No More Learning

"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. " Hence Nietz- sche's next thought-four years after the malfunctioning of his type- writer-was to philosophize on the typewriter itself. Instead of testing Remington's competing model, he elevated MaIling Hansen's invention to the status of a philosophy. And this philosophy, instead of deriving the evolution of the human being from Hegel's spirit (in between the lines of books) or Marx's labor (in between the differential potential of muscular energy), began with an information machine.
In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, knowledge, speech, and virtuous action are no longer inborn attributes of Man. Like the animal that will soon go by a different name, Man derived from for- getfulness and random noise, the background of all media. Which sug- gests that in 1 8 8 6, during the founding age of mechanized storage tech- nologies, human evolution, too, aims toward the creation of a machine memory. Guyau's argument presupposes the phonograph, Nietzsche's, the typewriter. To make forgetful animals into human beings, a blind force strikes that dismembers and inscribes their bodies in the real, until pain itself brings forth a memory. People keep promises and execute orders only after torture.
Writing in Nietzsche is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting. On the contrary: just as in the stanza on the delicate MaIling Hansen, humans change their position-they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface. Conversely, all the agency of writing passes on in its violence to an inhuman media engineer who will soon be called up by Stoker's Dracula. A type of writing that blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin necessarily stems from typewriters built before 1897, when Underwood finally introduced visibility. Peter Mitterhofer's Model 2, the wooden typewriter prototype of 1 8 66, unlike the MaIling
? ? ? ? ? Hansen did not even have types and a ribbon. Instead, the writing paper was perforated by needle pins-inscribing, for example, in a rather Nietzschean manner, the proper name of the inventor.
Such is the solidarity among engineers, philosophers, and writers of the founding age of media. Beyerlen's technical observation that in typ- ing, everything is visible except the actual inscription of the sign, also de- scribes On the Genealogy ofMorals. Neither in Nietzsche nor in Stoker can the victims see and hence read what the "most dreadful sacrifices and pledges," "the most repulsive mutilations," and "the cruelest rites"98 do to their body parts. The only possible, that is unconscious, kind of read- ing is the slavish obedience called morals. Nietzsche's notion of inscrip- tion, which has degenerated into a poststructuralist catch-all metaphor, has validity only within the framework of the history of the typewriter. It designates the turning point at which communications technologies can no longer be related back to humans. Instead, the former have formed the latter.
Under conditions of media the genealogy of morals coincides with the genealogy of gods. Following Beyerlen's law-namely, the invisibility of the act of inscription-we can deduce the necessary existence of beings that could be either observers or, as with Dracula, masters of inhuman commu- nications technologies. "So as to abolish hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering from the world and to deny it, one was in the past virtually com- pelled to invent gods and genii of all the heights and depths; in short some- thing that even roams in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting painful spectacle pass unnoticed. "99
It is Nietzsche's most daring experimental setup to occupy the place of such a god. If God is dead, nothing is there to prevent the invention of gods. "The poor man," as he was described by an emancipated woman, "is a true saint and ceaselessly working, even though he is almost blind and can neither read nor write (except with a machine)"lOO-this poor man identifies with Dionysus, the master of media. Once again, philoso- phizing or studying are followed by the crafting of verse. On the Geneal- ogy of Morals deploys itself in rhythms and unfolds an interesting and painful spectacle: Nietzsche's dithyrambs of Dionysus entitled Ariadne's
Complaint. Composing and dictating into a machine are, following Hei- degger's recollection, in word and deed one and the same thing.
Typewriter 2I I
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Ariadne's composed lament arises out of complete darkness or blind- ness. She speaks about and to a "veiled" god that tortures her body, fol- lowing all the rules of mnemotechnology or memory inscription de- scribed in Genealogy. Dionysus has neither word nor style nor stylus- except for torture itself. His female victims are faced with the painful attempt to decode from their bodily pain the trace of a desire, which is truly the desire of the other. And only after 1 5 0 lines or laments can Ari- adne read that she herself desires the desire of the god:
Come back!
With all your torments!
All the streams of my tears run their course to you!
and the last flame of my heart it burns up to you.
Oh come back,
my unknown god! my pain! my last happinesspOI
This last cry is not a fiction. It is a quotation-from one of the new women writers. One of Lou von Salome's poems, accompanied by Nietz- sche's music, contained the following lines: "Have you no more happiness to share with me, so be it! as yet you have your torment. " The poet of dithyrambs is once again only a secretary who puts the words of one woman, von Salome, into the mouth of another woman, Ariadne. And as the Genealogy predicted, the god of inscription can and must come forth from inscribed pain itself. After Ariadne's or Salome's last cry, the long- concealed Dionysus himself becomes "visible" in blinding and "emerald beauty. " The dithyrambs come to a necessary close because their answer transmits plain text: the whole scene of writing has been a scene of torture:
Be wise Ariadne! . . .
You have little ears, you have ears like mine:
let some wisdom into them! -
Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love ourself? . . . I am thy labyrinth . . . 102
A Dionysus that occupies the ear of his victims and inserts smart words turns into a poet (Dichter) or dictator in all senses of the word. He dictates to his slave or secretary to take down his dictation. The new no- tions of love and heterosexuality become reality when one sex inserts painful words into the ear of the other. University-based, that is, male, discourses on and about an alma mater are replaced by the discourse of
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two sexes about their impossible relationship: Lacan's rapport sexuel. That is why Nietzsche describes Dionysus's existence as an "innovation" once he has invented him as a "philosopher. " Unlike Socrates with his Greek noblemen, and unlike Hegel with his German civil-servant appren- tices, Dionysus dictates to a woman. According to Nietzsche, Ariadne's Complaint is just one of the many "celebrated dialogues" between Ari- adne and her "philosophical lover" on Naxos. 103
The Naxos alluded to here was not a fiction either, but the future of Germany's institutions of higher education. The widow of Max Weber has described how new female students, "from unheard-of intellectual points of contact with young men," were afforded "unlimited opportuni- ties for innovative human relationships": "camaraderie, friendship, love. "104 (To say nothing of the innovative human relationships that, as in the case of Lou Andreas-Salome, grew out of the opportunities between male and female psychoanalysts. ) Following the double loss of his MaIling Hansen and his Salome, Nietzsche at any rate was on the lookout for sec- retaries into whose ears he could insert Dionysian words. For Zarathustra and his whip he "needed . . . just somebody to whom he could dictate the text"-and "Fraulein Horner fell from the sky," it seems, precisely "for that purpose. " 105 Then, for Beyond Good and Evil, that Foreplay to Phi- losophy of the Future, a certain Mrs. Roder-Wiederhold set foot on the is- land of Naxos.
"I am your labyrinth," Dionysus said to the tortured Ariadne, who in turn had herself been the mistress of the labyrinth during the Cretan rit- ual dance. And Zarathustra added that poet-dictators who write in blood and aphorisms want not to be read but to be learned by heart. 106 That is precisely why Mrs. Roder-Wiederhold caused some problems. Unfortu- nately, certain gods, demons, intermediate beings of Europe had already inserted the morality of Christendom and of democracy into her ears. That made the scene of dictation in Engadine into a scene of torture. Her own hand had to write down what was beyond good and evil, beyond Christendom and morality. Ariadne's complaint turned into an empirical event. Every history of writing technologies has to account for the fact that Beyond Good and Evil was not easily written. Nietzsche knew and wrote it. "In the meantime I have the admirable Mrs. Roder-Wiederhold in the house; she suffers and tolerates 'angelically' my disgusting 'anti-de- mocratism'-as I dictate to her, for a couple of hours every day, my thoughts on Europeans of today and-Tomorrow; in the end, I fear, she may still 'fly off the handle' and run away from Sils-Maria, baptized as she is with the blood of r 848. "107
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Against human and/or technological typewriters such as Nietzsche and the MaIling Hansen, substitute secretaries could not compete. Nietz- sche stuck to his love affair with the writing ball from January through March 1882: "Between the two of us," the media master wrote about his "admirable woman": "I can't work with her, I don't want to see a repeat (Wiederholung). Everything I dictated to her is without value; as well, she cries more often than I can handle. "lo8
A complaint of Ariadne that her dictator might have been able to foretell: "Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love ourself? . . . " Nietzsche and his secretaries, no matter how ephemeral and forgot- ten, have introduced a prototype into the world. Word processing these days is the business of couples who write, instead of sleep, with one an- other. And if on occasion they do both, they certainly don't experience ro- mantic love. Only as long as women remained excluded from discursive technologies could they exist as the other of words and printed matter. Typists such as Minnie Tipp, by contrast, laugh at any romanticism. That is why the world of dictated, typed literature-that is, modern litera- ture-harbors either Nietzsche's notion of love or none at all. There are
desk couples, two-year-long marriages of convenience, there are even women writers such as Edith Wharton who dictate to men sitting at the typewriter. Only that typed love letters-as Sherlock Holmes proved once and for all in A Case of Identity-aren't love letters.
The unwritten literary sociology of this century. All possible types of industrialization to which writers respond have been thoroughly re- searched-ranging from the steam engine and the loom to the assembly line and urbanization. Only the typewriter, a precondition of production that contributes to our thinking prior to any conscious reaction, remains a critical lacuna. A friend writes or dictates a biography of Gottfried Benn. Upon rereading the 200 typed pages, he begins to realize that he is writing about himself: the biographer and the writer have the same ini- tials. After 200 additional pages, his secretary asks him whether he has noticed that secretaries and writers (Schriftsteller) have the same ini- tials. . . . Lacan's three registers cannot possibly be demonstrated more ef- fectively: the real of the writer, the imaginary of his doppelganger, and, fi- nally, as elementary as forgotten, the symbolic of machine writing.
Under such conditions, what remains to be done is to start a register of the literary desk couples of the century (Bermann's film was never realized).
Case I. When, beginning in 1 8 83 , Wyckoff, Seamans, & Benedict developed a sales network and (following the example of Mark Twain)
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solicited writers to advertise typewriting, "the Petrograd salesman came up with the most spectacular big name, Count Lyof Nikolayevitch Tol- stoy, a man who loathed modern machinery in every form ("The most powerful weapon of ignorance-the diffusion of printed matter. "-War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 8 ), and got a great photograph of the author, looking quite miserable, dictating to his daughter, Alexandra Lvovna, who sat poised over the Remington keyboard. "109
Case 2. When Christiane von Hofmannsthal finished the sixth grade of secondary school, instead of continuing on she transferred to learn Gabelsberg stenography and typewriting. In 1919 her father and poet wrote about how difficult it would be if he "had to do without the little one as my typist, which she is. "110
Case3. In1897,Hofmannsthal'sAustriaallowedfemalegraduates of secondary school to study philosophy, in 1900, medicine (including state exams and the doctorate). Consequently, Sigmund Freud, university professor of nerve pathology, began his Introductory Lectures on Psycho- Analysis in Vienna during the winter semester of 19 I 5-16 with the revo- lutionary address, "Ladies and Gentlemen! " Since "the ladies among you have made it clear by their presence in this lecture-room that they wish to be treated on an equality with men," Freud scorned "science . . . for schoolgirls"l11 and identified primary sexual markers by their names. He told the women in the lecture hall that the secular distribution of gender roles, including the symbols of pen and natural paper, was psychoanalyt- ically obsolete: "Women possess as part of their genitals a small organ similar to the male one. "
Women, however, who have a "clitoris"112 in the real, and who are "wood, paper, . . . books" l13 in the symbolic of the dream, stood on both sides of writing technologies' gender differences. Nothing and nobody barred them anymore from professions involving case studies and hence writing. Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salome, Anna Freud, and so on, up until today: female psychoanalysts became historically possible. An in- stitution that banned phonographs from its examination rooms and ig- nored the cinema altogether still adjusted its writing equipment. "In Feb- ruary [of 19 1 3 J Freud took the novel step of buying a typewriter. . . . But it was not for himself, for there was no question of his employing an amanuensis and giving up his beloved pen. It was simply to help Rank to cope with his increasing editorial duties. " Exceeding the mechanization of psychoanalytical secretaries and film interpreters, the machine also al-
216 Typewriter
tered their sex; for, curiously enough, the typewriter, according to the same biographer, remained not with Rank but in the lifetime possession of Anna Freud, the bridal daughter and psychoanalyst. 114
"Typewriter," after all, signifies both: machine and woman. Two years after the purchase of the machine, Freud wrote to Abraham from Hofmannsthal's Vienna: "A quarter of an hour ago I concluded the work on melancholy. I will have it typewritten so that I can send you a copy. " 115
Case 4. In 1907, Henry James, the writer and brother of Miinster- berg's great sponsor, shifted his famous, circumlocutionary style of novel writing toward "Remingtonese. "116 He hired Theodora Bosanquet, a philosopher's daughter who had worked for the offices of Whitehall on the Report of the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion and who learned to type for James's sake. After a job interview, during which James came across as a "benevolent Napoleon,"l17 novel production got under way. The Remington, along with its operator, "moved into his bedroom," where dictation "pulled" texts from James "so much more effectively and unceasingly" than did "writing. " Soon a reflex loop was created: only the clanking of the typewriter induced sentences in the writer. "During a fort- night when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver type- writer with evident discomfort, and he found it almost impossibly discon- certing to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all. "118
So it went for seven years, until a less benevolent Napoleon said farewell. James had several strokes in 19 I 5 . His left leg became paralyzed, and his sense of orientation in space and time was impaired; only the con- ditioned reflex of pure, intransitive dictation remained intact. Writing in the age of media has always been a short circuit between brain physiol- ogy and communications technologies-bypassing humans or even love. Hence, James ordered the Remington, along with Theodora Bosanquet (not the other way around), to his deathbed, in order to record the real behind all fiction. Henry James had become emperor and dictated: a let- ter to his brother Joseph, the king of Spain; a decree specifying new con- struction at the Louvre and in the Tuileries; finally, some prose on the death of the royal eagle and the cowardice of its common murderers. ll9 That is how deliriously, how lucidly a paralyzed brain recorded itself, the situation, and the system of media. From 1800-1815, Napoleon's noted ability to dictate seven letters simultaneously produced the modern gen- eral staff. His secretaries were generals and a marshal of France. J20 From
1907-17, a typewriter and its female operator produced the modern American novel. From that, imperial eagles died.
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Case 5 . Thomas Wolfe, who made a point o f selling his American novels in a highly industrialized fashion, by word count (350,000 in the case of Look Homeward, Angel),121 was nevertheless
the most completely un-mechanical of men and never knew how to operate a typewriter, although on at least two occasions he got machines and swore that he would learn. He rented a Dictaphone in 193 6, in the hope that he could recite his work into it and have it typed up later, but the only thing he ever actually dictated was a few remarks on the ancestry and character of his most unfavorable critic, Bernard De Voto. He would sometimes play this back and listen to it, grinning.
At any rate, because of his inability to type, he hired a stenographer for $25 a week, who came each day and transcribed his longhand as fast as he could get it down on paper. . . . A typist had to have both practice and a vivid imagination to read what he had written, and most of them worked for him for only a short time. He was constantly distracted by this difficulty: "I can always find plenty of women to sleep with," he once blurted out, " but the kind of woman that is really hard for me to find is a typist who can read my writing. " 122
Case 6. In I93 5, Dr. Benn quit his medical practice to serve as chief medical officer for the recruitment inspection offices in Hannover. Re- maining in Berlin were two female friends whom Thomas Wolfe would have had no trouble finding: the actresses Tilly Wedekind and Ellinor Biiller-Klinkowstrom. But the military, Benn's aristocratic form of emi- gration, had its everyday problems. After two "terribly lonesome and se- cluded years," he wrote to the second of the two women:
The sheets are torn, the bed isn't done from Saturday through Monday, I've got to do the shopping myself, even getting the heating stove going, sometimes. I don't respond to letters, since I've nobody to do the writing for me. I don't do any work, since I neither have the time nor solace nor anybody to dictate to. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I make some coffee, that is the one content ofmy life. At nine in the evening I go to bed, that's the other. Like cattle. 123
On the Genealogy of Morals predicted it all: in the chaos without recording technologies, literature basically had to take the shape de- scribed by Benn's tripartite organization: First, a beer or wine pub, read- ing, meditating, and radio listening, in order to bring highbrow poetry up to par with the sound and standard of popular songs. Second, an "old desk ( 7 3 cm x I 3 5 cm) " with unread " manuscripts, j ournals, books, sample medication packages, an inkpad (for recipes), three pens, two ash- trays, one phone," in order to "scribble" the poem the next day in one of those physician's scrawls that Benn "himself could not read.
" Finally, an- other desk, "the decisive one," equipped with microscope and typewriter,
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to convert the "scribbles" into "typewritten materials," in order to make the material "accessible to judgment" and prepare for "the feedback flow from the inspired to the critical 1. "124 The whole process operated as a perfect feedback loop, with the hitch that Benn "himself did not type well. "125 With "nobody to dictate to," it was hardly possible to deal ade- quately with the material on paper, and hence the media competition of radio and cinema was overwhelming.
More fortunate than his colleagues Nietzsche and Wolfe, however, the writer made a find in Hannover. Benn entered a "marriage of companion- ship" 126 that was to come to an end only during the World War, when his typewriting wife committed suicide. In Berlin two women friends received their last handwritten letters; the fact that one of them answered with a typewritten letter127 was no match for the technological competition.
I must make one more try to establish a serious human relationship and, with its help, to escape from the morass of my life.
Morchen, you may know everything, but nobody else does. And when I now describe to you what kind of a person she is, someone who will almost certainly become unhappy, you will be surprised.
Much younger than myself, about 30. Not a bit pretty in the sense of Elida and Elisabeth Arden. Very nice body, but negroid face. From a very well-respected family. No money. Job similar to that of Helga, well paid, types about 200 sylla- bles, a perfect typist. 128
Two hundred syllables per minute are pretty close to 773 keystrokes, the German typing record of 198 5 . Modern literature could be produced in the Wehrmacht and the Army High Command simply because the daughter of an officer's widow, Herta von Wedemeyer-following the ex- ample of the female protagonist of a 1 894 noveP29-worked as secretary.
Case 7. (so as not to forget, amidst all those writers, "les Postes en general," that is, general secretaries and general field marshals). 130 " By virtue of a decree of the erstwhile Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Trade of July 17, 1897, typewritten documents were deem? d admissible in dealings with the government. "l3l Official (or government) texts were rendered anonymous and laid the groundwork for Herta von Wede- meyer's profession. Which had consequences not only for chief medical officers but also for their ultimate superior, the minister of war. Nine days prior to Benn's second marriage and in the same city,
on January 1 2 [ I93 8 ] , General Field Marshal von Blomberg, who since I93 2 had been widowed and had two sons and three daughters, married the former stenog-
? August Walla, typeface, 198 5 . (Reproduced courtesy of Dr. Johann Feilacher, Die Kiinstler aus Gugging, Vienna)
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rapher Erna Gruhn, a secretary of the Imperial Egg Center (Reichseierzentrale), in the presence of a small circle of friends. Witnesses: Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goring. The couple went on their honeymoon immediately. Shortly thereafter, senior investigator Curt Hellmuth Miiller, chief of the Center for Personnel Iden- tification in the Central Office of Criminal Justice, received a load of indecent photographs.
"Mrs. General Field Marshal," more faithful to Bertillon than Minnie Tipp, was "registered" with the authorities. 132 Hitler could take over chief command of the army himself.
Case 8. Once, shortly before the onset of war, fear of cancer drove Hitler to "the extraordinary effort" of "writing down his will by hand. " Other than that, like most people in command, Hitler "had for years been used to dictating his thoughts into the typewriter or the shorthand re- port. "133 A specially constructed typewriter with larger type was at his disposal. This typewriter, however, did not solve all the problems involved in coordinating a world war from the Fuhrer's headquarters, Wolfs- schanze. The official historian of the Army High Command saw reason to record a rather inofficious version of the end of the war. It was widely known that great situation conferences would take place around 1300 hours. Hitler, by contrast, had set up "his daily routine" so that
Jodi could present to him at around II and, surrounded by a small circle, the mes- sages and the maps of engagements be compiled overnight. Sometimes it got later, since Hitler was fond of drinking tea with his close advisers after a day's work Of, as happened regularly, of staying with his stenographers until about 4 A. M. Mili- tarily speaking, it was highly inconvenient that he then slept well into the day and was not to be disturbed. 134
But even Fuhrer-typewriters and secretaries, which Hitler preferred over his joint General Staff at the Wolfsschanze, could not decide wars. In order to do that, the Second World War had to produce somewhat more complicated typewriters that did away with literature altogether. . . . First, we need to conclude that fictive cases 9 (Mina Harker + Dr. Seward in Stoker), 10 (Minnie Tipp + poets in Bermann), II (Mademoiselle Lust + Faust in Valery), and their numerous successors (Breidenbach, Bronnen, Gaupp, Heilbut, Kafka, Keun) are anything but fictive. Desk couples have replaced literary love pairs. Only in film scripts or romances do both co- incide in a happy end. After Mina Harker for half the novel has collected, recorded, typed, and carbon-copied all discourses on Dracula until the latter has been done away with, she still ends up being a mother. After her
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German namesake has made a poet successful and sterile, "they type" (paraphrasing Dante) "no more on that day. " According to a beautiful tautology, sexes relayed through media will reunite through media as well. Heilbut's Friihling in Berlin (Spring in Berlin), Gaupp's Nacht von heute aufmorgen (Sudden night) are novels about typewriter romances. And the 30 film renditions of Stoker do not even show phonography and type- writing, so that true love comes to triumph over Dracula. The good for- tune of media is the negation of their hardware.
Empirically speaking, women employed in processing discourses are likely to have a successful career. Word processing, somewhere amidst the relays of technological communications networks, breaks up couples and families. Precisely at that gap evolves a new job: the woman author. Ri- carda Huch became one (in I9 IO) after studying in Zurich ( I 8 8 8-9 I ) and working as a secretary in the university's main library ( I 89 I-97). Ger- trude Stein became one after working in the office of and conducting ex- periments at the Harvard psychological laboratory headed by her patron, Munsterberg. Theodora Bosanquet became one after working for eight years in the delirious general staff. Tatjana Tolstoy, inspired by her sister's Remington, wrote her first article on a typewriter and mailed it anony- mously to her father, who would not have been "impartial" otherwise. Tolstoy was instantly enthused. 135
Anonymity and pseudonymity (as formerly with the female poets who wrote in the shadow of the Ur-author, Goethe) are hardly necessary these days. Whether typewriting authors are called Lindau, Cendrars, Eliot, or Keun, Schlier, or Bruck does not count for much in relation to the mass media. A desexualized writing profession, distant from any au- thorship, only empowers the domain of text processing. That is why so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writers. Sitting in front of autobiographical type- writers, Irmgard Keun's heroines simply repeat the factual career of their author. Paula Schlier's Konzept einer Jugend unter dem Diktat der Zeit (Concept of a youth under the dictates of time), that extraordinarily pre- cise subtitle for a secretary, hears in "the regular clanging of letters . . . the melody accompanying all the madness of the world:"136 from world- war field hospitals and lectures in Munich to the editorial office of the Volkische Beobachter and the Beer Hall Putsch. Christa Anita Bruck's Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (Destinies behind typewriters) is an autobiography without mention of love, only the desire to help those
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"women who are not interested in motherhood" to have a breakthrough as women writers. 137 And since, during office dictation, "a self-regulating machine somewhere in the head chops up the meaning of what the hand, antenna-like, receives,"138 ecriture automatique is no longer difficult:
Tempo, Tempo, faster, faster.
Man funnels his energy into the machine. The machine, which is he himself, his foremost abilities, his foremost concentration and final exertion. And he him- self is machine, is lever, is key, is type and moving carriage.
Not to think, not to reflect, on, on, fast, fast, tipp, tip, tipptipptipptipptipp- tipp . . . 139
At its high point, typewriter literature means repeating ad infinitum Minnie Tipp's proper name or the advertising slogan on her office door. (Up until Helene Cixous, women will write that only writing makes women into women. ) The relay unit of human and machine exercises a pull that can even replace love. First with female typists, then with their male counterparts. That Kafka's love was a media network is confirmed at the height of German literary history by Case 1 2 .
Felice Bauer (1887-1960), who was employed after graduation in 1908 as a stenographer for the Odeon record company, switched in 1909 to Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the largest German manufacturer of dicta- phones and gramophones (with a daily output of 1,500 units). 14o Within three years there, beginning as a simple typist, she made a business career highly unusual for women: with her power of attorney she was entitled to sign "Carl Lindstrom A. -G. " At exactly that time, during a trip to Bu- dapest in the summer of 19 1 2, Ms. Bauer visited the family of Max Brod, the head of personnel for the Prague postal service. 141
Present on this occasion was a young and little-published writer who was just putting together his first book for Rowohlt and who, at first, saw in the traveling woman nothing but a "bony, empty face" that "wore its emptiness openly. "142 Until the potential inscription surface dropped a sentence that "so amazed" Dr. Kafka "that I banged on the table":
You actually said you enjoyed copying manuscripts, that you had also been copy- ing manuscripts in Berlin for some gentleman (curse the sound of that word when unaccompanied by name and explanation! ). And you asked Max to send you some manuscripts. 143
That is how quickly a typist's lust taught a (hand)writer a love that, even in the shape of jealousy, wasn't one. Since only professors in Berlin and friends involved in information technology were privileged to have
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their manuscripts typed and readied for publication, Kafka had no choice but-in an unusual step for him-to go to work on the typewriter him- self. Whereas the "main" and "happy" part of Kafka's work consisted in "dictating to a living being" in the office,144 the endless stream of love let- ters to Felice Bauer started, as if negating love itself, with a typescript.
"But dearest Felice! " Kafka wrote a year later, "Don't we write about writing, the way others talk about money ? " 145 Indeed: from the first letter to the last, their impossible relationship was a feedback loop of text pro- cessing. Time and again, Kafka avoided traveling to Berlin with his hand, the hand that once held Felice Bauer's. Instead of the absent body there arrived a whole postal system of letters, registered letters, postcards, and telegrams in order to describe that "hand" with "the hand now striking the keys. " What remained of "personal typing idiosyncrasies" was only what was simultaneously of interest to The Criminological Uses of Type- writing, namely, the "types of mistake correction" : first, with skilled typ- ists; second, with unskilled typists; and third, with "skilled typists on an unaccustomed system. " 146 Kafka counted himself among the third group, and of the twelve typos in his first letter, four, that is, a highly significant 33 percent, involved the pronouns "ich" (I) and "Sie" (you). As if the typ- ing hand could inscribe everything except the two bodies on either end of the postal channel. As if the "fingertips" themselves had taken the place of his insufficient "mood" by the name of Ego. And as if the self-critical "mistake," which Kafka "realized" in self-critical amplification while "inserting a new sheet of paper," coincided with nervous typos.
Kafka's call For the Establishment and Support of a Military and Civilian Hospital for the Treatment ofNervous Diseases in German Bo- hemia stated:
This great war which encompasses the sum total of human misery is also a war on the nervous system, more a war on the nervous system than any previous war. All too many people succumb to this war of nerves. Just as the intense industrial- ization of the past decades of peace had attacked, affected, and caused disorders of the nervous system of those engaged in industry more than ever before, so the enormously increased mechanization of present-day warfare presents the gravest dangers and disorders to the nervous system of fighting men. 147
Under its initial conditions of a "war of nerves" between literature and Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the exchange of love letters was doomed to fail, even though it later switched to handwriting and returned to "in- creased mechanization" only in 1916, when typed postcards were the fastest way of passing through the war censorship between Prague and
? Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt
! 'OR DAS KONiORmCH IIOHMEN IN PRAo.
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ai 191
? SehrgeehrtesFrau1ein
? Fur den leieht megliehen Fall,dass Sie sieh meiner aueh im gering. sten nieht rnehr erinnern kennten, stelle ieh rnieh noeh einmal vor :
Jeh heisse Franz Kafka und bin der Menseh,der Sie zum? erstenmal
am Abend beirn Herrn Direktor Brod in Prag begrusste ,J
ann liber
den Tisch hin l'hotographiBll von einer Thaliareise, eine. naeh der andern)
reichte und der schleesslieh in dieser Hand,mit der er jetzt die 1'asten sehlagt , ihre Iland hielt ,! Oit der Sie das Versprechen bekra:(- tigten,im naehsten Jahr eine Palastinareise mit ihm machen zu wollen.
Wenn iie nun d iese Reise noeh immer machen wollen-3ie sagten d a- mals,Sie waren nicbt wankelmlithig und ich bemerkte auch an Jhnen niehts dergleichen-dannwird es nieht nur gut,sondern unbedingt not- wendig sein,dass wir schon von jetzt ab liber diese Reise uns zu ver- standi3'ln suchen. Denn wir werden unsere gar fUr eine Palastinareise viel zu kleine Urlaubsze i t b i s auf d en Grund ausnutzen mUssen und das. werden wir nur kennen,wenn wiT uns so gut als me? :lich vorberei- tet haben und liber aIle Vorber? itungen einig sind.
Eines muss ich nur eingestehen,so schlecht es an sich klingt und
so schlecht es uberd ies zum Vori? en passt :Jch bin ein unplinktl icher Briefschr? iber. Ja es ware noch arger,als es ist,wenn ia&k ich nicht die Schreibmaschine hatte;denn wenn aueh einmal meine Launen zu einem Brief nicht hinreichen sollten,so sind schliesslieh die Fin- gerspitzen zum Sohreiben immer noeh da. Zum Lohn daflir erwarte ieh aber aueh niemals , d ass Briefe pilnktlieh kommen; selbst wenn ieh e i nen Brief mit taglieh neuer Spannung erwarte ,bin ieh niemals enttauseht , wenn er nieht ko? t und kommt er sehliesslieh,erschreekex iehgern.
Jch merke baim neuen Einlegen des Papiers ,dass ich mich vielleich1 viel Bchwierir,er gemacht habe,als ich bin. Es wurde mir ganz recht ge- schebn, "enn ich d iesen Fehler gemacht haben soll te , d enn waru? : schrei bE ich auch diesen Brief nach der sechsten BUrostunde und auf einer
Scbre ibmascbine , an d i e ich nicbt sehr gewobnt bin.
Aber trotzdem,trotzdem -es ist der einzige Nacbteil des Schreib- maschinenschreibens , dass man sicb so verlauft-wenn es aucb dagegen ? e. denken geben sollte,pr? ktische Bedenken meine icg,mich auf eine Rei- se als TIeisebegleiter,-fuhrer,-Ballast,-Tyrann,and was sich noch aus mir ent"ickeln konnte,mitzunehmen,gegen mich als Korrespondenten -und d arauf kiime es j a vorlaufig nur ap. -d'arfte nichts Entscbeidendes XIII:Jl von vornberein e inzuwendlln se in und S ie konnten es wohl mit mir ver- suchen.
Prag , am 20. September 1912.
Jbr herzlich ergebener
? . :;? ? +
Berlin, Austria and Prussia. 148 In 19I7, while Lindstrom's acoustical me- dia network, with its financial leverage, helped the Army High Command establish the film corporation UFA,149 Kafka terminated his engagement to Felice Bauer. Shortly thereafter, the woman, freed from the bombard- ment of letters, married an affluent Berlin businessman.
In one of his last letters to his last female pen pal, however, Kafka took stock: of misused love letters and communications vampires, of re- duced physical labor and information machines.
How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one an- other by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enor- mously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communica-
Typewriter 2 2 5
? ? Franz Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer.
2 2 6 Typewriter
tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal ser- vice it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish. ISO
Hence only ghosts survive the Kafka-Bauer case: media-technological projects and texts reflecting the material limitations of the written word. Even though, or because, Kafka considered the "very existence" of gramophones "a threat,"151 he submitted to his employee of a phono- graph manufacturer a series of media links that were supposed to be able to compete with Lindstrom's empire. Aside from a direct link involving a parlograph, which "goes to the telephone in Berlin" and conducts "a lit- tle conversation" with a "gramophone in Prague," Kafka envisions a "typing bureau where everything dictated into Lindstrom's Parlographs is transcribed on a typewriter, at cost price, or at first perhaps a bit below cost price. "152 That was not, of course, the most up-to-date proposition (thanks to Dr. Seward and Mina Harker), but one with a future. In Bron- nen's monodrama Ostpolzug of I926, "an electrically hooked-up dicta- phone dictates into an equally electric typewriter. "153 And since "the ma- chine makes further inroads" into "the function of brains" themselves, instead of merely "replacing the physical labor of man, . . . a typewriter is announced [in I925] that will make the typist superfluous and will translate the sound of words directly into typed script. " 154
Kafka, however, for whom Ms. Bauer did not type a single manu- script, let alone construct media networks, stuck to old-fashioned litera- ture.