No More Learning

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.
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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
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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. "
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Of course, this procedure affects above all words themselves. Schreber's imbecilic voices rhyme without any regard for "sense," simply according to the "similarity of the sounds," as in such distant signifiers as "'San- tiago' or 'Cathargo,"' " 'Ariman' or 'Ackermann. '" " Ball has his Green King add a few strange examples to this list. Such rhymes have nothing to d o with the orality and echo effects of a whispering Mother Nature. They constitute a mimicry of madness and are thus naked dictation. The writer does not invent, but only simulates an insane person who in turn has not invented the rhymes but rather, "in an actual rhyming mania," "had to construct verses without any regard for the nonsense that resulted. ""
The seriousness of such simulations is not diminished in the least by being "limited to linguistic phenomena, that is, to only one symptom among many. "" Contemporary psychiatrists did not proceed any differ- ently. "Simply because most of one's acts in higher cultural life are not concrete actions but spoken or written words, language in itself" offers writers "the same possibility of portraying mental illness that a person's speech allows us"-that is, psychiatrists-"the possibility of making an unbiased diagnosis of mental illness. "" Psychiatrists and writers are thus remarkably in accord about restricting the range of possible data to the symbolic. The former compile and order whole archives of psychotic speech errors, which are then at the disposal of the latter. Only when sci- ences localize madness in "language in itself" does its literary simulation become possible and important. Psychiatric discourse provides mono- graphs on psychotic neologisms, rhyme manias, and special languages, to which writers, seeking information from competent sources, need only help themselves. The necessary consequence is a writing that has no refer- ent outside of psychiatry and of which Biilsche provided an early and exact description. If literature "rightly despises" its secular support in philosophers such as Hegel or Schopenhauer, in order to exploit instead the details amassed by psychiatry and pathology, it can only be a sim- ulacrum of madness.
A number of careful minds, particularly practicing writers, rightfully despise this shaky bridge and have boldly confronted amassed details of oblective knowledge. The success reveals a serious danger in this undertaking as well. Scientific psy- chology and physiology are constrained, by conditions familiar to all, to conduct their studies mainly with the diseased organism, and so they coincide almost en- tirely with psychiatry and pathology. Now the writer who in a justified thirst for knowledge intends to gain instruction from these disciplines, finds himself unin- tentionally drawn more and more into the atmosphere of the clinic. He begins to turn his attention away from his rightful object, from healthy, universal human life, toward the abnormal, and in the intention of observing the premises of his realistic art, he unwittingly fillshis pages with the premises of his premises, with the observed material itself, from which he should be drawing conclusions. Then
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there arises a literatureof man as sick, of mental illnesses, of difficult child births, ofthearthritic-in short,ofwhatnotafewignorantpeopleimaginetoberealism itself. "
Biilsche describes what literature does in the discourse network of 1900:it utilizes refuse from the nonsense stored by psychophysics. The delirious discourses that gain entry to the scientific archives only on the condition of making no sense lose even this referent in literary simulation. Anyone who fillspage after page with the premises of his premises speaks neither of the world or of Man. As a simulacrum of madness, literature loses its classical distinction of springing immediately from Nature or the
Soul and of subsequently having this naturalness certified by philosophi- cal interpreters. It becomes secondary literature in the strictest sense of the word. Its discourse, cut off from "universal human life," deals with other discourses, which it can only transpose. Because media transposi- tions render useless such concepts as authenticity and primacy,'*any ves- tige of extradiscursive verification is lost. Literature does not reveal phe- nomena or determine facts; its field is a madness that, as Miinsterberg realized, exists only on paper.
Many fictional presentations of abnormal mental states are taken to be sensitive psychological portraits precisely in areas where the scientifically trained observer would recognize an impossibility. If persons were actually to behave in the rnan- ner the writer has them act and speak in these novelistic mental disturbances, the doctor would have to conclude that they were simulating. "
"Novelistic mental disturbances" accordingly occur in a no man's land, which can be verified neither by immediately accessible mental truths nor by controlled experiments. Its name is simulacrum. Writers who simulate being psychiatrically informed describe persons who, viewed from the standpoint of psychiatry, are simply simulators. But that is the point. Simulation without reference dissolves the old connection between madness and illness in order to establish an entirely different connection: between madness and writingsx
Novelistic mental disturbances, which occurred in more than novels in 1900,did not renew the affiliation of artists and the insane against a phi- listine bourgeoisie. The appearance of expressionist "young artists" was not necessary "to obtain the provocative possibility of concretely repre- senting their opposition to the ruling norms and notions of value" by the revised and positive valuation of madness.
" This transvaluation occurred when positivistic sciences began determining cultural technologies from deficits and defects and thus liquidated classical norms. The myths of the young and of provocation only obscure the complete extent of the young provocateurs' dependence on the discourse network of their period. '"
? Something completely different is at stake when psychophysics and litera- ture collide. Illusory political-moral struggles, in which writers purpor- tedly are the first to discover madness, are superfluous; the struggle con- cerns only the use of the same discourse. Whereas psychophysics held on to the connection between madness and illness, literature constructed a completely different connection between madness and writing. Its simula- tion created individual cases that speak and write out of standardized col- lections of symptoms. And so they appeared, accidental and singular as only dilettantes of the miracle could be: "The Madman" (GeorgHeym), "The Imbecile" (Ball), "The Visionnut" [Der Visionarr](Jakob van Hod- dis), "The Idiot" (Huelsenbeck, Zech, Johannes Becher). They appear and begin their nonsensical speech: the "Song of the Escapees" (Johannes Urzidil), "The Idiot's Song" (Rilke), not to forget "The Song of the Crazy Women" (Paul Adler).
As if to name the discursive status of these songs, the young Breton wrote, across the barrier erected by the First World War:
Demence pricoce, paranoia, etats crCpusculaires. 0 poesie allemande, Freud et Kraepelin!
Dementia praecox, paranoia, twilight states Oh German poetry, Freud and Kraepelin! "
No one could say more clearly that literature utilizes the discarded mate- rial of contemporary psychiatry. Dementia praecox is, of course, "in its contemporary form" Kraepelin's "new creation. "LzAnd so the glory of literature was reflected onto psychiatry. Psychiatry's archives became rough drafts of poetry and provided material and methods for pure writ- ing. Of course, classical and romantic writers learned from the psychic cures of their Reils and Hoffbauers," but the Occident remained the pre- dominant theme and archive. Meaning always came from Above; non- sense, by contrast, cannot be invented, it can only be transcribed and written down. Thus a "German poetry" of Freud and Kraepelin took over the systemic position occupied by Poetry in the classical-romantic discourse network, and literature moved from second to third place in the new order of discourse. The third place is (just as for Schreber) the site of sensual pleasure. A remainder of nonsense, of no further use to even the sciences of nonsense, is left over for games.
Because it cuts the old bond between madness and illness, the game of the simulated delirium makes the distinction between doctors and pa- tients somewhat tenuous. Miinsterberg was probably right to suspect that simulators of medical science actually describe simulators of mad- ness. In 1893 a four-part work appeared in Berlin entitled Body, Bruin,
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Mind, God, a work that (with the exception of God) cataloged in its title the basic problems of 1900and identified its author as a "practicing doc- tor. "" Its intent is true psychophysics: Karl Gehrmann brings case his- tory after case history to bear on the problem of relating diverse physical symptoms to neural centers in the brain. But the place names on this brain atlas outdo one another in their poetry, the recorded dreams of countless patients become more and more beautiful and flowery, until aftertwothousand pages there is no longer any doubt that all the neural centers, casehistories, and recorded dreamscanonly refer to a singlesub- ject, the institutionalized writer. Doctors, proceeding like the institu- tionalized Schreber toward exhausting the contents of the brain, end up in madness themselves.
One need only write down psychophysics to produce "German po- etry. " That is exactly what the young assistant doctor Benn does when he lets a, or his, professor speak for himself.
PROFESSOR: And now, gentlemen, I have in conclusion a very special surprise for you. As you can see, I have colored the pyramidal cells from the hippocampus of the left hemisphere of the cerebrum taken from a fourteen-day-old rat of the Katull variety. Now observe: the cells are not red, but pink, with a light brownish-violet coloration that shades into green. This is indeed most interest- ing. You are aware that lately a paper came out of the Graz Institute that dis- putes this fact, despite my thorough investigations of the matter. I will not say anything about the Graz Institute in general, but 1 must say that this paper struck me as premature. As you see, I now have the proof at hand. This does have enormous implications. I t would be possible to distinguish rats with long black fur and dark eyes from those with short rough fur and light eyes through this fine difference in cell color, as long as the rats are of the same age, have been fed with candy, have played for half an hour daily with a small puma, and have spontaneously defecated twotimes in the evening with the tempera- ture at 37 or 36 degrees centigrade. "
The utilization of discarded material from psychophysics is as concrete as it is perilous. During his training with famous psychiatrists and pa- thologists, Benn published scientific work and texts that ridiculed brain research, notably works with the same titles and contents as his own. L6 The montage of its senseless accumulation of fact made psychophysics into the mental disturbance it was investigating, and made the pink brain cells of the rat into phenomena as magnificent as those found in Gehr- mann. In the literary publication of his lectures, Benn's professor takes his rightful place alongside the Flechsig of the Memoirs (assistant doctor Ronne threatened to sue the professor "because of brain damage"). " Most likely, only because Ziehen and Karl Bonhoeffer did not read the materials their assistant Benn published in marginal avant-garde journals was Benn saved from the compromising situations of Gehrmann or
? Schreber. zSFor Hoffmann, the bureacratic-poetic double life was a useful arrangement because it betrayed the secret unity of both functions; Benn was confronted with double-entry bookkeeping, in which one hand con- tinued to write statistics and the other exploited a singular delirium.
Along with Ernst Mach and Mauthner, those philosophic sources for most research on expressionism, Ziehen taught that the unity of the ego was a fiction when compared with the reality of the association of ideas. " Benn and Ronne had only to put their boss's theory into practice in writ- ing. It was an irreconcilable but permissible use of psychiatric discourse to turn it on one's own accidental case. Exactly that happened when Benn's report on his last year as a psychiatrist, 1913,produced the psy- chiatric diagnosis of the irreconcilability of writing and treatment.
I attempted to find out for myself what I was suffering from. The manuals on psychiatry that I consulted led me to modem psychological works, some quite remarkable, particularly in the French school; I immersed myself in the descrip- tions of the condition designated as depersonalization . . . I began to see the ego as an entity that strove, with a force compared to which gravity would be the touch of a snowflake, for a condition in which nothing that modem culture desig- nated as intellectual gifts played any pan. "'
The writer as insane-not a mythic conflict between artists and the bour- geoisie, but the semi-official doctrine of psychiatric textbooks creates the connection. Benn and Ronne are psychiatrists who become incapable of "taking interest in a newly arrived case or observing the old cases with constant individualizing attention," 'I which according to Ziehen and the rules of data exhaustion, would be their professional obligation. '* In- stead, Ronne, lying motionless in the doctor's office, simulates the cata- tonic, and Benn simulates a situation in which he is the newly arrived case in need of constant observation. But a doctor who transfers the latest di- agnoses, such as depersonalization, from his patients onto himself, uses Janet or Ribot no differently from how Schreber used Kraepelin's text- book. Education or "intellectual gifts" have no role in either case.
But by isolating psychophysical results, literature simulated only what distinguished psychoanalysis in the discourse network of I 900. Biograph- ically, first of all, there is Freud's self-analysis, the mythic origin of his new science, which proceeds by the same inversion of roles. As Benn would later discover his psychotic depersonalization, so Freud found the basic complex of his neurotic patients "in my own case too. " '' Method- ologically, psychoanalysis singularized statistical material: it does not order the collected nonsense into nosological entitites, but attributes the material to unconscious subjects. Finally, in a literary sense, this organi- zation of the material appears in the case histories, which count as "mod- em German letters" or "German poetry. "
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Like the Poets and Thinkers one hundred years earlier, writers and analysts came into "close and fruitful contact. "" As early as 1887the philosopher Dilthey deplored a new "misology" among artists, who hated thinking, aesthetics, and culture [Bildung]. " One friendship was over (even if other critics did not have Dilthey's keen ear for the an- nouncement), and another, just as perilous, could begin. What Goethe had said about philosophers-that he could never do without them and yet could never come to terms with them-from I900on was addressed to Freud: although or because, according to Kafka, there was "of course" a great deal of Freud in "The Judgment," his literary writing obeyed the imperative "No more psychology! " '* The solidarity of solidarity and competition, once the fate of Poets and Thinkers, hecame the fate of writ- ers and analysts.
Of course, it was no longer a question of meaning and its interpreta- tion. Writers and psychoanalysts did not constitute a state-supporting community of interpreters in which there was a mutual exchange of cer- tificates validating the creation of eternal values. Their mutual relation- ship was supported by the existence, at the basis of all cultural technolo- gies, of bodies and their nonsense. These bodies, however, were only accessible to psychophysical experiments at the price of silence and death. But on the couch, where "alas, everything is different," "nothing takes place . . . but an interchange of words. " '' In literature, where even such exchange is lacking, nothing occurs but intransitive writing. Psycho- analysis must thus focus on the nonsense in speech until it can gather a linked set of indices that closes around an inaccessible reality. Literature must purify pieces of paper of everything readable until the body of its words coincides with the other body in an instantaneous shortcircuit. As such, however, the two discourses compete with one another. There is a reality inaccessible to both, and two mutually exclusive detours: decod- ing and the shortcircuit.
Freud did not ever claim to be able to explain the fact that literature exists. In spite or because of this, writers have done their utmost to keep him from any such explanation. Given the alternatives of laying their bodies on the couch or setting down bodies of words, almost all opted for pure writing as against a "(possibly unproductive) life. " So the relation- ship between writers and analysts became all kinds of things-dialogue, reading, greetings addressed even without an accompanying chalice-but
it did not become practice.
"AtonetimeIdidconsiderpsychiatrictreatment," hesaid,"butdroppedtheidea just in time. "
For a long time he actually had believed that his salvation lay in psychoanaly- sis. His beloved, Lou Andreas-Salome, was an avid follower of Freud and his
? circle and had urged Rilke to lay himself on the famous couch. For years before the war Rilke considered the pros and cons but finally, at the last moment, drew back. "I won't have anyone poking around in my brain,'' he said to me, "I'd rather keep my complexes. "
Later he did meet Freud personally, but said nothing about his problems. After that he avoided Freud whenever they encounteredone another. The panic fear of being picked apart and sucked dry constantly pursued him. "
As paranoid as Schreber, who also lived in fear of a brain-pillaging doc- tor, Rilke took the opposite course. One gave his body over to a science that was hardly capable of demonstrating itself worthy of such a gift. The other withdrew his body from a science that had neither the intention nor the capability of poking around in his brain, because of course it dealt only in the exchange of words. The rage of simulated paranoia is worse than that of the clinical variety. The fact that psychoanalysis transferred psychophysical methods to individual cases unleashed the phantasm of trephination. The writer's brain became the mythic vanishing point of all attempts to ground discourse neurologically. Writing circa I900 there- fore means: this brain, its clinical or simulated madness notwithstanding, shall be immediately transposed into texts and protected from any medi- cal soundings. This transposition of media had to pass through that other vanishing point, the endopsychic perception of brain functions. What Gehrmann and Schreber began, issued into literature.
Shortly after Apollinaire received his head wound in the trenches at Aisne, he issued a challenge to his critics, the admirers of Boileau and Ben Akiba: "But is there nothing new under the sun? It remains to be seen. What! My head has been x-rayed. I have seen, while I live, my own cra- nium, and that would be nothing new? ''u)A "new spirit," then, as the title of the essay promises, inspires the poet. No last words are pronounced on the life-threatening wound to the head, in that it opens up the much more exciting possibility of endopsychic perception. Dr. Bardel's x-rays and trephination of Apollinaire made literal truth of what Flechsig and his clever student expected only of the postmortem examination. It is only logical, therefore, that Apollinaire should immediately appeal to writers to approach the great novelty under the sun and connect their writing with technological media like film and the phonograph.
Bruins-the title of Benn's early collection of novellas-designates an entire writing project. Ronne, the hero, was originally a psychiatrist and brain researcher, who "in these hands had held hundreds or even thou- sands" of brains," not merely those of rats. But when he makes the transi- tion from doctor to patient, all of his research interests shrink to a single enigma. Ronne constantly performs a gesture "as if he were breaking open a soft, large fruit, or as if he were unfolding something""-a rebus
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? that adoring nurses are finally able to decode as the opening of his own brain. It stands, like Rhne's association with brain damage, for a new writing project: literary impulses are to be fed on the vivisected fruit of his own brain. That is why the hero procures himself a journal and a pencil. "
And as if to take Ronne's decision at its word, Flake, an admirer of Benn, made an entire novel out of the latter's laconic novellas; out of Brains, that is, came an entire City oftheBruin. The hero, Lauda, has, of course, studied medicine and for three semesters has "always begun again hesitantly with the opening cut": "sometimes into the up-turned hemi- spheres, the gelatinous site of conscious throught, which can be modified, sometimes into the base, the more defined, differentiated, architectonic portion. "" He has thus already been to school with Ronne, when years later, after leaving the office and secretary, he happens to read a paper on neurology. It describes the brain as an endlessly complex "cross network" consisting of transmitters/receivers of "electrical waves. " The reader in- stantly decides "to construct a model of the world from this. " Because models of the world in 1900 consist in "words, perhaps only words," Lauda begins a "metaphysical journal" that by means of "psycho-physi- ology" derives his own thought apparatus from "nerve tracts" and de- scribes his brain as "a city of pathways that I laid down according to in- dividual acts and now must travel forever. " Having sunk to being the knowing slave of his "thought paths," Lauda therefore falls asleep, only to return to the impossible place of such reflections. Ronne's gesture be-
comes a dream act. Lauda stays in a scientifically "read-in" city of the brain until the next morning brings the realization or renunciation that is decisive for writers: "A physical residence in the city of the brain is im- possible, only the allegorical is possible. " Because the impossible wishes tell the truth, the renunciation reveals the character of literature in the discourse network of 1900: Lauda henceforth intends only to "scream walk write" [schrein schreiren schreiben]. " The novel itself becomes an allegorical residence in the brain, a deciphering of neurophysiological engrams.
Marcel, the narrator, dawdles in his pursuit of The Remembrance of Things Past as long as he fails to realize that the goal of his search lies simply in the "storehouse" of his own brain and is stored only there. The fact that he, like Gehrmann or Lauda, will have to transcribe nerve tracts is simultaneously and immediately also the fear that a "head accident" could make him forget all the stored traces, indeed make him forget the forgetting of them. * Thus Marcel began to write just in time, driven by the furies of an eventual aphasia, which was, not coincidentally, a sub-
? ject on which the physician Dr. Adrien Proust, the writer's father, had published. '-
But enough demonstration. The puzzling question common to neurolo- gists and the insane, to psychoanalysts and writers circa 1900 is summed up in the title Brain and Langu~ge. 'T~he doctors (who take precedence in formulating the problem) pose the theme; the writers work it through. Their writing stands exactly at the place or takes the place of the brain vivisection that all psychophysics must dream of and do without. Rilke fled psychoanalysis because his own "work" was for him "actually noth- ingotherthanthatsortofself-treatment. "" Thusheflednotmerelybe- cause Freud or Viktor Gebsattel would poke around in his brain, but to be able to compete with the vivisectors. The underlying mutuality of the two discourses excluded any overlap. In the discourse network of 1900, writers are people who in the analysis-that is, the decomposition-of their psychic apparatus prefer to go it alone.
With his mute gesture, Ronne turns his own brain hemispheres inside out in order to reach the source of his thought; Lauda visits the city of his brain in the metaphor of the dream; but there was one who, widely de- cried as a dreamer and maker of images, took on the impossible task common to them all, and did it technologically, without images. How- ever, he was a poet and hated the approximate. In order to define the status of literature, Rilke, in his "notebook" Primal Sound [ Ur-Geruusch], chose a model that since 1900has designated all inscription and decod- ing: the phonograph.
Fourteen or fifteen years after an unforgotten day in school on which he constructed a phonograph out of cardboard and parchment paper, candle wax and the bristles of a clothes brush,'" Rilke attended anatomy lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Among all the medical samples, what "enchanted" the writer was a "special housing closed against all worldlv space"-the skull. Rilke acquired a skull and spent the evenings studying it-with the result that his childhood memory was completely rewritten. If it once seemed that "this autonomous sound [would] remain unforgettable, apart from us, preserved outside," the stu- dent of anatomy learned that not the sounds "from the funnel," but "those markings traced on the cylinder of the phonograph"" were much more essential. But the sutura coronalis effects the shift from reproduction to inscription, from reading to writing in the technological age. "In the peculiarly vigilant and demanding light of the candle the cranial suture was quite evident and I soon realized what it reminded me of: those un- forgotten lines that were once scratched onto a little wax roll by the point of a bristle! "
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? 316 1900
The suture that divides the two cranial hemispheres like a sagittal inci- sion designates the status of all script for a writer of 1900. Only a scratch or cut into the flesh of forgetfulness itself can be unforgettable. What Nietzsche learned investigating the genealogy of morals, what Kafka's ex- plorer learned in the penal colony," Rilke was able to learn from anat- omy. If ever an initiation did justice to the material, then this was it. The cranial suture functions as the left-over trace of a writing energy or art that, instead of "making variations o r imitating," "had its joy in the dance of existences," in a "dictatorial art that presents dispositions of energy. " A "consciousness of an ethical nature,"" of the kind evoked in the titles of Nietzsche and Kafka, can add nothing to this. Technology and phys- iology are responsible for material inscription.
More exactly, a system composed of technology and physiology is re- sponsible. That is what the skull for years had "suggested again and again" to Rilke the writer.
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has-let us assume- a certain similarity to the closely woven line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself natu- rally-well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then have made its appearance in the world . . . "
Unlike poets such as Shakespeare or Gottfried Keller, who throw their heroes into the traditional melancholy associations at the sight of a skull, the writer is an experimenter. He suggests, more radically than techni- cians and physiologists-and in a language that maintains a wonderful balance between precision and caution-a phonographic test of human body parts. The insight of information science, that recording and play- back devices are essentially convertible,'ballows the decoding of a track that no one had ever encoded. But the fact that nature has thrown away the keys to its secrets is no reason, in 1900,to leave the rebus untouched. Let deranged people like Gehrmann attempt to solve it with mere books, but "we," the art-physiologists and artists, "inevitably think of a process similar to Edison's phonograph when it comes to the molecules and nerve tracts in the brain. " '-Simmel's objective interpretation, Freud's analytic construction, Rilke's apparatus-all can track traces without a subject. A writing without the writer, then, records the impossible reality at the basis of all media: white noise, primal sound.
That is only logical. Certainly "it" has been making noise from time
? immemorial, as long as there has been Brownian motion. But for any dis- tinction between noise and information to be possible, the real must be able to move through technological channels. Printing errors occur in the hook as medium, but there is no primal sound. The phonographic repro- duction of a groove "that is not the graphic translation of a sound" mocks translatability and universal equivalents. Setting gramophone needles onto coronal sutures is only possible in a culture that gives free reign to all discursive manipulations. And of course anything that "exists natu- rally," like the skull, thereby loses its distinctiveness. At such extremes the transposition of media creates only unconscious programs out of so- called nature. Otto Flake and Proust dreamed of making literal reproduc- tions of the inscribed pathways in their brains; Rilke made technological suggestions for the technological realization of their dreams. Yet Rilke re- serves this realization for writers. It was not for the "Poets," who, accord- ing to Rilke's historically exact insight, "were overwhelmed" by "almost only" one sense, the visual, whereas "the contribution made by an inat- tentive sense of hearing" was practically nil. Rilke had in mind an artistic practice that "contributes more decisively than anyone else to an exten- sion of the several sense fields," that is, with more determination than even "the work of research. " 'li
Writers and analysts of the mental apparatus thus engaged in open, unrelenting competition. The very Rilke who fled psychoanalytic vivisec- tors programmed, as the writer's only task, the transposition of coronal sutures. Even his enigmatic "inner-world space" was only another name for the engram stored in the brain and transcribed by writers. The evi- dence is that Rilke called the skull a "special housing closed against all worldly space" and thereby restated the physiologist's insight that, for such a housing, "our own body is the external world. "s9Interpreters who read "inner-world space," this technological and physiological system, philosophically, thus remain as far behind the state of the art, as belated as their totemic animal, the proverbial owl.