No More Learning

It proclaims a power without referent, which confirms the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia in the self-referentiality of the act of writing. A prince whose entire em- pire consists in the neologisms of his title raves deliriously as he writes. With the inexorability of imperial messages, that vanishing point of Kaf- ka's writing, his decree establishes the monetary value of puns. All short- ages vanish thanks to a word of power, which, as in Freud's insight, works "with words instead of things. "
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Of course, this procedure affects above all words themselves. Schreber's imbecilic voices rhyme without any regard for "sense," simply according to the "similarity of the sounds," as in such distant signifiers as "'San- tiago' or 'Cathargo,"' " 'Ariman' or 'Ackermann. '" " Ball has his Green King add a few strange examples to this list. Such rhymes have nothing to d o with the orality and echo effects of a whispering Mother Nature. They constitute a mimicry of madness and are thus naked dictation. The writer does not invent, but only simulates an insane person who in turn has not invented the rhymes but rather, "in an actual rhyming mania," "had to construct verses without any regard for the nonsense that resulted. ""
The seriousness of such simulations is not diminished in the least by being "limited to linguistic phenomena, that is, to only one symptom among many. "" Contemporary psychiatrists did not proceed any differ- ently. "Simply because most of one's acts in higher cultural life are not concrete actions but spoken or written words, language in itself" offers writers "the same possibility of portraying mental illness that a person's speech allows us"-that is, psychiatrists-"the possibility of making an unbiased diagnosis of mental illness. "" Psychiatrists and writers are thus remarkably in accord about restricting the range of possible data to the symbolic. The former compile and order whole archives of psychotic speech errors, which are then at the disposal of the latter. Only when sci- ences localize madness in "language in itself" does its literary simulation become possible and important. Psychiatric discourse provides mono- graphs on psychotic neologisms, rhyme manias, and special languages, to which writers, seeking information from competent sources, need only help themselves. The necessary consequence is a writing that has no refer- ent outside of psychiatry and of which Biilsche provided an early and exact description. If literature "rightly despises" its secular support in philosophers such as Hegel or Schopenhauer, in order to exploit instead the details amassed by psychiatry and pathology, it can only be a sim- ulacrum of madness.
A number of careful minds, particularly practicing writers, rightfully despise this shaky bridge and have boldly confronted amassed details of oblective knowledge. The success reveals a serious danger in this undertaking as well. Scientific psy- chology and physiology are constrained, by conditions familiar to all, to conduct their studies mainly with the diseased organism, and so they coincide almost en- tirely with psychiatry and pathology. Now the writer who in a justified thirst for knowledge intends to gain instruction from these disciplines, finds himself unin- tentionally drawn more and more into the atmosphere of the clinic. He begins to turn his attention away from his rightful object, from healthy, universal human life, toward the abnormal, and in the intention of observing the premises of his realistic art, he unwittingly fillshis pages with the premises of his premises, with the observed material itself, from which he should be drawing conclusions. Then
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there arises a literatureof man as sick, of mental illnesses, of difficult child births, ofthearthritic-in short,ofwhatnotafewignorantpeopleimaginetoberealism itself. "
Biilsche describes what literature does in the discourse network of 1900:it utilizes refuse from the nonsense stored by psychophysics. The delirious discourses that gain entry to the scientific archives only on the condition of making no sense lose even this referent in literary simulation. Anyone who fillspage after page with the premises of his premises speaks neither of the world or of Man. As a simulacrum of madness, literature loses its classical distinction of springing immediately from Nature or the
Soul and of subsequently having this naturalness certified by philosophi- cal interpreters. It becomes secondary literature in the strictest sense of the word. Its discourse, cut off from "universal human life," deals with other discourses, which it can only transpose. Because media transposi- tions render useless such concepts as authenticity and primacy,'*any ves- tige of extradiscursive verification is lost. Literature does not reveal phe- nomena or determine facts; its field is a madness that, as Miinsterberg realized, exists only on paper.
Many fictional presentations of abnormal mental states are taken to be sensitive psychological portraits precisely in areas where the scientifically trained observer would recognize an impossibility. If persons were actually to behave in the rnan- ner the writer has them act and speak in these novelistic mental disturbances, the doctor would have to conclude that they were simulating. "
"Novelistic mental disturbances" accordingly occur in a no man's land, which can be verified neither by immediately accessible mental truths nor by controlled experiments. Its name is simulacrum. Writers who simulate being psychiatrically informed describe persons who, viewed from the standpoint of psychiatry, are simply simulators. But that is the point. Simulation without reference dissolves the old connection between madness and illness in order to establish an entirely different connection: between madness and writingsx
Novelistic mental disturbances, which occurred in more than novels in 1900,did not renew the affiliation of artists and the insane against a phi- listine bourgeoisie. The appearance of expressionist "young artists" was not necessary "to obtain the provocative possibility of concretely repre- senting their opposition to the ruling norms and notions of value" by the revised and positive valuation of madness. " This transvaluation occurred when positivistic sciences began determining cultural technologies from deficits and defects and thus liquidated classical norms. The myths of the young and of provocation only obscure the complete extent of the young provocateurs' dependence on the discourse network of their period. '"
? Something completely different is at stake when psychophysics and litera- ture collide. Illusory political-moral struggles, in which writers purpor- tedly are the first to discover madness, are superfluous; the struggle con- cerns only the use of the same discourse. Whereas psychophysics held on to the connection between madness and illness, literature constructed a completely different connection between madness and writing. Its simula- tion created individual cases that speak and write out of standardized col- lections of symptoms. And so they appeared, accidental and singular as only dilettantes of the miracle could be: "The Madman" (GeorgHeym), "The Imbecile" (Ball), "The Visionnut" [Der Visionarr](Jakob van Hod- dis), "The Idiot" (Huelsenbeck, Zech, Johannes Becher). They appear and begin their nonsensical speech: the "Song of the Escapees" (Johannes Urzidil), "The Idiot's Song" (Rilke), not to forget "The Song of the Crazy Women" (Paul Adler).
As if to name the discursive status of these songs, the young Breton wrote, across the barrier erected by the First World War:
Demence pricoce, paranoia, etats crCpusculaires. 0 poesie allemande, Freud et Kraepelin!
Dementia praecox, paranoia, twilight states Oh German poetry, Freud and Kraepelin! "
No one could say more clearly that literature utilizes the discarded mate- rial of contemporary psychiatry. Dementia praecox is, of course, "in its contemporary form" Kraepelin's "new creation. "LzAnd so the glory of literature was reflected onto psychiatry. Psychiatry's archives became rough drafts of poetry and provided material and methods for pure writ- ing. Of course, classical and romantic writers learned from the psychic cures of their Reils and Hoffbauers," but the Occident remained the pre- dominant theme and archive. Meaning always came from Above; non- sense, by contrast, cannot be invented, it can only be transcribed and written down. Thus a "German poetry" of Freud and Kraepelin took over the systemic position occupied by Poetry in the classical-romantic discourse network, and literature moved from second to third place in the new order of discourse. The third place is (just as for Schreber) the site of sensual pleasure. A remainder of nonsense, of no further use to even the sciences of nonsense, is left over for games.
Because it cuts the old bond between madness and illness, the game of the simulated delirium makes the distinction between doctors and pa- tients somewhat tenuous. Miinsterberg was probably right to suspect that simulators of medical science actually describe simulators of mad- ness. In 1893 a four-part work appeared in Berlin entitled Body, Bruin,
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Mind, God, a work that (with the exception of God) cataloged in its title the basic problems of 1900and identified its author as a "practicing doc- tor. "" Its intent is true psychophysics: Karl Gehrmann brings case his- tory after case history to bear on the problem of relating diverse physical symptoms to neural centers in the brain. But the place names on this brain atlas outdo one another in their poetry, the recorded dreams of countless patients become more and more beautiful and flowery, until aftertwothousand pages there is no longer any doubt that all the neural centers, casehistories, and recorded dreamscanonly refer to a singlesub- ject, the institutionalized writer. Doctors, proceeding like the institu- tionalized Schreber toward exhausting the contents of the brain, end up in madness themselves.
One need only write down psychophysics to produce "German po- etry. " That is exactly what the young assistant doctor Benn does when he lets a, or his, professor speak for himself.
PROFESSOR: And now, gentlemen, I have in conclusion a very special surprise for you. As you can see, I have colored the pyramidal cells from the hippocampus of the left hemisphere of the cerebrum taken from a fourteen-day-old rat of the Katull variety. Now observe: the cells are not red, but pink, with a light brownish-violet coloration that shades into green. This is indeed most interest- ing. You are aware that lately a paper came out of the Graz Institute that dis- putes this fact, despite my thorough investigations of the matter. I will not say anything about the Graz Institute in general, but 1 must say that this paper struck me as premature. As you see, I now have the proof at hand. This does have enormous implications. I t would be possible to distinguish rats with long black fur and dark eyes from those with short rough fur and light eyes through this fine difference in cell color, as long as the rats are of the same age, have been fed with candy, have played for half an hour daily with a small puma, and have spontaneously defecated twotimes in the evening with the tempera- ture at 37 or 36 degrees centigrade. "
The utilization of discarded material from psychophysics is as concrete as it is perilous. During his training with famous psychiatrists and pa- thologists, Benn published scientific work and texts that ridiculed brain research, notably works with the same titles and contents as his own. L6 The montage of its senseless accumulation of fact made psychophysics into the mental disturbance it was investigating, and made the pink brain cells of the rat into phenomena as magnificent as those found in Gehr- mann. In the literary publication of his lectures, Benn's professor takes his rightful place alongside the Flechsig of the Memoirs (assistant doctor Ronne threatened to sue the professor "because of brain damage"). " Most likely, only because Ziehen and Karl Bonhoeffer did not read the materials their assistant Benn published in marginal avant-garde journals was Benn saved from the compromising situations of Gehrmann or
? Schreber. zSFor Hoffmann, the bureacratic-poetic double life was a useful arrangement because it betrayed the secret unity of both functions; Benn was confronted with double-entry bookkeeping, in which one hand con- tinued to write statistics and the other exploited a singular delirium.
Along with Ernst Mach and Mauthner, those philosophic sources for most research on expressionism, Ziehen taught that the unity of the ego was a fiction when compared with the reality of the association of ideas. " Benn and Ronne had only to put their boss's theory into practice in writ- ing. It was an irreconcilable but permissible use of psychiatric discourse to turn it on one's own accidental case. Exactly that happened when Benn's report on his last year as a psychiatrist, 1913,produced the psy- chiatric diagnosis of the irreconcilability of writing and treatment.
I attempted to find out for myself what I was suffering from. The manuals on psychiatry that I consulted led me to modem psychological works, some quite remarkable, particularly in the French school; I immersed myself in the descrip- tions of the condition designated as depersonalization . . . I began to see the ego as an entity that strove, with a force compared to which gravity would be the touch of a snowflake, for a condition in which nothing that modem culture desig- nated as intellectual gifts played any pan. "'
The writer as insane-not a mythic conflict between artists and the bour- geoisie, but the semi-official doctrine of psychiatric textbooks creates the connection. Benn and Ronne are psychiatrists who become incapable of "taking interest in a newly arrived case or observing the old cases with constant individualizing attention," 'I which according to Ziehen and the rules of data exhaustion, would be their professional obligation. '* In- stead, Ronne, lying motionless in the doctor's office, simulates the cata- tonic, and Benn simulates a situation in which he is the newly arrived case in need of constant observation. But a doctor who transfers the latest di- agnoses, such as depersonalization, from his patients onto himself, uses Janet or Ribot no differently from how Schreber used Kraepelin's text- book. Education or "intellectual gifts" have no role in either case.
But by isolating psychophysical results, literature simulated only what distinguished psychoanalysis in the discourse network of I 900. Biograph- ically, first of all, there is Freud's self-analysis, the mythic origin of his new science, which proceeds by the same inversion of roles. As Benn would later discover his psychotic depersonalization, so Freud found the basic complex of his neurotic patients "in my own case too. " '' Method- ologically, psychoanalysis singularized statistical material: it does not order the collected nonsense into nosological entitites, but attributes the material to unconscious subjects. Finally, in a literary sense, this organi- zation of the material appears in the case histories, which count as "mod- em German letters" or "German poetry. "
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Like the Poets and Thinkers one hundred years earlier, writers and analysts came into "close and fruitful contact. "" As early as 1887the philosopher Dilthey deplored a new "misology" among artists, who hated thinking, aesthetics, and culture [Bildung]. " One friendship was over (even if other critics did not have Dilthey's keen ear for the an- nouncement), and another, just as perilous, could begin. What Goethe had said about philosophers-that he could never do without them and yet could never come to terms with them-from I900on was addressed to Freud: although or because, according to Kafka, there was "of course" a great deal of Freud in "The Judgment," his literary writing obeyed the imperative "No more psychology! " '* The solidarity of solidarity and competition, once the fate of Poets and Thinkers, hecame the fate of writ- ers and analysts.
Of course, it was no longer a question of meaning and its interpreta- tion. Writers and psychoanalysts did not constitute a state-supporting community of interpreters in which there was a mutual exchange of cer- tificates validating the creation of eternal values. Their mutual relation- ship was supported by the existence, at the basis of all cultural technolo- gies, of bodies and their nonsense. These bodies, however, were only accessible to psychophysical experiments at the price of silence and death. But on the couch, where "alas, everything is different," "nothing takes place . . . but an interchange of words. " '' In literature, where even such exchange is lacking, nothing occurs but intransitive writing. Psycho- analysis must thus focus on the nonsense in speech until it can gather a linked set of indices that closes around an inaccessible reality. Literature must purify pieces of paper of everything readable until the body of its words coincides with the other body in an instantaneous shortcircuit. As such, however, the two discourses compete with one another. There is a reality inaccessible to both, and two mutually exclusive detours: decod- ing and the shortcircuit.
Freud did not ever claim to be able to explain the fact that literature exists. In spite or because of this, writers have done their utmost to keep him from any such explanation. Given the alternatives of laying their bodies on the couch or setting down bodies of words, almost all opted for pure writing as against a "(possibly unproductive) life. " So the relation- ship between writers and analysts became all kinds of things-dialogue, reading, greetings addressed even without an accompanying chalice-but
it did not become practice.
"AtonetimeIdidconsiderpsychiatrictreatment," hesaid,"butdroppedtheidea just in time. "
For a long time he actually had believed that his salvation lay in psychoanaly- sis. His beloved, Lou Andreas-Salome, was an avid follower of Freud and his
? circle and had urged Rilke to lay himself on the famous couch. For years before the war Rilke considered the pros and cons but finally, at the last moment, drew back. "I won't have anyone poking around in my brain,'' he said to me, "I'd rather keep my complexes. "
Later he did meet Freud personally, but said nothing about his problems. After that he avoided Freud whenever they encounteredone another. The panic fear of being picked apart and sucked dry constantly pursued him. "
As paranoid as Schreber, who also lived in fear of a brain-pillaging doc- tor, Rilke took the opposite course. One gave his body over to a science that was hardly capable of demonstrating itself worthy of such a gift. The other withdrew his body from a science that had neither the intention nor the capability of poking around in his brain, because of course it dealt only in the exchange of words. The rage of simulated paranoia is worse than that of the clinical variety. The fact that psychoanalysis transferred psychophysical methods to individual cases unleashed the phantasm of trephination. The writer's brain became the mythic vanishing point of all attempts to ground discourse neurologically. Writing circa I900 there- fore means: this brain, its clinical or simulated madness notwithstanding, shall be immediately transposed into texts and protected from any medi- cal soundings. This transposition of media had to pass through that other vanishing point, the endopsychic perception of brain functions. What Gehrmann and Schreber began, issued into literature.
Shortly after Apollinaire received his head wound in the trenches at Aisne, he issued a challenge to his critics, the admirers of Boileau and Ben Akiba: "But is there nothing new under the sun? It remains to be seen. What! My head has been x-rayed. I have seen, while I live, my own cra- nium, and that would be nothing new? ''u)A "new spirit," then, as the title of the essay promises, inspires the poet. No last words are pronounced on the life-threatening wound to the head, in that it opens up the much more exciting possibility of endopsychic perception. Dr. Bardel's x-rays and trephination of Apollinaire made literal truth of what Flechsig and his clever student expected only of the postmortem examination. It is only logical, therefore, that Apollinaire should immediately appeal to writers to approach the great novelty under the sun and connect their writing with technological media like film and the phonograph.
Bruins-the title of Benn's early collection of novellas-designates an entire writing project. Ronne, the hero, was originally a psychiatrist and brain researcher, who "in these hands had held hundreds or even thou- sands" of brains," not merely those of rats. But when he makes the transi- tion from doctor to patient, all of his research interests shrink to a single enigma. Ronne constantly performs a gesture "as if he were breaking open a soft, large fruit, or as if he were unfolding something""-a rebus
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? that adoring nurses are finally able to decode as the opening of his own brain. It stands, like Rhne's association with brain damage, for a new writing project: literary impulses are to be fed on the vivisected fruit of his own brain. That is why the hero procures himself a journal and a pencil. "
And as if to take Ronne's decision at its word, Flake, an admirer of Benn, made an entire novel out of the latter's laconic novellas; out of Brains, that is, came an entire City oftheBruin. The hero, Lauda, has, of course, studied medicine and for three semesters has "always begun again hesitantly with the opening cut": "sometimes into the up-turned hemi- spheres, the gelatinous site of conscious throught, which can be modified, sometimes into the base, the more defined, differentiated, architectonic portion. "" He has thus already been to school with Ronne, when years later, after leaving the office and secretary, he happens to read a paper on neurology. It describes the brain as an endlessly complex "cross network" consisting of transmitters/receivers of "electrical waves. " The reader in- stantly decides "to construct a model of the world from this. " Because models of the world in 1900 consist in "words, perhaps only words," Lauda begins a "metaphysical journal" that by means of "psycho-physi- ology" derives his own thought apparatus from "nerve tracts" and de- scribes his brain as "a city of pathways that I laid down according to in- dividual acts and now must travel forever. " Having sunk to being the knowing slave of his "thought paths," Lauda therefore falls asleep, only to return to the impossible place of such reflections. Ronne's gesture be-
comes a dream act. Lauda stays in a scientifically "read-in" city of the brain until the next morning brings the realization or renunciation that is decisive for writers: "A physical residence in the city of the brain is im- possible, only the allegorical is possible. " Because the impossible wishes tell the truth, the renunciation reveals the character of literature in the discourse network of 1900: Lauda henceforth intends only to "scream walk write" [schrein schreiren schreiben]. " The novel itself becomes an allegorical residence in the brain, a deciphering of neurophysiological engrams.
Marcel, the narrator, dawdles in his pursuit of The Remembrance of Things Past as long as he fails to realize that the goal of his search lies simply in the "storehouse" of his own brain and is stored only there. The fact that he, like Gehrmann or Lauda, will have to transcribe nerve tracts is simultaneously and immediately also the fear that a "head accident" could make him forget all the stored traces, indeed make him forget the forgetting of them. * Thus Marcel began to write just in time, driven by the furies of an eventual aphasia, which was, not coincidentally, a sub-
? ject on which the physician Dr. Adrien Proust, the writer's father, had published. '-
But enough demonstration. The puzzling question common to neurolo- gists and the insane, to psychoanalysts and writers circa 1900 is summed up in the title Brain and Langu~ge. 'T~he doctors (who take precedence in formulating the problem) pose the theme; the writers work it through. Their writing stands exactly at the place or takes the place of the brain vivisection that all psychophysics must dream of and do without. Rilke fled psychoanalysis because his own "work" was for him "actually noth- ingotherthanthatsortofself-treatment. "" Thusheflednotmerelybe- cause Freud or Viktor Gebsattel would poke around in his brain, but to be able to compete with the vivisectors. The underlying mutuality of the two discourses excluded any overlap. In the discourse network of 1900, writers are people who in the analysis-that is, the decomposition-of their psychic apparatus prefer to go it alone.
With his mute gesture, Ronne turns his own brain hemispheres inside out in order to reach the source of his thought; Lauda visits the city of his brain in the metaphor of the dream; but there was one who, widely de- cried as a dreamer and maker of images, took on the impossible task common to them all, and did it technologically, without images. How- ever, he was a poet and hated the approximate. In order to define the status of literature, Rilke, in his "notebook" Primal Sound [ Ur-Geruusch], chose a model that since 1900has designated all inscription and decod- ing: the phonograph.
Fourteen or fifteen years after an unforgotten day in school on which he constructed a phonograph out of cardboard and parchment paper, candle wax and the bristles of a clothes brush,'" Rilke attended anatomy lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Among all the medical samples, what "enchanted" the writer was a "special housing closed against all worldlv space"-the skull. Rilke acquired a skull and spent the evenings studying it-with the result that his childhood memory was completely rewritten. If it once seemed that "this autonomous sound [would] remain unforgettable, apart from us, preserved outside," the stu- dent of anatomy learned that not the sounds "from the funnel," but "those markings traced on the cylinder of the phonograph"" were much more essential. But the sutura coronalis effects the shift from reproduction to inscription, from reading to writing in the technological age. "In the peculiarly vigilant and demanding light of the candle the cranial suture was quite evident and I soon realized what it reminded me of: those un- forgotten lines that were once scratched onto a little wax roll by the point of a bristle! "
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The suture that divides the two cranial hemispheres like a sagittal inci- sion designates the status of all script for a writer of 1900. Only a scratch or cut into the flesh of forgetfulness itself can be unforgettable. What Nietzsche learned investigating the genealogy of morals, what Kafka's ex- plorer learned in the penal colony," Rilke was able to learn from anat- omy. If ever an initiation did justice to the material, then this was it. The cranial suture functions as the left-over trace of a writing energy or art that, instead of "making variations o r imitating," "had its joy in the dance of existences," in a "dictatorial art that presents dispositions of energy. " A "consciousness of an ethical nature,"" of the kind evoked in the titles of Nietzsche and Kafka, can add nothing to this. Technology and phys- iology are responsible for material inscription.
More exactly, a system composed of technology and physiology is re- sponsible. That is what the skull for years had "suggested again and again" to Rilke the writer.
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has-let us assume- a certain similarity to the closely woven line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself natu- rally-well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then have made its appearance in the world . . . "
Unlike poets such as Shakespeare or Gottfried Keller, who throw their heroes into the traditional melancholy associations at the sight of a skull, the writer is an experimenter. He suggests, more radically than techni- cians and physiologists-and in a language that maintains a wonderful balance between precision and caution-a phonographic test of human body parts. The insight of information science, that recording and play- back devices are essentially convertible,'ballows the decoding of a track that no one had ever encoded. But the fact that nature has thrown away the keys to its secrets is no reason, in 1900,to leave the rebus untouched. Let deranged people like Gehrmann attempt to solve it with mere books, but "we," the art-physiologists and artists, "inevitably think of a process similar to Edison's phonograph when it comes to the molecules and nerve tracts in the brain. " '-Simmel's objective interpretation, Freud's analytic construction, Rilke's apparatus-all can track traces without a subject. A writing without the writer, then, records the impossible reality at the basis of all media: white noise, primal sound.
That is only logical. Certainly "it" has been making noise from time
? immemorial, as long as there has been Brownian motion. But for any dis- tinction between noise and information to be possible, the real must be able to move through technological channels. Printing errors occur in the hook as medium, but there is no primal sound. The phonographic repro- duction of a groove "that is not the graphic translation of a sound" mocks translatability and universal equivalents. Setting gramophone needles onto coronal sutures is only possible in a culture that gives free reign to all discursive manipulations. And of course anything that "exists natu- rally," like the skull, thereby loses its distinctiveness. At such extremes the transposition of media creates only unconscious programs out of so- called nature. Otto Flake and Proust dreamed of making literal reproduc- tions of the inscribed pathways in their brains; Rilke made technological suggestions for the technological realization of their dreams. Yet Rilke re- serves this realization for writers. It was not for the "Poets," who, accord- ing to Rilke's historically exact insight, "were overwhelmed" by "almost only" one sense, the visual, whereas "the contribution made by an inat- tentive sense of hearing" was practically nil. Rilke had in mind an artistic practice that "contributes more decisively than anyone else to an exten- sion of the several sense fields," that is, with more determination than even "the work of research. " 'li
Writers and analysts of the mental apparatus thus engaged in open, unrelenting competition. The very Rilke who fled psychoanalytic vivisec- tors programmed, as the writer's only task, the transposition of coronal sutures. Even his enigmatic "inner-world space" was only another name for the engram stored in the brain and transcribed by writers. The evi- dence is that Rilke called the skull a "special housing closed against all worldly space" and thereby restated the physiologist's insight that, for such a housing, "our own body is the external world. "s9Interpreters who read "inner-world space," this technological and physiological system, philosophically, thus remain as far behind the state of the art, as belated as their totemic animal, the proverbial owl.
More than one hundred pages on aphasia research and phonographs, psychoanalysis and paranoia, will perhaps not have been wasted if they make it possible to spell out for the first time, and not merely to under- stand, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Spelling in the Notebooks is taken over by psychiatrists (whereas phi- losophers d o not appear at all). Doctors in the SalpZtriPre are the ones who make a-v-a-n-tout of avant, which Brigge (as the title of the book indicates) has only to note down. The question is why this twenty-eight- year-old, who is not in the SalpetriPre to gather racy material on doctor- patient relationships," shows up in the insane asylum instead of sticking
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to anatomy lectures and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The answer is that Brigge, like his novelist, "had once considered psychiatric treatment, but dropped the idea just in time. "
He enters the Salpetriire, explains his case, is registered for electro- shock therapy, is questioned briefly by a couple of assistant doctors, and is sent back to the waiting room. While Brigge is waiting for the promised or threatened electrical shocks, the discursive event occurs: his ears catch a hot, flaccid stuttering "a-v-a-n-t. " Psychophysical decomposition of language becomes the secret code of an initiation. Just like the word DADA, which occurs in a child's "babbling phase" and reminds people "of their honorably dirtied diapers and of the cry that is now supposed to delight the world,"6*the "a-v-a-n-t" also leads to a short circuit between experiment and primal sound, psychophysics and children's language.
And, then, as 1listened to the hot, flaccid stutteringon the other sideof the pam- tion, then for the first time in many, many years it was there again. That which had struck into me my first, profound terror, when as a child I lay ill with fever: the Big Thing. Yes,that was what I had always called it, when they all stood around my bed and felt my pulse and asked what had frightened me: the Big Thing. And when they got the doctor and he came and spoke to me, I begged him only to make the Big Thing go away, nothing else mattered. But he was like the rest. He could not take it away, though I was sosmall then and might easily have been helped. And now it was there again. . . . Now it grew out of me like a N- mor, like a second head, and was a part of me, though it could not belong to me at all, because it was so big. . . . But the BigThing swelled and grew over my face like a warm bluish boil and grew over my mouth, and already the shadow of its edge lay upon my remaining eye. "
At precisely the place or precisely in place of a psychiatric treatment that does not occur, because Brigge flees the Big Thing and the Salpetriire in one and the same movement, what does occur is the return of his child- hood. To drop the idea of psychoanalysis just in time thus means to walk the royal road alone and lift infantile amnesias. But lower abdominal play is not what returns with the repressed; it is the debris of a horror that could not be spoken and for which "the Big Thing" is still a euphemism. What appears is something real that cannot be spoken in any language because the very act of introducing it into language filters it out. Only the primal sound of the overheard psychiatrist is capable of evoking it, whereas the pleas of Brigge the child and Brigge the twenty-eight-year-old to his doctors can d o nothing.
The law governing delirium and hallucination determines that what has not entered the daylight of the symbolic appears in the real. The de- lirious Brigge becomes the debris of the debris that pours from his head. A second head, larger than the feverish one, blocks his eyes and mouth. Everything happens, then, as if Ronne's impossible gesture were possible.
? The brain, this warm bluish boil, turns itself inside out and encloses the external world. Because no one and nothing can introduce the material substratum of language into language, the shadow of neurophysiology falls on Brigge's mouth.
What occurs in the place of this eclipse is-writing. "I have taken ac- tion against fear. I have sat all night and written,""' Brigge writes of the fear that drove him in and then out of the SalpCtriPre. Writing therefore means: to put the exploded "inner-world space," the tumescent brain, down on paper, rather than have the explosion or tumor treated by the appropriate scientific methods. From then on Brigge spends his days read- ing in the Bibliotheque nationale and his nights writing on the sixth floor of his hotel. Rilke once told Gebsattel that one cannot live without the couch, but one could "read and write and endure,'; 64 Brigge uncouples his writing from speech and communication: he notes down whatever makes him mute, and when he writes letters they are never sent. There is no longer any question, then, of a life in poetry, led simultaneously in Atlantis and Dresden, on paper and in loving embraces. The medium of script reveals its coldness; it is purely archiving. Therefore it cannot re- place, represent, or be life, but only remember, repeat, and work through. To d o something against fear means to write down the fear itself.
The objects of writing are neighbors who somehow come within hear- ing, who creep out, and in some cases reach the brain to multiply and thrive there like pneumococci. The objects of writing are insane kings whose flesh has become indistinguishable from the amulets that cover it and the worms that devour it. The objects of writing are the dead heaped over battlefields, intertwined like a monstrous brain, and the dying, all of whose accumulated meanings vanish and for whom a large tumor rises in the brain-like a sun that transforms the world for them.
There is thus only one object of writing: the primal soup of brain physiology. What interests Freud is its organization; what interests Brigge is noting it down.
Better perhaps to have remained in the darkness, and your unconfined heart would have sought to be the heavy heart of all that is indistinguishable. . . .
0 night without objects. 0 obtuse window outward, o carefully closed doors; arrangements from long ago, taken over, accredited, never quite understood. 0 stillness in the staircase, stillness from adjoining rooms, stillness high up against the ceiling. 0 mother: o you only one, who shut out all this stillness, long ago in childhood. . . . You strike a light, and already the noise is you. And you hold the light before you and say: it is I; don't be afraid. "'
The fact that there is articulation at all becomes the enigma of a writing that inevitably articulates. Because Brigge (unlike Freud) does not raise the standards of his medium to norms of the real, it remains a question
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whether they are "better" than primal soup. But thus his simple descrip- tion correlates with psychophysical results.
It is wrong to assume that originally (as soon as the sense organs function) there were nothing but particular impressions out of which secondary connections among impressions were then formed. . . . The original situation should rather be thought of as a diffuse, whole sensibility. For example, when we lie daydreaming on the sofa with closed eves, we do not notice anything particular in the bright- ness that penetrates our eyelids, in the distant noise on the street, in the pressure of our clothing, or in the temperature of the room, but rather fuse all these things in the totality of our receptivity. Such-though much more vague and muffled- is how we must first think of the sensibility of the infant. Before we investigate the associations between pamcular impressions, we must first ask how the child manages to isolate a particular phenomenon out of this confused, whole state. H
As anticipatory as ever, Ebbinghaus addressed this question to his col- league, Stem, and isolated infantile isolation.
A very young child looked from a particular position into a particular room. He received a dihse, hardly differentiated impression. Now his mother pulls him in his wagon into an adjoining room; for the most part another whole impression replaces the first. But the mother and the wagon have remained the same. The optical stimuli they produce thus find the material disposable to them as well as their mental effects somewhat prepared in advance, and in addition they reinforce one another through mutual association; the other, modified stimuli do not have this double advantage. . . . The impression derived from the sight [of the mother] forms more and more easily on the one hand, and on the other hand it differenti- ates itself more and more from the various diffuse backgrounds in which it was originally dissolved: the sight of the mother becomes a progressively more inde- pendent part of the given whole impression. 6'
When one isolates the perceptual isolation of the child rigorously enough, it is no longer that of the child. The construction of articulated environ- ments proceeds through the first human contacts. What Ebbinghaus de- scribes coincides with what Brigge calls the shutting out of the indistin- guishable. The Notebooks, or the Remembrance of Things Past, critically decried as "mystical" or "oedipal" whenever they evoke childhood and the mother, simply inquire into the elemental relation, circa 1900,be- tween particular and background, sign and primal soup, language and primal sound. The answer to this inquiry can only be that discrete signs arise from sheer iteration. The mother (in Ebbinghaus) must return in order to be distinguished from the diffuse backgrounds; the mother (in the Notebooks) must say, "It is 1, don't be afraid. " Behind all identities and selections lurks the endless region of darkness.
"We know not what the imagination would be without darkness, its great school. "" reads the first empirical, child-psychological study of its kind, A Study of Fears. Eleven years before the Notebooks, in his case
? histories Stanley Hall archived all the childhood fears of Brigge: aside from mirrors, needles, and masks, there was also the moment that played such a key role for Malte and Marcel.
28. F. , I 8. The great shadow over all her early life was the dread of the moment her mother should kiss her good night and leave her alone in the dark; she lay tense and rigid, held her breath to listen with open mouth, smothered herself under the clothes, with which her head must always be covered, fancied forms bending over her, often awoke with her heart pounding and a sense of dropping through the air, flying or falling backward, feeling quivery for hours; she now vows "I will always put my whole foot on the stairs. ""'
The fact that Otto Rank's book on incest picked out the corresponding fear of Brigge, and only that one, as if to apprehend one more oedipal suspect,-"betrays the competition between literature and psychoanalysis. Childhood fears were copiously noted down in the discourse network of I 900. Psychophysics provided the theoretical and statistical framework; psychoanalysis and literature made texts of fitting individual cases, until the system was complete. None of the three discourses had solid points of reference in the two others; there is only a network of the three.
The object or abject caught in the net, however, was the child. None of the three discourses has any further concern for what mothers d o and say, for the kind of love or education they instill in their children. Instead of minimal signifieds of a first love, all that counts are the first signifiers on an indistinguishable background. The archiving of first signs, even if they are as vague as "the Big Thing" or as babbled as the "0-0-0-0-lda," that is, "fortlda" of Freud's grandson became a communal task. " The itera- tion and opposition of minimal signifiers provided material enough for constructing a system. And systems exist to be written down.
One winter evening the child Brigge is drawing. A red pencil rolls off the table and onto the carpet. The child, "accustomed to the brightness above and all inspired with the colors on the white paper," cannot find the pencil in the "blackness" under the table: dalfort. Instead, he sees his own searching hands as strange, blind creatures. Much has been written about this depersonalization, but not about the pencil, paper and black- ness, these three necessary and sufficient conditions for a medium, of which interpretations themselves are a part. And the pencil returns years later, as if it came back from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, only to desig- nate itself as the sign of a sign. A little gray woman turns it over endlessly in her miserable hands, until Brigge realizes that "it was a sign, a sign for the initiated," and senses "that there actually existed a certain compact" with the w~man. '~
Pencils are produced in order to make signs, not to be signs. But right before Brigge's eyes the woman transposes the writing instrument into
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special contexts that cut across the literary-alphabetic code. The pencil, once lost in the signless darkness of the carpet, as if in a jungle, returns as "the Big Thing" to reduce all writing to one code among others. Precisely the fact that it is "old," if not a piece of debris, makes it significant. In the Notebooks newspapers are sold by a blind man, who cannot read them. " Writing materials come to be misused by sign-giving analphabets. And so it goes in a discourse network that measures cultural technologies by their deficiencies and particular things by their degree of wear and tear. The pretty pictures produced prior to its disappearance by Brigge's pencil under the gaze of a reading governess do not count; for they are only the Basedow raisins of an alphabetizing power. What counts and is therefore put down on paper is the analphabetic adventure with writing material and paper. Freud's patient, the one who confused m and n, knew this story well.
The discourse network of I800 had archived the way in which children autonomously reproduced the engrained alphabet. But it did not begin to comprehend other children with other pleasuredfears. The discourse net- work of 1900cut apart the pedagogic feedback loop and directed children to write down their analphabetism. It was a paradoxical and impossible role that could only be taken on as simulacrum.
Brigge fills pages about an old pencil; the art-education movement had essays written on "The Rusty Pen. " Packed together with 144other simi- lar pens in industrial boxes three weeks previously, it is finally "good for nothing else" than to be thrown in the waste basket, But because only use singularizes, the useless pen becomes the subject of a writer. His semi- official name is the happy child; his empirical name is Heinrich Schar- relmann-a high school teacher who, in the place of pens and pupils that don't write, wrote a book entitled Happy Children. "
As it is in little things, so it is in big ones. At the convention of the art- education movement in Weimar, which dealt with German language and literature from October 9 to 11, 1903,laymen were in attendance along with thirty-four educational bureaucrats. One of the nonteachers, Dr. Heinrich Hart, clarified his status at the beginning of his address.
When my friend, Caesar Flaischgen, asked me to speak about the choice of litera- ture for schools at the art-education conference, l was seized by a slight fear. How could I possibly presume to speak about educational matters! I have never-I must admit to my shame-stood at the lectern, and any educational talent 1pos- sess barely suffices to educate myself. (Laughter. ) 1 intended to decline the invita- tion at once, when it occurred to me that I have indeed had a relationship to schools in one respect, and how would it be if I presented myself to the gathering of distinguished art educators not as a colleague, but as a pupil. . . .
The three combined words, "Education, School, Poetry," d o not resound with inspiring harmony in my poor pupil's soul. I will not go into further detail about
? what I suffered and endured during the years that I was taught, infused with, and force-fed poetry. "I don't want your pity. " 1 will only say, if you will pardon me this, that for a time I placed poetry in the same category as cod-liver oil and medicine. -'
With this bitter pill for educational bureaucrats, the pupil himself speaks up. But what would have been a scandal in the discourse network of I 800 produces only hearty laughter among the art educators. The mythic pupil can say that medicine is the shadow side of pedagogy.