No More Learning

Ebbinghaus, having been alphabetized, could read silently, without moving his mouth, but for test series he preferred the old-fashioned method of reading aloud at a tempo that could be mechanically di- rected. " Of course, typewriters that eliminated all the individuality of script had recently appea~ed:~but a psychophysical graphology arose in a counter movement and focused on the difference between standardized letters and unconscious-automatic hands that write. It was concerned with what under normal conditions would be considered a ''superfluous addition to the letters. "" If "it is emphasized-and rightly so-that a pupil should not learn material that is meaningless to him,"" each psycho- physical experimental subject-from the infant to the psychology pro- fessor-is an exception to such pedagogical norms. All the abilities and inabilities despised in I 800 return, not as simple regressions from an erst- while culture, but as objects of analysis and decomposition.
The cultural-technological standards do not represent Man and his Norm. They articulate or decompose bodies that are already dismem- bered. Nature does its own work before any experimenter arrives? ' Apo- plexy, bullet wounds to the head, and paralysis made possible the funda- mental discoveries upon which every connection drawn between cultural practices and physiology is based. In 1861 Paul Broca traced motoric aphasia, or the inability to pronounce words despite unimpaired con- sciousness and hearing, to lesions in a circumscribed area of the cerebral cortex. In I 874 Karl Wernicke made the mirroring discovery that sensory aphasia, or the inability to hear words despite unimpaired speech capac- ity, corresponded to a deficit in other areas of the brain. The method of isolating and measuring cultural practices by reference to deficiencies led finally to the decomposition of discourse into single parameter^. '^ Circa 1900 optical disturbances corresponding to the acoustical disturbances investigated by Broca and Wernicke, the alexias or agraphias, also be- came familiar. Further, a certain reversal in relation to linguistic reference
THEGREATLALUd 2. 15
? 216 1900
and its agnosias was discovered, for there turned out to be an oral, and then a graphic asymbolia, or the inability "to find the verbal image of an object" even when the doctor would show it to the patient. '" Diverse sub- routines finally had to be distinguished within each cultural practice; for example, writing included "dictation, copying, written description, and spontaneous writing" "-and each of the subroutines might lead to dif- ferent results. What we ordinarily call language is thus a complex linkage of brain centers through no less numerous direct and indirect nerve con- nections. As Nietzsche had prophesied and, as a paralytic, demonstrated to his psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen, language breaks down into individual elements: into optical, acoustical, sensory, and motoric nervous impulses and only then into signifier/signified/referent.
Research into aphasia marked a turning point in the adventures of speech. Disturbances in language no longer converged in the beautiful wordlessness of the romantic soul. If there are "as many sources of lan- guagedisturbanceasthereareorgansofspeechwantingtospeak,"" then the single "oh" becomes only an incidental case. s' The Poetry that lis- tened to or inspired that "oh" is replaced by sciences. Only on the basis of psychophysics does it make terminological sense for Saussure, in found- ing a new linguistics, to decompose the linguistic sign into the notion of a concept (signified) and an acoustic-sensory image (signifier),'' or for Freud, more copied than understood by his students, similarly to divide "thing representation" [Sucbvorstellung] from "word representation" [Wortvorstellung]. "
The cultural goal of universal alphabetization fades away with the "oh" of the soul. The pedagogy of 1900,because it was applied physi- ology, was preoccupied with standardizing, individually and successively, the brain regions of its pupils. The center of concrete representations, the motoric and sensorial centers for speech and writing-all had to be approached separately. "The reading-writing method in no way corre- sponds to the state of contemporary science. "'" Because not every local center has direct nerve connections to every other, there is no unity of the transcendental signified capable of organically developing speaking and hearing, writing and reading out of one another. The pedagogical un- coupling of the cultural-technological subroutines simply followed cuts made by the scalpel. Children circa 1900learned to read without under- standing and to write without thinking. The investigation of aphasia is always already its production.
In 1913Wassily Kandinsky published a volume of poems in German. He accompanied the title Sounds with some very practical tips. He meant not romantic primal sounds, but "inner sounds" that remain when one has repeated words until they become senseless-a proven and oft-employed
? THE GREAT LALUa 217
means of simulating aphasia. Thus Kandinsky's poetry isolated the sound images of words physiologically with the exactness that his painting iso- lated colors and forms. That does not hinder Germanists from attacking him in the name of a linguistics that grew out of the same premises. '' But alexia seems to haunt the books of its forgotten investigators . . .
In 1902Hofmannsthal's A Letter appeared with a self-diagnosis of the sender.
And could I, if otherwise I am still the same person, have lost from my inscrutable self all traces and scars of this creation of my most intensive thinking-lost them so completely that in your letter now lying before me the title of my short treatise stares at me strange and cold? At first 1 could not comprehend it as the familiar image of conjoined words, hut had to study it word by word, as though these Latin terms thus strung together were meeting my eye for the first time. "
One who writes that he is hardly able to read any more is virtually for- mulating a case of sensory and near-amnesiac alexia. But the person is Phillip Lord Chandos, and the pile of letters that refuses to coalesce into the images of words is the title of a Latin tract that Chandos has recently written. In the meantime he has not lost the ability to write (say letters). But he has lost a part of his ability to read, and he suffers from a thor- oughly physiological "dullness" of the "brain. "" Whereas Ofterdingen or Guido could give to even the most foreign books their own titles, the writer of 1902can no longer even understand his own title. We can read "Chandos" in place of "the patient" when a great physiologist describes the symptoms of alexia:
T'he patient can see the letters sharply enough, he can write them spontaneously, eventually he can even copy them without error-and yet he is unahle to read anything printed or written, even the words he had just clearly and correctly writ- ten (notes, short letters). . . . Thealexic recognizes single letters or even syllables, but he cannot grasp them successively and retain them as complete words so as to arrive a t an understanding of what he has read, even for single words. "'
The solidarity of physiology and literature extends to concrete details. One isolates the symptoms to which the other attests. Nietzsche praised the half-blindness that kept him from reading and allowed only the writ- ing of signifiers. Chandos experiences a similar blindness vis-A-vis sig- nifieds, but he develops a new discourse out of alexia (just as sensory lan- guage disturbances often influence the motoric aspect of language):b' he avoids "even pronouncing" signifieds, above all the transcendental ones ("Spirit, soul, or body"), and envisions instead "a language in which not one word is known to me, a language in which mute things speak to rne. ""I In much the same way, pedagogues versed in psychophysics sepa- rated reading and writing, because neither should be confused with sig-
? 218 1900
nifieds and referents, from wordless observational or practical instruc- ti~n. ~As' if he were a pupil in their school, the Lord finds that "a dog in the sun, an old churchyard, a cripple" and so on are "sublime revelations" beyond all wordsMThis is not surprising in the cripple he himself is. Be- cause they switch off medial operations of selection, aphasia and alexia necessarily present the nameless and formless. In aphasics, Nietzsche's terrible voice returns to the physiology of everyday life. "Speaking, whis- tling, clapping the hands, etc. , everything is to their ears the same in- comprehensible noise. " *'
Aphasia, alexia, agraphia, agnosia, asymbolia-in this long list of dys- functionalities the noise that precedes every discourse becomes at once theme and method. The products of decomposed language observed in the experimental subjects are as usable as the material provided by the experimenters. What terrified Nietzsche and Chandos discovered as a wondrous, foreign realm can also be transmitted. Discursive manipula- tions in the discourse network of 1900were quite extensive. Psycho- physics transmits white noise through a certain filter so that what comes across is, say, pink noise; whatever the eyes and ears of the receiver make of this is then the experimental result.
Ebbinghaus further tested his nonsense syllables on others. But some- thing remarkable occurred, for not all experimental subjects had his com- mand of the flight of ideas. For some,
at least in the begmning, it is hardly possible to refrain from the learning aids of all sorts of memory supports, to perceive the syllables as mere letter combinations and memorize them in a purely mechanical fashion. Without any effort o r voli- tion on their part, all kinds of associated representations constantlv fly toward them from individual syllables. Something occurs to them, indeed a motley of things: a syllabic assonance, relations among letters, similar sounding meaningful words or the names of persons, animals, and so forth, meanings in a foreign lan- guage, etc. . . . For example, pek is expanded to Peking, chi to child; sep recalls Joseph,neis the English word nice. . . . In the case of one subject, the syllables fuuk neit stimulated the idea "Fahrenheit," in another case, jus dum (via the French juser) suggested the notion of stupid jabbering; the syllable sequence dosch pum f a r lot was on one occasion joined together in the brief sentence: "The bread fire licks. ""
Such is the countertest to aphasia. The farrago of syllables that aphasi- acs produce from signifieds is put before normal speakers in order to see how they produce signifieds out of a syllabic hodgepodge and at the same time betray a sense-producing notion, which in the case of jas dum still means talking nonsense. In this way, the difference between Heating and Understanding can be quantified. An experiment run under that title sent nonsense syllables, such as paum and maum, through telephone and
? THE GRFAT LALUa 219
phonograph channels; subjects (in spite or of because of the frequency band restriction) received "the more probable baum ['tree'],'' thus pro- viding experimental verification of Nietzsche's oracles of language theory, or demonstrating that discourses are "eclectic combinations" of noise spectra. O' "We find it much easier to fantasize an approximate tree. . . . We are artists more than we suspect. "
Thus a physiological work entitled The Brain and Language, which reconstructs the path from the speechless patches of light and noise the infant perceives to the ordering of images and speech sounds, comes to the conclusion: "We proceed like poets. ""*But such poetic activity, rhym- ing Baum and maum or hitting upon faak neit I Fahrenheit, having been confirmed by Nietzschean brain researchers, no longer has any need of a muse. Even in the greatest authors, the unconscious functions of the brain are at work. A judgment on Anselmus's ecstasy beneath the elder tree, "made possible on the basis of a psychiatric and scientific contribu- tion,""' led the psychiatrist Otto Klinke to conclude that Anselmus, in lis- tening to the whispering of the three sisters, was clinically psychotic:
It can also happen, and with the mentally ill it does, that these sounds and words in a certain rhythm . . . are heard bv the inner ear as occurring at a regular tempo and are projected to a spot in the person's own body or onto the environment. This rhythm, expanding to associations, alliterations, and even rhymes, is often brought ahout by noises in the ear that are synchronous with heart or pulse rates, hut it can also be provoked and maintained by regular external sounds, such as marching to rhythm, or, recently, the regular rolling of train wheels. We see Anselmus in a similar situation at the beginning of the story. '"
This conclusion abolishes the precondition for Poetry. " The noises that led Anselmus to the Mother's Mouth lose all human quality, while his interpretation of them, called Serpentina, loses any basis. But magic is not lost, as it was in the age of enlightened fathers, when the Elf King's whis- pering voice became rustling leaves. Psychophysics advances, beyond all attribution of meaning and its transparent arbitrariness, to the meaning- less body, which is a machine among machines. A roaring in the ears and the roaring of trains are equally capable of providing disordered brains with assonances, alliterations, and rhymes. The fact that "Sister, sister, swing in the shimmer" was once written down as Poetry is no longer ap- plauded by psychophysics.
It had hardly any occasion to applaud. Circa 1900 noise was every- where. A psychotic in his cell constantly hears imbecilic voices that snap up words in the imbecility of his surroundings "which have the same or nearly the same sound as what they have to say or rattle off. " Like the subjects in Ebbinghaus's experiment, the hallucinations rhyme "Sahtiago" with "Cathargo" or (in a somewhat Saxon accent) "Briefbeschwerer"
? 220 1900
with "Herr Priifer schw6rt. "'' A psychiatric researcher drew the sad con- clusion from his association tests that rhymes such as HerzlSchmerz or BrustlLust, those honorable old warhorses of German Poetry, flood the inner ear "only in psychic disorders, that is, wherever so-called flight of ideas is the rule. " Ziehen cites a manic patient who associates Hund- Bund-Schund [dog-band-trash]," and who thus calls the output of rhym- ing words by its proper name.
Decisively, trash and nonsense had been scientifically recorded in 1893, not only in 1928,as even an informed literary scholarship would admit. " Lyric poetry, too, would have to check over its jingles in the Handbook of Physiological Psychology (the title of Ziehen's book). "Rrustl Lust" and "Schmerzl Herz" are among the examples presented by Arno Holz in his Slimy Rhymes and the Nonsense of Rhymes in General. The transition to modem free verse cannot always be described as an inherently literary innovation. When rhyme shows up in laboratories and madhouses, it must vanish from the printed page if poets and psychotics are not to be con fused.
Yet free verse was only one historical option circa 1900. A second, paradoxical option was mimicry. If the clattering of trains could suggest rhymes to the mentally ill, the lyric poet could detect new rhymes in such poetry of the body. The railroad itself, rather than an author or High Ger- man, speaks in Detlev von Liliencron's "Rattattattat. "-' And if marching to rhythm has the same effect, then Liliencron's rhyme play of "Persian Shah" and "klingling, bumbum and tschingdada" logically follows.
A military-musical sound source transmits tschingdada; the experi- mental subjects are asked if any rhymes occur to them. Such was the pro- cedure, in the year of the Gallows Songs (I~os)of,Narziss Ach, M. D. and Ph. D. His test consisted in meaningless syllables (excluding the syl- lable ach, unfortunately), to which subjects, under hypnosis and in a nor- mal state, were to respond with meaningless rhymes or assonances. " Difficulties appear only if the permitted reactions, unlike Ach's test or "Lalulii," are to be exclusively meaningful words. Hermann Gutzmann's
eclectic combination mauml Baum is harmless; tschingdada provokes foreign words; but things become truly aporetic with Stefan George. The inventor of so many unheard-of and nonetheless German rhymes has all discourse culminate in a syllabic hodgepodge that chokes off any reaction in the experimental subjects.
We were in that special region of unremitting punishments where the people are who had been unwilling to say, "0Lord! ," and where the angels are who said, "We want. " There in the place of their torment they blaspheme the eternal judge and pound their breasts; they claim to be greater than the blessed and despise their joys. But every third day a shrill voice calls from above: "Tiholu- Tiho1u"-
? a tangled confusion results the damned fall silent; trembling, gnashing their teeth, they prostrate themselves on the ground or try to hide themselves in the glowing dark depths. --
The dream of "Tiholu" perverts George's lifelong inspiration for rhyme and translation: Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante inflicted on his damned every imaginable speech disturbance, whereas the blessed were with the Word and God in one and the same measure. George, however, has the damned speak, but only so long as that shrill voice, in its mechanically regular act every three days, does not deliver its catchphrase. Nonsense syllables are the divine punishment that reduces them to a chaos of bodies. People who did not want to call out to their Lord are answered by the Discourse of the Master with his own, very contemporary perversion: hell as a random generator.
In discussing his theory of memory and its inscription, Nietzsche once mentioned the "slogan and catchphrase" [Schhg- und Stichwort]-* and with that illustrated the process he was describing. * Psychophysical ex- periments impose slogans and catchphrases until the tortured disappear into glowing depths or render up the physiology of cultural practices. With patients like Chandos, whose disturbances allow them "to read cor- rectly individual letters, but not to combine them into words," Ziehen recommends that one "spell a word for the patient and have him put it together, or, in reverse, present a word somehow and have the patient spell it. "" These catchphrases were such hits that they reappear every- where circa 1900.
Freud analyzed a female hysteric who "at nineteen, . . . lifted up a stone and found a toad under it, which made her lose her power of speech for hours afterwards. " Emmy v. N. fled a psychiatrist "who had com- pelled her under hypnosis to spell out the word 't . . . o . . . a . . . d. "' Before she would go to the couch, she made Freud "promise never to make her say it. "" As if he had been a wimess to the first psychiatrist's consultation, Make Laurids Brigge overhears a doctor-patient conversa- tion through the walls of the Salpihriere, Jean Martin Charcot's great healing or breeding institution for hysterias:
But suddenly everything was still, and in the stillness a superior, self-complacent voice, which I thought I knew, said: "Ria! " A pause. "Riez! Mais riez, riez! " 1 was already laughing. It was inexplicable that the man on the other side of the partition didn't want to laugh. A machine rattled, but was immediately silent again, words were exchanged, then the same energetic voice rose again and
The prefixes Schbg and Stich literally mean "blow," or "hit," and "stab. " The Ger- man terms for "slogan," "catchphrase," and "header" thus retain violent overtones of forc- ible, abbreviated mnemonic impression less obvious in their English equivalents. [Trans. ]
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ordered: "Dites-nous le mot: avant. " And spelling it: "A-v-a-n-t. " Silence. "On
n'entend rien. Encore une fois . . . "'"
Even in its oral, imperative form, the slogan and catchphrase is inscrip- tion. Chopping and iteration reduce discourse to discrete unities, which as keyboard or store of signs immediately affect bodies. Instead of trans- lating visual language into audible language, as the phonetic method did, breathing the beautiful inwardness of music into speech, psychophysics imposes the violence of spacing. Localization is the catchphrase of all aphasia research, spelling the psychiatrist's overheard command. It is only logical for the catchphrase technique to be applied to reading and writing.
Following the procedure of Helmholtz, who built device after device to measure reaction-time thresholds, the psychophysics of the nineties went to work measuring reading with kymographs, tachistoscopes, horopter- scopes, and chronographs. There was intense competition among these machines to determine the smallest fraction of time in which reading could be measured in experimental subjects. Thus the physiology of the senses and aphasia research were joined: James McKeen Cattell calculated in milliseconds the time in which a letter, exposed to view for one light- ning instant, traveled from one language area to the next. In other experi- ments, however, he (and later Benno Erdmann and Raymond Dodge) worked with tenths of seconds, which could measure subjects' eye move- ments and their backtracking to reread. By contrast, Wilhelm Wundt's experimental tachistoscope continuously diminished a letter's exposure time to the limit value of null. Only at 0. 01sec "can one be sure that any movement of the eye or wandering of attention is impossible. "" Experi- mental subjects (who were once more also the professorial directors of the experiments) thus sat, chained so as to hinder or even prohibit move- ment, facing black viewing boxes out of which for the duration of a flash-a pioneer of reading research, Frans Cornelius Donders, actually used electrical induction sparks"-single letters shone out. This is mo-
dernity's allegory of the cave.
"Lightning. Dionysus appears in emerald beauty," said the dithyramb.
A tachistoscopic trick-and letters appear for milliseconds in scriptual beauty.
"Stick a wise word in," said Dionysus in Ariadne's ear. The device also writes signs, whether wise or meaningless, onto the retina, signs that can only be taken literally. After the elimination of rereading and the rec- ognition of complete words, even the educated fall back on "the most primitive spelling" as the minimum and standard of all reading. *' This was probably the first time that people in a writing culture were reduced to the naked recognition of signs. Writing ceased to wait, quiet and dead, on patient paper for its consumer; writing ceased to be sweetened by pas-
? try baking and mothers' whispering-it now assaulted with the power of
a shock. Catchphrases emerge from a store of signs to which they return -with unimaginable speed, leaving behind in the subject inscriptions with- out ink or consciousness. The tachistoscope is a typewriter whose type hits the retina rather than paper. The mindless deciphering of such blind- ings can be called reading only by a complete uncoupling from orality, as if the madness of Heerbrand and his dancing Fraktur letters had be- come a standard. The helplessness of the experimental subjects before the tachistoscope ensures that all "processes" whose "uncommonly complex embodiment" is reading"-from the recognition of letters to that of
words, from speed to error quota-will yield only measurable results. Standards have nothing to do with Man. They are the criteria of media and psychophysics, which they abruptly link together. Writing, discon- nected from all discursive technologies, is no longer based on an individ- ual capable of imbuing it with coherence through connecting curves and
the expressive pressure of the pen; it swells in an apparatus that cuts up individuals into test material. Tachistoscopes measure automatic re- sponses, not synthetic judgments. But they thus restore the reputation of spelling, which had generally come to be viewed with contempt.
In 1803the psychiatrist Hoffbauer neatly calculated the normally edu- cated person's reading speed.
An average accomplished reader reads three signatures per hour, when the latter are of the type of the present volume and the subject of the book causes him no difficulty. On a rough estimate, he needs no more than one and a quarter minutes to read one page. There are thirty lines to the page, and every line contains thirty letters; thus in one and a quarter minutes or seventy-five seconds he must recog- nize and distinguish nine hundred letters. The recognition of a letter occurs as the result of an inference. Thus our reader makes twelve different inferences in a sec- ond. . . . Ifoneassumesthatthereaderisfollowingthewriter,sothatthelatter's thoughts are transmitted to the soul of the reader, one is struck with amazement. Some have wanted to conclude from this and other examples that we perceive objects without k i n g conscious of it. This does not seem to follow in the least. Rb
The mathematics of Bildung went this far and no further, if for no other reason than that numbers were written out. A reconstruction of com- pleted alphabetization, from a whole signature back to a single letter, cul- minates in reverence for a consciousness that can make 1 2 inferences per second, inferences that certainly do not justify the conclusion that the consciousness that has to accompany all my reading (to adapt Kant's phrase) amounts to nothing. As long as reading transported thoughts from soul to soul and had its norm, as with Anton Reiser, in the tempo of speech, it was in fact recognition, and any notion of the unconscious, technically defined, was absurd.
The automatism of tachistoscopic word exposition is not designed to
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transport thoughts. But there are other reasons the IO ms for entire words undercuts Hoffbauer's twelfth of a second per letter. An apparatus does not let alphabetization run its course, then applaud it afterwards. The apparatus itself, like Dionysus, dictates the tempo of exposition with lighming speed. Such procedures shed light on functions as foreign to the individual and consciousness as writing ultimately is. Psychophysics (and it thus made film and futurism possible) investigated "only the move- ments of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intelligence and for that reason are much more significant. "R*Cultural technologies could be attributed to Man only as long as they were marked off along the abscissa of biological time, whereas the time of the apparatus liquidates Man. Given the apparatus, Man in his unity decomposes, on the one hand, into illusions dangled in front of him by conscious abilities and faculties and, on the other hand, into unconscious automatisms that Hoffbauer hardly felt the need to dignify with a refutation.
It was illusion for the first typists to want to be able to see and read the text as it was being written, to want "view typewriters. " Automatized hands work better when blind. It was illusion for educated subjects to be "certain" that they had "seen the 'whole"' in the tachistoscope. In the realm of milliseconds, unaffected by introspection, even the most trained reader's eye proceeds by successive spelling. RRIt was an illusion of "sub- jective judgment" that Fraktur was more readable than roman script. Precisely the "people who much prefer to read Fraktur and believe they can d o so with greater ease are the ones who require more reading time. "*'
Hermann Bahr hit upon a succinct rule for all such illusion. Classical alphabetization had attempted to mediate between Man and World (while avoiding all discourses), but: "The experiment with man has failed. And the experiment with the world has failed. The experiment can now take place only where man and the world come together (sensation, impres- sion. "" All that remains of the real is a contact surface or skin, where something writes on something else. This is precisely the tachistoscopic effect planned by a literature intent on addressing "nerves" in order to "bring about certain moods" rather than "stammering about nonsensical pleasures. "" It would thus assault the language centers in the brain indi- vidually and successively. Nietzsche's view that language first transposes nervous impulses into images and then images into sounds is the most exact characterization of literary language. Holz not only replaced rhyme with a number of acoustic effects; he also asked "why the eye should not have its particular pleasures in the printed type of a poem. "" These plea- sures are not miniature images of Man and World, but rather (as if they were calculated on the tachistoscope) ergonomically optimal uses of read- ing time. Beginning in 1897, Holz typographically centered the lines of
? his poetry for physiological reading ease. "If I left the axis at the begin- ning of the line, rather than in the middle, the eye would always be forced to travel twice as far. "" What the verses have in view, then, are not read- ers and their understanding, but eyes and their psychophysics, in other words: "Movements of matter, which are not subject to the laws of intel- ligence and for that reason are much more significant. " Holz's Phantasus, rather than addressing fantasy as the surrogate of all senses in the finest romantic manner, reckons with unconscious optokinetics (which Hus- serl's contemporaneous phenomenology thematized). The aesthetics of reception had become quite different circa 1900:instead of cornmunica- tion and its myth of two souls or consciousnesses, there are numerical relations between the materiality of writing and the physiology of the senses. Whether and how actual readers approve of their nerves having been saved such and such many milliseconds is of no concern to Holz the lyric poet. Whereas his predecessors had invited readers to pass over letters, he was concerned with technical calculations concerning the ma- teriality of his medium. Spengler's desire that "men of the new generation devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology" came somewhat after the fact. " Since Nietzsche, "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology. "
The movements of matter had their greatest triumph in the field of writ- ing. An experimental subject wrote in a test journal, after thirty-eight days devoted to typing practice, "To-day I found myself not infrequently strik- ing letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves just below the level of consciousness. "" Psycho- physics investigated or generated unconscious automatisms in handwrit- ing as well. Ecriture automatrque appeared as early as r850, but only among American spiritualists; it was not analyzed until the turn of the century. 96After the theoretical work of F. W. H. Myers and William James, profane automatic writing arrived in the Harvard laboratory of the German psychologist and inventor of psychotechnology Hugo Munsterberg. In order to demonstrate the normality of hysterical auto- matisms, two students, who could be called normal according to a vague estimation of their introspective capacity (even if the young Gertrude Stein was one of them), participated in experiments that made them no less delirious than Ebbinghaus. Because reading runs more quickly and thus unconsciously than writing, experiments in automatic reading were included at the outset.
"This is a very pretty experiment because it is quite easy and the results are very satisfactory. The subject reads in a low voice, and preferably something com-
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? 226 1900
paratively uninteresting, while the operator reads to him an interesting story. If he does not go insane during the first few trials he will quickly learn to concentrate his attention fully on what is being read to him, yet go on reading just the same. The reading becomes completely unconscious for periods of as much as a page. "
It is a pretty experiment indeed, one made as if to dismiss hermeneutic reading. At one time our inner selves were supposed to be the workshop in which all reading operations were conducted; our ego was always to be kept in view because of the risk of insanity by distraction. But now the protocol calls for just what had scandalized Bergk, and once the rock of insanity has been circumnavigated, everything runs as unconsciously as it does normally. Rather than being rooted together in one voice from the inmost soul, the isolated routines of reading, listening, and speaking be- come automatic and impersonal: "the voice seemed as though that of an- other person. " %
In a more advanced step, Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein experi- mented with a coupling of automatic reading and writing. "For this pur- pose the person writing read aloud while the person dictating listened to the reading. In this way it not infrequently happened that, at interesting parts of the story, we would have the curious phenomenon of one person unconsciously dictating sentences which the other unconsciously wrote down; both persons meanwhile being absorbed in some thrilling story. "* The division of the unity of Man can thus be accomplished by two read- ers or writers. While both consciousnesses are fed with signifieds, one un- conscious takes dictation from the other-just as the psychoanalyst "must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the trans- mitting unconscious of the patient. " ' I x ) The deceptive proximity of this
writing situation to the romantic fantasy of the library in fact marks the latter's total perversion. When Serpentina whispered their love story to the student Anselmus, his hand wrote along in unconscious dictation. But nothing could be less impersonal than a phantom-beloved capable of playing the Mother's Mouth for a man's soul. For that reason her voice never really uttered anything aloud; it arose as a utopian shadow thrown by very real but unreadable signs. Because the Woman does not exist and plural women had no place in the educational system, an imaginary woman's voice had simultaneously to remind young authors or bureau- crats of their writing duty and to transform it magically into infantile sexuality.
Circa 1900,however,experimentation dissolvedtheutopia. l"'Gertrude Stein, not for nothing Miinsterberg's ideal student,"" could study psycho- physics like anyone else. While German universities still trembled at the thought of the chaos women students would provoke, the Harvard Psychological Laboratory had long been desexualized. In their test re-
? M EGREATLALUa 227
port, Solomons and Stein are referred to throughout as "he. " Io' The sci- entific discourse gives only hints that during this strange cooperation the man dictated and the woman wrote. Gertrude Stein, for years employed as an academic secretary, was in the experiment similarly "the perfect blanc while someone practises on her as an automaton. "1wNothing is said of why the two sexes were divided in that way. Two years later, how- ever, with Solomons significantly absent, Stein continued her autoexperi- mens with others-with the explicit purpose of "comparison between male and female experimental subjects. " '"5 Such a question already re- veals what supports the new scientific discourse. Real women, as they exist in plurality, had attained access to writing as practiced in university discourse. Their hysteria, rather than remaining out of the way as some idiosyncrasy like Brentano's sister, was experimentally simulated in order to make it a completely normal motoric automatism. As unconscious as she was obedient, Gertrude Stein took dictation from her fellow student.
With that, the positions of the sexes in the discourse network of I800 were reversed. Into the place of the imaginary Mother's iMouth steps a man who dictates factually; into the complementary place of the un- conscious author steps one of many women who have studied enough to be able to take dictation-Ariadne, Frau Roder-Wiederhold, Resa von Schirnhofer, Gertrude Stein, and so on. The fact that one of them became a writer is part of the logic of the experiment. lM
The greatest triumph of psychotechnology was to have made dictated writing into spontaneous, automatic writing. After their practice experi- ments in reading and taking dictation, Solomons and Stein went to work. A woman's hand produced texts without knowing that or what it wrote. With this, psychophysics discovered the rules of literary automaticwriting long before the surrealists. First, it is forbidden to reread anything writ- ten-precisely the act that made authors out of writing hands "stopped automatic writing. "'"' Second, the annoying intrusions of an ego are to be put off by repeating prewritten sentences with an obstinacy that matches their meaninglessness. Thirty years later Andre Breton translated these two fundamental rules in his Surrealist Manifesto:
Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and he tempted to reread what you have writ- ten. . . . Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur. If silence threatens to settle in, if you should ever happen to make a mistake-a mistake, perhapsduetocarelessness-break ofwithouthesitationwithanoverlyclear line. Following a word the origin of which seems suspicious to you, place any letter whatsoever, the letter "I" for example, always the letter "I. "'"
Having been educated as a psychiatrist, Breton cannot not have known where such rules of literary production came from. To give conscious,
? 228 1900
that is, distorting attention to repeated iterations of a sign reverses psychi- atric diagnosis. The "senseless repetition of the same letter for a half or whole line, as in children's writing books," which psychiatrists call, in the mentally ill, "written verbigeration," that is, flight of ideas,lmbecame, as kccriture automatique, the duty of nothing more and nothing less than literature. As this scene of inscription reveals, automatic writing is any- thing but freedom. The alphabetization campaign of 1800 also intended to automatize cultural practices, but only in order "to found and purify the ground of inwardness in the subject. """ When, by contrast, Gertrude Stein worked through a series of failed exercises and finally arrived at the experimental goal of "automatic writing by invention," precisely the freest invention conjured up inevitabilities as binding as the sentence, de- cades later, that a rose is a rose is a rose. The longest of the few examples cited by Solomons and Stein says this clearly: "Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what 1have spoken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken so glibly . . . ""'
What speaks, when It speaks, is always fate. This was no news to Freud. The medium and the message coincide because even in grammar the repetition compulsion rules. Such discourse is unavoidable precisely because it is empty. Automatic writing says nothing of thought or in- wardness, of intention or understanding; it speaks only of speech and glibness. Neither the inevitable nor the people it threatens exist except by hearsay. In the methodic isolation of her laboratory, cutoffrom all the classical determinations of woman and integrated into the new desexu- alized university, an ideal student speaks and writes as if the rejected truth of Western thought had returned. Psychophysics thus took the place of occult media (read: women). Alone and dazed, a Pythia sits on the tri- pod again, and men or priests whisper to her the secret fears of the people. But the mistress of the oracle cannot console. Whatever she says becomes unavoidable because she says it. No one is more tragic than Cas- sandra. Unconscious words transpire, and immediately the listeners har- bor a suspicion close to a truth intolerable for philosophers: that dis- courses conjure up what they seem only to describe. Whether under the sign of myth orof positivism, the release of automatic speaking means that Cassandra will not be believed and will find no way to warn the people who have just been spoken of so glibly. Thus, literally and without com- mentary, the leading journal of American experimental psychology, vol- ume 3,1896: "Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what I have spo- ken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken so
glibly . . . "
? THE GREAT LALULA 229 Technological Media
A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. And because the unconscious never finds an illusory belief, the unconscious can only be stored.
In the discourse network of 1900,psychophysical experiments were incorporated as so many random generators that produce discourses without sense or thought. The ordinary, purposeful use of language- so-called communication with others-is excluded. Syllabic hodgepodge and automatic writing, the language of children and the insane-none of it is meant for understanding ears or eyes; all of it takes the quickest path from experimental conditions to data storage. Good, old-fashioned handwriting is the storage mechanism for automatic writing, with the slight modification that Gertrude Stein watches her hands like separate machines with a modicum of curiosity rather than commanding them to write particular signs. ' In other cases, deposition into writing is impos- sible, because the random generators produce effects only at extremely high speeds. Automatic writing and reading already exhibit a tendency toward increasing speed: the tempo of dictation races ahead of the hands, that of reading exceeds the articulating organs. ' Thus, in order to retain anything at all, psychophysics had to join with the new media that revo- lutionized optics and acoustics circa 1900. These, of course, are Edison's twogreat innovations: film and the gramophone.
The long process that culminated in the Lumikres' cinematographs was dictated by the technical-industrial necessity of surpassing the hu- man eye's limited capability to process single images. The birth of film was attended by Eadweard J. Muybridge's serial photographs, Etienne- Jules Marey and C. E. J. Demeny's photographic gun, and Johann Hein- rich Ernemann's slow-motion photography. The gramophone also de- pended on being able to function at speeds slower than people can talk. It could not have been invented-contemporaries were wrong about this'-before Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier's mathematical analyses of amplitude or Helmholtz's studies in physiological acoustics. The tech- nical simulation of both optical and acoustical processes presupposed analyses made possible by the speed of the apparatuses themselves. Voice reproduction required a frequency band between 90 and 1,200 Hertz even for the fundamental tones; studies of body movements required illu- mination speeds in the realm of milliseconds.
The ability to record sense data technologically shifted the entire dis- course network circa 1900. For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The technological record-
? 230 1900
ing of the real entered into competition with the symbolic registration of the Symbolic. The wonderfully super-elevated Edison whom Philippe Villiers de ! 'Isle-Adam made the hero of his Tomonow's Eve concisely formulated the new development. Musing among his devices and appa- ratuses, he begins a monologue, ignored by literary theorists, that will bring Lessing's Laocoon up to date in 1886.
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.