No More Learning

In 1803the psychiatrist Hoffbauer neatly calculated the normally edu- cated person's reading speed.
An average accomplished reader reads three signatures per hour, when the latter are of the type of the present volume and the subject of the book causes him no difficulty. On a rough estimate, he needs no more than one and a quarter minutes to read one page. There are thirty lines to the page, and every line contains thirty letters; thus in one and a quarter minutes or seventy-five seconds he must recog- nize and distinguish nine hundred letters. The recognition of a letter occurs as the result of an inference. Thus our reader makes twelve different inferences in a sec- ond. . . . Ifoneassumesthatthereaderisfollowingthewriter,sothatthelatter's thoughts are transmitted to the soul of the reader, one is struck with amazement. Some have wanted to conclude from this and other examples that we perceive objects without k i n g conscious of it. This does not seem to follow in the least. Rb
The mathematics of Bildung went this far and no further, if for no other reason than that numbers were written out. A reconstruction of com- pleted alphabetization, from a whole signature back to a single letter, cul- minates in reverence for a consciousness that can make 1 2 inferences per second, inferences that certainly do not justify the conclusion that the consciousness that has to accompany all my reading (to adapt Kant's phrase) amounts to nothing. As long as reading transported thoughts from soul to soul and had its norm, as with Anton Reiser, in the tempo of speech, it was in fact recognition, and any notion of the unconscious, technically defined, was absurd.
The automatism of tachistoscopic word exposition is not designed to
? 224 1900
transport thoughts. But there are other reasons the IO ms for entire words undercuts Hoffbauer's twelfth of a second per letter. An apparatus does not let alphabetization run its course, then applaud it afterwards. The apparatus itself, like Dionysus, dictates the tempo of exposition with lighming speed. Such procedures shed light on functions as foreign to the individual and consciousness as writing ultimately is. Psychophysics (and it thus made film and futurism possible) investigated "only the move- ments of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intelligence and for that reason are much more significant. "R*Cultural technologies could be attributed to Man only as long as they were marked off along the abscissa of biological time, whereas the time of the apparatus liquidates Man. Given the apparatus, Man in his unity decomposes, on the one hand, into illusions dangled in front of him by conscious abilities and faculties and, on the other hand, into unconscious automatisms that Hoffbauer hardly felt the need to dignify with a refutation.
It was illusion for the first typists to want to be able to see and read the text as it was being written, to want "view typewriters. " Automatized hands work better when blind. It was illusion for educated subjects to be "certain" that they had "seen the 'whole"' in the tachistoscope. In the realm of milliseconds, unaffected by introspection, even the most trained reader's eye proceeds by successive spelling. RRIt was an illusion of "sub- jective judgment" that Fraktur was more readable than roman script. Precisely the "people who much prefer to read Fraktur and believe they can d o so with greater ease are the ones who require more reading time. "*'
Hermann Bahr hit upon a succinct rule for all such illusion. Classical alphabetization had attempted to mediate between Man and World (while avoiding all discourses), but: "The experiment with man has failed. And the experiment with the world has failed. The experiment can now take place only where man and the world come together (sensation, impres- sion. "" All that remains of the real is a contact surface or skin, where something writes on something else. This is precisely the tachistoscopic effect planned by a literature intent on addressing "nerves" in order to "bring about certain moods" rather than "stammering about nonsensical pleasures. "" It would thus assault the language centers in the brain indi- vidually and successively. Nietzsche's view that language first transposes nervous impulses into images and then images into sounds is the most exact characterization of literary language. Holz not only replaced rhyme with a number of acoustic effects; he also asked "why the eye should not have its particular pleasures in the printed type of a poem. "" These plea- sures are not miniature images of Man and World, but rather (as if they were calculated on the tachistoscope) ergonomically optimal uses of read- ing time. Beginning in 1897, Holz typographically centered the lines of
? his poetry for physiological reading ease. "If I left the axis at the begin- ning of the line, rather than in the middle, the eye would always be forced to travel twice as far. "" What the verses have in view, then, are not read- ers and their understanding, but eyes and their psychophysics, in other words: "Movements of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intel- ligence and for that reason are much more significant. " Holz's Phantasus, rather than addressing fantasy as the surrogate of all senses in the finest romantic manner, reckons with unconscious optokinetics (which Hus- serl's contemporaneous phenomenology thematized). The aesthetics of reception had become quite different circa 1900:instead of cornmunica- tion and its myth of two souls or consciousnesses, there are numerical relations between the materiality of writing and the physiology of the senses. Whether and how actual readers approve of their nerves having been saved such and such many milliseconds is of no concern to Holz the lyric poet. Whereas his predecessors had invited readers to pass over letters, he was concerned with technical calculations concerning the ma- teriality of his medium. Spengler's desire that "men of the new generation devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology" came somewhat after the fact. " Since Nietzsche, "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology. "
The movements of matter had their greatest triumph in the field of writ- ing. An experimental subject wrote in a test journal, after thirty-eight days devoted to typing practice, "To-day I found myself not infrequently strik- ing letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves just below the level of consciousness. "" Psycho- physics investigated or generated unconscious automatisms in handwrit- ing as well. Ecriture automatrque appeared as early as r850, but only among American spiritualists; it was not analyzed until the turn of the century. 96After the theoretical work of F. W. H. Myers and William James, profane automatic writing arrived in the Harvard laboratory of the German psychologist and inventor of psychotechnology Hugo Munsterberg. In order to demonstrate the normality of hysterical auto- matisms, two students, who could be called normal according to a vague estimation of their introspective capacity (even if the young Gertrude Stein was one of them), participated in experiments that made them no less delirious than Ebbinghaus. Because reading runs more quickly and thus unconsciously than writing, experiments in automatic reading were included at the outset.
"This is a very pretty experiment because it is quite easy and the results are very satisfactory. The subject reads in a low voice, and preferably something com-
THE GREAT LALUU 225
? 226 1900
paratively uninteresting, while the operator reads to him an interesting story. If he does not go insane during the first few trials he will quickly learn to concentrate his attention fully on what is being read to him, yet go on reading just the same. The reading becomes completely unconscious for periods of as much as a page. "
It is a pretty experiment indeed, one made as if to dismiss hermeneutic reading. At one time our inner selves were supposed to be the workshop in which all reading operations were conducted; our ego was always to be kept in view because of the risk of insanity by distraction. But now the protocol calls for just what had scandalized Bergk, and once the rock of insanity has been circumnavigated, everything runs as unconsciously as it does normally. Rather than being rooted together in one voice from the inmost soul, the isolated routines of reading, listening, and speaking be- come automatic and impersonal: "the voice seemed as though that of an- other person. " %
In a more advanced step, Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein experi- mented with a coupling of automatic reading and writing. "For this pur- pose the person writing read aloud while the person dictating listened to the reading. In this way it not infrequently happened that, at interesting parts of the story, we would have the curious phenomenon of one person unconsciously dictating sentences which the other unconsciously wrote down; both persons meanwhile being absorbed in some thrilling story. "* The division of the unity of Man can thus be accomplished by two read- ers or writers. While both consciousnesses are fed with signifieds, one un- conscious takes dictation from the other-just as the psychoanalyst "must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the trans- mitting unconscious of the patient. " ' I x ) The deceptive proximity of this
writing situation to the romantic fantasy of the library in fact marks the latter's total perversion. When Serpentina whispered their love story to the student Anselmus, his hand wrote along in unconscious dictation. But nothing could be less impersonal than a phantom-beloved capable of playing the Mother's Mouth for a man's soul. For that reason her voice never really uttered anything aloud; it arose as a utopian shadow thrown by very real but unreadable signs. Because the Woman does not exist and plural women had no place in the educational system, an imaginary woman's voice had simultaneously to remind young authors or bureau- crats of their writing duty and to transform it magically into infantile sexuality.
Circa 1900,however,experimentation dissolvedtheutopia. l"'Gertrude Stein, not for nothing Miinsterberg's ideal student,"" could study psycho- physics like anyone else. While German universities still trembled at the thought of the chaos women students would provoke, the Harvard Psychological Laboratory had long been desexualized. In their test re-
? M EGREATLALUa 227
port, Solomons and Stein are referred to throughout as "he. " Io' The sci- entific discourse gives only hints that during this strange cooperation the man dictated and the woman wrote. Gertrude Stein, for years employed as an academic secretary, was in the experiment similarly "the perfect blanc while someone practises on her as an automaton. "1wNothing is said of why the two sexes were divided in that way. Two years later, how- ever, with Solomons significantly absent, Stein continued her autoexperi- mens with others-with the explicit purpose of "comparison between male and female experimental subjects. " '"5 Such a question already re- veals what supports the new scientific discourse. Real women, as they exist in plurality, had attained access to writing as practiced in university discourse. Their hysteria, rather than remaining out of the way as some idiosyncrasy like Brentano's sister, was experimentally simulated in order to make it a completely normal motoric automatism. As unconscious as she was obedient, Gertrude Stein took dictation from her fellow student.
With that, the positions of the sexes in the discourse network of I800 were reversed. Into the place of the imaginary Mother's iMouth steps a man who dictates factually; into the complementary place of the un- conscious author steps one of many women who have studied enough to be able to take dictation-Ariadne, Frau Roder-Wiederhold, Resa von Schirnhofer, Gertrude Stein, and so on. The fact that one of them became a writer is part of the logic of the experiment. lM
The greatest triumph of psychotechnology was to have made dictated writing into spontaneous, automatic writing. After their practice experi- ments in reading and taking dictation, Solomons and Stein went to work. A woman's hand produced texts without knowing that or what it wrote. With this, psychophysics discovered the rules of literary automaticwriting long before the surrealists. First, it is forbidden to reread anything writ- ten-precisely the act that made authors out of writing hands "stopped automatic writing. "'"' Second, the annoying intrusions of an ego are to be put off by repeating prewritten sentences with an obstinacy that matches their meaninglessness. Thirty years later Andre Breton translated these two fundamental rules in his Surrealist Manifesto:
Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and he tempted to reread what you have writ- ten. . . . Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur. If silence threatens to settle in, if you should ever happen to make a mistake-a mistake, perhapsduetocarelessness-break ofwithouthesitationwithanoverlyclear line. Following a word the origin of which seems suspicious to you, place any letter whatsoever, the letter "I" for example, always the letter "I. "'"
Having been educated as a psychiatrist, Breton cannot not have known where such rules of literary production came from. To give conscious,
? 228 1900
that is, distorting attention to repeated iterations of a sign reverses psychi- atric diagnosis. The "senseless repetition of the same letter for a half or whole line, as in children's writing books," which psychiatrists call, in the mentally ill, "written verbigeration," that is, flight of ideas,lmbecame, as kccriture automatique, the duty of nothing more and nothing less than literature. As this scene of inscription reveals, automatic writing is any- thing but freedom. The alphabetization campaign of 1800 also intended to automatize cultural practices, but only in order "to found and purify the ground of inwardness in the subject. """ When, by contrast, Gertrude Stein worked through a series of failed exercises and finally arrived at the experimental goal of "automatic writing by invention," precisely the freest invention conjured up inevitabilities as binding as the sentence, de- cades later, that a rose is a rose is a rose. The longest of the few examples cited by Solomons and Stein says this clearly: "Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what 1have spoken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken so glibly . . . ""'
What speaks, when It speaks, is always fate. This was no news to Freud. The medium and the message coincide because even in grammar the repetition compulsion rules. Such discourse is unavoidable precisely because it is empty. Automatic writing says nothing of thought or in- wardness, of intention or understanding; it speaks only of speech and glibness. Neither the inevitable nor the people it threatens exist except by hearsay. In the methodic isolation of her laboratory, cutoffrom all the classical determinations of woman and integrated into the new desexu- alized university, an ideal student speaks and writes as if the rejected truth of Western thought had returned. Psychophysics thus took the place of occult media (read: women). Alone and dazed, a Pythia sits on the tri- pod again, and men or priests whisper to her the secret fears of the people. But the mistress of the oracle cannot console. Whatever she says becomes unavoidable because she says it. No one is more tragic than Cas- sandra. Unconscious words transpire, and immediately the listeners har- bor a suspicion close to a truth intolerable for philosophers: that dis- courses conjure up what they seem only to describe. Whether under the sign of myth orof positivism, the release of automatic speaking means that Cassandra will not be believed and will find no way to warn the people who have just been spoken of so glibly. Thus, literally and without com- mentary, the leading journal of American experimental psychology, vol- ume 3,1896: "Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what I have spo- ken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken so
glibly . . . "
? THE GREAT LALULA 229 Technological Media
A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. And because the unconscious never finds an illusory belief, the unconscious can only be stored.
In the discourse network of 1900,psychophysical experiments were incorporated as so many random generators that produce discourses without sense or thought. The ordinary, purposeful use of language- so-called communication with others-is excluded. Syllabic hodgepodge and automatic writing, the language of children and the insane-none of it is meant for understanding ears or eyes; all of it takes the quickest path from experimental conditions to data storage. Good, old-fashioned handwriting is the storage mechanism for automatic writing, with the slight modification that Gertrude Stein watches her hands like separate machines with a modicum of curiosity rather than commanding them to write particular signs. ' In other cases, deposition into writing is impos- sible, because the random generators produce effects only at extremely high speeds. Automatic writing and reading already exhibit a tendency toward increasing speed: the tempo of dictation races ahead of the hands, that of reading exceeds the articulating organs. ' Thus, in order to retain anything at all, psychophysics had to join with the new media that revo- lutionized optics and acoustics circa 1900. These, of course, are Edison's twogreat innovations: film and the gramophone.
The long process that culminated in the Lumikres' cinematographs was dictated by the technical-industrial necessity of surpassing the hu- man eye's limited capability to process single images. The birth of film was attended by Eadweard J. Muybridge's serial photographs, Etienne- Jules Marey and C. E. J. Demeny's photographic gun, and Johann Hein- rich Ernemann's slow-motion photography. The gramophone also de- pended on being able to function at speeds slower than people can talk. It could not have been invented-contemporaries were wrong about this'-before Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier's mathematical analyses of amplitude or Helmholtz's studies in physiological acoustics. The tech- nical simulation of both optical and acoustical processes presupposed analyses made possible by the speed of the apparatuses themselves. Voice reproduction required a frequency band between 90 and 1,200 Hertz even for the fundamental tones; studies of body movements required illu- mination speeds in the realm of milliseconds.
The ability to record sense data technologically shifted the entire dis- course network circa 1900. For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The technological record-
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ing of the real entered into competition with the symbolic registration of the Symbolic. The wonderfully super-elevated Edison whom Philippe Villiers de ! 'Isle-Adam made the hero of his Tomonow's Eve concisely formulated the new development. Musing among his devices and appa- ratuses, he begins a monologue, ignored by literary theorists, that will bring Lessing's Laocoon up to date in 1886.
The Word Made Flesh paid little attention to the exterior and sensible p a m either of writing or of speech. He wrote on only one occasion, and then on the ground. No doubt He valued, in the speaking of a word, only the indefinable heyondness with which personal magnetism inspired by faith can fill a word the moment one pronounces it. Who knows if all the rest isn't trivial by comparison? . . . Still, the fact remains, He allowed men only to print his testament, not to put it on the phonograph. Otherwise, instead of saying, "Read the Holy Scriptures," we would be saying, "Listen to the Sacred Vibrations. "'
Believers in the Book were prohibited in the name of their Lord from celebrating the exteriority and sensuality of the word and scripture. The permitted medium of printing made it possible to bypass signs for sense, the "beyond" of the senses. Only under the counter-command "Hear the sacred vibrations! " does the symbolic registration of the Symbolic lose its monopoly. Vibrations, even in God's voice, are frequencies far below the threshold of perception and notation for single movements. Neither the Bible nor the primer can record them. Therefore, phonograph's Papa, as Edison is known in the novel, rethinks the sacred itself. He dreams of ideal phonographs capable of registering the "oracles of Dodona" and "chants of the Sybils" (to say nothing of pure "noise") in indestructible recordings for "sonorous archives of copper. "' The dreams of an Ameri- can engineer dreamed by a French symbolist come quite close to the strange occurrences in Miinsterberg's laboratory. What the student as medium could hardly note down for all her psychotechnical ecstasy is caught by the gramophone as medium-the murmuring and whispering of unconscious oracles.
But not all women of 1900,as oracles or students, were abreast of their age and technology. Among the Germans there were still feminine readers. Anna Pomke, "a timid, well brought-up girl,'' can only regret "thatthephonographwasnotinventedinI800. " For,assheconfessesto a favorite professor: "I would so much like to have heard Goethe's voice! He was said to have such a beautiful vocal organ, and everything he said was so meaningful. Oh, if only he had been able to speak into the gram- ophone! Oh! Oh! "6 Among the believers in culture, holy vibrations are not sibylline whisperings but the tone and content of a voice that has long delighted feminine readers in the imaginary and that must now do so in the real. A loving professor, however, could not resist that sigh of longing and the wish to modernize a love of books. Abnossah Pschorr sneaks into
? the cemetery, makes a secret mold of Goethe's skeleton, reconstructs the larynx, wires it to a phonograph, and puts together this fine composite of physiology and technology in the office of the Goethe House. For "when- ever Coethe spoke, his voice created vibrations," whose reverberations "become weaker with the passage of time, but which cannot actually cease. " To filter the sound of Goethe's voice out of the noise of all the discourse that had occurred, one fed impulses into a "receiving organ" that simulated his larynx, with the help of an amplification device that was brand-new in 1916. 'Accordingly, Salomo Friedlaender's story is called "Coethe Speaks into the Gramophone.
" The story has a sad and logical ending: no engineer can stand having women love not the in- vention itself but its output. In jealous competition between media, Pro- fessor Pschorr destroys the only recording of the beautiful, monstrous, and absent voice that in I 800 commanded an entire discourse network.
A roll capable of recording Dodonian oracles, a roll capable simply of recording the poet: those were the writer's dreams in 1900. The lyric poet and feuilletonist, bohemian and amateur, who came up with the technical principle of the phonograph in 1877,gathered all these dreams in verse under the significant title Inscription.
Commelestraits danslescam&
J'ai voulu que les voix aimees
Soient un bien, qu'on garde a jamais, Et puissent r6p6ter le reve
Musical de I'heure trop brhe; Le temps veut fuir, je le soumets.
Like the faces in cameos
I wanted beloved voices
To be a fortune which one keeps forever, And which can repeat the musical Dream of the too short hour;
Time would flee, I subdue it. n
But Charles Cros, the writer, only pointed toward the phonograph and never built it. The deeds of Edison, the practical man, are more profane, less erotic, and more forgettable than writers' dreams or novelistic fan- tasies. Precisely that is their greatness. The phonograph and the type- writer exist for the same reason. Edison was nearly deaf, and the blind were foremost among the builders of typewriters. Media, like psycho- physical experiments, begin with a physiological deficiency. The very first tin-foil roll to record a voice, on December 6, 1877,registered the shouts of its inventor, a voice that remained distant and unreachable to his ac- tual ears. Edison roared "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the phono- graph's bell-mouth. '
The history of sound recording did not begin with oracles or poets, but
THE GREAT LALUU ZjI
? 232 1900
with children's songs, though in the roar of a deaf and childish engineer. In 1888,however, when his gramophone had just gone into mass produc- tion, Edison began to market dolls in which the speech roll had been re- corded by young girls. '"Again one heard-the hit among twelve choices- "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but this time as a children's song sung by a child. When Villiers, with a symbolist's love of oracles and sibyls, had Edison listen via stereophonic recording and playback devices to his young daughter sing "ring-around-a-rosy" in front of the laboratory, he approached the engineer's profane illumination. "
Talking dolls also mark the turning point between two discourse net- works. Kempelen's and Maelzel's mechanical children of 1778and 1823 repeated the minimal signifieds of loving parents for those parents. Circa
1800there was no children's ianguage independent of pedagogical feed- back. In the Edison talking doll, by contrast, real children sang children's songs about little Marys and their lambs. The century of the child began with such self-relatedness, unreachable by any MamaIrapa psychology.
According to Ellen Key, The Century ofthe Child brought an end to "soul murder" in school. 'LInstead of establishing pedagogical norms for what should be spoken by children, one gave free reign to language games. But these standards (in spite of all child's-century oracles) were techno- logical from the beginning. There cannot be any children's language un- filtered through the language of adults until discourses can be recorded in their positive reality. The classical pedagogical dream of forming adults with analytic, slow-motion pronunciation-walking phoneme archives for their children-became obsolete. Edison's invention was not called a phonograph for nothing: it registers real sounds rather than translating them into phonemic equivalencies as an alphabet does. Emile Berliner's more modern device, which replaced rolls with records, was not called a gramophone for nothing: true to its name, it retains "the sounds of letters" and has a writing angel as its trademark. "
Technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse. I4The phonograph and gramophone allow slow- motion studies of single sounds far below the perception threshold of even Stephani's ideal mothers. Though the frequency bandwidth possible circa 1900could not match the entire speech spectrum and particularly
? distorted s-sounds (with frequencies up to 6kHz), this was not a handi- cap. The talking machine moved into laboratories and schools very soon after its invention. In laboratories its very distortions made it possible to measure hearing. " In schools it was useful because "it is essential for achieving an accurate impression of the most fleeting, unrepresentable, and yet so important, characteristic aspects of language, of line phonetics (speech melody) and of line rhythm," whereas (because of its accurate re- cording) it "is not suited for pure pronunciation practice. "'" Thus wrote Ernst Surkamp, publisher of a journal that is nearly impossible to locate today, Instruction and Talking Machines-as if any further demonstra- tion that the epoch of High German phonetic norms is past were neces- sary. Of course, talking machines can create "a store of readily accessible language sounds in exemplary, faultless accent" and dictatorially inscribe schoolchildren with language sounds or universal keyboards. '' But they can do more and different things. To the student Rilke, whose physics teacher had his students reconstruct and experiment with a phonograph that he had acquired as soon as the machine was on the market, the regis- tered sounds opened "as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality. "'*The fact that a purely empirical phonetics (in rigor- ous distinction to phonology) suddenly became possible led to storing real phenomena according to technical standards rather than to regulat- ing them according to educational norms. One could record the wild army that Nieasche despaired of ever getting down. Because "dialects in schools deserve every possible encouragement, the talking machine can be effective in that its undistorted oral presentations nourish one's delight in a native language. ""
In the discourse network of I900, media rehabilitated dialects, those of groups like those of children. Not the delight of the subjects but the delight of the researcher came to power. In the absence of normativiza- tion, this delight brought to light discourses that previously had never passed a recording threshold-"a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality. "
On the second German Art-Education Day in Herder's Weimar, a speaker dismissed the unified language that for a hundred years had ruled over teachers and students.
The school-age child brings his own language to school, his native language, his family language, the language of his playmates, his own naive, intuitive language: our task and our desire is to teach him our language, the language of our poets and thinkers. . . . But isn't it asking a great deal when we demand that children, from the first day of school, speak nothing but school language? . . . It is not long before the children will be overtaken hv books and book language: a child learns to read. Reading, however, weakens and cuts across-it cannot be otherwise- the child's coherent, fluent speech, and book language begins more and more to
THE GREAT LALUL. & 233
? influence and control school language; finally, in its often foreign and refined way, it creates a child who is now shy and monosyllabic. '"
This speaker admits that book language represents a never-spoken excep- tion and impedes actual speech. The most fluent speaker is the one who, like children or the writer of Ecce Homo,never reads a line. Therefore progressive pedagogues can only compete with the media. Like the bell of a recording phonograph, they absorb every freely flowing word, every na- ive pun of children's dialects.
Christian Morgenstern, the child of German letters, immediately rec- ognized and exploited this development. Even if he was later to declare in mediocre verse that the gramophone was the work of the devil-before his master, Rudolf Steiner, said the same thing"-his heroes knew better.
Korf und Palmstrijm nehmen Lektionen, urn das Wetter-Wendische zu lernen. Eglich pilgern siezuden modernen Ollendorffschen Sprachlehrgrammophonen.
Dortnun lassen sie mit vielen andern, welche gleichfalls steile Charaktere (gleich als obs ein Ziel fiir Edle ware), sich im Wetter-Wendischen bewandern.
Dies Idiom behebt den Geist der Schwere, macht sie unstet, launisch und cholerisch . . . Doch die Sache bleibt nur peripherisch.
Und sie werden wieder-Charaktere.
Korf and Palmsa6m are taking lessons
From Ollendorff's didactic gramophones;
To learn Weather-Wendish's grammar and tone, They wander hence for daily sessions.
There they put with all the rest,
Who are stiff characters, too, it seems, (the place attracts elite esteem)
Their Weather-Wendish to the test.
The idiom tends to untie fetters,
Make people moody, things look dismal, But still it all remains peripheral,
and they revert once more-to characters. ''
This poem, entitled "Language Studies," may be an exact description- except that Surkamp would be a more appropriate name than Ollendorff. Heinrich Ollendorff5method of language instruction emphasized con- versation more than the rules of grammar, but Surkamp's company had at the time a near-monopoly on language-instructional gramophones and strongly encouraged dialects in the schools. In 1913 Korf and Palmstrom
? could choose among more than a thousand instructional records. The fact that they chose Weather-Wendish legitimately established the new status of dialects as an autonym of "naive and intuitive" children's language. ' The play on ethnography and weather reports is like the children's puns and jokes that were recorded by the psychologist Stanley Hall.
Words, in connection with rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, cadence, etc. , or even without these, simply as sound-pictures, often absorb the attention of children, and yield them a really aesthetic pleasure either quite independently of their meaning or to the utter bewilderment of it. They hear fancied words in noises and sounds of nature and animals, and are persistent punners. As buttedies make butter or eat it or give it by squeezing, so grasshoppers give grass, bees give beads and beans, kittens grow on the pussy-willow, and all honey is from honeysuckles, and even a poplin dress is made of poplar-trees. "
. . . and so on and so forth, until even the Wends speak Weather-Wendish. Their fantastical Slavic has its grave opposite in what the art-educators designated as the weakening, intimidating high idiom. Either there are characters, individuals, and the one norm, or gramophonics raises all the unstable, capricious changes in speech to the level of standards. Then "there is in fact no reason, as long as one recognizes Wendish as a lan- guage, that the same recognition should not be extended to Weather- Wendi~h. "~'
Korf and Palmstrom, of course, broke of their gramophone studies and became characters-that is, and not only in Greek, letters once more. Morgenstern's simulated children's language remained high idiom, writ- ten language, which quickly made its way into children's readers and dis- sertations. :' Discourses that had previously never been able to cross a re- cording threshold were stored and returned; the gramophone had paid its debt.
But heroes in poems were not the only ones to discover the talking ma- chine. Those who wrote poems were also tempted to give it a try. In I 897 the Wilhelmine poet laureate, Ernst von Wildenbruch, was probably the first German writer to record his voice on a wax roll. (His Kaiser had long since preceded him. ) Wildenbruch wrote a poem expressly for the occasion, "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice"; the history of its transmission says it all. The Collected Works did not collect it; Walter Bruch, who as the inventor of the PAL television system had access to archives of historical recordings, had to transcribe the verses from the roll. They will be quoted here in a form that will horrify poets, composi- tors, and Germanists.
Wendisch is the language of the Wends, a Slavic group that once inhabited p a m of eastern Germany. [Trans. ]
THEGREATLALUU 235
? ? 236 1900
Shapes can constrain the human visage, the eye be held fast in an image, only the voice, born in breath, bodiless dies and fliesoff.
The fawning face can deceive the eye, the sound of the voice can never lie, thus to me is the phonograph the soul's own true photograph,
which brings what is hidden to light and forces the past to speak. Hear then, for in this sound you will look into the soul of Ernst von Wildenbruch. "
A copious writer, Wildenbruch did not always rhyme so poorly. But in the moment he took leave of the Gutenberg galaxy, he was overcome by written language. As if in Gertrude Stein's dark oracle, an inevitability appears and does away with all poetic freedoms. Wildenbruch had to talk into a black phonographic speaker, which stored pure sounds rather than his words and notions. Of course, the voice did not cease being born in breath; it retains the vibration fundamental to classical-romantic lyric poetry; but-and this is too empirical or trivial a fact for Foucault's grandly styled history of discourse-the voice can no longer be pure po- etic breath that vanishes even as it is heard and leaves no trace. What once necessarily escaped becomes inescapable; the bodiless becomes material. The gramophone is not quite as volatile, capricious, and secondary as Korf and Palmstrom thought. The lyric poet Wildenbruch reacted like a rat in a test labyrinth. His musings on physiognomy and photography, which allow their subjects cunning countermeasures and escape hatches, circumscribe only the optical medium that he was familiar with: writing. When the phonograph forces the hidden to speak, however, it sets a trap for speakers. With it, speakers are not identified in the symbolic with a name, or in the imaginary by hero-reader identifications, but in the real. And that is not child's play. Wildenbruch alluded to the symbolic and imaginary registers when he coupled the sound of the poem with his own noble proper name and a look into his poetic soul in order not to speak of
the real, the speaking body.
Herder dreamed long before Anna Pomke of an improved "reading
and notational system" in which one "will probably also find a way of designating the characteristic substance and tone of a lyric piece. "'- With the gramophone's capacity to record lyric poetry, the dream becomes at once reality and nightmare. It is one thing to write proudly about the phonographic recording of all voices, as Charles Cros did; it is another thing to write, as Wildenbruch did, "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" and then to have to speak it. What good are the poetic mnemonic techniques of rhyme and meter when wax rolls can store not only substance and tone but real sounds? Like Alfred Doblin's defiant motto, "Not phonography, but art,">*Wildenbruch's poetaster rhymes bear witness to an embittered competition between poetry and tech- nological media.
Sound is a complex of physiological data that are impossible to put
? into writing or to counterfeit. In the discourse network of 1900,psycho- physics and media subvert the imaginary body image that individuals have of themselves and substitute a forthright positivity. The phonograph is called the true photograph of the soul; graphology is called the "X ray" of handwritten "indiscretions. " **
Mocking the doctrine of psychological physiognomy in 1800, phi- losophers could joke: nothing more was required than a decision of the individual to make itself incomprehensible for centuries. '" That is what Wildenbruch hoped to accomplish with his line about the fawning face deceiving the eyes of the physiognomist; but given a machine that dodges the tricks people use with one another, the laughter has died away after a century. Phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase. The past that the phonograph forces to speak is only Wildenbruch's helpless euphemism for his singular body, which was posthumous even while he lived.
The death of man and the preservation of corporeal evidence are one. In a brilliant essay, Carlo Ginzburg has shown that around 1900a new paradigm of knowledge gained ascendancy, one that operated only with unfakeable, that is, unconscious and meaningless, details-in aesthetics as well as in psychoanalysis and criminology. " Thus a writer in Scientific American said of the phonograph, which was just then going into mass production, "It can be used as a reliable witness in criminal investiga- tions. "" The individual of 1800,who was an individual universal, did not survive this fine-grained investigation. What one can know of a human being today has nothing to do with the 4,000 pages that Sartre, posing the same question, devoted to the psychology of Flaubert. One can record people's voices, their fingerprints, their parapraxes. Ginzburg also underestimates the modernity of these encroachments when he puts the origin of the gathering of evidence among prehistoric hunters and Re- naissance physicians. The snow that helped trackers was an accident; Edison's tin-foil roll or Francis Galton's fingerprint archive were pur- posefully prepared recording surfaces for data that could be neither stored nor evaluated without machines.
Thus Wildenbruch's mediocre verse points out whom the phonograph benefits. A lyric poet immortalized in the grooves on a record enters, not the pantheon, but the archive of the new "deposition psychology. " Under this name William Stern and others instituted a science based on the su- periority of technical over literary storage devices. Whether for criminals or for the insane, the use of "stylized depositions often produces a false impression of the examination and obscures the psychological signifi- cance of individual statements. " Because each answer "is, from the point of view of experimental psychology, a reaction to the operative stimulus in the question," experimenters and investigators provoke countertactics
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in their subjects as long as they use the bureaucratic medium of writ- ing. If, however, one selects "the use of the phonograph as an ideal method," then, especially if the recording is done secretly, any parasitic feedback between the stimulus and the reaction will be prevented. Se- crecy is "absolutely essential" with children in order to "guarantee the genuine innocence of their responses. " 34
As a photograph of the soul, the talking machine put an end to the innocent doctrine of innocence. Circa 1800 innocence was a historical- philosophical limit concept; it referred to a region it itself made impass- ible. "Once the soul speaks, then oh! , it is no longer the soul that speaks. " Although this loss of the soul's identity with itself had been attributed to the progressofthe human race or to the division of labor, it resulted, in the final analysis, simply from the technological impossibility of stor- ing the newly discovered voice in any form except that of writing. Olym- pia's automatized "oh" would otherwise never have been so fascinating and terrifying. Circa 1900, by contrast, the builders of automatons had carried the day. There was no longer any innocence below the recording threshold; there was only the tactical rule of anticipating counter reac- tions while recording. But the innocence that comes into being where bodies and media technologies come into contact is called flight of ideas.
Inorder to investigate "glossophysical" disturbances, or those that, beyond alalia or aphasia, affect entire sequences of speech, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky devised a new type of experimental pro- cedure. After having "shut out as far as possible all extraneous sense stimuli," Stransky had his subjects "look and speak directly into the painted black tube" of a phonographic receiver for one minute. " The subjects were selected partly from among Stransky's psychiatric col- leagues, partly from among his patients. The principal distinction be- tween the cohorts, however, was that most of the patients reacted with fright to the intentionally stimulus-free (that is, black) field of the re- ceiver, with the unfortunate result that their responses had to be recorded stenographically rather than phonographically. " But in the absence of any transcendental norm, psychiatrists and psychiatric patients exhibited the same speech behavior. After an initial trial period, they could produce nonsense for one minute (the recording time for one roll). The command to speak as much and as quickly as possible, together with a recorder capable of registering more material at a quicker pace than the alphabet, brought about an experimentally guaranteed hodgepodge of words. As in the experiments of Ebbinghaus, the initial difficulties resulted from the paradoxical imperative to bracket the operative imperatives of normal speech.
? In the beginning, it was normal for subjects to get no further than the first few sentences; they would stall and claim that nothing occurred to them, that they could no longer speak. . . . We are ordinarily so accustomed to thinking under the direction of general concepts that we constantly fall back into this tendency whenever we are presented with a particular aim, even when this aim consists in shutting o u t all general concepts . . . Only when t h e subjects realized t h a t seurch- ing for verbal ideas was completely unnecessary, that these ideas would come spontaneously and profusely to the foreground, did the initial stalling rapidly cease so we could proceed to the actual experiment. "
From a technological medium that records their voices without asking for hidden thoughts or ideas, experimental subjects learned "the release of linguistic expression from mental life" through their own bodies. In its
'L autonomy,"I* languageproceedswithoutanyneedtolookforsignifieds. Niensche announced long before Stransky that he learned to find once he grew weary of seeking; long after Stransky, Breton urged writers to trust the inexhaustible murmur.
The resultant output is all practically interchangeable. Automatic writing generates sentences reminiscent of "Rose is a rose is a rose. " Stransky's phonograph records the sequence, "Hope, green belief, green, green, green, green is an emerald, an emerald is green, a sapphire is green, a-a sapphire is green, green is, that isn't right," l9 etc. Henceforth speech knows only tautology and contradiction, thetwoempty, informationless extremes of truth values. "' In identifying the new artistic age of technical reproduction with film, Benjamin singled out the movie screen as making the single image obsolete and therefore establishing the rule of distrac- tion, rather than bourgeois concentration. But the principle applies more generally and rigorously. Film has no privileged position among the me- dia that have revolutionized literature and art. All have brought about, in exact psychiatric terms, the flight of ideas; Corresponding terms in cul- tural criticism, such as "distraction," remain euphemistic.
Stransky's phonograph did not record mere lapses in attention or mo- ments of distraction; it registered disdain for political and pedagogical norms, norms that would not have endured for a day were it not for a normativized language. " The catatonic Heinrich H. , for instance, re- sponded to test questions concerning the nature of state and school regu- lations thus:
The state is many people livingtogether, hour by hour, placesseparated by hours, bordered by mountains on four sides.
[School regulation] is that law over school-age children who are often in condi- tions of illness, when they stay home and when they should be working o u t on the land. Alternate daily,whentheyworkfortwodaysandgotoschoolfortwodays, they changeevery week. When they work for a week and go to school for a week,
THE GREAT LALUa 239
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all school-age children who are ill and have to stay home and save time, thus save
time, stay home, perhaps to work, perhaps to cook, perhaps to wash carrots . . . "
Responses on the order of vegetable stew effectively dismantle the powers on which education had been based since 1800.