No More Learning

Psychophysics
Two years before Nietzsche argued that mnemonic techniques were the genealogy of morals, a professor of psychology in Breslau, Hermann Ebbinghaus, published a short but revolutionary work entitled O n Mem- ory. Whereas the last philosopher ended the history of Western ethics by reducing history and ethics to machines, Ebbinghaus made a new, that is, technological contribution to knowledge of an age-old phenomenon. And whereas the philosopher and man of letters described the scene of writing with every line he wrote until such autoreferentiality issues in a megalomaniacal scream (or the book Ecce Homo)and brought psychia- trists into the picture, Ebbinghaus was quite reticent about the subject of his painful autoexperiment of memory quantification. This silence makes it possible to turn the great words of the ex-professor into science. Where the one had come to his end with psychiatrically defined flight of ideas, the other risked the same fate experimentally; his text, however, records only numbers, not a word of pain or pleasure. Yet numbers are the only kind of information that remains relevant beyond all minds, whether insane or professorial: as an inscription in the real. '
"During two periods, in the years 1879-80 and 1883-84," Ebbing- haus daily conducted autoexperiments, beginning at varied times of the
? day in the first period but using the early afternoon during the second. "Care was taken that the objective conditions of life during the period of the tests were so controlled as to eliminate too great changes or irregu- larities. "' Who might have created such chaos-servants or wives, stu- dents or colleagues-remains unspecified. What matters is that a German professor modified his life during specified periods in order to be able to count something that was previously deemed common knowledge and therefore beneath notice: his own memory capacity.
How does the disappearance of the ability to reproduce, forgetfulness, depend upon the length of time during which no repetitions have taken place? What pro- portion does the increase in the certainty of reproduction bear to the number of repetitions? How do these relations vary with the greater or lessintensity of the interest in the thing to be reproduced? These and similar questions no one can answer.
This inability does not arise from a chance neglect of investigation of these relations. We cannot say that tomorrow, or whenever we wish to take time, we can investigate these problems. On the contrary, this inability is inherent in the nature of the questions themselves. Although the conceptions in question- namely, degrees of forgetfulness, of certainty and interest-are quite correct, we have no means of establishing such degrees in our experience except at the ex- tremes. We feel therefore that we are not at all in a condition to undertake the investigation. . . . For example, to express our ideas concerningtheir [memories'] physical basis we use different metaphors-stored-up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths. There is only one thing certain about these figures of speech and that is that they are not accurate. '
What seems most familiar to introspection here becomes an object of research. And the customary metaphors and images of psychology can- not be eradicated without mortification. Nietzsche had derived the most spiritual of memories from the body and its suffering; psychophysics ap- proached the same enigma mathematically, with methods that H. L. F. von Helmholtz and G. T. Fechner had developed to measure perception. ' A shift in paradigms occurred: Nietzsche and Ebbinghaus presupposed forgetfulness, rather than memory and its capacity, in order to place the medium of the soul against a background of emptiness or erosion. A zero value is required before acts of memory can be quantified. Ebbinghaus banned introspection and thus restored the primacy of forgetting on a theoretical level. On the one hand, there was Nietzsche's delirious joy at forgetting even his forgetfulness; on the other, there was a psychologist who forgot all of psychology in order to forge its algebraic formula. This is the relation of the Discourse of the Master to that of the university, of Nietzschean command to technological execution. Rather than give a philosophical description of mnemonic inscription and practice it in dithyrambs, Ebbinghaus took the place of Nietzsche's victim or experi-
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mental subject and then retroactively became the observer of his own ex- perience in order to quantify what he had suffered.
Reading aloud at a tempo dictated by the ticking of his pocket watch, the professor spent years reading line after line of meaningless syllables, until he could recite them from memory. "His idea of using meaningless syllables as experimental material solved in a single stroke the introspec- tionist problem of finding meaning-free sensation^. "^ From that point on, the bare relation of numbers could serve as a measure for the force of psychophysical inscription. Lines of seven syllables can be learned in- stantly, lines of twelve syllables have to be read sixteen times, and lines of twenty-six syllables have to be read fifty-five times before the mechanism of reproducible memorization clicks on. It was not always easy, however, to exclude self-fulfilling prophecies in the numerical results; the forget- ting of forgetting remains as paradoxical as the effort "to rid oneself of a thought and by that very attempt foster that thought. "" After three quar- ters of an hour of uninterrupted memory exercises, "occasionally exhaus- tion, headache, and other symptoms," set in, "which if continued would have complicated the conditions of the experiment. "- Psychophysics is thus quite real, particularly for its inventor, for whom it (likeall mnemonic techniques, according to Nietzsche) causes physical discomfort. It was known in the classical age that "such a dreadfully one-sided application of so subordinate a mental power as memory can derange human rea- son";' but for this reason Anselmus circumvented mechanical repetition through hermeneutics. In 1900the opposite is necessary. A subordinate mental function becomes the most fundamental, because it is quantifi- able. ' Forthesakeofafewformulas,Ebbinghaussacrificed(asNietzsche did for the desert) his subject of knowledge. '"Dizzy, numbed by all the syllables, his mind became a tabula rasa. "
The test's individual conditions all contributed to such emptiness. Lan- guage was artificially reduced to a raw state. First, Ebbinghaus did not allow "the meaningless syllables to be connected with any associated meanings,asischaracteristicofcertainmnemonictechniques. ',I* Second, the empty page he had become was cleansed of memories and his native language. To isolate memory from all other cultural practices, Ebbing- haus eliminated signifieds from the beginning, because they might have provoked hermeneutic activity. "Associations tending in different direc- tions, differing degrees of interest, the recollection of particularly striking or beautiful verses, etc. ," all such ordinarily sanctioned mental activity amounted only to "disturbing influences. " ' I With his head spinning, Ebbinghaus achieved an unthinkable distance where nothing, but nothing, means anything. He instituted the flight of ideas.
? There is nothing exotic in distance, and the great kingdom of nonsense is no exception. In order to prove that recollecting meaningless material was the rule, Ebbinghaus conducted counter experiments. As if to test Nieasche's thesis of the basic utility of metrics, Ebbinghaus memorized cantos from Byron's Don Juan under the same experimental conditions as before. Even he was surprised by the result. "From this point of view it almost seems as if the difference between sense and nonsense material were not nearly so great as one would be inclined a priori to imagine. "" Thus the great doctrine bestowed by the discourse network of 1800 on its reformed primers is shaken: namely, the notion that readers would learn signifieds, because of their immanence in the mind, with much greater speed than they would learn signifiers by rote. To the contrary, pure non- sense reveals certain specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not even conceive. "The homogeneity of the series of syllables falls con- siderably short of what might be expected of it. The series exhibit very important and almost incomprehensible variations as to the ease or diffi- culty with which they are learned. "" Just beyond the purpose of the test, then, there is something that no longer concerns Ebbinghaus but that will interest Freud and the writers; it is the differentiality that precedes all meaning: the naked, elementary existence of signifiers. If "from this point of view" the difference between sense and nonsense dwindles, then the kingdom of sense-that is, the entire discourse network of I goo-sinks to the level of a secondary and exceptional phenomenon. Neither under- standing nor the previously fundamental capacity of "inwardizing" or recollection has any significant effect on the mechanics of memory.
If signifiers obey laws that are as fundamental as they are incomprehen- sible, it is essential to have the test material expressed in strict, statistical terms. Long before the expressionist "language eroticism" [Spracherorik] that "first must demolish language" and "establish the chaotic, originary condition, the absolute homogeneity of the material," I6 Ebbinghaus went to work on the same project. The nonsense that he spent hours, days, weeks, and years memorizing was never picked up from any native speak- ers in any locality. It was generated by a calculation at the beginning of every test series. Through an exhaustive combination of eleven vowels, nineteen beginning consonants, and (for the sake of pronunciation) only eleven end consonants, there came to be "ca. 2,300" or (asanyone might calculate) 2,299 tripthong syllables. " The random generator can not keep a few meaningful German words from appearing in a series, "doscbpiim
. "In
feu. lot. .
lor five seconds ago) and that have little effect. "Among many thousand combinations there occur scarcely a few dozen that have a meaning and
These, however, are exceptions that can be read over (like
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among these there are again only a few whose meaning was realized while they were being memorized. ""
Never before had such passion been devoted to syllables. Of course, Reformation primers did, to the dismay of the classical age, play through single vowel-consonant combinations of the second order. But their ab eb ib ob ub / bu be bibo bu was only an example; the goal was not a mathe- matically guaranteed completeness of assembly. The discourse network of 1900 was the first to establish a treasury of the signifier whose rules were entirely based on randomness and combinatorics. '" It is not that, with Ebbinghaus's numbered sounds and sound combinations or Mallarmk's twenty-four letters, an old-European discursive practice returns from its repression circa 1800. ~'The fact that combinatory groups do not neces- sarily produce sense also applied to the letters and words of the miserable scribes of 1736. But not even Liscov's satire had the scribes systematically avoid "agreement among the letters" the way Ebbinghaus did. The differ-
ence between the polyphonic line and the twelve-tone technique is simi- jar; the latter not only revives all contrapuntal-combinatory arts, but also avoids all accidental harmonic effects just as counterpoint had avoided all d'issonance.
The homologies between dodecaphony and Ebbinghaus, who began a whole positivist movement, are so far-reaching that a search for fac- tual cross-connections would be worthwhile (though it would not be merely the investigation into the ambience of Viennese coffee houses that Adorno's philosophy of modem music in all seriousness proposes). First, Ebbinghaus memorized the meaningless syllables in groups of seven to twenty-six, which, like Schonberg's twelve tones, are called series. Sec- ond, he eliminated the disturbing effects of easily learned syllables by put- ting aside the syllables from the available supply of 2,299 combinations that had already been memorized until all the other combinations had been gone through. zZDodecaphony proceeded in the same way with se- rial tones that had already been employed: these were taboo until the re- maining eleven had been tun through. Third, in order to refute the doc- trine of free association taught in 1800, Ebbinghaus produced a very complicated demonstration showing that the interconnection of members of a row facilitates memorization; for example, if an already memorized series dosch pam f a r lot . . . ,is reordered into the series lot pam few dosch . . . . Accordingly, "not only are the original terms associated with their immediate sequents," that is, those following in either direction, but "connections are also established between each term and those which fol- low it beyond several intervening members. "" Schonberg proceeded in the same manner by bypassing certain notes in a melody and transferring
them to parallel ~oices. ~In' both cases a combinatorics presented in the
? original material is subjected to a further combinatorics of the series and column.
Permutations of permutations eliminate any natural relation. Non- sense syllables or chromatic tones of equal value constitute media in the modern sense: material produced by random generation, selected and grouped into individual complexes. The fact that these materials always join discrete elements and do not develop in continuous genesis from an unarticulated nature distinguishes them from minimal signifieds. To Ebbinghaus the unique "oh" would simply be one among the 209 pos- sible dipthong combinations. It would not take until the year 2407, as Christian Morgenstern's Gingunz announces, for "the great paper- shredding snow centrifuge of the American Nature Theater Company Ltd. of Brotherson & Sann" to take the place of organically grown snow crystals. L'
If a syllable such as mu does not grow out of a mother-child love tran- scending words and then glide into the first word of the high idiom, Mama, but rather is thrown out like dice, it forfeits any ranking above the countless other syllables that are and remain meaningless. On the contrary, the effect of meaning, greeted by Tiedemann and Stephani as a revelation from beyond all language, becomes a disturbance that troubles the pure flightofideas with memories and associations. Thinking and in- tending, however, are the imaginary acts that led the philosophers of
1800to assert the primacy of the oral. In contrast to the technologies of the letter, only speaking-an externalization that immediately dis- appears-could figure as the frictionless unification of Spirit and Nature. But orality, together with thought, vanishes from randomly generated language material. Of course, Ebbinghaus worked with phonemes in order to be able to read aloud, but they were presented to him as writing. Syllable after syllable comes out of the random generator, onto the desk and into the file of worked-through alternatives, until all 2,299 have been used and output and input can begin again.
Memory tests in which the experimental subject necessarily thinks nothing and abandons the position of knowing subject have an equally subjectless observer, who is not as far from Nietzsche's new god as hasty distinctions between myth and positivism would have it. The two me- chanicalmemoriesoneithersideofthetabularasaEbbinghaus-the one generating the syllables and the other recording them after they have passed before him-form a writing machine that forgets nothing and stores more nonsense than people ever could: 2,299 nonsense syllables. This is the necessary condition for a psychophysical investigation of memory: memory is taken from people and delegated to a material orga- nization of discourse. The discourse network of 1800played the game
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of not being a discourse network and pretended instead to be the in- wardness and voice of Man; in 1900a type of writing assumes power that does not conform to traditional writing systems but rather radicalizes the technology of writing in generaLZ6
The most radical extrapolation from a discourse network of writing is to write writing. "All letters that have ever been written by man count. "'- Given an assortment of letters and diacritical signs, like a typewriter key- board (even, after 1888, in its standardized form), then in principle it is possible to inscribe more and different sorts of things than any voice has ever spoken. Of course, such notations have no purpose beyond notation itself; they need not and cannot be dematerialized and consumed by a hermeneutics; their indelible and indigestible existence on the page is all that the page conveys.
THE GREAT LALULA
Kroklokwafzi? Semernemi! Seiokrontro-prafriplo: Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi: quasti basti bo. . .
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!
Hontraruru rnirornente zasku zes rii rii? Entepente, leiolente klekwapufzi Iii?
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!
Sirnarar kos rnalzipernpu silzuzankunkrei (;)!
Majornar dos: Quernpu Lempu Siri Suri Sei [I!
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!
Before Morgenstem's 1905collection Gdows Songs, no poem had existed as a small discourse network. Literary historians have sought classical-romantic models for these poems and have found some non- sense verse here and there. **But even the "Wien ung quatsch, Ba nu, Ba nu n'am tsche fatsch," sung by a dark-skinned cook in Clemens Brentano's Several Millers of Sorrow, if it is not pidgin Rumanian, is at least speak- able. " No voice, however, can speak parentheses that enclose a semicolon (as specified in "The Great Lalulii") or even-to demonstrate once and for all what media are-brackets that surround an empty space. System- atic nonsense, which demands inhuman storage capacities, exists only in writing. The fact that Morgenstern's syllables owe their existence not to a combinatory method but, at first sight at least, to lovely chance doesn't
? make them all that different from Ebbinghaus's series. "The Great Lalulii" is also material without an author; the more chance enters, the more liter- ally does the imperative in the motto of the Gallows Songs apply: "Let the molecules roar / whatever they dice together! "
Clearly, the discourse network of 1900is a dice game with "serially ordered discrete unities,'"" which in the lyric are called letters and punc- tuation signs, and to which writers since Mallarmi have ceded the ini- tiative. More anarchic than Liscov's miserable scribes, who can at least discard a bad dice throw, less Faustian than all poetae minores of 1800, who produced quantities of meaning in inverse relation to their stature, literature throws out signifiers. "The Great Lalulii" says that, in the be- ginning and in the end, language is Blabla. "You can say what you like, people more often than not do nothing but-bark, cackle, crow, bleat, etc. Just listen for once to the animal conversations in a bar. ""
What remains is the enigma of the signifiers' use. To write down script that is simply script had no appeal for hermeneutic interpreters or for philosophers, whose chief concern is "naturally the stress on the factor of meaning" and therefore "naturally" German Poetry. " "Lalulii" is more useful to cryptographers (of whom more will be said). But psychophysics would have the greatest use for such writing. There are people in whom Morgenstern's nonsense "lives on as a fount of citation"-the most cer- tain "sign for what we call a classic poet" "-though one does not know how such mnemonic technique works. Because "new creation in lan- guage has something in common with the invention of undreamed-of physical phenomena,"" the "Lalulii" would be an occasion for readers to instigate autoexperiments in memory, especially since Ebbinghaus him- self fudged things a bit. In order to measure eventual differences between sense and nonsense, the psychophysicist introduced verses by Byron and thus determinants supplementary to meaning: rhyme and meter. In "Lalul5," by contrast, only these two redundancies, with no meaning, re- strict chance. As a missing link between the syllabic hodgepodge and the lyric form, "Lalulii" could bring experimental clarification to the contro- versial question whether rhyme and meter, in their mnemonically conve- nient conspicuousness, represent the identity of signifieds or are the effects of signifiers. " In this way one could distinguish those functions that, in Byron, remain clumped together as "unified strains of sense, rhythm, rhyme, and membership in a single language. " Nietzsche's doc- trine of the utility of poetry, which stressed mnemonic technique and questioned rather than supported the possibility of the transmission of meaning, could be brought to bear on The ScientificFoundations of Po- etry more materially through "The Great Lalulii" than the apostle of naturalism, Wilhelm Bolsche, had intended in his title.
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Following the heroic autoexperiments of Ebbinghaus, breaking down discourses into single and discrete functions became the task of an en- tire psychophysics of complex cultural practices. These functions have nothing to do with one another or with any unity imposed by conscious- ness; they are automatic and autonomous. "We may sum up the experi- ment by saying that a large number of acts ordinarily called intelligent, such as reading, writing, etc. , can go on quite automatically in ordinary people. "" In 1900speaking and hearing, writing and reading were put to the test as isolated functions, without any subject or thought as their shadowy supports. "Between finitude and infinity the word has ample room to be able to d o without any help from thought. "'* Rather than the long genetic path of the word from its beginning in nature to its end in culture, what counts is the signifier's mechanism and how it runs under either normal or pathological circumstances. Psychophysics is not a peda- gogy that takes necessary truths from Mother Nature for mothers and teachers; rather, it inventories previously unresearched particulars. Cul- ture [Bildung],the great unity in which speaking, hearing, writing, and reading would achieve mutual transparency and relation to meaning, breaks apart. Even if schoolmen draw massive conclusions from the in- ventory, the experimenters are at the wheel. Pedagogic reforms are only applications; they apply to only one cultural practice; indeed, they tend to make instruction in reading or writing into a somewhat muddled order of research. Thus even in its own field, in the "psychology of reading," "the competence of pedagogy" ends. " Exit Stephani.
The victory of psychophysics is a paradigm shift. Instead of the classi- cal question of what people would be capable of if they were adequately and affectionately "cultivated," one asks what people have always been capable of when autonomic functions are singly and thoroughly tested. " Because this capability is not a gift of productive nature, but as simple as either spelling or writing "Lalulii," it has no ideal completion or end- point. There is no universal norm (inwardness, creative imagination, high idiom, Poetry) transcending the particular functions. Each has a standard only in relation to defined experimental subjects and conditions.
When ten pupils from each of ten gymnasium classes read aloud and as quickly as possible one hundred connected words from E p o n t , the measured average reading time for those in the sixth class is 55 seconds, for those in the fifth class 43 seconds, and for those in the first class 23 seconds? ' These standards mean nothing to educationally bureaucratized lovers of Goethe. Ebbinghaus adds to these numbers his own, namely 0. 16 seconds per word of Goethe, thus leveling any distinction in rank between pupils and professors, empirical evidence and norm. To measure one's own reading pace as well as that of the sixth class means methodi-
? cally disposing of culture [Bildung]. Thus Ebbinghaus does not announce any record, because "the numbers continue to diminish with further practice in reading. "" So the transcendental norm falls into an endless series, at whose irreal end might be someone who could only speedread. If psychophysical standards had ideals rather than provisional records, those ideals would resemble the genius of Kafka's hunger artist. Indeed, the first German graphologist took such interest in cripples who wrote with their mouths or feet that he attempted to do so himself and re- produced facsimiles of his efforts. " Psychophysics ceased subjecting cul- tural practices to a dichotomy of the normal and pathological, the devel- oped and underdeveloped. It investigated capabilities that in everyday life would have to be called superfluous, pathological, or obsolete.
Ebbinghaus, having been alphabetized, could read silently, without moving his mouth, but for test series he preferred the old-fashioned method of reading aloud at a tempo that could be mechanically di- rected. " Of course, typewriters that eliminated all the individuality of script had recently appea~ed:~but a psychophysical graphology arose in a counter movement and focused on the difference between standardized letters and unconscious-automatic hands that write.
It was concerned with what under normal conditions would be considered a ''superfluous addition to the letters. "" If "it is emphasized-and rightly so-that a pupil should not learn material that is meaningless to him,"" each psycho- physical experimental subject-from the infant to the psychology pro- fessor-is an exception to such pedagogical norms. All the abilities and inabilities despised in I 800 return, not as simple regressions from an erst- while culture, but as objects of analysis and decomposition.
The cultural-technological standards do not represent Man and his Norm. They articulate or decompose bodies that are already dismem- bered. Nature does its own work before any experimenter arrives? ' Apo- plexy, bullet wounds to the head, and paralysis made possible the funda- mental discoveries upon which every connection drawn between cultural practices and physiology is based. In 1861 Paul Broca traced motoric aphasia, or the inability to pronounce words despite unimpaired con- sciousness and hearing, to lesions in a circumscribed area of the cerebral cortex. In I 874 Karl Wernicke made the mirroring discovery that sensory aphasia, or the inability to hear words despite unimpaired speech capac- ity, corresponded to a deficit in other areas of the brain. The method of isolating and measuring cultural practices by reference to deficiencies led finally to the decomposition of discourse into single parameter^. '^ Circa 1900 optical disturbances corresponding to the acoustical disturbances investigated by Broca and Wernicke, the alexias or agraphias, also be- came familiar. Further, a certain reversal in relation to linguistic reference
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and its agnosias was discovered, for there turned out to be an oral, and then a graphic asymbolia, or the inability "to find the verbal image of an object" even when the doctor would show it to the patient. '" Diverse sub- routines finally had to be distinguished within each cultural practice; for example, writing included "dictation, copying, written description, and spontaneous writing" "-and each of the subroutines might lead to dif- ferent results. What we ordinarily call language is thus a complex linkage of brain centers through no less numerous direct and indirect nerve con- nections. As Nietzsche had prophesied and, as a paralytic, demonstrated to his psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen, language breaks down into individual elements: into optical, acoustical, sensory, and motoric nervous impulses and only then into signifier/signified/referent.
Research into aphasia marked a turning point in the adventures of speech. Disturbances in language no longer converged in the beautiful wordlessness of the romantic soul. If there are "as many sources of lan- guagedisturbanceasthereareorgansofspeechwantingtospeak,"" then the single "oh" becomes only an incidental case. s' The Poetry that lis- tened to or inspired that "oh" is replaced by sciences. Only on the basis of psychophysics does it make terminological sense for Saussure, in found- ing a new linguistics, to decompose the linguistic sign into the notion of a concept (signified) and an acoustic-sensory image (signifier),'' or for Freud, more copied than understood by his students, similarly to divide "thing representation" [Sucbvorstellung] from "word representation" [Wortvorstellung]. "
The cultural goal of universal alphabetization fades away with the "oh" of the soul. The pedagogy of 1900,because it was applied physi- ology, was preoccupied with standardizing, individually and successively, the brain regions of its pupils. The center of concrete representations, the motoric and sensorial centers for speech and writing-all had to be approached separately. "The reading-writing method in no way corre- sponds to the state of contemporary science. "'" Because not every local center has direct nerve connections to every other, there is no unity of the transcendental signified capable of organically developing speaking and hearing, writing and reading out of one another. The pedagogical un- coupling of the cultural-technological subroutines simply followed cuts made by the scalpel. Children circa 1900learned to read without under- standing and to write without thinking. The investigation of aphasia is always already its production.
In 1913Wassily Kandinsky published a volume of poems in German. He accompanied the title Sounds with some very practical tips. He meant not romantic primal sounds, but "inner sounds" that remain when one has repeated words until they become senseless-a proven and oft-employed
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means of simulating aphasia. Thus Kandinsky's poetry isolated the sound images of words physiologically with the exactness that his painting iso- lated colors and forms. That does not hinder Germanists from attacking him in the name of a linguistics that grew out of the same premises. '' But alexia seems to haunt the books of its forgotten investigators . . .
In 1902Hofmannsthal's A Letter appeared with a self-diagnosis of the sender.
And could I, if otherwise I am still the same person, have lost from my inscrutable self all traces and scars of this creation of my most intensive thinking-lost them so completely that in your letter now lying before me the title of my short treatise stares at me strange and cold? At first 1 could not comprehend it as the familiar image of conjoined words, hut had to study it word by word, as though these Latin terms thus strung together were meeting my eye for the first time. "
One who writes that he is hardly able to read any more is virtually for- mulating a case of sensory and near-amnesiac alexia. But the person is Phillip Lord Chandos, and the pile of letters that refuses to coalesce into the images of words is the title of a Latin tract that Chandos has recently written. In the meantime he has not lost the ability to write (say letters). But he has lost a part of his ability to read, and he suffers from a thor- oughly physiological "dullness" of the "brain. "" Whereas Ofterdingen or Guido could give to even the most foreign books their own titles, the writer of 1902can no longer even understand his own title. We can read "Chandos" in place of "the patient" when a great physiologist describes the symptoms of alexia:
T'he patient can see the letters sharply enough, he can write them spontaneously, eventually he can even copy them without error-and yet he is unahle to read anything printed or written, even the words he had just clearly and correctly writ- ten (notes, short letters). . . . Thealexic recognizes single letters or even syllables, but he cannot grasp them successively and retain them as complete words so as to arrive a t an understanding of what he has read, even for single words. "'
The solidarity of physiology and literature extends to concrete details. One isolates the symptoms to which the other attests. Nietzsche praised the half-blindness that kept him from reading and allowed only the writ- ing of signifiers. Chandos experiences a similar blindness vis-A-vis sig- nifieds, but he develops a new discourse out of alexia (just as sensory lan- guage disturbances often influence the motoric aspect of language):b' he avoids "even pronouncing" signifieds, above all the transcendental ones ("Spirit, soul, or body"), and envisions instead "a language in which not one word is known to me, a language in which mute things speak to rne. ""I In much the same way, pedagogues versed in psychophysics sepa- rated reading and writing, because neither should be confused with sig-
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nifieds and referents, from wordless observational or practical instruc- ti~n. ~As' if he were a pupil in their school, the Lord finds that "a dog in the sun, an old churchyard, a cripple" and so on are "sublime revelations" beyond all wordsMThis is not surprising in the cripple he himself is. Be- cause they switch off medial operations of selection, aphasia and alexia necessarily present the nameless and formless. In aphasics, Nietzsche's terrible voice returns to the physiology of everyday life. "Speaking, whis- tling, clapping the hands, etc. , everything is to their ears the same in- comprehensible noise. " *'
Aphasia, alexia, agraphia, agnosia, asymbolia-in this long list of dys- functionalities the noise that precedes every discourse becomes at once theme and method. The products of decomposed language observed in the experimental subjects are as usable as the material provided by the experimenters. What terrified Nietzsche and Chandos discovered as a wondrous, foreign realm can also be transmitted. Discursive manipula- tions in the discourse network of 1900were quite extensive. Psycho- physics transmits white noise through a certain filter so that what comes across is, say, pink noise; whatever the eyes and ears of the receiver make of this is then the experimental result.
Ebbinghaus further tested his nonsense syllables on others. But some- thing remarkable occurred, for not all experimental subjects had his com- mand of the flight of ideas. For some,
at least in the begmning, it is hardly possible to refrain from the learning aids of all sorts of memory supports, to perceive the syllables as mere letter combinations and memorize them in a purely mechanical fashion. Without any effort o r voli- tion on their part, all kinds of associated representations constantlv fly toward them from individual syllables. Something occurs to them, indeed a motley of things: a syllabic assonance, relations among letters, similar sounding meaningful words or the names of persons, animals, and so forth, meanings in a foreign lan- guage, etc. . . . For example, pek is expanded to Peking, chi to child; sep recalls Joseph,neis the English word nice. . . . In the case of one subject, the syllables fuuk neit stimulated the idea "Fahrenheit," in another case, jus dum (via the French juser) suggested the notion of stupid jabbering; the syllable sequence dosch pum f a r lot was on one occasion joined together in the brief sentence: "The bread fire licks. ""
Such is the countertest to aphasia. The farrago of syllables that aphasi- acs produce from signifieds is put before normal speakers in order to see how they produce signifieds out of a syllabic hodgepodge and at the same time betray a sense-producing notion, which in the case of jas dum still means talking nonsense. In this way, the difference between Heating and Understanding can be quantified. An experiment run under that title sent nonsense syllables, such as paum and maum, through telephone and
? THE GRFAT LALUa 219
phonograph channels; subjects (in spite or of because of the frequency band restriction) received "the more probable baum ['tree'],'' thus pro- viding experimental verification of Nietzsche's oracles of language theory, or demonstrating that discourses are "eclectic combinations" of noise spectra. O' "We find it much easier to fantasize an approximate tree. . . . We are artists more than we suspect. "
Thus a physiological work entitled The Brain and Language, which reconstructs the path from the speechless patches of light and noise the infant perceives to the ordering of images and speech sounds, comes to the conclusion: "We proceed like poets. ""*But such poetic activity, rhym- ing Baum and maum or hitting upon faak neit I Fahrenheit, having been confirmed by Nietzschean brain researchers, no longer has any need of a muse. Even in the greatest authors, the unconscious functions of the brain are at work. A judgment on Anselmus's ecstasy beneath the elder tree, "made possible on the basis of a psychiatric and scientific contribu- tion,""' led the psychiatrist Otto Klinke to conclude that Anselmus, in lis- tening to the whispering of the three sisters, was clinically psychotic:
It can also happen, and with the mentally ill it does, that these sounds and words in a certain rhythm . . . are heard bv the inner ear as occurring at a regular tempo and are projected to a spot in the person's own body or onto the environment. This rhythm, expanding to associations, alliterations, and even rhymes, is often brought ahout by noises in the ear that are synchronous with heart or pulse rates, hut it can also be provoked and maintained by regular external sounds, such as marching to rhythm, or, recently, the regular rolling of train wheels. We see Anselmus in a similar situation at the beginning of the story. '"
This conclusion abolishes the precondition for Poetry. " The noises that led Anselmus to the Mother's Mouth lose all human quality, while his interpretation of them, called Serpentina, loses any basis. But magic is not lost, as it was in the age of enlightened fathers, when the Elf King's whis- pering voice became rustling leaves. Psychophysics advances, beyond all attribution of meaning and its transparent arbitrariness, to the meaning- less body, which is a machine among machines. A roaring in the ears and the roaring of trains are equally capable of providing disordered brains with assonances, alliterations, and rhymes. The fact that "Sister, sister, swing in the shimmer" was once written down as Poetry is no longer ap- plauded by psychophysics.
It had hardly any occasion to applaud. Circa 1900 noise was every- where. A psychotic in his cell constantly hears imbecilic voices that snap up words in the imbecility of his surroundings "which have the same or nearly the same sound as what they have to say or rattle off. " Like the subjects in Ebbinghaus's experiment, the hallucinations rhyme "Sahtiago" with "Cathargo" or (in a somewhat Saxon accent) "Briefbeschwerer"
? 220 1900
with "Herr Priifer schw6rt. "'' A psychiatric researcher drew the sad con- clusion from his association tests that rhymes such as HerzlSchmerz or BrustlLust, those honorable old warhorses of German Poetry, flood the inner ear "only in psychic disorders, that is, wherever so-called flight of ideas is the rule. " Ziehen cites a manic patient who associates Hund- Bund-Schund [dog-band-trash]," and who thus calls the output of rhym- ing words by its proper name.
Decisively, trash and nonsense had been scientifically recorded in 1893, not only in 1928,as even an informed literary scholarship would admit. " Lyric poetry, too, would have to check over its jingles in the Handbook of Physiological Psychology (the title of Ziehen's book). "Rrustl Lust" and "Schmerzl Herz" are among the examples presented by Arno Holz in his Slimy Rhymes and the Nonsense of Rhymes in General. The transition to modem free verse cannot always be described as an inherently literary innovation. When rhyme shows up in laboratories and madhouses, it must vanish from the printed page if poets and psychotics are not to be con fused.
Yet free verse was only one historical option circa 1900. A second, paradoxical option was mimicry. If the clattering of trains could suggest rhymes to the mentally ill, the lyric poet could detect new rhymes in such poetry of the body. The railroad itself, rather than an author or High Ger- man, speaks in Detlev von Liliencron's "Rattattattat. "-' And if marching to rhythm has the same effect, then Liliencron's rhyme play of "Persian Shah" and "klingling, bumbum and tschingdada" logically follows.
A military-musical sound source transmits tschingdada; the experi- mental subjects are asked if any rhymes occur to them. Such was the pro- cedure, in the year of the Gallows Songs (I~os)of,Narziss Ach, M. D. and Ph. D. His test consisted in meaningless syllables (excluding the syl- lable ach, unfortunately), to which subjects, under hypnosis and in a nor- mal state, were to respond with meaningless rhymes or assonances. " Difficulties appear only if the permitted reactions, unlike Ach's test or "Lalulii," are to be exclusively meaningful words. Hermann Gutzmann's
eclectic combination mauml Baum is harmless; tschingdada provokes foreign words; but things become truly aporetic with Stefan George. The inventor of so many unheard-of and nonetheless German rhymes has all discourse culminate in a syllabic hodgepodge that chokes off any reaction in the experimental subjects.
We were in that special region of unremitting punishments where the people are who had been unwilling to say, "0Lord! ," and where the angels are who said, "We want. " There in the place of their torment they blaspheme the eternal judge and pound their breasts; they claim to be greater than the blessed and despise their joys. But every third day a shrill voice calls from above: "Tiholu- Tiho1u"-
? a tangled confusion results the damned fall silent; trembling, gnashing their teeth, they prostrate themselves on the ground or try to hide themselves in the glowing dark depths. --
The dream of "Tiholu" perverts George's lifelong inspiration for rhyme and translation: Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante inflicted on his damned every imaginable speech disturbance, whereas the blessed were with the Word and God in one and the same measure. George, however, has the damned speak, but only so long as that shrill voice, in its mechanically regular act every three days, does not deliver its catchphrase. Nonsense syllables are the divine punishment that reduces them to a chaos of bodies. People who did not want to call out to their Lord are answered by the Discourse of the Master with his own, very contemporary perversion: hell as a random generator.
In discussing his theory of memory and its inscription, Nietzsche once mentioned the "slogan and catchphrase" [Schhg- und Stichwort]-* and with that illustrated the process he was describing. * Psychophysical ex- periments impose slogans and catchphrases until the tortured disappear into glowing depths or render up the physiology of cultural practices. With patients like Chandos, whose disturbances allow them "to read cor- rectly individual letters, but not to combine them into words," Ziehen recommends that one "spell a word for the patient and have him put it together, or, in reverse, present a word somehow and have the patient spell it. "" These catchphrases were such hits that they reappear every- where circa 1900.
Freud analyzed a female hysteric who "at nineteen, . . . lifted up a stone and found a toad under it, which made her lose her power of speech for hours afterwards. " Emmy v. N. fled a psychiatrist "who had com- pelled her under hypnosis to spell out the word 't . . . o . . . a . . . d. "' Before she would go to the couch, she made Freud "promise never to make her say it. "" As if he had been a wimess to the first psychiatrist's consultation, Make Laurids Brigge overhears a doctor-patient conversa- tion through the walls of the Salpihriere, Jean Martin Charcot's great healing or breeding institution for hysterias:
But suddenly everything was still, and in the stillness a superior, self-complacent voice, which I thought I knew, said: "Ria! " A pause. "Riez! Mais riez, riez! " 1 was already laughing. It was inexplicable that the man on the other side of the partition didn't want to laugh. A machine rattled, but was immediately silent again, words were exchanged, then the same energetic voice rose again and
The prefixes Schbg and Stich literally mean "blow," or "hit," and "stab. " The Ger- man terms for "slogan," "catchphrase," and "header" thus retain violent overtones of forc- ible, abbreviated mnemonic impression less obvious in their English equivalents. [Trans. ]
THE GREAT M L U U 221
? ? 222 1900
ordered: "Dites-nous le mot: avant. " And spelling it: "A-v-a-n-t. " Silence. "On
n'entend rien. Encore une fois . . . "'"
Even in its oral, imperative form, the slogan and catchphrase is inscrip- tion. Chopping and iteration reduce discourse to discrete unities, which as keyboard or store of signs immediately affect bodies. Instead of trans- lating visual language into audible language, as the phonetic method did, breathing the beautiful inwardness of music into speech, psychophysics imposes the violence of spacing. Localization is the catchphrase of all aphasia research, spelling the psychiatrist's overheard command. It is only logical for the catchphrase technique to be applied to reading and writing.
Following the procedure of Helmholtz, who built device after device to measure reaction-time thresholds, the psychophysics of the nineties went to work measuring reading with kymographs, tachistoscopes, horopter- scopes, and chronographs. There was intense competition among these machines to determine the smallest fraction of time in which reading could be measured in experimental subjects. Thus the physiology of the senses and aphasia research were joined: James McKeen Cattell calculated in milliseconds the time in which a letter, exposed to view for one light- ning instant, traveled from one language area to the next. In other experi- ments, however, he (and later Benno Erdmann and Raymond Dodge) worked with tenths of seconds, which could measure subjects' eye move- ments and their backtracking to reread. By contrast, Wilhelm Wundt's experimental tachistoscope continuously diminished a letter's exposure time to the limit value of null. Only at 0. 01sec "can one be sure that any movement of the eye or wandering of attention is impossible. "" Experi- mental subjects (who were once more also the professorial directors of the experiments) thus sat, chained so as to hinder or even prohibit move- ment, facing black viewing boxes out of which for the duration of a flash-a pioneer of reading research, Frans Cornelius Donders, actually used electrical induction sparks"-single letters shone out. This is mo-
dernity's allegory of the cave.
"Lightning. Dionysus appears in emerald beauty," said the dithyramb.
A tachistoscopic trick-and letters appear for milliseconds in scriptual beauty. "Stick a wise word in," said Dionysus in Ariadne's ear. The device also writes signs, whether wise or meaningless, onto the retina, signs that can only be taken literally. After the elimination of rereading and the rec- ognition of complete words, even the educated fall back on "the most primitive spelling" as the minimum and standard of all reading.