No More Learning

Twenty-four years later this laughter will have infected the revue girls who dance across the keyboard of a giant typewriter in Billy Wilder's film
Ready, Willing, and Able.
Yet The Lyle and the Typewriter, a year before it was written, was filmed-in the real. In 1912the writer Kafka met Felice Bauer one eve- ning at the house of Max Brod, immediately after the typist had been granted the head clerkship of her parlograph and dictation-machine firm
? or, in other words, had attained a power opposed to her previous posi- tion: she was allowed to sign Carl Lindstrom A. G. Kafka spent the fol- lowing weeks in his office at a typewriter, which he was not accustomed to use and which he misused to write the initial love letter^. ^' These letters revolve around a spoken word "which so amazed me that I banged the table. You actually said you enjoyed copying manuscripts, that you had also been copying manuscripts in Berlin for some gentleman (curse the sound of that word when unaccompanied by name and explanation! ) and you asked Max to send you some manuscripts. " "
Thunder and lightning, or the knock on the table. Jealousy of a name- less man in Berlin (who also dictates to Minnie Tipp, to the horror of the film hero),'' jealousy of his friend (whoworked in the telephone division of the Prague Postal Service)-jealousy of the entire media network, then, teaches the writer to love. This means that it is not love at all. Mr. K. and Felice B. (to speak with Freud and MallarmC) will never be a single mummy under happy palms, even if they were only the palms in a library like Lindhorst's.
That evening defies description: Kafka and Brod are going through Kafka's still-unpublished manuscripts and selecting those that will even- tually be published by Rowohlt. Also present is Felice, stopping over dur- ing a trip, who happens to mention that she enjoys typing manuscripts. She omits the fact that such work also pays-which distinguishes her from Minnie Tipp. But Kafka is already burning with love. He is able to type himself; there is even someone in his office whose job is to type for him, and Kafka's "principal task" as well as "happiness" consists "in being able to dictate to a living person. "'* But this functionary is a man and has never declared that Kafka's happiness is his as well. Office work remains the one-sided pleasure of a pervert who, in spite of his bureau- cratic position, constantly reverts to cunning measures ii la George. As Kafka writes to Felice Bauer: "I could never work as independently as you seem to; I slither out of responsibility like a snake; I have to sign many things, but every evaded signature seems like a gain; I also sign everything (though I really shouldn't) with FK only, as though that could exonerate me; for this reason 1 also feel drawn toward the typewriter in anything concerning the office, because its work, especially when exe- cuted at the hands of the typist, is so impersonal. ""
A woman who can type and sign documents is made to order for someone who systematically avoids signatures and yet, when switching from the office to his own desk every evening, is always betrayed by his handwriting. FK's double-entry bookkeeping, which registers the flow of documents in bureaucratic anonymity during the day and in literary man- uscripts during the night, seems to have found a "happy ending. " With a
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typist as wife, the unknown writer would have "the operational means of the printing press at his disposal" right at his desk. " It would be literally true that the typewriter "arrives as the liberator of those dedicated to the demanding service of the pen. "6'
But Felice Bauer's self-advertisement (notto say "the sign on her door") is directed to Brod, and the man whose texts she transcribes is a professor in Berlin. Bauer's professional independence does not rule out, but rather stipulates, that her literary taste, such as it is, places any number of writ- ers above Kafka. The gloominess of intransitive writing hardly charms women. The composer of love letters therefore fabricated texts, even with- out Minnie Tipp's adornments, that would be readable, indeed media- appropriatefor typists. As if the feminine power of reeducation had taken root, Kafka showed intense interest in Carl Lindstriim's company cata- logs-because, like a second Wildenbruch, he considered gramophonics "a threat. ''6zAs if subaltern bureaucrats were more independent than fe- male managers, Kafka made plans for a massive media network in the name of that very company. Lindstr6m was to develop parlographs that could be connected to typewriters, to juke boxes, to telephone booths, and finally to that fearful recorder of real data, the gramophone/' This gigantic project could appropriately have been called Project Dracula, and, in the seventy years since it was written down, it has been realized.
But Ms. Bauer (as far as one can judge from her side of the correspon- dence, which was destroyed) did not take up the suggestion.
Dracula appears once more, just where the marriage between the lyre and the typewriter does not take place. "Writing" in Kafka's sense "is a deep sleep, and thus death, and just as one will and cannot pull a dead manoutofhisgrave,soitiswithmeatmydeskatnight. "" Fromthesite of this grave or desk the writer not only fantasized about the massive me- dia network of a company whose strategy was the coupling and mass production of recording devices,"'but he put such a network together, if only by using or misusing available technologies.
For twenty-four weeks he sent up three letters per day, but did not take a train, which would have brought him to Berlin in a couple of hours, and he did not answer the telephone. . . . The correspondenceshows how it is possible to touch, chain, torture, dominate, and destroy another person,simply through the system- atic and total use of the mail and telephone.
First, Kafka established an exact schedule of all mail pick-ups in Prague and of all deliveries in Berlin. Second, he plotted Felice's movements between home and office by the hour, so he would know what time of day she would receive a letter, depending on whether it was addressed to her office or residence. Third, he deter- mined the exact path each letter would take, through which hands it would pass, at home (concierge, mother and sisters of the unfortunate) and at the office (mail- room, orderlies, secretaries). Fourth, he noted the time and distance taken by a
? normal letter on the one hand, and by an express letter on the other. Fifth, he noted the time it would take a telegram to reach her. . . . If one considers that Kafka not only put the words he had just written into envelopes, but also made mysterious references to letters he had written but not sent and likewise stuck in, whenever they fit, recriminations that he had formulated weeks before; if one considers that, in extreme cases, he put the ten to twelve pages of a single letter, written at different times, into as many different envelopes and mailboxes, one must admit that Kafka maximized the dispatch of all modalities and schedules of the mail in order, with this collective firepower, to force Felice to surrender. "
Cournot's brilliant analysis shows that in Kafka's stories the modali- ties of the technological channels of information-cross-talk and delay, networks and noise-levels-served no uncertain purpose. The love letters that Erich Heller celebrates as "the work of an unknown minnesinger from the first half of the twentieth century" break all technical reco~ds. ~' The anonymity of an FK has nothing to do with the namelessness of a minnesinger. It simply makes very clear that no love is to be given to women employed in discursive functions. The concentrated firepower of letters, express mail, and telegrams stands where cultured women or simple feminine readers once would willingly have been all eyes and ears. But the possibility of effortlessly recruiting feminine readers disappears along with the "meaning" that neither the writer Kafka nor the reader Bauer can find in "The Judgment. ""* The reason Rilke distributed his Chicory so awkwardly, by hand, was that no one was asking for it. The fact that Kafka vied for an arbitrary individual with an empty face rather than for a public changes nothing in the lack of demand. Only the dead need technically calculate their love letters.
If writers in the discourse network of 1900are the discarded material that they write down, then nothing can take place beyond writing itself. "I have the definite feeling that through marriage, through the union, through the dissolution of this nothingness that I am, I shall perish. ""' There is no chance on either side of the Kafka-Bauer correspondence of words reaching through to a soul. On one side is writing that occupies the place of madness and incessantly dissolves into its nothingness. "' On the other side, the processing of texts begins, which is no less transitory, only a medium among media.
The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature proclaims the motto that masses of molecules and spinning electrons are more exciting than the smile or tears of a woman (di una Rilke reported that one woman identified his cranial-suture-phonographic expansion of the five senses with "presence of mind and grace of love. " The writer, however, disagreed. Love "would not serve the poet, for individual variety must be
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? constantly present to him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full e~tent. "'T~hat means, as in Kafka's letter strategies and plans for the Lindstrijm company, the creation of unheard-of media-network connec- tions, such as those between coronal sutures and writing.
At the same time, the media-network amateurs Rilke and Kafka still politely formulated their queen's sacrifice: in gentle qualifications and love letters that were machine written and thus not love letters. But the expressionists had bad manners. "Get out with your love! " cries Ehren- stein's Tubutsch. -' Doblin demanded, in a single sentence, "the self-loss [Entselbstung],the exteriorization of the author" and the end of literary "eroticism. " The dissolution of the function of authorship drove all love out of books: love described as well as the constitutive love that joined the Poet and feminine readers in empathy. Material equality on paper guar- antees quite "naturally" that "the novel has as little to do with love as painting has to do with man or woman. "" When the imagination and "feeling" no longer react, then "love, woman, and so on" disappear from "a literature for discriminating bachelors. ""
So much for programmatic declarations from the founding period. To conclude, consider later, confirming evidence from two exact literary his- torians, who have registered the central fact and its preconditions. Benn and Valery demonstrate in theory and practice that the new order of things, founded by the typewriter, is the space of contemporary writing. "Circa 1900,"the union of love disappears from paper.
Art is a truth that does not yet exist. In the most significant novels since rqoo, women are ranged in categories: in the ethnic-geographic (Conrad), the artistic (DieGottinnen),and the aesthetic (Dorian Gray). In part they are brought in aphoristically, serving a purpose of ovation and reminiscence rather than deter- mining structure, and thus speaking a foreign language: in The Magic Mountain. In the most serious instance, love is a test faced by a newly developing typological principle. '*
Taking stock of things in this way has consequences for paper itself.
A celebration for Dionysus, for wine rather than corn, for Bacchus rather than Demeter, for phallic congestion rather than the nine-month's magic, for the apho- rism rather than the historical novel! One has worked on a piece, with paper and typewriter,thoughts, sentences,itsitsonthedesk. Onereturnsfromotherspheres, from acquaintances, professional circles, overloadings of the brain with circum- stances, overflows, repressions of every flight and dream-after hours of it one returns and sees the white streaks on the desk. What is it? A lifeless something, vague worlds, something painfully, effortfully put together, thought together, grouped, tested, improved, a pathetic remainder, loose, unproven, weak-tinder, decadent nothing. The whole of it an absurdity, an illness of the race, a black mark, a confusion of all relation? There comes Pallas, unerring, always with the helmet, never fertile, the slim childless goddess, born of her father, sexless. '-
? A literature that only arranges women and even despises the Woman or Mother, a literature for discriminating bachelors, has bitter need of a Pallas as tutelary goddess. Whatever bachelor machines produce with "paper and typewriter" remains refuse as long as there is no one to clean up the desk and magically transform refuse into art.
Little has changed, then, since the days of Nietzsche. In a typewritten letter to Overbeck, the half-blind man complains that his Malling Hansen is as "skittish as a young dog," and makes for "little entertainment" and "much trouble. " He is looking for young people to relieve his writing difficulties and would "for this purpose even agree to a two-year mar- riage. "-n Benn realized Nietzsche's subjunctive in his "marriage of com- radeship. "" In 1937, six years before the panegyric for the virginal Athena, a longtime woman friend of Benn's received a letter concerning his marriage plans: it clearly lays out the code for Pullas.
So a little relationship has developed here; it brings some warmth and illumina- tion into my existence and I intend to nourish it. Just sothat you know. There are, first, extemal reasons. Outwardly I'm completely falling apart. Things broken down, a mess everywhere, unfinished letters. . . . The bed sheets are torn up; the bed lies unmade all week; I have to do my own shopping. Heating also, some- times. I don't answer letters anymore because I have no one to write for me. I can't work because I have no time, peace, and no one to take dictation. I make coffee at 3:30 in the afternoon, and that's the one event of my life. At 9 in the evening I go to bed and that's the other. Like a beast. . . .
Nonetheless, I must make another attempt to construct a serious human rela- tionship and with its help try to pull myself out of this mire. Morchen, 1'11 tell you everything, but only you. And now if I tell you what sort of person this is, the one who will probably become unhappy, you'll probably be surprised.
Quite a bit younger than 1 am, just thirty years old. Not at all attractive like Elida and Elisabeth Arden. Very good figure, but the face is negroid. From a very good family. No money. Job similar to that of Helga, well paid, types zoo syl- lables, an expert typist. By our standards. that is, by the standards of o u r genera- tion, uneducated. ""
The end of love does not exclude, it includes marriage. Literary uti- lizers of discarded material are educated, but unable to straighten out the discarded files known as their desks. Thus they marry women who, like Felice Bauer, are neither beautiful nor educated, but who with their zoo typewritten syllables per minute are nearly record-setters. "'The name of the Pallas who comes to rescue and redeem the decadent paper tinder on the desk could be, rather than Herta von Wedemeyer, Minnie Tipp. For the helmet she never lays aside is her machine, which takes dictation. This is the way that pathetic remainders, loose, unproven, weak, which lie on the desk like white streaks, become a truth that does not yet exist- become art.
In 1916 ValCry noted: "Love is, no doubt, worth making. . . but as an
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occupation of the intellect, as a subject of novels and studies, it is tradi- tional and tedious. "nzIn 1940,between Benn's marriage of comradeship and Pallas, Valiry put his literary-historical statement to the test: he wrote 'MyFaust. ' Whereas the second half of the dramatic fragment in- troduces a nameless Nietzsche, who greets Goethe's hero as "trash" and discards him as trash, the first half revolves around a Demoiselle Luste. This pretty person with the pretty name is as able as the hermit of Sils to characterize the irretrievable past of German Poetry. Only Mephisto, who still thinks in terms of major, decisive actions, of Spirit and Nature, can imagine that Faust loves the Demoiselle. But the devil is just a poor devil and, like Dracula, brainless. The developments of modem science and technology have passed him by. " Faust, by contrast, stands at the height of an experiment that, as the "rediscovery of ancient chaos in the body," makes all discourses into secondary phenomena. Therefore his re- lationship to Luste cannot be love, but only an experiment in media
connection.
Me, ValPry, the books: let us sum it all up.
First Faust reads everything that has been written about him in litera-
ture and interpretation. He begins with an autobibliographical exhaus- tion, whose completeness, however, cannot be guaranteed. The second step is to transfer everything that has been stored into a discourse net- work called the Mhoires. Here are the title and the opening sentences.
"The Memoirs of My Self, by Professor Doctor Faustus, Member of the Academy of Dead Sciences, etc. . . . Hero of several literary works of repute. . . " So much has been written about me that I no longer know who I am. True, I have not read all the many works in question, and doubtless there are many more than one whose existence has not been made known to me. But those with which I am acquainted are enough to give me a singularly rich and complex idea of myself and my destiny. Thus I can choose freely among a variety of dates and places for my birth, all equally attested by irrefutable documents and proofs, put forth and discussed by critics of equal eminence. *'
The memoirs of the classical founding hero exceed the discourse network he inaugurated. As the rules stipulate, an author has arisen in the media network of poetic works and interpretations, and that author has all the attributes of literary fame. But precisely for that reason, mathematical combinatorics replaces the organic autobiography. Countless books about books about Faust cancel one another out. What remains is white noise, from which the memoir writer can extract arbitrary selections. Whoever no longer knows who he is and writes his memoirs with the declared in- tention of disappearing as an I is no longer an author.
Faust, having become the empty intersection of countless discourses, rescinds Goethe's Poetty and Truth. This means that, practically speak-
? ing, he dictates other things and otherwise than the Ur-author did. John, Johann Christian Schuchardt, Friedrich Theodor Kriiuter, Johann Peter Eckermann, Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, or even Geist-so runs the list of the names of men who would have been able to sign Goethe's truths and fictions if the rules in operation had been those of the materiality of writ- ing rather than the Discourse of the Master. Male secretaries were on the one side, and on the other were first a mother, who could hardly write one word correctly, then a wife, who provided for Goethe's "domestic peace and marital happiness" simply by never desiring "fame as a woman writer" and properly eschewing any "mixing in official and literary mat- ters. "*'Such were the parameters of a practice of writing, which led to the conception of an ideal in feminine form, or in the form of a woman. To dictate to the subaltern men present what the One, Only, and Absent Feminine has whispered-writing Poetry is nothing else. Even when Pro- fessor Abnossah Pschorr, one hundred years later, built his phonograph in the study of the Goethe House, the roll still registered men's voices: the Author as he whispers his words of wisdom to Eckermann. n6
Valery's 'MyFuust' is a systematic reversal of all classical writing prac- tices. He too dictates, but not as a bureaucrat who ends up with the state- supporting pact of his own signature. "The mere fact of knowing how to sign my name cost me dear once"-thus "I never write now,""- but in- stead he dictates toward the vanishing point designated by Kafka's avoid- ance of the signature. These dictations doubly oppose the Goethean vari- ety. First, they set no life or ideal of woman into writing, but only the sentences that poets and interpreters have written about an impossible real. Second, this book of books is being written by a woman, not a man. The fact that Demoiselle Luste has been with Faust for eight days is simply explained by her taking dictation. Mephisto can suspect whatever he likes, but what takes place at the end of the idea of Faust is a bargain sale of all poetic-hermeneutic discourse to a woman's ear. The ear is small and magical, as one could have predicted of an admirer of Nietzsche and Mallarme, and it is by no means there to understand anything. " Luste's ear is to take dictation with phonographic accuracy, clean off what was dictated at the beginning of the next day, and otherwise, otherwise be a not unattractive sight for the flight of ideas. "
Luste, a second Pallas, brings order into the combinatory chaos of the last Faust. The writer of the memoir neither has nor desires to have an overview of a life that too many books have described. With or without the help of the devil, who once in a while brings by an insidious text, his desk is a heap of refuse. But there is Luste, that is, the "modest but honor- able part of the thing that discreetly helps to oil the machinery of your thought. "" A woman who knows nothing of the thought or life of the
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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 twodivided 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.