The human voice represents the soul, the individuality in its errant journey
accompanied
by demonic guides.
KittlerNietzche-Incipit-Tragoedia
Freud receives what Schreber sends; Schreber sends what Freud receives.
All that remains unsaid is why the whole discourse network worked so promptly and precisely around one individual body.
Freud was much too concerned with the testimonial value of the received messages to investigate the logic of the channels.
What Schreber writes, what writers write-everything became for Freud an anticipation of psychoanalysis.
And he is not alone in this.
Schreber too grants poets like Wagner occasional anticipations of his neuro- theology.
" In the competition for corporeal knowledge, then, the ques- tion about which channels of knowledge constitute the body is left out.
The discourse network of 1900 withholds its proper name.
The Memoirs constitutes an ''exhaustion''a6of Schreber's body while he was still alive. The transposition of a body into a corpus was just as necessary-namely, as necessary for survival-as was the fictional com- poser Lindner's transposition of letter to note values. After Schreber has published his book (against the wishes of his family and the medical es- tablishment), the natural sciences of the mind have only to open it-and
REBUS 293
? Schreber's person is "offer[ed]. . . as an object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts. " Otherwise, "at some future time" the ex- perts could only confirm "such peculiarities of my nervous system . . . by dissection of my body,'' for "1 am informed that it is extremely difficult to make such observations on the living body. ''87
Schreber as writer or Schreber as anatomical preparation-these are the only alternatives in the discourse network of 1900. Like all writers of the epoch, he plays the role of the "victim of his own writing,"nnin order to be able, in place of his autopsy, to prepare refuse, a bodily substitute, a text. Only thus can his case remain "soul murder"*9and not descend to the postmortem examination of those peculiarities that make people with nervous diseases so attractive to their psychiatrists. The patient dissects his own organs and notes their modifications while he is still alive, with a positivism that honors psychophysics and comes close to correcting fac- tually Kraepelin's Psychiatry (on the subject of hallucinations). Schreber thus practiced, as if to realize Nietzsche's assertion "for there is no soul," preventative soul murder.
But "soul murder"-in Schreber's divine "primary-" or "nerve-lan- guage" an autonym for the neurophysiological relationship between him and God-is also a chapter title in Ellen Key's The Century of the Child. Schreber could once more confront his blind exegetes and their multiple associations on the phrase, with the extent of his reading of contempo- rary works, which aside from Kraepelin, Du Prel, and Haeckel, also in- cluded her. What is called divine nerve-language in divine nerve-language and not accidentally contains many "expressions which would never have occurred to" Schreber, namely expressions "of a scientific, and par- ticularlymedicalnature,"n issimplythecodeoftheepoch. In1903itdid not take private religious illuminations to reduce, in the first sentence of one's book, the soul to nervous tissue and to the language of nervous tissue, or in the final sentences to see one's own mental illness "in the sense of a nervous illness," although not in its ordinary sense. "
But if the soul has only neurophysiological reality, university nerve clinics are more likely than Ellen Key's schools to be responsible for soul murder. A book that does not bear the title Memoirs of M y Nervous III- ness was unable to use the words nervous illness without the epithet so- called, and set forth from the beginning the doctrine that there are "no independent illnesses of the mind without those of the body. "9LThe book is Paul Flechsig's inaugural lecture as the second professor of psychiatry in the history of the University of Leipzig. The first was named Johann Heinroth and was faithful to Hoffbauer and Rei1 in teaching the "mis- taken doctrine" of mental cures. A "chasm" thus "gaped" between him and his successor Flechsig, one "no less deep and wide than the chasm
? between medieval medicine" and modem medicine. " In "the age of Flechsig and Wernicke," (Benn's term)," souls became nerve information systems, and cures became experiments. The "'localization of nervous diseases"' entered "a new epoch" (as Freud says)9'with Flechsig, who posed for his festschrift photograph in front of the picture of a massive, cut-open brain. Only the individual case created difficulties, relative ones, in the Leipzig University Nerve Clinic; only curing such a case created absolute difficulties. On the one hand, the brain contains "the key to every natural conception of mental activity" and a fortiori to those of mental di~turbancesO. ~n~the other, "the protected position of the brain" means that the substratum of the psychoses, namely, chemical and physi- cal nerve damage, "can be detected in the living only through more or less composite inferences. " Thus the psychiatrist Flechsig was impelled onto a royal diagnostic road that was simultaneously a therapeutic dead end: "the emphasis on postmortem e~amination. "~-
No sooner said than done. The corpse of Holderlin, an insane or, in other words, not bureaucratically employed teacher, was among the first to enter the new order of things via the dissection table. %The corpse of Schreber, a judicial bureaucrat who had gone over into the new order, suffered the same, now foreseeable, fate (withoutthe feared or hoped-for modifications in nervous tissue being found). "
And yet, what was said had already been done. After Flechsig decreed postmortem examination to be the psychiatric royal road, Schreber's dis- creet, anonymous reference to having "been informed" about the diffi- culties of in vivo diagnosis of insanity is superfluous. In Schreber's case, the situation of the text leaves no doubt: the imaginative copyright to the patient's theology, developed from the notion of the epistemological ad- vantages of being a corpse, belongs to Paul Flechsig. '"
The above picture of the nature of God and the continued existence of the human soul after death differs markedly in some respects from the Christian views on these matters. I t seems to me that a comparison between the two can only favour the former. God was not omniscient and omnipresent in the sense that He contzn- uously saw inside every individual living person, perceived every feeling of his nerves, that is to say at all times "tried his heart and reins. " But there was no need for this because after death the nerves of human beings with all the impressions they had received during life lay bare before God's eye, so that an unfailingly just judgment could be reached as to whether they were worthy of being received into the realms of heaven. '"'
The precision of this image of God is equaled only by Flechsig's festschrift photograph. Everything runs according to the plan set out in Flechsig's inaugural lecture, Bruin and Soul. That God can discipline his still-living victims with mental cures or psychological introspection is an age-old fallacy. The soul consists of nervous tissue, which makes in vivo inves-
REBUS 295
? 296 1900
tigation impossible, but the nerves are perfect data recorders and for that reason will yield all their secrets to the clinical eye at the moment of dis- section. In other words: according to this theology, "within the Order of the World, God did not really understand the living human being and had no need to understand him, because, according to the Order of the World, He dealt only with corpses," until he initiated his world-order- defying relationship to Schreber. '">The theology simply equates God with the professor. Psychophysics banned all introspection, and theology complied; Flechsig restricted all diagnoses to corpses, and pious Schreber, performing the written dissection of his nerves, could only accommodate him. With that Schreber fabricated, to the joy of Freud, once a neu- rologist, the impossible piece ofevidence for psychoanalysis: endopsychic perceptions of brain functions.
Channels of information are indeed intimately linked. Schreber's case, rather than being an independent and indubitable piece of evidence for a libido theory, demonstrates the nexus between psychophysics and psy- choanalysis. As reader and writer, Freud walked blindly into the dis- course network to which he himself belonged. The Project for a Scientific Psychology and the Memoirs of M y Nervous IIIness are two continua- tions of a single discourse. No wonder they ran into the plagiarism prob- lem of being reverse sides of one another.
Just where Freud could have resolved the imaginary rivalry, his keen intellect failed before the discourse of the Other. Although he cannot not have noticed that the language of Schreber's nerves and delirium is the language of the experimental neurologist Flechsig,"" his interpretation systematically replaces the name Flechsig with that of the inventor of the Schreber Garden. All the patient's sentences concerning his doctor and "God Flechsig"'" are treated only as the displacement of a homosexual libido directed at the father. With this, Freud founded the boundless Schreber literature that anchors all the sufferings of Schreber fils in the wild childrearing methods of Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. The head bandages or orthopedic bed invented by Schreber senior and mentioned in passing in the Memoirs are then declared the "true background of Schreber'sconception of God as One Who knows man only as a corpse. " I"' Flechsig's message of the death of man, more hidden than Nietzsche's, has not reached the exegetes. Again and again the attempt is made to explain
the second industrial revolution by the first: Schreher as information sys- tem is related to orthopedic mechanics, the writing machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony" to frieze heads and planers. But nerve-language remains nerve-language, and typewriters with their own specially constructed means of making script visible are Underwood models. '" The system of 1900could spare itself the effort to spare muscular energy because it un-
? REBUS 297
dertook to create substitutions for the central nervous system itself. Be- yond mechanical head bandages, Schreber's paranoia followed the lead of an insane neurophysiologist. His book begins (running the risk of libel suits) with an open letter to Flechsig, asking the distinguished privy coun- selor to put aside his anger for once, as the undersigned has done, and answer the rigorous scientific query whether he possibly
like so many doctors, could not completely resist the temptation of using a patient in your care us an object for scientific experiments apart from the real purpose of cure, when by chance matters of the highest scientific interest arose. One might even raise the question whether perhaps all the talk of voices about somebody having committed soul murder can be explained by the souls (rays) deeming it impermissible that a person's nervous system should be influenced by another's to the extent of imprisoning his will power, such as occurs during hypnosis. "'-
The professor in Leipzig never answered this open letter (which appeared in Leipzig). Whereas Schreber could embroil his later psychiatrists in expert-testimony disputes, which his legal understanding helped him to win, the soul murderer maintained a silence that even today puts exegetes on the wrong track. All the interest in Schreber's so-called father prob- lems substitutes consanguinity for enmity, causality for war. But the clas- sical pedagogic power of Schreber senior can only be equated with the extremely efficient disposition of power in 1900. "T'~he nerve-language at the basis of the new disposition states that "an educative influence di- rected outwards" has been played out. '"'' Because God or psychiatrists, according to the world order, can only know corpses, a temptation to conduct psychophysical experiments arises. "The miracles directed against my bead and the nerves of my head""" inscribe themselves into the nervous system without a pedagogic detour and substitute an experi- mental arrangement for the impossible cure for paranoia. The practical consequence is that anything identifiable as "influences on my nervous systememanatingfromyour[Flechsig's]nervoussystem" breaksdownin the discourse of the doctor or experimenter into "mere 'hallucinations"' of his patient. "'
If psychophysics can explain its effects out of existence, then experi- mental subjects have no choice but open warfare and thus publication. Schreber writes to Flechsig in Flechsig's language in order to demonstrate in the latter's own territory that Schreber's purported hallucinations are facts effectuated by the discourse of the Other. The Memoirs stand and fight in the war of two discourse networks. They constitute a small dis- course network with the single purpose of demonstrating the dark reality of another, hostile one.
The mentioned writing-down-system is extraordinarily difficult to explain to other people even vaguely. . . .
? 298 1900
Books or other notes are kept in which for years have been written-down all my thoughts, all my phrases, all my necessaries, all the articles in my possession or around me, all personswith whom I come into contact, etc. I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God's omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies . . . but lacking all intelligence; their hands are led automatically, as it were, by passing rays for the purpose of making them write down, so that later rays can again look at what has been written.
To illuminate the purpose of this whole system I must enlarge further. "'
Enlarging somewhat further, it first of all should be explained that rays are nerve-language information channels that maintain a psychotechni- cal, material link between Schreber and Flechsig (or his incarnation as God), very much counter to the conditions of the world order. Rather than manifesting Himself only to corpses, God occupies SchreberS ner- vous system by innervating all local language centers with the exception of the external speech apparatus; that is, like a good aphasia researcher, he stimulates only sensory and motoric word images. "'No wonder, then, that the nerve-language appears to be hallucinated, no wonder that it can also bridge cosmic distances. According to Flechsig, who wrote an influ- ential monograph on nerve tracts, "the greatest part of the human cere- brum'' consists "in nothing more than millions of well-isolated circuits, measuring thousands of kilometers. "'" All the data on Schreber wanders through such interwoven cables to its destination on distant planets. The information comes in, is registered, and can be reread by other rays, which are preparing to move in the opposite direction. The neurologist- god of 1900 is a single discourse network. Whether he (like the gods of Rousseau or the Apocalypse) still uses the book as a storage bank no longer matters. All books are discourse networks, but not all discourse networks are books. If the recording occurs mechanically and without any Geist, the probability of its being a purely technical procedure is greater. "It is presumably a phenomenon like telephoning. " There is, for example, the appearance of a writing angel in the trademark of a gramophone company.
It is no accident that the neurotheological discourse network stores particulars, and stores them exhaustively. Not one of Schreber's thoughts, sentences, or personal possessions is left out. The paranoid machine op-
? REBUS 299
erates like an integrated system of all the data-storage devices that revolu- tionized recording circa 1900. And because its strategy was aimed not at statistical series but at exhausting the arbitrary case of Schreber, it also exemplifies the methodological project at the basis of psychoanalysis.
In 1882Stanley Hall began, in what was still a very statistical proce- dure, to gather material for a study entitled Tl7eContentsof Children's Minds. Soon thereafter the investigation also included individual cases, as when the vocabulary and neologistic creations of two thirteen-year-old girls were inventoried. 'IhConsequently, Erdmann could define even a po- etic vocabulary as a denumerable group of words. And consequently Freud, in his case histories, could develop a "neurosis inventory," which included all the thoughts, turns of phrase, and significant persons in the lives of his patients. The feeble-minded discourse network around Schre- ber is thus (as if to demonstrate Freud's remark on the incalculable prox- imity between mania and theory) tl7e discourse network of 1900. Only delirious memoirs betray the actual purpose of the immense effort at re- cording and storage, which "has increased to such an extent that it now includes almost all the words used in the human language. "
Exhaustion links individual cases to the discourse network of 1900. The material taken from Schreber's nerves and stored on distant suns is explicitly intended for inscription. Because it "seems to lie in the nature of the rays that they must speak as soon as they are in motion," they grant their victim, by virtue of an appropriate autonymity, this "law""* and then further the words for everything that Schreber coincidentally hap- pens to be doing. It is thus made certain that his nerves do not constitute an exception to the law, but rather serve up a verbal stew with compul- sive automatism. The rays have "the boundless impudence-1 can use no other expression-to demand that 1should express this falsified nonsense in spoken words as if it were my own thoughts. "'" As with Pameelen, the discourse network dictates nonsense, which, however, does not remain in the no man's land of psychophysical experiments, but demands Schreber's signature. It is not enough that he suffer the compulsive need to speak, which robs him of sleep and "not-thinking-of-anything-thought,''l o those basic rights of man, but he must also say that be is the speaker of all the nonsense. This is inscription as coupling.
The sudden, direct link between data-storage machines and individual cases liquidates a basic concept of 1800:the ownership of discourses. That Schreber is forced to sign the nonsense forced upon him logically reverses the storage procedures that ensnared him and his contempo- raries. God in his ignorance of Man countenances what by the bureau- cratic norm is the "completely mistaken view" that when Schreber, "for example, reads a book or newspaper, . . . the thoughts contained therein are my own thoughts. " The patient threatened with soul murder need
? 300 1900
only quite accidentally sing a few notes from the revenge aria in the Magic Flute, and immediately his brain fills with whispering voices "which pre- sume that . . . I am actually in the grip of despair. "'" Data-storage ma- chines are much too accurate to make the classical distinctions between intention and citation, independent thought and the mere repetition of something already said. They register discursive events without regard for so-called persons. Thus the pretext of being able to distinguish be- tween mental ownership, citation, and parapraxes became as superfluous as in psychoanalysis. "' To attribute each and every flatus vocis to a speaker as his mental property means to divest him of everything and drive him into insanity-an unparalleled trick indeed.
The writing-down also serves as another peculiar trick which again is based on a total misunderstanding of human thinking. It was believed that my store of thoughts could be exhausted by being written-down, so that eventually the time would come when new ideas could no longer appear in me. . . . This was the trick: as soon as an idea I had had before and which was (already) written-down, recurred-such a recurrence is of course quite unavoidable in the case of many thoughts, for instance the thought in the morning "Now I will wash" or when playing the piano the thought "This is a beautiful passage," etc. -as soon as such a budding thought was spotted in me, the approaching rays were sent down with the phrase "We have already got this," scil. written-down. '"
It makes no difference, then, whether the heavenly secretaries inscribe sentences or describe things as they occur. At one moment Schreber has to subscribe to the view that the imbecility forced on him is natural to him, at another that what is natural to him is imbecility. As precisely as Ebbinghaus sorted out previously learned nonsense, the nerves note all of Schreber's previously spoken sentences, so that he is subject to the recur- rence of recurrence itself. In triumphant Saxon accents, the nerves mock the correct High German faith of the bureaucrat on leave, according to which thinking and speaking are the nature of Man. With the eternal re- currence of "We already have't; we already have't" [harnmirschon ham- mirschon] eternal recurrence triumphs over original genius, as does psy- chophysics over Absolute Spirit. In order to make someone an imbecile, it suffices to impute to him an exhaustible supply of possible thoughts. Every discursive manipulation produces whatever claims it happens to make. It is not for nothing that the beings in charge of recording have no need for minds; their imbecilic inventorying drives Schreber out of his. The psychiatric insight that lists, address books, inventories, and a fortiori discourse networks are fundamentally examples of the flight of ideas, be- comes practice. The case of Schreber verifies once more Stransky's obser- vation that the flight of ideas can have pathological grounds as easily as it can have experimental grounds.
But when experiment and pathology coincide and the experimenter in-
? deed does drive the experimental subject crazy, the remaining problem is self-defense. All the gods that pursue Schreber announce their plan as "We want to destroy your reason"; against all such pursuit Schreber at- tempts "my allotted task of at all times convincing God . . . of my un- diminished powers of reason. '"" To this end he not only reads news- papers and books, but also cultivates the "notion" that "human thinking is inexhaustible; for instance reading a book or a newspaper always stimu- lates new thoughts. " ' l ' The basic principles of the classical discourse net- work have thus deteriorated into being the defensive weapons of a mental patient. In the crossfire of psychophysics, the last bureaucrat is left with only the sediment of his education, whose norms, however, are taken apart bit by bit. Inexhaustibility, this signum of great works, becomes in Schreber's desperation an attribute of newspapers as well. Poems suffer a similar fate. Among the "methods of defense" that make "even the most drawn-out voices finally perish," Schreber included reciting verses learned by heart, "particularly Schiller's ballads. " But he then had to realize that "however insignificant the rhymes, even obscene verses" did just as well as his classical poet. "As mental nourishment" obscene verses are "worth their weight in gold . . . compared with the terrible nonsense my nerves are otherwise forced to listen to. " '"
Newspaper rather than oeuvre, memorization rather than understand- ing,bawdyverseratherthanSchiller-the PresidentoftheJudicialSenate (on leave) himself takes apart the education that should have provided a defense against his neurologist-tormenter. The old bureaucratic race of the Schrebers must pay for the fact that Flechsig's plot denied Schreber "choice of those professions which would lead to closer relations with God such as that of a nerve specialist. ""- Only countering one medium with another can save one from psychophysics, and onlv mimicry can save one from voices that level all discourses to the stratum of their mate- riality. "There had been times when I could not help myself but speak aloud or make some noise, in order to drown the senseless and shameless twaddle of the voices. ""a That this tactic, despite every refinement, "ap- peared as raving madness to the physicians who did not know the true reason" simply demonstrates once more how indistinguishable pathology and experiment are. "' God makes an imbecile of someone who resists the onslaught with imbecility. The voices generate "more o r less senseless and partly offensive phrases, vulgar terms of abuse, etc. "; l'" Schreber com- bines Schiller and bawdy verse, poetry and noise. As in every war, the defensive forces have to learn from the attacking side. The case of Schreber is "the unheard-of event," as Goethe defined the proper material of the novella, of responding to Flechsig's psychophysics with a psychophysical nonsense.
REBUS 301
? 302 1900
And that, if it is not madness, is at least literature. In the Sonnenstein asylum high above the Elbe, a solitary and unrecognized experimenter practiced the apotropaic techniques that twelve years later would win fame and a public for the Zurich Dadaists in the Cafe Voltaire. On March 29, 1916, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Emil von Janko appeared
in the performance of a p o h e simultun. This is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three o r more voices speak, sing, whistle, and so on simultaneously, so that t h e i r e n c o u n t e r s c o n s t i t u t e t h e e l e g a i c , c o m i c , o r b i z a r r e c o n t e x t of t h e t h i n g . T h e obstinacy of the voice is starkly expressed in such simultaneous poems, and so too is the determining effect of accompaniment. The noises (an rrr drawn out for minutes, banging sounds or the wail of a siren, and so on) have an existence whose energy surpasses that of the human voice. The p o h e simultun deals with the value of the voice.
The human voice represents the soul, the individuality in its errant journey accompanied by demonic guides. The noises provide the back- ground-the inarticulate, the fatal, the determining. The poem attempts to ex- pose man's entanglement in mechanistic processes. With typical abbreviation it shows the conflict of the vox humunu with a world that threatens, strangles, and destroys, whose speed and noise are inescapable. "'
The insane asylum and the artists' cafe witness performances too simi- lar to require comment. Only Hugo Ball's commentary requires com- ment, in that it abandons its own insight into the determining importance of indeterminate and unarticulated elements. Schreber too wandered be- tween demonic guides and mechanistic processes, but he did not employ the vox humana (which is an organ register, not Nature) in order to as- sert individuality. He simulated-as Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Janko also did-noises whose energy surpassed that of his own voice. He took the side of the unarticulated, which is the background of all modem media. Those who roar, howl, or whistle are not presenting lachrymose theories of Man in a technological world; rather, they aim at discursive effects against definite and hostile discourses. The inhuman discourse network of 1900 is as inescapable as Gertrude Stein's dark oracle, but precisely its inhumanity allows one to escape from the imperative of sense. Like the audience in the coffee house, Schreber is released from all "effort" to "distinguish single words in the confusion of voices,"'" just as in the cof- feehouse words drown in the noise of the self-produced confusion of four artists' voices. When power rescinds its classical imperative of establish- ing only signifieds, even the victims gain new pleasure. The rays are by nature flighty and forgetful; thus Schreber too can indulge his beloved thoughts-thinking-nothing. God, the neurological mutant, places physi- cal pleasure above all morality; thus Schreber too is permitted enjoyment on consistent grounds: "On the other hand God demands constant en-
joyment, as the normal mode of existence for souls within the Order of
? the World. It is my duty to provide Him with it in the form of highly de- veloped soul-voluptuousness. . . . If l can get a little sensuous pleasure in this process, I feel I am entitled to it as a small compensation for the ex- cess of suffering and privation that has been mine for many years past. ""'
Wherever sense ends, enjoyment begins: a pleasure in the margins that a discourse network of pure signifiers leaves to its victims. Recollection and the establishment of sense, work and the deferral of drives may once have been the tasks of an individual, judicial bureaucrat-but the nerves and their slave practice a Nietzschean or "natural tendency. . . to forget" that "would soon have erased any . . . impressions'"" and knows only the many present moments of voluptuousness. Becausethere is already an exhaustive comprehension of data, data-storage machines need not be implanted in people as well, thus giving each a soul. The discourse net- work around Schreber is more merciful than Lindhorst's archive. Roar- ing, forgetful, suffering flight of ideas, the Senate President on leave can enjoy a freedom this side of bureaucratic and human dignity. That free- dom has been the definition of a subject since 1900. Schreber, because Flechsig's psychophysics used or misused him in experiments counter to the world order, became singular as only used pencils, knives, and watches could be. In opposition to the productive individual, he is allowed simply to consume whatever "falls off" chains of signifiers in the way of "sensual pleasure. " The subject of the unconscious is literally a "residuum. " I "
Individual differences drop onto the position of the subject. Whether the arbitrary case is called Schreber or Nietzsche means little. Assistant physician Dr. Ziehen said of his patient, Nietzsche: "He speaks rapidly, loudly, and without coherence, often for many hours. His mood is mor- bidly cheerful and exalted. """ Dr. Weber, director of the Sonnenstein in- sane asylum, said of Schreber, his guest at the family dinner table: "Ob- viously it often requires his greatest energy not to utter the 'bellowing noises,' and as soon as the table is cleared while he is still on his way to his room one can hear his inarticulate sounds. '"'' The "howling monkey" Nietzsche produced just such howls or "miraculous bellows" before the daughters of the desert. But whereas Nietzsche still appeared as a Euro- pean who found the perfect "sign amnesia" I'" only in the envied opposi- tion of two women, Schreber took the flight of ideas so far as to forget his gender. If "my whole body is filled with nerves of voluptuousness from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, such as is the case only in the adult female body, whereas in the case of a man, so far as 1know, nerves of voluptuousness are only found in and immediately around the sexual organs,"'" then this body is "a woman. "
Not the Woman, who does not exist, but a woman with the great privilege from which drive deferment and bureaucratic duties have kept
REBUS 3 0 3
? her: "succumbing to intercourse. """ Any man who becomes a neurophysi- ological case can n o longer be a man. In repeated petitions addressed to his doctor, as formal as they were pressing, a Senate President requested an experimental test of his proposition that he was a woman with nerves of voluptuousness interpenetrating his body from head to toe.
Thus the neurologist's strategy to extract SchreberS brain tissue failed due to its SUCC~SS. '~S'ensual pleasure is gained by killing off Man and the male. Schreber enjoyed the becoming-a-woman that threatened him; he used the discourse network that emptied him. Although the Memoirs of M y Nervous Illness no sooner promises than forgets to provide an "an- thology""' of all the senseless, insulting, common, and obscene dis- courses that the discourse network has stored and mobilized in making Schreber an imbecile-the bulk of its four hundred pages is just this an- thology. In the Memoirs a choice anthology of sexual descriptions that the bureaucrat Schreber would never have uttered or put on paper can and must be written down. The moral and legal measures Schreber could have taken to ensure an author's mental ownership fail when it comes to writing down a discourse network. "' Having become a woman in order to take the dictation of a neurologist God, having become a taker of dic- tation in order to be permitted to write the voluptuousness of being a woman, Schreber is free. Schreber as Writer [Schreberals Schreiber]lu writes up what has written him off. Without originality, mechanically, like nothing so much as those mindless beings who attend to the task of recording, he put Flechsig's neurophysiology or imbecilic nonsense on paper. Nothing and no one could hinder him in so doing. "For all mir- acles are powerless to prevent the expression of ideas in writing. ""'
A Simulacrum of Madness
In the eyes of I don't know which,-perhaps a very near culture we will be the ones who broughttwosentences into the closest proximity, sentences that are both as contradictory and as impossible as the famous "1 am lying," and that both desig- nate the same empty autoreferentiality: "I am writing" and "I am mad. '"
Literature in the discourse network of 1900is a simulacrum of mad- ness. As long and insofar as someone writes, his delirium is protected from the loss of the word. Distinguished from madness by a nothing named simulacrum, by a foil named paper, writing traverses the free space of eternal recurrence. Literary writing is its own justification pre- cisely in its empty self-referentiality. ' Whereas the claim of not being de- lirious necessarily leads, under the discursive conditions of brain phys- iology, to the delirium of originality and authorship, the reverse claim
? achieves discursive reality. A delirium written down coincides with what sciences and media themselves were doing.
The simulation of madness presupposes that the sciences of nonsense have become possible and dominant. Only when there is psychophysics to serve as a random generator and psychoanalysis to ensure the exhaus- tion of nonsense will a UTILIZATIONOF REFUSE [Ahfulhenuenung],as nonsensical as it is indisputable, finally take effect. Even after Flechsig has extracted all the nervous tissue from the brain and Freud has decoded all the libidinous cathexes of an arbitrary case, something remains: the fact of a delirious memoir. All experimental measures or miracles are powerless against texts that do not pretend to make sense but rather insist on their purely written character. The nonsense of writing down non- sense is as powerful and indisputable as Wilhelm Jensen's undertaking to supply invented persons with invented manias. "Every nonsense carried to extremes destroys itself in the end" wrote the sharp-witted Schreber (or the God that dictated to him). ' When that has happened, there is one more literary text.
Today "in the place of Lancelot we have Judge Schreber. "' Delirious texts entered the realm of literature when literature began to simulate madness. Schreber makes delirium into literature when he describes every hallucination as a fact of the nerve-language rather than underwriting each with an authorial name, and when in defense against the imbecility forced on him he occasionally simulated the imbecile. These were record- ing measures and simulations that, in all justice to the material and aside from any psychology, necessarily lead to masses of words. The rebus does not end with its psychoanalytic decoding; victims and simulators of mad- ness remain to tinker "with words instead of things. " 'Not only the "nerve- language" itself, but also the enormous quantity of names and idioms, dialect words and obscenities, that the language, through its neurological short cut, inscribed in Schreber's brain is simply a discursive event. Words that did not exist in Kraepelin or even in Bleuler were put down on paper.
Such is also the practice of a literature that "seeks new words for new moods. "* It is only a step from the memorable productions of Schreber's nerve-language to "Nasobem," which does not occur in Alfred Brehm and Meyer because it first saw the light of day in Morgenstern's work. - If the madness of 1900is allowed to seep beyond the poetic freedom of dra- matic monologues and overflow lexicon, syntax, and orthography as well," then literature is its simulation. Nasobems counter "a concept of the linguistic expression" in which "it is appropriate to have a meaning. " The insane and their simulators instead produce pure signifiers or "any- thing at all which appears and claims to be an expression, whereas when
REBUS 3 0 5
? 306 1900
one looks more closely, this is not the case. "9 With Morgenstern, this simulation occurs on the surface of scientific-lexical storage; with Hugo Ball, it occurs on the surface of psychiatry itself. Among Ball's Seven SchizophrenicSonnets, "The Green King" stands out with its claim of imperial proportions.
Wir, Johann, Amadeus Adelgreif,
Fiirst von Saprunt und beiderlei Smeraldis, Erzkaiser iiber allen Unterschleif
Und Obersackelmeister von Schmalkaldis,
Erheben unsern grimmen Liiwenschweif Und dekretieren vor den leeren Saldis: "lhr Rauberhorden, eure Zeit ist reif. Die Hahnenfedern ab, ihr Garibaldis!
Mann sammle alle Bliitter unserer Walder Und stanze Gold daraus, soviel man mag. Das ausgedehnte Land braucht neue Gelder.
Und eine Hungersnot liegt klar am Tag.
Sofort versehe man die Schatzbehalter
Mit Blattgold aus dem nachsten Buchenschlag. "
We, Johann Amadeus Noblegripp, Prince of Saprunt and of both Smeraldis, Emperor of all the raff and riff
And Chief Sack Master of Schmalkaldis,
Lift up our terrible lion's mane
And decree before the empty Saldis:
"You robber hordes, your time has come. Down with your cockfeathers, you Garibaldis!
Collect all the leaves from the forests' trees
And fashion coin from them, as many as you may. The extended nationneedsnew rupees.
And starvation is as clear as day.
So fill right up the treasury shieves With beech-leaf coin without delay. "'"
The poem preserves the forms of the sonnet and of the decree only in order to make a delirious claim in its empty interior. 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. "
? REBUS 307
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
? 308 1900
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,
REBUS 309
? 310 1900
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 . . .
The Memoirs constitutes an ''exhaustion''a6of Schreber's body while he was still alive. The transposition of a body into a corpus was just as necessary-namely, as necessary for survival-as was the fictional com- poser Lindner's transposition of letter to note values. After Schreber has published his book (against the wishes of his family and the medical es- tablishment), the natural sciences of the mind have only to open it-and
REBUS 293
? Schreber's person is "offer[ed]. . . as an object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts. " Otherwise, "at some future time" the ex- perts could only confirm "such peculiarities of my nervous system . . . by dissection of my body,'' for "1 am informed that it is extremely difficult to make such observations on the living body. ''87
Schreber as writer or Schreber as anatomical preparation-these are the only alternatives in the discourse network of 1900. Like all writers of the epoch, he plays the role of the "victim of his own writing,"nnin order to be able, in place of his autopsy, to prepare refuse, a bodily substitute, a text. Only thus can his case remain "soul murder"*9and not descend to the postmortem examination of those peculiarities that make people with nervous diseases so attractive to their psychiatrists. The patient dissects his own organs and notes their modifications while he is still alive, with a positivism that honors psychophysics and comes close to correcting fac- tually Kraepelin's Psychiatry (on the subject of hallucinations). Schreber thus practiced, as if to realize Nietzsche's assertion "for there is no soul," preventative soul murder.
But "soul murder"-in Schreber's divine "primary-" or "nerve-lan- guage" an autonym for the neurophysiological relationship between him and God-is also a chapter title in Ellen Key's The Century of the Child. Schreber could once more confront his blind exegetes and their multiple associations on the phrase, with the extent of his reading of contempo- rary works, which aside from Kraepelin, Du Prel, and Haeckel, also in- cluded her. What is called divine nerve-language in divine nerve-language and not accidentally contains many "expressions which would never have occurred to" Schreber, namely expressions "of a scientific, and par- ticularlymedicalnature,"n issimplythecodeoftheepoch. In1903itdid not take private religious illuminations to reduce, in the first sentence of one's book, the soul to nervous tissue and to the language of nervous tissue, or in the final sentences to see one's own mental illness "in the sense of a nervous illness," although not in its ordinary sense. "
But if the soul has only neurophysiological reality, university nerve clinics are more likely than Ellen Key's schools to be responsible for soul murder. A book that does not bear the title Memoirs of M y Nervous III- ness was unable to use the words nervous illness without the epithet so- called, and set forth from the beginning the doctrine that there are "no independent illnesses of the mind without those of the body. "9LThe book is Paul Flechsig's inaugural lecture as the second professor of psychiatry in the history of the University of Leipzig. The first was named Johann Heinroth and was faithful to Hoffbauer and Rei1 in teaching the "mis- taken doctrine" of mental cures. A "chasm" thus "gaped" between him and his successor Flechsig, one "no less deep and wide than the chasm
? between medieval medicine" and modem medicine. " In "the age of Flechsig and Wernicke," (Benn's term)," souls became nerve information systems, and cures became experiments. The "'localization of nervous diseases"' entered "a new epoch" (as Freud says)9'with Flechsig, who posed for his festschrift photograph in front of the picture of a massive, cut-open brain. Only the individual case created difficulties, relative ones, in the Leipzig University Nerve Clinic; only curing such a case created absolute difficulties. On the one hand, the brain contains "the key to every natural conception of mental activity" and a fortiori to those of mental di~turbancesO. ~n~the other, "the protected position of the brain" means that the substratum of the psychoses, namely, chemical and physi- cal nerve damage, "can be detected in the living only through more or less composite inferences. " Thus the psychiatrist Flechsig was impelled onto a royal diagnostic road that was simultaneously a therapeutic dead end: "the emphasis on postmortem e~amination. "~-
No sooner said than done. The corpse of Holderlin, an insane or, in other words, not bureaucratically employed teacher, was among the first to enter the new order of things via the dissection table. %The corpse of Schreber, a judicial bureaucrat who had gone over into the new order, suffered the same, now foreseeable, fate (withoutthe feared or hoped-for modifications in nervous tissue being found). "
And yet, what was said had already been done. After Flechsig decreed postmortem examination to be the psychiatric royal road, Schreber's dis- creet, anonymous reference to having "been informed" about the diffi- culties of in vivo diagnosis of insanity is superfluous. In Schreber's case, the situation of the text leaves no doubt: the imaginative copyright to the patient's theology, developed from the notion of the epistemological ad- vantages of being a corpse, belongs to Paul Flechsig. '"
The above picture of the nature of God and the continued existence of the human soul after death differs markedly in some respects from the Christian views on these matters. I t seems to me that a comparison between the two can only favour the former. God was not omniscient and omnipresent in the sense that He contzn- uously saw inside every individual living person, perceived every feeling of his nerves, that is to say at all times "tried his heart and reins. " But there was no need for this because after death the nerves of human beings with all the impressions they had received during life lay bare before God's eye, so that an unfailingly just judgment could be reached as to whether they were worthy of being received into the realms of heaven. '"'
The precision of this image of God is equaled only by Flechsig's festschrift photograph. Everything runs according to the plan set out in Flechsig's inaugural lecture, Bruin and Soul. That God can discipline his still-living victims with mental cures or psychological introspection is an age-old fallacy. The soul consists of nervous tissue, which makes in vivo inves-
REBUS 295
? 296 1900
tigation impossible, but the nerves are perfect data recorders and for that reason will yield all their secrets to the clinical eye at the moment of dis- section. In other words: according to this theology, "within the Order of the World, God did not really understand the living human being and had no need to understand him, because, according to the Order of the World, He dealt only with corpses," until he initiated his world-order- defying relationship to Schreber. '">The theology simply equates God with the professor. Psychophysics banned all introspection, and theology complied; Flechsig restricted all diagnoses to corpses, and pious Schreber, performing the written dissection of his nerves, could only accommodate him. With that Schreber fabricated, to the joy of Freud, once a neu- rologist, the impossible piece ofevidence for psychoanalysis: endopsychic perceptions of brain functions.
Channels of information are indeed intimately linked. Schreber's case, rather than being an independent and indubitable piece of evidence for a libido theory, demonstrates the nexus between psychophysics and psy- choanalysis. As reader and writer, Freud walked blindly into the dis- course network to which he himself belonged. The Project for a Scientific Psychology and the Memoirs of M y Nervous IIIness are two continua- tions of a single discourse. No wonder they ran into the plagiarism prob- lem of being reverse sides of one another.
Just where Freud could have resolved the imaginary rivalry, his keen intellect failed before the discourse of the Other. Although he cannot not have noticed that the language of Schreber's nerves and delirium is the language of the experimental neurologist Flechsig,"" his interpretation systematically replaces the name Flechsig with that of the inventor of the Schreber Garden. All the patient's sentences concerning his doctor and "God Flechsig"'" are treated only as the displacement of a homosexual libido directed at the father. With this, Freud founded the boundless Schreber literature that anchors all the sufferings of Schreber fils in the wild childrearing methods of Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. The head bandages or orthopedic bed invented by Schreber senior and mentioned in passing in the Memoirs are then declared the "true background of Schreber'sconception of God as One Who knows man only as a corpse. " I"' Flechsig's message of the death of man, more hidden than Nietzsche's, has not reached the exegetes. Again and again the attempt is made to explain
the second industrial revolution by the first: Schreher as information sys- tem is related to orthopedic mechanics, the writing machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony" to frieze heads and planers. But nerve-language remains nerve-language, and typewriters with their own specially constructed means of making script visible are Underwood models. '" The system of 1900could spare itself the effort to spare muscular energy because it un-
? REBUS 297
dertook to create substitutions for the central nervous system itself. Be- yond mechanical head bandages, Schreber's paranoia followed the lead of an insane neurophysiologist. His book begins (running the risk of libel suits) with an open letter to Flechsig, asking the distinguished privy coun- selor to put aside his anger for once, as the undersigned has done, and answer the rigorous scientific query whether he possibly
like so many doctors, could not completely resist the temptation of using a patient in your care us an object for scientific experiments apart from the real purpose of cure, when by chance matters of the highest scientific interest arose. One might even raise the question whether perhaps all the talk of voices about somebody having committed soul murder can be explained by the souls (rays) deeming it impermissible that a person's nervous system should be influenced by another's to the extent of imprisoning his will power, such as occurs during hypnosis. "'-
The professor in Leipzig never answered this open letter (which appeared in Leipzig). Whereas Schreber could embroil his later psychiatrists in expert-testimony disputes, which his legal understanding helped him to win, the soul murderer maintained a silence that even today puts exegetes on the wrong track. All the interest in Schreber's so-called father prob- lems substitutes consanguinity for enmity, causality for war. But the clas- sical pedagogic power of Schreber senior can only be equated with the extremely efficient disposition of power in 1900. "T'~he nerve-language at the basis of the new disposition states that "an educative influence di- rected outwards" has been played out. '"'' Because God or psychiatrists, according to the world order, can only know corpses, a temptation to conduct psychophysical experiments arises. "The miracles directed against my bead and the nerves of my head""" inscribe themselves into the nervous system without a pedagogic detour and substitute an experi- mental arrangement for the impossible cure for paranoia. The practical consequence is that anything identifiable as "influences on my nervous systememanatingfromyour[Flechsig's]nervoussystem" breaksdownin the discourse of the doctor or experimenter into "mere 'hallucinations"' of his patient. "'
If psychophysics can explain its effects out of existence, then experi- mental subjects have no choice but open warfare and thus publication. Schreber writes to Flechsig in Flechsig's language in order to demonstrate in the latter's own territory that Schreber's purported hallucinations are facts effectuated by the discourse of the Other. The Memoirs stand and fight in the war of two discourse networks. They constitute a small dis- course network with the single purpose of demonstrating the dark reality of another, hostile one.
The mentioned writing-down-system is extraordinarily difficult to explain to other people even vaguely. . . .
? 298 1900
Books or other notes are kept in which for years have been written-down all my thoughts, all my phrases, all my necessaries, all the articles in my possession or around me, all personswith whom I come into contact, etc. I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God's omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies . . . but lacking all intelligence; their hands are led automatically, as it were, by passing rays for the purpose of making them write down, so that later rays can again look at what has been written.
To illuminate the purpose of this whole system I must enlarge further. "'
Enlarging somewhat further, it first of all should be explained that rays are nerve-language information channels that maintain a psychotechni- cal, material link between Schreber and Flechsig (or his incarnation as God), very much counter to the conditions of the world order. Rather than manifesting Himself only to corpses, God occupies SchreberS ner- vous system by innervating all local language centers with the exception of the external speech apparatus; that is, like a good aphasia researcher, he stimulates only sensory and motoric word images. "'No wonder, then, that the nerve-language appears to be hallucinated, no wonder that it can also bridge cosmic distances. According to Flechsig, who wrote an influ- ential monograph on nerve tracts, "the greatest part of the human cere- brum'' consists "in nothing more than millions of well-isolated circuits, measuring thousands of kilometers. "'" All the data on Schreber wanders through such interwoven cables to its destination on distant planets. The information comes in, is registered, and can be reread by other rays, which are preparing to move in the opposite direction. The neurologist- god of 1900 is a single discourse network. Whether he (like the gods of Rousseau or the Apocalypse) still uses the book as a storage bank no longer matters. All books are discourse networks, but not all discourse networks are books. If the recording occurs mechanically and without any Geist, the probability of its being a purely technical procedure is greater. "It is presumably a phenomenon like telephoning. " There is, for example, the appearance of a writing angel in the trademark of a gramophone company.
It is no accident that the neurotheological discourse network stores particulars, and stores them exhaustively. Not one of Schreber's thoughts, sentences, or personal possessions is left out. The paranoid machine op-
? REBUS 299
erates like an integrated system of all the data-storage devices that revolu- tionized recording circa 1900. And because its strategy was aimed not at statistical series but at exhausting the arbitrary case of Schreber, it also exemplifies the methodological project at the basis of psychoanalysis.
In 1882Stanley Hall began, in what was still a very statistical proce- dure, to gather material for a study entitled Tl7eContentsof Children's Minds. Soon thereafter the investigation also included individual cases, as when the vocabulary and neologistic creations of two thirteen-year-old girls were inventoried. 'IhConsequently, Erdmann could define even a po- etic vocabulary as a denumerable group of words. And consequently Freud, in his case histories, could develop a "neurosis inventory," which included all the thoughts, turns of phrase, and significant persons in the lives of his patients. The feeble-minded discourse network around Schre- ber is thus (as if to demonstrate Freud's remark on the incalculable prox- imity between mania and theory) tl7e discourse network of 1900. Only delirious memoirs betray the actual purpose of the immense effort at re- cording and storage, which "has increased to such an extent that it now includes almost all the words used in the human language. "
Exhaustion links individual cases to the discourse network of 1900. The material taken from Schreber's nerves and stored on distant suns is explicitly intended for inscription. Because it "seems to lie in the nature of the rays that they must speak as soon as they are in motion," they grant their victim, by virtue of an appropriate autonymity, this "law""* and then further the words for everything that Schreber coincidentally hap- pens to be doing. It is thus made certain that his nerves do not constitute an exception to the law, but rather serve up a verbal stew with compul- sive automatism. The rays have "the boundless impudence-1 can use no other expression-to demand that 1should express this falsified nonsense in spoken words as if it were my own thoughts. "'" As with Pameelen, the discourse network dictates nonsense, which, however, does not remain in the no man's land of psychophysical experiments, but demands Schreber's signature. It is not enough that he suffer the compulsive need to speak, which robs him of sleep and "not-thinking-of-anything-thought,''l o those basic rights of man, but he must also say that be is the speaker of all the nonsense. This is inscription as coupling.
The sudden, direct link between data-storage machines and individual cases liquidates a basic concept of 1800:the ownership of discourses. That Schreber is forced to sign the nonsense forced upon him logically reverses the storage procedures that ensnared him and his contempo- raries. God in his ignorance of Man countenances what by the bureau- cratic norm is the "completely mistaken view" that when Schreber, "for example, reads a book or newspaper, . . . the thoughts contained therein are my own thoughts. " The patient threatened with soul murder need
? 300 1900
only quite accidentally sing a few notes from the revenge aria in the Magic Flute, and immediately his brain fills with whispering voices "which pre- sume that . . . I am actually in the grip of despair. "'" Data-storage ma- chines are much too accurate to make the classical distinctions between intention and citation, independent thought and the mere repetition of something already said. They register discursive events without regard for so-called persons. Thus the pretext of being able to distinguish be- tween mental ownership, citation, and parapraxes became as superfluous as in psychoanalysis. "' To attribute each and every flatus vocis to a speaker as his mental property means to divest him of everything and drive him into insanity-an unparalleled trick indeed.
The writing-down also serves as another peculiar trick which again is based on a total misunderstanding of human thinking. It was believed that my store of thoughts could be exhausted by being written-down, so that eventually the time would come when new ideas could no longer appear in me. . . . This was the trick: as soon as an idea I had had before and which was (already) written-down, recurred-such a recurrence is of course quite unavoidable in the case of many thoughts, for instance the thought in the morning "Now I will wash" or when playing the piano the thought "This is a beautiful passage," etc. -as soon as such a budding thought was spotted in me, the approaching rays were sent down with the phrase "We have already got this," scil. written-down. '"
It makes no difference, then, whether the heavenly secretaries inscribe sentences or describe things as they occur. At one moment Schreber has to subscribe to the view that the imbecility forced on him is natural to him, at another that what is natural to him is imbecility. As precisely as Ebbinghaus sorted out previously learned nonsense, the nerves note all of Schreber's previously spoken sentences, so that he is subject to the recur- rence of recurrence itself. In triumphant Saxon accents, the nerves mock the correct High German faith of the bureaucrat on leave, according to which thinking and speaking are the nature of Man. With the eternal re- currence of "We already have't; we already have't" [harnmirschon ham- mirschon] eternal recurrence triumphs over original genius, as does psy- chophysics over Absolute Spirit. In order to make someone an imbecile, it suffices to impute to him an exhaustible supply of possible thoughts. Every discursive manipulation produces whatever claims it happens to make. It is not for nothing that the beings in charge of recording have no need for minds; their imbecilic inventorying drives Schreber out of his. The psychiatric insight that lists, address books, inventories, and a fortiori discourse networks are fundamentally examples of the flight of ideas, be- comes practice. The case of Schreber verifies once more Stransky's obser- vation that the flight of ideas can have pathological grounds as easily as it can have experimental grounds.
But when experiment and pathology coincide and the experimenter in-
? deed does drive the experimental subject crazy, the remaining problem is self-defense. All the gods that pursue Schreber announce their plan as "We want to destroy your reason"; against all such pursuit Schreber at- tempts "my allotted task of at all times convincing God . . . of my un- diminished powers of reason. '"" To this end he not only reads news- papers and books, but also cultivates the "notion" that "human thinking is inexhaustible; for instance reading a book or a newspaper always stimu- lates new thoughts. " ' l ' The basic principles of the classical discourse net- work have thus deteriorated into being the defensive weapons of a mental patient. In the crossfire of psychophysics, the last bureaucrat is left with only the sediment of his education, whose norms, however, are taken apart bit by bit. Inexhaustibility, this signum of great works, becomes in Schreber's desperation an attribute of newspapers as well. Poems suffer a similar fate. Among the "methods of defense" that make "even the most drawn-out voices finally perish," Schreber included reciting verses learned by heart, "particularly Schiller's ballads. " But he then had to realize that "however insignificant the rhymes, even obscene verses" did just as well as his classical poet. "As mental nourishment" obscene verses are "worth their weight in gold . . . compared with the terrible nonsense my nerves are otherwise forced to listen to. " '"
Newspaper rather than oeuvre, memorization rather than understand- ing,bawdyverseratherthanSchiller-the PresidentoftheJudicialSenate (on leave) himself takes apart the education that should have provided a defense against his neurologist-tormenter. The old bureaucratic race of the Schrebers must pay for the fact that Flechsig's plot denied Schreber "choice of those professions which would lead to closer relations with God such as that of a nerve specialist. ""- Only countering one medium with another can save one from psychophysics, and onlv mimicry can save one from voices that level all discourses to the stratum of their mate- riality. "There had been times when I could not help myself but speak aloud or make some noise, in order to drown the senseless and shameless twaddle of the voices. ""a That this tactic, despite every refinement, "ap- peared as raving madness to the physicians who did not know the true reason" simply demonstrates once more how indistinguishable pathology and experiment are. "' God makes an imbecile of someone who resists the onslaught with imbecility. The voices generate "more o r less senseless and partly offensive phrases, vulgar terms of abuse, etc. "; l'" Schreber com- bines Schiller and bawdy verse, poetry and noise. As in every war, the defensive forces have to learn from the attacking side. The case of Schreber is "the unheard-of event," as Goethe defined the proper material of the novella, of responding to Flechsig's psychophysics with a psychophysical nonsense.
REBUS 301
? 302 1900
And that, if it is not madness, is at least literature. In the Sonnenstein asylum high above the Elbe, a solitary and unrecognized experimenter practiced the apotropaic techniques that twelve years later would win fame and a public for the Zurich Dadaists in the Cafe Voltaire. On March 29, 1916, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Emil von Janko appeared
in the performance of a p o h e simultun. This is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three o r more voices speak, sing, whistle, and so on simultaneously, so that t h e i r e n c o u n t e r s c o n s t i t u t e t h e e l e g a i c , c o m i c , o r b i z a r r e c o n t e x t of t h e t h i n g . T h e obstinacy of the voice is starkly expressed in such simultaneous poems, and so too is the determining effect of accompaniment. The noises (an rrr drawn out for minutes, banging sounds or the wail of a siren, and so on) have an existence whose energy surpasses that of the human voice. The p o h e simultun deals with the value of the voice.
The human voice represents the soul, the individuality in its errant journey accompanied by demonic guides. The noises provide the back- ground-the inarticulate, the fatal, the determining. The poem attempts to ex- pose man's entanglement in mechanistic processes. With typical abbreviation it shows the conflict of the vox humunu with a world that threatens, strangles, and destroys, whose speed and noise are inescapable. "'
The insane asylum and the artists' cafe witness performances too simi- lar to require comment. Only Hugo Ball's commentary requires com- ment, in that it abandons its own insight into the determining importance of indeterminate and unarticulated elements. Schreber too wandered be- tween demonic guides and mechanistic processes, but he did not employ the vox humana (which is an organ register, not Nature) in order to as- sert individuality. He simulated-as Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Janko also did-noises whose energy surpassed that of his own voice. He took the side of the unarticulated, which is the background of all modem media. Those who roar, howl, or whistle are not presenting lachrymose theories of Man in a technological world; rather, they aim at discursive effects against definite and hostile discourses. The inhuman discourse network of 1900 is as inescapable as Gertrude Stein's dark oracle, but precisely its inhumanity allows one to escape from the imperative of sense. Like the audience in the coffee house, Schreber is released from all "effort" to "distinguish single words in the confusion of voices,"'" just as in the cof- feehouse words drown in the noise of the self-produced confusion of four artists' voices. When power rescinds its classical imperative of establish- ing only signifieds, even the victims gain new pleasure. The rays are by nature flighty and forgetful; thus Schreber too can indulge his beloved thoughts-thinking-nothing. God, the neurological mutant, places physi- cal pleasure above all morality; thus Schreber too is permitted enjoyment on consistent grounds: "On the other hand God demands constant en-
joyment, as the normal mode of existence for souls within the Order of
? the World. It is my duty to provide Him with it in the form of highly de- veloped soul-voluptuousness. . . . If l can get a little sensuous pleasure in this process, I feel I am entitled to it as a small compensation for the ex- cess of suffering and privation that has been mine for many years past. ""'
Wherever sense ends, enjoyment begins: a pleasure in the margins that a discourse network of pure signifiers leaves to its victims. Recollection and the establishment of sense, work and the deferral of drives may once have been the tasks of an individual, judicial bureaucrat-but the nerves and their slave practice a Nietzschean or "natural tendency. . . to forget" that "would soon have erased any . . . impressions'"" and knows only the many present moments of voluptuousness. Becausethere is already an exhaustive comprehension of data, data-storage machines need not be implanted in people as well, thus giving each a soul. The discourse net- work around Schreber is more merciful than Lindhorst's archive. Roar- ing, forgetful, suffering flight of ideas, the Senate President on leave can enjoy a freedom this side of bureaucratic and human dignity. That free- dom has been the definition of a subject since 1900. Schreber, because Flechsig's psychophysics used or misused him in experiments counter to the world order, became singular as only used pencils, knives, and watches could be. In opposition to the productive individual, he is allowed simply to consume whatever "falls off" chains of signifiers in the way of "sensual pleasure. " The subject of the unconscious is literally a "residuum. " I "
Individual differences drop onto the position of the subject. Whether the arbitrary case is called Schreber or Nietzsche means little. Assistant physician Dr. Ziehen said of his patient, Nietzsche: "He speaks rapidly, loudly, and without coherence, often for many hours. His mood is mor- bidly cheerful and exalted. """ Dr. Weber, director of the Sonnenstein in- sane asylum, said of Schreber, his guest at the family dinner table: "Ob- viously it often requires his greatest energy not to utter the 'bellowing noises,' and as soon as the table is cleared while he is still on his way to his room one can hear his inarticulate sounds. '"'' The "howling monkey" Nietzsche produced just such howls or "miraculous bellows" before the daughters of the desert. But whereas Nietzsche still appeared as a Euro- pean who found the perfect "sign amnesia" I'" only in the envied opposi- tion of two women, Schreber took the flight of ideas so far as to forget his gender. If "my whole body is filled with nerves of voluptuousness from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, such as is the case only in the adult female body, whereas in the case of a man, so far as 1know, nerves of voluptuousness are only found in and immediately around the sexual organs,"'" then this body is "a woman. "
Not the Woman, who does not exist, but a woman with the great privilege from which drive deferment and bureaucratic duties have kept
REBUS 3 0 3
? her: "succumbing to intercourse. """ Any man who becomes a neurophysi- ological case can n o longer be a man. In repeated petitions addressed to his doctor, as formal as they were pressing, a Senate President requested an experimental test of his proposition that he was a woman with nerves of voluptuousness interpenetrating his body from head to toe.
Thus the neurologist's strategy to extract SchreberS brain tissue failed due to its SUCC~SS. '~S'ensual pleasure is gained by killing off Man and the male. Schreber enjoyed the becoming-a-woman that threatened him; he used the discourse network that emptied him. Although the Memoirs of M y Nervous Illness no sooner promises than forgets to provide an "an- thology""' of all the senseless, insulting, common, and obscene dis- courses that the discourse network has stored and mobilized in making Schreber an imbecile-the bulk of its four hundred pages is just this an- thology. In the Memoirs a choice anthology of sexual descriptions that the bureaucrat Schreber would never have uttered or put on paper can and must be written down. The moral and legal measures Schreber could have taken to ensure an author's mental ownership fail when it comes to writing down a discourse network. "' Having become a woman in order to take the dictation of a neurologist God, having become a taker of dic- tation in order to be permitted to write the voluptuousness of being a woman, Schreber is free. Schreber as Writer [Schreberals Schreiber]lu writes up what has written him off. Without originality, mechanically, like nothing so much as those mindless beings who attend to the task of recording, he put Flechsig's neurophysiology or imbecilic nonsense on paper. Nothing and no one could hinder him in so doing. "For all mir- acles are powerless to prevent the expression of ideas in writing. ""'
A Simulacrum of Madness
In the eyes of I don't know which,-perhaps a very near culture we will be the ones who broughttwosentences into the closest proximity, sentences that are both as contradictory and as impossible as the famous "1 am lying," and that both desig- nate the same empty autoreferentiality: "I am writing" and "I am mad. '"
Literature in the discourse network of 1900is a simulacrum of mad- ness. As long and insofar as someone writes, his delirium is protected from the loss of the word. Distinguished from madness by a nothing named simulacrum, by a foil named paper, writing traverses the free space of eternal recurrence. Literary writing is its own justification pre- cisely in its empty self-referentiality. ' Whereas the claim of not being de- lirious necessarily leads, under the discursive conditions of brain phys- iology, to the delirium of originality and authorship, the reverse claim
? achieves discursive reality. A delirium written down coincides with what sciences and media themselves were doing.
The simulation of madness presupposes that the sciences of nonsense have become possible and dominant. Only when there is psychophysics to serve as a random generator and psychoanalysis to ensure the exhaus- tion of nonsense will a UTILIZATIONOF REFUSE [Ahfulhenuenung],as nonsensical as it is indisputable, finally take effect. Even after Flechsig has extracted all the nervous tissue from the brain and Freud has decoded all the libidinous cathexes of an arbitrary case, something remains: the fact of a delirious memoir. All experimental measures or miracles are powerless against texts that do not pretend to make sense but rather insist on their purely written character. The nonsense of writing down non- sense is as powerful and indisputable as Wilhelm Jensen's undertaking to supply invented persons with invented manias. "Every nonsense carried to extremes destroys itself in the end" wrote the sharp-witted Schreber (or the God that dictated to him). ' When that has happened, there is one more literary text.
Today "in the place of Lancelot we have Judge Schreber. "' Delirious texts entered the realm of literature when literature began to simulate madness. Schreber makes delirium into literature when he describes every hallucination as a fact of the nerve-language rather than underwriting each with an authorial name, and when in defense against the imbecility forced on him he occasionally simulated the imbecile. These were record- ing measures and simulations that, in all justice to the material and aside from any psychology, necessarily lead to masses of words. The rebus does not end with its psychoanalytic decoding; victims and simulators of mad- ness remain to tinker "with words instead of things. " 'Not only the "nerve- language" itself, but also the enormous quantity of names and idioms, dialect words and obscenities, that the language, through its neurological short cut, inscribed in Schreber's brain is simply a discursive event. Words that did not exist in Kraepelin or even in Bleuler were put down on paper.
Such is also the practice of a literature that "seeks new words for new moods. "* It is only a step from the memorable productions of Schreber's nerve-language to "Nasobem," which does not occur in Alfred Brehm and Meyer because it first saw the light of day in Morgenstern's work. - If the madness of 1900is allowed to seep beyond the poetic freedom of dra- matic monologues and overflow lexicon, syntax, and orthography as well," then literature is its simulation. Nasobems counter "a concept of the linguistic expression" in which "it is appropriate to have a meaning. " The insane and their simulators instead produce pure signifiers or "any- thing at all which appears and claims to be an expression, whereas when
REBUS 3 0 5
? 306 1900
one looks more closely, this is not the case. "9 With Morgenstern, this simulation occurs on the surface of scientific-lexical storage; with Hugo Ball, it occurs on the surface of psychiatry itself. Among Ball's Seven SchizophrenicSonnets, "The Green King" stands out with its claim of imperial proportions.
Wir, Johann, Amadeus Adelgreif,
Fiirst von Saprunt und beiderlei Smeraldis, Erzkaiser iiber allen Unterschleif
Und Obersackelmeister von Schmalkaldis,
Erheben unsern grimmen Liiwenschweif Und dekretieren vor den leeren Saldis: "lhr Rauberhorden, eure Zeit ist reif. Die Hahnenfedern ab, ihr Garibaldis!
Mann sammle alle Bliitter unserer Walder Und stanze Gold daraus, soviel man mag. Das ausgedehnte Land braucht neue Gelder.
Und eine Hungersnot liegt klar am Tag.
Sofort versehe man die Schatzbehalter
Mit Blattgold aus dem nachsten Buchenschlag. "
We, Johann Amadeus Noblegripp, Prince of Saprunt and of both Smeraldis, Emperor of all the raff and riff
And Chief Sack Master of Schmalkaldis,
Lift up our terrible lion's mane
And decree before the empty Saldis:
"You robber hordes, your time has come. Down with your cockfeathers, you Garibaldis!
Collect all the leaves from the forests' trees
And fashion coin from them, as many as you may. The extended nationneedsnew rupees.
And starvation is as clear as day.
So fill right up the treasury shieves With beech-leaf coin without delay. "'"
The poem preserves the forms of the sonnet and of the decree only in order to make a delirious claim in its empty interior. 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. "
? REBUS 307
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
? 308 1900
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,
REBUS 309
? 310 1900
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 . . .
