rg o ,’ ” “ ‘A rim an ’ o r ‘A ck erm an n .’” 11 Ball has his G reen
K in g add a fe w strange exam ples to this list. Such rhymes have n o th in g to
d o w ith the orality and ech o effects o f a w hisperin g M o th er N atu re. T h ey
constitute a m im icry o f m adness and are thus naked d ictatio n . T h e w riter
does not invent, but on ly sim ulates an insane person w h o in turn has n ot
invented the rh ym es but rather, “ in an actu al rhym in g m a n ia ,” “ had to
con stru ct verses w ith o u t any regard fo r the nonsense th a t resu lted .” 12
T h e seriousness o f such sim ulations is n ot dim inished in the least by
being “ lim ited to lingu istic ph enom ena, that is, to only o n e sym ptom
am o n g m an y .” 13 C o n tem p o ra ry p sychiatrists did not proceed any d iffer­
ently. “ Sim ply because m ost o f o n e ’s acts in higher cu ltu ral life are not
concrete actions but spoken o r w ritten w ord s, lan gu age in itse lf” offers
w riters “ the sam e p ossibility o f p o rtra yin g m ental illness that a person ’s
speech a llo w s us” — that is, p sychiatrists— “ the po ssibility o f m a k in g an
unbiased d iagnosis o f m ental illness.” " Psychiatrists and w riters are thus
rem ark ab ly in accord a b o u t restrictin g the ran ge o f p ossible d ata to the
sym bolic. T h e form er com pile and o rd er w h o le archives o f p sych o tic
speech erro rs, w hich are then at the d isposal o f the latter. O n ly w h en sci­
ences localize m adness in “ lan guage in itself” d oes its literary sim ulation
b ecom e possible and im p ortan t. P sychiatric d isco u rse provides m o n o ­
grap h s on psych otic n eo lo g ism s, rhym e m anias, and special lan gu ages, to
w hich w riters, seekin g inform ation fro m com peten t sou rces, need on ly
help them selves. T h e necessary consequ ence is a w ritin g th at has n o refer­
ent outside o f psychiatry and o f w hich Bolsche provided an early and
ex a ct d escrip tion . If literature “ rightly despises” its secu lar su p p ort in
ph ilosophers such as H egel o r S ch op en h au er, in o rd er to e x p lo it instead
the details am assed by psychiatry and p ath o lo gy, it can only be a sim ­
ulacrum o f m adness.

A n u m b e r o f c are fu l m in d s, p a rtic u la rly p r a c tic in g w rite rs , rig h tfu lly d e sp ise th is

sh a k y b rid g e a n d h ave b o ld ly c o n fro n te d a m a ss e d d e ta ils o f o b je c tiv e k n o w le d g e .
T h e success rev eals a se rio u s d a n g e r in this u n d e r ta k in g a s well. S cientific p sy ­
c h o lo g y a n d p h y sio lo g y a re c o n s tra in e d , by c o n d itio n s fa m ilia r to all, to c o n d u c t
th e ir stu d ie s m ain ly w ith th e d ise ased o rg a n is m , a n d so th e y c o in c id e a lm o st e n ­
tirely w ith p sy c h ia try a n d p a th o lo g y . N o w th e w rite r w h o in a justified th irs t fo r
k n o w le d g e in te n d s to g a in in s tru c tio n fro m these d iscip lin es, finds h im s e lf u n in ­
te n tio n a lly d r a w n m o re a n d m o re in to th e a tm o s p h e r e o f th e c lin ic. H e b e g in s t o
t u r n his a tte n tio n a w a y fro m his rig h tfu l o b je c t, fro m h e a lth y , u n iv ersal h u m a n
life, to w a rd th e a b n o rm a l, a n d in th e in te n tio n o f o b se rv in g t h e p re m ise s o f his
re alistic a rt, h e u n w ittin g ly fills his p a g es w ith th e p re m ise s o f h is p re m ise s, w ith
th e o b se rv ed m a te ria l itself, fro m w h ic h h e sh o u ld b e d ra w in g c o n c lu sio n s. T h e n
308 1900

th e re arises a lite ra tu re o f m an as sick, o f m e n ta l illnesses, o f difficult child b irth s ,

o f th e a r th r itic — in s h o rt, o f w h a t n o t a fe w ig n o ra n t p e o p le im a g in e to be realism
itself.11

Bolsche describes w h a t literature does in the discourse n etw ork o f

1900: it utilizes refuse from the nonsense stored by p sych op h ysics. T h e
delirious discourses that gain entry to the scientific arch ives only on the
con d itio n o f m akin g n o sense lo se even this referent in literary sim u lation.
A n y o n e w h o fills page after page w ith th e prem ises o f his prem ises speaks
neither o f the w o rld o r o f M a n . A s a sim ulacrum o f m adness, literature
loses its classical distinction o f springing im m ediately fro m N atu re o r the
Soul and o f subsequently havin g this naturalness certified by p h ilo so p h i­
cal interpreters. It becom es secon d ary literature in the strictest sense o f
the w ord . Its discou rse, cut off from “ universal hum an life,” deals w ith
oth er discourses, w hich it can on ly tran sp o se. B ecause m edia tran sp o si­
tion s render useless such con cep ts as authenticity and p rim acy ,14 any ves­
tige o f extrad iscu rsive verification is lost. L iteratu re does not reveal p h e­
nom ena o r d eterm in e fa cts; its field is a m adness that, as M iin sterb erg
realized, exists only on paper.

M any fictio n al p re s e n ta tio n s o f a b n o rm a l m e n ta l sta te s a re ta k e n to be sensitive

p sy c h o lo g ic al p o r tr a its precisely in a re a s w h e re th e scientifically tra in e d o b se rv e r
w o u ld re co g n ize an im p o ssib ility . If p e rso n s w e re a c tu a lly t o b e h a v e in th e m a n ­
n e r th e w rite r h a s t h e m a c t a n d sp e a k in these n o v e listic m en ta l d is tu rb a n c e s , th e
d o c to r w o u ld have t o c o n c lu d e th a t th ey w ere s im u la tin g .17

“ N o ve listic m ental d istu rban ces” accord in gly o ccu r in a n o m an’s

lan d , w hich can be verified neither by im m ediately accessib le m ental
truths nor by c o n tro lled experim ents. Its nam e is sim u lacru m . W riters
w h o sim ulate being p sychiatrically inform ed describe persons w h o,
view ed from the stan dp oin t o f psychiatry, are sim ply sim u lators. But that
is the point. Sim ulation w ith o u t referen ce dissolves th e old con n ection
betw een m adness and illness in o rd er to establish an entirely different
con n ection : betw een m adness and w ritin g .1*
N ovelistic m en tal distu rbances, w h ich occu rred in m ore than novels in
1900, did not renew the affiliation o f artists and th e insane again st a p h i­
listine b ourgeoisie. T h e ap p earan ce o f expressionist “ y o u n g a rtists” w as
not necessary “ to obtain the provocative p ossibility o f con cretely repre­
senting their op p ositio n to the ruling norm s and n otion s o f va lu e” by the
revised and positive valu ation o f m adn ess.19 T his tran svalu ation o ccu rred
w hen p o sitivistic sciences began determ in ing cultural tech n o lo g ies from
deficits and defects and thus liquidated classical norms. T h e m yths o f the
yo u n g and o f provocation on ly o b scu re the com plete exten t o f the y o u n g
p ro v o cateu rs’ dependence on th e discourse n etw ork o f their p erio d .20
 RE BUS 309

Som ething com pletely different is at stake w hen p sych op h ysics and litera­
ture collide. Illusory p o litical-m o ral struggles, in w hich w riters p u rp o r­
tedly are the first to discover m adness, are superflu ou s; the stru ggle c o n ­
cerns only the use o f the same discourse. W hereas psych op hysics held on
to the conn ection b etw een m adness and illness, literature con stru cted a
com pletely different con n ection between m adness and w ritin g . Its sim u la­
tion created ind ivid u al cases th at sp eak and w rite o u t o f stan dardized c o l­
lection s o f sym ptom s. A n d so they appeared , accid en tal and sin gu lar as
only dilettantes o f the m iracle cou ld be: “ T h e M a d m a n ” (G eo rg H eym ),
“ T h e Im becile” (B all), “ T h e V isio n n u t” [D er Visionarr] (Jakob van H od -
dis), “ T h e Idiot” (H uelsen beck, Z e c h , Johannes Becher). T h e y ap p ear
and begin their nonsensical speech: the “ S on g o f the E scapees” (Johannes
U rzidil), “ T h e Idiot’s S o n g” (R ilke), n ot to fo rget “ T h e S on g o f the C ra z y
W om en” (Paul Adler).
A s if to nam e the discursive status o f these son gs, the y o u n g Breton
w ro te, across the barrier erected by the First W orld W ar:

D e m en c e p re co c e, p a ra n o ia , e ta ts c rep u sc u la ire s.
O p o e sie a lle m a n d e , F re u d e t K raep elin !
D e m e n tia p ra e c o x , p a ra n o ia , tw ilig h t sta te s
O h G e rm an p o e try , F reud a n d K ra e p e lin !2'

N o on e cou ld say m ore clearly that literature utilizes the d iscarded m ate­
rial o f con tem p o rary psychiatry. D em entia p r a e c o x is, o f cou rse, “ in its
co n tem p o ra ry fo rm ” K raepelin’s “ n ew creatio n .” 22 A n d so the glo ry of
literature w as reflected o n to psychiatry. Psychiatry’s archives becam e
rou gh d rafts o f p o etry and p rovid ed m aterial and m ethods fo r pure w rit­
ing. O f co u rse, classical and rom an tic w riters learned from the psychic
cures o f their R eils and H o ffb au ers,2’ but the O c cid e n t rem ained the p re­
d om inant them e and archive. M ean in g a lw ays cam e from A b o v e ; n on ­
sense, by con trast, can n o t be invented, it can on ly be tran scribed and
w ritten d o w n . T h u s a “ G erm an p o etry ” o f Freud and K raepelin to o k
o v er the system ic position occu p ied by Poetry in the classical-rom an tic
d iscourse n etw o rk , and literature m oved from secon d to third place in the
n ew ord er o f d iscourse. T h e third place is (just as fo r Schreber) the site o f
sensual pleasure. A rem ainder o f nonsense, o f no further use to even the
sciences o f nonsense, is left over for gam es.

Because it cuts the old b on d betw een m adness and illness, the gam e o f
the sim ulated delirium m akes the d istin ctio n betw een d o cto rs and p a ­
tients so m e w h a t tenuous. M iin sterb erg w as p ro b a b ly righ t to su sp ect
that sim ulators o f m edical science actu ally d escribe sim u lators o f m a d ­
ness. In 1893 a fou r-p art w o r k appeared in Berlin en titled B od y, Brain,
3 io 1900

M in d , G od , a w o rk th at (w ith the excep tion o f G o d ) cataloged in its title

the basic p ro b lem s o f 1 900 and identified its a u th or as a “ p ra ctic in g d o c ­
to r.” 24 Its intent is true p sych op h ysics: Karl G eh rm an n brin gs case h is­
tory after case history to bear on the problem o f relatin g diverse physical
sy m p to m s to neural centers in the brain. But the place nam es on this
brain atlas o u td o on e an oth er in th e ir poetry, the recorded dream s o f
countless patients becom e m ore and m ore beau tifu l and flow ery, until
after tw o thou san d pages there is n o longer any d o u b t th a t all the neural
centers, case histories, and recorded dream s can on ly refer to a single su b ­
ject, the institu tion alized w riter. D o c to rs, p ro ceed in g like the in stitu ­
tion alized Schreber tow ard ex h a u stin g the conten ts o f the b ra in , end up
in m adness them selves.
O n e need on ly w rite d ow n p sych op h ysics to prod u ce “ G erm an p o ­
etry.” T h a t is ex a ctly w h a t the you n g assistant d o c to r Benn does w h en he
lets a, or his, professor speak for him self.

professor : A nd n o w , g e n tle m e n , I h a v e in c o n c lu sio n a very sp e c ia l su rp rise fo r

y o u . A s y o u can see, I h a v e c o lo re d th e p y ra m id a l cells fro m th e h ip p o c a m p u s
o f th e le ft h e m isp h e re o f th e c e re b ru m ta k e n fro m a fo u rte e n -d a y -o ld r a t o f th e
K atull variety. N o w o b se rv e: the cells a re n o t re d , b u t p in k , w ith a lig h t
b ro w n ish -v io le t c o lo ra tio n th a t sh a d e s in to g re en . T h is is in d ee d m o st in te re s t­
ing. You a re a w a re th a t late ly a p a p e r c a m e o u t o f th e G ra z In s titu te th a t d is ­
putes this fa c t, d e sp ite m y th o ro u g h in v e stig a tio n s o f th e m a tte r. I w ill n o t say
a n y th in g a b o u t th e G ra z In stitu te in g e n e ra l, b u t I m u st say th a t th is p a p e r
s tru c k m e as p re m a tu re . A s y o u se e , I n o w h a v e th e p r o o f a t h a n d . T h is d o e s
h a v e e n o rm o u s im p lic a tio n s. It w o u ld b e p o ssib le to d istin g u ish ra ts w ith lo n g
black fu r a n d d a rk eyes fro m th o s e w ith s h o rt ro u g h fu r a n d light eyes th ro u g h
th is fine d ifferen ce in cell c o lo r, as lo n g as th e ra ts a re o f th e sa m e ag e, h a v e
b e e n fed w ith c a n d y , h a v e p la y e d fo r h a lf an h o u r d aily w ith a sm all p u m a ,
a n d h a v e sp o n ta n e o u s ly d e fec ate d tw o tim e s in th e e v e n in g w ith th e te m p e ra ­
tu r e a t 37 o r 36 d eg rees c e n tig ra d e .25

T h e utilization o f d iscarded m aterial from p sych op h ysics is as concrete

as it is perilous. D u rin g his train ing with fam ou s psychiatrists and p a ­
th o lo gists, Benn published scientific w o r k a n d te x ts that ridiculed brain
research, n otably w o r k s w ith the sam e titles and conten ts as his o w n .24
T h e m on tage o f its senseless accu m u latio n o f fa ct m ade p sych op h ysics
into the m ental d isturbance it w as investigating, and m ade the pink brain
cells o f the rat in to ph enom ena as m agnificent as those fou n d in G e h r ­
mann. In the literary pu b lication o f his lectures, Benn’s professor takes his
rightful place alongsid e the Flechsig o f the M em oirs (assistant d o c to r
R onn e threatened to sue the professor “ because o f brain d a m a g e ” ).27
M o st likely, on ly because Z ieh en and K arl B onh oeffer did n ot read the
m aterials their assistant Benn published in m arginal avant-gard e journals
w a s Benn saved from the com p rom isin g situation s o f G ehrm an n o r
 REBUS 311

Schreber.2* For H offm an n, the b u reacratic-poetic d o u b le life w as a useful

arrangem ent because it betrayed the secret unity o f b o th fu n ctio n s; Benn
w as co n fro n ted w ith d ou ble-en try b o o k k eep in g , in w h ich on e hand c o n ­
tinued to w rite statistics and the oth er exp lo ited a sin gu lar delirium .
A lo n g w ith Ernst M ach an d M au th n er, those p h ilo so p h ic sou rces for
m ost research on exp ressionism , Ziehen ta u gh t that the unity o f the eg o
w as a fiction when com pared w ith the reality o f the associatio n o f id eas.2’
Benn and R on n e had on ly to put their b o ss’s th eory in to p ractice in w r it­
ing. It w as an irrecon cilable b u t perm issible use o f p s ych ia tric discourse
to turn it on one’s ow n accid en tal case. E xa ctly th at happened w hen
Benn’s report on his last y ear as a psychiatrist, 1 9 1 3 , p ro d u ced the p sy ­
ch iatric d iagnosis o f the irrecon cilability o f w ritin g and treatm ent.

I a tte m p te d to find o u t fo r m y self w h a t I w a s su fferin g fro m . T h e m a n u a ls o n

p sy c h iatry t h a t I c o n s u lte d led m e t o m o d e rn p sy c h o lo g ic al w o rk s , s o m e q u ite
re m a rk a b le , p a rtic u la rly in th e F rench sc h o o l; I im m e rse d m y se lf in th e d e s c rip ­
tio n s o f th e c o n d itio n d e sig n a te d a s d e p e rs o n a liz a tio n . . . I b eg an to see th e e g o
as a n e n tity th a t stro v e , w ith a fo rce c o m p a re d to w h ic h g ra v ity w ould b e the
to u c h o f a sn o w fla k e, fo r a c o n d itio n in w h ic h n o th in g th a t m o d e rn c u ltu re d e sig ­
n a te d as in te lle ctu a l g ifts p lay ed any p a r t.30

T h e w riter as insane— n ot a m ythic con flict betw een artists and the b o u r­
geoisie, but the sem i-official d o c trin e o f psychiatric te x tb o o k s creates the
con n ection . Benn and R onn e are psychiatrists w h o b ecom e in cap ab le o f
“ ta k in g interest in a new ly arrived case or ob servin g the old cases w ith
con stan t in d ivid u alizin g atten tion ,” 31 w h ich a cco rd in g to Z ieh en and the
rules o f data exh au stion , w o u ld be their professional o b lig a tio n .32 In­
stead, R onn e, ly in g m otionless in the d o c to r ’s office, sim ulates the ca ta ­
ton ic, and Benn sim ulates a situation in w hich he is the n ew ly arrived case
in need o f con stan t ob servation . But a d o c to r w h o transfers the latest d i­
agn o ses, such as d ep erson alizatio n , from his patients o n to him self, uses
Janet o r R ib o t n o differently from h o w Schreber used K raepelin ’s te x t­
b o o k . E ducation o r “ intellectual g ifts ” have n o role in either case.
But by isolating psych op h ysical results, literature sim ulated on ly w h a t
distinguished p sychoan alysis in the d isco u rse n etw ork o f 1900. B io grap h -
ically, first o f all, there is F reud’s self-analysis, the m yth ic origin o f his
n ew science, w hich proceeds by the sam e inversion o f roles. A s Benn
w o u ld later discover his psych otic d ep erson alizatio n , so Freud fou n d the
basic co m p lex o f his n eu rotic patients “ in m y ow n case to o .” 33 M e th o d ­
ologically, p sychoan alysis sin gularized statistical m aterial: it d o es n ot
order the co llected nonsense in to n osological en titites, but attributes the
m aterial to u n con sciou s su bjects. Finally, in a literary sense, this o r g a n i­
zation o f the m aterial a p p e ars in the case histories, w h ich co u n t as “ m o d ­
ern G erm an letters” o r “ G erm an p o etry.”
312. 1900

Like the Poets and T h in kers one hundred years earlier, w riters and
an alysts cam e into “ close and fruitful c o n ta c t.” 14 A s ea rly as 18 8 7 the
p h ilosoph er D ilth ey dep lored a n ew “ m iso lo g y ” am o n g artists, w h o
hated thin kin g, aesthetics, and cu ltu re [B ild u n g ].'5 O n e friendship w as
over (even if oth er critics did n ot have D ilth e y ’s keen ear fo r the a n ­
nouncem ent), and another, just as perilous, cou ld begin. W h a t G o e th e
had said abou t p h ilo so p h ers— that he cou ld never d o w ith o u t them and
yet cou ld never com e to term s w ith th e m — from 1900 on w a s addressed
to Freud: although o r because, accord in g to K afka, there w a s “ o f c o u rs e ”
a great deal o f F reu d in “ T h e Ju d gm en t,” his literary w ritin g o b ey ed the
im perative “ N o m o re p s y c h o lo g y !” 34 T h e so lid a rity o f so lid a rity and
com p etition , o n c e the fate o f Poets and T h in kers, becam e the fate o f w r it­
ers and analysts.
O f co u rse, it w a s n o lon ger a question o f m eaning and its in terp reta­
tion. W riters and psych oan alysts did n ot constitu te a state-su pportin g
com m unity o f interpreters in w hich there w as a m utual ex ch a n g e o f cer­
tificates valid atin g the creation o f eternal values. T h e ir m utual relatio n ­
ship w a s sup ported by the existen ce, at the basis o f all cu ltu ral te ch n o lo ­
gies, o f bodies and their nonsense. T h ese b od ies, how ever, w ere on ly
accessible to p sych op h ysical exp erim ents at the p rice o f silence and death.
But on the c o u ch , w h ere “ alas, everyth in g is d ifferen t,” “ n othin g takes
place . . . but an interchange o f w o rd s.” 37 In literature, w h ere even such
exch an g e is lack in g, n oth in g o c c u rs bu t intransitive w ritin g . P sych o ­
analysis m ust thus focus on the nonsense in speech until it can gath er a
linked set o f indices that closes arou n d an inaccessible reality. Literature
must p u rify pieces o f paper o f everyth in g readable until the body o f its
w ord s coincides w ith the oth er b o d y in an instan taneous sh o rtcircu it. A s
such, h ow ever, th e tw o discourses com pete w ith o n e another. T h ere is a
reality inaccessible to both, and tw o m utually exclu sive detou rs: d e c o d ­
ing and the shortcircu it.
Freud did n ot ever claim to be able to explain the fa ct th at literature
exists. In spite o r because o f this, w riters have d on e their utm ost to k eep
him from any such ex p la n a tio n . G iven the alternatives o f laying their
b o d ies on the cou ch o r s e ttin g d o w n b od ies o f w ord s, alm o st all op ted for
pure w ritin g as again st a “ (possibly un productive) life.” 38 S o the relatio n ­
ship betw een w riters and analysts b ecam e all kinds o f things— d ialogu e,
readin g, greetings addressed even w ith o u t an a cco m p an yin g c h a lic e — but
it did n o t becom e p ractice.

“ A t o n e tim e I d id c o n sid e r p sy c h ia tric tr e a tm e n t,” h e sa id , “ b u t d ro p p e d th e idea

ju st in tim e .”
F o r a lo n g tim e h e a c tu a lly h a d believed t h a t his sa lv a tio n lay in p sy c h o a n a ly ­
sis. H is b e lo v e d , L ou A n d re a s-S a lo m e , w a s a n av id fo llo w er o f F re u d a n d his
 REBUS 3I3

circle and had u rg e d R ilk e to lay him self o n th e fa m o u s c o u c h . F o r years b e fo re

th e w a r R ilke c o n sid e re d th e p ro s a n d c o n s b u t finally, a t th e la st m o m e n t, d re w
b a ck . “ I w o n ’t h a v e a n y o n e p o k in g a ro u n d in m y b ra in ,” h e said to m e, “ I’d
ra th e r keep m y c o m p le x e s .”
L ater h e d id m e e t F re u d p e rso n ally , b u t sa id n o th in g a b o u t his p ro b le m s . A fte r
th a t h e a v o id e d F re u d w h e n e v e r th ey e n c o u n te re d o n e a n o th e r. T h e pan ic fe a r o f
b e in g p ick ed a p a r t a n d su c k e d d ry c o n s ta n tly p u rs u e d h im .3’

A s paranoid as Schreber, w h o also lived in fear o f a b rain -p illagin g d o c ­

tor, R ilke to o k the op p o site course. O n e gave his b o d y over to a scien ce
that w as hardly cap ab le o f d em on stratin g itself w o rth y o f such a gift. T h e
oth er w ith d rew his b o d y from a science that had neither the inten tion nor
the capability o f po kin g around in his brain, because o f co u rse it dealt
only in the ex ch a n g e o f w ord s. T h e rage o f sim ulated paran oia is w orse
than that o f the clin ical variety. T h e fa ct that psych oan alysis transferred
psychophysical m ethods to individual cases unleashed the ph an tasm o f
trephination . T h e w riter’s brain becam e the m ythic vanishing point o f all
attem pts to grou n d discourse n eu ro lo gically. W ritin g circa 1900 th ere­
fore m eans: this brain, its clinical o r sim ulated m adness n o tw ith stan d in g ,
shall be im m ediately transposed into texts and protected from any m ed i­
cal soun dings. T h is tran sposition o f m edia had to pass throu gh th at o th er
vanishing p o in t, the en d o p sych ic perception o f brain fu n ctio n s. W h a t
G ehrm ann and Schreber b eg a n , issued in to literature.
Shortly after A p ollin aire received his head w o u n d in the trenches at
A isne, he issued a challen ge to his critics, the adm irers o f B oileau and Ben
A k ib a: “ But is there n oth in g new under the sun? It rem ains to be seen.
W hat! M y head has been x -rayed . I have seen, w hile I live, m y ow n c ra ­
nium , and that w ould be n oth in g n e w ? ” 40 A “ n ew sp irit,” then, as the
title o f the essay prom ises, inspires the poet. N o last w ord s are p ron ou n ced
on the life-threatening w ou n d to the head, in that it open s up the m uch
m o re ex citin g p ossibility o f en d o p sych ic p ercep tion . D r. B ard cl’s x -ra y s
and trep h in ation o f A p o llin a ire m ade literal truth o f w h a t F lechsig and
his clever stud ent exp ected only o f the postm ortem ex a m in a tio n . It is
only logical, th erefore, that A p o llin a ire should im m ediately appeal to
w riters to approach the great n ovelty under the sun and co n n ect their
w ritin g w ith tech n ological m edia like film and the p h o n o grap h .
Brains— the title o f Benn’s early co llectio n o f n ovellas— designates an
entire w ritin g p roject. R onn e, th e hero, w a s origin ally a p sychiatrist and
brain researcher, w h o “ in th ese hands had held hundreds o r even th o u ­
sands” of b rain s,41 n o t m erely those o f rats. But w hen he m akes the tran si­
tion from d o c to r to patient, all o f his research interests shrink to a single
en igm a. R onn e co n stan tly perform s a gesture “ as if he w ere b reak in g
open a soft, large fruit, or as if he w ere u n fold in g so m e th in g” 42— a rebus
314 i 900

that a d o rin g nurses are finally able to d ecod e as the op en in g o f his o w n

brain. It stan ds, like R o n n e’s a ssociatio n w ith brain d am age, fo r a new
w ritin g project: literary im pulses are to be fed on the vivisected fruit o f
his o w n b rain . T h a t is w h y the h ero procu res him self a jou rn al and a
p encil.41
And as if to take R on n e’s d ecision at its w o rd , F lake, an adm irer
o f Benn, m ade an entire novel o u t o f the latter’s lacon ic novellas; o u t o f
Brains, that is, cam e an entire C ity o f th e Brain. T h e h ero, L au d a , has, o f
course, studied m edicine and fo r three sem esters has “ alw ays begun again
hesitantly w ith the open in g c u t” : “ som etim es into the up-turned h em i­
spheres, the gelatin ou s site o f co n scio u s th rou gh t, w h ich can be m od ified ,
som etim es in to the base, the m o re defined, d ifferentiated, a rch itecto n ic
p o rtio n .” 44 H e has thus a lread y been to sch o o l w ith R o n n e, w hen years
later, a fter leaving the office and secretary, he happens to read a paper on
neurology. It d escrib es the brain as an endlessly co m p le x “ cross n e tw o rk ”
consisting o f transm itters/receivers o f “ electrical w a ves.” T h e reader in­
stantly decides “ to co n stru ct a m odel o f the w o rld from th is.” B ecause
m odels o f the w orld in 1900 consist in “ w o rd s, perhaps only w o rd s ,”
Lauda begins a “ m etaphysical jo u rn a l” that by m eans of “ p sych o -p h ysi­
o lo g y ” d erives his o w n th o u gh t apparatu s fro m “ nerve tra c ts” and d e ­
scrib es his brain as “ a city o f p a th w a ys that I laid d o w n a cco rd in g to in­
dividual acts and n o w m ust travel forever.” H avin g sunk to b eing the
k n o w in g slave o f his “ th o u gh t p a th s ,” L au d a th erefore falls asleep, only
to return to the im possible place o f such reflections. R o n n e’s gesture b e ­
co m es a dream act. L auda stays in a scien tifically “ read-in” city o f the
brain until the n ext m ornin g brings the realization o r renu n ciation that is
decisive for w riters: “ A p h ysical residence in th e c ity o f the brain is im ­
possible, o n ly the allegorical is po ssib le.” Because the im possible w ish es
tell the truth, the renun ciation reveals the ch a ra cte r o f literature in the
discourse n etw ork o f 1900: L au d a henceforth intends o n ly to “ scream
w a lk w rite ” [schrein schreiten schreiben].4' T h e novel itself b ecom es an
allegorical residence in the brain, a deciphering o f n eu ro p h y sio lo g ica l
engram s.
M a rcel, the n arrator, d aw d les in his pursuit o f T h e R em em brance o f
Things Past as lon g as he fails to realize that the goal o f his search lies
sim ply in the “ sto reh ou se” o f his o w n brain and is stored on ly there. T he
fa ct that he, like G eh rm an n o r L au d a, w ill have to tran scribe nerve tracts
is sim ultaneously and im m ediately a lso the fea r th at a “ head a cc id e n t”
cou ld m ake him fo rget all the stored traces, indeed m ake him forget the
forgettin g o f them .46 T h u s M a rce l began to w rite just in tim e, driven by
the furies o f an eventual aph asia, w hich w a s, not coin cid en tally, a s u b ­
 RE BUS 315

ject on w h ich the ph ysician Dr. A drien Proust, the w rite r’s father, had
p ub lished .47
But en ough dem on stration. T h e pu zzlin g question com m on to n eu ro lo ­
gists and the insane, to psych oan alysts and w riters circa 190 0 is sum m ed
up in the title Brain a nd Language.“ T h e d o c to rs (w h o tak e precedence
in form u latin g the problem ) pose the them e; the w riters w o rk it th rou gh .
T h eir w ritin g stands e x a c tly at the place o r ta k es the place o f the brain
vivisection that all p sych op h ysics m ust dream o f a n d d o w ith o u t. R ilk e
fled p sych oan alysis because his o w n “ w o r k ” w a s fo r him “ a ctu a lly n o th ­
ing oth er than that sort o f self-treatm en t.” 4'* T h u s he fled not m erely b e­
cause Freud o r V ik to r G eb sattel w o u ld p o ke arou n d in his b rain , but to
be able to com pete with the vivisectors. T h e u n derlying m u tu ality o f the
tw o discourses exclu ded any overlap. In the d iscou rse n etw ork o f 1900,
w riters are people w h o in the analysis— that is, the d eco m p o sitio n — o f
their psychic apparatu s prefer to g o it alone.
W ith his m ute gesture, R onn e turns his o w n brain hem ispheres inside
out in o rd e r to reach the sou rce o f his th o u gh t; L au d a visits the city o f his
brain in th e m etap hor o f the d ream ; but there w as o n e w h o , w id ely d e­
cried as a dream er and m aker o f im ages, to o k on the im possible task
com m on to them all, and did it tech n ologically, w ith o u t im ages. Ffow-
ever, he w as a poet and hated the ap p ro x im ate. In order to define the
status o f literature, R ilk e, in his “ n o te b o o k ” Prim al S o u n d [ U r-G erausch],
chose a m odel that since 190 0 h a s designated all inscription a n d d e co d ­
ing: the p h on o grap h .
Fourteen o r fifteen years a fter an u n forgotten day in sch ool on w hich
he con stru cted a p h on o grap h ou t o f card b o ard and parchm en t paper,
candle w a x and the bristles o f a clo th es b ru sh ,10 R ilke atten d ed anatom y
lectures at the E cole des B eau x-A rts in Paris. A m o n g all the m edical
sam ples, w h at “ en ch an ted ” the w riter w as a “ special h ou sin g closed
against all w orldly sp ace” — the sk u ll. Rilke acq u ired a skull and spent
the evenings stu d yin g it— w ith the result that his ch ild h o o d m em ory w as
com pletely rew ritten. If it on ce seem ed that “ this a u to n o m o u s sound
[w ould] rem ain u n forgettab le, apart fro m us, preserved o u tsid e ,” the stu­
dent o f anatom y learned that not the soun ds “ from the fu n n el,” bu t “ those
m arkings traced on the cylin der o f the p h o n o g ra p h ” ' 1 w ere m uch m ore
essential. But the sutura coronalis effects the shift from rep rod u ction to
inscription , from readin g to w ritin g in the tech n ological age. “ In the
peculiarly vig ila n t and d em an d in g light o f the can d le the cranial suture
w as quite evid ent and I soon realized w hat it rem inded m e of: those un­
forgotten lines th a t w ere on ce scratched o n to a little w a x roll by the p o in t
o f a b ristle!” ' 2
3i 6 i 900

Th e suture that divides the tw o cranial hem ispheres like a sagittal in ci­
sion designates the status o f all scrip t for a w riter o f 1900. O n ly a scratch
or cut into the flesh o f forgetfu lness itself can be u n forg ettab le. W h a t
N ietzsche learn ed in vestigatin g the gen ealo g y o f m orals, w h a t K a fk a ’s e x ­
plorer learn ed in the penal c o lo n y ,53 Rilke w a s able to learn from a n a t­
om y. If e v e r an initiation did justice to the m aterial, then this w as it. T h e
cranial suture fu n ctions as the left-over tra c e o f a w ritin g en ergy o r art
that, instead o f “ m akin g variation s o r im itatin g,’ ’ “ had its jo y in the dance
o f existen ces,” in a “ d ictatorial art that presents d ispo sition s o f en ergy.”
A “ consciou sness o f an ethical n atu re,” '4 o f the kind evok ed in the titles
o f N ietzsch e and K a fk a , can add n oth in g to this. T ech n o lo gy and ph ys­
io lo g y are responsible fo r m aterial inscription.
M o re e x a ctly , a system com p o sed o f te ch n o lo g y and p h ysio lo g y is re­
sponsible. That is w h a t the skull fo r years had “ suggested again and a g a in ”
to R ilke the w riter.

T h e c o ro n a l s u tu re o f th e skull (this w o u ld first h av e to b e in v estig a te d ) h a s — let

us a ssu m e — a c e rta in sim ila rity to the closely w oven lin e w h ic h th e n e ed le o f the
p h o n o g ra p h e n g rav es o n th e receiv in g , r o ta tin g c y lin d e r o f the a p p a ra tu s . W h at if
o n e c h a n g e d th e n e ed le a n d d ire c te d it o n its re tu rn jo u rn e y a lo n g a tra c in g w h ic h
w as n o t d e riv e d fro m th e g ra p h ic tra n s la tio n o f s o u n d , b u t e x iste d o f itself n a tu ­
ra lly — w ell: to p u t it plainly, a lo n g th e c o ro n a l su tu re , f o r e x am p le. W h a t w o u ld
h a p p e n ? A s o u n d w o u ld n ecessarily re su lt, a se ries o f s o u n d s , m u sic . . .
Feelings— w h ic h ? In cred u lity , tim id ity , fe ar, a w e — w h ic h o f all th e feelings
h e re p o ssib le p re v e n ts m e fro m su g g e stin g a n am e fo r th e p rim al so u n d w h ic h
w o u ld th e n h a v e m a d e its a p p e a r a n c e in th e w o rld . . .”

U nlike poets such as Shakespeare o r G o ttfrie d K eller, w h o th ro w their

heroes into the trad itional m elan choly a ssociatio n s at the sight o f a sku ll,
th e w riter is an exp erim enter. H e suggests, m ore rad ically than tech n i­
cian s and p h ysio lo gists— and in a lan gu age th a t m ain tains a w on d erfu l
balance betw een precision and cau tio n — a p h o n o grap h ic test o f hum an
b o d y p a rts. T h e insight o f in fo rm ation science, that record in g and p la y ­
b a c k devices are essentially co n v ertib le ,'6 a llo w s the d eco d in g o f a track
that n o on e had ever en cod ed . But the fa ct that nature has th row n a w ay
the keys to its secrets is n o reason, in 1900, to leave the rebus u n tou ch ed .
L et deranged people like G ehrm an n attem pt to solve it w ith m ere b o o k s,
but “ w e ,” the art-p h ysiologists and artists, “ inevitab ly thin k o f a process
sim ilar to E dison ’s phonograph w hen it com es to the m olecules and nerve
tracts in the b ra in .” ' 7 Sim m el’s ob jective interpretation , Freud’s a n alytic
con stru ction , R ilk e’s a p p a ra tu s— all can tra c k traces w ith o u t a su bject.
A w ritin g w ith o u t the w riter, then, records the im possible reality at the
basis o f all m edia: w h ite noise, prim al soun d.
T h a t is o n ly lo g ic a l. C ertain ly “ it” has been m a k in g n oise from tim e
 REBUS 317

im m em orial, as lon g as there has been B row n ian m otio n . But for any dis­
tin ction between noise and inform ation to be possible, the real m ust be
able to m ove through tech n ological channels. Printing errors occu r in the
b o o k as m edium , but there is n o prim al sou n d . T h e p h o n o g ra p h ic rep ro ­
duction o f a g ro o v e “ that is not the gra p h ic translation o f a so u n d ” m ocks
tran slatab ility and universal equivalen ts. Setting g ra m o p h o n e needles
o n to co ro n a l sutures is on ly possible in a cu ltu re that gives free reign to
all discursive m anipulation s. And o f cou rse a n yth in g that “ exists n atu ­
rally,” like the skull, thereby loses its distinctiveness. A t such extrem es the
tran sposition o f m edia creates on ly u n con sciou s p rog ram s o u t o f so-
called nature. O tt o F lake and Proust dream ed o f m a k in g literal rep ro d u c­
tions o f the inscribed path w ays in their brains; R ilke m ade tech n olog ical
suggestions fo r the tech n ological realization o f their dream s. Yet R ilke re­
serves this realization for w riters. It w as not fo r the “ P oets,” w h o , a cc o rd ­
ing to R ilk e’s historically e x a ct insight, “ w ere o v erw h elm ed ” by “ alm ost
o n ly ” one sense, the visu al, w hereas “ the con trib u tion m ade by an in at­
tentive sense o f h ea rin g” w as p ra ctica lly nil. R ilke had in mind an artistic
p ractice that “ con trib utes m ore decisively than a n y o n e else to an e x te n ­
sion o f the several sense fields,” th at is, w ith m ore d eterm in ation than
even “ the w o rk o f research.” 5’
W riters and analysts o f the m ental a p p aratu s thus en gaged in op en ,
unrelenting com p etition . T h e very R ilke w h o fled p sych o a n a ly tic vivisec-
tors program m ed , as the w riter’s only task, the tran sposition o f coronal
sutures. Even his en igm atic “ inn er-w orld sp ace” w as only another nam e
for the engram stored in th e brain and tran scribed by w riters. T h e e v i­
dence is th at R ilke called the skull a “ sp ecial h ou sin g closed against all
w o rld ly sp ace” and thereby restated the p h ysio lo gist’s insight th at, for
such a housin g, “ ou r ow n body is the extern al w o r ld .” 5’ Interpreters w h o
read “ inn er-w orld sp ace,” this tech n ological and p h ysio lo gical system ,
ph ilosophically, thus rem ain as far behind the state o f the art, as b elated
as their totem ic anim al, the proverbial ow l.

M o re than one hundred p a g es on aphasia research and p h o n o grap h s,

p sychoan alysis and p a ran o ia, w ill perhaps not have been w asted if they
m ake it possible to spell ou t fo r the first tim e, and not m erely to under­
stand, T h e N o te b o o k s o f M alte Laurids Brigge.
Spelling in the N o te b o o k s is taken o v e r by psychiatrists (w hereas p h i­
losophers d o n o t ap p ear a t all). D o cto rs in th e Salpetriere a re the on es
w h o m a k e a-v-a-n-t ou t o f avant, w h ich Brigge (as the title o f the b o o k
indicates) has on ly to n ote d o w n . T h e question is w h y this tw enty-eigh t-
year-old , w h o is not in the Salpetriere to gather racy m aterial on d o cto r-
patient relationships,60 sh ow s up in the insane asylum instead o f stick in g
3i 8 1900

to an atom y lectures and the Ecole des B eau x-A rts. T h e an sw er is that
B rigge, like his novelist, “ had on ce considered psych iatric treatm en t, but
d ropped the idea just in tim e.”
H e enters the Salpetriere, exp lain s his case, is registered fo r electro ­
sh o ck therapy, is questioned briefly by a couple o f assistant d o c to rs, and
is sent b ack to the w a itin g room . W h ile B rigge is w a itin g fo r the prom ised
o r threatened electrical sh o ck s, the discursive even t occu rs: his ears catch
a hot, flaccid stuttering “ a-v-a-n-t.” P sychoph ysical d eco m p o sitio n of
lan guage becom es the secret cod e o f an initiation . Just like the w ord
d a d a , w h ich occu rs in a child’s “ b ab b lin g phase” and rem inds p eop le “ o f

their h on orab ly dirtied diapers and o f the cry that is n o w sup posed to
delight the w o rld ,” “ the “ a-v-a-n-t” also leads to a short circu it betw een
exp erim en t and prim al sou n d , p sych op h ysics and children ’s lan gu age.

A n d , th e n , a s I liste n e d to th e h o t, flaccid s tu tte rin g o n th e o th e r sid e o f th e p a r ti­

tio n , th e n f o r th e first tim e in m any, m a n y y e a rs it w a s th e r e a g ain . T h a t w h ic h
h a d s tru c k in to m e m y first, p ro fo u n d te rr o r , w h e n as a c h ild I lay ill w ith fever:
th e Big T h in g . Yes, th a t w as w h a t I h a d a lw a y s called it, w h e n th ey all s to o d
a ro u n d m y b e d and felt m y pulse and a sk e d w h a t had frig h te n ed m e: th e Big
T h in g . A nd w h e n th ey g o t th e d o c to r a n d h e c a m e a n d s p o k e to m e, I beg g ed him
o n ly t o m a k e t h e B ig T h in g g o aw ay, n o th in g else m a tte re d . B u t h e w a s like th e
rest. H e c o u ld n o t ta k e it aw ay, th o u g h I w as so sm all th e n a n d m ig h t easily h av e
b e e n h e lp e d . A n d n o w it w a s th e re a g a in . . . . N o w it g r e w o u t o f m e like a t u ­
m o r, like a se c o n d h e a d , a n d w a s a p a r t o f m e, th o u g h it c o u ld n o t b e lo n g to m e
a t all, b e ca u se it w a s so big. . . . B ut th e Big T h in g sw elled a n d g re w o v e r m y face
like a w arm b lu ish boil and g re w o v e r m y m o u th , and a lre a d y the s h a d o w o f its
e d g e lay u p o n m y re m a in in g eye.“

At precisely the place or precisely in place o f a psych iatric treatm ent

that does not occu r, because Brigge flees the Big T h in g and the Salpetriere
in on e and the same m ovem ent, w hat does occu r is the return o f his ch ild ­
h oo d . T o drop the idea o f p sych oan alysis just in tim e thus m eans to w a lk
th e royal road alon e and lift infan tile am nesias. But low er a b d o m in al play
is not w h at returns w ith the repressed; it is the debris o f a h o rro r that
cou ld not be spoken and fo r w h ich “ the Big T h in g ” is still a euphem ism .
W h a t app ears is som eth in g real th at c a n n o t be spoken in an y lan gu age
because the very act o f in trod u cin g it into lan gu age filters it out. O nly the
prim al sound o f the overh eard psychiatrist is capable o f ev o k in g it,
w hereas the pleas o f Brigge the child and B rigge the tw en ty-eigh t-year-old
to his d o cto rs can d o n othing.
T h e law govern in g delirium and h allu cin ation determ ines that w hat
has not en tered the d ayligh t o f the sym bo lic appears in the real. T h e d e ­
lirious B rigge b ecom es the debris o f the debris that pours from his head.
A secon d head, larger than the feverish on e, b lo ck s his eyes and m outh.
E verything h ap p en s, then , as if R o n n e’s im possible gesture w ere possible.
 REBUS 319

T h e brain, this w arm bluish b oil, turns itself inside o u t and en clo ses the
extern al w orld. Because n o on e and n oth in g can introd u ce the m aterial
substratum o f lan gu age into lan gu age, the sh a d o w o f n eu ro p h y sio lo g y
falls on B rigge’s m outh.
W hat o ccu rs in the place o f this eclipse is— w ritin g . “ 1 have taken ac­
tion against fear. 1 have sat all night and w ritten ,” 63 Brigge w rites o f the
fear that drove him in and then o u t o f the Salpetriere. W ritin g therefore
m eans: to put the ex p lo d e d “ inn er-w orld sp ace,” the tum escent b rain ,
d ow n on paper, rather than have the ex p lo sio n o r tu m or treated b y the
approp riate scientific m ethods. From then on B rigge spends his d ays read ­
ing in the B ib lioth eque n ation ale and his nights w ritin g on the sixth floor
o f his hotel. R ilke on ce told G ebsattel that on e can n o t live w ith o u t the
cou ch , but on e cou ld “ read and w rite and en d u re” ; 64 B rigge un cou ples
his w ritin g from speech and com m u nication: he n o tes d ow n w h atever
m akes him m ute, and w hen he w rites letters they are never sent. T h ere is
no lon ger any q u estion , then, o f a life in poetry, led sim u ltaneou sly in
A tlan tis an d D resd en , on paper and in lovin g em braces. T h e m edium o f
script reveals its coldness; it is purely arch ivin g. T h erefo re it can n o t re­
place, represent, or be life, but on ly rem em ber, repeat, and w ork th rou gh .
T o d o som ething against fear m eans to w rite d ow n the fe a r itself.
T h e o b jects o f w ritin g are n eigh b ors w h o so m e h o w co m e w ith in h e a r­
ing, w h o creep o u t, and in som e cases reach the brain to m u ltiply and
thrive there like p n eu m o cocci. T h e o b jects o f w ritin g are insane kings
w h o se flesh has becom e indistin guish able fro m the am ulets th at cover it
and th e w orm s that d evou r it. T h e ob jects o f w r itin g a re the d e a d heaped
ov er battlefields, in tertw ined like a m on strou s b rain , and the d yin g, all o f
w h o se accum ulated m eanings vanish and fo r w h o m a large tum or rises in
the b ra in — like a sun th at tran sform s the w o rld fo r them .
T here is thus on ly on e o b je c t o f w ritin g: the prim al sou p o f brain
ph ysiology. W h a t interests Freud is its orga n iza tio n ; w h a t interests Brigge
is n otin g it d ow n .

B etter p e rh a p s to h av e re m a in e d in th e d a rk n e ss , a n d y o u r u n c o n fin e d h e a r t
w o u ld h av e s o u g h t to b e th e heav y h e a r t o f all th a t is in d is tin g u ish a b le . . . .
O n ig h t w ith o u t o b je c ts. O o b tu s e w in d o w o u tw a r d , o c are fu lly c lo sed d o o r s ;
a r ra n g e m e n ts fro m lo n g a g o , ta k e n o v er, a c c re d ite d , n e v e r q u ite u n d e rs to o d . O
stillness in th e sta irc a s e , stilln ess fro m a d jo in in g ro o m s, stilln e ss high u p a g a in st
th e ceiling. O m o th e r: o y o u o n ly o n e , w h o s h u t o u t all th is stilln e ss, long a g o in
c h ild h o o d . . . . You strik e a lig h t, a n d a lre a d y th e n o ise is y o u . A n d y o u h o l d t h e
light b e fo re you a n d sa y : it is I; d o n ’t b e a fra id .65

T he fact that there is articu lation at all becom es the enigm a o f a w ritin g
th a t in evitab ly articulates. Because B rigge (unlike Freud) d oes n o t raise
the standards o f his m edium to norm s o f the real, it rem ains a question
3 20 1 9 °°

w hether they are “ b etter” than prim al sou p . But thus his sim ple d escrip ­
tion correlates w ith psych op h ysical results.

It is w ro n g to a ssu m e th a t o rig in a lly (as so o n a s the sense o rg a n s fu n c tio n ) th e re

w e re n o th in g b u t p a rtic u la r im p re ssio n s o u t o f w h ich se c o n d a ry c o n n e c tio n s
a m o n g im p re ssio n s w e re th e n fo rm ed . . . . T h e o rig in a l s itu a tio n sh o u ld r a th e r b e
th o u g h t o f as a diffuse, w h o le sensibility. F o r e x a m p le , w h e n w e lie d a y d re a m in g
o n th e so fa w ith c lo sed eyes, w e d o n o t n o tic e a n y th in g p a rtic u la r in th e b r ig h t­
n ess th a t p e n e tra te s o u r eyelids, in th e d is ta n t n o ise o n th e stre e t, in th e p re s s u re
o f o u r c lo th in g , o r in th e te m p e ra tu re o f th e ro o m , b u t r a th e r fuse all th ese th in g s
in th e to ta lity o f o u r receptivity. S u ch — th o u g h m u ch m o r e vague a n d m u ffled —
is h o w w e m u st first th in k o f th e se n sib ility o f th e in fan t. B efore w e in v estig a te
th e a sso c ia tio n s b e tw e e n p a rtic u la r im p re ssio n s, w e m u st first ask h o w th e c h ild
m a n a g e s t o iso la te a p a r tic u la r p h e n o m e n o n o u t o f th is c o n fu se d , w h o le s ta te .66

A s a n ticip atory as ever, E bbinghau s addressed this qu estion to his c o l­

league, S tern , and isolated infan tile isolation .

A very y o u n g c h ild lo o k e d fro m a p a rtic u la r p o sitio n in to a p a r tic u la r ro o m . H e

received a diffuse, h a rd ly d iffe re n tia te d im p re ssio n . N o w h is m o th e r p u lls h im in
his w a g o n in to a n a d jo in in g ro o m ; fo r th e m o s t p a r t a n o th e r w h o le im p re ssio n
re p la c e s th e first. B ut th e m o th e r a n d th e w a g o n have re m a in e d th e sa m e. T h e
o p tic a l stim uli th ey p ro d u c e th u s find th e m a te ria l d isp o sa b le to th e m a s w ell as
th e ir m e n ta l effects s o m e w h a t p re p a re d in a d v a n c e , a n d in a d d itio n th e y re in fo rc e
on e a n o th e r th ro u g h m u tu a l a s s o c ia tio n ; th e o th e r, m o d ified stim u li d o n o t have
th is d o u b le a d v a n ta g e . . . . T h e im p re ssio n derived fro m th e sig h t (of th e m o th e r|
fo rm s m o re a n d m o re easily o n th e o n e h a n d , a n d o n th e o th e r h a n d it d iffe re n ti­
ate s itself m o re a n d m o re fro m th e v a rio u s diffuse b a c k g ro u n d s in w h ic h it w as
o rig in a lly dissolved: th e sig h t o f th e m o th e r b e co m es a p ro g ressiv ely m o re in d e ­
p e n d e n t p a r t o f th e given w h o le im p re ssio n .67

W hen on e isolates the percep tu al isolation o f the ch ild rigorou sly en ou gh ,

it is n o lo n ger that o f the child. T h e c o n stru ctio n o f articu lated en viro n ­
m ents proceeds th rough the first hum an con tacts. W h a t E bb in ghau s d e ­
scribes coin cid es w ith w h at Brigge calls the shu tting ou t o f the in d istin ­
gu ishable. T h e N o te b o o k s , o r the R em em brance o f T hings Past, critically
decried as “ m ystical” o r “ o e d ip a l” w h en ever th ey ev o k e c h ild h o o d and
the m oth er, sim ply inquire in to the elem ental relation, circa 190 0, b e­
tw een p articu lar and b ack grou n d , sign and prim al soup, lan gu age and
prim al soun d. T h e a n sw er to this inquiry can on ly be th a t discrete signs
arise from sheer iteration . T h e m o th er (in E bbinghaus) m ust return in
order to b e distinguished from th e diffuse b ack grou n d s; th e m oth er (in
th e N o te b o o k s) m ust say, “ It is 1, d o n ’t b e a fra id .” Behind all identities
and selection s lurks the endless regio n o f darkness.
“ W e k n o w n o t w h a t th e im agination w o u ld be w ith o u t d arkn ess, its
great sc h o o l.” 6* reads th e first em p irical, ch ild -p sych o lo gical stu d y o f its
kind, A Study o f Fears. Eleven years b efore the N o te b o o k s , in his case
 RE BUS 321

histories Stanley H all archived all the ch ild h o o d fears o f B rigge: aside
from m irrors, needles, and m asks, th ere w as a lso the m om ent that played
such a key role fo r M a lte and M a rce l.

28. F., 18. T h e g re a t s h a d o w o v e r all h e r e a rly life w a s th e d r e a d o f th e m o m e n t

h e r m o th e r s h o u ld kiss h e r g o o d n ig h t a n d leav e h e r a lo n e in th e d a rk ; sh e lay
te n se a n d rig id , held h e r b re a th to listen w ith o p e n m o u th , s m o th e re d h e rse lf
u n d e r th e c lo th e s, w ith w h ic h h e r h e a d m u st a lw a y s b e c o v e re d , fa n cied fo rm s
ben d in g o v e r h e r, o fte n a w o k e w ith h e r h e a r t p o u n d in g and a sense o f d ro p p in g
th ro u g h th e a ir, flying o r fallin g b a c k w a rd , feeling q u iv ery f o r h o u r s ; sh e n o w
v o w s “ I will a lw ay s p u t m y w h o le fo o t o n th e s ta irs .” M

T h e fact that O tto R a n k ’s book on incest p ick ed o u t the co rresp o n d in g

fear o f B rigge, and on ly th a t o n e , as if to apprehend o n e m o re oedip al
susp ect,70 b etray s the com p etition betw een literature and psych oan alysis.
C h ild h o o d fears w ere co p io u sly noted d o w n in the d iscou rse n etw o rk o f
1900. P sychophysics p rovided the th eoretical and statistical fram ew o rk ;
p sychoan alysis and literature m a d e te x ts o f fitting in d ivid u al cases, until
the system w a s com plete. N o n e o f th e three discourses had solid points o f
reference in the tw o oth ers; there is o n ly a n etw o rk o f the three.
T h e ob ject or a bject cau gh t in the net, how ever, w as the ch ild . N one o f
the three discourses has any further concern fo r w h a t m oth ers d o and say,
for the kind o f love o r ed u cation they instill in their children . Instead o f
m inim al signifieds o f a first love, all that counts are the first signifiers on
an ind istin guish able b ack gro u n d . T h e arch ivin g o f first signs, even if they
are as vague as “ the Big T h in g ” o r as babbled as the “ o -o -o -o - I d a ” that
is, “ fo rt!d a ” o f F reu d ’s grandson b ecam e a com m u n al ta sk .71 T h e itera ­
tion and o p p ositio n o f m inim al signifiers p rovid ed m aterial en ou gh fo r
con stru ctin g a system . A n d system s exist to be w ritten d ow n .
O n e w in ter even ing the child Brigge is d raw in g. A red pencil rolls off
the table and o n to the carpet. T h e ch ild , “ accu stom ed to the brightness
above and all inspired w ith the colors on the w h ite p a p er,” can n o t find
th e pencil in th e “ b lackn ess” u nder th e table: d a l fort. Instead, he sees his
o w n searchin g hands as strange, blind creatures. M u c h h as been w ritten
ab ou t this d ep erson alizatio n , but not a b o u t the pencil, paper and b la c k ­
ness, these three necessary and sufficient con d itio n s f o r a m edium , o f
w h ich interpretations them selves are a p a rt. A n d th e pencil returns years
later, as if it cam e b ack from B ey o n d th e Pleasure Principle, only to d esig­
nate itself as the sign o f a sign. A little gra y w om an turns it o v er endlessly
in her m iserable hands, until B rigge realizes that “ it w as a sign, a sign for
the in itiated ,” and senses “ that there actu ally existed a certain c o m p a c t”
w ith the w o m a n .72
Pencils are p rod u ced in order to m ake signs, not to be signs. But right
b efore B rigge’s eyes the w om an transposes the w ritin g instrum ent in to
322 1900

special co n tex ts that cut across the literary-alp h ab etic code. T h e pen cil,
on ce lo st in the signless d arkness o f the carpet, as if in a jungle, returns as
“ the Big T h in g ” to reduce all w r itin g to o n e cod e a m o n g oth ers. Precisely
the fa ct that it is “ o ld ,” if n ot a piece o f debris, m akes it significant. In the
N o te b o o k s n ew spapers are sold by a blind m an, w h o can n o t read th em .73
W ritin g m aterials com e to be m isused by sign -givin g an alp h abets. A n d so
it goes in a discourse n etw o rk th a t m easures cu ltu ral tech n ologies by
their deficiencies and p articu lar things by their degree o f w ea r and tear.
T h e pretty pictu res p rod u ced p rior to its d isap p earan ce by B rigge’s pencil
under the g a z e o f a read in g governess d o not cou n t; fo r th ey are o n ly the
B ased ow raisins o f an alp h abetizing pow er. W hat cou n ts and is therefore
put dow n on paper is the an alp h ab etic adventure w ith w ritin g m aterial
and p ap er. F reu d ’s patien t, the on e w h o con fu sed m and n, k n e w this
story w ell.
T h e discourse n etw o rk o f i 800 h ad archived the w a y in w h ich children
auton om ou sly reproduced the en grain ed alp habet. But it did n ot begin to
com prehend other children with other pleasures/fears. T h e d iscou rse net­
w o rk o f 1900 cu t apart the p ed ag o gic feed back lo o p and d irected children
to w rite d ow n their an alphabetism . It w as a p arad oxical and im possible
role that co u ld on ly be tak en on as sim ulacrum .
Brigge fills pages a b o u t an o ld pencil; the art-edu cation m ovem en t h a d
essays w ritten o n “ T h e R u sty Pen.” Packed together w ith 144 oth er sim i­
lar pens in industrial b o x es three w eeks previously, it is finally “ g o o d for
n othin g else” than to be throw n in the w aste b asket. B ut because o n ly use
sin gu larizes, the useless pen b ecom es the subject o f a w riter. H is sem i­
official n am e is th e h app y child; his em pirical n am e is H einrich Schar-
relm ann— a high sch o o l teach er w h o , in the p lace o f pens and pupils that
d o n ’t w rite, w r o te a b o o k entitled H appy C h ild ren .74
A s it is in little things, so it is in b ig ones. A t the con ven tion o f th e art-
ed ucation m ovem en t in W eim ar, w hich dealt w ith G erm an lan gu age and
literature from O c to b e r 9 to 1 1 , 190 3, laym en w ere in atten d an ce a lo n g
w ith th irty-fou r ed u cation al bu reau crats. O n e o f the n onteachers, D r.
H einrich H art, clarified his status at the begin nin g o f his address.

W h e n m y frie n d , C a e s a r F laisch g en , a s k e d m e t o sp e a k a b o u t th e c h o ic e o f lite r a ­

t u r e f o r sc h o o ls a t th e a rt-e d u c a tio n c o n fe re n c e , I w a s seized by a slig h t fe a r. H o w
c o u ld I p o ssib ly p re su m e to sp e a k a b o u t e d u c a tio n a l m a tte rs ! I h a v e n e v e r— 1
m u st a d m it to m y s h a m e — s to o d a t th e le c te rn , a n d a n y e d u c a tio n a l ta le n t I p o s ­
sess barely suffices to e d u cate m yself. ( Laughter.) I in te n d e d to d e clin e the in v ita ­
tio n a t o n c e , w h e n it o c c u rre d to m e th a t I h a v e in d eed h a d a re la tio n s h ip to
sc h o o ls in o n e re sp ec t, a n d h o w w o u ld it b e if I p re se n te d m y se lf to th e g a th e rin g
o f d istin g u ish e d a rt e d u c a to rs n o t a s a c o lle ag u e , b u t a s a pupil. . . .
T h e th re e c o m b in e d w o rd s, “ E d u c a tio n , S ch o o l, P o etry ,” d o n o t re so u n d w ith
in sp irin g h a rm o n y in m y p o o r p u p il’s so u l. I w ill n o t g o in to fu rth e r d e ta il a b o u t
 RE BUS 323

w h a t I suffered and e n d u re d d u rin g th e y ears th a t I w a s ta u g h t, in fu se d w ith , a n d

force-fed p o e try . “ I d o n ’t w a n t y o u r p ity .” I w ill o n ly say, if y o u w ill p a rd o n m e
th is , th a t fo r a tim e I p laced p o e try in t h e sa m e c a te g o ry as c o d -liv er oil a n d
m ed ic in e .75

W ith this b itter pill fo r ed u cation al b u reau crats, the pupil him self speaks
up. But w hat w o u ld have been a scan dal in the d iscou rse n etw o rk o f 1800
p rod uces only hearty lau ghter am ong the art ed u cators. T h e m ythic pupil
can say th a t m ed icin e is the sh a d o w side o f ped agogy. H e can say th a t he
is neither educated n or an ed u cator, sim ply because the highest a lp h a ­
b etization (readin g the Poets) never reached him . Instead, D r. H art becam e
(as he is listed in the p rogram o f speakers) a “ w riter.” A fter N ietzsch e, the
career path o f m akers o f w ord s presupposes not being able to read. A n y ­
o n e w h o “ still has n ightm ares” 76 a b o u t readin g H o ra ce in sch o o l is a
w a lk in g archive o f ch ild h o o d fears, perfectly suited to the sciences o f
nonsense. “ T h e analysis o f m aterial from pu p ils,” reads on e q u estio n ­
naire that queried prom in ent p eo p le con cern in g their years as p u p ils, “ is
a necessity that can n o t be sufficiently stressed.” 77 A n d observe: the m ost
bitter and derisive item s in this m aterial com e from “ poets and w riters.” 7*
Indeed, am o n g people w h o co u ld speak it w as considered fash ion ab le in
1 9 1 2 “ to vie w the tragedies o f you th and sch ool ch ild ren , w h ich had
been portrayed in a few fine stories o f the period , as som eth in g th a t w as
alm ost o b vio u s and o b lig a to ry.” 7’
T h a t is o n ly logical in a discourse n etw ork that needs som eon e for the
im possible role o f the w ritin g an alp h abet. W riters are thus com m ission ed
to sim ulate the pupil o r the m adm an. C h ildren w h o in search in g fo r lost
pencils fail to recogn ize their ow n hands are n o less delirious than c h il­
dren w h o se reading o f H o ra ce still gives them n ightm ares decades later.
W hen the art-edu cation con ven tion puts w riters on the p rogram in ord er
to d raw all their plans fo r reform from the “ p o o r p u p il’s so u l,” the sim u ­
lacrum o f m adness receives sem i-official recogn ition . Ellen K ey ’s “ school
o f the fu tu re,” in w h ich first o f all the an alph abets “ p ro n o u n ce their ju d g­
m ent” on teachers and lesson plans found its b egin n in g.80
But the tragically isolated Poet is the m ost cherished illusion o f inter­
preters. O n e o v erlo o k s the system -im m anent fu n ction o f literature. T exts
w ritten to ord er for a n ew p ed ag ogy w ere at best credited as p o rtrayals o f
th e “ suffering im posed by the so cia l ord er.”
T h e hero o f M e y rin k ’s G o lem “ rep eats” w ord s so often and so “ sp as­
m odically, that they suddenly appear n akedly as m eaningless, frightenin g
sounds from a b arb aric, prehistorical p a st” — above all, the w o rd b -o -o -k.
His grand plan is to “ tak e on the alp h abet in the prim er in reverse ord er
from Z to A , in o rd er finally to arrive at the sp ot w h ere [he] b egan to
learn in sc h o o l.” 81 A as in a p e— that is the null po in t at w hich K a fk a ’s “ A
3 24 1900

Report to an A ca d em y ” begins. T h e leap o u t o f a speechless and a n a l­

ph ab etic ape-truth to the alp h abetizatio n o f the report itself b ecom es the
subject o f a story that links the acq u isition o f lan gu age w ith a to o tlin g
gra m o p h o n e and alco h o lism ."2 It is a force-feed in g like H a rt’s, by w h o se
analysis futu re academ ies and cu ltu rization cam p aign s w ill profit.
L iterary texts o f 1900 record h o w an alp h ab etic culture is to be d e­
fined from an an alp h ab etic outside. B rigge’s n o teb o o k s (to keep to the
story) are a lso w ritten w ith the ch ild ’s vanished pencil. “ T h e infinite real­
ity ” o f being a child , in w hich it is certain “ that it w ould never end,” de­
term ines every sentence on readin g and w ritin g . B rigge never stops w r it­
ing d o w n the endlessness o f agrap h ia and alexia.

It is well sim p ly t o re co g n ize c e rta in th in g s th a t w ill nev er c h a n g e , w ith o u t d e ­

p lo rin g th e fa cts o r even ju d g in g them . T h u s it b e c a m e clear to m e th a t I nev er
w a s a real re a d e r. In c h ild h o o d I c o n sid e re d re a d in g a p ro fe ssio n o n e w o u ld ta k e
u p o n o n e se lf, la te r so m e tim e , w h e n all th e p ro fe ssio n s c am e a lo n g , o n e a f te r th e
o th e r. . . .
U ntil th e b e g in n in g o f su ch c h an g e s I p o s tp o n e d re a d in g to o . O n e w o u ld th e n
t r e a t b o o k s a s o n e tre a te d frie n d s , th e r e w o u ld b e tim e fo r th e m , a definite tim e
th a t w o u ld p a ss reg u larly , c o m p la is a n tly , ju st so m u ch o f it as h a p p e n e d to su it
o n e . . . . B ut th a t o n e ’s h a ir sh o u ld b e co m e u n tid y a n d d ish e v elled , a s if o n e h a d
b e e n lying o n it, th a t o n e sh o u ld g e t b u rn in g e a rs a n d h a n d s a s c o ld a s m e ta l, th a t
a lo n g c a n d le b e sid e o n e sh o u ld b u rn r ig h t d o w n in to its h o ld e r , th a t, th a n k G o d ,
w o u ld th e n b e e n tire ly e x c lu d e d . . . .
O f w h a t I so o ften felt la te r, I n o w so m e h o w h a d a p re m o n itio n : th a t o n e h a d
n o rig h t to o p e n a b o o k a t a ll, u n le s s o n e p led g e d o n e se lf to re a d th e m all. W ith
every lin e o n e b ro k e off a b it o f th e w o r ld . B efore b o o k s it w a s in ta c t a n d p e rh a p s
it w o u ld b e a g ain a fte r th e m . B ut h o w c o u ld I, w h o w a s u n a b le to re a d , c o p e w ith
th em a ll? 83

If being alp h abetized m eans b ein g able to translate im m easu rab le

heaps o f letters and b o o k s into the m iniature m odel o f m eanin g, then it is
and rem ains a norm o f the o th ers, b eyo n d Brigge as only the B eyon d can
be. A historical system d eparts from the earth to disintegrate in beauty
and nothingness.*4 In this w o rld , to w hich Brigge rem ains true, there are
only bodies, b u rn ing ears, and cold hands. T h ese bodies can eith er not
read at all or, w h en they sit in the B ib lioth equ e n ationale, are com pletely
strange bodies, w ith ou t eyes and ears and w ith “ the h air o f som eon e
sleeping.” E verything lo o k s, then, as if professional readers w ere m ore
an alp h ab etic than a ch ild , w h o at least still believes in the illusion o f
being able to read in the future. Instead, those w h o frequent the lib rary —
w h o fo r the first time in the history o f G erm an w ritin g are described from
the o u tsid e— have indeed learned som ething, but at the price o f their d is­
appearance. “ O n e is not aw are o f them . T h e y are in the b o o k s .” 83
In 179 9 the w arn in g w as issued to u n dertake all readin g “ in the w o r k ­
place o f o u r inner selves” and “ n ot to forget ou rselves” o v e r w h a t w e are
 REBUS 325

reading. O th e rw ise w e w o u ld “ lose o u r presence o f m in d a n d b ecom e in­

sane through d i s t r a c t i o n . I n 1 9 1 0 it m akes n o difference w h eth er on e
c an read o r not: m adness overtakes o n e an yw ay. B ecause there is n o syn ­
th e tic fun ction c a p a b le o f selectin g am o n g the en u m erab le m asses o f data
w ith the eventual aim o f estab lishin g m eaning, b o o k s continue to pile up
b eyon d a n y possible com prehen sion . A cco rd in g to B rigge, readin g w o u ld
on ly be possible and perm issible if it cou ld acco m m o d a te all b o o k s. T h u s
in reading an im possible ex h a u stio n takes the place o f tran scen dental
apperception .
In 1803 on e cou ld assure that the healthy mind “ seeks to establish
unity everyw h ere in the m an ifold , and processes all given m aterial ac­
cord in g to its o rgan ization . In the consciou sness o f self it w in d s the im ­
m easurable thread o f tim e in to a b all, reproduces dead centuries, and
gathers th e infinitely extend ed lim bs o f space, m oun tain ranges, forests,
and the stars cast over the firm am ent into the m iniature p o rtra it o f an
idea.” "7 T h e po etic screenplays o f 1800 and their ab ility to gather up
space and tim e cou ld not b e m ore b eau tifu lly d escrib ed . Space shran k for
cultured writers/readers until the w orld fit into the b o x o f the N ew M elu-
sine, o r the w hole earth , in a p o etic dream o f flight, “ lo o k ed only like a
golden b ow l w ith the finest en gra vin g .” T im e shrank fo r cu ltu red w riters/
readers until “ the lon gest sto ries” w ere “ pulled together in short, b rillian t
m inutes,” '* or the im m easu rable threads o f on e’s o w n life cam e together
into the yarn o f a briefly leafed -throu gh b o o k o f Provencal poetry. Such
m iracles becom e im possible under the law o f exh au stion . C erta in ly tech ­
nical devices are extra o rd in arily cap ab le o f ex p a n d in g o r co n tra ctin g
tim e and sp ace. But a d ev ice is not a mind and establishes n o unity in
w hatever dispersion it en cou n ters. It is o f n o help to p eople. In their bod ily
forgetfulness, agrap h ia, and alexia, they can on ly w o rk throu gh serial
data (to b o rr o w o n ce m ore the apt lan gu age o f program m ers) in real-tim e
analysis.
T h e tw en ty-fou r hours in th e life o f L eop old B lo o m u n d ergo a real­
time analysis. Real-tim e analysis threatens to b ecom e la recherche du
temps perdu. O n ly a real-tim e analysis can “ a ch ie ve” (in the R ilkean
sense) ch ild h o o d . But the rule o f rem em bering, repeating, and w o rk in g
th rou gh does not govern on ly b iograp h ies and psych oan alyses. W ith o u t
“ ch o ice o r refusal,” ” B rigge’s n o teb o o k s a lso present w h at every h er­
m eneutics has avoided: pow er. “ For w h atever o f torm en t and h o rro r has
happened on places o f ex ecu tio n , in tortu re-cham bers, m adh ou ses, o p e ra ­
ting theatres, under the vaults o f bridges in late autum n: all this has a
tough im perishability, all this subsists in its ow n r ig h t . . . and clin gs to its
ow n frightful reality. People w o u ld like to be allo w ed to forget m uch
o f this; sleep g e n tly files o v e r such grooves in their brains.” But just as
326 1900

“ dream s . . . trace the designs a g a in ,’ ’ 90 so d o the N o te b o o k s . T hat is,

th ey inten tionally refuse to provide a m iniature p o rtrait, as Reil quite
rightly characterized it, in the spirit o f G erm an classicism ; rather, they
provide real-tim e analysis o f engram s. It is a p roced u re as “ fa tefu l’’ as
only p re-G u ten b erg techn ologies cou ld be. For w hat m oved and d elighted
a certain insane king o f Fran ce in passion plays w as “ that they con tin u ally
added to and exten d ed them selves, g ro w in g to tens o f th ou san d s o f verses,
so that ultim ately the tim e in them w a s the actu al tim e; so m ew h at as if
on e w ere to m ake a glo b e o n the scale o f the e a rth .’ ’ 91
A glo b e on the scale i : i; Brigge cou ld erect n o finer m on u m en t to
com m em orate his descriptive procedure. H e only needs to take care that
n othin g ex cep tio n a l creeps into the process, even som eth in g as m inim al
as th e a c t o f w ritin g itself. Yet as a tw en ty-eigh t-year-old , w h en he reads
B audelaire o r the b o o k o f Job, B rigge is still n ot com pletely a lp h abetized .
B ecause “ an a lp h abetic individual thinks on ly in p a rticu la rs,’ ’ 92 his d eal­
ings w ith texts rem ain a Passion M ystery.

T h e re it lies b e fo re m e in m y o w n h a n d w ritin g , w h a t 1 have p ra y e d , e v e n in g a fte r

evening. I tra n s c rib e d it fro m th e b o o k s in w h ich I fo u n d it, so th a t it m ig h t b e
very n e a r m e, s p r u n g fro m m y h a n d like s o m e th in g o f m y o w n . A n d n o w I w a n t
t o w r ite it o n c e a g a in , k n e e lin g h e r e b e fo re m y ta b le 1 w a n t to w r ite i t; f o r in th is
w a y I h a v e it lo n g er th a n w h e n I re a d it, a n d every w o rd is su s ta in e d a n d h a s tim e
t o d ie aw ay.93

T h u s B rigge, in his personal b ook, despite G u ten b erg and A n selm u s,

w rites as if he w ere a sim ple m on k-cop yist. But if rea d in g is c h o ic e and
refusal, then m odels o f texts, to o , can on ly be perm itted on the scale of
i : i . W ritin g b ecom es, rather than m iniatures o f m eaning, an ex h a u stio n
th at endlessly refuses to end. F o r if Brigge has tran scribed the passages
(w hich o f course are not disfigured with au th orial nam es) from B au d e­
laire and Job, the effect is still as if he had never d on e it. H e m ust, he
intends to , “ w rite it on ce again,’’ so that each w o rd can function in the
real tim e o f its being w ritten d o w n . “ T ran scrib in g is superior to readin g
and spellin g in that the m o to ric representation o f w ritin g is im m ediately
linked to the sen sory representation o f w ritin g and to the m o to ric repre­
sentation o f lan gu a g e.” 94 And so it goes. T h e N o te b o o k s a ctu ally contain
tw o pages that B rigge tran scribes fro m his tran scrip tion , that the p u b ­
lisher R ilke transcribes from this tran scription o f a tran scrip tion , and
th at the printin g press transcribes countless tim es (th rou gh ou t w hich
B aud elaire’s French o f cou rse rem ains untranslated).
“ H o w d o w e raise the level o f p erfo rm an ce in G e rm a n ? ,” asked an
art ed u cator the year the N o te b o o k s a p p e ared . His answ er: th rou gh
“ tran scrip tion ex ercises,” 95 the su brou tine that p sych op h ysics had so rig­
o rou sly isolated. Under the pressure o f com petition from oth er m edia,
 RE BUS 327

w ritin g on ce again becam e w hat it had been b efore universal a lp h a b e tiza ­

tion — a professional sp ecia lty — w hile ceasing to be indivisibly and a u to ­
m atically coupled w ith reading. B ecause w ritin g requires m anual craft,
transcription replaced reading am ong the practitioners o f high literature.
D ealin g w ith texts thus b ecam e the O n e Way Street at w h o se ju nction
Benjam in (a pupil o f art-edu cation ) recogn ized the d esp otic traffic sign o f
the signifier. His ob servation that “ the reader fo llo w s the m ovem en t o f
his e g o in the free space o f revery,” w hereas “ the tran scriber” lets this
m ovem ent be “ co m m an d ed ” ” c o u ld have been tran scrib ed from the
N o te b o o k s.
T h e d iscourse netw ork o f 1900 rescinds the freed om o f the w ritin g
im agin ation . N o on e w h o p ick s up a pen, from a child in sch ool to a
w riter, is better position ed than the profession al typists w h o w ith each
“ hand m o v e m e n t. . . fo llo w the instruction s literally, that is, d o nothin g
m ore than w h a t they stip u late.” ’ 7 T h ere is a m ethod to exercises in w r it­
ing and tran scribing. T h e a g e o f engineers dem ands techn ically e x a c t re­
p rod u ction s o f technical processes.
B rigge’s father had stipulated in his w ill that the d o c to rs sh o u ld p er­
form a perforation o f his heart. T h e son exp lain s w h y, rather than a v o id ­
ing such a h orrible sight, he reproduced it as a literary w itn ess. “ N o , no,
nothing in the w o rld can on e im agine beforeh an d , n ot the least thing.
E verything is m ade up o f so m any unique particulars that can n o t be fo re­
seen. In im agination on e passes over them and does not notice that they
are lacking, hasty as on e is. But the realities are slo w and in d escribab ly
d etailed .” ” T h e sentences p ra ctice the insight they con tain . T h e y them ­
selves o w e n oth in g to im agination, bu t are rath er tran scrip tion s o f art-
p ed agogical m ethod. H einrich Scharrelm ann had pointed to a fu n d am en ­
tal un im agin ability yea rs b efore Brigge.

It is u n b e lie v ab le h o w little w e a d u lts see, h o w in e x a c tly w e o b se rv e th in g s

a r o u n d us. . . . H o w m a n y bicycles th e city d w e lle r sees ru sh by ev ery day. If o n e
is n o t th e o w n e r o f a bicycle, w h o k n o w s all its p a rts v ery w ell, o n e m ig h t try to
sit d o w n a n d d ra w it. T h e m o st in cre d ib le sk e tch e s w o u ld b e p ro d u c e d , b e ca u se
m em ory fails th e d ra w e r and h e d o e sn ’t k n o w w h ere th e p e d a ls a re a tta c h e d ,
w h e th e r th e chain is lin k e d to th e fro n t o r b a c k w h e el, w h e re th e se a t is, a n d so
fo rth . O n e n eed o nly a tte m p t to m ake a m ental sk e tch o f any ev ery d a y o b je c t to
be stru c k by th e p o v e rty and in e x a c tn e ss o f o u r n o tio n o f th a t o b je c t.”

O n e need only read the p e rfo ration o f the heart and the b icycle in p a ra l­
lel, as exam ples o f literary and p ed agogical p ractice, to d eterm in e that
they are not exam ples at all. W ritin g circa 1900 necessarily addresses
op erations and apparatu ses as the only tw o app roach es to the real. In
fact, there c a n b e n o m iniature portraits o f the real, as they w ere ch er­
ished by inw ardness and prod u ced by the im agin ation . C ircu m stan ces
yz8 1900

that “ are com po sed o f m any individual d etails” escape the grasp o f any
herm eneutics; they h a ve to be scored up and denum erated. T h e reason is
sim ple: there are on ly con stru cted facts o r circu m stances. P rogram s, d ia ­
gram s, and num bers ex ist in order to en cod e th e real. T h u s the p h ilo so ­
pher A lain , con tin u in g in the line o f Scharrelm ann and B rigge, sum m ed
up all the criticism o f the poetics o f Kant and H egel in the terse o b serv a ­
tion that on e can n o t cou n t the colu m ns o f an im agined P an th eo n .100
T h e fundam ental u n im agin ability o f the real calls for au top sies in
w h ich its discrete elem ents are specified one after anoth er. T h at is w h at
B rigge does in Paris w hen (avoid ing the P antheon) he m akes torn -d o w n
houses, blind n ew spaper sellers, hospital w aiting room s, and m oribu n d
patients the su b ject o f a w ritin g th at proceeds exhau stively, like tech ­
n ological m edia. Poets w h o hate the ap p ro x im ate b elong in a cu ltu re o f
d o cto rs and engineers. T orn -d ow n houses still cou n t in tech n ology, as d o
hopeless cases in m edicine. T h e w riter takes pleasure in m a k in g use o f
discarded m aterial— and th e re fo re b rok en -d ow n w alls tak e the place o f
the H all o f Fam e. Engineers and d o cto rs m ake p a rticu la r things that
fu n ctio n ; B rigge’s w riting does the reverse w hen it “ m a kes” the accid en ­
tal and sin gular n ew sp ap er seller “ the w ay one m akes a dead m an .” 101 It
ch an ges n oth in g in the lo g ic o f co n stru ctio n .
It chan ges n oth in g, n ot even if the con stru ction seem s to be im aginary.
B efore Scharrelm ann and thus lo n g b efore B rigge, D aniel Paul Schreber,
“ in the unending m o n o to n y o f m y d reary life,” trained him self in a kind
o f “ d ra w in g ” th a t consisted in estab lishing representations, w ith o u t p en ­
cil and paper, o f landscapes and w om en ’s b reasts “ in such surprising
faithfulness and true c o lo r ” that Sch reb er h im self and the divine rays
“ have alm ost the e x a ct im pression o f the lan d scap es 1 w an t to see again
as if th ey w ere actu ally th e re .” T h e solitary m an at Sonnenstein thus
im agined, b u t w ith such precision th a t the im agination co u ld g o h and in
h an d w ith ph ysio lo gy. “ In th e sam e w ay as rays th ro w on to m y nerves
pictures they w ould like to see . . . 1 to o can in turn prod u ce p ictu res for
the rays w h ich I w ant them to see.” 102 N o th in g distinguishes nerve rays
thus im pressed from the angel to w hom R ilke, beginning with the D u in o
Elegies, show ed the sim plicities and details o f the earth.
But th o se w h o h ave n o dealings w ith nerves o r angels are forced to
d evelop techniques o f m aterial rep rod u ction . In con trast to the in e x ­
actness that adults betray in d ra w in g bicycles, S ch arrelm an n ’s pupils
practice gestural sim ulation.

W h e n I n e x t a sk e d , “ H o w d o e s th e kn ife sh a rp e n e r w o rk ? ,” m a n y c h ild re n w e re
a t o n c e p re p a re d to im ita te th e m o v em en ts o f th e s h a rp e n e r. T h ey im ita te d n o t
only th e p u m p in g o f th e fo o t o n th e pedal and th e h a n d s h o ld in g th e k n ife, b u t
th ey also m im ick e d th e b e n t b ack , th e h ead th r u s t f o rw a rd , th e s h iftin g g la n c e s to
 REBUS 329

check th e ed g e, b ru s h in g o ff d u s t, and so o n , so n a tu ra listic a lly , carefu lly , a n d

c o m p le te ly th a t I w a s a s to u n d e d a t th e a c c u ra c y a n d c e rta in ty o f th e c h ild re n ’s
a b ility to observe. I m y se lf h a v e so m e tim e s le a rn e d to o b se rv e c are fu lly so m e
a d u lt a c tio n by first w a tc h in g c h ild ren im ita te i t . 103

T his, too , is a m ethod for raising the level o f achievem ent in G erm an .
Instead o f w ritin g interpretations and thou ghtfu l essays, the pupils en ­
gage in a b od ily rep rod u ction o f techn ical processes, a rep rod u ction that
teaches observation and d escrip tion . O n e need only tra d e the k nife sh a rp ­
ener fo r an ep ilep tic (w hich is m o re app rop riate fo r the literary use o f
discarded m aterial), and on e has “ T h e P ortrayal o f the S o -C alled Jerk-T ic
by Rainer M aria R ilk e .” A s a psychiatrist sh ow ed in a study w ith that
title, the N o te b o o k s provide a clin ically e x a c t picture o f the illness, co m ­
pletely in keep ing w ith the con cep tion o f it in co n tem p o ra ry m edical sc i­
en ce.104 It is not a question o f the so-called jerk-tic’s po rtrayal by R ainer
M a ria R ilke, how ever, but o f its sim ulation by M a lte L aurids B rigge: in
the descrip tion , Brigge fo llo w s h is m a d su b ject, takes on his anxieties and
gestu res, and only thus en counters som eth in g real th at w o u ld rem ain
closed to em p ath y o r herm eneutics. W h en a m an w ith jerk -tic and a n ­
oth er man w h o sim ulates him as n aturalistically, carefully, and c o m ­
pletely as Sch arrelm ann ’s class sim ulated the k n ife sharpener, w h en these
tw o w a lk dow n the B oulevard S ain t-M ich el, one after the o th er, then an
allegory w a lk s through Paris: the w riter as sim u lator o f m adness.
T h e N o te b o o k s o f M alte Laurids Brigge co u ld perh ap s better be called
M em oirs o f M y Sim ulations o f N ervou s Illness. Just as the rule o f e x ­
haustion that governs all B rigge’s d escrip tion s returns in the w ritin g itself,
so also does the proced u re o f sim u lation. A key passage sh o w s that
B rigge’s hands as w ell as his feet fo llo w the tracks o f m adness. A fter he
has noted h o w all p rearranged m eanings vanish at the m om ent o f death
and h o w a tum or in the brain b ecom es the sun o f a new w o rld , there is a
note that describes his ow n note tak in g. “ For a w h ile yet 1 can w rite all
this d ow n and express it. But there w ill com e a d a y w h en my hand w ill be
fa r from m e, and w h en 1 bid it w rite, it w ill w r ite w ord s 1 d o n o t m ean.
T h e tim e o f that oth er interpretation w ill d aw n , w h en n o t o n e w o rd w ill
rem ain upon another, and all m eanin g w ill dissolve like clo u d s and fall
d o w n like rain .” '03
A n yo n e w h o , as o ccu lt m edium , predicts the end o f herm eneutics and
th e victory o f o ccu lt m ed ia , has a right n ot to be su b jected to her­
m eneutics. N o com m en tary, then, on ly further evid en ce fo r “ the tim e o f
that oth er in terp retation .”
In the cen tury o f the child , there w a s a reform m ovem ent fo r free essay
w ritin g. T h e free essay w as the op p osite p ractice o f the reread in g that
classical-rom an tic tim es established as the rule o f the G erm an essay—
3 30 1 900

w hether as interpretation that presented an oth er readin g o f the w o r k or

as the th o u gh tfu l essay that p rom oted th o u gh tfu l, w ritin g hands. In the
free essay, that the pupil does not “ reread ” an yth in g, that “ his pencil flies
across the ta b le ,” is “ just righ t.” 106 “ T o prod u ce m eans to give the creative
p o w er free reign over the treasure chests o f our b ra in s.” 107 T h e p u p ils are
thus perm itted to w rite w hat is inscribed in their brains, not w hat they
believe their teach er believes they o u gh t to be th in kin g. T h is freed om is
“ not at all ea sy ” to b rin g abou t: “ T hey a lw ays insist they aren’t allow ed
to w rite ‘that kind o f th in g.’ ” 108 T h e reason: for a cen tury the p ed ag ogic
essay sto od under the sign o r title “ O u r School Essay as D isgu ised D im e
N o velist.” Pupils have “ had eight years o f instruction in essay w ritin g ,
h a ve w ritten ‘g o o d ’ essays every w eek; every sentence has been scru ­
tin ized, filed d o w n , and p ro p p ed up.” T h e y have “ had to an alyze c h a r a c ­
ters in W illiam T ell and w rite reports a b o u t deep-sea fa u n a .” B ecau se a
lo g ic o f the signified stood over the w h o le process, the essay “ w a s ch arged
w ith the task o f u n ifyin g all preceding exercises (orth og rap h ic, g ra m ­
m atical, etc.) into a w h o le .” 108
T h e free essay, by con trast, u n cou ples the subroutines w h o se im agi­
nary unity has been called G erm an . It is pure w ritin g : w ritin g m inus
gram m ar, orth o g ra p h y, and the norm o f the high idiom . But that can on ly
o c c u r w hen rereading is n o longer p racticed , by teachers as w ell as pupils,
when essays n o lon ger return censored in red ink. T h e self-im posed cen­
sorship that forbid s w ritin g “ that kind o f th in g” is the “ feed fo rw a rd ”
com m an d o f a discourse carried on w ith the O ther. A n um ber o f u n ­
coun ted voices circa 190 0 dem anded an en d to the red m a rk s in the es­
say’s m a rg in ,110 until an elem entary school teacher in L eip zig cam e ou t
w ith a m on ograp h on the subject. Paul G e o r g M u n c h ’s p o lem ic A r o u n d
the R ed In kw ell co rrects essay correction s w ith p ro b ab ly the best-proven
m eans that p sychop hysics can m uster again st the presu m p tion s o f sense.
“ These strange d istorted pictures betw een the lines! T h ese ugly red ch ecks,
needles, squiggles, cla w s, thorn s, snakes . . . ! And ev eryth in g con scien ­
tiously registered o n ce m ore on the m argin! D oesn ’t this ed ge really look
like the ragged flag o f C h in ese m arauders? Turn the essay upside d ow n
and just let the im age o f burn m arks and black ink sink in: y o u ’ d think
y o u w ere in th e com p an y o f th e m um m ies o f tatto oed south-sea islan d ­
ers !” 111 A class o f signs breaks ap art u n d er eth n o lo gical ob servation until
n othin g rem ains but a n aked , N ietzschean po w er o f inscription . M u n ch
uses turn in g upside d ow n (the tech n iqu e E bbinghaus and M o rg e n ste m
recom m ended fo r n ew spapers and the conten ts o f im a g e s)112 to urge his
colleagues in th e ed u cation al b u reau cracy to forget their foreb ear L in d ­
h o rst and to read, not the essays, b u t their o w n correction s as squiggles
and ink m arks.
 REBUS 331

Teachers w ith o u t red ink necessarily becom e exp erim enters, and free-
essay-w ritin g pupils becom e their subjects. “ T h e nature o f p ed agogical
problem s” is identical to “ the question o f the lo caliza tio n o f m ental o p e ra ­
tions in the brain. In both cases experim ents are requ ired .” 1" If Z ieh en ’s
association tests with school children in Jena had the th eoretical effect of
freeing p sych o lo g y “ from the u n natu ral, bu t until now unshaken p a tro n ­
age o f lo g ic ,” then the free essay had the effect, w h ich p uzzled Z ieh en , o f
being able “ to con stru ct in a practical w a y — sit venia v erb o — instruction
in a sso ciatio n .” " 4 It p ro vid es “ im m ensely im portan t d ocu m en tation in
em pirical p e d a g o g y ” and gives “ the scien tists” am o n g the teach in g staff
“ findings in exp erim ental p sych o lo g y .” 1" T h u s one shou ld not be taken
in by the attribute o f freedom . W h at is at stake w hen pupils free associate
on top ics o f their ow n ch o o sin g has nothing to d o w ith the a u to n o m o u s
child’s m ind o f 1800. W h at applied , rather, w as the fu n dam en tal p sy c h o ­
analytic rule that an uncontrolled flow o f speech liberates the fatality o f
the u n con sciou s. E xperim ental p sych o lo g y is n othin g w ith o u t evidence,
d a ta — w hich is w h y un corrected essays provide an o p p o rtu n ity fo r te ach ­
ers to trade in their ob solete red ink fo r a m ore scien tific variety o f m arker,
one that can be used in statistical tests and evalu ation s o f T h e E v id en ce o f
Hearsay in C h ild ren .'"' Literary bohem ians, h ow ever, w h o cou ld not be
suspected o f favorin g discip lin ary m easures, su p ported these m ethods.
F or Peter H ille, any adults w h o perpetuate the irresponsible “ old -style
e d u ca tio n ” have “ n o business w ith ch ild ren .” T h eir n ew privilege w a s to
“ oversee this b eau tifu l, fresh y o u n g w o r ld .” 117
T here is n o such thin g as a d ocu m en t that docu m en ts n o th in g bu t its
au th or. A u to m a tic w ritin g , p sych o a n a ly tic a sso ciatio n , the free essay—
all p rovide evidence o f p ow ers that reduce the w riter to a m edium . Even
im pressionistic essay exercises necessarily issue in d ictatio n .

I c o n d u c t im p re ssio n istic e x ercises d aily w ith m y n in e- a n d te n -y e a r-o ld s. I h a v e

six o r e ig h t o f th e m c o m e u p to th e c la ss ro o m w in d o w s w ith p e n cil a n d p a p e r a n d
h a v e th e m o b se rv e th in g s in th e ir e n v iro n m e n t in th e n a tu r a l lig h t, r a th e r th a n in
t h e lig h tin g o f th e c la ss ro o m , a n d th e n w rite a b o u t w h a t th e y see. T h e y a r e t o
n a m e t h e sim p le st th in g s o n th e stre e t a n d sh o u ld s e e h o w th e m o m e n t b rin g s
th ese th in g s to g e th e r. T h eir th o u g h ts c an then b e e m b o d ie d in w o rd s w ith o u t
c o n s tra in t, th e ir sen se s c a n d ic ta te th e ir e x p e rie n c e s in to w ritin g w ith o u t delay,
and th is p roceeds w ith o u t a n y th o u g h t b e in g given as to w h e th e r the se n te n c e s
m ig h t yield a “ g o o d ” essay o r n o t . " ’

In M u n c h ’s exp erim ent, then, the senses d ictate, and these in turn tak e
d ictatio n fro m w h atever o c c u rs on the street. It is n o a ccid en t that his
book ends w ith an em p h atic reference to the new Exercise-Program fo r
the Infantry, w h ich appeared in 1906 and a lso program m ed the im m e­
diacy o f stim ulus and resp o n se ."’ W hether it is a pencil o r rifle, then, the
332 1 900

hands that h old it are unencum bered by an eg o (or, in the end, a teacher)
and its intentions. C on seq u en ces oth er than d ep erson alizatio n w o u ld
c o n tra d ict a discursive ru le that stipulates “ the avoid an ce o f orth o g ra p h y,
p u n ctu ation , as well as w ord s and phrases not based in sen sation ” 120 and
th at applies to children as w ell as the insane. T h e free essay in G erm an
w as an exp erim en t in c o u p lin g the tw o im possible sentences, I am w rit­
ing and I am delirious.
This lin kage is qu ite clear in the exp erim en t set up by O sk a r O sterm a i,
a teacher in D resd en . O n e y ear b efore B rigge, th e serious Journal o f G e r ­
m an Instruction repo rted u n heard -of n ew s to its readers.

I had a seventh form . T h e c h ild re n w e re used to w ritin g free essays o n th e ir e x p e ­

rien c es a n d d id th is w ith e n th u s ia sm a n d joy. O n e day a child a rriv e d a t n in e
o ’c lo c k in stea d o f a t e ig h t. T h e c h ild h a d a le tte r f ro m his fa th e r, w h ic h s ta te d th a t
th e c h ild h a d b e c o m e sick th e p re v io u s e v en in g , b u t h a d in siste d th a t h e b e a llo w e d
to g o to sc h o o l a t nine o ’clock a t lea st so th a t h e could w rite his essay. A nd w h a t
did th e child w a n t to w rite? “ H o w I g o t a fever la st n ig h t.” A t te n o ’c lo c k th e
c h ild h a d to re tu rn h o m e a n d w a s th e n a b s e n t fo r sev eral d a y s .121

T hus, a child w ith a fever w rites h o w he go t the fever. T he senses that

d ictate their data into w ritin g w ith ou t delay are deliriou s. But on ly a f a ­
ther still calls the delirium an illness; the child and the teacher take it as a
necessary and sufficient grou n d for essays in w h ich the act o f w ritin g
guaran tees w h a t is w ritten . F or a single sch ool h ou r the ch ild appears
out o f the indistin guish able grou n d o f all m edia and articu lates this
g ro u n d , b efore it again becom es all p o w erfu l. H a ll’s A Study o f Fears
continues its exp erim ental course, and m adness circa 1900 rad ically d is­
solves its o ld affinity w ith illness and finds a p la ce fa r fr o m p a th o lo g y — in
discourse itself. “ T h ere w ill com e a d a y w h e n my hand w ill be far from
m e, and w hen 1bid it w rite, it w ill w rite w ord s 1d o not m ean. T h e tim e o f
that other interpretation w ill daw n, w hen not on e w o rd w ill rem ain upon
an other, and all m eaning w ill dissolve like clo u d s and fall d o w n like rain.”
W riters a p p e a r in the place o f the feverish child that w rites d o w n his
fever. A t tw enty-eight Brigge is still un able t o understand h o w he “ m an ­
aged w h o lly to return from th e w o r ld ” o f his ch ild h o o d , speechless fe­
v e rs.122 B ecause he does not understand, the fever’s recurrence in the in­
sane asylum is n o reason to w a it for the d o c to r in the n e x t room . “ L ike
one w h o hears a glo riou s lan gu age and feverishly conceives plans to w rite,
to create in it,” 121 Brigge leaves and runs to his desk. T h ere he notes dow n
w hat fev er is, freed from the tutelage o f lo g ic and the high id iom —
nam ely, not fever at all, not a n osological entity, but “ the Big T h in g .”
O n ly w o r d s from a ch ild ’s lan gu age cou ld ad equ ately represent the T h in g
in (to use the jargon o f G erm an teachers) “ form and co n ten t.”
Brigge w rites free essays. His N o te b o o k s d o not parallel the art-
 RE BUS 333

education m ovem ent in the h isto ry o f ideas; they carry o u t that m ove­
m ent’s program . Inform ed con tem p o raries, such as the exp erim en tal
p sych o lo g ist Ernst M eu m an n , saw that the free essay p ro v o k ed “ the o u t­
grow th o f exp ressionism and fu tu rism ” as w ell as o f “ m od ern lyric p o ­
etry.” Indeed, it taught “ future generations . . . linguistic con fu sion and
undisciplined th in k in g.” 124 G erm an ists, how ever, w hen co n fro n ted w ith a
m eaning that falls like rain, have little inkling o f “ the oth er in terp reta­
tio n .” T h ey have searched m eticu lou sly fo r the artistic sym m etries, a r­
rangem ents, and u n ifyin g law s in B rigge’s serial n otes and have attem pted
to w eaken the susp icion o f A n g e llo z that such things d o n ’t exist. O n e
must suspend the interpretive disposition in w ritin g a free essay, o r else
the essay w ill becom e “ m em orandum stuff, slogan p rovision s, dressings
fo r skeletal inten tions.” 125 L.ike M u n ch ’ s pupils, B rigge n otes the sim plest
occurren ces w ith the sim plest aleatory m ethod: “ h o w the m om ent brings
these things to g eth er.”
W hen R ilk e, w ith B rigge, op ts fo r w riting and against psych oan alysis,
he sounds like M u n ch : “ Piety k eep s me from allo w in g this intru sion , this
great clean in g and straigh ten in g up that life does not d o — from this c o r ­
rection o f a w ritten p a g e o f life, w hich 1 im agine as th o ro u g h ly m arked
w ith red im provem en ts— a foolish im age and certain ly a com p letely false
o n e.” 126 Foolish im ages d o d em on strate som eth ing, th en — nam ely, that
literature circa 1900 joined the stru ggle arou n d the red inkw ell. R ilk e ’s
im age is false only in its judgm ent o f a science that w o u ld d o as little to
restore prop er form and m eanin g to errors in lan gu age as w o u ld litera­
ture, and w o u ld instead use them to trace u n con sciou s signifiers. In any
case, R ilk e’s renunciation o f p sych oan alysis m akes clear that T h e N o te ­
b o o k s o f M alte Laurids Brigge indeed are the w ritten p age o f life in u n ­
corrected rough form .
G e o rg H eym , w riter and d o cto ral can d idate at the U niversity o f W u r z ­
burg, received the fo llo w in g response from o n e o f its com m ittees: “ T h e
law and political science facu lty has decided n ot to accep t the w o rk su b ­
m itted b y y o u in its present form , in that it does n o t m eet th e fa cu lty ’s
requirem ents. A cco rd in g to the report, the w ork con tain s so m any ty p o ­
graphical errors and deficiencies in sentence structure that it o b vio u sly
has not been proofread after h avin g been ty p e d .” 127 T h is officially d eter­
mines w h at is not a w o rk and w h o is n ot an author. In the discourse net­
w o rk o f 1800, to w hich faculties con tin u e to b elon g, reread in g esta b ­
lished a co rp u s out o f heaps o f paper and an im aginary b o d y called the
auth or ou t o f peop le. But som eon e like C arl Einstein’s B eb u qu in , w h o
prays fo r the sickness and d issociation o f his lim bs, in o rd er to attain an ­
oth er kind o f w ritin g th rou gh “ m etam orp h o sis” o r “ d isso lu tio n ,” 12*
som eone like Brigge o r H eym , w h o deliver u n corrected pages, w h o se
334 19 ° °

hands w rite independently o f the eg o , fu n ctio n s differently. A u th o rs are

not needed for u tilizin g discarded p sych op h ysical nonsense. A rb itra ry in ­
dividual cases a re necessary and sufficient; they cou n t as discarded m ate­
rial to be utilized. T h e pencil in the w om an ’s hands, w hich d o not use it at
all, signals som ething quite sim ple to Brigge the observer: he, the w riter,
is on e o f those w h o m his n o teb o o k s so exhau stively record — “ refu se” or
“ husks o f hu m an ity that fate has sp ew ed o u t.” 12’
Intransitive w ritin g, practiced by w riters as w ell as ch ild ren , w hom the
discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 “ places side by sid e,” 130 is an a n o n ym o u s and
arb itrary fu n ctio n . N o w that children n o lon ger perform the b rillian t
feats b ro u g h t a b ou t by prem ature alp h ab etizatio n , in w h ich letters im m e­
d iately becam e h allu cin ation s, the recruitm ent o f w e ll-k n o w n authors n o
lon ger ta k e s place. A rb itra ry individual c a se s th at fo r on e reason o r an ­
o th er h ave acq u ired p a p e r (perhaps given to them o u trigh t b y m em bers o f
the art-edu cation m ovem ent) just gather aleatory data. “ If 1 giv e three
eight- o r nin e-year-old boys a fe w cents for spendin g m on ey and send
them to the fair in Leipzig, then tw o o f the three w ill certain ly buy them ­
selves a n o te b o o k . A n d it d o esn ’t m atter h o w tem ptin g . . . the roller
coaster o r T u rk ish gin gerb read are: tw o o f the three w ill still buy n o te­
b o o k s!” 131 So much for the initial situation from the point o f view o f the
experim enter. N o w fo r the exp erim ental confirm ation from the p o in t o f
view o f the exp erim ental subject.

If I h a d a n o te b o o k a t h a n d , o r if th e re w e re any o th e r o p p o rtu n ity , I w o u ld w rite

d o w n w h a t o c c u rs to m e. S o m e th in g is a lw ay s o c c u r rin g to m e. So I in c u r a m a jo r
o c c u rre n c e , w h ic h I’d lik e to re c o rd w ith in c u rre d in n o ce n ce .

It’s n o t all to o h o t; blue flo o d s th ro u g h th e sky, h u m id a n d b lo w n u p fro m th e

c o a s t; eac h h o u se is n e x t to ro s e s , s o m e a re c o m p le te ly su n k in th em . I w a n t to
b u y a b o o k a n d a pencil; I w a n t to w rite d o w n a s m u ch as p o ss ib le n o w , so th a t it
w o n ’t all flo w a w ay . I lived fo r so m an y y e ars, a n d it h a s all sunk. W h e n I b e g a n ,
did I still h a v e it? I n o lo n g e r know .

B ut if all th is is p o ss ib le — h a s even n o m o re th an a se m b la n c e o f p o ss ib ility — th e n

surely, f o r all th e w o r ld ’s sa k e , s o m e th in g m u st h a p p e n . T h e first c o m e r, h e w h o
h a s h a d th is d is tu rb in g th o u g h t, m u st begin to d o so m e o f th e th in g s th a t h a v e
b e e n n e g le c te d ; even if h e is ju st a n y b o d y , by n o m e a n s th e m o st su ita b le p e rso n :
th e re is n o o n e else a t h and. T h is y o u n g , in sig n ific an t fo reig n e r, B rigge, will h av e
to sit d o w n in his ro o m five flights u p a n d w rite , d a y a n d n ig h t: yes, h e will h a v e
to w rite ; th a t is h o w it w ill e n d .132

It is a p recariou s and arb itrary practice, the w ritin g o f these inter­

ch an geab le individual cases. But at least it realizes, m aterially, m anifestly,
the im possible sentence I am writing. O tto Erich H artleb en , civil servan t,
can d idate fo r the high co u rt, and subsequen tly a w riter, first d em on ­
strated that “ the a ctiv ity o f the co u rt appren tice is certain ly on e o f the
 RE BUS 335

m ost n oble o f all hum an activities, because it can never be replaced o r

rendered superfluous b y any m achine. . . . T h e cou rt appren tice effo rt­
lessly defies the inventors o f the cheapest and best typew riters. A s little as
a typ ew riter m ight cost, he costs even less: he is gratis.” From this, it fo l­
low s that H artleben ’s period o f can d id acy fulfilled a c h ild h o o d dream :

W ritin g ! To b e a b le to w rite , p e rh a p s to b e c o m e a real w rite r. T h is w ish h a d e s­

se n tia lly been fulfilled. I w as a llo w e d to w rite , I c o u ld w rite, in d ee d I had to w rite .
A n d if for th e tim e b e in g I w as n o t p u ttin g m y o w n th o u g h ts a n d fig u re s d o w n o n
p a p e r, b u t m o stly d ic ta te d re p o rts , I c o u ld a t le a st c o n so le m y se lf w ith th e th o u g h t
th a t n o t e v ery th in g c o u ld h a p p e n a t o n c e. In a n y case: 1 h a d a tta in e d w h a t w a s
m an ife st, m ate ria l, in m y w ish : I w as w r itin g ." 3

W ritin g is the a cteg ra tu it itself. It m akes neither an a u th or fam ou s nor

a rea d er h ap p y, b ecause the act o f w ritin g is n oth in g b eyon d its m ateri­
ality. T h e pecu liar people w h o p ractice this act sim ply rep lace w ritin g
m achines. B ecause tech n ologies and path o lo gies are con vertib le circa
1900, the b ach elo r m achines k n ow n as w riters have to be pretty much
cra zy in o rd e r to h ave any pleasu re in the acte gratuit. N o on e prom ises
them a silver taler o r the d au gh ter o f a L in d horst, bu t on ly the m ystical
union o f w ritin g and delirium .
T h e b egin nin g o f w ritin g w ill th u s, to fo llo w B rigge’s le a d , a lw a y s be
its end. W h at B all’s L auren tius Tenderenda “ w o u ld like to record w ith
incurred in n ocen ce” slips ou t o f oth ers’ hands. K arl T u b u tsch , the h e ro o f
a novella by Ehrenstein, w atches tw o flies d ro w n in his in k w ell, in co n se­
quence trades his pen (lackin g a typew riter) fo r a pen cil, and finally does
not w rite at a ll." 4 It is not necessary, then, for o n e’s o w n b la c k heart to
d row n first in the in k w ell, as with N ie tz k y ; even tw o dead flies can stop
an a ct as p recarious and delirious as w ritin g . “ W hat keeps me from m a k ­
ing an end to everything, from finding eternal rest in so m e lak e and in k ­
w ell o r so lvin g th e question W h at G o d gon e m ad o r d em o n does the
inkw ell b elon g to , the on e in w hich w e live and die? and T o w h o m in turn
d o es this G o d g o n e m ad b elo n g?” 135

Poetic w o rk s o f 1800 b elon ged in the K in gd om o f G o d . A n A b so lu te

Spirit, in w hich n o m em ber w as sober, consum ed all au thors and w o rk s
at the end o f their earth ly cycles. T h e au thors turned in their c iv ic nam es
at the chalice o f this realm o f spirits, but on ly in ord er to attain the in­
finity o f interpretation and th e im m ortality o f m eaning.
A com pletely different G o d stan ds over the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900
and its inkw ells. H e has gone m ad. In him the sim u lators o f m adness have
their m aster. W hen the insane G o d drin ks, it is not in order to sublate
fantasies in a threefold sense. W here in 1800 there w as a fu n ctio n o f
ph ilosoph ical con sum ption , on e hundred years later there is bare a n n i­
336 1900

hilation. W riters w h o drow n in the inkw ell o f the insane G o d d o not

a ch ieve the im m ortality o f an a u th o r’s nam e; they sim ply rep lace a n o n y ­
m ous and p a ra d o x ica l an alph abets w h o are cap ab le o f w ritin g d o w n a
w h o le discourse n etw o rk from the ou tside. For that reason there are no
authors and w o rk s , bu t on ly w riters and w ritings.
T itles like T h e N o te b o o k s o f M alte Laurids Brigge are n ot a p p ro x im a ­
tions. T h e y designate a den um erable co lle ctio n o f letters in their m a te­
riality and an a rb itrary w riter— “ this y o u n g, insignificant foreigner,
B rigge” — in his singularity. In Ehrenstein’s story, on e sees the same thing.
T h e first sentence is: “ M y nam e is T u b u tsch , K arl T u b u tsch . 1 m ention
that on ly b ecau se 1possess ve ry little o th er than m y n am e.” A n d the last
is: “ But 1 possess n oth in g, n oth in g at all that cou ld m ake me g la d in
my heart o f hearts. 1 possess n oth in g ex cep t as m en tio n ed — m y nam e is
T u b u tsch , K arl T u b u tsch .” " 6
B rigge, T u b u tsch , R onn e, Pam eelen— the nam es d o not vanish in a
P hen o m en o lo g y o f the Spirit, w h ich is Spirit itself and th erefore n am e­
less. But the fact that these nam es rem ain behind d em on strates on ly their
nullity. A ll the bare last nam es p arap hrase N ietzsch e’s phrase that there is
as little to m akers o f w ord s as to w ord s. An insane G o d ru les over m akers
o f w ords, and this G od , lack in g om n ip oten ce, is ruled by oth er pow ers.
It is not hard to guess their nam es. T h e fa ct that a fter the fly accid en t
som eon e recom m ends to T u bu tsch that he buy a ty p e w rite r red u ces the
d em o n o lo g y o f the inkw ell to the nothingness it is under techn ical-
ph ysio lo gical con d ition s. T h ese oth er pow ers have n o need f o r literature.
T ech n ology and p h ysio lo gy survive w ith ou t the Interpretation o f the
Poet, w hich in the discourse n e tw o rk o f 1800 w as created by chairs in
ph ilosophy. A fter the to a sts betw een G o e th e and H egel becam e o b solete,
there w as n o longer an address at the university for a n yth in g that m akers
o f w o rd s prod u ced . H a vin g fallen to the third and last place o f the d is­
course n etw o rk , literature becam e the debris it described.
In 190 0 there is n o universal ed u cation al b u reau crat to legitim ize p o ­
etic w o rk s, b ecau se they legitim ize the bureaucrat. T h e practice-orien ted
educational bu reau crats becam e experim enters and co n d u cted m edia
tran sposition s, not interpretation s, w ith literary te x t s ." 7 T h e p h ilo so p h y
professors left te x ts to the professors o f literature, w h o had b eco m e on e
ty p e o f m edia professional a m o n g oth ers."* W h e re the d isco u rse n etw o rk
o f 1800 en thron ed M an o r the B ureaucrat as the king o f all k n o w le d g e,
there w as left a g a p in g hole. T h erefo re w riters co u ld only sim ulate ch il­
dren and the insane, th e subjects o f psych op h ysics; apart from sim u la­
tion , there w as the reality, the act, o f b ecom in g a fu n ctionary. “ T hey w ere
given the choice o f b ecom in g kings o r k in g ’s m essengers. L ike ch ild ren ,
they all w an ted to be m essengers. T h erefo re there a re n o th in g but m es­
 RE BUS 337

sengers; they race through the w orld and, because there are n o kin gs, call
o u t th eir m essages, w hich have becom e m eaningless in th e m ean tim e, to
each other. T h e y w o u ld glad ly qu it this m iserable existen ce, but d o n ’t
dare to b ecause o f their oath o f office.”
Such is the com m ent, still nicely m etap h orical, o f the b u reau crat K a fk a
on the professional p o sitio n o f w riters o n ce the k in g ’s p o sitio n has been
don e a w ay w ith . T h e sam e phenom enon w as described with dead ly
seriousness by a techn ical illu strator w h o entered the Silesian insane
asylum , T ro p p au . T h e con sp iracy described in m inute detail by A n to n
W enzel G ro ss operates w ith o u t any cen tral, com m an d in g figure. A ll it
takes to drive him insane is a g ro u p com po sed o f “ sup posed m ailm en,
co u rt clerks, policem en, gu ard s,” and, above all, “ lith ograph ers, b o o k
printers, typesetters, die m akers, stam p cutters, chem ists, ph arm acists,
tech n ician s.” 14" T h e y are all discursive fu n ctionaries, then, w ith the tech­
nical com peten ce to block channels o f inform ation o r postal contacts at
cru cial points, or, in the guise o f profession al b enevolence, to fa lsify
docum ents and reports that w o u ld have rehabilitated G ro ss. A s such they
are identical to the m indless beings w h o , w ith m echanical p recision , car­
ried out the task o f d rivin g a b u reau crat by the name o f Schreber out o f
his m ind. T h e discourse n etw o rk at Sonnenstein also stored only the falsi­
fied nonsense that oth er and equally subaltern nerve m essengers shouted
into Sch reb er’s ears.
M an or the B ureaucrat w as the universal m em ory o f all the p ro d u cts o f
the m ind, but discursive fu n ctio n aries constitu te a d isparate g ro u p w ith
particular and circum scribed responsibilities. N o n e stores everyth in g,
but together th ey ob literate the m o n o p o ly on b o o k s and m eanin g that
had been incorp o rated under the nam e o f Spirit. W hether th ey are called
m essengers by K a fk a , letter carriers by G ro ss, o r w ritin g p o w ers by
Schreber— a ph ysio lo gist’s a x io m a p p lies to them all.

In p h y sio lo g y th e d istin c tio n o f p a rtia l m em o ries is a fa m ilia r tr u th ; b u t in p sy ­

ch o lo g y th e m e th o d o f “ fa c u ltie s” h a s so lo n g fo rc e d th e re c o g n itio n o f m e m o ry
a s a n e n tity th a t th e e x is te n c e o f p a rtia l m e m o rie s h a s b e e n w holly ig n o re d , o r , a t
th e m o st, re g ard e d a s a n o m a lo u s . It is tim e th a t th is m is c o n c e p tio n w a s d o n e
a w a y w ith , a n d th a t th e f a c t o f sp e c ia l, o r, as so m e a u th o rs p re fe r, local m e m o ­
ries, w a s clearly reco g n ized . T h is la st te rm w e a c c e p t w illingly o n th e c o n d itio n
th a t it is in te rp re te d a s a d isse m in a te d lo c a liz a tio n . . . . T h e m e m o ry h a s o ften
been c o m p a re d to a s to re -h o u s e w h ere every fa c t is p re serv e d in its p ro p e r p lac e.
If th is m e ta p h o r is to be re ta in e d , it m u st b e p re se n te d in a m o re a c tiv e fo rm ; w e
m ay c o m p a re each p a rtic u la r m em o ry , fo r in sta n c e , w ith a c o n tin g e n t o f cle rk s
c h a rg e d w ith a special and e x clu siv e service. Any o n e o f th e s e d e p a rtm e n ts m ig h t
be a b o lish e d w ith o u t s e rio u s d e trim e n t to th e r e s t o f th e w o r k .141

D ispersed lo caliza tio n , op erated by bu reau crats w h o can be dism issed

and w h o are thus m ore like fu n ctio n a ries— this is a brain p h ysio lo g y that
338 1900

also describes the factu al discursive arrangem ents o f 1900. If the facu lty
o f all faculties, the M in d o r Spirit, does not exist, then there are on ly the
sp ecialized functions o f specified carriers o f in form ation . For this reason
so m any o f K a fk a ’s texts deal w ith the m ateriality o f channels o f in fo rm a ­
tion: the channels bleed in to on e anoth er ( “ M y N e ig h b o r” ); th ey fu n c­
tion w ith dead o r delay tim es ( “ A n Im perial M e ssa g e” ); they are not
thoroughly intercon n ected ( T h e C a stle); and w h atever they transm it has
n o m eaning b eyon d the statem ent that they exist (“ Before the L a w ” ).
B ut the fa ct that m essages b ecom e m eaningless w hen there is n o k in g
at the origin and destination o f discourses is on ly o n e , alb eit th o ro u g h ly
described, side o f the con tem p o rary discourse n etw o rk . T ech n o lo gy
m akes it possible for the first tim e to record single and a ccid en tal m es­
sages. It is n o longer possible for a p h ilosoph er to w a lk in and reduce
p ro to co l sentences to categories, o r sp oken w ord s to w ritten truth. A n y ­
thin g expressed rem ains undisputed and in d isp u table as it is, because spe­
cialized m em ory fu n ctions appear for the od d est bits o f speech. In D ia g ­
n o stic Studies o f A sso cia tio n , w hich the great psychiatrist Bleuler left for
his assistants at B ergholzli to finish, one o f the four hundred stim ulus
w ords, in e x a c t reprise o f the P h en om en olog y , is the stim ulus w o rd dark.
A nd one o f the sixty-five exp erim ental subjects, a “ th irty-eigh t-year-old
id io t,” actu ally reprod u ced the u n forgettab le p ro to co l sentence o f sense
certainty. “ D ark: that is n o w .” 142 But this did not m ove assistant d o cto rs
Jung, R ik lin , and W ehrlin to repeat the experim ent tw elve hours later or
to show the thirty-eigh t-year-old id iot, w ith sp ecu lative finesse, the id iocy
o f his con cep tion o f “ n o w .” Translations into the native land o f the sig­
nified are not the p rerogative o f fu n ctionaries, but o f the D iscou rse o f the
M aster. Bleuler, m eanw hile, did not d erive even on e ph ilosophem e from
the 14,400 recorded associatio n s, but instead w ro te a preface to them in
w hich he described the om n ipoten ce o f u n con sciou s associatio n s w ith the
exam p le o f “ w h en 1, fo r instan ce, w rite a b o u t a sso ciatio n s.” T h u s “ D ark :
th a t is n o w ” returns on ce m ore, but in th e a c t o f w ritin g . T h e id io t and
the d irector o f the exp erim en t are in the end o n ly the m arion ettes o f their
“ b od ily sensations.” 143
An entire P hen o m en o lo g y resulted from the refutation o f the sentence,
“ T h e n ow is n igh t.” T h e entire discourse n etw ork o f 190 0 is fed by the
return o f an o p aq u e thisness. T h e rou gh m aterial fo r an essay that O ster-
m a i’s pupil handed in at ten o ’clo ck , b efo re his b o d ily sensations to o k
him b ack hom e, prob ab ly a lso said only, “ Fever, that is n o w .” T h a t, at
least, is w h at the parallel passage o f the sim ulated m adm an B rigge su g ­
gests: “ N o w it,” nam ely the B ig T h in g , “ had retu rned.” N o n e o f these
instances o f thisness has an address; none has a m eaning. D ispersed spe­
cialized o r local m em ories call o u t m eaningless m essages to o n e another.
 REBUS 339

W ith that, h ow ever, the sheer N o w , o r that w hich incessantly ceases, is

halted for the first recorded tim e.
R ecorders that record thisnesses b ecom e thisnesses them selves. T h a t
m akes every instance o f arch ivin g in to a d iscu rsive even t. T h e less p u r­
pose a discourse in the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 has, the m o re im p os­
sible it becom es to n eutralize it. It fo llo w s that incom p rehen sible debris,
that is, literature, incessantly d o es not cease. (V alery’s entire po etics deals
w ith this.) A literature that w rites d ow n thisnesses exclu sively o r that a p ­
pears as thisness in its w o rd s and ty p o g ra p h y occu p ies all sto rage eq u ip ­
m ent and so d riv es ou t the ty p e o f po etry a b o u t w hich “ the nam e ‘ p h ilo ­
sop h ical lyric’ alread y says e n o u g h .” T h e fa c t that Schiller, “ an extrem ely
learned p o e t,” treated them es such as N ature o r the W alk as “ thou gh t-
ou t things . . . that are accom p lish ed throu gh a b straction s and syntheses,
and thus through logical rather than real o r natural p rocesses,” d isqualifies
him and the entire con sp iracy betw een Poets and T h in k e rs .14* T h e va cated
regal position then can and m ust be filled w ith m any p articu lar points o f
the present: recorders as sin gular as w h atever th ey record. W h o le series o f
chapters in A rebours and D orian G ra y list the m ost priceless o b je c ts—
jew els, carpets, spices. But w h o reads such lists? D oes an yon e at all?
There are tw o possible answ ers t o these qu estion s, o n e esoteric a n d the
oth er the op posite. Both are option s in the sam e realm . T h e eso teric a n ­
sw er says that w h at is stored is w h a t is sto red, w h eth er p eop le tak e n ote
o f it o r n o t.14' O sc a r W ild e, com p o ser o f on e o f the longest inven tories o f
precious o b jects, un abashedly traced the creation o f an excellen t m odern
p o etry in E ngland to the fa ct that n o on e read and therefore corru p ted
it.146 Thus Z a ra th u stra ’s m axim o f doing nothing fo r the rea d er is put into
practice. T h e journal Pages fo r Art w as devoted, it a n n ou n ced , to “ a
closed and m em ber-invited circle o f readers.” Such scarcity-p ro d u cin g
techniques, w h ich p rogram discursive events, have, o f co u rse, ex cited
h o rro r and con tem p t in u pstan ding citizen s. But their attack s glan ce off a
logic against w hich even critical theory, in order to raise any o b jectio n at
all, is for on ce forced to believe in the P eop le.147 T h e esoteric H o fm an n s­
thal, for instance, based his disinterest in everyth in g “ th a t o n e usu ally re­
fers to as the social q u estio n ” in an u n assailab le n om inalism . “ O n e never
en counters it as an yth in g real: and probably n o one k n o w s w h a t it ‘ rea lly ’
is, neither th o se w h o are in it n or even the ‘ upper classes.’ 1 h ave never
met the People. 1 d o n ’t think the People exists; here, at least, there are
only fo lk s.” 14'
T h e im possible real that dom inates all recording and m em ory circa
190 0 thus b ecom es a kind o f pragm atic linguistics. A literature in w hich
only p a rticu la rs are w ritten d o w n will recogn ize, a m o n g its readers or
nonread ers, on ly particu lar readers. T h e vern acu lar exp ression fo lk s has
34 ° 1900

no ph ilosop h ical o r so cio lo g ica l status. It is a sign for the second possible
answ er, fo r sto ch astic dispersion, the w h ite noise o v e r and again st w hich
m edia are w h a t they are.
It m akes little difference, then , w h eth er literature deals w ith decadence
o r with w h at has sunk to the level o f debris, w h ether it sim ulates a risto c­
racy o r psychosis. O n the u n attain ab le reverse side there w ill alw a y s be
stochastic dispersion, esp ecially in the op tion o p p o se d to esotericism .
W ith his beginnings in P rague, R ilke first a d o p te d W ild e ’s p ostu re, as
w hen in his lecture on m odern lyric p o etry he th a n ked the G erm an p u b lic
for its n otoriou s disinterest. M o d ern poetry can b e because people let
it b e .14’ Yet R ilke personally d istributed co llectio n s o f his and o th ers’
poetry. “ I’ ve sent a n um ber o f copies to c iv ic orga n iza tio n s and gu ilds,
to b o o k sto res and h ospitals, etc., and have distributed C h ico ry m yself
in several areas. W h e th er th ey will really reach ‘the p e o p le ’ — w h o
k n ow s? . . . I’m co u n tin g on chan ce to see that a c o p y here and there w ill
arrive a m o n g the people an d find its w ay in to a so lita ry ro o m .” 150 T h is
mode o f d istribu tion solves the social question in that it puts the p eo p le
between qu otation m arks and establishes o n ly individual cases. R ilk e ’s
strange w and erings through Prague seek ou t the “ fo lk s ” th at fo r the e so ­
teric H ofm an n sthal solely con stitu te the real. But “ p e o p le ” can n o lon ger
be sou ght o u t, because there are n o lon ger any m ultipliers and h en ce n o
lon ger any m ethods fo r the d istribu tion o f poetry. R ilk e’s p r o je c t avoid ed
sch ools, the on ly institution that prod u ces readers as such. And the h o sp i­
tals and guilds he included fu n ction less as m ultipliers than as th e letter-
d rops used in espionage. T h e w riter, fallen to the level o f fu n ctio n ary, lets
his C h ico ry (as the plant nam e indicates) fall on the b ib lical stones by the
side o f the road. All he “ co u n ts” on is “ ch an ce.” And on e can n o t c a l­
cu la te ch an ce w ith o u t using statistics. W hether literature since 190 0
reaches anyon e at all rem ains a question for em pirical social research.
T h e on ly p h ilo lo g ica l evidence availab le is the w ay in w hich im possible
addresses to p articu lar readers, o r m easures ad opted in ord er n o t to reach
the educated individual enter textu ality. O nly a m ode o f d ealin g with d e­
bris counts as a m ode of d istribu tin g texts that con stitu te the debris o f a
discourse n etw ork . In this, literature opposes the classical-rom an tic p r o ­
gram o f proliferatin g Poetry.
A final w o rd on H offm ann and L in dhorst. Y o u n g men and fem inine
readers w ere cau g h t in the classical-rom an tic m anner w ith very finely
w oven nets. T h e w ell-k n o w n b u reau crat and secret Poet com m ission ed a
judge and Poet to fu n ction as a p o etic m ultiplier. T h is secon d ary Poet
then b ro u g h t a y o u n g man into the pictu re, w h o learned herm eneutic
readin g so perfectly that he b ecam e cap ab le o f w ritin g Poetry. Fem inine
 REBUS 341

readers w ere then able to p u zzle endlessly over w h ich w om an w as the

true ob ject o f the P oet’s lo v e , and y o u n g but p o etic bu reau crats, faithful
disciples o f A n selm u s, learned to read the im age o f W om an w ith suffi­
cient h allu cin ato ry vividness t o b e a b le to find th e im age again in so-
called life. N oth in g in this p rogram survived the tu rn in g point o f 1900.
T h e eradication o f the am bigu ou s nam e, w h ich cou ld designate a u th or-
individuals like A n selm us o r A m ad eu s and b u reau crats like H eerb ran d
or H offm an n, w as en ou gh to ensure the b reak. Even th o u gh R ilk e sc h o l­
ars con tin u e to m ake frien d s w ith M a lte, M a lte L aurids B rigge n o n e­
theless rem ains the “ y o u n g, insignificant foreigner, B rig g e.” T h e nam e
as pure signifier exclu des im aginary identification. K a fk a ’s “ K .” and
“ Joseph K .” a llo w o n ly the kind o f gam e that Freud played w ith his a n o n ­
ym ou s personnel o f Em m y v. N ’s and A n n a O .’s. Such b are and d ism em ­
bered fam ily n am es can n o t su p port a con tin u ou s history o f B ildung and
thus a lp h ab etizatio n . H eroes th a t lab o r u nder a g ra p h ia o r a le x ia can
n ever represent the A uth or.
“ B io grap h y n o lo n ger cou n ts. N am es d o n ’t m atter,” as it w a s o n ce put
in the telegrap hic style o f 1 9 1 2 .151 T h e nam e that in the d iscou rse n etw o rk
o f 1800 w as o r becam e “ sound and sm o k e” (“ Schall und R a u ch ” ; Faust, 1.
3457) w as o f course that o f the M a ste r— H E rr. A fte r its era d ica tio n , a u ­
th o rs’ nam es c o u ld fill its place, and their p o etic b iograp h ies c o u ld inspire
readers to w rite and fem inine readers to love. But the d esp otic signifier that
stands o v e r the discourse n etw ork o f 1900 o rd ers soul m urder o r the tw i­
light o f m ankind. T h u s a u th o rs’ nam es disappear, som e in to the n u llity o f
individual cases, oth ers in to a factu al anon ym ity. “ He w h o k n o w s the
reader, does n oth in g fu rth er fo r the reader” — so, acco rd in g to N ietzsch e,
he provides n o inform ation on his ow n spiritual h istory and the “ p ro b ab le
further course o f his d evelop m en t.” D oblin the d o cto r, fo r instance, gave
this p sych oan alytic com m en t on D ob lin the w riter: “ 1have n oth in g to say
con cern in g my m ental developm ent; as a p sych oan alyst, 1 know h o w false
any self-disclosure is. In psychic self-relation I’ m a tou ch -m e-n ot, and a p ­
proach m yself on ly through the distance o f ep ic n arra tio n .” 152 R ubiner, for
instance, to o k the a n th o lo g y title T w ilight o f M ankind literally and re­
fused the p u b lish er’s trad itional request fo r b io grap h ical in fo rm ation .
“ L u d w ig R ubiner requested th at n o b io g ra p h y be included. H e believes
that the recoun tin g not only o f acts but a ls o o f lists o f w o rk s and dates
derives from a vain erro r o f the past, that o f the in d ivid u alistic grand -artist.
His co n v ictio n is that on ly a n on ym ou s, creative m em bership in co m m u ­
nity has any im portan ce fo r th e present o r fu tu re.” 155
T h e w riters w h o beginning in 1 9 1 2 con trib u ted to a jou rnal w ith the
significant title T h e L o o se B ird [i.e., “ a loose fe llo w ” ]— such as M a x
342 1900

B rod , R o bert M u sil, Ernst Stadler, Robert W alser, and Franz W erfel—
carried the p roject to factu al an on ym ity. R u biner exp lain s w hat the loose
bird means:

A n o n y m ity is th e ru le in th is jo u rn a l p u b lis h e d by D e m eter. Is it p o s s ib le t o c o n ­

ceive o f a w o rd th a t w o u ld give th e lea st in d ic a tio n o f th is s h a k e -u p , o f th e bliss o f
th is realized u to p ia ? W h a t m u st b e m a d e c le a r is th a t a c e n tu ry w h o s e fu n c tio n
w as to give us m ess tin s, single-sized b o o ts , a n d sc o res by W ag n e r n o lo n g e r e x ists
as a h in d ra n c e f o r th e m ind. . . . A n o n y m ity is a g a in th e ru le in a n e w jo u rn a l:
t h a t is , a fte r a c e n tu ry th e re is o n c e a g a in c o m m itm e n t a n d re la tio n .
T h e d a y th a t one person really h a d th e c o u ra g e to th in k th e c o n c e p t o f a n o ­
n y m ity th ro u g h to its e n d is th e d a y th a t b e lo n g s to th e c re a tiv e p e rio d o f c o n te m ­
p o r a ry h isto ry .15'1

T h e an on ym ity o f loose birds is thus an intentional break w ith classical-

rom an tic w ritin g , a discursive event intended to m ake discursive events
possible. In the elite space o f the cult o f the letter that the d iscou rse net­
w o rk o f 190 0 left to m akers o f w ord s, an earlier, w idespread p ractice is
taken up “ a g a in .” 155 T his “ relinqu ishing o f the a u th o r” can be psychi-
atrically con cep tu alized as d ep erson alizatio n ” 15‘ o r celebrated as th e cre a ­
tive a ct o f “ the m in d ” — in each case a n on ym ity gu aran tees w ord s the
effects o f radical foreignness. “ T h e m ind leaps into the sto n e-w alled space
o f the objective. A w o rd , a sentence is left to resound in the w o r ld .” 157
But b ew are: the o n e p erson w h o “ rea lly had the cou ra g e to thin k the
con cep t o f a n on ym ity through to its en d ” cou ld be nam ed G eo rg e. W hen
in the last issues o f Pages fo r A rt “ a u th o rs’ nam es w ere om itted as n o n es­
sential elem ents,” R ubiner, the u pright leftist w ith o u t nam e o r b io grap h y,
w as alarm ed. T hen the one, d esp otic signifier, w ith o u t b etrayin g nam es,
issued the call to W orld W ar 1. W ords w ere left to resound in the w o rld
and cou ld not be neutralized by ord in ary legal p ro ced u res.15' A n d it b e­
cam e terrifyingly clear w h at “ loose b ird ” m eans.

UN C O U P D E D ES J A M A I S N ’ A B O L I R A LE H A S A R D .

A rtists w h o no m ore sign their w o rk s than “ the earth signs the grass
that gro w s o u t o f it,” 159 w h o leave their C h icory on corn ers at w o rk e rs’
pubs, w h o issue their right- or left-w in g calls to b attle w ith o u t the civic
a ttrib u tab ility o f n am es, all perched on sto ch astic dispersion and o p e r­
ated in the strategic field. T h e discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 created the c o n ­
dition s o f po ssibility fo r a genuin e so c io lo g y o f literature. T h e com bin ed
program ann oun ced in G u stave L an so n ’s title Literary H istory a nd S o ci­
o lo g y fo llo w s the loose birds and depersonalized w ritin g h ands that have
flow n across paper since 1900. T h e fa c t that w riters w rite w o rd s that an
e g o neither intends n or answ ers fo r m akes the b o o k a social fact. “ T h e
b o o k , th erefore, is an evolvin g social phenom enon. O n ce it is published,
 REBUS 343

the a u th or n o longer possesses it; it n o lon ger signifies the th o u gh t o f the

author, but the th o u gh t o f the pu b lic, the th o u gh t o f the pu b lics that su c­
ceed on e another in tu rn .” 160
H ere, w h a t divides theory from practice is th at Lanson w rites a b o u t
thoughts, w hereas fo r a lo n g tim e signifiers had not o n ly not signified an
a u th o r’s th o u gh ts, but n o t signified a n y th in g at all. W h atever factu al
readers d o w ith the social fa c t o f the b o o k can be d on e en tirely w ith o u t
thin kin g. W h en a school lib rary op en ed its P oetic Treasure to ten-year-
old Hans C aro ssa in 1 888, he “ did not understand a tenth o f w h a t [he]
read,” but w as “ gripped and form ed by the sound and rhythm o f the
p o em s.” O rd ers are a lw ays m o re effective w h en n o th in g o r n o on e n eu ­
tralizes them . W here Reiser, K arl Friedrich vo n K lod en , e tu tti quanti
w ere offended by incom prehen sible letters, C aro ssa w as b ew itch ed , as if
b y m agical incantation s. W h at offended him w a s just th e o p p o site. “ 1w a s
a little disturbed in the begin nin g by th e nam es that sto od beneath each
poem and did not b elon g there; at least 1 could not im agine w hat such
funny w ord s as K lo p sto ck , R iickert, M o rike, G o e th e , o r K o p isch had to
d o w ith that intim ate m usic.” 161

A y o u n g man like C aro ssa is in capable o f letting his anger issue into
a cts and eradicatin g fun ny nam es like G o eth e. T h e w ra th o f a m ature
w om an is required. T h is w o m a n ’s nam e is A b elo n e and she is unable
to sit by w h en a m an n am ed B rigge un suspectin gly reads arou n d in
G o e th e ’s C orrespon den ce w ith a Young G irl.

“ If y o u w o u ld a t least re a d a lo u d , b o o k w o rm ,” said A b e lo n e a fte r a little. T h a t

did n o t so u n d n early so q u a rre lso m e , and sin ce I th o u g h t it high tim e fo r a re c o n ­
c ilia tio n , I p ro m p tly re a d a lo u d , g o in g rig h t o n to th e e n d o f th e se c tio n , and on
again to th e n e x t h e ad in g : To B e ttin a.
“ N o , n o t t h e a n s w e rs ,” A b e lo n e in te rru p te d . . . .T h e n sh e la u g h e d a t th e w ay
I w as lo o k in g a t her.
“ M y g o o d n e ss, M alte, h o w badly y o u ’ve been re a d in g .”
T h en I h a d to a d m it th a t n o t f o r o n e m o m e n t h a d m y m ind b e e n o n w h a t I w a s
d o in g . “ I re a d sim ply to g e t y o u to in te rru p t m e ,” I c o n fessed , a n d g re w h o t a n d
tu rn e d b a c k t h e p a g es till I c a m e to t h e title o f t h e b o o k . O n ly th e n d id I k n o w
w h a t it w a s. “ A n d w h y n o t th e a n sw e rs? ” I a sk e d w ith c u rio sity .
A b e lo n e seem ed n o t to h a v e h e a rd m e. She sa t th e r e in h e r b rig h t d re ss, a s
th o u g h sh e w e re g ro w in g d ark all o v e r inside, as h e r eyes w e re now .
“ G ive it to m e ,” sh e said su d d e n ly , as if in a n g e r, ta k in g th e b o o k o u t o f my
hand and o p e n in g it rig h t a t th e p a g e sh e w a n te d . A nd th en she re a d o n e o f Bet-
tin a ’s letters.
I d o n ’t k n o w h o w m u ch o f it I to o k in, b u t it w a s a s th o u g h a so le m n p ro m ise
w ere b e in g given m e th a t o n e d a y I sh o u ld u n d e rs ta n d it a ll.162

Lanson’s law is rigorou s. B ooks circa 1900 are social ph en o m en a, p o s­

sessed by n o one, not even their origin al au thor. H istorical ch an ge m akes
344 19 0 0

G o e th e ’s C o rresp o n d en ce w ith a Young G irl into the corresp on d en ce o f

a w om an w ith n o o n e— becau se a second w om an interrupts every tim e
G o e th e, in the nam e o f his nam e, puts off a lovin g adm irer. A cen tu ry
later, his nam e is go n e; B rigge has to lo o k b ack at the title fo r it, and
A b elo n e (like the N o te b o o k s as a w h ole) does not even p ro n o u n ce it.
D iscursive m anipu lation s are incisions. T o p o lo g ica lly sp eakin g,
m apped o n to the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 a corresp on d en ce carried on
d u rin g the y e a rs 18 0 7 to 1 8 1 2 is n o lon ger eq u ivalen t to its earlier self.
P ro x im ities in a b o o k (betw een lo v e letters and replies) are d estroyed , and
o th e r proxim ities (betw een love and love and love) are established. T h e
tran sposition o f m edia creates a n ew corp u s, the co rp u s B ettin a Bren­
tan o . “ Just n o w , B ettin a, you still were-, I understand you . Is n ot the earth
still w arm w ith y o u , and d o n ot the birds still leave room fo r y o u r voice?
T h e d ew is different, but the stars are still the stars o f y o u r nights. O r is
n o t the w h o le w o rld o f y o u r m a k in g?” " JT h e corp u s o f Bettina B rentano,
also called the w o rld , appears in the place o f authorship and o f the d o m i­
nance o f the w o r k . W h ere the creato r nam ed G o eth e is ab sen t, space fills
w ith the voices o f birds and w o m e n . A letter w riter w h o w as qu ite h ap p y
to be insignificant d oes not becom e an a u th o r posth u m ou sly. But w h at
she w ro te into the w in d ceases, in the a b sen ce o f a u th orsh ip , to cease.
Precisely because it does n oth in g but eternally repeat a love, this w ritin g
is sud d en ly tim ely. It is tim ely w hen the eternal recurrence o f o p a q u e
thisness defines all w ritin g .
E ach discourse n etw ork alters co rp o ra o f the past. T h e a n o n ym o u s or
pseu d on ym o u s w om en w h o rem ained at the m argins o f w ritin g circa 1800
n ow m ove into the cen ter o f the system , because the au th ors o r men in
w h o se w o r k th ey perished w ere perish in g in turn. W om en in E ighteenth-
a nd N in eteen th-C en tu ry G erm an In tellectual L ife — w h eth er in statistics
o r in increasing singularity, w om en w ere hon ored in such m on ographs
circa i9 0 0 .IM G o e th e ’s m other, w ith her o rth o g ra p h ica lly catastrop hic
letters, provided a m odel for the free essa y ."5 Rahel V arnhagen is taken to
be a “ great p o w e r” o f the classical period ."* G e o rg e d edicated a poem to
the shore o f the Rhein w h ere K arolin e von G iin d ero d e th rew herself in.
Bettina B rentano, finally, m arked th e lim it and failu re o f G o e th e. W hen
intransitive w ritin g b ecom es the sign o f literature, u n heard -of w om en ,
w riters o f letters, prefigure the new a ct o f w ritin g , w h ereas texts w ritten in
authorial c o d e and thus fam iliar to the general w o rld o f readers becom e
anathem a. Brigge w rites to Bettina B rentano:

You y o u rs e lf k n e w th e w o rth o f y o u r lo v e; y o u re cite d it a lo u d to y o u r g re a te s t

p o e t, so th a t h e sh o u ld m ake it h u m a n ; fo r it w a s still e le m en t. But he, in w ritin g
to y o u , d issu a d e d p e o p le fro m it. T h e y h a v e all re a d his a n s w e rs a n d be lie v e th em
r a th e r , b e c a u se th e p o e t is c le a re r to th e m th a n n a tu re . B ut p e rh a p s it will s o m e ­
 REBUS 345

day a p p e a r th a t h e re lay th e lim it o f h is g re atn ess. T h is lo v er w a s im p o s e d u p o n

h im , a n d h e w a s n o t e q u a l to h er. W h a t d o e s it signify th a t h e co u ld n o t re sp o n d ?
Such love n eed s n o re sp o n se , itself c o n ta in s b o th th e m atin g -ca ll a n d th e re p ly ; it
a n sw e rs its o w n p r a y e r s ." 7

Significantly, it w as not B rigge w h o achieved this tran svalu ation o f all

values. B y readin g G o e th e ’s answ ers he w o u ld have can celled o u t th e in ­
transitive love on ce m ore, if he had n o t read so b ad ly and fo r th e sole
purpose o f being interrupted. If there is to b e an ecriture fem in in e, one
m ust put an end to alphabetise. Instead o f progressin g co n tin u o u sly to ­
w ard his ow n authorship by readin g G o e th e, B rigge ex p o ses his readin g
to an interruption that fu n ctions like the G en eva sto p o f film o r the ta ­
chistoscop e o f p sych op h ysics. W hen A b elo n e takes up the b o o k and
reads, she d o es not substitute go o d read in g fo r bad. F or the first tim e, she
reveals (as Larisch m ight say) the “ b etw een ” o f G o e th e ’s answ ers. Her
listener d o e s not gain herm eneutic u n derstan d ing, only the p rom ise that
“ one d a y ” he “ should understand it a ll.”
A w om an w h o reads o u t lo u d th e un heard-of (in both senses o f the
w o rd ) love letters o f a w om an closes a circle arou n d both sex es that e x ­
cludes m ale herm eneutics. B ecau se there is n o a u th or to suggest to fem i­
nine readers that his soul is the cryp tic w o rd o f their lo ve , A b elo n e is r e ­
leased fro m the o b ligation o f close reading. T h e fu n ctio n s that defined the
sex es in the d iscourse n etw ork o f 1800, the prod u ctive con tin u ation o f
texts and pure con su m ption , both fall aw ay. B rigge is not A n selm u s and
A b elon e is n o t V eron ik a. H e h an d s the b o o k to her and she d o es w h a t she
likes w ith it. O n e hundred yea rs later, then, w h a t w as im possible betw een
Bettina Brentano and G o eth e occurs. “ But he should have hum bled h im ­
se lf before her in all his splendor and w ritten w h at she d ictated , w ith both
hands, like John on Patm os, kneeling. T h e re w as n o ch oice fo r him b efore
this voice w hich ‘ fulfilled the an gels’ fu n ctio n .’ ” 16' R ead in g a lo u d in a
voice that continues to am p lify because it feeds back in to an oth er w o m a n ,
A b e lo n e d ictates all o f B rigge’s fu tu re insights. She dictates w h a t Bettina
B rentano w as unable to d ictate under the con d itio n s o f classical d is­
course. T he fun ction o f angels is o f cou rse to an n ou n ce a d eath. D ic ta ­
tions are a lw ays the death o f the a u th or. W h ereas G o e th e “ left e m p ty ”
the “ dark m y th ” that a w o m a n ’s v o ic e had prepared fo r his d e a th ," ’ the
w riter o f the N o te b o o k s assum es this m yth. T h e era o f the oth er inter­
pretation m eans being w ith o u t the h on orable title o f author and b eing
subject to the dictates o f o th ers. K neelin g, as G o eth e failed to , Brigge
transcribes. W ith that, how ever, the prom ise that em anated from A b e-
lone’s incom p rehen sibility “ is still b eing fu lfilled .” 170
E verything w ritten a b ou t w om en in the N o te b o o k s is d ictated by a re­
soun d in g vo ice, at on ce A b elo n e and Bettina: that, fo r instance, there is
346 1900

n o th in g to say a b o u t her, “ b ecau se on ly w ro n g is done in the tellin g” ; 171

that there is n o question o f w ritin g letters to her, only d ra fts o f letters that
Brigge d o es n ot send; that all attem p ts to rise to the level o f an a u th o r by
w ritin g fo r yo u n g ladies (as G o e th e m ight have put it) com e to n oth in g
a gain st the will o f w om en “ to rem ove from [their] lo v e all that w as tra n ­
sitiv e” ; 172 and that an intransitive love can o n ly con sist in a kind o f w rit­
ing that circa 1900 is in corporated as literature. W h a t d o es it m ean that
w om en , accord in g to R ilke, “ fo r cen turies n ow . . . have perfo rm ed the
w h o le o f love; they have a lw ays played the full d ialo g u e, both p a rts” ? 171 A s
in A d elbert von H anstein or Ellen Key, it ou tlin es an alternative literary
h isto ry consisting o f unansw ered and intransitive calls o f lo v e — o f Bettina
B rentano, S ap pho, Heloi'se, G a sp a ra Stam pa, Elisa M e rco e u r, C la ra
d ’A n d u ze, Louise L ab b e, M a rce lin eD esb o rd es-V a lm o re, Julie Lespinasse,
M arie-A n n e de C lerm o n t, and so many o th ers.174
W here the d ivin ity o f the a u th o r d isappeared , w om en w h o w rite
appeared , as irred u cible as they are unread. B ecause their texts exist,
their w riters can n o t be con fo u n d ed w ith the O n e M o th e r w h o has m ade
som eon e an a u th o r (as G o e th e c o n fo u n d e d even Bettina B rentano). T h e
discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 o b ey ed the rule o f im possible ex h a u stio n n o ­
w h e re m ore rigorou sly than in the field o f sexu al difference. N o t on ly are
Schillerian a b straction s such as “ N a tu re ” o r “ T he W a lk ” im possible, bu t
so are all discourses that u n ify th e sexes. S u ch is th e insight that B rigge
receives in d ictatio n from his im possible beloved.

Is it p o ssib le th a t o n e k n o w s n o th in g o f y o u n g girls, w h o n o n e th e le ss live? Is it

p o ssib le th a t o n e say s “ w o m e n ,” “ c h ild re n ,” “ b o y s,” n o t g u e ssin g (d e sp ite all
o n e ’s c u ltu re , n o t g u e ssin g ) t h a t th ese w o rd s h a v e lo n g sin ce h a d n o p lu ra l, b u t
o n ly c o u n tle ss sin g u lars?
Yes, it is p o ssib le . . .
B ut if all th is is p o ss ib le — h a s even m o re th a n a se m b la n c e o f p o ss ib ility — th e n
surely, f o r all th e w o rld ’s s a k e , so m e th in g m u st h a p p e n . T h e first c o m e r, h e w h o
h a s h a d th is d is tu rb in g th o u g h t, m u st b e g in to d o so m e o f th e th in g s th a t h a v e
b e e n n eg le cte d ; even if h e is ju st a n y b o d y , b y n o m e a n s th e m o st su ita b le p e rso n :
th e re is n o o n e else a t h and. T h is y o u n g , in d iffe ren t fo reig n e r, B rig g e, will h a v e to
sit d o w n in h is ro o m five flights u p and w rite, d a y and n ig h t: yes, h e w ill h a v e
to w rite ; th a t is h o w it will e n d .175
 Queen’s Sacrifice

^LsTfemme n’existe pas. W om en in the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 are en u ­

m erable sin gulars, irred u cible to the O n e W om an o r N a tu re . A ll the
m edia and the sciences that su p port the n etw ork com p ete in a qu een ’s
sacrifice.
Technical engineers m ake the first m ove. T h e H u n garian chess m aster
R ezso C h a ro u se k , im m ortalized in G u sta v M e y rin k ’s G o le m , im m o rtal­
ized him self throu gh a q u een ’s sacrifice. A n d E dison, as celebrated by V il-
liers de P lsle-A d am , betrayed the secret o f his profession . “ By the w ay, I’ d
like to be introd uced to that great lady ‘N a tu re ’ som e day, because ev ery ­
b od y talks about her and n o b o d y has ever seen h er.” '
T h e novel T o m o rro w ’s E ve u n fold s this aphorism across its entire
plot. An English lord has fallen helplessly in love w ith a w om an w h o se
b eauty (as if to confirm the ph ysio lo gist Paul M o b iu s) is surpassed only
by the im becility o f everyth in g she says. T h e father o f the p h on o grap h
then decides to furnish his despairing friend w ith a love o b ject that has n o
trou b lesom e aspects. H e recon stru cts the m an’s beloved electrom ech an i-
cally in all her corp oreality, but exch an ges for her m ind t h a to f the W om an.
T o m o rro w ’s Eve— as E dison ’s au tom aton is c alled — “ replaces an intelli­
gence w ith Intelligence itself.” 2 A “ co p y o f N a tu re ” is created, w hich is
m ore perfect than the origin al in both m ind and b od y, and w h ich w ill
thus “ b u ry ” n atu re.5 N o t o n ly is the flesh o f the A n d ro id im perishable,
but the cultural techn ologies built into her surpass all the possible desires
o f any lover. Instead o f lungs she has tw o electrical p h o n o g ra p h s— far
ahead o f the then-current state o f research— w hich contain the m ost
beautiful w ord s o f love ever sp oken by Poets and T h in k ers. L ord E w ald
348 1900

has only to sw itch from one w om an to the W om an and speak to the A n ­

d ro id , and the tw o ph on o grap h s w ill sp it o u t, acco rd in g to the m ethod of
E bbinghau s, the v o ca b u la ry fed into them . They are cap ab le o f p ro d u cin g
different replies to tender w ord s o f lo v e fo r sixty hou rs, as a m echanism
p la y s through all possible com b in ation s o f th e m aterial.
O f course Lord E w ald , to w h o m Edison exp lain s ev eryth in g in tech ­
nical detail, is shaken at first. H e cannot th in k o f loving an a u to m a to n ’s
lim ited vo ca b u la ry and repertoire o f gestures, until the engineer d em o n ­
strates that love is a lw ays on ly this litany. W hereas w om en in p lu rality (as
the case o f A b elo n e show s) say things entirely different fro m w h a t men
w o u ld like to h ear, the W om an pleases w ith each o f her au to m a tic w ord s.
Edison sh o w ed b efore Erdm ann, then, that not only every professional
lan guage bu t all everyd ay lan gu age m akes d o w ith a m odest sto re o f sig­
nifiers, and that, finally, in m atters o f love as w ell “ the g rea t k aleid o sco p e
o f hum an w o rd s” is best left to au tom atized fem ale m ed ia-p ro fession als.4
T h e program m ed o u tco m e occu rs; L ord E w ald fa lls m adly in love w ith
the O n e W om an o r L ove; and Edison is able to b rin g a cen tury o f “ a h ’s,”
“ o h ’s,” and O ly m p ias to a close. “ T h is m ust be the first tim e that Science
showed it cou ld cure a m an, even o f love.” 5 O n ly the spear can heal the
w o u n d it has m ade. T h e tech n ological substitute perfects and liquidates
all the ch aracteristics attribu ted to the im aginary im age o f W om an by
Poets and T h in kers. S pallan zan i’s O ly m p ia cou ld utter the on e prim al
sigh; E dison’s m echanical E ve talks f o r six ty hours. T h e great lad y N atu re
w h o m everyon e talks a b ou t and n o one has seen dies o f perfect sim u la­
tion — T o m o rro w ’s E ve, o r the negative p ro o f that M o th er N atu re does
not exist. In con sequ en ce, only w om en in plu rality remain after E dison ’s
exp erim en t, as discarded exp erim en tal m aterial, to be sure, but n o n e th e­
less real.
A fter the techn ologists com e the theoretician s. If the phantasm o f
W om an arose in the d istribu tion o f form and m atter, spirit and nature,
w ritin g and readin g, prod u ction and con su m p tion , to the tw o sexes, a
n ew discourse n etw ork can celled the polarity. A s lo n g as w om en to o have
an “ innate, in erad icab le, blin dly strivin g form ative p rin cip le” that “ seizes
mental m aterial,” 6 the com p lem en tarity o f form and m atter, man and
w o m a n , is irretrievably lost. H enceforth there are A riad n es, B ettinas,
A b elon es, and thus w om en ’s discourses. T o form u late “ the essential d if­
ference betw een the sexes” in “ term s such as ‘p ro d u c tiv ity ’ and ‘ recep ­
tiv ity ’ ” is m ere “ paroch ialism in the age o f m odern p sych olog y.” 7 Instead
o f estab lishing on e sole difference betw een the sexes, m odern p sych ology,
through ob servation and exp erim en t, discovers differential differences
that are dependent variables o r respectively applied sta n d a rd s.' Even p h i­
losophers like O tto W ein in ger— w h o used psych op h ysical d a ta and m ea­
 q u e e n ’s s a c r i f i c e 349

sured brain w eigh t in an attem pt to develop an ideal o f each sex — c o n ­

cede that “ in actual exp erience neither men nor w om en e x is t,” but on ly
the m ixed relationships o r differential differences to w h ich qu an titative
description alone does justice.’ W ein inger’s less speculative colleagu es did
not even attem pt to define ideals. T h e title o f an essay by Ernst Sim m el,
“ O n the P sych o lo gy o f W om en ,” w ritten lo n g before B rigge’s N o te b o o k s ,
clearly indicates that it is im possible to speak o f m em bers o f a sex ex cep t
in the p lu ra l.10
T h e m any w om en established in the discourse n etw o rk o f 190 0 w ere
lo o k ed at in every light save that o f love. T o m o rro w ’s E ve sh o w s, after
all, that the necessary a nd sufficient condition for love is the W om an as
sim ulacrum . Em pirical individual fem ales, un burdened o f the ideal, to o k
on oth er roles. T h ey could speak and w rite, d eviatin g from the classical
p o larity o f the sexes. Fran ziska von R even tlow does n ot m ention her
ch ild ’s N am e-of-the-F ather an yw h ere in her w ritin g. A ccord in gly, “ w e ”
are con fron ted , in an a n th o lo g y entitled L o v e Songs o f M od ern W om en ,
“ not sim ply with the norm al course o f a w o m a n ’s love life,” bu t w ith “ its
dem onic and p ath o lo gical ab erratio n s” as w e ll."
Since 1896 the w o rd and deed o f p sychoan alysis have existed t o a c ­
com m od ate these dem ons and path o lo gies. T h e oth er illness for w h ich
Freud provided a c u re — obsessional neurosis, the scou rge o f m en— is
“ only a dialect o f the lan guage o f h ysteria,” 12 o r o f w o m e n ’s lan gu age.
Freud w as fa ce d w ith the radical new task o f listening to w om en fo r
thirty years and gatherin g everyth in g they said under the enigm atic ques­
tion “ W h a t does a w om an w a n t? ” T h e fact that the qu estion rem ained
unansw ered, as Freud finally confessed , not gratu itou sly, to a w om an
w h o had been his stu d e n t," is on e m ore piece o f evid ence fo r the n o n e xis­
tence o f the W om an. H er on e “ a h !” and the on e w a y in w h ich it m ight be
cu re d , accord in g to a classical th erapist by the nam e o f M e p h isto , d isa p ­
p e ar together. T h e place left v a c a n t is filled by en u m erable w o rd s, w hich
Freud registers, as if at the b id d in g o f E dison in V illiers’s n ovel. G ra m o -
p h o n ics com m an d s th at on e n o lo n g er read H o ly W rit, bu t th at on e listen
to divine vib ration s— esp ecially since hysteria, a lth ou gh a com p lete lan ­
gu age, has as m any dialects and variation s as M o rg en stern ’s W eather-
W endish. O n ly by offerin g n o response to the love o f his fem ale patients
could Freud d raw o u t the peculiar vib ration s o f fem ale sexuality. T h is
rule o f nonresponsiveness established as part o f p sych o a n a ly tic m ethod
w hat Brigge learned from Bettina and A belon e: there is n o lon ger desire
when satisfied by the oth er sex. W hen Freud once gave in to tem ptation
and, fo llo w in g all the rules o f transference, identified the desire o f a fe­
m ale hysteric w ith a certain “ M r. K .” and this “ K .” w ith him self, the cure
failed. T o the “ com plete c o n fu sio n ” o f the beginner Freud, “ the h o m o ­
350 1900

sexual (gynecoph ilic) love for M rs. K .” w as “ the stron gest u n co n scio u s
c u rren t” o f D o r a ’s lo ve life ."
O ne o f Lacan’s m athem es states that psych o a n a lytic d iscou rse exists as
the tran sposition o f h ysterical discou rse. T h is im plies that w om en are no
lon ger ex clu d ed from k n o w led g e. T h e n onexisten t beloved o f all men
yields to drives and their vicissitudes, am o n g w hich genital love is now
on ly an a ccid en t— it is even taboo in the con su ltin g room in the Berg­
gasse. T here w as no Poetry to feed the en igm atic k n o w led g e u n k n o w in g ly
tran sported by fem ale hysterics, o r to translate it in to lo v e fo r Freud, to
his greater g lo ry as au th or. W om en ’s k n o w led g e rem ained k n o w led g e
and w as transm itted to w o m e n — w hich indeed “ w o u ld ruin any chan ce
. . . o f success at a U n iversity” 15— as the science o f psych oan alysis. M a rie
B on aparte, to w h om Freud d ivu lged his question abou t the question o f
w om en , w as only on e o f many w om en students; Lou A n d reas-S alo m e
w as an oth er (to say n oth in g o f F reu d ’s daughter).
“ Ladies and G en tlem en ” — so begins the Introductory L ectu res on
Psychoanalysis, delivered at the U niversity o f V ienn a d u rin g the w in ter
sem esters from 1 9 1 5 to 1 9 1 7 . A discourse based on w o m en ’s discourse
can and m ust, even under acad em ic con d itio n s, return to w om en . T h is
distinguishes it from the D iscou rse o f the U niversity, w h ich from 1800 on
system atically e x c lu d e d w o m e n so th at countless b u reau crats co u ld c o n ­
d u ct their dance arou n d the alma m ater. O n ly a G rea t M o th e r cou ld
m a k e possible th e h ero so necessary fo r subjects o f th e university to utter
any k n ow led ge: the a u th o r.16 A m asculine discourse on and from the
M o th er fed university discourse, just as h ysteric d iscou rse fed p sy c h o a n a ­
lytic discourse. In 18 9 7 , im m ediately b efore the o n ly university reform
that has ever been w orth y o f the nam e, when A rth u r K irch h o ff gathered
his Judgm ents o f Prom inent University Professors, Teachers, a n d W riters
on the A p titu d e o f W om en fo r U niversity Study, the university subject
D r. H ajim Steinthal op ined that w om en sh o u ld n ot attend the university,
for “ in the uncertain hop e o f p ro d u cin g anoth er G o e th e, 1co u ld on ly re­
gret the certain ty o f losin g a m oth er-o f-G o eth e.” 17
L ectures to “ L ad ies and G en tlem en ” thus elim inate, a lo n g with “ Frau
R a t,” the necessary p recon d ition s o f a u th o rsh ip , even if th ey prod u ce a
great m any w om en w riters and analysts. Either there is an alm a m ater on
one side and on the oth er y o u n g men to w hom (exclu d in g such im p o s­
sible w om en as G iind erod e) an authorial G o d ’s K in gdom is revealed, or
the w h o le interpreter’s gam e betw een m an and the w orld com es a p a rt. If
man and w o m a n , a u th or and m oth er, can n o lo n ger be added u p — and
the synthesis o f fo rm and m atter, spirit and w o r ld , w as m an in a p s y c h o ­
logical sense and the w o rld in a ph ilosop h ical sen se— it w a s becau se on
A u g u st 1 8 ,1 9 0 8 , a fo rty-year w a r for the adm ission o f w om en to uni ver-
 QUEEN’S SACRIFICE 35 I

sities finally led to victory, even in Prussia. It then becam e im possible to

lead m ale and only m ale students arou n d by the nose in the Faustian
m ann er— during the lectures th ey had so m any C le o p a tra ’s n oses right
before their eyes.
T h e university reform w as a radical turnin g point in the relationship
betw een sex u a lity and truth. W h at d isappeared w as “ the p articu lar c h a r­
a cte r o f G erm an stud en ts” and that “ u nbridled student atm o sp h ere”
k n ow n from the A u e rb a ch ’ s Keller (in G o e th e ’s Faust). For the first tim e,
w om en talked a b ou t sexuality and thus “ cast off the ideal that G erm an s
fortun ately still dem and fro m a w o m a n .” 1* In o th e r w o rd s, on ly E ve or
the O n e W om an can satisfy the d esires o f professors and m ale students,
w h ereas the plurality o f w om en students enter a dom ain o f discourse
that, since Edison, n o lon ger know s love. “ H avin g both sexes in the cla ss­
ro o m ” necessarily m eans “ pu ttin g n o em phasis w h atsoever on sexu al d if­
ference” and “ co n fro n tin g the ph enom ena o f in tellectu al-h isto rical life
soberly and o b jectiv ely ” rather than in fantasies o f lo v e ."
N o soo n er said than d on e. Im m ediately before he d elivers the go o d
new s to the ladies am o n g the ladies and gentlem en present that, a n a to m i­
cally, th ey a lso h ave a phallus, and that in d ream s th ey h ave the sym bols
w o o d , paper, and b o o k s , Freud states that he ow es an acco u n t o f his
treatm ent o f prim ary sexu al ch aracteristics.20 His response m atches the
principles o f coed u cation just cited. “ A s there can be n o science in usum
D elp h in i, there can be none fo r sch oolgirls; and the ladies am ong you
have m ade it clear by their presence in this lectu re-room that they w ish to
be treated on an eq u ality with m en .” 21
N o w that is equal rights. N o th in g stands in the w ay o f w ritin g for
w om en , w h o, first, have a ph allus or stylus and w h o , second, are w o o d ,
paper, or b o o k s — least o f all a determ ination o f the hum an race that d if­
ferentiated authors as engravers and w om en as the w ritin g tablets o f na­
ture. If both sexes can be fou n d on both sides o f the difference, they are
read y fo r a w riting apparatu s that can d o w ith o u t a su b ject and a stylus.
T here w as a tim e w hen needles in th e h a n d s o f w om en w ove clo th , w hen
pens in the hands o f auth ors w ove an oth er clo th called te x t. But that time
is past. “ M ach in es everyw h ere, w herever on e lo o k s! T h e re is a rep lace­
ment fo r the countless tasks that man p erform ed w ith an able hand, a
replacem ent and one w ith such po w er and speed. . . . It w as on ly to be
exp ected that after the engineer had taken the very sym bol o f fem inine
skill ou t o f w o m en ’s h an d s a colleagu e w o u ld com e up w ith the id ea o f
replacin g the pen as well, the sym bol o f m asculine intellectu al p ro d u c ­
tion, w ith a m ach in e.” 22
M a ch in es d o a w a y w ith p o la r sexu al difference and its sym bols. A n
apparatu s th a t can replace M a n o r the sym bol o f m asculine p ro d u ctio n is
352 1900

a lso accessible to w om en . A p a rt from Freud, it w as R em in gton w h o

“ granted the fem ale sex access to the o ffice.” " A w ritin g a pparatu s that
does not represent an ero tic union o f script and v o ic e , A n selm u s and Ser­
pentina, Spirit and N atu re, is m ade to ord er fo r coed u cation al purposes.
T h e typ ew riter b rou gh t a b o u t (F ou cau lt’s O rd er o f Things o v erlo o k s
such trivialities) “ a co m p letely new o rd er o f th in gs.” "
W hereas the first generation o f w om en students, described in M a r i­
anne W eber’s T h e C hanging Im age o f University W om en , “ con sciou sly
renounced the garlan d o f fem inine gra ce ,” a n o th e r ty p e soo n appeared .
T h is typ e discovered “ an infinite variety o f new kinds o f hum an co n tact
in the previously u n available possibilities o f intellectual ex ch a n g e w ith
y o u n g men: com rad esh ip , friendship, love.” U nsurprisingly, this ty p e a lso
“ finds ready en cou ragem en t from m ost professors.” " M rs. Forster-
N ietzsche w as told by a p rofessor in Z u rich that “ the em an cipated w om en
o f the earlier period are grad u ally b ecom in g m ore ch arm in g ,” and they
“ are highly valued as secretaries and assistants at universities and lib ra r­
ies.” " She cou ld have heard the sam e thing from an ex-p ro fesso r o f Basel
w h o w en t half-blind and had to alternate betw een using secretaries and
typew riters.
“ It is better to b ecom e the am anuensis o f a scholar than to d o scientific
w o r k at o n e’s o w n c o st” — such w as Ellen K ey’s a d v ice to w o rk in g
w o m e n ." T h e y fou n d a place in the university m id -w ay betw een being
slaves at the ty p e w rite r and research assistants. A s the ex a m p le o f Felice
Bauer sh o w s, the situation w as the sam e in office w o rk . E m p loyed by a
firm that happened to m an u factu re p h on o grap h s, K a fk a ’s fiancee was
prom oted from a secretarial to a m anagerial position in just a few years,
sim ply because she w as a go o d typist. C ertain ly “ office w o r k , w h eth er
keep ing the b o o k s, h an d lin g accou n ts, or typ in g, gives a w om an little o p ­
portunity to m ake her special, m ost ch aracteristic co n trib u tio n .” " Yet
despite o r because o f this T h e Entrance o f W om en in to M ale Professions,
as one title pu t it, occurred in the field o f text p ro d u ctio n . W om en have
the ad m irab le ability “ to sink to the level o f m ere w ritin g m ach in es.”
W hereas m en, w ith the com m en d ab le excep tion o f a w riters’ elite and the
Stefan G eo rg e scrip t, continu ed to depend on their classically form ed
h a n d w ritin g and thereby blindly, w ith o u t resistance, left a m arket p o si­
tion u n occu p ied , yo u n g w om en “ w ith the w o rst h a n d w ritin g ” ad van ced
“ to o p eratin g a ty p e w rite r” — as if, from the p e d ag o gu e’s po in t o f view ,
“ one w ere bu ild in g a church tow er in thin air, havin g forgotten the fo u n ­
dation w a lls.” "
That is just it. F ou n d ation w alls n o lon ger cou n t. R em in gton ty p e w rit­
ers turned the system atic h an d icap o f w om en , their insufficient education,
into a historical op portu n ity. T h e sales division o f the firm just cited had
 q u e e n ’s s a c r i f i c e 353

only to discover, in 1 8 8 1, the m asses o f u n em ployed w o m e n — and o u t o f

an un profitable innovation cam e the typ ew riter as m ass-prod u ced p ro d ­
u ct.30 A tw o -w e e k intensive cou rse w ith a rented ty p e w rite r m ade the
lon g classical ed u cation required fo r the secretary A n selm u s and his fu n ­
dam entally m ale colleagu es in the nineteenth cen tu ry unnecessary. “ T h e
so-called ‘ em an cip ation ’ o f w om en ” 31 w as their ta k in g hold o f the m a­
chine th at did aw ay w ith p ed agogical a u th o rity o v e r discou rse. O ffice
w o rk , in G erm an y and elsew here, becam e the front line in the w ar be­
tw een the sexes because it w as “ n ot a profession protected by en tran ce
and selective ex a m in a tio n s.” 32

Jonathan H arker, a law yer in an English n o ta ry office, keeps a diary

w hile traveling to T ran sylvan ia w ith docu m en ts to be delivered to C o u n t
D ra cu la . T h e n o teb o o k is his salvation from the strange pleasu res that
354 1900

overcom e the C o u n t night after night. H arker, like B rigge, R o nn e, L au d a,

and all the oth ers, notes: “ A s I m ust d o som ething o r g o m ad, 1w r ite this
d iary.” 33 H a rk e r has learned stenograp hy, but even so n o teb o o k w riters
still gain identifiability, coheren ce, and thus ind ivid u ality from their
h an d w ritin g.
M e an w h ile H a rk e r’s fiancee sits lon gin gly at the typ ew riter b ack in
E xeter. W hereas her betrothed will on e day sim ply inherit the n otary
p ra ctice on the death o f his em p loyer, M ina M u rra y is sorely in need o f
n ew discursive techn ologies. She is an assistant sch oolm istress but, not
content with p ed ag o gic h alf-em an cip ation , she dream s o f d o in g “ w h a t I
see lady journalists d o .” So she d iligently practices typ in g and ste n o gra ­
phy in order to be able “ to tak e d ow n w h at he w an ts to sa y ” after her
m arriage to Jon ath an .34 H o w ever (as Lily Braun had so rightly seen), the
“ disintegration o f the old fam ily stru ctu re” sets in “ precisely w h ere one
th o u gh t on eself qu ite con servative” : 35 fo r office girls, even if they have
oth er dream s, there is n o “ return to any sort o f position in the fam ily.” 36
T he typ ew riter and office tech n o lo g y can never be con tain ed in the closed
space o f m oth erh ood . T h eir fu n ction is a lw a y s that o f the interface b e­
tw een b ranchin g and specified stream s o f data. T h is becom es clear as
S to k er’s novel develops.
Instead o f sim ply ta k in g d ictatio n from Jon ath an , n ow her husband,
M in a H a rk e r is forced to b ecom e the central relay station o f an im m ense
inform ation n etw ork . For the C o u n t has arrived secretly in England and
is leavin g scattered and fea rfu l signs o f his presence. O n e is a m adm an in
w h o se brain the psychiatrist, D r. Sew ard , discovers new a n d dreadful
n erve paths; he im m ediately has the verbal traces o f these paths spoken
into his p h on o grap h . A n o th e r is M in a ’s friend, L u cy W estenra; tw o sm all
w ou n d s ap p ear on her th roat and she becom es increasingly som n am -
bulan t, anem ic, and (to put it briefly) hysterical. Finally, there is a D utch
physician , w h o “ has revolu tionized therapeutics by his d iscovery o f the
con tin u ou s evolution o f b rain-m atter.” 37 This a llo w s him to discover
w hat is a ctu ally behind the scattered evidence o f the horror. But his in ­
sight w o u ld rem ain a gray theory o f vam pirism if M in a H a rk er did not
un dertake the task o f exhaustive evidence gathering. She w h o dream ed o f
d o in g w hat she saw lady jou rnalists d o uses her typ ew riter to tran scribe
every d iary entry, ev ery p h on o grap h roll, every relevant n ew sp ap er c lip ­
pin g and telegram , every docu m en t and lo g b o o k . She m akes cop ies of
her tran scrip tions; she delivers these daily to all the investigators, and so
on and o n .31
T h e C o u n t, had he any idea o f w hat w as occu rrin g , m ight have e x ­
claim ed in the w o rd s o f Schreber: “ For years th ey h ave been keep ing
b o o k s or o th e r n ota tions, in w hich all m y thou ghts, m y verbal expres-
 queen ’ s SACRIFICE 355

sions, my personal articles, all ob jects in m y possession o r an yw h ere near

me, all p eop le I com e in to co n ta ct w ith, etc., are w ritten d o w n ."
It is n ot alw a y s easy for a w om an to in corpo rate in to a te x t every shred
o f evidence o f a perverse desire. S ew ard ’s (not to say S tran sk y’s) p h o n o ­
graphic roll turns faster than a typist’s hands w o u ld like. T h e “ w o n d erfu l
m achin e” is a lso so “ cruelly tru e” that the tran scribing M ina perceives
the b eating o f torm ented hearts “ in its very to n es.” *’ But a discourse fu n c­
tion ary d oes n o t give in, simply because she has b ecom e a d iscou rse fu n c­
tionary. H er friend, h ow ever, like so m any hysterics since E ugene A zam
and R ichard W agner, suddenly m anifests a second p erson ality at night:
w hile still w retch ed and d ocile, she refuses m ed ication, d ra w s her gu m s
b ack from her eyeteeth, and speaks in an u n ch aracteristically soft, s a la ­
cio u s voice. It is as if K u n d ry in the first a c t o f Parsifal had b ecom e K un-
d ry in the m agic garden.
“ W hat does a w om an w a n t? ” In the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 the
alternatives are n o lon ger m oth erh ood or hysteria, but the m achin e or
destruction . M in a H arker types, w h ereas L u cy W estenra’s secon d p er­
son ality is the w ill w illed by a d esp otic signifier. O n the on e h and, a de-
sexu alizatio n permits the m ost intim ate diaries and m ost perverse se x u ­
alities to be textu alized ; on the oth er hand, there is the truth. Indeed,
precisely the truth corresp on d s to Freud’s origin al insight and w as sim u l­
taneously b eing p u b licized b y an extended ju ristic-jou rn alistic dragnet:
the fa c t that hysteria consists in h avin g been seduced b y a d esp ot. L u cy’s
sleep w alk in g does n ot arise from her o w n sou l, but from her paternal in ­
heritance.4" T h e dream s o f w olves and th e bites from eyeteeth a re n o fa n ­
3J6 1900

tasies; they are the C o u n t’s engram s in brain and throat. W hereas M in a
ty p e s, her friend en d s up on the n octu rn al sid e o f m achine w ritin g . T w o
tiny bite w ou n d s on the th roat m aterialize Beyerlen’s law that eyeteeth or
a p iece o f ty p e , th rou gh a single, b rief a p plicatio n o f pressure, p lace the
entire engram in the prop er position on skin o r paper. “ T h e sp ot that
should be seen is a lw ays visible, ex c ep t at the m om ent w h en visib ility is
n ecessary o r is believed to be n ecessary.” For blind acts o f w riting, on ly
after-th e-fact d ecod in g is possible. But som eone w h o , like L u cy ’s D utch
physician, is d eeply im m ersed in C h a r c o t’s th e o ry o f hysteria can ta k e the
w oun d s and dream s o f a hysteric for the sex u a lity they sign ify and hunt
dow n the dream w o lf (at the risk o f b ecom in g h ysterical oneself) by the
light o f day.
N o despot can survive when a w h o le m ultim edia system o f p sy ch o ­
analysis and textu al techn ologies go es after him . T h e sp ecial fo rce s have
“ scientific ex p erien ce,” w h ereas D racu la has only his “ c h ild ’s b ra in ” w ith
en gram s d atin g b ack to the b attle o f M o h a c s (15 2 6 ).41 H e d o e s h ave an
in k lin g o f the p o w e r a b o u t to brin g him d o w n , fo r oth erw ise he w ou ld
n ot th row the p h o n o grap h ic rolls and typescripts he finds into the fire.
But the hunters h ave M in a and “ than k G o d there is the oth er c o p y in the
sa fe .” 42 Linder the co n d itio n s o f inform ation tech n ology, the old -E u rop ean
d esp ot disintegrates into the lim it value o f B row n ian m otio n , w hich is the
noise in all channels.41
A stab to the heart turns the U ndead to dust. D ra c u la ’s sa lacio u sly w h is­
perin g b rid e, the resurrected vam pire Lucy, is put to death a second tim e,
and finally, on the thresh old o f his h om elan d, so is he. A m ultim edia sys­
tem , filmed over tw en ty times, attacks with typescript c o p ie s and tele­
gram s, n ew spaper clippings and w a x rolls (as these different sorts o f dis­
course are neatly labeled). T h e great bird n o lon ger flies over T ran sylvan ia.

“ T h ey plu ck in th eir terror hand fu ls o f plum es from the im perial

E agle, and w ith n o greater cred it in consequ ence than that th ey face,
keep in g their eq u ipoise, the awful b lo o d y beak that turns upon them . . .
E veryone lo o k s h aggard , and o u r o n ly w o n d er is that they succeed in
lo o k in g at all.” 44 It is alw a y s the sam e story in the d iscou rse n etw o rk o f
1900. T h e last lines o f H enry Jam es, b efore the a g o n y b e g a n , w ere pre­
served by a typew riter. And the enigm a o f their m eanin g is the prehistory
o f this m ateriality.
T h e w riter James, fam ou s for his co m p a ct yet o verarticu lated style,
turned to dictation b efore 1900 in order to m ove from style to “ free, un­
answ ered sp eech ,” thus to “ d iffu sion ” o r flight o f ideas. In 19 0 7 T h e o ­
d ora Bosanquet, an em p loyee in a L on d on ty p in g service w h o w as at the
 q u e en ’s s a c r i f i c e 357

time busy typ in g the R eport o f the R oy al C o m m issio n on C o a st E rosion,

w as ordered to report to James, w h o in the initial in terview appeared as a
“ benevolent N a p o le o n .” T h u s began B o sa n q u et’s “ job , as ala rm in g as it
w as fascin atin g, o f servin g as m edium betw een the sp oken and m achined
w o rd .” A larm in g, because B osanq u et w as o f cou rse only the w ill o f the
d icta to r’s w ill, w h o in his dream s again and again appeared as N ap o leo n .
F ascin atin g, b ecau se she b ecam e indispensable: w h en ever the pink noise
o f the Rem ington ceased , Jam es w o u ld have n o m ore ideas.45
G ertru d e Stein’s d ark oracle predicted everything, all o f it, even that an
o racle w a s in capable o f w a rn in g an yon e. T h e w riter w h o en gaged a m e­
dium in 190 7 in order to shift his style to “ R em in gton ese” w a s felled by a
strok e in 1 9 1 5 . Sheer facts o f literary history realize an ep o ch ’s w ild est
phantasm . T h e blood clot in the brain did not deprive Jam es o f clear d ic ­
tion , but it did claim all prearranged m eanings. P aralysis and a sym b olia
k n ow only the real. A n d this real is a m achine. T h e R em in gton , together
with its m edium , w ere ordered to the deathbed in order to tak e three d ic ­
tation s from a delirious brain. T w o are com po sed as if the em p ero r o f the
F ren ch , that great artist o f d ictatio n , had issued and signed them ; the
third notes that the im perial ea gle is bleeding to d eath and w h y it is
bleeding.
N o th in g is m ore un th in k able, but n othin g is clearer: a m achine regis­
ters itself.
W hen King D avid w as old and o f m any days, he asked fo r a beau tifu l
y o u n g w om an to w arm him. A n d they gave him A b iga il o f Sunem . T h e
w riter does not ask fo r T h e o d o ra B osan q u et, but fo r her typ ew riter. A n d
the queen’s sacrifice is com plete.
In the discourse n etw o rk o f 19 0 0 — this is its open secret— there is n o
sexual relation betw een the sexes. A p p aren t ex cep tio n s d o n ot alter the
fact. If M a u p a ssa n t, w h o p ro b ab ly fo r the sam e ven ereal-op th alm ological
reason s as N ietzsch e o ccasio n a lly d ictated to a secretary, c o u ld n ot re­
frain from sleeping w ith her, it w as on ly as prep aration fo r a full-stage
separation com ed y.44 T h e com edies o f u n ification , by co n tra st, are left to
the m edia and their literary an cillary industries. A cco rd in g to a fine ta u t­
ology, men and w o m e n , w h o are linked together by m edia, co m e togeth er
in m edia. T h u s the entertainm ent industry daily creates new ph an tasm s
out o f the op en secret o f 1900. A fter D ra c u la ’s b lack h ea rt has bled dry,
the pow erless hero H arker and his typist are able to have a ch ild after all.
A s lon g as there are gram op h o n es and secretaries, every b oss and w ord -
smith is sm iling.
“ M y H oney W ants to T ake M e Sailing on Sunday,” runs a son g from
19 2 9 , w hich sings out the industrial secret o f its fiction in the first verse.
358 1900

T ra u m e n d a n d e r S c h re ib m a sc h in ’
sal? die kleine Jo s e p h in ’,
d ie S e h n su c h t des H e rz e n s, d ie fiih rte d ie H a n d .
D e r C h e f k a m u n d las es u n d s ta u n te , d a sta n d :
“ A m S o n n ta g will m ein Sillier
m it m ir segeln g e h n ,
sofern d ie W in d e w e h n ,
d a s w a r ’ d o c h w u n d e rsc h o n !
A m S o n n ta g w ill mein Sillier . . .”

A t the ty p e w rite r in a d re a m
T h e re sa t little Jo se p h in e
H e r lo n g in g h e a r t p la y e d w ith h e r h a n d s
T h e b o ss c a m e a n d r e a d it b u t d id n ’t u n d e rs ta n d :
“ M y h o n e y w a n ts to ta k e m e
sa ilin g o n Sunday
w e ’ll sail a w ay
a n d th a t will h e so lovely!
M y honey w ants to tak e m e . . .” 47

T h e L yre a n d th e Typew riter, a 1 9 1 3 screenplay that w as u n fo rtu ­

n ately never film ed, prom ises to tak e up A n selm u s’s and S erpen tin a’s
d ream s o f A tlan tis. It is included in Pinthus’s M o v ie B o o k , and it links
m ovies, the typ ew riter, and w ritin g in a perfect pictu re o f the tim es, in
w hich o n ly a gra m o p h o n e and sou n d track are lack in g . R ichard A . Ber-
m ann’s tech n olog ica l A tlan tis begins w hen a sw arth y typist com es hom e
from the m ovies, w hich she loves to d istraction , and tells her b oyfrien d
everyth in g prom ised in the silent film. T h e film w ithin the film , how ever,
begins with the op posite: a youn g w riter o f verses ch ew s on his pen in
va in and tears up sheets o f paper after w ritin g o n e line. “ C e v id e papier
que sa b lan cheur d efen d ” inspires w riters a fte r M a lla rm e o n ly w ith the
w ish to flee.4* T h e w riter runs ou t and is soon fo llo w in g a w o m a n , but she
is not on e o f th o se w h o d o it fo r m oney, and finally she closes her d o o r in
his fa ce . O n ly then does the sign on her d oor, her prom ise, becom e
readab le.4’

M I N N I E T 1 PP

T y p in g Service
T ra n s c rip tio n o f L ite rary W o rk s
D ic ta tio n
 queen ’ s sacrifice 359

Th e w riter rings the b ell, is ad m itted , assum es a d ictatin g pose and says:
“ M iss, I love y o u !” A n d M in n ie— just like her nam esake in S tok er, w h o
also no lon ger k n e w a n y th in g as private— sim ply typ es it o u t on her m a­
ch in e.50T h e n ex t d a y the bill arrives in the m ail. W h en m essengers w ith ­
o u t kings and discourse fu n ctionaries w ith o u t b u reau crats tra n sp o rt m es­
sages from m edium to m edium , m essages co n tain in g m ean in g or love d o
not arrive. M o n ey, the m ost ann ihilatin g signifier o f all, stan dardizes
them . (In 1898 on e thou san d typed w ord s c o s t 10 P f.)51
If this w ere n ot en ou gh , B erm ann’s screen play stipulates th at the typed
line “ M iss, I love y o u !” appear on the “ w hite screen .” Even if the w om an
had been sittin g at a typ ew riter on w hich it w as n o t possible to see the
typescript, film w ould m ake am oro u s w h isperin g m ute, visib le, and rid icu ­
lous. A discourse n etw ork o f rigorou s evidence gath erin g d o es n ot ign ore
the soul; it co n fro n ts it w ith m echanical devices and w om en w h o g o to
the m ovies. Berm ann’s screen reverses D em en y’s p h o n o sco p e, w hich
com bin ed exp erim ental phonetics and serial p h o to g ra p h y to d ivid e the
tw o secon ds it takes a man’s m outh to p ron ou n ce the sound series “ j e v
o u s a i m e ” in to tw en ty still shots o f the m o u th ’s successive position s.52
But o f course men g ro w in fro n t o f m achines. A fterw a rd s, the yo u n g
w riter is able to w rite poem s a b o u t his love that M in n ie T ip p finds read­
able and, through her copies, is able to turn into “ several hun dred per­
fectly transcribed m an u scrip ts,” w hich literary critics can read. W ith
typew ritten c o p y “ on e secures and increases o n e’s m a rk et.” 55 T h u s the
b o o k goes to press and the divinely com ic d ay arrives w hen the tw o ,
the man with the lyre and the w om an with the typ ew riter, “ n o lon ger
ty p e d .” 54 End o f the film w ithin the film . Fran cesca and P a o lo , Serpentina
and A nselm us in the a g e o f the film screen.
T h e tw o lovers in the fram e story, h o w e ver, are n ot brough t together.
T h e sw arthy m ovie-goer and typist sees in the film the trium ph o f the
fem inine po w er o f reeducation in even the m ost outdated o f m ale profes­
sions. T o her friend, w h o believes in w orks w ritten w ith the pen, the story
m eans that the typew riter turns high literature into mass literature and
m akes w om en frigid. W h ereu p on the w om an laughs.
T w en ty -fo u r years later this laughter w ill have infected the revue girls
w h o d a n ce acro ss the k eyb o ard o f a gian t typ ew riter in Billy W ild er’s film
Ready, W illing, a n d A b le.

Yet T h e Lyre and the Typew riter, a year b efore it was w ritten , was
film ed— in the real. In 1 9 1 2 the w riter K a fk a met Felice Bauer one eve­
ning at the house o f M a x B rod, im m ediately after the typ ist had been
granted the head clerkship o f her parlograph and d ictatio n -m ach in e firm
 QUEEN’S SACRIFICE 36 I

or, in oth er w ord s, had attained a po w er o p p osed to her previou s p o si­

tion: she w as allow ed to sign C arl L in dstrom A. G . K a fk a spent the fo l­
lo w in g w eeks in his office at a typ ew riter, w h ich he w as not accu stom ed
to use and w hich he m isused to w rite the initial love letters.55 T h ese letters
revolve around a sp oken w o rd “ w hich so am azed me that I b an ged the
table. You a ctu ally said you enjoyed co p y in g m anuscripts, that y o u had
a ls o been c o p y in g m anuscripts in B erlin fo r som e gentlem an (curse the
sound o f th a t w ord w h en u n accom pan ied by nam e and exp lan ation !) and
y o u asked M a x to sen d y o u so m e m an u scrip ts.” 56
T h u n d er and lightning, o r the k n o ck on the table. Jealousy o f a n am e­
less man in Berlin (w h o also dictates to M innie T ip p , to the h o rro r o f the
film h ero),57 jealousy o f his friend (w h o w o rk e d in the telep h on e division
o f the Prague Postal Service)— jealou sy o f the entire m edia n etw o rk , then,
teaches the w riter to love. T h is m eans that it is not lo ve at all. M r. K. and
Felice B. (to speak w ith Freud and M allarm e) will n ever be a single
m um m y under h app y palm s, even if th ey w ere o n ly the palm s in a library
like L in d h orst’s.
T h a t evening defies d escrip tion : K a fk a and B rod are g o in g throu gh
K a fk a ’s still-unpublished m anuscripts and selectin g th ose that will even ­
tually be published by R o w o h lt. A lso present is Felice, stopping ov er d u r­
ing a trip, w h o happens to m ention that she enjoys ty p in g m anuscripts.
She om its the fact that such w o r k a lso p a y s— w hich distinguishes her
from M in n ie T ip p . But K a fk a is alread y burning w ith love. H e is able to
ty p e him self; there is even som eone in his office w h o se job is to ty p e for
him , and K a fk a ’s “ principal ta sk ” as well as “ happ in ess” consists “ in
being a b le to dictate to a livin g p erso n .” 5' But th is fu n ctio n a ry is a m an
and has never declared th a t K a fk a ’s happiness is his as w ell. O ffice w o rk
rem ains the one-sided pleasure o f a p ervert w h o , in spite o f his b u reau ­
cratic p o sitio n , con stan tly reverts to cunning m easures a la G eo rg e. As
K a fk a w rites to Felice Bauer: “ I cou ld never w o r k as indepen den tly as
you seem to ; I slither ou t o f responsibility like a sn ake; I have to sign
m any things, but every evaded signature seem s like a gain ; I a lso sign
everything (though I really sh o u ld n ’ t) w ith FK only, as though that cou ld
exon erate me; fo r this reason I a lso feel d ra w n tow ard the ty p e w rite r in
an yth in g con cern in g the office, because its w o r k , esp ecially w hen e x e ­
cuted at the hands o f the ty p ist, is so im p erso n al.” 5’
A w om an w h o can ty p e a n d sign d o cu m en ts is m ade to o rd e r for
som eone w h o system atically avoids signatures and yet, when sw itch in g
from the office to his o w n d esk every evening, is alw ays betrayed by his
h and w riting. F K ’s doub le-en try b o o k k eep in g , w h ich registers th e flow o f
docum en ts in b ureaucratic an on ym ity d u rin g the day and in literary m an ­
uscripts durin g the n ight, seem s to h a ve fou n d a “ h app y en d in g .” W ith a
362 1900

typist as w ife, the u n kn ow n w riter w o u ld have “ the op eratio n al m eans of

the printin g press at his d isp o sal” right at his d esk.60 It w o u ld be literally
true that the typ ew riter “ arrives as the liberator o f those ded icated to the
dem and in g service o f the pen .” *'
But Felice B auer’s self-advertisem ent (not to say “ the sign on her d o o r ” )
is directed to B rod, and the man w hose texts she transcribes is a professor
in Berlin. Bauer’s profession al independence does not rule o u t, but rather
stipulates, that her literary taste, such as it is, places any n um ber o f w rit­
ers above K a fk a . T h e gloom iness o f intransitive w ritin g hardly charm s
w o m e n . T h e co m p o ser o f love letters th erefore fabricated te x ts, even w ith ­
o u t M in nie T ip p ’s ad orn m en ts, th at w o u ld be readable, indeed m edia-
a p p rop riate fo r ty p is ts . A s if the fem inine p o w er o f reeducation had taken
ro o t, K a fk a sh o w ed intense interest in C arl L in d stro m ’s com pan y ca ta ­
logs— because, like a second W ild en b ru ch , he considered gram op h o n ics
“ a th rea t.” 62 A s if subaltern b ureaucrats w ere m ore independent than fe­
m ale m anagers, K a fk a m ade plans fo r a m assive m edia n etw o rk in the
nam e o f that very com pany. L indstrom w as to d evelop p a rlo grap h s that
cou ld be co n n ected to typ ew riters, to ju ke b oxes, to telephon e b ooth s,
and finally to that fearful recorder o f real d ata, the gram op h o n e.63 T h is
gigan tic project could ap prop riately have been called P roject D ra cu la ,
and, in the seventy years since it w a s w ritten d o w n , it has been realized.
But M s. B auer (as far as on e can judge from her side o f the co rresp o n ­
den ce, w h ich w as destroyed) did not take up the suggestion.
D ra cu la ap p ears on ce m ore, just w h ere the m arriage betw een the lyre
and the typ ew riter does not take place. “ W riting” in K a fk a ’s sense “ is a
deep sleep, and thus death, and just as one w ill and can n o t pull a dead
man ou t o f his grave, so it is w ith me at m y desk at n ig h t.” 64 From the site
o f this grave o r desk the w riter not o n ly fantasized a b o u t the m assive m e­
dia n etw o rk o f a co m p a n y w h o se strategy w as the co u p lin g and mass
p rod u ction o f record in g d evices,65 but he put such a n e tw o rk togeth er, if
on ly by using o r m isusing available techn ologies.

F o r tw e n ty -fo u r w e ek s h e se n t u p th r e e le tte rs p e r d a y , h u t d id n o t ta k e a tra in ,

w h ich w o u ld h av e b ro u g h t him to B erlin in a c o u p le o f h o u rs , a n d h e d id n o t
a n sw e r th e te le p h o n e . . . . T h e c o rre sp o n d e n c e sh o w s h o w it is p o ss ib le to to u c h ,
chain, t o r tu r e , d o m in a te , a n d d e s tro y a n o th e r p e rs o n , sim p ly th r o u g h th e sy s te m ­
a tic a n d to ta l u se o f th e m ail a n d te le p h o n e .
F irst, K afka e sta b lish e d an e x a c t sc h e d u le o f all m ail p ic k -u p s in P ra g u e a n d o f
all deliv eries in B erlin. S e c o n d , h e p lo tte d Felice’s m o v e m e n ts b e tw e e n h o m e a n d
office by th e h o u r, so h e w o u ld k n o w w h a t tim e o f day sh e w o u ld re c e iv e a letter,
d e p e n d in g o n w h e th e r it w as a d d re ss e d to h e r office o r re sid en ce. T h ird , h e d e te r­
m in e d th e e x a c t p a th each le tte r w ould tak e, th ro u g h w hich h a n d s it w o u ld p a ss,
a t h o m e (c o n cierg e, m o th e r a n d siste rs o f th e u n fo rtu n a te ) a n d a t th e office (m ail-
ro o m , o rd e rlie s, se c re tarie s). F o u rth , h e n o te d th e tim e a n d d is ta n c e ta k e n b y a
 queen ’ s sacrifice 363

n o rm a l le tte r o n th e o n e h a n d , a n d b y a n e x p re ss le tte r o n th e o th e r. F ifth , h e

n o te d th e tim e it w o u ld ta k e a te le g ra m t o re ac h her. . . . If o n e c o n sid e rs th a t
K afk a n o t o n ly p u t th e w o rd s h e h a d ju st w ritte n in to e n v e lo p e s, b u t a lso m a d e
m y ste rio u s referen ces to le tte rs h e h a d w ritte n b u t n o t s e n t a n d lik e w ise s tu c k in,
w h e n e v e r th e y fit, re c rim in a tio n s t h a t h e h a d fo rm u la te d w e ek s b e fo re ; if o n e
c o n sid e rs t h a t , in e x tre m e cases, h e p u t th e te n to tw elv e p a g es o f a sin g le le tte r,
w ritte n a t d iffere n t tim es, in to a s m any d iffere n t e n v elo p es a n d m a ilb o x e s , o n e
m u st a d m it th a t K afka m a x im iz e d th e d isp a tc h o f all m o d a litie s and schedules o f
th e m ail in o rd e r, w ith th is c o lle ctiv e firepow er, to fo rce Felice to s u rr e n d e r .66

C o u rn o t’s brillian t analysis sh o w s that in K a fk a ’s stories the m o d a li­

ties o f th e tech n ological channels o f in fo rm ation — cross-talk and delay,
n etw ork s and noise-levels— served n o u ncertain pu rpose. T h e love letters
that Erich Heller celebrates as “ the w o rk o f an u n kn ow n m innesinger
from the first half o f the tw en tieth cen tu ry ” b reak all techn ical records.67
T h e an on ym ity o f an FK has n oth in g to d o with the nam elessness o f a
m innesinger. It sim ply m akes very clear that n o love is to be given to
w om en em p loyed in discursive fu n ctions. T h e concentrated firepow er o f
letters, express m ail, and telegram s stands w h ere cultured w om en or
sim ple fem inine readers on ce w ould w illin gly have been all eyes and ears.
But the p o ssibility o f effortlessly recru itin g fem inine readers disappears
a lo n g w ith the “ m eaning” that neither the w riter K a fk a n or the reader
B auer can find in “ T h e Ju d gm en t.” 6* T h e reason R ilke d istribu ted his
C h ico ry s o aw k w a rd ly, b y hand , w a s that n o on e w as a sk in g fo r it. T h e
fact that K a fk a vied fo r an arb itrary individual w ith an em pty fa ce rather
than fo r a p u b lic chan ges nothing in the lack o f dem and. O n ly the dead
need techn ically calcu late their love letters.
If w riters in the discourse n etw o rk o f 1900 are the discarded m aterial
that they w rite d o w n , then n oth in g can take place b eyon d w riting itself.
“ I have the definite feeling that th rou gh m arriage, through th e u nion,
through the disso lu tion o f th is nothingness that I am, I shall p erish .” 6’
T here is n o chan ce on either side o f the K afka-B au er corresp on d en ce o f
w ord s reachin g through to a soul. O n on e side is w ritin g that occu p ies the
place o f m adness and incessantly dissolves into its n oth in gn ess.70 O n the
oth er side, the processin g o f texts begins, w hich is n o less tran sitory, on ly
a m edium am o n g m edia.

T h e Technical M a nifesto o f Futurist Literature proclaim s the m otto

that m asses o f m olecules and spin nin g electrons are m ore e x c itin g than
the smile or tears o f a w o m a n (di una d onn a).7' R ilke reported th a t on e
w om an identified his cran ial-su tu re-p h on ograp h ic exp an sion o f the five
senses w ith “ presence o f m ind and grace o f lo v e .” T h e w riter, how ever,
disagreed. L ove “ w o u ld not serve the po et, fo r ind ivid u al variety m ust be
364 1900

constan tly present to him , he is com pelled to use the sense sectors to their
full ex te n t.” 72 T hat m eans, as in K a fk a ’s letter strategies and plans fo r the
Lindstrom com pany, the cre atio n o f un heard-of m ed ia-n etw ork co n n ec­
tions, such as those b etw een coro n a l sutures and w riting.
A t the sam e tim e, the m ed ia-n etw ork am ateurs R ilke and K a fk a still
politely form u lated their queen’s sacrifice: in gentle q u alification s and
love letters th a t w ere m achin e w ritten and th u s n o t love letters. But the
expressionists had bad m anners. “ G e t ou t w ith you r lo ve !” cries Ehren-
stein’s T u b u tsch .73 D o b lin d em an d ed, in a single sentence, “ the self-loss
[E ntselbstung], the exteriorization o f the a u th o r” and the end o f literary
“ ero ticism .” T h e d issolu tion o f the function o f au th orsh ip drove all love
o u t of books: love described as w ell as the constitu tive love that joined the
Poet and fem inine readers in em pathy. M aterial eq u ality on paper g u a r­
antees quite “ n atu ra lly” that “ the novel has as little to d o w ith lo ve as
pain tin g has to d o w ith man o r w o m a n .” 74 W hen the im agination and
“ feelin g” n o lo n g er react, then “ love, w o m a n , and so o n ” d isap p ear from
“ a literature for d iscrim inatin g b ach elo rs.” 75
So m uch for p rogram m atic d eclarations from the fo u n d in g period . T o
con clu d e, consider later, con firm in g evidence from tw o e x a c t literary his­
torians, w h o h ave registered the central fa ct and its p recon d ition s. Benn
and V alery dem on strate in th eory and p ractice th at the n ew ord er of
thin gs, foun d ed by the typ ew riter, is the space o f c o n tem p o ra ry w ritin g.
“ C irca 19 0 0 ,” the union o f love disappears from paper.

A rt is a tru th th a t d o e s n o t y e t e x ist. In th e m o st significant novels sin ce 1 9 0 0 ,

w o m e n a re ra n g e d in c a teg o rie s: in th e e th n ic -g e o g ra p h ic ( C o n ra d ), th e a rtistic
( D ie G ottinnen), a n d th e a e s th e tic (Dorian Gray). In p a r t th ey a re b r o u g h t in
a p h o ristic a lly , se rv in g a p u rp o s e o f o v a tio n a n d re m in isc en c e r a th e r th a n d e te r­
m in in g s tru c tu re , a n d th u s sp e a k in g a fo reig n lan g u a g e : in T h e M agic M ountain.
In th e m o st se rio u s in sta n c e , love is a te st faced b y a new ly d e v e lo p in g ty p o lo g ic a l
p rin c ip le .76

T a k in g sto ck o f things in this w ay has consequences fo r paper itself.

A c e le b ra tio n f o r D io n y su s, f o r w in e r a th e r th a n c o rn , fo r B acc h u s r a th e r th a n
D e m eter, f o r p hallic c o n g e stio n ra th e r th a n th e n in e -m o n th ’s m a g ic , f o r th e a p h o ­
rism ra th e r th a n th e h isto ric a l novel! O n e h a s w o rk e d o n a piece, w ith p a p e r a n d
ty p e w rite r, th o u g h ts , se n ten c es, it sits o n th e d esk . O n e r e tu r n s fro m o th e r sp h e re s,
fro m a c q u a in ta n c e s , p ro fe ssio n a l circles, o v e rlo a d in g s o f the b ra in w ith c irc u m ­
sta n c e s, overflow s, re p re ss io n s o f every flight a n d d re a m — a fte r h o u r s o f it o n e
re tu r n s a n d sees th e w h ite s tre a k s o n th e d e sk . W h a t is it? A lifeless so m e th in g ,
vague w o rld s, so m e th in g p a in fu lly , effo rtfu lly p u t to g e th e r, th o u g h t to g e th e r,
g ro u p e d , te s te d , im p ro v e d , a p a th e tic re m a in d e r, loose, u n p ro v e n , w e a k — tin d e r,
d e c a d e n t n o th in g . T h e w hole o f it a n a b su rd ity , a n illness of th e race, a black
m a rk , a c o n fu sio n o f all re la tio n ? T h e r e c o m e s P allas, u n e rrin g , a lw a y s w ith th e
h e lm e t, n e v er fertile, th e slim child less g o d d e ss, b o rn o f h e r fa th e r, sex less.77
 queen ’ s sacrifice 365

A literature that on ly arran ges w om en and even despises the W om an

or M o th er, a literature for d iscrim inatin g b ach elors, has b itter n eed o f a
Pallas as tutelary goddess. W h atever b ach elor m achines prod u ce w ith
“ p a p er and ty p e w rite r” rem ains refuse as lon g as there is n o on e to clean
up the d esk and m agically tran sform refuse in to art.
L ittle has ch an ged , then , since the days o f N ietzsch e. In a typ ew ritten
letter to O v erb eck , the h alf-b lin d m an com p lain s that his M a ilin g H ansen
is as “ skittish as a you n g d o g ,” and m akes fo r “ little en tertain m en t” and
“ much tro u b le .” H e is lo o k in g for y o u n g people to relieve his w ritin g
difficulties and w o u ld “ fo r this purpose even agree to a tw o -y ea r m ar­
riage.” 7’ Benn realized N ietzsch e’s su bju nctive in his “ m arriage o f c o m ­
radeship.” 7’ In 1 9 3 7 , six years b efore the p a n egyric fo r the virgin al
A then a, a lon gtim e w o m a n friend o f Benn’s received a letter con cern in g
his m arriage plans: it clearly lays o u t the cod e for Pallas.

So a little re la tio n s h ip h a s d ev elo p ed h e re ; it b rin g s so m e w a r m th a n d illu m in a ­

tio n in to my e x iste n c e a n d I in te n d t o n o u rish it. J u s t so th a t y o u k n o w . T h e re a re ,
first, external re a so n s. O u tw a rd ly I’m c o m p le te ly falling a p a r t. T h in g s b ro k e n
d o w n , a m ess e v ery w h e re , u n finished letters. . . . T h e b e d sh e e ts a re to rn up; th e
b e d lies u n m a d e all w e ek ; I h a v e to d o m y o w n s h o p p in g . H e a tin g a lso , so m e ­
tim es. I d o n ’t a n sw e r letters a n y m o re b e ca u se I h a v e n o o n e to w rite f o r m e. I
can’t w o rk because I have n o tim e , p e ac e, and n o o n e to tak e d ic ta tio n . I m a k e
coffee a t 3 :3 0 in th e a fte rn o o n , a n d th a t’s th e o n e e v en t o f m y life. A t 9 in th e
e v e n in g I g o t o b e d a n d th a t’s th e o th e r. L ike a b e ast. . . .
N o n e th e le ss, I m u st m a k e a n o th e r a tte m p t to c o n s tru c t a se rio u s h u m a n re la ­
tio n s h ip a n d w ith its h e lp try to pull m yself o u t o f th is m ire. M o rc h e n , I’ll tell y o u
ev ery th in g , b u t o n ly y o u . A n d n o w if I tell y o u w h a t s o r t o f p e rs o n th is is, th e o n e
w h o will p ro b a b ly b e c o m e u n h a p p y , y o u ’ll p ro b a b ly b e su rp rise d .
Q u ite a b it y o u n g e r th a n I a m , ju st th irty y e ars old. N o t a t all a ttr a c tiv e like
E lida a n d E lisa b e th A rd e n . Very g o o d figure, h u t th e face is n e g ro id . F ro m a very
g o o d fam ily. N o m oney. J o b sim ila r to th a t o f H elga, w ell paid, ty p e s 2 0 0 syl­
lab les, a n e x p e rt ty p ist. By o u r s ta n d a rd s , th a t is, by th e s ta n d a r d s o f o u r g e n e ra ­
tio n , u n e d u c a te d .10

T h e end o f love does not ex clu d e, it includes m arriage. L iterary u ti­

lizers o f discarded m aterial are ed u cated , but u n able to straighten o u t the
discarded files k n o w n as their desks. T h u s th ey m arry w om en w h o , like
Felice Bauer, are n eith er beautiful n or ed u cated , but w h o w ith their 200
typew ritten syllab les per m inute are n ea rly record-setters."1 T h e nam e o f
the Pallas w h o com es to rescue and redeem the decaden t p a p e r tinder
on the desk co u ld b e, rather than H erta vo n W edem eyer, M in n ie T ip p .
F o r the helm et she never lays aside is her m achine, w h ich ta k es d ictatio n .
T h is is the w a y that pathetic rem ainders, lo o se , u n proven, w e a k , w hich
lie on the desk like w h ite streaks, b ecom e a truth th at d oes not y e t e x is t—
becom e art.
In 1 9 1 6 V alery n oted : “ Love is, n o d o u b t, w o r th m akin g . . . but as an
366 1900

o ccu p ation o f the intellect, as a su b ject o f novels and studies, it is trad i­

tional and te d io u s.” *2 In 194 0 , betw een Benn’s m arriage o f com rad esh ip
and Pallas, V alery p u t his literary-historical statem ent to the test: he
w ro te ‘M y F a u st.’ W hereas the second h a lf o f the d ra m a tic frag m en t in ­
troduces a nam eless N ietzsch e, w h o greets G o e th e ’s hero as “ trash ” an d
discards him as trash, the first h a lf revolves arou n d a D em oiselle Luste.
T his p retty person w ith the pretty nam e is as able as the herm it o f Sils to
characterize the irretrievable past o f G erm an Poetry. O n ly M e p h isto ,
w h o still thin ks in term s o f m ajor, decisive a ctio n s , o f Spirit and N atu re,
can im agine that Faust loves the D em oiselle. But the devil is just a p o o r
devil and, like D ra cu la , brainless. T h e d evelopm ents o f m odern science
and tech n o lo g y have passed him by.” Faust, by con trast, stands at the
height o f an experim ent that, as the “ rediscovery o f a n cien t ch ao s in the
b o d y ,” m akes all discourses into secon d ary ph en o m en a. T h erefo re his re­
lationship to Luste can n o t be lo ve , but on ly an experim ent in m edia
con n ection .
M e , V alery, the b ook s: let us sum it all up.
F irst F au st reads everyth in g th a t has been w ritten a b o u t him in litera­
ture and interpretation. H e begins w ith an a u to b ib lio g ra p h ical ex h a u s­
tion , w hose com pleteness, h ow ever, can n o t be gu aran teed . T h e secon d
step is to transfer everyth in g that has been stored into a d iscou rse net­
w o rk called the M ernoires. H ere are the title and the open in g sentences.

“ T h e M e m o irs o f M y Self, by P ro fe sso r D o c to r F a u stu s, M e m b e r o f th e A c ad e m y

o f D e a d S c ien c es, etc. . . . H e r o o f several lite ra ry w o rk s o f r e p u te . . .” So m u ch
h a s b e e n w r itte n a b o u t m e th a t I n o lo n g e r k n o w w h o I am . T ru e, I h a v e n o t re a d
all th e m an y w o rk s in q u e stio n , a n d d o u b tle ss th e re a re m any m o re th a n o n e
w h o s e e x iste n c e h a s n o t b e e n m a d e k n o w n to m e. B ut th o s e w ith w h ic h I am
a c q u a in te d a re e n o u g h t o give m e a sin g u larly rich a n d c o m p le x id ea o f m y se lf
a n d m y destiny. T h u s I c a n c h o o se freely a m o n g a v a rie ty o f d a te s a n d p la c e s fo r
m y b irth , all e q u ally a tte s te d by irre fu ta b le d o c u m e n ts and p ro o fs, p u t fo rth a n d
d iscu ssed by c ritics o f e q u a l e m in e n c e .”

T h e m em oirs o f the classical fou n d in g hero exceed the discourse n etw o rk

he inaugurated . A s the rules stipulate, an author has arisen in the m edia
n etw ork o f p o e tic w o r k s and interpretation s, and th at a u th or has all the
attributes o f literary fam e. But precisely fo r that reason, m athem atical
c o m b in ato rics replaces the o rga n ic a u tob iograp h y. C o u n tless b o o k s a b o u t
b o o k s a b o u t Faust cancel on e a n o th er o u t. W h a t rem ains is w h ite noise,
from w hich the m em oir w riter can e x tra ct arb itrary selectio n s. W h o e ve r
no lon ger k n o w s w h o he is and w rites his m em oirs with the d eclared in ­
tention o f d isap p earin g as an I is n o lon ger an au thor.
Faust, h avin g b ecom e the em p ty intersection o f countless discourses,
rescinds G o e th e’s Poetry a n d Truth. T h is m eans that, p ra ctica lly sp ea k ­
 queen ’ s sacrifice 367

ing, he dictates oth er things a n d o th erw ise than th e U r-au thor did. John,
Johann C h ristian Schuchardt, Friedrich T h e o d o r K rau ter, Johann Peter
E ckerm ann, Friedrich W ilh elm Riem er, o r even G eist— so runs the list o f
the names o f men w h o w ould have been able to sign G o e th e ’s truths and
fictions if the rules in op eration had been those o f the m ateriality o f w r it­
ing rather than the D isco u rse o f the M aster. M a le secretaries w ere on the
on e side, and on the oth er w ere first a m other, w h o could hardly w rite
one w o rd correctly, then a w ife, w h o p rovid ed fo r G o e th e ’s “ d om estic
peace and m arital happin ess” sim ply by n ever desiring “ fam e as a w om an
w riter” and p ro p erly esch ew in g any “ m ixin g in official and literary m at­
ters.” ,s Such w ere the param eters o f a practice o f w ritin g , w h ich led to the
con cep tion o f an ideal in fem inine form , o r in the form o f a w om an. T o
dictate to the subaltern men present w h at the O n e, O n ly, and A b sen t
Feminine has w h isp ere d — w ritin g P oetry is n oth in g else. Even w h en P ro ­
fessor A b n o ssah Pschorr, one hundred years later, b u ilt his p h on o grap h
in the study o f the G o e th e H ouse, the roll still registered m en’s voices: the
A u th o r as he w hispers his w o rd s o f w isd om to Eckerm ann.*6
V alery’s ‘M y F aust’ is a system atic reversal o f all classical w ritin g p ra c ­
tices. H e to o d ictates, but n ot as a b u reau crat w h o ends up w ith the state-
su p portin g p act o f his ow n signature. “ T h e m ere fa ct o f k n o w in g h o w to
sign my nam e cost me dear o n c e ” — thus “ 1 never w rite n o w ,” *7 b u t in ­
stead he dictates tow ard th e van ishing point designated b y K a fk a ’s a v o id ­
ance o f the signature. T h ese dictations doubly o p p ose the G o e th ea n v a ri­
ety. First, th ey set n o life o r ideal o f w o m a n into w ritin g , bu t on ly the
sentences that poets and interpreters have w ritten a b o u t an im possible
real. S econ d, this b o o k o f b o o k s is b ein g w ritten by a w o m a n , n ot a m an.
T he fact that D em oiselle Luste has been w ith Faust fo r e ig h t d a y s is
sim ply exp lain ed b y her ta k in g d icta tio n . M e p h isto can su sp ect w h atever
he likes, but w h at takes place at the end o f the idea o f Faust is a bargain
sale o f all poetic-herm eneutic discourse to a w o m a n ’s ear. T h e ear is sm all
and m agical, as one c o u ld have predicted o f an adm irer o f N ietzsch e and
M a llarm e, and it is b y n o m eans there to un derstan d anything.** L u ste’s
ear is to take d ictatio n with p h o n o grap h ic accu racy, clean o ff w hat w as
dictated at the b egin nin g o f the n ext day, and oth erw ise, o th erw ise be a
not un attractive sight for the flight o f ideas.”
Luste, a seco n d Pallas, brings o rd e r in to the co m b in ato ry ch ao s o f the
last F au st. T h e w rite r o f the m em oir neither has n or desires to h ave an
overview o f a life th a t to o m an y b o o k s have described. W ith o r w ith o u t
the help o f the d evil, w h o o n ce in a w h ile brings by an insidious te x t, his
desk is a heap o f refuse. But there is Luste, th a t is, th e “ m odest b u t h o n o r­
able part o f the thin g that discreetly helps to oil the m achin ery o f y ou r
th o u gh t.” ’0 A w om an w h o k n o w s n othin g o f the th o u gh t o r life o f the
368 1900

one who dictates takes up the chaos of memoirs with clever ears and crys­
talline logic. That is why Faust hired her. For phonographic accuracy
means doing away with the constitutive repressions in discourses. When
Faust for once is not interested in dictating and instead talks about the
evening sun and his desire for a little flirtation, Luste, just like Minnie,
puts that too onto the mute page. When he risks a physiological defini­
tion of laughter, which (as abstraction or parapraxis) applies just as well
to orgasm, Luste responds with an endless laugh. When in his finest philo­
sophical style he styles his “ relations with men and things” as the theme
of the memoirs, Luste questions the ambiguous word men, and Faust
must be more specific and add that he also had dealings with women.
Thus the simple presence of a secretary decomposes the unity of mankind
and leaves everywhere only two divided sexes. Faust can no longer play
Fichte-Schelling-Luden’s representative of all mankind because his words
strike a clever woman’s ear.
Again and again in the war between the sexes, one leads the other
around by the nose. The memoir writer tries this with his secretary, using
delicate bits of memory. But the beautiful willing widows of autobiogra­
phy, whether they are (with Faust) fiction or (with Mephisto) truth, re­
main women in plurality. The myth of life sources and Nature’s breasts
has it otherwise. Ever since European universities have included female
secretaries as well as Faust, M .A ., and his assistant Wagner, the myth
risks provoking only laughter. Luste is Wagner, Luste is Gretchen, Luste
is therefore neither one nor the other. The comedy Luste begins with her
laughter, and it ends with her “ no” to love. Women in plurality, laughing
and writing, make affairs like that with Gretchen utterly impossible (as
Faust explains to the devil). Because discourses are of secondary impor­
tance under conditions of advanced technology, one need not say what
has replaced love and sighs. Signifiers are unambiguous and dumb. The
one who laughs is Luste.
 Afterword to the Second Printing

Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superious.

Tabula Smaragdina

The term discourse network, as God revealed it to the paranoid cognition

of Senate President Schreber, can also designate the network of technolo­
gies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and pro­
cess relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institu­
tions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a
historically very powerful formation, which in the Europe of the age of
Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism.
In order ) describe such systems as systems, that is, to describe them
from the o aside and not merely from a position of interpretive imma­
nence, Fc .icault developed discourse analysis as a reconstruction of the
rules by which the actual discourses of an epoch would have to have been
organized in order not to be excluded as was, for example, insanity. His
concept of the archive— synonymous with the library in Foucault’s re­
search methods, if not in his theory1— designates a historical a priori of
written sentences. Hence discourse-analytic studies had trouble only with
periods whose data-processing methods destroyed the alphabetic storage
and transmission monopoly, that old-European basis of power.2 Fou­
cault’s historical research did not progress much beyond 1850.
All libraries are discourse networks, but all discourse networks are not
books. In the second industrial revolution, with its automation of the
streams of information, the analysis of discourses has yet to exhaust the
forms of knowledge and power. Archeologies of the present must also
take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in tech­
nological media. Literary criticism can learn from an information theory
that has formalized the current state of technical knowledge, and thus
370 AFTERWORD

made measurable the performance or limits of information systems. After

the destruction of the monopoly of writing, it becomes possible to draw
up an account of its functioning.
Traditional literary criticism, probably because it originated in a par­
ticular practice of writing, has investigated everything about books ex­
cept their data processing. Meaning as the fundamental concept of her­
meneutics and labor as the fundamental concept of the sociology of
literature both bypass writing as a channel of information and those insti­
tutions, whether schools or universities, that connect books with people.
Hermeneutics did not deal with the literal materiality of the letter, but
with works and traditions, because only these were said to be historical
and capable of producing history. Contemporary sociology of literature
takes the opposite approach and reads texts as reflections of relations of
production, whose paradigm is energy or labor rather than information.
Steam engines and looms (in Goethe also) became topics, but typewrit­
ers did not.
Discourse analyses, by contrast, have to integrate into their material­
ism the standards of the second industrial revolution. An elementary
datum is the fact that literature (whatever else it might mean to readers)
processes, stores, and transmits data, and that such operations in the age-
old medium of the alphabet have the same technical positivity as they do
in computers. Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject al­
ways arrive too late.
What remain to be distinguished, therefore, are not emotional disposi­
tions but systems. Information networks can be described only when they
are contrasted with one another. The source, sender, channel, receiver,
and drain of streams of information, Shannon’s five functions, in other
words,3 can be occupied or left vacant by various agents: by men or
women, rhetoricians or writers, philosophers or psychoanalysts, univer­
sities or technical institutes. Whereas interpretation works with con­
stants, the comparison between systems introduces variables. If the latter
pursues historical investigations, then “ at least two limiting events” are
indispensable, for which either systemic differentiation or communica-
tional technique can be considered criteria.4
Universal alphabetization circa 1800 and technological data storage
circa 1900 constitute just such turning points, for which there is sufficient
evidence within about fifteen years. Whether data, addresses, and com­
mands circulate among pedagogy, Poetry, and philosophy, or among me­
dia technologies, psychophysics, and literature, the difference changes the
place value of each word. In describing such feedback systems of senders,
channels, and receivers, the instantaneous exposures or snapshots of a
single moment can be of more help than intellectual histories. According
to Heidegger, the nineteenth and “ most ambiguous” century can “ never
 AFTERWORD 371

be understood by means of a description of the chronological succession

of its periods. It must be demarcated and approached simultaneously
from two sides.” 5
The examination rules of the new philologies had little to do with de­
marcating borders. The literary history of the smallest increments or dis­
tinctions functions almost like “ devices that cannot distinguish a pseudo­
random sequence from a real random sequence, when the length of a
period” (determined by an “ easy-to-fill condition” ) “ is larger than its ca­
pacity for storage.” 6 By contrast, system comparisons like that between
the age of Goethe and the turn of the century need to seek minimal auto­
correlation functions whose periods can be counted in centuries. What
intellectual history conjures up as the nonsimultaneity of the simultane­
ous, and hermeneutics as the infinite number of possible contexts thus
shrinks to options or erratic values. A belief in inexhaustible works is
simply an unwillingness to allow holy writ to be joined by its long forgot­
ten siblings. Discourse analyses, however, even if they cannot establish
any airat; keyo/xevov, at least have the advantage of Occam ’s razor: data
that have not been multiplied beyond necessity can be transmitted under
the conditions of high technology— as books into other media and as
homes into other countries.
Meanwhile, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 has become part of an
information network that describes literature as an information network.
Avital Ronell deciphers Goethe’s authorship as dictation to his Ecker-
manns and psychoanalysts. Klaus Theweleit tells of the women and me­
dia from v om books have emerged in Freud, Benn, or Celine. Wolfgang
Scherer ar plies the historical breaks of alphabetization and media tech­
nologies co the history of music and its criticism; Bernhard Siegert and
Frank Haase establish the postal system as a universal transmission me­
dium. The irretrievable effects of film on autobiographies and theoretical
constructions of modernity have been discussed by Manfred Schneider
and Thorsten Lorenz. And finally, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Lud­
wig Pfeiffer reconstruct a space of communicative materialities that have
granted literature its origin and end.
Literary texts can thus be read as a methodological, but only a meth­
odological, center of Discourse Networks, in contexts that explode the
two-cultures schema of our academic departments. Information technol­
ogy is always already strategy or war. “And that means: pessimism all the
way down the line. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of
freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but above all mis­
trust, mistrust, and more mistrust in all understanding: between the
classes, between peoples, between individuals. And unlimited trust only
in I. G. Farben and the satisfactory perfection of the air force.” 7
Under conditions of high technology, the work of putting things in
3 72- AFTERWORD

order (this structural activity) becomes as old-fashioned as it is inescap­

able. Putting things in order, although it is not a sublation [Aufheben],
does not lag far behind in ambiguity. Hegel’s project of determining the
nature of the discourse network in the age of Goethe resulted in the judg­
ment that “ art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a
thing of the past.” 8 Works that put things in order do not furnish any
judgments or even oracles, but they “ dispossess” people of “ that dis­
course in which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly what
they think, believe, or imagine.” 9
At the beginning of Discourse Networks 1800/1900 stood the Fugs
with their song “ Exorcizing the Evil Spirits out of the Pentagon.” At the
end stand words that have brought other words onto a screen.
There is no end to the writing of books, wrote the preacher. Even
books written to bring about the end of books and of their ordering sub­
mit to this pronouncement.
p
Reference Matter
 Notes

Full authors’ names, titles, and publication data for works given in short
form below may be found in Works Cited, pp. 4 19 —47.
The following abbreviations have been used in the notes. Because of
the frequent repetition of similar titles in German editions, these abbre­
viations represent titles or substantial parts of titles, not works per se.
Thus one will find, for example, both Goethe, SW , and Pestalozzi, SW,
representing the different complete editions of these respective authors. In
the list 1 io w , the authors for whom each abbreviation is used are given
after e" di title.

AL Aufsdtze zur Literatur K Kampfzeiten (H. Lange)

(Doblin) KA Kritische Ausgabe
B Briefwechsel (Hoffmann, (F. Schlegel)
Hofmannsthal, KS Kritische Schriften
Nietzsche) (A, Schlegel)
CE Critical Essays (Barthes) LCM P Language, Counter-
G Gesamtausgabe Memory, Practice
(J. Fichte) (Foucault)
GAW Gesamt-Ausgabe der OC Oeuvres completes
Werke (George) (Mallarme)
GS Gesammelte Schriften PS Padagogische Schriften
(Benjamin, Dilthey, (Schleiermacher)
Wagner) S Schriften (Hardenberg,
GW Gesammelte Werke Tieck)
(Benn, Einstein, SE Standard Edition (Freud)
Morgenstern)
37 6 NOTES TO PAGES 3 - 1 2

SS Samtliche Schriften W Werke (C. Brentano,

(Goethe) Goethe, Nietzsche,
SW Samtliche Werke J. P. Richter)
(J. Fichte, Goethe, WB Werke und Briefe
Herder, Pestalozzi, (B. Brentano,
Rilke) Nietzsche)

The Scholar’s Tragedy

note: We are grateful to Stanley Corngoid for allowing us to draw on his per­
sonal translation of this chapter. [Trans.]
1. Goethe, Faust, 11. 354—57. The German text is from Goethe, SW; the
translation is by Walter Kaufmann, copyright © 1961 by Walter Kaufmann (used
by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing
Group, Inc.). The opening monologue of Goethe’s Faust is written in Knittel-
verse, an irregular meter of four feet used by the sixteenth-century poet Hans
Sachs. This and all following translations have very occasionally been adapted
from the published sources given in the Works Cited where this was necessary to
highlight aspects of the original under discussion. [Trans.]
2. Schiller, SW (1963), I: 313. In German, the title of Schiller’s distich is
“ Sprache” (“ Language” ). N ote that the German word contains and transforms
the “ ach!” of the soul’s sigh, thereby enacting the alienation of the soul in lan­
guage that the distich states thematically. [Trans.]
3. See Lacan, Encore, p. 55. 4. Foucault, Order, p. 206.
5. Rickert, Goethes Faust, p. 156. 6. Luther, IV: 3.
7. See the speech-act analysis in Gessinger (Sprache, pp. 38—43), whose de­
preciatory categories demonstrate how contemporary concepts of language per­
sist in rewriting Faust and how they can describe other orders of discourse only as
terror.
8. Tiedemann, Untersuchungen, III: 359.
9. Lacan, “ The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since
Freud,” Ecrits (New York), p. 174.
10. Foucault, Order, p. 41.
11. Foucault, “ Language to Infinity,” in LCM P, pp. 66—67.
12. See Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 20—21.
13. Cited in Herbertz, p. 559.
14. In Faust’s time, Herder did so, and was then able only to write out the
unspeakable Johannine polysemy. “ Word! but the German ‘w ord’ does not say
what this primary concept says,” namely, “ concept and expression, primary con­
cept and first cause, idea and imprint, thought and word.” (Herder, “ ‘Johannes,’ ”
in SW, VII: 320.)
15. Derrida, “ Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, p. 279.
16. For the terminology, see Barthes, “ The Imagination of the Sign,” in CE,
pp. 206—8. On the interpretation, see Wilkinson, “ Faust,” pp. 1 1 9 —23, which,
referring to Saussure, attributes an awareness of the paradigmatic to Faust. His
various Germanizations are said to be choices “ between alternatives that were
available since the beginning of Biblical interpretation” ; consequently, they pro­
vide “ an impression of the dangers, heresies, and violence that belonged to the
traditional accompaniments of the exegesis of the word logos.” That is her­
meneutically correct but untenable from the perspective of discourse analysis, be­
 NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 - 2 2 377

cause Faust’s own discursive violence dispenses with all reference to traditions.
17. Barthes, “ The Imagination of the Sign,” in CE, p. 205.
18. Nietzsche, WB, III: 367.
19. Bielschowsky, II: 635.
20. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 967—68; see also Turk, “ Hegel,” p. 132.
21. Spinoza, p. 172. 22. Ibid., p. 161.
23. See L. Strauss, pp. 1 7 9 -8 6 . 24. Rickert, p. 158.
25. Goethe, Uber Philostrats Gemahlde, in W, X LIX, 1, p. 142.
26. Derrida, “ Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference,
p. 226.
27. This “ here I am” of the Spirit was grasped at once by Hegelian inter­
preters of Faust: Faust, “ instead of proceeding to the sign of the macrocosmos
and microcosmos, now opens the sacred Original, which, because it belongs to
the manifestation of divine truth, he does not consider merely word and letter, but
which, because he cannot possibly esteem the word so highly, he raises with the
help of the Spirit to the level of living Spirit.” (Hinrichs, p. 97.)
28. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, I, 11 (“ On the N ew Idol” ), pp. 160—63.
29. Nietzsche, W, III, 2, p. 23 if. On the concrete form of such supervision—
namely, in the state examinations for teachers— see Prahl, p. 248f.
30. “ It should be remembered that the ‘Word’ in John represents Christ, and
so Faust’s disparagement of the ‘Word’ also implies an indictment of the Savior
whom it symbolizes in the Bible. It is not a mere word, but a specific reference to
Christ that Faust is here attempting to excise from the Bible.” (Durrani, p. 61.)
31. Baumgart, “ Gelehrte,” p. 58. See also M cClelland, p. 79.
32. Paulsen, Deutschen Universitdten, p. 77.
33. Paulsen, Geschichte, II: 93.
34. Allgemeines Landrecht, II, 12, §1; p. 584. See also II, 13, §3; p. 589.
35. Jeismann, p. 23.
36. Gedike, “ Einige Gedanken fiber Schulbiicher und Kinderschriften,” in
Gesammelte chulschriften, I: 438—40.
37. J. P .1 uchter, “ Das Kampaner Tal oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele,”
in W, IV: ,49.
38. “ Hahnische Litteralmethode,” p. 94f. Katharina Rutschky carries coals to
the Newcastle of reform pedagogues when she characterizes Hahn’s old-fashioned
literal method as the “ destruction of the world through instruction.” (Rutschky,
Schwarze Padagogik, pp. 563—67.)
39. See Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in SW,
XXII: 149.
40. Biinger, p. 231.
41. Schmack, p. 55.
42. Such was the diagnosis of the polemical Catholic von Hammerstein, pp.
23 0 -36 .
43. F. Schlegel, Athenaums-Fragmente, in KA, II: 182.
44. See Deleuze/Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, pp. 75 —85, on the “ order-
word.”
45. See, e.g., Durrani, p. 60.
46. Code Napoleon, §4, 1807: 2. See Seebohm, Kritik, p. 13E
47. Hintze, p. 11. The final scene of Faust concerns the difference between
“ life-long” and “ indissoluble.”
48. Cited in Bradish, p. 200.
49. Ibid., p. i8 f.
37 8 NOTES TO PAGES 2 2 - 3 2

50. Goethe, document of November 1785, in SS, I: 420. See Curtius, p. 113.
51. Bradish, p. 18.
52. Foucault, Discipline, pp. 29, 30.
53. Penzenkuffer, p. 92.
54. Ibid., p. 96.
55. Baumgart, “ Faust,” p. 94.

The M other’s Mouth

1. The capitalized and crossed-out article is a Lacanian notation indicating
that woman does not exist as One in that women, as they exist, exist in a plurality
and thus cannot be inscribed in the phallic function (universality). See Lacan, En­
core, passim; in relation to classical-romantic poetry, see Schreiber, “ Zeichen der
Liebe,” pp. 276—83.
2. Tobler, in Goethe, SW, X X X IV : 5.
3. Lacan, Encore, p. 90.
4. See Kaiser, Wandrer und Idylle, p. 106.
5. See Geissler, pp. 35 —37.
6. Nietzsche, Human, A ll Too Human, vol. II, pt. 2, 124, p. 340.
7. See F. Kittler, “ Autorschaft und Liebe,” pp. 155-59.
8. Hinrichs, p. 152L
9. See Hamacher, pp. 1 1 6 —24.
10. Brandes, Betrachtungen, pp. 108, 183. On the recrudescence of the famil­
iar form of address, see Wolke, p. 89; also Goethe, SW, XXII: 269.
1 1. Brandes, Betrachtungen, p. 108.
12. See Donzelot, Policing, p. 20.

Learning to Read in 1800

1. J. A. Fluber, p. 28.
2. J. P. Richter, Leben Fibels, des Verfassers der Bienrodischen Fibel (vor-
datiert 1812), in W, VI: 426.
3. Flobrecker, p. 7.
4. Buno, cited in Helmers, p. 40.
5. Freud, Interpretation o f Dreams, in SE, IV: 312.
6. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben. Zweiter Abteilung erster und zweiter Band
(Italienische Reise), in SW, XXVII: 184.
7. Splittegarb, pp. 5L 8. Olivier, pp. 15, 24.
9. J. H. Campe, p. 73. 10. Basedow, I: 1 7 - 1 9 .
11. See Olivier, p. 58; and Niethammer, “ Bediirfniss,” p. 239. For the early
European history of edible letters, see Dornseiff, p. 17L
12. Niemeyer, p. 242.
13. Basedow, I: 27.
14. Schleiermacher, “ Katechismus der Vernunft fur edle Frauen,” in PS,
V: 239.
15. For a detailed discussion, see F. Kittler, “ Lullaby,” pp. 10 —13.
16. See Pestalozzi, Uber den Sinn des Gehors, in Hinsicht auf Menschen-
bildung durch Ton und Sprache, in SW, XVI: 290.
17. See Kehr, pp. 38 5-8 9 .
18. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 3.
19. See Kehr, p. 39of, and Meumann, Vorlesungen, III: 450.
 NOTES TO PAGES 3 2 -4 0 379

20. Stephani, Beschreibung, pp. 1 6 —18.

21. Foucault, Order, p. 286; see also Liede, II: 223L
22. For a description of how autobiographers of 1800 related their experience
with their spelling-method instructors, see Hardach-Pinke and Hardach, pp.
1 1 5 ,1 5 2 .
23. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 12L O n equating letters and musical notation,
see also Olivier, p. 95; on the collaboration of voice and German teachers at a
school in Leipzig, see von Turk, p. i74ff.
24. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 18.
25. See Basedow, I: 21; and Biinger, pp. 83, 239.
26. Stephani, Beschreibung, pp. 24—26. See also von Turk, p. 188, on the
phonetic method of Johann Friedrich Adolph Krug in Leipzig.
27. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 33L
28. C. Brentano, W, II: 613.
29. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 10. Stephani claimed that his method “ would
make reading one of the most enjoyable of entertainments. You, noble mother,
will find that you have to break off reading with your young ones more often than
you like.”
30. Ibid., p. 25; see also F. Kittler, “ Erziehung,” pp. 12 1 — 27.
31. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 7.
32. Ibid., pp. 26, 32.
33. Ibid., p. 7.
34. Von Turk, p. 176 ; see also Petrat, p. 76L
35. See Gessinger, Schriftspracherwerb, pp. 9 3 - 1 0 1 .
36. Hardenberg, “ M onolog,” in S, II: 672.
37. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in SW, XXIII: 44.
For an overview, see Blackall.
38. See Chapuis and Gelis, II: 202—6.
39. Olivier, p. 99. 40. Ibid., pp. 95, 101.
41. See ib p. 91. 42. H. J. Frank, p. 309.
43. Herdf ., Von der Ausbildung der Schuler in Rede und Sprache. Schulrede
Weimar, in _.W, X X X : 217L Von Turk’s diagnosis and therapy program for the
Leipzig dialect was quite similar (perhaps even more severe because it involved his
own accent); see von Turk, p. 56L
44. See Foucault, Order, p. 297L 45. Herrmann, p. 116 .
46. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 5 if. 47. Erstes Lesebiichlein.
48. Griissbeutel, A VIV and BII. 49. Jordan, A v IV.
50. Kehr, pp. 364—68; this mistake is repeated by all historians of A B C books.
51. See Foucault, Order, pp. 1 9 —20.
52. “ The beginner can consider any animal and, by imitating its voice, will
naturally pronounce the letters.” One will find similar comments in Comenius
(1659), cited in E. Schwartz, p. 61.
53. See Biinger, p. 29.
54. Herder, Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur, in W, I: 401.
55. See Giesecke, p. 61. 56. Herder, “ Origin,” p. 116 .
57. Lohmann, p. 66. 58. Herder, “ Origin,” p. 1 1 7 .
59. This is the view of Grob, pp. 5 — 29.
60. Herder, “ Origin,” p. 87.
61. See ibid., p. 90.
62. Ibid., p. 91. O f Rousseau’s analogous anthropological language, Staro-
binski writes: “ Rousseau would have us consider what precedes the human order
380 NOTES TO PAGES 40 -4 9

of speech. O f course, he asserts that there is discourse, but he does so to reveal a

voice that begins before all discourse. . . . By definition, the voice of nature must
precede any speech” (p. 283).
63. Noted by Lohmann, p. 67.
64. Herder, “ Origin,” pp. 9 0 - 9 1 .
65. Hippel, Lebenslaufe, III: 1.
66. See the interpretation of Milch, pp. 1 5 6 — 59.
67. Hoffmann, “ The Sandman,” in Tales, p. 103.
68. Ibid., p. 115 .
69. Wolke, p. 150; such definitions seem so self-evident to Germans that they
can be ridiculed as a German metaphysics of language. See Parain, Untersuch-
ungen, pp. 151 — 54.
70. Hoffmann, “ The Sandman,” in Tales, p. 118.
7 1. Bosse, “ Herder,” p. 82.
72. Niethammer, “Bediirfnis,” p. 2 2 if.
73. Hegel, Philosophy o f Subjective Spirit, III: 18 1; see also Bernhardi, II:
26off.
74. A. W. Schlegel, KS, I: 141.
75. See T. Meyer, p. 161.
76. Foucault, Order, p. 286.
77. Hegel, Philosophy o f Subjective Spirit, III: 179.
78. Bernhardi, I: 6 1 —7 1. 79. Herder, “ Origins,” p. 94.
80. Ibid., p. 90. 81. Von Loeben, p. 62.
82. See the detailed discussion in Wyss, pp. 1 5 6 —60.
83. Von Turk, p. 181. 84. Olivier, p. 84k
85. Liscov, III: io3 f. 86. Griissbeutel, A, IT.
87. Ickelsamer, C , IV r.
88. See Herder, Buchstaben- und Lesebuch, in W, X X X : 297; Splittegarb,
p. 15; A B C , p. 4.
89. Biinger, p. 27; see also J. P. Richter, Leben Fibels, in W, IV: 430, 550.
90. Niemeyer, p. 243; see also Basedow, I: 1 7 —19.
91. Niemeyer, p. 243.
92. Tillich, p. 1.
93. See Hegel, Logic, p. 82. “ Perhaps,” suggested Novalis, “ the ultimate book
is like an A B C book” (Hardenberg, fragment of 1798, in S, II: 610).
94. See Zwirner, p. 33.
95. See Biinger, p. 316, on this unavailable edition.
96. See Foucault, Discipline, p. 1 5 9 -6 0 .
97. Pestalozzi, “ Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt; ein Versuch, den Mfittern
Anleitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten,” in SW, XIII: 194L
98. Pestalozzi, “ Pestalozzi’s Brief an einen Freund fiber seinen Aufenthalt in
Stanz,” in SW, XIII: 27.
99. Herder, Lesebuch, in W, X X X : 293.
100. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 15.
101. Paulsen, Geschichte, II: 166.
102. Lacan, letter of January 5, 1980.
103. See Fritzsch, p. 497, for the historical context of Tiedemann’s work.
104. Tiedemann, Beobachtungen, pp. 23, 27.
105. Ibid., p. 27.
106. See Stern, Psychologie, p. 88f.
107. See Chapuis and Gelis, II: 208— 12.
 NOTES T O PAGES 5 0 - 5 7 381

108. Stephani, Fibel, p. 4!.

109. Wolke, p. 65. O n the immediate pedagogic exploitation of the newly dis­
covered phenomenon of deprivation, see also Basedow, I: 202.
110. Stephani, Beschreibung , p. 65L
h i . Rousseau, p. 19k
112 . Von Lang, p. 10; see also Schenda, p. 50.
113 . See G. Stephan, p. 67.
114 . See Melchers, p. 28f.
115 . See Benjamin, “Alte vergessene Kinderbucher,” GS, III: 1 2 —22.
116 . Hempel, p. ix.
1 1 7 . Kopke, I: 14.
118 . Tieck, Der blonde Eckbert, in S, IV: 154. The following anticipates any
commentary on this typical plot line in Tieck fairy tales: “ M any people are so
attached to nature because they grew up afraid of their fathers and took refuge
with their mothers” (Hardenberg, fragment of 17 9 8 —99, in S , III: 360).

Motherliness and Civil Service

1. Pestalozzi, “ Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt; ein Versuch, den Muttern An-
leitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten,” in SW, XIII: 326.
2. Pestalozzi, Das Buch der Mutter, oder Anleitung fur Mutter, ihre Kinder
bemerken und reden zu lehren, in SW, X V : 350.
3. O n the conceptual pair sidos/vXr) as representation and veiling of sexual
difference, see Lacan, Encore, p. 76.
4. See F. Kittler, “ Lullaby,” pp. 5 — 19.
5. See G. A. Kittler, p. 314.
6 . Humboldt, X: 213; see also W. T. Krug, Staatund Schule, pp. 12 8 —30.
7. Derrida, “Nietzsches Otobiographie,” p. 94 (a summary of Nietzsche’s
words).
8. For details see Paulsen, Geschichte, II: 2 79 —82.
9. Holst, p 175.
10. See V dhgram, pp. 262, 291; as a decoding of Napoleon’s orders, con­
sider the line' t>y Pink Floyd, “ Mother, will they put me in the firin’ line? Mother,
isn’t it jusf j. waste of time?”
1 1 . Von Turk, p. 15 6 k see also Blochmann, p. 56L
12. Holst, p. 167.
13. Gleim, II: 150; see also Hippel, Nachlass uber weibliche Bildung, in SW,
VII: i 4f.
14. Holst, p. 58L Thus someone directly involved contradicts the sociologist’s
supposition that the defined gender roles of 1800 served “ without doubt to secure
ideologically the dominance of patriarchy” (Hausen, p. 375).
15. See Wychgram, p. 225 (on Vives).
1 6 . See Foucault, History o f Sexuality, p. 1 1 7 .
17. Holst, p. 55.
18. Pestalozzi, “Weltweib und Mutter,” in SW, XVI: 3 4 7 —54.
19. Holst, p. 175.
20. See Hardenberg, “ Glauben und Liebe oder Der Konig und die Konigin,”
in S, II: 4 9 1 —94.
21. Articles 3 and 30, cited in Blochmann, p. 114 ; see also Schwarz, p. 262L,
and von Turk, p. 139 (the teacher and “poetess Carolina Rudolphi” was “ a
tender mother” to all her students in Heidelberg).
22. Voss, I: 429L
382 NOTES TO PAGES 5 7 - 6 1

23. Hippel, Burgerliche Verbesserung, p. 129: “Truly, in order to reorient

ourselves we ought to prefer women for service in the state; they have an undeni­
able, God-given talent for such service, something that most of our good-for-
nothings in high office conspicuously lack.”
24. Holst, p. 5k
25. Voss, I: 419.
26. Hardenberg, fragment of 1 7 9 9 -1 8 0 0 , in S, III: 568.
27. Gleim, I: 104k
28. Goethe, Die Wablverwandtscbaften, in SW, XXI: 205. For Goethe’s stipu­
lation that the male servants are servants of the state, see F. Kittler, “ Ottilie
Hauptmann,” p. 262.
29. Heydenreich, p. 99.
30. Ibid., pp. 99, 98.
31. See: Hattenhauer, p. 174 (on civil service law and the state idol).
32. Hardenberg, “ Konig und die Konigin,” in S, II: 489.
33. See von Westphalen, p. 9.
34. Dilthey and Heubaum, p. 246.
35. Humboldt, document of July 8,18 0 9 , in ibid., p. 253. O n demand for the
general civil service exam, see Hattenhauer, p. 177.
36. Stephani, Grundriss, pp. 80, 74.
37. Roessler, p. 266.
38. Jeismann, p. 100.
39. Allgemeines Landrecht, II, §§ 66 and 73; p. 587.
40. Siivern, 18 17 , cited in Heinemann, p. 344.
41. Penzenkuffer, pp. 9 1k , 2 71. See also W. T. Krug, Staat und Schule, p. 97.
The historical differentiation of systems of power that Foucault entitles Discipline
and Punish was already accomplished (during the moment of differentiation it­
self, one might say,) by Penzenkuffer: in the earlier period, when the state had its
foundation in bureaucrats who dispensed justice, the state remained despotic; it
became a free and moral state only in 1800 when its foundation shifted to educa­
tional bureaucrats.
42. Von Westphalen, p. 118.
43. Schleiermacher, lecture of 1826, in PS, V: 238.
44. See, e.g., Niethammer, p. 19 7k One of the first sentences that one primer
dictates to a child’s writing hand reads: “ I call myself a human being” (Herrmann,
p. 70).
45. Hausen, p. 385.
4 6. One pedagogue, however, said that the mother-child nexus was “ no­
where more visible than in the classes that conduct the business of thestate”
(Schwarz, p. 4).
47. Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, I: 677. The sentence is a partial plot
summary of Kleist’s play; see Act 3, scene 5. [Trans.]
48. See Hausen, pp. 283 — 87. 49. Donzelot, Policing, p. 18.
50. Holst, p. 106. 51. See Oppermann, p. 106.
52. See Jeismann, p. 112 .
53. Schleiermacher, document of December 14, 1810, in P. Schwartz, p. 195.
54. Matthias, p. 218. Matthias has counted the following old-European cer­
tificates: examination in theology; formal written application; trial lesson; mas­
ter’s or doctoral degree; certificate of seminar completion; entrance examination.
55. Von Westphalen, p. 122.
 NOTES TO PAGES 6 1-70 383

56. K. M arx, I: 253. M arx, of course, is citing Hegel.

57. Gleim, I: 105; see also Baumer, p. 22.
58. Cited in Blochmann, p. 116 .
59. Goethe, Wahlverwandtschaften, in SW, XXI: 31.
60. Gleim, I: io6f.
61. Niethammer, p. 245; see also F. Kittler, “ Ottilie Hauptmann,” p. 264.
62. See Schreiber, “ Zeichen,” p. 293k
63. See Leporin, p. 130k, and von Hanstein, I: 167.
64. Leporin, p. 142. Johann Christoph Gottsched was of the same opinion:
see Wychgram, p. 224k See also Boehm, pp. 3 0 1—23.
65. See von Hanstein, II: 348—53. Those who consider the poetic incest of
Odoardo and Emilia Galotti to be interpretation run wild should reflect on the
bridal dress the girl is wearing. See Act V of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.
66 . See Busshoff, pp. 15 — 21.
67. See Stephani, Grundriss, pp. 7 7 — 81. Similarly, see W. T. Krug, Staat und
Schule, p. 7 6 .
68. F. Schlegel, Uber die Philosopbie. An Dorothea, in KA, VIII: 42.
69. Hintze, pp. 7, 39.
70. Hegel, Logic, p. 50.
7 1. See Lacan, Encore, p. 33. “ O ntology is what has foregrounded in lan­
guage the usage of the copula, isolating it as a signifier. . . . To exorcize it, it
would perhaps suffice to propose that, when one says of anything at all that it is
what it is, nothing obligates us in any way to isolate the verb to be [etre]. It is
pronounced it is what it is [c’est ce que c’est], and it could just as easily be written
idiswadidis [seskece]. In this usage one would miss the copula completely. One
would miss it completely if a discourse, which is the discourse of the master, of
“ being-to-me” [m’etre], did not put the accent on the verb to be. . . . The entire
dimension of being is produced in the current of the discourse of the master, of he
who, uttering the signifier, expects of it that which is one of its effects as link, not
to be overlooked, and whose condition of existence is that the signifier command.
The signifier is st of all imperative.” In the original French, the phrase “ being-
to-me” plays o . the homophony of m ’etre and maitre— “ to be” with a first-
person object pronoun, and “ master.” Etre is also the standard French transla­
tion of the Heideggerian Sein (“ Being” ). [Trans.] (Translation courtesy of Daniel
Katz.)
72. Hegel, Subjective Spirit, III: 19 1. See also Reil, p. 4 16; and Hoffbauer,
II: 99k
73. Von Turk, p. 176.
74. F. Schlegel, Philosophie, in K A, VIII: 45.
75. Ibid., p. 46.
76. Ibid., p. 45.
77. Brandes, I: 53.
78. F. Schlegel, Philosophie, in K A, VIII: 61.
79. Tobler, in Goethe, SW, X X X IX : 6.
80. F. Schlegel, Philosophie, in K A, VIII: 48.

Language Channels
1. F. Schlegel, “ Georg Forster. Fragment einer Charakteristik der deutschen
Klassiker,” in K A , I: 99; see also Hardenberg, “ Dialogen,” in S, II: 6 6 1 —63.
384 NOTES TO PAGES 7 0 - 7 7

2. Stephani, Grundriss, p. 54.

3. F. Schlegel, “ Forster,” in KA, I: 99.
4. Bergk, Bucher, p. 170.

The Im-possibility o f Translations

1. F. Schlegel, K A, XVIII: 203.
2. Heinz Schlaffer, Faust, p . 135.
3. Goethe, letter of Sept. 7, 1821, in W, IV: 35, 75.
4. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in SW, X X IV : 56f.
5. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in SW, XVII: 166.
6 . Hegel, speech of Sept. 29, 1809, cited in Thaulow, III: 1 9 1 k According to
Hegel, translated works of the ancients “ taste like flat Rhine wine” — fine evi­
dence for reading as oral consumption.
7. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 964.
8. Bernhardi, II: 398, 422.
9. Foucault, Order, p. 283.
10. Hardenberg, letter of N ov. 30, 179 7, in S, IV: 237.
1 1. F. Schlegel, “ Forster,” in KA, I: 99.
12. McLuhan, p. 206.
13. Goethe, “ German Romance,” in SW, XXXVIII: 142.
14. See Hegener.
15. Hardenberg, letter of N ov. 30, 179 7, in S, IV: 237.
16. F. Schlegel, “ Gesprach fiber die Poesie,” in KA, II: 303.
17. Hardenberg, “ Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” in S, I: 287. Von Loeben’s
Guido, a mediocre imitation of Ofterdingen, provides the plain text for such a
metaphysics: “ The princess often seemed to have forgotten that she was speech­
less; for her father did not miss a single one of her words” (p. 13).
18. Herder, “ Ueber die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Volker in
alten und neuen Zeiten,” in SW, VIII: 339; see also Bergk, Bucher, p. 109.
19. Heidegger, Language, pp. 118 , 119 .
20. See Giesebrecht, p. n 8 f .
21. See Bosse, “ Dichter,” pp. 1 1 7 —25.
22. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 15.
23. See Moritz, “ Erinnerungen,” pp. 6 5—70.
24. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 176. A book of essay topics for young students
begins with a corresponding pedagogic “ fiction.” It concerns an orphan day-
laborer named Karl who “ can hardly earn his keep.” Thus, “ his favorite pastime
was to collect any piece of paper that had something written or printed on it and
read it during the evening. Finally, he had the idea of sacrificing until he could
afford to buy new paper. An old inkwell of his father’s and a few quill pens that
he found amounted to his greatest wealth; with these he wrote down his first
thoughts about himself.” (Dolz, p. 95k) This is classical-romantic acculturation
in a nutshell.
25. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 15 k 26. Ibid., p. 415.
27. Ibid., p. 222. 28. Stenzel, p. 36.
29. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 416.
30. For a detailed discussion, see Herrlitz, p. 81.
31. Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 593.
32. Kaiser, Keller, p. 31; see also p. 24.
33. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 30k
 NOTES TO PAGES 7 7 “ 85 385

34. Hoffmann, “ Nachrichten von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Ber­
ganza,” in Nacbtstiicke, p. 139.

“ The Golden Pot”

1. Hoffmann, “ The Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 15.
2. Ibid., p. 38.
3. Ibid., pp. 26, 17.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. See Wagner, My Life, pp. 32 and 549. The allusion, of course, is to the
opening of Das Rheingold. [Trans.]
6 . Wagner actually constructed his “ Wagalaweia” according to Grimm’s rules
of root meanings; see R. M . Meyer, p. 92.
7. Tillich, p. 27.
8. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 18.
9. Ibid., p. 35.
10. O n Goethe’s poem “ Erlkonig,” see Zons, p. 127; on Hoffmann, see
Schmidt, p. i68f.
x i. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 37.
12. Ibid., p. 49. A report from an elementary school in Dessau demonstrates
that English cursive script was the pedagogical standard: “ I saw several samples
of the boys’ writing taken from the latest public examination. They are a credit
to the writing master. Several of the samples equal the finest English cursive”
(von Turk, p. 19). A sample of a writing test (from 1743) can be found in Dege-
ring, p. 98.
13. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, pp. 49— 50.
14. Ibid., p. 67.
15. Hardenberg, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in S, I: 295. See F. Kittler, “ Irr-
wege,” pp. 4 4 2 -4 8 .
16. See H erm ann, “ Das fremde Kind,” in Serapions-Briider, pp. 4 7 2 — 510.
17. See the ummary in Hey, pp. 26—30.
18. Steph ni, Schreibmethode, p. 3f.
19. Ibid., p. 8; see also Schmack, p. 105.
20. Pohlmann, p. xiv.
21. Stephani, Schreibmethode, p. 27k
22. Ibid., p. 74.
23. Ibid., p. 44.
24. Pohlmann, p. 12 1.
25. See Hey, pp. 35, 95, on this “ reformer” from Dobeln.
26. Riihm, p. 278.
27. Stephani, Schreibmethode, pp. 43, 7 2 —75.
28. Ibid., p. 41.
29. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 344.
30. Stephani, Schreibmethode, p. 26.
31. Gleim, II: 57. Today’s pedagogues did not invent the phrase “ learning to
learn” of which they are so proud.
32. Hippel, V erbesserung, p. 166.
33. See F. Kittler, “ Sozialisation,” pp. 99 —115 .
34. Charlotte tried to make Ottilie write, indeed, “ to lead her toward a freer
line in handwriting” in Elective Affinities (Goethe, SW, XXI: 51). The attempt
failed and is thus the exception that proves the rule of writing in the classical pe­
386 NOTES TO PAGES 8 5 -9 4

riod: women, particularly ideal mothers like Ottilie, exist to make others speak,
not to write; women, in particular real mothers like Charlotte, are not to teach
writing. Ottilie, with her “ stiff” handwriting, ends up copying the handwriting of
a man, Eduard, who is far from perfect.
35. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 60.
36. Montandon, p. 12.
37. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 59.
38. Hardenberg, “ Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” in S, I: 79.
39. Von Loeben, p. 338; see also p. 237.
40. Gedike, “ Einige Gedanken fiber die Ordnung und Folge der Gegenstande
des jugendlichen Unterrichts,” in Gesammelte Schulschriften, II: 148k
41. Hoffmann, “Johannes Kreislers Lehrbrief,” in Nachtstiicke, p. 323. See
also Jaffe, pp. 1 5 3 - 5 5 .
42. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 51.
43. Ibid., pp. 33, 47.
44. Ibid., pp. 36, 52.
45. See Lacan, Ecrits (New York), pp. 321 — 24.
4 6. Olivier, p. 78.
47. See Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, pp. 51, 58 — 59.
48. Basedow, II: 68.
49. Hufeland, Guter Rat, p. 64.
50. Stephani, Schreibmethode, p. 36.
51. Brandes, Betrachtungen, p. 108.
52. For Novalis, see F. Kittler, “ Irrwege,” p. 445.
53. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, V, pp. 3 4 8 -4 9 , 2 9 0 -9 2 .
54. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 28.
55. Ibid., p. 66. 56. Ibid., p.29.
57. Ibid., p. 45. 58. Ibid., pp. 2 6 -2 7 .
59. Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” in Tales, pp. 94 —99; see the discussion in
F. Kittler, “ Phantom,” pp. 140—59.
60. See Ehrenreich and English, pp. 9 —27; and Donzelot, pp. 1 6 — 18.
61. “ Dark and unspeakable” because the Lindhorst-Rauerin or salamander-
snake pair is incestuous. But in romanticism incest was the rule (rather than the
exception) for family structure.
62. See Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, pp. 45, 79.
63. Ibid., p. 42.
64. See Aschoff, p. 4 15!; and Geistbeck, p. 2k
65. See Jaffe, p. 322k
66. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 63.
67. Foucault, “ Fantasia of the Library,” in LCMP, p. 90.
68. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 63.
69. Menzel, I: 17.
70. See Paulsen, Universitdten, p. 79.
7 1. Paulsen, Geschichte, II: 222k
72. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 30.
73. Ibid., pp. 6 3 -6 4 .
74. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 68; on “effort” see Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,”
in Tales, pp. 50— 51.
75. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 231.
76. See Bolz, p. 79k
1 NOTES TO PAGES 9 4 - IOO 387

77. See Nietzsche, Beyond G ood and Evil, V, 19Z, p. 105.

78. Lichtenberg, I: 814.
79. See D. Richter, p. 219.
80. Oest and Campe, 178 7, cited in Rutschky, p. 314.
81. Schneider, p. 116 .
82. See Foucault, History o f Sexuality, pp. 4 1 —42.
83. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 91.
84. J. P. Richter, Leben des Quintus Fixlein, aus funfzehn Zettelkasten ge-
zogen, in W, IV: 74k
85. The view of Schenda.
86. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 68.
87. Furet and Ozouf, I: 90.
88. Niemeyer, p. 242.
89. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 13.
90. Niemeyer, p. 247; see also Basedow, I: 61.
91. Trapp, p. 361.
92. The view of Engelsing, Analphabetentum, p. 126; but see Kehr, pp. 403 - 9.
93. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 25.
94. Ibid., p. 92.
95. Tieck, “ Die Gemalde,” in S, XVII: 70; see M . Frank, Allgemeine, p. 351.
96. Stephani, Schreibmethode, pp. 6, 12.
97. Ibid., p. 4.
98. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 38.
99. The words come from an academic report, prepared according to then re­
cently established guidelines, on the new judge Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann
(document of July 18, 179 5, in Hoffmann, B, I: p. 64). See also Heinemann,
p. 68. [Ernst Theodor Wilhelm was Hoffmann’s given name— Trans.]
100. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 30.
101. See Hoffbauer, I: i68f.; and Reil, pp. 173 —78.
102. See Maass, p. 296; and comments by Foucault, Histoire de la folie,
Trans, as ahnsinn und Gesellschaft, p. 507.
103. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 23. An early reviewer of “ The
Golder f'ot” visited Court Councilor Heerbrand and his wife Veronica in Dres­
den and while there had several long conversations with Heerbrand about “ the
invention of the high art of writing, . . . a certain authority possessed by the
Fraktur script,” and “ the controversial question as to whether the Greeks used
writing sand and blotter paper” (Anonymous, 18 1 7 , in Hoffmann, B, III: 62).
The technological basis of the writing system of 1800 was thus administered by
state bureaucrats, whereas by 1 8 1 7 the poet Anselmus had long since disap­
peared with Serpentina to Atlantis. From this transcendental position, however,
distant from all writing, Anselmus creates the possibility that readings or reviews
of “ The Golden Pot” can take place as visits with characters in the novella.
104. O n the function of coffee, see Schivelbusch, pp. 50—52.
105. Hahnemann, “ Striche,” II: 244.
106. For more on the contrast between the two types of handwriting, see
Gedike, “ Ordnung,” in Gesammelte Schulschriften, II: 150L
107. Herder, “ Vitae, non scholae discendum. Schulrede Weimar,” in SW,
X X X : 267.
108. Foucault, “ La Folie,” p. 128.
109. R. Campe, pp. 142, 154.
388 NOTES TO PAGES IO O -IIO

no. Hoffbauer, II: 100.

in . Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 70.
112 . Ibid., p. 75.
113 . Lichtenberg, I: 655.
114 . Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in SW, XXI: 21.
1 15 . For a humorous and precise discussion, see Fiihmann, pp. 78 — 80.
116 . See Lacan, “The Deconstruction of the Drives,” in Four Fundamental
Concepts, p. 167.
1 17 . Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 73.
118. See Foucault, “ La Folie,” p. 128.
119 . Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 251.
120. Gravell, p. 5.
121. Document of Feb. 21, 1802, in Hoffmann, B, III: 109.
122. Graved, p. 37.
123. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 88.
124. Ibid., p. 67.
125. Ibid., p. 89.
126. Brandes, Betrachtungen, II: 440.
127. Pohlmann, p. 38.
128. W hy arrack, rather than something from the elder tree? To anticipate a
possible book on intoxication and speech, Hoffmann’s autobiographical explana­
tion, that arrack was “ the favorite drink” of “ his friend, the conductor Johann
Kreisler” (“ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 89) is tautological. More relevant is the fact
that, at least in Ceylon, southern Arabia, and Persia, arrack was made with fer­
mented palm juice. Lindhorst’s library is, of course, lined with palm trees and his
genealogical manuscript is made of palm leaves. The use of arrack therefore obeys
a strict rule of symmetry: the same plants that, transformed into Serpentina,
create the romantic intoxication of the hero create, when distilled, the alcoholic
intoxication of the fairy tale’s author.
129. See Elling, p. 27.
130. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 91. One psychiatrist could not re­
sist stressing the accuracy of this diagnostic description. It is indeed characteristic
that the delirium of habitual drinkers “is not a hallucination concentrated in a
single sense, but a combined occurrence across ad the senses” (Klinke, p. 233).
13 1. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 91.
132. Vidaume, p. 62. Compare also Karl Philipp M oritz’s new concept of style.
133. See the interpretation of the end of “The Golden Pot” by Apel, p. 206.
134. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 92.

Authors, Readers, Authors

1. Furet and Ozouf, I: 90.
2. Pestalozzi, Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt; ein Versuch, den Muttern An-
leitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten, in SW, XIII: 306L
3. Hoffmann, Serapions-Briider, p. 26. Important comments on pseudo-
Serapion arguments can be found in Hoffbauer, II: 65.
4. Spiess, p. 56.
5. Tieck, “ Der Runenberg,” in S, IV: 224; see Lindemann, p. 269L
6 . Arnold, II: 210; see also the overview provided by Leibbrand and Wettley,
p. 349L
 NOTES TO PAGES I I O - 1 8 389

7. J. P. Richter, Leben des Quintus Fixlein , aus fiinfzehn Zettelkdsten gezo-

gen, in W, IV: 11.
8. Hoffmann, Serapions-Briider, p. zz.
9. Hardenberg, Heinrich von Ofterdingen , in S, I: 312.
10. Tiedemann, Untersuchungen , III: 267.
11. J. P. Richter, Leben Fibels, des Verfassers der Bienrodischen Fibel (vor-
datiert 1812), in W, IV: 4 17 , 426f.
12. Brandes, Betrachtungen, III: 20.
13. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in SW, X X V : 10.
14. Foucault, “ What Is an Author?,” in LCM P, pp. 113 — 38.
15. Bermann, in Pinthus, Kinobuch, p. 29.
16. J. P. Richter, Leben Fibels, in W, VI: 369.
17. Ibid., p. 4 3 5f.
18. A. W. Schlegel, S, II: 225.
19. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 626—27; see also Hardenberg, Ofterdingen, in S,
I: 209b
20. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 627.
21. Ibid., II: 967.
22. Hardenberg, fragment of 1798, in S, II: 650.
23. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder D ie Entsagenden, in SW,
X X : 15; see also Hannelore Schlaffer, Wilhelm Meister, p. 144b
24. Lessing, Laocoon, p. 75.
25. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, pp. 55 — 56.
26. Hoffmann, “ The Sandman,” in Tales, pp. 104— 5; see F- Kittler, “ Phan­
tom,” pp. 1 6 2 —64.
27. Hoffmann, Serapions-Briider, p. 531.
28. Von Kloden, pp. 46, 72, 79, 89, 104.
29. K. M . Michel, p. 20.
30. Herrmann, p. 107.
31. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 176 ; see Wuthenow, p. 90.
32. jrsuasively argued by K. M . Michel, p. 20.
3 3 oee Arnheim, p. 27b
' 4. Wagner, “ Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” in GS, III: 105b
35. Spiess, p. 56.
36. Tieck, “ Runenberg,” in S, VI: 224.
37. For the theological interpretation, see M . Frank, Allgemeine, p. 267. Con ­
temporary psychiatric cures provided contrary technical evidence. To cure fixed
ideas, Red used an almost theatrical method consisting in “ an uninterrupted se­
ries of objects, like the images of the magic lamp, [which] passed before the senses
of the mental patients” (Reil, p. 199).
38. Von M att, p. 169.
39. Hoffmann, “ Der Kampf der Sanger,” in Serapions-Briider, p. 274.
40. Von M att, p. 1 7 1 .
41. See Eisner, p. 105b; exceptions in literary criticism are Bloom, pp. 36 —52,
and McConnell.
42. Hegel, letter of N ov. 13, 179 7, in B, I: 55.
43. F. Schlegel, “ Eisenfeile,” in KA, II: 399.
44. Hardenberg, fragment of 1798, in S, III: 377.
45. Hardenberg, Ofterdingen, in S, I: 264.
390 NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 8 - 2 6

46. Eichendorff, II: 55.

47. Hardenberg, Ofterdingen , in S, I: 264b
48. Ibid., p. 345.
49. In Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the recruitment scenario during the
initiation in the tower already shows signs of time-lapse photography. However,
the four images from Meister’s biography lack the transitiveness that constitutes
the hallucinatory quality in Ofterdingen.
50. Goethe, conversation of 1806, cited in Riemer, p. 261.
51. See Freud, “ Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in SE,
XVIII: 106.
52. See Derrida, “Nietzsche’s Otobiographie,” pp. 33—36.
53. Von Loeben, p. 38b
54. Ibid., p. 338.
55. On the figuram implere, see Auerbach, p. 66; applied to Ofterdingen, see
Heftrich, p. 82.
56. Hardenberg, fragment of 1798, in S, II: 563.
57. Hardenberg, Ofterdingen, in S, I: 265.
58. See Haym, p. 378: “ In the guise of mythology, in the generalization of
metaphysics, the poem encapsulates the inner history, the poeticized life history of
the poet himself. . . . This might seem to be an allegorical excess— but the poet,
the hero of the apotheosis, is Hardenberg himself!”
59. Foucault, “ What Is an Author?,” in LCM P, p. 125.
60. Ibid., loc. cit. For Germany, see Bosse, “Autorisieren.”
61. Lempicki, pp. 261b, 290.
62. Hoffmann, “ Kampf der Sanger,” in Serapions-Briider, p. 278.
63. Hoffmann, “ Ritter Gluck,” in Nachtstiicke, p. 22b

The Toast
Function: Feminine Reader . . .
1. Hegel, manuscript of 17 9 9 — 1800, in “ Der Geist des Christentums,” p. 466.
2. F. Schlegel, “ Uber die Philosophie. An Dorothea,” in KA, VIII: 48.
3. Even Basedow, in order to give direction to the “idle gossip” of women,
planned “ a whole program for women’s visits and social gatherings” : it consisted
in reading poetry (Wychgram, p. 24of).
4. Brandes, Betrachtungen, II: 466.
5. Schwarz; see also Blochmann, p. 66.
6. F. Schlegel, “ Philosophie,” in KA, VIII: 45; see Brandes, Betrachtungen,
II: 281.
7. T. Huber, in L. F. Huber, pt. 3, vol. 3.
8. D. Schlegel, letter of Feb. 14, 1800, in Briefwechsel, I: 31.
9. Schlegel’s editing of Florentin put the novel into the high or literary idiom—
it contains almost none of the dative-accusative confusions that were the agram-
matical rule in women’s discourse circa 1800. Compare Deibel, p. 65.
10. Deibel, p. 1; for more perspective see Hannelore Schlaffer, “ Frauen als
Einlosung,” p. 287.
x i. T. Huber, in L. F. Huber, pt. 3, vol. 3.
12. Ibid., pt. 4, vol. 5. See also Riemer, pp. 1 6 4 -6 6 , on Goethe’s marriage:
Christiane was to “ facilitate his more complete devotion to art, science, and offi­
 NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 6 -3 8 391

cial duty by taking over onerous tasks.— Such was the only type of feminine crea­
ture he needed for free and relatively unhindered self-development. The type of
woman concerned with rank and titles, who frequents learned society, and per­
haps even has literary ambition herself, would never have been helpful or have
provided for his domestic happiness.”
13. Schwarz, p. 179.
14. T. Huber, in L. F. Huber, pt. 3, vol. 4.
15. See Strecker, pp. 9b 16. B. Brentano, I: 300.
17. Ibid., p. 279. 18. Ibid., p. 254.
19. Ibid., p. 479; see F. Kittler, “ Writing into the W ind,” pp. 33 — 37 .
20. C. Brentano, in B. Brentano, I: 19.
21. C. Brentano, in Steig, pp. 262—74.
22. L. F. Huber, 1802, cited in Kluckhohn, p. 276.
23. B. Brentano, II: 370. Bettina’s identification with Mignon met with the
author’s approval. See Goethe, Gesprdche, III: 224.
24. B. Brentano, II: 222, on Goethe’s Ottilie.
25. Bergk, Bucher zu lesen, pp. 61, 64.
26. Brandes, Betrachtungen , II: 468.
27. Lacan, Encore , p. 71.
28. D. Schlegel, letter of N ov. 18, 1799, in Briefwechsel, I: 23.
29. Varnhagen, letter of Aug. 2 0 ,1 8 1 5 , in Briefwechsel, IV: 266f; see Burger,
pp. 9 4 - 9 7 .
30. Varnhagen, cited in Key, Rahel, p. 142.
31. Varnhagen, letter of O ct. 30, 1808, in Briefwechsel, I: 88.
32. Goethe, Tasso, 1 1 . 1 0 8 4 -8 6 ; the German text is cited from Goethe, SW.
Subsequent line numbers will be given in the text. We are grateful to Suhrkamp
Publishers for permission to cite the translation by Michael Hamburger. [Trans.]
33. B. Brentano, II: 354 (about Goethe).
34. Goethe, conversation of N ov. 24, 1809, reported in Riemer, p. 313!; see
Schre;uer, “ Zeichen der Liebe,” p. 283.
3 * Goethe, Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in SW, X X IV : 176.
~ ). The quoted words of the Princess are “ to say the least, ambiguous. In view
o f dtie sentiments Tasso has expressed throughout the scene, the effect upon him
of the Princess’s words is only to be expected. He interprets these lines as encour­
agement, which her final speech of the scene only strengthens. When Tasso is
overcome with ecstasy, she can hardly be said to rebuff him” (Waldeck, p. 18).
37. See Lacan, “ The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psycho­
analysis,” in Ecrits (New York), p. 69.
38. B. Brentano, II: 163.
39. Goethe, conversation of 1807, in Riemer, p. 266.
40. Tieck, “ Der Runenberg,” in S, IV: 243.
41. Tieck, “ Phantasus. Eine Sammlung von Mahrchen, Erzahlungen, Schau-
spielen und Novellen,” in S, IV: 244.
42. Hoffmann, “The Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 38.
43. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. i6 f; see Hoffbauer, II: 9 7 — 100.
44. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 40; Councilor Heerbrand reacts
with the same cry of “ romantic rot!” when in 1 8 17 , during a visit from the re­
viewer, he finds his wife Veronica reading “ The Golden Pot” (Anonymous, in
Hoffmann, B, III: 63).
45. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 41.
392- NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 8 - 4 7

46. See Clement, pp. 148 — 54.

47. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 73.
48. Ibid., p. 40.
49. Theweleit and Langbein, p. 144.
50. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 86. The reviewer of 1 8 1 7 also
comes up with this interpretation (Anonymous, 18 17 , in Hoffmann, B, III: 63).
51. Hoffmann, “ Golden Pot,” in Tales, p. 86.
52. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “ Katechismus der Vernunft fur edle Frauen,” in
F. Schlegel, Prosaischen Jugendschriften, II: 267.
53. For a preliminary reading see Schmidt, pp. 1 6 5 —76.
54. Goethe, conversations of Dec. 6 and 10, 1809, in Riemer, p. 236.
55. Goethe, conversation of 1809, in Gesprdche, II: 474. See the ironic com­
ments by Brandes, Betrachtungen, II: 460.
56. Alewyn, “ Klopstocks Leser,” p. 115 .
57. Kaiser, Wandrer, p. 201. See also Gleim’s contemporary formulation,
II: n o .
58. F. Schlegel, Ideen, in KA, II: 267.
59. Menzel, I: 2.
60. Goethe, conversations of 1806 and Jan. 29,1804, in Riemer, pp. 260, 247.
61. See Erning, p. 69.
62. Anonymous, cited in Schenda, p. 60.
63. Gessinger, Schriftspracherwerb, p. 39.
64. Hoche, p. 68.
65. Beyer, p. 23.
66. Hence the law “ bars and lending libraries are not tolerated here” in the
American constitution of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels. (Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden,” in SW, X X : 164). See Hannelore Schlaffer,
p. 141.
67. Beyer, p. 27. “ They” are, of course, the worthless books and not, as
Beyer’s failure might imply, the scholars.
68. See I. H. Fichte, I: 6f.
69. J. G. Fichte, “ Die Grundziige des gegenwartigen Zeitalters,” in W, VII:
in .
70. Bergk, Bucher zu lesen, pp. 4 1 1 - 1 3 .
7 1. Ibid., p. 64.
72. Ibid., p. 339; see also Bergk, zu Denken, p. 16.
73. Bergk, Bucher zu lesen, p. 409. 74. Ibid., p. 34.
75. Ibid., p. 199. 76. See Graubner, pp. 7 2 - 7 5 .
77. J. R Richter, “ Kleine Nachschule zur asthetischen Vorschuler,” in W , V:
5 0 9 -n .
78. Niethammer, Der Streit, pp. 1 4 4 -4 9 .
79. Hegel, letter of N ov. 13, 179 7, in Briefe, I: 55b The credit for calling at­
tention to these lines belongs to Derrida, Glas, p. 174.
80. Schwarz, p. 191.
81. Niethammer, “ Bediirfniss,” cited in Goethe, W, XL: 402.
82. The view of Helmers, p. 194.
83. Biinger, p. 293.
84. Gleim, cited in H. J. Frank, p. 295. For a discussion of Betty Gleim, see
Zimmermann.
85. See Blochmann, pp. 7 1 , 99—112 . Further, and in part underestimated evi­
 NOTES TO PAGES 1 4 7 - 5 3 393

dence from girls’ schools and related programs can be found in Wychgram,
pp. 246—55, above all p. 255 (on reading as therapy for reading mania).
86. Gleim, II: n o .
87. Sartorius, in Goethe, conversation of O ct. 16, 1808, in Gesprdche , II:
375. Similar statements can be found in Kluckhohn, p. 283.
88. Blochmann, p. 7 1.
89. This phrase is in English in the original book. [Trans.]
90. Hoffmann, “ Klein Zaches,” p. 33.
91. Schwarz, p. 173 ; see also Blochmann, p. 66.

. . . and the Kingdom o f God

1. Niethammer, “ Bediirfniss,” in Goethe, W, XL: 2, p.401.
2. Niethammer, letter of Feb. 3, 1809, in Goethe, W, XL: 2, p. 410.
3. See Kesting, pp. 420—36.
4. Niethammer, “ Bediirfniss,” in Goethe, W , XL: 2, p. 405.
5. Ibid., p. 405L
6. Ibid., p. 407L
7. Niethammer, letter of June 28, 1808, in Goethe, W, XL: 2, p. 398.
8. Lacan, Encore , p. 51.
9. Herrlitz, pp. 9 5 —96, provides evidence from Goethe’s papers.
10. Ludwig, p. 57.
11. Niethammer, “ Bediirfniss,” cited in Goethe, W , XL: 2, p. 402.
12. For a discussion of Lacan’s terms le discours du maitre and le discours
universitaire, see Hass, pp. 9 —34.
13. See Herrlitz, p. 75.
14. Niethammer, cited in Herrlitz, p. 97.
15. See Matthias, pp. 403, 2 11.
16. Thiersch, I: 340. Gedike had similar ideas, see “ Einige Gedanken iiber
deutsche Sprach- und Stiliibungen auf Schulen,” in Gesammelte Schulschriften,
II: 236f
17. Matthias, p. 186; see Jager, “ Deutschunterricht,” p. 144b
18. Tiesebrecht, p. 126.
1 . Schleiermacher, document of Dec. 14, 1810, in P. Schwartz, p. 196.
20. Bernhardi, document of 1810, in P. Schwartz, p. 1 7 1 .
21. Schleiermacher, document of Dec. 14, 1810, in P. Schwartz, p. 196.
22. Giesebrecht, p. 129.
23. See H. J. Frank, p. 260b
24. P. Schwartz, p. 187.
25. See the figures in L. von Wiese, I: 33, 4 1, 404b
26. The view of Brandes, Betrachtungen, III: 31b
27. See Gessinger, Sprache, p. 79.
28. Schleiermacher, document of Dec. 14, 1810, in P. Schwartz, p. 173.
29. F. Schlegel, Ideen, in K A, II: 261.
30. Niethammer, Der Streit, p. 257; see also Heinemann, p. 198. The same
criterion for the formation of bureaucrats can be found in J. G. Fichte, “ Ueber das
Wesen des Gelehrten, und seine Erscheinungen im Gebiete der Freiheit. In of-
fentlichen Vorlesungen, gehalten zu Erlangen im Sommer-Halbjahre 1805,” in
SW, VI: 354.
31. Suvern, document of 1816 , in Budde, I: 72.
32. Penzenkuffer, p. 62b n.
394 NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 3 -6 0

33. See Turk and Kittler, pp. 9 —20.

34. Voss, II: 326.
35. K. Fricke, p. 16. Indeed, only a teacher would have been capable of such a
singularly clear formulation.
36. Hinrichs, p. 69b
37. J. G. Fichte, D ie Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, in G, I:
415.
38. Ibid., p. 415m
39. See Vietta, Sprache, p. 25b, on Hardenberg’s reception of Fichte’s ideas.
40. J. G. Fichte, Plan anzustellender Rede-Uebungen, in G , II: 130. With
these words, the tutor Fichte offered his services, immediately after the establish­
ment of the Abitur and the inclusive German essay, as director of a private, but
publicly funded, essay-writing institute. The institute was not established, but
German Poetry was.
41. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 173.
42. J. G. Fichte, Deducirter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden hoheren
Lehranstalt, in SW, VIII: 98; see Engelsing, Der literarische Arbeiter, p. 103!.
43. See I. H. Fichte, I: 195. Humboldt also gave theoretical consecration to
this style of lecturing. See McClelland, p. 124.
44. J. G. Fichte, letter of June 21, 1794, in G , III: 143.
45. See Schiller’s explanation (XVI: 52f) of why Don Carlos cannot have tex­
tual coherence in the conventional sense; also consider Fichte’s disdainful reply to
Schiller’s charges of incoherence: “ The discovery that everything I write is in such
dire need of revision has made me, as it should, quite attentive” (J. G. Fichte,
letter of June 26, 1795, i*1 G , III: 340).
46. Schiller, letter of Aug. 3—4, 1795, in I. H. Fichte, II: 388.
47. See J. G. Fichte, letter of June 27, 1795, in I. H. Fichte, II: 380.
48. See B. von Wiese, pp. 487, 447.
49. Goethe, letter of April 13, 1821, in Hegel, Briefe, II: 258. See also Lowith,
pp. 1 7 —28.
50. Hinrichs, p. 8.
51. See F. Kittler, “Vergessen,” pp. 2 0 2 -9 .
52. Lukacs, p. 541.
53. Ibid.
54. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1224.
5 5. On Hinrichs, see Weimar, pp. 307— 12; note his dictum, “ German literary
criticism, as an applied aesthetic, was born in the Hegelian school” (p. 312).
56. Blumenberg, p. 93.
57. Wellek and Warren, p. 120b
58. Derrida, “ Titel (noch zu bestimmen),” p. 25!.
59. Burger; for a general commentary, see McClelland, p. 16: “ H ow ironic
that the German universities have for generations taught their students to look
with an open and critical eye upon every matter except the institution of the
university.”
60. Holborn, p. 365.
61. See Reinhardt, “ Die klassische Walpurgisnacht. Entstehung und Bedeu-
tung.” in Von Werken, pp. 384—90.
62. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 493.
63. Ibid., p. 492.
 NOTES TO PAGES l 6 l —72 395

64. Baggesen, 179 5, cited in Leon, I: 436b Consider above all the refrain of
this “ drinking doctrine” : “ I am an I, who drank the not-I, sitting in my cups: /
Hallelujah!”
65. Hegel, letter of Aug. 2, 18 2 1, in Briefe, II: 275.
66. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 65, 27.
67. F. Schlegel, letter of June, 179 3, in Briefe, I: 97.
68. J. G. Fichte, Die Grundziige des gegenwartigen Zeitalters, in SW, VII:
109. See Bosse, “Autorisieren,” p. 130b
69. Hegel, Phenomenology,p . 218. 70. See ibid., p. 16.
7 1. Ibid., pp. 2 18 —19. 72. Ibid., p. 221.
73. Hinrichs, p. 136. 74. See Lacan, Encore, p. 78.
75. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 59. 76. Ibid., p. 9.
77. Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1218.
78. Von Rochow, 1 7 7 6 , cited in Gessinger, “ Schriftspracherwerb,” p. 26. For
parallels in other primers of the period, see Schenda, p. 51b
79. See, alone among all interpreters of Hegel, Neumann, p. 385b
80. O n the signature and date in general, see Derrida, “ Signature Event C on ­
text,” in Margins, pp. 309—30.
81. Stephani, Beschreibung, p. 66.
82. See Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 3 8 - 4 1 .
83. Ibid., p. 39; note the same claim or arrogance in Schopenhauer, I: xiii.
84. See F. Kittler, “ Vergessen,” p. 210.
85. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 66.
86. Garfinkel, Common Sense, I: 210.
87. Hegel, “Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme,—
dargestellt an den Werken des Herrn Krug’s,” in GW: IV: 178.
88. Ibid., p. 179.
89. Henrich, p. 160.
90. Hegel, System der Philosophie, in SW, IX: 63m
91. W. T. ” ;ug, Lebensreise, p. 5b
92. Ibid., p. 1 1 4 —21.
93. Ibid. pp. 1 2 2 — 26.
94. H e0el, “Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand,” in G W , IV: 180.
95. See Derrida, Glas, pp. 1 0 8 -8 7 (on Nanette Endel, M aria von Tucher,
and above all Hegel’s sister Christiane, who vanished from an insane asylum in
Zwiefalten into the water of the N agold— an Antigone in the Real).
96. Hegel, System der Philosophie, in SW, X: 355.
97. Goethe, letter of June 24, 1794, in J. G. Fichte, G, III: 145.
98. See Rohde, p. vi.
99. See Creuzer, “ Das Studium,” pp. 1 —22.
100. Rohde, p. v.
io x . Creuzer, letters of June 30, 1806, and M ay 17, 1805, in Liebe, pp. 259,
95 -
102. Ibid., pp. 277, 197.
103. Ibid., p. 142.
104. See Rohde, p. 50.
105. See Creuzer, letters of N ov. 7 ,18 0 4 , and Dec. 1 9 ,1 8 0 5 , in Liebe, pp. 33,
202.
106. Ibid., p. 292b
396 NOTES TO PAGES 177-8 5

Nietzsche: Incipit Tragoedia

1. Benn, Roman des Phdnotyp. Landsberger Fragment, in G W , II: 169.
Nietzsche’s Foreword appeared the year Benn was born, 1886.
2. Benn, speech in Knokke, in GW , I: 543.
3. Hofmannsthal, Buck, p. 61.
4. Meier-Graefe, II: 733. The distinction made here by two proper names
elsewhere came together as Shiva.
5. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, I, “ O n Reading and Writing,” p. 152.
6. Villaume, p. 67.
7. Nietzsche, Beyond G ood and Evil, V, 192, p. 105.
8. Schenda, p. 444. According to Schenda’s cautious estimates, the percent­
ages of the central-European population over the age of six that had been alpha­
betized were: 25 percent in 1800; 40 percent in 1830; 75 percent in 1870; and 90
percent in 1900.
9. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, II, 5, p. 87.
10. “ We absorb all previous culture only to entomb it in paper once more. We
pay for the books we read with those that we write.” (Menzel, I: 4).
1 1. Nietzsche, Human, Vol. II, I, 156, p. 248.
12. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, II, 5, p. 87.
13. Nietzsche, fragment of 1887, in W, VIII, 2, p. 218.
14. Kirchner, p. 14; see Hellpach, “ Psychopathologisches,” p. 199.
15. See Nietzsche, diary entry for Dec. 8, 1859, in WB, I: 188.
16. Klossowski, p. 323.
17. Nietzsche, lecture of 1872, in W, III, 2, p. 170b “ The pinnacle of public-
school education” is a literal quote from the pedagogue Deinhardt. See also Jager,
Schule, p. 41.
18. See Jensen and Lamszus, pp. 20—67, I 4 Z -
19. Nietzsche, “ Uber die Zukunft unserer Bildungs-Anstalten,” W, III, 2,
p. 1 7 1 .
20. Nietzsche, letter of Oct. 19, 1861, in WB, II: 1 — 5.
21. Nietzsche, fragment of 1868—69, >n ibid., V: 254.
22. Nietzsche, fragment of 1862, in ibid., II: 7 1.
23. Franziska Nietzsche, letter of Aug. 3, 1889, cited in Gilman, “ Nietzsche’s
‘Niederschriften,’ ” p. 323.
24. See the discussion in Gilman, p. 342.
25. Rupp, “ Der ‘ungeheure Consensus,” ’ p. 191.
26. Foucault, Order, p. 300.
27. Nietzsche, fragment of 1868—69, in W B ,V : 205.
28. See, e.g., Reil, p. 4 17 : “ The patient hears a wild noise, but nothing com­
prehensible; he is incapable of extracting any sound from the manifold and trac­
ing it to its cause, and thus cannot determine its meaning.”
29. Ibid., p. 136.
30. Nietzsche, fragment of 1864, in WB, II: 408.
31. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “W hy I Am So Clever,” 10, p. 258.
32. Ziehen, document of M ay 18, 1889, in Podach, p. 1453.
33. Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, “ Where I Offer Objections,” p. 664.
34. Nietzsche, fragment of 1884—85, in W, VII, 3, p. 59.
35. Valery, “ Poetry and Abstract Thought,” p. 63.
36. Mallarme, “ Crise de vers,” in O C , p. 366.
 NOTES TO PAGES 18 5-9 3 397

37. See Bridgwater, “ Sources,” p. 32 (on Mauthner, Holz, Walden, and the
Sturm poets); see also the documents in Portner, pp. 395—461.
38. See Valery, diary entry for Oct. 10, 189 1, in Oeuvres , I: 1723 (on
Mallarme).
39. See Matthias, pp. 2.53f, 350b
40. Lehmann, cited in Paulsen, Geschichte, II: 710.
41. Jensen and Lamszus, p. 147.
42. Hackenberg, p. 70.
43. See Stern, Psychologie, p. 88, and Ament, p. 80.
44. Barthes, “ Preface,” in CE, pp. x iv —xv.
45. See F. Kittler, “ Wie man abschaft,” pp. 1 5 2 —54.
46. Nietzsche, “ Ueber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” W,
III, 2, p. 371.
47. Ibid., p. 373.
48. See also Mallarme, “ Crise de vers,” in O C , p. 363b
49. See F. Kittler, “ Nietzsche,” p. 192.
50. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, IV, 5, p. 249.
51. Nietzsche, Beyond G ood and Evil, VIII, 255, p. 195. See F. Kittler, “ Pink
Floyd, Brain Damage,” p. 474b
52. Nietzsche, Birth o f Tragedy, 9, p. 67.
53. Arnheim, p. 27.
54. Nietzsche, Birth o f Tragedy, 9, p. 67.
55. For the basics of film, see Flein and Herzogenrath, p. 3 if.
56. For the similarity of such music to the subsequent sound techniques, see
Schlupmann, pp. 104b 127.
57. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, IV, 10, p. 249.
58. Nietzsche, fragment of 1868, in WB, V: 268.
59. Rupp, Rhetorische Strukturen, p. 95.
60. Nietzsche, Twilight, “W hat I O w e to the Ancients,” I, p. 557.
61. Nietz he, letter of Feb. 2, 1884, in WB, II: 575.
62. Nietz ;he, Genealogy, Preface, 8, p. 23.
63. Sark wski, p. 18.
64. Se^ Jean Paul Richter, Leben des Quintus Fixlein aus funfzehn Zettel-
kdsten gezogen, in W, IV: 8if.
65. See Mallarme, “ La Litterature. Doctrine,” in O C , p. 850.
66. Nietzsche, letter of N ov. 5, 1879, in Briefe, IV: 28.
67. Kohlschmidt, p. 47.
68. See the discussion in Geistbeck, pp. 43b 155!; for an insightful discussion
of the literary consequences, see O ’Brien, pp. 4 6 4 -7 2 .
69. Stramm, p. 26.
70. Ibid., p. 62.
7 1. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “ Human, All-Too-Human,” 4, pp. 2 8 7—88.
72. Ibid., “ W hy I Am So Clever,” 8, p. 253.
73. Mallarme, “ L’Action restreinte,” in O C , p. 370. This and following M a l­
larme translations courtesy of Marian Sugano. [Trans.]
74. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “ W hy I Am So Clever,” 9, p. 254.
75. Nietzsche, letter of Aug. 14, 1881, in Briefe, IV: 7 1 b Nietzsche’s plan
dates back to the “ year of blindness,” 1879; see the letter of Aug. 14, 1879, in B,
II, 5, p. 435.
76. Janz, II: 95.
398 NOTES TO PAGES I 9 3 - 2 0 I

77. Nietzsche, letter of March 1882, in Briefwechsel mit Overbeck, p. 170.

Another invalid among Germany’s pioneers of the typewriter, the forgotten offi­
cer and feuilletonist Dagobert von Gerhardt, didn’t explain why he got a type­
writer: a war wound in his arm left him physically and psychically crippled (see
von Gerhardt). This much, at any rate, is clear: Hoffmann’s captain, also suffering
from an arm wound, was saved in 1813 by a wise woman; the officer of 1 8 7 0 - 7 1
is saved by technology.
78. Burghagen, p. 22L
79. Burghagen, p. H 9 f; also see Scholz, p. 9. But even with the Remington,
one ophthalmologist found that the decisive aspect of “ progress was that one
could write with the eyes closed” (Cohn, p. 371). Thus Sherlock Holmes erred in
supposing that nearsightedness should hinder typewriting (Conan Doyle, p. 192).
80. Janz, II: 95, 81.
81. Burghagen, p. 120.
82. Herbertz, p. 560.
83. See Lacan, “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits (New
York), p. 150L
84. Burghagen, p. 49. See the discussion in Richards, p. 24.
85. Mallarme, “ La litterature. Doctrine,” in O C , p. 850.
86. See the discussion in Scholz, p. 12L
87. Cited in Herbertz, p. 559; see also Miinsterberg, Grundzuge, p. 386.
88. Nietzsche, letter of Feb., 1882, in Briefe, IV: 97.
89. Nietzsche, Genealogy, II, 3, p. 61.
90. Ibid., 7, p. 68.
91. Reinhardt, “ Nietzsches Klage der Ariadne,” in Von Werken, p. 477.
92. Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithyramben, W, VI, 3, pp. 396—99.
93. Nietzsche, Ecce Elomo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 8, p. 308.
94. Nietzsche, Beyond G ood and Evil, IX, 295, p. 234.
95. Nietzsche, Twilight, “Skirmishes of an Untimely M an,” 19, p. 526.
96. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “ W hy I Write Such Good Books,” 5, p. 267.
97. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, IX, 269.
98. H. Lange, “Wie lernen Frauen die Politik verstehen?,” in K, II: 10 1.
99. H. Lange, “ Weltanschauung und Frauenbewegung,” in K, I: 252.
100. Schreiber, “ Die Ordnung,” p. 229.
101. See Nietzsche, Zarathustra, I, “ Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 7, pp. 1 3 2 -3 3 .
102. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, II, 84, p. 138; see also Du Prel, p. 67.
103. Scholz, p. 15; see also Richards, p. 1.
104. Nietzsche, letter of July 23, 1885, in Janz, II: 393.
105. Forster-Nietzsche, p. 138.
106. For an overview, see Braun, p. 139.
107. See Nietzsche, letter of April, 1884, in Forster-Nietzsche, p. 202: “ As to
topics for fine dissertations, my The Dawn is rich material. I encourage you to
read it, as well as The Gay Science — both books are also introductions and com­
mentaries to my Zarathustra .”
108. The author of a monograph entitled Nietzsche and Women finds the
“ grotesqueness of this fact” something “ not worthy of further emphasis” (Brann,
p. i7 o f).
109. Nietzsche, letter of Oct. 22, 1884, in Briefe, V, 2, p. 5 71.
n o . Janz, II: 398.
i n . Nietzsche, letter of July 19, 1887, in Janz, II: 354.
 NOTES TO PAGES 201 —1 3 399

112 . See Nietzsche, Twilight, “ Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” 19, p. 526..

113 . Druskowitz, Pessimistische Kardinalsdtze, p. i8f. (The date of publica­
tion for this work is uncertain— biographies sometimes make it difficult to estab­
lish bibliographies.)
114. Nietzsche, Human, I, 7, no. 409, p. 153.
115 . Nietzsche, fragment, in W, VII, 1, pp. 540—44.
116. See Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 1 —3, and the discussion in F. Kitt­
ler, “ Nietzsche,” pp. 1 5 9 —97.
117 . Ziehen, document of Jan. 19, 1889, in Podach, p. 1453.

The Great Lalula

Psychophysics
1. See Lacan, “ Lituraterre,” p. 10.
2. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 25.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. On the history of this research, see Manis, p. 27.
5. Kvale, p. 240.
6. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 28.
7. Ibid., p. 55.
8. “ Die Hahnische Litteralmethode,” p. 94.
9. Thus a text of “ art physiology” (!) distinguishes the “psychological age of
the doctrine of memory” (“ memory as an aid to consciousness” ) from the physio­
logical age, in which only storage techniques count (Hirth, p. 327!).
10. O n Nietzsche, see Foucault, “ Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in LCM P,
pp. 16 2 —64.
11. The prerequisite for any psychophysics, according to Bolsche, p. 16.
12. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 25. 13. Ibid., p. 23.
14. Ibii See also Ogden, p. 187. 15. Ebbinghaus, Memory , p. 23.
1 6. Ha /ani, p. 210. 17. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 22.
18. S ' , Ebbinghaus, Grundzuge, I: 676.
19. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 23.
20. For a definition, see Lacan, “ Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of
Desire,” in Ecrits (New York), p. 298.
21. Such is Turk’s critical interpretation of Foucault’s history of language in
“Das ‘Klassische Zeitalter.’ ”
22. Ebbinghaus, Memory, p. 22.
23. Ibid., p. 101.
24. See R. Stephan, p. 59L
25. Morgenstern, “ Der Gingganz,” in Galgenlieder, p. 319.
26. See Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 8—26.
27. Morgenstern, “ Epigramme und Spriicher,” in G W , p. 330.
28. See Spitzer, pp. 104— 6.
29. C. Brentano, “ Aus der Chronika eines fahrenden Schulers,” in W, II: 684.
30. Kvale, p. 241 (on Ebbinghaus).
31. Morgenstern, “ Stufen,” in G W , p. 392.
32. Liede, I: 6.
33. Alewyn, “ Morgenstern,” p. 401.
34. Spitzer, p. 90.
400 NOTES TO PAGES Z I 3 - 1 9

35. The view of the romantic, Bernhardi, II: 422.

36. Ebbinghaus, M e m o r y , p. 51. 37. Solomons and Stein, p. 5o8f.
38. Hatvani, p. 210. 39. Zeitler, p. 443.
40. “ It is remarkable that pedagogy has concerned itself so little with inves­
tigating such laws. One would think that it would attend to a child’s actual be­
havior before it proceeded to try to improve performance.” So say Jensen and
Lamszus (p. 16) of their classical predecessors. Similar thoughts are expressed by
Ostermai, p. 5 if.
41. See Berger, p. 172.
42. Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , I: 709.
43. See Preyer, p. 36, and Goldscheider, p. 505.
44. Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , I: 728.
45. Tarde, p. 350.
46. Preyer, p. 7.
47. Stern, P s y c h o lo g ie , p. 157.
48. Kussmaul, p. 182 (on clinical and experimental work).
49. For a history of the relevant research, see the summary in Hecaen and An-
gelergues, pp. 2 5 -5 0 .
50. Durr, in Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , II: 730.
51. Ziehen, “ Aphasie,” p. 670 (conceivably a precise enumeration of literary
possibilities since 1900).
52. Von Kieseritzky, p. 53.
53. A certain Gowers located it in the right-brain correlate of the Broca
position.
54. See Saussure, p. 66. The “ sound-image,” which is rigorously distinguished
from the motoric image, corresponds to the “ word-sound image” of physiology
(Ziehen, “ Aphasie,” p. 665^, which abbreviates the following formulation: “ ac­
tivity in the audible region corresponding to previous excitation of this center by
an external stimulus” (Sachs, p. 3).
55. Freud, “ The Unconscious,” in SE, XIV: 2 o if.
56. Lindner, p. 19 1. See also Miinsterberg, G r u n d z u g e , p. 247L
57. See Philipp, p. 1 26L
58. Hofmannsthal, “ Chandos,” p. 130.
59. Ibid., p. 138.
60. Von Monakow, p. 4 1 6f. On the inability to read whole words, see also
Lay, p. 81. Interpretations based on Hofmannsthal’s attendance at university lec­
tures in Vienna are one-sided in their treatment of the language-deficiency theme;
only Ernst M ach’s epistemology is considered relevant (see Wunberg).
61. Ziehen, “ Aphasie,” p. 675.
62. Hofmannsthal, “ Chandos,” pp. 133, 144.
63. See Lindner, p. 193^ and R. Lange, pp. 76 —78.
64. Hofmannsthal, “ Chandos,” p. 135.
65. Von M onakow, p. 522; see also Kussmaul, p. 176L
66. Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , I: 675f.
67. Gutzmann, p. 484.
68. Sachs, p. 70.
69. Klinke, p. 202.
70. Ibid., p. io o f. On sources of noise, see also Ziehen, L e it fa d e n , p. 182;
R. M . Meyer, p. 255, and Schreber, p. 229.
 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 9 - 2 8 401

71. See the general discussion in Heidegger, “ Rimbaud,” p. 17.

72. Schreber, pp. 168—69.
73. Ziehen, L e it fa d e n , p. 145L See also Jung and Riklin, p. 63.
74. Liede, I: 8.
75. On the poetry of train noise, see Breucker, p. 323L
76. See Ach, pp. 196 —210.
77. George, Z w e i T r d u m e . In G A W , XVII: 30L
78. Nietzsche, G e n e a lo g y , I, 5, p. 29.
79. Ziehen, “Aphasie,” p. 685.
80. Freud and Josef Breuer, S tu d ie s o n H y s te r ia , in S E , II: 55, 179.
81. Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 58. 82. W undt, I, 1, 569.
83. See Erdmann and Dodge, p. 9.84. Zeitler, p. 403.
85. Erdmann and Dodge, p. 1. 86. Hoffbauer, II: 286E
87. Filippo Marinetti, F u tu r is t M a n if e s t o , cited in Baumgarth, G e s c h ic h t e ,
p. 169.
88. Zeitler, p. 401. See also Wernicke, p. 5 11.
89. Messmer, p. 288; see also p. 273E
90. Bahr, p. 9.
91. Ibid., p. 28.
92. Holz, X: 574.
93. Ibid.; see also Schulz, pp. 71 —83. O f course, one wonders why Holz
didn’t carry his idea through to its logical conclusion:
If this note were not part of a scholarly work,
then this type of positioning alone,
more than any central axis,
would minimize the ophthalmokinetic return path.
94. Spengler, I: 41.
95. tvift, p. 302.
96. ,ee Ellenberger, I: 177, and the already-historical historical summary in
Janet pp. 376 -4 0 4 .
9/. Solomons and Stein, p. 503.
98. Ibid., p. 504.
99. Ibid., p. 505.
100. Freud, “ Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-analysis,” in
S E , XII: 115.
101. See Foucault, “ Revolutionary Action: ‘Until N ow ,’ ” in L C M P , pp.
218—33.
102. See biographical material in Brinnin, p. 29.
103. See Solomons and Stein, pp. 500, 506.
104. Stein, cited in Brinnin, p. 30.
105. Stein, p. 295.
106. On Gertrude Stein, see Skinner, pp. 50—57; on women who write and
the university in general, see Maschke, p. 12.
107. Solomons and Stein, pp. 508, 498.
108. Breton, M a n if e s t o , pp. 29—30.
109. Preyer, p. 12.
n o . Hegel, S y s te m d e r P h i lo s o p h i e (E n c y c lo p a d ie ), in S W , X: 351.
i n . Solomons and Stein, p. 506.
402 NOTES TO PAGES 2 2 9 -3 8

Technological Media
I. Solomons and Stein, p. 506.
z. Ibid., p. 506b
3. See, e.g., Villiers, p. 38, and, by contrast, Read and Welsh, pp. 2—6.
4. Villiers, p. 13. Perhaps because he despised phonographs, H. H. Ewers
translated the final sentence into German with virtuoso repression, putting
“ words” for “ vibrations” ; Hugo Ball’s “ oscillating of divine cadences,” by con­
trast, matches Villiers’ fine phrase, even though it is not a translation (cited in
Philipp, p. 127).
5. Villiers, p. 10. For the scientific approximation of such novelistic utopias,
see Hornborstel and Abraham, p. 223 f.
6. Friedlaender, p. 159.
7. Ibid., p. i59 f.
8. Cros, p. 136. Translation by Daniel Katz. [Trans.]
9. See Chew, p. 3, and Read and Welsh, p. 17.
10. See Bruch, p. 26.
I I . See Villiers, p. 17, and Kittler, “ Pink Floyd,” p. 470.
12. Key, D a s J a h r h u n d e r t, pp. 219 —49.
13. See Bruch, pp. 31, and (on the illustration) 69.
14. The situation is like that alleged in a parody of Arno H olz’s concept of art:
“ In such a view the history of art would be the history of artistic techniques!”
(cited in Holz, X: 191).
15. See Gutzmann, pp. 4 9 3 -9 9 .
16. Surkamp, p. 13.
17. Ibid., p. 30; see also Parzer-Miihlbacher, p. 106.
18. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 52.
19. Surkamp, p. 14.
20. Hackenberg, p. 70b, also Scharrelmann, W e g , p. 90.
21. See Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 280, and Steiner, p. 262. According to
Steiner, gramophones are a “ shadow of the spiritual” from which— were man­
kind ever to love it— only the gods could save us.
22. Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 123. Translation by Michael Metteer.
[Trans.]
23. Hall, C o n t e n t s , p. 31. See comments in Meumann, V o r le s u n g e n , I: 348.
24. Alewyn, “ Morgenstern,” p. 399.
25. See Liede, I: 287—91.
26. Wildenbruch, cited in Bruch, p. 20.
27. Herder, R e z e n s io n : K l o p s t o c k s W e r k e , in S W , X X: 322b
28. Doblin, “ Futuristische Worttechnik,” in A L , p. 10.
29. Tarde, p. 363; see also Preyer, p. 60.
30. Lichtenberg, fragment of 1778, cited in Hegel, P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f S p ir it,
p. 191.
31. See Ginzburg, p. 7.
32. “ N ew Phonograph,” p. 422.
33. Stern, “ Sammelbericht,” p. 432.
34. Stern, P s y c h o lo g ie , p. 14.
35. Stransky, “Amentia,” pp. 7, 18. Anticipations of the technique can be
found as early as 1890, in Blodgett, p. 43.
 NOTES TO PAGES 2 3 8 -4 6 403

36. See, for comparison, Stoker, chap. 24, pp. 374—75, and Ach, p. 18.
37. Stransky, “Amentia,” p. 17b
38. Ibid., p. 96.
39. Ibid., p. 45.
40. See Wittgenstein, 4 .4 6 1—64, p. 131.
41. “ The noblest product of needful humanity, the state . . . would be diffi­
cult” were it not for the role of language in the formation of individualities and
totalities: an insight of romantic thought on language (Bernhardi, I: 4f). The po­
litical correlate of flight of ideas, by contrast, is “ anarchy” (Liepmann, p. 82).
42. Stransky, “ Amentia,” pp. 81 —83.
43. Mauthner, W o r te r b u c h , II: 398. Ellen Key’s “ soul murder” in the school
has thus founded a school of thought.
44. Kafka, D e s c r ip t io n , pp. 80—81.
45. Stransky, “ Amentia,” p. 4.
46. Liepmann, p. 74, see also p. 59b
47. Ufer, 1890. Under the conditions of classical education or culture, only a
Bettina Brentano could have such an insight. See B. Brentano, W B , I: 290, and
comments by F. Kittler, “ Writing,” p. 41b
48. Stransky, “ Amentia,” p. 96.
49. Benn, “ Der Vermessungsdirigent,” in G S , II: 324.
50. The painter Titorelli does the same thing; see Kafka, T r ia l, chap. 7, p. 204.
51. Three desiderata in Pameelen’s obsolete concept of communication.
52. Benn, “ Der Vermessungsdirigent,” II: 324—26.
53. Wehrlin, p. 115.
54. Hellpach, “ Psychopathologisches,” p. 144.
55. Ziehen, I d e e n a s s o z ia tio n , I: 12b
56. Ibid., p. 6.
^7. Benn, D i e R e is e , in G W , II: 33.
8. Ibid., p. 43.
59. Such is Ronne’s diagnosis in Irle, p. 101.
60. Benn, G e h ir n e , in G W , II: i8f.
61. Benn, D i e R e is e , in G W , II: 34.
62. Ibid., p. 35b
63. See Sellmann, p. 54: “ The cinematograph can only do one thing, as its
name implies, and that is to record movement.”
64. See the general thesis in Morin, p. 139: “ The viewer reacts to the screen as
if to an external retina tele-relayed to his brain.”
65. See Guattari, p. 99b
66. Sartre, p. 122.
67. Ibid., p. 120. A movie house in Mannheim advertised with the slogan,
“ Come on in, our theater is the darkest in the whole city!” (cited in Vietta, “ Liter-
atur und Film,” p. 295).
68. Sartre, pp. 12 4 —25.
69. Ibid., p. 119.
70. Egon Friedell, “ Prolog vor dem Film” (1912), in Kaes, ed., K i n o - D e b a t t e ,
p. 45. See the pertinent remarks of Koebner, pp. 1 7 —19.
71. Hans-Heinz Ewers, letter of Oct. 8, 19 12 , in Zglinicki, p. 375.
72. See Miinsterberg, F ilm , pp. 18 —48, 84—87.
73. McLuhan, pp. 19 2 —93.
404 NOTES TO PAGES 2 46 -5 4

74. Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , p. 22.

75. An anthropological theory of film (in opposition to the accumulation of
technical data) can be found in Morin, pp. 31 —53.
76. Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , p. 23. See also Kaes, ed., K i n o - D e b a t t e , p. 23 —29.
77. Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , pp. 21 —23.
78. See Schanze, “ Literaturgeschichte,” p. 133.
79. Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , pp. 13, 16. See Zglinicki, pp. 364—86.
80. Sellmann, p. 54b
81. Benn, letter of Aug. 28, 1935, in B, I: 63.
82. See Lindau, pp. 86, 8if. The copy I cite once belonged to the Royal Police
Department of Munich.
83. Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , p. 23.
84. As is the case in Sasse, p. 226.
85. Hofmannsthal, “ Poesie,” pp. 3 1 6 - 1 8 . See also Holz, X: 187- o, as well
as the many unordered bits of evidence in Daniels, ed.
86. Dilthey, “ Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik,” in G S , V: 318b
87. Schanze, “ Literaturgeschichte,” p. 133.
88. According to the same Schanze, M e d ie n k u n d e , p. 52. For historical evi­
dence, see the demarcation of film and theater in Miinsterberg, F ilm , p. 73 ff.
89. Sasse, p. 226.
90. Mallarme, “ Sur le livre illustre,” O C , p. 878.
91. Kafka, letter of Oct. 25, 1915 , cited in Sarkowski, p. 71. See also George,
letter of Aug., 1903, in George and Hofmannsthal, p. 195; on the unrepresen-
tability of Morgenstern’s poems, see Spitzer, p. 91.
92. Wolters, p. 320; see also Scharffenberg, p. 72b
93. Schleiermacher, P d d a g o g is c h e S c h r ift e n , p. 580. For further examples of
such bans, see Liede, II: 65, 102, 199b
94. Apollinaire, p. 228.
95. Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , II: 2f; see also Wundt, I: 577.
96. Kaes, ed., K in o - D e b a t t e , p. 10.
97. Kussmaul, p. 5.
98. See Ballet, p. 30, and comments by Hecaen and Angelergues, p. 35.
99. Kussmaul, pp. 12 6 ,12 8 . The literary echo of such concepts can be seen in
Maupassant, XVIII: 30.
100. Erdmann and Dodge, p. 165.
101. Ibid., pp. 187, 161. Mallarme’s experimental “ A Dice Throw ” is corre­
spondingly a poem “ having no novelty but for the spacing out of what is to
be read. The white spaces, indeed, take on importance, are striking at first”
(Mallarme, “ Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard,” O C , p. 455.)
102. See Zeitler, p. 391. Graphology had only to copy down such research
results, according to Klages, H a n d s c h r ift , p. 53.
103. Zeitler, p. 403.
104. Lindner, p. 196.
105. Saussure, p. 131.
106. See Derrida, G r a m m a to lo g y , pp. 87—90.
107. Saussure, p. 119.
108. Such is the thesis of M . Frank, D a s in d iv id u e lle A llg e m e in e , pp.
170 -7 5 .
109. Soennecken, p. 12.
 NOTES TO PAGES 2 5 4 -6 3 405

n o . See Meumann, U b e r O k o n o m i e .
h i . Meumann, V o r le s u n g e n , III: 608.
112 . Soennecken, p. 39. See also Burgerstein, p. 33, as well as the “ 80 binary
combinations,” from which Preyer (pp. 4 9 -5 2 ) attempted to construct a n y con­
ceivable script.
113 . See G. R. Lange, p. 231.
114. Soennecken, p. 41.
115 . Von Larisch, pp. 97, 109.
116. See graphic material in Riegger-Baurmann, pp. 209—57.
11 7 . See Soennecken, pp. 39—41 (the graphic on p. 39).
118. Von Larisch, p. 11.
119 . Ibid., p. 102L
120. Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 59; G a llo w s S o n g s , p. 17. The transla­
tion, © M ax E. Knight, is reprinted courtesy of the University of California Press.
[Trans.]
121. Spitzer, p. 6of.
122. Ibid., p. 65.
123. Liede, I: 292.
124. Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 31.
125. Burghagen, p. 193.
126. See Scharffenberg, p. 75.
127. Von Larisch, p. 106. On the personal book, see also Schur, p. 1 3 8f, as
well as Tarde, p. 347.
128. Von Larisch, pp. 9, 114 . 129. McLuhan, p. 260.
130. Burghagen, p. 120. 131. Just, p. 229.
132. Schur, pp. 228, 231.
133. Rilke, letter of Oct. 2, 1901, in Scharffenberg, p. 177.
134. Meumann, V o r le s u n g e n , III: 605b, 614.
135. See Burgerstein, p. 39.
136. Messmer, pp. 218, 224b
137. Miinsterberg, G r u n d z u g e , p. 252. For literary-critical confirmation, see
the clear propositions in H. Fricke, pp. 1 7 - 2 2 .
138. Mattenklott, p. 209. 139. See Burgerstein, p. 39.
140. Preyer, p. 128. 14 1. Forrer, p. 521.
142. Mallarme, “ Sur la graphologie,” in O C , p. 878.
143. See George, G A W , VI-VII: 215.
144. Klages, pp. 9 1 - 9 5 .
145. Bondi, p. 13.
146. Tarde, p. 350. See also Preyer, p. 86: “ It is difficult to find definite char­
acteristics of natural handwriting when one uses block letters. Therefore, anyone
who does not want to be immediately recognized by his handwriting on the ad­
dress of a letter can use block letters, as long as he does not mind the effort in­
volved and does not prefer the typewriter.”
Block letters or the typewriter— aside from writers who write bad checks,
criminals take such advice to heart. A certain Mr. Windibank, who deceives his
stepdaughter, a typist, with love letters, types even the signature for safety’s sake.
And it is this truly George-like bit of cunning that inspires Sherlock Holmes, the
successful opposing technician, to write the first monograph entitled “ On the
Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime” (Doyle, C o m p le t e S h e r lo c k H o lm e s , pp.
406 notes to pages 2 64-71

19 7 —99). The detective is once more ahead of his time. N ot until much later did
comparable scientific monographs appear, as, e.g., Streicher, “ The Criminologi­
cal Use of Typescript” (1919).
147. See Foucault, O r d e r , pp. 366—67.
148. George, G A W , IX: 134 (orig. pub. 1919); W o r k s , p. 408. Translation by
Olga M arx and M ax M orw itz © The University of North Carolina Studies in the
Germanic Languages and Literatures, 1974, reprinted courtesy of the University
of North Carolina Press. [Trans.]

Rebus
Untranslatability and the Transposition o f Media
1. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 55.
2. For the technical details, see McLuhan, U n d e r s ta n d in g M e u > „, x p. 56—61.
3. See Blumner, cited in Daniels, ed., pp. 251 — 54.
4. See Heidegger, B e in g a n d T im e , pp. 102—7 (on non-readiness-to-hand),
and in connection to “ The Word,” Heidegger, L a n g u a g e , pp. 60—61.
5. Mattenklott, p. 179L
6. R. M . Meyer, p. 55.
7. Heidegger, L a n g u a g e , p. 65.
8. George, G A W , VI-VII: 150; W o r k s , p. 281. For this and following George
poems, translation by Olga M arx and M ax M orwitz © The University of North
Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 1974, reprinted
courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press. [Trans.]
9. Heidegger, L a n g u a g e , p. 62.
10. Morgenstern, M e n s c h W a n d e r e r , p. 164. “ Geist ist nur Heissen; Heisst,
so schrieb sich besser Geist. / Der Heisst heisst alle Ding (doch Ding ist auch nur
Heisst).”
11. Waetzoldt, p. 255L See also R. Lange, pp. 1 1 0 —14.
12. Dilthey, “ Dichterische Einbildungskraft und Wahnsinn,” G S , VI: 158. See
also G. T. Fechner, I: 51.
13. On the topos, see, e.g., Cumont, pp. 87, 240, 295. On the new fashion,
see George, G A W , XVII: 53; Klages, R h y t h m e n , p. 474; Ball, D i e F lu c h t , pp.
92—96; Freud, I n tr o d u c to r y L e c t u r e s o n P s y c h o a n a ly s is , in S E , XV: 1 7 —18. In
1922 Valery gave the title C h a r m e s to a volume of his poetry.
14. Morgenstern, letter of 1 9 1 1 , in Spitzer, p. 107.
15. G. Meyer, p. 40.
16. See Rouge, p. 21 (on George, Volapiik, Ido, and Esperanto).
17. George, G A W , VI-VII: 1 2 8 -2 9 ; W o r k s , p. 271. See comments in Boehrin-
ger, “ U b e r h e r s a g e n ,” p. 19, and the general discussion in Forster, p. 87.
18. See David, p. 16.
19. See R. M. Meyer, p. 269.
20. Liede, II: 239.
21. Nietzsche, fragment of 1873, in W , III, 4, p. 318 (on “ Poetry” ).
22. Bahr, p. 28L
23. Simmel, “ Vom Wesen,” pp. 18, and (on machines) 19.
24. E. Strauss, p. 197L
25. Ibid., p. 122.
26. Kussmaul, p. 27. See also A. Proust, p. 310; Baumann, p. i2 f, and Sachs,
p. 122.
 NOTES TO PAGES 271 - 7 8 407

27. E. Strauss, pp. 1 3 3 —42. In 1885 Paulhan “ observed that the sound of a
waterfall or of a train made the conception of a melody considerably easier for
him” (Ballet, p. 31). Gertrude Stein preferred to write in the presence of distract­
ing noises (see Skinner, p. 54); one of Otto Flake’s heroes wrote to the sound of
gas pipes (Flake, p. 205). Rilke is, as usual, the most precise; see “ On the Young
Poet” and the sources of his inspiration: “ W ho will name all of you, co-contribu­
tors to inspiration, you who are nothing more than noises, or bells that have
ceased ringing, or miraculous new bird calls in neglected woods?” (Rilke, “ Uber
den jungen Dichter,” S W , VI: 1054). In spectral analysis, bells do in fact have the
highest proportion of noise (in the technical sense) of all sounds.
28. Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 13.
29. Morgenstern, “ Uber die Galgenlieder,” in G W , p. 226.
30. Boehringer, U b e r h e r s a g e n , pp. 7 7 —88.
31. Maier-Smits, pp. 158 —61 (recollections of the first female pupil).
32. See the minute wiring plan in Villiers, p. 129b
33. For details, see von Zglinicki, pp. 2 7 7 —94.
34. Pinthus, Kinobuch, p. 9. See comments in Miinsterberg, Film, pp. 84—87.

Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow

1. See Freud, T h e I n te r p r e ta tio n o f D r e a m s , in S E , IV: 55.
2. Ibid., pp. 96—98.
3. Ibid., pp. 2 7 7 —78.
4. As an expressionist puts it: “ So much of victory is in simple position, be it
that of armies or sentences” (Hatvani, p. 210).
5. Freud, I n te r p r e ta t io n o f D r e a m s , in S E , IV: 303.
6. Ibid., p. 99.
7. Muschg, pp. 315, 306.
8. Freud, I n te r p r e ta t io n o f D r e a m s , in S E , IV: 297.
9. Bahr, p. 30 (in relation to the internal-stimulus theory of dreams).
10. Freud, S t u d ie s o n H y s te r ia , in S E , II: 280—81.
1 1 . As does Lyotard, D e s d is p o s it if s , p. 77.
12. Mattenklott (p. 309!) turns this homology between literature and psycho­
analysis into its opposite.
13. George, G A W , III: 106; “ Evening of Peace,” in W o r k s , p. 107.
14. See Foucault, M e n t a l I lln e s s a n d P s y c h o lo g y , pp. 76 —88.
15. Langbehn, p. 8 (coined for science and art).
16. See Guattari, p. 102b
17. Freud, S tu d ie s o n H y s te r ia , in S E , VII: 110. See comments in Foucault,
“ Dream,” p. 57.
18. Rank, Der Doppelgdnger, p. 7b Todorov (Fantastic, p. 160) takes only a
half truth from such interpretive claims, namely that “ psychoanalysis has re­
placed fantastic literature (and thus rendered it superfluous).” But the divide be­
tween the book and the image simultaneously made for the resurrection of all
imaginary mirror images on another, popular level, in the real of the film screen.
19. Rank, Der Doppelgdnger, p. 7. 20. See Farges, p. 89.
21. See Gaube, p. 42. 22. Jung and Riklin, p. 63.
23. See Saussure, p. 112.
24. Freud, letter of July 30, 1915 , in Freud and Andreas-Salome, p. 36.
25. See Steiner, “ Initiationserkenntnis,” pp. 9 6 -9 8 .
26. Bergson, p. 330b
408 notes to pages 2 78-85

27. The view of Habermas, pp. 300—31.

28. Bolsche, p. 15. See also Flechsig, H ir n le h r e , p. 41.
29. Kussmaul, p. 34.
30. On Helmholtz and Briicke, see Bernfeld, pp. 435 —55.
31. Freud, “ The Unconscious,” in S E , XIV: 1 7 4 —75.
32. Freud, O n A p h a s ia , p. 22. On “ B u t t e r ! M u t t e r ” [butter/mother], see
Kussmaul, p. 188.
33. Meringer and Mayer, p. vi. See also Freud, T h e P s y c h o p a t h o lo g y o f
E v e r y d a y L i f e , in S E , VI: 53—60. Collections of parapraxes are as old as psycho­
physics itself. See G. T. Fechner, I: 225b
34. See Ziehen, L e it fa d e n , p. 144, as well as comments by pmann, p. 20.
35. Meringer and Mayer, p. 20, see also p. 38.
36. Freud, P s y c h o p a t h o lo g y , in S E , VI: 84.
37. Jung, “ Beitrag,” p. 19.
38. Jung, D e m e n t ia p r a e c o x , p. 130.
39. Ibid., p. 146b 40. Meringer and Mayer, p. 9.
41. Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 29. 42. Conan Doyle, p. 92.
43. Bleuler, p. 52.
44. Freud, P s y c h o p a t h o lo g y , in S E , VI: 48.
45. Ibid.
46. Zeitler, p. 391.
47. Gutzmann, p. 499. See also Miinsterberg, G r u n d z u g e , p. 708.
48. Lacan, E c r its (Paris), p. 469.
49. Freud, P s y c h o p a t h o lo g y , S E , VI: 214.
50. Freud, “ From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in S E , XVII: 94.
51. See Freud, I n te r p r e ta tio n o f D r e a m s , S E , V: 499. The same image can be
found in Villiers, T o m o r r o w ’s E v e , p. 206; Meringer and Mayer, p. 100; Hirth,
p. 535b; Sachs, p. 37; Munch, p. 87; Miinsterberg, G r u n d z u g e , pp. 28, 708b In
the discourse network of 1800 there was reason to warn against the proofreader’s
eye and its forgetting of “ sense” as if against an “ idiosyncrasy,” which should
“ remain within the norm” (Reil, p. 102). In 1910, this idiosyncrasy defined the
poet, as when Brigge “ copies down” a biographical note on the dramatist Alexis-
Felix Arvers: “ He was dying in a gentle and unruffled way, and the nun perhaps
thought he had gone further with it than in reality he had. Quite loudly she called
out an indication where such and such was to be found. She was a rather unedu­
cated nun; the word ‘corridor,’ which at that moment was not to be avoided, she
had never seen written; so it was that she said ‘collidor,’ thinking that was the
word. A t that Arvers postponed dying. It seemed to him necessary to put this
right first. He became perfectly lucid and explained to her that it should be ‘cor­
ridor.’ Then he died. He was a poet and hated the approximate” (Rilke, B r ig g e ,
P- 146).
52. Freud, “ Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-analysis,” in
S E , XII: 113.
53. Ibid., pp. 115 —16.
54. Benjamin, “ Work of Art,” p. 235.
55. See Freud, S tu d ie s o n H y s te r ia , in S E , II: 49!.
56. Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” in S E , X X : 12.
57. See Habermas, p. 302 (there are the nightmares, too).
58. Muschg, p. 333.
59. Freud, “ Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in S E , VII: 39.
60. Freud, F iv e L e c t u r e s o n P s y c h o - a n a ly s is , in S E , XI: 13.
 NOTES TO PAGES 2 8 5 - 9 5 409

61. Ibid.
62. Freud, “ Fragment,” in SE, VII: 8.
63. Ibid., p. 10.
64. “ If I have made a sentence out of something— what does that something
have to do with the sentence?” (Ma'nn, p. 24). See comments in Carstensen, pp.
175-79-
65. FreuT Fragment,” in SE, VII: 9.
66. Freud, “ On Beginning the Treatment,” in SE, XII: 136. Compare the pre­
carious, but not completely impossible relationship between the Royal Privy Ar-
chivarius Lindhorst and his poet.
67. Freud, “ Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” in SE, X: 156.
68. Freud, “ Fragment,” in SE, VII: 8.
69. Muschg, p. 322b
70. On the mythic sense of these names, see Turk and Kittler, p. 42.
7 1. See Conan Doyle, p. 214, and, on Freud and Holmes, the testimony of the
Wolf-Man, in Gardiner, ed., p. 146.
72. See Freud, “ Constructions in Analysis,” SE, XXIII: 255—70.
73. See Muschg, p. 316.
74. On this and the following, see Kittler, D e r T r a u m , pp. 3 1 9 —23.
75. Freud, D e lu s io n s a n d D r e a m s in J e n s e n ’s ‘ G r a d iv a ,’ in SE, IX: 94.
7 6. Ibid., p. 92.
77. Ibid., p. 7.
78. Ibid., p. 40.
79. Freud, “ Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case
of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in SE, XII: 9.
80. Ibid., pp. 78—79.
81. Freud, “ Fragment,” in SE, VII: 14 (footnote added by Freud in 1923).
82. Freud, O u t l i n e , in SE, XXIII: 196.
83. Schreber, p. 31.
84. Freud, “ Psycho-analytic Notes,” in SE, XII: 10.
85. See Schreber, pp. 46n, 48, 52m
86. Lacan, “ L’Etourdit,” p. 16.
87. Schreber, p. 251.
88. Foucault, “ What Is an Author?,” p. 1 1 7 .
89. Schreber, pp. 54—61.
90. Ibid., p. 49m
91. Ibid., pp. 45 and 286; see also p. 2oon.
92. Flechsig, G r u n d la g e n , p. 21. See, above all, Schreber, p. 243.
93. Flechsig, G r u n d la g e n , p. 3b
94. Benn, D e r A u f b a u d e r P e r s o n lic h k e it , in G W , I: 92.
95. Freud, “ Charcot,” in SE, III: 15. For which Flechsig thanked him . . .
96. Flechsig, G e h ir n , p. 18.
97. Flechsig, G r u n d la g e n , pp. 9, 11.
98. On the dissection of Holderlin, see Fichtner, p. 54b
99. On the dissection of Schreber, see Baumann, p. 522.
100. And, after having used up so much typewriter ribbon, I too see that the
intellectual achievement of describing the discursive network Flechsig-Schreber-
Freud belongs first to Roberto Calasso. His admirable human science fiction
has already drawn on all sources to recreate the vicissitudes of German “ nerve-
theology.” The only thing Calasso overlooked is Flechsig’s stark imperative of
41 0 NOTES TO PAGES 2 9 5 - 3 0 4

weighing postmortem evidence, which he replaced with a philosophical notion

that cannot have motivated Schreber’s anxiety and writing. See Calasso, D i e
g e h e im e G e s c h ic h t e , p. 61.
x o i. Schreber, p. 54.
10 2. Ibid., p. 7 5 .
103. Mannoni’s insight, p. 91. On possible grounds for Freud’s complicity,
see Calasso, D i e g e h e im e G e s c h ic h t e , p. 22b
104. Schreber, p. 91.
105. S. M . Weber, p. 490.
106. See Kafka, “ Penal Colony,” p. 164, and the c.. aentary by Wagenbach,
p. 70b Neumann, pp. 3 9 6 -4 0 1, however, links “ writing machines” in Kafka and
Schreber.
107. Schreber, pp. 34—35.
108. An equation made most decisively by Schatzman.
10 9. Schreber, p. 1 5 5 .
n o . Ibid., p. 1 3 5 .
i n . Ibid., p. 34.
112. Ibid., p. 119. On “ rays,” see the “ audible rays” and the “ primary visual
rays” in Flechsig, H ir n le h r e , p. 20.
113. See the physiological details in Schreber, p. 69.
114. Flechsig, G e h ir n , p. 26. Compare the echo in Schreber, p. 118.
115 . Schreber, p. 229. See also p. i i 3 n (on light-telegraphies).
116. See Chamberlain, p. 263.
11 7 . Schreber, p. 222.
118. Ibid., p. 12 1. See comments by Lacan, “ On a Question Preliminary to
Any Possible Treatment in Psychosis,” in E c r its (New York), p. 184b
119. Schreber, p. 121.
120. Ibid., p. 144.
1 2 1 . Ibid., p. 1 9 7 .
122. In an exemplary analysis, Freud deduces all the erotic troubles of a travel
acquaintance from an incorrectly cited verse of T h e A e n e i d (Freud, P s y c h o ­
p a th o lo g y , in S E , VI: 8 - 1 1 .
123. Schreber, p. 122. 124. Ibid., pp. i6 6 n a n d 146.
125. Ibid., p. 122. 126. Ibid., p. 176.
127. Ibid., p. 57. 128. Ibid., p. 123m
129. Ibid. But see Kussmaul, p. 217, where the actual state of affairs is entirely
clear to a psychiatrist.
130. Schreber, p. 122. 13 1. Ball, D i e F lu c h t , p. 79b
132. Schreber, p. 226. 133. Ibid., p. 209.
1 3 4 . Ibid., p. 52.
135. See Deleuze/Guattari, A n t i - O e d i p u s , p. 17 (on Schreber).
136. Ziehen, letter of Jan. 26, 1889, in Gilman, p. 337.
137. G. Weber, document of N ov. 28, 1900, in Schreber, p. 280.
138. A concept of Ribot, p. 15. 139. Schreber, p. 204.
140. Ibid., p. 63. 141. Ibid., p. 135.
14 2 . Ibid., p. 1 2 2 .
143. See comments in Mannoni, p. 8of.
144. M annoni’s title.
145. Schreber, p. 298. See comments in S. M . Weber, pp. 37, 47.
 NOTES TO PAGES 304 - 1 2 4 11

A Simulacrum o f Madness
1. Foucault, “ La folie,” p. 128.
2. On Gertrude Stein, see Skinner, p. 55.
3. Schreber, p. 226.
4. Foucault, D i s c i p l i n e , p. 194.
5. Freud “ The Unconscious,” S E , XIV: 204.
6 . ^ Guthner, B e itr a g e , I: 122.
7. See Morgenstern, G a lg e n lie d e r , p. 79; G a llo w s S o n g s , pp. 7 4 —75.
8. See Herzfelde, p. 297.
9. Flusserl, II, 1, 54. Husserl’s example, as if to confirm the incantation-
fashion of 1900, is “ Abracadabra.”
10. Ball, G e d i c h t e , p. 34. Translation by David E. Wellberg. [Trans.] See also
Rilke, “ Madness,” from “ The Book of Images,” in Rilke, S e le c t e d P o e m s , pp.
22—23.
1 1 . Schreber, p. 168.
12. The testimony of a sufferer of acute mania, whose rhyming has been ex­
haustively collected. See Forel, p. 974.
13. Cardinal, p. 315; on the most famous and extensive simulation of mad­
ness, see Breton and Eluard’s “ Immaculee Conception” of 1930.
14. Hellpach, “ Psychopathologisches,” p. 140. Scheerer, S tu d ie n , p. 144, an
otherwise precise investigation of surrealistic simulations of madness, demon- .
strates the exact correspondences between discourses and diagnosed illnesses ca.
1900 on the basis of information mailed from a regional clinic in 1970.
15. Bolsche, p. 9L
16. See comments in Enzensberger, p. 183.
17. Miinsterberg, G r u n d z u g e , p. 665. Similarly, see Cardinal, p. 315.
18. See Foucault, “ La Folie,” p. 128b
19. Anz, p. 151.
20. Ott, pp. 3 7 1 —98.
21. Breton, letter of Sept. 25, 1916 , cited in Bonnet, p. 99.
22. Stransky, “Amentia,” p. 158.
23. On Goethe, see, e.g., Diener.
24. See Gehrmann, and comments in Benjamin, “ Einbahnstrasse,” in G S , IV,
2, p. 6 i8 f.
25. Benn, I t h a k a , in G W , II: 293b
26. Ibid., p. 295^ and comments by Rube, in Benn, M e d iz i n i s c h e S c h r ift e n ,
p. 96b
27. Benn, I t h a k a , in G W , II: 298 (thus another soul murder).
28. “ A wide readership in lay circles . . . could create confusion, despite the
clear condition of the case,” reads a psychiatric review of Schreber’s book (Pfeiffer,
p. 353). That is a fortiori true of a wide readership for experiments on rat brains.
29. See Ziehen, L e it fa d e n , p. 172b
30. Benn, E p ilo g , in G W , IV: 9.
31. Ibid.
32. See Ziehen, D i e G e is t e s k r a n k h e it e n , III: 126.
33. Freud, letter of Oct. 15, 1897, L e tte r s t o F lie s s , p. 272.
34. Hesse, p. 47.
35. Dilthey, “ Dichterische Einbildungskraft und Wahnsinn,” in G S , VI: 195b
4 12 NOTES TO PAGES 3 1 2 - 2 3

36. On K afka’s comments, see Ryan and Seidler.

37. Freud, I n t r o d u c t o r y L e c tu r e s o n P s y c h o - a n a ly s is , in S E , X V : 17.
38. Rilke, letter of Jan. 24, 1912, in L e tte r s , p. 51.
39. Goll, p. 65. 40. Apollinaire, p. 232.
41. Benn, G e h ir n e , in G W , II: 18. 42. Ibid., p. 16.
43. Ibid., p. 13. 44. Flake, p. 267.
45. Ibid., p p . 2 7 3 - 8 4 .
46. M . Proust, III: 1092. On Eu~ ™em em .b ra n c e as a gigantic evidence-
gathering project, see Ginzburg, p. 33.
47. See A. Proust, and comments by Bariety, p. 575, and Le Masle, p. 55 (fur­
ther work by the student of Broca and Charcot on paralysis in the area of the lips,
tongue, and jaws, on brain localization, and on trephination). Biographers of
Proust, however, bring in only Adrian Proust’s measures against cholera, which
have no relevance for T h e R e m e m b r a n c e .
48. Sachs’s title, B r a in a n d L a n g u a g e .
49. Rilke, letter of Jan. 14, 1912, in L e tte r s , p. 52.
50. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 51. That such ordinary materials suffice is the
reason for the then-current misconception that the phonograph could have been
invented centuries ago, as in Villiers, T o m o r r o w ’s E v e , p. 20.
51. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 52.
52. Ibid., p. 53. On the cranial suture in ontogenesis, see Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 184.
53. See Bridgwater (K a fk a a n d N ie t z s c h e , pp. 1 0 4 - n ) on the homology of
these two texts.
54. Flake, pp. 284, 282; see also p. 95.
55. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 53.
56. See comments in Enzensberger, p. 160.
57. Flirth, p. 38.
58. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” pp. 54—56.
59. Sachs, p. 4.
60. As does Claretie, in his piquant L e s A m o u r s d ’ u n in te r n e .
61. Huelsenbeck, p. 23. See also Ball, D i e F lu c h t , p. 88.
62. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , pp. 5 8 -5 9 .
63. Ibid., p. 23.
64. Rilke, letter of Jan. 24, 1912, in B r ie f e , IV: 184.
65. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , pp. 69—70.
66. Stern, P s y c h o lo g ie , p. 58L See alsotheearly childhood “ Heniden” in
Weininger, p. i 2 i f .
67. Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , II: 15.
68. Hall, S tu d y o f F ea r s, p. 188.
69. Ibid., p. 184. See related passages in M . Proust, R e m e m b r a n c e , I: 3 — 15.
70. See Rank, D a s I n z e s t - M o t iv , p. 6 7 if.
71. Freud, B e y o n d th e P le a s u r e P r in c ip le , in S E , XVIII: 1 4 —15.
72. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , pp. 84, 42.
73. See Bradley, p. 52.
74. See Scharrelmann, W e g , pp. 13 9 —43.
75. Hart, p. 122L
76. Ibid., p. 126.
77. Graf, p. 7.
78. See Hermann Bahr, Hans Bethke, Alfred Kerr, Carl Spitteler, in Graf,
 NOTES TO PAGES 3 2 . 3 - 3 1 4 13

pp. 1 8if, 201, 256. On the whole issue, see Rilke, “ Rezension: Ellen Key, ‘Das
Jahrhundert des Kindes,” in S W , V: 588.
79. Heuss, p. 67.
80. Key, D a s J a h r h u n d e r t, p. 299.
81. M eyrink, pp. 180, 94.
82. Kafka, “ A Report to the Academy,” in C o m p le t e S to r ie s , pp. 256—57.
83. RilM , N o t e b o o k s , p p . 1 6 9 - 7 2 .
8a Mid., p. 201.
85. Ibid., p. 40. Brigge simply objectifies what then-contemporary psychology
(also using the example of reading) describes as the selectivity of all attention:
“ While the attended impression becomes more vivid, all other impressions be­
come less vivid, less clear, less distinct, less detailed. They fade away. We no
longer notice them. They have no hold on our mind; they disappear. If we are
fully absorbed in our book, we do not hear what is said around us, and we do not
see the room; we forget everything. Our attention to the page of the book brings
with it our lack of attention to everything else” (Miinsterberg, F ilm , p. 3 6).
86. Bergk, B u c h e r z u le s e n , p. 339.
87. Reil, p. 55.
88. Hardenberg, H e in r ic h v o n O f t e r d in g e n , in S , I: 202, 325. According to
Goethe, “ true poetry” is altogether a “ bird’s-eye perspective” on the earth
(Goethe, A u s m e in e m L e b e n . D i c h t u n g u n d W a h r h e it , in S W , X XIV: 161).
89. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p. 67; see also Liepmann, p. 57.
90. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p. 68.
9 1. Ibid., p. 187; see also Borges, H is to r ia u n iv e r s a l d e la in fa m ia , in O b r a s
c o m p le ta s , III: 1 3 if.
92. Ferrier, p. 322.
93. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p . 52.
94. Lay, p. 176.
95. R. Lange, pp. 6 1 —63; see also Scharrelmann, W e g , p. 89.
96. Benjamin, “ Einbahnstrasse,” in G S , IV, 1, 90.
97. Burghagen, p. 2 11; see also Key, J a h r h u n d e r t, p. 38.
98. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p. 138. 99. Scharrelmann, W e g , p. 71.
100. See Alain, S y s te m e , p. x xx. 101. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p. 177.
102. Schreber, p. 181. 103. Scharrelmann, W e g , p . 18.
104. See Muller, p. 272L 105. Rilke, B r ig g e , p . 52.
106. Scharrelmann, K in d e r , p . 85. 107. Scharrelmann, W e g , p. 44.
108. R. Lange, L e is t u n g e n , p. 98. 109. Munch, pp. 3, 26.
110. See Key, D a s J a h r h u n d e r t, p. 280; E. Strauss, p. 115 ; Wolgast, “Jugend-
schrift,” p. 113 ; Ostermai, p. 68f; R. Lange, L e is t u n g e n , p. 103. For comments
on the historical period, see H. J. Frank, pp. 365—67.
h i . Munch, p. 73.
112. See Ebbinghaus, G r u n d z u g e , II: 13, and Morgenstern, G a llo w s S o n g s ,
pp. 16 2 —63.
113 . Dilthey, “ Schulreformen und Schulstuben,” in G S , VI: 89.
114. Ziehen, I d e e n a s s o z ia t io n , I: 65f.
115 . Munch, p. 42; see also Scharrelmann, W e g , pp. 160—65.
116 . See O. H. Michel, p. 421, and Ostermai, p. 55.
1 1 7 . Hille, II: 104; see the same argument in Benjamin, “ Die Schulreform,
eine Kulturbewegung,” in G S , II, 1, p. 15.
4 14 NOTES TO PAGES 3 3 1 - 4 1

i n , * 'r';nch, p. 97.
119. See the important comments in Hirth, p. 364^ on the identity of training
maneuvers, weapons technique, and art psychology.
120. Herzfelde, p. 297. See Scharrelmann, K in d e r , p. 85.
121. Ostermai, p. 54.
122. Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 89. As evidence that seventy years have changed noth­
ing in the discourse rules, consider this transcription of a verse from Pink Floyd:
“ When I was a child I had a fever. / M y hands felt just like two balloons. / N ow
I’ve got that feeling once again. / 1 can’t explain, you would not understand.”
(The lines, of course, are addressed to a doctor.)
123. Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 214.
124. Meumann, V o r le s u n g e n , III: 826. Among Rilke scholars, only Storck
shares this view; he has vigorously stressed the presence of Ellen Key and the free
schools in Rilke’s work (J. W. Storck, pp. 2 5 7-6 6 ). His question concerning
emancipation, however, evades the point that interests Meumann, which is really
an aspect of the school.
125. Munch, p. 28.
126. Rilke, letter of Jan. 14, 1912, in L e t t e r s , pp. 42—43.
127. Cited in Heym, III: 256.
128. Einstein, “ Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders,” in G W , p. 234.
129. Rilke, B r ig g e , p. 42.
130. Rilke, “ Rezension,” in S W , V: 591.
131. Munch, p. 98b
132. Ball, T e n d e r e n d a , p. 115 ; Benn, G e h ir n e , in G W , II: 13; Rilke, B r ig g e ,
p. 30.
133. Hartleben, II: 147b 134. See Ehrenstein, pp. 1 7 —19.
135. Ibid., p. 48. 136. Ibid., pp. 8, 54.
137. Otto Karstadt’s “ Working poetry hours,” for example, used texts as pre­
texts for role playing, children’s drawings, and confabulations. See comments in
H. J. Frank, p. 369b
138. See Langenbucher, p. 57. A journalist and President of the Republic says
of his first semester as a student in Munich, the winter semester of 1902: “ I didn’t
have any visiting cards printed, but I did write on small cards: ‘student of neo-
phil.’ The usual ‘Ph.’ appeared to me, after an admittedly short taste of it, too old-
fashioned” (Heuss, p. 217).
139. Kafka, fragment of 1 9 1 7 —18, in H o c h z e it s v o r b e r e it u n g e n , p. 44.
140. Anton Wenzel Gross, cited in Bose and Brinkmann, p. 34. Franz Jung,
another simulator of madness, used these notes for his novella T h e T e le p a th ie s .
141. Ribot, pp. 1 4 1 —42. See Maupassant, XVIII: 29.
142. Wehrlin, p. 119 . 143. Bleuler, p. 52.
144. Wehnert, p. 473. 145. See Mallarme, O C , p. 230.
146. See Wilde, S o u l o f M a n , p. 248.
147. See Mattenklott, p. 12.
148. Hofmannsthal, letter of June 18 ,18 9 5 , *n Hofmannsthal and Bebenburg,
B , p. 80.
149. See Rilke, speech of 1898, in S W , V: 364.
150. Rilke, letter of Feb. 1, 1896, in B r ie f e , I: 12b See also Rosenhaupt,
p. 239.
151. Rubiner, “ Die Anonymen,” p. 302.
152. Doblin, “Autobiographische Skizze,” in A L , p. 21.
 NOTES TO PAGES 3 4 1 _ 5 ° 4 X5

153. Pinthus, M e n s c h h e it s d a m m e r u n g , p. 357.

154. Rubiner, “ Die Anonymen,” p. 300.
155. On medieval anonymity as a model, see Mauthner, W o r t e r b u c h , I: xviii.
156. Doblin, “ Bemerkungen zum Roman,” in A L , p. 18.
157. Rubiner, “ Die Anonymen,” p. 302.
158. See Rubiner, “ Rezension,” p. 214 (on the war poems of the George
circk'.
159. Hans Arp, cited in Goll, p. 45.
160. Lanson, p. 631.
161. Carossa, p. 134. For the theory of such reading technique, consider Stern
(P s y c b o lo g i e , p. 157): “ Further, the analysis of early childhood learning reveals
that the sense and significance of the learning material do not play nearly so great
a role as they do later. For grade-school pupils it is considered important— rightly
so— that material be significant and age appropriate; a text that such a pupil can­
not comprehend has no actual educative value and demands incomparably more
time and energy in learning than a more comprehensible text of equal length.
Early childhood, by contrast, is really the more appropriate phase for rote mem­
ory. If, as we have seen, the child repeats words for the simple pleasure of their
sound and this process leads to unintentional memorizing, the effect is hardly di­
minished by the fact that the child almost never understands the short verses in
their entirety— often such understanding is confused and partial. But it would be
unnecessary pedantry to insist that understanding be brought about through long
and tiresome explanations, or to exclude poems that cannot be completely
understood.”
162. Rilke, N o t e b o o k s , p. 1 7 3 —74.
163. Ibid., p. 175.
164. See von Hanstein.
165. Ostermai, p. 69.
166. Key, D a s J a h r h u n d e r t, p. 57; see also Key, R a h e l, passim.
167. Rilke, B r ig g e , pp. 1 7 5 —76. 168. Ibid., p. 176.
169. Ibid. 170. Ibid., p. 174.
17 1 . Ibid., p. i n . 172. Ibid., p. 208.
173. Ibid., p. 119 . 174. Ibid., pp. 198, 87, 210 —16.
175. Ibid., p. 30.

Queen’s Sacrifice
I. Villiers, p. 60. 2. Ibid., p. 131.
3. Ibid., p. 60. 4. Ibid., p. 133.
5. Ibid., p. 217.
6. H. Lange, “ Organisches oder mechanisches Prinzip in der Madchen-
bildung?,” in K a m p f z e it e n , II: 67.
7. Gaudig, p. 232.
8. See, e.g., Stern, P s y c h o lo g ie , pp. 25 —27.
9. Weininger, p. io f.
10. Simmel, Z u r P s y c h o lo g ie , p. 16.
I I . Grabein, p. ix.
12. Freud, “ Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” in SE, X: 157.
13. Freud, cited in Jones, II: 421.
14. Freud, “ Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in SE, VII: 120.
416 notes to pages 3 5 0 -6 1

15. Freud, I n tr o d u c to r y L e c t u r e s o n P s y c h o a n a ly s is , in SE, X V: 16.

16. Lacan, “ Radiophonie,” p. 97. “ In the discourse of the university, it is the
gap produced in which the subject vanishes for having to suppose that knowledge
has an author.”
17. H. Steinthal, cited in Kirchhoff, D i e a k a d e m is c h e F r a u , p. 216.
18. J. Scheiner, cited in Kirchhoff, ed., p. 264.
19. H. Lange, “ Organisches,” in K a m p f z e it e n , II: 73.
20. See Freud, I n tr o d u c to r y L e c t u r e s , in SE, X V: 154.
21. Ibid.
22. “ Schreiben mit der M aschine,” p. 863. On sewing machines and typewrit­
ers, see also Burghagen, p. 31.
23. Scholz, p. 15. 24. Burghagen, p. 1.
25. M . Weber, pp. 3, 5. 26. Forster-Nietzsche, p. 136.
27. Key, D a s J a h r h u n d e r t, p. 56. 28. Krukenberg, p. 38.
29. Schwabe, p. 6f.
30. See Bliven, pp. 3 —16, 69—79, for amusing historical details and the la­
conic sentence, “ There are more women working at typing than at anything else.”
31. Richards, p. 1.
32. Krukenberg, p. 38. See also the international statistics in Braun, p. 178L
33. Stoker, p. 344. Compare pp. 49—50.
34. Ibid., p. 70. O n women journalists, see Maschke, p. 26L
35. Braun, p. 197.
36. Schwabe, p. 21.
37. Stoker, p. 292.
38. This ideal portrait of Mina Harker was taken from Chew, p. 27.
39. Stoker, p. 266.
40. See Stoker, p. 9 1, as well as Freud, letter of Sept. 21, 1897, in L e t t e r s to
F lie s s , pp. 264—65.
41. See Stoker, pp. 360, 405^ and 42.
42. Ibid., p. 340.
43. Ibid., p. 37 2 .
44. Henry James, cited in Hyde, p. 277.
45. Bosanquet, pp. 243—48; see McLuhan, pp. 227—32.
46. See details in Lumbroso, p. 6zoL
47. Gilbert and Profes, in L. W. Wolff, ed., p. 59.
48. See Mallarme, O C , p. 38.
49. Bermann, in Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , p. 30.
50. Such scenes were mass produced. “ In the early fiction written with secre­
taries for heroines, the hero (a rising young executive in the firm) was usually so
impressed by his secretary’s decorum that he didn’t dare even to propose; in one
story after another he called her in and dictated a proposal, building to the climax
in which she, her eyes brimming with tears, asked ‘And to whom, Sir, is this mis­
sive to be addressed?’ ” (Bliven, p. 12).
51. See Burghagen, p. 28.
5 2. The photos of Georges Demeny, who was of course at once experimenter
and subject, were taken from Marechal, p. 406.
53. Burghagen, p. 28.
54. Bermann, in Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , pp. 3 1 - 3 3 .
55. Kafka could have read in Conan Doyle that typed love letters are not love
letters. See Conan Doyle, p. 194, and comments in Bliven, pp. 7 1, 148.
 NOTES TO PAGES 361-70 417

56. Kafka, letter of Oct. 27, 1912, in L e tte r s t o F e lic e , p. 16.

57. See Bermann, in Pinthus, K i n o b u c h , p. 33.
58. Kafka, letter of N ov. 2, 1912, in L e tte r s t o F e lic e , p. 23.
59. Kafka, letter of Dec. 21, 1912, in ibid., p. 115.
60. McLuhan, U n d e r s ta n d in g M e d ia , p. 260; also Burghagen, p. 22.
r i. Burghagen, p. 25.
62. Kafka, letter of N ov. 27, 1912, in L e tte r s to F e lic e , p. 70;see also p.149.
63. See this fascinating passage in Kafka, letter of Jan. 2 2 -2 3 , i 9 i 3j i*1
L e tte r s to F e lic e , pp. 1 6 7 —68.
64. Kafka, letter of June 26, 19 13, in ibid., p. 279.
65. For the sake of Kafka scholarship, which is not exactly well informed
about information technology, the following data is supplied: “ The Deutsche
Grammophon Aktiengesellschaft (DGA), came to occupy in Germany much the
same position as its British parent, the Gramophone Company. It dominated
the quality market. . . . Its arch-enemy in the marketplace and in the courts was the
firm of Carl Lindstrom, which, by a series of amalgamations, built up an enor­
mous local and foreign trade in instruments and motors and, by 19 13, controlled
the sale of Beka, Dacapo, Favorite, Fonotipa, Homophon, Lyrophon, Jumbo, and
Odeon records as well as its own Parlophones. . . . In the period 1 9 0 3 - 1 4 Ger­
man ingenuity was concentrated aggressively on the techniques of mass produc­
tion” (Chew, p. 38). Founded in 1896, the Lindstrom company, like many others,
vanished after the introduction of the electrical gramophone.
66. Cournot, p. 6of.
67. Heller, “ Introduction,” in Kafka, L e t te r s to F e lic e , p. vii.
68. Kafka, letter of June 2, 19 13, in ibid., p. 265.
69. Kafka, letter of July 10, 19 13, in ibid., p. 288.
70. Kafka, letter o f July 13, 19 13, in ibid., p. 289.
71. Marinetti, M a n if e s t o , in Baumgarth, p. 168.
72. Rilke, “ Primal Sound,” p. 55.
73. Ehrenstein, p. 34.
74. Doblin, “ Bemerkungen zum Roman,” in A L , p. 23.
75. Einstein, “ Anmerkungen zum Roman,” in GW , p. 54.
76. Benn, R o m a n d e s P h d n o t y p , in GW, II: 198.
77. Benn, P a lla s , in GW, I: 366.
78. Nietzsche, letter of M arch 1882, in B r ie f w e c h s e l m i t O v e r b e c k , p. 169L
79. Benn, letter of Feb. 6, 1937, in D e n T r a u e m , p. 192.
80. Benn, letter of Jan. 10, 1937, in D e n T r a u e m , pp. 184—86.
81. See Burghagen, p. 21.
82. Valery, C a h ie r s , IV: 44. Translation by Daniel Katz. [Trans.]
83. See Bliiher, p. 48L 84. Valery, ‘ M y F a u s t ,’ pp. 13, 14.
85. Riemer, pp. 164, 166. 86. See Friedlaender, pp. 1 6 9 - 7 5 .
87. Valery, ‘M y F a u s t ,’ p. 54. 88. Ibid., p. 18.
89. Ibid., p. 10. 90. Ibid., pp. 10 —11.

Afterword
1. Foucault, Archeology, pp. 126—31.
2. See Innis.
3. Shannon and Weaver, pp. 33 —35.
4. Luhmann, p. 1 1; see also pp. 1 9 —21.
4 18 NOTES TO PAGES 3 7 1 - 7 2

5. Heidegger, Nietzsche, I: 102.

6. Tietze and Schenk, p. 510.
7. Walter Benjamin, “ Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der
ropaischen Intelligenz,” in GS, II: 308.
8. Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 11.
9. Foucault, Archeology, p. 2 11.
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Zeitler, Julius. “ Tachistoskopische Untersuchungen iiber das Lesen.” Philoso-
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p
 Index of Persons
The index lists persons from the two time periods covered, together with, as far as possible,
their biographical dates and their roles in the discourse network.
Ach, Narziss ( 1 8 7 1 -1 9 4 9 ), professor of
philosophy and psychology, Gottingen,
220
Adler, Paul (18 7 8 -19 4 6 ), judge and
writer, 309
Alain (pseudonym for Emile Auguste Char-
tier, 1868—1951), professor of
philosophy, Paris, 3 28
Alewyn, Richard (19 0 2 -1 9 7 9 ), professor
of German literature, Bonn, 141
d’Anduze, Clara, troubadour, 346
Apollinaire, Guillaume (18 8 0 -19 18 ),
writer, 250—5 1, 3 i3 f
Aristotle, 33, 52, 283
Arnim, Ludwig Achim von ( 1 7 8 1 - 1 8 3 1 ) ,
estate owner and writer, 142
Arp, Hans (18 8 7 -19 6 6 ), painter, sculptor,
writer, 342 (see 4150159)
Arvers, Alexis-Felix (18 0 6 -18 50 ), writer,
283 (see 408051)
Azam , Eugene (18 2 2 -18 9 9 ), M .D ., Bor­
deaux, 355
Baggesen, Jens (17 6 4 -18 2 6 ), writer, 161
(see 395064)
Bahr, Hermann (18 6 3 -19 3 4 ), stage direc­
tor and writer, 224, 270, 275, 323 (see
4i2n78)
Ball, H ugo (18 8 6 -19 2 7 ), writer, 230 (see
40204), 302f, 3o6f, 309, 335
Basedow, Johann Bernhard (1723 —1790),
D irector of the Philanthropinum Des­
sau, 30, 33, 74, 8 7 -8 8 , 124 (see
39003), 140, 322
Baudelaire, Charles ( 1 8 2 1 -1 8 6 7 ), writer,
326
Bauer, Felice (18 8 7 -19 6 0 ), secretary, 352,
- ,
359 63 365
Becher, Johannes R. (1 8 9 1 -1 9 5 8 ), writer
and secretary of cultural affairs, 309
Beethoven, Ludwig van (17 7 0 -18 2 7 ),
composer, 45
Behrens, Peter (1868—1940), Director of
the Arts and C raft College Diisseldorf,
art consultant for Allgemeine Elektrizi-
tatsgesellschaft, 255
Benedict, M oritz (18 3 5 -19 2 0 ), neu­
rologist, 278
Benjamin, Walter (1892—1940, suicide),
Ph.D., writer, 52, 239, 261, 284, 327
Benn, Gottfried (18 8 6 -19 5 6 ), M .D ., spe­
cialist in skin and venereal diseases,
writer, 177 , 2 4 0 -4 8 , 277, 295, 3 1 0 -
11, 313C 334 (see 4140132-), 336
Berg, Alban (18 8 5 -19 3 5 ), accountant and
composer, 271
Bergk, Johann Adam (176 9 —1834), private
scholar in Leipzig, 129, 1 4 3 - 4 5 , J52,
226, 325
Bergson, Henri (1 8 5 9 -1 9 4 1 ), professor of
philosophy, Paris, 278
Berliner, Emile (18 5 1—1929), inventor and
450 INDEX
producer of gramophones, 232, 285,
298
Berlioz, Hector (1803 —1869), composer,
hi
Bermann, Richard A. (18 8 3 -19 3 9 ), Ph.D.,
journalist in Berlin, 112 , 3 5 8 -5 9
Bernhardi, August Ferdinand ( 1 7 6 9 -
1820), Director of the Friedrichswerder
Gymnasium, Berlin, 43, 7 1 , 239 (see
403041)
Bethke, Hans (1876—1946), writer, 323
(see 4i2n78)
Beyer, Johann Rudolph Gottlieb (175 6 —
1813), pastor near Erfurt, 143 (see
3^zn 65, n 67)
Beyer 'n, Angelo (1 8 5 2 -1 9 1 2 ), engineer,
Ro al Wiirttemberg court steno-
grap. t ; founder of the first German
typewriter business, 12, 195, 356
Bizet, Georges (18 3 8 -18 7 5 ), composer,
204
Bleuler, Eugen (18 5 7—1939), professor of
psychiatry, director of the psychiatric
clinic Burgholzli/Zurich, 280—81, 305,
3 3 8f
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313 —1375), 136
Bodmer, Johann Jakob (16 9 8 -17 8 3 ), pro­
fessor of Swiss history, Zurich, 3 6,
122—23
Bolsche, Wilhelm (18 6 1 -19 3 9 ), science
writer, 213, 279, 307f
Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas ( 1 6 3 6 - 1 7 1 1 ) ,
writer, 313
Bonaparte, M arie, Princess of Greece
(1869—1960), psychoanalyst, 35of
Bondi, Georg (1865—1935), publisher, 259
Bonhoeffer, Karl (18 6 8 -19 4 3 ), professor
of psychiatry, Breslau and Berlin, 310
Bopp, Franz (18 9 1 -1 9 6 7 ), professor of
general philology and oriental liter-
ture, Berlin, 3 2
Bosanquet, Theodora (1880—1961),
writer, 356—57
Brandes, Ernst (17 5 8 -18 1 0 ), privy coun­
cilor in Hanover, 26, 66
Braun, Lily (18 6 5 -19 6 2 ), suffragette/
feminist, 3 54f
Brehm, Alfred Edmund (18 2 9 -18 8 4 ),
natural scientist, 305
Breitinger, Johann Jakob (1701 — 1776),
professor of classics at the Gymnasium
in Zurich, 36
Brentano, Bettina (17 8 8 -18 5 9 ), writer,
20, 1 2 7 -3 0 , 1 3 4 - 3 5 , i 4 2, 147, 2.27,
240, 270, 3 4 3 - 4 6
Brentano, Clemens (1778 —1842), writer,
34, i2 7 f, 147, 212
Breton, Andre (18 9 6 -19 6 6 ), male nurse,
writer, 227, 239, 307, 309
Breuer, Josef (18 4 2 -19 2 5 ), M .D ., inter­
nist, Vienna, 280
Broca, Paul (1824—1880), professor of sur­
gery, founder of the anthropological
laboratory in Paris, 2 1 5f
Brod, M ax (18 8 4 -19 6 8 ), lawyer, writer,
temporary member of the Czech coun­
cil of ministers, 342, 359—62
Brown, Robert (1 7 7 3 -1 8 5 8 ), botanist,
3i 7, 356
Briicke, Ernst Wilhelm, Ritter von
(18 19 -18 9 2 ), professor of physiology,
Vienna, 279, 285
Burgerstein, Leo (18 5 3 -19 2 8 ), Ph.D.,
geologist, college teacher in Vienna,
254 (see 405M 12)
Burghagen, Otto, teacher at a commercial
school in Hamburg, 259 (see 405M 25)
Byron, George N oel Gordon, Lord
(1788—1824), writer, 209, 213
Campan, Jeanne-Louise de (17 5 2 —1822),
secretary of Marie-Antoinette, head of
the educational institute for orphans of
the Legion of Honor in Ecouen, 5 5
Campe, Johann Heinrich ( 1 7 4 6 -1 8 1 8 ),
teacher at the Philanthropinum Dessau,
schoolbook-seller, 30, 3 3 ,9 5 f, 115
Carossa, Hans (18 7 8 -19 5 6 ), M .D .,
writer, 343f
Cattell, James M cKeen (1860—1944),
assistant to W undt in Leipzig, professor
of psychology at the University of Penn­
sylvania, 222
Charcot, Jean M artin (18 2 5 -18 9 3 ), pro­
fessor of psychiatry, director of the
Salpetriere, Paris, 129, 221, 277b 356
Charousek, Rezso (1873 — 1900), Hun­
garian chess master, 347
Chodowiecki, Daniel N ikolaus (172 6 —
1801), engraver, 31, 51, 94, 140
Cicero, 137, 143
Claretie, Jules (18 4 0 -19 13 ), writer, 317
(see 4i2n6o)
Clermont, Marie-Anne de (16 9 7—174 1),
Superintendent of the Royal House­
hold, 346
Comenius, Amos (15 9 2 -1 6 7 0 ), Senior of
the Bohemian Brethren, 3 9 (see
3791152)
Conrad, Joseph (1 8 5 7 -19 2 4 ), sea captain,
writer, 364
Creuzer, Friedrich ( 1 7 7 1 - 1 8 5 8 ), professor
of classical philology, Heidelberg,
17 1-7 3

Cros, Charles (1842—1888), writer and
inventor (color photography,
phonograph), 231, 236
Czerny, Karl (179 1 — 1857), pianist, 34
Dante (1 2 6 5 -1 3 2 1 ) , 221, 359
Degas, Edgar ( 1 8 3 4 - 1 9 1 7 ), painter, 184
J"' .meny, Georges Emile Joseph (1850—
19 17), photographer, assistant of
Marey, 229, 3 59f
Desbordes-Valmore, M arceline ( 1 7 8 5 -
1859), writer, 346
Diderot, Denis ( 1 7 1 3 - 1 7 8 4 ), writer, 161
Dilthey, Wilhelm ( 1 8 3 3 - 1 9 1 1 ) , professor
of philosophy, Berlin, 249, 268, 312,
33if
Doblin, Alfred (1 8 7 8 -1 9 5 7 ), M .D ., psy­
chiatrist, and writer, 236, 341, 364
D olz, Johann Christian (17 6 9 -18 4 3 ),
director of the Ratsfreischule Leipzig,
75, 166
Donders, Frans Cornelius (18 18 -18 8 9 ),
professor of physiology, Utrecht, 222
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (18 5 9 -19 3 0 ),
physician and writer, 193, 263L 288f
Druskowitz, Helene (1 8 5 6 -1 9 1 8 ), men­
tal patient, Ph.D., Zurich, writer,
200—203
Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850—1909), pro­
fessor of psychology, Breslau, 185,
206—15, 2 18 —23, 238, 251 (see
404095), 300, 32of, 330
Eckermann, Johann Peter (17 9 2 -18 5 4 ),
Goethe’s secretary, 367
Eckmann, O tto (18 6 5 -19 0 2 ), professor at
the Berlin Arts and C raft Museum, 255
Edison, Thomas Alva (1 8 4 7 -1 9 3 1 ), in­
ventor and manufacturer, 188, 230—
3 2, 23 7 , 3 4 7 f
Ehrenstein, Albert (18 8 6 -19 5 0 ), Ph.D.,
writer, 273, 335k 364
Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von (1 7 8 8 -
1857), senior executive officer in the
Prussian M inistry of Culture, writer,
118 (see 39on46)
Einstein, Carl (18 8 5 -19 4 0 , suicide), bank
clerk and writer, 333, 364 (see 417075)
Eliot, George (pseudonym for M ary Ann
Evans, 18 19 —1880), writer, 200
Eluard, Paul (1895 — 1952), writer, 307
Erdmann, Benno ( 1 8 5 1 - 1 9 2 1 ) , professor
of philosophy, Halle and Bonn, 222f,
252, 254, 299, 348
Ernemann, Johann Heinrich (1850—1928),
inventor and manufacturer of cameras,
229
INDEX 451
Ewers, Hanns Heinz (1 8 7 1 -1 9 4 3 ), writer,
230 (see 40204), 246—47, 277
Exner, Sigmund, Ritter von (18 4 6 -19 2 6 ),
professor of physiology, Vienna, 278
Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801 — 1887),
professor of physics, Leipzig, 207, 268
(see 4 0 6 m 2), 279 (see 408033)
Felbiger, Johann Ignaz von (1724 —1788),
director of public education for the
Austrian states, 28
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (176 2 —1814), pro­
fessor of philosophy, Jena and Berlin,
i 4 5 55? i 4 3 , i 5 4 - 6 2 .
Flaischgen, Casar (18 6 4 -19 2 0 ), Ph.D.,
writer, 322
Flake, O tto (1880—1963), M .D . honoris
causa, writer, 271 (see 407027), 315 — 17
Flaubert, Gustave (18 2 1-18 8 0 ), writer,
99, 2.37
Flechsig, Paul Emil ( 18 4 7 -19 2 7 ), pro­
fessor of psychiatry, Leipzig, 279 (see
408028), 2 9 3 -9 8 , 3 0 1 - 5 , 3 io f, 313
Fleischer, Gerhard (176 9 —1849), publisher
and bookseller in Leipzig, 126
Forster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth (1846—1931),
founder of the Nietzsche Archive in
Weimar, 200, 352
Forster, Johann Georg Adam ( 1 7 5 4 -
1794), explorer and writer, 70
Foucauld, designer of typewriters, 193
Foucault, Michel (1926—1984), professor
of the history of systems of thought,
Paris, 32 (see 379021), 59 (see
382041), 9 1, 210 (see 399021), 278,
304 (see 4 1 1 m ) , 352
Fourier, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph, Baron de
(17 6 8 -18 3 0 ), mathematician and
departmental prefect, 229
Frederick II, King of Prussia ( 1 7 1 2 - 1 7 8 6 ),
39
Freud, Anna (18 9 5 -19 8 2 ), psychoanalyst,
350
Freud, Sigmund (18 5 6 -19 3 9 ), honorary
professor of neuropathology, Vienna,
psychoanalyst, 25, 120, 129, 209, 216,
221, 228, 2 7 3 -9 6 , 299L 3 0 5 -9 , 3I2f,
3 i5 f, 319, 321, 341, 350- 5^ 355>361
Friedell, Egon (pseudonym for Egon Fried­
mann, 1 8 7 8 -1 9 4 5 , suicide), Ph.D.,
actor, critic, writer, 246 (see 403070)
Friedlaender, Salomo (pseudonym M y-
nona, 18 71 — 1946), Ph.D., writer,
23if , 367 (see 417086)
Galton, Francis ( 1 8 2 2 -1 9 1 1 ), explorer,
discoverer of fingerprinting, 237
452 . INDEX
Gebsattel, Viktor Emil, Freiherr von
(18 8 3 -19 7 6 ), professor of psychology
and psychotherapy, W urzburg, 315,
319
Gedike, Friedrich (175 4 —1803), director
of the Kollnische Gymnasium in Berlin,
19 (see 377036), 61, 8 5 -8 6
Gehrmann, Karl, M .D ., physician in
Berlin, 310, 313!, 316
Geist, Johann Jakob Ludwig (17 7 6 -18 5 4 ),
Goethe’s secretary, 367
George, Stefan (18 6 8 -19 3 3 ), writer, 113 ,
201, 221, 25of, 2 5 6 -6 9 , 272, 274,
276, 342, 344, 352, 361
Gerhardt, Dagobert von (pseudonym
Amyntor, 1831 — 1910), major and
writer, 193 (see 398077)
Gleim, Betty ( 1 7 8 1 -1 8 2 7 ) , girls’ school
teacher in Bremen, 56 (see 38 1M 3), 62,
84 (see 385031), 1 4 7 -4 9
Gluck, Christoph W illibald ( 1 7 1 4 - 1 7 8 7 ),
composer, 123
Goethe, Christiane, nee Vulpius (1764—
1816), 126 (see 390012), 367
Goethe, Johann W olfgang von
(17 4 9 -18 3 2 ), 3 - 2 7 , 34, 4 1 - 4 3 , 46f,
54, 58, 6 if, 7 1 - 7 4 , 76, 83, 99, 102,
n o f , 114 , 119 , i2 8 f, 1 3 4 - 4 1 , 1 4 7 -
52, 156, 158, 160—64, i 7 i f , 177 , 18 1,
189, 214, 219, 2 3 if, 258f, 268, 270,
272, 312, 325 (see 413088), 336,
3 4 3 - 4 6 , 3 5 G 3 6 6 -6 8
Goethe, Katharina Elisabeth (1 7 3 1-18 0 8 ),
3 4 4 , 3 5° , 367
Goll, Ivan (18 9 1 -19 5 0 ), Ph.D., writer, 43
Goltz, Friedrich Leopold (1834—1902),
professor of physiology, Strassburg, 276
Gottsched, Johann Christoph (17 0 0 -
1766), professor of philosophy, Leipzig,
12 2 -2 3
Gouges, M arie Olympe de (1748?—1793),
suffragette, died under the guillotine,
66
Gravell, M aximilian Karl Friedrich
(17 8 1 -18 6 0 ), J. D ., io 3 f
Graser, Johann Baptist ( 1 7 6 6 -1 8 4 1 ), pro­
fessor of philosophy, school supervisor
in Bayreuth, 97
Grimm, Jakob (1785 — 1863), professor in
Gottingen, 32, 44, 52
Grimm, Wilhelm (17 8 6 -18 5 9 ), professor
in Gottingen, 5 2
Gross, Anton Wenzel (b. 1886; died in a
mental ward), technical draftsman, 337
Griissbeutel, Jacob, sixteenth-century pub­
lisher of spelling books, 3 8f, 45
Giinderode, Karoline von (1780—1806,
suicide), canoness and writer, 127,
i7 if, 344, 35°
Gundolf, Friedrich (pseudonym for Gun-
delfinger, 1880—1931), professor of
German literary history, Heidelberg,
263
Gutzmann, Hermann (18 6 5 -19 2 2 ), in­
structor of internal medicine, specialist
in speech disorders, Berlin, 219 (see
40on67), 220, 282
Haeckel, Ernst ( 1 8 3 4 -1 9 1 9 ), professor of
zoology, Jena, 294
Hahn, Johann Friedrich ( 1 7 1 0 -1 7 8 9 ),
general superintendent in M agdeburg,
director of the Gymnasium Aurich, 20
(see 377n38)
Hahnemann, Samuel Christian Friedrich
(17 5 5 -18 4 3 ), homeopath, personal
physician in Kothen, 27, 99 (see
387M 05)
Hall, Granville Stanley (1846—1924), pro­
fessor of psychology, Baltimore, 23 5!,
299, 32G 332
Hanstein, Adelbert von (1 8 6 1 -19 0 4 ), lit­
erary historian, 344 (see 4 i5 n i6 4 )
Hardekopf, Ferdinand (18 7 6 -1 9 5 4 , died
in a mental ward), stenographer at par­
liament, writer, 190
Hardenberg, Friedrich von (pseudonym
Novalis, 1 7 7 2 -1 8 0 1 ) , assessor of salt
works, writer, 36, 47 (see 380093), 57,
72, 79, 81, 85, 104, n o , 114 (see
389022), 1 1 8 - 2 3 , 125, 147, 154, 159,
246, 325 (see 413088)
Hart, Heinrich (18 5 5 -19 0 6 ), writer, 322f
Hartleben, Otto Erich (1864—1905),
lawyer, writer, 334—35
Hasenclever, Walter (18 9 0 -19 4 0 , suicide),
writer, 273
Hegel, Georg W ilhelm Friedrich (1770 —
1831), professor of philosophy, Heidel­
berg and Berlin, 14, 43, 46, 64k 71, 76,
i i 3 f , 146, 1 5 8 -7 0 , 192, 228 (see
4 0 1m 10), 237 (see 402030), 273, 307,
336f, 338
Heidegger, M artin (18 8 9 -19 7 6 ), professor
of philosophy, M arburg and Freiburg,
73 (see 384019), 266, 267 (see 40609)
Heinroth, Johann Christian August (1773 —
1843), professor of psychiatry, Leipzig,
294
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand
von (1 8 2 1-18 9 4 ), professor of physics,
Berlin; director of the physical-
technical institute of the Reich, 207,
222, 229, 279 (see 408030)

Hempel, Friedrich Ferdinand (17 7 8 —
1836), lawyer in Altenburg, 52
Herder, Johann Gottfried von (174 4 —
1803), general superintendent, supreme
councilor of the consistory and
preacher at the courtly church in
Weimar, 12 (see 376014), 3 7 -4 3 ,
48f, 7 1 , 73L 87, 96, xo6, 236, 249
Herzlieb, M inna (1 7 8 9 -1 8 5 6 , died in a
mental ward), 135, 270
Hesse, Hermann (1 8 7 7 -1 9 6 2 ), writer, 312
(see 411034)
Heuss, Theodor (18 8 4 -19 6 3 ), President of
the Federal Republic of Germany, 323
(see 413079), 336 (see 4140138)
Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich ( 1 7 6 4 -1 8 0 1 ),
professor of philosophy, Leipzig, 5 8f
Heym, Georg (188 7—1912), writer, 309,333
Heyne, Christian Gottlob (172 9 —1812),
professor of rhetoric, Gottingen, 158
Hille, Peter (1854—1904), bohemian,
writer, 331
Hinrichs, Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm
(1 7 9 4 -1 8 6 1 ), professor of philosophy,
Heidelberg and Halle, 17 (see 377027),
154, 158 (see 394050)
Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von (1741 —
1796), privy councilor of war and
mayor of Konigsberg, 4 1 - 4 3 , 57, 84
(see 385032), 166, 184
Hirth, Georg (1841 — 1916), publisher and
writer, 208 (see 39909), 316 (see
412057), 331 (see 4140 119)
Hobrecker, Karl (18 76—1949), librarian,
52
Hoche, Johann Gottfried (17 6 2 -18 3 6 ),
councilor of the consistory in
Halberstadt, 143 (see 392064)
Hoddis, Jacob van (18 8 7-19 4 2 ?), writer,
3°9
Holderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich
(1770 —1843), private instructor and
writer, 104, 295
Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph ( 1 7 6 6 -
1827), professor of philosophy in
Halle, 9 9 -10 0 , n o (see 38803), 223,
294, 309
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus
Wilhelm (1 7 7 6 -1 8 2 2 ), councilor of the
Superior C ourt of Justice for Berlin,
4 if, 7 7 —109, i n —15 , 1 1 9 —23,
13 6 —42, 148 (see 393090), 193 (see
398077), 219L 226, 238, 276, 285 —
87, 3 i i , 341, 348
Hofmannsthal, H ugo von (18 74 —1929),
Ph.D., writer, 43, 17 7 , 2 17 , 249, 339
Holst, Amalie (17 5 8 -18 2 9 ), educator in
INDEX 453
Hamburg and Grosstimkenberg, 5 6f,
60 (see 382050)
H olz, Arno (1863 — 1929), writer, 185 (see
397037), 220, 224L 232 (see 402014),
249
Horace, 190—9 1, 194, 323
Huber, Ludwig Ferdinand (17 6 4 -18 0 4 ),
administrative councilor at the Swabian
department of education, writer, i2 5 f
(see 3 9 0 m l, 391014), 158
Huber, Therese (17 6 4 -18 2 9 ), writer,
12 6 —27
Huelsenbeck, Richard (1892—1974), M .D.
and Ph.D., physician, psychoanalyst,
journalist, 302, 309, 318 (see 412061)
Hufeland, Christoph W ilhelm (176 2 —
1836), professor of pathology, Berlin,
27, 88 (see 386049)
Humboldt, W ilhelm von (1 7 6 7 -1 8 3 5 ),
Prussian Minister of Culture, 55k 59,
15 7, 249
Husserl, Edmund (1859—1938), professor
of philosophy, Jena and Freiburg, 225,
306 (see 41109)
Huysmans, Joris Karl (1848—1907),
writer, 399
Ickelsamer, Valentin (ca. 1500—1541?),
preacher, teacher in Erfurt and
Augsburg, 39, 45
Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig (17 7 8 -18 5 2 ),
gymnast, 52
James, Henry (18 4 3 -19 16 ), writer, 356f
James, W illiam (18 4 2 -19 10 ), professor of
psychology, Harvard, 225
Janet, Pierre (1859—1947), professor of
philosophy, Paris, 3 11
Janko, Emil von (1888—1967), writer, 302
Jensen, Wilhelm ( 1 8 3 7 - 1 9 1 1 ) , Ph.D., edi­
tor and writer, 289—92, 305
John, Ernst Karl Friedrich (17 8 8 -18 5 6 ),
Goethe’s secretary, 367
Jordan, Peter (died ca. 1536), printer in
M ainz, 39
Joyce, James (1882—1941), language
teacher and writer, 159, 246, 325
Jung, Carl Gustav ( 1 8 7 5 - 1 9 6 1 ), professor
of psychotherapy, Basel, 28of, 338
Jung, Franz (1888—1963), writer, 337 (see
4140140)
K afka, Franz (18 8 3 -19 2 4 ), J. D ., clerical
employee at a workers’ accident insur­
ance company in Prague, writer, 215,
24of, 250, 296, 306, 312, 316, 323,
337L 34G 359- 63, 367
454 INDEX
Kandinsky, Wassily (18 6 6 -19 4 4 ), lawyer,
painter, 2 16 —17
Kant, Immanuel (172 4 —1804), professor
of philosophy, Konigsberg, 14, 35,
i 54f
Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar
(17 5 7 -18 2 8 ), 22
Keller, Gottfried (18 19 -18 9 0 ), town clerk
of Zurich, writer, 76, 136, 316
Kempelen, W olfgang von (17 3 4 -18 0 4 ),
mechanic, official at the Vienna court
chamber, 49, 116 , 232
Key, Ellen (1849—1926), teacher at the
workers’ institute Stockholm, 130 (see
391030), 232, 240 (see 403043), 294,
323, 333 (see 4140124), 3 4 4 -4 6 , 352
Kirchner, Karl ( 1 7 8 7 -1 8 5 5 ), Dean of the
Fiirstenschule Pforta, 180 (see 396014)
Klages, Ludwig (1 8 7 2 -19 5 6 ), grapholo­
gist and writer, 252 (see 4040102),
2 6 2 -6 3
Kleist, Heinrich von ( 1 7 7 7 - 1 8 1 1 , suicide),
second lieutenant, writer, 41, 60 (see
382047), 104, 154
Klockenbring, Friedrich Arnold (174 2—
1795, died in a mental ward), secretary
of the chancellery for the Hanover gov­
ernment, 99
Kloden, Karl Friedrich von (178 6—1856),
director of the Friedrichswerdersche
trade school in Berlin, 92, 115 , 343
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724 —
1803), writer, 7 5 - 7 6 , 14 1, 150, 343
Koberstein, Karl August (17 9 7 -18 7 0 ),
professor of German literature at
Schulpforta, 180
Koselitz, Heinrich (pseudonym Peter Gast,
1 8 5 4 -1 9 1 8 ), composer, 2orf, 204
Kopisch, August (1 7 9 9 -18 5 3 ), writer, 343
Kraepelin, Emil (18 5 6 -19 2 9 ), professor of
psychiatry, Dorpat, Heidelberg, and
M unich, 280, 294, 305, 309, 3 11
Krauter, Friedrich Theodor (17 9 0 -18 5 6 ),
Goethe’s secretary, 367
Kronberger, M axim ilian (18 8 8 -190 4),
Gymnasium student in M unich, 250
Krug, Johann Friedrich Adolph (17 7 1 —
1843), head teacher at the public
school in Leipzig, 34 (see 379n26)
Krug, Wilhelm Traugott (17 7 0 -18 4 2 ),
professor of philosophy, Frankfurt/
Oder, Konigsberg, and Leipzig, 63 (see
383n67), 1 6 8 -7 0
Kussmaul, A dolf (18 2 2 -19 0 2 ), professor
of psychiatry, Erlangen, Freiburg, and
Strassburg, 251 (see 404n97, n99)
Labbe, Louise (15 26—1566), poetess, 346
Lacan, Jacques (19 0 1-19 8 2 ), M .D ., psy­
choanalyst, 25f (see 3 7 8 m , n3), 34, 64
(see 38 3n7i), 80, 134 (see 3 9 1 ^ 7 ) ,
246 ,24 9, 350
Lang, Karl Heinrich Ritter von (176 4 —
1835), district director in Ansbach, 52
Langbehn, Julius ( 1 8 5 1 -1 9 0 7 ), Ph.D., pri­
vate scholar, 276 (see 4 0 7 m 5)
Lange, Helene (18 6 4 -19 4 8 ), chair of the
General Association of German Women
Teachers, 198 (see 398n98, n.99)
Lange-Eichbaum, Wilhelm (18 7 5 -19 5 0 ),
M .D . and Ph.D., psychiatrist in Berlin
and Hamburg, n o
Lanson, Gustave (18 5 7 -19 3 4 ), professor
of literary history, Paris, 342!
Larisch, Rudolf Edler von (18 5 6 -19 3 6 ),
professor at the imperial and royal arts
and crafts school in Vienna, 2 5 5 - 5 7 ,
259
Lasker-Schiiler, Else (18 6 9 -19 4 5 ), poet­
ess, 273
Lautensack, Heinrich (1881 — 1919, died in
a mental ward), writer, 247
Lechter, M elchior (1 8 6 5 -19 3 7 ), painter
and book artist, 250, 259!
Leporin, Dorothea Christina (1715 —
1762), Ph.D., 62
Lespinasse, Julie de (173 2 —1776), salon
lady, 346
Lessing, G otthold Ephraim ( 1 7 2 9 - 1 7 8 1 ),
writer, 27, 35, 49, 62, 114 , 230
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (174 2 —
i 7 9 9 h professor of physics, Gottingen,
95, 1 0 1 - 2 , 16 1, 237 (see 402n3o)
Liliencron, Detlev von (18 4 4 -19 0 9 ), army
captain and writer, 220
Lindau, Paul (18 3 9 -19 1 9 ), editor, theater
director, writer, 193, 248, 259
Lindstrom, Carl (18 6 9 -19 3 3 ), Swedish
designer of phonographs, 3 6 1 - 6 2
Liscov, Christian Ludwig (17 0 1—1760),
member of Saxony war council, satirist,
44, 210, 213
Loeben, Ferdinand August Otto Heinrich
G raf von (17 8 6 -18 2 5 ), writer, 44, 73
(see 384M 7), 85, 121
Londe, Albert ( 1 8 5 8 -1 9 1 7 ), director of
the laboratory at the Salpetriere, in­
ventor of the Rolleiflex camera, 277
Louise (17 7 6 —1810), Queen of Prussia, 57
Luden, Heinrich (17 8 0 -18 4 7 ), professor
of history, Jena, 165, 376
Lukacs, Georg (1 8 8 5 -1 9 7 1 ), philosopher,
minister of culture, 159

Lumiere, Auguste (18 6 2 -19 5 4 ), ffim
manufacturer, 188, 229
Lumiere, Louis (18 6 4 -19 4 8 ), film manu­
facturer, 188, 229
Luther, M artin (14 8 3 -15 4 6 ), religious re­
former, 10, 20, 7 1 , 74
M ach, Ernst ( 1 8 3 8 -19 16 ), professor of
physics, Graz; professor of philosophy,
Vienna, 2 17 (see 4oon6o), 3 11
M cLuhan, Herbert M arshall (19 11 —
1980), director of the Toronto Center
for Culture and Technology, 1 15 , 259
M aelzel, Johann Nepom uk (1 7 7 2 -18 3 8 ),
mechanic, inventor of the metronome,
49, 232
M allarm e, Stephane (1842—1898), English
teacher at a lycee in Paris, 184L 190,
192 (see 397073, 195 (see 398n85),
199, 210, 213, 250—51, 262f, 358,
361, 367
M ailing Hansen, Hans Rasmus Johan
(1835 — 1890), pastor, director of an
institute for the deaf and dumb in
Copenhagen, maker of typewriters,
1 9 3 -9 4 , 2 5 9 -6 0 , 365
M ann, Heinrich (1 8 7 1 -1 9 5 0 ) , writer, 364
M ann, Thomas (1875 — 1955), doctor hon­
oris causa, writer, 248, 286, 364
M arey, Etienne-Jules (1830—1904), pro­
fessor of natural history at the College
de France, Paris, president of the
French photographic society, 229
M arinetti, Emilio Filippo Tommaso
(18 76—1944), writer, 224 (see
401087), 363
M arx, Karl (18 18 -18 8 3 ), Ph.D., econo­
mist, 61 (see 383056), 107
M aupassant, Guy de (18 5 0 -18 9 3 ), gov­
ernment official, writer, 251 (see
404n99), 337 (see 4 14 0 14 1), 357
Mauthner, Fritz (18 4 9 -19 2 3 ), editor and
writer, 185 (see 397037), 240, 3 11
May, Karl (1842—1912), writer, 181
M ayer, Karl (1862—1936), professor of
psychiatry, Innsbruck, 279—81, 287
M eierotto, Johann Heinrich Ludwig
(17 4 2 -18 0 0 ), dean of the Joachimsthal
Gymnasium, Berlin, 150
M enzel, W olfgang (1798 —1873), teacher
in Aarau, editor in Heidelberg and
Stuttgart, 91 (see 386n69), 142 (see
392ny9), 179 (see 396nio)
M ercoeur, Elisa (1809—1835), writer, 346
M ereau, Sophie ( 1 7 6 1 -1 8 0 6 ), writer, 172
Meringer, Rudolf (1859—193 1), professor
INDEX 455
of Sanskrit and comparative philology,
Vienna, 279, 287
Mesmer, Franz Anton ( 1 7 3 3 - 1 8 1 5 ), mag-
netizer, 170
Messmer, Oskar (b. 1878), professor at the
teachers’ training college in Rorschach,
254, 260
Meumann, Ernst (1862—1915), professor
of pedagogy, Zurich, 254 (see 4050110,
nm )
M eyer, Joseph (179 6 —1856), publisher
and bookseller, founder of the biblio­
graphical institute, 305
M eyrink, Gustav (1868—1932), banker,
writer, 323, 347
M obius, Paul (1853 — 1907), M .D ., psychi­
atrist in Leipzig, 347
M orike, Eduard (18 0 4 -18 7 5 ), pastor in
Cleversulzbach, teacher of literature at
an all-girls’ school in Stuttgart, 343
M onet, Claude (1840—1926), painter, 17 7
Morgenstern, Christian (1871 — 1914),
writer, 2 1 1 - 1 2 , 234—36, 250 (see
404091), 256—59, 267k 2 7 if , 275J,
305, 330
M oritz, Karl Philipp (17 5 6 —1793), teacher
at the Philanthropinum in Dessau and
at the military orphanage in Potsdam;
assistant principal at the Gymnasium
zum Grauen Kloster in Berlin, 29, 47k
7 6 -8 3 , 97, 107 (see 3880132), 115
(see 389031), 170, 343
M orris, W illiam (1834—1896), designer
and writer, 256, 260
M ozart, W olfgang Amadeus (175 6 —179 1),
composer, 300
M unch, Paul G eorg (b. 1877), public
school teacher in Leipzig, 330—33
Miinsterberg, Hugo ( 1 8 6 3 -1 9 1 6 ), pro­
fessor of psychology, Freiburg and
Harvard, 225k 230, 246, 249 (see
404088), 261 (see 4050137), 3o8f, 324
(see 413085)
M uschg, Walter (18 6 2 -19 6 5 ), professor of
German literary history, Basel, 285,
287
M usil, Robert (18 8 0 -19 4 2 ), Ph.D., engi­
neer and writer, 342
M uybridge, Eadweard J. (1830—1904),
landscape photographer, 229, 277
M yers, Frederic W illiam Henry (1843 —
1901), co-founder of the London
Society for Psychical Research, 225
Napoleon ( 1 7 6 9 - 1 8 2 1 ), Emperor of
France, 21, 55, 357
456 INDEX
Niemeyer, August Hermann (17 5 4 -1 8 2 8 ),
professor of theology and director
of an orphanage in Halle, 30, 46 (see
380090, n 9 i), 97 (see 387088)
Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel (1766—
1848), central school councilor and
instructor at the Bavarian Department
of the Interior, 42 (see 380072), 60 (see
382044), 62 (see 383061), 1 4 5 - 4 6 ,
152
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844—
1900), professor of classical philology,
Basel, 13 (see 377018), 18, 54k 67, 94,
143, 1 7 7 -2 0 5 , 2 0 6 -8 , 2 11 , 216, 2 l8 f,
221, 224L 233, 240, 243, 251, 26of,
269, 294, 303J 316, 323, 336k 341,
35 2j 357 >365k 367
Novalis, see Hardenberg, Friedrich von
Oest, Johann Friedrich ( 1 7 5 5 -1 8 1 5 ) , pri­
vate instructor, 95
Olivier, Ludwig Heinrich Ferdinand
(175 9 —1815), teacher at the Phi-
lanthropinum in Dessau, 33, 37, 44,
66, 87 (see 386046), 97
Ollendorff, Heinrich (18 0 3 -18 6 5 ), in­
ventor of the language laboratory, 234
Ostermai, Oskar, public school teacher in
Dresden, 332, 338
Overbeck, Franz (18 37—1905), professor
of theology, Basel, 365
Pappenheim, Bertha von (18 5 9 -19 3 6 ),
writer, 2 8 5 -8 7
Paulhan, Frederic ( 1 8 5 6 -1 9 3 1 ), philoso­
pher, 271 (see 407027)
Paulsen, Friedrich (1846—1908), professor
of philosophy and pedagogy, Berlin, 19
(see 377032, 033)
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849—1936), pro­
fessor of physiology at the academy of
military medicine in Leningrad, 244
Penzenkuffer, Christian Wilhelm Friedrich
(176 8 -18 2 8 ), college instructor, 23
(see 378053, 054), 59 (see 382041),
153 (see 393032)
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (17 4 6 -18 2 7 ),
director of educational institutions and
teacher training colleges, 27, 31, 48,
5 3 - 5 5 , 67, 108 (see 38802), 115
Pierre, designer of typewriters, 193
Pink Floyd (19 6 5 -19 8 6 ), rock band, 55
(see 3 8 in io ), 332 (see 4140122)
Pinthus, Kurt (18 8 6 -19 7 5 ), reader of
manuscripts, stage director, 246 (see
4 ° 4 n7 4 ), 2735 2.77, 358
Plato, 131
Pohlmann, Johann Paul (176 0 -18 4 8 ),
teacher in Erlangen, 81 —82, 106, 166,
2-55
Prel, Karl Freiherr Du (18 3 9 -18 9 9 ), pri­
vate scholar, 199 (see 3980102), 294
Preyer, Wilhelm ( 1 8 4 1 -1 8 9 7 ), professor of
physiology, Jena, 215 (see 400043),
228 (see 401M 09), 254 (see 4050112),
261 (see 4050140), 263 (see 4050x46)
Proust, Adrien (1834—1903), M .D ., 315
Proust, M arcel (1 8 7 1 -1 9 2 2 ), writer, 314,
3 17, 321, 325
Rank, O tto (18 8 4 -19 3 9 ), Ph.D., psycho­
analyst, 277, 321
Rask, Rasmus Kristian (17 8 7 —1832),
professor of oriental languages,
Copenhagen, 32
Raumer, Friedrich Ludwig Georg von
(1 7 8 1 -1 8 7 3 ) , professor of political
science, Berlin, 52
Ree, Paul (18 4 9 -19 0 1), philosopher, 193
Reil, Johann Christian (1 7 5 9 - 1 8 1 3 ), pro­
fessor of psychiatry in Halle and Berlin,
99, 116 (see 389037), 183 (see 396028,
029), 283 (see 408051), 294, 309, 326
Remington, Philo (18 16 -18 8 9 ), manufac­
turer (arms, sewing machines,
typewriters), 193, 352
Reventlow, Franziska Duchess of
( 1 8 7 1 -1 9 1 8 ), writer, 349
Ribot, Theodule (18 3 9 -19 2 6 ), professor
of psychology at the College de France,
Paris, 303 (see 4100138), 3 x1, 337 (see
4140141)
Richter, Jean Paul (17 6 3 -18 2 5 ), elemen­
tary school teacher, writer, 19, 96,
1 1 0 - 1 2 , 114 , 144k 190 (see 397064)
Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm (17 7 4 —1845),
college professor in Weimar, 367
Rilke, Rainer M aria (18 7 5 -19 2 6 ), writer,
190, 221, 233, 271 (see 407027), 281,
283 (see 408051), 313, 3 1 5 - 3 6 , 34of,
3 4 5 -4 6 , 363f
Rivarol, Antoine de (1753 — 1801), jour­
nalist, 36
Robespierre, M aximilien (1758 —1794,
under the guillotine), politician, 162
Rochow, Friedrich Eberhard von ( 1 7 3 4 -
1805), officer, estate owner, and
founder of public schools, 20, 166
Roder-Wiederhold, Louise, secretary, 199,
227
Rohde, Erwin (1845 — 1898), professor of
classical philology, Leipzig and

Heidelberg, 1 7 1 - 7 2 (see 3951198,
m o o , 11104)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ( 1 7 1 2 —1778),
writer, 40 (see 3791162), 52, 74, 77,
298
Rowohlt, Ernst (188 7—1960), publisher,
361
Ifubiner, Ludw ig (18 8 1—192o), editor and
writer, 3 4 1 - 4 2
Rudolphi, Caroline (17 5 4 —18 11), girls’
school teacher in Heidelberg, 57 (see
381021), i4 7 f
Riickert, Friedrich (17 8 8 -18 6 6 ), professor
of oriental philology, Erlangen, 343
Sachs, Heinrich (b. 1863), M .D ., instructor
in Breslau, 216 (see 400054), 219 (see
40on68), 315 (see 412048), 3 17 (see
412059)
Salis, M eta von (1855 —1929), Ph.D.,
writer, Zurich, 200
Salome, Lou von (1861 — 1937), writer and
psychoanalyst, 20of, 312, 350
Sartre, Jean-Paul (19 0 5 -19 8 0 ), college
teacher of philosophy, writer, 237,
245
Saussure, Ferdinand de ( 1 8 5 7 - 1 9 1 3 ), pro­
fessor of comparative and historical
Indogermanic philology, Geneva, 12
(see 376016), 189, 2 i6 f, 2 5 3 - 5 5 , 277
Scharrelmann, Heinrich (18 7 1 -19 4 0 ),
dean of the Comprehensive School,
Bremen, 322^ 328f
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
(1775 — 1854), professor of philosophy
in M unich and Berlin, 1 5 7 —60, i68 f,
3 68
Schiller, Friedrich von (17 5 9 -18 0 5 ), pro­
fessor of history, Jena, 3f, 14, 40, 47,
104, 147, 152, 15 6 —59, 16 2 —63, 167L
170, i8 o f, 238, 283, 301, 339, 346
Schirnhofer, Resa von (1 8 5 5 -1 9 4 5 ),
Ph.D., writer, Zurich, 200, 227
Schlegel, August W ilhelm (1 7 6 7 -1 8 4 5 ),
professor of literature, Bonn, 43, 47,
112 , 161
Schlegel, Dorothea^ «ee Mendelssohn, div.
Veit, 6 5 -6 8 , 124L 129L 198
Schlegel, Friedrich (17 7 2 —1829), instruc­
tor of philosophy, Jena; Austrian
legation councilor, 20 (see 377043),
6 3 - 7 0 , 79, 84, 10 1, 1 1 7 (see 389043),
123 — 26, 141 (see 392n58), 149!, 155,
159, i 6 i f , 197, 28yf
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel
(1768—1834), professor of theology,
INDEX 457
Berlin, 26, 31, 52, 59 (see 3 8 2 ^ 3 ),
139, 1 52—53»249, 254>258
Schlozer, Dorothea (1770 —1825), Ph.D.,
63
Schonberg, Arnold (1874—19 5 1), com­
poser, 210, 244, 276
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788—1860), lec­
turer in philosophy, Berlin, 167 (see
395083), 307
Schreber, Daniel Gottlieb M oritz (1808 —
1861), director of the orthopedic clinic
Leipzig, 291, 29 6f
Schreber, Daniel Paul ( 1 8 4 2 - 1 9 1 1 ) , J. D.,
president of the senate at the Higher
Regional C ourt Dresden, 220 (see
401072), 2 9 0 - 3 1 1 , 313, 328, 337k
354
Schuchardt, Johann Christian (1799—
1870), registrar in Weimar, G oethe’s
secretary, 367
Schwarz, Friedrich Henrich Christian
(176 6 —1837), girls’ school teacher, 60
(see 382046), 146, 148 (see 393091)
Schwitters, Kurt (188 7—1948), draftsman,
writer, 249
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (17 9 2 -18 2 2 ), writer,
200
Simmel, Georg (1858 — 1918), professor of
philosophy, Strassburg and Berlin,
270L 288, 316, 349
Soennecken, Friedrich (1848—1919), com­
mercial councilor, manufacturer of
stationery and office supplies, 254f
Solomons, Leon M ., 214 (see 400037),
226—29
Sophocles, 165, 188
Spallanzani, Lazzaro (172 9 —1799), pro­
fessor in Reggio and Pavia, discoverer
of artificial insemination, 42, 116 , 348
Spengler, Oswald (18 8 0 -19 3 6 ), Ph.D.,
private scholar, 225
Spiess, Christian Heinrich (1755 —1799),
actor and writer, n of
Spinoza, Baruch de (1632—1677), philoso­
pher, i y f
Splittegarb, Karl Friedrich (1753 — 1802),
theologian, director of a boys’ school in
Berlin, 29, 51, 87
Stadler, Ernst ( 1 8 8 3 -19 14 ), professor of
German literature, Brussels and
Strassburg, writer, 342
Stampa, Gaspara (15 2 3 -1 5 5 4 ), poetess,
346
Steig, Reinhold ( 1 8 5 7 -1 9 1 8 ), professor of
German literary history, 128
Stein, Gertrude (18 74—1946), writer, 214
458 INDEX
(see 4001137), 2 2 5 -2 9 , 236, 239, 271
(see 4071127), 302, 304 (see 41 m 2),
35 7
Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom
und zum (17 5 7 —1831), Prussian minis­
ter, 55, 58
Steiner, Rudolf (1861 — 1925), founder of
anthroposophy, 234, 272, 278
Steinthal, Hajim (18 2 3 -18 9 9 ), professor
of general philology, Berlin, 350
Stephani, Heinrich (17 6 1-18 5 0 ), Bavarian
church and school councilor, 2 7 -4 0 ,
4 9 - 5 U 59, 78, 8 1 -8 5 , 88, 9 3 -9 4 , 97
(see 387089), 98, 1x5 , 1 2of, i6 6 f, 2 11 ,
214, 232, 255, 258, 261, 281
Stern, William (1 8 7 1 -1 9 3 8 ), professor of
psychology, Breslau, Hamburg, U.S.A.,
237 , 3 2° , 343 (see 4 150 16 1)
Stoker, Bram (1 8 4 7 -1 9 1 2 ), journalist, the­
ater manager, writer, 196, 3 5 3 -5 6
Stramm, August ( 1 8 7 4 -1 9 1 5 ) , Ph.D.,
postal councilor, army captain, writer,
190—91
Stransky, Erwin (18 7 7 -19 6 2 ), professor,
psychiatrist in Vienna, 238—41, 280,
300, 355
Strauss, Emil (18 6 6 -19 6 0 ), writer, 27of
Surkamp, Ernst, manufacturer of phono­
graphs, 233
Siivern, Johann Wilhelm (1 7 5 5 -18 2 9 ),
professor of philology, Konigsberg;
privy councilor in the Prussian Ministry
of Culture, 59 (see 382040), 153
Swift, Jonathan (1 6 6 7 -1 7 4 5 ), dean in
Dublin, writer, 45
Thiersch, Friedrich (1784—1860), pro­
fessor of classical philology, Munich;
founder of the philologists’ conferences,
150
Tieck, Johann Ludwig (17 7 3 -1 8 5 3 ),
writer, 5 2 - 5 3 , n o , 116 , 136, 144
Tiedemann, Dietrich (174 8 -18 0 3 ), pro­
fessor of philosophy, M arburg, ro (see
376n8), 49, i n , 211
Tillich, Ernst (178 0 -18 0 7 ), boys’ school
teacher in Leipzig and Dresden, 4 6 -4 8 ,
78
Tissot, Simon Andre ( 1 7 2 8 -1 7 9 7 ), physi­
cian in Lausanne, 95
Tobler, Johann Christoph ( 1 7 5 7 - 1 8 1 2 ),
theologian, 25 (see 378n2), 35, 68 (see
3831179)
Trapp, Ernst Christian ( 1 7 4 5 -1 8 1 8 ), pro­
fessor in Halle, member of the school
council in Braunschweig, 97
Turk, Karl W ilhelm Christian Ritter von
(17 7 4 —1846), Prussian senior executive
officer and school councilor, 36 (see
379n34), 44 (see 380083), 55 (see
3 8 1 m l) , 57 (see 38 M 21), 65 (see
383073), 81 (see 385012)
Twain, M ark (pseudonym of Samuel Lang-
horne Clemens, 1 8 3 5 -1 9 1 0 ), journalist
and writer, 193, 259
Tzara, Tristan (pseudonym of S. Rosen-
stein, 1896—1963), writer, 302
Underwood, John T. (1 8 5 7 -1 9 3 7 ), de­
signer of typewriters, 195, 224, 296
Urzidil, Johannes (1896—1970), press at­
tache, writer, 309
Valery, Paul (1 8 7 1 -1 9 4 5 ) , writer, 268 (see
4 °6 n i3 ), 339, 364, 3 6 5 - 6 7
Varnhagen, Rahel Antonie Friederike
( 1 7 7 1 - 1 8 3 3 ), 129L 135, 344
Vetterlein, Christian Friedrich Rudolph
(17 5 9 —1842), dean of the Latin school
in Kothen, 149
Villaume, Peter (174 6 —1825), D. Theol.,
professor of philosophy at the
Joachimsthal Gymnasium, Berlin, 107,
178 (see 39606)
Villiers de l’lsle-Adam, Philippe Auguste
Mathias, Compte de (18 40 -18 8 9),
writer, 2 3 0 -3 2 , 272 (see 407032), 283
(see 408051), 315 (see 412050),
3 4 7 - 4 8 , 349
Voss, Christian Daniel (1761 — 1821), pro­
fessor of philosophy, Halle, 57 (see
381022), 153
Voss, Johann Heinrich ( 1 7 5 1 -1 8 2 6 ),
writer, 149
Vulpius, Christian August (176 2 —1827),
librarian in Weimar, writer, 160
W aetzoldt, Stephan (18 4 9 -19 0 4 ), under­
secretary in the Prussian M inistry of
Culture, 2 6jt
Wagenseil, Johann Christoph ( 1 6 3 3 -
1705), professor in Altdorf, 1 1 7
Wagner, Cosima (18 3 7 -19 3 0 ), Ph.D. hon­
oris causa, 201
Wagner, Richard (18 13 -18 8 3 ), composer
and writer, 78f, 116 , 189, 204, 293,
355
Walden, Herwarth (pseudonym of Georg
Levin, 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 4 1 ) , editor and writer,
185 (see 397037)
Walser, Robert (18 7 8 -19 5 6 ), writer, 342
Weber, Samuel M ., M .D ., director of the

psychiatric clinic, Sonnenstein, 296 (see
4100105), 303
Weber, M arianne (1870—1954), chair­
woman of the League of German
Women’s Associations, 352
Wedag, Friedrich Wilhelm (17 5 8 -17 9 9 ),
reformed preacher in Dortmund and
Leir- /g, 27
We Cmeyer, Fferta von, married Benn
( 1 9 0 7 -1 9 4 5 , suicide), 365
Weininger, O tto (18 8 0 -19 0 3 , suicide),
Ph.D., 320 (see 412066), 348—49
Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb (17 8 4 -18 6 8 ),
professor of philology, Giessen, G ot­
tingen, and Bonn, 149
Werfel, Franz (18 9 0 -19 4 5 ), writer, 273,
342
Werner, Zacharias (1768 —1823), secretary
of war and crown lands, writer, 77
Wernicke, Karl (18 4 8 -19 0 5 ), professor of
psychiatry, Breslau, 2 15 k 295
Wertheimer, M ax (1880—1943), professor
of psychology, Berlin, Frankfurt/Main,
N ew York, 192
Wieland, Christoph M artin ( 1 7 3 3 - 1 8 1 3 ),
professor in Erfurt, educator to the
prince, writer, 52, 158
INDEX 459
Wilde, Oscar (1854-190 0 ), writer, 339k
364
Wildenbruch, Ernst von (1845-190 9),
legation councilor, writer, 235—37,
246k 286, 362
Wilhelm II (1859—1941), German Em­
peror, 185, 235
Willis, Thomas (16 2 2 -16 7 5 ), professor of
natural history, Oxford, 99
W olf, Friedrich August (17 5 9 -18 2 4 ), pro­
fessor of philosophy, pedagogy, and
rhetoric, Halle and Berlin, 59, 92, 94,
114
Wolke, Christian Heinrich (1741 — 1825),
teacher at the Philanthropinum in Des­
sau, Imperial Russian Aulic Concilor,
27, 50 (see 381M 09)
W undt, Wilhelm (1832—1920), professor
of philosophy in Leipzig, director of the
Institute of Experimental Psychology, 222
Zech, Paul (1881 — 1946), writer, 273, 309
Ziehen, Theodor (18 6 2 -19 5 0 ), professor
of psychiatry, Berlin; director of the
Charite, 184 (see 3 9 6 ^ 2 ), 205 (see
3990117), 216, 220—21, 242f, 279,
3° 3, 3i i , 33i
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kittler, Friedrich A.
[Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. English]
Discourse networks 1800/1900 / Friedrich A. Kittler; translated
by Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens; foreword by David E.
Wellbery.
p. cm.
Translation of: Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 0-8047-1616-1 (cl.): isbn 0-8047-2099-1 (pbk.)
1. German literature— 19th century— History and criticism.
2. German literature— 20th century— History and criticism. 3. Books
and reading in literature. 4.Authorship. 5. Books and reading—
Germany— History— 19th century. 6.Books and reading— Germany—
History— 20th century. 7. Literature and society— Germany—
History— 19th century. 8. Literature and society— Germany—
History— 20th century. I. Title.
PT345.K5813 1990 89-26291
83°-9'357— dC2° cip

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