No More Learning

It is deathly still in the room-the one sound is the pen scratching across the paper-for 1 love to think by writing, given that the machine that could imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented. In front of me is an inkwell in which I can drown the sorrows of my black heart, a pair of scissors to accustom me to the idea of slitting my throat, manuscripts with which I can wipe myself, and a chamber pot. "
This is a primal scene, less well known but no less fraught with conse- quences than the despair of Faust in and over his study in the Republic of Scholars. The scholar is replaced, however, by the very man of letters whom Faust made to appear magically as the redeemer from heaps of books. The one who signs himself "homme Otudit en lettres" has experi- enced nothing beyond the formative education of the gymnasium, which as an "appeal to the individual" is the opposite of scholarly training. The scene of writing is therefore bare of all library props, and thus bare, too, of any enigma about how supposed texts are to be translated into Spirit and meaning. The solitary writer is a writer and nothing more: not a translator, scribe, or interpreter. Bare and impoverished, the scratching of the pen exposes a function that had never been described: writing in its materiality. ThereisnoBibletoGermanize,novoicetotranscribe, andso there are none of the miracles that in I800 obscured that materiality. One no longer writes around the fact of writing-writing has become its own
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medium. Even in the clinic for nervous diseases in Jena, Nietzsche was "happy and in his element" as long as he had pencil^. ^' But already the man of letters F W v Nieaky, in contrast to the schoolboy Wilhelm Friedrich Niensche, is through with putting literary works, literary auto- biographies, and discussions of literature on paper-beyond the act of writing there is nothing at all. Whether or not the star pupil of the Schulpforta Gymnasium would have had anything to say, had the ped- agogues left him alone, is unimportant. In the "Euphorion" fragment, in the countless notebooks that until the final day in Turin recorded thoughts and laundry receipts, possible book titles and headache reme- dies, to say nothing of the few scribbles from the insane asylum, which found their way back to the empty schema of the autobiographical Ger- man essay? Nietzsche's papersrecord only the primal scene and its en- during enigma.
What is most disturbingin the posthumous fragments is the fact that they are not a collectionof notes, but rather a collection of writing exercises, indeed rhetorical exercises in the sense of attemptsat various styles, in which the ideasare then run through their declensions. Nietzsche finally achieved a lexicon in which words emptied of all context were brought back into phrases, or were idiomized, so to speak; it was a mute exercise, carried on without further commentary, between the vocabulary notebook, the translation guide, and the collection of stylistic howlers. "
When writing remains a writing exercise, a spare and dismal act with- out any extension into what is called book, work, or genre, there is no place for the "personal presentation and formation" so dear to the essay pedagogues. The "appeal to the individual" to become an individual and author comes to nothing precisely because the model pupil takes it liter- ally. For the one who takes up the pen and writes is no one; instead of serving an individual, the inkwell drowns a black heart; instead of aiding the process of revision and rereading, the technical premises of author- ship, the pair of scissors has a quite different task. And as with the indi- vidual, so too with his production-manuscripts destined for the cham- ber pot. Zarathustra's nose for Spirit or the stench of the writing culture thus comes from a scene of writing in which the props-pen, inkwell, scissors, chamber pot-have done away with the ego and its meanings. The author disappears, to say nothing of the readers he might address; in the "Euphorion" fragment writing produces refuse and feces rather than poetic works. Precisely because Nietzky is another Euphorion, who pos- sessed in his parents a complete classicism and romanticism, in that he had at his command every facility of the classical-romantic discourse net- work, the pedagogic promises and the literary training, there was no eu- phoria; he fell, true to his name until the end.
? Modem texts would follow this downward trajectory in various ways. Nietzky-Nietzsche touched on the zero point on which literature in 1900 would build. It is intransitive writing that is not directed toward written truths or readers; rather, "all its threads converge upon the finest of points-singular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal-upon the simple act of writing"; it is writing that "breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representation" and that can be "a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor. "zC
In the deathly still room, only the pen makes a sound. Neither sound nor phonetic method supports a writing that occurs without preliminary speech and so without a soul. If something precedes its materiality, it is only the materiality of sound itself. An isolated, early observation by Nietzsche records the deafening noise in this still scene of writing: "What I fear is not the horrible shape behind my chair but its voice: not the words, but the frighteningly inarticulate and inhuman tone of that shape. If only it would speak as people speak! "I-
In its beginning German Poetry had shut out the animal sounds of a poodle and preferred, when translating prelinguistic feelings, to follow the advice of a Spirit that only later articulated its own name. An inar- ticulate tone defines the zero point of literature, a tone not only inhuman, but also not animal or demonic. T'he creaturely sounds that filled the lan- guage space of the sixteenth century were silenced when Man became aware of a beloved language or a woman's voice. The inhuman tone be- hind Nietzsche's back is not the speech at the beginning of articulation; it is not speech at all. All discourse is powerless against it because all dis- courses add to it and fall prey to it. Within the realm of all sounds and words, all organisms, white noise appears, the incessant and ineradicable background of information. For the very channels through which infor- mation must pass emit noise.
In 1800simple, unarticulated tones were excommunicated. They fo- mented an insanity that, in contrast to the fixed idea, had no poetic value: that of the imbecile. '* If one had no "ability to comprehend the speech of others," one was required to assume "the posture of reading aloud and slowly during an attack. "" Writers like Faust or Anselmus were allowed to trust their inmost feeling only because it was supported by reading, which in turn was supported by a human language or voice.
Nietzsche, however, wrote before and after white noise. He took so literally the German essay's appeal "to listen to one's own thoughts and feelings" that thoughts and feelings turned into their opposites: the lis- tener hears a "humming and roaring of the wild camps" within him, which fight an irreconcilable "civil war. " Where there should have been a
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prelinguistic inwardness, susceptible to articulation and development, "a roar went through the air. " 'O
The frightening, inarticulate tone that Nietzsche heard behind his back hums in the ears themselves. What does not speak as people speak would be called (if it could have a name) "Nietzsche. " The autobiography dem- onstrates this for Nietzsche's own beginning: "At an absurdly early age, at seven, 1 already knew that no human word would ever reach me. " I' The medical records from Jena demonstrate it for his end: "Often screams inarticulately. " ' l Everything began for him, then, when human or peda- gogical encouragement was unable to cover over the noise at the basis of all information channels and instead merged with it. And everything ended when he left The Will to Power sitting on his desk, turned around in his chair, and dissolved into the noise that had horrified him for as long as he lived or wrote.
The woman's voice that made Anselmus write occupied the same chair he did: it exemplified the interlocking media network of speaking and writing, of the soul and Poetry. The voice that formed the ground for Nietzsche's writing exercises remained behind his chair, and he was un- able ever to unlearn the horror it inspired. It halted all erotic exchange between orality and writing, reducing writing to pure materiality. "You should have sung, my soul," is a pathetic sentence-in that "there is no soul" and "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology. "" Henceforth, there exist only the two sides of an exclusion. Behind the chair there is white noise, that is, physiology; in front of the chair, there are the inkwell, the scissors, paper, and words as multiple as they are empty. For if the incessant noise can whisper anything to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter! what do 1matter! ""
Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates acci- dents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents: Nietzsche comes quite close to the poetics of Mallarmt. Faust's helpful Spirit diverted the act of writing toward a goal in the beyond, the transcendental signified of the word; Hippel's anathema excluded literary hacks from the realm of souls; makers of words, however, never escape the medium they institute. An anecdote concerning Mallarmt illustrates this. "Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often foundgreatdifficultyinthisworkaccessorytohispainting. . . . Oneday he said to Mallarme: 'Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas. . . . 'And Mallarmt answered: 'My dear Degas,onedoesnotmakepoetrywithideas,butwithwords. ""' Thelast
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philosopher and the first modern poet agreed even in their choice of words. Mallarm6 decomposes the phrase maker of words in a single sen- tence. For Nietzsche it became impossible to put his own thoughts and feelings on paper because all meaning was lost in noise. For Mallarmi meanings or ideas had been played out, so that there was no longer any translation from one medium, literature, to another, such as painting. There was nothing to makers of words (according to the word-maker Nietzsche); Mallarmi called his hellish profession the "elocutionary dis- appearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words. '"" Writing that can discover the basis of its rights neither in what is written nor in the writer has its message only in the medium it constitutes. In 1900,in direct descent from Nietzsche, "word art" became synonymous with literature. "
A professor who was no longer a professor and an educational bureau- crat who no longer wanted to be one stood at the threshold of a new dis- course network. 'nSoon every child would learn that makers of words are not authors and that words are not ideas. The confusion between words and ideas that had supported an entire classicism did not end only in soli- tary rooms. On December 4,1890,the emperor's irrefutable mouth issued an order placing German as a school subject at the center of all pedagogy and essay writing at the center of this enter. '^ With that, Ger- man ceased to be beyond all school instruction, a realm where words were always bypassed for their meanings and thus for the university disci- pline of philosophy. Consequently, a decree of 1904did away with the study of philosophy as an "obligatory part of the doctoral examina- tion. ""' Indeed, the great experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing- haus nearly succeeded in having philosophy replaced by physiological psychology in examinations for teaching positions. Schools also came close to teaching that aesthetics is nothing more than applied physiology.
But if writing came to be at the center of the center in school, physiol- ogy also found its way into the classroom, even without being included in examination regulations. The noise that grounded Nietzsche's writing was put down on paper. Free essays, advocated by the art-education movement beginning in 1904,contributed neither to unfolding the indi- viduality of their authors nor to the ideality of their thoughts. At an ex- treme they simply led to writing down the droning in feverish children's heads. What Nietzsche already knew at the absurdly early age of seven years attained positive discursive reality. Art education gave up on reach- ing its pupils with human or pedagogical words. Instead, it emphasized how "productive the child is with its language," and complained that children should be "forced to produce in a foreign language, namely that of the adult. "" Little makers of words were most free if their speaking
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and writing remained untouched by a mother's mouth. In 1900linguists and psychologists claimed that even "the newborn child brings language, universal language, into the world: we do not teach it to speak, we only teach it our own language. "4LIt thereby follows that there is no Mother's Mouth at the origin of human speech and masculine writing. Instead of the female Other, who with the minimal signified ma created the begin- ning of articulation and Poetry, there is an autarchic children's language, which cannot be formed by parents because it respects no national bound- aries and spontaneously produces signifiers such as Amme or Mama? ' Makers of words thereby lose the authority that had once made them au- thors. Ever since, there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss.
The discourse network of 1900could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Discursive practices are so historically variable that even elementary and apparently universal concepts are lacking in certain systemswIn 1900no authority of produc- tion determines the inarticulate beginning of articulation. An inhuman noise is the Other of all signs and written works. N o distribution can use language as a mere channel and thus attract ever more writers and read- ers. Like any medium in 1900,discourse is an irreducible fact that will not disappear in philosophical meaning or psychological effects. There- fore it cannot allow a consumption that would retranslate speech back to its origin.
This all constitutes a largely unwritten chapter in literary studies, and it still needs to be described in its technological and institutional aspects. But the hermit of Sils had already traversed this space, without institu- tions, almost without technologies, simply as his tragedy. Although he does not seem an imposing figure, a founder of a new discourse? in his failed experiments Nietzsche was the victim offered up to a writing other than the classical-romantic.
The experiments began with a theory of language concerned, to quote the title of an essay, with "Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense. " Considered apart from the ostensible truth-telling demands of moralistic or even educative voices, language is no longer the translation of prelin- guistic meanings, but rather one medium among others. Media, however, exist only as arbitrary selections from a noise that denies all selection. Nietzsche absorbed the lesson of the scene of his writing so completely that "Nature" itself, rather than assuming human or maternal form be- came one with the frighteningly inarticulate tone. "She threw away the key: and woe to the fateful curiosity that once would look out and down-
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ward through a crack in the room of consciousness and would sense that man, in the indifference of his ignorance, rests on the merciless, the crav- ing, the voracious, the murderous, and hangs in dreams on the back of a tiger. "-
No medium of information can translate the terror that excludes con- sciousness and that consciousness in turn excludes. Falsehood, in an ex- tramoral sense, is truth. A lie is only a lie of selection, which veils the terror or even, like someone at his desk, turns his back on it. Reading is one example, in that Nietzsche compares the actual text from which ran- dom selection was made to an unthinkably complex object of nature. But language itself does not function any differently.
A juxtaposition of different languages shows that words never have anything to do with truth or adequate expression: for otherwise there would not be so many different languages. The "thing in itself" (and that would be pure, inconsequen- tial truth) is incomprehensible and utterly unworthy of effort for the creator of language as well. He designates only the relations of things to men and for their expression makes use of the most daring metaphors. First of all a nervous impulse is translated into an image. First metaphor. The image is again further formed into a sound! Second metaphor. And each time there is a complete leap, from one sphere into a completely different and new
Whereas in the discourse network of 1800an organic continuum ex- tended from the inarticulate minimal signified to the meanings of factual languages, there is now a break. Language (as its plural suggests) is not the truth and consequently not any truth at all. **Though there is no na- ture of language for philosophers to uncover behind its bold metaphors? another, physiological nature appears. Nietzsche's theory of language, like his aesthetics, proceeds from nervous impulses. Optical and acoustic responses to impulses, images and sounds, bring about the two aspects of language, as signified and signifier. Yet they remain as separated from one another as they are from the pure stochastic processes to which they re- spond. The break between the imaginal signified and the acoustic signifier cannot be bridged by continuous translation; only a metaphor or trans- position can leap the gap. Separate sense media come together against the background of an omnipresent noise-as "completely different and new spheres. " Instead of deriving media from a common source like the poetic imagination, Nietzsche divides optics and acoustics into a "world of sight" and "world of sound. "
Each of the two media repeats its common relation to an origin that, being a random generator, is not an origin. Nietzsche dreamed of a music that would not, like all German music, "fade away at the sight of the vo- luptuous blue sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky," music that"prevailsevenbeforethebrownsunsetsofthedesert. "'I Onlyanau-
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dible world in which sound and color triumph over form and morality would remain, despite any process of selection, close to its inhuman background, one that (aswe know) answers to the god's name Dionysus. But the optical medium of Apollo does not function any differently.
When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero-in short, the Apollonian aspect of the mask-are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. "
Nietzsche's visual world is born in the eye itself. Entoptical visions heal and transpose pain in the eyes, which, in a reversal of all tradition, is not caused by a blinding sun but by a horrible night. This ground, against which colors and forms are only selections, is at once preserved (by pain) and metaphorically veiled (by the reversal of darkness into light). Apollo- nian art, too, fulfills a condition constitutive of technological media by meeting the "demand that it should not only be similar to the object, but should furnish the guarantee for this similarity by being, so to speak, a creation of the object itself, that is, by being mechanically produced by it. "S'No imagination can stand up to such demands; where psychological translation once sufficed, material transposition now becomes necessary.
Moving "images of light" by which the eye forms an image of its own retina have little to do with productions of Sophocles at Athenian fes- tivals. Nietzsche's Apollonian art describes something quite different- the technological medium of film, which the Lumitre brothers would make public OR December 28, 1895. Nietzsche and the Lumikres based Apollonian art and the movies on applied physiology: the entoptical after- image, or the illusion, created by afterimage and strobe effect, in which discrete images proceeding with sufficiently high frequency appear to form a continuum. And if the Apollonian hero is "in the last analysis nothing but a bright image projected on a dark wall, which means ap- pearance through and through,"" then all the elements of film have come together: first, the black before each selection, which for Nietzsche was original night and in film is the protective concealment of the reel during transport; second, the optical or even entoptical hallucinatory effect; third, the projection screen, precisely the contribution of the Lumitres, which made Edison's cinemascope of 1891 into the movies. sS
A music that holds its own in the desert and a theater that is film avant la lettre ""-by their physiological effects these innovations explode the limits of European art. They become media. As in Wagnerian opera, their heroic predecessor, media no longer speak "the language of the culture of a caste and in general no longer recognize any distinction between the
? cultivated and the uncultivated. "" Only the ingrained alphabetization of I 800 made it possible to celebrate and understand the "philologist-poet" Goethe in the way that his Discourse of the Master understood under- standing. An aesthetics of applied physiology, by contrast, required nei-
ther training nor elite culture.
But Nietzsche was not Wagner. For makers of words, even if they
dream of music and movies, there remains only the paradoxical desire to break open the general medium of culture within and by means of its own structure. Therefore Nietzsche began by countermanding the Faustian revolution. Goethe's universality joined philological and poetic practice to create Spirit from letters and human happiness from study. When even as a student Nietzsche scolded Faust for his method of translation, he did so in the name of a philology that was still a particular competence of the Republic of Scholars. An old-fashioned professional ethic confronted uni- versal alphabetization. Whereas "we modems read nothing but thoughts" and distill Faustian meaning from five out of twenty words, Nietzsche praises the ascesis of the philologist who still reads words and under- stands "conjectural criticism" as "an activity of the kind employed in solving a rebus. '' '*
All appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche made no serious attempt to rescind the historical fact that everyone was now able to learn to read. He did not plan an "imitation of the historical practices of communication" fortheirownsake;'9 theywereonlytoprovidehimwiththemeansofand weapons for his own writing project. Instead of practicing conjectural criticism to solve the rebus of purported texts, he invented riddle after riddle. Philological insights, for instance, that in Horace's poetry "this minimum in the extent and number of the signs" attains "the maximum . . . in the energy of the signs" in that "every word-as sound, as place, as concept, pours out its force right and left,"" became for Nietzsche the writer a design for his own experiments. Zuruthustru was a "play of every kind of symmetry" "down to the choice of vowels. "6'
In the guise of historical regression, Nietzsche pushed the structures of writing to an extreme. Faust's translation of hdym marked a moment in the history of the sign when there was no awareness of the paradigmatic; by contrast, Nietzsche's writing, in its program and practice, established pure differentiality. A topology of the signifier, as Saussure would apply it to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, orders the text and therefore its programmed reception as well. Nietzsche demanded an "art of inter- pretation" by which each sign was to be read together with contiguous signs as well as with those for which it was a substitute. In place of her- meneutic rereading he saw a simple, physiological "rumination-some-
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thing for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a 'modem man. '"6* All of Nietzsche's stylistic techniques embody this one com- mand-including the sentence that issued it. His typographical accents were intended to keep the reader from "skipping over" the imperative and, being "held by the restrictive clause, to spell it. ",' Alphabetized flu- ency is throttled; the insistence of the signifier takes the paradigm man/ animal apart syntagmatically (in a transvaluation of all connoted values). As cows, the readers (or rather the feminine readers) Nietzsche demanded became analphabetical. "He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader"; but where nonreaders are being eliminated, style itself must enforce the difficult process-the old-European norm-of spelling out the text.
Ever since Nietzsche, the logic of the signifier has become a technique of sparseness and isolation, and minimum signs release maximum energy. Hermeneutic theories, with their notions of context, are inadequate to such a calculus. They are familiar onlv with organic relationships and with a continuous-that is, psychological or historical-narrative repre- sentation of them. The relative value of signifiers, by contrast, is given mathematically; its articulation is called counting.
To count words-in the days of romanticism this was the ridiculously outmoded fixed idea of a Fixlein with his kabala of the Bible;" in the age of media it becomes a primary and elementary necessity. Mallarmi de- rives the essence of literature from the fact that there are twenty-four let- ters:' In the opening line of a poem, Rilke raises his eyes "from the book, from the near, countable lines. " What Nietzsche praises in Horace ap- plies also to the "telegraphic style" of his own aphorisms.
" For simple, economic reasons telegrams demand the paucity of words that for Nietz- sche had a physiological basis in nearsightedness and lenses of fourteen diopters.
Where the hermit of Sils seems to retreat from universal alphabetita- tion into the prehistorical, he is preparing the way for the rule of the enig- matic letter in the discourse network of 1900. The topology and econom- ics of the signifier are a matter more for engineers than for Renaissance philologists. Only a very ordinary understanding of the Sociological Foundations of Literary Expressionism in Germany could see in August Stramm and Ferdinand Hardekopf "a certain disjunction between their avant-garde literary activity and their professions as postal official and parliamentary stenographer. "6- In reality there is no truer or more urgent juncture. Stramm's poems, with their six to eight lines of one to three words each, are the telegraphic style as literature. They are entirely ap- propriate from a postal inspector who, after thorough training in the
? postal and telegraphic services, wrote a doctoral thesis entitled "Histori- cal, Critical, and Fiscal Policy Investigation of the World Postal System's Postage Rate and Its Basis" for the philosophical faculty of the University of Halle. Once there is a world postal system, signifiers have standardized prices that mock all meaning. Once there are telegrams and postcards, style is no longer the man, but an economy of signs. "*What Horace meant to Nietzsche the philologist of ancient languages is for Stramm "the gen- eral business principle of obtaining the greatest possible value for the least expense. " It was, of course, a principle that raised "exchange of in- formation" and, in particular, expressionist poetry to the second power: the costs are "costs that do not immediately create value or raise values, but which make the creation of value possible. "69They are discourses in the good Nietzschean manner, then, as a self-heightening of structures of mastery, which became ever more necessary under the conditions of stan- dardized and mass produced information. Only the minimax of sign en- ergy escapes the fate of incalculable masses of data, as in Nietzsche's inner civil war. From the "empirical law of correspondence production, ac- cording to which each letter posted from one country to another country elicits another letter from the second country to the first,"-" there follows finally only noise.
In The WandererandHisShadow, Nietzsche first experiments with the telegraphic style. The conjectural critic had become so ill, his eyes so nearsighted, that each letter he read exacted its price. The professor from Basel had become so tired of his profession that the night in his eyes gave birth to a shadow, one beyond culture and the university.
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
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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-
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? 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.