No More Learning

There is thus only one object of writing: the primal soup of brain physiology. What interests Freud is its organization; what interests Brigge is noting it down.
Better perhaps to have remained in the darkness, and your unconfined heart would have sought to be the heavy heart of all that is indistinguishable. . . .
0 night without objects. 0 obtuse window outward, o carefully closed doors; arrangements from long ago, taken over, accredited, never quite understood. 0 stillness in the staircase, stillness from adjoining rooms, stillness high up against the ceiling. 0 mother: o you only one, who shut out all this stillness, long ago in childhood. . . . You strike a light, and already the noise is you. And you hold the light before you and say: it is I; don't be afraid. "'
The fact that there is articulation at all becomes the enigma of a writing that inevitably articulates. Because Brigge (unlike Freud) does not raise the standards of his medium to norms of the real, it remains a question
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whether they are "better" than primal soup. But thus his simple descrip- tion correlates with psychophysical results.
It is wrong to assume that originally (as soon as the sense organs function) there were nothing but particular impressions out of which secondary connections among impressions were then formed. . . . The original situation should rather be thought of as a diffuse, whole sensibility. For example, when we lie daydreaming on the sofa with closed eves, we do not notice anything particular in the bright- ness that penetrates our eyelids, in the distant noise on the street, in the pressure of our clothing, or in the temperature of the room, but rather fuse all these things in the totality of our receptivity. Such-though much more vague and muffled- is how we must first think of the sensibility of the infant. Before we investigate the associations between pamcular impressions, we must first ask how the child manages to isolate a particular phenomenon out of this confused, whole state. H
As anticipatory as ever, Ebbinghaus addressed this question to his col- league, Stem, and isolated infantile isolation.
A very young child looked from a particular position into a particular room. He received a dihse, hardly differentiated impression. Now his mother pulls him in his wagon into an adjoining room; for the most part another whole impression replaces the first. But the mother and the wagon have remained the same. The optical stimuli they produce thus find the material disposable to them as well as their mental effects somewhat prepared in advance, and in addition they reinforce one another through mutual association; the other, modified stimuli do not have this double advantage. . . . The impression derived from the sight [of the mother] forms more and more easily on the one hand, and on the other hand it differenti- ates itself more and more from the various diffuse backgrounds in which it was originally dissolved: the sight of the mother becomes a progressively more inde- pendent part of the given whole impression. 6'
When one isolates the perceptual isolation of the child rigorously enough, it is no longer that of the child. The construction of articulated environ- ments proceeds through the first human contacts. What Ebbinghaus de- scribes coincides with what Brigge calls the shutting out of the indistin- guishable. The Notebooks, or the Remembrance of Things Past, critically decried as "mystical" or "oedipal" whenever they evoke childhood and the mother, simply inquire into the elemental relation, circa 1900,be- tween particular and background, sign and primal soup, language and primal sound. The answer to this inquiry can only be that discrete signs arise from sheer iteration. The mother (in Ebbinghaus) must return in order to be distinguished from the diffuse backgrounds; the mother (in the Notebooks) must say, "It is 1, don't be afraid. " Behind all identities and selections lurks the endless region of darkness.
"We know not what the imagination would be without darkness, its great school. "" reads the first empirical, child-psychological study of its kind, A Study of Fears. Eleven years before the Notebooks, in his case
? histories Stanley Hall archived all the childhood fears of Brigge: aside from mirrors, needles, and masks, there was also the moment that played such a key role for Malte and Marcel.
28. F. , I 8. The great shadow over all her early life was the dread of the moment her mother should kiss her good night and leave her alone in the dark; she lay tense and rigid, held her breath to listen with open mouth, smothered herself under the clothes, with which her head must always be covered, fancied forms bending over her, often awoke with her heart pounding and a sense of dropping through the air, flying or falling backward, feeling quivery for hours; she now vows "I will always put my whole foot on the stairs. ""'
The fact that Otto Rank's book on incest picked out the corresponding fear of Brigge, and only that one, as if to apprehend one more oedipal suspect,-"betrays the competition between literature and psychoanalysis. Childhood fears were copiously noted down in the discourse network of I 900. Psychophysics provided the theoretical and statistical framework; psychoanalysis and literature made texts of fitting individual cases, until the system was complete. None of the three discourses had solid points of reference in the two others; there is only a network of the three.
The object or abject caught in the net, however, was the child. None of the three discourses has any further concern for what mothers d o and say, for the kind of love or education they instill in their children. Instead of minimal signifieds of a first love, all that counts are the first signifiers on an indistinguishable background. The archiving of first signs, even if they are as vague as "the Big Thing" or as babbled as the "0-0-0-0-lda," that is, "fortlda" of Freud's grandson became a communal task. " The itera- tion and opposition of minimal signifiers provided material enough for constructing a system. And systems exist to be written down.
One winter evening the child Brigge is drawing. A red pencil rolls off the table and onto the carpet. The child, "accustomed to the brightness above and all inspired with the colors on the white paper," cannot find the pencil in the "blackness" under the table: dalfort. Instead, he sees his own searching hands as strange, blind creatures. Much has been written about this depersonalization, but not about the pencil, paper and black- ness, these three necessary and sufficient conditions for a medium, of which interpretations themselves are a part. And the pencil returns years later, as if it came back from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, only to desig- nate itself as the sign of a sign. A little gray woman turns it over endlessly in her miserable hands, until Brigge realizes that "it was a sign, a sign for the initiated," and senses "that there actually existed a certain compact" with the w~man. '~
Pencils are produced in order to make signs, not to be signs. But right before Brigge's eyes the woman transposes the writing instrument into
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special contexts that cut across the literary-alphabetic code. The pencil, once lost in the signless darkness of the carpet, as if in a jungle, returns as "the Big Thing" to reduce all writing to one code among others. Precisely the fact that it is "old," if not a piece of debris, makes it significant. In the Notebooks newspapers are sold by a blind man, who cannot read them. " Writing materials come to be misused by sign-giving analphabets. And so it goes in a discourse network that measures cultural technologies by their deficiencies and particular things by their degree of wear and tear. The pretty pictures produced prior to its disappearance by Brigge's pencil under the gaze of a reading governess do not count; for they are only the Basedow raisins of an alphabetizing power. What counts and is therefore put down on paper is the analphabetic adventure with writing material and paper. Freud's patient, the one who confused m and n, knew this story well.
The discourse network of I800 had archived the way in which children autonomously reproduced the engrained alphabet. But it did not begin to comprehend other children with other pleasuredfears. The discourse net- work of 1900cut apart the pedagogic feedback loop and directed children to write down their analphabetism. It was a paradoxical and impossible role that could only be taken on as simulacrum.
Brigge fills pages about an old pencil; the art-education movement had essays written on "The Rusty Pen. " Packed together with 144other simi- lar pens in industrial boxes three weeks previously, it is finally "good for nothing else" than to be thrown in the waste basket, But because only use singularizes, the useless pen becomes the subject of a writer. His semi- official name is the happy child; his empirical name is Heinrich Schar- relmann-a high school teacher who, in the place of pens and pupils that don't write, wrote a book entitled Happy Children. "
As it is in little things, so it is in big ones. At the convention of the art- education movement in Weimar, which dealt with German language and literature from October 9 to 11, 1903,laymen were in attendance along with thirty-four educational bureaucrats. One of the nonteachers, Dr. Heinrich Hart, clarified his status at the beginning of his address.
When my friend, Caesar Flaischgen, asked me to speak about the choice of litera- ture for schools at the art-education conference, l was seized by a slight fear. How could I possibly presume to speak about educational matters! I have never-I must admit to my shame-stood at the lectern, and any educational talent 1pos- sess barely suffices to educate myself. (Laughter. ) 1 intended to decline the invita- tion at once, when it occurred to me that I have indeed had a relationship to schools in one respect, and how would it be if I presented myself to the gathering of distinguished art educators not as a colleague, but as a pupil. . . .
The three combined words, "Education, School, Poetry," d o not resound with inspiring harmony in my poor pupil's soul. I will not go into further detail about
? what I suffered and endured during the years that I was taught, infused with, and force-fed poetry. "I don't want your pity. " 1 will only say, if you will pardon me this, that for a time I placed poetry in the same category as cod-liver oil and medicine. -'
With this bitter pill for educational bureaucrats, the pupil himself speaks up. But what would have been a scandal in the discourse network of I 800 produces only hearty laughter among the art educators. The mythic pupil can say that medicine is the shadow side of pedagogy. He can say that he is neither educated nor an educator, simply because the highest alpha- betization (readingthe Poets) never reached him. Instead, Dr. Hart became (ashe is listed in the program of speakers) a "writer. " After Nietzsche, the career path of makers of words presupposes not being able to read. Any- one who "still has nightmares"-" about reading Horace in school is a walking archive of childhood fears, perfectly suited to the sciences of nonsense. "The analysis of material from pupils," reads one question- naire that queried prominent people concerning their years as pupils, "is a necessity that cannot be sufficiently stressed. "' And observe: the most bitter and derisive items in this material come from "poets and writers. "" Indeed, among people who could speak it was considered fashionable in 1912"to view the tragedies of youth and school children, which had been portrayed in a few fine stories of the period, as something that was almost obvious and obligatory. ""
That is only logical in a discourse network that needs someone for the impossible role of the writing analphabet. Writers are thus commissioned to simulate the pupil or the madman. Children who in searching for lost pencils fail to recognize their own hands are no less delirious than chil- dren whose reading of Horace still gives them nightmares decades later. When the art-education convention puts writers on the program in order to draw all their plans for reform from the "poor pupil's soul," the simu- lacrum of madness receives semi-official recognition. Ellen Key's "school of the future," in which first of all the analphabets "pronounce their judg- ment" on teachers and lesson plans found its beginning. *"
But the tragically isolated Poet is the most cherished illusion of inter- preters. One overlooks the system-immanent function of literature. Texts written to order for a new pedagogy were at best credited as portrayals of the "suffering imposed by the social order. "
The hero of Meyrink's Golem "repeats" words so often and so "spas- modically, that they suddenly appear nakedly as meaningless, frightening sounds from a barbaric, prehistorical past"-above all, the word h-o-o-k. His grand plan is to "take on the alphabet in the primer in reverse order from Z to A, in order finally to arrive at the spot where [he] began to learn in school. "*' A as in ape-that is the null point at which Kafka's "A
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? Report to an Academy" begins. The leap out of a speechless and anal- phabetic ape-truth to the alphabetization of the report itself becomes the subject of a story that links the acquisition of language with a tootling gramophone and alcoholism. *zIt is a force-feeding like Hart's, by whose analysis future academies and culturization campaigns will profit.
Literary texts of 1900 record how an alphabetic culture is to be de- fined from an analphabetic outside. Brigge's notebooks (to keep to the story) are also written with the child's vanished pencil. "The infinite real- ity" of being a child, in which it is certain "that it would never end," de- termines every sentence on reading and writing. Brigge never stops writ- ing down the endlessness of agraphia and alexia.
It is well simply to recognize certain things that will never change, without de- ploring the facts or even judging them. Thus it became clear to me that I never was a real reader. In childhood I considered reading a profession one would take upon oneself, later some time, when all the professions came along, one after the other. . . .
Until the beginning of such changes I postponed reading too. One would then treat books as one treated friends, there would be time for them, a definite time that would pass regularly, complaisantly, just so much of it as happened to suit one. . . . Rut that one's hair should become untidy and dishevelled, as i f one had been lying on it, that one should get burning ears and hands as cold as metal, that a long candle beside one should h u m right down into its holder, that, thank God, would then be entirely excluded. . . .
Of what I so often felt later, I now somehow had a premonition: that one had no right to open a book at all, unless one pledged oneself to read them all. With e v e r y l i n e o n e b r o k e of f a b i t of t h e w o r l d . B e f o r e b o o k s i t w a s i n t a c t a n d p e r h a p s it would be again after them. But how could I, who was unable to read, cope with them all? '3
If being alphabetized means being able to translate immeasurable heaps of letters and books into the miniature model of meaning, then it is and remains a norm of the others, beyond Brigge as only the Beyond can be. A historical system departs from the earth to disintegrate in beauty and nothingnessR4In this world, to which Brigge remains true, there are only bodies, burning ears, and cold hands. These bodies can either not read at all or, when they sit in the BibliothPque nationale, are completely strange bodies, without eyes and ears and with "the hair of someone sleeping. " Everything looks, then, as if professional readers were more analphabetic than a child, who at least still believes in the illusion of being able to read in the future. Instead, those who frequent the library- who for the first time in the history of German writing are described from theoutside-have indeedlearnedsomething,butatthepriceoftheirdis- appearance. "One is not aware of them. They are in the books. ""'
In 1799the warning was issued to undertake all reading "in the work- place of our inner selves" and "not to forget ourselves" over what we are
? reading. Otherwise we would "lose our presence of mind and become in- sane through distraction. """ In 1910 it makes no difference whether one can read or not: madness overtakes one anyway. Because there is no syn- thetic function capable of selecting among the enumerable masses of data with the eventual aim of establishing meaning, books continue to pile up beyond any possible comprehension. According to Brigge, reading would only be possible and permissible if it could accommodate all books. Thus in reading an impossible exhaustion takes the place of transcendental apperception.
In 1803one could assure that the healthy mind "seeks to establish unity everywhere in the manifold, and processes all given material ac- cording to its organization. In the consciousness of self it winds the im- measurable thread of time into a ball, reproduces dead centuries, and gathers the infinitely extended limbs of space, mountain ranges, forests, and the stars cast over the firmament into the miniature portrait of an idea. "*- The poetic screenplays of 1800and their ability to gather up space and time could not be more beautifully described. Space shrank for cultured writenheaders until the world fit into the box of the New Melu- sine, or the whole earth, in a poetic dream of flight, "looked only like a golden bowl with the finest engraving. " Time shrank for cultured writers/ readers until "the longest stories" were "pulled together in short, brilliant minutes,"Rsor the immeasurable threads of one's own life came together into the yarn of a briefly leafed-through book of Provenpal poetry. Such miracles become impossible under the law of exhaustion. Certainly tech- nical devices are extraordinarily capable of expanding or contracting time and space. But a device is not a mind and establishes no unity in whatever dispersion it encounters. It is of no help to people. In their bodily forgetfulness, agraphia, and alexia, they can only work through serial data (to borrow once more the apt language of programmers) in real-time analysis.
The twenty-four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom undergo a real- time analysis. Real-time analysis threatens to become la recherche du temps perdu. Only a real-time analysis can "achieve" (in the Rilkean sense) childhood. But the rule of remembering, repeating, and working through does not govern only biographies and psychoanalyses. Without "choice or refusal,"*9 Brigge's notebooks also present what every her- meneutics has avoided: power. "For whatever of torment and horror has happened on places of execution, in torture-chambers, madhouses, opera- ting theatres, under the vaults of bridges in late autumn: all this has a tough imperishability, all this subsists in its own right. . . and clings to its own frightful reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of this; sleep gently files over such grooves in their brains. " But just as
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"dreams . . . trace the designs again,"" so do the Notebooks. That is, they intentionally refuse to provide a miniature portrait, as Rei1 quite rightly characterized it, in the spirit of German classicism; rather, they provide real-time analysis of engrams. It is a procedure as "fateful" as only pre-Gutenberg technologies could be. For what moved and delighted a certain insane king of France in passion plays was "that they continually added to and extended themselves, growing to tens of thousands of verses, so that ultimately the time in them was the actual time; somewhat as if one were to make a globe on the scale of the earth. ""
A globe on the scale I :I; Brigge could erect no finer monument to commemorate his descriptive procedure. He only needs to take care that nothing exceptional creeps into the process, even something as minimal as the act of writing itself. Yet as a twenty-eight-year-old, when he reads Baudelaire or the book of Job, Brigge is still not completely alphabetized. Because "an alphabetic individual thinks only in particulars,"" his deal- ings with texts remain a Passion Mystery.
There it lies before me in my own handwriting, what I have prayed, evening after evening. I transcribed it from the books in which I found it, so that it might be very near me, sprung from my hand like somethingof my own.
And now I want to write it once again, kneeling here before my table I want to write it; for in this way I have it longer than when I read it, and every word is sustained and has time to die away. "
Thus Brigge, in his personal book, despite Gutenberg and Anselmus, writes as if he were a simple monk-copyist. But if reading is choice and refusal, then models of texts, too, can only be permitted on the scale of I :I. Writing becomes, rather than miniatures of meaning, an exhaustion that endlessly refuses to end. For if Brigge has transcribed the passages (which of course are not disfigured with authorial names) from Baude- laire and Job, the effect is still as if he had never done it. He must, he intends to, "write it once again," so that each word can function in the real time of its being written down. "Transcribing is superior to reading and spelling in that the motoric representation of writing is immediately linked to the sensory representation of writing and to the motoric repre- sentation of language. "" And so it goes. The Notebooks actually contain two pages that Brigge transcribes from his transcription, that the pub- lisher Rilke transcribes from this transcription of a transcription, and that the printing press transcribes countless times (throughout which Baudelaire's French of course remains untranslated).
"How do we raise the level of performance in German? ," asked an art educator the year the Notebooks appeared. His answer: through "transcription exerci~es,''~t'he subroutine that psychophysics had so rig- orously isolated. Under the pressure of competition from other media,
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writing once again became what it had been before universal alphabetiza- tion-a professional specialty-while ceasing to be indivisibly and auto- matically coupled with reading. Because writing requires manual craft, transcription replaced reading among the practitioners of high literature. Dealing with texts thus became the One Way Street at whose junction Benjamin (a pupil of art-education) recognized the despotic traffic sign of the signifier. His observation that "the reader follows the movement of his ego in the free space of revery," whereas "the transcriber" lets this movement be "commanded"% could have been transcribed from the Notebooks.
The discourse network of 1900 rescinds the freedom of the writing imagination. No one who picks up a pen, from a child in school to a writer, is better positioned than the professional typists who with each "hand movement. . . follow the instructions literally, that is, do nothing more than what they stipulate. ""There is a method to exercises in writ- ing and transcribing. The age of engineers demands technically exact re- productions of technical processes.
Brigge's father had stipulated in his will that the doctors should per- form a perforation of his heart. The son explains why, rather than avoid- ing such a horrible sight, he reproduced it as a literary witness. "No, no, nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be fore- seen. In hagination one passes over them and does not notice that they are lacking, hasty as one is. But the realities are slow and indescribably detailed. "'* The sentences practice the insight they contain. They them- selves owe nothing to imagination, but are rather transcriptions of art- pedagogical method. Heinrich Scharrelmann had pointed to a fundamen- tal unimaginability years before Brigge.
It is unbelievable how little we adults see, how inexactly we observe things around us. . . . How many bicycles the city dwellerseesrush by every day. If one is not the owner of a bicycle, who knows all its parts very well, one might try to sit down and draw it. The most incredible sketches would be produced, because memory fails the drawer and he doesn't know where the pedals are attached, whether the chain is linked to the front or back wheel, where the seat is, and so forth. One need only attempt to make a mental sketch of any everyday object to be struck by the poverty and inexacmess of our notion of that
One need only read the perforation of the heart and the bicycle in paral- lel, as examples of literary and pedagogical practice, to determine that they are not examples at all. Writing circa 1900necessarily addresses operations and apparatuses as the only two approaches to the real. In fact, there can be no miniature portraits of the real, as they were cher- ished by inwardness and produced by the imagination. Circumstances
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that "are composed of many individual details" escape the grasp of any hermeneutics; they have to be scored up and denumerated. The reason is simple: there are only constructed facts or circumstances. Programs, dia- grams, and numbers exist in order to encode the real. Thus the philoso- pher Alain, continuing in the line of Scharrelmann and Brigge, summed up all the criticism of the poetics of Kant and Hegel in the terse observa- tion that one cannot count the columns of an imagined Pantheon. '"'
The fundamental unimaginability of the real calls for autopsies in which its discrete elements are specified one after another. That is what Brigge does in Paris when (avoiding the Pantheon) he makes torn-down houses, blind newspaper sellers, hospital waiting rooms, and moribund patients the subject of a writing that proceeds exhaustively, like tech- nological media. Poets who hate the approximate belong in a culture of doctors and engineers. Torn-down houses still count in technology, as do hopeless cases in medicine. The writer takes pleasure in making use of discarded material-and therefore broken-down walls take the place of the Hall of Fame. Engineers and doctors make particular things that function; Brigge's writing does the reverse when it "makes" the acciden- tal and singular newspaper seller "the way one makes a dead man. " "'I It changes nothing in the logic of construction.
It changes nothing, not even if the construction seems to be imaginary. Before Scharrelmann and thus long before Brigge, Daniel Paul Schreber, "in the unending monotony of my dreary life," trained himself in a kind of "drawing" that consisted in establishing representations, without pen- cil and paper, of landscapes and women's breasts "in such surprising faithfulness and true color" that Schreber himself and the divine rays "have almost the exact impression of the landscapes I want to see again as if they were actually there. " The solitary man at Sonnenstein thus imagined, but with such precision that the imagination could go hand in hand with physiology. "In the same way as rays throw on to my nerves pictures they would like to see . . . I too can in turn produce pictures for the rays which I want them to see. "'"zNothing distinguishes nerve rays thus impressed from the angel to whom Rilke, beginning with the Duino Elegies,showed the simplicities and details of the earth.
But those who have no dealings with nerves or angels are forced to develop techniques of material reproduction. In contrast to the inex- actness that adults betray in drawing bicycles, Scharrelmann's pupils practice gestural simulation.
When I next asked, "How does the knife sharpener work? ," many children were at once prepared to imitate the movements of the sharpener. They imitated not only the pumping of the foot on the pedal and the hands holding the knife, but they also mimicked the bent back, the head thrust forward, the shifting glances to
? check the edge, brushing of dust, and so on, so naturalistically, carefully, and completely that 1 was astounded at the accuracy and certainty of the children's ability to observe. I myself have sometimes learned to observe carefully some adult action by first watching children imitate it. ""
This, too, is a method for raising the level of achievement in German. Instead of writing interpretations and thoughtful essays, the pupils en- gage in a bodily reproduction of technical processes, a reproduction that teaches observation and description. One need only trade the knife sharp- ener for an epileptic (which is more appropriate for the literary use of discarded material), and one has "The Portrayal of the So-called Jerk-Tic by Rainer Maria Rilke. " As a psychiatrist showed in a study with that title, the Notebooks provide a clinically exact picture of the illness, com- pletely in keeping with the conception of it in contemporary medical sci- ence. IMIt is not a question of the so-called jerk-tic's portrayal by Rainer Maria Rilke, however, but of its simulation by Malte Laurids Brigge: in the description, Brigge follows his mad subject, takes on his anxieties and gestures, and only thus encounters something real that would remain closed to empathy or hermeneutics. When a man with jerk-tic and an- other man who simulates him as naturalistically, carefully, and com- pletely as Scharrelmann's class simulated the knife sharpener, when these twowalk down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, one after the other, then an allegory walks through Paris: the writer as simulator of madness.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge could perhaps better be called Memoirs of My Simulations of Nervous Illness. Just as the rule of ex- haustion that governs all Brigge's descriptions returns in the writing itself, so also does the procedure of simulation. A key passage shows that Brigge's hands as well as his feet follow the tracks of madness. After he has noted how all prearranged meanings vanish at the moment of death and how a tumor in the brain becomes the sun of a new world, there is a note that describes his own note taking. "For a while yet 1 can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words I do not mean.
The time of that other interpretation will dawn, when not one word will remain upon another, and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. " '"'
Anyone who, as occult medium, predicts the end of hermeneutics and the victory of occult media, has a right not to be subjected to her- meneutics. No commentary, then, only further evidence for "the time of that other interpretation. "
In the century of the child, there was a reform movement for freeessay writing. The free essay was the opposite practice of the rereading that classical-romantic times established as the rule of the German essay-
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? whether as interpretation that presented another reading of the work or as the thoughtful essay that promoted thoughtful, writing hands. In the free essay, that the pupil does not "reread" anything, that "his pencil flies across the table," is "just right. "'" "To produce means to give the creative power free reign over the treasure chests of our brains. '""- The pupils are thus permitted to write what is inscribed in their brains, not what they believe their teacher believes they ought to be thinking. This freedom is "not at all easy" to bring about: "They always insist they aren't allowed to write 'that kind of thing. '"'" The reason: for a century the pedagogic essay stood under the sign or title "Our School Essay as Disguised Dime Novelist. " Pupils have "had eight years of instruction in essay writing, have written 'good' essays every week; every sentence has been scru- tinized, filed down, and propped up. " They have "had to analyze charac- ters in William Tell and write reports about deep-sea fauna. " Because a logic of the signified stood over the whole process, the essay "was charged with the task of unifying all preceding exercises (orthographic, gram- matical, etc. ) into a whole. "'"
The free essay, by contrast, uncouples the subroutines whose imagi- nary unity has been called German. It is pure writing: writing minus grammar, orthography, and the norm of the high idiom. But that can only occurwhen rereading is no longer practiced, by teachers as well as pupils, when essays no longer return censored in red ink. The self-imposed cen- sorship that forbids writing "that kind of thing" is the "feed forward" command of a discourse carried on with the Other. A number of un- counted voices circa 1900 demanded an end to the red marks in the es- say's margin,"" until an elementary school teacher in Leipzig came out with a monograph on the subject. Paul Georg Munch's polemic Around the Red Inkwell corrects essay corrections with probably the best-proven means that psychophysics can muster against the presumptions of sense. "These strange distorted pictures between the lines! These ugly red checks, needles, squiggles, claws, thorns, snakes . . . ! And everything conscien- tiously registered once more on the margin! Doesn't this edge really look like the ragged flag of Chinese marauders? Turn the essay upside down and just let the image of bum marks and black ink sink in: you'd think you were in the company of the mummies of tattooed south-sea island-
ers! ""' A class of signs breaks apart under ethnological observation until nothing remains but a naked, Nieeschean power of inscription. Munch uses turning upside down (the technique Ebbinghaus and Morgenstern recommended for newspapers and the contents of images)'I' to urge his colleagues in the educational bureaucracy to forget their forebear Lind- horst and to read, not the essays, but their own corrections as squiggles and ink marks.
? Teachers without red ink necessarily become experimenters, and free- essay-writing pupils become their subjects. "The nature of pedagogical problems" is identical to "the question of the localization of mental opera- tions in the brain. In both cases experiments are required. ""' If Ziehen's association tests with school children in Jena had the theoretical effect of freeing psychology "from the unnatural, but until now unshaken patron- age of logic," then the free essay had the effect, which puzzled Ziehen, of being able "to construct in a practical way-sit venza verbo-instruction
in association. " It' It provides "immensely important documentation in empirical pedagogy" and gives "the scientists" among the teaching staff "findings in experimental psychology. ""' Thus one should not be taken in by the attribute of freedom. What is at stake when pupils free associate on topics of their own choosing has nothing to do with the autonomous child's mind of I800. What applied, rather, was the fundamental psycho- analytic rule that an uncontrolled flow of speech liberates the fatality of the unconscious. Experimental psychology is nothing without evidence, data-which is why uncorrected essays provide an opportunity for teach- ers to trade in their obsolete red ink for a more scientific variety of marker, one that can be used in statistical tests and evaluations of The Evidence of Hearsay in Children. "" Literary bohemians, however, who could not be suspected of favoring disciplinary measures, supported these methods. For Peter Hille, any adults who perpetuate the irresponsible "old-style education" have "no business with children. " Their new privilege was to "oversee this beautiful, fresh young world. ""'
There is no such thing as a document that documents nothing but its author. Automatic writing, psychoanalytic association, the free essay- all provide evidence of powers that reduce the writer to a medium. Even impressionistic essay exercises necessarily issue in dictation.
I conduct impressionistic exercises daily with my nine- and ten-year-olds. I have six or eight of them come up to the classroom windows with pencil and paper and have them observe things in their environment in the natural light, rather than in the lighting of the classroom, and then write about what they see. They are to name the simplest things on the street and should see how the moment brings these things together. Their thoughts can then be embodied in words without constraint, their senses can dictate their experiences into writing without delay, and this proceeds without any thought being given as to whether the sentences might yield a "good" essay or
In Munch's experiment, then, the senses dictate, and these in turn take dictation from whatever occurs on the street. It is no accident that his book ends with an emphatic reference to the new Exercise-Program for the Infantry, which appeared in 1906 and also programmed the imme- diacy of stimulus and response. l" Whether it is a pencil or rifle, then, the
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? hands that hold it are unencumbered by an ego (or, in the end, a teacher) and its intentions. Consequences other than depersonalization would contradict a discursive rule that stipulates "the avoidance of orthography, punctuation, as well as words and phrases not based in sensation" l Z n and that applies to children as well as the insane. The free essay in German was an experiment in coupling the two impossible sentences, I am writ- ing and I am delirious.
This linkage is quite clear in the experiment set up by Oskar Ostermai, a teacher in Dresden. One year before Brigge, the serious ]ournu1 of Ger- man Znstnrction reported unheard-of news to its readers.
I had a seventh form. The children were used to writing free essays on their expe- riences and did this with enthusiasm and joy. One day a child arrived at nine o'clock instead of at eight. The child had a letter from his father, which stated that the child had become sick the previous evening, but had insisted that he be allowed to go to school at nine o'clock at least so that he could write his essay. And what did the child want to write? "How I got a fever last night. " At ten o'clock the child had to return home and was then absent for several days. "'
Thus, a child with a fever writes how he got the fever. The senses that dictate their data into writing without delay are delirious. But only a fa- ther still calls the delirium an illness; the child and the teacher take it as a necessary and sufficient ground for essays in which the act of writing guarantees what is written. For a single school hour the child appears out of the indistinguishable ground of all media and articulates this ground, before it again becomes all powerful. Hall's A Study of Fears continues its experimental course, and madness circa 1900radically dis- solves its old affinity with illness and finds a place far from pathology-in discourse itself. "There will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words 1do not mean. The time of that other interpretation will dawn, when not one word will remain upon another, and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. "
Writers appear in the place of the feverish child that writes down his fever. At twenty-eight Brigge is still unable to understand how he "man- aged wholly to return from the world" of his childhood, speechless fe- vers. '*' Because he does not understand, the fever's recurrence in the in- sane asylum is no reason to wait for the doctor in the next room. "Like one who hears a glorious language and feverishlyconceives plans to write, to create in it,''IZ1 Brigge leaves and runs to his desk. There he notes down what fever is, freed from the tutelage of logic and the high idiom- namely, not fever at all, not a nosological entity, but "the Big Thing. " Only words from a child's language could adequately represent the Thing in (to use the jargon of German teachers) "form and content. "
Brigge writes free essays. His Notebooks do not parallel the art-
? education movement in the history of ideas; they carry out that move- ment's program. Informed contemporaries, such as the experimental psychologist Ernst Meumann, saw that the free essay provoked "the out- growth of expressionism and futurism" as well as of "modern lyric po- etry. " Indeed, it taught "futuregenerations . . . linguistic confusion and undisciplined thinking. " I" Germanists, however, when confronted with a meaning that falls like rain, have little inkling of "the other interpreta- tion. " They have searched meticulously for the artistic symmetries, ar- rangements, and unifying laws in Brigge's serial notes and have attempted to weaken the suspicion of Angelloz that such things don't exist. One must suspend the interpretive disposition in writing a free essay, or else the essay will become "memorandum stuff, slogan provisions, dressings for skeletal intentions. " 12' Like Munch's pupils, Brigge notes the simplest occurrences with the simplest aleatory method: "how the moment brings these things together. "
When Rilke, with Brigge, opts for writing and against psychoanalysis, he sounds like Munch: "Piety keeps me from allowing this intrusion, this great cleaning and straightening up that life does not do-from this cor- rection of a written page of life, which I imagine as thoroughly marked with red improvements-a foolish image and certainly a completely false one. """ Foolish images do demonstrate something, then-namely, that literature circa 1900joined the struggle around the red inkwell. Rilke's image is false only in its judgment of a science that would do as little to restore proper form and meaning to errors in language as would litera- ture, and would instead use them to trace unconscious signifies. In any case, Rilke's renunciation of psychoanalysis makes clear that The Note- books of Malte Laurids Brigge indeed me the written page of life in un- corrected rough form.
Georg Heym, writer and doctoral candidate at the University of Wiirz- burg, received the following response from one of its committees: "The law and political science faculty has decided not to accept the work sub- mitted by you in its present form, in that it does not meet the faculty's requirements. According to the report, the work contains so many typo- graphical errors and deficiencies in sentence structure that it obviously has not been proofread after having been typed. "I2- This officially deter- mines what is not a work and who is not an author. In the discourse net- work of 1800,to which faculties continue to belong, rereading estab- lished a corpus out of heaps of paper and an imaginary body called the author out of people. But someone like Carl Einstein's Bebuquin, who prays for the sickness and dissociation of his limbs, in order to attain an- other kind of writing through "metamorphosis" or "dissolution," 128 someone like Brigge or Heym, who deliver uncorrected pages, whose
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? hands write independently of the ego, functions differently. Authors are not needed for utilizing discarded psychophysical nonsense. Arbitrary in- dividual cases are necessary and sufficient; they count as discarded mate- rial to be utilized. The pencil in the woman's hands, which do not use it at all, signals something quite simple to Brigge the observer: he, the writer, is one of those whom his notebooks so exhaustively record-"refuse" or "husks of humanity that fate has spewed out. '''Lq
Intransitive writing, practiced by writers as well as children, whom the discourse network of 1900 "places side by side,""" is an anonymous and arbitrary function. Now that children no longer perform the brilliant feats brought about by premature alphabetization, in which letters imme- diately became hallucinations, the recruitment of well-known authors no longer takes place. Arbitrary individual cases that for one reason or an- other have acquired paper (perhaps given to them outright by members of the art-education movement) just gather aleatory data. "If I give three eight- or nine-year-old boys a few cents for spending money and send them to the fair in Leipzig, then two of the three will certainly buy them- selves a notebook. And it doesn't matter how tempting . . . the roller coaster or Turkish gingerbread are: two of the three will still buy note- books! "'" So much for the initial situation from the point of view of the experimenter. Now for the experimental confirmation from the point of view of the experimental subject.
If I h a d a n o t e b o o k a t h a n d , o r i f t h e r e w e r e a n y o t h e r o p p o r t u n i t y , I w o u l d w r i t e down what occursto me. Something is always occurring to me. So I incur a major occurrence, which I'd like to record with incurred innocence.
It's not all too hot; blue floods through the sky, humid and blown up from the coast; each house is next to roses, some are completely sunk in them. I want to buy a book and a pencil; I want to write down as much as possible now, so that it won't all flow away. I lived for so many years, and it has all sunk.