No More Learning

The Word Made Flesh paid little attention to the exterior and sensible p a m either of writing or of speech. He wrote on only one occasion, and then on the ground. No doubt He valued, in the speaking of a word, only the indefinable heyondness with which personal magnetism inspired by faith can fill a word the moment one pronounces it. Who knows if all the rest isn't trivial by comparison? . . . Still, the fact remains, He allowed men only to print his testament, not to put it on the phonograph. Otherwise, instead of saying, "Read the Holy Scriptures," we would be saying, "Listen to the Sacred Vibrations. "'
Believers in the Book were prohibited in the name of their Lord from celebrating the exteriority and sensuality of the word and scripture. The permitted medium of printing made it possible to bypass signs for sense, the "beyond" of the senses. Only under the counter-command "Hear the sacred vibrations! " does the symbolic registration of the Symbolic lose its monopoly. Vibrations, even in God's voice, are frequencies far below the threshold of perception and notation for single movements. Neither the Bible nor the primer can record them. Therefore, phonograph's Papa, as Edison is known in the novel, rethinks the sacred itself. He dreams of ideal phonographs capable of registering the "oracles of Dodona" and "chants of the Sybils" (to say nothing of pure "noise") in indestructible recordings for "sonorous archives of copper. "' The dreams of an Ameri- can engineer dreamed by a French symbolist come quite close to the strange occurrences in Miinsterberg's laboratory. What the student as medium could hardly note down for all her psychotechnical ecstasy is caught by the gramophone as medium-the murmuring and whispering of unconscious oracles.
But not all women of 1900,as oracles or students, were abreast of their age and technology. Among the Germans there were still feminine readers. Anna Pomke, "a timid, well brought-up girl,'' can only regret "thatthephonographwasnotinventedinI800. " For,assheconfessesto a favorite professor: "I would so much like to have heard Goethe's voice! He was said to have such a beautiful vocal organ, and everything he said was so meaningful. Oh, if only he had been able to speak into the gram- ophone! Oh! Oh! "6 Among the believers in culture, holy vibrations are not sibylline whisperings but the tone and content of a voice that has long delighted feminine readers in the imaginary and that must now do so in the real. A loving professor, however, could not resist that sigh of longing and the wish to modernize a love of books. Abnossah Pschorr sneaks into
? the cemetery, makes a secret mold of Goethe's skeleton, reconstructs the larynx, wires it to a phonograph, and puts together this fine composite of physiology and technology in the office of the Goethe House. For "when- ever Coethe spoke, his voice created vibrations," whose reverberations "become weaker with the passage of time, but which cannot actually cease. " To filter the sound of Goethe's voice out of the noise of all the discourse that had occurred, one fed impulses into a "receiving organ" that simulated his larynx, with the help of an amplification device that was brand-new in 1916. 'Accordingly, Salomo Friedlaender's story is called "Coethe Speaks into the Gramophone. " The story has a sad and logical ending: no engineer can stand having women love not the in- vention itself but its output. In jealous competition between media, Pro- fessor Pschorr destroys the only recording of the beautiful, monstrous, and absent voice that in I 800 commanded an entire discourse network.
A roll capable of recording Dodonian oracles, a roll capable simply of recording the poet: those were the writer's dreams in 1900. The lyric poet and feuilletonist, bohemian and amateur, who came up with the technical principle of the phonograph in 1877,gathered all these dreams in verse under the significant title Inscription.
Commelestraits danslescam&
J'ai voulu que les voix aimees
Soient un bien, qu'on garde a jamais, Et puissent r6p6ter le reve
Musical de I'heure trop brhe; Le temps veut fuir, je le soumets.
Like the faces in cameos
I wanted beloved voices
To be a fortune which one keeps forever, And which can repeat the musical Dream of the too short hour;
Time would flee, I subdue it. n
But Charles Cros, the writer, only pointed toward the phonograph and never built it. The deeds of Edison, the practical man, are more profane, less erotic, and more forgettable than writers' dreams or novelistic fan- tasies. Precisely that is their greatness. The phonograph and the type- writer exist for the same reason. Edison was nearly deaf, and the blind were foremost among the builders of typewriters. Media, like psycho- physical experiments, begin with a physiological deficiency. The very first tin-foil roll to record a voice, on December 6, 1877,registered the shouts of its inventor, a voice that remained distant and unreachable to his ac- tual ears. Edison roared "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the phono- graph's bell-mouth. '
The history of sound recording did not begin with oracles or poets, but
THE GREAT LALUU ZjI
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with children's songs, though in the roar of a deaf and childish engineer. In 1888,however, when his gramophone had just gone into mass produc- tion, Edison began to market dolls in which the speech roll had been re- corded by young girls. '"Again one heard-the hit among twelve choices- "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but this time as a children's song sung by a child. When Villiers, with a symbolist's love of oracles and sibyls, had Edison listen via stereophonic recording and playback devices to his young daughter sing "ring-around-a-rosy" in front of the laboratory, he approached the engineer's profane illumination. "
Talking dolls also mark the turning point between two discourse net- works. Kempelen's and Maelzel's mechanical children of 1778and 1823 repeated the minimal signifieds of loving parents for those parents. Circa
1800there was no children's ianguage independent of pedagogical feed- back. In the Edison talking doll, by contrast, real children sang children's songs about little Marys and their lambs. The century of the child began with such self-relatedness, unreachable by any MamaIrapa psychology.
According to Ellen Key, The Century ofthe Child brought an end to "soul murder" in school. 'LInstead of establishing pedagogical norms for what should be spoken by children, one gave free reign to language games. But these standards (in spite of all child's-century oracles) were techno- logical from the beginning. There cannot be any children's language un- filtered through the language of adults until discourses can be recorded in their positive reality. The classical pedagogical dream of forming adults with analytic, slow-motion pronunciation-walking phoneme archives for their children-became obsolete. Edison's invention was not called a phonograph for nothing: it registers real sounds rather than translating them into phonemic equivalencies as an alphabet does. Emile Berliner's more modern device, which replaced rolls with records, was not called a gramophone for nothing: true to its name, it retains "the sounds of letters" and has a writing angel as its trademark. "
Technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse. I4The phonograph and gramophone allow slow- motion studies of single sounds far below the perception threshold of even Stephani's ideal mothers. Though the frequency bandwidth possible circa 1900could not match the entire speech spectrum and particularly
? distorted s-sounds (with frequencies up to 6kHz), this was not a handi- cap. The talking machine moved into laboratories and schools very soon after its invention. In laboratories its very distortions made it possible to measure hearing. " In schools it was useful because "it is essential for achieving an accurate impression of the most fleeting, unrepresentable, and yet so important, characteristic aspects of language, of line phonetics (speech melody) and of line rhythm," whereas (because of its accurate re- cording) it "is not suited for pure pronunciation practice. "'" Thus wrote Ernst Surkamp, publisher of a journal that is nearly impossible to locate today, Instruction and Talking Machines-as if any further demonstra- tion that the epoch of High German phonetic norms is past were neces- sary. Of course, talking machines can create "a store of readily accessible language sounds in exemplary, faultless accent" and dictatorially inscribe schoolchildren with language sounds or universal keyboards. '' But they can do more and different things. To the student Rilke, whose physics teacher had his students reconstruct and experiment with a phonograph that he had acquired as soon as the machine was on the market, the regis- tered sounds opened "as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality. "'*The fact that a purely empirical phonetics (in rigor- ous distinction to phonology) suddenly became possible led to storing real phenomena according to technical standards rather than to regulat- ing them according to educational norms. One could record the wild army that Nieasche despaired of ever getting down. Because "dialects in schools deserve every possible encouragement, the talking machine can be effective in that its undistorted oral presentations nourish one's delight in a native language. ""
In the discourse network of I900, media rehabilitated dialects, those of groups like those of children. Not the delight of the subjects but the delight of the researcher came to power. In the absence of normativiza- tion, this delight brought to light discourses that previously had never passed a recording threshold-"a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality. "
On the second German Art-Education Day in Herder's Weimar, a speaker dismissed the unified language that for a hundred years had ruled over teachers and students.
The school-age child brings his own language to school, his native language, his family language, the language of his playmates, his own naive, intuitive language: our task and our desire is to teach him our language, the language of our poets and thinkers. . . . But isn't it asking a great deal when we demand that children, from the first day of school, speak nothing but school language? . . . It is not long before the children will be overtaken hv books and book language: a child learns to read. Reading, however, weakens and cuts across-it cannot be otherwise- the child's coherent, fluent speech, and book language begins more and more to
THE GREAT LALUL. & 233
? influence and control school language; finally, in its often foreign and refined way, it creates a child who is now shy and monosyllabic. '"
This speaker admits that book language represents a never-spoken excep- tion and impedes actual speech. The most fluent speaker is the one who, like children or the writer of Ecce Homo,never reads a line. Therefore progressive pedagogues can only compete with the media. Like the bell of a recording phonograph, they absorb every freely flowing word, every na- ive pun of children's dialects.
Christian Morgenstern, the child of German letters, immediately rec- ognized and exploited this development. Even if he was later to declare in mediocre verse that the gramophone was the work of the devil-before his master, Rudolf Steiner, said the same thing"-his heroes knew better.
Korf und Palmstrijm nehmen Lektionen, urn das Wetter-Wendische zu lernen. Eglich pilgern siezuden modernen Ollendorffschen Sprachlehrgrammophonen.
Dortnun lassen sie mit vielen andern, welche gleichfalls steile Charaktere (gleich als obs ein Ziel fiir Edle ware), sich im Wetter-Wendischen bewandern.
Dies Idiom behebt den Geist der Schwere, macht sie unstet, launisch und cholerisch . . . Doch die Sache bleibt nur peripherisch.
Und sie werden wieder-Charaktere.
Korf and Palmsa6m are taking lessons
From Ollendorff's didactic gramophones;
To learn Weather-Wendish's grammar and tone, They wander hence for daily sessions.
There they put with all the rest,
Who are stiff characters, too, it seems, (the place attracts elite esteem)
Their Weather-Wendish to the test.
The idiom tends to untie fetters,
Make people moody, things look dismal, But still it all remains peripheral,
and they revert once more-to characters. ''
This poem, entitled "Language Studies," may be an exact description- except that Surkamp would be a more appropriate name than Ollendorff. Heinrich Ollendorff5method of language instruction emphasized con- versation more than the rules of grammar, but Surkamp's company had at the time a near-monopoly on language-instructional gramophones and strongly encouraged dialects in the schools. In 1913 Korf and Palmstrom
? could choose among more than a thousand instructional records. The fact that they chose Weather-Wendish legitimately established the new status of dialects as an autonym of "naive and intuitive" children's language. ' The play on ethnography and weather reports is like the children's puns and jokes that were recorded by the psychologist Stanley Hall.
Words, in connection with rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, cadence, etc. , or even without these, simply as sound-pictures, often absorb the attention of children, and yield them a really aesthetic pleasure either quite independently of their meaning or to the utter bewilderment of it. They hear fancied words in noises and sounds of nature and animals, and are persistent punners. As buttedies make butter or eat it or give it by squeezing, so grasshoppers give grass, bees give beads and beans, kittens grow on the pussy-willow, and all honey is from honeysuckles, and even a poplin dress is made of poplar-trees. "
. . . and so on and so forth, until even the Wends speak Weather-Wendish. Their fantastical Slavic has its grave opposite in what the art-educators designated as the weakening, intimidating high idiom. Either there are characters, individuals, and the one norm, or gramophonics raises all the unstable, capricious changes in speech to the level of standards. Then "there is in fact no reason, as long as one recognizes Wendish as a lan- guage, that the same recognition should not be extended to Weather- Wendi~h. "~'
Korf and Palmstrom, of course, broke of their gramophone studies and became characters-that is, and not only in Greek, letters once more. Morgenstern's simulated children's language remained high idiom, writ- ten language, which quickly made its way into children's readers and dis- sertations. :' Discourses that had previously never been able to cross a re- cording threshold were stored and returned; the gramophone had paid its debt.
But heroes in poems were not the only ones to discover the talking ma- chine. Those who wrote poems were also tempted to give it a try. In I 897 the Wilhelmine poet laureate, Ernst von Wildenbruch, was probably the first German writer to record his voice on a wax roll. (His Kaiser had long since preceded him. ) Wildenbruch wrote a poem expressly for the occasion, "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice"; the history of its transmission says it all. The Collected Works did not collect it; Walter Bruch, who as the inventor of the PAL television system had access to archives of historical recordings, had to transcribe the verses from the roll. They will be quoted here in a form that will horrify poets, composi- tors, and Germanists.
Wendisch is the language of the Wends, a Slavic group that once inhabited p a m of eastern Germany. [Trans. ]
THEGREATLALUU 235
? ? 236 1900
Shapes can constrain the human visage, the eye be held fast in an image, only the voice, born in breath, bodiless dies and fliesoff.
The fawning face can deceive the eye, the sound of the voice can never lie, thus to me is the phonograph the soul's own true photograph,
which brings what is hidden to light and forces the past to speak. Hear then, for in this sound you will look into the soul of Ernst von Wildenbruch. "
A copious writer, Wildenbruch did not always rhyme so poorly. But in the moment he took leave of the Gutenberg galaxy, he was overcome by written language. As if in Gertrude Stein's dark oracle, an inevitability appears and does away with all poetic freedoms. Wildenbruch had to talk into a black phonographic speaker, which stored pure sounds rather than his words and notions. Of course, the voice did not cease being born in breath; it retains the vibration fundamental to classical-romantic lyric poetry; but-and this is too empirical or trivial a fact for Foucault's grandly styled history of discourse-the voice can no longer be pure po- etic breath that vanishes even as it is heard and leaves no trace. What once necessarily escaped becomes inescapable; the bodiless becomes material. The gramophone is not quite as volatile, capricious, and secondary as Korf and Palmstrom thought. The lyric poet Wildenbruch reacted like a rat in a test labyrinth. His musings on physiognomy and photography, which allow their subjects cunning countermeasures and escape hatches, circumscribe only the optical medium that he was familiar with: writing. When the phonograph forces the hidden to speak, however, it sets a trap for speakers. With it, speakers are not identified in the symbolic with a name, or in the imaginary by hero-reader identifications, but in the real. And that is not child's play. Wildenbruch alluded to the symbolic and imaginary registers when he coupled the sound of the poem with his own noble proper name and a look into his poetic soul in order not to speak of
the real, the speaking body.
Herder dreamed long before Anna Pomke of an improved "reading
and notational system" in which one "will probably also find a way of designating the characteristic substance and tone of a lyric piece. "'- With the gramophone's capacity to record lyric poetry, the dream becomes at once reality and nightmare. It is one thing to write proudly about the phonographic recording of all voices, as Charles Cros did; it is another thing to write, as Wildenbruch did, "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" and then to have to speak it. What good are the poetic mnemonic techniques of rhyme and meter when wax rolls can store not only substance and tone but real sounds? Like Alfred Doblin's defiant motto, "Not phonography, but art,">*Wildenbruch's poetaster rhymes bear witness to an embittered competition between poetry and tech- nological media.
Sound is a complex of physiological data that are impossible to put
? into writing or to counterfeit. In the discourse network of 1900,psycho- physics and media subvert the imaginary body image that individuals have of themselves and substitute a forthright positivity. The phonograph is called the true photograph of the soul; graphology is called the "X ray" of handwritten "indiscretions. " **
Mocking the doctrine of psychological physiognomy in 1800, phi- losophers could joke: nothing more was required than a decision of the individual to make itself incomprehensible for centuries. '" That is what Wildenbruch hoped to accomplish with his line about the fawning face deceiving the eyes of the physiognomist; but given a machine that dodges the tricks people use with one another, the laughter has died away after a century. Phonography means the death of the author; it stores a mortal voice rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase. The past that the phonograph forces to speak is only Wildenbruch's helpless euphemism for his singular body, which was posthumous even while he lived.
The death of man and the preservation of corporeal evidence are one. In a brilliant essay, Carlo Ginzburg has shown that around 1900a new paradigm of knowledge gained ascendancy, one that operated only with unfakeable, that is, unconscious and meaningless, details-in aesthetics as well as in psychoanalysis and criminology. " Thus a writer in Scientific American said of the phonograph, which was just then going into mass production, "It can be used as a reliable witness in criminal investiga- tions. "" The individual of 1800,who was an individual universal, did not survive this fine-grained investigation. What one can know of a human being today has nothing to do with the 4,000 pages that Sartre, posing the same question, devoted to the psychology of Flaubert. One can record people's voices, their fingerprints, their parapraxes. Ginzburg also underestimates the modernity of these encroachments when he puts the origin of the gathering of evidence among prehistoric hunters and Re- naissance physicians. The snow that helped trackers was an accident; Edison's tin-foil roll or Francis Galton's fingerprint archive were pur- posefully prepared recording surfaces for data that could be neither stored nor evaluated without machines.
Thus Wildenbruch's mediocre verse points out whom the phonograph benefits. A lyric poet immortalized in the grooves on a record enters, not the pantheon, but the archive of the new "deposition psychology. " Under this name William Stern and others instituted a science based on the su- periority of technical over literary storage devices. Whether for criminals or for the insane, the use of "stylized depositions often produces a false impression of the examination and obscures the psychological signifi- cance of individual statements. " Because each answer "is, from the point of view of experimental psychology, a reaction to the operative stimulus in the question," experimenters and investigators provoke countertactics
? 238 1900
in their subjects as long as they use the bureaucratic medium of writ- ing. If, however, one selects "the use of the phonograph as an ideal method," then, especially if the recording is done secretly, any parasitic feedback between the stimulus and the reaction will be prevented. Se- crecy is "absolutely essential" with children in order to "guarantee the genuine innocence of their responses. " 34
As a photograph of the soul, the talking machine put an end to the innocent doctrine of innocence. Circa 1800 innocence was a historical- philosophical limit concept; it referred to a region it itself made impass- ible. "Once the soul speaks, then oh! , it is no longer the soul that speaks. " Although this loss of the soul's identity with itself had been attributed to the progressofthe human race or to the division of labor, it resulted, in the final analysis, simply from the technological impossibility of stor- ing the newly discovered voice in any form except that of writing. Olym- pia's automatized "oh" would otherwise never have been so fascinating and terrifying. Circa 1900, by contrast, the builders of automatons had carried the day. There was no longer any innocence below the recording threshold; there was only the tactical rule of anticipating counter reac- tions while recording. But the innocence that comes into being where bodies and media technologies come into contact is called flight of ideas.
Inorder to investigate "glossophysical" disturbances, or those that, beyond alalia or aphasia, affect entire sequences of speech, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky devised a new type of experimental pro- cedure. After having "shut out as far as possible all extraneous sense stimuli," Stransky had his subjects "look and speak directly into the painted black tube" of a phonographic receiver for one minute. " The subjects were selected partly from among Stransky's psychiatric col- leagues, partly from among his patients.
The principal distinction be- tween the cohorts, however, was that most of the patients reacted with fright to the intentionally stimulus-free (that is, black) field of the re- ceiver, with the unfortunate result that their responses had to be recorded stenographically rather than phonographically. " But in the absence of any transcendental norm, psychiatrists and psychiatric patients exhibited the same speech behavior. After an initial trial period, they could produce nonsense for one minute (the recording time for one roll). The command to speak as much and as quickly as possible, together with a recorder capable of registering more material at a quicker pace than the alphabet, brought about an experimentally guaranteed hodgepodge of words. As in the experiments of Ebbinghaus, the initial difficulties resulted from the paradoxical imperative to bracket the operative imperatives of normal speech.
? In the beginning, it was normal for subjects to get no further than the first few sentences; they would stall and claim that nothing occurred to them, that they could no longer speak. . . . We are ordinarily so accustomed to thinking under the direction of general concepts that we constantly fall back into this tendency whenever we are presented with a particular aim, even when this aim consists in shutting o u t all general concepts . . . Only when t h e subjects realized t h a t seurch- ing for verbal ideas was completely unnecessary, that these ideas would come spontaneously and profusely to the foreground, did the initial stalling rapidly cease so we could proceed to the actual experiment. "
From a technological medium that records their voices without asking for hidden thoughts or ideas, experimental subjects learned "the release of linguistic expression from mental life" through their own bodies. In its
'L autonomy,"I* languageproceedswithoutanyneedtolookforsignifieds. Niensche announced long before Stransky that he learned to find once he grew weary of seeking; long after Stransky, Breton urged writers to trust the inexhaustible murmur.
The resultant output is all practically interchangeable. Automatic writing generates sentences reminiscent of "Rose is a rose is a rose. " Stransky's phonograph records the sequence, "Hope, green belief, green, green, green, green is an emerald, an emerald is green, a sapphire is green, a-a sapphire is green, green is, that isn't right," l9 etc. Henceforth speech knows only tautology and contradiction, thetwoempty, informationless extremes of truth values. "' In identifying the new artistic age of technical reproduction with film, Benjamin singled out the movie screen as making the single image obsolete and therefore establishing the rule of distrac- tion, rather than bourgeois concentration. But the principle applies more generally and rigorously. Film has no privileged position among the me- dia that have revolutionized literature and art. All have brought about, in exact psychiatric terms, the flight of ideas; Corresponding terms in cul- tural criticism, such as "distraction," remain euphemistic.
Stransky's phonograph did not record mere lapses in attention or mo- ments of distraction; it registered disdain for political and pedagogical norms, norms that would not have endured for a day were it not for a normativized language. " The catatonic Heinrich H. , for instance, re- sponded to test questions concerning the nature of state and school regu- lations thus:
The state is many people livingtogether, hour by hour, placesseparated by hours, bordered by mountains on four sides.
[School regulation] is that law over school-age children who are often in condi- tions of illness, when they stay home and when they should be working o u t on the land. Alternate daily,whentheyworkfortwodaysandgotoschoolfortwodays, they changeevery week. When they work for a week and go to school for a week,
THE GREAT LALUa 239
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all school-age children who are ill and have to stay home and save time, thus save
time, stay home, perhaps to work, perhaps to cook, perhaps to wash carrots . . . "
Responses on the order of vegetable stew effectively dismantle the powers on which education had been based since 1800. Fritz Mauthner's proph- ecy that "the states will one day have to pay for making their schools into institutions in which the minds of children are systematically destroyed" was fulfilled before it was written. " What the technological media record is their own opposition to the state and school. People who are encour- aged to speak more quickly than they think, that is, to outpace the con- trolling function, necessarily begin guerrilla warfare against disciplinary power. The one who not only forgets, but in a Nietzschean manner also forgets his forgetfulness, always delivers, like Kafka's drunken man, the Description of a Struggle:
Now the drunk jerked up his eyebrows so that a brighmess appeared between them and his eyes, and he explained in fits and starts: "lt's like this, you see-l'm sleepy, you see, so that's why I'm going to sleep. -You see, I've a brother-in-law on the Wenzelsplatz-that's where I'm going, for I live there, for that's where I have my bed-so 1'11 be off-. But I don't know his name, you see, or where he lives-seems I've forgotten-but never mind, for 1 don't even know if I have a brother-in-law at all. -But 1'11 beofnow, you see-. Do you think I'll find him? ""
Stransky hoped that by using a neutral recording device he would avoid the psychophysical danger of producing mere "laboratory arti- facts,"" or of programming the response into the stimulus; yet steno- and phonographic recording functions like alcohol in the passage from Kafka. It provokes the provocative responses that no self-respecting ser- vant of the state or educational bureaucrat would have wanted to write down. As catchphrases pronounced by the experimenter, "state" and "school" can no longer be subsumed under any more general heading. Psychiatry also realized, then, that "enumerations"-catchphrases, in- ventories, address books, grammars-are themselves instances of the flight of ideas;" to which the pedagogy of learning impairments could respond that hyperactive children's flight of ideas was a result of enumer- ative textbooks. '- Thus when Stransky stated that "the formation of gen- eral concepts" might have been inhibited for "pathological or experi- mental reason^,"'^ the "or" should be replaced by an equal sign.
The very fact that flight of ideas governed both sides of the experi- mental situation allowed it to be transposed into other media. By sub- stituting ordinary writing materials for the phonograph and artificial laboratory artifacts for phonographic ones, one could achieve "the re- lease of linguistic expression from mental life" in literature as well. The physician Gottfried Benn demonstrated this when he had his fellow phy- sician Jef van Pameelen "enter the foyer of a hospital for prostitutes" and
? registered the associations of this his doppelganger with phonographic fi- delity. To be sure, nothing at all occurs to the subject Pameelen. In his "dread at his inability to experience anything" he sees only "an empty hall with a clock. " But hardly have these words escaped him when a disembodied "voice" sounds above him. "An empty hall with a clock? Further! Extension! Yield! The doorman's apartment? The hairpins on the ground? The garden on the right? And so? "There are only discon- nected catchphrases, but like "state" or "school regulations" they de- mand continuation, if only into ideational flight. Acting the part, as if to make things easier for his archivist, Pameelen consents to the flight of catchphrases:
PAMEELEN (actingthe part): I know a house very similar to the one you have just described, Herr Doctor! I entered it on a warm spring morning; first there was an empty hallway with a clock, the doorman's apartment was on the right, hairpins were lying on the ground, very funny, and on the right there was a small garden, a bed of roses in the middle, two wethers grazed tethered to the grass, probably the Aquarian goats?
Truly an "epistemological drama" (as The Survey Director is subtitled): although it dutifully, indeed exhaustively runs through the catalogue of questions, Pameelen's answer confuses identity, the epistemological bed- rock, with mere samene~s. ~C"learly drama (longbefore Peter Handke's Kuspur) is about speaking rather than action. Identity falls into simu- lacrum without any extradiscursive context. Empty words circulate be- tween Pameelen and the voice with no figure behind it, words without points of view, address, or reference, determined and guided by the im- perative of association. " The voice notes down Pameelen's venerealogical joke about the Aquarian goats as a "very good," namely, "distant asso- ciation that plays on the meaning of hospital with a light, humorous touch. " The medical profession does not exempt one from the status of experimental subject in drama any more than it does in a laboratory full of phonographs. The voice that directs Pameelen is anything but tran- scendental-he addresses it as "Herr Doctor! " This experimenter shares Stransky's insight that any search for verbal ideas is superfluous. When- ever "peripheral fatigue" or "cortical fading" in Pameelen's "brain" hin- der the associations, the doctor cracks his whip and commands "fur- ther! " 'z Pameelen is obviously among the "worst cases" of imbecility who "already grow tired of the procedure by the 58th reaction. "" With his whip, however, the doctor (likethe phonograph) commands speech at a tempo that separates discourse from mental life or "experiential per- spectives. '' Drama, once the genre of free subjects, becomes pathological "or" experimental.
This is because free subjects appear in books of philosophy, whereas
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experimental subjects appear in the field of psychophysics. "The one science that most strongly captures the world's attention throws its light and shadow across prose fiction as well. Since about 1860this has been pathology, physiological and psychological. " (* Thus the enigma of the whip-brandishing Herr Doctor can be quickly clarified. One need only write out the previously quoted dramatic dialogue in the following manner:
VOICE
Hall with a clock? Doorman's apartment Hairpins on the floor? A garden on the right
PAMEELEN
first there was an empty hallway with a clock doorman's apartment on the right
there were hairpins on the floor, very funny
and to the right there was a small garden, a bed of
rosesin the middle
Next read one of many published pages of interviews that the psychia-
trist Ziehen conducted with school children in Jena.
0. G. , 1 2 years, 9 months. Father tailor. School performance quite variable, aver- age. July 3, I 8 9 8 . 9 A. M. Previously one hour of class (reading and explanation of a poem about the Pied Piper of Hamelin).
STIMULUS WORD
Teacher Father snow Blood
Rat snow
RESPONSE
H e n Stichling (teacher, with whom he was just in class) my father
some fell (thought of yesterday's snowfall)
when an animal is slaughtered (thought of a cow he saw
slaughtered the day before yesterday)
how the rat catcher lures the rats into the trap white ("that's on the ground") ''
Consider, finally, that Ziehen's Idea Associations of the Child aimed to "determine the speed of association," indeed "to determine the associa- tion process and its speed under special conditions (fatigue, etc. ),"y"and one will have also deduced the special condition of the whip. From this, it is only a step to recognizing that the head physician of the psychiatric intern Gottfried Benn was none other than Professor Theodor Ziehen.
It hardly matters whether the experimental subject is a child or a doc- tor, is 0. G. , J. v. P. , or G. B. For the physician Werff Ronne, the hero of Benn's first novella, to practice random association without the whip of an experimenter, is merely a further transposition of psychophysical tech- niques into literature. But the only genre that can present an experi- menter and an experimental subject as separate agents is the drama. The hero of Benn's novella, by contrast, stands under an order of association that functions despotically because it has transposed itself into flesh and blood. The laboratory artifact becomes absolute. No interpretation could recognize it. Only the schoolchildren in Jena with whom Ziehen experi-
? mented, while attending to his patient Nietzsche on the side, would have known why Ronne would intensify, in a continuous commentary that is also the narrative perspective, the mumbo jumbo he hears in the officers' mess over the strangely soft tropical fruit. He can do nothing else. "It was only a matter of transmission, all the particulars remained untouched; who was he to appropriate or oversee or, resisting, to create? " '-
Verbal transmission as neurosis, without any basis in a transcendental or creative Poet's ego; medial selection without reference to the real, to the incomprehensible background of all media-even in his delirium, Ronne obeys orders. Pameelen has to transmit the doorman's apartment, hairpins, the hospital hallway, and goats, and Ronne has to transmit everything heard and said. What his acquaintances in the mess say, what they associate with this, what he himself says and associates with what is said and associated-it all becomes impossibly exhausting. "The struggle between associations, that's the final ego-he thought and walked back to the institute. " '*
Where else should one go, except into a catatonic stupor? " That at least allows Ronne to forget his forgetful project leader. But before final paralysis, the failed doctor extends his associations to their material basis, the brain itself. "I have to keep investigating what might have hap- pened to me. What if the forceps had dug a little deeper into the skull at this point? What if I had been hit repeatedly on a particular spot on the head? What is it with brains, anyway? "" In an aporetic attempt to get behind his own thinking, that is, to localize it using his own medical knowledge, Ronne literally sacrifices his knowing subjectivity. The fact that he has words and associations at all becomes an improbable excep- tion to the countless possible deficits and disturbances. Language ceases to be a bastion of inwardness; the gesture that simulates turning his brain inside out also reverses the condition of language into one of chance and exteriority.
Therefore Ronne (in direct descent from Nietzsche) never encounters a "word that reached me. ""'When blows to the head lead to aphasia in one instance, to associations and words in others, the preconditions of Poetry become one more casualty. The word that had always reached people op- erates at a certain psychic reaction threshold, which was called the dis- course of nature and the nature of discourse. Psychophysics does away with both of them. Thus nothing remains for a psychiatrist who has be- come a psychiatric case, like Ronne, and who nonetheless wants to be reached by something, nothing remains but to undertake TheJourney into other media.
He looked down the street and saw where to go.
He rushed into the twilight of a movie house, into the unconsciousof the first
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? floor. Reddish light stood in large calyxes of flat flowers up to hidden lamps. The sound of violins, nearby and warmly played, scraped over the curve of his brain, drawing out a truly sweet tone. Shoulders leaned against shoulders, in devotion: whispering, closing together, touching, happiness. A man came toward him, with wife and child, signaling familiarity, his mouth wide and laughing gaily. But Riinne no longer recognized him. He had entered into the film, into the sharp gestures, the mythic force.
Standinglarge before the sea, he wrapped himself in his coat, its skirts flapping in the fresh breeze; he attacked the air as he would an animal, and how the drink cooled the last of the tribe.
How he stamped, how vigorously he bent his knee. He wiped away the ashes, indifferent, as if possessed by great things that awaited him in the letter brought by the old servant, on whose knee the ancestor once sat.
The old man walked nobly up to the woman at the spring. How surprised the nanny was, as she put her handkerchief to her breast. What a lovely playmate! Like a deer among young bulls! What a silvery beard!
Riinne hardly breathed, careful not to break it.
Then it was done, it had come to pass.
The movement and spirit had come together over the ruins of the period of
sickness, with nothing in between. The arm sailed clearly from an impulse; from light to the hip, a bright swing, from branch to branch. hL
A movie theater in the suburbs of Brussels in 1916 is this Christologi- cal goal of all journeys. The novella makes what was accomplished in the film unambiguously clear. "Movement" can now be recorded in the tech- nological real, no longer only in the imaginary. "'Ronne, the man whom no word reaches, is not altogether beyond contact, but his reaction threshold functions physiologically rather than psychically. Film estab- lishes immediate connections between technology and the body, stimulus and response, which make imaginary connections unnecessary. Reflexes, as in Pavlov's animals, occur with "nothing in between": they arc be- tween sensory impulses and motoric reactions. This is true of the figures optically portrayed in the silent film; it is true of the accompanying music. The violins playing in the dark theater become an immediate presence for the physiologically schooled listener: just as in Schonberg's "Pierrot lun- aire," they play on the curves of his brain. MFor that reason the individual named Ronne, who in the medium of language had just renewed acquain- tanceships, falls into a condition for which his contemporary psychiatrists had the fine word asymbolia: Ronne no longer recognizes anyone.
Psychiatry or no, asymbolia is the structure of the movies. +'One auto- biographer who (as the sad title of his book, The Words, already indi- cates) later became only a writer, wrote of his first visits to the movies: "We had the same mental age. I was seven years old and knew how to read, [the new art] was twelve years old and did not know how to talk. "" Thenewmedium,whetherinParisin 1912orBrusselsin 1916,presented language deficits as happiness. With his mother, who loved movies,
? Sartre fled his grandfather, a man of letters, who like all the bourgeoisie went faithfully to the theater only to be able to go home "insidiously pre- pared for ceremonious destinies. " The movies release Ronne from a dis- course that is as incessant as it is empty. Two literary descriptions of film celebrate, in simple solidarity, "the unconscious of the first floor" and "the living night" of the projections as the end of the book's
Film transposed into the technological real what Poetry had promised in the age of alphabetization and granted through the fantasy of the library. Both cineasts attribute the highest, that is, unconscious pleasure to the heroes and audience; both submerge themselves in a crowd that is bodily contact and not merely (as in Faust) a philosophic humanity; both blend into boundless identification with the phantasmagoria. One transfers words spoken at the Cross to film, the other writes more garrulously, but in the same vein.
All of this was one and the same: it was Destiny. The hero dismounted, put out the fuse, the traitor sprang at him, a duel with knives began: hut the accidents of the duel likewise partook of the rigor of the musical dwelopment: they were fake accidents which ill concealed the universal order. What joy when the last knife stroke coincided with the last chord! I was utterly content, I had found the world in which I wanted to live, 1 touched the
Habent sua fata libelli. There were times when the Absolute was manifest to people as a gallery of images of Spirit, that is, as poetic- philosophical writing. There are other times when it departs from the heaps of paper. Coherence, identification, universality-all the honorary titles conferred upon the book by universal alphabetization are trans- ferred to the media, at least among the common people. Just as in 1800 the new fantasy of the library, despised by scholars, became the joy of women, children, and the uneducated, so too, a century later, did the ap- paratus of film, despised by library fantasts. A psychiatrist who has sunk to the level of a patient meets an acquaintance at the movies "with wife and child"; among the Sartres, mother and son go to the movies, whereas the writer and theater-goer grandfather can only ask stupid questions: "'Look here, Simonnot, you who are a serious man, do you understand it? My daughter takes my grandson to the cinema! ' And M. Simonnot replied, in a conciliatory tone: 'I've never been, but my wife sometimes goes. '" **
As technological media, the gramophone and film store acoustical and optical data serially with superhuman precision. Invented at the same time by the same engineers, they launched a two-pronged attack on a mo- nopoly that had not been granted to the book until the time of universal alphabetization: a monopoly on the storage of serial data. Circa 1900, the ersatz sensuality of Poetry could be replaced, not by Nature, but by
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? 246 1900
technologies. The gramophone empties out words by bypassing their imaginary aspect (signifieds) for their real aspects (the physiology of the voice). Only a Wildenbruch could still believe that a device would be properly attentive to his soul, to the imaginary itself. Film devalues words by setting their referents, the necessary, transcendent, indeed absurd ref- erence points for discourse, right before one's eyes. When Novalis read rightly, a real, visible world unfolded within him in the wake of the words. Riinne, struck with "mythic force" by the facticity of gestures and things in the silent film, no longer needs such magic.
Writers were justified in complaining that "the word is gradually losing credit" and "is already something somewhat too conspicuous and at the same time oddly undifferentiated for us today. "m To use Lacan's methodological distinction between symbolic, real, and imaginary, two of these three functions, which constitute all information systems, became separable from writing circa 1900. The real of speaking took place in the gramophone; the imaginary produced in speaking o r writing belonged to film. Hanns Heinz Ewers, author and screenplay writer of The Student of Prague, stated this distribution (though with a certain bias): "I hate Thomas Aha Edison, because we owe to him one of the most heinous of inventions: the phonograph! Yet 1 love him: he redeemed everything when he returned fantasy to the matter-of-fact world-in the movies! ""
While record grooves recorded bodies and their heinous waste mate- rial, the movies took over the fantastic or imaginary things that for a cen- tury had been called Poetry. Munsterberg, inventor in word and deed of psychotechnology, provided in 1916the first historical theory of film in his demonstration that film techniques like projection and cutting, close- up and flashback, technically implement psychic processes such as hallu- cination and association, recollection and attention, rather than, like plays or novels, stimulating these processes descriptively with words.