No More Learning

These necessities are obliterated by the possibility of technological sound storage. It suddenly becomes superfluous to employ a rhythmical tick-tock (as in Greece) or rhyme (as in Europe) to endow words with a duration beyond their evanescence. Edison's talking machine stores the most disordered sentence atoms and its cylinders transport them over the greatest distances. The poet Charles Cros may have immortalized the in- vention of his phonograph, precisely because he was never able to build it, in lyrical rhymes under the proud title "Inscription"-Wildenbruch, that plain consumer, is in a different position. "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" no longer requires any poetic means. Rather than dying and fading away, his voice reaches one of today's engineers. Technology triumphs over mnemotechnology. And the death bell tolls for poetry, which for so long had been the love of so many.
Under these circumstances writers are left with few options. They can, like Mallarme or Stefan George, exorcise the imaginary voices from between the lines and inaugurate a cult of and for letter fetishists, in which case poetry becomes a form of typographically optimized black- ness on exorbitantly expensive white paper: un coup de des or a throw of the dice. 120 Or for marketing reasons they can move from imaginary voices, such as those Anna Pomke had hallucinated in Goethe's verses, to real ones, in which case a poetry of nameless songwriters appears, or reappears, on records. Illiterates in particular are their prime consumers, because what under oral conditions required at least some kind of mnemotechnology is now fully automatized. "The more complicated the technology, the simpler," that is, the more forgetful, "we can live. "121 Records turn and turn until phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology. We all know hits and rock songs by heart precisely because there is no reason to memorize them anymore.
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To provide a demographically exact account of White-Collar Work- ers, including their nocturnal activities, Siegfried Kracauer becomes ac- quainted with a typist, "for whom it is characteristic that she cannot hear a piece of music in a dance hall or a suburban cafe without chirping along its text. But it is not as if she knows all the hits; rather, the hits know her, they catch up with her, killing her softly. "122
Only two years or steps separate this sociology "from the newest Germany" from fictional heroes such as those in Irmgard Keun's Rayon Girl of 1932, who (obviously under the influence of Kracauer) turn into poets (and in Berlin into prostitutes) when listening to the gramophone or the radio. For it is not the typewriter, in front of which the rayon em- ployee Doris spends her days, that turns an entertainment consumer into a producer. Only when she and her current lover hear "music from the ra- dio" and listen to "Vienna, My One and Only" does she "feel like a poet" who "can also rhyme, . . . if only up to a point. " 123 And if "a gramo- phone next door" should be playing in the moonlight, "something won- derful takes hold of her": listening to a hit, Doris first of all has the feel- ing "of making a poem" and then decides to write an autobiography or even a novel.
I think it is good when I describe everything, because I am an uncommon person. I am not thinking of a diary-that would be ridiculous for an up-to-date girl of eighteen. But I want to write like a movie, because that's the way my life is and it will soon be more so. . . . And when I read it later, it will be like a movie-I will see myself in images. 124
Entertainment novels (including Keun's) describe their own medial con- ditions of production with great precision. The medium of the gramo- phone has as its effect a type of poetry that is nothing but the inside of its outside. Skipping all textuality it jumps straight into the medium of film.
My heart is a gramophone, playing excitedly with a sharp needle in my breast. . . . From the movies comes music, records that are passing on human voices. And all are singing . . . 125
Novels that flow from hits in order to end in movies are part of the "lit- erature of nonreaders" reviewed in 1926 by, of all journals, Die liter- arische Welt:
This, the literature of nonreaders, is the most widely read literature in the world. Its history has not yet been written. Nor do I feel quite up to the task myself. I would simply like to make reference to one of its branches: poetry. For the litera- ture of nonreaders, like "our" own, has a special category for poetry.
8 2 Gramophone
Every couple of weeks there is a survey: "Who is the most beloved poet of the year? " Every time, the question is answered incorrectly. The ones we know are not even considered. Neither Rilke nor Casar Flaischlen, not Goethe, and not Gottfried Benn. Rather, Fritz Griinbaum ("When You Can't, Let Me Do It! "), Schanzer and Welisch ("If You See My Aunt"), Beda ("Yes, We Have No Ba- nanas"), Dr. Robert Katscher ("Madonna, You Are More Beautiful than the Sun- shine)"-and who else? A lot more-before Flaischlen, Rilke and Benn come up.
"The 222 Newest Hits"-that is the most popular poetry anthology of all. The contents are revised and expanded every two months. And the whole thing costs just ten cents. Here there is only one genuine type of poem: the love poem. Girls, women, females-other topics are not favored. 126
Even if all the names on both sides of the debate have long since changed, this remains a very exact appraisal. With the invention of tech- nical sound storage, the effects that poetry had on its audience migrate to the new lyrics of hit parades and charts. Their texts would rather be anonymous than deprived of royalties, their recipients illiterate rather than deprived of love. At the same time, however, media technology's pre- cise differentiation brings about a modern poetry that can do without all supplementary sensualities ranging from song to love because-accord- ing to a remark of Oscar Wilde's as ironic as it is appropriate-it is not read. 127 And this remains the case even when Rilke plans poetic coronal suture phonography or Benn writes poems that consciously set themselves apart from the entertainment industry. For Benn's poems can merely note but not verify that records and movies are part of a present that outpaces our cultural critics. Otherwise, his poems would be as successful, anony- mous, and forgotten as the hits they sing about:
A popular hit is more 1950
than five hundred pages of cultural crisis.
At the movies, to which you can take along hat and coat, there is more firewater than in the cothurnus
and without the annoying intermission. 128
Lowbrow and highbrow culture, professional technology and profes- sional poetry: the founding age of modern media left us with those two options. Wildenbruch's third way was eliminated. "So listen to the sound of what I declare, and Ernst von Wildenbruch's soul will be laid bare," the imperial state poet rhymed, as if one could simultaneously speak into technological machines and claim an immortal name. From sound back to poem, from poem back to soul-that is the impossible desire to reduce the real (the physiology of a voice) to the symbolic, and the symbolic
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(an articulated speech) to the imaginary. The wheel o f media technology cannot be turned back to retrieve the soul, the imaginary of all Classic- Romantic poetry. What effectively remains of Wildenbruch in "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" is nothing but noise, posthumous already during his lifetime. Record grooves dig the grave of the author. Wildenbruch pulls out all the stops of the imaginary and the symbolic, of his immortal soul and his aristocratic name, so as not to have to speak of his speaking body. "By virtue of our bodies," Paul Zumthor's theory of oral poetry states, "we are time and place: the voice, itself an emanation of our physicality, does not cease to proclaim it. "129 Upon replaying the old cylinder of r 897, it is a corpse that speaks.
Between or before lowbrow and highbrow culture, between hit records and experimental poetry, there is only one third party: science. When Wildenbruch spoke into the bell-mouth, the phonograph stored indices rather than poems. And these indices speak precisely to the extent that their sender cannot manipulate them. The poet performing "The Phono- graphic Recording of His Voice" seemed at least to have been aware of this: because "the sound of the voice can never lie," its technological stor- age reveals the "hidden" and makes the "past"-the corpse of a Wilden- bruch or a Goethe-speak.
Edison saw his phonograph "pressed into the detective service and used as an unimpeachable witness" 130 in court. With technological media, a knowledge assumes power that is no longer satisfied with the individ- ual universals of its subjects, their self-images and self-representations- these imaginary formations-but instead registers distinguishing particu- lars. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown in "Clues and Scientific Method," this new knowledge rules Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes, that is, aes- thetics, psychoanalysis, and criminology. However, Ginzburg fails to see that the shift in technologies of power simply follows the switch from writing to media. Books had been able to store and convey the imaginary corporeal self-images entertained by individuals. But unconsciously treacherous signs like fingerprints, pitch, and foot tracks fall into the purview of media without which they could neither be stored nor evalu- ated. Francis Galton's dactyloscope and Edison's phonograph are con- temporaneous allies.
Wildenbruch appears to have suspected as much, or else his verses would not refer to the phonograph as the soul's own true photograph. His paranoia is justified. A phonographically recorded state poet no longer enters a pantheon of immortal writers but rather one of the countless
? ? 84 Gramophone
Proroype of receiver (Bell & Clarke, 1874).
evidence-gathering agencies that since 1880 have been controlling our so- called social behavior, that is, all the data and signs that are by necessity beyond our control. The good old days in which a self-controlled and "flattering" face could "fool" eyes equally bereft of media are over. Rather, all the sciences of trace detection confirm Freud's statement that "no mortal can keep a secret" because "betrayal oozes out of him at
Gramophone 8 5
every pore. "131 And because (we may add) since 1880, there has been a storage medium for each kind of betrayal. Otherwise there would be no unconsclOUS.
In 1908, the psychologist William Stern publishes a "Summary of De- position Psychology. " This new science is designed to cleanse the oral de- positions of court protocols, medical reports, personal files, and school re- ports from all guile and deceit on the part of the speakers. Old European, that is to say, literary, means of power are not immune from deception. Whether for criminals or for the insane, the traditional "stylized deposi- tions often produce a false impression of the examination and obscure the psychological significance of individual statements. " As each answer "is, from the point of view of experimental psychology, a reaction to the op- erative stimulus in the question,"132 experimenters and investigators pro- voke countermeasures in their subjects as long as they use the bureau- cratic medium of writing. An argument made by the stimulus-response psychologist Stern that, sixty years later, is reiterated by interaction psy- chologists like Watzlawick (despite all criticism of the stimulus-response scheme). 133 Which is why examiners of 1908 recommend "the use of the phonograph as an ideal method"134 and those of 1969 recommend tape decks. 135
In 1905, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky, quietly anticipat- ing his colleague Stern, published a study, On Speech Disturbances. In or- der to contribute to the knowledge of such disturbances among the "men- tally ill and mentally healthy," German psychiatry for the first time availed itself of the ideal method of phonography. Stransky had his sub- jects "look and speak directly into the black tube" for one minute (the recording time for one roll) after " all extraneous sense stimuli, " that is, all the psychological problems of deposition, had been eliminated. 136 Whatever they said was completely irrelevant. The "aim" of the whole experiment "consists in shutting out all general concepts. "137 To test "concepts like 'speaking at odds,' 'hodgepodge,' 'thinking out loud,' 'hal- lucination,' etc. ,"138 the subjects had to abandon their so-called thinking. In Stransky's phonographic experiment, "language," in its "relative au- tonomy from the psyche,"139 takes the place of general concepts or signi- fieds, as if intending to prepare or facilitate a key concept of modern literature.
Media technology could not proceed in a more exact fashion. Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections of meaning. The phonograph, how-
? ? ? 8 6 Gramophone
ever, draws out those speech disturbances that concern psychiatry. Stran- sky's fine statement that "the formation of general concepts " could be in- hibited "for pathological or experimental reasons"140 is a euphemism. The "or" should be replaced by an equal sign. All the more so because the splendidly consistent Stransky places in front of the machine not only psy- chiatric patients but also, to collect comparative data, his own colleagues, the doctors. For the latter, the ensuing hodgepodge was related to exper- imental reasons, needless to say, while the patients had their pathological reasons. But the fact that psychiatrists, too, immediately produce a whole lot of nonsense when speaking into a phonograph, thereby relinquishing the professional status that distinguishes them from madmen, fully demonstrates the machine's power. Mechanization relieves people of their memories and permits a linguistic hodgepodge hitherto stifled by the. mo- nopoly of writing. The rules governing rhyme and meter that Wilden- bruch employs to arrange his words when speaking into the phonograph; the general concepts that Stransky's colleagues use to arrange theirs dur- ing the first test runs-Edison's invention renders them all historically ob- solete. The epoch of nonsense, our epoch, can begin.
This nonsense is always already the unconscious. Everything that speakers, because they are speaking, cannot also think flows into record- ing devices whose storage capacity is only surpassed by their indifference. "The point could be made"-a certain Walter Baade remarked in 19 1 3 in
"On the Recording of Self-Observations by Dictaphone"-
that such an exertion is unnecessary, because it is not a matter of recording all re- marks but only the important ones-this, however, fails to realize first of all that utterances of great importance are often made by subjects in moments when they themselves believe only to have made a casual remark and the examiner is alto- gether unprepared for an important comment, and secondly that even when both parties are aware that at least some part of a remark is "important," the decision what should and should not be recorded by the protocol is frequently very diffi- cult and, subsequently, has a disturbing effect. For the most part, these two afore- mentioned reasons make the uninterrupted, indiscriminate recording of all utter- ances appear as an idea[. 141
Presumably the first to follow this ideal is a fictional psychiatrist of 1897. Bram Stoker's Dracula, that perennially misjudged heroic epic of the final victory of technological media over the blood-sucking despots of old Europe,142 features a certain Dr. Seward, who is baffled by the non- sensical discourse produced by his schizophrenic patient Renfield. The latter keeps screaming that the master is approaching, but Dr. Seward has no way of knowing that this refers to Dracula's arrival in England.
? ? Gramophone 87
However, in the wake of a profane illumination anticipating Dr. Stran- sky, Dr. Seward resorts to media technology. He purchases one of the re- cently mass-produced phonographs, not to record the patient (as Stran- sky did) but rather his own associations triggered by the latter's speeches. The grooves store, to quote Seward's succinct and precise description, an "unconscious cerebration" that divines the subconscious of the schizo- phrenic but cannot advance all the way to the psychiatrist's ego. It is only (as Baade put it) the uninterrupted, indiscriminate recording of all utter- ances or associations that will allow Dr. Seward's unconscious cerebra- tion "to give the wall to [its1 conscious brother. "143 And only the typed transcription of all cylinders, recommended as early as 1 890 by Dr. Blod- gett,144 by a certain Mina Harker will reveal to him and all the others hunting Dracula that the Count himself was behind Renfield's schizo- phrenic nonsense.
Since 1897, the year of Dracula's publication, this procedure has no longer belonged to the realm of fiction. A science has emerged that turns it and all its particulars into a method: psychoanalysis.
As is known, Freud's "talking cure" is based on a segmentation of speech. On the one hand, patients lying on the couch speak-at least that's what they believe -according to classic discourse rules: A Kantian ego has to be able to accompany all my representations and provide for correct words and sentences-sentences that, unfortunately, say nothing about the patient. On the other hand, many minor symptoms emerge in the flow of speech-interruptions and paralalia, nonsensical words and puns-in which (to paraphrase Stransky) for pathological or experimen- tal reasons the formation of general concepts has not occurred and a sub- conscious appears. Subsequently, the attentive doctor need only separate nonsense from sense like wheat from chaff (and not the other way around). He feeds the parapraxes back to the patient, thus triggering new associations and parapraxes, which once again are fed back, and so on until an ego in control of speech has been dethroned and the unspeakable truth can be heard.
Around 1900, only media theoreticians play as revolutionary a part as the physician Freud. Experimenting with telephones and phonographs, Hermann Gutzmann, a lecturer in speech disorders in Berlin, discovers that the prompting of nonsense words to his patients produces nothing but parapraxes. Precisely because both machines-due to transmission economy or technical imperfections-limit the frequency band of lan- guage on either end, what subjects "understand" can differ from what
? 8 8 Gramophone
they "hear. " Gutzmann speaks nonsense syllables like "bage" or "zoses" into the mouthpiece, and the ear at the other end receives "lady" or "process. "145 A simple question brings to light an unconscious. And the research in "On Hearing and Understanding" is able to "answer the ques- tion what such experiments may mean for experimental psychology":
First of all, it is evident that using fake words stimulates the combinatory powers to such a degree that even against his will the listener is forced to replace the non- sense syllables he has heard with those words closest in his mind, in the pertinent constellation of ideas; that is, he is forced to hear the latter in the former. This can be seen very clearly in the protocol of Subject I, a fickle eighteen-year-old who is deeply in love; he is attracted to everything feminine, and the many girls' names and an additional "lady" make his constellation of ideas easily recognizable. This also applies to the fake French words of the two "well-educated young ladies. " If we wanted to conduct phonographic tests aimed at discovering certain suspected trains of thought, we would only need to use syllables sounding like the corre- sponding words as stimuli in order to arrive at the positive or negative result. J46
Freud turns Gutzmann's simple suggestion into his explicit goal and imaginary constellations into the subconscious. In other words, he him- self takes the place of phonographic tests. And for good reason: the psy- choanalyst in his chair would also be faced with the problem of repress- ing or filtering the communication of an alien subconscious with his own subconscious had he not from the very beginning turned his ears into a technical apparatus. Unlike Gutzmann's subjects, Freud's patients fall from sense into nonsense, yet their doctor is not allowed to use his un- derstanding to turn it back into sense. For that reason, Freud's "Recom- mendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis" simply amount to telephony:
Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation . . . without substi- tuting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has foregone. To put it in a formula, he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor's unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconsciousness which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient's free associations. 147
? Gramophone 8 9
The fictional Dr. Seward had been obliged to first record his uncon- scious associations, which traced those of another unconscious, before he was able to arrive at a conscious interpretation upon replaying them. In exactly the same way the historical Dr. Freud turns into a telephone re- ceiver. Following the nationalization of the Vienna telephone exchange in 1895, he not only had a telephone installed in his study148 but also de- scribed the work that went on in that study in terms of telephony. As if "psychic apparatus," Freud's fine neologism or supplement for the anti- quated soul, were to be taken literally, the unconscious coincides with electric oscillations. Only an apparatus like the telephone can transmit its frequencies, because each encoding in the bureaucratic medium of writ- ing would be subject to the filtering and censoring effects of a conscious- ness. Under media conditions, however, "selection and refusal," to quote Rilke, are no longer permissible. 149 Which is why the conscientious depo- sition psychologist Freud abstains from note-taking during his sessions; instead-and much like Dr. Seward listening to his cylinders-he pro- duces them later. ISO
The question remains, however, how the telephone receiver Freud can retain the communication from another unconscious. The phonograph owners Drs. Seward, Stransky, and Gutzmann are not faced with this problem, since they are in possession of a storage medium. Producing psy- choanalytic case studies, that is, putting into writing what patients said, requires that one record whatever the two censors on and behind the couch want to render unsaid: parapraxes, puns, slips, signifier jokes. Only technological media can record the nonsense that (with the one exception of Freud) technological media alone were able to draw out into the open. Freud's telephone analogy elides this point. Nonetheless, his principle that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusivelSI formulates this very media logic. For that reason, it is consistent to define psychoanalytic case studies, in spite of their written format, as media technologies. Freud in- troduces his "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" with the au- dacious avowal that his written "record" of hysterical speeches has a "high degree of trustworthiness," though it is "not absolutely-phono- graphically-exact.
" lS2
Evidently, psychoanalysis competes with technological sound record- ing. Its enemy or image is the phonograph, not film as Benjamin con- cluded from global parallels. 153 Neither as a word nor as a subject does film occur in Freud's writings. Rather, psychoanalytic texts are haunted by the absolute faithfulness of phonography. Thus, Freud's method of de- tecting unconscious signifiers in oral discourse and then interpreting these
90 Gramophone
signifiers as letters of a grand rebus or syllable puzzle154 appears as the fi- nal attempt to establish writing under media conditions. Whereas women, children, and madmen simply stop reading assigned novels and desert to the movies as a "couch of the poor," 155 psychoanalysis once again teaches them letters that, however, are signifiers devoid of all meaning and phan- tasms. As a science it performs what Mallarme or George inaugurate as modern literature.
In Berliner's own words, his Gramophone holds on to "the sound of letters";156 conversely, Freud's psychoanalysis holds on to the letters of sound. While the entertainment industry transmits speech flows, the fac- tual data input of every talking cure, and Freud's teacher Briicke, the an- cestor of German speech physiology, analyzes them as such, Freud writes down their signifiers. His justification: unlike any street urchin, he "could not imitate"157 all the stuttering, clicking of the tongue, gasping, and groaning158 of his female hysterics. Which is why psychoanalysis is "not absolutely-phonographically- exact " ; and why "reality will always re- main 'unknowable. "'159
A global success that falls short of the absolute or real has only one precondition: patients, who, thanks to the telephonic and equidistant re- ceptivity of Freud's' unconscious, may indulge in any kind of babble as long as they stick to the everyday medium of orality, are themselves not allowed to make use of storage technologies, lest they incur the wrath of psychoanalysis, the discrete textual recording of contractually arranged indiscretions . 1 6o
Concerning "The Handling of Dream-Interpretation in Psycho- Analysis," its inventor notes that it would be a mistake to let patients write down their own dreams. "For even if the text of a dream is in this way laboriously rescued from oblivion, it is easy enough to convince one- self that nothing thereby has been achieved for the patient. Associations will not come to the text, and the result is the same as if the dream had not been preserved. "161 The storage medium of writing fails once it is uti- lized by the patient and not by the analyst. Turning speech flows into syl- lable puzzles or "letters," which "do not occur in nature,"162 remains the monopoly of the scientist seated in his chair. Precisely because a dream text already amounts to half an interpretation, it can no longer draw ideas or speech flows out of the sick unconscious. As a result of this drainage, writing assumes the transitoriness of orality; it is consumed by oblivion. And thus psychoanalysis establishes with self-recursive elegance the renown and status of its own text. In 193 2, Freud's writings receive the Goethe prize.
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9 2 Gramophone
"Should We Let Patients Write Down Their Own Dreams? " Karl Abraham asks in an essay of 1913 that appears to confirm Freud's au- thoritarian words with examples from the couch practice. "Against the doctor's orders," one of Abraham's patients "put writing materials next to his bed" and, following a "a very extensive, eventful, and highly charged dream," brought "two quarto pages full of notes" to the session. But to his own shame and to the delight of Abraham, he realizes "that the notes are almost completely illegible. " 163 The psychoanalyst's love of non- sensical speeches has no written or cryptographic equivalent.