No More Learning

Underwood's "view typewriter" in I 898, all models (much to the disadvantage of their popu- larization) wrote invisible lines, which became visible only after the fact. *6 But Underwood's improvement did little to change the fundamental dif- ference between handwriting and typescript. Toquote Angelo Beyerlen's engineering expertise:
In writing by hand, the eye must constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each written line, must measure, direct, and, in short, guide the hand through each movement. For this, the written line, particu- larly the line being written, must be visible. By contrast, after one presses down briefly on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a com- plete letter, which not only is untouched by the writer's hand but i s also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work. Why should the writer look at the paper when everything there occursdependably and well as long as the keys on the fingerboard are used correctly?
The spot that one must constantly keep in view in order to write correctly by hand-namely, the spot where the next sign to be written occurs-and the pro- cess that makes the writer believe that the hand-written lines must be seen are precisely what, even with "view typewriters,'' cannot be seen. The only reason- able purpose of visibility is not fulfilled by the "view typewriters. " The spot that must be seen is always visible, but not at the instant when visibility is believed to be required. *-
Underwood's innovation unlinks hand, eye, and letter within the mo- ment that was decisive for the age of Goethe. Not every discursive config- uration rests on an originary production of signs. Circa 1900several blindnesses-of the writer, of writing, of script-come together to guar- antee an elementary blindness: the blind spot of the writing act. Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the phi- losopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the play between type and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription.
Instead of writing on his broken machine, Nietzsche continued to write about the typewriters that had made certain very forgetful "slaves of affect and desire" into so-called human beings. Out of technology
? 196 1900
comes science, but a science of techniques. "Our writing materials con- tribute their part to our thinking" reads one of Nietzsche's typed letters. " Five years later The Genealogy of Morals gathered a whole arsenal of martyrs, victims, maimings, pledges, and practices to which people, very tangibly, owe their memories: "perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotech- nics. 'If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. '"" This writing out of fire and pain, scars and wounds, is the opposite of alphabetization made flesh. It does not obey any voice and therefore forbids the leap to the sig- nified. It makes the transition from nature to culture a shock rather than a continuum. It is as little aimed at reading and consumption as the pain applied ceases not to cease. The signifier, by reason of its singular rela- tionship to place, becomes an inscription on the body. Understanding and interpretation are helpless before an unconscious writing that, rather than presenting the subject with something to be deciphered, makes the subject what it is. Mnemonic inscription is, like mechanical inscription, always invisible at the decisive moment. Its blindly chosen victims are "virtually compelled to invent gods and genii at all the heights and depths, in short, something that roams even in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting, painful spectacle pass unnoticed. " *'
Nietzsche's third experiment was to step into the place of such a god. If God is dead, then there is nothing to keep one from inventing gods. Dio- nysus (like Dracula several years later) is a typewriter myth. The mne- monic technique of inscription causes bodies so much pain that their la- menting, a Dionysian dithyramb in the most literal sense of the word, can and must invent the god Dionysus. Hardly anything distinguishes the drama described in the Genealogy from Nietzsche's dithyramb "Ariadne's Lament. " 91 Tortured and martyred by an InvisibleOnewho represents the naked power of inscription, Nietzsche's Ariadne puzzles over the desire of this Other. Such speech was not heard, indeed would have been unheard of, in the classical-romantic discourse network. It was first necessary to write with and about typewriters; the act of writing had first to become a blind incidence from and upon a formless ground before speech could be directedtowardtheunansweringconditionsof speechitself. Ariadnespeaks as the being who has been taught to speak by torture, as the animal whose forgetfulness has been driven o u t by mnemonic techniques; she talks about and to the terror that all media presuppose and veil. She became "the fateful curiosity that once would look out and downward through a crack in the room of consciousness and would sense that man . . . rests on the merciless, the craving, the voracious, the murderous. "
? NIETZSCHE 197 But because language itself is a transposition, the desire of this Other
remains unspoken. Ariadne says it.
Stich weiter!
Grausamster Stachel!
Kein Hund-dein Wild nur bin ich, grausamster Jager!
deine stolzeste Gefangne,
du RIuber hinter Wolken . . .
Sprich endlich!
Du Blitz-Verhiillter! Unbekannter! sprich! Was willst du, Wegelagerer, von mir?
Stab further!
Most cruel thorn!
Not a dog-I am your trapped animal
most cruel hunter!
your proudest prisoner,
you bandit behind clouds . . .
Speak finally!
You who hide in lighming! Stranger! speak! What do you want from me? , highwayman . . .
Dionysus, hidden in formlessness, stabs but does not speak. The torments and only they are his style. For that reason Ariadne, in contrast to women in the discourse network of 1800,knows nothing of authorship or love. She can only speak in monologues that can call the inscription ''love'' just as well as "hatred. "
Was willst du dit erhorchen? was willst du dir erfoltern, du Folterer
du-Hen ker-Con!
Oder sol1 ich, dem Hunde gleich, vor dir mich walzen?
Hingebend, begeistert ausser mir dir Liebe-zuwedeln?
What would you command? what would you extract,
you torturer you-hangman-god !
Or should I, like a dog,
throw myself before you? Come wagging, devoted
and beside myself-with love? "
It was as Nietzsche wrote: "Who besides me knows what Ariadne is! -For all such riddles nobody so far had any solution; 1 doubt that anybody even saw any riddles here. "" When Friedrich Schlegel wrote O n
? 198 1900
Philosophy to his beloved, there was neither riddle nor solution. The man enjoyed his human determination, authorship; the woman remained the mute feminine reader of his love and of the confession that it was not he, but she who had introduced him to philosophy. With the "news" that far from docents and professors there was a "philosopher Dionysus," all the rules of the university discourse were reversed. " Ariadne and her "philo- sophic lover" conduct "famous dialogues on Naxo~,"~w'here first and foremost a woman speaks and learns from her mute executioner-god that "love-in its means, [is]war, at bottom, the deathly hatred of the sexes. "96 The discovery of "how foreign man and woman are to one another"" does away with the possibility of placing the two sexes in polar or com- plementary relations within a discourse network. Henceforth there is no longer any discursive representation of one through the other, as Schlegel presupposed and practiced it. Because they are at war, Dionysus does not speak for Ariadne, and Ariadne certainly never speaks for Dionysus. The discourse network of 1900codifies the rules that "one class cannot repre- sent another" and "that it is much less possible for one sex to represent an~ther. "'T~hus "a particular language" comes into being: "the wom- an's language. ""
Another language follows immediately after the woman's language, after Ariadne's lament. Following the stage direction "Lighming. Diony- sus appears in emerald beauty," the god speaks and thus materializes the logic of media. In his shroud of lightning Dionysus gives Ariadne's eyes the reversed afterimage effect that turns glimpsed darkness into light in order to protect the retina. Where earlier poetic hallucination had passed quietly over the reaction-time threshold of the senses, the lightning sends a dark and assaulting light, which transposes speech into its other medium.
Sei klug, Ariadne! . . .
Du hast kleine Ohren, du hast meine Ohren:
steck ein kluges Wort hinein! -
Muss man sich nicht erst hassen, wenn man sich lieben soll? . . . Ich bin dein Labyrinth . . .
Bewise, Ariadne! . . .
You have small ears, you have my ears:
stick a wise word in! -
Must we not first hate each other, if we are to love one another . . . I am your labyrinth . . .
The god does not answer or grant anything with his words, rather, he heightens the enigma. Rather than dissolve the ambiguity of light and darkness, love and hatred, he underscores it. A Dionysian "yes"-his wise word names the dark ground behind all words, even as he incarnates that ground. If Ariadne's lament was a glimpse out of the room of con-
? sciousness into the abyss, then Dionysus transgresses this transgression. With the line " I am your labyrinth," the abyss of language declares that it is an abyss. Ariadne's lament remains unheard: "the ears of the god be- come smaller and more labyrinthine, and no word of lament finds the way through. '""" Something else happens instead. If, in contrast to the many he- and she-asses, Ariadne has small ears, if she sticks the wise word in, then what takes place is not elegy, monologue, or epiphany but, very suddenly and technically, dictation. The philosopher Dionysus, un- like his university-tamed predecessors, utters a Discourse of the Master, or despot. A dictate (in the double meaning of the word), however, is not to be understood or even read; its sense is literal. '"'"Stick a wise word in! " Ariadne's lament began with words about torture, stabbing, and in- scription; it ends with a word that stabs.
Nietzsche, who was proud of his small ears just as Mallarm6 was proud of his satyr's ears, thus wrote the program of his program. Rather than simply being thought as The Genealogy of Morals, typewriter be- came act in the dithyramb. The rhythm of the lyric has, of course, the "advantage" of "better impressing" words "into memory. " (Human be- ings are that forgetful, and gods that hard of hearing. ) IOL Hence, instead of declaring an ambiguous love to women with classical-romantic lyri- cism, Nietzsche stages a scene of torture. "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays inthememory. " Thisfixedsomethingisneithersignifiednorfixedidea; it is a dictated word. Nietzsche as lyric poet, or "HOWto Write Poetry with a Hammer. "
The end of all women's laments is based on the historical fact that script, instead of continuing to be translation from a Mother's Mouth, has become an irreducible medium among media, has become the type- writer. This desexualization allows women access to writing. The follow- ing sentence applies literally to the discourse network of 1900: "The typewriter opened the way for the female sex into the office. " lo' Nietz- sche's Ariadne is not a myth.
In place of his broken Malling Hansen typewriter, the half-blind Nietzsche engaged secretaries-for Beyond Good and Evil, a Mrs. Roder- Wiederhold. She had such difficulty, however-as if in empirical demon- stration of the title and of Nietzsche's dithyrambs-in tolerating the anti- democratic, anti-Christian master's discourse stuck into her ear that she "cried more often" than her dictator "cared for. "lMAriadne's lament . . .
Women circa 1900were no longer the Woman, who, without writing herself, made men speak, and they were no longer feminine consumers, who at best wrote down the fruits of their reading. A new wisdom gave them the word, even if it was for the dictation of a master's discourse.
NIETZSCHE 199
? 200 1900
Whenever the hermit of Sils went out among people, he consorted with emancipated women-that is, with women who wrote. For their part, from 1885on they traveled to Engadine "only in order to make the ac- quaintance of Professor Nietzsche, who nonetheless seemed to them to be the most dangerous enemy of women. "'"' The quiet mountain valley thus witnessed the future of our educational institutions. Whereas until 1908 Prussia's bureaucratic university held fast to its founding exclusion, Swit- zerland had long admitted women to the university. 'IMLou von Salomi is only the most well known among them; aside from her and other women students, at least three women Ph. D. S appeared in Nietzsche's circle: Meta von Salis, Resa von Schirnhofer (to whom Nietzsche vainly recom- mended himself as a dissertation t~pic),'a"n~d one of the first women to earn a doctorate after the great historical turning point, Helene Drus- kowitz. Yet this context of Nietzsche's writing remains as unanalyzed as it is decisive. '" With writing women as with writing machines, the man of many failed experiments was the first to use discursive innovations.
The text that Nietzsche first composed and then transferred into Ariad- ne's lament came from Lou Salome. One has only to exchange "enigma" or "enigmatic life" for "Dionysus" in the "Hymn to Life," and the woman's verse "If you have no happiness left to give me, good then, you still have pain! " becomes Nietzsche-Ariadne's "No! Come back! With all your martyring! " The dithyramb (to say nothing of the rest of Nietzsche's rela- tionship to Salomk) thus remains quite close to what suffragettes called "the language of woman. " In a letter to his sister from Zurich, where Druskowitz was a student, Nietzsche reports:
This afternoon I took a long walk with my new friend Helene Druscowia, who lives with her mother a few houses up from the Pension Neptune: of all the women I have come to know she has read my books with the most seriousness, and not for nothing. Look and see what you think of her latest writing (Three English Poetesses, among them Eliot, whom she greatly esteems, and a book on
Shelley). . . .
my "philosophv. " I""
I would say she is a noble and honest creature, who does no harm to
A woman (Nietzsche'ssister) is thus written that other women write- particularly about other women, who without disparagement are called "poetesses. " She reads further that writing women are the most serious of Nietzsche's readers, without any doubt about their independence. There is no longer any talk about the ravages of feminine reading mania. Nietzsche learned with great care the negative lesson of the Pforta school, where pupils could become acquainted with everything but women. His "philosophy," therefore set between quotation marks, reversed the uni- versity discourse. Out of the exclusion of the other sex came, circa 1900, an inclusion. "I am your labyrinth," says Dionysus to one who in the
? Cretan cultic dance was herself the mistress of the labyrinth. Not only because Nietzsche exploded the interpretation rules of 1800 is it unneces- sary to identify Ariadne with Cosima Wagner, as so often occurs. The enigma at the origin of all discourse has been played out; henceforth "women" count only insofar as they are known to Nietzsche and are ac- quainted with Nietzsche's writing.
Women are neither One nor all, but rather, like signifiers, a numbered multitude, or with Leporello, rnill'e tre. Accordingly, their relation to Nietzsche's "philosophy" is ordered by selection. George's male circle, which would implement a reduction of books and book distribution, was not the first to put an end to the classical proliferation of texts. First, Zu~uthustruwas already, in a direct reversal of the reception aesthetics of 1800, A Book for Everyone and No One. Second, Zaruthustru con- cluded with a secret fourth part, carefully planned as a private edition. Third, Nietzsche dispatched this private edition with all the wiliness of a Dionysus, who passed his wiliness on only to certain women. One copy went to Helene Druskowitz, who, however, "took it to be a loan and soon returned the book to Ktiselitz's address, which made Nietzsche and Koselitz quite happy, for Nietzsche later-correctly-characterized his trust of her as 'stupidity. '"""
Whether knowledge of a stupidity or stupidity of a knowledge, there arises a type of book distribution that was not distribution at all. The public shrinks to private printings and private addresses, to books as loans, even misunderstood ones. In the war between the sexes, any means is justified to select women with small ears out of an open group. Only for a time did Druskowitz belong to the happy few who read Nietzsche without any harm to Nietzsche. Once she was called ''my new friend," another time "that little literature-ninny Druscowitz," anything but "my pupil. ""' Dionysus, too, once praises Ariadne for her small ears; another time he asks her why she doesn't have larger Unstable circum- stances, dictated by physiology and chance, confronted writing men and writing women circa 1900.
The philosopher who had come up with pro- vocative theses on woman as truth and untruth recommended to women (as if to realize as quickly as possible his well-known dream of chairs in Zarathustra studies) doctoral work on these theses. But when the women philosophers then-as in the books Druskowitz wrote after her disserta- tion-wrote about and against Zarathustra, Zarathustra's dispatcher had to wonder for once whether he were not the long-eared jackass. As long as women write books, there is no longer any guarantee that their torment and pleasure will consist in receiving wise words.
Druskowitz, when Nietzsche was in an insane asylum, rose in the titles of her books to "Doctor of World Wisdom" and (as if to parody F W v
NIETZSCHE 2 0 1
? 202 I900
Nietzky) into the aristocracy. But that was not enough: before she herself vanished into an insane asylum, she also published only "for the freest spirits. " Thus was issued an answer to Dionysus and Zarathustra, who, after all, approached women with declarations of war, whips, and tor- ture. Druskowitz's last book deals with "the male as a logical and tem- poral impossibility and as the curse of the world":
Throughout the entire organic world, the superiority claimed on behalf of the male sexual form has been lost by the human male in two senses: ( I ) as regards the more attractive part of the animal kingdom, ( 2 ) as regards his feminine com- panion. The she-goat and female ape would more deserve to be called his natural companions. For he is horribly made and carries the sign of his sex, in the shape of a sewer pump, before him like a criminal. "'
The feminist, despite Nietzsche'sdenial, just might be a true pupil. "Must we not first hate each other, if we are to love one another? " The polarity of the sexes in 1800 unified mothers, writers, and feminine readers in One Love, but now twoscare tacticians, as hostile as they are equal, enter the scene. The language of man and the language of woman deny one another with the charge that everything said by one side is determined by what is said by the other. Dissuasion includes "askinrbehind," a phrase coined by Niensche. Druskowitz sees in his philosophy only a dusty love of the Greeks, determined by his neohumanist education; Nietzsche, per- haps because he recommends his philosophy to women as a dissertation topic, sees in their books only a gymnasium-determined, stinking alpha- betism. "For heaven's sake don't let us transmit our gymnasium educa- tion to girls! An education that so often takes spirited, knowledge-thirsty, passionate young people and makes of them-images of their teachers! '""
"Asking-behind'' can be precarious. No sooner has one traced certain discourses of others to the Discourse of the Other, than the topic turns to boys who are images of their teachers and who are thus precisely the Dis- course of the Other in that they are also images of the star pupil who writes. The escalation of scare tactics in the war between the two sexes can thus only end in dithyrambic self-scorn.
Ha! Herauf, Wiirde! Tugend-Wiirde! Europser-Wiirde! Blase, blase wieder,
Blasebalg der Tugend!
Ha!
Noch Ein Mal briillen,
Moralisch briillen,
Als moralischer L6we
Vor den Tochtern der Wiiste briillen! -Denn Tugend-Geheul,
Ihr allerliebsten Madchen,
? 1st mehr als Alles
Europaer-hbrunst, Europier-Heisshunger! Und da stehe ich schon,
AIS Europier,
lch kann nicht anders, Gott helfe mir! Amen!
Ha! Upward, dignity!
Virtue-dignity! The European's dignity!
blow, blow again
bellows of virtue!
Ha!
Roar once more,
the moral roar,
roar like a moral lion
before the daughters of the desert!
-For virtue-wailing,
you dearest girls,
is more than anything
the European's ardor, the European's craving! And there I am,
as a European,
I have no choice, God help me!
Amen! "'
This was the riskiest of experiments, and therefore it remained on paper. Before the daughters of the desert, one prostitutes a discourse, which as the Discourse of the Other rules animals and can make them speak. What the Pforta school denied to its star pupil is realized in the desert: women appear, very different from gymnasium pupils and their emancipated copies. They neither speak nor write; a moralistic howling monkey, although he calls himself the labyrinth of women, finds that Dudu and Suleika, these "mute, ominous she-cats," "resphinx" him. The enigma of sexual difference, the phallus that Nietzsche transfigures into a Dionysian instrument of torture and that "Ema (Dr. Helene von Drus- kowitz)" proclaimed was a stigma in the shape of a sewer pump-in the desert its only invitation is to play.
Diese schiinste Luft trinkend,
Mit Niistern geschwellt gleich Bechern,
Ohne Zukunft, ohne Erinnerungen,
So sitze ich hier, ihr
Allerliebsten Freundinnen,
Und sehe der Palme zu,
Wie sie, einer Tanzerin gleich
Sich biegt und schmiegt und in der Hiifte wiegt -man thut es mit, sieht man lange zu!
Einer Tanzerin gleich, die, wie mir scheinen will,
NIETZSCHE 203
? 2. 04 1900
Zu lange schon, gefshrlich lange
Immer, immer nur auf Einem Beine stand? -Da vergass sie darob, wie mir scheinen will, Das andre kin?
Vergebens wenigstens
Suchte ich das vermisste
Zwillings-Kleinod
-namlich das andre Bein-
In der heiligen Nahe
Ihres allerliebsten, allerzierlichsten
Facher- und Flatter- und Flitterriickchens.
Drinking this finest air,
with nostrils filled like Chalices,
without future, without memories,
here I sit, you
dearest friends,
and watch the palm tree,
how like a dancer
she plays and sways her hip
-one dances along if one watches for long! Like a dancer, who, it seems to me,
stands too long, dangerously long,
always, always only on One Leg?
-She forgot, it seems to me,
that other leg?
I at least
have looked in vain
for the missing twin jewel
-the other leg, namely-
in sacred nearness
to her dearest, most graceful
sparkling, fluttering, fanlike dress.
The phallus is missing or forgotten or there, where it is not: on women. The palm tree, instead of immediately becoming a piece of paper, as under the conditions of northern culture, dances the erection. Even the howling monkey, instead of merely learning to read and write from women as from palm trees, succumbs to the rhythmical imperative. The music that Nietzsche had vainly awaited from Wagner, Bizet, Koselitz, or Gast arises after all: a music equal to the brown sunsets of the desert. Women who are daughters of the desert, and therefore do not exist in the singular at all, place writing on the unmeasured ground without which signs and media would not exist. The despot's dream of being able to fix words as purely and simply as incessant pain would bum itself in evaporates in the emptiness that reduces words to small, amusing accidents. (The howling monkey himself mocks the word resphinx as a sin against language. ) "Un coup de d 6 jamais n'abolira le hasard. "
? In the desert of chance there is neither future nor memory. Fixed ideas might once more excite the European's ardor, but circa 1900an opposite symptom grounds the act of writing: the flight of ideas. Having become a lion or howling monkey, the philosopher can finally partake of the privi- lege of animals-an active forgethlness, which does not merely forget this or that, but forgets forgetting itself. 'I6Mnemonic technique, simply by being called technique rather than being, like memory, an inborn fac- ulty, exists only as a resistance to the incessant and thought-fleeing inno- cence of speech.
The dithyrambic, flight-of-ideas wish to be out of Europe and in the desert, to lose one's head among its daughters, was not unfulfilled. In an- other desert, the institute for the cure and care of the insane in Jena, the ex- professor demonstrated this fulfillment in front of experts. What "came to" the psychiatrists writing the case report and listening to Nietzsche's speech was what always occurred to them circa 1900:"flight of ideas. ""'
NIETZSCHE 2 0 5
? The Great Lalula
In the discourse network of 1900,discourse is produced by RANDOM GENERATORS. Psychophysics constructed such sources of noise; the new technological media stored their output.
Psychophysics
Two years before Nietzsche argued that mnemonic techniques were the genealogy of morals, a professor of psychology in Breslau, Hermann Ebbinghaus, published a short but revolutionary work entitled O n Mem- ory. Whereas the last philosopher ended the history of Western ethics by reducing history and ethics to machines, Ebbinghaus made a new, that is, technological contribution to knowledge of an age-old phenomenon. And whereas the philosopher and man of letters described the scene of writing with every line he wrote until such autoreferentiality issues in a megalomaniacal scream (or the book Ecce Homo)and brought psychia- trists into the picture, Ebbinghaus was quite reticent about the subject of his painful autoexperiment of memory quantification. This silence makes it possible to turn the great words of the ex-professor into science. Where the one had come to his end with psychiatrically defined flight of ideas, the other risked the same fate experimentally; his text, however, records only numbers, not a word of pain or pleasure. Yet numbers are the only kind of information that remains relevant beyond all minds, whether insane or professorial: as an inscription in the real. '
"During two periods, in the years 1879-80 and 1883-84," Ebbing- haus daily conducted autoexperiments, beginning at varied times of the
? day in the first period but using the early afternoon during the second. "Care was taken that the objective conditions of life during the period of the tests were so controlled as to eliminate too great changes or irregu- larities. "' Who might have created such chaos-servants or wives, stu- dents or colleagues-remains unspecified. What matters is that a German professor modified his life during specified periods in order to be able to count something that was previously deemed common knowledge and therefore beneath notice: his own memory capacity.
How does the disappearance of the ability to reproduce, forgetfulness, depend upon the length of time during which no repetitions have taken place? What pro- portion does the increase in the certainty of reproduction bear to the number of repetitions? How do these relations vary with the greater or lessintensity of the interest in the thing to be reproduced? These and similar questions no one can answer.
This inability does not arise from a chance neglect of investigation of these relations. We cannot say that tomorrow, or whenever we wish to take time, we can investigate these problems. On the contrary, this inability is inherent in the nature of the questions themselves. Although the conceptions in question- namely, degrees of forgetfulness, of certainty and interest-are quite correct, we have no means of establishing such degrees in our experience except at the ex- tremes. We feel therefore that we are not at all in a condition to undertake the investigation. . . . For example, to express our ideas concerningtheir [memories'] physical basis we use different metaphors-stored-up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths. There is only one thing certain about these figures of speech and that is that they are not accurate. '
What seems most familiar to introspection here becomes an object of research. And the customary metaphors and images of psychology can- not be eradicated without mortification. Nietzsche had derived the most spiritual of memories from the body and its suffering; psychophysics ap- proached the same enigma mathematically, with methods that H. L. F. von Helmholtz and G. T. Fechner had developed to measure perception. ' A shift in paradigms occurred: Nietzsche and Ebbinghaus presupposed forgetfulness, rather than memory and its capacity, in order to place the medium of the soul against a background of emptiness or erosion. A zero value is required before acts of memory can be quantified. Ebbinghaus banned introspection and thus restored the primacy of forgetting on a theoretical level. On the one hand, there was Nietzsche's delirious joy at forgetting even his forgetfulness; on the other, there was a psychologist who forgot all of psychology in order to forge its algebraic formula. This is the relation of the Discourse of the Master to that of the university, of Nietzschean command to technological execution. Rather than give a philosophical description of mnemonic inscription and practice it in dithyrambs, Ebbinghaus took the place of Nietzsche's victim or experi-
THE GREAT LALUa 207
? 208 r9oo
mental subject and then retroactively became the observer of his own ex- perience in order to quantify what he had suffered.
Reading aloud at a tempo dictated by the ticking of his pocket watch, the professor spent years reading line after line of meaningless syllables, until he could recite them from memory. "His idea of using meaningless syllables as experimental material solved in a single stroke the introspec- tionist problem of finding meaning-free sensation^. "^ From that point on, the bare relation of numbers could serve as a measure for the force of psychophysical inscription. Lines of seven syllables can be learned in- stantly, lines of twelve syllables have to be read sixteen times, and lines of twenty-six syllables have to be read fifty-five times before the mechanism of reproducible memorization clicks on. It was not always easy, however, to exclude self-fulfilling prophecies in the numerical results; the forget- ting of forgetting remains as paradoxical as the effort "to rid oneself of a thought and by that very attempt foster that thought. "" After three quar- ters of an hour of uninterrupted memory exercises, "occasionally exhaus- tion, headache, and other symptoms," set in, "which if continued would have complicated the conditions of the experiment. "- Psychophysics is thus quite real, particularly for its inventor, for whom it (likeall mnemonic techniques, according to Nietzsche) causes physical discomfort. It was known in the classical age that "such a dreadfully one-sided application of so subordinate a mental power as memory can derange human rea- son";' but for this reason Anselmus circumvented mechanical repetition through hermeneutics. In 1900the opposite is necessary. A subordinate mental function becomes the most fundamental, because it is quantifi- able. ' Forthesakeofafewformulas,Ebbinghaussacrificed(asNietzsche did for the desert) his subject of knowledge. '"Dizzy, numbed by all the syllables, his mind became a tabula rasa. "
The test's individual conditions all contributed to such emptiness. Lan- guage was artificially reduced to a raw state. First, Ebbinghaus did not allow "the meaningless syllables to be connected with any associated meanings,asischaracteristicofcertainmnemonictechniques. ',I* Second, the empty page he had become was cleansed of memories and his native language. To isolate memory from all other cultural practices, Ebbing- haus eliminated signifieds from the beginning, because they might have provoked hermeneutic activity. "Associations tending in different direc- tions, differing degrees of interest, the recollection of particularly striking or beautiful verses, etc. ," all such ordinarily sanctioned mental activity amounted only to "disturbing influences. " ' I With his head spinning, Ebbinghaus achieved an unthinkable distance where nothing, but nothing, means anything. He instituted the flight of ideas.
? There is nothing exotic in distance, and the great kingdom of nonsense is no exception. In order to prove that recollecting meaningless material was the rule, Ebbinghaus conducted counter experiments. As if to test Nieasche's thesis of the basic utility of metrics, Ebbinghaus memorized cantos from Byron's Don Juan under the same experimental conditions as before. Even he was surprised by the result. "From this point of view it almost seems as if the difference between sense and nonsense material were not nearly so great as one would be inclined a priori to imagine. "" Thus the great doctrine bestowed by the discourse network of 1800 on its reformed primers is shaken: namely, the notion that readers would learn signifieds, because of their immanence in the mind, with much greater speed than they would learn signifiers by rote. To the contrary, pure non- sense reveals certain specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not even conceive. "The homogeneity of the series of syllables falls con- siderably short of what might be expected of it. The series exhibit very important and almost incomprehensible variations as to the ease or diffi- culty with which they are learned. "" Just beyond the purpose of the test, then, there is something that no longer concerns Ebbinghaus but that will interest Freud and the writers; it is the differentiality that precedes all meaning: the naked, elementary existence of signifiers. If "from this point of view" the difference between sense and nonsense dwindles, then the kingdom of sense-that is, the entire discourse network of I goo-sinks to the level of a secondary and exceptional phenomenon. Neither under- standing nor the previously fundamental capacity of "inwardizing" or recollection has any significant effect on the mechanics of memory.
If signifiers obey laws that are as fundamental as they are incomprehen- sible, it is essential to have the test material expressed in strict, statistical terms. Long before the expressionist "language eroticism" [Spracherorik] that "first must demolish language" and "establish the chaotic, originary condition, the absolute homogeneity of the material," I6 Ebbinghaus went to work on the same project. The nonsense that he spent hours, days, weeks, and years memorizing was never picked up from any native speak- ers in any locality. It was generated by a calculation at the beginning of every test series. Through an exhaustive combination of eleven vowels, nineteen beginning consonants, and (for the sake of pronunciation) only eleven end consonants, there came to be "ca. 2,300" or (asanyone might calculate) 2,299 tripthong syllables. " The random generator can not keep a few meaningful German words from appearing in a series, "doscbpiim
. "In
feu. lot. .
lor five seconds ago) and that have little effect. "Among many thousand combinations there occur scarcely a few dozen that have a meaning and
These, however, are exceptions that can be read over (like
THEGREATLALUU 209
? 210 1900
among these there are again only a few whose meaning was realized while they were being memorized. ""
Never before had such passion been devoted to syllables. Of course, Reformation primers did, to the dismay of the classical age, play through single vowel-consonant combinations of the second order. But their ab eb ib ob ub / bu be bibo bu was only an example; the goal was not a mathe- matically guaranteed completeness of assembly. The discourse network of 1900 was the first to establish a treasury of the signifier whose rules were entirely based on randomness and combinatorics. '" It is not that, with Ebbinghaus's numbered sounds and sound combinations or Mallarmk's twenty-four letters, an old-European discursive practice returns from its repression circa 1800. ~'The fact that combinatory groups do not neces- sarily produce sense also applied to the letters and words of the miserable scribes of 1736. But not even Liscov's satire had the scribes systematically avoid "agreement among the letters" the way Ebbinghaus did. The differ-
ence between the polyphonic line and the twelve-tone technique is simi- jar; the latter not only revives all contrapuntal-combinatory arts, but also avoids all accidental harmonic effects just as counterpoint had avoided all d'issonance.
The homologies between dodecaphony and Ebbinghaus, who began a whole positivist movement, are so far-reaching that a search for fac- tual cross-connections would be worthwhile (though it would not be merely the investigation into the ambience of Viennese coffee houses that Adorno's philosophy of modem music in all seriousness proposes). First, Ebbinghaus memorized the meaningless syllables in groups of seven to twenty-six, which, like Schonberg's twelve tones, are called series. Sec- ond, he eliminated the disturbing effects of easily learned syllables by put- ting aside the syllables from the available supply of 2,299 combinations that had already been memorized until all the other combinations had been gone through. zZDodecaphony proceeded in the same way with se- rial tones that had already been employed: these were taboo until the re- maining eleven had been tun through. Third, in order to refute the doc- trine of free association taught in 1800, Ebbinghaus produced a very complicated demonstration showing that the interconnection of members of a row facilitates memorization; for example, if an already memorized series dosch pam f a r lot . . . ,is reordered into the series lot pam few dosch . . . . Accordingly, "not only are the original terms associated with their immediate sequents," that is, those following in either direction, but "connections are also established between each term and those which fol- low it beyond several intervening members. "" Schonberg proceeded in the same manner by bypassing certain notes in a melody and transferring
them to parallel ~oices. ~In' both cases a combinatorics presented in the
? original material is subjected to a further combinatorics of the series and column.
Permutations of permutations eliminate any natural relation. Non- sense syllables or chromatic tones of equal value constitute media in the modern sense: material produced by random generation, selected and grouped into individual complexes. The fact that these materials always join discrete elements and do not develop in continuous genesis from an unarticulated nature distinguishes them from minimal signifieds. To Ebbinghaus the unique "oh" would simply be one among the 209 pos- sible dipthong combinations. It would not take until the year 2407, as Christian Morgenstern's Gingunz announces, for "the great paper- shredding snow centrifuge of the American Nature Theater Company Ltd. of Brotherson & Sann" to take the place of organically grown snow crystals. L'
If a syllable such as mu does not grow out of a mother-child love tran- scending words and then glide into the first word of the high idiom, Mama, but rather is thrown out like dice, it forfeits any ranking above the countless other syllables that are and remain meaningless. On the contrary, the effect of meaning, greeted by Tiedemann and Stephani as a revelation from beyond all language, becomes a disturbance that troubles the pure flightofideas with memories and associations. Thinking and in- tending, however, are the imaginary acts that led the philosophers of
1800to assert the primacy of the oral. In contrast to the technologies of the letter, only speaking-an externalization that immediately dis- appears-could figure as the frictionless unification of Spirit and Nature. But orality, together with thought, vanishes from randomly generated language material. Of course, Ebbinghaus worked with phonemes in order to be able to read aloud, but they were presented to him as writing. Syllable after syllable comes out of the random generator, onto the desk and into the file of worked-through alternatives, until all 2,299 have been used and output and input can begin again.
Memory tests in which the experimental subject necessarily thinks nothing and abandons the position of knowing subject have an equally subjectless observer, who is not as far from Nietzsche's new god as hasty distinctions between myth and positivism would have it.