No More Learning

My sickness also gave me the right to change all my habits completely; it permit- ted, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient. -But that means, of thinking. -My eyes alone put an end to all book wormishness-in brief, philology: I was delivered from the "book"; for years 1did not read a thing-the greatest benefit I ever con- ferred on myself. -That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously-but eventually it spoke again. -'
A physiological accident made Nietzsche's second experiment pos- sible. Near-blindness released writing from being the productive continua- tion of reading it had been in I800 or the commentary on a pile of books it had been in the Republic of Scholars. Though Nietzsche's method of philo- logical spelling out governed his own work, he was no longer a scholar, one "who at bottom does little nowadays but thumb books-philolo- gists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day. "R At the point where the
NIETZSCHE 191
? 192 1900
eyes or imagination of others see printed paper, night intervenes. Hegel's refutation of sense-certainty would d o nothing for someone too blind to read. The absolute certainty of night and shadow put the cultural me- dium of the book on the same level as physiological media, which had their ground and countersupport in the desert, noise, and blinding dark- ness. In place of the uncounted words already written, in place of philolo- gists' two hundred books per day (first counted by Nietzsche), an uncon- scious self appears, which in its refusal to do the required reading is as foreign and physiological as the voice behind the chair. What finally be- gins to speak is, of course, never reached by any word. Near blindness, more effective than the devouring of books by women ever was, grants forgetfulness.
But the accident of illness brought about merely the conditions that distinguish all signifiers. In order for a sign to exist, it must necessarily stand against a background that cannot be stored by any mechanism. For letters, this is empty white paper; in another case, the mirror-image trans- position of writing, it is the empty black sky.
To write-
The inkwell, crystal clear like a conscience, with its drop of darkness at the
bottom, so that something may come out of it: then, set aside the lamp.
You noticed, one does not write the alphabet of stars luminously, on a dark field, only, thus is it indicated, barely begun or interrupted; man pursues black
on white.
This fold of dark lace, that holds the infinite, its secret, woven by thousands,
each one according to its own thread or unknown continuation, assembles distant interlaced ribbons where a luxury yet to be inventoried sleeps, vampire, knot, leaves and then present it. -*
The inkwell, in whose darkness Nietzky would drown his black heart; the lamp set aside, which the half-blind hardly need anyway; the dark field on which stars are stars and where the afterimages of Apollonian visions ease pain-the materiality of signifiers rests on a chaos that de- fines them differentially. Nietzsche could call his styles, because of their "variety" or in spite of it, "the opposite of chaos. "" A precondition for something to "come out," that is, to be written down, is a relation to the dark ground. The fact that writing reverses this relation of figure and ground (Max Wertheimer would soon study the physiology of perception involved) into dark marks against luminous space changes nothing in its logic. As a "fold of dark lace" that "assembles distant interlaced rib- bons," letters are determined by the space between them.
The logic of chaos and intervals was implemented as a technology by the discourse network of 1900-through the invention of the typewriter. When his eyes decreed an end to all bookwormishness, Nietzsche
? wrote that he had no idea how he would handle written material (letters and notes). He was thinking about getting a typewriter, and he had been in contact with its inventor, a Dane from Copenhagen. " Five months later, Paul Rie brought the machine, which cost 450 Reichsmark, to Genoa. It had "unfortunately been damaged during the trip. A mechanic was able to repair it within a week, but it soon completely ceased functioning. " 76
Nietzsche as typist-the experiment lasted for a couple of weeks and was broken off, yet it was a turning point in the organization of discourse. No other philosopher would have been proud to appear in the Berlin Daily as the owner of a strange new machine. -' As far as one can recon- struct the unwritten literary history of the typewriter, only journalists and reporters, such as Mark Twain and Paul Lindau, threw away their pens in the pioneering days of I880. The stinking Spirit, as it led its skim- ming readers, also made its move to a machine that, in contrast to the pen, was "capable of putting one's first thoughts, which are well known to be the best, onto paper. "'* Nietzsche's decision to buy a typewriter, before greater interest in the new technology arose in Europe around
1890,had a different motivation: his half-blindness. Indeed, the first typewriters (in contrast to the Remington of 1873)were made for those who were blind, and sometimes (as with Foucauld and Pierre) by those who were blind. Nietzsche's Dane from Copenhagen was Malling Han- sen, pastor and teacher of the deaf and dumb, whose "writing ball" of 1865o r 1867 "was designed for use only by the blind," but by virtue of improved mechanics and working speed "was the first practical and us- able typewriter. ""
Nietzsche, who even as a school boy dreamed of a machine that would transcribe his thoughts, knew better than his biographer Kurt Paul Janz, who with feigned outspokenness (and probably out of respect for fab- ricators of munitions and buyers of typewriter patents like the Reming- tons) flatly denied the Dane (whom he calls Hansun) any credit for the invention. '" Nietzsche's choice, by contrast, as half-blind as it was certain, picked out a machine whose rounded keyboard could be used "exclu- sively through the sense of touch," because "on the surface of a sphere each spot is designated with complete certainty by its spatial position. "*'
Spatially designated and discrete signs-that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter. "In place of the image of the word [in handwriting] there appears a geometrical figure created by the spatial arrangement of the letter keys. "I2 Indeed, a peculiar relation- ship to place defines the signifier: in contrast to everything in the Real, it can be and not be in its place. " As soon as the typewriter was ready to go into mass production, therefore, "a powerful movement in favor of intro-
NIETZSCHE 193
? ducing a universal keyboard got under way, and the 1888 congress in Toronto agreed on a standard
I
In an apparatus and its discrete letters, Toronto in 1888 realized (be- yond Gutenberg) what Sils-Maria praised in Horace and his verse: that elements of a keyboard can be structured to the "right and left" and throughout the whole. In the play between signs and intervals, writing was no longer the handwritten, continuous transition from nature to cul- ture. It became selection from a countable, spatialized supply. The equal size of each sign-a lofty, distant goal for the genetic method of writing instruction-came aboutofitself(ifonly,asinHansen'stypewriter,be- cause the machine had nothing but capital letters). The only tasks in the
QWERTYUIOP ASDFGHJKL ZXCVBNM
-I
? NIETZSCHE 195
transposition from keyboard to text remained the manipulations of per- mutation and combination. "Yes! With its 24 signs, this Literature pre- cisely named Letters, as well as through its numerous fusions in the elab- oration of sentences and then verse, a system arranged like a spiritual zodiac, contains its own doctrine, abstract and esoteric like a theology. ""
In typewriting, spatiality determines not only the relations among signs but also their relation to the empty ground. Type hits paper, leaving an impression, or sometimes even a hole. Not for nothing was the type- writer born in the realm of blindness. Whereas handwriting is subject to the eye, a sense that works across distance, the typewriter uses a blind, tactile power. Before the introduction of John T. Underwood's "view typewriter" in I 898, all models (much to the disadvantage of their popu- larization) wrote invisible lines, which became visible only after the fact. *6 But Underwood's improvement did little to change the fundamental dif- ference between handwriting and typescript. Toquote Angelo Beyerlen's engineering expertise:
In writing by hand, the eye must constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each written line, must measure, direct, and, in short, guide the hand through each movement. For this, the written line, particu- larly the line being written, must be visible. By contrast, after one presses down briefly on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a com- plete letter, which not only is untouched by the writer's hand but i s also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work. Why should the writer look at the paper when everything there occursdependably and well as long as the keys on the fingerboard are used correctly?
The spot that one must constantly keep in view in order to write correctly by hand-namely, the spot where the next sign to be written occurs-and the pro- cess that makes the writer believe that the hand-written lines must be seen are precisely what, even with "view typewriters,'' cannot be seen. The only reason- able purpose of visibility is not fulfilled by the "view typewriters. " The spot that must be seen is always visible, but not at the instant when visibility is believed to be required. *-
Underwood's innovation unlinks hand, eye, and letter within the mo- ment that was decisive for the age of Goethe. Not every discursive config- uration rests on an originary production of signs. Circa 1900several blindnesses-of the writer, of writing, of script-come together to guar- antee an elementary blindness: the blind spot of the writing act. Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the phi- losopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the play between type and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription.
Instead of writing on his broken machine, Nietzsche continued to write about the typewriters that had made certain very forgetful "slaves of affect and desire" into so-called human beings. Out of technology
? 196 1900
comes science, but a science of techniques. "Our writing materials con- tribute their part to our thinking" reads one of Nietzsche's typed letters. " Five years later The Genealogy of Morals gathered a whole arsenal of martyrs, victims, maimings, pledges, and practices to which people, very tangibly, owe their memories: "perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotech- nics. 'If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. '"" This writing out of fire and pain, scars and wounds, is the opposite of alphabetization made flesh. It does not obey any voice and therefore forbids the leap to the sig- nified. It makes the transition from nature to culture a shock rather than a continuum. It is as little aimed at reading and consumption as the pain applied ceases not to cease. The signifier, by reason of its singular rela- tionship to place, becomes an inscription on the body. Understanding and interpretation are helpless before an unconscious writing that, rather than presenting the subject with something to be deciphered, makes the subject what it is. Mnemonic inscription is, like mechanical inscription, always invisible at the decisive moment. Its blindly chosen victims are "virtually compelled to invent gods and genii at all the heights and depths, in short, something that roams even in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting, painful spectacle pass unnoticed. " *'
Nietzsche's third experiment was to step into the place of such a god. If God is dead, then there is nothing to keep one from inventing gods. Dio- nysus (like Dracula several years later) is a typewriter myth. The mne- monic technique of inscription causes bodies so much pain that their la- menting, a Dionysian dithyramb in the most literal sense of the word, can and must invent the god Dionysus. Hardly anything distinguishes the drama described in the Genealogy from Nietzsche's dithyramb "Ariadne's Lament. " 91 Tortured and martyred by an InvisibleOnewho represents the naked power of inscription, Nietzsche's Ariadne puzzles over the desire of this Other. Such speech was not heard, indeed would have been unheard of, in the classical-romantic discourse network. It was first necessary to write with and about typewriters; the act of writing had first to become a blind incidence from and upon a formless ground before speech could be directedtowardtheunansweringconditionsof speechitself. Ariadnespeaks as the being who has been taught to speak by torture, as the animal whose forgetfulness has been driven o u t by mnemonic techniques; she talks about and to the terror that all media presuppose and veil. She became "the fateful curiosity that once would look out and downward through a crack in the room of consciousness and would sense that man . . . rests on the merciless, the craving, the voracious, the murderous. "
? NIETZSCHE 197 But because language itself is a transposition, the desire of this Other
remains unspoken. Ariadne says it.
Stich weiter!
Grausamster Stachel!
Kein Hund-dein Wild nur bin ich, grausamster Jager!
deine stolzeste Gefangne,
du RIuber hinter Wolken . . .
Sprich endlich!
Du Blitz-Verhiillter! Unbekannter! sprich! Was willst du, Wegelagerer, von mir?
Stab further!
Most cruel thorn!
Not a dog-I am your trapped animal
most cruel hunter!
your proudest prisoner,
you bandit behind clouds . . .
Speak finally!
You who hide in lighming! Stranger! speak! What do you want from me? , highwayman . . .
Dionysus, hidden in formlessness, stabs but does not speak. The torments and only they are his style. For that reason Ariadne, in contrast to women in the discourse network of 1800,knows nothing of authorship or love. She can only speak in monologues that can call the inscription ''love'' just as well as "hatred. "
Was willst du dit erhorchen? was willst du dir erfoltern, du Folterer
du-Hen ker-Con!
Oder sol1 ich, dem Hunde gleich, vor dir mich walzen?
Hingebend, begeistert ausser mir dir Liebe-zuwedeln?
What would you command? what would you extract,
you torturer you-hangman-god !
Or should I, like a dog,
throw myself before you? Come wagging, devoted
and beside myself-with love? "
It was as Nietzsche wrote: "Who besides me knows what Ariadne is! -For all such riddles nobody so far had any solution; 1 doubt that anybody even saw any riddles here. "" When Friedrich Schlegel wrote O n
? 198 1900
Philosophy to his beloved, there was neither riddle nor solution. The man enjoyed his human determination, authorship; the woman remained the mute feminine reader of his love and of the confession that it was not he, but she who had introduced him to philosophy. With the "news" that far from docents and professors there was a "philosopher Dionysus," all the rules of the university discourse were reversed. " Ariadne and her "philo- sophic lover" conduct "famous dialogues on Naxo~,"~w'here first and foremost a woman speaks and learns from her mute executioner-god that "love-in its means, [is]war, at bottom, the deathly hatred of the sexes. "96 The discovery of "how foreign man and woman are to one another"" does away with the possibility of placing the two sexes in polar or com- plementary relations within a discourse network. Henceforth there is no longer any discursive representation of one through the other, as Schlegel presupposed and practiced it. Because they are at war, Dionysus does not speak for Ariadne, and Ariadne certainly never speaks for Dionysus. The discourse network of 1900codifies the rules that "one class cannot repre- sent another" and "that it is much less possible for one sex to represent an~ther. "'T~hus "a particular language" comes into being: "the wom- an's language. ""
Another language follows immediately after the woman's language, after Ariadne's lament. Following the stage direction "Lighming. Diony- sus appears in emerald beauty," the god speaks and thus materializes the logic of media. In his shroud of lightning Dionysus gives Ariadne's eyes the reversed afterimage effect that turns glimpsed darkness into light in order to protect the retina. Where earlier poetic hallucination had passed quietly over the reaction-time threshold of the senses, the lightning sends a dark and assaulting light, which transposes speech into its other medium.
Sei klug, Ariadne! . . .
Du hast kleine Ohren, du hast meine Ohren:
steck ein kluges Wort hinein! -
Muss man sich nicht erst hassen, wenn man sich lieben soll? . . . Ich bin dein Labyrinth . . .
Bewise, Ariadne! . . .
You have small ears, you have my ears:
stick a wise word in! -
Must we not first hate each other, if we are to love one another . . . I am your labyrinth . . .
The god does not answer or grant anything with his words, rather, he heightens the enigma. Rather than dissolve the ambiguity of light and darkness, love and hatred, he underscores it. A Dionysian "yes"-his wise word names the dark ground behind all words, even as he incarnates that ground. If Ariadne's lament was a glimpse out of the room of con-
? sciousness into the abyss, then Dionysus transgresses this transgression. With the line " I am your labyrinth," the abyss of language declares that it is an abyss. Ariadne's lament remains unheard: "the ears of the god be- come smaller and more labyrinthine, and no word of lament finds the way through. '""" Something else happens instead. If, in contrast to the many he- and she-asses, Ariadne has small ears, if she sticks the wise word in, then what takes place is not elegy, monologue, or epiphany but, very suddenly and technically, dictation. The philosopher Dionysus, un- like his university-tamed predecessors, utters a Discourse of the Master, or despot. A dictate (in the double meaning of the word), however, is not to be understood or even read; its sense is literal. '"'"Stick a wise word in! " Ariadne's lament began with words about torture, stabbing, and in- scription; it ends with a word that stabs.
Nietzsche, who was proud of his small ears just as Mallarm6 was proud of his satyr's ears, thus wrote the program of his program. Rather than simply being thought as The Genealogy of Morals, typewriter be- came act in the dithyramb. The rhythm of the lyric has, of course, the "advantage" of "better impressing" words "into memory. " (Human be- ings are that forgetful, and gods that hard of hearing. ) IOL Hence, instead of declaring an ambiguous love to women with classical-romantic lyri- cism, Nietzsche stages a scene of torture. "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays inthememory. " Thisfixedsomethingisneithersignifiednorfixedidea; it is a dictated word.
Nietzsche as lyric poet, or "HOWto Write Poetry with a Hammer. "
The end of all women's laments is based on the historical fact that script, instead of continuing to be translation from a Mother's Mouth, has become an irreducible medium among media, has become the type- writer. This desexualization allows women access to writing. The follow- ing sentence applies literally to the discourse network of 1900: "The typewriter opened the way for the female sex into the office. " lo' Nietz- sche's Ariadne is not a myth.
In place of his broken Malling Hansen typewriter, the half-blind Nietzsche engaged secretaries-for Beyond Good and Evil, a Mrs. Roder- Wiederhold. She had such difficulty, however-as if in empirical demon- stration of the title and of Nietzsche's dithyrambs-in tolerating the anti- democratic, anti-Christian master's discourse stuck into her ear that she "cried more often" than her dictator "cared for. "lMAriadne's lament . . .
Women circa 1900were no longer the Woman, who, without writing herself, made men speak, and they were no longer feminine consumers, who at best wrote down the fruits of their reading. A new wisdom gave them the word, even if it was for the dictation of a master's discourse.
NIETZSCHE 199
? 200 1900
Whenever the hermit of Sils went out among people, he consorted with emancipated women-that is, with women who wrote. For their part, from 1885on they traveled to Engadine "only in order to make the ac- quaintance of Professor Nietzsche, who nonetheless seemed to them to be the most dangerous enemy of women. "'"' The quiet mountain valley thus witnessed the future of our educational institutions. Whereas until 1908 Prussia's bureaucratic university held fast to its founding exclusion, Swit- zerland had long admitted women to the university. 'IMLou von Salomi is only the most well known among them; aside from her and other women students, at least three women Ph. D. S appeared in Nietzsche's circle: Meta von Salis, Resa von Schirnhofer (to whom Nietzsche vainly recom- mended himself as a dissertation t~pic),'a"n~d one of the first women to earn a doctorate after the great historical turning point, Helene Drus- kowitz. Yet this context of Nietzsche's writing remains as unanalyzed as it is decisive. '" With writing women as with writing machines, the man of many failed experiments was the first to use discursive innovations.
The text that Nietzsche first composed and then transferred into Ariad- ne's lament came from Lou Salome. One has only to exchange "enigma" or "enigmatic life" for "Dionysus" in the "Hymn to Life," and the woman's verse "If you have no happiness left to give me, good then, you still have pain! " becomes Nietzsche-Ariadne's "No! Come back! With all your martyring! " The dithyramb (to say nothing of the rest of Nietzsche's rela- tionship to Salomk) thus remains quite close to what suffragettes called "the language of woman. " In a letter to his sister from Zurich, where Druskowitz was a student, Nietzsche reports:
This afternoon I took a long walk with my new friend Helene Druscowia, who lives with her mother a few houses up from the Pension Neptune: of all the women I have come to know she has read my books with the most seriousness, and not for nothing. Look and see what you think of her latest writing (Three English Poetesses, among them Eliot, whom she greatly esteems, and a book on
Shelley). . . .
my "philosophv. " I""
I would say she is a noble and honest creature, who does no harm to
A woman (Nietzsche'ssister) is thus written that other women write- particularly about other women, who without disparagement are called "poetesses. " She reads further that writing women are the most serious of Nietzsche's readers, without any doubt about their independence. There is no longer any talk about the ravages of feminine reading mania. Nietzsche learned with great care the negative lesson of the Pforta school, where pupils could become acquainted with everything but women. His "philosophy," therefore set between quotation marks, reversed the uni- versity discourse. Out of the exclusion of the other sex came, circa 1900, an inclusion. "I am your labyrinth," says Dionysus to one who in the
? Cretan cultic dance was herself the mistress of the labyrinth. Not only because Nietzsche exploded the interpretation rules of 1800 is it unneces- sary to identify Ariadne with Cosima Wagner, as so often occurs. The enigma at the origin of all discourse has been played out; henceforth "women" count only insofar as they are known to Nietzsche and are ac- quainted with Nietzsche's writing.
Women are neither One nor all, but rather, like signifiers, a numbered multitude, or with Leporello, rnill'e tre. Accordingly, their relation to Nietzsche's "philosophy" is ordered by selection. George's male circle, which would implement a reduction of books and book distribution, was not the first to put an end to the classical proliferation of texts. First, Zu~uthustruwas already, in a direct reversal of the reception aesthetics of 1800, A Book for Everyone and No One. Second, Zaruthustru con- cluded with a secret fourth part, carefully planned as a private edition. Third, Nietzsche dispatched this private edition with all the wiliness of a Dionysus, who passed his wiliness on only to certain women. One copy went to Helene Druskowitz, who, however, "took it to be a loan and soon returned the book to Ktiselitz's address, which made Nietzsche and Koselitz quite happy, for Nietzsche later-correctly-characterized his trust of her as 'stupidity. '"""
Whether knowledge of a stupidity or stupidity of a knowledge, there arises a type of book distribution that was not distribution at all. The public shrinks to private printings and private addresses, to books as loans, even misunderstood ones. In the war between the sexes, any means is justified to select women with small ears out of an open group. Only for a time did Druskowitz belong to the happy few who read Nietzsche without any harm to Nietzsche. Once she was called ''my new friend," another time "that little literature-ninny Druscowitz," anything but "my pupil. ""' Dionysus, too, once praises Ariadne for her small ears; another time he asks her why she doesn't have larger Unstable circum- stances, dictated by physiology and chance, confronted writing men and writing women circa 1900. The philosopher who had come up with pro- vocative theses on woman as truth and untruth recommended to women (as if to realize as quickly as possible his well-known dream of chairs in Zarathustra studies) doctoral work on these theses. But when the women philosophers then-as in the books Druskowitz wrote after her disserta- tion-wrote about and against Zarathustra, Zarathustra's dispatcher had to wonder for once whether he were not the long-eared jackass. As long as women write books, there is no longer any guarantee that their torment and pleasure will consist in receiving wise words.
Druskowitz, when Nietzsche was in an insane asylum, rose in the titles of her books to "Doctor of World Wisdom" and (as if to parody F W v
NIETZSCHE 2 0 1
? 202 I900
Nietzky) into the aristocracy. But that was not enough: before she herself vanished into an insane asylum, she also published only "for the freest spirits. " Thus was issued an answer to Dionysus and Zarathustra, who, after all, approached women with declarations of war, whips, and tor- ture. Druskowitz's last book deals with "the male as a logical and tem- poral impossibility and as the curse of the world":
Throughout the entire organic world, the superiority claimed on behalf of the male sexual form has been lost by the human male in two senses: ( I ) as regards the more attractive part of the animal kingdom, ( 2 ) as regards his feminine com- panion. The she-goat and female ape would more deserve to be called his natural companions. For he is horribly made and carries the sign of his sex, in the shape of a sewer pump, before him like a criminal. "'
The feminist, despite Nietzsche'sdenial, just might be a true pupil. "Must we not first hate each other, if we are to love one another? " The polarity of the sexes in 1800 unified mothers, writers, and feminine readers in One Love, but now twoscare tacticians, as hostile as they are equal, enter the scene. The language of man and the language of woman deny one another with the charge that everything said by one side is determined by what is said by the other. Dissuasion includes "askinrbehind," a phrase coined by Niensche. Druskowitz sees in his philosophy only a dusty love of the Greeks, determined by his neohumanist education; Nietzsche, per- haps because he recommends his philosophy to women as a dissertation topic, sees in their books only a gymnasium-determined, stinking alpha- betism. "For heaven's sake don't let us transmit our gymnasium educa- tion to girls! An education that so often takes spirited, knowledge-thirsty, passionate young people and makes of them-images of their teachers! '""
"Asking-behind'' can be precarious. No sooner has one traced certain discourses of others to the Discourse of the Other, than the topic turns to boys who are images of their teachers and who are thus precisely the Dis- course of the Other in that they are also images of the star pupil who writes. The escalation of scare tactics in the war between the two sexes can thus only end in dithyrambic self-scorn.
Ha! Herauf, Wiirde! Tugend-Wiirde! Europser-Wiirde! Blase, blase wieder,
Blasebalg der Tugend!
Ha!
Noch Ein Mal briillen,
Moralisch briillen,
Als moralischer L6we
Vor den Tochtern der Wiiste briillen! -Denn Tugend-Geheul,
Ihr allerliebsten Madchen,
? 1st mehr als Alles
Europaer-hbrunst, Europier-Heisshunger! Und da stehe ich schon,
AIS Europier,
lch kann nicht anders, Gott helfe mir! Amen!
Ha! Upward, dignity!
Virtue-dignity! The European's dignity!
blow, blow again
bellows of virtue!
Ha!
Roar once more,
the moral roar,
roar like a moral lion
before the daughters of the desert!
-For virtue-wailing,
you dearest girls,
is more than anything
the European's ardor, the European's craving! And there I am,
as a European,
I have no choice, God help me!
Amen! "'
This was the riskiest of experiments, and therefore it remained on paper. Before the daughters of the desert, one prostitutes a discourse, which as the Discourse of the Other rules animals and can make them speak. What the Pforta school denied to its star pupil is realized in the desert: women appear, very different from gymnasium pupils and their emancipated copies. They neither speak nor write; a moralistic howling monkey, although he calls himself the labyrinth of women, finds that Dudu and Suleika, these "mute, ominous she-cats," "resphinx" him. The enigma of sexual difference, the phallus that Nietzsche transfigures into a Dionysian instrument of torture and that "Ema (Dr. Helene von Drus- kowitz)" proclaimed was a stigma in the shape of a sewer pump-in the desert its only invitation is to play.
Diese schiinste Luft trinkend,
Mit Niistern geschwellt gleich Bechern,
Ohne Zukunft, ohne Erinnerungen,
So sitze ich hier, ihr
Allerliebsten Freundinnen,
Und sehe der Palme zu,
Wie sie, einer Tanzerin gleich
Sich biegt und schmiegt und in der Hiifte wiegt -man thut es mit, sieht man lange zu!
Einer Tanzerin gleich, die, wie mir scheinen will,
NIETZSCHE 203
? 2. 04 1900
Zu lange schon, gefshrlich lange
Immer, immer nur auf Einem Beine stand? -Da vergass sie darob, wie mir scheinen will, Das andre kin?
Vergebens wenigstens
Suchte ich das vermisste
Zwillings-Kleinod
-namlich das andre Bein-
In der heiligen Nahe
Ihres allerliebsten, allerzierlichsten
Facher- und Flatter- und Flitterriickchens.
Drinking this finest air,
with nostrils filled like Chalices,
without future, without memories,
here I sit, you
dearest friends,
and watch the palm tree,
how like a dancer
she plays and sways her hip
-one dances along if one watches for long! Like a dancer, who, it seems to me,
stands too long, dangerously long,
always, always only on One Leg?
-She forgot, it seems to me,
that other leg?
I at least
have looked in vain
for the missing twin jewel
-the other leg, namely-
in sacred nearness
to her dearest, most graceful
sparkling, fluttering, fanlike dress.
The phallus is missing or forgotten or there, where it is not: on women. The palm tree, instead of immediately becoming a piece of paper, as under the conditions of northern culture, dances the erection. Even the howling monkey, instead of merely learning to read and write from women as from palm trees, succumbs to the rhythmical imperative. The music that Nietzsche had vainly awaited from Wagner, Bizet, Koselitz, or Gast arises after all: a music equal to the brown sunsets of the desert. Women who are daughters of the desert, and therefore do not exist in the singular at all, place writing on the unmeasured ground without which signs and media would not exist. The despot's dream of being able to fix words as purely and simply as incessant pain would bum itself in evaporates in the emptiness that reduces words to small, amusing accidents. (The howling monkey himself mocks the word resphinx as a sin against language. ) "Un coup de d 6 jamais n'abolira le hasard. "
? In the desert of chance there is neither future nor memory. Fixed ideas might once more excite the European's ardor, but circa 1900an opposite symptom grounds the act of writing: the flight of ideas. Having become a lion or howling monkey, the philosopher can finally partake of the privi- lege of animals-an active forgethlness, which does not merely forget this or that, but forgets forgetting itself. 'I6Mnemonic technique, simply by being called technique rather than being, like memory, an inborn fac- ulty, exists only as a resistance to the incessant and thought-fleeing inno- cence of speech.
The dithyrambic, flight-of-ideas wish to be out of Europe and in the desert, to lose one's head among its daughters, was not unfulfilled. In an- other desert, the institute for the cure and care of the insane in Jena, the ex- professor demonstrated this fulfillment in front of experts. What "came to" the psychiatrists writing the case report and listening to Nietzsche's speech was what always occurred to them circa 1900:"flight of ideas. ""'
NIETZSCHE 2 0 5
? The Great Lalula
In the discourse network of 1900,discourse is produced by RANDOM GENERATORS. Psychophysics constructed such sources of noise; the new technological media stored their output.
Psychophysics
Two years before Nietzsche argued that mnemonic techniques were the genealogy of morals, a professor of psychology in Breslau, Hermann Ebbinghaus, published a short but revolutionary work entitled O n Mem- ory. Whereas the last philosopher ended the history of Western ethics by reducing history and ethics to machines, Ebbinghaus made a new, that is, technological contribution to knowledge of an age-old phenomenon. And whereas the philosopher and man of letters described the scene of writing with every line he wrote until such autoreferentiality issues in a megalomaniacal scream (or the book Ecce Homo)and brought psychia- trists into the picture, Ebbinghaus was quite reticent about the subject of his painful autoexperiment of memory quantification. This silence makes it possible to turn the great words of the ex-professor into science. Where the one had come to his end with psychiatrically defined flight of ideas, the other risked the same fate experimentally; his text, however, records only numbers, not a word of pain or pleasure. Yet numbers are the only kind of information that remains relevant beyond all minds, whether insane or professorial: as an inscription in the real. '
"During two periods, in the years 1879-80 and 1883-84," Ebbing- haus daily conducted autoexperiments, beginning at varied times of the
? day in the first period but using the early afternoon during the second. "Care was taken that the objective conditions of life during the period of the tests were so controlled as to eliminate too great changes or irregu- larities. "' Who might have created such chaos-servants or wives, stu- dents or colleagues-remains unspecified. What matters is that a German professor modified his life during specified periods in order to be able to count something that was previously deemed common knowledge and therefore beneath notice: his own memory capacity.
How does the disappearance of the ability to reproduce, forgetfulness, depend upon the length of time during which no repetitions have taken place? What pro- portion does the increase in the certainty of reproduction bear to the number of repetitions? How do these relations vary with the greater or lessintensity of the interest in the thing to be reproduced? These and similar questions no one can answer.
This inability does not arise from a chance neglect of investigation of these relations. We cannot say that tomorrow, or whenever we wish to take time, we can investigate these problems. On the contrary, this inability is inherent in the nature of the questions themselves. Although the conceptions in question- namely, degrees of forgetfulness, of certainty and interest-are quite correct, we have no means of establishing such degrees in our experience except at the ex- tremes. We feel therefore that we are not at all in a condition to undertake the investigation. . . . For example, to express our ideas concerningtheir [memories'] physical basis we use different metaphors-stored-up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths. There is only one thing certain about these figures of speech and that is that they are not accurate. '
What seems most familiar to introspection here becomes an object of research. And the customary metaphors and images of psychology can- not be eradicated without mortification. Nietzsche had derived the most spiritual of memories from the body and its suffering; psychophysics ap- proached the same enigma mathematically, with methods that H. L. F. von Helmholtz and G. T. Fechner had developed to measure perception. ' A shift in paradigms occurred: Nietzsche and Ebbinghaus presupposed forgetfulness, rather than memory and its capacity, in order to place the medium of the soul against a background of emptiness or erosion. A zero value is required before acts of memory can be quantified. Ebbinghaus banned introspection and thus restored the primacy of forgetting on a theoretical level. On the one hand, there was Nietzsche's delirious joy at forgetting even his forgetfulness; on the other, there was a psychologist who forgot all of psychology in order to forge its algebraic formula. This is the relation of the Discourse of the Master to that of the university, of Nietzschean command to technological execution. Rather than give a philosophical description of mnemonic inscription and practice it in dithyrambs, Ebbinghaus took the place of Nietzsche's victim or experi-
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mental subject and then retroactively became the observer of his own ex- perience in order to quantify what he had suffered.
Reading aloud at a tempo dictated by the ticking of his pocket watch, the professor spent years reading line after line of meaningless syllables, until he could recite them from memory. "His idea of using meaningless syllables as experimental material solved in a single stroke the introspec- tionist problem of finding meaning-free sensation^. "^ From that point on, the bare relation of numbers could serve as a measure for the force of psychophysical inscription. Lines of seven syllables can be learned in- stantly, lines of twelve syllables have to be read sixteen times, and lines of twenty-six syllables have to be read fifty-five times before the mechanism of reproducible memorization clicks on. It was not always easy, however, to exclude self-fulfilling prophecies in the numerical results; the forget- ting of forgetting remains as paradoxical as the effort "to rid oneself of a thought and by that very attempt foster that thought. "" After three quar- ters of an hour of uninterrupted memory exercises, "occasionally exhaus- tion, headache, and other symptoms," set in, "which if continued would have complicated the conditions of the experiment. "- Psychophysics is thus quite real, particularly for its inventor, for whom it (likeall mnemonic techniques, according to Nietzsche) causes physical discomfort. It was known in the classical age that "such a dreadfully one-sided application of so subordinate a mental power as memory can derange human rea- son";' but for this reason Anselmus circumvented mechanical repetition through hermeneutics. In 1900the opposite is necessary. A subordinate mental function becomes the most fundamental, because it is quantifi- able. ' Forthesakeofafewformulas,Ebbinghaussacrificed(asNietzsche did for the desert) his subject of knowledge. '"Dizzy, numbed by all the syllables, his mind became a tabula rasa. "
The test's individual conditions all contributed to such emptiness. Lan- guage was artificially reduced to a raw state. First, Ebbinghaus did not allow "the meaningless syllables to be connected with any associated meanings,asischaracteristicofcertainmnemonictechniques. ',I* Second, the empty page he had become was cleansed of memories and his native language. To isolate memory from all other cultural practices, Ebbing- haus eliminated signifieds from the beginning, because they might have provoked hermeneutic activity. "Associations tending in different direc- tions, differing degrees of interest, the recollection of particularly striking or beautiful verses, etc. ," all such ordinarily sanctioned mental activity amounted only to "disturbing influences. " ' I With his head spinning, Ebbinghaus achieved an unthinkable distance where nothing, but nothing, means anything. He instituted the flight of ideas.
? There is nothing exotic in distance, and the great kingdom of nonsense is no exception. In order to prove that recollecting meaningless material was the rule, Ebbinghaus conducted counter experiments. As if to test Nieasche's thesis of the basic utility of metrics, Ebbinghaus memorized cantos from Byron's Don Juan under the same experimental conditions as before. Even he was surprised by the result.