No More Learning

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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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. '* As mechanized psychotechnology the "world of the movie" has "become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an 'allnights newsery reel,' that substitutes a 'reel' world for real- ity. . . . His verdict on the 'automatic writing' that is photography was the abnihilization of the etym. ""
In 1800words went about their task of creating a real, visible world in such an undifferentiated way that visions and faces, which the book de- scribed for the purpose of recruiting authors, shared only one trait with their readers. Film exhibits its figures in such detail that "the realistic'' is "raised into the realm of the fantastic," which sucks up every theme of imaginative literature. ? ' Quite logically, early German silent films repeat- edly took up the motif of the doppelganger. -' In Golem, in The Other, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in The Student of Prague-everywhere dop-
? pelgangers appear as metaphors for the screen and its aesthetic. A film trick demonstrates what happens to people when the new medium takes hold of them. These doppelgangers, instead of sharing a single trait with their originals, as in a book or screenplay, are the heroes of the films and therefore the focus of identification. With its guaranteed perfection in preserving evidence, film does not need, like the solitary hero of a roman- tic novel, to talk the reader into identification; what the moviegoer Ronne called his entry into film can occur automatically and wordlessly.
Movies thus took the place of the fantasy of the library. All the tricks that once magically transformed words into sequential hallucinations are recalled and surpassed. "In the movies," not just the "most beautiful" but also the "most common" is "miraculous. "-' Like any unconscious, the unconscious of the movie house is determined by the pleasure principle.
The schoolboy wants to see the prairies of his Westerns; he wants to see strange people in strange circumstances; he wants to see the lush, primitive banks of Asian rivers. The modest bureaucrat and the housewife locked into her household long for the shimmering celebrations of elegant society, for the far coasts and mountains to which they will never travel. . . . The working man in his everyday routine becomes a romantic as soon as he has some free time. He doesn't want to see anything realistic; rather, the realistic should be raised into an imaginary, fan- tastic realm. . . . One finds all this in the movies. -'
To counter this triumphant competition, literature has two options. One easy option tends toward "trivializing mechanisms": namely, while underrating the technological media, to join them. 'R Since 1900many writers have given up on getting their names into the poetic pantheon and, intentionally or not, have worked for the media. Whereas Wild- enbruch summoned up pathos and spoke his name and soul into the pho- nograph, other lyric poets, preferring anonymity and success, produced texts for phonographic hits. The first screenplay writers also remained anonymous. When Heinrich Lautensack in 1913 published the written text of a screenplay after the film had been shot, the sensational use of his name demonstrated "that real poets, too, have written films, even if anonymously (how many might have done that, because of the money, over the years! ). " Before Lautensack, "H. H. Ewers [was] probably the only known author whose name appeared with his films. ""
Mass literature has been identified as non-value ever since hermeneutic reading guides distinguished between works and mass products, repeated rereading and reading mania. But when texts could be transposed to other media, the difference became one of method of production. The judgment that "the best novel and best drama are degraded into dime novels in the movies, full of sensationalism and make-believe" can be re- versed. *"Audiovisual sensuousness, also employed by high literary texts
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in 1800,became the speciality of books that aimed at hallucinatory effects with the methodical efficiency of digital-analog converters. Turn- of-the-century bestsellers were quickly made into films: historical novels like Quo Vudis (whose writer won the Nobel Prize), stories of doppel- gangers like The Golem, psychopathological thrillers like Paul Lindau's The Other, to say nothing of Buddenbrooks. For "the Paul Lindaus have their merits and their immortality. ""' They were there when the type- writer made the publishing process more economical; they knew what was going on when psychophysics reduced the mystery of the soul to fea- sibilities. Their books thus appeared where they belonged: on the movie screen. Lindau's "Other" is a district attorney; when a crime occurs in his house, he uses the best criminological methods to gather evidence, only to discover that he himself, as doppelganger or schizophrenic likeJekyll and Hyde, was the perpetrator. A year earlier, Hallers, the district attorney, had had a riding accident and injured the occipital lobe, on which brain localization theories focus . . .
Of course, role inversion was characteristic of literary heroes like Ronne and literary techniques like automatic writing circa 1900,but only in film could hallucination become real and indices like a clock or por- trait bring about unambiguous identifications. Criminology and psycho- pathology work with the same technologies as the entertainment indus- try. *' A district attorney who unconsciously (as his friend, a psychiatrist, explains to him) every night becomes his own other is a metaphor for the shift from bureaucracy to technology, from writing to media. In the un- conscious of the movie house, modest bureaucrats or women trapped in their households don't want to see symbolic or real servants of the state. What they want is imaginary reversal.
Literature's other option in relation to the media is to reject them, along with the imaginary and real aspects of discourse to which they cater, and which have become the province of popular writers. Because "kitsch will never be eliminated from humanity," one group of writers renounces it. n'After 1900a high literature develops in which "the word" becomes something "too conspicuous," that is, it becomes a purely differ- ential signifier. Once imaginary effects and real inscription have been re- nounced, what remains are the rituals of the symbolic. These rituals take into account neither the reaction thresholds of people nor the support of Nature. "Letters of the alphabet do not occur in nature. " Words as literal anti-nature, literature as word art, the relation between both as material equality-this is their constellation in the purest art for art's sake and in the most daring games of the avant-garde. Since December 28, 1895, there has been one infallible criterion for high literature: it cannot be filmed.
? When idealist aesthetics bound the various arts together as parts of a single system, sculpture, painting, music, and architecture were unam- biguously determined by their respective materials-stone, sound, color, building material. Poetry, however, as the universal art, was permitted to reign over the universal medium of the imagination. It lost this special status circa 1900in the interest of thorough equality among materials. Literature became word art put together by word producers. As if to con- firm Lacan's theory of love, Kurt Schwitters was in love with his Anna because "her name [can be spelled] backwards as well as forwards: u-n-n- u. " Itishardlycontroversialtomakethisclaimwithrespecttothewriters of experimental modernism. But even writers like Holz o r Hofmannsthal, often seen as continuing the projects of Herder or Humboldt one hundred years after the fact, expressed concern to do justice to the material they worked with. *' Hofmannsthal argued concisely that the basic concepts of classical-romantic Poetry were so much blabla in relation to its material, the word. "I wonder whether all the tiresome jabbering about individ- uality, style, character, mood, and so on has not made you lose sight of the fact that the material of poetry is words. . . . We should be allowed to be artists who work with words, just as others work with white or col- ored stone, shaped metal, purified tones or dance. ""
Less concise, but astonishing in a direct descendant of Schleiermacher, is Dilthey's line that before any hermeneutics there are "sensually given signs": "stones, marble, musically formed sounds, gestures, words, and script. "" No voice, then, no matter how traditional its idiom, can be heard locating Poetry in an immaterial imagination. It is simply wrong to assign ''an abstraction from the realm of literary-historical media to the period" in which "the paradigms of media used in positivistic literary his- tory were widened to include film, radio, and records. "*. What is here vaguely circumscribed as "abstraction" had long cemented the classical bond of friendship between poets and thinkers. But in 1900 film and the gramophone (radiowould not appear until twenty-fiveyears later) would lead to the very opposite result by isolating the word theoretically as well, leaving to the media its previous effects o n the imagination. The rankings of the individual arts in a synchronic system inevitably shifted. nRBut his- torical derivations of modernist word literature, such as Gunther Sasse's, are perhaps superfluous; by presupposing a "situation in need of clarifica- tion, namely, that not until one hundred years after the thematization of language in philosophy, did the same problem become central in litera- ture,"" such an approach creates more problems than it solves. But be- cause there was once a brief friendship between literature and philoso- phy, literary historians still read Humboldt's philosophy instead of test series.
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All the evidence indicates that the high literature of 1900 gave up its symphilosophizing because other contemporary movements gained prominence. The new sciences and technologies made it necessary to re- nounce the imagination. MallarrnC stated this when he answered an in- quiry On the Nustrated Book with a decided "No. " "Why," he asked in response, "don't you go right to the cinematographs, for their sequence of images will replace, to great advantage, many books in image and text. """ If reform primers and novels of artistic development cunningly used images to contribute to an imperceptible alphabetization and identi- fication, high literature cut out everything available to the other media. For all his love of film, Kafka conveyed to his publisher his "horror" at the very thought that an illustrator of his Metamorphosis "might even want to draw the insect itself. Not that, please! I don't want to diminish the area of his authority, but issue my request only on behalf of my natu- rally better grasp of the story. The insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot be drawn even from a great distance. "" Literature thus occupies, with creatures or noncreatures that can only be found in words, the margin left to it by the other media. Illustrations outgrew their baby shoes, their con- tributory role, and learned to walk and wield power in the unconscious of the movie house; the symbolic remained, autonomous and imageless as once only God had been.
The literary ban on images allowed only twoexceptions.
One occurred when Stefan George wanted to document the fact that he was not a classi- cal author and thus not for the young ladies. He gave his artist and book designer, Melchior Lechter, "a nonartistic task" that "leaves the realm of art" and ended any further collaboration between them. qLThe Commem- oration for Maximin was to be prefaced, not by the hand-drawn portrait Lechter suggested, but by Maximilian Kronberger's photograph. Only the scandal of technological media in the midst of the ritual of letters could materialize the scandal of the master desiring a singular and real body.
The other exception was systematic. After 1900 letters were permitted to construct figures, because they had always been figures. This too di- rectly reversed classical norms. Schleiermacher "completely" excluded from Poetry verses in dialect as well as those others "that look like an axe or bottle. "" Ninety-eight years later, Apollinaire justified his Calli- grammes by citing the competition of film and records.
It would have been strange if in an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is a book of pictures, poets had not tried to compose pictures for medi- tative and refined minds that are not content with the crude imaginings of the makers of films. These last will become more perceptive, and one can predict the day when, the photograph and the cinema hav. ing become the only form of pub-
? lication in use, the poet will have a freedom heretofore unknown. One should not be astonished if, with the means they now have at their disposal, poets set them- selves to preparing this new art. "
Pictures made of letters remain in the cleared area, in the technological niche of literature, without suffering any material inequality vis-a-vis the other media that, Apollinaire prophesies, will soon be the only ones. Such pictures had been despised for a century, because any emphasis on the figural quality of letters would have made it more difficult to ignore them. To achieve the psychophysical insight, to see letters "as a great quantity of strange figures on a white background," or as calligrammes, "one has only to look at a newspaper page upside down. '" The literality and mate- riality of the written can be realized only at the expense of readability and in limited experiments. Apollinaire and Mallarmk competed with the technological medium of film, whereas it would have seemed sufficient to distinguish letters and books from traditional painting. The call for a cult of typefaces issued by writers circa 1900 had nothing to do with fine writing, everything to do with machines. In the words of Anton Kaes: "The reform movement in literature that ran parallel to the rise of the movies as a mass medium took shape against the background of the new technological media. "'"
Research into the localization of language replicated the typewriter. The tachistoscope of the physiologists of reading was the twin of the movie projector, with the side effect of typographically optimizing the typewriter. Brain physiology did away with the illusion that language is more "than a play of mechanical equipment learned by practice," which "is set into ordered motion by ideas, just as one can operate a sewing, adding, writing, or talking machine without needing to be familiar with its construction. '"' Prior to consciousness, then, there are sensory and motor, acoustical and optic language centers linked by nerve paths just as the working parts of a typewriter are connected by levers and rods. As if taking Nietzsche's dictation style as a metaphor, brain physiology formu- lates the path from the sound image of the word to the hand that writes and to consciousness as an inaudible dictation, to which only autonomic reaction is appropriate at the level of consciousness. 9pTo produce actual discourse, there must be impulses in the cerebral cortex "through which the word, as an acoustical and optical image, is transposed into its sen- sory sound parts on a sound clavier. " All keyboards (including those that produce sounds), however, are spatial arrangements, or a sort of type- writer keyboard of language. A "cortical soundboard" virtually conjures up the lever system of the old Remingtons. "
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As soon as one connects the brain physiology of language with the psychophysics of the senses via the tachistoscope, the hypothetical ma- chine in the brain becomes a real machine in front of the retina. The letters and words presented for milliseconds by the tachistoscope are al- eatory choices from prepared stores or vocabularies. The procedure is only apparently arbitrary and "peculiar to our experiments. " For "as rich as the number of words in our civilized languages has gradually become, their number diminishes considerably in each language during a particu- lar period, for a particular domain of literature, and for a particular au- thor. " Irn Periods, genres, authors-all play on unconscious word key- boards and even more unconscious letter keyboards. The philosopher become experimenter Erdmann says nothing of them; instead, he presents the basic rule that words are recognized in their "totality," that is, by those traits "in which the black marks of the letters contrast with the white background. " In which case, "the surface areas of the white back-
ground are as essential for the whole configuration as the black ones
are. "
Erdmann's followers and critics, however, were not philosophers or hermeneutic interpreters, and they limited their investigations to the ma- teriality of letters. They turned the tachistoscopes to speeds higher than those at which reading can take place because only disturbances and defi- ciencies betray the fundamental secrets of letters and forms of script. The film projector's twin thus functions in an opposite manner. The pro- jector, in the unconscious of the movie house, presents a continuum of the imaginary, generated through a sequence of single images so precisely chopped up by and then fed through the projector's mechanism that the illusion of seamless unity is produced. With the tachistoscope, in the darkened laboratory of the alphabetical elite, a cut-up image assaults as a cut in order to establish out of the torment and mistaken readings of vic- tims the physiologically optimal forms of letters and script. As with the typewriter, which has its own key for spacing, intervals are built into the experimental procedure. But they also become the test result. The ta- chistoscope demonstrates that on the most basic level reading consists in perceiving not letters but the differences between them, and that word recognition proceeds by hitting upon discontinuous, single letters that lit- erally stick out. Systematically evaluated misreadings indicate that letters at x-height (vowels and some consonants) are relatively undifferentiated, but that consonants with ascenders or descenders serve as typographic recognition signals. '"' According to Julius Zeitler, the historically re- newed primacy of the letter is based on a "decomposition of the letter continuum into groups. " "There are whole series of words, analogous in
their letter composition, that run through heterogeneous meanings if one
101
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letter in the same position is changed. . . . If the new meaning of the word image that has been altered in this way is to be registered, the letter must be determined, that is, it must be spelled out. When this does not occur, the original word image is constantly reassimilated, as is the original meaning along with it. " I"'
The letter-crosswords with which Reformation primers liked to play could therefore be resurrected. One theorist of elementary education il- lustrated Zeitler's theory for his deaf and dumb children with the follow- ing example: 'Iu
One need only read this series as a column-and Saussure'stheory of lan- guage as a combinatory system is born. As it says in the structuralist bible: l n 5
In every such case the isolated sound, like every other unit, is chosen after a dual mental opposition. In the imaginary grouping anma, for instance, the sound m stands in syntagmatic opposition to its environing sounds and in associative op- position to all other sounds that may come to mind:
r-
1anma V
d
But, as Derrida was the first to rediscover,** the modest letter re- searchers or grammatologists were more rigorous than linguistics' found- ing hero. Their tachistoscope locates pure differentiality not in "sounds," that is, in incorporeal sound images of words, but in the material signs of type. Thus the machine demonstrates and practices what structural lin- guistics accomplishes insofar as it writes down nonsense words such as anma, even though it stresses their use in speech. In order to engrave an example of the differentiality of phonemes into his own text, Saussure
? was forced to shift to the distinction between necessary and arbitrary, graphematic and graphic differences between letters.
The value of letters is purely negative and differential. The same person can write t, for instance, in differentways:
The only requirement is that the sign for t not be confused in his script with the signs used for I, d, etc. '"'
It is because the example of the three handwritten t's does not constitute an example, but is rather a conclusive demonstration with which differ- ences in sound could never compete, that structural linguistics and psy- chophysical positivism belong together. Instead of continuing in the line of Schleiermacher'shermeneutics,'"*Saussure systematized, at the price of a methodological phonocentrism, the countless scriptural facts that ex- periments circa 1900produced and let stand in their facticity.
But the love of facts can also bear fruit. It might not produce a system, but it does produce typographies. Erdmann's measurement of the relation between letters and background, Zeitler's differentiation of letter recogni- tion according to x-height, ascenders, and descenders, Oskar Messmer's calculation of the frequency of these three types in coherent texts, all cul- minated in a knowledge of differentiality that could become immediately practical. The secular war between Fraktur and roman scripts, for in- stance, no longer need be burdened with the imaginary values of Things German in opposition to the world. After simple tests with both types of script-with the tachistoscope, in low light, with beginning pupils and professors-the superiority of roman was a matter of fact. Semiotic posi- tivism allowed Friedrich Soennecken to explain that roman consisted of two basic lines, whereas Fraktur consisted of "no less than sixty-six basic lines differing in form and size. '"OP This sort of massive differential differ- ence made decisions easy for researchers who published works such as The Economy and Technology of Learning: ' l o "Anyone who has ever ex- perimented with the tachistoscope knows that the simpler a type of script is, the easier it is to learn. " ''I
Indeed, under the conditions of pure differentiality there is nothing simpler than the opposition that, in theory and praxis, determines the current century: binary opposition. If roman consists of only two "ele- ments, the straight line and the half circle,''11zthen an ideal script has been found, one whose elements can be combined and analyzed quite dif-
? ferently from Pohlmann's o r Stephani's handwriting norms. An economy took the place of organic merging, one that (perhaps following the new standard of Morse code) technically optimized signs and the differences between them.
Thus differences appeared even in roman typeface, the very mini- malization of difference. Saussure distinguished necessary and arbitrary differences among letters; embracing necessary difference, since I 900 the various roman typefaces that reject ornament have flourished and be- come as pervasive as chemically pure industrial design. "' Forms to be filled out call for block letters; lower case and sans serif are the height of Manhattan advertising chic.
The call was answered. Because roman capital letters are what "the child first encounters at every turn"-"on street signs, street cars, post offices, train stations""'-the block letters of technological information channels found their way into elementary-school instruction. Rudolph von Larisch's students in Vienna learned from a manual Instruction in Ornamental Script; but they learned a surface art that rejected all "per- spective and shadow effects" of the Stephani type of word painting. The goal, "in competition with other demands," was "a HIGHER degree of readability": "that the characteristic qualities of a letter be stressed with all possible force and the difference from similar letters be stressed. " I I ' Psychophysicists and structural linguists hardly say it more clearly. The medium of writing and paper no longer pretended to be a springboard to painted nature. Using uniformly thick lines, Eckmann and Peter Behrens,"" Larisch and Soennecken drew block letters as block letters.
The decomposition of roman letters, as it confronts elementary binary opposition, is the mirror image of their composition. To write block letters is not to connect signs with other signs but to combine discrete elements piece by piece. In the age of engineers an armature construction set replaces the growth of plants and originary script. 'l- Separate letters consisting of separate elements are based, in strict opposition to classical writing rules, on Saussure's most daring opposition: that between signs and emptiness, medium and background. "The beginner has to learn to look, not simply at the form of the letters, but constantly BETWEEN the letters; he must use all the power of his vision to grasp the surface forms that arise between the letters and to assess the effect of their optical mass. ""* A reversal of every habit or facility thus grants the "BETWEEN" the same status as the positive marks it separates. So Larisch knocked children over the head with the lesson that psychophysics produced with the tachistoscope and with newspapers turned upside down: the fact that letters are what they are only against and upon a white background. A "BETWEEN" in capital block letters is a sheer autonym. And if educators
? 256 1900
circa 1800 aimed at mitigating the shock of binary opposition by con- necting lines and an attenuation of the black-white contrast, Larisch-as
a student of William Morris-gave his students the "feeling of how poorly the softening halftone fits into a printed book," in that "simple, powerful outlines and the full contrast of black and white spaces have an appearance characteristic of printed type. ""'
And yet-the implications of the tachistoscope and the economy of letters for literature and literary science become even more obscure, if possible, here on the page, for all its black and white space. One needs the whole power of one's vision to glimpse the overlooked visibility of texts. The black and white of texts seems so timeless that it never occurs to readers to think of the architects of that space. The forgotten techni- cians of 1900,however, revolutionalized the page of poetry, from the most playful verses to the most ritualized. Morgenstern's Gallows Songs enact the derivation of what the Stefan George typeface practiced in mute solemnity.
Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun
rnit Zwischenraum,hindurchzuschaun.
Ein Architekt, der dieses sah, stand eines Abends plotzlich da-
und nahm den Zwischenraumheraus und baute draus ein grosses Haus.
Der Zaun indessen stand ganz dumm, rnit Latten ohne was herum.
Ein Anblick griisslich und gernein. Drum zog ihn der Senat auch ein.
Der Architeckt jedoch entfloh nach Afri- od- Arneriko.
There used to be a picket fence
with space to gaze from hence to thence.
? THE GREAT LALUU 257 approached it suddenly one night,
removed the spaces from the fence and built of them a residence.
The picket fence stood there dumbfounded with pickets wholly unsurrounded,
a view so naked and obscene the Senate had to intervene.
The architect, however, flew to Afri- or Americoo. ""
"The Picket Fence" is the fairy tale of a new age. Where Anselmus saw the woven arabesques of handwritten letters, the cold eye of the architect sees the opposite. One evening Larisch's imperative-to look constantly BETWEEN the letters, to grasp the space outlined between them with all one's strength-is realized word for word. In so doing, the architect does not discover merely how indispensable concepts of relation are. "! Some- thing more tangible is at stake: the fact that the readability of signs is a function of their spatiality. The architect's manipulation of space demon- strates that, when the lack is lacking and no empty spaces remain, media disappear, "naked and obscene," into the chaos from which they were derived.
Consider the final stanza of "The Picket Fence" in light of the architec- ture of block letters. Whereas "the alliteration of Africa and America feigns an ending in -(i)~a,'"w~h~ich also plays with the ending of oder [the placement of "or"], a "between" appears in the realm of the graph- eme: the space designated by the dash. The words of the poem, complete autonyms in this sense, foreground their own intervals between stem and ending. Morgenstern's constructed architect does not disappear into far- off lands, but into the space between signs that he had usurped.
From this vanishing point called paper, it is only a step to "the ideal of purely abstract, absolute poetry," an ideal of such brilliance "that it also means the end of poetry; it can no longer be imitated or surpassed; it is transcended only by the empty white page. "I2' "The Picket Fence" de- scribes the binary opposition between letters or pickets [Lettemlhtten] and the space between them, but "Fish's Night Song" uniquely enacts this opposition without any description at all. "' In it, the reduction to straight line and half curve that distinguishes roman from Fraktur scripts be- comes textual event. Circumflex and dash, two signifiers that define themselves through mutual opposition and relation, are the absolute minimum economy of the signifier. Their binary opposition to each other, canceled or articulated through the shared opposition of both to paper,
An architect who saw this sight
? 258 1900
constitutes the poem that meets all the reading-psychological desiderata of its epoch. Period. For there is nothing more to write about a minimal signifier system.
Or there would be nothing more to write if the poem did not have a title composed in the very different, redundant, signifier system of the twenty-six letters. Through the title, one discourse network answers an- other across the turning point that divides them. "Fish's Night Song" is the cancellation of Goethe's "Wanderer's Night Song 11. " In the latter, a human voice outlasts the surrounding sounds of nature for one breath in order to express the promise that it, too, would find rest in the lap of Mother Nature. In the former, the text brings a mute fish not to speech, but into a typogram. It thus realizes Schleiermacher'snightmare: namely, that a real optics would render superfluous the imaginary, imaginal as- pects that meaningful words suggest to alphabetized readers. As mute and dead as any script, the fish no longer needs the phonocentric consola- tion of a seamless transition between speech and nature. The signs on the page cannot be spoken by any voice-regardless of whether one reads them as fish scales or discrete elements of the roman typeface. Man and soul, in any case, no longer apply. With all the wanderers between day and night, Spirit and Nature, male and female, Man simply died around 1900. It was a death to which the much-discussed death of God is a foomote.
Stephani wrote that written letters provide notes for the mouth instru- ment. But a mute fish demonstrates that signs can mock all speech and nonetheless still be written signs. The half curve and dash, the two mini- mal signifieds of Soennecken and of the "Night Song," can be found on every universal keyboard. The first German monograph on the typewriter
? thus celebrated the fact that "with a little inventiveness one can produce very fine borders and flourishes" on Remingtons and Olivers. 'z' It pre- sented the prototype of modernist ideal poetry years before Morgenstem.
Not only is the human voice incapable of reproducing signs prior to and beyond alphabets, but writers, by prescribing their own alphabets, can remove their texts from hermeneutic consumption. The existence of a Stefan George script in the discourse network of 1900demonstrates that "Fish's Night Song" is the signet of the whole system.
The Stefan George script, which Lechter fabricated and used through- out the first edition of George's Collected Works, was adapted from George's handwriting. But it was handwriting only in name. First, the single letters-beyond any supposed Carolingian reference-were based on a contemporary advertising grotesque. 1zhSecond, any handwriting that can be transposed into reusable typeface functions fundamentally as mechanized script.
Technology entered the scene in archaic dress. Larisch came up with "the ideal of a personal book" that would be "self-designed, -written, - ornamented, and -bound. " IL- That is exactly what George did before Lechter and Georg Bondi made him aware of the possibility of technologi- cal reproduction. Under the pressure of media competition, high literature returned to the monastic copyists whom Gutenberg had rendered unneces- sary and Anselmus had made to seem foolish. At the same time, however, the personal book (that oxymoron) was to be set in block letters that, "equal in their characteristics," have none of the redundant differences of individual handwritten letters. According to Larisch, the historic "mo- ment" was "favorable" for old-fashioned, manually made books because "precisely now the use of typewriters is becoming widespread. " "*
The ascetics of handwork art, even when they played at being medi- eval, were in competition with the modern media. As soon as there were typewriters, there were fashioners of texts like Mark Twain or Paul Lindau, who had "the production means of the printing press at their dis- posal" on their desks. According to Marshall McLuhan, the fact that "the typewriter fuses composition and publication" brought about "an en- tirely new attitude to the written and printed word. ""' Like innovation, its effects surpassed its applications. When Larisch and George stylized their handwriting until it became a typeface, they achieved what Malling
THE GREAT LALUU 259
? 260 1900
Hansen and Nietzsche had been praised for: script "as beautiful and regular as print. " ' l o "Perfect lyrical creations and perfect technical ob- jects are one and the same. ""'
The new relation to the printed word became printed reality in the layout of George's books. From the time of his break with Lechter, at the latest, his books constituted an imageless cult of letters. The cry of mate- rial equality extended from the single lyrical word to the entire alpha- betical medium. If modem, Morris-inspired publications, such as Goals of Internal Book Design, state in tautological conclusion that "paper and type make up a book," the poets of the George circle were "more or less the first to realize that a book consists of paper and type. "''z
But it is not only the fact that books of the turn of the century "looked very booklike" that places them into technological contexts. "' More im- portant, the Stefan George script (as typeface, in the form of its letters, and in its orthography and punctuation) presupposed, maximized, and exploited experimentally obtained standards. In terms of the physiology of reading, it was evident that the "letters and other elements of the type- face" and "the capital and small letter should be as similar as possible. " It follows that roman is by far "more efficient" than Fraktur, which would be "unthinkable as a typewriter typeface. '"" The Stefan George script met just these standards; in its new letter forms for e, k, and t, capital and lowercase letters were even more alike than in ordinary roman type. '" George eliminated the ascenders from two of the twenty-six letters (kand t). This might seem a minimal innovation, but in combination with Grimm's orthography (the use of small letters for nouns, the elimination of h from many th combinations, and the use of ss rather than the Eszett), it had a significant cumulative effect. Whereas the physiologist Messmer counted 270 letters above or below x-height in an ordinary text a thousand letters long, I find in George an average of only 200 extended as opposed to 800 small letters. (The same passages in Duden orthogra- phy would contain nearly one hundred more ascenders and descenders. )
Messmer could show that words such as physiological or psychologi- cal, taken simply as collections of letters containing a high percentage of ascenders and descenders, d o not convey the "unitary whole impression" that distinguishes words such as wimmem, nennen,or weinen. "" Ex- tended letters quicken the pace of tachistoscopic word recognition, but in a special script or cult of the letter intended to hinder any alphabetized skipping over of letters, material equality is everything and a gain in speed is nothing. Therefore masses of words like wimmern, nennen, and weinen fill the eighteen volumes of an oeuvre whose esotericism is phys- iologically guaranteed. In it, homologies, recognitions, and knowing smiles are exchanged between the most aristocratic of writers and the
? THE GREAT LALULA 261
modest experimenters of I900. The inventor of psychotechnology con- firmed an esotericism in the inventor of the Stefan George script that-a first in the history of writing-could be measured. "The fact that the elimination of capital letters from the beginning of nouns constitutes a strong check against rapid absorption can be easily verified, should read- ers of Stefan George find it necessary, by psychological experiment in an easily measurable procedure. " 'I'
These lines are as true as they are prophetic. Whereas readers of Nietzsche stumbled only here and there over italicized introjections, read- ers of George have trouble with every letter. A perfect experimental pro- cedure forestalls understanding in order to fix the eyes on signifiers as murky as the "Fish's Night Song. " But the readers were fascinated and forgot they were experimental subjects. In opposition to the technologi- cal media, they conjured up a secondhand old Europe. Consider Gert Mattenklott's consideration of George: "The image of Stefan George ap- pearsfinallyasthesheerallegoricalcorpse. . . . Everythingarbitraryand individual is transcribed into a meaningful universal, perhaps most clearly when George made his own handwriting resemble a typeface in- tended to replace the conventional one. "''nThese lines are as false as they are Benjarninesque. Their writer is simply unaware of the technologies of his own century. The facts that the typewriter made it inevitable that handwriting should come to resemble type, that there was the project of a "world letter" to unburden memories,'" and that the logic of the signifier explodes the "meaning" of the age of Goethe all fall victim here to an allegory of allegory.