No More Learning

I conduct impressionistic exercises daily with my nine- and ten-year-olds. I have six or eight of them come up to the classroom windows with pencil and paper and have them observe things in their environment in the natural light, rather than in the lighting of the classroom, and then write about what they see. They are to name the simplest things on the street and should see how the moment brings these things together. Their thoughts can then be embodied in words without constraint, their senses can dictate their experiences into writing without delay, and this proceeds without any thought being given as to whether the sentences might yield a "good" essay or
In Munch's experiment, then, the senses dictate, and these in turn take dictation from whatever occurs on the street. It is no accident that his book ends with an emphatic reference to the new Exercise-Program for the Infantry, which appeared in 1906 and also programmed the imme- diacy of stimulus and response. l" Whether it is a pencil or rifle, then, the
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? hands that hold it are unencumbered by an ego (or, in the end, a teacher) and its intentions. Consequences other than depersonalization would contradict a discursive rule that stipulates "the avoidance of orthography, punctuation, as well as words and phrases not based in sensation" l Z n and that applies to children as well as the insane. The free essay in German was an experiment in coupling the two impossible sentences, I am writ- ing and I am delirious.
This linkage is quite clear in the experiment set up by Oskar Ostermai, a teacher in Dresden. One year before Brigge, the serious ]ournu1 of Ger- man Znstnrction reported unheard-of news to its readers.
I had a seventh form. The children were used to writing free essays on their expe- riences and did this with enthusiasm and joy. One day a child arrived at nine o'clock instead of at eight. The child had a letter from his father, which stated that the child had become sick the previous evening, but had insisted that he be allowed to go to school at nine o'clock at least so that he could write his essay. And what did the child want to write? "How I got a fever last night. " At ten o'clock the child had to return home and was then absent for several days. "'
Thus, a child with a fever writes how he got the fever. The senses that dictate their data into writing without delay are delirious. But only a fa- ther still calls the delirium an illness; the child and the teacher take it as a necessary and sufficient ground for essays in which the act of writing guarantees what is written. For a single school hour the child appears out of the indistinguishable ground of all media and articulates this ground, before it again becomes all powerful. Hall's A Study of Fears continues its experimental course, and madness circa 1900radically dis- solves its old affinity with illness and finds a place far from pathology-in discourse itself. "There will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words 1do not mean. The time of that other interpretation will dawn, when not one word will remain upon another, and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. "
Writers appear in the place of the feverish child that writes down his fever. At twenty-eight Brigge is still unable to understand how he "man- aged wholly to return from the world" of his childhood, speechless fe- vers. '*' Because he does not understand, the fever's recurrence in the in- sane asylum is no reason to wait for the doctor in the next room. "Like one who hears a glorious language and feverishlyconceives plans to write, to create in it,''IZ1 Brigge leaves and runs to his desk. There he notes down what fever is, freed from the tutelage of logic and the high idiom- namely, not fever at all, not a nosological entity, but "the Big Thing. " Only words from a child's language could adequately represent the Thing in (to use the jargon of German teachers) "form and content. "
Brigge writes free essays. His Notebooks do not parallel the art-
? education movement in the history of ideas; they carry out that move- ment's program. Informed contemporaries, such as the experimental psychologist Ernst Meumann, saw that the free essay provoked "the out- growth of expressionism and futurism" as well as of "modern lyric po- etry. " Indeed, it taught "futuregenerations . . . linguistic confusion and undisciplined thinking. " I" Germanists, however, when confronted with a meaning that falls like rain, have little inkling of "the other interpreta- tion. " They have searched meticulously for the artistic symmetries, ar- rangements, and unifying laws in Brigge's serial notes and have attempted to weaken the suspicion of Angelloz that such things don't exist. One must suspend the interpretive disposition in writing a free essay, or else the essay will become "memorandum stuff, slogan provisions, dressings for skeletal intentions. " 12' Like Munch's pupils, Brigge notes the simplest occurrences with the simplest aleatory method: "how the moment brings these things together. "
When Rilke, with Brigge, opts for writing and against psychoanalysis, he sounds like Munch: "Piety keeps me from allowing this intrusion, this great cleaning and straightening up that life does not do-from this cor- rection of a written page of life, which I imagine as thoroughly marked with red improvements-a foolish image and certainly a completely false one. """ Foolish images do demonstrate something, then-namely, that literature circa 1900joined the struggle around the red inkwell. Rilke's image is false only in its judgment of a science that would do as little to restore proper form and meaning to errors in language as would litera- ture, and would instead use them to trace unconscious signifies. In any case, Rilke's renunciation of psychoanalysis makes clear that The Note- books of Malte Laurids Brigge indeed me the written page of life in un- corrected rough form.
Georg Heym, writer and doctoral candidate at the University of Wiirz- burg, received the following response from one of its committees: "The law and political science faculty has decided not to accept the work sub- mitted by you in its present form, in that it does not meet the faculty's requirements. According to the report, the work contains so many typo- graphical errors and deficiencies in sentence structure that it obviously has not been proofread after having been typed. "I2- This officially deter- mines what is not a work and who is not an author. In the discourse net- work of 1800,to which faculties continue to belong, rereading estab- lished a corpus out of heaps of paper and an imaginary body called the author out of people. But someone like Carl Einstein's Bebuquin, who prays for the sickness and dissociation of his limbs, in order to attain an- other kind of writing through "metamorphosis" or "dissolution," 128 someone like Brigge or Heym, who deliver uncorrected pages, whose
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? hands write independently of the ego, functions differently. Authors are not needed for utilizing discarded psychophysical nonsense. Arbitrary in- dividual cases are necessary and sufficient; they count as discarded mate- rial to be utilized. The pencil in the woman's hands, which do not use it at all, signals something quite simple to Brigge the observer: he, the writer, is one of those whom his notebooks so exhaustively record-"refuse" or "husks of humanity that fate has spewed out. '''Lq
Intransitive writing, practiced by writers as well as children, whom the discourse network of 1900 "places side by side,""" is an anonymous and arbitrary function. Now that children no longer perform the brilliant feats brought about by premature alphabetization, in which letters imme- diately became hallucinations, the recruitment of well-known authors no longer takes place. Arbitrary individual cases that for one reason or an- other have acquired paper (perhaps given to them outright by members of the art-education movement) just gather aleatory data. "If I give three eight- or nine-year-old boys a few cents for spending money and send them to the fair in Leipzig, then two of the three will certainly buy them- selves a notebook. And it doesn't matter how tempting . . . the roller coaster or Turkish gingerbread are: two of the three will still buy note- books! "'" So much for the initial situation from the point of view of the experimenter. Now for the experimental confirmation from the point of view of the experimental subject.
If I h a d a n o t e b o o k a t h a n d , o r i f t h e r e w e r e a n y o t h e r o p p o r t u n i t y , I w o u l d w r i t e down what occursto me. Something is always occurring to me. So I incur a major occurrence, which I'd like to record with incurred innocence.
It's not all too hot; blue floods through the sky, humid and blown up from the coast; each house is next to roses, some are completely sunk in them. I want to buy a book and a pencil; I want to write down as much as possible now, so that it won't all flow away. I lived for so many years, and it has all sunk. When 1began, did I still have it? I no longer know.
But if all this is possible-has even no more than a semblance of possibility-then surely, for all the world's sake, something must happen. The first comer, he who has had this disturbing thought, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even if he is just anybody, by n o means the most suitable person: there is no one else at hand. This young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down in his room five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he will have to write; that is how it will end. "*
It is a precarious and arbitrary practice, the writing of these inter- changeable individual cases. But at least it realizes, materially, manifestly, the impossible sentence I am writing. Otto Erich Hartleben, civil servant, candidate for the high court, and subsequently a writer, first demon- strated that "the activity of the court apprentice is certainly one of the
? most noble of all human activities, because it can never be replaced or rendered superfluous by any machine. . . . The court apprentice effort- lessly defies the inventors of the cheapest and best typewriters. As little as a typewriter might cost, he costs even less: he is gratis. " From this, it fol- lows that Hartleben's period of candidacy fulfilled a childhood dream:
Writing! To be able to write, perhaps to become a real writer. This wish had es- sentially been fulfilled. I was allowed to write, I could write, indeed I had to write. And if for the time being I was not pumng my own thoughts and figures down on paper, but mostly dictated reports, 1 could at least console myself with the thought that not everything could happen at once. In any case: I had attained what was manifest, material, in my wish: I was writing. "'
Writing is the actegratuit itself. It makes neither an author famous nor a reader happy, because the act of writing is nothing beyond its materi- ality. The peculiar people who practice this act simply replace writing machines. Because technologies and pathologies are convertible circa 1900, the bachelor machines known as writers have to be pretty much crazy in order to have any pleasure in the acte grutuit. No one promises them a silver taler o r the daughter of a Lindhorst, but only the mystical union of writing and delirium.
The beginning of writing will thus, to follow Brigge's lead, always be its end. What Ball's Laurentius Tenderenda "would like to record with incurred innocence" slips out of others' hands. Karl Tubutsch, the hero of a novella by Ehrenstein, watches two flies drown in his inkwell, in conse- quence trades his pen (lacking a typewriter) for a pencil, and finally does not write at all. "' It is not necessary, then, for one's own black heart to drown first in the inkwell, as with Nietzky; even two dead flies can stop an act as precarious and delirious as writing. "What keeps me from mak- ing an end to everything, from finding eternal rest in some lake and ink- well or solving the question What God gone mad or demon does the inkwell belong to, the one in which we live and die? and To whom in turn does this God gone mad belong? ""'
Poetic works of 1800 belonged in the Kingdom of God. An Absolute Spirit, in which no member was sober, consumed all authors and works at the end of their earthly cycles. The authors turned in their civic names at the chalice of this realm of spirits, but only in order to attain the in- finity of interpretation and the immortality of meaning.
A completely different God stands over the discourse network of 1900 and its inkwells. He has gone mad. In him the simulators of madness have their master. When the insane God drinks, it is not in order to sublate fantasies in a threefold sense. Where in 1800 there was a function of philosophical consumption, one hundred years later there is bare anni-
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? hilation. Writers who drown in the inkwell of the insane God do not achieve the immortality of an author's name; they simply replace anony- mous and paradoxical analphabets who are capable of writing down a whole discourse network from the outside. For that reason there are no authors and works, but only writers and writings.
Titles like The Notebooks of Malte lmuids Rrigge are not approxima- tions. They designate a denumerable collection of letters in their mate- riality and an arbitrary writer-"this young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge"-in his singularity. In Ehrenstein's story, one sees the same thing. The first sentence is: "My name is Tubutsch, Karl Tubutsch. I mention that only because I possess very little other than my name. " And the last is: "But 1 possess nothing, nothing at all that could make me glad in my heart of hearts. I possess nothing except as mentioned-my name is Tubutsch, Karl Tubutsch. "
Brigge, Tubutsch, Ronne, Pameelen-the names do not vanish in a Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is Spirit itself and therefore name- less. But the fact that these names remain behind demonstrates only their nullity. All the bare last names paraphrase Nietzsche's phrase that there is
as little to makers of words as to words. An insane God rules over makers of words, and this God, lacking omnipotence, is ruled by other powers. It is not hard to guess their names. The fact that after the fly accident someone recommends to Tubutsch that he buy a typewriter reduces the demonology of the inkwell to the nothingness it is under technical- physiological conditions. These other powers have no need for literature. Technology and physiology survive without the Interpretation of the Poet, which in the discourse network of 1800was created by chairs in philosophy. After the toasts between Goethe and Hegel became obsolete, there was no longer an address at the university for anything that makers of words produced. Having fallen to the third and last place of the dis- course network, literature became the debris it described.
In 1900there is no universal educational bureaucrat to legitimize po- etic works, because they legitimize the bureaucrat. The practice-oriented educational bureaucrats became experimenters and conducted media transpositions, not interpretations, with literary texts. '" The philosophy professors left texts to the professors of literature, who had become one type of media professional among others. "* Where the discourse network of 1800enthroned Man or the Bureaucrat as the king of all knowledge, there was left a gaping hole. Therefore writers could only simulate chil- dren and the insane, the subjects of psychophysics; apart from simula- tion, there was the reality, the act, of becoming a functionary. "They were given the choice of becoming kings or king's messengers. Like children, they all wanted to be messengers. Therefore there are nothing but mes-
? sengers; they race through the world and, because there are no kings, call out their messages, which have become meaningless in the meantime, to each other. They would gladly quit this miserable existence, but don't dare to because of their oath of office. ''"9
Such is the comment, still nicely metaphorical, of the bureaucrat Kafka on the professional position of writers once the king's position has been done away with. The same phenomenon was described with deadly seriousness by a technical illustrator who entered the Silesian insane asylum, Troppau. The conspiracy described in minute detail by Anton Wenzel Gross operates without any central, commanding figure. All it takes to drive him insane is a group composed of "supposed mailmen, court clerks, policemen, guards," and, above all, "lithographers, book printers, typesetters, die makers, stamp cutters, chemists, pharmacists, technicians. " Iu) They are all discursive functionaries, then, with the tech- nical competence to block channels of information or postal contacts at crucial points, or, in the guise of professional benevolence, to falsify documents and reports that would have rehabilitated Gross. As such they are identical to the mindless beings who, with mechanical precision, car- ried out the task of driving a bureaucrat by the name of Schreber out of his mind. The discourse network at Sonnenstein also stored only the falsi- fied nonsense that other and equally subaltern nerve messengers shouted into Schreber's ears.
Man or the Bureaucrat was the universal memory of all the products of the mind, but discursive functionaries constitute a disparate group with particular and circumscribed responsibilities. None stores everything, but together they obliterate the monopoly on books and meaning that had been incorporated under the name of Spirit. Whether they are called messengers by Kafka, letter carriers by Gross, or writing powers by Schreber-a physiologist's axiom applies to them all.
In physiology the distinction of partial memories is a familiar truth; but in psy- chology the method of "faculties" has so long forced the recognition of memory as an entity that the existenceof partial memories has been wholly ignored,or, at the most, regarded as anomalous. It is time that this misconception was done away with, and that the fact of special, or, as some authors prefer, local memo- ries, was clearly recognized. This last term we accept willingly on the condition that it is interpreted as a disseminated localization. . . . The memory has often been compared to a store-house where every tact is preserved in its proper place. If this metaphor is to be retained, it must be presented in a more active form; we may compare each particular memory, for instance, with a contingent of clerks charged with a special and exclusive service. Any one of these departmentsmight be abolished without serious detriment to the rest of the work. '"
Dispersed localization, operated by bureaucrats who can be dismissed and who are thus more like functionaries-this is a brain physiology that
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? also describes the factual discursive arrangements of 1900. If the faculty of all faculties, the Mind or Spirit, does not exist, then there are only the specialized functions of specified carriers of information. For this reason so many of Kafka's texts deal with the materiality of channels of informa- tion: the channels bleed into one another ("My Neighbor"); they func- tion with dead or delay times ("An Imperial Message"); they are not thoroughly interconnected (TheCastle);and whatever they transmit has no meaning beyond the statement that they exist ("Before the Law").
But the fact that messages become meaningless when there is no king at the origin and destination of discourses is only one, albeit thoroughly described, side of the contemporary discourse network. Technology makes it possible for the first time to record single and accidental mes- sages. It is no longer possible for a philosopher to walk in and reduce protocol sentences to categories, or spoken words to written truth. Any- thing expressed remains undisputed and indisputable as it is, because spe- cialized memory functions appear for the oddest bits of speech. In Diag- nostic Studies of Association, which the great psychiatrist Bleuler left for his assistants at Bergholzli to finish, one of the four hundred stimulus words, in exact reprise of the Phenomenology, is the stimulus word dark. And one of the sixty-five experimental subjects, a "thirty-eight-year-old idiot," actually reproduced the unforgettable protocol sentence of sense certainty. "Dark: that is now. ""' But this did not move assistant doctors
Jung, Riklin, and Wehrlin to repeat the experiment twelve hours later or to show the thirty-eight-year-old idiot, with speculative finesse, the idiocy of his conception of "now. " Translations into the native land of the sig- nified are not the prerogative of functionaries, but of the Discourse of the Master. Bleuler, meanwhile, did not derive even one philosopheme from the 14,400recorded associations, but instead wrote a preface to them in which he described the omnipotence of unconscious associations with the example of "when I, for instance, write about associations. " Thus "Dark: that is now" returns once more, but in the act of writing. The idiot and the director of the experiment are in the end only the marionettes of their "bodily sensations. "
An entire Phenomenology resulted from the refutation of the sentence, "The now is night. " The entire discourse network of 1900is fed by the return of an opaque thisness. The rough material for an essay that Oster- mai's pupil handed in at ten o'clock, before his bodily sensations took him back home, probably also said only, "Fever, that is now. " That, at least, is what the parallel passage of the simulated madman Brigge sug- gests: "Now it," namely the Big Thing, "had returned. " None of these instances of thisness has an address; none has a meaning. Dispersed spe- cialized or local memories call out meaningless messages to one another.
? With that, however, the sheer Now, or that which incessantly ceases, is halted for the first recorded time.
Recorders that record thisnesses become thisnesses themselves. That makes every instance of archiving into a discursive event. The less pur- pose a discourse in the discourse network of 1900has, the more impos- sible it becomes to neutralize it. It follows that incomprehensible debris, that is, literature, incessantly does not cease. (VaICrysentire poetics deals with this. ) A literature that writes down thisnesses exclusively or that ap- pears as thisness in its words and typography occupies all storage equip- ment and so drives out the type of poetry about which "the name 'philo- sophical lyric' already says enough. " The fact that Schiller, "an extremely learned poet," treated themes such as Nature or the Walk as "thought- out things. . . that are accomplished through abstractions and syntheses, and thus through logical rather than real or natural processes," disqualifies him and the entire conspiracy between Poets and Thinkers. '" The vacated regal position then can and must be filled with many particular points of the present: recorders as singular as whatever they record. Whole series of chapters in A rebours and Dorian Gray list the most priceless objects- jewels, carpets, spices. But who reads such lists? Does anyone at all?
There are two possible answers to these questions, one esoteric and the other the opposite. Both are options in the same realm.
The esoteric an- swer says that what is stored is what is stored, whether people take note of it or not. "' Oscar Wilde, composer of one of the longest inventories of precious objects, unabashedly traced the creation of an excellent modem poetry in England to the fact that no one read and therefore corrupted it. "" Thus Zarathustra's maxim of doing nothing for the reader is put into practice. The journal Pages for Art was devoted, it announced, to "a closed and member-invited circle of readers. " Such scarcity-producing techniques, which program discursive events, have, of course, excited horror and contempt in upstanding citizens. But their attacks glance off a logic against which even critical theory, in order to raise any objection at all, is for once forced to believe in the People. "' The esoteric Hofmanns- thal, for instance, based his disinterest in everything "that one usually re- fers to as the social question" in an unassailable nominalism. "One never encounters it as anything real: and probably no one knows what it 'really' is, neither those who are in it nor even the 'upper classes. ' I have never met the People. 1 don't think the People exists; here, at least, there are only folks. " 14*
The impossible real that dominates all recording and memory circa 1900thus becomes a kind of pragmatic linguistics. A literature in which only particulars are written down will recognize, among its readers or nonreaders, only particular readers. The vernacular expression folks has
? no philosophical or sociological status. It is a sign for the second possible answer, for stochastic dispersion, the white noise over and against which media are what they are.
It makes little difference, then, whether literature deals with decadence or with what has sunk to the level of debris, whether it simulates aristoc- racy or psychosis. On the unattainable reverse side there will always be stochastic dispersion, especially in the option opposed to esotericism. With his beginnings in Prague, Rilke first adopted Wilde's posture, as when in his lecture on modem lyric poetry he thanked the German public for its notorious disinterest. Modern poetry can be because people let it be. ''9 Yet Rilke personally distributed collections of his and others' poetry. "I've sent a number of copies to civic organizations and guilds, to bookstores and hospitals, etc. , and have distributed Chicory myself in several areas. Whether they will really reach 'the people'-who knows? . . . I'm counting on chance to see that a copy here and there will arrive among the people and find its way into a solitary room. ""O This mode of distribution solves the social question in that it puts the people between quotation marks and establishes only individual cases. Rilke's strange wanderings through Prague seek out the "folks" that for the eso- teric Hofmannsthal solely constitute the real. But "people" can no longer be sought out, because there are no longer any multipliers and hence no longer any methods for the distribution of poetry. Rilke's project avoided schools, the only institution that produces readers as such. And the hospi- tals and guilds he included function less as multipliers than as the letter- drops used in espionage. The writer, fallen to the level of functionary, lets his Chicory (as the plant name indicates) fall on the biblical stones by the side of the road. All he "counts" on is "chance. " And one cannot cal- culate chance without using statistics. Whether literature since I900 reaches anyone at all remains a question for empirical social research.
The only philological evidence available is the way in which impossible addresses to particular readers, or measures adopted in order not to reach the educated individual enter textuality. Only a mode of dealing with de- bris counts as a mode of distributing texts that constitute the debris of a discourse network. In this, literature opposes the classical-romantic pro- gram of proliferating Poetry.
A final word on Hoffmann and Lindhorst. Young men and feminine readers were caught in the classical-romantic manner with very finely woven nets. The well-known bureaucrat and secret Poet commissioned a judge and Poet to function as a poetic multiplier. This secondary Poet then brought a young man into the picture, who learned hermeneutic reading so perfectly that he became capable of writing Poetry. Feminine
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readers were then able to puzzle endlessly over which woman was the true object of the Poet's love, and young but poetic bureaucrats, faithful disciples of Anselmus, learned to read the image of Woman with suffi- cient hallucinatory vividness to be able to find the image again in so- called life. Nothing in this program survived the turning point of 1900. The eradication of the ambiguous name, which could designate author- individuals like Anselmus or Amadeus and bureaucrats like Heerbrand or Hoffmann, was enough to ensure the break. Even though Rilke schol- ars continue to make friends with Malte, Malte Laurids Brigge none- theless remains the "young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge. " The name as pure signifier excludes imaginary identification. Kafka's "K. " and "Joseph K. " allow only the kind of game that Freud played with his anon- ymous personnel of Emmy v. N's and Anna 0. 3. Such bare and dismem- bered family names cannot support a continuous history of Bildung and thus alphabetization. Heroes that labor under agraphia or alexia can never represent the Author.
"Biography no longer counts. Names don't matter," as it was once put inthetelegraphicstyleof19Iz. "I Thenamethatinthediscoursenetwork of I800 was or became "sound and smoke" ("Schall und Rauch"; Fuust, 1. 3457) was of course that of the Master-HErr. After its eradication, au- thors' names could fill its place, and their poetic biographies could inspire readers to write and feminine readers to love. But the despoticsignifier that stands over the discourse network of 1900orders soul murder or the twi- light of mankind. Thus authors' names disappear, some into the nullity of individual cases, others into a factual anonymity. "He who knows the reader, does nothing further for the reader"-so, according to Nietzsche, he provides no information on his own spiritual history and the "probable further course of his development. " Doblin the doctor, for instance, gave this psychoanalytic comment on Doblin the writer: "I have nothing to say concerning my mental development; as a psychoanalyst, I know how false any self-disclosure is. In psychic self-relation I'm a touch-me-not, and ap- proach myself only through the distance of epic narration. " Rubiner, for instance, took the anthology title Twilight of Mankind literally and re- fused the publisher's traditional request for biographical information. "Ludwig Rubiner requested that no biography be included. He believes that the recounting not only of acts but also of lists of works and dates derives from a vain error of the past, that of the individualistic grand-artist. His conviction is that only anonymous, creative membership in commu- nity has any importance for the present or future. ""'
The writers who beginning in 1912contributed to a journal with the significant title The Loose Bird [i. e. , "a loose fellow"]-such as Max
? Brod, Robert Musil, Ernst Stadler, Robert Walser, and Franz Werfel- carried the project to factual anonymity. Rubiner explains what the loose bird means:
Anonymity is the rule in this journal published by Demeter. Is it possible to con- ceive of a word that would give the least indication of this shake-up, of the bliss of this realized utopia? What must be made clear is that a century whose function was to give us mess tins, single-sized boots, and scores by Wagner no longer exists as a hindrance for the mind. . . . Anonymity is again the rule in a new journal: that is, after a century there is once again commitment and relation.
The day that one person really had the courage to think the concept of ano- nymity through to its end is the day that belongs to the creative period of contem- porary history. "'
The anonymity of loose birds is thus an intentional break with classical- romantic writing, a discursive event intended to make discursive events possible. In the elite space of the cult of the letter that the discourse net- work of 1900left to makers of words, an earlier, widespread practice is taken up "again. ''"s This "relinquishing of the author" can be psychi- atrically conceptualized as depersonalization"""or celebrated as the crea- tive act of "the mind"-in each case anonymity guarantees words the effects of radical foreignness. "The mind leaps into the stone-walled space of the objective. A word, a sentence is left to resound in the world. ""-
But beware: the one person who "really had the courage to think the concept of anonymity through to its end" could be named George. When in the last issues of Pages for Art "authors' names were omitted as nones- sential elements," Rubiner, the upright leftist without name or biography, was alarmed. Then the one, despotic signifier, without betraying names, issued the call to World War I. Words were left to resound in the world and could not be neutralized by ordinary legal procedures. "' And it be- came terrifyingly clear what "loose bird" means.
UN COUP DE DES JAMAISN'ABOLIRA LE HASARD.
Artists who no more sign their works than "the earth signs the grass that grows out of who leave their Chicory on comers at workers' pubs, who issue their right- or left-wing calls to battle without the civic anributability of names, all perched on stochastic dispersion and oper- ated in the strategic field. The discourse network of 1900created the con- ditions of possibility for a genuine sociology of literature. The combined program announced in Gustave Lanson's title Literary History and Soci- ology follows the loose birds and depersonalized writing hands that have flown across paper since 1900. The fact that writers write words that an ego neither intends nor answers for makes the book a social fact. "The book, therefore, is an evolving social phenomenon. Once it is published,
? the author no longer possesses it; it no longer signifiesthe thought of the author, but the thought of the public, the thought of the publics that suc- ceed one another in turn. "
Here, what divides theory from practice is that Lanson writes about thoughts, whereas for a long time signifiers had not only not signified an author's thoughts, but not signified anything at all. Whatever factual readers do with the social fact of the book can be done entirely without thinking. When a school library opened its Poetic Treasureto ten-year- old Hans Carossa in 1888, he "did not understand a tenth of what [he] read," but was "gripped and formed by the sound and rhythm of the poems. " Orders are always more effective when nothing or no one neu- tralizes them. Where Reiser, Karl Friedrich von Kloden, e tutti quanti were offended by incomprehensible letters, Carossa was bewitched, as if by magical incantations. What offended him was just the opposite. "I was a little disturbed in the beginning by the names that stood beneath each poem and did not belong there; at least I could not imagine what such funny words as Klopstock, Riickert, Morike, Goethe, or Kopisch had to do with that intimate music. " '*I
A young man like Carossa is incapable of letting his anger issue into acts and eradicating funny names like Goethe. The wrath of a mature woman is required. This woman's name is Abelone and she is unable to sit by when a man named Brigge unsuspectingly reads around in
Goethe's Correspondence with a Young Girl.
"If you would at least read aloud, bookworm," said Abelone after a little. That did not sound nearly soquarrelsome, and since I thought it high time for a recon- ciliation, I promptly read aloud, going right on to the end of the section, and on again to the next heading: To Bettina.
"No,not the answers," Abelone interrupted. . . . Then she laughed at the way I was looking at her.
"My goodness, Malte, how badly you've been reading. "
Then I had to admit that not for one moment had my mind been on what I was doing. "I read simply to get you to interrupt me," 1confessed, and grew hot and turned back the pages till I came to the title of the book. Only then did 1 know what it was. "And why not the answers? " 1 asked with curiosity.
Abelone seemed not to have heard me. She sat there in her bright dress, as though she were growing dark all over inside, as her eyes were now.
"Give it to me," she said suddenly, as if in anger, taking the book out of my hand and opening it right at the page she wanted. And then she read one of Bet- tina's letters.
I don't know how much of it I took in, but it was as though a solemn promise were being given me that one day 1should understand it all. '"*
Lanson's law is rigorous. Books circa 1900are social phenomena, pos- sessed by no one, not even their original author. Historical change makes
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? Goetbe's Correspondence with a Young Girl into the correspondence of a woman with no one-because a second woman interrupts every time Goethe, in the name of his name, puts of a loving admirer. A century later, his name is gone; Brigge has to look back at the title for it, and Abelone (like the Notebooks as a whole) does not even pronounce it.
Discursive manipulations are incisions. Topologically speaking, mapped onto the discourse network of 1900a correspondence carried on during the years 1807to 1812is no longer equivalent to its earlier self. Proximities in a book (between love letters and replies) are destroyed, and other proximities (between love and love and love) are established. The transposition of media creates a new corpus, the corpus Bettina Bren- tano. "Just now, Bemna, you still were; I understand you. Is not the earth still warm with you, and do not the birds still leave room for your voice? The dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. Or is not the whole world of your making? "'"'The corpus of Bettina Brentano, also called the world, appears in the place of authorship and of the domi- nance of the work. Where the creator named Goethe is absent, space fills with the voices of birds and women. A letter writer who was quite happy to be insignificant does not become an author posthumously. But what she wrote into the wind ceases, in the absence of authorship, to cease. Precisely because it does nothing but eternally repeat a love, this writing is suddenly timely. It is timely when the eternal recurrence of opaque thisness defines all writing.
Each discourse network alters corpora of the past. The anonymous or pseudonymous women who remained at the margins of writing circa I800 now move into the center of the system, because the authors or men in whose work they perished were perishing in turn. Women in Eigbteentb- and Nineteenth-Century German Intellectual Life-whether in statistics or in increasing singularity, women were honored in such monographs circa 1900. '"Goethe's mother, with her orthographically catastrophic letters, provided a model for the free essay. '"'Rahel Varnhagen is taken to be a "great power" of the classical period. '" George dedicated a poem to the shore of the Rhein where Karoline von Giinderode threw herself in. Bemna Brentano, finally, marked the limit and failure of Goethe. When intransitive writing becomes the sign of literature, unheard-of women, writers of letters, prefigure the new act of writing, whereas texts written in authorial code and thus familiar to the general world of readers become anathema. Brigge writes to Bettina Brentano:
You yourself knew the worth of your love; you recited it aloud to your greatest poet, so that he should make it human; for it was still element. But he, in writing to you, dissuaded people from it. They have all read his answers and believe them rather, because the poet is clearer to them than nature. But perhaps it will some-
? day appear that here lay the limit of his greatness. This lover was imposed upon him, and he was not equal to her. What does i t signify that he could not respond? Such love needs no response, itself contains both the mating-call and the reply; it answers its own prayers. lh-
Significantly,it was not Brigge who achieved this transvaluation of all values. By reading Goethe's answers he would have cancelled out the in- transitive love once more, if he had not read so badly and for the sole purpose of being interrupted. If there is to be an kccrrrure fkminine, one must put an end to alphabbise. Instead of progressing continuously to- ward his own authorship by reading Goethe, Brigge exposes his reading to an interruption that functions like the Geneva stop of film or the ta- chistoscope of psychophysics. When Abelone takes up the book and reads, she does not substitute good reading for bad. For the first time, she reveals (as Larisch might say) the "between" of Goethe's answers. Her listener does not gain hermeneutic understanding, only the promise that "one day" he "should understand it all. "
A woman who reads out loud the unheard-of (in both senses of the word) love letters of a woman closes a circle around both sexes that ex- cludes male hermeneutics. Because there is no author to suggest to femi- nine readers that his soul is the cryptic word of their love, Abelone is re- leased from the obligation of close reading. The functions that defined the sexes in the discourse network of 1800,the productive continuation of texts and pure consumption, both fall away. Brigge is not Anselmus and Abelone is not Veronika. He hands the book to her and she does what she likes with it. One hundred years later, then, what was impossible between Bettina Brentano and Goethe occurs. "But he should have humbled him- self before her in all his splendor and written what she dictated, with both hands, likeJohn on Patmos, kneeling. There was no choice for him before this voice which 'fulfilled the angels' function. '"'"* Reading aloud in a voice that continues to amplify because it feeds back into another woman, Abelone dictates all of Brigge's future insights. She dictates what Bettina Brentano was unable to dictate under the conditions of classical dis- course. The function of angels is of course to announce a death. Dicta- tions are always the death of the author. Whereas Goethe "left empty" the "dark myth" that a woman's voice had prepared for his death,'"' the writer of the Notebooks assumes this myth. The era of the other inter- pretation means being without the honorable title of author and being subject to the dictates of others. Kneeling, as Goethe failed to, Brigge
transcribes. With that, however, the promise that emanated from Abe- lone's incomprehensibility "is still being fulfilled. " I'"
Everything written about women in the Notebooks is dictated by a re- sounding voice, at once Abelone and Bettina: that, for instance, there is
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? nothing to say about her, "because only wrong is done in the telling"; "' that there is no question of writing letters to her, only drafts of letters that Brigge does not send; that all attempts to rise to the level of an author by writing for young ladies (as Goethe might have put it) come to nothing against the will of women "to remove from [their] love all that was tran- sitive"; ''I and that an intransitive love can only consist in a kind of writ- ing that circa 1900is incorporated as literature. What does it mean that women, according to Rilke, "for centuries now . . . have performed the whole of love; they have always played the full dialogue, both parts"? '-'As in Adelbert von Hanstein or Ellen Key, it outlines an alternative literary history consisting of unanswered and intransitive calls of love-of Bettina Brentano, Sappho, Heloike, Gaspara Stampa, Elisa Mercoeur, Clara d'Anduze, Louise Labbe, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Julie Lespinasse, Marie-Anne de Clermont, and so many others. '"
Where the divinity of the author disappeared, women who write appeared, as irreducible as they are unread. Because their texts exist, their writers cannot be confounded with the One Mother who has made someone an author (as Goethe confounded even Bettina Brentano). The discourse network of 1900 obeyed the rule of impossible exhaustion no- where more rigorously than in the field of sexual difference. Not only are Schillerian abstractions such as "Nature" or "The Walk" impossible, but so are all discourses that unify the sexes. Such is the insight that Brigge receives in dictation from his impossible beloved.
Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nonetheless live? Is it possible that one says "women," "children," "boys," not guessing (despite all one's culture, not guessing) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
Yes,it is possible .